They honeymooned in San Francisco, and moved to a spacious apartment in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Marcella, newly promoted to lieutenant commander, took over her duties at the naval hospital, as did Petty Officer John DeVries, who had rented an apartment near the newlyweds.
It went well for a while: the Allies had turned the tide, and it was now only a matter of time before Germany and Japan capitulated, Marcella was satisfied with her supervisory duties, and Johnny and Doc had become great friends.
Doc had become the father that Johnny had lost. The two would spin off together in Doc’s LaSalle convertible for long, aimless jaunts all over the L.A. basin. That was the trouble, Marcella decided. Doc was never around, and when he was he was deliberately mysterious and darkly elliptical.
It soon became obvious to her that her husband’s “opportunity of a lifetime” was the receiving of stolen goods from an L.A. -based robbery gang. Johnny, high on hop one night, had told her that Doc had garages filled with stolen merchandise all over the city. He fenced the contraband goods–furs, jewelry, and antiques–to army and navy high brass, hangers-on in the movie industry, and the gamblers and other assorted eon artists who frequented Hollywood Park and Santa Anita racetracks.
Doc was a loving, solicitous husband when he was around, but Marcella started to worry. She began drinking to excess and corresponding voluminously with Will to assuage the fears that were building in her about the man she loved. He seemed to be laughing at her, thinking always two or even three steps ahead of her, and always, always smiling darkly with what she imagined to be an evil, absolutely cold light in his eyes.
Marcella decided she needed a vacation by herself. She needed to cut down her intake of alcohol and collect her thoughts. She told Doc this, and he readily agreed. She had a month’s accumulated leave time coming, and her superiors were more than willing to let their fiercely competent nurse take some time off to relax.
She drove to San Juan Capistrano and swam in the sea and wrote long letters to Will, who had–amazingly_resettled in Tunnel City. Astounded by this, Marcella telephoned him there. Will told her that he had found it necessary to confront his tragic past. He had become a seeker of the spiritual path. It worked, he told her; he was at peace here, running the town movie theater, going on bookbuying missions to Chicago for the Tunnel City Public Library, and meditatively walking the cabbage fields he had once hated so terribly.
Marcella returned to Los Angeles to find she was pregnant and that Johnny was once again addicted to codeine. He had taken up with a young woman that Doc had considered unworthy and had decreed that he not see again. Cowed by his father-surrogate, Johnny had agreed, and the woman had left Los Angeles.
Marcella was angry at her husband’s hold over her brother, and hurt. She had exercised authority over Johnny much more benignly. Doc would coldly order Johnny about, tell him to drive him places, instruct him on what to wear and eat; and always, always with that cold smile on his face.
Marcella was troubled. But when she told Doc the news of her pregnancy, she was overjoyed to see the laughing, witty, and tender Doc of their courtship reemerge. He was solicitous, he was considerate, he anticipated her moods perfectly. She was never happier, she wrote to Will, not ever.
Michael was born in August of 1945, and Marcella’s letters to Will became less frequent. She never mentioned her new child and ignored Will’s written queries about him.
“Trouble, trouble,” she wrote Will in October of that year. “John and I are being questioned about a drug robbery on an aircraft carrier. We have been singled out because of Johnny’s addiction. It is a terrible, terrible thing.”
“Trouble, awful trouble from all quarters,” she wrote in November of ’45, three months after the end of the war. It was their last contact for almost six years.
Will and Johnny had run into each other in Chicago late in ’49. Johnny had looked terrible: emaciated, his skin a ghastly gray. Will had sought to comfort him, had told him about the “Order of the Clandestine Heart” to which he belonged. Johnny seemed interested, but became nervous when Will pushed the point.