Joe Williams and Del

Joe Williams and Del’s marriage briefly seems recoverable when Joe returns to Norfolk intending to leave the sea and build a settled life with his wife. But their reunion exposes a widening gap: Joe wants financial stability, domestic closeness, and a family, while Del works long hours, depends on other people’s company, and resists the future he imagines. Their affection repeatedly draws them back together, yet suspicion, money troubles, and conflict over her wartime activities finally end in Joe’s departure.

Marriage Under Strain

While Joe is stranded in Boston without money, he writes to Del every day and longs to earn enough to see her. Her replies seem cool to him. She is worried about paying the rent and buying spring clothes, and fears that people at her office would disapprove if they learned she was married. The exchange establishes the material pressures on the couple as well as the secrecy and emotional distance already forming between them: Joe understands himself as a husband waiting to return, while Del is trying to manage a life in which his absence is a practical and social complication.

Joe signs on as a quartermaster aboard the Callao, expecting a short trip and the wages that would let him come back with money. After a much longer journey, the Gold Shell brings him to Perth Amboy in late October. He draws his back pay and takes the first train connections toward Norfolk. Tired of shipboard life, he tells himself he is finished with the sea and can at last settle down to married life. With three hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, he imagines affection and even the possibility of having a child. His return is therefore more than a visit: he invests it with a plan for a shared domestic future.

Reunion and Unequal Expectations

Norfolk has changed in the wartime atmosphere, and Joe is uneasy because he has not heard recently from Del. He still has a key to their apartment but knocks before entering. The untidy rooms and signs that people have gathered there unsettle him, though he tries to explain them as evidence of Del’s sociability. When she returns, she embraces him and introduces an army lieutenant who is leaving overseas the next day and had planned to take her to dinner. Joe manages to greet him, but the meeting makes the distance between Joe’s imagined homecoming and Del’s active social world immediately visible.

After the officer leaves, Del asks about Joe’s work prospects and whether he has obtained a second mate’s ticket. She says she wishes he could earn more, since she dislikes sharing the apartment with another woman but needs to do so to meet the rent. Joe nevertheless remembers this first evening as a moment of real happiness together. The warmth is genuine, but it does not resolve the conditions pressing on them: Joe has returned without a settled job, and Del’s work and arrangements have continued in his absence.

The Repeating Cycle

Joe finds little to occupy him while Del works in an office by day and at the Red Cross canteen in the evening. She often returns after he has gone to bed, sometimes accompanied by an army officer. Joe lies awake imagining that the men are intimate with her, then confronts her when she comes in. Their arguments turn on competing interpretations of her work: Del says he does not understand her and regards his interference as unpatriotic, while Joe experiences her absences and the officers’ attention as threats to their marriage. At times they reconcile, and Del’s tenderness restores his sense of closeness; the same pattern of absence, suspicion, quarrel, and renewed affection then begins again.

On Sunday mornings, when Del is too tired to get up, Joe makes breakfast and they eat together in bed. These domestic intervals offer a glimpse of the companionship he wants. Del tells him she loves him and urges him to find a good shore job and earn enough for her to stop working. But she also recounts the interest of a wealthy captain who wanted her to divorce Joe and marry him, and of a well-paid office manager who offered her a pearl necklace, which she says she declined because it was not right. Such stories leave Joe feeling diminished rather than reassured. He tries to discuss having children, but Del reacts negatively, making clear that their hopes for married life do not align.

Joe’s efforts to find employment fail: he comes close to getting a foreman’s position at a Newport News shipyard repair shop, but another applicant takes it. Social outings do not help. Del moves freely among the officers, while Joe feels snubbed by the group and becomes increasingly alienated. He begins drinking more often, and Del is angry when she finds him drunk; Joe, by then, says he no longer cares. The failed job search deepens the imbalance between Del’s working life and Joe’s wish to provide a stable home, while his drinking further damages their already volatile life together.

Confrontation and Separation

The marriage breaks at night on the street. After drinking, Joe sees Del walking with an army officer and observes them stopping in dark doorways to embrace. He approaches them under a streetlight and strikes the officer. Del responds by threatening to have Joe arrested for insulting the uniform and assault. She calls him a slacker and condemns him for staying at home while other men fight overseas. Joe sobers enough to help the officer stand, tells them both to go to hell, and leaves before the officer can respond.

Joe goes home, packs his suitcase, and leaves. He seeks help from Will Stirp, who lends him money to travel to New York; Joe later tells people he is going to see his sister and try for a second mate’s ticket. The departure follows not a single misunderstanding but an accumulation of failed expectations: Joe has not secured the shore work he hoped would support them, Del has not embraced his plan for children and domestic life, and his jealousy has become physical confrontation. Her appeal to wartime duty and his sense of marital betrayal leave no shared account of what fidelity or responsibility requires. In the evidence of this episode, the relationship ends in separation, with no reconciliation shown.