It didn’t take us long to walk every neighborhood in Manhattan, and so pretty soon we started exploring the outer boroughs, as well. I never met anybody who knew the city better. He took me to neighborhoods I’d never even heard of, and we would explore them on foot in the wee hours of the morning, talking all the while. We walked all the cemeteries and all the industrial yards. We walked the waterfronts. We walked by the row houses and through the projects. We eventually walked over every single bridge in the greater New York metropolitan area—and there are a lot of them.
Nobody ever bothered us. It was the strangest thing. The city was not a safe place back then, but we walked through it as though we were untouchable. We were often so deep in our own conversations that we often didn’t even notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be. I wondered at times if people could even see us at all. But then sometimes the police would stop us and ask what we were doing, and Frank would show his badge. He would say, “I’m walking this lady home”—even if we were in a Jamaican neighborhood in Crown Heights. He was always walking me home. That was always the story.
Sometimes, late at night, he would drive me to Long Island to buy fried clams at a place he knew—a twenty-four-hour diner where you could pull right up to the window and order your food from the car. Or we’d go to Sheepshead Bay for littlenecks. We’d eat them while parked on the dock, watching the fishing boats head out to sea. In the spring, he would drive me out to the countryside in New Jersey to pick dandelion leaves in the moonlight, for making bitter salads. It’s something Sicilians enjoy, he taught me.
Driving and walking—those were the things that he could do, without getting too anxious.
He always listened to me. He became the most trusted confidant of my life. There was a clarity about Frank—a deep and unshakable integrity. It was soothing to be with a man who never boasted about himself (so rare, in men of that generation!) and who did not impose himself on the world in any way. If he ever had a fault, or made a mistake, he would tell you before you could find out for yourself. And there was nothing I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him.
Most of all, though, he listened.
I told him everything. When I had a new lover, I told him. When I had a fear, I told him. When I had a victory, I told him. I was not accustomed, Angela, to having men listen to me.
And as for your father, he was not accustomed to being with a woman who would walk five miles with him in the middle of the night, in the rain, in Queens, just to keep him company when he could not sleep.
He was never going to leave his wife and daughter. I knew that, Angela. That’s not who he was. And I was never going to lure him into bed. Aside from the fact that his injuries and his trauma made a sexual life impossible for him, I was not a woman who could have an affair with a married man. That’s not who I was. Not anymore.
Moreover, I can’t say I ever fantasized about marrying him. In general, of course, the thought of marriage gave me a hemmed-in feeling, and I didn’t long for it with anyone. But certainly not with Frank. I couldn’t imagine us sitting at a breakfast table, talking over a newspaper. Planning vacations. That picture didn’t look like either of us.
Lastly, I can’t be certain that Frank and I would have shared the same depth of love and tenderness for each other, had sex ever been part of our story. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.
So we were devoted to each other, in our own way, but we kept our lives separate. The one New York City neighborhood that we never explored together on foot was his—South Brooklyn. (Or Carroll Gardens, as the realtors eventually named it, although your father never called it that.) This was the neighborhood that belonged to his family—to his tribe, really. Out of respect, we left it quietly untouched by our footsteps.
He never came to know my people and I never came to know his.
I introduced him briefly to Marjorie—and certainly my friends knew about him—but Frank was not somebody who could socialize. (What was I going to do—have a dinner party, and show him off? Expect a man with his nervous condition to stand in a crowded room and make idle chitchat with strangers while holding a cocktail? No.) To my friends, Frank was just the walking phantom. They accepted that he was important to me because I said that he was important to me. But they never understood him. How could they have?
For a while, I’ll admit, I’d indulged a fantasy that he and Nathan might meet someday, and that he could become a father figure to that dear little boy. But that wasn’t going to work, either. He could barely be a father figure to you, Angela—his actual child, whom he loved with all his heart. Why would I ask him to take on another child to feel guilty about?
I asked nothing of him, Angela. And he asked nothing of me. (Other than, “Do you want to go for a walk?”)
So what were we to each other? What would you call it? We were something more than friends—that was certain. Was he my boyfriend? Was I his mistress?
Those words all fall short.
Those words all describe something that we were not.
Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I’d never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye. (His skin looked like the weathered binding of some ancient, sacred book.) I was enchanted by the hours that we kept and the mysterious places we went—both in the course of our conversations, and in the city itself.
The time we spent together happened outside of the world, is how it felt.
Nothing about us was normal.
We always ate in the car.
What were we?
We were Frank and Vivian, walking through New York City together, while everyone else slept.
Frank normally reached out to me at night, but on one roastingly hot day in the summer of 1966, I got a call from him in the middle of the afternoon, asking if he could please see me immediately. He sounded frantic, and when he arrived at L’Atelier, he leapt out of the car and started pacing in front of the boutique with more nervousness than I’d ever before witnessed. I quickly handed over my work to an assistant, and hopped into the car, saying, “Let’s go, Frank. Come, now. Just drive.”
He drove all the way out to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn—speeding the entire time, and not saying a word. He parked in a patch of dirt at the end of a runway, where we could watch the Naval Air Reserve planes come in for landings. I knew that he must have been profoundly agitated: he always went to Floyd Bennett Field to watch the planes land when nothing else would calm him. The roar of the engines settled his nerves.
I knew better than to ask him what was wrong. Eventually, once he had caught his breath, I knew he would tell me.
So we sat in the crushing July heat with the car off, listening to the engine tick and cool. Silence, then a landing plane, then silence again. I cranked down my window, to bring in some air, but Frank didn’t seem to notice. He hadn’t yet taken his white-knuckled hands off the steering wheel. He was wearing his patrolman’s uniform, which must’ve been sweltering. But again, he didn’t appear to notice. Another plane landed and shook the ground.
“I went to court today,” he said.
“All right,” I said—just to let him know that I was listening.
“I had to testify about a break-in last year. A hardware store. Some kids on dope, looking for things to fence. They beat up the owner, so there were assault charges. I was the first officer on the scene, so.”
“I understand.”
Your father often had to appear in court, Angela, on some police matter or another. He never liked it (sitting in a crowded courtroom was hell for him, of course), but it had never caused him to have a panicked reaction like this. Something more troubling must have occurred.
I waited for it.
“I saw somebody I used to know today, Vivian,” he said at last. His hands were still not off the wheel, and he was still staring straight ahead. “A guy from the Navy. Southern guy. He was on the Franklin with me. Tom Denno. I haven’t thought of that name in years. He was a guy who came from Tennessee. I didn’t even know he lived up here. Those southern guys, you’d think they would’ve all gone back home after the war, right? But he didn’t, I guess. Moved here to New York. Lives way the hell up on West End Avenue. He’s a lawyer now. He was in court today, representing one of the kids who broke into the hardware store. I guess that kid’s parents must have some money. They got a lawyer. Tom Denno. Of all people.”
“That must have surprised you.” Again, just letting him know I was there.
“I can still remember Tom when he was brand new on the ship,” Frank went on. “I don’t know the date—don’t own me to it—but he come on in something like early forty-four. He came straight off the farm. Country boy. You think city kids are tough, but you should see those country boys. Most of them, they came from such poverty, you never saw anything like it. I thought I grew up poor, but it was nothing compared to these kids. They never saw food before, like the amounts of food on the ship. They ate like they were starving, I remember. First time in their lives they hadn’t shared dinner with ten brothers. Some of them had hardly ever worn shoes. Accents like you never heard. You could barely understand them. But they were tough as hell in battle. Even when we weren’t under fire, they were tough. Fighting with one another all the time, or mouthing off to the marines who were guarding the admiral, when the admiral was onboard. They didn’t know how to do anything except come at life hard, you know? Tom Denno was the hardest of them all.”
I nodded. Frank rarely talked in such detail about life onboard the ship, or about anyone he’d known in the war. I didn’t know where this was all going, but I knew it was important.
“Vivian, I was never tough like those guys.” He was still gripping that steering wheel like it was a life preserver—like it was the only thing in the world keeping him afloat. “One day on the flight deck, one of my men—young kid from Maryland—stopped paying attention for a second. He took a step in the wrong direction, and his head got sucked right off his body, right into a plane propeller. Just pulled his head right off him, right in front of me. We weren’t even under fire—just a routine day on the deck. Now we have a headless body on the deck, and you better hurry and clean it up, because more planes are coming in, landing every two minutes. You gotta keep the flight deck clear at all times. But I just freeze. Now here comes Tom Denno, and he grabs the body by its feet and drags it away—probably the way he used to drag pig carcasses back on the farm. He doesn’t even flinch, just knows what to do. Meanwhile, I can’t even move. And then Tom’s gotta come and pull me out of the way, too, so I won’t be the next one killed. Me—an officer! Him, an enlisted kid. This was a kid who’d never been to a dentist, Vivian. How the hell did he end up as a Manhattan lawyer?”
“Are you sure it was him that you saw today?” I asked.
“It was him. He knew me. He came over and talked to me. Vivian, he’s one of the 704 Club. Jesus Christ!” Frank threw me a tortured look.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said as gently as I could.
“The men who stayed on the Franklin when we were hit that day—there were seven hundred and four of them. Captain Gehres named those guys the 704 Club. He built them up as heroes. Hell, maybe they were heroes. The Heroic Living, Gehres called them. The ones who didn’t desert the ship. They get together every year and have reunions. Relive the glories.”
“You didn’t desert the ship, Frank. Even the Navy knew that. You were blown overboard in flames.”
“Vivian, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was already a coward long before that.”
The panic had drained from his voice. Now he spoke with dreadful calm.
“No, you weren’t,” I said.
“It’s not an argument, Vivian. I was. We’d been under fire already for months before that day. I couldn’t handle it. I could never handle it. Guam in July of forty-four—bombing the hell out of Guam. I couldn’t imagine how there was even a single blade of grass left standing on that island when we were done with it, we rained such hell on that place. But when our troops landed at the end of July, out come all these Japanese soldiers and tanks. How did they even survive it? I can’t imagine. Our marines were brave, the Japanese soldiers were brave, but I wasn’t brave. I couldn’t bear the noise of the guns, Vivian—and they weren’t even being fired at me. That’s when I started being like this. The nerves, the shakes. The men started calling me Twitchy.”
“Shame on them,” I said.
“They were right, though. I was a pile of nerves. One day, we had a bomb fail to release from one of our planes—a hundred-pound bomb, just got jammed in the open bomb bay. The pilot radios in that he’s got a bomb stuck in the bay, and he has to land like that, can you imagine? Then, during the landing, the bomb kind of shudders lose and falls out, and now we have a hundred-pound bomb skittering across the flight deck. Your brother and some other guys just ran right at it and pushed that thing over the edge of the ship like it’s nothing—and again, I’m frozen. Can’t help, can’t act, can’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t matter, Frank.” But again, it was like he couldn’t hear me.
“Then it’s August 1944,” he went on. “We’re in the middle of a typhoon, but we’re still running sorties, landing planes even while the waves are breaking over the flight deck. And those pilots, landing on a postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific, in the teeth of the gale—they never even flinch. Here I am, my hands can’t stop shaking, and I’m not even piloting the goddamn planes, Vivian. They called our convoy ‘Murderers’ Row.’ We were supposed to be the toughest guys around. But I wasn’t tough.”
“Frank,” I said, “it’s all right.”
“Then the Japanese start suicide-bombing us in October. They know they’re gonna lose the war, so they decide to go down in glory. Take out as many of us as they can, by any means necessary. They just kept coming at us, Vivian. One day in October, there were fifty of them that came at us. Fifty kamikaze planes in one day. Can you imagine it?”
“No,” I said, “I cannot.”
“Our guys knocked them out of the air, one after another, but they sent more planes the next day. I knew it was just a matter of time before one of them would hit us. Everyone knew we were sitting ducks, not more than fifty miles off the coast of Japan, but our guys were so cavalier about it. Strutting around like it was nothing. And there was Tokyo Rose on the radio every night, telling the world that the Franklin was already sunk. That’s when I stopped sleeping. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Terrified, every minute. I’ve never slept right since then. Some of those kamikaze pilots, when they got shot down, we fished them out of the water as prisoners. One of those Japanese pilots, he was being marched across our flight deck to the brig, but then he broke away and ran right to the edge of the ship. Jumped off and killed himself, rather than be taken prisoner. Death with honor, right in front of me. I looked at his face as he was running to the edge, Vivian—and I swear to God, he didn’t look anything near as scared as I felt.”
I could feel Frank spinning back into the past now, hard and fast, and it wasn’t good. I needed to bring him back home—back to himself. Back to now.
“What happened today, Frank?” I asked. “What happened with Tom Denno in that courtroom today?”
Frank exhaled, but gripped the steering wheel even harder.
“He comes up to me, Vivian, right before I’m supposed to testify. Rem
embers me by name. Asks how I’m doing. Tells me about how he’s a lawyer now, where he lives on the Upper West Side, where he went to college, where his kids go to school. Gave me a speech about how well he’s done. He was one of the skeleton crew that sailed the Franklin back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard after the attack, you know, and I guess he never left New York after that. Still has that accent from right off the farm, though. But wearing a suit that probably costs more than my house. Then he looks me up and down in my uniform, and says, ‘A beat cop? That’s what naval officers become these days?’ Christ, Vivian, what am I supposed to say? I just nod. Then he asks me, ‘Do they even let you carry a gun?’ And I say something stupid, like, ‘Yeah, but I’ve never used it,’ and he says, ‘Well, you always were a soft apple, Twitchy,’ and he walks away.”
“He can go straight to hell,” I said. I felt my own fists balling up. A wave of rage overcame me so fiercely that the noise of it in my ears—a roar of rushing blood—was, for a moment, louder than the roar of the plane landing in front of us. I wanted to hunt down Tom Denno and slit his neck. How dare he? I also wanted to gather up Frank in my arms and rock him and comfort him—but I couldn’t, because the war had bunged up his mind and his body so badly that he couldn’t even be held in the arms of a woman who loved him.
It was all so vicious and it was all so wrong.
I thought of how Frank had once told me that—when he came up in the water after being blown off the ship—he emerged into a world that was completely on fire. Even the seawater around him was on fire, blanketed with burning fuel. And the engines of the stricken aircraft carrier were only fanning the flames. Burning the men in the water even more severely. Frank found that if he splashed hard, he could push the fire away and create a small spot in the Pacific that was not on fire. So that’s what he did for two hours—him, with burns over most of his body—until he was rescued. He just kept pushing the flames away, trying to keep one small area of his world free from the inferno. All these years later, I felt like he was still trying to do that. Still trying to find a safe radius somewhere in the world. Someplace where he could stop burning.
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