Morning Glory (40 page)

“Good morning. Carnegie Municipal Library.”

“Hello, Miss Beasley?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Will.”

“Oh, my goodness, Will—Mr. Parker, are you all right?”

“I’m just fine but I’m in kind of a hurry. Listen, I’m sorry to call you at work but I couldn’t think of any other way to get word to Elly. And I have to ask you to do me the biggest favor of my life. Could you possibly go out there or pay somebody else to get word to her? We just found out we ship out Sunday and we got forty-eight hours’ leave but if I take a train clear down there I’ll have to turn around and come right back. Tell her I want her to take the train and meet me in Augusta. It’s the only thing I can figure out is if we meet halfway. Tell her I’ll be leaving here on the next train and I’ll wait at the train depot—oh, Jesus, I don’t even know how big it is. Well, just tell her I’ll wait near the women’s rest room, that way she’ll know where to look for me. Could you do that for me, Miss Beasley?”

“She’ll have the message within the hour, I promise. Would you like to call back for her answer?”

“I haven’t got time. My train leaves in forty-five minutes.”

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, isn’t there, Mr. Parker?”

“What?”

“If this doesn’t get her off that place, nothing will.”

Will laughed appreciatively. “I hadn’t thought of that. Just tell her I love her and I’ll be waiting.”

“She shall get the message succinctly.”

“Thank you, Miss Beasley.”

“Oh, don’t be foolish, Mr. Parker.”

“Hey, Miss Beasley?”

“Yes?”

“I love you, too.”

There followed a pause, then, “Mr. Bell didn’t invent this instrument so Marines could use it to flirt with women old enough to be their mothers! And in case you hadn’t heard, there’s a war on. Phone lines are to be kept free as much as possible.”

Again Will laughed. “’Bye, sweetheart.”

“Oh, bosh!” At her end, a blushing Gladys Beasley hung up the telephone.

Elly had ridden on a train only once before but she’d been too young to remember. Had someone told her four months ago that she’d be buying a ticket and heading clear across Georgia by herself she’d have laughed and called them a fool. Had someone told her she’d be doing it with a nursing baby and changing trains in Atlanta, heading for a city she’d never seen, a railroad depot she didn’t know, she’d have asked who the crazy one was supposed to be.

Before he’d left, Will had said women will have to do more for themselves, and here she was, sitting in a rocking, rumbling railroad car surrounded by uniforms and dresses with shoulder pads, and noise and too little space and what appeared to be a week’s worth of squashed cigarette butts on the floor. Trains grossly overbooked passengers these days, so people were standing, sitting in aisles and crowded three and four into a bank of seats meant for only two. But because she was traveling with a baby, people had been kind. And because Lizzy P. had been fractious they’d been helpful. A
woman with bright-red lipstick, bright-red high-heeled shoes and a red and white tropical print dress offered to hold Lizzy for a while. The soldier accompanying the woman took off his dog tags and twirled them in the air to entertain the baby. In the foursome of seats across the aisle eight soldiers were playing poker. Everyone smoked. The air in the car was the color of washwater but not nearly as transparent. Lizzy grew tired of the dog tags and began crying again, grinding her fists into her eyes, then twisting and reaching for Elly. When the woman in the tropical dress figured out that the baby was hungry but Elly nursed, she whispered to her young lieutenant and in no time at all he’d rounded up a porter who cleared out a pullman unit and ushered Elly to it, giving her thirty minutes of privacy to feed Lizzy and change her diaper.

The Atlanta train depot was as crowded as steerage, a melee of people, all rushing, shouldering, bumping, kissing, crying. The loudspeaker and rumbling trains scared Lizzy and she bawled for the entire forty-minute layover until Elly herself was close to tears. Her arms ached from battling the bucking child. Her head ached from the noise. Her shoulder blades ached from tension. Frightening questions kept hammering the inside of her skull: what would she do if she got to Augusta and Will wasn’t there? And where would they sleep? And what would they do with Lizzy?

The final leg of the trip was on an older train, so dirty Elly was afraid Lizzy would catch something, so crowded she felt like a hen being crated off to market, so noisy Lizzy couldn’t sleep, no matter how tired she was. In a single seat a woman slept on a man’s lap, their heads clunking together in rhythm with the wheels rolling over the uneven seams in the rails. A group of soldiers were singing “Paper Doll” while one of them strummed a guitar discordantly. They had sung it so many times Elly wanted to put a foot through the guitar. Men with loud voices told stories about boot camp, interspersing them with curse words and simulated sounds of machine-gun fire. In another part of the car the inevitable poker game created sporadic cheers and bursts of howling. In the seat next to Elly a fat woman with a mustache and an open mouth slept, snoring. A female with a shrill laugh used it too often.
Periodically the conductor fought his way through and bellowed out the name of the next town. Somebody smelled like used garlic. The cigarette smoke was suffocating. Lizzy kept bawling. Elly kept wanting to. But, looking around, she realized she was no different from hundreds of others temporarily misplaced by the war, many of them hurrying to a brief, frantic, final meeting with someone they loved, as she was.

She wiped Lizzy’s dripping nose and thought,
I’m coming, Will, I’m coming.

The train terminal of Augusta, servicing the traffic to and from countless military bases, was worse than any so far. Debarking, Elly felt lost in a sea of humanity. With Grandfather See’s suitcase in one hand and the baby in the other, she struggled up a set of steps, swept along like flotsam at high tide, not knowing if she was heading in the right direction but having little choice.

Somebody bumped her shoulder and the suitcase fell. As Elly bent to retrieve it, Lizzy slipped down and somebody bumped them from behind, nearly knocking them to the floor. “Oops, sorry!” The private in the army green helped Elly up, snapped the suitcase and handed it to her. She thanked him, gave Lizzy a bounce to get her balanced and moved on with the crush toward what she hoped was the main body of the terminal. Overhead, a nasal, monotone voice announced as if echoing down a culvert, “The five-ten to Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Richmond and Washington, D.C., is now boarding at gate three.” She had vague impressions of passing a newspaper stand, a restaurant, a cigarette stand, a shoeshine boy, queues of faceless people waiting to buy tickets, a pair of nuns who smiled at Lizzy, and so many military uniforms that she wondered who was out there fighting the war.

Then she saw a swinging door that said “men” and a moment later its twin, swinging shut, adding “Wo—”

Women.

She stopped and reread the entire word to make sure, spun around, and there he was, already hurrying toward her.

“Elly!” He smiled, waved. “Elly!”

“Will!” She dropped her suitcase and waved back, jumping twice, her heart drumming crazily, her eyes already filling.
He zigzagged closer, moving people aside. Another moment and he reached her.

“Elly-honey—oh, God, you came!” He lifted her clean off the floor, kissing her open-mouthed, with Lizzy squashed between them. Is-it-really-you-I-missed-you-so-I-love-you-oh-God-it’s-been-so-long...

The floor shook as trains rumbled, the air was a cacophony of voices, the room a melange of motion, while Will and Elly shared a lusty kiss, timeless and prolonged, with tongues swirling and arms clinging and the salt of Elly’s tears flavoring their reunion.

Then Lizzy started squirming and they broke apart, laughing, suddenly aware that they’d been crushing her.

“Lizzy P., oh, sugar, you’re here too... let me look at you...” Will took her from Elly and held her aloft, smiling up at her apple cheeks and eyes whose lashes and irises were much darker than last time he’d seen them. With so many new distractions Lizzy didn’t know whether to fret or laugh. “Lizzy P., you sweet thing, look at how fat you’re getting.” He kissed her soundly, set her on his arm and said, “Hello, sweet thing.”

“I’m sorry, Will, I had to bring—”

Will’s mouth stopped Elly’s explanation. The second kiss began jubilant, became sensual, then commandeering with full complement of tongue and lips while Lizzy squirmed on his arm but went ignored. He grasped the back of Elly’s head and told her without words what she could expect when they were alone. When the kiss ended, he pulled back while they studied each other’s faces.

She found him stunning in his crisp uniform and garrison cap, so incredibly handsome she felt as if she’d stepped into a fantasy.

He found her thinner, prettier, her face trimmed with a pale touch of makeup, the first he’d ever seen her wear.

“God,” he whispered, “I can’t believe you’re here. I was so scared you wouldn’t come.”

“I might not have if it wasn’t for Miss Beasley. She made me.”

He laughed and kissed her again briefly, then held her hand
and backed up a step, scanning her length. “Where’d you get the dress?” It, too, was stylish: yellow with black military-type trim and buttons, padded at the shoulder, trim at the hip and flaring to a short hem that revealed her legs from the knee down. And she was wearing sling-back high heels with a cutaway toe!

Elly’s gaze dropped self-consciously. “I made it for when you were supposed to come home the last time. Remember, I said I had a surprise for you?”

He gave a slow whistle and stole a phrase from radio’s Captain Marvel. “Shazaam!”

Elly colored becomingly, touched a button at her waist and glanced up shyly into Will’s handsome face. It was odd—she was almost afraid to stare at him too much, as if doing so might jeopardize her right to someone so dignified-looking, so attractive. “Lydia Marsh lent me her pattern and I ordered the cloth and shoes from the catalogue.”

He was so impressed he didn’t know on what to comment first, the fact that she’d made a friend or the updated change in her looks. Her hair was twisted high and away from her face the way the women in the munitions factories often wore theirs beneath safety scarves. One soft wave dipped low over the side of her forehead; her eyebrows had been slightly plucked and her lips painted pale pink.

“And makeup, too,” he said approvingly.

“Lydia thought I ought to try it. She showed me how.”

“Honey, you look so pretty you take my breath away.”

“So do you.” She took a full draught of him in his dress greens: wool blouse and crisply creased trousers, gleaming shoes, khaki shirt and tie and the Sam Browne belt running from his right shoulder to his left waist; the shining Marine Corps emblem—eagle, globe and anchor—centered above the leather bill of his garrison cap, which gave him the look of some important stranger. He had put on weight, was thicker at the shoulders and chest, but it definitely became him. The sight of her husband in the hard, tailored suit made Elly’s heart swell with pride.

In a soft, teasing voice she asked, “Where is my cowboy?”

“Gone, ma’am.” Will replied with banked pride. “He’s a soldier now.”

“You look like somebody who’d guard a door at the White House.”

He chuckled and she requested, “Let me see that hair they cut off.”

“Aww, you don’t wanna see that.”

“Yes, I do, Private First Class Parker.” She playfully flicked the single gold chevron on his sleeve.

“All right—you asked for it.”

He removed the garrison cap and she couldn’t withhold a gulp of regret at the sight of his skull showing through the mere sprinkling of hair remaining on his head. Gone was the thick pelt she’d often washed and cut and combed.
The Marines ought to hire a new barber,
she thought. Why, she could do better with her plain kitchen scissors. But she searched for something heartening to say.

“I don’t think I ever saw your ears before, Will. You got fine ears, and even without no hair you’re still pretty to me.”

“And you’re a pretty li’l liar, Mrs. Parker.” Laughing, he replaced the hat, stole another kiss, picked up her suitcase and his duffel in a single hand. “Hang on,” he ordered. “I don’t want to lose you in this mob. Lizzy P. is a surprise. How you doin’, Lizzy-girl? You tired, babe?” He kissed her forehead while she whimpered softly and rubbed her eyes. “How was she on the train?”

“Terrible.”

“Sorry for the quick orders. But on a
forty-eight
I didn’t have time to think about arrangements for the kids. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have cared if you had to bring ‘em all, as long as I got to see you. Where are the boys?”

“At Lydia Marsh’s. They kicked up a fuss when they found out I was comin’ to see you, but it was bad enough havin’ to bring this one. I had to though, ‘cause she’s still nursing.”

“I realized that after I’d hung up. I made it awful hard for you, didn’t I? How long ago did she eat?”

“Around three.”

“And how ‘bout you—are you hungry?”

“No. Yes.” She glanced at the neon light over the door of
the coffee shop as they passed it. “Well, sort of.” She hugged his arm. “I mean, I don’t want to waste time in any restaurant and I don’t know how much longer Lizzy will hold out.”