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C h a p t e r 10 Reassignment The call came on November 27, 1944, as I was padding around barefoot getting Rick’s midmorning snack. After the phone call, after I had put the phone down, ten minutes later Rick was in his grandmother Frieda’s arms, and I was driving the family Ford north out of Miami. I was in a tizzy—so tizzied that as I was driving and looked down, I saw two bare feet. It didn’t matter. The phone call was the one I had been waiting for: the one from Jack telling me he was home. And waiting for me to come get him. Where he was waiting was at Morrison Field in West Palm Beach. We had been apart for just about a year, and as with all of us on the home front who had loved ones overseas, that separation had controlled my life. I had found myself constantly veering between an ecstasy and a funk, an ecstasy because I had received a letter, a funk because of something I had read in the paper. In the months before that phone call, I had been in a funk a lot. Because the B-29s were the biggest bombers of them all, they were such media stars that newspapers had taken to reporting in full everything they did. Thus I was daily treated to a rundown of B-29 missions and, in a sidebar story just for me, of their casualties. But at this moment I was in nothing but a happy delirium as I raced up the road. Perhaps “racing” is not quite what I was doing. U.S. 1 was crowded, not as crowded as it might have been if gasoline rationing had not still been with us, but U.S. 1 was the only north-south artery through southeast Florida , so it was pretty congested. So racing was out, and frustration was in. As I made my way up the road, I imagined that the crews in the planes flying over me and heading as I was for Morrison Field were laughing and pointing at this pathetic young lady in the Ford trying to put on some speed. I wanted to tell those mighty roaring things that my heart was going faster 140 Reassignment than their planes were flying, so fast in fact that I had some feeling it might leap out the window and beat me up there. At that moment in time, if there was a future to be thought of, it was the one that would happen in about an hour, the one when I would have Jack safely in my arms. Then all at once I was there, past the MPs at the gate, and there Jack was, in my sights, looking at me with that Jack look that always made me go funny whenever we had been apart, if only for hours. There was my Jack with that familiar rangy frame, the crumpled shirt tucked and untucked by turns, the hat in the flying officer’s signature “raunchiness.” Had he changed at all? When I had last seen him, his six foot two frame was equipped with two hundred pounds, and now he was thinner, though the lost weight made him look somehow fitter, as if he had gotten himself into fighting form for his job. Well, there was also a change in his officer status. He now wore a captain’s “railroad tracks” instead of a lieutenant’s single one, but who cared? We got into the car and went to an orange juice stand because orange juice was what Jack wanted “ASAP,” he said, which was another new expression for me to file away. And then we went to the hotel in West Palm Beach where we had spent our honeymoon—the one we were reduced to after we had lost most of our money at the dog track, the hotel that overlooked not a lake lapping at the mansions of Palm Beach but a parking lot. Actually it didn’t matter which hotel we chose. What mattered was that Jack was in the room with me and there was a bathroom where I could wash my feet and a bed that we could throw ourselves into. The next morning we went back down U.S. 1, Jack driving, me sitting as close as I could without actually being in his lap. We needed gas, and I had enough coupons to...

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