Evelyn

Evelyn is George Krause’s wife and the lost center of a marriage that continues to haunt him years after it ends. Although she appears chiefly through Krause’s memories rather than as an independently narrated presence, those recollections give her a consequential place in the story: his devotion to duty, his sense of personal failure, and his departure from Southern California are all bound to the relationship. The novel presents both genuine love and painful incompatibility, while making clear that readers encounter Evelyn through the injured, self-questioning perspective of the man who loved her.

Identity and Introduction

Evelyn is in her early twenties when she meets Krause, who is thirty-five and experiencing his first love. He remembers her as brilliant and beautiful, and describes the attachment as unusually overwhelming: loving her brought him an active happiness unlike anything he had known before. Their home in Coronado briefly gives him a sense of roots. The sun-baked beaches and barren hills of Southern California begin to feel like home, a striking contrast with the steel-bounded life of shipboard duty that has otherwise defined him.

This portrait is retrospective and partial. The narrative supplies no sustained account of Evelyn’s independent history or her private thoughts; it shows what Krause recalls, regrets, and believes he failed to communicate. Even his judgment that she could not appreciate the meaning of “Fitted and retained” is filtered through his own experience of that assessment. Her significance therefore lies not in a separately developed public or professional life, but in the intimate relationship through which the story exposes the costs of Krause’s service-bound identity.

Marriage and Conflicting Expectations

The marriage lasted two years, but Krause remembers only a month of happiness, happiness he describes as shamefaced. Some of the early friction concerned the difference between his inward convictions and the habits of the life they shared. Evelyn was amused to discover that her husband sincerely knelt to pray morning and night. She was more irritated when he would not leave a duty aboard his ship to his executive officer in order to attend a party. These remembered incidents are small in themselves, but they disclose a recurring conflict: Krause treats duty as something he cannot delegate, while Evelyn resents the time it takes from their marriage.

Krause does not represent the conflict as hers alone. He believes Evelyn could not understand his commitment, but also concedes that this was partly his failure to explain his feelings and compulsions. He imagines that a more skillful man might have made them clear. The result is a divided account of responsibility: he remains convinced of the necessity of his service, yet recognizes that his inability to communicate helped make that necessity painful at home.

The service’s assessment, “Fitted and retained,” deepens the division. The words are hideous to Krause because they carry a professional judgment that mattered intensely to a man who had lived for duty; he sees Evelyn’s failure to grasp their implications as a failure of sympathy. At the same time, the assessment reinforces his determination to serve. The more he feels misunderstood in the marriage, the more firmly he holds to duty, and that firm resolve in turn makes the marital quarrels more likely. His memories do not establish that Evelyn simply rejected his vocation; they show how differently the two understood its emotional and personal consequences.

Separation and Lasting Injury

Krause recalls quarrels that could drive him into rages, followed by black remorse at what he had said. He is distressed not only by the hurt he may have caused Evelyn, but by his own loss of self-control. His later reflections connect this remorse to a larger suspicion that he was unworthy of the happiness he had briefly found. The pain becomes sharper when Evelyn tells him about a handsome, black-haired young lawyer in San Diego. Krause remembers the news as an agony that exceeded any physical suffering he had experienced, and says that the ensuing formalities could not undo what had already been said and done. The wedding day and wedding night stand in his recollection as the pain’s culminating points.

The memory remains vivid years later. During a dark Atlantic night, fatigue and the low ebb of the midnight-to-four morning watch make thoughts of Evelyn return with renewed force. Krause recalls her with the lawyer and reproaches himself as dull, while acknowledging that she was justified in tiring of him. The account describes the marriage as ending in a way that left him alone with its consequences; it does not grant him a scene of reconciliation or a later conversation with Evelyn that might settle their competing understandings.

Memory, Duty, and Narrative Significance

Evelyn’s absence is made palpable through ordinary sensory reminders. When the crew can smoke again after a night in which a visible match or cigarette might give away their position, the drifting smoke recalls that Evelyn smoked. Krause remembers the faint cigarette aroma and the smallest hint of her perfume when he returned to their little house in Coronado. A permitted cigarette on a warship thus opens, briefly and involuntarily, a passage from present danger to domestic intimacy. The memory is not resolved by the scene; it simply returns, as part of the emotional life Krause carries into his work.

His thoughts about Evelyn also intrude upon moments when he is required to judge his own conduct. After the deaths of men under his command, he sees himself as cold and indifferent and feels a sharp pain at the thought that such coldness must have hurt her warm-heartedness. When considering whether to break radio silence to seek help, he examines whether personal weakness or concern for his career is affecting his decision. The old service judgment remains painful, but he insists it must not determine what he does. In this way, the marriage persists not only as grief but as a measure against which Krause tests his motives and character.

The relationship also explains why Krause requested assignment to the Atlantic seaboard: he could not face the possibility of seeing Evelyn in San Diego or Coronado, or hearing fragments of gossip about her. He recognizes that the move might have kept him away from the danger in which many of his friends died at Pearl Harbor, but this does not console him. In his account, chance and duty shape the course of his life, while the lost marriage marks the place where duty failed to preserve the private happiness he had briefly begun to call home. Evelyn remains absent from the ship and from the present action, yet her remembered presence recurs whenever fatigue, smoke, grief, or self-scrutiny loosens Krause’s control.