If My Heart Had Wings: A World War II Love Story
Nadine Taylor
Foreword
W ORLD WAR II SAW MORE than 80 million men in uniform engaged in battle on every continent and every ocean around the world. Out of this greatest of all conflicts came millions of stories of love and loss, including this one—special because it’s not only about a lost soldier, but also about those left behind who must deal with that loss forever.
If My Heart Had Wings is a tale well-told; a beautiful narrative reminding us that when we lose someone we love, we pay with grief. And the greater the love, the greater the grief.
But would we have it any other way?
C . PAUL HILLIARD, VICE Chairman, Board of Trustees
The National World War II Museum
Prologue
T HEIR WEDDING PICTURE was so typical of the World War II years. Mom was dressed to the nines in a chic pearl grey suit with padded shoulders and a pencil-slim skirt, set off by a little pink hat perched toward the front of her head and surrounded by puffs of pink tulle. Dad was every inch the perfect groom in a black double-breasted suit with a jaunty white carnation on his lapel.
My sister Dawn and I often lingered over this picture of our parents as we flipped through their wedding album, if you could call it an album. It was more like a spiral-bound notebook holding about a dozen 8 x 10 black and white pictures in plastic sheet protectors. They didn’t need anything fancy, Mom said, so they settled on the cheapest package available. Still, Dawn and I agreed that the photographer should have gotten at least one shot of Mom walking down the aisle with her eyes open. In the only picture that survives, she approaches her new life with her eyelids firmly shut.
“There goes Mom,” we liked to say, “sleepwalking down the aisle!”
Nineteen forty-six was a big year for weddings when soldiers came home from World War II eager to reunite with their sweethearts, get married, start families, and get on with the business of living.
My parents were no different, although they didn’t know each other very well when they tied the knot in March of that year. They had met briefly during the war and corresponded for two years. Then, when Dad got back to the States, they spent two months getting to know each other and trying to decide if they had something that could last.
When the answer turned out to be yes, Mom booked a church and headed downtown in search of an attractive yet practical suit. There was no point in spending money on some silly dress you could only wear once, she told us, when you could buy a high-quality suit for the same price (or less) and wear it over and over again. Which is exactly what she did. That pearl grey suit became one of her wardrobe staples. In fact, she was able to wear it to work until she was seven months pregnant with my sister.
So, you can imagine my surprise when, at the age of thirteen, I was out in the garage, riffling through a drawer full of black and white photos, when I came upon a picture of my mother in a white wedding gown, complete with a shoulder-length veil! It was the summer of 1966; my sister was seventeen, my parents had been married for twenty years, and as far as I knew, there had never been any mention of a white wedding dress.
I hightailed it down the driveway and burst through the kitchen door, waving the picture. Mom was standing at the stove stirring something while Dawn was busy chopping tomatoes at the kitchen counter.
“Mom!” I shouted, thrusting the picture at her. “I thought you got married in a suit !”
She looked at the picture, smiled sheepishly, and said, “Well, I guess I always knew I was going to have to tell you girls someday... I was married before.”
My sister and I looked at each other with jaws dropped. There had never been the slightest mention of any romantic relationship in Mom’s past, much less a husband ! Dumbfounded, we looked at our mother with eyes that demanded an explanation.
“It happened during the war, before I knew your father,” she said, trying to brush it off like an unwanted piece of lint.
“Well, who was he?” I demanded.
“He was my college boyfriend.”
“Did you have any kids?” I asked, panicked, imagining some strange family member suddenly materializing on our front porch.
“No,” she smiled, trying to calm me down. “There were no kids. And anyway, it all happened a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
With that, she turned back to her stirring, discussion ended.
I was so shocked by her news that I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So, I scurried back to the garage to see if I could find any other interesting (and possibly stunning) pictures. I couldn’t.
There was a time, when I was very young, when I couldn’t imagine that my mother had had a life before I existed. Once I got a little older, I realized that she’d married my father and given birth to my sister before I was born, so I began to think of her life as starting once she met Dad. But I also knew that she had been a child once, just like me; I’d seen the pictures. So I revised my idea once again and thought of her life as a two-part affair: her childhood and Dad/us.
But once I found the white wedding picture, it became glaringly apparent that at least one other part of her life had existed, the part involving another man and another marriage. It was such a bizarre notion that I simply blocked it at first. But the older I got, the more curious I became about this secret life of hers. It seemed so mysterious and romantic—two adjectives I normally wouldn’t have applied to my pragmatic, matter-of-fact mother. And the more I looked into it, the more obsessed I became.