I Pledge Allegiance Read online

  The Seminary used to look to me like Yankee Stadium set inside of a great big national park. It’s not. It’s a Little League park, in the backyard of some school, surrounded by a brick wall. The store, Fargasin’s, is so close, my mother could have yelled her order out the window and got it delivered as quick as I could get it.

  The USS Boston is bigger than Boston, Massachusetts.

  I fall back on my bed and close my eyes, figuring after a rest I will adjust again and wake up to the world I knew.

  As I fade to sleep, “Anchors Aweigh” starts playing away in my head.

  Anchors Aweigh my boys, Anchors Aweigh.

  Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day-ay-ay-ay …

  The bell is ringing. It is ringing, hard and incessant and louder than I ever remember it ringing before. I jump up and get down the stairs and out the door where everybody is waiting and screaming at me and we start racing straight down the street toward school. Me, and Ivan, and Rudi, and Beck racing to school and we are late and it is all my fault so everybody is screeching mad at me.

  Except for Vera. Vera is running beside me, silent and smiling, as we hurry to school and the screeching is incessant.

  And a jet, a MiG-21 fighter, comes curving out of the sky ahead. It angles and heads straight into the path to the school. It drops, slings low, and the screeching of the jet engines and of the guys is fearsome as the jet strafes the bunch of us, shredding us with bullets ’til we all go down, falling over each other, bleeding and coming to pieces, and I can see every eye of every guy in the pile of guys that is us, and they all stare in disgust at me. Except Vera, who seems okay with it all.

  I jump up out of bed to the clanging bell. I can actually hear the morning school bell from my bed in the spring and summer when the window is open. More days than I would want to admit, that bell got me out of bed and racing to school because Ma was already two hours at work before I had to be up.

  But it’s not the school bell now, it’s the clanging, dinging trolley making its way down South Huntington Avenue. I have been sleeping for a couple of hours at least. Long enough to have just about worked up my appetite again for dinner.

  Although this dinner is hardly about appetite.

  I go to my closet and select some nice, fancy Pier 4 clothes. I slip into my royal blue shirt and charcoal gray pants and realize these are the clothes I wore to my graduation and the dinner afterward, and I realize as well that they are looser on me now. It was only to Fontaine’s, up the road in Dedham, for boneless fried chicken. But it meant a lot to Ma. She was dressed all the way up to the nines — which is just the way I find her when I step out into the kitchen.

  “You look a million, Ma,” I say, because she does. It could be Easter Sunday, she looks that good with her pink dress and matching short jacket.

  She does not return the compliment.

  “What?” I say, palms out, all defensive like I’ve smashed a window with a baseball. She hasn’t said anything, but trouble is obvious.

  “What are you wearing? “

  I look myself over. “My best?”

  She shakes her head. “I have not been chewing my fingernails down all through the news every evening for nothing. The people of Anthony’s Pier 4 are going to know that I am having dinner with my hero son who is over there risking his life for their prime rib and lobster thermidor. So just reverse course or abandon ship or whatever it is you do, sailor, and go in that room and put on that handsome uniform of yours. That is an order.”

  Her words do not begin to tell the story of how funny she is. Or how scary.

  I’m back in the room and back in the uniform in mere seconds. As I’m tucking, straightening, smoothing, I walk back through the door and notice there is one big bloom of a tomato stain on my left thigh.

  If the suit were red, my mother would still notice the red stain.

  The suit is, of course, not red.

  “Right,” she says, twirling away from me in disgust. She stomps down the hall and I scamper after her.

  “Ma, Ma.”

  “Don’t talk,” she says. “Just forget it. I am calling Mr. Anthony Athenas to cancel our dinner at Anthony’s Pier 4 because my son, who is supposed to be saving the world, can’t even eat a few meatballs without making a disaster out of his uniform.”

  She says the name of the restaurant like an incantation, and the name of the owner as if he personally took her reservation, which is unlikely. But she is accomplishing her aim anyway, which is to make me feel like an embarrassing baboon.

  “It was not a few meatballs,” I say. “It was about a thousand.”

  “You are defending freedom,” she says. “Look at your pants!”

  She still has her back to me when I catch up, grabbing her shoulders. They are actually trembling. I turn her around.

  Her face is laminated with tears again. And it’s worse yet. The lines of her face are not recognizable to me. As if her real face has been glazed with those tears, frozen in a freezer, then cracked with a hammer to create fractures and fissures and all kinds of unwelcome wrong angles.

  “Ma?” I say, half laughing, all nervous, “it’s a little stain.”

  “Blood,” she says. “Looks like blood. There is an artery” — she makes a slashing gesture across her own inner thigh — “you could die … it never stops … on the TV … it … never … stops. We all know these things now….”

  I grab her and I hold her and she trembles enough that it reminds me of the tremors coming up from under the ship during bombardment, but I don’t think I’ll share that story. I just keep holding her and I tell her that together we can get this stain out. It’s the kind of challenge she loves anyway. She’s ready to let go now but I don’t let her, because if she sees me crying, then I just don’t know what kind of situation we’ll have on our hands and we just might end up disappointing Mr. Athenas after all.

  I had no idea. How could I be so stupid as to think she wasn’t going to be right there with me every bloody step of the way?

  When we stroll through the front doors of Anthony’s Pier 4, after walking along the Fish Pier, it is everything I always imagined it would be. The only reason I had even imagined it was anything at all was because of Ma’s talking about it like it was the restaurant version of a trip to the crying Mary statue at Lourdes. Myself, I was impressed enough with the Fish Pier.

  I am finding myself at home with piers and ships, with the smell of the ocean and even sulfuric decaying seaweed.

  And I’m wondering how the boys are all doing.

  The hostess could not be nicer. She actually salutes me as she seats us. Ma is beaming and gleaming, possibly as proud of her miracle de-staining job on my pants as anything else. Probably not, though.

  I am staring at the glory that is Anthony’s menu. There is more ocean life on one page here than I have sailed over all these months. I glance up periodically to catch Ma not really looking very closely at her menu. She is glancing at it but mostly swimming in the surroundings.

  I have the clam chowder, she has the shrimp cocktail. She has the poached salmon while I have the broiled scrod, a fish so mythically delicious I doubt it even exists in nature.

  But the truth is, I would find it all wonderful because Ma is finding it all so wonderful, which she would do even if they brought her a boiled shoe.

  “Everyone is looking at you in your uniform,” she says. “Now aren’t you glad you wore it?”

  “I am, Ma,” I say, quite honestly. But I’m glad because of how she’s feeling.

  “Can I have an Irish coffee?” she asks me, impishly, as we’re served Ma’s strawberry cheesecake and my key lime pie.

  The tide has now, officially, turned.

  She is asking my permission.

  I have never seen my mother so proud, so happy.

  Almost too happy.

  When the coffee’s done, the bill comes, and my head starts spinning all over again. I figure the entire USS Boston could be fed for three days
for the price of this meal.

  “The coffee and dessert were on us,” says the waitress as I empty my wallet almost completely.

  But she’s looking at my mother when she says it.

  “I feel like I’m in one of those World War Two musicals,” Ma says, very conspicuously looking in all directions, attempting eye contact with any diner or passing staff she can lock onto. She is giddy with Irish coffee and pride, and I know already what movie she is thinking of. She loves musicals, she loves World War II, and she loves to imagine that is what war is.

  “On the Town,” I say. “With Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra.” It’s about three sailors on shore leave in 1944. They’re dressed just like I am now. That’s the only real thing about it.

  “Yes,” Ma says, bubbly. “Yes, exactly. And the other one.”

  “There’s another one?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes, yes … Anchors Aweigh.”

  I am looking around at everybody in Anthony’s Pier 4 Restaurant now. I am staring, ogling, just like my mother’s been doing. Only not as she has been doing. I am really looking at their faces, into their eyes. I am really seeing them, while she is projecting MGM musicals onto their faces.

  And what am I seeing, in the reality? Nothing. I see nothing everywhere. Nobody is looking back at me. Nobody notices. Nobody knows.

  Nobody cares one little bit what I’m doing in this silly sailor suit.

  “What’s wrong?” Ma asks.

  I am not Frank Sinatra. I am not Gene Kelly. “New York, New York! It’s a helluva town!” is not ringing in my ears.

  “Anchors Aweigh” is, over and over and over.

  “Those movies are so unbelievably stupid, Ma,” I say, getting up from the table and waiting for her to do the same.

  I might as well have just punched her in the head.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mother Ship

  I spend the next three days of my leave apologizing to my mother in any way I know how. I do laundry. I cook. I take long walks through the neighborhood with her, some in my uniform, some in normal civvies. Gradually, I make my way back.

  But back where? More with every walk, this does not feel like home. I want to be home, without a doubt. But I just can’t seem to find it.

  The last morning, I stand on Peters Hill, looking out over the city of Boston, ready to head back to the ship of Boston. I’m anxious now to go. I never thought I would say that. The people I have met have all been polite, but nobody is giving me any of that “go get ’em” stuff like in the movies.

  Instead, they say:

  “Just come home safe.”

  “Keep your head down.”

  “Don’t be a hero.”

  That last one came from Mrs. Lahar, my sixth grade teacher, who now lives in a retirement home halfway between my house and my old school.

  I laughed at first. “Don’t be a hero? Mrs. Lahar, you were the one who taught me about heroes. You were the most gung-ho history teacher I ever came across, before or since.”

  She nodded, then pointed a long finger at me with the same old authority. “There are a lot of causes to die for, Morris. Come home from that pointless and immoral war and find one.” Then she kissed me on the cheek. “And try and keep an eye on that idiot friend of yours while you’re there.”

  She was walking away when I tried to pull us both out of it. “You mean Beck, of course,” I said.

  She stopped, turned, and looked as if I had just torn a scab off her.

  “What a waste,” she said sadly.

  So all I can think of now, as I look at the skyline of my lifelong hometown is, I don’t belong here. I don’t understand this war — or any war, now that I’m in the middle of one — but I understand I’m supposed to be somewhere and this is not that somewhere right now. If Beck, Ivan, and Rudi are in Southeast Asia, then Southeast Asia is where I belong.

  How can that be pointless and immoral, to fight for one’s friends? It can’t be. It can’t.

  I’m headed back two days earlier than originally planned, because I’ve been called back. Something is up, and I’m not sorry to go and find out what it is.

  Ma, sensing some of what is in me — sensing, of course, all that’s in me — is torn to shreds but also not blubbering when I break away from the visit’s final hug.

  “Do what you need to do,” she says. “Get it done, and then come back to me. All of you, just do your jobs and get home.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, and head down the road five pounds heavier. I can at least carry the scent of home, the essence of it, as I go. It is the scent of meatballs, basil, garlic, and spring onions. And of Pond’s cold cream, Chanel No. 5, and Alberto V-O 5 hairspray.

  I just hope it’ll all be the same when I return.

  I get a shock when I report.

  “Reassigned?” I say, reading the notice on the big board at the naval station at the South Boston Shipyard.

  The USS Boston is no longer my home. Seems that it’s not just the Terrier missiles that are suddenly surplus to requirements.

  The notice tells us to report to the mother ship one last time to collect personal belongings, say good-byes, and read the new assignments that have been posted. There is a list of names on this notice, probably ten percent of the ship’s crew, who will be moved.

  I wonder if it’s a coincidence that every one of the guys I bunk with is being transferred. Except, of course, Vera, who transferred himself. I’m thinking it’s not a coincidence. Is there such a thing as a suicide virus?

  I get to the ship, make my way down to The House. I pass under the 8-inch cannons, detouring for one last sight of the Terrier guided missiles, which the war has left behind but still look ready to come off the bench and get in the game.

  All the other guys are already there when I reach sleeping quarters. There’s a lot of laughing, head-slapping, shoulder-punching. Hugging, crying, any of that stuff is just not on the menu.

  The Navy appears to have reassigned us in twos. Seven is playing his guitar, all packed and sitting in his rack, encouraging Huff to get a move on so they can get to their new assignment on the tank landing ship Westchester County. Bruise and Rascal have their bags over their shoulders, itching to report to their new life aboard the destroyer Sacramento.

  Vera’s belongings have been packed up by somebody and are waiting to be collected. Even his dog tags, which he opted not to take with him to the bottom of the sea, sit on top of it all, waiting.

  “Where the action is, pal,” Moses says, grabbing me in a half-headlock. I’m reading the postings list, trying to make sense of it.

  “What is this, ‘RAF’?” I ask. Really, I should know. Really, I don’t. “Does it mean we’ve been transferred all the way to the British Royal Air Force?”

  “Riverine Assault Force vessel, Mo. It’s a floating tank they’re putting us on, guns everywhere. We are now part of the Mobile Riverine Force, working together with the sad fools of the Army. We go right upriver, into the very heart of this whole crazed show. We deliver Army jokers way up-country, we go back and forth and supply Army jokers, and when the time comes, we go back up and collect whatever’s left of them Army jokers. All the while we blast away at everything that moves.”

  I just keep staring at the list. “Oh,” I say.

  Moses points at my designation letters. “At least you finally got your wish, Mr. Communications. You’re a radioman.”

  I brighten up right away. All I ever really wanted was to be in communications, whatever craft they put me on. So not only could I watch over my pals, I might be able to contact them as well. Just to hear them …

  Another happy thought occurs to me. “So I won’t have to do any shooting?”

  “Oh, no,” Moses says, laughing. “Everybody on that ship is shooting, pal. Even the cook has to be shooting, if you want to get up- and downriver in one piece.”

  “Oh,” I say again. “Oh.”

  With very little fanfare, I go to my rack and pack up the remains
of my life aboard USS Boston. It all peters out to the end.

  “See ya” and “Good luck” and “Maybe we’ll catch up again” are about all we give to each other, all we get from each other. Just like that, The House empties for the last time.

  “Come on,” Moses says, “let’s go. I don’t want to spend one more minute than necessary on the USS Crackerbox.”

  I would have thought Moses had been the happiest guy on the whole ship.

  But maybe I don’t know anything.

  We’re headed out the door when we bump right into the big Marine officer coming in. Moses and I snap right to attention, salute, and stand aside as the officer walks past.

  Col. Rivera it says on his name tag.

  We stand frozen in place as he walks silently to Vera’s rack.

  He stands over the rack, over the really puny little hump of belongings that are what is left of his son. He stands, hunched over it, exactly the way a person pauses on his way past a coffin at a funeral.

  He does not move for the longest time. It is so tense, so sad, so gut-wrenching, I would throw my own self into the ocean right now if I had half a chance.

  Colonel Rivera breaks the stillness by saluting his son.

  I am certain it is the first and only time he has done so. I am wondering how things might have been different if he had done it, just once, while Vera was alive.

  “You men can go,” the colonel says, his voice cracking but still clearly the authority in the room. “Move on, gentlemen. Please, move on.”

  We don’t need to be told again. We scramble as Colonel Rivera sits on the rack, his back still to us, gathering up the dog tags, picking up — and smelling close and deep — his boy’s shirt.

  He is definitely humming softly as Moses and I depart.

  Anchors Aweigh.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Blue Water No More

  After reporting, with our lives stuffed into these long canvas duffel bags, we are once more transported across the ocean, on a converted World War II troop ship, back to the action. Only this time, we’re taken much deeper into the action.