December 1941

December 1941 is the pivot on which Noah Calhoun's young adulthood turns. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor draws America into the global conflict, and Noah, who has been working for Morris Goldman in New Jersey, walks into his boss's office the following month to announce his intent to enlist. The war that Goldman had long predicted has finally arrived, and Noah's decision sets in motion a chain of events that will carry him through North Africa and Europe, transform his financial circumstances, and ultimately bring him back to the house he had once dreamed of owning.

Causes and Background

By December 1941, Noah Calhoun is twenty-six years old and has spent nearly a decade trying to forget Allie Nelson. After their summer romance ended in 1932, he left New Bern for Norfolk, then moved to New Jersey, where he found work in a scrap yard owned by Morris Goldman. Over the following years he rose to run the entire operation, brokering deals and managing a staff of thirty, and the yard became the largest scrap-metal dealer on the east coast. Yet the memory of Allie never left him. He wrote to her monthly for two years without receiving a single reply—letters that, unknown to him, were being intercepted by her mother—and eventually forced himself to accept that the summer was all they would ever share. A trip to Winston-Salem in search of her yielded nothing; her father had left the tobacco firm and no forwarding address existed. The Depression had made earning a living in New Bern almost impossible, and the war now offered a different kind of escape.

Enlistment and the War Years

Noah enlists in January 1942, returning briefly to New Bern to say goodbye to his father before heading to training camp. While there, he receives a letter from Morris Goldman thanking him for his work, together with a certificate entitling him to a small percentage of the scrap yard if it is ever sold. Goldman writes, "I couldn't have done it without you. You're the finest young man who ever worked for me, even if you aren't Jewish." Noah then spends the next three years with Patton's Third Army, tramping through deserts in North Africa and forests in Europe with thirty pounds on his back, his infantry unit never far from action. He watches friends die around him and sees some of them buried thousands of miles from home. The war ends in Europe, then a few months later in Japan. Just before his discharge, Noah receives a letter from a lawyer in New Jersey representing Morris Goldman's estate. Goldman had died a year earlier, the business had been sold, and Noah is given a cheque for almost seventy thousand dollars.

Consequences and Aftermath

The windfall from Goldman's estate allows Noah to return to New Bern and buy the plantation-style house he had admired as a teenager—the same house where he had once brought Allie, looked past the decay, and told her he would one day own it and fix it up. He brings his father around to see the property and point out the changes he intends to make, but his father seems weak, coughing and wheezing. Noah is concerned, but his father insists it is only the flu. Less than one month later, his father dies of pneumonia and is buried next to his wife in the local cemetery. Noah spends the next eleven months and a small fortune restoring the house, working day and night, slaving so hard he barely has time to catch his breath. A reporter from the Raleigh paper calls it one of the finest restorations he has ever seen. Yet the house is haunted by the ghost of Allie's memory: he sees her in Fort Totten Park, on the porch where he sits with his guitar, everywhere he looks. The war has taken his youth, his friends, and his father, but it has also given him the means to build the life he once imagined—a life that still waits, fourteen years later, for the woman who left him.