kids. We sat there, cheering and thumping the leather cushions, as U-Boats, munitions factories, cities, and airfields blew into pieces and aircraft—German and Japanese—exploded in mid-air and plummeted into the North Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean. Tracer bullets directed us from belly gunner to target, sandwiched between the two movies—Cagney killed and danced—and Veronica Lake squinted behind a curtain of silken, blond hair that covered one side of her face. Dana Andrews was captured by the Japanese and tortured in Tokyo, while Bing Crosby and Risё Stevens tried to save the souls of young boys through songs and baseball. Barry Fitzgerald narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to all of it.
Our immediate battleground was the Park, Gardner, Pearl, Jewett and Fayette Streets. My father and quiet but friendly Mr. Morton, who lived on Jewett across the street from my Park friends—the McQueeney boys—became air raid wardens. At night I would kneel by the parlor window with my heart pounding as my father dared the black veil of night. Mr. Morton would inch over the dark streets, crouching behind bush and tree and lamppost until he would appear halfway down Gardner Street hill and slip up, commando style, behind my father, who was carrying a fire extinguisher in watchful anticipation of German bombers. No one ever really told us that there would have been a fuel problem somewhere across the Atlantic so we all waited to be featured in Movietone News the following week.
My father and Mr. Morton, helmeted and intrepid, patrolled our street, yelling to an errant neighbor to shut the light off and tuck in the black window covering. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Mr. Morton would chide. My father, gentle and kind by nature, would just shift, embarrassed, from one foot to another.
The blackout secure, my father would come in at eleven o’clock, his military tour over for another night and we would have hot chocolate. My father, who never swore, would say to my mother, “Gor-ram-it, Rose, Charlie Morton is a great guy until he puts that helmet on and then he thinks he’s George Patton. Gor-ram-it, it’s embarrassing.”
One day as I stood by the Green Box waiting for Miss Feeney to open it and pass out the cards and board game to the gamblers, and the baseball gear to the rest of us, I looked up to the sidewalk beside Jugger Casey’s house. My mother was standing there talking to Bessie O’Leary, who we were all convinced was a real, live witch. My mother was dabbing at her eyes with a blue apron. I froze for a moment. Who was dead or hurt? My father – I knew it was my father. He had a heart attack. Oh, God, why? Why did my father have to die? I felt sick and numb as I passed the catcher’s mask to Stretch and ran up the hill to my mother, who was discreetly blowing her nose into the apron.
“Bill, we’ve had some bad news. Your cousin Jackie has been killed in action. On Saipan. My sister’s boy,” my mother said, as she turned back to the witch.
I had never seen Bessie this close up before. Most of the time she was looking out her windows, the curtains pulled back just enough so she could see us, and we could see her. I backed away, more intent on Bessie O’Leary than on my cousin Jackie’s death.
“Yes,” my mother went on, “my sister died when he was only a three year old. That’s when the father went sour. We don’t know where he is. Bill, go get your bike and ride over to Nana’s house. Your cousin Evelyn called to tell me. Her aunts in Brighton got the telegram this morning. They brought him up,” she said to the witch.
“What do you want me to do, Ma?”
“Just be with her. Just console her.”
I ran up Gardner Street, past Bessie’s house. Then I stopped and ran back through her yard and climbed over the stone wall. None of us dared go through her yard but since I knew she wasn’t home I had nothing to fear.
I always felt foolish riding the bike. It was my sister’s and it didn’t have a bar. I never knew why girls’ bikes were different, but I reluctantly jumped on and raced past my mother who was laughing at something. I did not understand how she could laugh when Jackie was dead in a faraway land.
The war had always been in movies or in the gold stars that hung in the shadows of dark houses, but now it seemed closer to me. To our family. To the Street. To the Park.
My girl’s bike was a P.38 fighter plane and I mowed down Jap soldiers all the way to my grandmother’s while I repeated the strange sounding place in the South Pacific where my cousin, who always smiled and had a million freckles, now lay still—forever. Saipan, Saipan, Saipan, I whispered as I hovered over the handlebars. I turned into Nana’s yard just as Evelyn was walking up the dirt path.
I had a lump in my throat and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Nana had been dead two years. Aunt Louise, my mother’s sister, was still at work in the telephone company, so that left me all alone. “Console Evelyn,” my mother said. Why didn’t my mother console her?
“Ev? Ev,” I repeated as I ditched my bike in the dirt.
She turned to me with the crumpled telegram clutched in her hand. She didn’t say a word as I approached her. Tears streamed down her pretty face. I couldn’t speak. I just put my arms around her and told her how bad I felt.
The war was no longer out there, far away, as other cousins were wounded, even Evelyn’s older brother, Bobby.
It was June 1944 when we received word of Jackie’s death and by August of that summer, because many of the kids in the Park lost relatives on D-Day in Europe or on the Pacific Islands, we would spread the newspaper out on the top of the Green Box and read about Normandy, St. Lo, Marseilles, Belgium, The Ruhr Valley, and the other war—Burma, Peleliu, Bloody Ridge. The headlines bannered names like Patton, Montgomery, Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Merrill’s Marauders, Rommel, Eisenhower, and MacArthur, as baseball and summer continued to roam the Park without interruption. It was as though the movies and the real war were one and the same. And when we thought about the battles and the beachheads, it was with the idea that once victory was established, the credits would appear at the bottom of the front page. Directed by Michael Curtiz or King Vidor. Art Director: Hans Drier—Cedric Gibbons. Screenplay: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Removed from it all, we almost enjoyed the war as news and pictures and conversations buzzed, always just a few feet away from us across kitchen tables or behind radio static, or from an offhand observation of my father’s after supper as I’d be heading out the door.
“Where you headed, Bill?”
“Park.”
“Enjoy it. It’s later than you think.” He’d wink and smile. But sometimes I thought there was a sadness in the remark. Then he’d smile again and sing.
“Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink.
The years go by as quickly as a wink.
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”
I’d go off down to the Park, humming, leaving my mother playing the piano and my father singing along to her the song of the day.
“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all stay free.”
And then crooning into,
“It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.
It’s from an old familiar score.”
My father’s big song that year, one that he “Crosbied” from the parlor through the open windows and trilled along the sidewalk as I made for the Park, was,
“I
