Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  It was not that I was leery of Sally Ann, worried that she might turn up unannounced. It was more nebulous than that. It was the houseboat itself I didn’t want to disturb, as though it might swallow me up if I opened the wrong drawer or stirred the wrong cobweb. The truth is I was afraid.

  Up until the moment I packed my suitcase and checked out of my hotel, Joey was merely a helpful stranger who had developed a vested interest in helping me look for my father’s journal. This is the lie I told myself. And this is the lie that kept me comfortable in his presence and allowed me to continue inching closer to him without feeling the space between us diminishing. But the day we moved onto the houseboat, this lie evaporated, carried off by some more substantial breeze. I was well aware that as soon as we unlocked the door and let ourselves in, I should have turned and left. There was only one bed and no sofa; I’m certain Sally Ann was conscious of this fact when she offered the houseboat in the first place.

  We didn’t speak about sleeping arrangements as Joey and I began to nervously unpack our things. The banter between us was too easy, and too difficult, all at the same time. I knew I should get out of there and never look back. But by then the lie had delivered me into the hands of the truth, so to speak, and there was no going back. I was, for the first wonderful, terrible time, exactly where I belonged. Together we put our things away with a shared sense of solemn, frightened dignity. When our suitcases were empty, we turned to face each other in the middle of the room, and with a soldier’s bravery Joey reached out to hold the back of my skull, very gently, in his hand.

  We were lost to each other after that.

  48

  Settling into life on the houseboat, Joey puttered around, whistling like a happy canary and making his improvements. He was, I soon learned, a minor master when it came to the art of jerry-rigging things. When we discovered the heavy iron door of the wood-burning stove fell off its hinges whenever we opened it to stoke the fire, Joey managed to replace the pin in the hinge with a bent coat hanger and a stray railroad spike he found near the tracks in town. He polished a hubcap and hung it in the shower to serve as a shaving mirror, for the bathroom had no mirror. Upon opening up a weathered trunk he discovered some old fishing traps, so he cleaned them up and put them out in the water around the houseboat. He caught a pair of Dungeness crabs and boiled them that night until their shells were perfectly laced at the edges with a rusty flame-orange color.

  Occasionally we took the ferry across the bay to San Francisco. Other times we took walks in the wooded hills around Sausalito. When it came to running errands in town, to avoid unwanted attention, we decided it was best for Joey to go by himself.

  Whenever he ran errands, I found myself sitting alone, staring at the journal I still had yet to open.

  • • •

  The object itself was intimidating. It was thick, heavy, and bound in hard leather. The pages were crinkled with weather and age; from the side it looked like a book stuffed with a pile of stiff yellow ruffles. I got the sense that, had the journal been any less substantial, it may not have endured its long journey. The cover was scratched and worn, stained with mud, coffee, and—in one suspicious spot—what appeared to be blood. That stain in particular drove something home for me: This object had been to war. War, an abstract place far removed from my existence, now made real through the brownish-maroon residue of someone’s blood . . . my father’s, or someone else’s, entirely unknown. I’d regarded my father’s stories about the First World War with so much doubt, and now I realized with a sense of shame this doubt was the privilege of a spoiled, oblivious child.

  Finally, one morning while Joey was out and the fog lay thick over the entire bay, I tipped open the cover. Just like that. I’d done this once or twice before, studying my father’s handwriting in the abstract, but not reading the words. This time, however, I allowed my eyes to linger. I began to read. If there were any clues or hints that might support or debunk Clarence’s story, they were likely towards the very end, during the Second World War, when my father had run out of pages just before shipping out to the Pacific front. But I decided to start at the beginning. If I was going to learn the truth about my father, I was going to learn all of it.

  It began with my father’s enlistment. My grandfather had given his son the blank journal in 1917, the day my father decided to sign up for the Army, and urged him to record his experiences. In his first entry, my father wrote about standing on line at a dance studio on 125th Street and adding two fictional years to his age in order to enlist, nervous and excited, proud to serve his country. The entries continued as my father reported the events that eventually led him from training camp to the battlefield. I use the word training loosely, for compared to the white regiments the Hellfighters’ training was a joke. While the white regiments trained for months, the 369th trained for mere weeks in their civilian clothes and were handed broomsticks to practice with instead of rifles. They were treated even worse when they were sent to finish their training in South Carolina, the locals making an effort to ensure the colored boys from the North understood they were subject to Jim Crow and everything that came with it. At the front, they were put on labor service duties for months, until finally it was decided they would be sent to the trenches as part of a French division.

  I recalled during my childhood how my father displayed what can only be described as a kind of emotional patriotism for France—second only to his patriotism for America—and as I read the pages of his diary the reason for his sentiment towards the French finally clicked: The French cared far less about the color of his skin than the fact he was a loyal and able-bodied man. He wrote about how staggering it was to suddenly be treated with a sense of dignity. He and the others in his regiment were issued French helmets and sent to the front lines, where, impressively, the 369th never lost a single trench or foot of soil.

  In a less overtly complimentary way, perhaps it could be argued the Germans were nearly as egalitarian as the French, for the nickname “the Harlem Hellfighters” had been bestowed upon my father’s regiment by the Germans. I chuckled a bit when I read that, imagining a German staring goggle-eyed at a black man charging into his trench and concluding that such a terrifying force of nature could only come from the mouth of hell itself.

  I also began to understand why my father had been so tolerant of Clarence, letting him overstay his welcome in our house. According to one of my father’s entries, he credited Clarence with saving his life, pushing my father out of the way of a sniper’s bullet as they sat stand-to at late dusk during the regiment’s first few days in the trenches. The bullet had whizzed so close it had nicked Clarence’s ear, inflicting a superficial wound that bled profusely. Grateful, my father turned over his day’s wine ration to Clarence, and thus their friendship was cemented.

  Once I began reading, momentum carried me along and I quickly got lost in more and more pages. My father was hardly a wordsmith, but there were so many descriptions in his journal that, to my mind, verged on poetry. He wrote about the careful way he checked the seals of his gas mask. About the yellow haze that sat heavy in the trenches. About being the first regiment to reach the Rhine and what it had been like to stand on its shores and look out over the landscape. I felt a balloon of pride filling in my chest, not only for the things he had seen but also for the tender way he paid attention to the world around him. He wrote about his homecoming to New York, and about marching in a parade—I can only assume this was the same event Clarence had mentioned—and about trying to repress a grin the whole way up Fifth Avenue, turning at 110th Street, then Lenox, and marching into the familiar heart of Harlem.

  When Joey returned from his errands he looked at me twice, flinching with surprise when he caught sight of what I was reading.

  “You’re reading it,” he stammered. “How—how is it?”

  “Good,” I said. This was honest, in fact. “His accounts of the trenches in the First World War are real
ly something . . . and to think, he saw all this when was only sixteen . . .”

  “Sixteen?” Joey repeated.

  “He was so eager to enlist, he was one of those who lied about his age.”

  Joey waited. I could tell he wanted to ask more questions, but out of polite consideration he didn’t. He puttered around, putting things away, but consciously remaining within earshot just in case I felt like sharing. We spent most of the day like that: me on the bed, reading with intense concentration, as Joey buzzed quietly nearby. Hours passed, the daylight waned, and Joey thoughtfully switched on the electric lightbulb that hung over the head of the bed.

  “Huh,” I guffawed some time later, reading one entry in particular. The entries trailed off after the war ended and my father left Europe and came back to America. He remained in the National Guard, but during weekdays apprenticed himself to a small radio repair business in Harlem.

  “Listen to this,” I said. Joey came over and sat on the foot of the bed. I proceeded to read from the journal: “‘Young woman came in today to pick up her daddy’s radio . . . told her I had to replace one of the vacuum tubes . . . she act like I was making something up, made me damn near take the whole radio apart to show her what I done . . . wasn’t satisfied until I let her hold one of the tubes for herself, saying, “This it? This all that need fixing? This look like a whole lot of nothing. Don’t look like that much sound could come out of little old this.” I explained the science of radios to her best I could, pack her up with that Marconi and send her along, back to her daddy. Pain in the backside, sure as I born! But got a funny little way about her. Couldn’t help but think of her for the rest of the day . . .’”

  “What’s so funny?” Joey asked.

  “That,” I said, still chuckling, “had to be my mother.”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling and laughing along with me. He waited for me to say more, but when I didn’t, he politely went back to puttering. I greedily read all the details of my parents’ first date, a story that, in my mother’s retelling of it, had been much more chaste.

  The hour grew late. Eventually Joey climbed into bed next to me and occupied himself with a paperback novel as I continued to read. The minutes ticked on well past midnight and into the wee hours, but I could not stop reading.

  “Listen to this,” I said softly, my chest heavy as I read. “‘My boy passed on today. I seen a lot of things in the war, but I didn’t recognize him when they pull his body out of the river. Like my eyes and brain weren’t working no more. Mae had to give the confirmation, she nod at the officer and the officer write “Marcus Tillman” in the report. Mae always been stronger than me. Now she saddled with more burden than ever, because I feel like some part of me no longer working. Can’t say a man is ever whole again after losing his first son.’”

  Joey looked at me, waiting for me to explain.

  “My older brother,” I said. “Marcus. He died the year I was born.”

  Joey gave a solemn nod. There was a tender, compassionate look in his eyes, and in that moment I believed he understood the conflicted, intricate feelings I had on the subject, the anxiety I’d always felt about the ill-timing of my birth, the way I suspected I was a poor replacement for the brother who had come before me.

  “May I?” Joey said, reaching a gentle hand for the journal. I let him take it. He turned a few pages. The entries had, understandably, become infrequent in the time that followed Marcus’s death, but then eventually picked up again. Joey did not have to flip many pages until coming upon what he was looking for. He looked up at me and smiled.

  “‘I don’t know what I done to have a son half so smart as Miles,’” Joey read aloud. He continued to read my father’s words—as my father praised my intelligence and potential, laying claim to me as his “best and brightest creation”—and compassionately ignored the glassy look in my eyes as I blinked away my reaction.

  “And, on that note,” Joey said, smiling affectionately at me, “I think you need some rest. Let’s go to sleep.” He closed the journal and leaned over me to slip it onto the little nightstand beside the bed. “Don’t worry,” he added, noticing my face. “I know you want to, but you can’t read the whole thing in one sitting. It’ll keep.”

  49

  Two days later, I found myself on the ferry, watching the fat brown bodies of sea lions slip off piles of harbor rocks and into the water as the ship pulled out of the dock in Sausalito. The ferry was San Francisco–bound. I had read through the entirety of my father’s journal and, with a specific mission in mind, decided to return to the main branch of the city library.

  For the majority of its pages, reading the journal had been heartening. My father’s account of the trenches in the First World War struck me as heroic and honest, a young man’s first test of his mettle. His anecdotes of life between the wars, of meeting my mother and starting a family, had brought me closer to him, allowing me a rare glimpse of my childhood through his eyes. It was the final spate of entries—the entries leading up to his aborted tour of duty during the Second World War, just as I’d suspected—that had given me cause to once again recall Clarence’s damning words and question my father.

  In 1941, the U.S. Army was still segregated, and while many of my father’s peers were replaced by newly enlisted men, the Harlem Hellfighters more or less remained intact as a division of the National Guard. But after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, my father’s regiment was reorganized and reactivated for duty. They were sent upstate for training, stationed briefly in Massachusetts, then shipped out West, eventually destined for Hawaii and Okinawa. By that time my father was thirty-nine, although his original white lie to the Army when he enlisted put his age as two years older. Either way, he was an anomaly among the eighteen-year-olds who enlisted and who made up most of the regiment around him. Young privates poked fun at my father and Clarence behind their backs, scoffing at the pair of “old” men who didn’t have the common sense to bow out of the National Guard when they were expected to. According to my father’s journal entries, these jibes weren’t very subtle, but he managed to let most of them roll off his back.

  There was one exception to the rule of my father’s tolerance, however. My father’s commanding officer, Captain Julian Harris, was a cocky young bully. As a sergeant, my father was meant to serve as Julian’s right-hand man. Furthermore, as a veteran with a good amount of experience, my father took it upon himself to offer Julian advice. This proposal was not happily met. Insecure about being undermined by “an old geezer who thinks he’s a war hero,” Julian responded by treating my father like a lackey. He put my father through his paces during training camp, singling him out at every turn, pushing my father’s mental and physical capabilities to the limit in the hopes that he might break. While my father seemed able to ignore the other men’s rude treatment, Julian managed to push my father’s buttons. Reading his journal, I realized with a chill that my father’s anger and resentment were very real. This was a side of him I had never known.

  Things went from bad to worse between the two men when it came to light that someone in the regiment was stealing radio parts, very likely selling them on the black market. Julian instantly accused my father. Given that my father had spent time working in a radio repair shop, he made a good suspect. He had knowledge of which parts were valuable and where to sell them undetected. It unnerved me that my father never denied the accusations in any of his entries. Perhaps, though, this is not so strange; journals are documents we write for ourselves, under the assumption of privacy. If my father was innocent, it is logical that he may not have felt the need to defend himself to himself. Nonetheless, I found myself longing for a denial, for proof of his innocence. Instead, my father’s journal entries chronicled a record of Julian’s offenses to my father’s dignity, until eventually my father ran out of pages. He stashed the journal in a locker, with a final note that he was worried he’d written too much about his dislike fo
r Julian. “Best to leave my grievances behind,” he wrote. “Don’t want no one using them against me.”

  It was that final note that unnerved me the most and reawakened Clarence’s accusations. I tried to picture it. There my father was, still under suspicion of having stolen radio parts, sailing across the Pacific with a man he detested more than any other human being on earth. Clarence’s voice echoed back to me: He murdered a man just so’s they wouldn’t have no proof o’ his thievery . . . It didn’t seem possible. The man I knew didn’t have the act in him—not the theft, and certainly not the other. But both my father’s uncharacteristic anger and the circumstances were unsettling. I wanted more.

  • • •

  Once the ferry pulled into the city, I walked down Market Street, finding my way back to the Civic Center and, more specifically, to the library. I had only been in San Francisco for three and a half weeks, but it felt like aeons since those first days I’d spent rattling around the microfiche room and requesting backlogged periodicals from the circulation desk. This time I was helped by an elderly male librarian who—partly out of need and partly out of curious, nostalgic affectation—used an antique ear trumpet.

  “Doesn’t do to ask patrons to speak up when you work in a library,” he explained when he caught me looking at the whimsically shaped brass trumpet. “Beethoven himself used one of these,” he added in a slightly defensive, huffy tone. When I described what I was looking for, taking care to politely speak into the ear trumpet, the librarian led me through the reference shelves, to a section of hardbound volumes of The New York Times Obituaries Index.

  “If the feller was from New York like you say, I’d start here. You know how to check the index, don’t you?” He looked at me skeptically. I nodded. “Wish all papers would put these out; very helpful,” he sighed, patting the spines. He turned and left me to my search. I pulled down a few volumes, from around the time of my father’s embarkation to his eventual discharge. There was only one man my father had truly hated. Ironically, I prayed now that particular man had made it through the war.