Lanux, Eyrie de. "You Can't Know Anything About It."

Lanux's brief, two-part short story is set in New York City during the early days of World War 2 and focuses on young Mary Caruthers, a female volunteer at a rest-and-relaxation club for merchant mariners. Her primary duties include pouring out generous cups of tea for the weary men, filling in as an occasional fourth at bridge and, perhaps most important, chatting with the mariners. We encounter Mary on her first day at the club, and her attempts at making polite chit chat are somewhat forced, particularly in light of the grim wartime stories of survival at sea after the torpedoing of their ships that many of the men share among themselves and with her. Mary meets a young mariner at the club that day, has a brief relationship with him, and, in the second part of the story - set a couple of weeks later - is in a waterfront bar with him just before his departure back to sea. Though the mariner (Eddie) has enjoyed his time with Mary, he matter-of-factly lets her see that the sea is his first priority, though he at least promises to try and stay in touch with her. Lanux's story is not an upbeat one and doesn't conclude on either an optimistic or patriotic note. This makes it far more interesting to the modern reader than the typical (and often sentimental) short stories of the era which were then flooding mainstream mass circulation magazines such as Collier's, Liberty or The Saturday Evening Post.