Читать книгу An Affair of State онлайн

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"Wait. I'll unriddle it. I married when I was nineteen. My husband was much older. Not that he wasn't a good husband. He was. In every sense. He was also--I was going to say like a father but that's not what I mean. He was like a tutor--a wise friend. He was in the Public Health Service and when war came the Marines took him and shipped him out to the Pacific to clean up those islands. I'd see him every six months or so. He'd come back to get a planeload of little fish to eat mosquito larvae--things like that. He was always fighting for supplies and medicines not only for the Marines but for the people in New Georgia, and the Marshallese, and the Gilbertese. He was that kind of man."

"And you lost him?"

"I lost him. I celebrated V-J day in a big way, because I knew he'd soon be back. I woke up with a hangover and a telegram beginning, 'The Secretary of the Navy regrets.' All I have to show for him is a Legion of Merit, posthumous."

"I'll admit that's tough. Okay. But other women lost their husbands and got over it."