Ann looked at the two of them and left, saying nothing.
Sarah finally turned to him.
He looked gaunt, she thought, but even more handsome than the first time she had seen him. She was reacting to him now as she had reacted to him then. Except now she understood what that reaction was. He was more than the most handsome man she had ever seen, he was the sexiest. Perhaps that was really what handsome meant.
She wanted very much to rush to him, to put her arms around him, to feel his body against hers. But that, she sensed, was not what she should do right now. There had been shock in his eyes when he looked at her, maybe even fear. Certainly not lust.
“How’s your friend Canidy?” Sarah asked. “Ann hasn’t heard from him in a long time, months.”
“To hell with Canidy,” he snapped. “Let’s talk about this.” He raised the baby in his arms.
“He’s very healthy,” Sarah said. “And most of the time very happy.”
“He looks like you,” Bitter said.
“Too early to tell,” she said. “You like him?”
“I like him,” he said, and looked at her and smiled happily.
I’ll be damned if that isn’t true!
“I’m glad,” she said. She smiled back. It was the first time she had smiled since he had arrived.
“Me, too,” he said. “Glad, I mean. Happy. Stunned, but happy and glad.”
“It wasn’t what you expected, was it?”
“I came with evil designs on your body,” he said.
Sarah met his eyes.
He means that. He came hoping for a quick piece of ass, and was instead presented with his child. But that is not important. I am not offended, or hurt. He didn’t know, and he came. That is enough.
“He’s usually sound asleep at half past five,” she said. “And he sleeps like a log until it’s time to feed him again.”
He was strangely excited. He recognized it as sexual excitement.
What the hell. What’s wrong with that?
“We’ll have to get rid of Ann,” he said.
“If she can’t hear the baby cry, she couldn’t hear us,” Sarah said.
She saw the surprise on his face and added: “I’ve been thinking about you that way, too. Does that shock you?”
“I don’t think anything will ever shock me again,” Bitter said.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin H. Bitter, USN, and Miss Sarah Child were united in matrimony seventy-two hours after he learned that he was a father.
There were two ceremonies, the first in the chambers of Judge Braxton Fogg of the U.S. Circuit Court for the Tennessee District. Before going on the bench, Judge Fogg had represented the Chandler H. Bitter Company, Commodities Brokers, in Memphis and become a close friend of Chandler H. Bitter.
Judge Fogg was pleased to be able to be of service, and between Judge Fogg and Miss Ann Chambers it was arranged to keep the news of the wedding from being released to—more important, published in—the Memphis Advocate, or any other newspaper.
Both the father of the groom and Joseph Schild, the father of the bride, agreed that the important thing was that Ed had come home alive to assume—if a little late—his role as husband and father. The story, it was agreed between them, to be given out was that Sarah and Ed had been secretly married before Ed had gone off to the Flying Tigers.
It would have been better if Sarah had been willing to divulge the name of the father before now, so that story could have been circulated earlier, but there was nothing that could be done about that now.
Mr. Schild confided in Mr. and Mrs. Bitter the unfortunate reaction his wife had had upon learning that her only daughter was pregnant, and told them that she was again in the Institute of Living in Hartford. He was of course desperate to do anything that might help her.
Could Chandler Bitter and his wife possibly see their way clear to participating in a Hebrew wedding ceremony, photographs of which would be taken and shown to Mrs. Schild? Together with photographs of the married couple with their child?
A second wedding ceremony was performed by Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum in Memphis’s Congregation Beth Sholom. Wearing hastily rented formal clothing, Mr. Schild gave his bride to marriage to Commander Bitter, whose father served as his best man. Miss Ann Chambers served both as bridesmaid and supervisor of wedding photography.
It was the first time Commander Bitter, his parents, or Miss Chambers had ever been in a Hebrew place of worship.