Lone eagle

Her parents urged her to go on a trip that summer, and after much arguing, Kate finally agreed to go. She went to visit her godmother in Chicago, and from there on to California to see a girl she knew who was going to Stanford. It was an interesting trip, and she had a good time, but she always felt now as though she were only making the motions, and not living her life anymore. It was a relief finally when she came home on the train. She had three days to herself to stare out the window and think about him, all that he had been, and hopefully still was. But even she was beginning to think now that he was no longer alive. By the time she returned to Boston at the end of August, he'd been gone for nine months. And no one had heard anything about him, or seen him in any of the prisoner of war camps. Both Washington and the RAF had finally agreed that he was dead.

Kate didn't go to Cape Cod that summer. It had too many memories for her, even though she had only seen him there twice. She came home from California just in time to start her senior year at Radcliffe. She was majoring in history and art, and had no idea what she was going to do with it. Teaching didn't appeal to her, and there was no other career path that held any particular lure for her, nor did anything else.

She saw Andy a few weeks after they got back, he was starting his third year of law school, and had almost no time to see her anymore. He loved it, and was working too hard. Several of her friends hadn't come back to school that fall, two of them had gotten married over the summer, and another girl had moved to the West Coast. Another had gone to work to support her mother, her father and both her brothers had been killed in the Pacific the previous year. It seemed to be a world supported and staffed by women, bus drivers, mailmen, all the jobs that had previously been done by men were being performed by women. Everyone had gotten used to it, and Kate teased her parents and told them she was going to be a bus driver when she grew up. Unfortunately, there was nothing else she wanted to do more.

She was twenty-one years old, and soon to become a graduate of Radcliffe. She was intelligent, beautiful, interesting, fun to be with, and well-informed. By all rights, her mother insisted, if there hadn't been a war on, she would have been married and had kids by then, if not with Joe, then with someone else. But she hadn't even been on a date since he died. Several of the boys from Harvard had asked her out, a couple of the excessively brainy ones from MIT, and even a nice boy from Boston College, but she turned all of them down. She had no interest in anyone, and she still expected to get a call from Washington, telling her that Joe was still alive, or even from the visiting room downstairs that there was someone waiting for her. She expected to see him as she got on buses, walked around corners and crossed streets. It was impossible to adjust to the idea that he had vanished into thin air, that he no longer existed anywhere on the planet, and no matter how much she loved him, would never come back to her. The whole concept of death was incomprehensible to her.

The holidays meant very little to her that year, although they were less painful than they had been the year before. She had calmed down a lot, and was warm and kind to her parents, but when her mother urged her to go out, Kate would either change the subject or leave the room. Her parents were beginning to give up hope, and her mother had confided to Kate's father that she was afraid Kate would be an old maid.

“I hardly think so,” he laughed at Elizabeth. “She's twenty-one years old and there's a war on, for God's sake. Wait till the boys come home.”

“And when will that be?” Elizabeth asked with a mournful look.

“Soon, I hope.” But there was no sign of it yet.

Paris had been liberated finally in August. Russia had prevailed against the Germans, and Russian troops had moved into Poland. But the Germans had increased their bombing raids over England since September. And their offensive in the Ardennes Forest was going badly for the Allies. And the Battle of the Bulge over Christmas had cost a vast number of lives and disheartened everyone on the home front.

It was the last day of the Christmas vacation when Andy Scott dropped by the house with a group of friends, and convinced Kate to go skating with them. They were driving to a nearby lake, and her mother was relieved when she saw her leave with them. She was still hoping that Kate would pay more attention to Andy one day, but Kate always insisted that she had no romantic interest in him, he was just a friend. But they had gotten noticeably closer year by year, and Elizabeth hadn't entirely given up hope. She thought he would have been the perfect husband for Kate, and Kate's father didn't disagree, but he thought that was best left up to Kate.