Free Too Jewish by Patty Friedmann

that meant. I could tell she'd only learned the meaning recently. "I guess that's some solace," I said. I didn't know how I was going to leave behind a girl who knew how to ignore me.
    She stroked my shoulder. We weren't sitting right next to each other because the evening was so warm. A breeze was coming off the lake, and all the windows were open, so we were comfortable, but skin touching skin would have made us perspire. "What's important right now is how you feel," she said. "You need to keep in mind that never, not for a second, did you stop trying to get her out. You'll always be able to tell her that."
    In spite of myself, I was thinking,
If I ever see her again.
"And you'll always be able to tell yourself that, too," she said. The girl could read my mind. I wondered if girls in New York were that clever. If I hadn't lived in New York before, I would have assumed they would have been much cannier. But I'd read somewhere that the more primitive a culture was, the more the people were in tune with the extrasensory. I'd been sure when I read the article that it was limited to the deeply academic compared to those spared all exposure to what passed for civilization. But maybe it was more nuanced. Maybe girls in the South were wiser because they weren't trying to be wiseguys.
    I kissed her. And then I kissed her more.
    "You're leaving soon," she said.
    I nodded.
    "I don't know about you," she said, and I knew that wasn't true at all. "But I'm not dealing well with the idea of saying goodbye."
    "What are you thinking?"
    "The same that you're thinking," she said. "I think." She gave me a cockeyed smile.
    "I wish I knew exactly what that was," I said.
    "Seriously," she said. "I know you're shipping out. Are you going into combat?"
    I told her I was an officer. I couldn't tell her anything more, but I completely expected to survive the war. "Until this moment, I didn't know that," I said. "But now I do. And I'm not violating any code. It has nothing to do with my orders. I just know I'm coming back intact."
    "And you're coming
back
."
    It took a moment to figure that one out. This hadn't been an issue for me for a long time. I once had imagined myself going over to Europe, finding my mother and living out my days in Stuttgart. Now when I found her, I would get passage for her to New York. I always thought "when." I always imagined changing her name to Cooper, of teaching her rudiments of English, grocery-store English.
    "I'm an American," I said. I didn't say I was a New Yorker, though I was. I didn't see any reason to be unkind.
    "Then we'll write to each other."
    "That's pretty much all we can do beside get married tomorrow," I said.
    I could say that to Letty.

Chapter Five
    I spent the remainder of the war on General Eisenhower's staff stationed outside London. I was on the logistics team. All my years of reading the greatest books of European literature in the original had counted for nothing when I took the tests for aptitude that sent me for officers' training. I was born a mathematician, something not evident in my cook-by-pinching mother and shoe-designing father. There was a lot of mind-wasting at the turn of the twentieth century. And a lot of my mind seemed to be wasted when I sat around outside Norfolk House on the logistics staff. It was our place to prepare for Normandy.
    Each boy would have his own toilet paper, shaving brush, socks, folding shovel, first aid packet, package of v-mail letters, toothbrush, and other items he could stuff in his pockets. He was going to get onto one of the boats Letty's mother wouldn't let her build, and the chances were good he was going to die and leave those v-mails lying strewn on Omaha Beach. It was my job to count up that toilet paper. Two years in London, eating K rations and ducking air raids, and my toilet paper often didn't make it to the beach.
    I wrote to Letty fifteen times, and her letters crossed with mine so somehow I heard from her eighteen times. She became my