They met in 1943. He was a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy, the communications officer on a destroyer based in Honolulu; she danced in the chorus line of a USO show that traveled around the military bases on the islands. “If it hadn’t been for the war, we never would have met,” Mumma told us. “And who knows what would have become of your father.”
The encounter was brought about by Katy and Louella, women in their late twenties, professional dancers—unlike Mumma, who was only a natural, unschooled in dance as in all else. They dragged her along with them to a Saturday dance at the Officers’ Club. Most of the men, they knew, would be married, but Katy and Louella, themselves a couple, preferred to deal with the hearts of married men, and since Mumma was engaged, all she could do was flirt. This, theoretically, was what the USO-sponsored showgirls were there to do: dance with the men—enlisted or officers—flirt with them a little but not too much, give a temporary normalcy to their lives, and be fun. They were for morale, the USO girls. The sponsoring organizations—the Salvation Army, YMCA, National Jewish Welfare Board, National Catholic Community Service, Travelers Aid Society—were probably aware of a certain ingenuousness in this view of their girls, and their service clubs, and their camp shows. But they were aware also of the nature of war, its propensity for ironic as well as ordinary everyday cruelties, compared to which ingenuousness and even sex might well have seemed much the lesser evils.
This particular dance, because it was at an Officers’ Club, not a USO Servicemen’s Club, promised good food and a real band, as well as alcohol. Katy and Louella were high livers and enthusiastic partygoers. They were not about to decline even the offhand invitation to “Come on along and bring your prettiest friends.”
(My sister Meg doubted this version. “Personally? I think they probably crashed it and the guys were too drunk to notice—that’s if they’d have cared if they had noticed. You know what Pops says about those shore leaves and how much he had to drink to forget what was going on.” As the oldest, Meg was the authority on the topic of our parents’ romance, and she never missed a chance to remind us that she remembered things that younger, later arrivals—me, for example—could not hope to know.)
That evening, Pops was wearing his dress whites and Mumma wore an orange dress with big red poppies all over it, her good-luck outfit, with cap sleeves, fitted bodice, and wide skirt. On her feet were gold pumps with the high heels that showed off her ankles. She and Pops didn’t meet immediately. They didn’t glimpse each other across the crowded room and fall into love at first sight. The stories might have varied, but that version was never on offer.
The dining room of the Officers’ Club was dimly lit and filled beyond capacity, men crowding around the bar, dancers crowded together on a small dance floor, each table crowded with several officers and two or three women—nurses, staff, even a few of the local girls, and most of the USO troupe. There was a heavy odor of whiskey and cigarettes in the air; there was the sound of the band, rhythmic and melodic; also, people insisted on trying to talk. Mumma entered with her two friends. Pops was among the men settled in near the bar. They probably didn’t even notice each other for a long time, that was our guess, although Mumma maintained that from the moment she stepped out on the floor—with a boy from Ohio, an ensign—from that instant, Pops never took his eyes off her.
(Amy maintained it was the dress. “He must have been astounded by her bad taste. Not to mention those shoes.” Amy inherited Mumma’s concreteness: “Picture it,” she advised us. “Orange? Big red poppies? Gold high-heeled pumps?”)
Mumma sat down beside her Ohio ensign when he rejoined his friends, and they all wanted to dance with her. “They were all—you know—attracted,” as she told the story. But she wanted to drink her drink and look around. This was the first Officers’ Club she’d ever been in, and she was trying to decide what she thought. She begged off the requests to return to the dance floor, fended off her admirers. Then she noticed Pops, standing by an open window, staring at her.
In the formal commissioning photograph Pops sent to his mother, it’s clear what Mumma saw: a big, blond officer, not so young as her ensign and undeniably handsome. All of his life Pops struggled with his good looks. He was square of jaw and blue of eye, broad of shoulder and over six feet tall; his round glasses gave him a trustworthy, intelligent expression. He looked as if he had gone to some fancy famous college, Yale or Harvard (which he had), and he looked rich, like a young man with a trust fund, or maybe two (also true). Added to this, he had an easy smile, like a man who enjoyed his own charm, and the loose walk of a natural athlete. Both of these belied his true nature, which was in fact anxiously thoughtful, even pedantically philosophical, and unathletic often to a comic degree, except Pops was no comedian. He could, however, laugh at himself, which he frequently had cause to do, and his upbringing had, perversely, produced in him the generous, grateful nature of a man who had neither looks nor money to make life easy for him.
For a long time Mumma stared back at him. Then she rose from her seat and made her way across the room. She claimed to have had no particular reason to do that, except he wasn’t making the slightest move toward her, and patience was never one of her strongest characteristics. He piqued her curiosity, challenged her vanity; also, he was easy on the eyes. She pushed through the crowd of people to plant herself in front of him. “You want to dance with me,” she told him, and held out her hand.
“No. No, I don’t. Thank you,” Pops said. Back in Boston, everybody knew he couldn’t dance, any more than he could sing. His sisters had teased him about it and tried to teach him, his brothers had gloated and mocked and showed off their own easy movement, his mother had sent him to dance classes and sat resolutely watching while he failed to learn. In his circle, Pops was a famous non-dancer. You didn’t want him for a dance partner, or to escort you to a cotillion, a debutante party, a hunt ball, or any occasion when you might possibly have to dance with him. “Thank you, no,” he said again, when Mumma neither retracted her hand nor went away. Pops was a man who understood his limitations.
In the dim light and with the difference in height, they had to peer up and down to see each other’s faces. With the noise of voices and music, they had to lean toward each other and speak loudly to be heard.
“But you do,” Mumma corrected him.
“No, really, I don’t,” he maintained. Then exactitude struck, and he added, “That is to say, I don’t dance.”
Mumma thought about this briefly. “Like the song,” she concluded, typically getting it wrong in the precise wording but right in its essential meaning.
“What song?”
She sang the first bars, unintelligible with all the noise in the room, “I won’t dance, don’t ask me…” He pretended he could hear until it had been enough time to say, “Never heard it.”
“Yes you have,” Mumma insisted. “You must have,” she explained.
“Well, but I never did,” he said.
(We know as much as we do about this first conversation thanks to the perseverance of Amy, who collects details. And if Meg was the one who insisted on hearing the story, over and over, while Amy elicited the facts, it’s Jo—the most romantic of the four of us, the dreamiest, or laziest and least practical, but without a doubt the most empathic—who understood what Pops didn’t want to talk about. “Pops must have been a fish out of water in the Navy, in a war. He wouldn’t know the first thing. Everything would go against his nature.”)
“You must have heard it,” Mumma insisted. “Don’t you listen to the radio?”
“I listen all the time.” This was, however, one of Pops’ private jokes, because monitoring radio transmissions to and from his ship was part of his job. Another of his jokes at that time was: What else would the Navy do with a philologist?
Mumma didn’t get it, so she pressed on with the conversation. She almost never got Pops’ jokes and almost always pressed on. “What’s your name? Mine’s Rida.”
“Spencer Howland,” he said.
“Like Rita Hayworth, only with a d.”
Pops studied the girl in front of him. “You’ve got red hair like her, but you’re not nearly as tall, and you have a different build. You’re plumper.”
“Maybe, but you have to admit it’s in at least two of the right places,” Mumma said.
Which made Pops laugh. And for a minute, laughing, he forgot where he was, and why. He also forgot the bright orange and red splotches of her dress, and the heavy application of lipstick and mascara and perfume—that is to say, her dubious taste. That he forgot forever.
“If you won’t dance with me,” Mumma said, “then what would you like to do? Within reason,” she warned him, because soldiers, sailors, airmen, all boys at war, sometimes they got their hopes up.
“I’m always within reason,” Pops told her, truthfully.
Her initial response was flirtatious. “I bet you are.” Then she looked into his mild eyes and figured him out. (“I always understood your father, from the first. That’s one of the things I liked about him, right away.”) She suggested a walk. “Or don’t you walk, either?” After all, he could be wounded, or even crippled. All she’d seen him do was stand still.
“That’s an odd question,” he said, then told her, “It happens that walking is my favorite form of exercise. I don’t enjoy sports,” he added, as if she would want to know about that.
They exited the room through French doors that opened out onto a stone patio that, in daylight, would overlook the golf course. Pops, protecting Mumma from discovering to what uses the soft, grassy greens might even at that moment be being put, kept close to the well-lit clubhouse as he led her around to the front, through the rows of parked cars, and eventually down to the broad Pacific beach.
Stars burned in the black night sky and a three-quarters moon floated in front of them. Its light flowed silver over the surface of the dark water. The scent of flowers blended into the salt air smell on a velvety black breeze that brushed gently against their cheeks. Mumma carried her shoes by their high golden heels, one in each hand; Pops slung his white jacket, with its single gold stripe, over one shoulder. Noticing how the breeze pestered her hair into her face, he offered her his tie. “To keep it out of your eyes,” he said, and held her shoes while she wrapped the tie around her head, never losing a beat in her insistence that he had to have heard “I Won’t Dance,” ignoring his disclaimers, and, either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that these lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein, explaining to him that it was the cleverness of Cole Porter’s songs that made them less American than Tommy Dorsey’s dance band because not everybody liked cleverness but everybody liked to dance. “Maybe so, but America’s a country that idolizes individuals,” he said. “Which is, by the way, why communism will never present a real danger to our country.”
Mumma had an argument to win. “Everybody dances,” she said. “Dancing is basic to human nature.”
“Although, Americans do like team sports,” Pops pointed out to himself, then cited his proof. “Baseball. Football.”
“In the Middle Ages, too, and even before then,” she argued.
“Perhaps I’m making a false distinction,” he said.
“Although I don’t know much about the Egyptians, but I bet they did, too. Dance,” Mumma added, when she saw his expression in the bright tropical moonlight.
Pops took a breath and shifted conversational course, to follow her. “Nobody actually knows much about the Egyptians,” he said. “You see, most of our information is necrophilic—that is to say, it comes from temples and tombs. Even our knowledge of the language, which has as its text the Book of the Dead. What we know of the society and daily life, architecture too, is derived from tomb paintings.”
They walked on in silence until Mumma thought to remark, “You sound educated.”
“I should. I am.”
“I’ve met some pretty stupid educated people,” Mumma observed.
For some reason—perhaps all the gin and tonics—this made Pops laugh. Again. “So have I. In point of fact, I could well be one of them. Do you mind?”
“If you’re stupid?”
“If I’m educated.”
“How educated are you?”
He spread his jacket on the sand for her to sit on, and they talked, taking drinks from the silver flask his Howland uncles had presented to him as a commissioning gift, with the observation that Dutch courage was better than none. Pops told Mumma this, looking out over the uneasy black Pacific, wondering in the back of his mind if he would—his body, that is—end up rolling around in its lightless depths. Dead. Once he was dead, he reminded himself, his body wouldn’t matter to him, and he took the usual comfort from the familiar thought against the familiar fear.
Terror, really. He swallowed brandy and watched a shadowy wave creep up the sand to reach him where he sat telling this girl the story of his silver flask.
“How many uncles do you have?” she asked.
“On my father’s side, two. And there are three more on my mother’s.”
“Real uncles or are they married to real aunts?”
“You mean by blood,” he told her. “They’re almost all by blood. Why?”
“Do you have lots of aunts, too?”
A pause to count. “Seven. Including by marriage. One of my mother’s brothers isn’t married. I’ve got twenty-one first cousins.”
“That’s a big family.”
“I guess it is,” he said.
“Why is it Dutch courage when you’re drunk? Are Dutch people drunk all the time?” Mumma asked. “Or do you mean they’re cowards? I don’t get it.”
“Not drunk. I’m not drunk.”
“No, you’ve just had too much.” She turned her face to him. “Probably you’ll forget all about tonight.” She didn’t sound worried about that eventuality. “But I won’t forget you.”
“That would be a kindness, because it seems to worry me that I’m not likely to be remembered by anyone for very long.”
“Just for starters, I’ve never met anyone from such a big family before.”
“I’ve accepted it, though. I’ll be gone. Erased. As if I never existed.”
Mumma never had any trouble conversation hopping. “How could that happen with all those people who know you to remember you?”
“If I’m the only one of us who dies, maybe they’ll remember me.”
“Why should you die?” Mumma demanded.
And Pops laughed again, making it at least three times that night, maybe five, which was at least three and maybe five more times that he’d laughed than…Thinking back, he thought he’d had one good laugh in San Diego, but he’d been drunk at the time and the memory was not clear.
He reminded her, “I’m a soldier.”
“A sailor,” she corrected him. “And an officer.”
“Metaphorically, I’m a soldier. Soldiers die.”
“I suppose if your ship goes down,” she granted him. “But until then your odds are much better than if you’re in the Air Force. And much, much better than the trenches in the last war. Everybody says,” she concluded her point. “But in that case, why waste drinking for Dutch courage now, when you’re on land? You should save it up, for when you need it.”
Pops decided he could let himself confide in her. “All I really want—what I’m really afraid of? I mean, other than some horrible wound—although…”
She offered comfort. “If it’s really horrible you’ll probably die.”
He laughed yet again and admitted, “I just want to die well. Bravely. You know? Honorably.”
“If I were you, I’d want to live. You can live those same ways. Why waste them on dying?”
“It’s not up to me,” he reminded her.
“I know that. I may not be educated, but I’m not stupid.”
“I never said—”
“I’m an orphan,” she told him. “A foundling, too. Somebody dropped me off at the hospital. At the door. The emergency room door, because it was night, but it was summer so they knew I wouldn’t freeze or anything. I don’t know how you feel about orphans,” she said. “I mean, foundlings. Because of your big family. Nobody ever adopted me,” she said. “Not even when I was little. I had bright red hair, and lots of people don’t care for red hair. And then there’s my name, which they gave to me because of course I didn’t have one when I was found.”
“It’s a fine name. Rita Hayworth uses it.”
“Not Rita, Rida. It’s not Hayworth either, it’s Smith.”
“Were all of the orphans named Smith?” Pops wondered.
“Or Davis. Or Jones. Or Thomas.” Then Mumma made her own great confession. “It’s not Rida, really. It’s Elfrieda, which I hate.”
“In alphabetical order, one after the other,” Pops guessed, not distracted by her odd name, and maybe that’s when she began to love him. “So if you’d arrived one baby later, you’d have been Rida Thomas. But Rida? Think about it this way: When you’re a foundling, you could have been anybody. You can be anybody. There’s no restriction on who you might be. My family has been around for centuries—since the Mayflower—”
“Only three,” Mumma pointed out. “That’s not exactly centur-ies.”
“I think I might like to be a foundling.”
“I don’t mind,” Mumma told him. “It makes me different, so I stand out.”
“You’d stand out anywhere,” he told her sincerely.
“Thank you,” she said.
It was a fact Pops was stating, not a compliment he was paying, but Mumma didn’t make any distinction between the two. She was satisfied by his admiration and he was satisfied by her practicality. When he walked her back to her quarters, he said, “I’ll see you again.”
“When? Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we go out on ops. Just training, although even in training ops, accidents happen.”
Mumma wasn’t concerned about the theoretical. “For how long?”
“Four days. Sometimes, even when they’re just out doing exercises, boats go down. Things can always go wrong.” He looked at his watch. He had only four more hours on land.
“That doesn’t usually happen,” she pointed out before returning to her main point. “So you’ll call me Friday?”
“You’ll have forgotten me by then.”
“No I won’t. I told you I wouldn’t, and one thing about me is I mean what I say. You’ll like that about me. And you’ll remember me. Because you said I stand out,” she reminded him, and added her own embellishment, “in any crowd.” He laughed again and forgot for another minute where he was, and why.
• • •
The ship docked early on a bright, hot Friday morning, but it was midday before Pops was allowed ashore. He had quarters on board the ship, but the showers at the Officers’ Club had an abundant supply of water that was not only hot but also fresh, and thick towels, too, hotel-quality terry cloth, so the first thing he did was head off to the club for a cleanup and maybe lunch, a couple of beers. (“He said he’d forgotten all about calling me,” Mumma told us. “But I knew better. He was crazy about me. And if he wasn’t going to call, why did he go right by the phones?”) Since midmorning, she had been standing beside the pay phones at the gates to the dock, waiting, wearing a yellow, green, and blue flowered dress, her bright hair tangled by the wind. You couldn’t miss her, standing there, so Pops didn’t, especially when she called out to him, and waved wildly.
“What’s this, Spence?” commented one of his fellow junior officers. “You never said you had a date.” There were three of them, counting Pops, and they approached her together.
“I thought I’d save you the trouble of making the call,” Mumma said. “Besides, I have to return this.” She reached down into a bright red carryall to pull out his tie. Pops took it and thanked her, and the four of them then stood in an awkward silence. Mumma had settled in her own mind what was happening next, so she didn’t say anything. The two companions were waiting for Pops to speak, so one of them could strike up an acquaintance with her if Pops was going to drop the ball, Spence being an odd duck and known ball-dropper, but an okay guy and tireless out at sea, a good man to stand watch with.
Finally Mumma asked, “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?” and Pops obliged, finding that he did remember her, that he did know her name, and that he was glad to see her.
“Rob, Marty, this is Rida.” After the pleased-to-meetchas, another awkward silence rose up among them. (“They were curious, and they wanted to know me better. They were attracted, you know. But your father had found me first and they had to play fair.”) She said to the three of them, “Every one of you needs a bath and a shave, don’t you? We can all go together to your Officers’ Club, but Spencer plans to take me out afterward. You’ll want me to wait at the bar for you,” she told Pops.
The truth was, Pops was exhausted. When at sea, he barely slept, from anxiety about where he was, and why, and the fear—of a torpedo, an air attack, something unpredictable and unpredicted, even a great white whale with the skeleton of a man still strapped to its side. At sea something terrible could easily happen, with him unconscious on his bunk, his quarters not much bigger than a coffin, a shared coffin at that. Fear and dread and the necessity of sobriety kept him awake. But his exhaustion was as much nervous as physical; he knew from experience that he wouldn’t sleep until he had relaxed—which meant a couple of hours of drinking to stupefy himself, followed by reading a couple of chapters of Aristotle to give his brain something else to chew on. The truth was, the last thing Pops wanted to do was go on a date. But exhaustion made him too slow to elude this unexpected girl. By the time he realized that his usual manner of coming ashore was at risk, it was too late. The four of them were walking along together toward the Officers’ Club, and Rida was attached to his arm.
It wasn’t all bad. For once, he was the one with the girl, and this was not the kind of girl anyone would miss seeing on your arm. Just her hair, to start with. That unruly, untidy, unorganized red mass grabbed attention, and her high-heeled shoes were bright yellow, and nobody could deny that she had a fine figure. She was utterly different from all the girls and women he had ever met. If he was going to die—and he was sure that he was, although probably not for a couple of weeks now that he was safely returned from maneuvers and the ship was in harbor being stocked and fitted for its next tour, a process that would take at least two weeks and maybe three…If he was not going to die immediately, Pops thought that he might enjoy the novelty of this girl, and be diverted by it. This Rida wasn’t educated; she’d said as much. But she had to have some ideas, didn’t she? It was human nature to have ideas. Just as Socrates believed that each one of us desires the good, Pops believed that everyone wanted to have a life of the mind, and as it turned out—granted that her idea of an intellectual life differed in content and approach from his wider, more disciplined one—he was absolutely right about Mumma.
On that day, she held a large carryall, something she’d picked up cheap at the market, the kind of colorful woven straw bag the local women were seen with, from which they would extract food, clothing, changes of diaper for an infant, towels, flowers, newspapers, kerchiefs—just about anything a woman needed to get through a day. This was not the kind of bag to hang off a lady’s gloved wrist as she shopped for a hat, or to set down beside neatly crossed ankles when she took a chair. This bag hung shapeless from the shoulder, and when Pops—showered and shaved and in fresh civilian trousers and shirt—walked out on the beach beside Mumma, she pulled out of it Spam-and-Velveeta sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, a thermos, a blanket to sit on, and a bottle of beer for him. She never drank, she told him, and went to the water’s edge to bury the bottle up to its neck in the wet sand. “To cool it,” she told him. “You don’t want warm beer.”
“Didn’t you have a drink the other night?” he questioned her. The day was warm and only gentle breezes blew, here on this empty beach, only a mild offshore breeze of “under two knots,” he would be able to tell her if she asked his professional opinion. He looked off across the ocean, to the horizon. He preferred the Pacific seen from a blanket on the beach in daylight, no question about that. From a blanket on the beach, he might actually like the old bastard.
“That was an exception.” Mumma poured a thermos cap of pineapple juice for herself, offering to share it with him.
“Never doesn’t admit of exceptions.” He stretched out on his back on the cotton blanket. The afternoon sun—hot even in early spring on that exotic island—poured down over him; the sand was warm under his back and legs. He closed his eyes and heard, instead of the thrum of engines, the equally regular rush of waves on the sand. He closed his eyes and felt the deep earth steady beneath him.
“What’s the best book you ever read?” her voice asked him.
He opened his eyes and sat up in surprise. “Why?”
“You tell me what and I’ll tell you why.”
“You don’t strike me as a bookish girl.”
“I bet you know a lot of those,” she said. “Are they terrible bores?”
He considered this alternative to everything he’d ever thought or been told to think. “Only sometimes. Like me.”
“You mean people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Unable to follow the leap and parry of her mental processes, “War and Peace,” he told her.
“Is that a book?”
He had her full attention, and he registered for the first time the mahogany color of her eyes and felt the intensity of her gaze, as if the answer to this question mattered deeply to her. Her mouth was not pulled up at the ends by the little flirtatious smile with which the girls he knew, including his cousins and especially his sisters, his sisters being the girls he knew best, masked their intensities. He noticed also how unfashionably dark and definite her eyebrows were, and he’d already, at some unacknowledged level, registered the soft roundnesses of her body, arms and breasts, hips. He gave her his full attention right back.
“A novel by a Russian—”
“Not an American?”
“Most Russians aren’t,” he said, then wished he hadn’t given in to intellectual snideness, then—when she laughed, a sound as round as her thighs—forgave himself. “If you’d asked me my senior year, I’d have said Moby Dick, which is by an American.”
“Anybody can guess the story of War and Peace,” Mumma said. “But what’s Moby Dick?”
“A whale. Everybody hunts him, and dies—well, except for one man, Ishmael, but everybody else…Moby Dick attacks the ship and sinks it. In the Pacific,” he pointed out.
She failed to sympathize. “Can a whale do that?”
“One did, in the last century; it sank the Essex. The story was in the newspapers when Melville was a young man.”
“Who’s Melville?”
“He wrote it.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s—it’s great.” He thought of how to express it to her, so she could grasp the importance of the valuation. “It’s about good versus evil, or maybe good and evil. It’s about man, nature, God, fate, life, everything important. It’s a terrific story and the writing is…Melville uses traditional narrative, and theater, irony, science, descriptive essay, comedy—”
She was no longer interested in Moby Dick. “But now you like the Russian better. Are you a Communist?”
“It’s so human,” Pops said. He was thinking that he could introduce her to literature, be her teacher, educate her. She clearly had curiosity, and curiosity was a sure sign of intelligence. He could be a Socrates in his own Meno for what could well be the last two or three weeks of his life. “War and Peace takes place during the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.” He lay back down, considering this new idea, thinking that then she would always remember him, the doomed young sailor who changed her life. “So it’s early nineteenth century. It has an incredible cast of characters, all levels of society, all kinds of people, a wonderful hero—two heroes, actually—and one of the most interesting heroines—”
“Don’t tell me,” her voice interrupted him. He thought she must be bored, and probably wasn’t ready for a project the size of War and Peace, which logged in at about 1,400 pages in his Modern Library edition at home. He wondered where to begin with her—Thucydides? Pride and Prejudice? The Scarlet Letter? He didn’t think he himself ever wanted to read Gone with the Wind, but for her that might make a good first step. But did he have time to waste on such a first step? Not Shakespeare. Huckleberry Finn? Not Aeschylus. Little Women? He heard his own voice saying, “Little Women, have you read that? It’s a bible for all the girls I know.” His voice sounded to him as if it were from a distance, babbling. “My sisters loved it, my female cousins, all their friends.”
When Pops awoke, the sand was cool under the blanket, and the eastern rim of the world, off at the ocean’s distant edge, was fading from pearly gray to pink. He had no memory of the night, as if he had slept the unbroken sleep he only remembered these days: the kind of sleep he hadn’t enjoyed since his last summer on the Cape, the summer of 1941; the kind of sleep the anxiety of senior year and then the anxiety of his time in history had made impossible. Rolling over, seeing the girl silhouetted at the water’s edge, looking out, he didn’t think it was sex that had granted him such a sleep. Sex like that, he would have to remember it, wouldn’t he? Because he hadn’t had anything to drink, had he?
Rida, that was her name. She seemed to sense his awakened state and turned from the horizon to approach him. The rising sun backlit her windblown hair, and he stood up. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“You fell asleep,” she told him.
“I know that.”
“Do you know any place you could get me a breakfast? Because I ate my picnic for lunch yesterday and by now I’m really hungry,” Mumma said. “The bus leaves at noon and I haven’t packed, so I have to get back. Now that you’re awake,” she reproached him.
He walked her to her quarters, carrying the red bag, apologizing for his ignorance of all-night eateries, promising that he would find her some breakfast, somehow, and he’d be back ASAP with food. She told him that the USO troupe was leaving that day on a ten-day tour of the islands. He discovered that hunger made Mumma snappish, so he gave up trying to talk to her. He left her at the steps to the women’s barracks, and by the time he got back she had packed, changed into khaki coveralls for the journey, and was in a fine bad temper.
“Is that beer still buried in the sand?” he asked, offering first a banana, then a milk bottle, being sure to wait until she had bitten into her second doughnut before he took anything for himself.
“I never drink,” she said, and glared at him, daring him to contradict. “You can go back for it, if you want it so badly. But you drink too much.”
Pops didn’t argue and he didn’t make excuses. Having nothing better to do, he walked her over to the camouflaged bus, into which girls carrying duffel bags climbed. They waited for the driver, also female but older than the USO girls, and the WAC officer in charge of getting the show to the airport.
“Where will you be performing?” he asked.
“The walls have ears,” she answered, “but I’ll be back.”
He knew—although he didn’t say it—that in two days’ time she would have forgotten him. After ten days, he would have become one of a mass of uniformed young men, all faceless.
Mumma seemed to read his mind. “You can take me to dinner my first night back. Six o’clock, a week from Thursday.”
“If we’re still in port.”
“You will be,” she told him.
They stood face-to-face by the bus, waiting for the final call. “You can kiss me goodbye,” she told him. So he did, bending over because she was so short, and as they kissed she placed a warm palm softly against his cheek. He drew up at the end, feeling bemused and oddly satisfied. Also, distinctly eager to kiss her again. She looked up at him, her mahogany eyes sparkling. “You love me.”
“No I don’t. I can’t, really, you know. There’s a girl, back home.” He realized that for the last fourteen hours he had forgotten Abigail as thoroughly as he had forgotten his own imminent death, although when you propose to a girl because you’re confident that you won’t live to marry her, it’s the kind of engagement a man might easily forget. “I’m engaged.”
“That’s all right,” Mumma said. “I am too. With the ring to prove it. In fact”—she laughed softly, reaching up to touch his cheek again in a gesture he found more intimate and seductive even than the willing softness of her mouth—“I’ve got four of them. Rings, I mean. I mean, I have the fiancés too.” And then it was time to get on the bus, and she left him with a careless backward wave of her hand.
• • •
Immediately, Pops started to accept the fact that he’d never see her again, which was actually—now that he thought clearheadedly about it—something of a relief. She disturbed his equanimity. She undermined the stoicism he had worked so hard to achieve. And she thought he drank too much. Also, she had—by her own admission—four fiancés, four men she had encouraged enough to propose marriage, each of whom she had accepted. And she had never—also by her own admission—even heard of Moby Dick. He could almost hear his mother asking, “Is she really your kind of girl, Spencer? This—what did you say her name was? Something melodramatic, rather affected, don’t you think? Rida? Not your type at all, I’d think. Oh, but,” the voice growing indulgent, “I should remember that you’re at war.” His mother’s was the voice of reason, the voice of his better self, and that voice gently inquired, “You haven’t forgotten the promises you made to Abigail, have you? But I know you’ll do the right thing, Spencer. You’ve been brought up to do the right thing.”
Pops spent the next ten days alone—or, perhaps more accurately, apart from Mumma, because one of the most discouraging things for a man like Pops about being in the service was the lack of solitude, so he was not ever alone, as he remembered it, as he told the stories. Low-ranking young officers shared living quarters with other low-ranking young officers, and unlike the prospects in the two other branches of the military, a battlefield promotion to a rank offering more private quarters wasn’t likely, since his particular field of battle tended to go down with all hands.
Pops filled those ten days with drink and dread in the relentless company of his fellows, checking in supplies and stores, making sure the radio room was outfitted for the ship’s upcoming tour of duty. He forgot about Mumma, her return and their dinner date, until another lieutenant j.g. announced at morning mess that the USO girls were giving a show on Saturday and that he for one intended to be at whatever they were using for a stage door, with whatever he could find by way of flowers with which to attract to himself the companionship of whoever was available to him. Pops was nursing a relatively minor hangover, so it wasn’t until the words “USO girls” penetrated his consciousness that he remembered his date, and the girl Rida. But it all happened in time for him to bow out of the poker game and be waiting at the foot of the stairs when she emerged from the wooden barracks, wearing a sky-blue dress splotched with yellow flowers, her bright red hair in its usual disorder.
“Hi there,” she said, holding out her hand to shake his as if they had never kissed and she had never touched his cheek in that way, which was in fact the same seductive way she later sometimes touched the faces of her daughters, saying “What a little face,” as she cupped it within her palms, delighted that it was just that particular little face she was looking into.
“Good tour?” he asked, shaking the offered hand.
“I read the whole thing.” She tucked her left hand under his right arm to walk off with him.
“The whole what thing?” He couldn’t help noticing that she wore a ring on every visible finger of the hand that had wrapped itself around his arm.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. “Because I’m real hungry. I hope it’s got good food.”
“War and Peace?” he guessed.
“What did you think? And it was a good thing that the prince died, wasn’t it? Because otherwise Natasha wouldn’t have been able to marry the count, who makes a much better husband. Did you think, when you read it, that there are some men—like you—who are destined not to die in whatever war is going on? Like that count, even though he was pretty stupid about risking his own life.”
“You read all of War and Peace?”
“You didn’t tell me how long it is. You could have warned me. But it’s okay, I’m a fast reader.”
He took her to the Officers’ Club, where she seemed pleased to talk—and dance—with anybody who came by. His shipmate Rob pulled a chair up to the table for two that Pops had booked and invited himself to join them for dinner.
“Spence is a pretty limited conversationalist,” Rob told Rida, who listened with interest. Pops could tell she thought Rob was amusing, which he was, a born comedian. “He’s a Gloomy Gus, which can’t be much fun for a girl like you.”
“Like me meaning what?” Mumma asked.
“Meaning a real live wire. Now, I’m a talker. I’m good at talking, and Marty”—a second chair was pulled up and they were joined by the second young officer, who greeted Rida like an old friend even though he’d met her only once, and briefly—“Marty dances like a dream. Like Fred Astaire.”
“And you’ve got that Ginger Rogers look about you,” Marty added, a comparison particularly appreciated by someone like Mumma, someone with short and not shapely legs, however delicate her ankles. “I’m right, aren’t I? You do like dancing?”
“Who doesn’t?” Mumma riposted. She sipped at her ginger ale, then asked, “What about him? What’s special about Spencer, unless you can only talk about yourselves? What’s he got to offer a girl?”
“You’ve got me there,” Marty said, and grinned at Pops, while Rob suggested, “Looks?” and Marty realized, “He’s nice, you know, a nice guy.”
“Between the three of us, we make one perfect man,” Rob announced. “If you don’t mind there being three.”
Mumma laughed, delighted.
“Like Cerberus,” Pops suggested.
“Who’s Cerberus when he’s at home?” Mumma made a joke of it.
“That’s what I mean by gloomy,” Marty remarked, and Rob agreed.
“But I can learn things from him,” Mumma told them. “I get smarter every time I talk to him.” (“They were falling in love with me and I didn’t want them to get their hopes up,” she told us.) “Spencer’s educated.”
“We’re all educated,” Marty protested.
“But he’s really interested in it, he really likes it, and you two think—You think education is like some suit of clothing, if you pay for it you have it, and the more expensive it is the more you can be sure it’s better than anybody else’s. But education’s not like that, it’s like a meal, you have to eat it to have it. Except, really, education is like a smile. I mean, a good smile. A good smile makes people smile back at you, and if you’re educated, when you talk to people, you make them smarter. But you don’t care about education, it’s just something somebody bought for you,” Mumma told Marty. “I bet you’ve never read…oh, War and Peace. No, I didn’t think so. Or Moby Dick either I bet. I don’t think any the less of you, I promise. And I surely do love to dance.” She covered the back of Marty’s hand with one of hers, the one bearing all the rings, adding, “and I am a big talker,” as she covered the back of Rob’s hand with the other. She raised her face to smile at Pops. “So who is this Cerberus?”
Much later in the evening, Mumma and Pops went to a bar so small it didn’t even have room for tables. They set two chairs side by side on an open patio, facing across the sand to black water that surged onto the shore like some great blind animal in the throes of death, or of birth, struggling for breath just beyond their sight. Over the water, stars crowded the sky, in the dark of the moon.
“You’re a flirt,” Pops said to Mumma. The statement was in part the result of observing her all evening with Rob and Marty, but even more it concerned her several engagements. All evening, these had been worrying him. He had decided that she didn’t know what moral peril she had put herself in. As the evening went on, he had determined to help her toward a clearer position vis-à-vis men, and herself, and also her life. “You’re a terrible flirt.”
“No I’m not.” Mumma had ordered a stinger, arguing—when Pops reminded her that she said she never drank—that something so sweet was dessert, not drinking. And who was he to complain at her about drinking anyway? She’d been counting; he’d had too many. “In fact, I’m pretty good at flirting. It’s not as easy as it looks, you know. I bet you think it’s easy, but I notice you don’t even try.”
“Who are these fiancés?” he asked. “How can you have four of them?”
She held out her left hand, for both of them to admire. “I never wear just one of the rings. I always wear all four if I wear any. I don’t like to play favorites.”
He didn’t know how to respond. Was she joking? Should he laugh? Or if he laughed, would she just get insulted, and if she were to feel he’d insulted her, what would she do? What would a girl like this do, if she thought you were laughing at her? This unpredictable girl, this Rida. He almost wanted to try to insult her to find out. A sudden curiosity on this subject burned in him, but he couldn’t think of how to go about it, so he stuck to his point. “Who are they?”
She told him, name, age, service, rank.
“And every one of them said he wanted to marry you? And loved you?”
“Of course.”
“And you in turn told every one of them you’d marry him? I mean,” he paused to give more weight to the point, “you said yes to each one when he proposed?”
“Of course.”
“You promised that you’d be faithful to him, in your heart, and,” Pops struggled to express his sense of the weightiness of betrothal, “not flirt, for one thing, with anyone else. Not kiss anyone else. Not fall in love with anyone else.”
“Of course not. Why would I promise any of those things? I never promised anything like that. I only said yes I’d marry them. I write to them, at least once a week, or every ten days sometimes, and each one gets his own different letter, not just the same letter sent to four different places.”
“Do they know about one another?”
“Of course.” She could see that he was confused, so she explained. “Each one does think he’s the real one, that’s only human nature. But they’re just boys, and they’re going to war.” She looked at him measuringly. “You aren’t going to think badly of me, are you?” Then she smiled. “No, you won’t. Because you love me, so you don’t want to, so you won’t. Probably you’re jealous.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Pops said.
In the shadowy light from the low candles, she peered into his face for a long time. “No, you never would be jealous, would you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Is your fiancée the jealous type?” Mumma asked. “Because I know some girls aren’t. I’m not. What’s her name? You should tell me her name. I feel sorry for her, you know?”
“Why would you feel sorry for Abigail?”
“Because I’m guessing she’s like that Hélène. Remember her? With the shoulders?”
Pops remembered. “Abigail’s not…sexy.” He hesitated, wondering if that was an acceptable word to use with this girl, but she seemed unoffended by it. Then he started to wonder why she wasn’t offended, but he got distracted by what she’d just implied about him. “That would make me Pierre.”
“Hélène isn’t sexy either, she just looks like it and besides, it’s not just sexy women men fall in love with. You know that. Anybody knows that. Men aren’t so dumb as everybody says.”
“I don’t think I’m as muddle-minded as Pierre,” Pops said, although he would have to admit that he might be as clumsy. “Tell me more about your fiancés.”
Happy to talk, Mumma started with Tony because, “We’ve been engaged the longest, almost a year.”
The next evening Pops took her out again, and then they spent the weekend in each other’s company, from morning until late at night. During the days Pops spent with Mumma, he had no time to think about his forthcoming death and his implacable fears. He had, for one thing, these men, these fiancés, to get her to do right by. If she wanted to insist to him that he was in love with her, he would deal with that misapprehension later, after he’d helped her clear up this mess she had made.
They talked about other things, too. Of course. She asked him about the schools he went to and no sooner had he recited their prestigious names than she informed him that she wasn’t sure she liked the sound of a family that sent its children away at such a young age.
He thought that perhaps her orphaned state was the root cause of her inability to turn down suitors. “If I asked, you’d probably get engaged to me, too.”
They were on the beach, in bathing suits. No Rita Hayworth, Rida did not appear to advantage in her one-piece suit. She looked round, and soft, like an overripe pear, but she seemed unaware of this. And in fact to Spencer Howland she was plump and delicious, a succulent pear. She was also easy to be with, and fun, and lively. She kept surprising him and making him laugh, and letting him forget where he was, and why. She supported Roosevelt and admired Eleanor, although she “didn’t blame him a bit for the other women because what man wants to always be talking about everything that’s going wrong in the world? He loves her, though. Anyone can tell. I’m not so sure about her, though. What do you think—do you think she really loves him? You know this kind of people, don’t you? I don’t—how could I? Although, I tend to think people are pretty much the same, no matter how much money they have. But don’t go thinking I’m a Communist. I expect to take care of myself.”
“By getting married,” he pointed out.
“Of course.”
“To one of these fiancés.”
“What’s the point of getting engaged if you don’t ever get married?”
He laughed, and she laughed too, and she leaned over to kiss him in that way she had, her palm against his cheek.
“How can I convince you not to get engaged to everyone who asks you?”
“You’d have to marry me,” she said. “Because then it would be illegal. To get engaged to anyone else,” she explained, since she seemed yet again to have confused him.
“Marry you?”
“Since you love me,” she told him, for the hundredth or so time, and this time he realized that she was right. He did love her. He heard himself ask, “Will you? Marry me?”
“Of course. But you have to give me a ring to make it real.”
“No, Rida, I mean marry-marry. Not engaged-marry.”
“I know that.”
“And you have to break it off with those other fiancés.”
“I will. But we can’t get married right away, you know. It takes time, and you have to give me a ring to show you really mean it.”
He knew better. “My captain can marry us. I’m not kidding about this, Rida.”
“I know you aren’t. In the first place, you’re not a kidder. And besides, you’re crazy about me. Of course you want to marry me.”
“I am!” he laughed. “I do!” He hoped the captain, a paternalistic type, would go along with this project. Because suddenly he found himself able to hope.
When he made his request, first thing on Monday, the captain observed, “I’ll say this, Howland, she’s good for your nerves. We sail Tuesday.”
“That’s tomorrow!”
“It’s already been delayed three days. So get the girl right over here, Lieutenant. You’ve got a ring? The girl has to have a ring. You take care of that, I’ll do the paperwork, and you be back here by 1600 hours. She’s eighteen, isn’t she?”
Pops had no idea getting married could be so simple. Mumma, on the other hand, would have been both surprised and displeased had things not gone along quickly and smoothly. Not because she trusted Pops, nor because she trusted the Navy—neither of these being in her opinion particularly efficient entities—but because it was what she wanted. So she and Pops stood up in front of the captain to make their vows. They used a ring from Mumma’s collection, a silver band with a turquoise stone set in it, which she’d been given by an Air Force fiancé who trained in Arizona where there were Navaho silversmiths. They had a wedding dinner at the Officers’ Club with their friends—Katy and Louella, who had been instrumental in their meeting, and Rob and Marty. (“Those men got pretty drunk but you couldn’t expect them to be too happy when it was my wedding dinner to someone else.”) After the dinner, and a final drink at the little bar on the beach, they went to a hotel.
The next morning, Pops left port and Mumma stood on the dock watching until the ship could no longer be seen in the oceanic distances. (“I was a wife now. I had to stay and wave as long as the other wives. So I did. And I didn’t lay eyes on him again for years. Talk about being deprived of a honeymoon. You girls have no idea.”)