Dear Life

actually.
    “Ask him if he remembers I used to wash his bottom,” she said.
    Ileane, reporting this, said that she herself had been especially courteous, even snooty, because she could not stand the woman.
    But Jackson went red, cornered and desperate, the way he used to when asked a question in school.
    “I shouldn’t even have mentioned her,” Ileane said. “Youget in the habit of caricaturing people, living in a parsonage.”
    He said it was okay.
    That time turned out to be Jackson’s last leave. They wrote to each other. Ileane wrote about finishing her typing and shorthand and getting a job in the office of the Town Clerk. She was determinedly satirical about everything, more than she had been in school. Maybe she thought that someone at war needed joking. And she insisted on being in the know. When hurry-up marriages had to be arranged through the clerk’s office, she would refer to the Virgin Bride.
    And when she mentioned some minister visiting the parsonage and sleeping in the spare room, she said she wondered if the mattress would induce Peculiar Dreams.
    He wrote about the crowds on the
Île de France
and the ducking around to avoid U-boats. When he got to England he bought a bicycle and he told her about places he had biked around to see, if they were not out of bounds.
    These letters though more prosaic than hers were always signed “With Love.” When D-day did come there was what she called an agonizing silence but she understood the reason for it, and when he wrote again all was well, though details were not permitted.
    In this letter he spoke as she had been doing, about marriage.
    And at last VE-day and the voyage home. There were showers of summer stars, he said, all overhead.
    Ileane had learned to sew. She was making a new summer dress in honor of his homecoming, a dress of lime-green rayon silk with a full skirt and cap sleeves, worn with a narrow belt of gold imitation leather. She meant to wind a ribbonof the same green material around the crown of her summer hat.
    “All this is being described to you so you will notice me and know it’s me and not go running off with some other beautiful woman who happens to be at the train station.”
    He mailed his letter to her from Halifax, telling her that he would be on the evening train on Saturday. He said that he remembered her very well and there was no danger of getting her mixed up with another woman even if the train station happened to be swarming with them that evening.
    On their last evening before he left, they had sat up late in the parsonage kitchen where there was the picture of King George VI you saw everywhere that year. And the words beneath it.
    And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
    And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
    Then they went upstairs very quietly and he went to bed in the spare room. Her coming to him must have been by mutual agreement but perhaps he had not quite understood what for.
    It was a disaster. But by the way she behaved, she might not even have known that. The more disaster, the morefrantically she carried on. There was no way he could stop her trying, or explain. Was it possible a girl could know so little? They parted finally as if all had gone well. And the next morning said good-bye in the presence of her father and brothers. In a short while the letters began.
    He got drunk and tried once more, in Southampton. But the woman said, “That’s enough, sonny boy, you’re down and out.”
    A thing he didn’t like was women or girls dressing up. Gloves, hats, swishy skirts, all some demand and bother about it. But how could she know that? Lime green. He wasn’t sure he knew the color. It sounded like acid.
    Then it came to him quite easily, that a person could just not be there.
    Would she tell herself or tell anybody else, that she must have mistaken the date? He could make himself believe that she would find some lie, surely. She was resourceful, after all.
    Now that she is gone out onto the street, Jackson does feel a wish to see her. He could never ask the owner what she looked like, whether her hair was dark or gray, and she herself still skinny or gone stout. Her voice even in distress had been marvellously unchanged. Drawing all importance to itself, to its musical levels, and at the same time