I Pledge Allegiance (7 page)

I
n basic training they told us we could expect to learn something new every day in the Navy. Here is something I learned: In the military, in war, you make friends just like that. And you lose them again, just like that.

I raised the alarm. We tried to find him.

But we never did.

It’s kind of funny that we receive our next shipment of mail just before we’re due to arrive in Boston. In no time we’re going to be face-to-face with most of the people who wrote us the letters, and so maybe we should save them and have them read to us by the authors.

Pretty funny, huh?

All the guys from The House are sitting in mess, our food in front of us, our mail in hand.

Here’s another funny thing: We lost our quietest guy, and somehow The House got quieter.

The plan was to take the mail to dinner, read out loud, mock each other, throw food and be stupid,
without thinking any of the thoughts that are likely to make our trip ashore less fun than it should be.

Instead, we read to ourselves. We eat like birds, and I don’t mean seagulls. Seven Hands plucks away at something that haunts, that I have never heard but that feels like I have known it all my life.

I have a letter from Beck.

How did he know I was cowering? Maybe it
was
him up there. The jerk.

I’m more homesick than ever now. I’m going home, will be there in a matter of hours, and I’m almost literally sick to my stomach with homesick. I’ll see people, I’ll see my mom, I’ll eat well and sleep in my own bed and the world will not constantly undulate beneath my feet, and all this is good — no, great — stuff.

But I’ll be home to a home that doesn’t have Rudi and Beck and Ivan in it. I’ve never really known a home
like that, at least not since I reached the age of really
knowing
things.

So, is that really home?

The most loving and strangulating hug in human history answers my question as soon as I walk through the door.

Of course this is home. I am home.

“Ma, please,” I gurgle, the breath squeezed right out of me. She has her head on my chest, her strong arms pythoning my rib cage, and she’s quietly crying. I have seen this phenomenon maybe three times in my life, the crying. “Please, Ma, don’t,” I plead. It is not sloppy sobbing. There are no cries to the heavens of
my son, my son, thank God he’s alive.
But in her own way, in
our
way, this is a highly emotional demonstration.

“How is it possible that you got skinnier?” she asks, examining each rib with her fingers the way a tailor would check seams.

“It isn’t possible,” I say rather feebly, “because I’m not skinnier.”

“You’re telling me? You are telling
me
about
this
?” She gestures at the totality of me, a sweeping gesture from my head down to my feet as if I am a magic trick she just conjured out of nothing.

She raised me all by herself after we lost my dad. So in a way, I am exactly that.

I’m wearing my uniform, which if you have ever seen the uniform of the United States Navy, you will realize it exaggerates whatever body you’ve got. Brilliant white flared trousers topped by a brilliant white blouse and a blue kerchief, all topped by the white cupcake hat. If you’re fat or short or tall, you’re fatter or shorter or taller in this getup. If you’re thin …

“Get in here,” Ma demands, pulling me by the hand through the front hall toward the kitchen. I can smell her meatballs percolating away in her homemade sauce. I can smell that there are forty of them. Just for me. It’s ten a.m., and I know this meal has been on for a minimum of four hours.

“I was going to take you out to eat tonight,” I say as she just about throws me into my chair. The kitchen set. Aluminum frame. Two-foot by two-foot table with a pebbled silver Formica top. Just-about-padded red vinyl seat and back on the chairs. I want to be buried with this set.

“So who says you can’t take me out? Tonight is a whole day away, and you have a good few meals to catch up on.”

I spend a good portion of the day eating, and still she doesn’t change her mind about going out for dinner. Then the curse of the Navy uniform starts to grab me, and I feel like a loaf of bread stuffed into a half-loaf bag.

“That’s more like it,” Ma says, standing in front of me, in front of my bedroom door. She pats my stomach with great professional chef satisfaction. I’m not any bigger, just more like a garden hose that got a rat stuck in it.

“Where are we going to eat tonight, Ma?” I ask, and I am so looking forward to this exchange.

“Oh, no place special. I don’t want to be any trouble. Someplace nice, inexpensive …”

“Anthony’s Pier 4,” I say powerfully. It feels really good.

She gasps. “Oh, my, no. That is just nonsense. All we need to do is —”

Cheesy as it sounds, I take the greatest delight yet in drawing my wallet out of my pants pocket, opening it up, and fanning a selection of bills I am sure she has not seen since my father died. And quite possibly not before then, either.

She gasps again.

“I thought you were in the Navy, not the Mafia.”

“Ma. I get paid. And I don’t spend hardly any of it.”

She is actually blushing. This is my most successful day as a son, topping my graduation, even. And it may be my peak, so I plan to milk it.

“So, lady,” I say, pointing at her, “while I’m taking
my nap, you can just call Anthony’s Pier 4 and make us a reservation.”

I approach my bed with a grin on my face. Ma always thought of Pier 4 like it was some kind of holy grail of dining experiences, talked about it as if it was this mystical, not-really-possible ideal that was great to think about, without ever quite getting there. Now she’s getting there.

I strip off my crisp Navy issue whites and take devilish pleasure in dropping them right there on the floor. It’s like escaping the regimented military life and slipping back into my kid self all in one smooth, sloppy move.

I flop onto my bed.

How did this happen?

I stare up straight over my bed. My room is upstairs, where my mother and I occupy the top half of my uncle’s two-family house. They don’t talk to each other, so it’s like we own a house to ourselves but just never use the downstairs part. I’m on the gabled front of the house, and the ceiling has slants and angles all over. On the tilted surface that I would always stare straight into while lying on my back, there is my great big poster of Tony Conigliaro. It’s a collage of him batting, playing center field for the Red Sox, and signing autographs for
kids at the park. Covering the other sloped wall, just on the opposite side of my one window, is the great up-close shot of Bill Russell leaping, torso-to-torso, to block the shot of the immense Wilt Chamberlain. Behind my head, over the headboard, is Richard Petty and his blue-and-red number 43 winning Daytona.

How did this happen?

How did these posters get so … small? How did they lose their zing?

This is my room, my life, my
me.
I am lying on my scuffed-up pine colonial mini poster bed, which feels noticeably smaller than it did the last time I slept in it only seven months ago.

And Tony C. and Russ suddenly look … what? Stupid. That cannot be. They’re great men. But what they are doing, what looked to me like the most important jobs in the world, now looks like a massive waste of some amazing physiques.

It cannot be. I cannot let it be.

I’m in my underwear, and I pop up out of bed, duck under the baseball poster without looking at it again, and go to my window. I look out at the neighborhood as I know it, at the world as I knew it. I look out over my two modest little swimming trophies from Jamaica Plain Youth Week that stand on my windowsill, raising their tiny arms for attention.

I stare out over the Sem, the Seminary, where I played about fifty thousand innings of baseball. Looking off beyond that is Hyde Square, where I was first ever allowed to go to the store by myself.

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.

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.