Page 61 of One of Them

So he must have still had his arm then, Delia thought. He couldn’t have been there, in the thick of things, without it.

“We laughed about it, laughed at them. Spring was coming, and there we were, marching down a road on a sunny morning, laughing. And singing too. Singing as loud as we could...”

Delia waited before she spoke. “And then?”

“Then the shooting started. Bullets were coming from every direction.”

“German troops?”

“The soldiers we’d seen earlier, the ones who ran away?

The ones we mocked? It turns out that they hadn’t run away at all, they were just hiding, waiting to ambush us.

The guy marching next to me—Fred, he was my buddy—was hit in the chest. I reacted out of instinct, trying to shield him even though I knew that he was already dead.

That’s when I was hit—my shoulder, my arm, sprayed with bullets.

They just kept coming. The next thing I remember was waking up in the hospital.

The doctor told me they tried to save it”—he touched the empty sleeve—“but they couldn’t. ”

Whatever she might say would be inadequate; Delia kept quiet.

“They kept me pretty doped up for a while, so the full impact didn’t hit me right away. And as soon as I was able to travel, they sent me home. They even gave me a citation for bravery.”

“So you came back here? To your mother?”

“I did. She’d already lost a husband and two kids. Instead of mourning my missing arm, she woke up every day grateful that I was still here, still alive. She got me through the worst of it. And somehow the fact that she was able to tolerate the loss helped me to do the same.”

“It sounds like she deserved a citation too.”

He nodded, and they sat in silence for a while.

A group of young people—a handful of girls and boys—came down the street, giggling and talking to each other in high, excited voices.

The boys wore light jackets over button-down shirts and belted pants; three of the girls were in skirts with sleeveless blouses while the fourth was in a flouncy dress with a sash that tied in a bow at the back.

“College kids,” George said when they had passed. “You went to college, right? Vassar?”

“How did you know?”

“Your father told my mother. She said he was very proud of you.”

“Well, there’s not so much to be proud of now. I was asked to leave. Expelled.”

“Oh,” George said. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“That’s all right,” Delia said. “You didn’t know. Aren’t you going to ask why?”

“No. You’ll tell me if you want to.”

Delia hadn’t planned to reveal this, at least not so soon.

But it had come up; here she was. “I had an affair with one of my professors. A married professor. The dean found out. I was gone by the end of the week.” She scanned his face and in it saw no shock, no disapproval or distaste.

He didn’t judge, he just listened to the story and then said, “What happened to him? Was he asked to leave too?”

“No. And I heard he was offered a tenured position somewhere else.”

“So his situation got better. Yours got worse. That hardly seems fair.”

“I suppose not.”

“I didn’t finish college either,” he said.

“Because you were drafted?”

“I enlisted. I’d just started at City College, but when I saw so many guys signing up, it felt wrong to stay behind.”

“You could go back now,” she said.

“I could,” he agreed. “But I’m not sure I could stand the looks, the pity.” He gestured toward his missing arm.

“You don’t need anyone’s pity,” she said. She hoped he knew that she was being utterly sincere.

“Thank you.” He turned to look at her, and between the moonlight and the streetlamp, she could read the expression on his face and saw that yes, he did.

“There’s something else...” she said. “Something I haven’t told anyone.”

“What’s that?”

“I got a letter from a professor at Vassar. They’re offering to take me back.”

“That’s good, isn’t?” he said. “Problem solved.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How can I go back there? Everyone would know, they would talk about me.”

“Forget all that,” he said. “You said I could go back to college? Well, you can too. That’s the only thing that matters—whether you want to or not.

What other people think or say isn’t as important as that.

And don’t let yourself get waylaid by too much thinking.

This is a decision you make with your heart, not your head. ”

George made it sound so simple, so self-evident.

She thought of a quote by Blaise Pascal that had been in one of her textbooks, long ago.

“Le c?ur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna?t point.” The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.

And she knew what her heart was telling her. “Do you think I really could?”

“Yes. You could, and what’s more, you should.

” He sounded so sure. She felt herself drawn, like a moth in one of those books by Fabre, to his certainty, to his ease with himself.

And he was sitting very close to her now; when had that happened?

But before she could figure it out, he’d leaned over and was kissing her.

And to her surprise—and slowly unfurling delight—she was kissing him back.