His words were noble, but his face said: Somehow I will learn to bear this repugnant hunk of awfulness.
“I love you, too, Jim,” I lied, and I kissed him with something that might have been interpreted as gratitude and relief.
But if you would like to know when—in all my years of life—I felt the most sordid and vile, it was right then.
—
Winter came.
The days got shorter and colder. My commute to work with my father was executed both morning and night in pitch darkness.
I was working on knitting Jim a sweater for Christmas. I had not unpacked my sewing machine since returning home nine months earlier—even looking at its case made me feel sad and grim—but I had recently taken up knitting. I was good with my hands, and handling the thick wool came easily. I’d ordered a pattern through the mail for a classic Norwegian sweater—blue and white, with a snowflake pattern—and I worked on it whenever I was alone. Jim was proud of his Norwegian heritage, and I thought he might like a gift that reminded him of his father’s country. In making this sweater, I pushed myself to the same level of excellence my grandmother would have demanded of me, ripping back whole rows of stitches when they were not perfect, and trying them again and again. It would be my first sweater, yes, but its excellence would be beyond reproach.
Other than that, I was doing nothing with myself but going where I was told, filing whatever needed to be filed (more or less alphabetically), and doing whatever anyone else did.
It was a Sunday. Jim and I had gone to church together, and then we went off to see a matinee of Dumbo. When we came out of the movie theater, the news was already all over town: The Japanese had just attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
By the next day, we were at war.
—
Jim didn’t need to enlist.
He could have dodged the war for so many reasons. For one thing, he was old enough that the draft would not necessarily have caught him. For another, he was the sole financial provider of a widowed mother. And lastly, he worked in a position of authority at the hematite mine, which was an industry essential to the war effort. There would have been deferments available in all directions, should he have wished to reach for them.
But you can’t be a man with the constitution of Jim Larsen and let other boys go to war on your behalf. That’s not how he was forged. And on December 9, he sat me down for a conversation about it. We were alone at Jim’s house—his mother was at lunch with her sister in another town—and he asked if he could have a serious talk. He was determined to join up, he said. This was his duty, he said. He would never be able to live with himself if he didn’t help his country in its hour of need, he said.
I think he expected me to try to talk him out of it, but I didn’t.
“I understand,” I said.
“And there’s something else we should discuss.” Jim took a deep breath. “I don’t want to upset you, Vee. But I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought. Given the circumstances of the war, I think we should cancel our engagement.”
Again, he looked at me carefully, waiting for me to protest.
“Go on,” I said.
“I can’t ask you to wait for me, Vee. It’s not right. I don’t know how long this war will last, or what will become of me. I could come back injured, or not come back at all. You’re a young girl. You shouldn’t put your life away on my account.”
Now, let me point out a few things here.
For one thing, I wasn’t a young girl. I was twenty-one—which by the standards of the day practically made me a crone. (Back in 1941, it was no joke for a twenty-one-year-old woman to lose her wedding engagement, believe me.) For another thing, a lot of young couples across America that week were in exactly the straits as Jim and I. Millions of American boys were shipping off to war in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Vast numbers of them, though, hastened to get married before they departed. Some of this rush to the altar surely had to do with romance, or with fear, or with the desire to have sex before facing possible death. Or maybe it was driven by an anxiety about pregnancy, for couples who’d already begun having sex. Some of it probably had to do with an urgent push to pack as much life as possible into a short amount of time. (Your father, Angela, was one of the many young American men who sealed himself up in swift matrimony to his neighborhood sweetheart before being thrown into battle. But of course you would know that.)
And there were millions of American girls eager to nail down their sweethearts before the war took all the boys away. There were even girls who angled to marry soldiers whom they barely knew, anticipating that the boy might be killed in battle and his widow would receive a ten-thousand-dollar allotment for his death. (These kinds of girls were called “Allotment Annies”—and when I heard about them, I felt some relief in knowing that there were actually worse people out there than me.)
What I’m saying is this: the general trend among people in these circumstances was to hurry up and get married already—not to call off their damn engagements. All over America that week, dreamy-eyed boys and girls were following the same romantic script, saying, “I’ll always love you! I’ll prove my love by marrying you right now! I’ll love you forever, come what may!”
This isn’t what Jim was saying, though. He wasn’t following the script. And neither was I.
I asked, “Would you like your ring back, Jim?”
Unless I was dreaming—and I do not believe I was dreaming—an expression of enormous relief flickered across his face. In that moment, I knew what I was seeing. I was seeing a man who’d just realized he had an out—that he did not have to marry the frighteningly tainted girl now. And he could keep his honor. He looked so nakedly grateful. The reaction lasted only for an instant, but I saw it.
Then he pulled himself back together. “You know I will always love you, Vee.”
“And I will always love you, too, Jim,” I dutifully replied.
Now we were back on script.
I slid that ring off my finger and placed it firmly in his waiting palm. I do believe to this day that it felt just as good for him to get that ring back as it felt for me to shed it.
And thus we were saved from each other.
You see, Angela, history is not so busy shaping nations that it cannot take the time to shape the lives of two insignificant people. Among the many revisions and transformations that the Second World War would bring to the planet was this tiny plot twist: Jim Larsen and Vivian Morris were mercifully spared from matrimony.
—
An hour after we had broken off our engagement, the two of us were having the most outrageous, memorable, backbreaking sex you could ever imagine.
I suppose I had initiated it.
All right, I’ll admit it: categorically, I had initiated it.
Once I’d returned the ring, Jim had offered me a tender kiss and a warm embrace. There’s a way that a man can hold a woman that says, “I don’t want to hurt your gentle feelings, darling,” and that’s how he was holding me. But my gentle feelings had not been hurt. If anything, it felt like a cork had been yanked from my skull and I was now exploding with an intoxicating rush of freedom. Jim was going to be gone—and of his own volition, better still! I would come out of this situation looking blameless, and so would he. (But more important: me!) The threat had been lifted. There was nothing more to be pretended, nothing more to be disguised. From this moment onward—ring off my hand, engagement canceled, reputation intact—I had nothing more to lose.