Only the joy of finding Vanessa at the end of a day kept her going. Only the letters from Teddy warmed her heart. Only the money from her modeling at the department store kept them alive. There were days when she thought she would drop from exhaustion and when she wanted to cry with despair. But day after day, six days a week, she went downtown to model, to wander around the floors in the latest creations, to hand out perfume samples, to stand near the front door in a striking fur coat, to model in the fashion shows when they had them. It wasn't until the second year that she was promoted to the designer salon. And then she modeled for special customers, or in the big shows. She wore only their finest designer dresses from New York or Paris, and she was rapidly learning the tricks of her trade, how to do her hair in half a dozen flattering styles, how to do her makeup to perfection, how to move, how to smile, how to sell the clothes just by weaving a kind of spell. And whereas she was beautiful before, with the new skills she was learning, she was even more remarkable looking than she had been before. People talked about her in the store, and often people stared at her. The women customers looked at her in envy, but more often with a kind of fascination, as though she were a work of art. Their husbands stared at Serena, utterly awed by her beauty, and it wasn't long before the store's advertising agency saw her, and they made her their main model for the store. Every week her photograph was in the papers, and by the end of her second year at the store people began to recognize her around town. Men asked her out. She got invited to parties by relative strangers, but her answer was always the same. Without exception she declined. Her only interest was in returning home to Vanessa, to play with the little golden-haired child who looked so much like B.J., to sing silly songs with her at the little piano Serena had bought at an auction, to read her stories, and to share their dreams. Serena told her that one day she would be a beautiful, famous lady.…

“Like you, Mommy?”

Serena smiled. “No, much prettier than I am, silly. Everyone will stop to stare at you in the street, and you will be successful and happy.” Serena would stare into space for a moment, thinking of her own dreams. Was that what she wanted? To be stared at? To be successful? For her, modeling had been the only answer, but it was a strange life, making her living by how she looked, and often she felt foolish and unimportant, like the mannequin she literally was. But none of that mattered—she couldn't afford to have doubts about it. She had to survive.

It was a painfully empty life. She had the child, and her work, and their apartment. But other than that, she had nothing at all. No man, no friends, no one to talk to or to turn to. There seemed to be no room in her life for anyone but the child. And at night she would sit and read, or write letters to Teddy. They took weeks to reach him in the distant outposts of Korea. He was a resident now, and wrote to her long sorrowful letters about what he thought of the war. To him, it all seemed a senseless carnage, a war they couldn't win and didn't belong in, and he longed to come home or be transferred to Japan. There were times when she would read his letters over and over, holding them in her hand, and then staring out at the bay, remembering his face the day she had met him … the way he had looked in his cutaway at Greg's wedding … the day he had delivered Vanessa … at his graduation at Stanford. It was odd how often now, in her mind, she confused his face with her husband's. It was as though over the past two and a half years they had got confused in her mind.

And on their third Christmas alone Serena and Vanessa went to church and prayed for his safety, as they did each Sunday, and that night Serena lay in her bed and cried. She was aching with loneliness and exhaustion, from the years alone, the endless hours of hard work at the store, and all that she poured out to Vanessa. It was as though she had to give it all, and there was no one to replenish her strength for her. Week after week she waited anxiously for Teddy's letters. They were what kept her going. It was in writing to him that she poured out her own soul. In a sense it was her only real contact with a grown-up, and her only contact with a man.

At work she spoke to almost no one. Word had got out at one point that she had been an Italian princess before her marriage to an American soldier, and everyone decided that she was arrogant and aloof, and they were frightened by her beauty. After a while no one even tried to make friends with her. They had no way of knowing how lonely she was behind the cool facade of the princess. Only Teddy knew when he read her letters, her pain and loneliness and the still-fresh grief for her husband were obvious between the lines.

“It's amazing to see,” she wrote to him after Christmas, “how they all misunderstand me. They think me cold and snobbish, I suppose, and I let them. It's easier, and safer perhaps, than allowing them to know how much I hurt inside.” She still missed Brad, but it was more than that now. She missed someone. Someone to talk to and to share with and to laugh with, and go for walks on the beach with. She couldn't bear to do the things she had done with Brad, or even with Teddy, they only made her feel more lonely, and reminded her of how alone she was. “I feel at times as though this will go on forever. I will always be alone, here, with Vanessa, night after night and year after year, in this apartment, working at the store, and no one will ever know me. It frightens me sometimes, Teddy. It is as though you are the only one left who has truly known me.…”

There was of course Marcella, but it had been years since she had seen her, and Marcella was part of another life now. The letters that she dictated to someone else to be sent to Serena were always stilted and awkward, and left an empty chasm there too. In effect there was only Teddy, thousands of miles away in Korea, and it was only in the last few months of the war that they both began to realize what had happened. After two and a half years of writing letters, baring their souls to each other, holding each other up across the miles, she finally understood why there had been no one in almost three years. She was waiting for him.

The morning that she heard the news that the war was over, she was working at the store, and wearing a black velvet evening suit with a stiff white organdy collar, and she stood in the middle of the designer salon with tears streaming down her face.

A saleswoman smiled at her, and others chattered excitedly among them. The war in Korea was over! And Serena wanted to give a whoop of joy. “He's coming home,” she whispered, but someone overheard her. “He's coming home!”

“Your husband?” someone asked.

“No.” She shook her head slowly, with a look of amazement on her face. “His brother.” The woman looked at her strangely and Serena suddenly knew that an important question was about to be answered. When the years of letters suddenly ended, what would Teddy be to her?





32

And he felt as though in three years of war everything about him had changed. His interests, his needs, his priorities, his values. On the long flight over from Japan he had wondered again and again how he was going to fit in. For almost three years he hadn't seen his family. His mother's letters had been newsy, but he had always felt light-years away from home. Greg had only managed one or two letters a year. His father had died the year before. And most of his friends had eventually stopped writing, except Serena. His main contact with civilization had been with her, and now suddenly he was back, in the midst of a world no longer familiar, looking for a woman he hadn't seen in three years.