The Chocolate Syrup Wait

Ray goes AWOL but none suspect and his friends all ship out.

Transcript

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Ray Conan is sitting in a room at the Omaha YMCA that cost him exactly 75 cents for the afternoon. It is June 3rd, 1945, and the world is exhaling a collective, shaky breath as the war in Europe ends. But for a radar man in the Army Air Forces, the Pacific remains a looming, jagged shadow. Ray's room is, in his own words, about as big as the downstairs bathroom at his girlfriend Shirley's house. The walls are a dull pink, decorated with what look like polka dotted fingerprints. The table shakes under his hand as he writes, and the dresser is either hand-carved or just exceptionally scratched up. He's hopped a ride into town on an ice cream truck just to find the sliver of silence, away from the blasting radios and the thrum of a thousand soldiers back at the field. He is writing to Shirley, his darling little flower, because he needs to tell her that the odds are currently stocked against them. He's trying to figure out a way to see her one last time before he shipped west, maybe Arizona, maybe New Mexico, and then inevitably overseas. He tells her a story about being in the fourth grade when his teacher was getting married and ordered ice cream for the class. There wasn't enough to go around, and Ray was one of the two kids who had to wait. But when the second batch finally arrived, it wasn't just ice cream, it came with chocolate syrup. That's how he's choosing to see their life right now. The wait is long and the uncertainty is cold, but he's convinced the chocolate syrup is coming. The logistical reality of 1945 is a relentless grind of train schedules and military priorities. Ray spends his afternoon in that cramped YMCA room calculating the distance between Chicago and Omaha like a man trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces. He checks the afternoon zephyr, but reservations are booked weeks in advance. He looks at the morning trains, but if Shirley travels on a Sunday, they wouldn't even have 24 hours together before she had to be back at work on Monday. He worries about her mother. He worries about the B-29 crews that started shipping out that very day. If he is alerted, he has to check back at the field every couple of hours. In his letter, he tells her that if this is to be their last time together, he wants them to be free from all those worries. He wants it to be just you and me. There's a desperation in his ink, a refusal to let the bureaucracy of war dictate the terms of their goodbye. He tells her that if they have to, they'll rent a private plane and fly anywhere in the country. He simply has to see her again. By June 7, the tension of waiting has turned into a strange localized frustration. Ray is back at the base and he's one mad baby. A shipment of 500 men just went out, radar men he trained with in Boca Ratan, guys who had only been at the field for a week, and somehow he wasn't on the list. He describes it as someone playing a game of tag with him, leaving him as the last man sitting on his footlocker while his friends vanish toward the front. To pass the time, he's trying to elevate his literary tastes with the late George Opley, but he finds it dreadfully dull because there's no bloodshed. He tells Shirley that every book, no matter the theme, should have a couple of good murders in it. This is the humor of a man living in the shadow of a global cataclysm. He finds a fictional murder mystery more comforting than a polite social drama. He's managed to scavenge a few packs of cigarettes and a box of gooey candy bars from the PX to send to her, small offerings across the miles. Shirley's 24th birthday is approaching, and he calls her an old hunk of strawberry shortcake, marveling that she can be so swell in only 24 years. Then Ray does something dangerous. He goes AWOL. He doesn't call it that, but he disregards the rules and takes off for a couple of days to see her. By June 12th, he's back at the field marveling at the fact that no one even missed him. He's feeling brazen. On the train ride back, he subsists on 15 cups of coffee, a cheese sandwich, and a crummy murder mystery where the killer turned out to be a streetcar conductor. He writes to Shirley about the strange sights of a Monday morning in America, clotheslines full of laundry stretching across every backyard from the train window. He finds it deeply unfair that the whole country decides to wash their clothes on the same day. When he finally crawls back into his luxurious barracks bed at one in the morning, he can't sleep. His head is muddled and he finds he's forgetting how to spell simple words. But the sun is shining, the firing squad isn't scheduled for him, and as far as he's concerned, everything is Roger Dodger. The Nebraska sunset on June 14 is bright orange and the sky is all colored upright pretty, but the piece is punctuated by the roar of airplane engines. Ray sits in the grass watching the B-29s and decides that being alive is, for the moment, very nice. He reflects on his brief illegal trip to see her, telling her that even if he'd been skinned and boiled in oil, it would have been worth it. But the war is never far away. He mentions almost in passing that one of the fellows walked into a propeller that morning and was killed. It was pretty messy. He also notes that there's talk of making the base permanent after the war, a sign that the bigwigs are planning for a very different world than the one they left behind. He's trying to follow the advice of a smart guy who told him never to volunteer for anything, never to try to get on or off a list, and just let old gal fate handle the details. As the war in the Pacific grinds toward its final, violent months, Ray Conan finds himself in a state of suspended animation. He's been a shavetail, a second lieutenant, for six months, and he's counting down the twelve more he needs to reach first lieutenant. He's thinking about the future, about paternal responsibilities, and wondering if he should buy a dog because he misses the pitter pat of little footsteps. He jokes about 17 masked bandits with submachine guns stealing a box of black crows candy he meant to send her. But under the jokes and the descriptions of bad army breakfast, fried rice with bacon bits as a particular grievance, there is the constant steady pulse of a man who is deeply in love and profoundly uncertain of when he will see his home again. He tells Shirley that his flashing eyelids are drooping and his young body is screaming for rest. He signs off by telling her that the shades of night might cloud her from his sight, but never from his heart. Ray Conan's war wasn't just about radar and B 29s, it was about the desperate, beautiful effort to keep a connection alive across a continent, one 75 cent YMCA room at a time. Share this story of a love that refused to be sidelined by history with someone who appreciates the power of a handwritten letter.