sent their daughters there weren’t as elite as in Eleanor’s day, but Eleanor enjoyed them and the subjects she taught.
She was at her desk, preparing her French classes, and Camille was asleep the night they got home, when the doorbell rang, and a Western Union messenger handed her a telegram. She hadn’t heard from Alex in three weeks, but it had happened before and she knew that eventually his letters would catch up with her again. She just had to hope and assume he was alive in the meantime.
The messenger handed her the telegram quickly, and as she opened it, he was already halfway down the stairs. The telegram was from the U.S. War Department. The words in the telegram leapt off the page in capital letters as she closed the door and read them again and again. “Regret to inform you your husband Lieutenant Alexander William Allen wounded December 4, 1942, due to arrive Port of San Francisco approximately January 12 Hospital Ship USS Solace” and it was signed the adjutant general. That was all it said. It didn’t state the nature of his injuries or what had happened. All she knew after she read it was that Alex had been wounded, but he was alive and due to arrive in San Francisco in fifteen days, so he was well enough to travel, and thank God he wasn’t dead.
Her heart was pounding as she sat down on the couch with the telegram still in her hand and she read it again. His military serial number was listed on the telegram, but there was no one to call, no one to give her the details, except Alex himself in two weeks. But she was grateful he was coming home. He had been gone for nine months. She just hoped his injury wasn’t too serious, but maybe serious enough to keep him out of the war once he got home. It was all she could hope for now. She had been aware that there were military transports arriving, and hospital ships, with their wounded who were being sent home, to be tended in the States at military hospitals. And San Francisco was one of the ports they were using on the West Coast.
She read the telegram again the next morning, and called her parents to tell them. The best news was that the telegram hadn’t announced something much worse, and if he was coming home by ship, it seemed to indicate that he was well enough to travel. Her parents were concerned, but were encouraged by the fact that he was alive, and his injury wasn’t so severe that he couldn’t make the journey.
She informed the school when they reopened in January, and by then she had nine more days to wait to see Alex’s situation for herself. She didn’t know if he would have to report to a military base, would need to convalesce at a military hospital, or if he could come home to the apartment with her and Camille. The days seemed interminable as she waited for the USS Solace to reach San Francisco.
She called the Port of San Francisco on January 5 to ask if they had any word of the ship’s progress, and they told her to call back in two or three days, they expected to have news by then. They said the Solace hadn’t reached Hawaii yet, so it would be at least another week before she reached San Francisco, if not longer. They asked if she had someone on the ship, and she said yes, her husband. The voice at the other end was slightly more sympathetic after she said it.
“Most of them will be going to Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, in case you miss him at the dock. Check with them there. It’s always chaotic when they come in. You’ll have an easier time finding him at the hospital than here.” But there was no way she was going to let Alex return to San Francisco wounded and not do everything in her power to meet him at the dock, and accompany him wherever he was going after that, if they let her.
She called every few days to check. They told her there had been storms in Hawaii and finally on the fourteenth, they told her the ship would dock in two days.
“Is it a big ship?” she asked, nervous after what they’d said before, that she might miss him at the dock.
“We have almost six hundred wounded