But Marian couldn’t refuse. Bomber crews didn’t have much in the way of life expectancy.
She lifted her finger, tapped OK.
Eddie met them at the Savoy. Marian gave his hand a firm shake, looked him in the eye. He was very tall and had a long rectangular head like a cart horse’s and warm eyes under heavy brows. Though his teeth were long and a little crowded, he showed them unreservedly when he smiled. “I’ve been wanting to be friends with you for a long time,” he said. “Ruth doesn’t usually rave about people.”
“You’ll give her a swollen head,” Ruth said, leaning on his arm.
“Before the war,” Eddie said as he steered them to the American Bar, “I never would have dared come into this hotel because I would have been worried about looking like a hayseed, but the way I see it, if I can fly over Germany, I can drink anywhere I want.” He indicated his olive jacket, his silver navigator’s wings. “It helps not having to worry about what to wear.”
Marian nodded. Her own blue uniform felt like armor, too, like a universal explanation.
Ruth poked her in the back. “You’ll have to talk tonight, Marian, or Eddie will think I’ve been telling tall tales.”
“I know what you mean,” Marian said to Eddie, thinking of Jackie scolding her for wearing flying clothes to her interview. “It’s a relief to be above reproach.”
“Above reproach!” Eddie said. “That’s exactly it. You know, I almost don’t want to admit how much I’ve been enjoying London. The mood is exuberant, isn’t it? I want to say careening. Do you know what I mean? I guess when people are being reminded all the time they might die—they will die—they make more of an effort to be alive. Don’t you think?”
They ordered cocktails, and Eddie told a story about his ball turret gunner falling asleep as they approached a target, curled in his steel and Plexiglas bubble under the B-17’s belly. “I don’t know how you sleep like that, dangling in the sky, but this guy can sleep anywhere. He’s famous for it.”
“Marian can sleep anywhere, too,” said Ruth.
Eddie raised an eyebrow. “That so? What’s your secret? I’m a terrible sleeper.”
“Keep going with the story,” Marian said.
“Well, we didn’t know he was asleep, only that he was being real quiet. He said he didn’t wake up until the flak was really going, and then he”—Eddie mimicked someone lurching and blinking awake—“swiveled around and immediately, immediately, shot down a Messerschmitt. We got back in one piece—one slightly perforated piece—and he said he’d been having a dream about shooting down an airplane, and as soon as he woke up, it came true.” He leaned forward, amused, looking between Marian and Ruth. “Isn’t that strange? I’ll tell you, we all thought hard about what we wanted to dream about before we went to sleep that night in case it was contagious—dreams coming true.”
“I hope you dreamed about waking up at an air base in England,” Ruth said.
Charming. That was the word for him. Marian had met so few charming people, at least not whose charm was of Eddie’s easy, generous, affable variety. She could see, watching Ruth watch Eddie, that she loved him.
“Marian could fall asleep in a ball turret if she wanted to,” Ruth said.
Eddie asked, “Where’s the most unlikely place you’ve ever slept, Marian?”
Marian looked at Ruth, who waited expectantly, wanting her to impress, to dazzle. She felt defeated already. She could never compete with Eddie’s charm. Still, she resolved not to be dull.
“Once,” she said, “in Alaska, I crashed a plane into a river, deep enough that there was water in the cockpit. There was no chance of help until the next morning, so I slept on top of the plane.” She hunched her shoulders, losing momentum. “It was summer. It wasn’t too bad, except for the mosquitoes.”
“Tell him about the bear,” Ruth said.
“A bear came by,” Marian said miserably. “Fishing.”
“A grizzly bear,” said Ruth.
“Were you always brave?” Eddie said. “What were you like as a child?”
Marian thought. “Na?ve,” she said. “Boyish. Obsessive.”
Eddie smiled broadly.
* * *
—
They went to dinner at a Greek restaurant. “There’s something shocking about the scale,” Eddie said about Greenland, over which he’d navigated a brand-new B-17 when he came from the States. “All you can see is ice. White to the horizon. My maps might as well have been empty pages.”