Her letters were lighthearted, but the stress of wartime did manifest itself, as they tried to navigate spats and uncertainties. Jim continued to complain if time went by and he didn’t get any letters. One night Dot drafted an angry response, writing late at night after a long day. She wrote: “I was just sitting here in bed, waiting for Carolyn to turn out the light, and re-reading the last epistle received from you. I thought that I was a past master of hammer-on-the-head technique, but, J. Bruce, you have me beat all hollow! In some spots that letter blesses me out twice in the same sentence!… The truth of the matter is that I really envy you. Did you think that was just soft soap when I said it before? I’ll trade places with you just any day you say.” But the letter seemed too strong, so in the rational light of morning, she didn’t send it.
The good thing about the pace of their correspondence was that it gave them time to cool off. In August, Jim was pleased that he had received two letters from her, each of which had taken two weeks to reach him. “I enjoy very much reading your letters, Dot,” he said. Casting around for things he could safely tell her, he reported that the enlisted men were playing a “hot game of bridge”; that he had finished his meteorological charts for the day; that the officers didn’t seem much interested in poker, which was good since he played some recently and it was “hard on the nerves.” But there was a Ping-Pong table and “a victrola with some good records that the Navy left us,” as well as a piano.
The war went on and on. As early as the beginning of 1944, Jim had floated the idea of marriage—on top of his hinting around and taking her to meet his sisters before he left—and Dot struggled to decide whether she wanted to settle down, and if so, when, and with whom. She went back and forth. In October 1944, Jim wrote Dot that he was being sent to another posting and complained that he hadn’t heard from her. It had been nearly a year since his hasty trip to Washington to see her. “I guess you are still having a good time with your friends in Lynchburg,” he said, a little plaintively. He said that he could only take sixty-five pounds of personal items to his new station, so was having to pick and choose what to put in his suitcase, and figured he could get two pounds of random items in his pocket. “Dot, don’t you worry your pretty self about me because I think my new assignment will be better than the one here.”
By November, Jim Bruce was stationed in Iran. “The weather situations are rather interesting here,” he wrote. “I noticed a while ago that we have a few clouds that I didn’t forecast and can’t explain.” He sent her a candlestick and pen, and she wrote saying that she liked them. He still did not seem certain of her affections. “Dot, you should stop worrying about your brothers and me if you really do worry about me. I am safer here than I would be in the States where there are so many ways to be hurt. There are no bad girls here to harm me either.”
He continued, seriously: “Dot, what worries me is this war is going to be longer than we thought and it is going to be a long time before I get home to see you.” In December 1944 he had not heard from her “since I wrote last,” and reflected with some anxiety that he now must be six thousand miles away from her. “That is a long ways, in fact it is six thousand miles further than I would like to be.” He concluded: “Be good and write to me often, Dot. I enjoy reading about all the things you do.”
Even as she vacillated, Dot was writing letters that were affectionate, which he took note of. “In a letter from you that I received yesterday, you wanted to know if I still had a dimple in my chin so the purpose of the enclosed photograph is to show that I do have a dimple and that I can raise a mustache,” he wrote her. “I promise to cut off the mustache before I come home though.”
Dot, I have been receiving your letters in about ten days, much to my happiness, and I enjoy them all very much. You wrote that if I wanted to know how much you love me that you would tell me. Please tell me because I do want to know.
In that letter, however, Jim was worried about her old friend Bill Randolph, who had received a diplomatic posting. “Dot, you are lucky to be such a good friend of a vice-consul. I hope he stays in South America until after I get back home because I am afraid that you will decide to be more than brother and sister.” He was planning to throw a party with Scotch and fruitcake. “Dot, it will be close to Christmas when you receive this so I hope you have a very merry one and a happy new year. I sincerely hope that I can be with you next Christmas.”
In January he was elated to have two letters from her and a Christmas card. “I love you and am looking forward with great anxiety to the day when I get home and see you.” In a subsequent letter he was still worried, though, that he hadn’t heard from her. He admitted that he was not going to church much and urged her to write him both at the APO address she had been using and another APO address that some of the other officers were using, “and number them consecutively” to see which Army Post Office got the letters to him faster.
He was pleased with a recent forecast he had made.
It stopped raining and cleared up when I predicted, the fog came in this morning and then it cleared up again as my forecast said it would. When I went to the mess hall this morning some of the pilots congratulated me which is very unusual. Usually they give us H! if the forecast is bad and forget it if it turns out OK.
He noted that he had been overseas for almost thirteen months and figured that in four or five more he could start hoping to be transferred. “I will be working all the angles I know of trying to get home to see you.”
Be a good girl Dot and write to me. Some day you can tell me all that you are thinking and not have to write it.
All my love, Jim
Jim continued to broach getting married. They corresponded over this in the fall of 1944. Enjoying her independence, Dot put him off; then gave her assent; then wasn’t sure. Around February 1945 she suggested they write a letter every day. But at the end of that month, Jim wrote that “the letter that I received from you today is the one in which you turned down my request to become engaged now.”
He was clearly disappointed. “Dot, I know that you did the right thing but I must admit that I was surprised,” he wrote. “When we were corresponding over the question last fall you stated that you could think of nothing better than becoming engaged to me.” He speculated that “maybe you didn’t really mean it last fall” and worried that he had been bragging about his family and that had put her off. “I didn’t mention my good family thinking that it would have any effect on our marriage,” he wrote apologetically. “I just thought that you might be interested in knowing something about them. I was asking you to marry me and not my family.”
But here was the good thing about Jim Bruce: He didn’t browbeat Dot or try to force her. He told her he respected her decision. And neither did he give up. “Well, I guess we had best drop the subject for a while,” he wrote mildly. She had mentioned that Crow and Louise were going home to Mississippi for a visit, and he wished them well.
Dot, I must go to work now and help to keep ’em flying.
All my love, Jim
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Enemy Landing at the Mouth of the Seine”