Chapter 4

I held that page long enough for Clovis to take it as respect.

"Ain't that something?" he said. "I don't know where she gets it."

I reached under my bed, which hurt, and brought up the White Owl box.

I took out the first letter, the one on Morrison Hotel paper, and laid it on his blanket next to his own, with my finger under the line.

"Well, I'll be," he said, still grinning. "Your wife's got my line. Must've come out of a magazine."

"What's it say on your license, Clovis? Not Jenny."

His grin stayed where it was, but his eyes went back to the paper.

"Genevieve," he said.

The sealed envelope was at the bottom of the box, where it had been for eight months.

I tore off the end and shook the picture out on his blanket, and she looked up at us from under that little hat.

"Now how in the hell," Clovis said, "did you get my Jenny's picture?"

So I told him, low, so the ward wouldn't hear.

I told him to his face: the platform, the arm coming down, the hand on her hat, the two fingers on the brim.

I had carried that for eight months, and it took under a minute.

"Tall fellow," he said. "Buick. Bad ear."

"That's him."

"He stood up at my wedding."

He looked at the picture and he looked at me, and his jaw started to work, and I got ready, because he had big hands.

Then a noise came out of him like a calf in a culvert.

It started low and it kept coming, until he was beating on the mattress with the flat of his hand, and men who had been lying with their faces to the wall for a week started laughing with no idea why.

A nurse came down the ward at a fast walk, because there was red coming through his dressing.

"Corporal, you've torn your stitches! What on earth is funny?"

"Ma'am," he said, wiping his eyes, "I want you to meet my husband-in-law."

While they sewed him up he got the rest out of me.

"You saw her, with your own eyes, from the train, and you kept on paying?"

"Stopping it meant saying why."

That nearly tore him open again.

"Son, you are the biggest fool in the United States Army."

"You're married to her too."

"Second biggest," he said, and he shook my hand.

When he could talk straight he told me what we were, because he had read a piece in the Stars and Stripes about a gal with a string of sailors.

"Allotment Annie, they call that kind. Fifty a month off every fellow she can get in front of a judge, and his insurance on top."

For eight months I had lain awake working out what she saw in that man that she didn't see in me.

I hadn't been that important.

I was a line in somebody's books.

"How many of us, you reckon?" Clovis said. "A sentence that good, she ain't going to use it on just two."

"What difference does it make?"

"Hell, I don't know. I'd just like to meet 'em, wouldn't you?"

By that fall the Army had looked at my leg and my old paperwork and given me back my brushes.

I was on limited duty with the base section at Naples, going from hospital to hospital with a can of black and a mahlstick, lettering ward signs.

Nobody looks at a sign painter.

I could stand on a ladder with my back to a ward, turn my head, and read an envelope at thirty feet.

In October I found the third one, on a bedside table in a ward for arms and shoulders.

He was the biggest man I ever saw lying down.

His name was Arvid Lindahl, he was twenty-nine, he worked the ore docks at Duluth, and the girl who mopped that ward mopped around his bed twice.

I came down off the ladder and told him to his face, her name and the Buick and the sentence, and I laid my page on his blanket.

He read it, and he read it again, and he hadn't said one word yet.

He got up, which took a while, with one arm strapped in a sling.

He hit me once with the other one, and I went backward across the next man's bed with my nose over by my ear.

He sat down again, and the bed took it hard.

"Now tell the rest," he said.

I was on the floor, bleeding into a clean shirt. "That's all of it."

"No."

He talked slowly, with long spaces, like a man unloading something heavy one piece at a time.

"I had a friend. Emil Sobczak. From Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Twenty-four years old."

They'd been in the same rifle company in Italy, and Emil had a wife in Chicago he called Genia.

"He read me that line. Be late. I had it too, in my shirt. I did not tell him. I thought all the girls were saying it that year."

He looked down at the sling for a while.

"He was late for everything. Chow. Formation. On report in three countries. He was paying on a bicycle back home, out of his Army pay. A bicycle."

I got out my handkerchief and held it to my face.

"In January we go up at six in the morning. That one morning Emil was there at ten to six, shaved. I don't know why."

He didn't say any more about that morning, and I didn't ask.

"The telegram goes to the wife," he said. "His things go to the wife. His ten thousand goes to the wife, by the month."

"He have people?"

"A mother. A widow. She takes in wash."

Up to that minute I had thought the worst thing in this whole business was what had been done to me, and I'd spent a year on it.

Arvid reached inside his shirt and brought out a sheet of paper gone soft at the creases.

He had written to her, the way Emil asked him to, and she had written back.

It was in pencil, in the stiff, careful hand of somebody who came to English late, and he laid it on the blanket where I could see.

"My daughter-in-law writes me every week."