Eddie Jr. came back, obedient but complaining. He stopped, shocked, when the beam of the headlights caught his father’s red-rimmed and swollen eyes. All the while they had been sitting here, shooting the abstract shit, sardonically debating one another, Pop had been crying.
“Son, I happened to read, only this morning, that native North Americans broke the necks of their dying.”
Tit for Tat
My father spoke to us only in favorite sayings, a stable of workhorses saddled up to fit any occasion. The common ones are still with me, as familiar as the alphabet. We could never be sure just what fresh derangement he might squeeze out of the overused maxims, what foreign situation he might wedge them into. He let them mean everything and its opposite. All we knew in advance was that whenever the world threatened to do us in, whenever we most needed him to assure us that life could still be reinvented, he would instead resort to one favorite saying or another. For the longest time, I assumed that all fathers did. After all, as everybody knew, all Indians walked in single file.
I now know that he thought such familiarities would be more useful to us in the long run than mere care. Looking back, I see how he wanted us to love his mysterious homilies the way he loved them. He meant them to substitute for him, the distant fellow lost in an abstraction. But we couldn’t and they didn’t. Not at the time. I did not even understand what they meant, what the man was all along announcing, or what he was up against until after he was dead.
My father’s real imprisonment hid in those single-file Indians, in “There’s more to any of us than any suspects,” and in a few others. Alongside those two, he favored “Take all that you want, but eat all that you take,” a metaphor, by turns, for the need for foresight, the indivisibility of means and ends, and the impossibility of true satisfaction. Then there was the paradoxical “We sometimes need coaxing to act on our own.” Whenever he resorted to this one, I would throw back “Tell us how free we are, Pop. Tell me how free I am.”
The phrase of his that most haunted me when I was young, that seemed the most beautiful and inscrutable, that came closest to pulling me beyond the barricade into the cell where he wasted away, was “If you bail out the tide with a twopenny pail, then you and the moon can remove a great deal.” As mysterious and poetic as the ubiquitous couplet was, I never once guessed until the repetitions ended that Pop’s enemy was necessity, and what, if anything, the private citizen could do to spite it.
I recall his most urgent one: I would break an anniversary vase, or my sister would despair over headlines, or our mother would go to pieces at the old man’s latest raging fever, and he would say, from his half-coma, “Suppose the world were already lost.” Suppose it is, because it is. I never took this advice, I never bothered to suppose while he was still living, because I always thought he used this most crucial of all his phrases as a way to evade the camp of conscience we are all thrown into. Just the opposite. “Suppose the world were already lost.” Somehow Dad understood that forsaking everything was the only chance we had of saving what we cared for.
But the aphorism that blew the man open for me, the phrase that gave me a foot into the barred gate, burned into my memory through Pop’s thousand reiterations, was “Fate is the stuff we stick in the time capsule.” His favorite variant was “This place is how we got here.” While he lived, saying it every chance he got, all the line ever did was annoy me. But when, days after he left for good, I heard him repeat it one last time, I finally understood that he had been begging history’s pardon.
God knows, he’d given us his capsule’s inventory often enough. I still hear him tell the whole family, assembled at dinner, how in the spring of 1944, a shopgirl in Saddle River Township, New Jersey, had her first look at history. He described her periodic sweep past the drugstore’s magazine racks, doing her bit, in the words of the trade, to reduce shrinkage, waging hopeless war against deterioration of store stock, preserving margin from shopkeepers’ plagues. He had seen her countless times, on untouched afternoons, patrolling the magazine section to chase away those starstruck, fact-starved, and surreptitious browsers who even today, when current events can be had for free, sneak all the news that fits into a few-minute cram.
On that afternoon’s rounds, the shopgirl found, according to Dad’s version, two half-pints who pealed out of the store at her approach and a debutante who, caught red-handed in a brief fantasy of discovery in a soda shoppe in Southern Cal, guiltily slid closed the book of Life and moved on to Cosmetics. But in addition to these three regulars, she came across something she had not bargained for: a boy-man, just old enough for the service, looking over a weekly picture magazine and weeping.
I can no more imagine my father crying than I can imagine how saving toothpaste tubes could defeat the Nazis. But the boy with the picture magazine was my father, the same man who had to assume the world was lost to love it. My mistake, repeated each time my father told the story, was never connecting the two. The shopgirl had a similar problem. Not knowing how else to respond, and washed in guilt as if she were the cause of the crisis, she offered, “It’s okay, mister,” although she knew it was not okay, either with Management or with the diminutive Mister she meant to comfort.
Choked speechless, the boy showed her, by explanation, the magazine he illegally browsed. She looked obediently, but could not make out which of the stories on the proffered page caused him to break down. I have since looked up a copy of the same magazine spread. I can see her eliminating the pictorial on a nationwide scrap-rubber drive as devoid of intrinsic emotion. Similarly, a brief photo-biography of a one-armed major-league ballplayer, although fascinating, lacked the necessary pathos to reduce even a fan to tears. Down on the lower left of page 17, a detailed account of the immense jump in the cost of living, while disturbing, could not have brought on such anguish.
Process of elimination left only one picture on the two-page spread that could account for the fellow’s public sorrow. She studied the holdout, a two-inch-by-two-inch grainy black-and-white snapshot of the body of a young Army Air Corps pilot being removed from the wreckage of a fluke accident near Brownsville, Texas.
She quizzed the boy with compassion, seeing his face for the first time. It crossed her mind to tell him that, although against the rules, he could browse as long as he liked. A miniature oral seizure told her he was trying to say something. She listened, leaning closer, and thought she made out the phrase “My brother.” My uncle. I imagine she fought off an urge to touch his arm; not wanting to intrude on his grief even to look at him, she glanced back down at the glossy page.
And then something happened to her that she doubtless regretted daily for all of the thirty-odd years that followed. She lost her presence of mind and, at the urging of the weekly news magazine, whose home-front function was to turn disaster into something bearable and diverting, asked, “Is it really your brother? He’s really dead, then?” With a horrible noise, half sob and all laugh, an inhuman sound that both she and I can still hear in late century, the boy turned from the magazine rack and was gone.
I can trace this Jersey shopgirl, call her Sarah, easier than I can follow what happened to my father. She grew, acquired a college degree, married, had four children, and retired somewhere outside Orlando, Florida. Yet throughout the course of her long and varied life, concealing this incident from those nearest her, never speaking of it over dinner, she could not understand how she could love some perfect stranger more than her successful husband and flawless children, how she could care for someone she didn’t even know, someone she had met for all of three minutes, someone already lost, how she could still remember, daily, down in the suburbs outside Orlando, her once having stumbled across a boy-man who broke all the rules and openly cried his loss, despite the magazine rack being clearly posted NO BROWSING.
About Sarah, I speculate. The boy’s story I have firsthand. A few months later, graduating from high school, my father spent the evening of his qualifying birthday in a bedroll outside his neig
hborhood selective-service office. Dad passed the medical and psych exams without incident. But he came up short, or rather too tall by inches, to make his intended field of service. At six foot one, he was just over the maximum height for both his first choice, pilot, and second choice, gunner. His board laughed good-naturedly, and told him to swallow his bad luck. “Shake it off,” they supposedly said, although the words sound more like his than theirs. “Some guys has got fallen arches, some’s too tall. The war’s winding up anyway.”
Pop’s ensuing comic monologue, in which he claimed that he was really very short for his height and swore that he would stoop and wear shoulder weights for the duration, left the draft-board officers unwilling to bend the rules in this instance. They asked him why he was so hot to fly, and he told them the familiar motive, the solution even heads of state could not improve on: fire with fire. Revenge.
They had more than enough applicants for the combat flight positions, and with the war in its transitional stage, the time needed to train greenhorns for such demanding jobs was prohibitive. But seeing that this kid was more than usually desperate to contribute to the fly-boys’ war, they offered him a bit part as an airplane and engine mechanic. I have the papers spread in front of me: Job Spec 747. Within the year, they guaranteed, he’d never want to see a plane again, inside or out.
Thus Pop discovered that practical history had no salve left in it for the local soul. For that, the griever must make another place. He spent two and a half months in Air Corps Basic, Job Spec 521, thirteen weeks in Amarillo Mechanics School, and an additional six weeks in Transition Airplane and Engine Mechanics, learning how to “Examine portions of aircraft such as wings, fuselage, stabilizers, flight control surfaces, propeller and landing gear for evidence of wear or damage and correct such defects by appropriate maintenance.” He worked mainly on B-29 Superfortresses, a plane he often described to us with clinical interest.
“What did you do in the War, you ask?” he would answer, although we never asked. He’d get that wry, dry, sardonic smile, and say, “Prophylactic surgery.” But even preventing a thousand Brownsvilles could not undo this one. I suppose that was why Dad rapidly won a reputation for being the guy you could always (“had to” sounds closer to the truth) send in for the potentially dangerous scut work—the jammed bomb payloads, the inflammable fuel ruptures.
Dad always described his tour of duty as a Johnny-come-lately’s domestic Bataan Death March. As the war rolled into its final months and enemy resistance collapsed without his lifting a weapon, Pop and his paperwork moved from Stateside air base to air base, throughout the South and Southwest, rolling up the increasingly obsolete runways. He joked to us ad nauseum that whenever the Joint Chiefs wanted to close up a base, they called him in. On the strength of this sterling service record and mocking his notorious love of photoplay, his buddies called him the Leo Gorcey of airplane mechanics, the seventh Dead End Kid.
Flight mechanics kept him too busy to consider the hopelessness of his situation. I imagine Dad longed for civilian life, not for ordinary reasons but for the chance to suffer something, make some sacrifice, help pay for Victory out of his own pocket, if only indirectly, by toughing out the hundred national rationings and shortages—rubber, shoes, or gas. But R and R worsened the condition. He asked that his leave be cut; the higher-ups told him special arrangements couldn’t be swung. If they let him have less leave, others would want to take up the slack. And yet, for reasons reason understood, he hated more than anything to return to Jersey for a weekend, where in the front window of my grandparents’ railroad apartment hung that indicting chunk of star-shaped precious metal announcing: We Gave. My father’s son, I feel him sliced down the middle with Sunday’s pork roast, seared by his parents’ casual words, trapped by the epochal events he could get no closer to than his safe place under the fuselage, resting on his brother’s laurels.
On one such unwanted home leave, while suffering through a particularly lightweight matinee of Busby Berkeleyesque fluff in which two hundred blond, curvaceous hoofers tapped out the logical necessity of the current geopolitical situation in a brilliant piece of choreography involving spiked heels that discharged low-caliber weapons at Hitler silhouettes when kicked out to the proper angle, Dad, in an early exit to the lobby, collided with my mother. The escapist cineadventure horrified him because he alone of the Allied War Effort did not want to escape from stresses so much as he wanted to escape into them. But by both accounts, when their eyes met, she over jujubes and he over a Lucky Strike Red—because “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war”—they re-created a life-sized enactment of what had earlier taken place between hero and leading lady in the first reel. Silently, without introductions, they accompanied each other out to the street and into the sunshine.
They used to re-create the dialogue that followed, playing it for us in tandem. Sometimes they disagreed slightly over a minor turn of phrase. But overall, they agreed remarkably. Over the years they hammered out a compromise of what had transpired in their first conversation. Both loved to playact their courtship for us. This touring repertoire was the only public romance they ever performed. Fate is what you put in the time capsule. Here is how we got there.
They exchanged names and thumbnail biographies. Mom confessed that she hadn’t cared for the film either. She explained to him as they walked that she ordinarily worked days, for a company that put the homo in homo milk. She had only gone to the afternoon show because her boss, although not a dentist, nevertheless weighing in very close to one by wearing a white smock all day long, had threatened her with an enforced week’s vacation with pay if she didn’t take the afternoon off. “He thinks I work too hard,” she explained shyly.
“Don’t have that problem with my current employer,” Eddie joked, indicating the uniform. “But they make me take the vacation anyway.” Something in their body odors smelled of mutual sacrifice, and they found themselves linking fingers almost without thinking. Mother would do it again, years later, stroking Dad’s knuckles in remembered protection. After another silence, he raised their knotted hands to his face, kissed the back of her wrist, and smiled with the resigned sadness and gratitude of one finishing the last chapter of a book. I re-create that smile on his face, a police artist’s composite.
They walked side by side along a row of shops, looking, pointing, swinging hands, but not saying much. Finally Dad, looking away from this unknown woman, said, “That movie . . .” alluding to the escapist morale musical they had just escaped. “That war . . .” making the same bizarre and untenable equation the film itself had just tried to make. “I lost a brother to that war.” An act of courage just to say it, let alone repeat it for years. His voice filled with horror at anyone trying to film the incomprehensible present with song and dance.
His wife-to-be bowed her head and looked away herself. She said something, an “I did too” that carried away on the wind down an east/west cross street, taking a forty-year detour.
After some blocks, he drew near her and asked, “Does this tune mean anything to you?” He whistled a few bars of “Moonlight Serenade.” She nodded, swiftly and succinctly, a glow filling her eyes. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. Then he asked “How about this one?” And he began “A Mighty Fortress.”
Mother looked down at the sidewalk and nodded more slowly. “Yes, but I’ve never heard it whistled before.” Her confusion was so sincere, her answer so earnest, that they both suddenly broke out laughing at the sound. Their laughter took them, like falling, the most natural movement in the world, into each other’s arms for that promissory kiss everyone can make only once in life without perjury. They drew apart, laughter quieted, needing further assurance.
They were still joined at the hands. They walked for blocks, through residential neighborhoods, retail strips, warehouses, empty lots. They looked in the windows of every structure they passed, exercising the eminent domain of those marginally happier than the median. After twenty minutes, Dad at last asked, �
�Well, what about children, then?”
And my mother, in the most quietly assured voice she would ever muster for him, answered, “Oh, the more the better, of course. A dozen.”
The PFC clapped his hands and opened his throat. “Yes! A dozen. A baker’s dozen.” Then he fell circumspect. A minute later, he added confidentially, “They really are the only sure form of protection, you know.” He could not have meant us.
The next day, Sunday, the libraries and civic offices were closed. By eleven A.M. Monday, however, my father had all the institutional cross-references about the stranger that he needed. He appeared cap in hand at her place of employ and asked her out to lunch. How he’d gotten her work address he never revealed and she never discovered. Over deli cuts and funny stories about the service, he popped the question. Years later, he told us that he never had any anxieties about her refusing.
And on account of the uniform, his high cheekbones, her general commitment to national duty, or some deep disaffection with social mores, she did not disappoint him. She cabled back to Oak Hill River Park Forest Grove, more to impart information than to seek her folks’ approval. Days later, the two children edged into the office of the justice of the peace and signed the pact just before Dad headed back down South to close up the rest of the Army Air Corps’ shop. It was, they both agreed later, a regulation wartime wedding.
When she found out how her husband-to-be had spent Monday morning, Mom took a deep and lasting offense. She could not decide which pained her more: her future husband taking it on himself to research her, or his being too hurried to do as comprehensive a job on her as on all the previous candidates. She passed the test after only one morning of record-digging, calling into question the thoroughness of his job.
She never dropped word of it to any of us, not even to that unacknowledged child who was her secret favorite. Over the years she listened smilingly as Dad told her children how he had looked up her files and passed her in rigorous inspection. She helped him reenact the whirlwind courtship over our faked protests of indifference. But I’m sure it ruined her, although she never said the first word. There was more to our mother than any of us suspected.
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