Chapter 5

I read that line with my nose dripping on the floor of a ward in Naples.

Somebody had to tell that old woman, and it wasn't a thing you could put in a letter with a razor blade waiting for it.

That was true, and it was also very convenient, and I leaned on it for a year.

That winter I found the fourth one, at a rest camp at Sorrento, getting over pneumonia.

He was a stone-setter from Providence named Pietro Ricci, twenty-six years old, with careful hair and the best hands I ever saw on a man.

Clovis came along for the fun of it, and Arvid came along because I'd told him where I was going.

Pietro twisted a bit of wire off a ration crate into a little flower the whole time I talked.

"She wears my pin," he said. "Silver filigree, with a garnet. She wears it to Mass."

"I saw her kiss that man, Pietro."

"Her cousin."

"It wasn't how you kiss a cousin."

He looked at me with real pity. "In my family we kiss everybody."

I laid three letters on his cot, the same hand and the same line in each.

He read them all, and he handed them back with the corners squared.

"So it's a good sentence," he said. "She's kind to lonely men. You want me to be ashamed of that? I'll pray for you fellows."

Arvid started to get up, and I put my hand on his good arm, which was like putting it on a bridge.

That night Pietro wrote to her, the way he did every night, and not one of us thought to wonder what he was saying.

The fifth one didn't need telling.

I found him in March, in a ward for lungs, a coal miner from Hazard, Kentucky, named Dewey Stamper.

He was thirty, long-boned and black-haired, and he read his mail with one finger under the line, taking his time.

I sat down on his bed and said I had something to tell him about his wife.

"I know," he said.

"You know what?"

He looked out the window a good while before he answered, which was how he talked.

"That she's Mr. Lenihan's wife."

"His cousin, you mean."

"No, sir."

The day before his wedding he had gone up to her apartment to see about a stove that wouldn't draw, and he'd opened a bureau drawer, hunting matches.

"Crown Point, Indiana. February of 1940. Him and her. It was a real nice certificate."

I had to take hold of the bed rail.

For a year and a half I had been sore about watching my wife kiss another man.

She had been kissing her husband.

I was the other man.

"You married her the next day," I said. "Knowing that."

"Yes, sir. City Hall."

"Why, in God's name?"

He took so long I thought he hadn't heard me.

"I'm thirty years old," he said. "Nobody ever wrote me a letter."

He laid his hand flat on the pages on his chest. "She said she'd write every week, and she has. Twenty-two dollars. I figured that was cheap."

He was the only one of us who got what he paid for.

I told him about Mrs. Sobczak then, and he looked out the window the longest yet.

"Well," he said. "That's different. I'll say what I saw to whoever you want."

He put his finger back under the line. "I'd be obliged if I could finish out the mail."

Number six was the easy one.

I was lettering a door at the base section's legal office when I saw the envelope on the desk of a red-haired sergeant in wire glasses.

Neil Meehan was twenty-eight, he had clerked for a lawyer in South Boston, and he talked like a man being chased.

I told him, and he took his glasses off.

"Before me? Legally? With a certificate?"

"Crown Point."

"So I'm not married."

"None of us are."

He came around the desk and kissed me on both cheeks.

"Thank God," he said. "There's a Red Cross girl named Irene Cermak, twenty-six, from Cicero, and I've been going out of my mind."

It was Neil who told us what it would cost, in a wine shop off the Via Roma, with Clovis and Arvid at the table.

A government policy could pay only a lawful widow, he said, or a child, a parent, a brother or a sister.

With that certificate Genevieve was nobody's widow, and Emil's money fell to his mother.

"But it doesn't fall by itself," he said. "Somebody swears to it, in a federal court in Chicago, with reporters."

Clovis quit smiling, which I had never seen.

"My daddy's a deacon in Lubbock. You want that in the Avalanche? Seven husbands?"

Nobody said anything, and Arvid looked at me.

I had been a year and a half afraid of one sentence, and my mother took the Kuryer Polski, and all of St. Josaphat's read it over her shoulder.

"Put my name first," I said.

I don't know who was more surprised.

In May the war in Europe quit, and the Army added up my months and my ribbon and found I had ninety points.

By July the six of us were on cots at a depot outside Naples, waiting on boats, with Arvid's feet hanging off the end of his.

"Same train," he said one night, to the roof of the tent. "All of us. Last car. Let her wave."

So every man would wire his wife at whatever address he had for her, and between us we had four.

Pietro said from two cots down that he'd ride along too, so he could be there to hear us apologize.

In September, Arvid and Clovis and I shipped out of Naples on the same boat, in bunks stacked five high.

We had the day set by then, the same for every man: every wire would name the Pennsylvania's train into Union Station on Thursday, the eighteenth of October, at twenty to four.

Neil wrote to the Bureau in Chicago, and a man there wrote back three lines: he had sent to Crown Point, and he would be on that platform.

We kept paying, every one of us, right up to the end, so she'd have no reason to wonder, and Clovis called it chipping in on the rope.

We landed at Newport News the first week of October, and the mail was waiting.

It was her hundred and third letter to me, and it asked about Pulaski's hip, and the hand never shook.

In two years she had not once written me a P.S.

"P.S. You always could see a long way, Chet."