"While I was off in England preparing to drop into France and witness the majority of my company getting slaughtered, Bob turned his attention to Mary. And why not? She was a beautiful, auburn-haired girl in the prime of her life. He worked on her for nearly a month, at first befriending her and then finally making her fall in love with him, all the time pretending he was in love with her. That was the thing back then you see. A girl would never consent to sex before marriage if she didn't think the guy was in love with her. There was no casual sex like there is these days. If you did the unthinkable and had sex before marriage, it damn sure meant you were going to get married soon. So that was Bob's scheme, he would turn on the charm and make them think he intended to marry him, he would make them think they were so in love that sex wouldn't seem like a big deal since they were going to get married eventually anyway.
"That's what he did to Mary. He seduced her over the space of about a month and finally got what he wanted from her. He took her virginity from her one night in his apartment building after telling her he loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
"The next day, thinking that she was in love, thinking that she'd found what she wanted from him, she wrote me that letter.
"Bob continued to have sex with her for about a month, as much as he could get away with. When she finally started trying to pin down a date for the wedding, when she started asking too much about when she could tell her parents about the announcement, he dumped her. Of course being the person he was he had a speech already pre-planned. He gave it to her, telling her that he'd THOUGHT he'd been in love with her but that it had been simple youthful exuberance. She left his apartment that day knowing she'd been destroyed, knowing that she'd lost everything. She never even wrote me again after that. We never even communicated through the rest of the war.
"I jumped out of airplanes time and time again before Germany finally surrendered in April of 1945. I helped take bridgeheads, railheads, and every other kind of head in advance of the infantry troops. Friends were shot down left and right until I stopped making friends. I even jumped across the Rhine itself just before the end of the war. I didn't care whether I lived or died anymore. Mary was gone. What more did I have to live for?
"Somehow I made it to the end. A bullet or an artillery fragment never had my name on it. I came home in October of 1945 to Spokane to find my life destroyed, my hopes shattered by Bob Simpson."
He grinned a little. "Sometimes there is justice in the world. When I got home I found that someone like me had been there before me. A young man my age by the name of Jeff Zand had received a similar letter while he was fighting the Japanese. Jeff got himself a million dollar wound on Okinawa, shot in the knee, and they sent him home. His first act upon getting back was to find himself a pistol and shoot Bob Simpson to death in his apartment. He shot him twelve times, having to reload his pistol once in order to do it. Jeff was given the electric chair of course and he sat in it less than a year later. His last words were to the effect that it had been worth it."
"Not too many people turned out for Bob's funeral I heard, but there was damn near a thousand at Jeff's. I was one of 'em. I gave his coffin a sharp salute before they lowered it into the ground."
"But you and your wife did eventually marry." I said.
"Eventually." He told me, nodding. "I knew what Bob was like you see so I knew long before I got back that she wasn't gonna be Mrs. Simpson. But she was tainted you see, I couldn't take her back and she couldn't ask. Both of our lives were destroyed by what Bob had done to her. You see, despite his discretion, everyone knew what he was doing and everyone knew whom he was doing it to. It amazed me how so many women fell for him with the reputation he had; hell, even Mary had to have heard the rumors before she started up with him. He must've been one smooth talker indeed.
"Back then it was unthinkable for a woman to get caught having sex without benefit of the clergy. Once people knew she'd done such a thing, Mary was little more than a slut in everyone's eyes." He swallowed. "Mine included. An unfair way to think I agree, but that's the way it was. I couldn't have anything to do with her after that. I still loved her and I still thought about her, especially late at night when my hand found my organ, but I couldn't be with her because of what she'd done.
"The same applied to everyone else. Oh, men approached her all of the time but not with marriage in their minds. Mary learned her lesson from the first time and always sent them away but the damage, as they say, had been done. She got older and older and remained a maiden; a miserable maiden, living with her Mom and Dad.
"Myself, I tried to date some other girls and more than one of them hinted that marriage might be in the cards if I played them right, but none of them ever made me feel the way Mary had. None of them could compare to the way I'd felt when I was with Mary.
"The solution to the problem was so simple. It was staring me in the face the whole time but the thinking I'd been raised with kept me from seeing it.
Instead of finding a replacement for Mary, I needed Mary. In late 1950 I finally came to my senses. I decided to throw all of the unkind words, all of the nasty talk about her to the side. I went and found her and asked her if she would go out with me.
"She did and it was less than two weeks before we were talking about marriage. Of course everyone I knew told me I was making a mistake. My own parents told me to stay away from that slut. But for the first time in my life I stopped listening to what other people said and listened to what my heart said. The happiest day of my life was the day that Mary and I went down to the courthouse and said our vows to each other."
"As it turned out, I made the right decision back then. Mary and I have been happy together ever since. Many of the same friends who shunned me for marrying "a slut" ended up divorced from the "respectable women" that they married. To this day I still love her deeply and she still loves me and I sometimes still curse myself for wasting all those years.
"The only sour spot in our marriage was our inability to have children. We tried and tried and nothing happened. When we finally went to see the doctor he found that I had an unnaturally low sperm count. We were told that conception was damn near impossible and that we might want to consider adoption.
"Well, we decided against adoption for various reasons and just went about our lives. And then in 1966, long after we'd given up any hope for kids, Mary got pregnant." He snorted. "That brought back all of the slut talk of course. If there's one thing people love to do more than have sex it's talk about where everyone else is getting theirs. They figured Mary's "true colors" had come out once again. How else could she be pregnant? There was never any doubt in my mind about Nina's paternity. I live with Mary and I know her better than anyone on Earth. She could no more cheat on me than she could sprout a set of wings and fly.
"So you can see two things from this conversation young man," He told me. "One, why I dislike you so much and why I won't let you around my daughter. Two, why I care so much for my daughter and what happens to her. Nina's led a sheltered life with us, I'll be the first to admit it. It wasn't helped that she had a lisp as a child. Kids used to make fun of her, call her ugly, treat her like dirt because she was a little different." He shook his head sadly. "Kids can be mighty cruel you know. We sent her to speech therapy and got rid of the lisp but, like with her mother, the damage had been done.