Chapter Eight
It didn’t occur to her until she got back to the house after seeing him off for twelve weeks of training—basic in Michigan, officers’ in Illinois—that she’d never been alone before.
The closest she’d come was when she’d lived at the lodging house in Columbus, but she’d been surrounded by people there, even if they were strangers.
She’d certainly felt alone many times, living with Felix, but this was something new.
The house seemed like an echo chamber of plain white walls.
Many times a day she had to remind herself that Felix wasn’t going to walk through the door.
In the evenings, she listened to Edward R.
Murrow, flipped through catalogues and movie magazines, read Up at the Villa, Mildred Pierce.
Thrillers that pulled her away for a chapter or two.
She found she was going to bed earlier and earlier.
The wives up and down the block got together with other wives in the neighborhood for mutual support—also for cake and coffee, drinks and cigarettes—and when Margaret got wind of these gatherings, she started attending, reconnected with Ruth Mitchell (whose husband was now in France), and met some new faces.
War wives, they called themselves, as if they’d said their vows with a war.
They sat around their living rooms and talked about where their husbands were stationed and how much they worried, and sometimes one or two of them cried, which Margaret always found awkward; then they talked about things like rationing and repurposing and extension recipes, and that was what made Margaret want to cry, it was so boring.
Yet she knew it was good for her to be out, and to be around people.
She hosted, too, served carrot cake and tea to seven of them, and one, Mrs. Luft (a little frosty, midforties, husband in Italy) looked around the living room and asked Margaret if she’d finally decided what she was going to do with the place.
“Sorry?” Margaret asked, sitting forward just a bit, holding her cup by the handle and palming the saucer beneath it.
“The décor, dear,” said Mrs. Luft. With a smile, no less.
Margaret was so upset about that remark that she crawled back into bed after the war wives left.
But later the phone rang, and it was Ruth.
She wanted to thank Margaret for hosting them that afternoon.
She and Agnes (husband in the Pacific) had had a lovely time.
Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, Mrs. Luft was a grumpy old battle-ax, and Margaret shouldn’t give her another thought.
—
Still, the battle-ax had a point. Margaret could have done something more than just hang pictures in the year and a half they’d been living there.
Put some color up on the walls, at least. In the coming weeks, she picked out a color for the kitchen (a soft yellow) and the living room (robin’s-egg blue), and when Ruth and Agnes got wind of what she was up to, they insisted on coming over to help paint.
They put on the new Tommy Dorsey record and threw drop cloths over the furniture, and Ruth, eyeing the bottle of Dewar’s on the drink cart, asked if they might have a little snort to get things going.
Like Agnes and almost every other wife in the neighborhood, Ruth was a few years older than Margaret.
She had prominent eyebrows and an expressive face and often wore her brown hair done up in as many Victory Rolls as she could fit across the top of her forehead.
Paintbrush in one hand, Dixie cup in the other, she asked where Margaret volunteered, and when Margaret said nowhere, Ruth said she highly recommended it.
She and Agnes had learned: staying busy was the best way to fight the doldrums. She said this as if she assumed Margaret also had doldrums. What Margaret had was a feeling of emptiness in the pit of her stomach that she carried around every day and that didn’t seem to have anything to do with hunger; was that a doldrum?
Ruth and Agnes had grown up in Bonhomie and quipped about how small the town must have seemed when Margaret first arrived. No, no, Margaret lied, she’d found it charming—though she told them how she wouldn’t have minded a museum or two, maybe an arts center that offered classes and lectures.
“That’s why God made Toledo,” Agnes said. She had dots of robin’s-egg blue in her platinum hair.
When Margaret expressed a desire to go dancing somewhere that wasn’t the Bric-a-Brac or the USO, which was meant for single ladies, both Agnes and Ruth exchanged a glance.
They’d been getting together downtown once a week with some other people—friends of theirs, they said, not the neighborhood brigade—to practice dance steps and unwind.
A casual thing, they emphasized, at a little place over the Dads she thought it looked distinguished. Ruth said she thought it had pizzazz.
—
In September, Felix returned—for one week.
His hair was shorter, and he was even bigger in the shoulders, arms, and chest. He seemed happy to see her, happy to be home, happy to be shipping back out in seven days.
He didn’t notice the fresh paint in the living room and kitchen until she pointed it out to him.
The wallpaper in the den stopped him in his tracks.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
He said he did. She led him into the bathroom to show him the seahorse-patterned wallpaper she’d hung (with Agnes’s help), then upstairs to the guest room to show him the new canvas window shades she’d put up (with Ruth’s help).
Everything looked wonderful, Felix said and asked roughly how much it cost. When she told him, his teeth flashed—not in a smile.
But he said, “The house is within your purview. Just keep an eye on the bank balance.”
He’d had his photo taken in his dress blues in Chicago.
She put it in a frame and set it on the mantel.
That week, he talked optimistically about the war.
In bed, he was ambitious—and even successful.
Then, all too soon, they were saying goodbye again and he was off to San Francisco, where he would finish his processing and wait to be deployed.
When he left that time the look in his eyes, and both what he said and didn’t say, told her that he would most likely be gone until the end of the war, which meant indefinitely.
The openness of that folded in on itself and formed a constant knot of worry in her stomach.
In her gloomiest, most selfish hours, all reason and circumstance fell away, and she could think only that he’d chosen to go.
—
San Francisco was all waiting and paperwork, he wrote.
Forms for the government. Forms for the Navy.
Allotment forms. Life insurance forms. He was going to arrange to have his pay sent home while he was gone, not that she should get too excited about that, because it was a pittance.
The life insurance was more, but he hoped she never had to see that check.
He wanted to get assigned to an aircraft carrier.
If not one of those, a destroyer or a tender.
(Margaret wasn’t sure what a tender was, but it sounded nicer than a destroyer.)
Then his assignment came in. He was to report to an auxiliary cargo ship that would run supplies from the West Coast out to various ports in the Pacific and move supplies from base to base out there, as needed.
A month later, his first letter arrived from sea. Greetings from the SS James Teague, it began.
The Teague was a Liberty ship, he told her. 440 feet long, 14,000 tons empty. Can go 12 mph on calm seas. It’s a fairly new ship now he barely noticed the motion of the ship, unless they were in bad weather.
The skies were huge and the nights were a vast canopy of stars.
He wished she could see it. He also wished she could meet the guys he was sailing with—dead serious, some of them, but some were real cut-ups.
There were seventy men on board at present: thirty-nine civilian merchant sailors and thirty-one regular Navy, and because of the dregs of a typhoon they’d encountered, half of the guys on board were seasick.
Not him yet, luckily. His quarters—shared with one other officer—were near the engine room, and the engine was incredibly loud, but he’d been told a person got used to it after a while.
He had springs in his mattresses and a built-in reading light over his bunk.
He was reading the Armed Services edition of Look Homeward, Angel.
There was a barbershop on board, a post office, a tailor, a cobbler. Even a makeshift movie theater; they were showing Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost on Saturday—again.