Brian held his hand up. “Don’t, Arthur. Please. Because I got a feeling you’re going to tell me about all kinds of terrible things mixed up in the frankfurters.”
“Listen, Brian, if you knew what I knew, you’d never eat another one of those poisoned things again.”
“I’ve eaten six so far today, Arthur,” Brian said and pressed his hand against his flat stomach. “Don’t tell me anything. Not anything at all.”
They started down the ramp which led to the interior of the stadium, stopped for a moment to exchange greetings with a couple of patrolmen heading for relief. The two older men were football fans and they were vigorously arguing a point and asked the younger policemen for an opinion.
The discussion became very involved because Arthur started to kid them along, and even though he knew nothing about football, he was convincing. Brian backed him up, taking his cues from him.
There was a sharp blast of cold gray wind from around the corridor that led to an aisle into the upper tier of the Polo Grounds and a roar of human voices rose, the familiar roar of excitement, so familiar it went almost unnoticed by the four policemen.
It was Arthur who noticed first, sensed, felt, something different. He held his mittened hand up for a moment, then grabbed Brian’s arm so that the others turned to him in surprise. Arthur tilted his head toward the sound, which had changed somehow, almost imperceptibly. He moved toward the opening, and the others followed.
They stood looking down at the playing field wondering what play had caused the strange, indefinable scene. Incomprehensibly, players on both teams were mingling, hands on each other’s arms, shoulders, not teammates, just players mingling with umpires and officials who seemed to wander on the field in a daze. They all stood, puzzled, waiting to absorb what the nearly incoherent voice of the announcer on the loudspeaker had said.
Fans stood up restlessly, leaned forward, questioned, shrugged. Some people yelled for the game to go on, yelled “What the hell is going on?” “What the hell is the delay?” “Come on, what gives?”
“Hey, Jesus, hey, Jesus, you guys.”
They turned, the four policemen, and there was Walsh, hat off, coat off, cigar in his hand, his large, normally red face gone white as a sheet.
“What’s up, Walsh?” Brian asked.
They moved toward him, the four surrounded him in the corridor. Walsh’s face contorted, puzzled. His mouth was dry and his voice crackled when he spoke.
“Jesus, I don’t know. See, I was listening to The Shadow, you know? Right?” He looked at Brian and then at Arthur as though he needed them to confirm this fact. “Well, then, right in the middle of the story, see, they interrupted the program. This guy just busts right in with a news announcement and he says that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. And that all of our warships there got sunk. And that this means that we’re at war with Japan. Jeez, you think it’s some kinda joke like that nutty guy pulled about the Mars invasion a coupla years back?”
One of the older patrolmen raised his eyebrows and turned to his partner. “Pearl Harbor? Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?”
Only Brian O’Malley knew where Pearl Harbor was and that the U.S.S. Arizona was currently in Pearl Harbor and that his cousin Radioman John O’Malley was stationed on the U.S.S. Arizona.
Arthur heard the quick choking intake of breath, the gasp as though Brian had been kicked in the stomach. Arthur saw Brian’s face drain of color, turn as white as Walsh’s.
“Brian, hey, what is it, kid?”
Brian stared at Arthur and moved his head slightly, then said softly as a moan, “Oh, Holy Mother of God. Poor John!”
The O’Malleys didn’t have much time to grieve for John. Too many things happened too quickly. Secretly, his uncles might have questioned themselves about the ultimate wisdom of their solution for poor John, but among themselves none of them betrayed anything but pride in his heroism as described in the Navy Department’s telegram.
Billy O’Malley, a full-fledged Marine, was to receive his mail addressed to him at something called “A.P.O. San Francisco” and his letters home, generally cryptic, were even more so.
Billy Delaney deserted Roseanne two months after their third child was born and joined the Army. After an absence of four months, he showed up, trim and sheepish, and signed over his allotment to Roseanne, and by the time he returned to camp in Kansas, they were reconciled.
Francis Kelly enlisted in the Navy and left behind a bloated, pregnant, self-satisfied Marylou, who promptly put a little rayon flag with a blue star on it in the window of her apartment to show that she was a Navy wife.
Arthur Pollack enlisted in the Army Air Force and was married just before his induction.
One cold and rainy day in March, Kevin came home from school much too early and with a glow of excitement that alarmed Brian the minute he entered the apartment. Kevin, three days after his eighteenth birthday, and three months before high school graduation, joined the Navy. There was no way to persuade him to wait and Margaret gave up the attempt and signed the papers.
All during the months following Pearl Harbor, Brian felt his life suspended in unreality. Only he was not part of everything that was happening around him; the others were all undergoing drastic changes, movement, relinquishing old responsibilities for the excitement of new adventures. Two of his younger cousins joined the Navy when Kevin did.
It was his mother and grandmother and younger sister who stood between Brian and the Army; he wasn’t to be drafted because of his dependents.
It was Patrick Crowley who pointed out that there was always a way to do what you want providing you take the time to figure things out sensibly. What Patrick Crowley wanted was Brian O’Malley for a son-in-law; he knew that what Brian wanted was a way to get into the war.
“Well now, did you young people have a good time?” he asked in an artificially solicitous tone. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen and help your mother prepare some tea?”
Mary Ellen responded to her father’s suggestion as though it were a direct command: it was all the same.
He signaled to Brian and watched, settled in his chair, as Brian poured the two customary shots of whiskey. “Well,” he said softly, “let’s drink the health of your young brother,” Crowley said, intent on Brian. “The girl tells me he’s joined up in the Navy. Here’s his health then.” He tossed the drink to the back of his throat, gasped, swallowed, blinked and twitched, which was also customary. “Well, and have you thought much about your own self, Brian? This is a big war, lad, and you must be itchin’ to get into it.”
Brian slugged down the drink and carefully rotated the glass between his fingers. He’d known Crowley well enough by now to realize this was no casual conversation. It was the preliminary to something and he felt curiosity as well as caution.
“Well,” Crowley said abruptly, “the girl will finish her first year at the Academy come this June.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“When do you plan to marry her, if I may ask?”
The question took him totally by surprise. The glass slipped from his fingers and he felt the heat rush to his face as he bent to retrieve it.
“Well, that’s been on your mind, I take it?” Crowley said flatly, more statement than question.
“Well, yes, sure. I mean, yes. But I’m not exactly in a position right now to...well...”
“Well, yes, sure, I mean, yes, but,” Crowley mimicked him precisely, then laughed shortly. “God love us, but who the hell ever is in a position? The point is, I see no sense in investing another year on the girl at the Academy while you’re cooling your heels and trying to see exactly what your position is.” He gestured for another shot of whiskey and held his eye steady on Brian as Brian poured. “Not for yourself, lad? Ah, it’s just as well, for you should have a clear head for this little talk. Now, here’s what I had in mind, lad. You’d like to get into the fray, in a manner of speaking, lad, wouldn’t you? What with even your little brother
in the service, and your young cousin among the first killed, it must make it hard on you. If you’d your choice, what would it be?”
He dreamed of being a pilot, but realized the dream was unrealistic. He knew he became seasick, so the Navy was out.
“Marines,” he answered, without much thought.
Crowley’s head jerked up and down several times. “Well, that would be very fine. Would serve you well in the future, too. Remember this, lad, a man who hadn’t a part of this great war, he won’t be worth shit in the future. Remember that now.”
And then Crowley put it to him, straight out, on the line. So that Brian could enlist in the Marines, he’d give a dowry of a year’s tuition; that would more than support Brian’s mother and grandmother and sister, along with Brian’s allotment. Mary Ellen wouldn’t need it; she’d live at home.
As quickly as the old man said the words, the possibility formed inside Brian with a force beyond anything he could protest. He’d have it all: the adventure, the excitement, the freedom of all responsibility, and Mary Ellen, waiting for him at home.
The technicality, easily tended, was asking Mary Ellen. She accepted shyly and he never knew if her father had ever discussed the situation with her and it seemed wiser not to ask.
When he left for war, he left a beautiful young wife, pregnant with their daughter, to spend the next three and a half years under the care of her parents.
PART FOUR : The Grandson: Patrolman Patrick Brian O’Malley 1970
THIRTY-ONE
THE SOUND OF HIS PARENTS’ voices penetrated the light stage of morning sleep. Sound rather than words washed over him and aroused no particular emotion but slowly memory touched along the edges of his consciousness. There had been other mornings, hundreds of other mornings, and the voices then had been neither soft nor careful. They were according him the status of a guest and he felt strange, as though he were in fact a guest in this house.
There had been mornings of his childhood when the angry words penetrated the walls of his room and forced him to partake of their unknowable mysteries. Force-fed on their secrets, he would emerge blank-faced, sit at the breakfast table with them and with their terrible silences. His sister’s pale face, his mother’s trembling hands, his father’s angry and abrupt movements, filled him with a tension he could scarcely contain.
Under the weight of pretended ignorance, he and his sister were subjected to sudden, unanticipated questions from their father. How did you do on that Latin quiz? You get the math straightened out yet? Tell me again about that dance you want to go to on Friday night. Who did you say was going to chaperon? How the hell did your bike get broken this time?
Each question was a veiled accusation, a probe, an attempt to turn his father’s anger to something which could be dealt with openly. He knew that, yet knowing, he always provided the substance.
“Don’t, Patrick,” Maureen had told him over and over again. Four years older than he, four years of greater endurance or wisdom or whatever it was that kept her eyes carefully down and her mouth tightly closed. While he, Patrick, provided the tight-lipped, grudging response to his father’s interrogation. For God knew what reason, he would fix his steel-gray eyes on his father’s wrath, feel himself freeze into breakable ice, sliver thin, melting in the growing danger, yet unable to stop himself.
Whatever was unfinished between his mother and father always left his father filled with a consuming anger. To restore himself, to purge himself, the force of that emotion would always turn toward his son.
Maureen told Patrick that it was his own fault. Why did he always put himself in the middle by tone of voice, glare of eyes? It was a senseless defiance that could only end badly for him.
He didn’t know why. Helplessness. Because of a feeling of abject helplessness. The knowledge that he was totally powerless to heal the rift between them, yet forced to witness and by witnessing, participate, filled him with an anger of his own.
At some distant time in his life there had been the small, twisted, loud-voiced, evil-smelling old man for whom he had been named: Patrick Crowley, his grandfather. Recollection of his grandfather was not of an actual man but of a presence, powerful, terrible, a knowing presence which had somehow, mysteriously, incomprehensibly, controlled their lives, and at some point in that distant time, his grandfather died and Patrick wondered sometimes if he actually remembered the old man or merely remembered stories told him about the old man.
Although his grandmother lived with them until he was nearly twelve, she was no more part of his knowledge than had she been an apparition. When she died, no void was left. It was as though she had never been.
He could conjure nothing of her, no expression, sound, fragrance, essence, quality. There was nothing left of her beyond a few photographs to establish that she had indeed led an existence in close proximity to his own, within the same walls as part of the same family.
Patrick stretched his arms straight into the air, yawned, studied his wristwatch in surprise. He must have fallen asleep or had been so totally involved in fleeting memory that an hour had gone by. They’d probably gone to ten o’clock Mass, which was late for his mother but standard for his father. His mother hadn’t asked him about Mass and he felt a slight uneasy sense of shame. Not about missing Mass, but about her unwillingness to face him with it.
That was his mother: Don’t mention it and it won’t be.
She had aged. Her fine skin, tight over delicate facial structure, had eased somewhat and cracked at the corners of her eyes into a series of hairline wrinkles. He had been surprised; she had always seemed flawless, as flawless as a child actress who is never really young and never really grows old. He felt guilty at having seen, noticed, the signs of her age, as though he had betrayed her somehow. She was still a beautiful woman: forty-seven years old, slim as a girl, favoring blue clothes for her eyes, her hair tinted a discreet silver-soft blond.
He’d seen Henderson cast an appraising eye. Henderson’s mother was one of those big women, arms larded and neck thick. Henderson’s father looked like her twin.
God, he’d been proud of them, that they were his parents. In the hustle and commotion at Kennedy, that was his first feeling when he caught sight of them. Christ, they looked great.
His father had that finished look, the dark, certain pride of a man who knew who the hell he was: Deputy Chief Inspector in Charge of Public Affairs of the Police Department of the City of New York.
The security guard tried to make a big commotion about it but his father, with just a gesture, just a few quick whispered words, got things under control, managed to slip through the V.I.P. gate without anyone noticing. His father handled things smoothly, was definitely a man accustomed to handling things smoothly.
They looked great, his mother so fair and slight, his father, thick, dark hair gone just a little gray at the temples, lean in a good, well-tailored dark suit.
He wanted to just stand and watch them, unseen, to try and get them into some perspective but his mother was in his arms and his father pounded his back, took his duffel bag. He introduced them to Henderson and then Henderson introduced his parents and everybody shook hands and spoke at once and he and Henderson swore they’d be in touch when both knew they wouldn’t. They hadn’t liked each other in Nam and there was no reason why they’d like each other back home.
They all talked at once on the drive home or all fell silent at the same time and then each of them spoke again, as though silence mustn’t be allowed to happen. The house looked exactly as he remembered it; it had been large in memory and reality did not diminish it.
He’d been gone for twenty-two months out of his twenty-four years. He caught his father’s quick appraising look, which for once ended in a nod of approval.
“Scotch, Patrick?” his father asked, then made two highballs, which they drank slowly, self-consciously, in the study. “How was the trip? You must be tired. Probably won’t really hit you for a day or so.”
“I’m fine. Thi
s feels good, just sitting here, in this room.” Carefully, quickly, he added, “With you, Pop.”
His father patted his shoulder awkwardly, fleetingly. They were not used to touching. It seemed almost an intimacy between strangers, false and forced. His father took a deep swallow, moved away from him, settled into his deep leather chair. In the whiskey-warm calmness of the room, Patrick felt a rush of emotion. His head was filled with words he wanted to say but couldn’t: Hug me, Pop; embrace me; cry; talk; say what you feel; let me say what I feel. It’ll be all right, nothing will fall apart, nothing will shatter.
Christ. Oh, Christ, the honesty he’d learned with his dead buddy didn’t apply where it counted most.
“Gee, you look good, kid,” his father said. There was depth to his voice and warmth and pride. “Tell me, Pat, how’s it been?”
He tasted the drink again, put the glass of whiskey on the table beside the couch, ran the tip of his index finger around the lip of the glass.
“It’s not exactly over for me yet. I’m going to Kenyon’s wake tomorrow. I told you about Kenyon?”
“Jesus, Pat, I feel like I knew him. It’s a lousy thing, a close buddy like that.”
“It’s a funny thing about Kenyon. He knew he was going to get it. Almost like it had to happen because he was so sure of it. I never thought it would happen to me. And here I am.”
“A lot of guys are like that, fatalists. I remember—”
Patrick raised his face, moved his head to one side and his gray eyes pierced the space between them. “We gonna compare wars, Dad?”
It was the first sign, the first warning that there were things between them, beneath the safe surface of conversation. There was a momentary silence, sharp and electric, as they regarded each other and found familiarity.
His father’s mouth pulled into a smile and he spoke easily. “I was going to say that I remember you wrote us a few months ago about Kenyon, how he wasn’t afraid of anything because he felt it was going to happen to him and there was nothing he could do about it.”
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