Without saying any of the above, Mrs. Beachum could read it on my face.
“Look, honey, I know you wanted to go with Kathy—but I know you know that no one will ask Lydia, and there’s just sumpin’ not right ’bout that. She’s a nice girl. Just a little slow. Some people fast, some people slow. All God’s children. All. ’Specially Lydia. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Beachum.” Yes, I knew that, and I actually even believed it. But weren’t the longest tanned legs in the school also something worth believing in?
“I knew that would be your answer,” she said proudly. “Couldn’t ask this of the other boys. No sir! Only you. Thank you, child.”
Ugh. Why not? Why not ask them? Why me?
“Plus, I figured seeing how you are thinking of going to the seminary next year, you won’t really need many of these ‘manners’ I’m teaching you, now will you?”
Apparently the Mother Superior had shared my thoughts about becoming a priest with Mrs. Beachum. And, of course, what use does a priest have for sex, much less “manners,” much less those pink-black engorged lips you’re using to hand me the worst news of my life?
“Sure. It’s fine. But what about Kathy?” I asked. Yes, what about Kathy? You’re not considering the grief she’s going to experience not being able to be my date!
“Like I said, I already talked to her. She was very happy to do this special thing for Lydia. Said you would be, too.”
I decided to give it one last shot. “But, but then Kathy will be all alone at the dinner!”
“No, child, here’s what we do. Lydia will sit across from you. Kathy will sit with the both of you, next to Lydia. So in a way, Kathy will still be there as sorta your date, too.”
Sorta. (This will become the story of my dating life. More later.)
“But you’ll officially be there with Lydia and you will pull her chair out for her and order for her and talk to her and make her feel that she, that she… is…”
A hint of tears began to make their way to the front of her eyes, but she blinked fast enough to catch them and wick them back behind her sockets and finished her sentence.
“That she is wanted. Can you do that, Michael?”
That this had suddenly been elevated beyond an etiquette lesson, beyond a date, to a call for mercy and possible sainthood—well, that was all I needed to hear.
“Yes, I can do this. I want to do this. You can count on me! You’re right, I won’t have any use for girls after this year anyways!” Exactly! Mrs. Beachum, you’d just be wasting all these lessons on me. I’m off to be a monk for life!
I had a pain in the pit of my stomach.
I went into the classroom and asked Lydia to be my date. Though I tried to say it soft enough so none of the other boys would hear me, it wasn’t long before word got out that I had given up the top prize for the Loser Lydia—and these little men in their high-waisted pants spent a lot of time on the playground scratching their butch-cut heads and trying to figure out exactly what had happened to me.
“Don’t make sense, Mike,” Pete said, shaking his head. “How are you even gonna stand it, being next to her?”
“I dunno” was about all I could muster. How was I going to sit next to her? Ewww.
The big night came to go to Frankenmuth, and Lydia was all freshly scrubbed and her dress was plain but pretty. I opened the door for her, let her take my arm, pulled her chair out for her and, in a momentary act of rebellion against my impending lifelong celibacy, I pulled Kathy’s out for her, too. Kathy talked to Lydia, then I talked to Lydia, and Lydia talked back to us. We heard the story of how her brother had died and how her dad was working two jobs because her mother had health problems and how she spent her time in her room writing poems. Lydia was shy but not a cipher. She was funny, and she had a snorty laugh that after a while was cute and catchy. The other classmates looked down the table to see what the three of us were up to, and a couple of the boys joined in to talk to the newly interesting Lydia. This gave Kathy and me a chance to talk, also a new thing for me, for up until now she had just been an object to observe as often and as vigorously as possible.
“You were a good guy, Mike, to do this,” she whispered to me.
“Really? Um, well, you know I’m going to the seminary?”
“Sure. I heard that.”
“So, you see, this class wasn’t really for me.”
“Well, it was fun, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Can I have your pie if you’re not gonna eat it?”
After our class’s First Date Night at the Frankenmuth Bavarian Chicken House, there was no going back to the War of the Sexes. Thanks to Mrs. Beachum, we all discovered that we liked each other—a lot. And while others contemplated their next moves in the dating life, I had time to ponder such things as what kind of trouble would Mrs. Beachum be in for having upended the Puberty Retardation Policy that the Church had implemented. Boys stopped picking on girls, and girls stopped laughing at boys. We helped each other with homework. We let the girls throw the basketball around. Everything felt better and we were grateful to Mrs. Beachum for her enthusiasm and her desire to teach us more than just the capitals of all fifty states. We looked forward to our afternoons with her; it was the best part of every day. So when we came back from lunch for our afternoon with Mrs. Beachum on February 5, 1968, we were surprised to learn that she had not shown up to school. She did not show up the next day, either. Nor the next day. We were told that no one knew where she was, that she was missing. At first, we hoped that maybe she had overslept and just not shown up for work for a few days. The Mother Superior filled in for her. But as the week went on, the look of worry and concern on Mother Superior’s face was evident, and her attempts to follow Mrs. Beachum’s lesson plans were awkward, as she was surely distracted. She offered no information, and by the fifth day of Mrs. Beachum’s absence, enough of us had complained to our parents and asked them to please get to the bottom of just what the heck was going on.
The nightly news on TV that week was grisly. It was the Vietnamese New Year (“Tet”) of 1968, and though this was the first time any of us knew the Vietnamese got a second New Year, the only reason we knew this was by way of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley explaining to us why the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese had launched their biggest offensive of the war. NBC News was especially graphic (in those days, TV showed the war uncensored). Their camera caught a South Vietnamese general grabbing a Viet Cong suspect on the street, putting his gun to the man’s temple, and blowing his brains literally out of the other side of his head. That made the Swanson Salisbury Steak TV dinner go down easier.
The Tet Offensive of 1968 sent a shock wave through the American public because, opposite of everything we had been told about the United States soon “winning” the war—“We can see the light at the end of the tunnel!”—in fact, Tet showed just how powerful the other side was and how badly we were losing. The Viet Cong were all over Saigon, even at the door of the U.S. embassy. We were nowhere near to winning anything. This war was going to be with us for a very long time. I stared at the TV, and I was happy I was going to the seminary next year. If you were in the seminary, they couldn’t draft you. One more reason not to need Mrs. Beachum’s dating service.
Word eventually filtered through the parents that Mrs. Beachum had indeed vanished. There was no official word from the parish, but this much was said:
“Mrs. Beachum’s husband is missing in Vietnam and presumed dead. Nobody knows where Mrs. Beachum is, but she has probably left and gone home to be with her family.”
We never heard from Mrs. Beachum again. No one did. It was said she was too distraught to talk to anyone at St. John’s and, if she had, no one would have quite known what to say to her. Others said she had a complete nervous breakdown when she got the news about her husband and she went off, to be far, far away, to be by herself and shun this cruel world. One parishioner said she took her own life, but none of us believed that because if th
ere was one person who was thrilled about being alive, it was Mrs. Beachum. We finished out the year with an afternoon substitute teacher who did his best, but he never asked us to sing him a poem.
It was then, in the spring of 1968, after the deaths in Vietnam of Sergeant Beachum and a boy from the high school, plus the assassinations of King and the sweet man in the Senate elevator who helped me find my mother, that I made up my mind: under no circumstances, regardless of whatever amount of coercion, threats, or torture leveled at me, I would never, ever, pick up a gun and let my country send me to go kill Vietnamese.
And if anyone would ever ask me why I felt this way, I’d just look at ’em and say, “Don’t be facetious, child.”
Perhaps Mrs. Beachum is reading this. If so, I want to say: I’m sorry for whatever it was that took you away from us. I’m sorry we never had the chance to say good-bye. And I’m so sorry I never got to thank you for teaching me all those wonderful manners.
Christmas ’43
MY DAD HAD NOTICED for some years that I no longer wanted to shoot guns. He had taken note of when we boys in the neighborhood had stopped playing War. I didn’t know much about his time as a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II. The only clues my sisters and I got was when he would name our dogs after battles he was in: Peleliu, Tarawa, etc. In our attic he kept some war souvenirs: a Japanese flag, a sword, and the gun he had taken off a Japanese soldier. One day, without explanation, Dad decided he no longer wanted these items in our house. He quietly went and got a shovel out of the garage, gathered together the Japanese spoils of war, and went out to the large weeping willow tree in our backyard. He dug a hole—a very, very deep hole—and buried the gun and the sword and flag under the shade of that tree. When it was all done and the earth had been restored, he stood there alone, looking down, deep in thought or prayer or who knows what. I watched from my bedroom window.
“I want to tell you a story from the war,” he told me one day. “I want you to know why every day is precious and why I am thankful each day to be here.”
My dad was one of seven children, and they lived in twelve homes over eighteen years. They moved around a lot, dodging landlords who came to collect the rent they couldn’t afford to pay. The Great Depression had not been particularly kind to the Moore family of Kansas Avenue/Franklin Avenue/Kensington Avenue/Bennett Street/Kentucky Street/Illinois Street/Caldwell Avenue/Jane Street and other thoroughfares on the east side of Flint, Michigan.
Francis (or Frank, as he was known) was the fourth child of the family, and now, suddenly, at the age of twenty-two, his whole life—falling down the coal chute at two, clinging on for dear life at four while stuck on the running board of his dad’s car, getting cut from the high school basketball team the game before the state championship so that the coach could make room for a younger player coming in next year, getting fired the first day of driving the Coca-Cola delivery truck because he admitted he “didn’t much like the taste of Coke,” being placed by his mother temporarily at the age of ten in an orphanage along with his brother because she simply couldn’t afford to take care of seven children—all of this flashed before him as he lay exposed on top of Hill 250 on some miserable piece-of-shit island in the South Pacific, watching as the tracer rounds came out of the plane above, firing directly at him and his fellow Marines on Christmas Day, 1943. Except the planes, like him, were American.
How Frank came to find himself on Hill 250 on the island of New Britain made about as much sense to him as the fact that his own side was now trying to kill him with such ease. To begin with, no one ever explained to him how these hills got their names; it wasn’t as if there were 249 other hills he had to climb to get to Hill 250. In fact, to even call them “hills” seemed like some War Department cartographer’s idea of a joke. Maybe by calling them hills they would make an American Marine feel more like he was home—and that if he were going to die for this hill, then, well, at least he’d feel like he was dying for… home. Home had hills. Hills with trees and wildflowers with names like Yellow Lady Slippers and Jack in the Pulpit and Shooting Stars. Hills with pleasant hiking paths. Hills to hide out in. Hills to pick berries from. Hills where hobos could find a peaceful night’s rest. Hills where you and yours could find a small, quiet space to build a quick fire and make love beside it.
What led Frank to this particular hill was a worldwide war that had nothing in particular to do with his world. His world was one of hard work and sports and Saturday nights at the Knickerbocker Dance Hall. Though they lived the shared poverty of many in the worst days of the Depression, the Moore brothers—Bill, Frank, Lornie, and Herbie—each took extra care to always have a clean, well-pressed suit, a sharp haircut, and enough coin in their pockets to buy a pretty girl the first drink, if not the second.
They took dance lessons upon leaving high school, somehow figuring out that the fairer gender liked to go dancing. Because the other young men in town were slightly less adept at picking up on this, the Moore boys were always the first ones out on the dance floor, and this impressed the ladies. If nothing else, it showed the girls that they were fearless, and that in and of itself was quite attractive. Lornie, sixteen months younger than Frank, became known as the king of the dance floor and soon found himself teaching dance in a downtown dance studio. It dawned on him that he was in fact helping out the enemy by teaching other men how to dance a cool jitterbug, but Lornie had a gentle soul and a generous spirit, and he was just happy to see more people dancing the night away.
Things had been looking up in Flint by 1941. The Roosevelt policies of putting everyone back to work, plus the beginning of industrial production in anticipation of American involvement in a war that had started two years earlier in Europe and the Far East, was enough to prevent a factory town like Flint, Michigan, from collapsing entirely. Bill and Frank and Lornie all had WPA jobs right out of high school (a fact they tried to hide when speaking to girls). By the summer of ’41 Frank had already held down numerous jobs from hawking flyers for a local grocery store to driving an egg truck to (briefly) driving a truck full of the maximum-size (6 oz.), green-tinted Coke bottles. Each of the boys eventually landed the coveted General Motors assembly-line job. Frank, not looking forward to the monotony and repetition of placing the same nodule on an AC Spark Plug 4,800 times a day, took a night class to learn how to type, hoping to get a clerk’s job in the factory’s office. But he couldn’t type as fast as the girls, so he was relegated to Plant 7, line 2, spark plug pin insertion.
Eventually his three brothers saw a bigger world in their future and quit the factory (“Sales, Frank—that’s where the money is!”), and their combined incomes in 1941 were enough to pay the rent on their mother’s home and cease the constant upheaval of being two steps ahead of the landlord and his good friend, the county sheriff.
And after the rent and the food and the coal bills were paid, there was enough left over for the bus ride to the Knickerbocker. Or, if it was a special weekend, to the Industrial Mutual Association auditorium where the likes of Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra would play as they passed through the Midwest. It was, for young working men, a version—a version—of paradise.
So it came with some disappointment that the Emperor decided to interfere with their lives on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack, the elimination of nearly the entire Pacific fleet, came as a shock to the nation. The following day, even as President Roosevelt issued his call to arms, young men flocked to recruitment centers like the one in Flint, Michigan, which had been hastily set up in a large grade school on the near east side of town. The Brothers Moore, though, would not be among those signing up that day, or the next day, or the next week or the following month, or the month or two or three or six after that. It wasn’t that they weren’t upset at Hirohito or any less patriotic or any less eager to go kick some Axis ass. After all, they weren’t known at St. Mary’s High as “dancers.” They were Irish, and they never shied away from a fight.
It’s just that
this new war was, well, poorly timed. Bill had just gotten married, and Frank was sweet on a girl who had been the valedictorian of her class at Flint Northern. She planned to go to Ann Arbor, to the University of Michigan, to study medicine, which in those days meant she would become a nurse. Frank had some ambition for further education, but the recent union victories at GM meant that he was making good money, and Ann Arbor might as well have been on the moon. Nonetheless, the valedictorian seemed worth pursuing, so this war was unwelcome at best.
Frank’s father had served in the Marines in World War I, and his uncle Tom had been a doughboy in the trenches in France during that same war. Having been gassed by the Germans, Tom was of ill health and thus lived with Frank and the family in Flint. Frank got to see up close the effect that nasty war had on these two good men. Neither could explain to Frank why America had gone to war in 1917, and so when the drums began to beat again, Frank wanted to know exactly what this one was all about. Yes, it was enough that the nation was attacked—but was there something else we should know? Anything? Something? OK, well, those bastards destroying our fleet was certainly good enough for Frank. He was ready to go fight.
He waited until the last minute, until the draft notices started to arrive in July 1942. He decided he didn’t want to be drafted into the Army—“every man’s for himself in that operation,” he would say—and so on the first of August, 1942, Frank went down to the recruitment center at the large grade school and signed up to be a Marine. A Marine? “The Marines fight as a team,” he told his friends. “They look out for each other.” But his brothers (all of whom would soon enlist themselves: Bill in the Air Force, Herbie in the Navy, and Lornie in the paratroopers, where he would die from a sniper’s bullet in the last months of the war) told him, “Marines are sent into the worst of situations. You’ll get killed in the Marines.”
Here Comes Trouble Page 11
