Finally Phillip went to see the senior American officer, Colonel Watkins.
“Sir, I respectfully request that a request be delivered to Commander Nakanishi. We need supplies for the hospital: sulfa, quinine, whatever else he’s got.”
The colonel, a burly Southerner with a pockmarked face, drawled, “Request denied, Lieutenant.”
“But, sir! The men are dying for lack of those few simple things.”
The colonel leaned forward, his eyes hard. “Are you blind? Nakanishi doesn’t give a damn! The more of us who die, the easier his job is. If you complain, they are just going to list you as a troublemaker. They ain’t going to give you any sulfa or even any Band-Aids. No way!”
Phillip watched in impotent fury as the colonel settled back into his chair and rolled a cigarette. The next time Phillip visited his friend, Bugleman was in a deep coma. Driven to despair, Phillip decided to protest, against orders. Using an old envelope, he drafted a polite letter and walked over to the commandant’s headquarters. He gestured to a guard that the letter was to be delivered to Colonel Nakanishi.
The guard was gone for two or three agonizing minutes, while Phillip waited, fearful that his answer would be the order for his immediate execution. Then the guard returned, his face impassive.
Phillip walked back to his hut. Nakanishi could deny the request, or ignore it—but at least he, Phillip, had taken a stand. Perhaps in the long run it would have an effect.
He was standing in the food line with his men when the PA system whined into life and Nakanishi mounted the platform. The men were forced to stand at attention.
“Lieutenant Coulter. Step forward.”
Phillip managed to propel himself forward on trembling legs.
“It has come to my attention,” Nakanishi began, “that you are unhappy with the conditions provided by our glorious Emperor Hirohito.”
Phillip said nothing.
Nakanishi eyed him for a moment before descending the steps to the compound. He crossed to within two feet of where Phillip stood.
“Answer my question!” The diminutive commandant was working himself into a rage.
Phillip’s initial terror was replaced by a sense of inner calm. At least he would die doing what he knew was right.
The commandant stamped his foot: Phillip’s silence was an insult to him, a threat to his authority—to the authority of the Emperor himself.
He pulled his heavy service revolver out of its holster and hit Phillip hard on the right cheek with the barrel. Phillip dropped to the ground. The last words he heard before passing out were: “Be grateful for what you’ve got … pretty boy.”
Phillip lay unconscious in the middle of the compound. No one dared approach him until Nakanishi had disappeared into his quarters and slammed the door. Then Phillip’s men ran to help him. Wordlessly, they picked him up and carried him to the sick bay.
That night, Phillip lay on a mat in the hut that served as officers’ quarters. The wound was deep and somewhat painful, but no bones were broken. Worse was the fact that after regaining consciousness Colonel Watkins had stormed into the sick bay and chewed him out for disobeying orders.
In the dim light, Phillip noticed that someone was standing over him. He hoped the man would go away and let him sleep.
The voice that said his name spoke gently, with a Brooklyn accent. “How ya doin’ there, Coulter?”
“Not too bad,” Phillip managed. He opened his eyes and recognized their chaplain, Father Michael O’Connor. A blunt-spoken young Irish priest, he had a pair of world-weary blue eyes that nothing seemed to shock.
O’Connor had seen more in his short lifetime than most men. One of ten children of a fiercely Irish Catholic family, he had grown up in a section of Brooklyn that was largely Jewish. The little O’Connors had been isolated by their Catholicism, and by their policeman father, a basically decent man who was nonetheless uncompromisingly intolerant of the Jews around them, and liked to call them “the murderers of Our Lord” in his bad moments.
But young Michael had always been fascinated by the community and took every opportunity to learn about it. He spoke Yiddish fluently and had studied Jewish religious customs.
When he grew older, he got a job delivering suits for Abraham the tailor. His father grudgingly admitted that money was money, as long as Michael understood that he was not to mingle with “the sheenies” any more than was absolutely necessary. O’Connor had already decided that Michael was to enter the seminary, just as he had intended his oldest daughter for the convent.
By the time Michael reached adolescence, he had established a business for himself in delivery services. But he was also deeply offended by the corruption that ran just beneath the surface of life in the little community, and doubted he could really fit in. So it was with a feeling of relief that he had entered the seminary at eighteen, just as his sister Mary Agnes had dutifully entered the convent the year before.
But the austere, scholarly life of the order didn’t satisfy Michael’s desire to be needed, so immediately after taking his vows, he requested to work in one of the worst slums in Brooklyn.
The downtrodden inhabitants of the neighborhood loved O’Connor, even though he often could do nothing for them. When the pressures and frustrations became too much for him, he drank, and as time passed, he drank more. Sometimes he slept in the rear of a saloon, unable to make it home. The other priests knew that Father O’Connor had his little weakness, and would quietly help him home the next day.
O’Connor was almost glad when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. As an army chaplain he would have no time for the bottle and even less time to feel sorry for himself. From the beginning, he had been constantly in demand to console suffering men like Lieutenant Coulter. Coulter, though not badly hurt, was now staring up at him with an expression of unrelieved misery. O’Connor knew of Phillip’s friendship with Bugleman, and understood that Phillip was tortured with guilt at his failure to help the captain. He probably believed that he had made things even worse by his ill-considered action.
O’Connor cleared his throat nervously. “That was a fine thing you did, Lieutenant,” he said. When Phillip merely turned his head away he added, “It took a lot of guts to face Nakanishi—more guts than old Watkins has.”
“Thanks,” Phillip managed to say.
“How’s your buddy doing?”
“Not so good.”
O’Connor was silent for a moment. “It’s tough to see all these young guys dying. Real tough.”
Dragging himself painfully to a sitting position, Phillip asked, “Father, do you think that God has a purpose in all this?”
“Frankly, no. I don’t think God has anything to do with it.”
“You know, I’m Jewish, and even though I’m not from a very religious family, I’ve always felt God’s presence in my life.”
O’Connor nodded.
“But how can I believe in God when he allows all these horrible things to happen? I mean, I see Jerry Bugleman—a bright, wonderful man with a beautiful wife—and because he can’t get even elementary medical care, he’s going to die.”
“Well, Coulter, three years of seminary didn’t give me answers to such questions. I don’t know why God allows bad things to happen to good people.” He reached out and rested a hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not being much help.”
The following evening Phillip was sitting with Bugleman, trying to make conversation. The captain seemed more lucid than he had in days, and was sipping a cup of weak tea.
“You should see my wife … She’s a princess. I knew her all my life … wanted to marry her since the sixth grade. And now we’re having a baby. May already be born, for all I know. Hey, maybe I’m already a papa!”
He smiled softly, remembering. “We were going to call it Sarah. Alicia was convinced that it would be a girl.”
“Well, you’ll know soon, Captain,” Phillip said. “Ann and I haven’t gotten lucky yet. Maybe after the
war …”
“Yeah, you’ll go home,” Bugleman said quietly.
“So will you, Jerry!”
But Bugleman shook his head. “No. I want you to do something for me when you get back. Go see my wife. I need you to tell her just how much I love her, and that I’m sorry I can’t hang on.”
“Jerry!” Phillip cried. “Don’t even say that!”
Bugleman reached out and grabbed Phillip’s hand with unexpected strength. “Will you cut the bullshit, Phil? I’m your commanding officer, remember? You’ll see Alicia … please?” His voice trailed off weakly.
Phillip looked away for a moment, tears flooding his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”
The next day Bugleman was dead. The grave-digging detail couldn’t keep up with the flood of bodies and had resorted to mass graves, but Phillip was determined that Bugleman at least be given the proper Jewish service. So he tried to round up ten Jews to say Kaddish but came up one short. Seeing his distress, O’Connor finally approached him.
“Lieutenant, I hear that you can’t find a minyan. I was wondering if you could forget the fact that my collar buttons in the back. I could say the Kaddish.”
“Would you be willing to do that, Father?”
“I think Our Savior would insist,” O’Connor said, smiling.
Phillip and eight other mourners stood with Father O’Connor at the graveside. The heat had ripened the corpses waiting for burial until the stench was staggering. But as Bugleman’s body was laid to rest, the final words murmured over his body were the traditional Kaddish chant.
Chapter Sixteen
WEARILY, ANN SWUNG HER legs over the side of the bed and walked to the window in Phillip’s old bedroom. It was almost the holiday season, but staring out into the chilly gray San Francisco fog, she had very little to celebrate.
Phillip had been gone now for ten months of sheer agony, and Ann found herself cut off from all news except the radio and the daily papers, which had told of the fall of Bataan several months previously. As time passed, she came to assume that he had been killed or taken prisoner. She had received no direct word since the day the General Pershing had sailed.
In desperation, she made inquiries at one government department after another, but without success. No one seemed to even know where the Pershing was, much less care about her husband’s fate. At times she wanted to scream, to force the rude, harassed clerks to find out something. But during that terrible period of never-ending American defeats, thousands of wives were in the same position as Ann, and the armed forces simply didn’t have accurate casualty lists.
Just before Christmas Ann arrived home to find Eva slumped over on the side of the couch.
Ann ran to her. “Eva, darling, what’s wrong?”
Her mother-in-law’s face was frighteningly distorted, her eyes staring unfocused. She tried to move her lips, but the sound that emerged was garbled. As Ann put her arm under Eva’s shoulders to straighten her, she noticed the yellow rectangle lying on the rug.
With a cry, Ann snatched it up, taking in the message with a single horrified glance: LIEUTENANT PHILLIP COULTER … MISSING IN ACTION … NEAR CORREGIDOR.
Forgetting her mother-in-law, Ann burst into tears. Missing in action! But when the first storm of sorrow subsided, Ann told herself: Missing in action isn’t dead. Phillip may have been taken prisoner.
Forcing herself to be calm, Ann turned back to Eva. When her mother-in-law remained motionless, Ann rushed to the phone and called the doctor.
Eva had suffered a massive stroke, which paralyzed her entire left side, undoubtedly brought on by the shock of seeing the telegram. After a quick examination, the doctor called the ambulance and had her hospitalized.
For the next few days, it was touch and go whether she would live. Ann was at the hospital ’round the clock, while Simon hovered helplessly at his wife’s bedside. It was only after several days of uncertainty that Eva gradually began to improve. A week later, they were able to bring her home, but her side remained paralyzed and her speech was unintelligible.
Simon spent his days sitting by his wife and holding her hand. He had stopped going to work and seemed unable to think of anything but Eva. Ann knew that she couldn’t keep her job and still take care of the two old people. Eva would need constant nursing, and Simon was virtually useless at this point. All the courageous plans she had made for taking care of their future would have to be abandoned. They would all simply have to live on Phillip’s allotment.
Ann found it hard to think positively, but she knew that she was not the only one suffering. Ruthie was equally worried about Kenny, and was struggling to raise her baby, fearing he would never see his father.
On New Year’s Eve the two women decided to see in 1943 together. They sat in the Coulters’ living room, while Ann popped the cork of a bottle of cheap champagne. When the clock struck twelve, they lifted their glasses and drank to Phillip and Kenny. Ann went down the hall to see if Eva and Simon would join them, but the two old people were asleep.
Back in the living room, she filled their glasses again and Ann proposed another toast. “To you, Ruthie. Thank God you’re my friend.”
Chapter Seventeen
DURING THE NEXT YEAR and a half, Ann knew she would never have survived without Ruthie’s support. One of the few joys in her life was Ruthie’s baby, Jeremy. Seeing him grow healthy and happy, Ann found the courage to believe in the future, to believe that someday Phillip would return and they could start their own family,
But by D-Day, in June 1944, Ann was beginning to think that she would have to live the rest of her life in limbo, that the war would go on forever. Even when Germany surrendered and Ruthie learned that Kenny would be returning home, the fighting in the Pacific seemed to go on and on. According to the papers, nothing short of invasion would bring Japan to its knees.
Still Ann tried to share Ruthie’s joy when they went to the station to welcome Kenny. The train pulled in, and shouting GIs surged off in every direction to find their families. As Ruthie strained her eyes for a glimpse of Kenny, she was reminded of the day he had left. How similar the scene was, yet how wonderfully different. All around her people were weeping, but this time with tears of joy.
And then she was in Kenny’s arms, crying unashamedly.
“Ruthie, oh, Ruthie….”
“Kenny, darling. Oh, darling, I can’t believe you’re here.” She hugged him, feeling how thin he was beneath the well-tailored captain’s uniform.
Jeremy, who had been holding Ann’s hand, impatiently tugged at Ruthie’s skirt. “Mommy!”
Unbelievably, Ruthie had almost forgotten her son’s presence. “Yes, darling.” Then, face glowing, she looked up at her husband and said softly, “Kenny, this is Jeremy.”
Keeny scooped up the little boy. “So this is my son. How are you, Jeremy?” He looked for a long moment at the dark-haired boy in his arms, regarding him with an expression of grave interest. “He looks … wonderful—” He broke off, his eyes filled with tears.
Ann watched the three of them, feeling as if her own heart would break. Oh, God, why hasn’t Phillip come home like Kenny? For a moment, she felt a stab of envy, then she forced herself to rejoice for the Newmans.
Kenny put down his little boy and turned to Ann. “You’re as beautiful as ever, Ann,” he said as he kissed her on the cheek.
“Thanks, Kenny,” Ann whispered. “I’m so glad you’re home safely. Ruthie needs you—and so does Jeremy. He’s a wonderful little boy.”
Kenny smiled. “Isn’t he, though? And I want to thank you, Ann. I know from Ruthie what a wonderful friend you’ve been.”
Ann smiled but thought to herself, She won’t be needing me anymore now….
It was true. Even though Ruthie called almost every day, she was busy now finding a new place to live, trying to make a perfect home for Kenny. Ann now had more time alone to worry about Phillip and wonder if she would ever learn what had happened to him.
Then one day she woke u
p to learn the United States had dropped a new kind of bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A few days later the Emperor of Japan surrendered. Ann saw pictures of him handing over his sword. Now, she thought, maybe they’ll tell me what happened to my husband.
But the months passed, and the troops coming home from the Pacific docked in San Francisco or Oakland, then dispersed across America.
And still the War Department had no information for Ann.
Once again, New Year’s Eve rolled around. The Newmans asked Ann to their house near Twin Peaks, where they were giving a small party. Ann had tried to decline, knowing that being surrounded by happy young couples would depress her, but Ruthie wouldn’t hear of it.
“You’ll just sit at home and brood, Ann. You know you will. I insist that you come.”
“Okay, Ruthie. But I don’t feel very festive.”
Now she sat quietly in Ruthie’s gaily decorated living room, watching the party swirl around her. She looked at Kenny and Alvin Sachs and Irving Cahn, listening to their laughter and easy banter. It was difficult to believe that all these high school buddies of Phillip’s had gone off to war and endured untold terrors and hardship. How could they look so happy, so healthy?
Later, in the dining room, she could barely touch her steak, so she sipped at her burgundy until everything became pleasantly fuzzy. She was reaching again for the decanter, when a hand on her arm stopped her.
Looking up, she saw Kenny’s concerned face. “Can I help you, Ann?” he asked quietly.
Ann’s eyes stared past him, unfocused. “Sure … Bring my husband back, Kenny. That’s how you can help me.”
Embarrassed, Kenny glanced over at Ruthie, who just shrugged.
“Ann, honey, I’m sure he’ll be home soon.”
“But when? Why don’t you know?” Ann said, a rising note of hysteria in her voice.
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