GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love (39 page)

After walking for hours, Rae was exhausted and beginning to despair when she reached a large shoe shop called Forsythe's. Inside, it was thronging with customers, but she eventually managed to catch the attention of the manager.

‘Do you have any jobs going?' Rae asked, bracing herself for yet another rejection.

‘Are you good at learning stock codes?' he asked her.

Rae thought back to her first job in the Ordnance Corps, learning the code numbers for parts and equipment. It had been boring work, but she had quickly mastered it. ‘Yes, I am,' she told him confidently.

‘Well, if you can learn these overnight, then I'll hire you.' He handed her a card on which each type of shoe was listed next to a series of numbers and letters, before rushing off to see to the next customer.

That evening, Rae sat for hours poring over the list of codes. In the morning, she returned and asked for the manager.

‘Nurse's Oxford, white?' he demanded.

‘J-8650,' replied Rae.

‘Arrabuk suede high-heel, black?'

‘C-39793.'

‘Pennywise sandal, beige?'

‘V-74656.'

‘You're hired,' he told her. ‘Now go help that customer over there.'

Rae found she didn't at all mind selling shoes. She enjoyed being around people, and the store was always busy. It was a welcome distraction from thoughts of the three little boys she had left behind, whom she missed terribly. She had decided that she needed to be independent, and this was a step in the right direction.

There was one more hurdle Rae had to jump, however. She told her friend Marlene that she appreciated her generosity, but she had decided to move out. She wanted to live on her own.

Rae scoured the rentals section of the local newspaper and found an apartment above a shop on Walnut Street, in downtown McKeesport.

Marlene helped her move in and then left her to unpack. When the door closed, Rae breathed a contented sigh as she looked around at her apartment, the first she had rented with her own money. Finally, her wellbeing didn't have to depend on anyone else – especially not a man. When her landlady asked her if she was likely to bring any boyfriends back, Rae replied, in no uncertain terms, ‘I don't plan on having any boyfriends.'

Not long after Rae had moved in she exercised her most fundamental right as an American citizen and voted in a presidential election. When she had first become a citizen, Pap Oppenheim had encouraged her to register Republican, and out of loyalty to him she had agreed. But now Rae wanted to make her own decisions. She read up on the two candidates, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, and despite all that the former Allied Supreme Commander had done during the war, she decided she was going to vote Democrat.

Rae's life fell into a familiar routine, working at Forsythe's and eating her lunch in the canteen at the nearby Murphy's Five & Dime – where she befriended a couple of girls who worked there called Ruth and Jenny. The three of them would go to a local bar and restaurant called Gill's in the evenings and chat over soda pops and fish sandwiches, watching the comings and goings at the bar.

One day they were laughing over their sodas as usual when a well-built, dark young man in his late twenties came over to their table. Ruth and Jenny knew him already, and introduced him to Rae as Joe, and they began chatting away with him. Rae had absolutely no interest in getting to know a member of the opposite sex, and had been quite happy just talking to the girls, but Joe made an effort to involve her in the conversation. ‘How did you come to live in America?' he asked, having noticed her accent.

‘How do you think?' snapped Rae. ‘I was married!' That seemed to shut him up.

When they left Gill's, Ruth told Joe that she and Rae were walking home in the same direction, and he insisted on accompanying them. Rae's place was first so they dropped her off, and then Joe and Ruth carried on to her house. He must be after her, Rae reasoned.

From then on Joe started coming into Gill's more and more often, and he would always join the three girls in their booth. Now that she was convinced there was something going on between him and Ruth, Rae didn't mind chatting to him as a friend. He told her he came from a large Slovak family and worked at National Tube, just like his father. He was considered the best tube-cutter in the mill, he said proudly, because he could cut almost 1,000 tubes a day.

One evening, Ruth was busy, so Rae and Jenny went to Gill's without her. Joe turned up as usual, and at the end of the evening he insisted on walking Rae home even though Ruth wasn't there. It was a short walk to her apartment and as they arrived, to Rae's surprise, he asked, ‘Would you like to go out some time?'

‘I'm not going out with you,' Rae retorted. ‘What about Ruth?'

‘What
about
Ruth?' Joe replied.

‘Well, isn't there something going on between the two of you?'

‘No. We've never even been on a date together!'

Confused, Rae said a brusque goodbye and went up to her flat.

Inside, she thought back over all the times she and Ruth had chatted with Joe at Gill's. Could he have been coming to see her, not Ruth?

After her disastrous marriage to Raymond, Rae had done her best to avoid men. But Joe had slipped in under the net, and she had grown to like him as a friend.

The next time he saw her, Joe asked her out again. Rae had no intention of allowing another man close enough to hurt her, but she didn't see any harm in dating him – she would just be sure to keep him at arm's length.

Being with Joe felt easy and natural, but Rae was careful not to give him the false impression that she was after anything serious. ‘If he tries to tell me he loves me, I'll drop him,' she told Jenny and Ruth.

One Saturday night, Rae and Joe caught a movie together and then went out on the town. By the time he walked her back to her front door it was two in the morning. ‘Can I see you again tomorrow night?' he asked. ‘How about I call for you at eight?'

‘Okay,' Rae shrugged. ‘See you then.'

On Sunday evening, she was ready and waiting for Joe at eight o'clock, but there was no knock on the door. Rae started pacing around the apartment, hating the feeling of waiting helplessly for a man. She kept looking out of the window, but there was no sign of him. Quarter-past and half-past went by, and still he wasn't there.

He must have stood me up, Rae thought angrily. She should have known better than to trust another man, especially a Yank. What had she been thinking, going out with him?

There was one last possibility – perhaps Joe had gone to Gill's by mistake, thinking they were supposed to be meeting there. She grabbed her coat and ran out into the street. She had just got to the bank on the corner when she spotted Joe walking along on the other side of the street. ‘Oi!' she called. ‘Where do you think you're going?'

He turned around with a surprised look on his face. ‘Oh, hi, Rae,' he said.

‘You were supposed to be at my apartment at eight o'clock!' Rae shouted, struggling to control her anger. She had a lump in her throat, and she didn't want to give away how hurt she felt.

‘No, that's Monday night,' Joe replied blankly.

‘You said last night you'd see me tomorrow,' Rae insisted. ‘We went out on Saturday, so tomorrow means Sunday.'

‘No,' he replied calmly. ‘I took you home at two this morning, so tomorrow night is Monday.'

Rae couldn't believe he had come up with such a ridiculous story to cover for having stood her up. ‘Oh, get lost!' she shouted. She turned on her heel and ran back along Walnut Street and into her apartment, slamming the door behind her.

That night, Rae barely slept, furious with herself for letting a man make her feel vulnerable again. All day on Monday in the shoe shop she wasn't her normal chatty self. She just wanted to get home and hide away.

That evening, Rae was curled up under the covers when there was a knock on the door. Reluctantly she went downstairs and answered it.

Joe was standing on the doorstep.

‘What are you doing here?' Rae demanded.

‘It's eight o'clock,' he replied. ‘We've got a date.'

‘That was yesterday,' she said. ‘You didn't turn up!'

‘No, you crazy limey,' he replied. ‘I told you, the date was for tonight.'

Rae was thrown. Maybe it hadn't just been an excuse, she realised.

‘So are you coming, or do I have to go on my own?' Joe asked her.

Rae hesitated. She wanted more than anything to believe him, to know that she could trust him.

There was only one way to find out. ‘All right,' she told him. ‘You've got one last chance.' She ran and got her things, and they set off together.

‘Rae, are you sure you're an American citizen?' Joe asked her, as they walked up the street.

‘Yeah, why?' she asked.

‘Because you sure as hell acted like John Bull last night!'

Joe never pressed Rae to define their relationship, but after more than a year of dating it was obvious to everyone that they were going steady – not least to his parents. ‘When are you going to marry this girl?' his mother asked. ‘After one year, a man should know his intentions,' his father added.

One night, Rae was cooking Joe roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner when he told her, ‘You'd make somebody a great wife, you know.'

‘Yeah, anybody but you!' came the prickly reply.

That silenced Joe for a few more months, until parental pressure began to build up again. ‘Either marry her or drop her!' demanded his father.

The next time Rae saw Joe, he told her, ‘My parents want to know when we're getting married.'

‘Tell them I don't want to get married again!' she retorted.

Joe passed on this information to his parents, but they didn't believe him. ‘Of course she does!' his mother said, exasperated. For years she had been turning down approaches from the parents of Slovak girls in their neighbourhood who wanted to arrange a marriage with her son. She had been determined that Joe would marry for love, but here he was at the age of twenty-eight, with no sign of a wedding on the horizon.

The next time they were together, Joe told Rae, ‘My parents have been asking about us getting married again.'

‘Did you tell them I don't want to?'

‘Yes, but they don't believe me!'

Rae couldn't help laughing at that.

‘Rae, why
won't
you marry me?' Joe asked her. It was the first time he had tackled the issue head on, and Rae suddenly found herself put on the spot.

‘Marry you? I don't even know if you love me!' she blurted out. She was taken aback by her own words.

‘Of course I do!' he replied. ‘Otherwise I wouldn't be asking you. But I heard you tell your friends that if I said I loved you, you'd drop me.'

Rae thought back to the comment she had made to Jenny and Ruth. Poor Joe had overheard and taken it to heart, and for nearly two years he had been unable to tell her how he felt.

Only now that he had done so did she realise she felt the same way. ‘Yes, I'll marry you, Joe,' she told him. To her surprise, there wasn't a trace of doubt in her mind.

That night, Joe was finally able to give his parents the news they had long been waiting for.

‘You see?' his mother said, triumphantly. ‘She did want to marry you all along!'

In order to marry Joe, Rae would first have to get a divorce from Raymond. She employed a lawyer, who contacted Raymond's father in Hackett to get his address. The lawyer discovered that Raymond was living in California with his former girlfriend from West Virginia – only now she was his wife. He had married bigamously, just as Rae's own stepfather had done all those years ago.

The last thing Rae wanted was to dredge up the painful memories of Raymond's adultery, so she sued him for ‘indignities to the person' rather than going into specifics. He signed the divorce papers willingly, and the error of judgement she had made as a naive nineteen-year-old was finally erased from her life.

Rae was going into this marriage as a very different woman. She may have opened her heart again, but she was determined to maintain her independence. She let Joe pay for the engagement ring she had picked out at a jewellery store on Fifth Avenue, but she bought their matching platinum wedding bands herself.

Since Rae's first wedding had taken place in a Methodist church, the Slovak National Catholic Church didn't recognise it, and to her new mother-in-law's delight she and Joe were allowed to get married at the altar. This time, no one gave the bride away – she and Joe walked down the aisle together.

The reception was held at a local club, where they had planned a simple gathering. But Rae hadn't counted on Joe's mother and aunties, who had gone down to the club earlier and been busy cooking chicken noodle soup, stuffed cabbage, pyrih pies, haluski dumplings, turkey schnitzel and delicious layered torts filled with apricots and pineapple. It was a beautiful spread, a million miles away from Rae's fish-and-chip wedding in Mansfield.

The room was packed with people, and although her own family couldn't be with her, Rae's friends from McKeesport, Monongahela and Hackett had all come to celebrate. The Slovaks knew how to throw a good party, and it was well into the early hours by the time people started to head home.

On their wedding night, Rae and Joe went back together to her apartment. She had decided it was where they would live now that they were husband and wife. It was still her place, but she didn't mind sharing it with Joe.

He might be a Yank, but he was a good one.