the Chicago Tribune, bent over a bed while stuffing an Army-issue rucksack. She looked up as Mrs. Ernestine Sage McCoy—whose exquisitely embroidered kimono almost but not quite concealed the evidence of her advanced pregnancy—came into the bedroom.
Jeanette smiled as Ernie carefully lowered herself onto the foot of the mattress.
“I used to have one of those,” Ernie said.
“A rucksack?” Jeanette replied, surprised. “You were a Girl Scout?”
“I meant a flat belly, with a cute little navel that used to drive the boys wild when I wore a bikini,” Ernie said. “Now look at me!” She patted her stomach. “I look like a boa constrictor that just swallowed a whole pig.”
Jeanette laughed. “Not quite that bad,” she said.
“Bad enough,” Ernie said.
Jeanette’s tone turned serious. “Can I offer a word of advice?”
“No,” Ernie replied sharply, then softened the edge. “Thank you, but no. I know what you’re going to say: Go home and have the baby.”
“I feel like a shit leaving you alone in your condition,” Jeanette said.
“I’m not due until the middle of December,” Ernie said. “You’ll be back before then, right?”
“I’ll be back in a week,” Jeanette said. “But I don’t want to walk in here a week from now and . . . hear something unpleasant.”
“You want to be here when something unpleasant happens, right?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Jeanette said. “But yeah, if something does go wrong—and so far you have a lousy record of going all the way through the childbearing process—I’d like to be here.”
“What’ll happen will happen,” Ernie said. “I’m doing everything the doctor told me to do, which really means not doing anything on a long list of things I’m not supposed to do. I’ll be all right.”
“If I say, reassuringly, ‘Certainly, you’ll be all right,’ you’ll use that as an excuse not to go home. If I say—”
“Jeanette, this is home. This is the first house Ken and I have ever owned.”
“A fact—you told me—you carefully concealed from him until very recently.”
“I thought of it as my house, our house,” Ernie said. “You know why I couldn’t tell him. He was trying to be a good Marine officer.”
“And for being a very good Marine officer, they started to kick him out of the Marine Corps. There’s a moral in there somewhere.”
Ernie exhaled audibly.
“So what happens to him when this war is over?” Jeanette asked. “Which it may be by the time I get to Korea, from what they’re saying at the Dai Ichi Building.”
“I wish I knew,” Ernie said. “He doesn’t say anything— good Marine officers don’t criticize the sacred Marine Corps—but he has to be bitter about what they did to him.”
“What would you like to happen?”
“What almost did,” Ernie said. “When we thought he was being ‘involuntarily released,’ which is the euphemism for getting kicked out, we went to see Colonel Ed Banning and his wife, and the Zimmermans, in Charleston. . . .”
“Who’s Banning?”
“He and Ken and Ernie go all the way back to the 4th Marines in Shanghai. He’s the one who sent Ken to Officer Candidate School. They were together all through World War Two. Anyway, before this goddamn war came along, Banning—who was about to retire—and Zimmerman were going to develop an island. . . .”
“Develop an island?” Jeanette parroted.
“You know, build houses on it and sell them. Their idea was to sell them to retired Marines. But I saw the island, and I think they could sell them to just about anybody. The island is just off the coast, and it’s just beautiful. Anyway—”
“Where are they going to get the money to do something like that?” Jeanette interrupted.
“Banning owns the island; he has money,” Ernie replied. “A lot of money. He was Ken’s role model for living on Marine pay, but he doesn’t have to play poor when he retires. And Ernie’s wife has the King Midas touch. They own a half-dozen businesses outside Parris Island. Anyway, they asked Ken to go in with them. He seemed to think it was a good idea. But that was when his choices were going back to being a sergeant or the island. Now . . . now they gave him his golden major’s oak leaf back. I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“You want to do this island-building thing?”
“Oh, yeah, I want to do the island-building thing.”
“Then tell him, ‘I’ve been chasing you around for all this time, now it’s your turn to do what I want for a while.’ ”