Steve O’Connor sent along the following short story after reading Marie’s post about the 2008 passing of James Sweeney, a decorated-World War Two Navy pilot from Lowell.  Steve’s story mentions another pilot, but it tells the bigger story of one of the hidden costs of war.  As I read it this afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking of the Veterans Day ceremony this morning and all the now-80 year old veterans of World War Two who were there but also of all their contemporaries who perished in the war.  They made the supreme sacrifice, but their demise extracted an incalculable cost on family, friends and community.

Since John’s death, Ruth spent most days alone. Her granddaughter used to visit, but she had moved away with her husband, who had taken a job in Connecticut. He did something with computers. Ruth never understood exactly what. But he took care of Rose, and that was all that mattered. Betty Briere was in assisted living now, but she called sometimes. Her brother Harold called, but he didn’t hear very well over the telephone.

Most of the old friends were gone. Mitzy Meehan, Helen McGilvray, Marilyn Mears, and the rest. A picture of the whole gang had appeared in the Sunday Sun once: “Highland Girls,” the caption read. It was in her scrapbook, all of them wearing the belted coats that were the fashion before the war.

She never opened the scrapbook now. She could see it all without looking, especially Danny McGilvray climbing into the cockpit of his plane, its nose painted to look like a shark’s head, malevolent jaw gaping to expose jagged teeth under an angry eye. The row of exhaust pipes like gills. “Curtis P-40 Warhawk,” he had written on the back. It was the last photograph ever taken of him. He was smiling in his leather cap and goggles, not the lurid death grin of the Warhawk. Just a warm smile.

They said his plane dove right at the Japanese battery. She never guessed he had that kind of courage in those golden summer days so long ago, when they flirted over sodas at Burbeck’s Ice Cream. His sister Helen had called her with the news, but she didn’t hang up the telephone and the two of them cried together over the phone for a long time.

She met John after the war, at the Commodore Ballroom. He was more serious than Danny had been. Maybe the war had made him serious. He would never have dared to ask her to dance, but it was lady’s choice and she saw him there, dark and shy and apart. She could sense his goodness, and she began to love him, so much. They took the train into Boston. She remembered their walk through the Common after he’d bought her the ring she still wore. They stopped there as the stars stood in the sky, burning in the cold night. Their noses were red and their white breath vapors mingled, and he told her that he wanted to be with her always, to protect her and take care of her and love her. And he did, oh he did. Ruth sighed as she remembered, and she said aloud, “Well, what can you do?”  It was the question that always concluded these reminiscences, and marked the beginning of an attempt to buck up.

It was no good to remember too much this early. The day would be shot with gray, and she would fall into that deep place that it was sometimes hard to climb out of. She turned on the radio and exhaled sharply. The Brandenburg Concertos filled the room. The music gave some order, some sense to the emptiness, and she opened the back door and breathed the fragrant air. She’d take the morning paper out to the garden. Nature was the only antidote to memory, and that was why that writer in Concord had once asked, “What right have I to grieve who have not yet ceased to wonder?” The black and white cat slunk out of from under the lilac bush and sat watching with his yellow eyes a sparrow at the feeder. She felt the sun on her shoulders and repeated aloud to herself, “Who have not yet ceased to wonder.”