• • •
Raven and the city people made fun of Luchow’s, but I secretly liked it because the restaurant reminded me of my grandmother and how much she’d loved their sauerbraten. We used to go there on her birthday every year before she died two Octobers ago, and she always looked so happy, listening to the oompah band that would play in the dining room. It was beyond corny, but there was something touching and familiar about the restaurant, the way the older waiters seated you so solicitously, the way the whole place smelled of cigar smoke and beer.
“We’ll need a few minutes,” my father was telling the waiter now, after he handed us the menus. “In the meantime, I’d like some coffee, if it’s fresh, and Kate?” My father looked at me. I would have loved to order a beer just to freak him out, but I said, “Coffee for me, too, please,” and the waiter smiled and nodded and went away. My father was not the type to have a beer with lunch, or dinner for that matter. He said drinking made him sleepy.
We studied the menu while waiting for the coffee. There was something to love about the menu. You didn’t see this type of fare in Elephant Beach restaurants, that’s for sure. Casseroled Spring Guinea Hen in Wine Kraut. Koenigsberger Klopse with caper sauce, which were really meatballs. Pigs Knuckle with Sauerkraut. Seventeen different styles of potatoes!
“So,” my father said, reaching for a roll. “September is right around the corner. Are you all set for school?”
I nodded. I’d been accepted at Carver Community College. I hadn’t applied anywhere else, because my grades weren’t good enough, except in English. I’d look at the brochures and college tour books in my guidance counselor’s office and feel only anxious; I couldn’t think of another place I wanted to be, except the Beach. It was the only life I knew. Carver was about a half-hour drive up the parkway toward the middle of the Island. It used to be an army barracks and now it was a college where you went to class in old airplane hangars with gunnysacks still hanging from the rafters.
“You were accepted on the daytime schedule, as I recall,” my father said. There was more status in going during the day. People tended to think of daytime students as real college students who took things more seriously, as opposed to the nighttime students trying to crunch in their classes between commuting and their jobs. Most of the Trunk kids who’d been accepted at Carver were going at night.
“I’ve been thinking, though, maybe it would make more sense for me to switch to nights,” I said. “Work more hours at the A&P. I could maybe go full-time and take—”
“No,” he said sharply.
“‘No’ what?” I asked. “Most people would be happy to have a daughter who wanted to work to help pay for her college education. I guess you’re just not one of them. I could make one hundred and fifty dollars a week plus benefits. What’s so bad about that?”
“I’m not raising you to be Martha Muldoon,” my father said.
“Well, that’s cool, because I’m not looking to be Martha Muldoon,” I said, and just then the smiling, red-faced waiter with the waxy mustache appeared with our coffee and asked if we were ready to order.
“I’ll have the Saddle of Canadian Hare with Kronberries and potato dumplings,” I said.
“For God’s sake, Katie,” my father said. “Order something you’re going to eat.”
“I’ll eat it,” I said. “It’s rabbit, right? I love rabbit.”
“When have you ever eaten rabbit?” he asked. “Do you even know what the hell a kronberry is?”
“Is very good,” the waiter said, beaming.
“There! It’s settled,” I said. “Thank you.” I handed my menu back to the waiter and crossed my arms over my chest. This wasn’t like when I was thirteen years old and he told me I shouldn’t order the chicken pot pie at Pat Reilly’s Chop House because it was all scraps, all garbage. I was eighteen and we were in a city restaurant and I could order what I wanted.
My father sighed and handed his menu to the waiter. “I’ll have the bratwurst,” he said.
“Is very good,” the waiter said, and then he left us. My father watched him go. He selected another crisp, white roll, tore it in half and took a bite. He looked in my direction. The light from the lamps in the room glanced off his glasses, pinpoints of brightness against the smudged frames.
“The A&P is fine for now,” he said in a placating tone. “It’s a fine part-time job while you’re still in school. But down the road, you might want something a little different. Something better. You know, Carver has one of the highest transfer rates in the country. Your mother and I were thinking . . .” He trailed off. He took a sip of his coffee. I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t tell him that I was sick and tired of hearing about the transfer rates at Carver; it was all well and good, but I mean, it was still Carver, not Harvard. I lit a cigarette, and I could see the expression on my father’s face because he hated my smoking. But still he said nothing, just patted his lips with his napkin and then laid the napkin back in his lap.
I was thinking how the mothers were always screaming, but the fathers were silent. Every house I walked into, my own house as well; the mothers were always going at it. “Over my dead body you’ll see him again!” “Take your sister with you, no arguments!” “And where do you think you’re going? Get back here and do those dishes!” “It’ll be a cold day in hell before you wear that outfit out of this house!”
But none of the fathers talked. They were silent at the supper table, except to bark, “Be quiet!” or ask for the mashed potatoes to be passed. They spent all day working away from the rest of us, behind desks, on scaffolds, underneath sinks. Yet, they never shared anything with us but short answers; “Fine,” my father said, when my mother asked how his day was. Or else they grunted and poured a scotch and took it into the den to watch the news in peace, because no one else was interested. They were up early, before anyone else, sitting at kitchen tables, scalding their tongues on bitter instant coffee, reading the paper in lonely silence that they didn’t want disturbed. The ones who worked the night shift were still sleeping when their children left for school, and they didn’t welcome interruption, either. I watched my father now, across the table, cleaning his glasses with the snowy white edge of the tablecloth, thinking I would never notice him twice if he wasn’t my father, wondering why if he went to college he had so much trouble saying things. I could almost see the words stumble before they reached his lips.
“What were you and Mom thinking?” I asked, trying not to sound exasperated. I knew how it would go if my mother was here. She’d be bringing in everything, the A&P, street corners, failing Regents geometry by one point, for God’s sake. Her voice rising, waving her hands around until my father took hold of them and held her fingers down and said through clenched teeth, “Janice, control yourself.”
“We were thinking you might want to go away to school after a year or two at Carver,” my father said.
“Why? Trying to get rid of me?” I asked.
“No, no, nothing like that,” he said quickly, like he was trying to reassure me. “We just thought that, perhaps after a year or two, you might want to see a little more of the world than Elephant Beach, that’s all. Sometimes new experiences—”
I snorted. “You didn’t even want me to order the Hare with Kronberries!”
“Sometimes new experiences,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “give you a new perspective on life. Going someplace different than what you’ve been used to can open up—”
“I haven’t even started Carver yet,” I said. I wanted this conversation to be over. I had been very hungry and now my insides were shaking. I didn’t know if I could eat.
“There’s no rush—”
“Then why are we talking about it?”
“Because it’s never too early to begin thinking about the future.”
“You just said there was no rush. That’s, like, a contradiction.”
&
nbsp; My father sighed again, and I felt bad. We were rarely alone together and he’d been sincerely trying to have a conversation. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know how to talk to me. It wasn’t his fault that this was the way it was with fathers.
“Let’s see what happens this semester,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t even registered for classes yet.”
“I’d be happy to help you,” he said quickly, looking up at me. “I’d be happy to go with you to the registration, help you pick out—”
“I’m all set,” I said, just as quickly. “It’s not happening till the last week in August. I’ve got my ride and everything.”
“Katie, it’s very important that you pick the right—”
“I know that, Daddy. I went to the orientation last month. I took notes. I’m all set, really.”
“Well then,” he said, and the way his face looked made me feel like crying, and then the food came and we both looked at our plates and away from each other.
I waited until we finished eating to speak, because I knew my father liked to eat in silence. My meal had been pretty good, but not the best. The kronberries tasted disappointingly familiar.
“You were in the war, right?” I asked. “World War Two?”
“World War Two and Korea,” he said, looking around the room as the waiter removed the plates. “Though that was just a skirmish, compared to the Second World War.”
“What do you think about Vietnam?” I asked him.
“What do you mean, what do I think about it?”
“Well, compared to the other wars,” I said. “Are we winning? I mean, why are we even there? No one seems to know, not even the—”
My father laced his fingers together and placed his chin on the bridge of his hands. “I don’t know that anyone ever wins a war,” he said. “When you consider the cost on the other side of the ledger.”
“You mean like—the deaths and everything?”
“The deaths, sure. Those who died fighting. But there’s the living, too, don’t forget. Men, women, families—it’s a tremendous impact on how people live, afterward. Funny,” he said, putting his hands down on the table, “we act like going to war is a perfectly normal thing, as normal as leaving for work in the morning. But don’t kid yourself. There’s nothing normal about it. Taking ordinary people, living ordinary lives, thrusting them into—into horrifying situations, really, that they have absolutely no training for. One day you’re working in a hardware store, the next you’re shipped off to some beach thousands of miles from anything you’ve ever known. How the hell does working in a hardware store prepare you for Guadalcanal?” He shook his head. “Some people never recover, and when you think about it, that’s the more normal—the more expected reaction. And we treat them as though they’re the sick ones, as though you shouldn’t be troubled by watching your friends—” He broke off and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Kate,” he said. “I shouldn’t be going on this way, not to you. Especially not after eating, how was your hare?”
“The hare was fine,” I said. “But Daddy, did you—I mean, during the war—wars—were you in the—I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m just—I’m interested in what you have to say.” It was true. I was listening to my father now. He was saying the same things that Mitch had said, but in a different way. I thought he was saying things that Luke was probably feeling. I heard everything my father was saying, because it made so much sense.
He was quiet for a few moments. When the waiter came by, he asked for more coffee. “During World War Two, I was an ensign,” he said. “Because I had a college education, I went directly from school into the navy, at a higher rank than some of the others. It was different than now; everyone enlisted. Everyone wanted to get into the service, to fight for their country. I was in the Pacific. And one of my assignments was to—to transport the men who experienced very intense battle fatigue back to the States from Japan.” He was quiet again.
“So—they were just tired of fighting?” I asked. “Were they going to, like, rest up and go back to the war?”
“No,” he said quietly. “They would never go back. Some of them—many of them, in fact—were classified Section Eight, meaning they’d been judged mentally unfit for service.”
After a moment I said, “So, they like, flipped out in battle?”
My father smiled wryly. “I guess you could put it that way. It’s as good a way as any. The ship was huge, a destroyer, filled from stem to stern with men who . . .” He paused. He stayed quiet for a minute. It seemed as though he was searching for words and couldn’t find any. “Those breakdowns occurred a lot more frequently than most people think,” he said, finally.
“What’d they do?” I asked. “Like on the ship, did they act crazy? Was it like The Snake Pit or something?”
He nodded. “Some did. Some cases were more severe, they cared for them in different ways. But mostly it was quiet. Almost eerily quiet, considering. Considering the sheer numbers of men on board. What I remember most was their eyes, how they’d follow you when you were walking by. They’d just look at you, not saying anything. At times, it was unnerving, to tell you the truth.”
“I bet it was,” I said. I looked at my father, dressed in a suit for his job as an accountant in a real estate firm. I tried picturing him in a khaki uniform, looking like Henry Fonda in Mister Roberts. I tried picturing him giving orders, walking past hundreds of men who couldn’t speak or didn’t want to. “Were you afraid, ever? That they’d like, do something?”
My father laughed out loud. “It was a war, Katie,” he said. “Every day, everywhere you looked, you had to be afraid someone was going to do something. You just never knew what.”
“Do you think any of them recovered? Like, once they got home, were around their families?”
He nodded. “Some of them, sure. Sure. I like to think most of them, after a while. And don’t kid yourself—a lot of men who fought and weren’t classified Section Eight were just as troubled afterward. If you’re really interested, there’s a movie you should see—The Best Years of Our Lives, with Fredric March. It’s a bit difficult to watch, but it’s a wonderful film. It tells the story of what happens after better than I ever could.”
I nodded. “I can look for it on The 4:30 Movie. Sometimes they run old movies.”
“But I never answered your original question,” he said. “About the war we’re fighting now. Kate, listen to me: You must never underestimate the evils of communism. Despite what you kids think, it enslaves people more than capitalism. God knows this country has its problems, but—in Korea, the lines were drawn. Things were clear. You knew exactly who the enemy was. With Vietnam, there was no provocation, no attack. There’s no—no clarity to this war whatsoever. Half the time our boys don’t know who they’re fighting, or why. Chasing shadows in the jungle. I don’t blame them for being terrified, and when you’re terrified you do desperate things. We don’t belong there. We never did.” My father drank from his water glass. I lit a cigarette. We sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t bad. The waiter came back, pouring fresh coffee into our cups. He handed us both dessert menus.
“What would you like?” my father asked. “They make a terrific German pancake here. They’re famous for it. They prepare it right at the table, set it up in flames and everything. It’s a real performance, very dramatic. And delicious. You can have anything you want with it—apples, chocolate sauce. Huckleberries. Though maybe you’ve had your fill of berries for one day.” He smiled. He was reading the menu and he looked happy. My father loved desserts. My mother was always after him; “That’s enough, Bob,” she’d say, when he tried to sneak an extra sliver of chocolate cake, a final dollop of rice pudding. She didn’t want him to get fat. She didn’t like fat people; she thought they were sloppy and had no discipline.
I had seen them make the German pancake before, when we’d come here
on my grandmother’s birthday. It was an exciting dessert, but we’d never ordered it because my grandmother was always afraid the tablecloth would catch fire and we’d all go up in flames. I was full from the lunch, but I said, “I don’t think I could eat a whole one, can we split it? Maybe with chocolate sauce?”
If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go Page 23