Significant Others (18 page)

**

VIIth MISSION

FRANKFURT, GERMANY

MAY 28, 1944

Skimming over Daniel’s words about the bombing raid, I went on to the more personal and puzzling part.

I haven’t gotten a letter from you yet. Did you get the letter with my address? I’m anxious to hear all about what you’re doing on the home front. How are things back in Pittsburgh? I hope you’re having fun, but not too much fun without me. Is your mother still determined to keep us apart? Have you made any progress stating our case? Does the woman know how much I love you? If she did, she could never have any objections to our being together.

I wondered why Daniel hadn’t received my letters and why I hadn’t received any of his. I had written to him every day and handed the letters over to my mother to post. Poor Daniel. No one there to comfort him, to let him know they were thinking of him. All those newsreels I watched alone in a dark movie theater, worried sick. Not knowing if he was dead or alive. I imagined him fighting over there, but there was no way to reach him, to let him know how much I was praying for him. How desperately I was missing him. I went to his house but no one was home. I asked around and they said the Moore brothers were all off to war. Every one of them. How awful that must have been for Daniel’s mother. How scared I was, but also how grateful I was to be carrying his child. If only I could have let him know.

**

VIIIth MISSION

FLORENNES, BELGIUM

MAY 31, 1944

Very uneventful; No flak, no fighters. Tonight I’ll dream easier. I dream about you every night, you know. Waiting for word from you, my love. I hope it comes soon. Missing you is not getting easier. It’s an ache that can’t be washed away. But I know you’re waiting for me and that’s all that matters. I know what we’re doing over here is important, but our love is all that’s keeping me going. I’d rather be there with you than over here fighting. But then I realize you’re the reason I’m fighting.

**

Skipping over the next two missions, I came to the letter dated June 6, the day that would go down in history as “D-Day,” and continued to read with pride.

XIth MISSION

CAEN, FRANCE

JUNE 6, 1944

It was my 11
th
mission, on June 6, 1944, which also happens to be my birthday. You probably don’t even know that.

They woke us at midnight, the earliest yet of any previous mission. We were told no abortions—no bombs in the channel. We flew straight across the channel and dropped our bombs about eight minutes before the first landing barge hit the coast in the Cherbourg Peninsula—formerly the worst flak area on the coast. We ran missions all day. Quite a lot happened. I got my personal message from General Eisenhower. It will be one of my most prized
possessions. A letter from you would rank right up there, but so far I haven’t heard from you. I’m sure there must be an explanation, some SNAFU. It would truly be history-making to get your letter.

They issued me a .45, which I’ll carry on all future missions. I’ve killed from the anonymity of a top turret. I’ve watched Forts blow apart into a dozen flaming pieces hurtling toward the earth and ships go down in a flat spin and burst into a sheet of flame when they hit the ground. I’ve fought nausea and broken out in a cold sweat when I saw my first flak. Deprived of oxygen half the time, I’ve vomited in my leaking mask and all over the floor-plate of the turret during the really rough missions. The flak is as thick as the soup I flew in over 30,000 feet up. And it’s accurate enough to really scare the hell out of us. Actually, I’m too sick to be scared. I sweated out this mission—as I always do.

I tell you this to let you know that I’m not particularly brave. The truth is I’m as scared as any of the guys. Of course, none of us will admit that to each other. We’re all just putting on a front. But I want you to know me and everything about me.

I’m just a man. But I believe in what we’re fighting for. And one of the things I’m fighting for is you and our future. I can see it so clearly in my head. I have a vision of you in our house, with lots of windows to let in the sunlight so I can see your beautiful face. You’re holding our son—and we haven’t talked about this, but I want a houseful of kids. Right now I don’t know how we’ll afford this life I’m dreaming of, but somehow we will, the two of us working side by side, building our new life together. I hope you’re getting the money I’m sending and saving it. I can’t wait to hold you in my
arms again. I hope your mother isn’t giving you too much trouble about us. But I will win her over. I swear I will.

I had to stop then because the tears were blinding me. Daniel would have loved a son, he would have loved Donny. He wanted children, our children. Oh, if only I had known then. If only I had been braver, stronger. If only I hadn’t let my mother run my life.

I wiped my face on the sheet, picked up the letter, and continued reading.

I wasn’t going to admit it, but over here you never know whether your next letter will be your last one. And so I want to have no secrets from you. I’ll be honest. I couldn’t dance at all right before I met you. All the soldiers were jitterbugging in the women’s clubs where dances were held for the troops. I’d hardly ever talked to a girl in my life. I wasn’t the social type at all. I’d never had a date in high school because I couldn’t afford the clothes or the money to date. So there I was, just 20 years old, at a dance in the lower level Rec Room of St. Anne’s Catholic Church. Some of the girls took pity on me and taught me how to dance. Don’t be jealous, but without that experience, you probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Something just clicked and I became a class jitterbugger and a smooth dancer.

Those lessons changed my life. I couldn’t believe my luck when the prettiest girl in the club agreed to dance with me, talk with me, marry me. Could you tell how inexperienced I was? I was so hungry for you the night before I shipped out. I was fumbling around in your car like a clumsy schoolboy. But I was so in love
that making love with you seemed natural, right. I can’t wait until you’re back in my arms again. Until our life together begins. It seems like I’ve already waited forever.

I remember you said I was the most handsome man you’d ever seen on or off the movie screen. Well, I don’t know about that, but it sure made me feel good to hear it. Now it occurs to me that it must have been the uniform. In our uniforms we’re highly revered, because the uniform represents the war effort, which is why I enlisted in the Army Air Corps. I wanted to be part of something important, something bigger than just me. I only have two stripes—but over here corporal is right under God because you can spend 30 years in the Army and never make corporal. Decked out in my bric-a-brac and braid and big gold wings left over from flying school (I washed out, I’m sorry to say), everybody salutes me. But they’re not saluting me. They’re paying their respects to America. And in my uniform, whenever I enter a restaurant or a pub, somebody offers to pick up the check because they’re so happy to have us over here.

Okay, so if I am serious about this business of not keeping secrets, I have to tell you the whole truth. And you will probably agree with your mother that I am not worthy of you, that I have nothing to offer. But I happen to believe that we can overcome our backgrounds. So I will tell you my story.

Oh, Daniel, didn’t you know I would have loved you no matter what you told me? How could you have doubted that?

I was born in Pittsburgh on Bedford Avenue in an area known as the Hill District, which was part of the
inner city. My real father died when I was two weeks old. My stepfather was an average-sized man named Marty who drove a big Packard automobile, which was high class in those days. He convinced my mother that he would raise her little boy, so she married him and he formally adopted me. He turned out to be an abusive drunk who smoked several packs of Camels a day. He never smiled, but he managed to father six more children with my mother before the Depression. I was not permitted to see my real father’s family. I wasn’t really accepted. I had no father figure. I was just out of place. The guidance I needed that could have been provided by a father never came. And I’ve always wondered what it would have been like if my real father had lived.

That is why I promise you now that I will try to be the best father ever if we are lucky enough to have a child of our own.

I had to stop and cry again, for Daniel, for me, for our little boy who never knew his father.

Things were tough back in 1930. In those days our family moved constantly, never staying anywhere for more than a year because we couldn’t pay the rent. I thought that was normal and that everybody moved each spring.

Is that honest enough for you? I want you to know what you’re getting into if you still want to throw in your lot with me. I couldn’t tell you this in person, but over here, now that I have a purpose in life—that is you—I feel I can tell you anything.

As kids, we kept the front door locked, because if somebody banged on the door, it was most likely a bill collector. And if we didn’t answer, he assumed that we
weren’t home. We all hid behind the couch. I’ve never forgotten that. The Depression will probably stay with me forever.

For a period, we were on welfare. (Don’t tell your mother.) And welfare meant wearing welfare shoes with a kind of a square point. When our shoes wore out, we just cut out some cardboard for soles. The winters were tough. In the welfare years, flour and sugar came in sacks. My mother cut out the neck and arms and added a shirttail hem and that was our upper underwear.

Being poor, in an area of affluence, was difficult. I felt out of place going to school in upper class Squirrel Hill. Growing up, my brothers and I interchanged clothing. In the early years, four of us slept in one bed in a house without a bathroom or heat. (Shades of military life to come.)

Being on welfare also meant that the family service organization in the Hill District handed out wicker food baskets with potatoes, carrots, a turnip, a loaf of bread, and about a pound of meat of some kind, wrapped in butcher’s wrap. And we would walk home with our welfare baskets.

Marty was a gambler. When I wanted to take my mother down to Ludine’s for a corned beef sandwich, we couldn’t scrape up the $.15 price, because Marty drank or gambled everything away. Sometime, in around 1938, Marty gave me a dollar to go out and buy him some cigarettes. I came back with a loaf of bread and a quart of milk for my mother. Marty came at me, and I just stepped back and hit my stepfather square in the mouth and knocked him out. I took a shopping bag, gathered the few possessions I had, and left home.

I was in 11
th
grade; I had no money and I didn’t
know how I would finish high school. So I moved in with my grandmother. Every week, I prearranged to meet my brothers and sisters at the big Firestone station two blocks away from where they lived. The six of them would bring me up to date on what was going on, and then I’d catch a streetcar and they’d walk the couple of blocks back home. When I was with my brothers and sisters, I didn’t feel like a stepchild. I felt a part of something bigger, like I do now.

So now you know—although you were always much too polite to ask—why I didn’t have much money to take you out, why we always ended up at the USO dances and not on real dates, why I didn’t have a car—why I never took you to my home. But, by some miracle, you fell in love with me anyway.

I can’t wait to introduce you to my family. We’re a motley crew, so I hope you’re not too overwhelmed when you meet everybody. They’re going to be shocked when they find out I got a classy lady like you to marry me. And they’re going to love you. As for your mother, I plan to wear her down. I figure after this, being over here, doing what I’m doing, I will have earned her respect. It’s not where you come from but what you do with your life that counts.

Oh, I loved him so much. I had then and I still did. Look what he’d overcome. I wish I’d had a chance then to tell him how proud I was of him. How proud I would have been to share his life.

Rubbing my eyes, I picked up the next letter. Donny was always asking about love letters, and I hadn’t admitted there were none. But my son would give anything to read these letters from his real father, to find out, in his dad’s own words, what he did during the war. He would treasure these words that made his father come alive. But what would he do if he found out his father
was
alive? How would he feel about me then?

**

XIIIth MISSION

BEAUMONT, FRANCE

JUNE 11, 1944

This was 12B, as Mission 13 is known. This was to be a short one to bomb an airfield in the invasion area. Coming back over the Cherbourg Peninsula—at about 9,000 feet—a perfect ducks-in-a-gallery formation—the Group after us caught a dozen bursts. Bursts that were intended for us. We were lucky. We came back across the channel at about 1,200 feet—pretty low for a big formation.

Still no word from you. It’s hard when the other guys hear from their girls. But I’m not giving up. I have faith in us. I’m sure there’s a reason you’re not writing, but the waiting is hard. I imagine you’re saving it all up and soon I’ll get the biggest letter any soldier has ever seen. Or, better yet, a whole batch of letters that were lost in the mail will arrive. And all at once at mail call they’ll dump them on me and I’ll stay up the whole night reading them. And the rest of the night dreaming of you. Maybe there’ll even be a picture. I’ve pretty much worn down the only one I have of us. It goes everywhere with me. I’m convinced you’re my good luck charm.

**

Reading on, I rushed through Daniel’s next three missions in Lille, Melun, and Bordeaux, France.

XVIIth MISSION

HAMBURG, GERMANY

JUNE 18, 1944

We just came back off a 24-hr. pass and the
operations officer was waiting for us in our hut. No sleep that night. It was a little past midnight. The flak was very thick, but no enemy fighters. Still no letter from you. I miss you more and more each day. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand not being with you. But I can dream, can’t I? Remember the words to that song we used to dance to?