The following Tuesday, Mother and I entered the former downtown furniture store that had been converted into a servicemen’s canteen. Every woman in town took her turn behind the small lunch counter, serving sandwiches and cake and providing a friendly shoulder for the homesick boys.
Someone was playing the piano expertly while several airmen and girls sang less expertly, but with great enthusiasm. The pianist performed a jazz version of “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” with plenty of rippling chords. He finished with a flourish and spun his stool around to face the room. It was Max.
Immediately he jumped up and came over to me with a big grin on his face. “Hello! I was hoping you’d turn up!”
“Mother, I’d like you to meet Max Cassidy.”
“How do you do, Max? Will you help us make coffee?”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Jolliffe.” He began to run water into the coffeepot. “It’s a right treat to have real coffee again. I used to drink gallons of the stuff back in Taz.”
Robbed of their accompanist, the singers drifted off to play ping-pong or darts. Someone had pinned a cartoon of Hitler’s face over the dartboard. Applause broke out whenever a dart pierced Hitler’s nose or eye.
“Do you live around here?” Max asked.
“No, we live four miles out of town. My father’s a farmer.”
“Funny, you don’t look like a farm girl.” He squinted his eyes as if examining a rare butterfly.
“How many have you known?”
“Come to think of it, none. You’ll set the standard.”
While the coffee was brewing we returned to the piano. I leaned over Max’s shoulder while we sang all of my favourites. He had a clear tenor voice.
“There must be a song about Rose,” he said at last, trailing his long fingers over the keyboard and smiling up into my face.
“My father named me after his favourite song, ‘Rose Marie.’”
“That’s a lovely song. It suits you.” Max played while we sang together: “Oh, Rose Marie, I love you, forever thinking of you.…” Mother’s soprano joined in from the kitchen.
I finally dragged myself away long enough to wash the dishes, but Max followed me into the kitchen and insisted on tying an apron over his uniform and drying them. When the last saucer was put away, it was time to go.
“See you on Thursday?” Max asked.
“I’ll be here.” I glanced over my shoulder as we left the canteen. He winked and waved.
Unlike June, who had already fallen in love half a dozen times, I tried to keep my distance from the airmen. I knew there was an uncertain future in store for these boys, not to mention anyone who cared about them. And I shrank from the way some girls openly pursued the pilots, bagging them like trophies. Their mothers weren’t much better. Mrs. Cooper, for instance, never invited anyone but officers to her house, practically shoving her unmarried daughters in their faces.
But I knew I was in trouble one sunny Saturday, when Max made the long walk out to our farm. While Mother baked cookies in the kitchen, Max and I fooled around on the piano. I could play, although not nearly as well as Max, and he was showing me a new duet. We had never been alone in the house. In fact, we were never alone at all unless we went out for a walk. Mother was quite firm about that.
“Are you going back to the tourist business when the war is over, Max?”
“I’m hoping to conduct.”
“Conduct?” I asked, thinking about trains.
“Righto, conduct an orchestra. I practise all the time.”
“How do you do that?”
“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil, and I’ll show you.” He took the paper, tore it into bits, and wrote on them.
“Now some pins, please.”
I fetched my mother’s sewing basket. Max pinned the pieces of paper in neat rows along the back of the blue mohair chesterfield.
“I need some music. I’ll take a gander at your records.” Max bent over the wind-up gramophone in the corner and searched the small record collection. “Hmm … Harry Lauder, John McCormack. Here’s a good one: Glenn Miller, ‘In the Mood.’”
He put the record on the turntable, wound up the machine, dropped the needle onto the edge of the record, tapped his pencil on the back of a chair, and stood poised in front of the chesterfield, arms raised to shoulder height. I came closer to see what he had written: First Strings. Second Strings. Clarinet. Saxophone. Drums. Then his paper orchestra began to play.
I stood beside him, entranced, as Max conducted the Glenn Miller Orchestra flawlessly. When it was time for the saxophone, he pointed his pencil at one piece of paper and the saxophone came in right on cue. When the music hushed and the piece seemed to be over, his pencil was still. Suddenly he raised his arms again and the instruments rushed back in a crescendo of sound for the grand finale.
He stepped back, turned to me and bowed from the waist. I clapped until my palms stung. “Max, that was terrific! How did you learn to do that?”
“Every night I put my bits of paper up on the wall and have a gay old time. The problem is that I don’t have any records so I go through the pieces I already know. Once in a while I even try a new arrangement.”
“Can you actually hear the music in your head?”
“If I’m not too fagged out from studying. Then all I can hear when I go to bed is the sound of the engines in my kite. We’re coming up for finals, you know.”
I knew Max would return to England and begin flying operations soon. “Do you think you’ll pass your exams?” Suddenly I wanted him to say no.
“I expect so. I’m doing quite well in most of my classes.”
I reached out my hand and drew him down beside me on the chesterfield. We sat silently for a few minutes, me thinking of the half-life that awaited Max in England, far from home and family, risking his life for freedom.
His arm slid around me, and we kissed. My cheeks flushed and the strength drained from my limbs. Even my fingers felt weak, the way they did sometimes when I woke up in the morning and couldn’t make a fist.
“I never wanted this to happen, you know.” My voice was trembling. “I didn’t want to … to … you know, get attached to somebody who was going away.”
“You’d better not, then.”
“I can’t help it.” We kissed again.
“When the war is over, I want to take you home to meet my mother and my sister, Kathleen, and show you all over Tasmania.”
“I’d like that, Max.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. “I’m very lucky, you know,” he said suddenly. “I once won five pounds in the mess. I’ll probably live to be the most dreadful old man. You’ll have to throw me down the stairs to get rid of me.”
I awoke with a tremendous start, my eyes wide open and staring. I had dreamed that German Panzers were rolling across the farm, but the real nightmare was waking up and remembering