The four males of the family—Father, thirty-four; Peter, thirteen; Stephen, twelve; and John, seven—were wearing identical seersucker suits. The three females—Mae-Su, thirty-three; Mary, six; and Ernestine, three—were wearing nearly identical summer linen dresses.
The dresses and suits had all been cut and sewn by the Chinese wife of another Parris Island Marine—this one a staff sergeant drill instructor—who had gone to the Shanghai Palace restaurant in Beaufort, South Carolina, hoping to find employment as a cook—for that matter, anything at all; she needed the income—on the basis that she had been born and raised in Shanghai.
The proprietor, Mae-Su Zimmerman, was not interested in a cook, but she was looking for a seamstress. The DI’s wife—who had met her husband in Tientsin, China, right after World War II—came from a family of tailors and seamstresses. After passing two tests, first making, from a picture in the society section of the Charleston Post-Gazette, a dress for Mrs. Zimmerman, and then, from the Brooks Brothers mail-order catalog, a suit for Master Gunner Zimmerman, Joi-Hu McCarthy went into business with Mrs. Zimmerman, who became a silent (40 percent) partner in Shanghai Custom Tailors & Alterations, of Beaufort, South Carolina.
Mrs. Zimmerman was also a silent partner in several other Chinese-flavored businesses in Beaufort as well as the proprietor of the local hamburger emporium, and the franchisee of Hertz Rent-A-Car.
The Ford station wagon in which the Zimmerman family appeared at 66 South Battery, properly attired for a visit to the ladies, belonged to Hertz of Beaufort.
Luddy Banning and Mae-Su Zimmerman embraced with understated, but still visible, deep affection. Mae-Su had been Luddy’s midwife by the side of the dirt road in Mongolia when she had given birth to Edward Edwardovich Banning.
In Cantonese, Mrs. Zimmerman inquired of Mrs. Banning, “Does the Killer know we know?”
“My husband told them,” Luddy replied in Cantonese.
“Sometimes I hate the U.S. Marine Corps,” Mae-Su said.
“Me, too. But they are married to it,” Luddy said.
The children were gathered and ushered up the stairs toward Mother Banning, who waited for them. She told them they all looked elegant, and gave each a kiss and a peppermint candy.
“The Colonel and the Killer are downstairs, Ernie,” Luddy said to Master Gunner Zimmerman.
“How is he?”
“Better than I thought he would be when I heard,” Luddy said.
“That don’t look like no Marine master gunner to me,” McCoy said when Zimmerman walked into what was known as “The Colonel’s study,” although it was in fact more of a bar than a study. “That looks like an ambulance chaser.”
That was not exactly the truth. Despite the splendidly tailored Brooks Brothers-style seersucker suit, white button-down-collar shirt, and red striped necktie, there was something about Zimmerman that suggested he was not a member of the bar, but rather a Marine in civvies. He was a squat, muscular, barrel-chested man, deeply tanned, and his hair was closely cropped to his skull.
“Screw you, Captain, sir,” Zimmerman said, walking to him, and grabbing his neck in a bear hug.
“How they hanging, Ernie?” McCoy asked, freeing himself.
“A little lower every year,” Zimmerman said.
“Help yourself, Ernie,” Banning said, gesturing toward an array of bottles in a bookcase.
“Thank you, sir. What are you—”
“Famous Grouse,” Banning said.
“What else?” Zimmerman asked, chuckling.
“And we have been marching down memory lane,” Banning said.
“Yeah? Which memory lane?”
“Guess who’s at Pendleton?” Banning asked.
Zimmerman shrugged.
“Major Robert B. Macklin,” McCoy said.
“No shit?”
“I saw his name on his office door when I was in the G-1 building,” McCoy said. “I didn’t see him.”
“That figures, G-1,” Zimmerman said. “That chair-warmer is a real G-1 type.”
Banning and McCoy chuckled.
“Killer,” Zimmerman went on, conversationally, “you really should have let me shoot that no-good sonofabitch on the beach on Mindanao.”
Banning and McCoy chuckled again, louder, almost laughed.
“Jack NMI Stecker said I could,” Zimmerman argued. “You should have let me.”
“I was there, Ernie,” Banning said. “What Colonel Stecker said was that you could deal with Captain Macklin in any way you felt you had to, if, if, he got out of line. As I understand it, he behaved in the Philippines. . . .”
“That sonofabitch was never in line,” Zimmerman said. “And now he’s a goddamn major, and they’re giving you the boot? Jesus H. Christ!”
“Ernie, I told Ken we wouldn’t talk about . . . that . . . unless he brought up the subject,” Banning said.
"How are you not going to talk about it?”
"By not talking about it,” Banning said.
“So what are you going to do? Take the stripes they offer you, or get out?” Zimmerman asked, ignoring Banning.
“Would you take the stripes, Ernie?” McCoy countered.
“I thought about that,” Zimmerman said. “Christ, when we were in the Fourth in Shanghai, I was hoping I could make maybe staff sergeant before I got my twenty years in. But that was then, Ken. A lot’s happened to us—especially you—since then. No, I don’t want to be a sergeant again, having to kiss the ass of some dipshit like Macklin, or some nice kid who got out of the Naval Academy last year.”
“Spoken like a true master gunner,” Banning said, chuckling.
Master gunners are the Marine equivalent of Army warrant officers. While not commissioned officers, they are entitled to being saluted and to other officer privileges. They are invariably former senior noncommissioned officers with long service, and expertise in one or more fields of the military profession. Their pay and allowances, depending on their rank within the master gunner category, approximates that of second lieutenants through majors.
“What did they offer you?” Zimmerman asked.
“I won’t know that until I get back to Pendleton,” McCoy said.
“You give any thought to what you would do if you do get out?”
“Fill toothpaste tubes at American Personal Pharmaceutical, ” McCoy said. “I’ve got an in with the boss’s daughter. I don’t know, Ernie. I’m going to think about it on the way to California. Right now, I have no goddamn idea.”
“Colonel, you tell him about the island?” Zimmerman said.
“There hasn’t been time,” Banning said.
“Island?” McCoy asked. “What island? The one where your great-grandfather buried the champagne glasses?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Banning said. “You know where Hilton Head Island is?”
“Across from Parris Island? To the south?”
“Right. They’re starting to develop Hilton Head, you know, put in a golf course, nice houses, that sort of thing. The family’s got some property on Hilton Head . . .”
“Like five thousand acres,” Zimmerman interjected.
“. . . and south of Hilton Head,” Banning went on, ignoring him, “the family has an island.”
“You own that one? That’s where you buried the glasses?” McCoy asked.
“Buried what glasses?” Zimmerman asked.
“Yes, we own it,” Banning replied, again ignoring Zimmerman. “And Luddy and I, and Mae-Su and Ernie, have been talking about developing that ourselves.”
“Where are you going to get the money?”
“Well, I have some,” Banning said.
“And Mae-Su’s made us a real bundle, Killer,” Zimmerman said. “Mae-Su figures that if we start now, don’t get ourselves over our ass in debt, put everything we make back in the pot, starting about 1960, 1961, we’ll be in a position to make a killing.”
“Why a killing?” McCoy asked. “Why 1960?”
“Mae-Su aske
d me what a Marine lieutenant colonel has in common with an Army lieutenant colonel and a Navy commander.”
“None of the above can find their asses with both hands?” McCoy quipped. “OK. I’ll bite, what?”
“They don’t have any place to go when they retire. They don’t own houses, most of them, and they’re going to have to have someplace to go, and they would like to be around their own kind. Plus, they have pretty decent pensions.”
“And 1960, 1961, because that’s when the first of the World War Two guys can start to retire at twenty years?” McCoy asked.
“Exactly. The buildup started in 1940,” Banning said.
“So what are you going to do between now and 1960?” McCoy asked.
“Two things,” Banning said. “One: Develop the property on Hilton Head. They’re planning to sell houses, et cetera, to well-to-do people looking for a second home or a retirement home. We’ll see how that’s done, learn how to do it, and with a little luck make a little money, and invest that in the development of the other island.”
“What’s ‘two’?” McCoy asked.
“See if we can come up with some friendly investors, working partners,” Banning said.
“And you’re loaded, Killer,” Zimmerman said. “Think about it.”
“My wife is loaded,” McCoy corrected him.
“I’m as broke as any other marine gunner,” Zimmerman said. “Mae-Su’s made a lot of money. We’re loaded. Not like you and The Colonel, but loaded.”
“It’s more than the money, Ken,” Banning said. “It would be something for you and Ernie to do, all three of us to do, when we hang up the uniform for the last time.”
“Like what?”
“You know who’s harder to cheat than an honest man?” Zimmerman asked, then answered his own question. “A China Marine, that’s who. A graduate of the Bund School of Hard Knocks.”
“Most construction, Ken,” Banning said, “is done by subcontractors. One firm puts in the sewers, another one the streets, another one the electricity, et cetera. What the builder, the contractor, has to do is make sure—”
“They don’t rob you blind,” Zimmerman finished the thought for him. “And yeah, I do know what I’m talking about. When we built the last house in Beaufort, the one we’re in now, I did the subcontracting. The first house we had, we got screwed by the numbers. This house, believe you me, we didn’t.”
McCoy suddenly had a thought, from out of nowhere.
When The Colonel said that General Pickering had called and told him what was going on, I presumed that he meant he told him everything. Why I got the boot from the Dai Ichi Building.
But he didn’t. He just told him that I was being involuntarily relieved from active duty as an officer. And that’s all that The Colonel told Ernie, because it was all he knew.
They don’t know what’s going to happen in Korea.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me after what happens in Korea happens. If it happens before 30 May, will they keep me in the Corps as a captain? Or what? If they offer me, say, gunnery sergeant, and I take it, then what? Go to war as a gunnery sergeant in a line company? But if they offer me gunnery sergeant and I turn it down, and get out, they damned sure won’t call me back as a captain.
But I’m a Marine, and Marines are supposed to go— what’s that line?—“to the sound of the musketry”—not the other way, to build houses on golf courses on islands for well-to-do people.
“Why do I get the idea you’re not listening to me?” Zimmerman asked, bringing him back to The Colonel’s study.
“I’m thinking, Ernie, I’m thinking,” McCoy said.
Then think of something.
“Does The General know about this get-rich-quick scheme of yours?” he heard himself ask.
“It’s not a get-rich scheme, Ken—” Banning said, offended.
“Fuck you, Killer,” Zimmerman interrupted . . .
“—and yes, he does. He said that whenever we’re ready for an investment, to let him know.”
“I apologize for the wiseass remark,” McCoy said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Because you’re a wiseass, and always have been a wiseass,” Zimmerman said.
“And with that profound observation in mind, we forgive you,” Banning said. “Right, Ernie?”
“Why not?” Zimmerman said.
[TWO]
“We have a small problem,” Ernie McCoy said to her husband in the privacy of their room. “I couldn’t figure out how to say ‘no’ again.”
“No to who, about what?”
“Apparently, Ernie and Ed are starting some kind of real estate development . . .”
“They told me.”
“And Luddy thinks it would be just the thing for us when you get out of the Marine Corps.”
“And?”
“They’re going to propose at dinner that we go to the island—”
“Which island? I think there’s two islands.”
Ernie threw up her hands helplessly.
“—to look at it.”
“General Pickering apparently did not tell them why I was sent home from Japan,” McCoy said.
“I picked up on that,” Ernie said. “I almost blew that too, honey.”
“ ‘Almost’?” he parroted.
“They don’t know,” Ernie said.
“Good. And we can’t tell them, obviously.”
She looked at him curiously.
“They would try to help,” he explained. “Especially Ed Banning, and there’s nothing he could do, except maybe get himself in trouble.”
“So what do we do?”
“When Luddy proposes we go look at the island, we say, ‘Gee, what a swell idea!’ ”
“They’re not talking about much money,” Ernie said. “A couple of hundred thousand.”
“You know how much I make in the Corps, made in the Corps. ‘A couple of hundred thousand dollars’ is not much money.”
“You sign the Internal Revenue forms, you know what our annual income is,” Ernie said. “Not to reopen that subject for debate, I hope.”
They met each other’s eyes for a moment, then Ernie went off on a tangent.
“What I was thinking, honey, is that we don’t have any place to go when . . . if . . . you get out of the Corps. Not about going in with them, but this Hilton Head Island place. It might be a nice place to build a house.”
“We could probably pick up a nice little place for no more than a couple of hundred thousand, right?”
She didn’t reply, but he thought he saw tears forming.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“I asked Zimmerman if he would go back to wearing stripes, and he said no, he wouldn’t. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to either, but it was nice to hear that I wasn’t alone.”
“I told you that was your decision,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. I remember,” he said.
“And I meant it,” she said.
“I know, baby. But it wouldn’t have worked. It just wouldn’t have worked. For me, or for you.”
She nodded but didn’t speak.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if I’m wrong,” he said.
“About ‘the worst-case scenario’?”
He nodded.
“I hope I am wrong,” McCoy said. “I hope that there is no war, that I get separated 30 June, that—”
“We could come back here and go in the real estate development business?”
“Either that, or to Jersey, and the executive trainee position your father offered me.”
“He means well, sweetheart. . . .”
“I know, and for all I know, I might find Personal Pharmaceuticals a real challenge.”
“Ken, for the last goddamn time, that was Daddy’s idea of trying to be a nice guy. If I had known he was going to propose that, I would have stopped him.”
“You told me that, and I believe it
,” he said. “But to get back to the point, the worst possible scenario may be what happens. If I’m out of the Marine Corps should that happen . . .”
“You’re out, right? There’s no way they can call you back in?”
“There was a light colonel, a nice guy named Brewer, in the G-1’s office at Pendleton. He had me in his office, and he let me know that he thought it was a dirty deal to ‘involuntarily separate’ me just because I don’t have a college degree. Anyway, I asked a couple of questions, and the answer to one was that the Navy Department has the right to call someone back into the service in a national emergency up to a hundred and eighty days from the date of their separation.”
“Oh, God!”
“After that, the separation becomes permanent. The thinking is, I suppose, that after six months, you’ve forgotten everything you knew. But for one hundred eighty days, I’d be subject to recall.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t want you back.”
“Because I’m a troublemaker, and got a final fitness report from Captain Edward C. Wilkerson, USN, using words like ‘irresponsible’ and ‘lacking basic good judgment’? Probably not to intelligence duties—I don’t even have a security clearance anymore. Did I tell you that?”
She shook her head, “no.”
“But I would be a former Marine captain, presumed to have the basic skills of any Marine captain. I don’t think they’d give me command of a line company, but the Corps always needs motor officers, supply officers . . .”
“That’s so goddamned unfair!”
“This is the ‘worse’ that priest was talking about when we got married, ‘for better or for worse.’ ”
“Oh, honey!”
“So what we’re looking at, to try to start something new in our life, baby, is 1 December 1950, not the end of this month. Between now and then, we’ll just have to hold our breath.”
“We’ll really be starting something new in our life about then,” Ernie said. “If nothing goes wrong again this time.”
“Nothing will go wrong this time,” McCoy said, with a conviction he didn’t feel. “And with that in mind, what the hell, why not, what’s a measly couple of hundred thousand, why don’t we look for a place on Banning’s Island where we can build a house? We can’t just sit around waiting for the other shoe to drop. And maybe we’ll get lucky.”
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