First published on FEBRUARY 7, 2009 3:44PM
Wilma was, as is becoming apparent, a complex woman. In her decision to show her mother that she would defy the threat to be essentially disowned if she went to visit Al, there was certainly a stubborn “I’ll show you!” anger and hot headed temper at work. But there was also something deeper going on.
This was essentially the first time in her life that Wilma, the woman, not the child, actually decided to do something that clearly drew the line that a woman must draw when she decides that she is capable of making her own decisions. It was, in fact, the action of a woman who finally decided for herself what she wanted to do. And that decision was certainly not what her mother or anyone else was wanting at the time. For all its passion it was also a time of growing up.
So Wilma went back to Topeka to pack. She thought that she would have to pack a lot more for a long stay in Tacoma. The truth was that she actually had very little other than clothes to pack. The furniture came with the apartment. Almost all of the pictures and decorations in the apartment belonged to her room mates.
When she got it sorted out, and just left clothes and shoes that she knew she would never wear again, she had what would just fill the large trunk that she brought her things in when she came to Topeka. And the things she needed during the trip west would fit in one small suitcase.
Greyhound was actually quicker to the northwest from Topeka than would be taking a train. Greyhound had a through bus that made the trip to Tacoma in three and an half days. So Greyhound it was. She didn’t mind the long bus ride. She had a lot of things to plan and she had never been west of Kansas so she would enjoy seeing the mountains on the trip.
She packed up, left a note for her room mates, called the lounge and the Princess Shop and said that she was moving out of town. She called the hospital and told them she could not volunteer any longer. And that was that. No explanations. No apologies. Nothing. She just burned the bridges and thought nothing of it.
Three and a half days later she stood at the bus station in Tacoma with her suitcase, her trunk and about $600 in her pocket. She hailed a cab and asked if there was a YWCA in town with lodging. The answer was yes and she took the cab to the YWCA, paid the nominal first week’s rent, and settled into a 14’x10’ room, complete with a pitcher and bowl on the dresser for quick clean ups, a high boy, a single bed, a small desk and chair, and a bath down the hall.
She slept well that night. Rested, she got up, took a bath, went down stairs and asked where there was a reasonably priced place to eat breakfast. It turned out to be a a bakery/donut/coffee shop a block away. As she was going into the shop she noticed a “help wanted” sign in the window and after a couple of donuts and coffee she inquired about the job.
The hours were 5 am to 1:30 pm with a half hour for lunch, six days a week. Starting pay was 80 cents an hour plus tips. The job was as a waitress/ short order cook/dish washer in the donut/coffee shop part of the operation. Did she have any experience? “Of course.” After a few dozen white lies she got the job and was told to report the next morning at 5 am.
The lies really weren’t as bad as most that she told. After all she was, in fact, an excellent cook, had washed her share of dishes; and how hard could it be to hand out menus, take orders and bring the customers food? She would put on her best personality and fawn over her customers. Which she did superbly. And the tips came, and then increased, and then people started sitting in her area because she was “just like family.” And the tips got bigger. Her section was always filled and she quickly made a lot of “friends” who would have sworn that they had known Wilma for a long time.
Later that morning she asked the desk clerk how to get to the Tacoma VA Hospital and learned that it was a fairly short trip. Cost? 10 cents. She went to her room and freshened up a bit and went to the bus stop at the corner, caught the bus, got a schedule, and headed out to see Al. If all of this seems unlikely and the ultimate in good luck coupled with a cocky confidence happening in a new city 2000 miles for home then you have it exactly right. It was just Wilma being Wilma.
She got to the Hospital in less than a half hour, found out where Al’s wing was and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The building had four stories and was in the shape of a large cross, with four wings per floor. The area in the center was a large lounge area and there was a solarium at the end of each wing.
She walked into his wing, went to the nurse’s station and asked which was Al Galemore’s bed. The nurse gave her the bed number and pointed at the row it was in. But, she said, Al wasn’t there. He was down at the solarium at the end of the hall having a cigarette. Wilma asked, “Did he walk all the way down there?” The nurse replied, “Oh, sure, honey, Al is most determined patient we have on this ward. I think he could run down there if he had to.” Wilma’s eyes filled with tears, but finally they were tears of joy.
During all of the high drama in Wilma’s life Al’s days were endlessly the same with constant physical therapy and no small amount of pain. But he was making surprising progress in the not quite three months that he had been in Tacoma. He started learning to walk again by learning how to kick his legs forward using the muscles in the back and sides of his thighs. He walked between two parallel bars so that at first he kept almost all his weight on his hands, arms, and upper body.
As time passed he found that he could carry more and more weight on his legs and could use the bars only to help with balance. After a few weeks he ditched the bars for crutches and when he got pretty good with those they switched him to short crutches that ended at his elbows, forcing him to carry much of his weight on his legs, and to shift the weight from one side to the other while simultaneously throwing out his leg for the next step. After two months he was able to take shuffling steps, awkward and painful steps at first, without any support. In the beginning it was only a few feet but then, he quickly found that could walk longer distances. He could, by the time Wilma arrived, walk to the phone and could therefore, use it.
This presented him with a particular dilemma. While there had been times when Wilma’s letters might not come every day and once or twice they had been held up for three days and he would get three letter in a single day. But this time he had not heard from her in over five days and he was starting to worry.
His greatest fear, the one he didn’t even want to admit to himself, was that she was avoiding him, maybe because she fell in love with some one else, some man who was whole and healthy. Then he worried that he should be ashamed of such thoughts because she could be sick or have been in an accident, or even killed. And the fear and anxiety would well up in him to where it felt unbearable.
The telephone seemed almost an evil thing. It could bring him terrible news at any time. Or, he could call her number and another man might answer. What would he say? Or he could call and every thing would be all right. But if he did that would she think that he was a silly nervous worried teenager? The more he thought about it the more it drove him crazy.
The only place he found peace was in the solarium at the end of the hall where he could smoke a cigarette and look out over the beautiful tree filled grounds of the Hospital, watch people walking in and out, or having a picnic lunch on the grass under the trees. He could watch the cars pull into the circle drive and see the bus as it came up the drive to the building letting out all of its passengers as this was the end of the line and the turnabout for the bus which would head from here back downtown.
Had Al come into the solarium just a couple of minutes earlier he would have seen the bus come into the circle and stop under the solarium window. He would have seen a small, determined, auburn haired woman get off the bus and walk into the building. As it was he saw the bus parked in front of the building taking on passengers for the trip downtown, and then watched it drive off.
Al preferred to stand when he visited the solarium. Standing was actually the easiest thing about his rehab. The design of the lounge chairs in the solarium was all wrong for him and it was next to impossible to push himself back onto his feet once he sat down because the furniture was modular and had no side arm rests. Al thought they were designed in hell and sold to the government at a discount.
Al had finished his cigarette and decided to have a second before he went back to the ward. He was looking out the window and fishing out the second Old Gold when he heard the distinct clicking of a woman’s high heels coming rapidly down the corridor. Nurses wore quiet rubber soled shoes. Actually, the determined quick pace of the owner of those shoes sounded a lot like…Wilma! He turned around and she shrieked out his name and started running toward him. He stood there just as he promised himself he would when next he saw her.
She ran into his arms and he enfolded her in them. She was laughing, and crying, and sobbing huge deep sobs into his chest. He just held her until the wracking sobs quit. He felt completed as her body seemed to melt into his. Then he took his arms from around her and and gently placed his hands under her chin and lifted her face toward his. He cradled her face in both hands and leaned down and kissed her. Again. And again. She opened her eyes and looked into his. Tears were running down his face.
And she said, “I love you, Al, and I have come home.”
“Home?”
“Yes, darling. Home is where you are.”
In a sense the rest of their time in Tacoma went so well that it almost feels anticlimactic. Soon after Wilma arrived Al was given permission to leave the Hospital during the afternoon following his therapy sessions in the morning. So by the time that Wilma got off work in the early afternoon Al would be waiting to walk with her back to the YWCA.
Men were not allowed into the residence rooms but there was a large lobby, a recreation room and a small canteen where you could get sodas and candy and snacks. It was a comfortable place and virtually empty except for the two of them until late afternoon when the girls who lived there started coming home from work.
It also turned out that Wilma didn’t have to manipulate Al to get him to ask her to marry him. In fact after she told him that “home” was with him even a country boy could figure out what she meant by that; and he asked her to marry him the very same afternoon that she said that. Which, of course, started her crying all over again. She was not used to a man who took the initiative, in this case an initiative that said that he loved her for who she was and not for what she looked like or how determined she was. It seemed so out of character for him to do that she did not doubt for an instant that he meant everything he said. That gave her a sense of personal validation that she had never felt before.
The next day they checked what the waiting requirements in Washington state were for being married and were told by some old man that the wait was a year. They were skeptical and called City Hall and were told that with so many young soldiers and sailors wanting to get married before they shipped out the state legislature had changed the law to a seven day wait!
But rather than getting married immediately, they decided that they would wait until he was discharged both from the Hospital and the Army, which Al guessed would be about two months hence, in October. In the meantime he was more determined than ever to get on with his rehab because his discharge date from the hospital would be determined by the doctors based on his performance.
Meanwhile, Al and Wilma got serious about their financial situation and decided to pool their money and open a bank account. Amazingly they found out that they had a whole lot more money than either knew. They should have known it, but it didn’t dawn on either of them until one day Wilma asked Al how much he got paid by the Army. He said he wasn’t sure but it was around $150 a month, maybe a bit more since he had been wounded. She asked where he kept it. And he said he didn’t. Whenever he needed cigarette money or such he just drew out an amount from the hospital cashier.
The policy with severely wounded soldiers was to hold their pay for safekeeping until they felt up to taking care of it themselves. Many, like Al, simply either didn’t know that they could have it all any time they wanted it or, if they knew, they found it easier and safer to just let the Hospital act as a bank until they were discharged.
The bottom line was that by the end of August Al had a pay credit in the hospital of a little over $1000. Wilma was saving over $25 a week from her job and still had about $500 left from the $600 she started with, thanks to getting the job as soon as she got to Tacoma. By the time they would leave Tacoma for Kansas they would have a nest egg of almost $2000, which was not bad for a couple of kids, one who never had any money in his life, and the other who had plenty but spent it like water.
A couple of weeks after Wilma arrived they were walking downtown and Al steered her into a pawn shop where she picked out a simple gold engagement ring with a single small diamond. Her Daddy had bought her better rings for her birthday. But to Wilma this was the finest ring in the world. They also picked out two plain gold band wedding rings for when they married.
In late September the doctors told Al that they had sent the necessary paperwork to the Department of the Army recommending that he be discharged from the Hospital and from the Army. They also recommended that he be approved for a 60% disability payable monthly upon discharge. The reply came about ten days later and was approved for the 15th of October, 1945.
Al and Wilma immediately went to City Hall and applied for a marriage license and were given the name of a Justice of the Peace who was just around the corner from City Hall. After getting the license they went to the Justice of the Peace and arranged to be married the morning of October 16. They then went to the historic Washington Hotel and reserved a room for two nights starting the 16th. From there they went to the Greyhound station and got two tickets to Topeka for the 18th.
Everything came off exactly as planned. Wilma gave notice that she would be quitting work on the 15th, which was greeted with both tears and joy by her fellow workers and her customers. Al had his few possessions taken by taxi to the YWCA to be stored in Wilma’s room.
The JP was a short, happy fat man who was about as wide as he was tall. His secretary was a tall, skinny somber lady who served as witness. From there the two went to the hotel for a celebratory wedding lunch, complete with champagne, and then headed for their room not to step forth from it for two days. They decided that room service was a wonderful thing.
On the 18th they checked out, caught a cab and took themselves to the YWCA, asked the cabbie to wait, paid Wilma’s bill and got their luggage, rode to the Greyhound station, boarded the bus and headed back to Kansas.
It had been almost seven months to the day since Al had arrived at Stormont-Vail Hospital in Topeka, a wounded and emotionally battered boy who really didn’t care whether he lived or died.
But life isn’t all that easy.
To be continued…………..
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