Chapter 1

From the last car of the troop train I watched my wife wave until she thought I couldn't see her anymore.

Then she turned around and kissed the man who'd driven her to the station.

She kept writing to me every week for two years.

I was twenty-five and she was twenty-four, and we had been married two weeks.

She wore her good hat, the little green one with the feather, and she had my name on a government allotment, fifty dollars a month.

"I'll wave till you can't see me," she told me at the steps.

She was a woman of her word.

I just had better eyes than she figured.

"I'll wave till you can't see me," she said, and she slid an envelope with her picture in it into my coat pocket and fixed my collar one more time.

That was Union Station in Chicago, on a Tuesday in October of 1943, at twenty to four in the afternoon.

An MP had let the wives through the gate for ten minutes, and the ten minutes were up.

Her cousin Ted Lenihan stood behind her in his dark overcoat, turning his car keys over in his hand.

Ted was thirty-one, and he had driven her down in his Buick, the way he drove everybody everywhere.

He had stood up as my best man at City Hall.

He had carried my papers to the post office himself: twenty-two dollars a month out of my sixty-six, twenty-eight more from the government, and a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy with her name on it.

"I'll see she gets home," he told me, and he shook my hand.

I climbed up.

The train jerked and started to roll, and I stayed in the open door at the back of the last car with my left hand on the rail, which I had been ordered not to do.

I should explain about my eyes.

I painted signs for a living, back in Milwaukee, and in that trade you cross the street to check your letters.

The doctor at Fort Sheridan tested me twice, because he figured I had memorized the chart.

My wife, Genevieve, walked along after us to the very end of the platform, out where the canopy quits and the sun comes in, with her long hair pinned up under that hat.

She waved with her whole arm, and I waved back with mine.

Every window on that side of the train had a soldier in it, looking at her, and I want you to know I was proud.

The track runs straight as a ruler south out of there.

We crawled through the yard about as fast as a man pushing a wheelbarrow, and a switch engine kept blowing steam across, and every time it cleared she was smaller.

The feather went first, then her face.

The fellows in the windows gave up and sat down, because by then she could have been a mailbox.

I could still see the arm, going up and over.

She waved until she thought I couldn't see her.

Then the arm came down, the way a man sets down his lunch pail at the end of a shift.

She turned around.

Ted had walked up behind her.

She laid one glove flat on his lapel and went up on her toes and kissed him, and that is not how you kiss a cousin.

Her hat tipped back.

His hand came up and held it on for her, in no hurry at all, the way you catch a door you've been through a thousand times.

I couldn't see her mouth, and I couldn't hear one thing.

I could see that hand.

Over the top of her hat Ted looked down the track, straight at the last car, and he lifted two fingers and touched his brim.

He had reason to feel easy.

He knew what train I was on, and he knew what I had signed.

I could have stepped down, because we weren't doing ten miles an hour, but I was under orders and the Army has a word for that.

The steam came back across, and I looked up at my own right arm.

It was still in the air.

I was still waving, at her back.

Six days later her letter found me, written that night at a hotel desk, and God help me, it was the best I ever got…