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and dismay. “Don’t tell me you’re regretting it already?”
    “Oh Duke, no,” she insisted between sobs, “of course I’m not. It’s not that. It’s just that tomorrow we’re going to be leaving for California. I’ve never been away from Mommy and Daddy before, not for more than a week anyway, and I’m gonna miss them so much. Oh, and Austin!”
    At the thought of her brother, she began wailing again. Duke fought down his feelings of annoyance. What the hell did she see in that chinless, judgmental, preppy little son of a bitch anyway?
    “Come on now,” he said, reaching over and patting her thigh sympathetically. “It’s not like I’m taking you to Europe or something. Your parents can come visit. I bet you we see them all the time.”
    Minnie shook her head sadly. “I’m not so sure,” she said. “You know how much they disapproved of us getting married. What if they never forgive me?”
    “Sure they will,” said Duke. Although privately he wished his wife didn’t already think of their marriage as some sort of sin to be forgiven.
    The first year of the marriage was a happy one. Duke had bought them a large house in North Hollywood, back when L.A. property was still dirt cheap, and Minnie delighted in decorating it and playing house while her new husband was on-set. His career was going from strength to strength, and in 1941 he landed his first leading role, in a farcical comedy called
Checkmate
. The rift with her family remained strong, and she saw her parents only once in that first year, spending an agonizingly awkward long weekend with them at the newly developed resort of Palm Springs. But life with Duke was so blissful, and Minnie was so caught up with establishing herself as a hostess among his new and exciting Hollywood crowd, that she found herself feeling less and less homesick, and less and less guilty, by the day.
    Then came the war. And as for so many young couples, overnight it seemed, everything changed.
    Duke was sent to Asia, where he was to spend the next three and a half years. He was, as he liked to tell people later, one of the lucky ones. He came home. But the home, and the woman he came home to, had changed out of all recognition.
    For the first six months after he was conscripted, Minnie remained in Hollywood, trying to make a life for herself among the other army wives there. But loneliness soon overcame her and, encouraged by her mother and brother, she decided to return home to Connecticut. She missed Duke terribly and wrote to him religiously twice a week. But she also found herself naturally slipping back into the old rhythms of life at home. Soon she was going riding with her father and out to lunches in Manhattan with her mother, just like the old days, and her married life back in California began to feel more and more like a distant dream.
    Duke would come home on leave and stay with the Millers. His father-in-law was civil—now that he had seen active service, Duke had apparently become a smidgen more acceptable in the old man’s eyes—but still always treated him with a patronizing sense of social superiority that Duke bitterly resented.
    When he complained to Minnie about it, she dismissed his concern. He was imagining slights and insults where there were none.
    Duke wanted her to move back to L.A., but the mere suggestion made her almost hysterical.
    “What’s the point of me being there when you’re away?” she asked. “I’m isolated and I’m lonely, whereas here I have friends and family to support me. Things are so much better now with Mom and Dad. Please, please don’t ruin it all again.”
    He couldn’t really argue with her. Still, he returned to the front with a gnawing sense that he was somehow losing her. That she was no longer completely on his side.
    After the war, they did move back home, and for a while life got back to something approaching normal. Duke went back to work at the studio, and Minnie almost immediately fell pregnant with