The Amateur Marriage Read Online Free PDF

her.
    But you never knew, Mrs. Anton went on. There was many a slip betwixt cup and lip. She wasn’t holding her breath.
    She brightened as she said this—unbecomingly, some agreed later, discussing it among themselves.
    Katie Vilna left the cannery and took a job making airplane parts. The Golka twins journeyed daily to the steel mill out at Sparrows Point. And Wanda Bryk might join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, as soon as they began accepting applications. Should she? Shouldn’t she? she asked, twirling on her stool at the soda fountain. Yes! the other girls told her. Do it! They would join in a flash, if only their parents would let them.
    Pauline didn’t come around St. Cassian Street much anymore. She was busy with her volunteer work. The neighborhood girls had their own volunteer work (they must have rolled a million bandages by now, all the while wearing white headdresses that made them look like sphinxes), but Pauline’s sounded more interesting. She was helping out at a Red Cross canteen, Katie said, serving coffee and doughnuts to lonesome soldiers passing through the port. Sometimes Katie helped too. Katie couldn’t count all the fellows she’d met! She said her biggest expense these days was stationery.
    A number of the girls asked if they could come with her next time.
    In Anton’s Grocery, Mrs. Szapp said, “Where has Pauline got to? Nobody seems to have seen her.”
    “Oh, she’s around,” Mrs. Anton said.
    “I thought she might have gone off somewhere.”
    “She’s around, I tell you! She was in here just . . . when was it. Just last week, or the week before. Talking on and on about Michael. You know how she talks.”
    Mrs. Szapp was quiet a moment, and then she asked how many ration points a pound of sausage would cost her.
    The younger of the Piazy boys went down with his ship in the Coral Sea. It was the parish’s first casualty. Mr. Piazy completely stopped speaking. The neighbors walked around for days with pale, tight faces, silently shaking their heads, murmuring phrases of disbelief when they met on the street. So this was for real! they seemed to be saying to each other. Wait a minute! No one had told them things would get so serious!
    The Dobeks received a telegram saying Joe was missing in action. Davey Witt was sent home with some kind of nervous trouble that the Witts preferred not to discuss. Jerry Kowalski caught malaria. And Michael Anton was shot in the back and sidelined to the infirmary.
    Mrs. Anton said she was glad. She said, “Every day he spends lying in that hospital bed is a day he’s not overseas getting killed.” Nobody could blame her.
    Pauline got more letters than ever, now, and already she had three shoeboxes full. She kept referring to Michael’s having been “wounded.” And of course, he had been wounded, but only by mistake. Some stupid, careless mistake on the part of a fellow trainee. To hear Pauline talk, though, you would think he’d been in hand-to-hand combat.
    The elderly Japanese man who cleaned fish in the Broadway Market had quietly disappeared. Where had he gone? He’d been perfectly nice! Oh, things were dragging on too long, here. This war was lasting forever; everything was taking more time than anyone had expected. Already it was summer. Pearl Harbor seemed to have happened about a hundred years ago.
    The oddest items were in short supply. Hairpins, for instance. Who would have thought hairpins? Gasoline, all right, but . . . And the littlest of the Brunek boys couldn’t have the tricycle he’d requested for his birthday. Rubber tires were the reason. But try explaining that to Petey Brunek!
    Then the War Office sent the Szapps two telegrams in the space of three days, and everybody felt guilty for complaining about trivia.
    Although still, it would have been nice if Petey could have had his tricycle.
    When Michael Anton came home to stay, he wrote ahead to his mother and said he would like for Pauline to meet his train