May 1946
Providence, Rhode Island
“So, you see, I really loved him,” Cecily told Sam, and she was crying. They were sitting in a booth at the café where she’d worked before the war, and his coffee was growing cold in front of him. “I had no idea it could cause so much harm. I really didn’t.”
Sam was desperate to make her stop crying. He knew now that she had cried enough for a lifetime, and he hadn’t waited out the entire excruciating war—his time in France and Belgium, her time working at the Providence Shipyard—to give up on her now.
Or had he?
“No idea whatsoever!” she continued. “And I was naive back then, I know, but I was so young. And I’m sorry! I wish I could change it, but I can’t. I can’t.” She stopped, sat back and blinked. Her eyes softened, and she gazed at him as if he had the power to redeem her. If only he had the will.
Did he?
And why would she ask this of him now, after all this time—and what could this redemption, if bestowed, even mean—when, always, she had had some reason why not?
He’d asked her first when she was discharged from the San in the summer of ’41. He was worried about her, honestly—she talked about getting a job! Was she truly strong enough? (He had not examined her himself; he wanted to trust his colleagues’ judgment, but couldn’t, not entirely, not when it came to her.)
What it came down to was that he wanted to take care of her. If they got married, she could live with him in married housing at the San. She could read all day by the lake.
“You don’t want some sick wife on your hands, when all you do is take care of sick people all day,” she said, and she went up to Providence, rented a small apartment, and started working at this very café, serving pie and coffee, ham and eggs, to strangers. Every time Sam had a day off, he’d drive down to the city, take her to the movies, and ask her again to consider it. (She looked so awfully pale; he missed her—just having her nearby—as much as he’d have missed his right arm.)
Then, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor; his enlistment. “We can’t possibly get married now, when the future is so unknown,” she said, though most people they knew were getting married in a rush, as if trying to set something in stone to hang on to in the face of the unknowable. Sam would’ve preferred that, himself. But Cecily wouldn’t even accept an engagement ring. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re going to change your mind about me, I guarantee it. There’s a whole big world out there, you’ll see.”
During the war, there’d been no fewer than four letters telling him she’d “misbehaved.” It was a sailor on leave, a welder at the shipyard, a clamdigger, another welder. I am so sorry, she wrote, each time. But, obviously, I am no one you should want to marry. I hope you’ll forget about me. It’s the only way you have a chance at happiness, my darling.
Each time, it was like she’d ripped his heart from his chest.
He tried to forget her. There’d been several nurses who’d been willing to help him try.
He couldn’t forget her. Why do you do this? he wrote to her, after her confession about the second welder. When you know you are so entirely loved? When you know I want to give you the whole world?
I don’t know any such thing, she wrote back.
Now, finally, Sam knew the real reason why. He had seen and treated men with their guts shot out who’d probably felt better than he did right now. He gestured to the waitress for more coffee. “Pour out the cold stuff, would you?” he asked, when she came over. “Life’s too short for cold coffee.” Truth was, after the war, he had much less patience for anything the slightest bit physically uncomfortable—for less than perfect circumstances in anything—than he’d once had. Wouldn’t you have thought the opposite? That, after weeks out in the ice and snow with injured and dying men, bombs falling all around and the constant threat of imminent attack, he should be able to tolerate anything now?
And yet, he could tolerate almost nothing. He’d gone back to his old job at the San just for the peace and quiet, the old routine.
He and Cecily both watched the waitress—Ruth, said her name tag—take his coffee cup over to the sink behind the counter, pour it out, and fill it with fresh from the pot. They watched as if she held the key to the secrets of God. Her hips switched in her pink dress. She brought the cup on its saucer back, set it down in front of Sam, and said, “This time, why don’t you drink it, and stop making your girlfriend cry.”
Sam flinched, and Cecily reached out to Ruth like a supplicant to the Virgin Mary. “Oh, no, he isn’t—it isn’t his f—”
Ruth was already gone.
Cecily sighed, gave Sam a weak, half-apologetic smile, and took a tiny sip of her coffee, which had to be as cold as his had been. She wiped the tears from her face with the flat of her hand.
He took a sip of his coffee, too. It was so hot it burned his tongue, and his despair at this was so instant and outsize that he actually wanted to cry.
But he didn’t. He swallowed and set the cup down to cool.
“But do you see now?” she said, blinking wet lashes over sapphire eyes. Her quiet voice raked through him like metal. “Do you see now why I can never marry you?”