Saving Graces Read Online Free PDF Page B

where he spent his nights in a classroom and his days in a cockpit. My father loved flying and swore he’d never get out of a plane. He never minded the danger, but he did mind the unrelenting heat of Corpus Christi and the intense schedule. “I still have a lot to learn,” he told his mother as his training program came to a close. “We have to know everything about this plane except how to make it talk.” That left little time, he complained, for the more important things, like football and girls. But all that was about to change.
    In a letter home to his mother, my father slipped in the name of my mother—and his plan to marry her—between the notice that he had taken $135 from his bank account and a reminder that his Plymouth was due for a free checkup. “Believe me,” he wrote, “this is it. She is tall, shapely, light brown hair—fairly attractive. Hope you will like her.”
    My mother was born Mary Elizabeth Thweatt, the daughter of a Navy pilot and a Mississippi farm girl. Her father, Troy, had courted my grandmother Mary in letters from the front as part of the first Navy Air Corps during World War I. While in France, he wrote her a sweet letter about how much he adored and missed her. He always started his letters “Dearest Girl,” and that is how this one started. On the outside of the letter he wrote that if the letter wasn’t welcome, she needn’t keep it. She could send it back, and he would send it to another girl. My grandmother wrote back that she liked the letter fine and believed she would keep it, but she would always wonder who had gotten it before she did. He knew then he had to marry her.
    My mother never knew a hometown any more than I did. There was land in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, that her mother’s family owned, land she and her siblings still own today, but it was no more home to her than my grandparents’ houses in Pittsburgh or Pensacola were to me. She too had grown up on naval bases around the country, moving every few years, with her elementary school days in Norfolk, her junior prom at California’s famous Hotel Del Coronado, and graduation from high school at Punaho in Hawaii, as if in a prequel to my own life.
    After Pearl Harbor, Liz, as my mother was known, left college to work at the air station in Kingsville, Texas, where her father was stationed, and there, through a friend, she met a young pilot from Illinois, Carl Hallen. When he was transferred to Hanford, Washington, she traveled by train—with a wedding dress and veil—to marry him under crossed swords, surrounded by near-strangers, since neither her family nor her friends could afford to travel in wartime. She moved to San Diego when his squadron moved and went home to her family—then in Pensacola, Florida—when the squadron was deployed to the Pacific theater.
    It was there that she was living when she got a telegram that Carl’s plane had lost its positioning and flown nose-down into the Pacific. No body was recovered; there was no funeral to attend. Mother accepted the news with the same silent strength she had seen women draw on to accept similar news her whole life; her grief would be private. Mother simply went back to college, this time to Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee. This time as Mary Elizabeth Hallen, widow.
    I suppose every little girl grows up thinking her mother is beautiful. When I was eight I drew a picture of a woman’s face with X’s at the corners of the mouth—my mother had just had surgery to remove cysts on her chin—and I labeled it “Beautiful Woman,” so I was no exception to the rule. But as I look back at photographs of my mother, I can see now that she really was a great beauty, long-legged and lean—she had been named “Best-Placed Protoplasm” in high school, a title my brother and sister and I found hilarious. She had soft brown curls and clear blue eyes above Rita Hayworth cheekbones. She said Carl Hallen fell for her when he saw her in jodhpurs and