But there was also, of course, the other war, the war in the Pacific, a landscape that felt different from us, separate from us, more savage, more other. The Midway Atoll, the long bloodbath of Guadalcanal, the Battles of Tenaru and the Eastern Solomons and ­Matanikau. And so Tarawa and Makin and Eniwetok. And so Saipan and Angaur and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And so ­Hiroshima. And so Nagasaki. We did not feel the Japanese dead. We would have dropped a thousand atomic bombs on every one of their cities and we would have watched them become ash over and over because they had taken our children, our boys, and they would pay as long as there was yet breath in our lungs. Jimmy Wilson’s end came on the island of Iwo Jima in the shadow of the great rock hulk of Mount Suribachi, a bullet passing through his chest so that he just had time to look down to the torn front of his uniform shirt where the blood was already pumping from the pressure of the final beat of his heart. He died facedown in the sand, and if he cursed his killers or thought of his bosom friend or of a girl or of his country or of anything at all, I do not know. What I know is that he died like so many others on some island he had never heard of and did not care about, fighting an enemy he did not know and could not understand. Seven thousand in February of 1945. Millions more in the years since. And millions more to come.

Mrs. Wilson and I reached what turned out to be a café, a quaint, box-like room on Auburn’s main street, a roadway lined with old-fashioned businesses from a different time, redolent of nostalgia for an era that likely never existed at all. Memory ­filtered out the horrors so that what remained was that gauzy yellow light and the feeling that there had been, once upon a time, a period in which life was better than it would ever be again, the children respectful of their elders, the fruit heavy on the boughs, the rules just and easy to follow.

What the street stood for, at least for me, was something that had come up again and again whenever I spoke to anyone about 1945. They did not remember Ray Takahashi but what they did recall was an abiding sense of joy, for the war was over and the whole country was jubilant with success, with victory, especially in the small communities up and down what had been the old highway. There had been parades here in Auburn, likely on the very street where Mrs. Wilson had directed me drive her Pontiac, parades meant to celebrate the victors, spaced in ranks and led by open-topped cars filled with waving girls and square-jawed older men, their hair shorn to stubble as if in tribute to those discharged veterans.