PARTISAN REVIEW
It was so dark I could not locate him, only hear
his
unplaced voice.
"Hell," another said, "it'll break the heat. I got a good mind
to get out in it and get myself sopping wet now."
We lingered in silence, then the corpsman who had spoken last
stepped from the porch and began to run, caroling like a child,
around the yard in the steady rain. One by one we joined him, and
our dungarees, drenched quickly, clung to our stung but glowing
flesh. In the dark and fresh wetness of the night our idiotic voices
were sharp and tuneful like children at an exciting game.
But the night rain, as
if
some hand unknown and hidden in
the vast darkness above ourselves had swept it capriciously away,
ceased abruptly. Yet our elation was strangely buoyed even further
when the rumor spread that the system for discharging personnel
had just been revised. All of us began counting again the number of
months we had been in the service or overseas, calculating the earliest
possible date when we should return. I walked from the hospital
to the beach because, in my dazed contentment, I somehow wanted
to be by myself to enjoy it. I can recall to this day the air of festivity
there was to the sight of the distant lights on the ships anchored far
across the bay. They seemed to me at the time, I remember, like
garden-party lanterns, like those at high-school graduation parties
when across finely cropped lawns we, in our blue jackets and white
trousers and the girls in their most daring organdy gowns, strolled
clumsily, and where in something like wonder we gazed wide-eyed
and cruelly at each other.
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