his age in good health. He must have weaseled his way out of service. (Of course.) He was with a girl—short, cute, blond. My heart did a quick rumba at the sight of him. He was the first man I’d laid eyes on in years who made me feel a rush of desire—but of course, that would make sense. I screeched to a stop just a few feet from him, and stared right at him. Something in me wanted to be seen by him. But he didn’t see me. Alternatively, he saw me, but didn’t recognize me. (With my short hair and trousers, I didn’t look any more like the girl he used to know.) The final possibility, of course, is that he recognized me and elected not to pay me any mind.
That night, I burned with loneliness. I also burned with sexual longing—I will not lie about this. I took care of it myself, though. Thankfully, I had learned how to do that. (Every woman should learn how to do that.)
As for Anthony, I never saw him or heard his name again. Walter Winchell had predicted that the kid would be a movie star. But he never made it.
Or who knows. Maybe he never even bothered to try.
Only a few weeks later, I was invited by one of our actors to a benefit at the Savoy Hotel to raise money for war orphans. Harry James and His Orchestra would be playing, which was a fun enticement, so I beat down my tiredness and went to the party. I stayed for just a short while as I didn’t know anybody there, and there weren’t any interesting-looking men to dance with. I decided it would be more fun to go home and sleep. But as I was walking out of the ballroom, I bumped straight into Edna Parker Watson.
“Excuse me,” I mumbled—but in the next instant, my mind calculated that it was her.
I’d forgotten that she lived at the Savoy. I never would have gone there that night had I remembered.
She looked up at me and held my gaze. She was wearing a soft brown gabardine suit with a pert little tangerine blouse. Casually tossed over her shoulder was a gray rabbit stole. As ever, she looked immaculate.
“You are very excused,” she said, with a polite smile.
This time there could be no pretending that I had not been identified. She knew exactly who I was. I was familiar enough with Edna’s face to have caught that quick shimmer of disturbance behind her mask of adamant calm.
For almost four years, I had pondered what I would say to her, if our paths ever crossed. But now all I could do was say, “Edna,” and reach for her arm.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but I don’t believe you’re somebody I know.”
Then she walked away.
When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right—not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either.
In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.
After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain—yet somehow, still, we carry on.
TWENTY-FIVE
Now it was late 1944. I had turned twenty-four years old.
I kept working around the clock at the Navy Yard. I can’t remember ever taking a day off. I was squirreling away good money from my wartime wages, but I was exhausted, and there was nothing to spend it on anyway. I barely had the energy to play gin rummy with Peg and Olive in the evenings anymore. More than once, I fell asleep during my evening commute and woke up in Harlem.
Everyone was bone weary.
Sleep became a golden commodity that everyone longed for but nobody had.
We knew we were winning the war—there was a lot of big talk about what a bruising we were giving the Germans and the Japanese—but we didn’t know when it would all be over. Not knowing, of course, didn’t stop anyone from running their mouths nonstop, spreading fruitless gossip and speculation.
The war would end by Thanksgiving, they all said.
By Christmas, they all said.
But then 1945 rolled in, and the war wasn’t done yet.