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  Sunlight heightened the incongruity of heavy makeup on their childishly soft faces. Round little Roy’s freckles were not quite obliterated by Max Factor’s Pan Cake, and her mouth was excessively maroon. Althea—tall and very thin—had smudged her topaz eyes with mascara and drastically enlarged her fine lips with great swoops of plummy lipstick.

  Even in its ridiculous upsweep, Althea’s hair was really something. Straight, silky, and ash blond, with lambent streaks that varied from palest gold to gleaming silver.

  The two freshmen had struck up an acquaintance at Orientation, in their first hour at Beverly, and since then had become inseparable. Almost every afternoon Althea walked with Roy and Marylin along Charleville to the apartment. There the two younger girls stationed themselves in the bathroom, experimenting with makeup, combing their hair into high pompadours over NolaBee’s wadded rats, emerging to consume boxes of graham crackers and gallons of milk that the Wace household could ill afford.

  NolaBee, though, chuckled indulgently, delighted that Roy at last had a friend.

  There were certain strange aspects to the friendship. Althea never spoke about her parents and had never once invited Roy to her home. If either Marylin or NolaBee said a word, Roy loyally shouted them down: “So what? We live closer to school. And who cares about families?”

  Althea had gone to private school, so the Waces guessed she must come from one of those classy houses north of Santa Monica Boulevard—or possibly even a north-of-Sunset mansion. Rich she certainly was. There was no question about that. Every afternoon at five, a heavyset elderly colored woman, obviously a servant, would honk the horn of a Chevy coupe with an A gas-ration sticker on the windshield. Althea would run down. After a few minutes the phone would ring, and Roy would pick it up and chatter away for another forty-five or fifty minutes. “I declare, I don’t know what all those two find to talk about,” NolaBee would say to Marylin, laughing.

  Althea’s clothes were peculiar. Finely tucked blouses made of creamy crepe de chine rather than the usual white cotton; sweaters handknit in an out-of-date way with patterns; very long and narrow Oxford shoes. “No snap,” was NolaBee’s opinion. “I reckon without Roy that Althea Cunningham’s an unhappy little thing.” Another remark that Roy vehemently denied.

  A nearby table crowded with freshman boys erupted into laughter, and a short boy stood, nodding his sandy crewcut toward Roy before departing with a self-conscious strut.

  Althea said, “Noticed by Mr. Big Time himself!”

  “Oh, hug me!” cried Roy.

  “Not until we meet thereafter.”

  “You can say that again.”

  They talked about boys in a language of catch phrases all their own.

  A brunette had come over to the table. “Hi, Roy,” she said, her smile displaying elaborate braces. Squeezing her looseleaf to her breasts, she inquired, “How did you do on the English quiz?”

  Roy grinned cheerfully. “Flunked, most likely. You?”

  Althea stared down toward the gym buildings. Her joyous expression was replaced by remote hauteur. She sat next to Roy in the English class, and it was humiliating not to be greeted or questioned—but then it seemed to Althea that her classmates always either ignored her or tormented her. She wanted to viciously batter the intruder while at the same time she wished fervently that she had been asked about her quiz results.

  “Roy, what about that Tri-Y meeting?” the girl was asking.

  Idiot, jerk, Althea thought, her fingers clenching. Nobody.

  Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the desire to be home at Belvedere, alone in her airy room that overlooked the Italian gardens. People drained her spirit and made her miserable. Had it always been like this? Or had she begun to feel an outcast only after it had happened? . . . Althea squeezed her eyes shut, banning the dreaded memory.

  The girl left.

  “Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Althea drawled.

  “Oh, Betty’s a good kid,” Roy said.

  “The correct answer is all three— if you consider the salad caught in her braces,” Althea said. “I for one wouldn’t be caught dead with those Tri-Y drips!”

  Marylin glanced up from the papers on her lap. Like NolaBee, she was glad that Roy had a friend, yet she had reservations: Althea seemed to have some sort of complex that made her belittle the other kids.

  After a moment Roy said, “If you don’t want to go to the meeting, neither do I.”

  At that moment a crowd of sophomore boys began an elaborate horseplay on the other side of the patio: the two friends watched, then leaned toward one another giggling and whispering.

  Marylin reached for her thermos and poured cocoa into the cup. The flavored milk seemed to have picked up a metallic taint.

  But what did taste right to her now?

  Though Marylin’s ignorance of certain reproductive information was near total, a truth had been known to her subconscious for weeks now: the cause of this faint, omnipresent nausea.

  She was pregnant.

  She was utterly alone, terrified, and certainly unable to confide this shame to anyone. Was it possible that until a few months ago her innermost thoughts and dreams had been innocent enough to expose to her mother? Twice she had started to write to Linc, only to have her fingers cramp perilously when she attempted to form the words “I think I’m having a baby.” Prudery was appallingly inane at this point, yet she could not put her disgrace on V-Mail.

  She had no idea of what to do, none.

  Her one prayer, and she repeated it on a never-ending prayer wheel, was that the Enterprise would return to San Diego.

  Sighing, she looked down at Linc’s large spiky handwriting on yellow legal paper.

  This was “Island,” the sheets with the story had arrived yesterday. At home in a box she had twenty or so other stories: some were only a single page, others were long—one had fifty pages. In these tales of different men aboard an aircraft carrier, the main character of one story might play a minor part in another, or an omnipotent I might insert a description—Linc had written that this narrator was a fictive device, yet she intuitively accepted I as Linc. Each character rang so utterly true to her that she wondered if he had crawled under his shipmates’ skins.

  A few stories were based on her and Linc. “Island” was one of them.

  Of course he knew quite well he could not block out the war, any more than he could stop time, yet it was a conceit of his that when he was with Rain, if they saw no family or friends, admitted no mention of the war, why, then the war did not exist. The hours he spent with her were an island, a place where peace and love existed, where there were no cream-colored Zekes firing on him, no huge gun muzzles on Japanese ships blazing colorful death—green, yellow, black, blue-white, pink, purple—no crouching over his stick praying there was enough gas to get him and the two others back, no memories of floating alone and crying out for Hobbs and Cariu even though he had seen neither of their chutes open. He kept the island pristine of these things, and each time he came there he found it more difficult to leave.

  Rain, of course, wondered about his furtiveness, and doubtless it, like his foul humor, hurt her. For the most part, though, loving him, she accepted him, and did not raise too much of a fuss that he kept their relationship in the present.

  [I described Rain in the story about the pilot and the cop, didn’t I? A small, delicately built girl with enormous sea-green eyes and a beauty mark near the shell of her navel.]

  He did all he could to protect the island, and when it was threatened, he could get pretty brutal.

  On this particular leave, he had determined to—

  “Marylin.” Tommy Wolfe was leaning on their table.

  “Hi, Tommy,” she replied.

  “You have gym next, don’t you?” He was red about the ears.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Me too. I’ll walk you down. Uhh . . . I mean, it’s a chance to go over our new lines.”

  Roy and Althea were staring. T
hey knew that Tommy, who was in the Junior Play and hung around at lunchtime, had a big fat case on Marylin.

  “I already learned mine,” she said.

  Tommy hung his big, carefully combed head in embarrassment. Roy and Althea tittered.

  “It’s a good idea to try the scene together, Tommy.” Marylin tucked “Island” carefully into her notebook. “That way we’ll be ready in drama class.”

  * * *

  Miss Nathans, the drama teacher, a recent graduate of USC, a tall young woman with the full figure of a Viking boat prow, sat at her desk in the center of the dais-cum-stage. Normally she called out cheerful greetings, but today her face was somber as she watched her students stroll to their desks and start to chatter. Marylin, who sat in the front row, took out a blue V-Mail sheet and began to scribble her profuse, heartfelt admiration of “Island”—contradictorily, when she was writing to Linc, her problem was most remote. The buzzer sounded.

  Miss Nathans rose to her feet. Normally she took roll with perfunctory swiftness before getting down to the work she enjoyed, but today her modulated contralto reverberated lingeringly over each name. Thirty-one pairs of eyes gazed with expectant curiosity at her.

  “As some of you may have noticed,” she said with the same intense depth that she had taken roll, “the author of our class play, Barbara Jane Fernauld, is not with us this afternoon.”

  There was a buzzing in the class, and everyone turned toward the empty desk-seat as though to ascertain the truth of this, although two minutes earlier BJ had not answered. Marylin alone held still, her frightened eyes fixed on Miss Nathans’s high-colored face.

  “Barbara Jane was called home during third period. Her family received the sort of news dreaded by each of us who has a loved one serving our country. Her brother, Lincoln Fernauld, Beverly Hills High School, summer class of ’37, is missing in action. . . .” She paused.

  She’s a liar, a liar, a liar, Marylin thought, shivering. A rotten, lousy, hateful liar.

  “At Beverly,” Miss Nathans intoned, “Lincoln was on the Bee and Varsity basketball squad, he was a Squire, a Knight, a four-year Palladian, he was city editor on the Highlights and head editor on the Watchtower.” Miss Nathans paused again, a longer pause. “Will the class join me in a minute of silent prayer for the safety of Lieutenant Lincoln Fernauld.” She bowed her head.

  In the worst of revelations sometimes there is a moment of benumbed grace before horror takes over. Missing in action?

  Linc?

  It couldn’t be. “Island” had arrived in yesterday’s mail.

  Missing in action?

  Then the truth encompassed Marylin with preternatural vividness. From one of the longer stories she knew in full, ineradicable detail what it was like to be shot down. In this ghastly, distorted instant the immolation was hers.

  She cringed backward in the burning cockpit, seeing the fire spread from the gasoline filler pipe, her ears heard the engine of the spinning plane shrill like a woman, her body felt the bone-consuming heat, flames seared her hands as she yanked off the heavy gloves, her fingers struggled helplessly with the recalcitrant buckle of the safety belt, her desperate lungs gasped in the asphyxiating smoke, she was standing up in her seat frantically attempting to force her way out of the burning plane while the solid wind wall of slipstream trapped her. . . .

  She did not realize that she was clutching her books and purse to her breasts, stumbling toward the glass-inset door.

  “Marylin,” Miss Nathans called after her. “You are not dismissed.”

  Marylin pushed into the cool, empty hall. She was still trapped in the incendiary hell of the TBM cockpit.

  “Marylin.” Miss Nathans had followed her. “You know as well as I that it’s against school rules for you to leave in the middle of class.”

  Marylin gazed wildly at this apparition amidst her torment.

  “Whatever is it? You’re white as a sheet . . .” The drama teacher’s voice, worried and no longer theatrical, came from far away.

  Marylin’s books and purse slipped from her grasp.

  A great, hollow silence opened up.

  9

  Marylin swam back to consciousness.

  She lay on something hard, a starched white cap atop a wrinkled visage hanging over her, while at a distance blurred the anxious faces of Miss Nathans and Tommy Wolfe.

  I fainted. . . . Why? As memory spoke, her body convulsed feebly.

  “Wait a minute before you try to get up,” said the school nurse’s New England twang.

  Marylin became aware that something soakingly warm wrapped her lower body, and there was an ammoniac smell. Moaning, she closed her eyes.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, that happens,” said the nurse briskly. She glanced over her shoulder, and Tommy disappeared.

  “Marylin, dear,” Miss Nathans said, “I’ll see how you are later.” She went back into the classroom.

  After a minute or so the nurse helped Marylin to her feet: with one assisting arm around the slight waist, she led the girl slowly down the stairs and along the main corridor to the brightly sunlit nurse’s office. NolaBee was on the day shift at Hughes, so there was no point in calling home.

  “You live on Charleville,” said the nurse crisply. “Miss Nathans goes in that direction. She’ll give you a lift.”

  “What about my sister?” Marylin’s voice sounded odd and tinny to her. “My sister will worry.”

  “I’ll send a note to her class.”

  With impersonal competence the nurse helped Marylin off with her wet clothes, giving her a loose gown that tied with strings. Marylin stretched nauseated and light-headed on one of the cots that were separated by a curtain from the dispensary. She could hear the nurse’s quick, expert typing, hear a fly buzzing nearer, than farther . . . nearer, then farther. That gruesome you-are-there clairvoyance was gone and her mind reiterated “missing in action . . . missing in action . . . missing in action.”

  Though shivering, she did not pull up the khaki blanket folded over the foot of the cot; though the curtain was bile green, ugly, and menacing, she did not take her eyes from it. Like that poor trapped fly, her mind endlessly revolved around the three words.

  Missing in action.

  Missing . . . in . . . action. . . .

  It meant his plane had not returned, it meant he was somewhere, but not on the Enterprise.

  It did not mean that he was dead.

  He was shot down once before and he was okay, she thought, forlornly trying to comfort herself. Why doesn’t the nurse open a window and let the fly out? Missing in action . . . missing in action. . . .

  The final bell buzzed. Feet thundered on cement hallways, lockers clanged, voices shrilled and roared.

  Roy and Althea burst into the nurse’s office, both demanding at once, “Where’s Marylin Wace? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Which one of you is Roy Wace?” asked the nurse.

  She sent Althea packing before she would explain to Roy that Marylin had fainted.

  “Fainted?” Roy asked. “She’s never fainted.”

  “It happens a lot. No wonder, the way you girls diet nowadays. She had a little accident with her clothes. They’re in this bag. And here’s a note for your mother.”

  Marylin borrowed Roy’s hand-me-down blue coat.

  The three of them squeezed into the front seat of Miss Nathans’s rattly black LaSalle coupe. When the car pulled up in the garage driveway, Marylin said: “Thank you, Miss Nathans.” She had scarcely spoken to Roy in the nurse’s office, and these were the first words she had uttered since they had left Beverly High.

  Climbing the steps, Roy gripped her sister’s fragile arm. She felt protective, flustered, sympathetic, and inadequately young. As she used her doorkey, she asked, “Marylin, what happened?

  Marylin, without replying or taking off the saggy old coat, sat at the table.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  Marylin gave her a blank look.

  “W
hat about something to eat?”

  Marylin blinked as if somebody had shone a flashlight in her lovely blue-green eyes. “Oh. Maybe a cup of tea.”

  Waiting for the water to boil, Roy reached her own conclusions about the fainting spell. In movies and novels a swoon generally announced a baby was on the way. Roy knew only the vaguest outline of the process (oh sure she jabbered with sophisticatedly raised eyebrows to Althea, but that was only talk) so she imagined that passing out had been Marylin’s first inkling of pregnancy. And Linc was thousands of miles away! No wonder the poor girl was in a state. How gruesome.

  Roy carried a sloshing cup of liquid that was more milk than tea to the table and sat opposite her sister. “Marylin, listen, I’m not a little kid anymore.” Her menarche had occurred in January, by clever chance the same month that she started Beverly.

  Marylin looked up. “What?”

  “If something’s . . . wrong . . . I’ll do everything to help.”

  Marylin shook her head.

  “However bad it is,” Roy said, “I promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Mama.”

  Marylin stared at her with the wide-open, vague look of a strafed refugee.

  Roy’s natural loyalty and sympathy gushed, and she had to fight back tears. “I’m your sister,” she muttered, hugging Marylin’s trembly shoulders. “You can trust me.”

  “I’m cold, so very cold.”

  “Here, let’s get you into bed.”

  At a little after six the rickety outside stairs shuddered under footsteps, and Roy, thoroughly frightened by her sister’s zombielike inertia, galloped to open the door for her mother. NolaBee, as usual, lugged a big brown bag of groceries. Seeing Marylin, salt white under a heap of faded old patchwork quilts, she thrust the bag at Roy and ran to her crumpled, beautiful child. Marylin sat up, holding out her arms, and when NolaBee clasped her, she buried her face in her mother’s meager bosom and began gasping in terrible deep sobs.

  “Darlin’, darlin’. What is it?”

  “Linc . . . he’s . . . missing in action. . . .”

  “Oh, my poor darlin’.”