She laughed nervously. “I mean, Daddy had any job Paul could want, either with his companies or with one of his friends. Paul didn’t even need to work, but he… he said he needed to do something.”
She stood abruptly and went to an ornate Art Deco credenza behind my sofa. “We argued about it, but he refused to see it my way.” Agitated, Christine took two cigarettes from a black lacquered box and lit them with a sterling silver lighter. Handing me one, she hissed, “I wanted my husband back, not a college student! He insisted on taking a full load, too.” The cigarette glowed angrily as she inhaled hard.
Animatedly, Christine meandered to the far end of the big room and stared through the tall windows into the mild, sunny afternoon.
‘Paul Smith told her ‘no’ and stuck to it,’ I thought.
“Have you all checked around the university? Talked to his friends or professors?” I asked.
She nodded without looking at me. “Of course. That’s the first lead they checked,” she intoned. “Nothing. At TCU, they told us that one day, he just stopped coming to class.”
After a few minutes, she crushed the cigarette in a fancy pedestal ashtray and returned to the sofa with a slight frown.
Then, the switch had flipped again, and in a professional, engaging manner, Christine Norton Smith spent the next half-hour describing how she’d met Paul. She described meeting and falling for the handsome, largely unpolished, yet supremely confident working-class football player from the hardscrabble, east Texas oil fields.
“He was on a football scholarship to SMU, and incredibly, the guy born without two pennies to rub together overshadowed the sons of the wealthy and connected. His manner and presence commanded respect, and everyone naturally responded.”
She looked away sadly and, almost as an aside, said, “Paul is… is so strong, so steady. He makes me behave.” Nervously, she brushed a nonexistent hair from her face and smiled demurely. “He makes me so, so happy.”
Assuming her engaging manner, she continued, “Oh, we made quite the couple! Of course, Daddy and all my decent friends–both of them,” she laughed and clasped her hands to her chest, “were scandalized by our romance.”
Taking a sip of coffee, Christine regarded me with smiling eyes over the rim of the expensive bone China cup. Softly, the attractive brunette said, “Like two crazy kids, we went too far. Believing I was in a family way, Paul and I ran off to Shreveport and got married. That license was the best dollar I ever spent.
“Typical of Paul, when we returned, he manned up, met Daddy head-on, and for a moment, I feared for both of them.” She smiled wanly as if remembering. “In the end, Daddy relented,” she sniggered, “just as he always does.
“Anyway, a few weeks later, well, I… you know,” she shrugged bashfully, “and we knew it was a false alarm.” Turning sad, she whispered, “And I cried when I found out.”
Christine stared at her hands and twisted her simple gold wedding ring.
She laughed drily. “Not to be left out, Rita threw a fit. The nicest thing she called me was ‘trollop’ and said I was ruined. Typically, Daddy made her a peace offering. This time with a new Mercury V8. The shrew wrecked it a month later.”
She looked away with that strange half-smile and said lowly, “Rita doesn’t work very hard at being an awful person because it comes so naturally.” For a fleeting moment, a dark expression hardened her pretty features.
After a thoughtful pause, Christine’s mood lightened, and she gleefully described her pre-war life with Paul Smith. They lived in a small apartment near SMU, and even though he was a scholarship athlete, the coaches ignored that he was married. Her father’s status as a major donor and supporter helped.
“Paul occasionally stayed in his dormitory the night before a game,” she explained, “and regularly ate at the training table.” Otherwise, they lived a fun and easy life, and Christine said wistfully, “I felt truly loved for the only time in my life.”
She described their shock when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and how Paul, several of his teammates, and many other SMU men immediately joined the service.
“Since he was a college man, did they try to make him an officer?” I asked.
With a wistful smile, Christine nodded her head. “Yes, most of the SMU boys became officers, but Paul said it wasn’t for him. People seemed so drawn to him so that he would’ve made a great officer.” She fixed me with another intense look. “Paul is a man’s man, and before the war’s end, he realized he was destined to be an officer.”
She beamed while reaching into a small drawer on the coffee table and removed a stack of photos. “Here is one of the photos in late 1944. After that terrible island that starts with a P… Pola… Palla…”
“Peleliu,” I said.
Studying the photo, I felt a queasy gut punch as memories unexpectedly surfaced. After that meatgrinder, Paul Smith looked like the rest of us: haggard, emaciated, and with old eyes. ‘Old at twenty-three,’ I thought. She missed all of that in the photo, seeing only her tanned, lean beloved on a sunny tropical island.
“Yes, that one,” Christine nodded. “After that, they awarded Paul an upgrade to officer rank.”
“He accepted a battlefield commission,” I offered. “There were… a lot of those after Peleliu,” I whispered, now fighting back the darkness. I clasped my trembling hands in my lap, which she followed with her eyes.
Christine regarded me curiously before replying, “Yes, one of those.” She sorted through a few more photos of Paul and continued, “During the big battle on Okinawa, Paul left his platoon and took charge of a… a company? Is that what it’s called.”
“Yes, that was common due to officer casualties,” I confirmed. Corporals or sergeants leading platoons, senior NCOs or lieutenants running companies, and captains or inexperienced field grade officers running what was left of battalions became the norm.
A telephone rang in a small side room. Christine excused herself and spoke to someone in low, urgent tones. When she returned, she appeared agitated and seemed to collapse onto the large sofa.
“That was the man whose detectives are looking for Paul across the bay east of San Francisco.” Her eyes glittered angrily. “Ten men, plenty of money, and they can’t find a trace of him!”
“Why there?” I queried.
She sighed and crossed her arms tightly under her ample bosom. Christine said in a soft, emotional voice, “When Paul came home in late ’45, I knew things would be different. So did he, and we tried hard to put things back the way they were in January of ’42 when he shipped out.”
She gazed impassively past me at a painting above the credenza. Preparing to bare her soul, she exhaled a long breath. “You aren’t married, but you know how those times were,” Christine stated. Her eyes dropped to my left hand.
“Yes, Ma’am, but I was just a dumb kid, nearly eighteen, when I joined the Corps six days after Pearl Harbor.”
“Imagine being married.”
“I can only imagine,” I stated. “I know that coming home was in some ways more difficult than leaving.” So much of my skip-tracing and detective work resulted from the vast changes sweeping post-war America.