“The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End”

"She was from the farmland west of Chicago, with her wide Midwest smile and broad vowels, and she had a voice that turned heads when she sang “Salve Regina” at Sunday Mass. She wouldn’t remain trapped behind her town’s palisade of cornstalks. She wanted to see things. She wanted to help people. So she became a nurse. This was the Cold War, the 1960s. The Army promised travel. She joined the Army Nurse Corps without telling her parents. She was a striking recruit whose starched nurse’s whites made her dark hair and brown eyes even more striking. The military made her a captain and shipped her off to Italy.

The young first lieutenant spied her though the canned peas and carrots at the Army base commissary. He was a West Pointer, lean and loose-armed, caffeinated and wordy. He drove a Sunbeam Alpine two-seater drophead coupe and had the smile of one for whom things had always come easy. He was directing the base community theater’s production of The Fantasticks, because he was an unlikely lover of show tunes, and he needed a Luisa for the lead. I couldn’t stand him, the nurse would say. He was arrogant. At that first rehearsal, though, she fiddled with her pendant until the necklace broke. Then the leading man got sick, and he stepped to center stage beside her. His name was John, but she soon called him Ja. Her name was Mary Jane, but he soon called her Sweetie."

RIGHT IN THE FEELS.

via GQ, by Christopher Soloman