Free To Kingdom Come by Robert J. Mrazek

“Ted” Wilken
2300
     
     
    I t had rained all that Sunday and well into the night, keeping the flight crews inside on ground duties, and cloaking the air base in swirling fog. A new movie, The More the Merrier , starring Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur, was shown at 1500 hours in the base theater.
    In the evening, there had been a basketball game between two of the squadron teams. The incessant rain had put many of the men in a reflective mood. When the mission alert arrived from High Wycombe at 2240, Second Lieutenant Ted Wilken was finishing his nightly v-mail letter to Braxton.
    Life in wartime England was definitely different for the married men, at least those who were faithful to their wives. For Ted, it was an easy choice. He had been blessed to find the young woman who made his life complete.
    Ted hadn’t expected to miss her so deeply. His longing was compounded by the news a month earlier that she had given birth to their first child, Katherine Ann. Whatever he was doing, wherever he was, particularly during the long combat missions, sudden images of Braxton would invade his mind, momentarily transporting him away from the war, giving him a brief sense of tranquility. He had tried to explain it in his nightly letters to her. Hopefully, she understood.
    Ted was born to privilege and wealth in 1920; his forebears were Old Dutch, the people who had founded New Amsterdam, later to become New York City. He had grown up in a fifty-room mansion in Bronxville, New York, and was driven by the family chauffeur each morning to Riverdale Country Day School.
    An only child, he had enjoyed a golden youth, marked by triumph and accomplishment. A gifted horseman, he was equally adept at polo, dressage, and jumping, medaling at the age of twelve in the equestrian championships at Madison Square Garden.
    After attending Riverdale, he was enrolled by his parents at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. There, it seemed he did everything well, academics, tennis, football, baseball, debating, or bridge.
    Elected captain of the football team, he led Choate to an undefeated season and earned the Prize Day Award as the finest athlete in the school. Of his contribution to the football team, his coach, John Maher, wrote, “Ted Wilken now takes his place in the hall of fame of the great Choate captains. He is one of the immortals—not only for the quality of his play, but also for the leadership and spirit he instilled into his team. There is about him a bond of sympathy, a spirit of camaraderie, and a determination for perfection.” In his senior year, Ted was chosen All-American.
    Ted had been accepted at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, but chose instead to attend Dartmouth, where his two closest friends were going. There, he discovered that he preferred partying, dancing, and skiing to organic chemistry.
    He had been raised to aim for perfection in every challenge he undertook, but in college he burned out. It was a great blow to his parents when he and a close friend left Dartmouth in his second year to join the crew of a sailing yacht owned by Otto Harbach, the famous lyricist of songs like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Roberta.”
    One summer evening, the boat was tied up at the dock of the Larchmont Yacht Club. That was the night he met Braxton Nicholson. She was born in Edgefield, South Carolina; her mother, Nelle, was a classic Southern belle, and reveled in the culture and traditions of the Old South immortalized in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind . She named her daughter after Confederate General Braxton Bragg.
    From an early age, Braxton was committed to breaking the mold. A free spirit, she grew up a Southern rebel, but it was in rebellion from the social dictates of the South, including its prevailing racial attitudes. She steadfastly refused to become the coquettish, simpering belle her mother had tried so hard to raise.
    After leaving South Carolina as a teenager to attend the Bennett School for Girls in