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Page 67.

In London, Tim dated English, Canadian, and American women, nothing too serious. His American girlfriends typically completed their tours and returned home, one of them to a fiancée she had not mentioned. He sometimes woke up screaming in the middle of the night, dreaming of the faces of large-eyed drowning men just under the waves, their arms waving at him for help. He remembered their names—Jerry Harris whose wife Edna had the finches in Manchester; Ben Meyer whose Shula probably cried daily over her carpets right here in London; red-haired Harvey Kinnan, whom he’d watched torn in pieces by sharks, whose wife Nuala was a nurse right here in London; and of course dour Jerry Harris with the dark staring eyes. It was material for many a nightmare, many a strangled scream, suddenly sitting up choking and unable to go back to sleep.

There was an H.M.S. Sturmer mothers’ league centered in Canterbury. Tim first learned of this organization from Jaguar, who instructed him on firm orders from Crane not to go, not to contact any of the bereaved parents. The official British line was that the ship had gone down with a total loss of life.

One day, in Spring 1944, Tim returned home from work to find his friend getting quietly drunk in the backyard. Rain fell on the grass, while Stan sat still in uniform, tie loose, with a bottle of gin in one hand and a toothpaste glass in the other. Stan was already leaning to one side in the white wrought-iron lawn set—four chairs, and a table covered by a torn multi-hued umbrella. Tim was just in time to rescue him from a fall on the flagstone walk. “Connie Bruce,” Stan managed to mumble, “she’s run off with a freckled guy from the U.S. Army, damned infantryman, gonna get killed and see there we are, whatcha get, she’ll eternally regret...” It was the familiar scenario of many a British training film, warning the wives of absent soldiers not to break up their marriages over the intoxicating and wild new presence of American G.I.s stationed in England by the tens of thousands. On that dire note, Stan passed out in Tim’s arms. Tim had a hell of a time dragging the body upstairs to its bed.

In the next few weeks, Tim almost welcomed Stan’s morbid state because it distracted from Tim’s own bleak horizons. A British attaché with the Logistics office invited Tim and a Limey navy nurse named Anna Stokowska to join them at a tea. The American liaison officer was a Billy Seward, who’d lost an eye in the Battle of Britain flying a Spit for the Brits, and now did desk duty in the espionage circus. Anna was a tall, willowy blonde, a classic Polish beauty with blue eyes, pink cheeks, and dimpled snowy skin. Something clicked between her and Tim from the first. She hung on Tim’s arm, while Stan Kehoe’s eyes snagged on her. He took Tim aside to ask: “Where did you find her? Do they have any more of her?” and Tim told him most likely in Warsaw.