Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Two)

4.

The Photo Shoot 

Two days after the party at which Mena first met Rake, she awoke in her barracks to find Debbie, in the sleeping berth immediately across the central hallway from hers, already in full mess uniform writing what appeared to be an already very long letter.

            “Last day as an AFC,” Debbie announced to Mena when she saw that she was awake.

            “You’re getting promote?” Mena asked blearily, pulling a curtain to one side so that she could change out of her pajamas behind it.

            “I’m getting promoted, yes!” Debbie said happily. “I’ll be Junior Leader Ripley as of tomorrow.”

            “Today Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow the world,” said Mena.

            “I’d say something more like ‘tomorrow Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow Leader Ripley,’ but you don’t need to be practically-minded just because I’m feeling that way right now,” said Debbie. Her pen kept scribbling softly, kindly, over the paper before her. Mena got her slip on and came out from behind the curtain. “High time they give us real ranks instead of this kindergarten-type stuff, I think,” Debbie said.

            Mena, who sometimes found herself thinking of herself as a Private First Class rather than an Auxiliary First Class, agreed with this wholeheartedly, but something bothered her about the idea of saying so out loud. The window behind her, and, facing it, the window behind Debbie, showed brilliantly, almost obscenely blue skies, the kind that Mena felt somehow looked stranger and more imposing the further from home she got. In Georgia the blue skies had been stranger still. She wondered if the Pennsylvania skies were as strange to Debbie and Rake as she knew they would be to her.

            “The bill they have to make us real military can’t be passed through soon enough,” said Debbie.

            “I didn’t think you wanted to be military,” said Mena. “You’ve always been in an ‘I want to help’ state of mind as long as I’ve known you, not exactly one to go get bruised and bloodied. I guess it is a question of respect, though,” she said, and Debbie nodded with relief at this, as if it was a remark that she had not wanted to make herself. “I don’t know what I’d do if I got sent overseas,” Mena continued as she pulled her skirt on. “My brother Frank is in Australia and they’ll probably send him north to start island-hopping back towards the Philippines soon. My sister Thomasine is in Canada but that’s because she married a guy from there; she’s a civilian. My other siblings are all in the Navy or the WAVES and all have shore duties.”

            “You know what Rake’s up to, of course,” said Debbie. It was the first indication that Mena had gotten that Debbie knew about her conversation with Rake the night before last. Mena had not heard anything from Rake himself since then either; his radio silence was indeed enough that she was starting to wonder if she had done something to make him not like her. She wasn’t sure if she hoped that she had or if she hoped that she hadn’t.

            “Rake’s a swell guy but I don’t want to get involved in your family, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Mena said.

            “Hey, some of us are still trying to sleep,” a voice elsewhere in the barracks hissed. Mena was surprised nobody had said anything like this before.

            “Five or six minutes till reveille,” Debbie said to Mena, turning to her with her big grey eyes and gathering her paper and pen in her hands as she stood up. She put the unfinished letter on her bedside table and started walking towards the doorway. “Let’s finish this talk outside,” she said.

 ❦

“I don’t think you fully understand just how much you’d be helping my family out by taking some pictures with Rake and me,” said Debbie as they stood smoking together on a dirt path that wound back from the barracks into an area of dense, sloping scrub. A large bird wheeled above them in the spring morning.

            Mena told Debbie that she understood pretty well what was at stake and was willing to take the pictures but was afraid of being dragged further into it, especially since she tended to side against people like Debbie and Rake’s parents when it came to difficulties between the races. Debbie said that she tended to side against people like her parents too and that she was beginning to doubt their real reasons for needing to give this ballplayer money; she made Mena promise not to repeat this to Rake, or to anybody else in their WAAC company for that matter.

            “What do you think your parents’ real reasons for needing these pictures are?” asked Mena.

            “I don’t doubt that they owe money to a Negro League ballplayer. What I’m questioning is why. Frankly, what I suspect is that they got sued for something and are dragging their feet about paying. Believe me, if they actually wanted to give him the money they owe him they’d be darn well able to do so without bringing in whoever this ‘courier’ is in Texas.”

            “Geez, what if they got sued for doing something horrible to this guy?” said Mena.

            “Exactly what I’m worried about,” said Debbie, puffing at her cigarette the way a much more hard-bitten kind of woman might have.    “Lighter question—did you get to church yesterday?”

            “Yep. Did you?”

            “Yep.”

            “Good. That Episcopalian church in Hollywood?”

            “No, I couldn’t get driven down to Hollywood. I just went to someplace locally. That church in Hollywood is quite something, though. My hand to God I saw Lawrence Olivier and Astaire there one weekend. Can you believe that?”

            “I wouldn’t know,” said Mena, who had lost track of who the stars were over the past several months; the truth was that she knew that this was exciting to Debbie and it probably would have excited her too but something about the quality of the air this morning was starting to prove physically uncomfortable to her.

 ❦

Later in the day, when they had about an hour to themselves, Mena submitted to Debbie’s entreaties about the photos. They met Rake right outside their base and walked together into the little town of which the house that hosted the parties was on the opposite side. This took maybe fifteen minutes, which gave them about half an hour in town before they had to walk back. Mena took off her jacket so that she would not be as readily identifiable as a WAAC rather than a WAVE; Debbie took five pictures of her drinking sodas with Rake, and Rake took three pictures of her pointing out to sea with Debbie and grinning manically.

            “Are you sure these pictures will do a lick of good?” Mena asked Rake.

            “Honestly, no, I’m really not sure,” said Rake. “If you knew my parents you’d understand…” He trailed off and started coughing loudly. “Yeah,” he said. “Right. No, Mena, we’re not sure the pictures will do any good. But hey, absolute worst case, we got some pretty good vacation pictures out of it, didn’t we?”

            Mena laughed in spite of herself. “I suppose we did,” she said. “Although my friends at home would be mighty puzzled if they saw me pointing at the Pacific like I hadn’t seen it almost every day of my life.”

            “Is my brother growing on you?” Debbie asked softly a minute or two later, while Rake was using the WC at the little soda shop they were sitting in.

            “A little, yeah,” said Mena, “I do have to admit. He’s not a terrible guy; we just got off on the wrong foot.”

            “He told me he came to find you when you wandered down to the cove at a party and found you swimming naked in the ocean,” said Debbie. “He said you compared it to the first time you and I met in the shower.”

            “I think the base for comparison is a pretty solid one,” said Mena. “I wasn’t sure what to make of you at first either.” This was true as far as it went; she had never felt any hostility towards Debbie the way she had towards Rake two nights ago. It had to do with Rake being a man whereas Debbie and Mena were women; with Rake being nineteen like Mena rather than twenty-three like Debbie; and probably with more besides that Mena could not sift through in her mind just yet.

            “He does grow on you, doesn’t he?” said Debbie, which Mena took as sympathy being expressed for her own feelings rather than Debbie simply saying again what she had already said before. “His CO seems to like him, even though there are a few kinks with him somebody might want to work out. He hasn’t come in for anything like that, though.”

            At this point Rake came back from the bathroom, picked up the camera again with still-damp hands, and took a candid shot of Mena and Debbie with two empty soda bottles between them.

5.

An Interlude 

It was completely dark in the cryptomeria grove. Mena was getting tired, and strange suspicious night noises were beginning to be in evidence.

            “How did you end up in fact going to Philadelphia?” asked Kara. “You were there for some months, weren’t you? I’m gonna have a hard time believing that the Ripley family managed to arrange for it just for their own benefit; at least around here we weren’t saying how high when rich folk said jump anymore, not by that point in the war.”

            “No, we didn’t jump when the Ripleys said how high,” said Mena. “Actually what happened was that I forgot about all this for a few months and then at some point in June or July, back when all those race riots broke out, Debbie got transferred back to Georgia to help train new WAC recruits and Rake and I both got transferred to posts in the Northeast. This was right around the time the WAAC with two As officially became the WAC with one A—that is, around the time we knew they were going to make us soldiers.”

            “And you wanted to be a soldier.”

            “Yeah. I also wanted to go to the Northeast. I was getting more emotionally invested in the Atlantic than the Pacific at this point because the invasion of Italy was underway and, you know, my grandparents came from there and all. It was important to me to see that through. There were flight nurses in North Africa and Sicily at this point and it looked like some of the WAC might get deployed overseas too—which has since happened, of course. I really wanted to see if I could meet up with some other pals of mine from training who I’d heard were getting sent to London or to Algeria. Of course these were still rumors at this point.”

            Kara flicked on the car light and rummaged around in her handbag for something. She eventually found it and took it out to show to Mena; it was a pamphlet called G.I. Jane Writes Home from Overseas. The cover had a picture of a young woman in uniform and a safari helmet carrying a backful of heavy luggage up a gangplank into a ship or plane of some description, looking at the reader with a determined expression and saying “I’d rather be with them…than waiting.”

            “Why are you showing this to me?” asked Mena.

            “Does it upset you? ‘What could have been,’ and so forth?” asked Kara.

            “I don’t know if it upsets me or not. Let’s find out,” said Mena, and took the pamphlet from Kara to start reading.

G.I. Jane Writes Home—While en Route Atlantic Crossing

LEAVING THRILL—“The ride to the ship with all our equipment, the ocean trip aboard a regular Army transport, the thrill of standing on deck and looking at the other ships in our convoy cutting through the water…all made me realize that I was starting on the biggest thing in my life.”

FLIGHT TO POST—“I swore they’d never get me in a plane unless they ordered me up, and look at me—I volunteered—and we were flown to our post at Goose Bay, Labrador.”

“We’re going to be out past curfew, you realize,” Mena said to Kara without saying anything else.

            “You’re right. Let’s do a sleepover at your place. It’ll be just like old times.” Kara reversed the Lincoln as best she could under the circumstances and eased it back down to the road. The trees soughed by on either side, the car making wind to sigh in them as it passed. “Something just occurred to me,” said Kara when they got back to the road.

            “And what’s that?”

            “Do you know of anybody not from our high school—our class or Francine’s class—who got the idea to move to the mainland to enlist in the WAVES or the WAC or the ANC?”

            “I don’t know. I’m sure there are a few…”

            “…but it seems to be the sort of scam—let’s call it a scam—that only arose among one type of person,” finished Kara. “Hawaii’s under martial law? Hawaiian woman can’t enlist? Our class found a way around that.”

            “If you’re trying to tell me I’ve led a charmed life, I actually know that, Kara,” said Mena. “Can I ask why you had that pamphlet in your handbag?”

            “Friend brought it back from Portland a few weeks ago. Apparently they’re finally going to start letting Hawaiian women enlist soon. Enlist as Hawaiian women.”

            “Fat lot of good that does me at this point,” said Mena.

            “Oh, don’t sell yourself short,” said Kara, deftly switching into another lane. “I may not know the details of your discharge but I do know you and I know how much you want to serve.” The suggestion that Mena wanted to serve, with serving described as if it constituted a job or a position or a calling in and of itself, hit Mena like a sock full of pennies to the face, and she blinked twice, rapidly, as Kara came up towards an Army roadblock. “Oh, Christ,” Kara muttered.

            “No need to swear,” said Mena.

            Kara pulled up to the roadblock and a military policeman came up to the car wielding a flashlight. He was broad-shouldered and seemed tired. “It’s past curfew,” he said to them. “You two going to be home soon?”

            “We work in a war industry,” Kara said. “We just got off work pretty recently. We’re going to be home as soon as possible, I assure you.”

            “You two live together?” asked the policeman.

            “No,” said Mena, “but we’re friends and she’s staying with me tonight.”

            “Identification, please,” said the policeman. Kara handed over her driver’s license and Mena handed over, for some reason, her WAC ID, which she, for some reason, still carried on her. “This says you’re a Corporal in the Women’s Army Corps, Miss Gentili,” said the policeman. “Any particular reason you’re not on base?”

            “I was discharged some time ago,” said Mena.

            “Honorably, I hope,” said the policeman. Mena nodded, and Kara, catching the nod in the corner of her eye, boggled, a little too visibly. The policeman seemed to take the bafflement as a joke between friends, and he laughed at it even though neither Mena nor Kara was laughing.

            “Seems to be in order,” said the policeman. “I’ll take your word for it that you’re in a war industry. Get home as soon as you can. If you run into any other MPs just tell them what you told me, okay? Drive safe now.”

            Mena started crying as Kara drove through the roadblock. She was still crying when they pulled up to Mena’s family’s house. “Good Lord, Mena, what’s wrong?! Did something happen?!” her mother asked as they passed her in the living room.

            “She’ll be okay,” Kara said. “She’s just thinking about her time in the service.”
            Mena’s mother shook her head, but in a way that Mena interpreted to mean that she understood. Of course she did not understand, but it was enough, for Mena, to think that someday she might.

            Mena and Kara ensconced themselves in Mena’s room with its three-year-old photos of Fredric March and battered red bakelite rosary hanging from her vanity mirror. Mena sat up in bed with Kara in a food-stained old blue armchair in the corner; Kara had a talent for sleeping sitting up and declined Mena’s offer to put some bedding on the floor for her. When Mena finally stopped crying, Kara asked her to tell her about her time in Philadelphia.

            “Here’s how it happened,” said Mena.

6.

The Grey Stations

On the troop train that took her across the United States from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in August of 1943, Mena shared a compartment with two other WACs and a WAVE, all of them West Coast natives who were being ordered to the East as part of the administration’s Europe-first policy. Mena had asked her CO in California why she was being attached to a unit in Pennsylvania and the Europe-first policy had more or less been Second Officer De Brun’s answer to her as well. She had brought some reading material, which she broke out over the course of this night ride over the high Rockies: a collection of Millay poems called Huntsman, What Quarry? and a WAC booklet, just published last month, called “You Must Be Fit: W.A.C. Field Manual Physical Training.” It reminded her that she was “a member of the first Women’s Army in the history of the United States”—as if she could ever forget this; almost everybody she knew took an incredible amount of pride in this fact, herself included—and declared, partway through the introduction, “Total War Is a Woman’s War: Your Job: To Replace Men.”

            “I wish,” Mena muttered.

            “What’s that?” one of the other WACs in her compartment, who was doing a crossword puzzle in her nightgown, asked her. Mena showed her the booklet. “Oh, that,” she said. “I read that a week or to ago and I’ve been doing…most of the exercises. I like the swimming ones best. Do you swim?”

            “I lived a lot of my life in Hawaii,” said Mena. “Of course I swim.”

            The other WAC nodded happily. “I’m an LA girl born and bred,” she said. “My family used to go out to the Santa Catalina Islands when I was a girl.”

            “Never got to see the Catalina Islands. I was posted a ways up the coast for the past six or seven months,” said Mena.

            They fell silent after that. The other WAC went back to her crossword and Mena set the booklet down and stared, along with the WAVE, out the window at the darkened landscape, seeing what stars she could above the peaks to either side of the train. Some of the everlasting snow on the peaks glinted in the starlight; the rest was consummately shadowed, as if lurking. From some other compartment in the train somebody was humming a jazz tune. The voice was low enough that it was probably a man but high enough that it could have been a woman. Listening intently to it and staring out into the dark, Mena drifted off, and did not wake up again until early morning, stiff-necked, frustrated, disheveled, with the train passing through endless cattle prairies.

 ❦

On the evening that the train finally reached Philadelphia, the people at 30th Street Station wasted no time in letting Mena know that the Phillies had just been blown out twenty to six in the second game of a double-header against the Cincinnati Reds. It was very late in the evening and Mena, who normally would have cared at least insofar as she would have pitied a team like the Phillies doing so badly so often, really had no interest in hearing people complain. Somebody made the intriguing observation that this “wouldn’t’ve happened if Veeck had bought the team.”

            “That Veeck story is a crock of crapola,” somebody else said. “As if anybody in his right mind would think Landis would go for a plan like that. It’s an invention of Grantland Rice and the Negro press.”

            “I take exception to that,” said a third person.

            “I preferred the series against St. Louis,” said the first person. “Schoolboy Rowe’s doing great this season.”

            “Yes, him and exactly zero of our other pitchers,” said the third person.

            Debbie, who was home on two weeks’ worth of her yearly thirty days’ furlough, had arranged to meet Mena on the street outside the station. She was in uniform despite being on leave and evidently had made sergeant sometime before leaving Georgia. She had a satchel draped over one shoulder and, rolled under the opposite arm, an umbrella that looked wet even though it seemed to be a dry evening here. When Mena asked her about it she said that it had fallen into the Schuykill River, in a tone of voice that let Mena know that this was going to be her last word on the subject.

            “What’s next for you, Mena?” Debbie asked as they walked through the streets towards the boarding house where Mena would be staying for her first two or three nights in the city.

            “Well, I have a few days of off-duty time—not furlough, just off-duty time—because they freed up somebody else to stay stateside a little longer than she originally thought she would. I just got a call about that a few hours before leaving LA, and I had to call my new commanding officer to arrange me this boarding house as a billet for my first few nights here. After that I’ll be at some camp across the river in South Jersey for I don’t know how long; they put me through the training course for air control tower radio work, so that’s what I’ll be doing.”

            “Sounds exciting. I envy you; they’re still having me on writing condolence letters.”

            “I thought you were training new recruits.”

            “They have me doing both. I’m not having a great time doing either. Say, might you have any interest in going to a ballgame tomorrow? I’m sure either the Phillies or the Athletics are playing, maybe even both; I’d need to ask someone.”

            “No, thank you; I’ve heard bad things about Philadelphia sports fans,” Mena said grimly.

            “Oh, and whom have you heard them from?” The whom jutted up out of Debbie’s question like a jaunty salute from a sailor-suited girl in a high-school Pinafore.

            “I’ve heard them for myself in the station just now. Lots of complaining about how badly the team is doing, some of it racialist. Is that big leagues fans everywhere?”

            “Is it not sports fans everywhere?” asked Debbie. “I have a hard time believing that Hawaii sports fans are so much better, especially since as I understand it you really wanted to leave Hawaii, at first.”

            “Different set of sports in Hawaii,” Mena said at first, and when Debbie pressed further she admitted that, yes, she was probably being unfair, and it was probably the stress of travel that was getting her down. They agreed that they would meet Rake when he got to the city tomorrow and all go out for a drink together tomorrow night at a place Rake knew. Mena, at the time that she agreed to this plan, had no way of knowing what kind of voyage agreeing to it would turn out to set her on.

 ❦

“Something I overheard in the train station yesterday has been sticking in my mind,” said Mena to Debbie the next day as they walked to this bar that Rake had suggested to them. Her first night in the boarding house had been acutely unpleasant even compared to the troop train and she had no interest in discussing it. She had spent the lion’s share of the night wakeful, reading Huntsman, What Quarry? Her first full day in Philadelphia had been better; she had toured Independence Hall and seen the Liberty Bell. The bar that they were going to was in South Philadelphia, near the Port, apparently a downscale and mostly Irish neighborhood.

            “What is it?” Debbie asked.

            “Do you know anything about a baseball team owner called Veeck?” asked Mena.

            Debbie shook her head. “I did hear about somebody trying to buy up the Phillies around the beginning of this year and not being able to, but I don’t remember if that was his name,” she said. “The story goes that he wanted to buy the team and turn around its fortunes by stacking it with Negro League stars. Of course the Commissioner of Baseball wants to keep up the color line so when he got wind of this he forced the National League to take over the team itself and sell it off for pennies on the dollar. Now it’s owned by a lumber baron by the name of Cox. This is the story, anyway; I don’t know how much of it I believe myself, but then I’m not as interested in sports as all that. Roland’s boyfriend Bob would be someone better to ask about that.”

            “Rake has a boyfriend?” Mena asked, boggling.

            “Sure does. There’s really nothing wrong with it,” said Debbie.

            “I didn’t say I thought there was.”

            “Aren’t you a Catholic?”

            “Aren’t you?”

            Debbie shook her head. “Same baptism, different services,” she said. “In any case, Bob’s a baseball fanatic himself, and he follows the Negro Leagues and the white big leagues both. He’s holding out for integration, obviously. He says he was crushed when this scheme to integrate the Phillies fell through.”

            It had always surprised Mena, ever since she had first learned about it, that there was such resolute segregation in big league ball, which existed almost entirely in Northern states and was always getting talked up as America’s game and the national pastime and so forth. She thought of the various uses and abuses of the Asians and the Natives and even, sometimes, the Portuguese back home. She did not know what to make of her thoughts about this.

            They got to the bar, which was called the Stationmaster’s Place even though it was not all that close to 30th Street Station and which one had to go down a little flight of stairs to a basement level to get into. Mena had always been a little wary of these underground-level bars in the past. Her brothers and cousins and Tom Lori often went to them, but she had an understanding that they were not mostly places where women were expected. She was glad of that; she would have hated to had the men in her family consorting with prostitutes and cabaret dancers or cruising for lonely divorcées or whoever it was whom she imagined frequenting other kinds of night establishments.

            The good patrons of the Stationmaster’s Place, when they walked in, both in uniform at this point, mostly looked up in rabbitlike startlement and alarm. Mena guessed why when she noticed Rake already there, not in uniform but with his arm around the shoulders of a tall, slender black man who was. Volunteer Navy, Mena thought, with an NCO bearing although she did not recognize the Navy insignia as well as she did the Army ones. They were sitting in a booth near the back of the house, with six or seven beverages between them, about half of which looked like sparkling water but could have been gin and tonics.

            “There’s Roland and Bob,” said Debbie, and made a beeline to sit down with them. Mena hung back a little to look around at the other patrons, not, she hoped, for long enough to be impolite. There were two or three woman-woman couples, one including a woman in a WAC uniform, another including a woman with very short hair who had clearly come directly from some sort of war industry job without changing her clothes. The rest of the barflies all seemed to be men, most of them coupled, one of them apparently looking for someone to couple with.

            Mena hustled over to the booth where the Ripleys and Rake’s boyfriend were and sat down next to Debbie and across from the black Navy man, Bob. “Sorry,” she said. “Never been in an establishment like this before. I’m Philomena Gentili,” she said, extending a hand to Bob. “Junior Leader in the WAC, which means I’ll be a corporal once my rank’s converted over to full military.”

            “Robin Jefferson,” said Bob, taking her hand and shaking it more firmly than one would expect from someone as rail-thin as he was. “PO3, US Navy. So we’re the same rank, more or less.”

            “How scandalous, Bob, you fraternizing with an enlisted grunt,” Rake said, taking his arm off of Bob’s shoulders for long enough to give him a mock punch in the side of the head.

            “What brings you folks to the Stationmaster’s Place?” Bob asked Mena and Debbie.

            “Not what you’d think,” said Debbie. “Honestly I just wanted to be around my brother for a while; I’m on furlough back home, you see.”

            Rake and Bob shared a sardonic, flickering little glance, then Bob pushed one of the clear fizzy beverages over to Debbie. “Do you still like gin and tonic, Deb?” Rake asked.

            “Not as much as I used to before events conspired,” Debbie said, referring, Mena could only assume, to something that had happened in their family of which she had no interest in learning the details.

            “Do you recall when we first met and you called me a queer?” Rake abruptly asked Mena while Debbie sipped the drink.

            “I do,” said Mena, coloring.

            “We probably both pretty much made asses of ourselves that night,” said Rake.

            “I think I made a bigger ass of myself than you did,” said Mena. Being here was already beginning to make her reassess certain facts, real or perceived, about the world around her—not about herself, but about other people and about the rarefied and frenetic society that the war had created in America.

            “Speaking of making asses of ourselves…” said Bob.

            “Oh Christ. What now?” said Debbie.

            “That money finally got to my brother.”

            “Thank God.”

            “The ballplayer is your brother? You’re the ballplayer’s brother?” Mena asked.

            Bob nodded, and told his story in what Mena assumed was abbreviated form. It seemed that the Ripley parents had had a problem with him not so much because he was the lover of their son as for essentially racialist reasons; he had actually been a feted guest at their home somewhere in one of Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs several times before Debbie and Rake’s father, a man with the astonishing name Carrington Ripley, had decided that he was worried about Bob stealing their dining room silver when he visited. Matters had escalated to such a point that the Ripleys had hired some street gorillas associated with a Mafia outfit out of Rhode Island to beat up Bob somewhere near the docks. This had been at a time of escalating tensions between the races already, but not to the point of the race riots that had rocked half a dozen cities over this past summer (Philadelphia had not seen black-versus-white race riots but had seen attacks on Mexicans after the zoot suit riots in LA, for parts of which Mena had unfortunately been stuck in the city). So Bob’s bother, Nate Jefferson, the ballplayer, had used his funds—more substantial than Bob’s by far—to hire a team of lawyers to take the Ripleys to court over Bob’s beating. The lawyers believed that even otherwise Negro-bashing people in the world of the law might be sympathetic to the Jeffersons’ case because Bob was in the service whereas the Ripley parents had been heard to publicly mock their own uniformed son and daughter. (“I hadn’t actually heard about that,” said Rake when Bob mentioned this)

            “And they settled the case, and dragged their feet on paying the settlement?” Mena asked.

            “That’s right,” said Bob. “They had the tom-fool idea of having some third party, this woman who you’re saying ended up getting transferred to Texas, deliver the money to my brother. Whether this would have held up in court I do not know but we were all sick of the thing by that point so we agreed to it.”

            “But they did get the money to you?” asked Mena.

            “They did eventually, yes. Nobody believed that the pictures of you with Roland and Debbie were of the person they said they were of. I’m glad to hear you weren’t as in on the con as we were afraid.”

            “If I had known it was to cover someone’s ass for something like this I would have just refused,” said Mena.

            “If we had known we wouldn’t have asked you,” said Debbie.

            “How’s it possible that Rake didn’t know?” Mena asked. “It’s his boyfriend.”

            “Believe it or not I’d been under the impression that Bob had already gotten his settlement and that this new money was for something else,” Rake said. “I wasn’t getting Bob’s letters to me at that time. Some Navy psychiatrist was looking into him.”

            “Did they eventually, uh, clear him?” Mena asked.

            “They eventually lost interest,” said Bob. “Some power struggle was going on in another formation that the shrink thought was more worth his time.”

            “Thank God for small blessings,” said Rake.

            “I’ll drink to that,” said Debbie.

 ❦

Mena asked for a glass of chianti but got literally laughed at for thinking that the Stationmaster’s Place had Italian wine. Then she asked for something that there was a shortage of in Philadelphia and possibly elsewhere in the US as well, and finally she settled for a draft of some sort of wheat beer from the tap. She realized that it was Saturday evening; she had lost track of days on the troop train and had previously thought that it was Friday. She pictured herself stumbling drunk and in her rumpled uniform—in lieu of a party dress—into some Low Mass in a slum church at seven, less than ten hours from now. Something about it seemed picturesque or maybe picaresque, and like a story to scandalize her grandchildren with, the way some of the WACs who were getting sent overseas eagerly anticipated boring theirs.

            At about eleven o’ clock an overdressed civilian woman came up to their booth to ask for a nickel to bribe the bartender so she could use the phone. The four of them—Mena, the Ripleys, and Bob—had seven pennies, as opposed to larger coins, between them and gave this woman all seven.

            “Rake, Bob, Debbie, you are true friends,” said the woman. “You too, newbie.” She waved gingerly at Mena as she staggered drunkenly over to the bar.

            “Is it okay by you to be a ‘newbie’ here?” Bob asked Mena.

            “Why wouldn’t it be? I am one.”

            “Wasn’t sure if you’d be the type to take exception to sticking out when you’re new,” Bob said.

            “Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” said Mena. “What was it like when you and Rake were new here?”

            “Long story,” said Bob, but Mena made the two of them tell it.