Next to Love (10 page)

Get ready for a good laugh. Despite all evidence to the contrary for the past eleven months, somewhere in the back of my head I couldn’t quite rid myself of the idea that I was going “abroad.” A military version of Henry James, don’t you know. Boy, has the army disabused me of that misconception. I’m on what the ads used to call a luxury liner, but the government has managed to siphon off any vestige of luxury
.

Instead of a stateroom, I have a narrow bunk with a bunch of sweaty guys above me and below me, to the right of me and to the left of me, and all up and down the deck. Most of them are probably all right, but not cheek by jowl. Instead of shuffleboard, we practice abandon-ship drills. In place of horse racing on the afterdeck, the men while away their time whittling their names and various profane, oops, I mean profound words into railings, like my students carving up their desks. Are these kids old enough to fight a war?

Forget the caviar and foie gras in the dining saloon. We eat standing up. Only officers get to sit down for meals, and they do it in shifts. As for what we’re eating, it’s anybody’s guess. Sometimes it’s gray, sometimes beige, sometimes brown, but always the same taste, or lack thereof
.

Seasickness is endemic. (You can imagine how that adds to the charm of the cramped quarters.) Craps games are ubiquitous. My longing for you is unceasing. The ship is speedy, but not fast enough for me. The sooner I get over there, the sooner I can get home to you
.

All my love
,
Claude

DECEMBER 3, 1942

Dearest Babe
,

What a country. Incessant rain. Bone-chilling cold. Inedible food. And the most cockamamie monetary system anyone ever dreamed up. But is it beautiful! I never dreamed green came in so many different shades. The entire country is a patchwork quilt of it. And those rolling hills. Remember the images of Tom Buchanan’s lawn in
Gatsby,
running and jumping over sundials and brick walls and burning gardens? England is acres and acres of running, jumping green. On the rare day the sun comes out, you can almost forget you’ve just marched thirty miles and have another twenty ahead of you
.

The only thing that can rival the scenery is the intensely present past. The history I’ve read is alive here. Sometimes when I’m dog tired, and that’s most of the time, it seems I could be marching with Henry V and his band of brothers
.

After the long drought—in letters, not weather—yesterday I hit the jackpot. Six from you at one mail call. I was, and still am, a happy man
.

The job with Western Union sounds interesting, and don’t worry about not measuring up. You can do it with both hands tied behind you. Do you realize, sweetheart, you’re the only one of your crowd who has a war job? That’s what I love about you, one of the things I love about you. You’ve got the gumption I haven’t. I suppose it’s the old opposites-attract story. You throw like a boy; I throw like a girl. (If I had your arm, my entire life would have been a different story.) But whatever the attraction is, it gets stronger every day. Believe that, Babe, and hold on to it until I get home to tell you in person
.

All my love
,
Claude

DECEMBER 10, 1942

Hi, Millie Mine, my heart, my soul, my blood, my cheeseburger with fried onions, my chocolate chip cookie the way only you can make them
.

I can’t believe the big day is almost here. I’d give anything to be there. Unfortunately, Uncle Sam has other plans for me. But my dad promises he’ll pace the hospital waiting room in my place, and with my mom and your aunt and
uncle, I figure the kid will have a good welcoming committee, even if his dad isn’t on hand
.

Listen, toots, I hope you don’t mind, but I really wish you wouldn’t call him, if he’s a him, Peter. The poor kid will spend the first couple of decades of his life being known as little Pete. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, let alone my firstborn son and heir. If he’s a she, I like all the names you listed, but my favorite is Elizabeth. She can be Liz or Betsy or Libby or Bess or any number of variations on the theme. As long as she looks like her knockout mom, I’m a happy man
.

I was going to send you a sketch of the old heap of brick we’re billeted in, but the rains came and destroyed it. The sketch, not the barracks. I take that back. The rains didn’t come. They’re always here. No loss though. It wasn’t one of my better efforts. Remember that “Sex Hygiene and VD” brochure the war department so considerately gave me? It said sex wasn’t necessary for a healthy mind and body. Maybe not, but it sure does improve the mood and keep the creative juices flowing. I miss you like an old Kentucky colonel misses his rye. I’d put it better, and stronger, but it’s none of the censor’s damn business
.

The craps game a few feet away is heating up, so I better get cracking and relieve those guys of their dough. Did I tell you I won fifty-five bucks last week? The military is deadening to the mind and hell on the body, but not bad for the wallet
.

Honestly, toots, I’m thinking of you every minute and waiting for that telegram. Whoever thought I’d be over the moon (that’s a limey expression) about having a kid? Consider yourself smooched and hugged and all the other good stuff, no matter how you say you look. This is one pfc who doesn’t believe it
.

Lots o’ love
,
Pete

SEPTEMBER 23, 1943

Dearest Babe
,

We’ve just come off a 150-mile march to our new camp. Miraculously, the rain held off for most of it, and now I’m even crazier about “this sceptred isle, this other Eden.” Someday you and I are going to come back here, not just for some Cook’s tour, but for a real stay. (One of the advantages of being a teacher
,
or being married to one, sweetheart, is two months off every summer.) We’ll get a cottage near the sea, and go up to London for culture with a capital C, and make up for entirely too much lost time. That’s a promise
.

In the meantime, things here are heating up. Yesterday I ran a hundred yards in army boots and uniform in twelve seconds, did thirty-five push-ups and ten chin-ups, crossed an obstacle course on the double, and proved my marksmanship with a variety of firearms. I still can’t throw, but I can shoot. The only thing that amazes me more than that is the fact that I’m proud of it. I hate this war, but I’d hate even more to be bad at it. Of course, I have not yet fired a shot in anger, as the expression goes
.

We’re training seven days a week now with one two-day leave a month. The funny part is, the worse it gets, the harder we all work. Boredom and inactivity are what undermine. The men are developing what I call foot-soldier swagger. (Swagger is not a trait I thought myself capable of, but I’m as bad as the next man.) It’s the only compensation for being in the infantry. We work harder, and have it tougher, and don’t we rub everyone else’s nose in the fact?

The two-day pass is coming up this weekend. That means next Monday there’ll be some powerful hangovers and a rush on the prophylactics stations. I make no promises about the former. Pubs are something else I love about this country. Every time I walk in to one, I feel as if I’m stepping into a Dickens novel. But you don’t have to worry about the latter. Brothel-crawling with a bunch of drunken soldiers is not my idea of a good time. War does funny things to a man. Okay, we’re not at war yet, only training for it, but you get the idea. Some guys just want a warm body, any warm body, as many warm bodies as possible. I’m not judging them. If that makes them happy, they’re lucky, because there’s plenty of that around. But the prospect of war has the opposite effect on me. I want the real thing. And that’s you, Babe. As the ads say, I will accept no substitutes. So barring your turning up in Piccadilly this weekend, I’ll settle for an afternoon wandering those antiquarian bookshops in Cecil Court I wrote you about, a show in the West End, and a couple of pubs. But wouldn’t it be something to do that together? And after the war, we will. I promise you that
.

All my love
,
Claude

P. S. I’m growing a mustache
.

JANUARY 24, 1944

Gracie darling
,

I will tell you a secret about military life. The best part of the day isn’t chow, even at the rare meals where it’s edible. It isn’t dropping into the sack after a day of endless marching and drilling. It isn’t even getting into town for some warm stout at the pub. It’s mail call. There isn’t a guy in the outfit who doesn’t live for getting letters. And I’ve got every one of those Joes beat by miles. At first they couldn’t believe it. Come on, Gooding, they’d say, what are you, some kind of Mormon? Nobody’s wife writes that many letters. But my wife does. And what letters they are, darling. Each one brings me closer to you and Amy. I read them over and over. Some of them are falling apart at the folds, but that’s okay, because I know them by heart. I can read them in my sleep
.

And speaking of sleep, I had the strangest experience the other night. A couple of us went into the village to that little pub I wrote you about. I was beat from a day of practicing something I’m probably not supposed to tell you about, again, and again, and again, and I must have dozed off sitting straight up on that hard wooden bench. When I came to, the first thing I saw was an old Queen Anne wingback chair in the corner in front of the fireplace, just like the one in our living room. Okay, more beat-up than ours, but you get the idea. And I don’t know if you can understand this, but for a minute or two, I was back there. I don’t mean I was daydreaming. I was really there. I could see the Sunday paper on the floor, smell the coffee perking and bacon and eggs frying, and hear you singing along with the radio in the kitchen. It was all real, as real as the ache when I snapped out of it
.

But that experience, darling, is emblematic of something I’ve learned over here. I used to have big dreams and make big plans. I was going to break some hot story, or get posted to the Washington bureau of some big-city newspaper, or win a Pulitzer. I still think all that would be nice, but now I know none of it is essential. What is essential is coming home to you and Amy and spending the rest of my life with the two of you. I can see that so clearly that, like the business in the pub, it hurts. I see the little things, like walking arm in arm from the garage to the house on a summer evening when you hear the car and come out to meet me, going to the movies on a Saturday night, waking up together on
Sunday morning the way we used to before Amy was born and will again. Come to think of it, that last is not little. It’s earth-shattering
.

I see the big moments too, like bringing another baby into the world, and watching Amy walk down the aisle someday, and growing older and older and finally old with you. So just try to hold on to that, darling. Someday we’ll tell our grandchildren about how much we longed for each other, and they won’t believe those two old fogies were capable of such love. But we are, my darling, and then some
.

Love
,
Charlie

MARCH 12, 1944

Dearest Babe
,

As they say in those boy-meets-girl movies, you’re cute when you’re angry. But don’t let those black-market boys with their scotch and steaks and nylons get to you. Though judging from the last batch of photos you sent, I don’t blame them for trying to get to you. The only good thing that’s come out of this war is women wearing pants. Let me rephrase that. The only good thing is you wearing pants. As for the black market operators, I don’t suppose there ever was a war without profiteers of one sort or another
.

We’ve been training like crazy for the past few weeks. As a result, foot-soldier swagger has been ratcheted up a couple of decibels. You can sense it in the barracks, see it in the men’s faces, and hear it in their language. The last was never what would pass muster at a church supper, but now it’s beyond the pale. The men have a word, a single all-purpose word, that both describes and embodies army life. It has four letters, and you know it, but if I wrote it, the censor would only take it out. Nonetheless, most of the men cannot get through a sentence without it. They use it as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and just about everything but a conjunction. If a creature came here from another planet and heard them talking, he would assume that was what we’re fighting for. And maybe we are. I suppose it’s as good a cause as any, though I wish they would find more ways of phrasing it. You can take the man out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the man
.