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Her last year at school is a tense one. Things are heating up in Europe, and there’s a constant buzz about how long America can afford to stay on the sidelines. Her girlfriends all have college acceptances, except the ones who have engagement rings. She has them too, though she can’t seem to remember applying. Her parents push for Mount Holyoke, and she doesn’t put up a fight. She feels wayward, and thinks an education might help.
When she comes home for Christmas, it’s to a different world. The boys who last year worried over Amherst or Williams are all talking about Europe or the Pacific, and her girlfriends are rushing into panicked marriages, trying to get to the altar before he gets to the draft board.
The day after New Year’s she takes her father’s car without asking and drives to the nearest factory to ask for a job. The foreman laughs, but he finds a place for her, and tells her to report at nine the next morning.
Her parents aren’t thrilled, but she makes a big fuss about doing her part for the war effort, and her father can’t argue with that. He’s been flying a flag in the yard since December 7th. She pacifies her parents with patriotism, and she’s not unmoved by the war, but it's the independence she craves. Her father won’t lend her the car again, so she scribbles the trolley route on the back of her hand. It’s easier than she expects, and she arrives on time for orientation and her first shift.
In some ways, being at the factory is like a war, at least the wars she reads about in books. Her coveralls feel like armor, and there’s a sense of camaraderie with the other women on the assembly line. They chat over the rise of the machinery, and make an effort to include her in the conversation. At the end of the shift, they invite her out with them. She’s nervous, but she takes to the trolley faster than she expected, and soon it’s a regular Friday night date.
She dances a lot and drinks only a little. She develops a reputation for wholesomeness, but it’s really just practicality. She’s socking her money away for a future she knows she wants but can’t quite grasp. Eventually, she learns that men will buy her a drink if she gives them a dance, and she shakes that reputation a little.
The future she chooses is nursing school. She’s never thought of herself as one of those angels of mercy in the recruitment posters, but it sounds like interesting work, and a way to do some good for somebody. She asks around, and sends her application to the best one. She’s accepted right away, and after a year on the assembly line, she hangs up her coveralls for good. The girls bring a cake for her last day, and wish her the best.
A year of riveting bought her a room in a Boston boarding house, and the first night she spends alone in that spare, furnished place she giggles with delight. She cuts pictures from magazines and pins them to the wall with thumbtacks to make the place feel more her own.
She starts to make friends, but she finds her classmates remind her more of the girls in high school than the women in the factory. She accepts their invitations to the Saturday night dances and has a good enough time. These dances are held in chaperoned halls, not the working class bars she’s used to, and there’s nothing wholesome about her here. She invites them over and makes fudge in her room, the way they did at Mount Holyoke, and carefully earns their trust.
School is the real joy. It’s an accelerated course, because of the war, and she finds the fast pace suits her. She takes pride in her work, and she likes when people notice. By the time she graduates, peace is on the horizon. Her instructors give her a good recommendation, and secure her a place at Massachusetts General. At her celebratory dinner, her father asks if she’s planning to stay in the city, then, and she shrugs.
The hospital is big and intimidating. The uniform they give her is new and over-starched. It doesn’t feel freeing, the way the coveralls did, but she breaks it in. They put her on an internal medicine ward. Doctors like her because patients like her, and the other nurses like her because she doesn’t pay the doctors too much attention.
She’s been on the ward for two weeks when an attending catches her replacing an IV during morning rounds and ask if she’s every considered training for surgery.
She likes working in the O.R. She follows the procedures and learns to anticipate the surgeons’ every move, having the instruments ready even before they ask. Doctors are funny about complimenting nurses, she’s learned, but she can tell the attending appreciate her, from the way they relax when they see her in the scrub room. The head nurse takes notice, and begins assigning her to the new residents’ first cases, a balm against dangerous screw-ups. She doesn’t mind, too much. The residents come and go, arriving as cocky hotshots and leaving as capable young doctors. They make more than their share of passes at her, but they don’t make much of an impression.
She meets him over an operating table, where he sets himself apart from the other residents by having the guts to correct the attending and the unmitigated gall to be right. In the scrub room after, he tries to approach, and the attending storms off. He looks a little bewildered, his hand outstretched, and she takes pity on him.
“Don’t worry about him,” she says. “He’ll get over it. He just needs to lick his wounds.”
He turns to her and without his mask his gaze is electrifying.
“Nurse Breslin,” he says, with the briefest of pauses before her name, “You did good work today.”
“Carlye,” she says, offering him the handshake he offered the attending. “And so did you, Doctor.”
“Pierce,” he finishes for her. His handshake is firm, but his fingers are delicate. “Hawkeye.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Hawkeye?”
“It’s from The Last of the Mohicans,” he pulls off his scrub cap, and she’s surprised to discover he’s as dark as he is tall.
“I’m afraid I haven’t read it.”
He smiles like he didn’t just get out of surgery.
“I’ll tell you about it over a cup of coffee.”
“I think I’m at least worth dinner,” she pouts.
She doesn't think she’s ever pouted at a man before. She doesn’t think she’s ever negotiated a date before, either.
“Oh, I’m definitely going to buy you dinner,” he promises, “but unfortunately, I have another surgery scheduled in forty minutes. They work us residents like dogs.”
“Especially the good ones.”
He blushes, but holds her gaze, and she can tell he knows as well as she does that the better you are, the harder they work you. It’s one of the few things nurses and residents have in common, besides being disrespected by attendings.
“That doesn’t leave me enough time for dinner,” he explains, “but I thought it might be just enough time for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria.”
She falls fast, after that.
True to his word, he buys her dinner once they’re done for the night. Her shift ends before his, so she walks to the library and checks out The Last of the Mohicans. He finds her reading it in the nurses’ lounge after he finishes his last surgery and lights up.
“My father is going to love you,” he declares.
She should find it presumptuous, but she doesn’t.
The next she knows, they’re joined at the hip, receiving knowing looks from the rest of the staff. More than a few nurses pull her aside to warn her that they knew Dr. Pierce in his med school days, and he has a certain reputation. It doesn’t bother her. She doesn’t care about his past, and she’s not worried about his present. He’s shown no sign of wanting to stray, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have the time; they’re together twenty-three hours a day. Eventually, the other nurses notice this, too, and the friendly warnings give way to friendly teasing. They’re the hospital’s favorite item, and Hawkeye encourages them by making a joke out of it, linking their arms together to stroll through the doors or into the cafeteria.
He’s unconventional—nothing like the boys who took her out in high school, or the men who escorted her to dances in nursing school, and it makes her love him more. Going to bed with him feels like continuing a conversation, and she never wants either to stop.
Curled against his chest in his narrow bed, she cries again about her boarding house, with its strict rules and prying eyes. They spend most of their nights at his place, because missing curfew gets her a stern lecture from the steely-haired matron, but sneaking a male visitor upstairs is grounds for dismissal. The place that once represented freedom to her now feels like a prison, and she can’t think of anything to do about it but cry.
“Why don’t you move in here?” he asks, gently rubbing her back. “You spend most of your time here anyway.”
She laughs through a sob.
“Into this glorified dorm? I barely have room to hang my coat in the winter.”
“We could find a place,” he suggests.
She stops crying and stares up at him.
“Together?”
“Together.”
It’s not a proposal, and she doesn’t ask for one. Over lunch in the diner across the street from the hospital, they start looking at real estate listings. They don’t have a lot of choices, on her salary and the peanuts they pay him as a resident. They finally find a place within their budget, and make an appointment to see it on their day off.
It’s a second story walk-up, The minute they step inside, she sees him deflate. He looks about as disappointed as she feels. The place is a mess—the ceiling sags, the floors are unfinished, the walls are peeling so badly the plaster is exposed. But she’s fallen in love with the idea of freedom, of a place to call their own, and she’s not going to let it slip away that easily.
“It could use a coat of paint,” she shrugs.
Hawkeye looks at her like she’s just discovered penicillin.
“We’ll take it,” he tells the landlord.
They paint it together, and have fun doing it. One night in bed he dissolves into laughter when he finds hunter green in her hair. He finds a couple of rugs secondhand and beats the dust out before he unrolls them. She buys cheap frames for her pictures and hangs them on the hunter green walls. The flat is tiny, but it’s theirs, and it’s everything she wanted. The future is starting to take shape, now, and it's one with him in it.
She knows people at the hospital have noticed them arriving together in the morning, leaving together at night. They’ve started attracting curious looks and pointed questions like when’s the wedding? She ignores them. She wants him more than she wants marriage.
The trouble is, after a while she begins to feel like she doesn’t have either.
He eats his meals hidden behind medical textbooks. She tries to coax him out by cooking special dishes, and when that doesn’t work she tries to lure him out by cooking strange ones, but he seems to swallow them down without tasting them. He starts working longer shifts, picking up extra surgeries, and little by little she sees less of him.
He’s even different in bed—less passionate and more desperate. He always comes away satisfied—and so does she—but she can’t quite tell if he enjoys it. His mind is always someplace else, probably someplace sterile.
She knows she should talk to him, but there’s no use talking to someone who doesn’t hear you.
Little by little, she breaks.
The flat feels smaller the more alone she feels. He had a way of opening up rooms with his words, his crazy, believable dreams. Now the hunter green walls box her in. Now she thinks maybe it’s a good thing she can’t talk to him about it. If she gives him a chance to beg her, she’ll stay, and she thinks she’ll die if she does.
When she can’t take it anymore, she slips out in the night. She knows she should feel bad about it, and she does. The guilt clings to her and her gut twists with how badly she misses him.
She goes to one of her friends from the factory who lives in the city, and stays there until she can get a flat of her own. She won’t go back to a boarding house, not now that she’s known freedom.
People at the hospital, know better than to ask questions, but she knows they notice. She wonders if they think he grew tired of her, or if she gave him an ultimatum about a ring. She decides she doesn’t care.
One morning she’s drinking black coffee in a diner a few blocks from the hospital—she started eating there to avoid running into him, and grew to like the place—when a man getting up a few stools down takes notice of her.
“Are you on your way to work?” he asks politely.
“Just finished.”
She’s been working mostly night shifts so she won’t have to see him. It’s not just the guilt—she’s afraid of what would happen if she did. She hates to cede the hospital to him—she’s worked there longer than he has—but she knows she can get a nursing job anywhere, and he’s stuck there until he finishes his residency. It’s not fair, but it’s not his fault it isn’t fair, so all she can do for now is be grumpy about it and work nights, which makes her grumpier.
The man eyes her oddly, and she sighs.
“I’m a nurse,” she explains. The diner is chilly, and she has her coat buttoned up over her uniform.
The man’s face brightens, but just then her plate of eggs comes out, and her hunger takes her attention. When she looks up, he’s gone. She eats her breakfast and doesn’t give him another thought, until she hears the door chime while she’s paying she check and turns to see him rushing back in, red-faced.
He lights up when he sees her. It’s cold outside, but he’s sweating.
“I made it in time!” he pants. “I was so sure you’d be gone… I made it all the way to the office, just kicking myself for not asking your name…”
She asks the waitress for a glass of water. She carries it over to him.
“Carlye Breslin,” she says, handing him the glass.
He takes it gratefully and drinks, and he sounds less out-of-breath when he says,
“Doug Walton.”
He asks her to dinner and she says yes, thinking he’s at least earned that much. She doesn’t expect anything to come of it, but he ran five blocks and skipped a meeting for her, and she has to admit she’s flattered.
She learns that he’s in advertising, making decent money with the chance of making really good money in a couple of years. Advertising sounds dull, and she’s afraid he’ll bore her to tears, but he doesn’t say much about it. He tells her upfront that he leaves his work at the office, and at first she doesn’t believe him, but he quickly proves himself. He’s handsome enough, in a conventional way. Everything about their courtship is conventional, enough that she feels compelled to honesty, and she’s not ashamed but she is nervous. She’s relieved that he’s not expecting a virgin, and pleased that he isn’t one himself. He isn’t always exciting, but she never catches him muttering the names of suturing techniques while he runs his hands over her chest, and she still has Hawkeye, when she needs him—as a fantasy on nights when she’s alone. She thinks this is the safest way to keep him, a beloved figment in her mind, who she can’t ask for more than he’s able to give her.
He’s unbothered about her history, but doesn’t suggest living together until he offers her a diamond ring. She accepts, and they pick out a small house in the suburbs. She takes a position at a local hospital, a slower schedule, but a state-of-the-art facility, and good surgeons to work with. Doug has no objection to her working, and takes no notice of her salary either way. The trolley service isn’t good, so he buys her her own car as a wedding present, and she cries harder than when he gave her the ring.
Their wedding is modest, but it isn’t cheap. Her parents are thrilled, and so are his—they like her; according to Doug they’ve been fretting about him settling down and starting a family. They drive up to Vermont for a honeymoon—she firmly vetoes Maine, and he doesn’t pry—and stay for two weeks while the movers get their house ready.
They talk circles around the idea of kids; Doug’s keen on it, but not as eager as his parents, and he doesn’t push. She isn’t sure what she wants. She used to think she might want to have children with Hawkeye, someday; she liked the idea of bringing more of him into the world. This new future has built itself up around her rather quickly, and she needs some time to get her bearings.
The conversation takes a forced recess when Walter Cronkite starts talking about Korea. Doug is itching to do his part—like her, he missed the last war—and he’s young enough to be drafted, anyway. His ROTC classes in college buy him a spot as a lieutenant on a Destroyer, and she thinks it could be a lot worse. It sounds like a relatively safe position, all things considered. She reads in the news that they’re drafting doctors, and tries not to think about him.
A month before Doug ships out, she makes up her mind to follow him. She trained as a wartime nurse, but never made it into the last one, she explains, and she thinks maybe it’s time to let the government collect on its investment. Doug is surprised, but proud. He has a patriotic streak, like her father—she thinks it’s why they get on so well.
She choose the army, because that’s where the work is. She knows her skills will be better put to use in a MASH than on a hospital ship, and if she’s going over there she wants to do as much good as possible. She likes the women she goes through training with; they remind her of her friends at the factory. When she gets her assignment, she discovers one of her classmates got the same one, and she’s happy to have a friendly face.
They’re flown into a small airport and driven by jeep to the 4077th. It’s a dusty, ramshackle outfit, and she has a hard time imagining anyone performing surgery in a place like this.
She should have expected him to be there. She should have known he’d be wherever the surgery was.
She wonders if she did; keeps herself up at night questioning if she didn’t choose the army chasing some vague hope of seeing him. What she sees worries her. She’s been following the war since the beginning, and she knows things have been ugly.
Her friend’s eyes beg for the story, and she indulges her, but only in spare details. She doesn’t want to relieve the whole thing again, or so she tells herself, until she finds herself doing exactly that.
She left him, but he never entirely left her; she never banished him from her heart. She’s not sure she could if she tried, and she isn’t altogether certain she wants to. The flesh-and-blood Hawkeye—she’s reminded over and over—is better than the one in her mind, but he’s also more complicated. He’s the way she remembers, but different, too—his hands, once soft, are cracked and calloused from harsh scrubbing.
He wants desperately to prove that he’s changed, but he hasn’t, not in any way that matters. He offers her marriage, but she still wants him more, and she knows she’ll never have all of him. She already has all of Doug, waiting loyally for her in a ship off the coast, writing letters and never suspecting a thing. She knows she should feel bad about, and she does. She feels worse about what she does to Hawkeye.
She asks for the transfer first, because she knows she’ll never get out if she doesn’t. She plans to tell him—orders from the army can’t be ignored, no matter how much he begs—but she sees how the camp loves him, and maybe she knows deep down someone else will do it before she has to.
They part on better terms, this time—anything is better than no terms at all—and for that she’s grateful. They send her to the 8055th; it’s the furthest MASH from the 4077th, and she suspect Colonel Potter did that for her on purpose. She’s billeted with two other nurses, but in rare moments alone, she tries to think of Doug, of his tenderness, his blunt, smooth hands. Doug gets her started, but before long Hawkeye always creeps in.
She doesn’t re-enlist when her tour of duty is up. She goes back to the hospital, where she smiles politely when her coworkers thank her for her service, and goes home to her empty house to wait for Doug. She doesn’t think of anyone at night, and sleeps between cold sheets, waiting for the war to end.
It does, in time, and she welcomes Doug with open arms and kisses that mean it. She lets them bask in the celebratory glow for a couple of weeks, and when it wears off she confesses her sin. She feels she owes him the honesty; the guilt doesn’t bother her as much as she thinks it should.
He takes it surprisingly well. She can tell it hurts him, but he says he understands, and he forgives her. He understands about war, and he understands about Hawkeye. She doesn’t need to ask if the transgression was mutual—she can tell it wasn’t. She truly does have all of Doug, she married him because he was willing to give it, but realizes now for the first time that she’s never given him all of her.