One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out
over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while
it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the
bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on
the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Luz stayed on night duty
for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she
prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or
enema. He went under the anesthetic holding tight on to himself
so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got
on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up
from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They
all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.
Before he went back to the
front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim
and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but
there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth
certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted every one
to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Luz wrote him many letters
that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the
front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They
were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was
impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at
night.
After the armistice they
agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not
come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It
was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or
any one in the States. Only to get a job and be married.
On the train from Padua to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at
once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed
good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying
good-bye like that.
He went to America on a
boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a
hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy
town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had
never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had
been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably
not be able to understand, but might someday forgive her, and be grateful to
her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She
loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She
hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it
was for the best.
The major did not marry her
in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to
Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea
from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through
Lincoln Park.