by Bill Mesce
“That’s always the worst of it,” the young pilot told Harry “You’re on the bomb run and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t climb or dive, you can’t jink. You just have to sit there, sweat, and take it until you let your eggs go. And the bomb run at Schweinfurt was six minutes long.”
Which was six minutes too long for the navigator. The flak thickened and he began screaming at Jordy to drop the bombs anywhere so they could get the hell out of there.
But Jordy kept to his post, coolly fiddling with the controls on his bombsight as he tried to put the cross hairs on his drop point through the heavy outpouring of flak blossoming all about them.
Then, over the bent shoulders of Jordy, the navigator could see an Me-109 bearing in on them.
“He had guts,” the pilot told Harry, meaning the 109 pilot. Normally, the German fighters withdrew when the bombers reached the flak umbrella over the target, so as not to be struck by their own gunners. “But this kraut just plowed on through. Came at us head-on, ’cause he knew we’re soft in the nose, no firepower up there. This guy was good, too, came in inverted.” The sharper German pilots attacked upside down, explained the pilot, because it allowed them to dive away quickly after their pass.
The navigator shouted at Jordy to look up at the Messerschmitt rapidly growing larger outside the Perspex nose as the combined speeds of the two ships brought them together at over six hundred miles per hour. Jordy kept his attention on his bombsight, not looking up until he announced, “Bombs away!” He raised his head just as the 109 “gave us a little squirt.” A 20-mm cannon shell crashed through the Perspex nose, decapitating Jordy. The pilot heard the navigator screaming on the interphone. When he climbed down into the nose he found the hysterical navigator splattered with the contents of Jordy’s skull, blood and brain matter turning brittle as it froze in the cold, thin air howling through the holed nose at twenty thousand feet.
The pilot looked silently out at the rolling Atlantic for a moment before he turned to Harry with a sad smile. “Jordy was OK. Damn shame.”
“How come you don’t scream in the night?” Harry asked, earnestly amazed that anyone who’d been through such a horror wouldn’t.
“Oh, I scream,” the pilot answered, and flicked his sad smile again. “Every night. In here,” and he tapped his forehead.
*
That late summer crossing was easier than Harry’s first, back in January’43. The North Atlantic is famously inhospitable at any time of year, but more so during winter. Harry — and most of the other troops aboard ship — spent most of that first crossing vomiting in the loo, sinks, fire buckets, helmets, anything they could find as snow-filled gales whipped the ship about.
And, while such violent weather usually put a damper on the U-boats, everyone aboard was feeling jumpy. The wolf-packs had already sunk two dozen ships since New Year’s Day. Harry’s U-boat paranoia ratcheted so high that every whitecap seemed, at first glance, to be a periscope’s wake.
But this was August. The U-boats were gone, at least for now, and the days were sunny; the Atlantic offered only a soothing swell. Harry enjoyed sitting out by the forward gun tub, sometimes exchanging a wave with someone on one of the other ships in the convoy. There were still exercises for the gun crews and boat drills, and the destroyers and corvettes in the escort screen cruised vigilantly round their charges. Occasionally, Harry would hear the distant, lulling buzz of aircraft — British Sunderlands from northern Scotland and the Orkneys, then later from the Shetlands and the Faeroes, and still later, American PBY Catalinas from Iceland — a protective canopy that would cover them across half the ocean. It all went to making Harry feel remarkably safe, and there were times when he could forget there was a war on somewhere miles behind him.
The convoy zigzagged its way northward, the seas grew rougher, the winds colder. They anchored in Reykjavik just long enough for the nimble little escort ships to refuel. At sea again, they continued north, to Kap Farvel in Greenland, and Harry could see, in the distance, the permanent ice cap draped across the inland heights. They turned southeast then, toward Newfoundland, and on this final leg, with every mile closer to home, the troops on board grew more restive and elated.
Most of them.
*
A day from the Labrador coast Harry was at his usual morning post by the forward gun tub. An announcement crackled over the ship’s Tannoy system calling for the medical officer. Harry started when he heard his compartment number mentioned.
He hurried for the nearest hatch, made his way to his deck, and pushed his way through the curious GI’s choking the companionway. The copilot was slumped on the companion-way deck, arms round his knees, head bent, shoulders heaving with sobs. Through the door of his compartment Harry could see the MO, a comforting arm about the shoulders of the pilot, who was tearing at the bunk blankets in a blind rage.
On the folding cot in the middle of the compartment lay the body of the navigator.
“When does it fucking stop, Doc?” the pilot demanded of the MO. “When does it fucking stop?”
*
There was an ad hoc inquest; the ship’s captain assigned one of his officers to interview each of the dead man’s cabin mates. From the interviewer, Harry learned the navigator had overdosed on sleeping pills prescribed for him back in England. The goal of the inquest was to determine if the overdose had been accidental or otherwise.
“Do you know any reason he might have had to kill himself?” the officer had asked Harry.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Harry replied.
*
A burial service was arranged for that evening. Above, shimmering streamers of light rippled across the darkening sky: the aurora borealis. On the afterdeck, a crowd of crewmen and passengers gathered round the corpse, wrapped tightly in a binding of white canvas and draped with an American flag. They could not all have had the chance to know him, Harry thought, looking the crowd over. But he wore a uniform as did they, and that made him their brother.
“… until that day when the sea shall give up her dead”
The bier was upended; the body slid out from under the flag and disappeared into the wake of the ship. The crowd dispersed until Harry and his two cabin mates stood alone at the after rail, looking back at the propeller-churned foam beneath which their comrade now lay.
The copilot looked up at the changing colors of the aurora. “He woulda liked that.”
Harry looked to the pilot, not speaking.
The pilot read the question in his eyes and shrugged. “He’s sleeping OK now.”
*
Two and a half weeks after leaving Liverpool, the escort ships, now assisted by Navy antisubmarine blimp patrols, herded the convoy past the minefields and submarine nets guarding New York Harbor. Harry stood with whooping and cheering soldiers along the rail of the main deck as they sailed past the Statue of Liberty and below the towers of Manhattan, the myriad windows fiery with the September morning sun.
He bid his two cabin mates good-bye, wished them luck, but before he could leave there was a rap on the door and a messenger appeared with orders for him. The pups saw the anxious look on Harry’s face as he signed the delivery chit, and discreetly left him alone in the room.
Harry took a moment before he slowly tore open the manila envelope. He looked at the document’s heading only long enough to make sure it was intended for him, then dropped his eyes to the text:
Your instructions upon arrival NYC are as follows:
(1)You are hereby assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s section Ft. Dix NJ;
(2)You are to report to the senior JAG officer Ft. Dix for assignment no later than five (5) days subsequent your arrival NYC;
(3)You will follow all security restrictions regarding transmission of information not relevant to new assignment.
Harry read the blunt, typed sentences three times. He lay back on his bunk, first smiling, then laughing in both relief and glee.
Translated from the cold Army ar
got, Harry’d been given five days’ leave before reporting for duty at his new station — Fort Dix — less than an hour’s train ride from his home and Cynthia and his two boys. As for the closing paragraph, it was a rather obtuse way of telling him to keep his mouth shut about the matters that had transpired in England that summer and triggered his exile.
Harry Voss had a deserved reputation for being a drab plodder, a step-by-step-follow-the-prescribed-program swot, and a bit naive to boot. All that comprised a rather lusterless air that people often mistook for intellectual dullness. But Harry was quite the clever fellow, doggedly and precisely analytical. He instantly recognized his new assignment for what it was.
It was a bribe.
*
From a table near the windows of the Horn &r Hardart Automat at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street, Harry looked out across Times Square. There were uniforms everywhere — Navy white, Army khaki, the forest green of the Marines, even a sprinkling of the flat caps of the British Navy and the dashing blue of the Royal Canadian Air Force. But other than the fact that there were few automobiles (a consequence of petrol rationing), there was little other evidence of the war. People laden with shopping bags jostled each other on the sidewalks, queued in front of cines and theaters, ate from pushcarts on the streets as they always had.
Harry looked down at his bowl of clam chowder, wedge of cherry pie, cup of fresh-ground coffee on the marble tabletop before him, all smelling so rich, so American.
He knew then that the world beyond the glass could no more incorporate him than the shadow play on the projection screen of the Loew’s Mayfair cine across the square. He could walk these streets, walk among these people, even act as one of them, but he could never again quite be one of them. If he ever spoke of what he’d seen on the other side of the ocean, and what he’d come to know, these people sitting round him sipping their egg creams and digging at plates spilling over with macaroni and cheese would look at him as if he were a lunatic, a madman speaking in tongues.
*
A uniform-packed train took him from Pennsylvania Station under the Hudson River, across the New Jersey marshes, and past the pig farms until he could see the belching smokestacks of the factories girdling Newark. From the Newark station he took a bus that deposited him just a few blocks from the street where he lived. But it was far enough that every half-block or so he had to set down his bags, catch his breath, and rest his aching arms.
Harry lived in the same neighborhood — the same building — in which he’d been born, on a street in Newark’s First Ward. An immigrants’ ghetto consisting of brick-topped streets crowded with aging tenements and small shops, it was predominantly populated by emigrant Italians and their progeny. Harry may have been the son of a Russian transplant, but these thickly peopled brick streets were still his home sod. The smells of boiling pasta and garlic crackling in a skillet of olive oil were as native to him as those of boiled potatoes and borscht.
The Newark Harry had left when he’d enlisted in early 1942 had been a manufacturing city still trying to shake off Depression doldrums, and the First Ward had especially suffered. Impoverished even before 1929, the Ward was home to peasant farmers who’d left behind even greater poverty in the Campania region of southern Italy and come to America with little more than what they could carry. But now Harry saw that everyone moved as if there were someplace they had to be; the shops and eateries that lined the streets brimmed with business.
It was unaccountable to him at first, but in the days to come Harry would learn this new activity was directly connected to all those belching smokestacks his train had passed on the way into Newark. Factories in Newark and the surrounding towns, like Kearney and Harrison, closed or partially idled during the Depression, were now open and thriving, nearly all converted to war industries. The plants were fully manned (or, more accurately, “womanned,” as many of the new laborers were the wives and mothers of men off in service), and often running three shifts per day.
Every able-bodied person not in service was laboring at the Charms Candy plant, which was now minting munitions, or Spiotta Brothers, which had made men’s suits before the war and was now spinning military uniforms, or any one of the other booming war plants in and around the city. The local shops were busy because there was more money than ever flowing through the neighborhood, although, ironically, with rationing there was less than ever to buy Harry trudged below the granite spires of Sacred Heart Cathedral, and if, perhaps, it didn’t have the majesty of Wren’s domed St. Paul’s, this was his cathedral, and he felt a warmth in his chest St. Paul’s could never have elicited. Then on along the border of Branch Brook Park, the oaks and elms and maples showing just a touch of their fall colors against a brilliant sky, past the derelict reservoir where he’d played baseball with his sons, and the public baths where Ward residents came for their showers.
He turned on to Seventh Avenue — his street.
With familiar sights came familiar faces. Some were feather-haired old men and women who had seen him grow from childhood. Many had come to him as clients, although knowing Harry, he had probably spent many an unbilled hour helping them through their legal affairs across their kitchen tables so they wouldn’t have to make the onerous trek to his office cubby in the business district. He had helped them with their immigration paperwork, their deeds and mortgages and leases, the documentation and licenses for their little businesses, and with their final testaments.
In the neighborhood, they had called him “Roosk,” an affectionate corruption of “Russkie.” When they saw his face, sweaty and wilted from hauling his duffels along the street, they came out from behind their shop counters to greet him. Men and women welcomed him home with a hug. The older men clapped a hand almost painfully on the back of his neck, while the older women pinched his cheek as if he were still the wee child they remembered.
“Here, Roosk, you take this home, fresh tomat’ like I bet you never see over there! You take this home for the family!”
“Here, Roosk, you take some fruit home, eh? I make a basket for you!”
Harry begged off. “I can barely carry my own bags, comar’ Rosa!”
“You don’t worry! I send the boy later!” And another hug, another kiss on the cheek.
“Hey, Roosk, you come in, I give you a welcome home haircut, huh?”
Harry tipped his cap and flashed his thinning pate. “I don’t think there’s much left for you to work with, z’Emidiol” And the old man who’d given him his first haircut a lifetime ago took his head between his spotted hands, bent it low, and kissed him on his pink scalp.
He crossed Garside Street, passing the chemist’s shop on the corner, and the apron of stairs where the boys from the neighborhood had always loitered, the young ones bouncing rubber balls off the risers, the older boys puffed with adolescent pride, exchanging misinformation about womankind. The tykes were in attendance at Seventh Avenue School now, but the older boys were still there, only now some of them strutted like peacocks in newly issued Army khaki, home on leave from the training center at Fort Dix. They recognized Harry, gathered round him, querying him on what he’d seen of the war, making brave comments about their eagerness to be done with training and get on with “the real thing.” The bravado masked a fear not of dying or injury but of what lay beyond the few city blocks where they’d spent their lives.
Past the stairs to the chemist’s, another set of stairs, this leading to the men’s social club in the cellar under the shop. It was one of the many such clubs in the area where the local men collected for rounds of cards and espresso. Hung near the door was a placard headed “In Memoriam,” and below was a photo of a young, uniformed man, smiling, his Army cap so jauntily angled it threatened to slide off his brilliantined head. Harry took a moment, riffling his memory to see if he remembered the young man, then decided he didn’t really want to know.
Past the dry goods shop, the hardware shop, then the tickling,
tangy smells of salami and sausage
and sawdust from Pennicho’s butcher shop, where the Pennichos crushed grapes in the cellar every summer for a rough-edged homemade wine.
Across the street, children’s voices sailed through the open windows of the school, warbling their way through “I’m a Little Teapot.” His boys, Ricky and Jerry, were somewhere inside the drab pile of red brick. Perhaps one of them was among the choristers. Or were they too old for that sort of thing? It troubled him that he couldn’t remember.
In the middle of the block sat another in the nondescript row of tenements, this one twelve flats squeezed onto four floors piled atop a fruit shop to one side of the entry, a grocery to the other. He set his bags down in front of the stoop, and looked up at the soot-streaked bricks, the face of the building crosshatched with a grillwork of fire escapes.
“Heldish.”
Before Harry even saw him, Philip Mayer sprang out of his grocery flinging his arms about Harry’s shoulders. Like Harry, the wiry, gray-haired Mayer was one of the few non-Italians in the neighborhood, yet he spoke Italian as if he’d just stepped off the boat from Naples.
“Survival, boychick,” Mayer had once explained to a much younger Harry when he had asked how Philip Mayer the Jew came to speak such proper Italian. “You can be a Jew, you can be a Republican, but you go out in the world you got to know survival. For survival, you got to have talent. And if you’re a Jew out in the world, from the talent you got to make art.”
Young Harry said he didn’t understand what any of that had to do with how Philip Mayer the Jew had come to speak such proper Italian. Mayer had pinched Harry’s pudgy child’s cheek and laughed. “You listen now. You learn later.”
Mayer started pulling Harry toward the door of his shop. Harry pointed to his bags on the sidewalk.
“The bags got legs, they’re gonna walk away?” Mayer tugged him inside. He shut the door and put the CLOSED sign in the window. ‘The world can do without me for five minutes while I welcome home the heldish. And I can do without the world for five minutes.”