It was a painfully empty life. She had the child, and her work, and their apartment. But other than that, she had nothing at all. No man, no friends, no one to talk to or to turn to. There seemed to be no room in her life for anyone but the child. And at night she would sit and read, or write letters to Teddy. They took weeks to reach him in the distant outposts of Korea. He was a resident now, and wrote to her long sorrowful letters about what he thought of the war. To him, it all seemed a senseless carnage, a war they couldn't win and didn't belong in, and he longed to come home or be transferred to Japan. There were times when she would read his letters over and over, holding them in her hand, and then staring out at the bay, remembering his face the day she had met him … the way he had looked in his cutaway at Greg's wedding … the day he had delivered Vanessa … at his graduation at Stanford. It was odd how often now, in her mind, she confused his face with her husband's. It was as though over the past two and a half years they had got confused in her mind.
And on their third Christmas alone Serena and Vanessa went to church and prayed for his safety, as they did each Sunday, and that night Serena lay in her bed and cried. She was aching with loneliness and exhaustion, from the years alone, the endless hours of hard work at the store, and all that she poured out to Vanessa. It was as though she had to give it all, and there was no one to replenish her strength for her. Week after week she waited anxiously for Teddy's letters. They were what kept her going. It was in writing to him that she poured out her own soul. In a sense it was her only real contact with a grown-up, and her only contact with a man.
At work she spoke to almost no one. Word had got out at one point that she had been an Italian princess before her marriage to an American soldier, and everyone decided that she was arrogant and aloof, and they were frightened by her beauty. After a while no one even tried to make friends with her. They had no way of knowing how lonely she was behind the cool facade of the princess. Only Teddy knew when he read her letters, her pain and loneliness and the still-fresh grief for her husband were obvious between the lines.
“It's amazing to see,” she wrote to him after Christmas, “how they all misunderstand me. They think me cold and snobbish, I suppose, and I let them. It's easier, and safer perhaps, than allowing them to know how much I hurt inside.” She still missed Brad, but it was more than that now. She missed someone. Someone to talk to and to share with and to laugh with, and go for walks on the beach with. She couldn't bear to do the things she had done with Brad, or even with Teddy, they only made her feel more lonely, and reminded her of how alone she was. “I feel at times as though this will go on forever. I will always be alone, here, with Vanessa, night after night and year after year, in this apartment, working at the store, and no one will ever know me. It frightens me sometimes, Teddy. It is as though you are the only one left who has truly known me.…”
There was of course Marcella, but it had been years since she had seen her, and Marcella was part of another life now. The letters that she dictated to someone else to be sent to Serena were always stilted and awkward, and left an empty chasm there too. In effect there was only Teddy, thousands of miles away in Korea, and it was only in the last few months of the war that they both began to realize what had happened. After two and a half years of writing letters, baring their souls to each other, holding each other up across the miles, she finally understood why there had been no one in almost three years. She was waiting for him.
The morning that she heard the news that the war was over, she was working at the store, and wearing a black velvet evening suit with a stiff white organdy collar, and she stood in the middle of the designer salon with tears streaming down her face.
A saleswoman smiled at her, and others chattered excitedly among them. The war in Korea was over! And Serena wanted to give a whoop of joy. “He's coming home,” she whispered, but someone overheard her. “He's coming home!”
“Your husband?” someone asked.
“No.” She shook her head slowly, with a look of amazement on her face. “His brother.” The woman looked at her strangely and Serena suddenly knew that an important question was about to be answered. When the years of letters suddenly ended, what would Teddy be to her?
32
Teddy returned from the Far East on August 3, and as he set foot on land in San Francisco, he was officially discharged from the Navy. His residency had been completed in the heat of the war, he was trained as a surgeon, as few had been in the States, and he was on his way to New York to train for another year with a great surgeon. But none of that was on his mind as he stepped off the plane at the airport. His blond hair glinted in the sunlight, his face was tanned, and he squinted at the horde of people waiting. How different it was from the day he had left on the ship in Oakland. And how different he felt. He had been gone for three years, and he had just turned thirty.
And he felt as though in three years of war everything about him had changed. His interests, his needs, his priorities, his values. On the long flight over from Japan he had wondered again and again how he was going to fit in. For almost three years he hadn't seen his family. His mother's letters had been newsy, but he had always felt light-years away from home. Greg had only managed one or two letters a year. His father had died the year before. And most of his friends had eventually stopped writing, except Serena. His main contact with civilization had been with her, and now suddenly he was back, in the midst of a world no longer familiar, looking for a woman he hadn't seen in three years.
His eyes searched the crowd, and he wandered slowly toward where the visitors were gathered. Signs waved, bunches of flowers were held aloft, tears streamed down faces, frantic hands reached out to husbands and sons and lovers who had been gone for years. And then suddenly he saw her, so staggeringly beautiful that he felt his heart lurch. She stood very tall, and wide eyed and quiet, in a red silk dress that hung straight and narrow on her body, with her silky blond hair loose on her shoulders, and the emerald-green eyes looking straight at him. Like her, he was oddly silent, there were no wild gestures, no running, he just walked steadily toward her, and then as though they both knew, he pulled her into his arms and held her with all his might, as tears ran down both their cheeks, and then forgetting the years that had drifted between them, he kissed her full on the mouth, as though to ease away all the years of loneliness and pain. They held each other that way for long moments, and then at last pulled apart and looked at each other, but her eyes were full and sad as they reached up to his. Teddy had come to her, she knew now, but Brad never would. It was as though in the past three years, waiting for his return, she had fooled herself that it was Brad in Korea and not Teddy. But she understood now, almost like a physical blow, that her husband was lost forever. In all the years of letters it had been as though she were reaching out to Brad as well as Teddy. The two men had somehow merged as one in her mind. And now she had to face the truth again, as her heart plummeted within her and she tried not to let her grief show in her face.
“Hello, Serena.”
She smiled now, over the first shock, and then simultaneously they both looked down at the little girl beside her. It was here that they both saw the three lost years most clearly. Vanessa was almost seven, and she had been three and a half when Teddy left.
“Good Lord, princess!” He knelt down in the hubbub to talk to Vanessa. His eyes were a bright dancing blue, and his face lit up in a gentle smile. “I'll bet you don't remember your uncle Teddy.”