I began to get nervous.
I’ll never know if my radar was good or bad on that night. He may have just wanted a kiss—that’s what he said he wanted when he grabbed me. I don’t know if I thought he was a psycho or just a strange boy who was too pushy and wanted to be able to tell his friends he kissed the American girl. I don’t know because when he lurched for me, expecting me, I guess, to cry or submit, I brought my knee up sharply into his stomach and pushed him over Bernard, who was unwittingly helpful by leaning over to pick up something off the ground.
And then I ran.
I ran through the back of whoever’s backyard we were in, through the break in the wall, and down the quiet, wet village street. At first they both scrambled up and ran after me, but soon I heard only one set of footsteps running behind me, gaining on me. I didn’t stop. Eventually, Bernard came abreast with me, huffing and puffing, and pointed out the right direction to my house. He ran with me to the top of the street and then we both slowed to a walk to catch our breath, and me, to negotiate re-entry to my house.
“He’s just someone I know,” Bernard said. “Nobody bad. Just wanted to meet you.”
I didn’t respond. We walked to my garden and I put my foot in the vines, grabbing for a good hold on the pipe with both hands. I turned to him.
“He give you money?” I asked.
Bernard shook his head but he was grinning. (It always amazed me how someone so bad could always be so jolly.)
“He didn’t get his kiss, did he?” he said.
I snorted and hoisted myself up the pipe to the balcony and into the warm and quiet house. Within minutes, I was in my bed.
Chapter Four
The Major
“The Potato Eaters and ancestors of the Hillbillies.” This is how Wikipedia describes the Irish. It is the first sentence of its description of them. My father wouldn’t have disagreed with that description, but then, he was fully Irish by blood, himself. A more perverse, obstinate and contrary group of people you’d be hard pressed to find.
On the other hand, the most charming, and delightful people of my acquaintance have also been Irish or of Irish descent. In my mind, the Irish have some incredibly good things about them, and like most Irish-Americans, I’ll always have a special spot in my heart for Ireland and things Irish. This doesn’t change the fact that they tend to be a difficult people, given to sly misrepresentation if not downright mendacity. So Erin go braugh that.
My father was the fourth child in an Irish family of seven children. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in August, 1920, four years after the Easter Rising in Ireland. He was the fourth child of Tom Kiernan and Mary Ann Mears, who met on the S.S. Lusitania ten years before the ocean liner was sunk by a German U boat in WWI. His older sister, Mary, and two brothers, Tom and Jim were born in America and were naturalized in 1920, along with their parents. My father, born that summer, was the first “true” American born of the family—something which, I believe, contributed to a life-long patriotism on his part.
He was christened “John Joseph” and was called “Joe” by family and friends. It’s an interesting, and utterly believable part of my father’s history that no one seemed to know—even his brothers and sisters—what his real name was. As long as I knew him, he was “John Patrick.” It wasn’t until nearly ten years after his death that I unearthed his original name. I’d always thought his first name was “Joseph” since that was what his siblings called him. I’d heard the stories why he’d changed it: He thought “Joe” was common, the equivalent of “Bud” or “Mac.” I had heard my paternal uncle, Bill, jokingly lament at having his middle name, Patrick, stolen by Dad. I had not known that Dad hadn’t made up the “John” part of his name. He was the kind of boy who might’ve easily done such a thing.
My grandmother and grandfather settled in Indianapolis shortly after arriving in this country in 1907. Mary Ann came from County Sligho to join her sister, Agnes and her husband Mike in Indianapolis. My grandmother spoke only Gaelic when she arrived at the age of twenty-five. But by the time she died, sixty years later, she could not remember a single word of her native tongue.
My grandfather Tom Kiernan was, technically, an Englishman, his parents having emigrated to Whitechapel, England, twenty-five years earlier from County Mayo. Seventy years later, I had an argument with my Aunt Kate where I tried to convince her that Grandad Kiernan wasn’t really Irish but an Englishman. (I was on an anti-Irish kick at the time.) I’ll never forget her response: “Well, his mother was Irish and his father was Irish, so I’d say that was a neat trick him turning out English!”
Because he had no real prospects in New York and because he believed he had just met the woman he wanted to marry, Tom followed Mary Ann within a few months to Indianapolis, where he became a fireman—an occupation that effectively buffered his soon-to-be-large Irish family—from the poverty and want of the coming Depression. They lived in a large house on the west side of Indianapolis, where their four boys and three girls attended parochial school.
Intellectually gifted, my father had a vision of who he was and where his place was in the world. From the beginning, he knew that wasn’t Indiana. At fourteen, he ran away to New York City where he found work as a photographer’s apprentice and modeled for Boys’ Life.
A year later, he returned to Indianapolis to finish school. My grandfather told him he wouldn’t waste any more private school tuition money on him. My father enrolled at Washington High School, a public school, skipped his junior year, and became class president, head of the school newspaper, and debating society president. He graduated at the top of his class.
After he graduated, he enlisted in order to join his two older brothers in World War II. Both of them were pilots; Tom was with the 55th Fighter Group, 338th Squadron, and Jim with the 398th Bomb Group, 603rd Squadron. Except for the fact that my Dad was, briefly, a part of the 8th Air Force, there is no file, and no record of his unit.
On the basis of a standard IQ test, my father was sent to Officer’s Training in Florida, given the rank of Lieutenant 2nd Class. He was sent to London to work with British Intelligence. From this point until he was honorably discharged from the Army in 1945 there is no detailed information as to what my father did in the war. When my older brother Tom used the Freedom of Information Act in 1996 to get what were supposed to be the military records of my father’s work with British Intelligence during the war, almost all of the pages were blacked out. We believe, from piecing together certain known events of his history, that my father migrated to the OSS, or the CIA after the war. But he never admitted to it, himself.
Often, when he’d had a few drinks too many, my father, who was a brilliant raconteur, would tell stories about experiences behind enemy lines, always out of uniform or, worse, wearing an enemy uniform. He was fluent in French but used to joke that his German wasn’t good enough to prevent him from being executed. He was certainly a spy during the war. He hinted at many escapades, but none fully explained.
He was a brilliant puzzle-solver, and when he wasn’t dodging bombs, dating English actresses, or doing intelligent reconnaissance on every pub in London, he worked at Bletchley Park. The work done at Bletchley Park (with British cryptanalyst, Alan Turing,) was primarily code cracking. The decryption done at Bletchley is generally accepted as being the reason the Allies defeated the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic, a turning point in the war.
There is a photograph taken during the war that each of us kids has displayed in our homes. It was taken at Station 159, Wormingford, England in East Anglia where nearly all of the US operational bases were located and where my father’s older brother Tom was stationed with the 55th Fighter Group. The photo shows Tom and our father standing in front of Tom’s P-51 with the name of a third brother written on the side of it. (The photo was taken several months after Jim had been killed during a bombing mission on the Ainsworth, Nebraska Bombing Range when his engine failed. He was the pilot of the B-17F and went down with a cr
ew of six.)
My father had come down from London with a photographer from the Stars and Stripes that wanted to do a story about the two brothers. After the photographer got his shots and was packing up his gear, Tom’s squadron, which provided escort to the big B-17 bombers, returned from their mission and overflew the field before breaking off into tight, sequential landing patterns.
This was always a dramatic and emotional moment. As the two brothers looked up to count the number of planes returning, the photographer knew that this was “the photo.” He grabbed his camera, steadied it without a tripod, and took the picture that would be forever etched in our hearts, and in our living rooms from Jacksonville to San Francisco: two brothers, and the memory of a third, in wartime.
A couple of months later, Tom loaned the “Prince James” to another pilot whose plane was in maintenance. He got shot down but made it out okay, but the “Prince James” rests at the bottom of the English Channel.
After the war, my father sat in on the Nuremberg Trials and then left the Army and moved to Paris for a few years. From there, he moved with a childhood friend to Alaska where he made and lost a fortune in some enterprise or another, before the two of them decided to take advantage of the GI bill and go to college. They enrolled at the University of Arizona.
In 1949, Tom died of spinal meningitis. My father returned to Indianapolis for the funeral, and met my mother through a mutual friend. They married soon after, and my older brother Tommy was born on the one-year anniversary of the day his Uncle Tom died. My father was thirty years old.
My father did not return to Arizona with his new bride but buckled down to making a life in Indianapolis. He got a job working at a menswear store by day and went to school at night, majoring in pre-law at Butler University.
Paris must have felt very far away to him.
I’m afraid married life came as a big shock to my father. He had been a free-and-easy older college student with no worries but the next class and the next bar tab. Now he was selling jackets and shirts. Every dime went for formula or clothes for a beautiful but nonworking wife. He no longer had enough time or energy for the life of the mind he craved.
In late 1950, my father was approached by the US government to “come back,” this time to the reserves. At the beginning of the Cold War, the US was taking precautions, reactivating bases overseas and preparing for its part in keeping Russia in check. There were reasons to fatten up the ranks.
The Air Force promised to bring him back at the rank of Major. They promised him a steady paycheck. They promised him his first base assignment would be in sunny Florida.
It was always a surprise to anyone who knew my father that he would accept the government’s offer. He was known as an independent man who scorned authority, idiotic rules and conformity. But I think he went back in because he was tired of the struggle, of being constantly poor. My father had expensive tastes (he lived at the Dorchester in London, and was known to keep his taxi waiting, meter running, while he dined in restaurants). Champagne, foie gras, jewelry, travel, and leather-bound books were very real seductions to a wallet that could not afford the daily, unrelenting needs of a family.
Finally, I think he went back in because he was fiercely patriotic. I think he really believed his country needed him. Coming from a family of immigrants—both parents possessing strong Irish and English accents that socially set them apart—he was always aware of his singular position as the first-born real American.
Besides, by the time he was approached by the United States Air Force, his little family was getting even bigger; by then he would’ve known that I was on the way.
In 1951, my father moved my mother and my brother, Tommy, to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where I was born a year later and my younger brother, Kevin, a year after that, at Patrick Air Force Base.
Patrick was originally built for the US Navy as an anti-submarine patrol base and was named Banana River Naval Air Station. The air base is two miles south of Cocoa Beach and separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the highway, AIA, but the Officer’s and NCO clubs were both built on the beach. Later, when we returned to this area after our overseas tour, and moved to a house on a beach further south, I’d be well aware of the dramatic differences in a beach that had been painstakingly cleared of coral and one that hadn’t. (The enlisted men had dug up all coral extending nearly a quarter of a mile into the ocean on the beach in front of the Officer’s club.) It was like wading out onto wall-to-wall carpet.
From Patrick, he moved us and my mother, now pregnant with Terry, back to Indianapolis where she would have the comfort of her sister and parents—and his own huge, rollicking family—to help her with four children, two toddlers and two infants, while he went to an atoll in the Pacific called Einowetok, there to watch one mushroom cloud after another in a series of nuclear bomb testing. A year of only male company, no vegetation, no town, khaki shorts, island snakes and booze. When he finally returned to collect us all, we landed in upstate New York at Griffiss Air Force Base for the next six years.
Griffiss Air Force Base was located in Rome, New York, about fifteen miles northwest of the town of Utica. (It was named in honor of Lt. Colonel Townsend Griffiss, who was shot down by friendly fire during the war.) It was a former WWII staging base for bombers and fighters, and then became a fighter interceptor base to defend us against high-flying Soviet bombers that might invade the US. When we were there, it was also a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. Because of the experience with material procurement, processing and disposal, they established an Air Force material Research and Development testing lab there, called the Rome Air Development Center (RADC) of which was my father was in charge.
This was a fairly wonderful period of time for all of us. We were there for nearly seven years and Tommy and I have strong memories of Rome and upstate New York, in general. Money must have been less tight (amazingly) for the family photo albums are full of my parents laughing and happy at New Year’s Eve parties, vacations, costume parties, and cocktail parties. I don’t know if it was any kind of a shock for my parents to get the news that we were being transferred overseas but I know they had made lifelong friends in Rome and were sad to leave.
Chapter Five
French Village Life in 1964
The house my father moved us into “on the economy” was comfortable but very French. It had a bright orange Mediterranean tile roof and a wrap-around balcony that my mother would have filled with flowers if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were heading into winter. It had mercurial plumbing, a very, very small kitchen, and dangerously steep stone steps leading to the large, very dark, very creepy basement carved out of solid rock and separated into several, doorless rooms.
Along the side of our house was a large ravine, covered with hanging vines and trees that leaned over as if to get a good look inside. The ravine would prove to be very important to us children, as it was the wet and boggy entrance to the village sewer, a labyrinth of slimy underground pathways that led throughout the village.
From the first day we discovered it, my brothers and I lived in the sewer. Fifteen feet in depth, we would climb down into it using ivy or tree branches that happened to have either fallen in from the last storm or were growing through the cracks in the sides of the cement walls. Later, we would create ladders and carve out hand and foot holds for more reliable entrance and exit.
The sewer was, essentially, a long underground tunnel which became an important conduit and playground for us because it allowed us to drop from sight instantly from almost any spot in the village and travel unseen its full width and breadth (something most children find very useful.) I can think of at least one time when I was out in the evening, presumed by my parents to be soundly and sweetly asleep in my little bed, when I espied a teacher in the street who would know I shouldn’t be there. I vanished into the sewer, reappearing within minutes in my own front yard.
When we weren’t using the sewer for travel, we used it to plot and scheme and to have
meetings with the other American kids in the next neighborhood over. (Oddly, the French kids wouldn’t go into the sewer. Clearly they saw our fascination with it as a singularly American thing.) In any event, we spent hours at a time down there, the grotty sides slowly oozing down in a constant, malodorous process of erosion and decomposition. If our parents were aware of the sewer’s existence and its proximity, (as surely they must’ve been?), they were absolutely unaware that it was the main conduit and playground for their children for the whole of the time that we lived in the village.
I’m sure what looked like a doable, picturesque commute in July, when my father put down the deposit on the house, gave no telltale sign of the reality once our first French winter hit. Situated at the top of a steep hill, our house was the only house on our side of the street, physically separate from the rest of the houses, which were all attached to one another. The back of our house backed up to a small tangle of untended garden belonging to a large stonewalled brick home facing, inexplicably, away from road or walkway. This house rarely showed signs of habitation. Sometimes there was a shadow moving against a window curtain or a light that hadn’t been on the day before. For the most part, the house was vacant and intensely mysterious.
Lorraine, where we now lived, was the origin of the wonderful peasant dish Quiche Lorraine that gained such popularity at American restaurants in the seventies and eighties. Interestingly, I don’t remember eating even a slice the whole time I lived there. Yet when I came back to the States three years later it felt like I’d practically invented the stuff, because nobody had heard of it in the midsixties.
The food we children ate while we lived in the village was completely American. My mother shopped at the Commissary on base for our groceries. So even though we lived in the heart of the French countryside among people who had never seen an American before, we woke up to Trix breakfast cereal and ate Chef Boyardee ravioli and drank Fizzies and Seven-Up.
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