when he finished the total ten weeks of training. She couldn’t wait to visit him at the end of January.
The platform was crowded with young men and a few his age, parents and girlfriends and children waving to their fathers. They kissed one last time, and Eleanor stood and waved with Camille in her arms until the train was fully out of the station, and then she went home to their apartment in Chinatown, to begin her life without him. They hadn’t been apart for a day in the twelve years of their marriage, and Eleanor couldn’t imagine what it would be like now.
She put Camille to bed that night, and sat in the living room feeling dazed, and thinking about him.
* * *
—
Four weeks later, Eleanor drove to Monterey, and left Camille with a neighbor she trusted. The family had moved in around the time Camille was born and had a baby the same age.
It took her four hours to get to Monterey from San Francisco, she left her car in the visitors’ parking area at Fort Ord, and went to the visitors’ center to meet her husband. She almost didn’t recognize him. He had lost weight, he looked trimmer and his shoulders were broader, his face was thin, his head was nearly shaved, he looked strong and fit and young, and his eyes were alive when he hugged her, and he was delighted to see her. He said the training was going well, although most of it was unnecessary, but he was in the best shape he’d been in, in years.
They had coffee and sat and talked, as she watched families around them visiting, some with small children. They went for a walk in the sea air, as the seagulls flew overhead. They held hands as they had when they were courting, and two hours later, it was over. He kissed her again. He was coming home for a weekend in six weeks, at the end of his training. She’d had very little to tell him except that she missed him. Her life was the same routine it had been since Camille was born. She left her with the babysitter, worked at the school all day, picked up her daughter, fed her, bathed her, put her to bed, and thought about her husband. It was lonely without him, but she didn’t say so. She tried to look happy and strong as she waved goodbye to him, and watched him disappear with the other officers in training, back to their barracks.
Then she drove back to San Francisco. She was exhausted when she got home, after eight hours of driving back and forth to Monterey. But she was glad that she had seen him. He looked handsome in his uniform.
But their lives seemed miles apart now. He was embarking on a whole new adventure, wherever it might lead him, and her job was to keep the home fires burning and take care of their daughter. When the training course was over, she hoped he would be assigned to San Francisco, as he thought he probably would in the Presidio, the army base in the city. At least then she could see more of him.
She went to bed that night and lay awake for hours, thinking about him, wishing that the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor and things were different.
* * *
—
At the end of Alex’s training course in March he got a three-day leave to come to San Francisco. She was waiting for him at the apartment when he arrived. They had allowed her to take the afternoon off from school, and she had left Camille with the neighbor again.
They dove into bed almost as soon as he came through the door, and their lovemaking was filled with the pent-up passion of two months without him, intense loneliness on her side, and extreme physical exertion and challenges on his. He looked and seemed ten years younger than when he left.
Alex had written to tell his brothers when he enlisted. Harry had asthma and a heart murmur and had been rejected. And Phillip had been drafted and assigned to a desk job in Washington, D.C., through his wife’s connections. Both of them had been shocked to learn that Alex had enlisted at his age, but said they admired him for it.
Alex took Eleanor out to dinner that night at one of the Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. And afterward, they picked Camille up at the neighbor’s. Alex carried