【明報專訊】Sometime during the war, which is to say sometime in the 1940s, dressed in her very best mauve-coloured outfit, and carrying in her purse, her wallet and even in her shoes, all the money she had been able to scrape together since meeting Matt the previous winter, Vivian boarded a train in Milwaukee bound for the unknown: an army camp in the middle of Georgia. Matt was about to be sent overseas to help rid the world of Nazi tyranny, and he'd sent her a money order to buy a round-trip rail ticket. In the letter, he had asked Vivian to come to Georgia to marry him. Knowing it would be more than she could spend, she didn't even ask about the price of a seat in the sleeping car section. As it turned out, her reclining seat was comfortable enough.