Willie Keith and May Wynn

Willie Keith and May Wynn’s relationship moves from an attraction Willie believes he can keep safely temporary to a bond sustained by letters, damaged by his evasions, and reopened by a postwar reunion. Its decisive change is not simply that Willie eventually asks May to marry him: it is that he begins to accept responsibility for what he has done to her, while the ending leaves their shared future uncertain rather than presenting reconciliation as a completed, uncomplicated happy ending.

Meeting and the Unequal Terms of Courtship

Their connection begins around May’s work as a singer. At an audition, a blonde performer struggles through the song, and then a small girl steps forward with an unusually thick arrangement placed on the music rack in front of Willie. Afterward, Mr. Dennis tells Willie to show her around. The two are left alone among the club’s artificial palm fronds and coconuts, an unpromisingly theatrical setting for an encounter that soon becomes personal.

At Luigi’s, where May sits in her damp coat near the open kitchen, Willie stares at her. Learning that her Italian name is Marie Minotti unsettles him in a revealingly double way: he feels relief and pleasure, but also disappointment. He had treated May’s understanding of opera as evidence of refinement, then recategorizes it as an ethnic exception once he knows she is Italian. The discovery lets him make her more familiar and, in his mind, less threatening. He assumes that he would never marry an Italian and relies on crude class and religious stereotypes to keep the possibility of serious attachment at a distance. His attraction is real, but from the beginning he tries to control what it can mean.

The relationship nonetheless continues after May’s club engagement ends. Willie gets the number of the Bronx candy store and keeps seeing her. Their courtship acquires the recognizable pleasures of romance: walks in a park newly green with spring, dinners at expensive restaurants, kisses in taxis, flowers, and sentimental presents, including ivory cats and fuzzy black bears. Willie writes sonnets; May rereads them and cries warmly, moved because no one has written poetry to her before. These gestures create intimacy, but Willie does not mistake them for a promise he must honor.

He privately plans to enjoy the relationship during the four months of midshipmen school and let it end when he goes to sea. He congratulates himself on arranging romance for maximum pleasure and minimum entanglement, and regards his refusal to sleep with May as proof of maturity. The narrative makes the self-protective logic plain: his apparent restraint depends in part on his assumption that May is not someone he will marry. What he calls a wise policy is therefore also a way of avoiding an honest discussion of the future.

Proposals, Conflict, and Separation

The relationship reaches a turning point when Willie asks May to marry him, then presses the question again in another conversation. The proposal does not resolve the unequal expectations that have shaped their courtship. May has wondered whether becoming more acceptable to Willie’s mother might require her to enroll in college. Willie recognizes that she is telling the truth about the importance of his family’s judgment, but can only say that education would make no difference to his mother. He realizes that May is no longer merely a companion for pleasant times: she is challenging his mother’s place in his life. The change leaves him disoriented because it makes visible a conflict he had not wanted to face.

May ends the relationship in blunt, particular terms. She describes herself as a poor Bronx girl with problems enough already: her parents’ fruit store does not pay, one brother is in the Army, and another is an unreliable source of trouble and expense. She wants a chance to earn money and live peacefully, not to add a hopeless romance to her burdens. She calls herself foolish for falling in love with Willie and attacks his emotional immaturity, even teasing him about his hair and his resemblance to a rabbit. Her anger is not a simple denial of affection; it registers the injury of having invested in a future Willie has continued to treat as optional. When she breaks off to ask why he keeps looking at his watch, the detail sharpens the encounter’s imbalance: even in this decisive conversation, his attention is divided.

Afterward, May visits Willie during his confinement at Furnald Hall. She is contrite and cheerful, but she also acts with tact, learning when his mother is likely to visit and staying away on those days. On two occasions she comes to the entrance, sees him talking with his mother, and departs with a discreet wave. The visits become less frequent in February, when May enrolls at Hunter College and has several late classes. Sometimes she cuts a class to see Willie, but she rejects the idea that her education is a sacrifice for him. She says she is doing it for herself, because she would rather not remain ignorant all her life. Her choice gives the relationship a form of change that does not depend on Willie’s approval: May pursues an independent aim even while she remains attached to him.

Willie continues writing affectionate letters and abandons his plan to drop May. He decides she is not too old for him to spend another year or two with, while leaving marriage unresolved as a possibility rather than a commitment. May’s letters are loving and cheerful; she enjoys college despite feeling old among the freshmen, earns high marks, and writes with increasing command of language. Their correspondence preserves closeness, but it also carries the original imbalance forward: Willie permits himself to imagine marriage without deciding on it, while May offers affection without forcing the question he avoids.

Wartime Correspondence and the Cost of Evasion

At sea, Willie turns May into his most powerful link to civilian life. During a long, nightmarish stretch, he spends countless hours daydreaming about her, looking at her photographs, and rereading her letters. The contrast between his remembered civilian world and the minesweeper’s rolling motion, shabby uniforms, binoculars, and the captain’s buzzer makes the letters more than routine communication: they become an imagined refuge from the shipboard life that now feels real. May’s presence reaches him through paper while the physical life they might share remains postponed.

His wartime letters are intensely affectionate, but he edits out references to marriage. As time passes, he suspects more strongly that he will not marry May. He imagines wanting peace and luxury if he returns alive, and fears a difficult marriage with her; at the same time, he uses romantic fantasy to ease the monotony and pain of life under Captain Queeg’s nagging. The letters are consequently evasive and contradictory. Willie knows this, feels guilty, and sends them anyway because the dream they sustain is too precious to relinquish. May’s replies are warm and happy, and she follows his silence on marriage rather than forcing a decision in her letters. That silence enables the correspondence to continue, but it does not make their positions equal: Willie gains comfort while becoming increasingly aware that he is treating her unjustly.

Near the end of the relationship’s long separation, Willie writes a substantial letter and receives no answer. Three months later he writes again, sheepishly allowing for the possibility that the first letter never reached her, but recognizing that silence probably communicates what an answer would have said. He still says he will look for May when he comes home and wants to see her face to face. The hoped-for reunion is now shadowed by the possibility that his earlier indecision has already ended the relationship for her.

Reunion and an Unsettled Promise

After returning, Willie cannot find May. He calls Marty Rubin’s office repeatedly, but the agent is out of town; his mother says nothing about May, and Willie interprets that silence as her assumption that she has won the struggle over the relationship. The search makes the cost of his earlier dependence on letters concrete: the woman who had been continually present in his imagination is now inaccessible, and he has no assurance that she is waiting for him.

When they meet again, Willie asks why she did not answer his letter. May tells him that it was wonderful, that she cried over it and still has it, but that it arrived four months too late. Her response confirms both that the letter mattered and that its timing cannot undo the hurt. Willie accepts the point, then asks her to marry him. He tells her that he loves her, that he deserves the names she has called him, and that what happened was his fault. He imagines they might have had the ideal springtime love found in books and acknowledges that he wrecked it. His appeal is no longer framed as a plan for convenient pleasure: he claims that they belong together and asks her to marry him if she loves him.

May does not immediately accept. She remembers the beating she took from him emotionally and says she had believed their love was dead, even felt glad that it was. Her distress prevents the reunion from erasing the breakup. Willie’s declaration that he loves her even without knowing exactly what she looks like expresses the force of his attachment, but it does not settle what she is ready to give. They kiss again. May says that before, she had imagined wanting Willie’s children, but explains that her feelings about Walter Feather are different and that Willie’s return has thrown her back into confusion. She warns that the renewed relationship would need great care and that he is being hard on her. Affection returns alongside injury, uncertainty, and the reality of another attachment.

Willie promises happiness rather than comfort, explicitly refusing to measure their future by the income he might provide. Later, as brass-band music accompanies the Navy’s ranks along Fifth Avenue, he watches from the crowd’s edge in his heavy bridge coat. He feels no regret at being a spectator; his attention is fixed on the struggle ahead and on making May his wife. He does not know what sort of life they can find together or whether they will be happy, and says that he no longer cares about that uncertainty. The story ends with his determination, not with a wedding or confirmation that May has accepted.

The Relationship’s Narrative Significance

The relationship repeatedly tests whether Willie can treat love as more than a private pleasure arranged around his own convenience. At first he uses class prejudice to rule out marriage while enjoying May’s company; later, he preserves her as an idealized refuge in letters while suppressing the commitment she might reasonably expect. May, by contrast, speaks directly about money, family responsibilities, education, and the cost of waiting. Her decision to attend Hunter College is not offered as a gesture to win Willie’s mother but as a choice for herself, and her refusal to accept the late letter as an instant repair protects the force of her earlier hurt.

Their final exchange therefore changes the balance without resolving every consequence. Willie acknowledges culpability and states a clear intention to marry; May responds with a kiss but also names her pain and the complications of the life she has since entered. The ending gives Willie a new seriousness about commitment, while withholding certainty about the marriage itself. Across clubside flirtation, springtime courtship, wartime letters, silence, and reunion, the relationship is both a source of comfort and a test of whether affection can survive the selfishness that has shaped it.