Willie proposes to May Wynn

Willie proposes to May Wynn in an eight-page letter written aboard the damaged USS Caine after a kamikaze attack makes him fear he will never see her again. The proposal reverses his earlier decision to end their relationship: he acknowledges that he misjudged her, asks her to marry him when he next comes home, and imagines a future in which he teaches rather than returns to nightclub work. He sends the letter into a long wait for an answer, so the gesture is a decisive change in his intentions, not yet a reconciliation.

The crisis that changes his perspective

The proposal follows an encounter with a kamikaze pilot in late June 1945. As the plane bears down on the USS Caine, Willie watches it approach and drops to the deck. Before it hits, he is overwhelmed by regret that he did not marry May. Since jilting her, he had tried to dismiss his recurring thoughts of her as weakness; in the immediate prospect of death, his longing feels instead like a truth he can no longer evade. The attack supplies no certainty about what will happen to the ship or to him, but it changes the weight he gives to the relationship.

The letter also follows a formative period in which Willie’s experience has repeatedly unsettled his assumptions about himself. At Kwajalein he had watched the bombardment with detached enjoyment, treating the destruction as spectacle; in the typhoon he had been reduced to a frightened man clinging to a telephone jackbox while Steve Maryk tried to turn the ship into the wind and sea. These episodes do not themselves constitute the proposal, but they frame its reversal: the young officer who could mistake danger for entertainment and regard emotional attachment as weakness now recognizes what he fears losing.

The letter and its admission

Willie writes late at night in the ship’s office, with the USS Caine alongside the tender Pluto for repairs. He shuts the door, turns on a yellow desk lamp, and types steadily in the quiet, interrupted only by the muffled creaking of the fenders. Although tattered pornography lies in the paper drawer, he is amused that he has no desire to stop and read it. The scene gives the proposal a practical, private setting: this is not a speech delivered to May, but a letter composed aboard a damaged ship and entrusted to the slow passage of the mail.

He begins by comparing the letter’s emotional urgency to the repeated experience of being shaken awake aboard ship. After five months without writing, he says he has at last been shaken out of his sleep about May, and hopes he has not waited too long. He does not disguise the likely shock of hearing from him or assume that she still cares for him. Instead, he acknowledges that he had decided to break cleanly rather than continue correspondence that might torment her, and names the arrogance beneath that decision: he had considered May not good enough for him.

His central request is direct: he wants May to be his wife and asks whether she will marry him the next time he comes home, whether the war is still underway or has ended. He presents his love as enduring and traces it back to their first meeting at Luigi’s. His account is candid rather than ceremonious: physical attraction began the attachment, but he also recognizes May’s intelligence and character, and admits that the disparity he once imagined between them was inverted. He now regards her as stronger, wiser, and better than he is, and understands his former concern with marrying into a supposedly good family as snobbery, not a sound reason to reject her.

A different future for Willie

The proposal is tied to a plan for life after the war. If the war ends soon, Willie hopes to return to school for a master’s degree, perhaps continue to a doctorate if his finances allow, and seek a college teaching job, preferably in a small town. He does not expect to rely on Mrs. Keith’s money. Instead, he thinks Dr. Keith’s insurance policy could support two or three years of study, supplemented by tutoring or other work and possibly government assistance for veterans. He also remembers that Dr. Keith had indirectly encouraged him to marry May, saying that his son had found something wonderful.

Willie’s sense of vocation has sharpened during his service as executive officer aboard the USS Caine. He describes running Armed Forces Institute courses for the sailors and finding particular satisfaction in helping them begin subjects that interest them, advising them as they study, and watching them improve. Teaching, he concludes, suits him. By contrast, he doubts that his piano playing amounts to more than a parlor trick and rejects the prospect of returning to the repetitive nightclub life he had known. The proposal therefore joins two decisions: to choose May again and to imagine a civilian identity that does not depend on his former ambitions or social pose.

Revision, mailing, and unresolved answer

Willie reads the letter perhaps twenty times, cutting phrases and inserting sentences before typing a clean copy. At four in the morning, he sees how it may strike May: astonishing, abject, wild, and babbling, yet true. He cannot make it dignified, because the situation itself is undignified to him; he is returning to a woman he jilted. He relies on the memory of their last kiss to believe she may still love him, but that belief is not the same as an answer from her.

He seals the proposal, puts it in the ship’s mailbox, and goes to sleep expecting a long interval before the letter can travel halfway around the world and a reply make the same journey back. The ending leaves the relationship suspended between his newly clarified choice and May’s unknown response. In that delay, the proposal records a genuine change in Willie while withholding the reassurance that the change will be reciprocated.