“What do you want to hear?” he’d asked. I couldn’t respond for the buzzing in my ears. My mind was suddenly mush and my body a solid mass of nerve endings. His smile told me he knew exactly how I felt. Then he asked me to a movie. That was the beginning of everything. Seven years we’d been together now. Seven long, wonderful, love-filled, and sometimes very frustrating years. We wanted more of each other than we could have. I looked forward to the day when we could finally sleep in the same room. The same bed. At last we would be lovers, a thought that filled me with a hunger for him. It was both amazing to me as well as a source of pride that we’d been able to wait this long. We hadn’t even come close to making love because Vincent didn’t want that temptation. He’d grown up expecting to become a priest, so it made sense to me that he would never pressure me to cross that line before we were married. Gina teased me about it. She and her boyfriend Mac made love before he joined the army and she thought Vincent and I were crazy for waiting. She didn’t think sleeping together was a sin. Gina didn’t think much was a sin, actually.
“Something’s come up that I need to talk to you about,” Vincent said now, lowering his arm from my shoulders and taking my hand as we walked. His tone, which had been playful all through dinner and our birthday-and-residency celebration, was suddenly serious and I wondered if I should be worried. My biggest fear was that he would be called up for service. He had a minor problem with his heart—a murmur, his doctor called it—and so far, that had kept him out, a fact he felt guilty about. The heart murmur caused him no trouble at all, thank God. “Why should I get to stay safe at home when so many others have to fight?” he would say. Selfishly, though, I was happy he couldn’t be drafted.
“Do I need to be worried?” I asked now.
He gave my hand a squeeze, and in the golden evening light, I saw him smile. “No,” he said. “You just need to be a bit … flexible.”
“I can do that,” I said, happy just to be holding his hand.
We walked past the row houses on our block, several of them bearing the red-bordered blue star flags in the windows, indicating that a family member was serving in the armed forces. One of the houses had two blue stars and one gold. It was sobering, walking past that house. This was a costly war.
The air was warm and silky on my bare arms as we headed toward the place we always went to talk: St. Leo’s. Our church. The hub of Little Italy. Even as kids, Vincent and I had had whispered conversations in St. Leo’s. It was where we made our first communions and confirmations and it was a source of comfort for both of us. It was also where we would become husband and wife.
We reached the church and, once inside, sat down in the last pew, still holding hands. I breathed in the scent of musk and candles and incense that seemed to emanate from the cold stone walls and the smooth wood of the pews. It was a scent I always equated with comfort and safety. As much as I loved St. Leo’s, though, I knew it meant more to Vincent than it did to me. While I felt the comfort of knowing I belonged in this church where people loved me and cared for me, Vincent felt something deeper here. Something spiritual. He’d tried to explain it to me, but it was the sort of thing you couldn’t force another person to feel—that intense closeness to God. One of the priests at St. Leo’s had recognized Vincent’s brilliance in math and science early on and encouraged him to go into medicine instead of the priesthood. “There are many ways to serve God,” he’d told him. I would be eternally grateful to that priest.
There were only a few other people in the church this evening. They sat or kneeled in the pews much closer to the altar. A few of them were at the side of the church, lighting candles. Since the war began, another bank of candles had been added. We had so many young men to pray for these days.
I leaned my head on Vincent’s shoulder. “So,” I said softly. “What do I need to be flexible about?”
“There’s been a small change in my plans for the next few weeks,” he said. “I need to go to Chicago for a little while.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “Chicago? Why?”
“There’s an infantile paralysis epidemic there,” he said. “They’re asking for doctors to volunteer.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding. “You’re thinking about your cousin Tony.” Vincent’s much older cousin had contracted infantile paralysis—polio—as a teenager. He was in his forties now and he wore braces on his legs and needed crutches to help him walk.
“Yes,” he said. “I guess I’m a little more sensitive to polio than another doctor might be, but I’d want to help anyway.”
That was Vincent. Always first to jump in when someone needed help. “There are so many kids living in poverty in this country,” he’d told me once. “I’ll devote at least part of my practice to helping them.” I had the feeling we would never be rich, but that was fine.
“How long do you think you’ll be gone?” I asked.
“I’m hoping only a couple of weeks,” he said. “These epidemics tend to happen during the summer and run their course by fall.”
I hated that frightening disease. Every summer, it seemed to set a different part of the country in its sights, attacking the children and leaving them horribly ill, sometimes paralyzed, for months or years or even the rest of their lives. As a nursing student, I’d seen a couple of children who’d been devastated by it.
Vincent let go of my hand and put his arm around my shoulders and I snuggled closer. “I don’t want to be away from you any longer than that,” he said.
A couple of weeks. That sounded like a lifetime to me right then and I felt like protesting, but I needed to support him. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I wish I was done with nursing school so I could go with you to help.” I had another week in my summer program and the fall semester would start shortly after.
“That would have been perfect.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I’ll miss you,” he said, “but I’ll be back in no time.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said again. I was determined to mean it.
2
Vincent’s two weeks in Chicago stretched into three, then four and I began the final semester of my nursing program. We’d never been apart for so long. He was desperately needed there, he wrote in his letters, which arrived a couple of times each week. They were short letters, his handwriting sloppy, hurried. He rarely called. The boardinghouse where he was staying had only one phone for eight men to share. Plus, he was so busy. He promised to be home by early October, but I was beginning to doubt his promises. Those few times I spoke with him, I heard something new in his voice. A different sort of energy and excitement. He couldn’t stop talking about the children he was seeing and the work he was doing. And he was falling in love with Chicago, he said. Would I ever consider living there? That sort of talk worried me. Chicago? Leaving Baltimore and our families had never been part of our plan.
As for me, I’d talk about my challenging classes and how Mimi and Pop were doing and the plans for our wedding. I’d talk about loving him. About our future, when we would work together in his pediatric practice. About the children we would have. He’d make a gallant effort to respond to what I was saying, but after a sentence or two he’d ease the conversation back to his work. I knew he was committed to me. I knew he wanted a future with me, and yet I felt something like impending doom during those weeks apart. I tried to remind myself that many of my friends, Gina included, had boyfriends thousands of miles away who faced danger and death every single day. My fiancé was safe. How dare I want him even closer to me when he was doing such important work and taking so much satisfaction from it?
The day before he was to come home, he called again. From the moment he said “Hi, Tess,” I knew what he was going to tell me.
“I have to stay a bit longer, darling,” he said. “I’m sorry.”