World War II: my grandfather’s cousin Susan[sup]*[/sup] was engaged to her lover, Mike. But Mike was a pilot, and a war was on. He told her he wouldn’t marry her like this, what with the high chance of her becoming a widow. There was much discussion on this point—as it can be with young love, it has an urgency even the evils of men have a hard time impeding. But as it can also be with young love, a touch of precocious honor was there, and Mike felt it would be no service to his love to engage in a ceremony of lifelong commitment when his life was in question.
And so he went to war.
As I mentioned, Mike was a pilot. He was shot down—or his plane malfunctioned, I do not know for sure—over Germany and ended up in a farm with a shattered leg. The farmers were not Nazi sympathizers, and they took him in to hide and care for him, hoping he wouldn’t die, that they wouldn’t be caught, and that this brave soldier could return home again.
From what I understand the situation was touch and go for him. For the military, however, it was just gone. After some time without contact form him he was declared MIA and presumed dead. Word was sent home to his family, and that led to the news reaching Susan.
Understandably, Susan was crushed. But as it is with almost all of us, she didn’t carry the pain so close to the surface, and eventually it only became a scar. She fell in with another man, Marc, and they planned their wedding.
The war was drawing to a close, and as it happened the Allies pushed forward far enough for the farmers keeping Mike safe to allow him to return.
Mike returned home and rushed to locate Susan, only to find her on her wedding day, prepared to be the wife of Marc. He tried hard to stop the wedding, but Susan’s father, not understanding the tragedy that had occurred here, stopped him from interrupting the wedding, and she was married. Mike later caught up with her at the reception, and in his haste to demonstrate the foundation of his feelings indicated quite plainly that he would never marry any woman but her. I can only imagine the tearful awkwardness of this reunion. Time heals wounds, they say, but I rather think it dulls the memories instead, and this story is now over fifty years old—the way the tale is told to me now, all these years later, is much more as a monologue than a sweeping romance. But I can imagine the reality that lies behind the bland description, for I know the people it happened to, and their character.
Yes, the marriage was a success, and Susan and Marc had two daughters from it.
But this story does not end here. Mike and Susan never stopped being friends. He stayed true to his word, and manifested the love he had professed to her: he never really left her side. He did not intrude, either, with soothing words meant to pry apart Marc and her. His once precocious honor had bloomed, you see, and while the cliche would demand he was a scholar he was not, he was the gentleman we so often think of when the word comes to mind.
But Marc’s work was in the oil industry in some capacity, and Marc’s soul was in a bottle in some capacity. Between the drinking and spending months apart from his family, Marc spiralled away the happy life he sought so long ago on that fateful wedding day. Mike remained true to his woman, but the situation led both him and Susan to adulterous relations. Was it out of depression that she went with this lost love? Were they simply weak? Or did they see their chance to taste what fate had taken from them, and relished it while it could be?
And Mike indeed devoted himself to his love, and helped raise those girls in Marc’s stead. Was he more of a father to them than their own paternal flesh? Some have hinted so.
And yet it was not the picture of Marc as a bad husband that fate painted; no, it was the picture of a man who made some mistakes—perhaps grave mistakes—, and it does not end with disrespect. Marc had told us that one day he looked at himself in the mirror and saw what he had become. Some drinkers can admit the problem but never fight it, and for others the task is long and painful, but for Marc the recognition of the problem was itself the solution, and he sobered up and tried to be the husband and father he never was.
Too little, too late? The answer to this lies in your perspective. He found out about Susan’s infidelity with her first love and close friend Mike, but held no ill-will to either of them. Indeed he saw, not that he deserved it, but that it was an understandable transgression. And so Mike returned to his previous post, and Marc worked to do what he now knew he didn’t all this time.
And again, it is a matter of perspective whether he had accomplished this, for of course there is no turning back the clock. His daughters were older now, his life had moved on. But the future was not a crushing weight, and the present was the best time to start. Through the work he did, and some thoughtful purchases, when he died of complications from his alcoholism he left his wife a comfortable amount of money and property (which she then rented out for income).
We close to the present day, my fellow dopers. Mike and Susan never married, it is true, and no reason was ever given as to why, and I shall not ask. I’d like to think that it was only that they never married in front of the state, for they live together now and have for years and years, and care for each other in their old age as best as anyone can. Are they married? —really? This, too, is a question that demands perspective, and from mine I think they are in a way no document could ever describe or declare.
There are no happy endings in life, my friends. The Mike and Susan of their youth never realized the entire life they’d once planned on building—even still. And Marc’s goals were also probably wasted on the pleasure of the moment for just a bit too long, and I think he left this world with regrets. And Mike’s promise that he would never marry any woman but this Susan was true, but only in a degenerate sense, for he never married anyone at all, including his Susan. And I can’t think that things have turned out in any way Susan would have ever expected or planned. No, there are no happy endings. But, dear dopers, this is not to say our characters did not know happiness, and for those still alive, they know it still.
Is this to say we should be thankful for what we have? It is not. It is only to say that we don’t have the gift of foresight, and though this can make our dreams and hopes seem totally out of reach sometimes, the world has the strangest way of working. The ending isn’t happy, and never is; it is getting there that makes us smile.
Mike and Susan live together this day, as they have for almost 30 years. If they knew you were in any way thinking of them, they’d wish you all a merry Christmas, and assure you that they are having one.
*[sub]All names have been changed. The story is otherwise as true as the memories of the family members that have told me.[/sub]