She was a girl about my age. She had long pigtails that bounced between her shoulder blades as she ran—she was the only Simpson who did run as she went from place to place, simply because she wasn’t fat like the rest of them. I watched her as she played on the porch. She had an imaginary life as vivid as mine, it seemed, for she spoke constantly to herself, as though she were surrounded by throngs of admirers. Sometimes she sang. I kept myself flattened among the fallen leaves behind the trees as she bounced around the yard, addressing the chickens in a clear, high voice. There would on occasion come a loud male rumble from the house, and the girl would stop what she was doing and trudge back onto the porch and inside, her spirit suddenly gone. After that, there would sometimes be crying, not just from her but from the other girls too—a chorus of wails, sometimes hysterical. So I knew her father was mean. I vowed solemnly to rescue the little girl when I was big enough. She became the object of my fantasy. I considered speaking to her from my observation post among the trees, but discretion, it seemed to me, would be rewarded in time with success. I had to wait until I was bigger. Then I would lock her father in his room and she would run away with me, and perhaps be my girlfriend. It seemed like a very good plan, and I worked it over in my head repeatedly until it had an infinite variety of plots and endings, all of which culminated in her release and unending gratitude, and sometimes kissing.
I knew better than to reveal my plan to Grandpa. He would have been livid with rage had he known I was considering contact with the Simpsons. So I explained it all to my father, with whom I held regular conversations in my fort along the brook at home. My father was fully in approval. He always wore his uniform, and whenever we met he would remove one of his medals and pin it on my chest. “I’m very proud of you, son,” he said. Sometimes we would take a ride in his F–4. He let me fly it whenever I wanted because I was good. I piloted it around the yard, up over the Simpson house, and far out above the massive Lake, which sat always dreaming and impassive half a mile to the north. I shot down enemy planes by the score and flew low over people’s houses. My father thought I was a genius and said he would help me in my plans to liberate the Simpson girl. I was a chip off the old block, he said. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He wished he’d had more men like me in Vietnam.
Grandpa sat in his rocking chair in the darkened living room and drank and whispered to himself. Now that the ghost had stopped harassing him, it was only the diary he spoke of—a mysterious book to which he’d never referred before. Talking to Grandpa was like talking to someone who is speaking in their sleep. You could answer him or not, as you liked, and his responses might or might not make sense. I usually ignored him, but my interest was piqued by his mention of this diary. I attempted to draw him out.
“I ain’t seen your diary in years,” he might say suddenly. “I left it with someone else.”
“Seen what?”
“You remember?” This was not addressed to me, I knew, but to some new and invisible presence, another ghost, but not a mischievous one. I had been aware of him for some time, but since he never threw things or hid things, I ignored him too. But now I answered Grandpa for him.
“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “Now where is that old diary of mine?”
“Hanged if I know,” said Grandpa. “It’s got all the old stories in there. There was that time you went down to Buffalo with Frederic and joined up. It’s all in there.”
“Who’s Frederic?”
“I hope you ain’t mad. I had to leave it with him. We made a deal.”
“Leave it with who?”
Grandpa said a name. It was not a regular American-sounding name, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. He wouldn’t repeat it.
“Wake up,” I said. “I’m hungry.”
Grandpa could rouse himself from his stupor when he chose, but I could tell that in general he was slowly surrendering his hold on the present in favor of some forgotten time when he hadn’t been sad and the house was full of people. We were entirely alone now. Doctor Connor didn’t visit anymore. The last time he’d come, there had been a tremendous argument, worse than any they’d ever had before, and Grandpa had cursed and thrown a whiskey bottle at him. Connor ducked just in time. The bottle exploded against the wall, and the shards of glass sat on the kitchen floor for days before I finally cleaned them up myself.
“What do you want to eat?” Grandpa asked me.
“Fried baloney,” I said.
He got up slowly from the rocking chair. “Where you been these days?” he asked as he went into the kitchen.
“Playing,” I said.
“By yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
I could hear him clattering around in the kitchen. He dropped the frying pan and groaned as he bent down to pick it up. I went and sat in his rocking chair. A half-empty glass of whiskey was on the table next to it. I took a tiny sip and immediately began choking. It burned like fire in my mouth. Tears came to my eyes and my nose started to run. So that was what he drank all the time: poison. Hot poison.
I could hear him mumbling over the sound of baloney sizzling in the pan. Gradually his mumbles gave way to soft sobs. He cried quietly to himself as he cooked my fried baloney. “Be sure to make enough for everybody,” he said. “Never let anyone go hungry. Nobody leaves the Mann house hungry.”
I sat in his rocking chair feeling the burn in my mouth start to fade. I hugged my knees to my chest and rocked back and forth as he cried to himself in the kitchen, trying to stifle it so I wouldn’t hear. I hoped he would sober up by bedtime. It frightened me to lie awake at night and hear Grandpa wandering through the house, talking aloud to invisible presences and crying to himself as he did now. And I was ashamed of myself for being frightened. My father would never have been scared of anything. I hoped, at that moment, that he wasn’t watching me.
2
Grandpa’s War Story, as Told to Me by Himself
There’d been a time, long before my arrival in the world, when Grandpa wasn’t yet a bitter and lonely recluse; when he wasn’t a bottle-a-day drinker of Irish whiskey; when he was, in fact, a charming and pleasant young man, the apple of his mother’s eye and Mannville’s brightest star. This was before the Second World War. I heard much about the war growing up; we’d had many wars, we Americans, but to hear Grandpa tell it there was really only one war that mattered, and that was his war. All the others, from the Revolution to World War One, had been practice wars, a sort of warm-up for the real thing, and all the wars afterward, such as Vietnam and Korea, merely weak imitations of it. The Second World War, I learned from Grandpa, grabbed hold of millions of lives like a leprous and inescapable fist. If it didn’t snuff them out, it changed them forever. That was what wars did, of course. But few of them did it on the scale this particular war managed to achieve. That was what it did to Grandpa, more or less, and even almost forty years later it still occupied the greater part of his attention. I heard this story over and over again until I had it memorized, and I can tell it almost without thinking, as though it had happened not to him but to me.
In 1943, when Grandpa was nineteen, he joined the Army and became a regular infantryman. He did this over the protests of his mother, Lily, who thought he ought to go to college instead. College, however, held no interest for Grandpa. He was more interested in the war. Most of the young men his age in Mannville had either already gone to war or were about to go. The town was full of soldiers and sailors strutting about in their fine new dress uniforms. In fact, it was becoming impossible to get noticed by girls unless one was in uniform, and getting noticed by girls, Grandpa admitted to me later, was his only real concern at the time. The war was a fever that had swept unchecked through the hearts and minds of Mannvillians, and nobody had any time for those who weren’t caught up in the same frenzy. Grandpa burned to fight and to distinguish himself; perhaps, he thought, if he was lucky, he would get wounded just badly enough to develop an interesting limp, and he would be sent home to live out h
is days in glory, like his grandfather Willie. Willie limped because there was a Confederate musket ball in his leg. Everyone, from the Mayor on down, worshipped him.
Lily Mann despaired. The infantry, she believed, was below the station of the Manns, who were millionaires thrice over and whose landholdings were of locally legendary proportions. She thought Grandpa at least ought to have become a cavalryman; she hadn’t yet grasped the concept of mechanized warfare, which had already swept over much of Europe and the Pacific like the shadow of a bloodthirsty hawk. To ride, she pointed out, was much more dignified than walking. When Grandpa—who, of course, was not called Grandpa yet, but Thomas Junior—explained to her that horses were useless against tanks and fighter planes, she relented. But, Lily said, at least he could go fight in the European Theatre, so he could imbibe some of the culture there.
“Ma,” said the young Thomas Junior, “when they say European Theatre, they’re not talking about a fancy opera house. They’re not going to let me just wander around looking at museums all the time.” He was being sarcastic, of course. Lily knew very well what the phrase European Theatre meant, and to remind her son of it she swatted him on the top of his head, which, though he was only nineteen, was already balding.
“You might at least learn to speak a little French,” she said. “French comes across so well in social circles.”
“Nobody around here speaks French,” said Thomas Junior. “Who would I speak it with?”
“You could speak it when you returned home and went to Harvard,” said Lily icily.
Thomas Junior dropped the subject. Her mind was made up. He knew better than to argue directly with his mother. She was the toughest person he’d ever met, man or woman. In fact, he thought, sometimes she got her way so much because she was a woman. If a man spoke to people the way she did, he would have to back himself up with his fists. But women didn’t have to fist-fight. A shame, really, Thomas Junior thought. If his mother could fight as well as she could talk, she would have ended the war herself within the year.
Lily had been only sixteen when she married Thomas Junior’s father, Thomas Senior. She was widowed a year later, when her husband died attempting to prove that it was possible to drive an automobile across Lake Erie, when frozen, all the way to Long Point, Ontario, Canada, a distance of roughly twenty miles. Theoretically this feat is possible, but Thomas Senior—my great-grandfather, Grandpa’s father—picked the wrong night to do it. There was a raging snowstorm, which limited visibility to less than twenty yards. Also, he was drunk. Also, the Lake hadn’t yet completely frozen over. But none of these factors seemed to deter him. We are daredevils, we Manns, every last one of us, and unconcerned with the laws of physics, which strictly prohibit the driving of automobiles on water. The inebriated Thomas Senior got in his brand-new Pierce-Arrow convertible, waved good-bye to a party of equally drunken friends on shore, and drove off gaily into the blizzard, never to be seen again.
Lily was pregnant with Thomas Junior at the time. She absorbed the news of her husband’s death with characteristic stoicism; she was not seen to cry, either when she learned of his death or at his funeral. And as soon as her son was born and her lying-in period was over, she single-handedly took control of the Mann estate with a firmness and sense of purpose her frivolous husband had never possessed.
“Everything,” Lily used to tell her son, “is a matter of life or death. So live.”
Lily herself was born to a poor but fanatically respectable farming family in nearby Springville. She’d married Thomas Senior not because he was rich but because he was irresistible. He had charm, wit, good looks, and smiled all the time; parties generally didn’t pick up speed until he arrived, and after he left they began to wind down. Lily had married him for love, not money, but she knew nevertheless that she was lucky to have married into such a fortune, and she was determined to keep her husband’s farms and orchards and vineyards profitable or die in the process.
Thomas Senior’s father, Willie, had retreated into his bedroom in a sort of self-imposed exile. He was old now, nearing death, or so he claimed, and he spent most of his time with his wounded leg propped up on a footstool, scribbling in his journal. Willie showed no interest in taking over operations again after his foolhardy son drove his Pierce-Arrow to the bottom of Lake Erie, an action that, incidentally, gave him no surprise. He’d always known his son was too giddy to be a businessman and perhaps even too foolish to live very long. Willie himself had announced his retirement from business affairs some years earlier, and in the same breath had politely requested that everyone leave him alone. Lily could, he said, run the whole show if she was so inclined. It made no difference to him whether she succeeded or went bankrupt. All he wanted to do was write in his journal, and he could do that in the poorhouse just as well as in his mansion.
Lily, being Lily, chose to take Willie at his word. She was barely eighteen years old, but her will was inexorable, her planning impeccable, her business instincts deadly accurate. In short, she was a success, and under Lily’s strong hand the Manns became wealthier than they’d ever been since Willie Mann made them rich after his return from the Civil War. By the time Lily was only twenty, she was the reigning queen of Erie County, in social, economic, and even political circles. Sheriffs and council members found it difficult to maintain their office if they didn’t have Lily Mann on their side. It was this strength of will that her son, Thomas, found himself confronted with now, and he followed the course of action he’d learned years ago to adopt when dealing with his mother: obey her.
The U.S. Army, however, had never heard of Lily Mann. After Thomas enlisted, he received orders to go to Buffalo, where he would board a bus for New York, a plane to San Francisco, and a transport to the Philippines, where he would do battle against the Japanese.
Lily was outraged. Much to Thomas’s embarrassment, she placed a phone call to a certain senator’s office in Albany. It was useless to fight, however. Although the senator was apologetic, he had the gall to suggest that there was nothing Lily could do; he compounded the insult by requesting a campaign contribution in the same breath. As an interesting footnote to history, and not entirely by coincidence, the senator’s campaign for reelection was unsuccessful.
“The Japanese indeed!” Lily raged. “Who are the Japanese, anyway? Nobody I know has ever even met a Japanese!”
“They’re small and yellow and they eat their own children,” said Thomas, which was the popular perception of the Japanese at the time. “They’re not really even human. Not like us. That’s why we need to fight them. They’re trying to take over the world.”
Lily shuddered. Thomas was delighted. Over the next few days he filled her head with as much anti-Japanese propaganda as he could make up. Thomas himself was terrified of the Japanese, and his terror was worsened by his own lies, but he wanted his mother to think he was doing something magnificent. He would, of course, have preferred going to Europe. But he knew there was nothing he could do about it, and he was determined to make the best of a bad situation. Gradually Lily’s attitude shifted, and then she was not only in favor of his going to the Pacific but actually bragged about it to her friends at parties and Red Cross fund-raisers. “My son is off to destroy the Yellow Menace,” she said proudly. “The Mann family simply will not tolerate Japanese aggression, no matter where it takes place.”
As rich as Lily became from selling food supplies to the Army, she gave almost all of her war profits back again in the form of donations to the Red Cross, her favorite charity, and also set up a fund for local women whose husbands had been killed in action and who had children to raise. She became even more of a celebrity than she had been before, and she became so proud of her son, off to the Philippines in just a few short weeks now, that she could barely speak of it in public without tears of joy. Thomas, though secretly afraid of being blown to bits by the Japanese, was proud of his mother too; she gave him the sort of courage to go on that he might otherwise have gotten from his daredevi
l father, had he still been alive. So it was with this mutual admiration in their hearts that Thomas kissed his mother farewell at the train station and boarded the seven-seventeen for Buffalo, an hour and a half away.
Thomas Junior was the second Mann to travel to Buffalo to be inducted into the Army. Eighty-two years earlier, his grandfather, William Amos Mann III, had walked barefoot from Mannville—which was then called Clare Town, after the Irish county that was the birthplace of most of its citizens—to join the Army of the Union and go down South to “whup Rebs,” as he put it. Thomas had known his grandfather well. He was a stooped old man with a tremendous white beard. He’d walked with a polished stick of hickory topped with gold and engraved with his monogram—W.A.M. III. He’d died only a few years earlier, at the remarkable age of ninety-five, still limping from a wound he’d received at the battle of Antietam. Willie had finally finished writing his diary, which everyone took to be an autobiography of sorts, and he gave it to Thomas in a ceremony utterly devoid of portent or majesty a short time before his death. He’d simply called him into his room one day, dug the diary out of an old trunk, and handed it to him, saying, in his gentle and diluted brogue, “Most of what I learnt in my life, lad, I tried to write down, so’s the next fella could maybe make some sense out of things. Bein’ as your father is gone to his reward, you’re the next fella. This is for you.”
Eddie's Bastard Page 3
