inflicting thousands of casualties on the Nazi army. In its record 183 straight days in combat, including the Battle of the Bulge, the unit suffered a heavy casualty rate. A total of 36 men were killed and 260 were wounded; 71 tanks were lost.
During Nicky’s tour of duty, flying shrapnel pierced his leg and hand. He was shipped back to Lake Placid for thirty days of recovery. Leaving Buffalo and my brother, I went to New York City to be with Nicky and his parents until he recovered and we could make some plans. His father, J. Frederic Davis, a high-spirited, slightly built man who smoked cigars continuously, met me at the airport and took me to his family’s small apartment in Brooklyn. At the apartment, Nicky’s mother, Helen, was waiting to meet me for the first time.
“Now I can die happy,” were her first words to me. “Nicky is happy.”
The Davises had adopted Nicky when he was nine months old. His natural mother was a wealthy, White woman from upstate New York. His father was the family chauffeur. Nicky’s natural grandparents forced his biological mother to take him to Spence’s Foundling Home; from there he was adopted by the Davises.
My in-laws, who doted on Nicky, accepted me graciously and I stayed in New York after Nicky returned to duty. My father-in-law explained, apologetically, that he had lost money during the Depression and wouldn’t be able to help us financially very much. Although I appreciated his thoughtfulness, I never counted on getting assistance from my in-laws.
I knew I would have to work, and took the first position I was offered. The job was at the home of an Englewood, New Jersey family who needed someone to care for their infant grandchild. The room they gave me was small and dirty. When I arrived, the grandmother just handed me the baby and left. I had never had full responsibility for a baby before. I did the best I could, but the child cried all the time. Feeling lonely, I made friends with the family’s laundress, Della Powell, a stocky, mahogany-complected woman from Athens, Georgia. Della was good-humored and she let me sit in the basement with her, while the baby napped, as she ironed and talked nonstop.
On Sunday, after I had been there a week, Della invited me to church. I asked my employer for my pay and then took a cab. As I sat through the service, tears rolled down my cheeks. I’m sure the other worshippers thought the preacher must be delivering a powerful sermon to touch me so. The truth is, I was so discouraged by the situation I was in, I couldn’t help crying.
After the service, Della invited me home for dinner. She made fried chicken, greens, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes, apple cobbler, hot rolls, and iced tea. I hadn’t tasted food like that since I had left home! We visited for the rest of the afternoon. When I started to leave, she could see how sad I was.
“Georgia, you don’t have to go back there. You can stay here with me.” Quitting my job, I accepted her offer, staying with her until I got another job in a sewing factory.
On that job I learned to use the serger, a machine that over-stitched the edges of the seams on women’s blouses and pajamas to keep them from raveling. After working my usual three months, I began searching for something that paid better. I heard that Wright Aeronautical Corporation in Paterson, New Jersey was hiring and I got a job there checking defense items as they were sent down the conveyor belt. They paid me a decent wage and I stayed until the war ended and Nicky came home.
Nicky and I were excited about being together again, but we found that we had become strangers after so much time apart. He drank more than I remembered and kept a gun by our bed; his war experiences seemed to be preying on his mind, but I didn’t know how to assess his behavior. After all, we had only spent two weeks together as husband and wife. We both worked patiently at getting to know one another again.
Nicky’s father got him a job as a messenger on Wall Street and I became a counter clerk with Chock Full O’Nuts, working at whichever of their twenty-three stores in the New York area needed me.
As a native New Yorker, Nicky knew lots of exciting places in the City; he wanted to show me all of them. To my delight, we began spending our weekends in Manhattan. We would go to the Savoy Ballroom where big-name musicians like Erskine Hawkins would play. We would jitterbug all night every Friday, stay over, and go to the Paramount Theatre on Saturdays, where they always had a good stage show. We’d often go to the Dickie Wells club for a quiet evening of drinking and dancing. Like many young people at the time, we were enjoying ourselves without giving much thought to the future. After a while working at dead-end jobs, though, our thoughts turned to more serious things.
We decided it was time to start a family. After months of trying to conceive, and still not becoming pregnant, I went with Nicky to see a doctor. He tested us both, then said that we would probably never have children. The news was a blow. Even though I hadn’t wanted a large family, I had hoped to have at least one or two children. Nicky consoled me in his gentle way. “We still have each other,” he said. Nevertheless, for many years afterward I’d felt an overwhelming sadness whenever I picked up some other woman’s baby.
Nicky was an easy-going person who enjoyed simple pleasures and liked to dress in nice clothes. At home he would wear a velvet smoking jacket or silk pajamas. When we made love, however, it was only pleasant, not passionate. More often than not, our lovemaking was at my initiation. At first, because of the rape I had suffered as a teenager and the sexual assaults of my first husband, I appreciated Nicky’s lack of interest in sex. However, as I matured and my own sexuality developed, I knew there was something lacking. Looking back, I can see that we were not sexually compatible and that this was a major factor in the failure of our marriage.
In our family, it had always been understood that we would help each other. When my brother Phillip called to ask if he could come to Englewood and live with us after he graduated high school, I said, “Sure, come on.” Phillip got a job in a bakery, starting work at 4 A.M. and sometimes walked the twenty miles to Hackensack where the bakery was located.
For a while, things seemed to be going smoothly, but then Nicky began to drink more, and his once even disposition began to change. He was unhappy with his job as a messenger on Wall Street and decided to open a small, storefront restaurant in Harlem with a friend of his who cooked. It was a bad time to go into the restaurant business; meat was hard to get and sugar was rationed. I supported his efforts as best I could. Phillip and I helped out, but after a few months, the restaurant flopped.
Later that year, Mom and Pop came to visit us in Englewood. They stayed for a week and it was a very happy time for me. We took in all the sights and went to dinner at Nicky’s parents’ house in Brooklyn. I wanted to give them their first subway ride, but I was so excited that I got us lost two or three times before we got to the 168th Street Bridge where we could catch the bus over to Jersey. Having them with us, I realized how much I had missed Mom and Pop. After they left I started talking to Nicky about moving back to Kentucky. I thought I was homesick. Looking back now, I know the longing I felt was not for home, but instead for some direction in our lives, for some goals to work toward. Homesickness is a longing for what you once had and left; I was longing for something I had not yet found.
Nicky didn’t like Kentucky, but he saw how much I had my heart set on the move, so he agreed. My brother Phillip was married by this time; he and his wife, Rose Marie, decided to go back to Louisville with us. I sold all our furniture, except a new mattress set, to our landlady for twenty-five dollars. We tied the mattresses to the top of Nicky’s Ford, put the luggage in the trunk, and the four of us, with our two cats, piled into the car and left for Louisville. After traveling for five full days, we pulled up in front of our parents house, looking like a bunch of vagabonds. They welcomed us.
Nicky went to work for International Harvester. However, the employees went on strike twice during the first year he was there. Nicky became so discouraged, he reenlisted in the Army. He was sent to Fort Knox, thirty miles from Louisville. During this period, I was hired by Enro
