Hunter College

Hunter College is presented through May Wynn’s experience as a student rather than through an institutional portrait: the novel supplies no campus description or account of the college’s organization. Its importance lies in what May’s enrollment makes visible. While separated from Willie Keith by the war, she returns to education, works hard, and reconsiders her ambitions. The college becomes a setting for her independent development, not simply a backdrop to a romance conducted by letter.

May’s return to study

After Willie’s disciplinary troubles at Furnald Hall, May visits him often, carefully avoiding the days when his mother is likely to be there. In February, her visits grow less frequent because she has enrolled at Hunter College and has several late classes. Sometimes, however, she cuts those classes to see him. Willie is uneasy about her return to school, but May dismisses his concern: “I’m not doing this for you, but for me.” She tells him that their relationship has had one good effect on her: she no longer wants to remain an “ignorant canary” all her life. Her explanation makes the education an explicitly personal choice, even as her affection for Willie continues to shape the circumstances around it.

May’s student life competes with, but does not simply replace, her relationship. She learns to arrange visits around Willie’s mother and occasionally gives up class time to be with him. The tension is small and practical rather than a dramatic break: school claims part of her schedule, while her repeated visits show that she remains attached to him. Willie’s uneasiness, meanwhile, reveals that he is still inclined to measure her choices in relation to himself. May’s insistence that she is studying for her own sake gives the college a significance beyond the couple’s separation.

Work, ambition, and changing plans

May’s return to college entails an opportunity cost. During the summer, Marty Rubin has obtained a midday radio booking for her that could have continued into the autumn and paid a hundred dollars a week. She gives it up to resume her studies. In a letter, she describes how education has altered the ambitions she once held: she had wanted a top salary as a top singer and had looked down on Hunter students who could not earn money. Now she questions whether it makes sense to spend all her days and nights pursuing a salary. She still loves singing and is glad to earn a fair rate at work she enjoys, but she doubts that she has the voice, style, or looks to become a first-rate singer.

Her account is candid rather than triumphant. She jokes that what she wants now is a kindhearted sugar daddy who will help her have a couple of babies and otherwise let her read in peace. The joke registers her uncertainty about how to arrange a future, while the wish to read shows that education has become valuable in itself. The novel does not present Hunter as guaranteeing a career or resolving May’s financial prospects; it shows her testing her assumptions against study and revising what she considers a worthwhile life.

The college in May’s letters

May’s letters give the reader the main evidence of her student experience. She says that her marks are high, though she feels like a grandmother among the freshmen. Her writing improves month by month, a change Willie notices in the letters he receives. Her account of reading Dickens’s Dombey and Son makes study concrete: she stays up all night over the book for a report that is not due until the following week, then jokes about the dark bags under her eyes. The letter’s playful tone coexists with a clear picture of sustained effort.

School also shapes the subjects and emotional texture of her correspondence. May writes about reading, work, and changing ambition, but she remains attentive to the war and to Willie’s whereabouts. After expecting that Italy’s surrender might bring him home, she fears that the war will drag on and admits that she cares most about the Pacific news. She is glad, though she calls the feeling potentially unpatriotic, that Willie has not yet joined the Caine. Hunter College therefore enters the letters not as an escape from wartime uncertainty but as one part of a life May is continuing to build within it.

Narrative significance

The college’s role is defined by contrast: Willie’s life is increasingly governed by naval assignments and wartime danger, while May’s letters describe classes, books, marks, and reconsidered ambitions. Their separation gives the correspondence its form, but her enrollment prevents May from existing only as the person waiting for Willie. She maintains her affection for him while making a choice that she identifies as her own, and the college supplies the setting for that distinction.

That distinction remains unsettled rather than complete. May sometimes sacrifices class time to visit Willie, worries about the danger he faces, and continues to write lovingly. At the same time, she relinquishes a potentially lucrative radio booking to return to school and takes satisfaction in reading and academic progress. Hunter College thus marks a modest but consequential shift in her self-understanding: May’s future is no longer described solely in terms of performance, salary, or a relationship, but also in terms of learning and a life she is trying to define for herself.