Flying Angels(20)
It was emotional for all three of them when she left her parents, but Lizzie loved San Francisco when she got there. It was a little gem of a city, next to a shimmering bay with strong winds and cool weather, and the new Golden Gate Bridge joined the city to the more rural Marin County. The hospital where she was going to work was efficient and modern. She was assigned to a dorm just for nurses, and there were always groups of women coming and going, or standing around having a smoke and a cup of coffee during their time off. The atmosphere was congenial and the nurses were quick to tell her the best places to visit on her days off.
Lizzie loved exploring the city, and the friendly attitude of the nurses she met there. Her letters to Audrey were full of enthusiasm, and she said she loved her job. The wounded were already returning from the Pacific by hospital ship, and the beds were full at the Presidio hospital. She felt that she was finally doing something useful and meaningful. The men being sent back from the Pacific were severely wounded, and many of them traumatized by what they’d been through. The fighting in the Pacific was savage. She spent many a night trying to comfort men suffering from shell shock and nightmares, in particular one who was barely older than she was. He had grown up on a farm in Alabama, and his wounds were severe enough to keep him in the hospital for quite some time, but not damaging enough to get him released from the army. She took care of him for a month, before they sent him back to active duty, still suffering from the trauma he’d experienced previously. The night before he left, he asked her to marry him, and she told him that she didn’t want to marry. The man she’d loved had died at Pearl Harbor.
Her trauma patient was being sent to a base on the East Coast, and from there back into combat, this time in Europe. He was twenty-four years old, only a year older than she was, but he seemed like a child to her, as she tried to calm him the night before he left. It seemed cruel to her to send him back into battle, still so shattered by what he’d lived through before. He was leaving in the morning. He cried when he talked to her that night. Her heart ached for him. She had never seen anyone so ravaged and distraught, and it illustrated the cruelty of war so clearly to her.
“Don’t make me go back into battle without telling me you love me,” he begged her, and she felt sick listening to him. He needed someone to care about him when he left. It seemed like so little to give him. But she didn’t want to mislead him, or encourage his romantic delusions about her.
“We don’t know each other, Alfred,” she said gently, trying to reason with him.
“Yes, we do. We’ve known each other for a month. People get married during wartime with less than that.”
“They shouldn’t,” she said quietly, thinking of Will Parker. Their feelings for each other had taken off like wildfire, and that was before the war. But she had known him for two years before that.
“Will you write to me, if I write to you?” Alfred asked her, and she reluctantly nodded agreement. But what difference did it make, and what harm would it do? They’d never see each other again. “Could we say we’re engaged?” he asked hopefully, and she drew the line there.
“No, we could not,” she said firmly.
“When I come back, I’ll make you fall in love with me,” he said with determination, looking like an overgrown child.
She had other work to do. She went off duty at two a.m., and he was finally asleep. He left the hospital at eight that morning when she wasn’t on duty. His letters to her started coming within days afterwards. Desperate, frightened, anguished pleas for love and support. He had grown up in foster homes in Alabama and had no family. She felt sorry for him, and wrote to him now and then to reassure him, trying to give him the strength to survive his return to the front. His handwriting was barely legible, and she felt sorry for him. She tried to encourage him without getting too deeply involved or too personal, but in each letter he poured out his love for her. All she hoped was that he’d survive the war and be able to make a decent life for himself when it was over, with what was left of his mind by then.
There were so many like him. She was careful not to encourage Alfred romantically, but he paid no attention to whatever she wrote and continued to declare his love for her, no matter what she said. She tried to taper off her letters, but he would beg for a response, and eventually she would feel sorry for him and send him a short note. The letters finally stopped and she assumed he’d been shipped off to Europe. It was a relief not to hear from him anymore. There was so little she could do for him and the others like him. She could heal their bodies better than their minds. There were so many broken souls returning from the war, men who would never be whole again. And there would be so many more before it was over.
* * *
—
When Alex finished her nurses’ training, she was assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco. She stopped in New York for a night to see her parents, and flew out on a military flight the next day. Her father hoped that going to San Francisco didn’t mean that she would be sent on to the Pacific. She was happy to be sent far from home. For the first time, she could pursue her own life without being told how peculiar and unlike her family she was, and how disappointed they were by her. San Francisco was a fresh start. She smiled broadly when she saw the city, as she rode into town on a military shuttle bus to the Presidio. She hopped on with her suitcase and her duffel bag, excited to be there. When she got off, it took her a little while to find the nurses’ dormitory. There was a young female private in the office on the ground floor handing out room assignments to new arrivals. Alex made her way up the stairs to the room she’d been assigned. There were two beds in the room, and someone sound asleep in one of them. She assumed it was probably a nurse who’d been working all night. Alex tried to move around as quietly as she could, and put her things away in the narrow closet and an empty chest of drawers. The furniture in the room was old and battered. There were no frills or additional comforts, just the bare necessities. She didn’t mind at all. It was a relief not to be burdened with the luxuries and trappings of her youth. She was like everyone else here. It was a melting pot of all kinds of people.