The Amateur Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

alone. Mrs. Anton didn’t appear to take offense. She supposed he planned to pop the question, she told the other women, and she spoke calmly, with a light shrug. As well she could afford to, now that she had her son back.
    The reason for his discharge was a pronounced and permanent limp. All his mother had dared hope was that he’d be transferred to a desk job, but mysteriously, unexplainably, he was sent home instead. He would never, ever in his life have to partake in combat. Mrs. Anton said soldiers called that a “million-dollar wound.” Then she stammered and glanced toward Mrs. Szapp, but Mrs. Szapp said, kindly, “ Ten million dollars, I would term it. God’s been good to you, Dolly.”
    At around the time Michael and Pauline were expected to alight from the streetcar—toward noon on a Wednesday at the very tail end of August—women started showing up at the grocery store to make single, random purchases. One box of Jell-O. A flyswatter. They lingered a long while, chitchatting, casting sidelong glances at Mrs. Anton who wore a nicer-than-usual dress and a dab of lipstick. Eventually, having no further excuse to stay, they moved out onto the sidewalk and stood around in front of Mrs. Serge’s parlor window next door. Mrs. Serge had a row of china nuns lined up beneath her service banner—little cute nuns, singing O-mouthed over hymn books or kneeling in prayer with tiny gold dots of rosaries painted across their fronts. It was hot as blazes, the sun glistening on the women’s faces and spreading darkened half-moons beneath their arms, but still they went on studying Mrs. Serge’s nuns.
    Might have known the train would be late, they murmured to each other. Trains nowadays were always late, always crowded with soldiers and subject to unexplained stops.
    Twice Mrs. Anton joined them, on the pretext of seeing a customer to the door—not something she would ordinarily do. She looked toward Dubrowski Street and then ducked back inside. She was wearing actual stockings, the women realized.
    The third time she came out, she called, “Eustace? Is Eustace with you all?” although she had no possible grounds for imagining that he would be. And then she looked up the street and cried, “There he is!”
    Not Eustace, of course, but Michael, with Pauline beside him. From a distance, they were as small and tidily matched as a couple on a wedding cake—Pauline in something pastel, Michael in summer khakis. Oh, couldn’t a uniform stab your heart, and fill you with love and grief and longing! It was true that Michael carried a cane. He leaned on it fairly heavily, tilting as he swung his right leg, and Pauline was lugging his gladstone bag in front of her with both hands. But still they made good time. The women let him come to them. They stood waiting, absorbing the sight of him.
    Then he was close enough so they could make out his broad grin, which stretched his face to a diamond shape and reminded them of the rambunctious kid he had been back in grade school. And his mother gave a sound that seemed wrenched from her chest, and set off at a hobbling run to meet him.
    Long, long afterward, reminiscing together about how oddly exhilarating those hard, sad war years had been, more than one of the women privately summoned the picture of Michael Anton and his mother hugging on the sidewalk while Pauline watched, smiling, tipping slightly backward against the weight of his bag.
    He said he was in no pain at all, except for when it rained. Then he might get a twinge in his hip joint. For he had been shot in the hip, not the back. In the rear end, to put it plainly. (“Back” had been a politeness.) Out in the woods on maneuvers, clambering over a log, he had felt a kind of slamming sensation and a deep, flaring ache, and next thing he knew he was lying facedown on a pile of moldering leaves. Lucky he’d been mounting that log or he would have been shot in the back, possibly straight through the heart. And yes, he could