"They'd have ten long magic days before Ty left, and Annabella, for one, would pretend they?d never end?"

Annabella sat in the big wing chair, smiling and smiling, making small talk in her sweet, childish voice. Ty sat opposite her, smoking a last cigarette, looking at her, memorizing her beautiful fact. And after a while he got up, patted the three nondescript dogs and walked around the living room slowly.

"Nice place you've got here," he told her, and that said it all. That said, "I'll miss the books and the garden and you with lamplight on your hair."

She said, "Yes, We like it," and she grinned at him, knowing that if she didn?t she might cry, and the Powers aren?t? much for tears. They aren't of the old drool school, either of them. The stuff is there, and they both know it, and why talk about it? "I'll be so efficient," she told him. ?I?ll try to keep the bills straight and take care of the garden and answer your mail for you."

"See that you do or you may get yourself fired." They laughed together softly, and in a few minutes he was gone. That was the first goodbye on January morning over two years ago. And it was unbearable, but-to a gal like Annabella-it was a little challenging, too.

She was so very eager to be a good war wife. As soon as she finished "Bomber's Moon" for Twentieth Century, she began her new stat-at-home program. Every day there would be first a long session at the desk. Bills, correspondence. Then straightening up the house and bringing in fresh-cut flowers. A walk with the dogs, must go on just as before, that was her credo. That was what she thought Ty would want, and it was what he thought he wanted himself. The comforting picture of her in their lovely home, managing his affairs, waiting for him.

Tyrone went through boot camp at the Marine Corps base in San Diego. It sounds easy put that way, but if you happen to know a guy who's done it, you know it's not too gay. In addition to the grim business of being a boot, Ty had to fight his way through a few feet of frost. The minute he got there, they began dishing the scuttlebutt."There?s something non-reg about this guy," they'd say. "Why'd he enlist at Headquarters, Washington, D.C./? ?Yeah,? someone else would pitch in, "and how come they hand him four and a half moths inactive duty?"

higher and higher?.

In time, the questions to around to Ty, and they were answered politely and logically. Seems he'd been in Washington on business when he'd been rejected by the Navy for a CPO rating. He was pretty letdown about it. Pretty ashamed because Annabella was with him when the word came. And because he hadn't felt like wasting any time, he?d gone directly to headquarters and enlisted. He was put on inactive duty so that he could finish a Navy film for 20th Century.

The air cleared gradually. Then one day, three weeks after he'd reported at the Recruit Depot, something kind of big happened, and thenceforward Power was rally in. His platoon was mustered, and a famous Marine officer passed the order. "Private Power, front and center."

Ty stepped forward, shaking, saluted and stood at attention as the Colonel enumerated the points of his adaptability one by one, designated him the ?outstanding man n his platoon? and presented him with the coveted certificate attesting to it.

There were four more weeks at San Diego after that, and all the time he saw Annabella just once-at the training base with a couple of hundred other Marines and their gals standing around. There were letters, of course, and the brief unsatisfactory phone calls. But sometimes seven weeks is a very long time. When at last he came home on a pass, he was different. Thinner, quieter.

She showed him how she had kept the books, conducted him on a tour of the house so that he could rave over how well she had persevered the feeling that this was home. He was pleased with her, and he did rave. Then he said, "And are you happy, darling?"

"Oh-happy." She gave a little shrug. Who is happy when she lives with loneliness night and day. "I'm doing all right."

Some more time went by, and Ty was at Officers? Candidate School at Quonset. They threw more information at him during the few months he spent there than most of us could absorb in a lifetime. He found time for letters because he?s the kind of guy who would, no matter what, but they were brief, and even the writing looked tired. When, at last, he got his bars and came home on leave, he was so weary that Annabella cancelled all the festivities their friends had cooked up.

"You will rest," she informed him, looking at the deep circles under his eyes.

After Quonset, Ty, who was a civilian pilot with 115 flying hours, went to Corpus Christi to become a Marine pilot, and Annabella would trek down to see him whenever he was free. There was one weekend when, the minute he saw her, he knew she had something up her sleeve. It was in her eyes and voice. In the grin that kept reappearing even when she thought her fact was in repose.

"Okay," Ty said finally, "Spill it."

?"They want me to do a show, darling-on Broadway." And it turned out that he was just as thrilled as she was.

So late in 1943, Annabella moved out of their dream house that perches on the edge on a canyon in Bel-Air, the beautiful Colonial house that was originally Grace Moore's, and which they re-modeled and re-decorated and loved so dearly. Annabella found homes for their three beloved dogs, left orders that the garden was to be kept exactly as was, Ty having planted so much of it himself, and trekked East, thinking a little sadly of strangers sitting tin their chairs, looking at their pictures.

Broadway, here she comes.

She took an apartment at the Pierre and began rehearsing "Jacobowsky and the Colonel" just at about the same time that Ty finished up at Corpus Christi and got ordered to the Instrument Flight Instructors school at Atlanta, Georgia. That meant six weeks of grueling and complex study, at the end of which time he would not only be able to fly, blind through any kind of weather in single or multi-motored aircraft, but he?d also be able to teach other pilots to do the same thing.

Ty will admit it was plenty rugged, but what really wore him down was the extracurricular stuff. The gals who mobbed him at the Officer's Club, the invitations from organizations to speak, the bid from the Southern Baseball League to throw in the first ball. He finally had to do the same thing Gable had had to do in England. Repair to his bunk every night about nine in order to get a touch of solitude.

Meanwhile, he was driving poor Annabella mad via airmail with his anxiety to get overseas. "Don't talk like that down there," she wrote him frantically. ?Someone might hear you, and you are doing vital work here." Just what he was doing at the point she had no idea, it was all so hush-hush, but if he were doing it, it had to be vital. When her friends quizzed her on his activities, she would say, "Very important secret things. He is one day in St. Louis, one day in Miami. All I know definitely is that he is never in New York."

And then one day he came. He phoned her from Philadelphia to say he'd completed his cross-country check-a flight from Atlanta to Philly on instruments-and had a 48-hour leave. The minute she hung up the phone she began getting ready. She took elaborate pains with her make-up, put on a stunning dress he had never seen, labored over her coiffure. "You would think," she told a friend on the phone that day, ?That I am feeteen, getting ready for my first date.? She thought of all the things she would say to him. Then he knocked at the door, and she opened it, and there were no words at all.

Sitting across from him at diner, she sparkled and scintillated for a while, and then they relaxed into their familiar talk. "Do you like me dress?" she asked him, as she?d asked him so many times before. She should have known better. "Yeah," he told her. "I always loved that job." It wasn't very tactful, considering he'd never laid eyes on it before, but it was so typically Tyronese that she wanted to hug him.

After diner, Annabella dashed to the theater, excited as if it were opening night. And when she came out on the stage, it was as if she were saying her lines for the first time because she was saying them for him. The whole play was fresh and new because she was seeing it through his eyes. After the first act, he was waiting for her in her dressing room. "You couldn't possibly be that good every single night,? he said.

"Not possibly, unless you were there every single night." And they looked at each other and wished it could be.

You talk, you talk, you talk.

Then the impossible thing happened. The phone rang, and Ty's forty-eight was cancelled. He was due to speak before the Associated Women's Clubs of Georgia the next morning. In the Marine Corps, you don't ask why. You just do it.

"Those southern gals-what the heck have they got?" Annabelle tossed it off lightly, the way you toss off anything that matters very much these days.

"Not a thing," Ty told her, and he kissed her quickly and left. He rode all night, asleep on the floor of the plane, and landed in Atlanta at five-thirty. He got a bath, a hurried snooze, and at 11 o?clock the officers called to escort him to where the good ladies were gathered.

"How do you feel?" they asked him.

"Tired," he said wearily.

"Have you any idea what you?re going to say to the Women?s Club?"

"Yes, sir," he said. "I'll do the best I can."

He didn't say what he had every right to say: "Why the hell did they order e out cross-country when they knew they had committed me to her duty? Who balled things up this time?" He said, "Sirs, I'll do the best I can."

They were still pouring it on when he graduated some five days ahead of time. The day for his final flight check came, with rugged Lt. "Pappy" Wade as his wing commander, Lt. Wade had fifteen instructors under his command, fourteen of whom had made formal application with him to make "Power's final check." Wade, as a good Navy man would, gave the job to the one independent Irishman who didn?t give a hoot whether he checked Power out or not. Furthermore, at the last minute a high-ranking officer piled into the plane just to be sure nobody was giving Power anything.

When the ship came down, the word was passed, amidst congratulation, "That guy's hot on instruments. That guy can fly."

While he proceeded from instrument school to operational training, Annabella continued in "Jacobowsky," discovering that acting in the summertime is really earning your living the hard way. You've never been even warm until you?ve been in a backstage dressing room in July. As for the stage itself, complete with lights the tropics are chill by comparison. But if you think she wished herself back in a pink pinafore in Bel-Air, you don?t know Annabella. Next to her family, she loves the stage better than anything in the world. Her letters to Ty were full of small, gay incidents. She told about the celebrities who stayed at her hotel, Arleen Whelan and Carmen Miranda and all the others; her week ends in town, seeking out a breeze; the occasional long week ends in Connecticut when she'd play hookey from the show for one day. She wrote funny little stories about the kids who climbed into the taxi with her to get her autograph; about the time-after one of those long week ends in the country spent sunning and playing tennis and getting rested-that she alighted from the train with a fairly good-sized suitcase and was unable to fine either a porter or a cab. Finally, she walked from 42nd Street to 61st, arriving at her hotel in approximately the same wilted state that she?d left it.

One day she had very great news to tell him. She had met and spoken to General Charles DeGaulle at a dinner in honor at the Waldorf, and the experience had moved her deeply. "Darling," she wrote, "he shook my hand, and I tried to say something to him, but I felt so like weeping." The man was a symbol to her of the new France, the potential liberator of her own family from whom she has had no word in two years, other than the one brief message that her brother was killed. It was a magnificent thing for Annabella, this encounter, reinforcing her deep love for France. "I am like a mother with two children,? she wrote to Ty, "one is ill and weak, and that is France. One is fat and strong, and that is America. I love them both devotedly."

Not long ago, Ty told her that he would have just a few more weeks in the States. She knew it was coming some day, that news, still when it came, it shook her. But they would have ten long days together, and Annabella, for one, would pretend they?d never end.

There were lovely walks along Fifth Avenue. Looking in the windows of Saks, stopping at St. Patrick's, having tea in the leisurely atmosphere of the Plaza. After the theater in the evening, there'd be supper at the Stork or 21, or maybe just a colossal hamburger at one of the joints. And then came the happiest of the whole ten days-when Annabella got word that she was going overseas with the USO in "Blithe Spirit." She and Ty took a walk through Central Park and talked.

Never say good-bye.

"Being so busy over there will help the restlessness," Annabella told him.

"The restlessness?"

"Oh darling, you must see how now I have the jitters. I cannot sit still."

He smiled into the calm, untroubled face she always contrives to present to him. "I'd never have known. You?re a swell actress."

"In the beginning," she mused, "it was sort of exciting and new, being a war wife. It was the same feeling I have at the beginning of a long trip. I felt fresh and alert and as if I were embarking on an adventure. Gradually the scenery has come to look all the same. Gradually the fellow travelers are less stimulating. Now I am at the stage where I am sitting with my hat and coat on. I am looking at my watch?" They stopped walking for a minute and turned to each other. Annabella?s voice dropped to a whisper, "Oh, darling, how I wish we?d get there."

He held her hand tight, and they walked along again talking about where they'd meet the next time. Maybe in London or Paris. Maybe on a little dot in the Pacific. They talked about Annabella's little girl, Anni, and how well she loves her school in Maryland. They talked about what they wanted for Christmas, and eventually, they just talked about the squirrels in the park and the budding trees.

Too soon their ten days ran out, and he was off again, the handsome, dark-haired Marine flyer. Once more the small, lonely word was whispered. "Goodbye, darling."

And this time was the hardest, and yet not the hardest. Because they know that when he comes home next time, they'll never have to say it again.