“You didn’t tell me you were promoted.”
“I was afraid it would go to your head.”
“Oh, darling, I—”
The roar of the ocean grew louder, and suddenly there was a silence and the line was
dead. Catherine sat at her desk staring at the telephone. And then she buried her head in
her arms and began to cry.
Ten minutes later, Fraser’s voice came over the intercom. “I’m ready for lunch when
you are, Cathy,” he said.
“I’m ready for anything now,” she said joyfully. “Give me five minutes.” She smiled
warmly as she thought of what Fraser had done and how much trouble it must have cost
him. He was the dearest man she had ever known. Next to Larry, of course.
Catherine had visualized Larry’s arrival so often that the arrival itself was almost an
anticlimax. Bill Fraser had explained to her that Larry was probably coming home in an
Air Transport Command plane or a MATS plane and they didn’t run at fixed times like
commercial scheduled airlines. You conned a ride on the first flight you could get on—and
it didn’t matter too much where the plane was headed—just so it was flying in the right
general direction.
Catherine stayed home all day waiting for Larry. She tried to read, but she was too
nervous. She sat and listened to the news and thought about Larry returning home to her,
this time forever. By midnight, he had still not arrived. She decided he probably would not
be home until the next day. At two in the morning, when Catherine could keep her eyes
open no longer, she went to bed.
She was awakened by a hand on her arm and she opened her eyes and he was
standing over her, her Larry was standing there, looking down at her, a grin on his lean,
tanned face, and in a flash Catherine was in his arms and all the worry and loneliness and
pain of the past four years were washed away in a cleansing flood of joy that seemed to
fill every fiber of her being. She hugged him until she was afraid that she was going to
break his bones. She wanted to stay like this forever, never letting him go.
“Easy, honey,” Larry said finally. He pulled away from her, a smile on his face. “It’s
going to look funny in the newspapers. ‘Flyer comes home safely from the war and gets
hugged to death by his wife.’”
Catherine turned on the lights, every one of them, flooding the room so that she could
see him, study him, devour him. His face had a new maturity. There were lines around his
eyes and mouth that had not been there before. The overall effect was to make him hand-
somer than ever.
“I wanted to meet you,” Catherine babbled, “But I didn’t know where. I called the
Air Corps and they couldn’t give me any information at all, so I just waited here and…”
Larry moved toward her and shut her up with a kiss. His kiss was hard and
demanding. Catherine had ex-pected to feel the same physical eagerness for him and she