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PART I OF III

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The train was already twenty minutes late when Lucille Lavon finally told her husband she thought he ought to go.

She had spent most of those twenty minutes hoping he would change his mind. The Fort Stockton depot was cold in the peculiar West Texas fashion that made thirty-eight degrees feel somehow more personal than twenty degrees did in Michigan. The wind had found the gap between Lucille’s coat collar and her neck and had been working on it steadily since they arrived. Levi stood beside her with a brown suitcase between his shoes and his good fedora pulled low against the wind. There was nothing military about him yet. He was still Levi Lavon, twenty-seven years old, married three years, owner of two white shirts good enough for church and one 1936 Ford that consumed oil with the enthusiasm of a refinery fire.

Seven days earlier, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Six days earlier, President Roosevelt had asked Congress for a declaration of war, and Germany had subsequently declared war on the United States. America had returned the favor. Within the space of a week the entire world seemed to have discovered reasons to kill one another, and Levi had spent three days deciding what that meant for Levi Lavon while Lucille spent three days pretending it meant nothing at all.

“You don’t have to volunteer,” she said.

“I know.”

“They’ll call you if they need you. You’ve got a job. We’re married.”

At that one he finally looked at her. “I know that too.”

She hated him a little for being calm. Not enough to matter, just enough to help. They had argued the previous night in their little rented house until neither one had anything new to say. Levi believed that if men waited to be compelled to defend their country, somebody else was always going to have to go first. Lucille believed this was an admirable principle when applied to somebody else’s husband. Neither argument had defeated the other.

Somebody had a portable radio playing inside the waiting room. Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” drifted through the open door whenever someone came outside, which Lucille thought was an unnecessarily cheerful song to be playing at a railroad station where people were saying goodbye. When the train finally announced itself somewhere east of town, Levi picked up his suitcase.

Lucille looked at him. “You ought to go.”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t want you to. Don’t ever tell anybody I wanted you to.”

“I won’t.”

“But if you stayed because of me, you’d always know it. And I’d always know it. Someday we’d hate each other for knowing it.”

Levi put the suitcase down again. “I could never hate you.”

“Give us time.”

That got the smile she wanted. It was the last one she remembered clearly.

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The train came in under a great cloud of smoke and machinery and noise. People appeared from the waiting room. A mother began crying before her son had even climbed aboard. Two boys stood near the end of the platform pretending not to watch. Somewhere a porter called something Lucille couldn’t understand.

Levi kissed her. He smelled of shaving soap and the Lucky Strikes he had promised her for three years he was going to quit.

“I’ll come home,” he said.

“You better.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

Then he picked up the suitcase and boarded the train. Lucille stood on the platform until the last car disappeared and remained there another minute afterward because there seemed no particular reason to move. Then she went home to the little house where Levi’s coffee cup was still beside the sink.

Five days later, she packed everything she could carry and went back to the station.

Her parents had left Fort Stockton for Detroit in 1934, after her father found work in the automobile industry and discovered that a man willing to stand beside a machine for ten hours could make considerably more money than a man willing to stand beside a dry West Texas field for fourteen. Lucille had stayed, partly because she was nineteen and stubborn but mostly because Levi was there. Now Levi wasn’t.

Her mother cried when Lucille stepped off the train in Detroit and then immediately began telling her she was too thin, which was how Eleanor Pritchard handled major emotional occasions. Her father carried the suitcases, and her old bedroom was waiting just off the living room.

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That was the worst part.

The wallpaper was the same. The dresser was the same. A little porcelain horse Lucille had bought when she was fourteen was still sitting on the shelf. Her mother had apparently preserved the room under the assumption that adulthood was an excursion from which Lucille might eventually return. At twenty-five years old, married, with a husband preparing for war somewhere she wasn’t allowed to know yet, Lucille Pritchard Lavon found herself sleeping beneath the same quilt she had slept beneath when Herbert Hoover was president.

Her mother knocked before entering for approximately two days. Then she stopped.

Detroit was already changing. Everybody said the word defense: defense plants, defense jobs, defense bonds, defense contracts. Men talked about production figures over breakfast. Women discussed shortages at the grocer. Newspapers carried maps of places Lucille had never heard of and suddenly needed to find: Malaya, Bataan, Wake Island, Libya, Burma.

The radio no longer seemed capable of simply being a radio. Jack Benny could still be funny, Fibber McGee could still open that closet, and the Kraft Music Hall could still provide an hour in which nobody had to think about Adolf Hitler. Eventually, however, an announcer would interrupt or a bulletin would follow, and everybody in the Pritchard living room would become quiet. Every strange place on the map was potentially a place Levi might someday be.

The mail became the most important event of Lucille’s day. At first there were letters from training. Levi complained about the food, his feet, sergeants, inspections, his feet again, and the remarkable military principle that a man could spend six hours hurrying so he could arrive somewhere and wait. He never complained about being afraid, which was how Lucille knew he was.

She answered every letter. She told him about her mother’s meat loaf, her father’s snoring, the woman down the street who had already put a service flag in the window, and how often she’d heard “Elmer’s Tune.” She did not tell him that sometimes she slept in one of his shirts. There were things a wife could put in a letter and things she kept for herself.

By January, Lucille decided she needed work. Her father thought this was sensible. Her mother thought it was unnecessary. Lucille thought that if she spent one more afternoon sitting beside the Philco waiting for Hitler to determine the course of her marriage, she was going to throw it through the front window.

Ford was hiring. Everybody was hiring. Detroit needed hands, and the hands no longer had to belong to men.

The Lincoln plant on Livernois had once made automobiles for people who did not have to ask what automobiles cost. When Lucille reported for work in February 1942, the factory seemed caught between two Americas. The old one had not quite left, and the new one was already coming through the doors.

Civilian automobile production was ending. Machinery was being moved, floor space rearranged and equipment delivered in crates. Supervisors carried clipboards and spoke about government contracts, production schedules and tolerances. Men who had spent years worrying about paint finish and upholstery seams were preparing to worry about military specifications.

Women appeared everywhere. Some were young and unmarried, some had husbands in uniform, some had children being watched by mothers, sisters or neighbors. Some had never earned a paycheck outside their homes. A few wore lipstick to work the first morning and discovered before lunch that lipstick and industrial production occupied separate branches of civilization.

Lucille was issued work clothes.

Her mother nearly fainted. “You can’t wear trousers to work.”

“Apparently I can.”

“Women don’t wear trousers.”

“The Germans will be relieved.”

Her father hid behind the newspaper.

Lucille liked the plant almost immediately, although there was little about it that could properly be called pleasant. It was loud, dirty, tiring and indifferent to anybody’s feelings. Her feet hurt, her shoulders hurt, and she learned that machinery could produce grime in locations she had previously considered inaccessible. But for eight or ten hours a day, the war became something she could touch. A part could be machined correctly, a fitting tightened, a measurement checked and a mistake fixed. The rest of the world had become impossibly large and beyond her control. The factory reduced it to tolerances.

Then, on her first morning, she saw the Lincoln.

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It was moving slowly toward the end of the automobile line. Lucille stopped walking, and the supervisor beside her took three more steps before noticing.

“You coming?”

She pointed. “What’s that?”

“Continental.”

The automobile was dark green, not merely green but the deep, nearly black richness of pine trees after rain. Its long hood stretched ahead of a compact passenger compartment, while wide whitewall tires stood beneath beautifully formed fenders. Chrome caught the overhead factory lights. At the rear, the spare tire stood upright beneath its painted cover, an extravagance so unnecessary that it became beautiful simply through the confidence required to put it there.

Lucille walked closer. Inside was tan upholstery, broad and soft, with a dashboard painted to match the dark green body. Gold-colored metal surrounded the instruments and radio. The steering wheel looked almost delicate against the enormous automobile surrounding it.

“How much?” she asked.

“Three thousand, give or take.”

Lucille laughed. The supervisor didn’t.

“You’re serious?”

He nodded.

Three thousand dollars. Levi could have bought their house for less, probably two houses if neither was particularly ambitious.

“Who buys something like that?”

“People who have three thousand dollars.”

Lucille walked around the front. Beneath that enormous hood sat a V-12 engine, twelve cylinders devoted to transporting perhaps two people to dinner. It was magnificent and completely absurd, which she would eventually realize was one of the things peace allowed people to be.

“Where’s it going?”

The supervisor shrugged. “Dealer, maybe. Storage. Government’s freezing a lot of new cars.”

“No more?”

“No more.”

“Ever?”

He glanced around at the factory being dismantled and rebuilt around them. “Lady, right now nobody knows what’s ever again.”

Someone called him away, but Lucille remained beside the Continental. A worker climbed behind the wheel, started the V-12 and eased the car forward. She did not know its serial number or who would own it, and she could never be certain it was literally the final Continental built before production stopped. In memory, none of that mattered.

It became the Last Lincoln.

Spring came, and Levi went overseas.

The letters changed after that, becoming less specific because they had to. Locations disappeared. Dates became unreliable. Sometimes three letters arrived in a week; sometimes nothing came for twelve days. Lucille learned not to panic until the thirteenth. Her mother learned not to ask, while her father learned to read the newspaper before Lucille came downstairs and fold away any page containing casualty figures. Nobody discussed having learned these things.

By then the Lincoln plant had ceased resembling the place where Lucille had seen the green Continental. Luxury had been evicted. The war wanted engines, munitions, Jeeps and amphibious vehicles. It wanted metal stamped, drilled, machined, welded and assembled faster than anyone had previously thought possible, and the factory answered.

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Lucille became good at her job, then very good. Her supervisor noticed. So did the men. Not all of them liked it. Some resented women in the plant; others regarded them as temporary substitutes, human scaffolding that would be removed once the real building returned. A few seemed personally offended whenever Lucille knew how to do something. Most simply adjusted, because a man who objected to women operating machinery could maintain the objection for only so long while standing beside a woman who operated the machinery better than he did.

Her first paycheck embarrassed her. The second pleased her. By the tenth, she understood something she had never understood before: money with your own name on it felt different. She bought war bonds, saved some and gave some to her mother for household expenses, beginning a monthly argument in which Eleanor refused the money and eventually accepted it while explaining that she was doing so only because Lucille was impossibly stubborn.

Levi wrote that he was proud of her.

She read that sentence until the fold in the paper began to weaken.

Life meanwhile became a collection of things Americans had previously assumed would always be available. Gasoline mattered. Rubber mattered. Sugar mattered. Coffee would soon matter. People saved kitchen grease, collected scrap metal, rolled bandages and bought bonds. Posters instructed everyone in responsibilities they hadn’t possessed the year before. There was plenty of grumbling because Americans had not suspended their national talent for complaining, but beneath it existed an acceptance that ordinary life had been interrupted and complaining did not constitute an exemption.

The women at Lincoln all had somebody somewhere. A son, a brother, a husband, a fiancé, or simply a boy who had taken a girl to the movies twice and might have taken her twenty times more if history had possessed better manners. At lunch they compared letters, photographs, rumors and silences. One woman’s husband was in England. Another’s brother was somewhere in the Pacific. A girl named Margaret had a fiancé in the Navy and now knew the location of every island between Hawaii and Australia despite having been unable to locate Ohio on a map the previous year.

Lucille kept Levi’s photograph in her locker. He was wearing his uniform.

She preferred the photographs where he wasn’t.

The green Continental returned to her thoughts occasionally, usually for no reason. She would remember the gold instrument panel, the tan seat or that absurd rear-mounted spare and wonder where the car had gone. Perhaps a doctor had received permission to buy it. Perhaps some government official was using it. Perhaps it had simply been put away somewhere, brand new and silent, waiting for a world in which twelve-cylinder luxury automobiles made sense again.

She liked that possibility best. The Lincoln was waiting, and so was she.

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Christmas came again. Lucille spent it in Detroit, where her mother made too much food for three people, Bing Crosby sang on the radio, and her father gave her a pair of gloves. Levi’s present sat beneath the tree because there was nowhere reliable to send it yet.

She had bought him a wristwatch. Nothing expensive, nothing like the beautiful watches in magazine advertisements, just something sturdy that a man could wear every day.

Lucille wound it Christmas morning and put it back in the box.

By February 1943, she had been at Lincoln a year and had stopped thinking of herself as a temporary employee, although nobody had actually told her she wasn’t. The war news from North Africa occupied the newspapers now, and names that once meant nothing produced immediate reactions: Tunisia, Rommel, Eisenhower, Kasserine.

Lucille had received a letter from Levi eleven days earlier. It was cheerful, which frightened her. He wrote about the weather, asked whether her mother still believed Franklin Roosevelt personally invented women wearing trousers, and reported that he had encountered a fellow from Odessa and decided Fort Stockton’s longstanding suspicions about Odessa were entirely justified.

At the bottom he had written:

When this is over, let’s buy something new.

Lucille smiled and immediately thought of the Continental. Three thousand dollars. She imagined telling Levi they ought to buy one and watching his face while he calculated how many years they would have to stop eating.

Margaret at the next station noticed her laughing.

“What’s funny?”

“My husband wants a new car.”

“Mine wants a boat.”

“We married idiots.”

“Apparently.”

Shortly after two o’clock, a black Ford sedan entered the plant grounds.

Nobody paid much attention. Black Ford sedans entered factory grounds every day. This one stopped near the administration building, and two men in dark overcoats got out. One carried an envelope.

A supervisor met them, spoke with them briefly and looked toward the factory floor. He did not move immediately. Instead, he removed his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief although they did not need cleaning.

Margaret saw him first.

“Lucille.”

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Lucille looked up and saw the supervisor walking toward her with the two men behind him. She could not hear the machinery anymore. That was something she would remember for the rest of her life. The machines were still running, hundreds of them, and the Lincoln plant was producing the material necessary to fight the largest war humanity had ever known. The noise inside those buildings was enormous.

But Lucille could not hear any of it.

She looked at her supervisor, then at the two men, and finally at the envelope one of them carried.

She knew.

There are moments when the human mind performs a kindness for itself by refusing information it has already received.

“Mrs. Lavon?”

The older man had a gentle face. That seemed important somehow.

“I’m Mrs. Lavon.”

“Could we speak somewhere privately?”

Lucille looked at the envelope again. “No.”

The man hesitated.

“If you take me somewhere, it won’t change what’s in it.”

Nobody spoke. Margaret had stopped working, as had the woman beside her. The silence spread outward from Lucille in a widening circle while the rest of the factory continued roaring beyond it.

The man stepped closer. “Mrs. Lavon, I am very sorry.”

That was all she heard clearly. There were other words: War Department, killed in action, North Africa, deepest sympathy, United States Government. They seemed to reach her individually, without ever forming a sentence.

Lucille looked down at her hands and noticed grease beneath one thumbnail. For some reason she thought she should have cleaned it. Then she remembered the watch upstairs in her old bedroom, still in its box, still wound every Sunday, waiting for a wrist that no longer existed anywhere in the world where she could reach it.

Margaret touched her arm.

Lucille did not cry. Not then.

She looked past the men toward the factory around her and remembered standing in almost the same place a year earlier, watching a dark green Lincoln Continental move toward the end of the line.

No more, the supervisor had told her.

Nobody knows what’s ever again.

She had thought he was talking about automobiles.

Outside, the black Ford waited to take the government men wherever they had to go next. There would be another wife somewhere, or another mother, another factory, another envelope. The machines continued running because they had to. That was the terrible arrangement everybody had made. Levi had gone because there were things larger than Levi, and Lucille had come here because there were things larger than Lucille. Now the country had taken what it needed from both of them: one life, and whatever remained of another.

Lucille finally looked at the envelope and took it.

Across the factory, metal struck metal. An engine turned over. A woman pulled a lever and the line moved forward.

And somewhere, Lucille liked to believe, a dark green Lincoln Continental sat beneath a roof in some quiet place, its tan seats empty and its V-12 cold, waiting patiently for a war to end.

The Lincoln would come back.

Lucille Lavon did not yet know whether she would.

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