It’s a photograph taken of John, Tom, and myself about two weeks before we lost John. Mrs. Brown borrowed a camera from the schoolteacher in Chilton Foliat, who had one as a matter of hobby. When she’d discovered John’s love for it, she asked him to take a picture of her and Mr. Brown for their fortieth wedding anniversary, as they’d never had one done together. Then she turned the camera on the three of us.
Not having the opportunity in this small town to develop the film, we were at the mercy of the schoolteacher to have them printed once he’d finished the roll, and we’ve only just now received them back.
This is my only copy, and to be honest, I was half tempted to keep it for myself. But not only is it in safer hands with you—because who knows what the next few months will bring for our sorry souls. Take good care of it for me. I have every intention of surviving this war and snatching it back from you when, at last, I get to return to home’s soil and meet you in person.
Margaret unwrapped the photograph from its brown paper packaging. She closed her eyes before looking at it. As excited as she was to see a new image of John, a myriad of them adorned every bit of her house, as if it had become a shrine. It was William’s visage (a delightful new word she’d learned and would have to share with him) that she was most eager to see. In these six months, his friendship had sustained her more than almost anything else. A letter in the mail with her name on it, inked in the careful and familiar handwriting of a soldier who described what newsreels and papers never could, was even more of a delight than the chocolates from Ebinger’s that had become Oliver’s habit to buy for them.
Hello, William, she thought as she held the photograph, wrong side up. It’s nice to finally meet you.
She opened her eyes and smiled at the picture of the three young men standing just beyond the cover of a thatched cottage roof. There was John, the top button of his shirt loosened, surely the first thing he did at the end of any training day. He’d never liked for his neck to feel encased. His grin was achingly familiar, the kind saved for their sibling antics, and it pleased her to know that William and Tom could elicit it. She held the picture to her heart and bent her head down. Despite all of the photographs in the house, this was, indeed, something to cherish. How thoughtful of William to have anticipated that.
To his left were the two other men. She walked over to the window and sat on the sofa where the waning sunlight of the afternoon cast its beam across the cushions. She flipped the photograph over, expecting some kind of mention of who was who, but it was blank. Could he really have forgotten to tell her?
With no hints, she looked at the picture more closely. The soldier right next to John was about the same height as her brother. His hair was shorn close to his head, hinting at its likely brown color. His forehead held the creases of someone who worried too much. She couldn’t tell if he was twenty, thirty, or forty. His face was ageless. Timeless. He was smiling, though not as widely as John. As if the camera had captured him one second behind the peak of a laugh.
The other soldier made her breathing stop. He was several inches taller than the other two and seemed to be wearing his dark hair as long as the army would allow. The picture was clearly taken just before evening, and the boy’s face wore the telltale sign of the long day with the shadow of a beard that would surely be shaved the next morning when they again reported for duty. But until then, it gave him a rugged, earthy look. Like the others, he was smiling at whatever had delighted them.
His eyes, however, had an enigmatic look to them. If the stage of joviality had not been set by everything around him, his eyes might equally suggest that he was deep in thought. If this was William, perhaps he was thinking of his next letter to her.
Something about this one stirred her in a way that was entirely new.
Is this what John and Dottie had felt for each other?
It couldn’t be. He was not Cyrano and she was not Roxane and it was not love through the proxy of ink and words because those things just happened in fiction. And yet…and yet, she had never known a man to whom she could pour out her heart, worry over, and await his return home.
She was working on a project for him. Something she’d give him at the end of the war. She’d raided her mother’s box of embroidery floss and stitched out the beginnings of a bouquet on a canvas. Eighteen holes per square inch for maximum detail. For every flower Tom drew for her, she created it with a needle and thread, carefully placing each one so that their individual beauty was displayed while arranging them so that their particular colors looked complementary next to its neighboring one.
It would be a piece of both of his friends that William could have forever.
* * *
March 1944
My dearest William,
I awoke hoping that the newest bespoke piece I am knitting does not provoke you to drastic despair, as I had to revoke my use of the red yarn since I am quickly running out of it, but I instead will create the next one in yellow so as to evoke the sunshine that I know you love.
Oh, my friends, your challenge was hardly one at all. And to prove it, I added a rhyme of my own. The two of you will have to try much harder next time.
But I do thank you both for the brief diversion.
How I wish such frivolities were the stuff that occupied the hours of our days. Instead, each new, terrifying headline in the newspapers fills my mind with dread for your safety and for Tom’s. I had every hope that my brother would survive the war. And to lose him before his part in it truly even began has made me keenly aware of the dangers you both face every day. I know now that nothing can be taken for granted. And the understanding that you and Tom could meet a similar fate is one that eclipses my girlish heart with that of a woman. Isn’t it ironic that when we’re young, we want to be all grown up? But when we finally arrive at that promised land, we want nothing more than to go back to the days of toy trains and baby dolls?
A year ago this time, I was poring through bridal advertisements with Dottie as we dreamed about her walking down the aisle of St. Charles Borromeo with John. And a year before that, I was planting flowers in our rooftop garden instead of the cucumbers I breed now. And a year before that—months before any of us had ever heard the words “Pearl Harbor,” let alone could locate it on a map—I was embroidering flowers onto dancing shoes, eager for an upcoming springtime formal.
So which is preferable? Innocence or that which whittles it down into a keen awareness of the realities of the world?
My answer is different every day.
In other, vastly more important news, our Dottie is hopelessly, obviously, pregnant. (I know that “pregnant” is such a crude word to use, but honestly, “in the family way” is saccharinely euphemistic, though perhaps it’s a step above some of its competitors. An old one being “wearing the bustle wrong,” whose meaning should be obvious. And one that I’ve discovered only recently through Dottie—“the rabbit died.” I will leave you to your own detective work to learn its meaning because I, frankly, can’t think about it without getting a bit sad.)
Any way you say it, there was no way to keep it hidden any longer, and Gladys and I went with her to break the news to her parents. There were tears and accusations from them both, and words exchanged that I dare not share even with a hardened soldier. In fact, their ire even turned toward me, with implications that as John’s sister, I represented a morally corrupt family.