The Amateur Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

they quoted revealed anything interesting. He didn’t like the food. The guy in the bunk next to him had a constant, honking cough. Life in camp alternated between working your head off one moment and sitting around, sitting around, sitting around the next, just waiting for the war to be over. By now it was a whole new year, 1942, and you would have thought they could have wrapped things up weeks ago.
    Every so often, in the late afternoon, the three girls would stop by Anton’s Grocery—Katie and Wanda and Pauline, sometimes with Pauline’s friend Anna tagging along. “How are you bearing up, Mrs. Anton?” Pauline would say. “Michael asked me to check on you. He’s worried how you’re doing. Have you heard from him lately?”
    Mrs. Anton was her usual gray self (“If he’s as worried as all that, he never should have gone and enlisted,” she said once), but those who knew her well could detect the gratified pleats at the corners of her mouth. And she always said, “ You’ve heard, I guess,” which was her devious way of asking without asking.
    “Yes, a letter came this morning. He’s managing okay, he says.”
    After the girls had left, the women would tell Mrs. Anton how sweet it was of Pauline to stop by. “She’s trying to be nice,” they told her. “You have to hand her that much.”
    Mrs. Anton just said, “Hmpf. For somebody holding down a job, she certainly has a lot of spare time, is all I can say.”
    Mrs. Anton had hired a colored man to help out in Michael’s stead. Eustace, his name was. He was small and dry and toasty brown, of an indeterminate age, and he always wore a suitcoat over his bib overalls. Any time Mrs. Anton assigned him a chore, he said, “Yes-sum,” and touched the brim of his hat in a dignified and respectful manner, but she told the other women she couldn’t wait to be rid of him. “This is a family business,” she said. “I can’t afford to hire some stranger off the streets! I just want Michael home again. I don’t understand what’s keeping him.”
    In February he did come home, but only briefly. By this time people were growing accustomed to the sight of uniforms in their neighborhood, their sons returning for visits in glaringly short haircuts and government-issue woolens. But Michael seemed more changed than the other boys. His face was positively gaunt, with hollows below the cheekbones and shadows the color of bruises underneath his eyes. He was less attentive to his mother, almost not in evidence around the store, and absentminded when friends addressed him on the street. Every fiber of his being, it seemed, was focused on Pauline.
    Well, that was something else people were growing accustomed to: these intense wartime romances. Three of the Szapp boys had married within a single week! But since Pauline was from away, this meant Michael all but disappeared from view. He spent most of his time at her family’s house. Her family loved him, Wanda reported. They were very doting and welcoming—a household of daughters, four of them, only one as yet married. They cooked for him and made a big fuss whenever he showed up. And Pauline, of course, was in heaven. It was a perfect, blissful five days, by all accounts, and then he shipped out for special training in California. (Was it his gift for reassembling rifles? Some fund of superior intelligence up till now kept hidden?) Mrs. Anton was left looking more bereft than ever. She no longer discussed her plans to fire Eustace.
    Mrs. Szapp asked Mrs. Anton if Michael and Pauline were thinking of marriage. This was not very tactful of her. The other customers tensed. But Mrs. Anton surprised them. Yes, she said mildly, he’d said something about it. He said the subject had come up between them. And it was a fact that a Baltimore girl would be preferable to somebody French or English.
    Oh, well, of course. Sure couldn’t argue with that, people said, tumbling over each other’s words in their haste to reassure