Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [28]
The thought of Dinah Culbert infuriated him. He had been playing a game, that was all. He closed War and Peace, which he could not follow anyway, and thought of good old Aunt Dinah. He was ashamed of himself, a young man of twenty-three escorting a woman of forty. From that moment in his own mind he never referred to Dinah as anything but Grandmom. He even used the word aloud once or twice, and soon it was common gossip at the hospital that Bill Harbison, the fine naval lieutenant, had joked about Aunt Dinah as his Grandmom.
Otherwise Bill let Dinah down easily. He took her to lunch at the restaurant in Vila once more, took her to dinner at his own mess, had drinks with her at the hospital club, and that was all. Dinah was not dismayed. When rumor first reached her that he had called her his grandmother, there was a sharp pang of unbelief. Then she laughed, right heartily. She was a nurse and no dumb cluck. She thought she knew pretty well what Bill's trouble was. "I pity the next girl he goes with," she said to herself.
The next girl was Nellie Forbush. She was a slender, pretty nurse of twenty-two. She came from a small town in Arkansas and loved being in the Navy. Never in a hundred years would Bill Harbison have noticed her in the States. She wouldn't have moved in his crowd at all. In Denver she would have lived somewhere in the indiscriminate northern part of the city, by the viaduct. In Albuquerque she would have lived near the Mexican quarter. But on the island of Efate where white women were the exception and pretty white women rarities, Nellie Forbush was a queen. She suffered no social distinctions.
Military custom regarding nurses is most irrational. They are made officers and therefore not permitted to associate with enlisted men. This means that they must find their social life among other officers. But most male officers are married, especially in the medical corps. And most unmarried officers are from social levels into which nurses from small towns do not normally marry. As a result of this involved social system, military nurses frequently have unhappy emotional experiences. Cut off by law from fraternizing with those men who would like to marry them and who would have married them in civilian life, they find their friendships restricted to men who are surprisingly often married or who are social snobs.
Bill Harbison did not stop to formulate the above syllogism when he started going with Nellie Forbush. Yet in his mind he had the conclusion well formulated. Put into words it began, "What the hell! If I'm going to waste three years of my life..." It went on from there to a logical end. Nellie Forbush just happened to be around when the decision was reached.
Bill was lovely to her. He took her swimming and gasped when he saw her for the first time in a swimming suit. She wore a gingham halter and a pair of tight trunks with only a suggestion of a flared ballet skirt. She did not bathe. She dived into the ocean and swam with long easy strokes to the raft. Perched upon the boards, she shook her bobbed hair free of water and laughed. "Some difference," Bill thought. "Not much like Grandmom!"
Nor was she much like Grandmom driving home along the narrow road through the coconut plantation. It was still daylight, but shadows were so thick it seemed like evening. Bill pulled the jeep to the side of the road and kissed his beautiful nurse. It was no chivalrous kiss. It was a kiss born of seeing her the most lovely person on the beach. It was a long, helpless kiss, and both officers found it thrilling and delicious.
After that there were many more swims and even more kisses. Bill wasn't around LARU-8 much after that. If Nellie had any free time, he