Free Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar

police who had to carve a path through the crowd—with rice. An accordionist played “Anchors Aweigh.”
    The New Yorker Hotel donated its bridal suite for a three-day honeymoon. When the couple entered the lobby that evening, the bandleader Benny Goodman struck up Here Comes the Bride . In the hotel’s Terrace Room, flashbulbs crackled as the couple shared lollipops and big bowls of ice cream. Willis toasted Joey as “the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.” Joey said, “I’m the happiest girl in the world.”

    NOWHERE IS there evidence that their sudden fame changed them. If anything, it reinforced in them the fragility of existence. They saw, perhaps more clearly than most, that the road was never sure. They saw that as a guide to the future, the past was faithless.
    The media glare, the movie interest, the crowds—it might have gone to some people’s heads. But Joey and Willis made no new plans. They did not seek further attention or money for their story. Nor did they show any sign of higher expectations. “I was never one to make plans ahead of time, because they never come out,” Willis told a reporter who’d caught them at breakfast at the hotel the morning after their wedding.

    When the honeymoon was over, she was still a broke eighteen-year-old with a dead father and an estranged mother; he was still the son of impoverished Texas farmers, earning enlisted men’s pay.
    For Willis and Joey, it seems, it was enough to have found each other.
    They rented a small two-room apartment on Fortieth Street in Philadelphia. And they used money from the radio show to furnish it. “She and I are determined to have a very happy life together,” Willis wrote to his grandmother. “She wants a home of her own where she can have something she had never had before. A sense of security.”
    But security would be a long time coming. A reminder of life’s inconstancy came less than two weeks after they’d left the New Yorker’s bridal suite.
    On Sunday, December 7, in the afterglow of their honeymoon, they slept in, reading the newspapers in bed and listening for hours to music on the radio. At around 2:45 p.m., the radio went suddenly silent. Then, in a moment, a news announcer’s grave voice. Scores of Japanese warplanes had mounted a surprise attack on U.S. Navy battleships in Pearl Harbor. The damage was too great to tally, but authorities feared hundreds—if not thousands—dead.
    Willis leapt out of bed, threw on his uniform, and raced to the Navy Yard. A commanding officer ordered him at once to the Delaware River. With sledgehammers and spikes and rope, he and the other sailors worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly a month, draping a net across the river to repel submarines. Friday nights were his only liberty. Because of the travel time, that left just four hours with Joey—10 p.m. to 2 a.m.—before he had to start back for the river.
    With the country at war, the sailor and his wife saw little of each other. In April 1942, Willis joined the crew of a PC-485 submarine chaser that landed troops on the Aleutian Islands. Joey cleared out of their Philadelphia apartment and moved in
with Willis’s family for a few months. Bereft without her husband, she moved to Seattle, to be as close to shore as possible when her husband’s ship came in. She waited until the summer of 1943. They spent about a year together in Seattle before he was shipped out again. Their first child, a daughter, was born while Willis was at sea. He saw the baby for just three days, when she was nearly a month old, before shipping out for another year.
    Their love story had vanished from the headlines as precipitously as it had appeared. A war was on, and the mood of the country had shifted. News reporters moved on to other, more pressing stories. Harry James never followed through. Selznick never made his movie.
    Over the course of a nearly sixty-three-year marriage, they never returned to New York.

Collision
    THE