Willie Keith and May Wynn's estrangement and unresolved reconciliation

Willie Keith and May Wynn’s estrangement turns on a painful imbalance: Willie continues to treat their love as recoverable, while May has had to live with his absence and has formed a life that no longer fits his assumptions. Their reunion brings a renewed proposal and a kiss, but not a promise. The novel ends with Willie determined to make May his wife and May still withholding an answer, so reconciliation remains a hope rather than an accomplished fact.

Letters, Silence, and the Deferred Answer

At Okinawa, after taking command from Tom Keefer, Willie writes May that a long letter sent three months earlier has gone unanswered. He cannot quite accept that it failed to reach her; if she never received it, he asks her to let him know so he can write again. But he also acknowledges the possibility that she read it and that her silence is itself an answer. Even while recognizing that possibility, he says he will look for her when he comes home and wants to speak face to face. The letter therefore holds two incompatible expectations together: May may have ended the relationship, yet Willie still imagines that a meeting could settle what correspondence has left unresolved.

In the same note, Willie tells May that he has come through the war unscratched and believes he has at last been somewhat useful. That change in his account of himself matters to his appeal: he is no longer writing only as the inexperienced young man whose future was shaped by other people’s expectations. Yet the letter does not establish that May has received or accepted a new proposal. At the end of his service, Willie has still been unable to find her. He has called Marty Rubin’s office repeatedly, but the agent is away; his search yields no answer from May and no reliable account of where she is. The long silence has thus become not only a question of love but a practical separation, with Willie unable to know what May’s life now contains.

Return and the Meeting with May

When Willie returns to the United States, Mrs. Keith meets him after the decommissioning of the USS Caine. She has driven to Bayonne every day since the ship arrived and assumes that taking him home is the natural next step. Willie resents the return to maternal care, thinking of her as having driven him first to the Navy and now back home. His search for May has failed, and he reads his mother’s silence about her as confidence that she has prevailed in keeping them apart. That interpretation is wrong: Mrs. Keith avoids the subject because she fears her son’s changed, adult presence and does not want to provoke him into declaring his independence.

On the drive, Willie brings May up himself. He tells his mother that he has tried to locate her and that he wrote in June asking her to marry him, but received no answer. His question gives the unanswered letter a sharper meaning: this was not simply a missed exchange but an explicit offer of marriage. The text does not explain what prevented May from answering or provide a full account of the intervening months. Instead, Willie’s report of silence is followed by the encounter in which May can finally tell him what the letter meant to her and why its arrival cannot restore the relationship to its former condition.

May says she received the letter, cried over it, and still keeps it. She also tells Willie that it came four months too late. Her response reverses his assumption that silence meant only rejection: the letter mattered deeply to her, but the timing had consequences that feeling alone cannot undo. When Willie asks whether she is engaged or married, May looks away rather than giving him an immediate answer. Her hesitation leaves the nature of her present commitment unclear, but establishes that Willie cannot simply resume their old courtship as if nothing had happened.

Proposal, Hesitation, and the Unsettled Future

Willie presses the question of whether she will marry him again. May challenges the speed with which he seems to have absorbed the news and suspects that he is acting nobly only to retreat later. Willie answers by accepting blame: he says that what he told her in the letter still stands, that the damage to their earlier love was his doing, and that he believes they belong together. He takes her hand and asks her to marry him. His appeal is both a declaration of continuing love and an admission that he cannot reclaim the springtime ideal he says he wrecked.

May’s response is not a simple refusal. She stands, pushes aside Willie’s coat, clings to him, and kisses him. Against that physical intimacy, she speaks of the future they once imagined: before, she thought she wanted Willie’s children. Now she does not feel the same about Walter Feather, and she struggles to say what that difference means. She warns that Willie would never forget Walter and that she would not either, and says that she had been emotionally back in one piece until the encounter reopened the wound. The kiss therefore confirms desire without erasing injury; her words insist that their shared past and her life since then remain present between them.

When Willie asks whether she was happy, May answers in terms of having a broken leg and begins to cry. The exchange offers no clean account of her happiness with Walter or a decisive comparison between the two men. Instead, May’s tears make visible the strain of being asked to choose while still confronting what she lost. She agrees to lunch, but when Willie asks about the following night, she tells him not to press her or build a future in his head. She says the conversation has gone wrong, feels unreal to her, and proves nothing. Her agreement to see him again keeps the possibility open; her warning prevents that possibility from being mistaken for consent to marry.

An Ending Without a Promise

Willie tells May that he believes they can be happy, distinguishing happiness from comfort or financial security. But the certainty belongs to him: May answers that he says so and agrees only to see him the next day. Their exchange leaves the central question unsettled. Willie has moved from treating her silence as the end to treating their meeting as the beginning of a renewed effort; May has acknowledged her love and pain without granting him the future he requests.

After leaving, Willie notices May watching him while he speaks with Walter Feather, then goes out to Fifth Avenue as Navy ranks march past. The parade’s music makes him straighten, but he feels no regret at standing among the spectators rather than marching with them. His attention is fixed on the struggle ahead: he intends to make May his wife, although he does not know what life they could build or whether they would be happy. The closing resolve is therefore forceful but not reciprocal. The narrative ends on Willie’s decision to pursue marriage, not on May’s acceptance; the reunion has reopened their relationship without resolving it.