1A week or ten days after his dinner with Betsey, Coverly moved into her apartment. This took a lot of persuasion on Coverly’s part but her resistance pleased him and seemed to express the seriousness with which she took herself. His case was based—indirectly—on the fact that she needed someone to look out for her, on the fact that she did not have, as she had said herself, the thickness of skin the city demanded. Coverly’s feelings about her helplessness were poetic and absorbing and when he thought of her in her absence it was with a mixture of pity and bellicoseness. She was alone and he would defend her. There was this and there was the fact that their relationship unfolded with great validity and this informal marriage or union, played out in a strange and great city, made Coverly very happy. She was the beloved; he was the lover—there was never any question about this and this suited Coverly’s disposition and gave to his courtship and their life together the liveliness of a pursuit. Her search for friends had been arduous and disappointing and it was these disappointments and exasperations that Coverly was able to redress. There was no pretentiousness in her—no memories of either hunt balls or razorback hogs—and she was ready and willing to cook his supper and warm his bones at night. She had been raised by her grandmother, who had wanted her to be a schoolteacher, and she had disliked the South so much that she had taken any job to get out of it. He recognized her defenselessness, but he recognized, at a much deeper level, her human excellence, the touching qualities of a wanderer, for she was that and said so and while she would play all the parts of love she would not tell him that she was in love. On the week ends they took walks, subway and ferryboat rides, and talked over their plans and their tastes, and late in the winter Coverly asked her to marry him. Betsey’s reaction was scattered, tearful and sweet, and Coverly wrote his plans in a letter to St. Botolphs. He wanted to marry as soon as he had passed his civil-service examinations and had been assigned to one of the rocket-launching stations where Tapers were employed. He enclosed a photograph of Betsey, but he would not bring his bride to St. Botolphs until he was given a vacation. He took these precautions because it had occurred to him that Betsey’s southern accent and sometimes fractious manner might not go down with Honora and that the sensible thing to do would be to marry and produce a son before Honora saw his wife. Leander may have sensed this—his letters to Coverly were all congratulatory and affectionate—and it may have been at the back of his mind that with Coverly married they might soon all be on Easy Street. It would be way at the back of his mind. Sarah was heartbroken to know that Coverly would not be married at Christ Church.

2Coverly passed his exams with flying colors in April and was surprised when the MacIlhenney Institute had a graduation ceremony. This was held in the fifth floor of the building in an academy of piano teaching where two classrooms had been thrown together to make an auditorium. All of Coverley’s classmates appeared with their families or their wives, and Betsey wore a new hat. A lady, a stranger to them all, played “Pomp and Circumstance” on the piano and as their names were called they went up to the front of the room and got their diplomas from Mr. MacIlhenney. Then they went down to the fourth floor where they found Mrs. MacIlhenney standing by a rented tea urn and a plate of Danish pastry. Coverly and Betsey were married the next morning at the Church of the Transfiguration. Mittler was the only witness and they spent a three-day honeymoon on an island cottage that Mittler owned and loaned them. Sarah wrote Coverly a long letter about what she would send him from the farm when he was settled—the Canton china and the painted chairs—and Leander wrote a letter in which he said, among other things, that to make a son was as easy as blowing a feather off your knee. Honora sent them a check for two hundred dollars, but no message.

3Coverly passed his Civil Service examinations and was qualified as a Taper. He knew, by then, the location of most of the rocket-launching bases in the country and as soon as he was settled he would send for Betsey and they would begin their marriage. Although Coverly’s status was civilian his assignment was cut at an army base and he was given transportation by the air force. His orders were cut in code. A week after his marriage he boarded an old C-54 with bucket seats and found himself, next day, in an airfield outside San Francisco. His feeling then was that he would be sent to Oregon or flown back to one of the desert stations. He telephoned Betsey and she cried when she heard his voice but he assured her that in a week or ten days they would be together again in a house of their own. He was very uxorious and lay down each night in his army bunk with Betsey’s specter, slept with her shade in his arms and woke each morning with powerful longings for his sandwich-shop Venus and wife. There was some delay about the second stage of his journey and he was kept at the air-force base in San Francisco for nearly a week.

4We all, man and boy, know what a transient barracks looks like and there would be no point in enumerating this barrenness. The fact that Coverly was a civilian did not give him any freedom and whether he went to the officers’ club or the movies he had to report his whereabouts to the orderly room. He could see the hills of San Francisco across the bay and, thinking that this city—or some firing grounds in the vicinity—would be his destination, he wrote hopefully to Betsey about her coming West. “It was cold in the barracks last night and I sure wish you’d been in bed with me to warm it up.” And so forth and so on. He lived among a dozen or so men who seemed to have been withdrawn from permanent installations in the Pacific because they were unfit. The most articulate of these was a Mexican who had not been able to stomach army food because there were no peppers in it. He told his story to anyone who would listen. As soon as he started eating army food he lost weight. He knew what the trouble was. He needed peppers. He had eaten peppers all his life. Even his mother’s milk had been peppery. He pleaded with army cooks and doctors to get him some peppers but they wouldn’t take his pleas seriously. He wrote to his Momma and she sent him some pepper seeds in an envelope and he planted them around an anti-aircraft gun emplacement where the soil was rich and where there was plenty of sun. He watered them and tended them and they had just begun to sprout when the commanding officer ordered them to be plowed under. It was unmilitary to raise vegetables on a gun emplacement. This order broke the Mexican’s spirit. He lost weight; he became so emaciated that he had to be sent to the infirmary; and now he was being discharged from the army as a mental incompetent. He would have been happy to serve his flag, he said, if he could have peppers in his food. His plaint seemed reasonable enough but it got tiresome night after night and Coverly usually stayed out of the barracks until the lights were off.

5He ate his meals at the officers’ club, lost or won a dollar at the gambling machines, drank a glass of ginger ale at the bar and went to the movies. He saw Westerns, gangster careers, tales of happy and unhappy love both in brilliant colors and in black and white. He was sitting in the movies one evening when the public-address system called: “Attention, attention everybody. Will the following men report to Building Thirty-two with their gear. Private Joseph Di Gacinto. Private Henry Wollaston. Lieutenant Marvin Smythe. Mister Coverly Wapshot …” The audience hooted and whistled and called, “You’ll be sorreee,” as they went out into the dark. Coverly got his valise and went over to Building Thirty-two and was driven with the rest of the men to the airfield. They all had some theory about their destination. They were going to Oregon, Alaska or Japan. It had never occurred to Coverly that he might be leaving the country and he was worried. He pinned his hopes on Oregon but decided that if his destination was Alaska Betsey could follow him there. As soon as they boarded the plane the doors were shut and they taxied down the runway and took off. It was an old transport with a conservative speed, Coverly guessed, and if their destination was Oregon they would reach there before dawn. The plane was hot and stuffy and he fell asleep, and waking at dawn and looking from the port he saw that they were high over the Pacific. They flew westward all day, shooting crap and reading the Bible, which was all they had to read, and at dusk they picked up the lights of Diamond Head and landed on Oahu.

6Coverly was assigned a bunk in another transient barracks and told to report to the airfield in the morning. No one would tell him if his travels were over, but he guessed, from the looks of the orderly-room clerks, that he had some way to go. He got rid of his valise and hitched a ride on a weapons carrier into Honolulu. It was a hot, stale-smelling night with thunder in the mountains. Memories of Thaddeus and Alice, of Honora and old Benjamin came to him and he walked in the footsteps of many Wapshots, but this was not much of a consolation. Half a world lay between him and Betsey, and all his plans of happiness, children, and the honor of the family name seemed cruelly suspended or destroyed. He saw a sign on a wall that said: AIRMAIL AN ORCHID LEI TO YOUR SWEETHEART FOR AS LITTLE AS THREE DOLLARS. This would be a way of expressing his tender feelings for Betsey and he asked an MP near the old palace where he could get a lei. He followed the MP’s directions and rang the bell of a house where a fat woman in evening clothes let him in. “I want a lei,” Coverly said sadly.

7“Well, you come to the right place, honey,” she said. “You come right in. You come right in and have a drink and I’ll fix you up in a few minutes.” She took his arm and led him into a little parlor where some other men were drinking beer.

8“Oh, I’m sorry,” Coverly said suddenly. “There’s some mistake. You see, I’m married.”

9“Well, that don’t make no difference,” the fat lady said. “More’n half the girls I got working for me’s married and I been happily married for nineteen years myself.”

10“There’s been a mistake,” Coverly said.

11“Well, make up your mind,” the fat woman said. “You come in here telling me you want to get laid and I’m doing the best I can for you.”

12“Oh, I’m sorry,” Coverly said, and he was gone.

13In the morning he boarded another plane and flew all day. A little before dark they circled for a landing and out of the ports Coverly could see, in the stormy light, a long, scimitar-shaped atoll with surf breaking on one coast, a huddle of buildings and a rocket-launching platform. The airstrip was small and the pilot took three passes before he made a landing. Coverly swung down from the door and crossed the strip to an office where a clerk translated his orders. He was on Island 93—an installation that was half military and half civilian. His tour of duty would be nine months with a two-week vacation at a rest camp in either Manila or Brisbane; take your pick.