Read Louise's War for Free Online Page B

newspapers, Ada planned to wash her hair and take a nap and Joe said he had tests to grade.
    ‘I’m going to a wake,’ I said.
    ‘Who died?’ Joe asked.
    ‘A man I worked with,’ I said. ‘It was in the paper yesterday.’
    ‘Where is it? The wake, I mean,’ Phoebe asked.
    ‘A funeral home near Griffith Stadium.’
    ‘Good luck finding a taxi,’ Ada said.
    ‘I’ve got a ride.’
    I still owned the black dress I’d bought when Bill died. It was quality, cotton pique with a Peter Pan collar, and I saw no need to get rid of it because I wore it to my husband’s funeral. I wasn’t sentimental that way. Not that I didn’t still get a catch in my throat when I thought of Bill. It was funny, we had been childhood sweethearts, and when I remembered him now, it was as a sunburned boy catching crabs off my parents’ pier, not as the serious young Wells Fargo telegrapher I’d married. I’d hated moving out of the two-room apartment over the telegraph office we’d shared and back into my old bedroom at my parents’ house, but there was no money left in our shoebox bank after I’d bought this dress and paid for the funeral. Now I made more than sixteen hundred dollars a year, myself, more than Bill dreamed of earning.
    When I recalled the end of my brief marriage it was as if I was watching a sad movie, poignant and moving, but not immediate. In the five years since Bill died the world had become a different place, and I was a different person.
    I fastened a single strand of cultured pearls around my neck. I’d bought it shortly after I’d gotten my pay raise at OSS, and I’d felt horribly guilty at the time. They’d cost eleven dollars and seventy-five cents, seven dollars less than a twenty-five-dollar war bond. But owning my own pearls meant so much to me I had to have them. They reminded me of the first time I met Rachel . . .
    All thirty-seven of us, the entering 1933 class of St Martha’s Junior College, had lined up against the hallway wall, waiting to have our pictures taken. Each, as directed, wore a dark dress with a white lace collar. We’d washed and styled our hair, dusted our shiny faces with powder and gently blotted our red lips. We were like peas in a pod, with one glaring, shameful exception. The night before at dinner when the dean instructed us on what to wear for our photographs, she ended her remarks with ‘don’t forget your pearls’. Well, I didn’t have any. I was the only girl at St Martha’s who hadn’t gotten a string, symbolic of reaching upper-class womanhood, on her sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t a member of that social class. And there’d be a record of my low standing for all time preserved in the pages of the St Martha’s Junior College 1933 yearbook. All the other girls decked out in pearls, while I wore my only necklace, a silver locket. I resented being set apart, spotlighted for all time as the middle-class girl.
    Not that anyone seemed to care. All the girls were chatting and primping, and included me in their silliness. If they didn’t notice, why should I? But I did. I was the one who’d look like the charity case as long as yearbook paper lasted. Not to mention the big group portrait the photographer would make up, the one with each of our pictures in little ovals, that would go in the foyer of the Main Hall.
    My maiden name started with ‘S’, Rachel’s with an ‘F’, so she was done already. She leaned up against the opposite wall, chatting with the other girls who’d finished, waiting for us all to be done so we could file into dinner together.
    Mary Orr went into the front drawing room, where the photographer had set up his tripod, lights and screen. I was next. And I was miserable.
    Rachel appeared by my side, her own double strand of real pearls dangling from her hand. ‘Dearie,’ she said, ‘here, wear these. Then we’ll all be the same.’ She fastened the diamond clasp around my neck. The pearls, cool and smooth, rested comfortably on