############“...and so here I am in the City of New York, with a drunk doughboy for a husband, no money, and all of my friends and relatives back in Germany.” “So what happened?” “What happened what?” Heidi asked in turn, as she smoothed the skirt that had acquired several wrinkles in its perfection in the course of her tale. “What happened to the husband?” “I don’t know and I don’t care. I left him passed out in a hotel room the next morning, and found a place of my own that afternoon.” “What did you do for money?” “Eventually, what any woman would do when left in dire enough straits,” Heidi replied with a firm stare at a distant wall. “But first, I took what was left of his discharge pay, or at least what was left of the money he had given me for shopping the day before, left after I bought some powder to cover the bruise. Here I was, a nineteen-year-old girl from Coblenz cooped up in a room for rent, with a very nice petticoat to show for a marriage to an American soldier.” The crying started once more. Wally stared at the opposite wall, the wall beyond his subject’s slumped figure, for a long silence. “And what happened then? How did you end up here?” |