The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (13 page)

I listened to my stepmother, Isabel, clattering and banging away down below in the kitchen while my father, in the nearby bathroom, performed his operatic ablutions. He had a creditable tenor voice, a little reedy but resolute, and as he went about his bathroom business he warbled snatches of Verdi and Puccini and Mozart operas that he’d picked up from old Caruso recordings and the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan broadcasts on the radio. These he tried to duplicate in wildly mispronounced phonetic Italian. The language is not meant to be sung by Anglo-Saxons. It took me a long time to realize that the words I heard above the flushing toilet or blurted halfway through a gargle were
Dalla sua pace
and
Il mio tesoro.
More often what I heard was invented Italian, fruity vocables such as
lalalala—Dio!
or
lalalala—amore!
I regularly had breakfast with my father before we went our separate ways, I to school and he to the shipyard in an automobile full of his white-collar brethren, known as cost estimators, who were members of a car pool. All this was long before the death of my mother and before he met Isabel, a lady who had become a small but piercing nail thrust into my psyche. I listened to her kitchen commotion. Isabel was a good cook and her talents extended well beyond putting together an appetizing breakfast—there was no way I could begrudge her that. It was one of her contradictions, really, since it was hard for me to accept the idea that this straitlaced, pleasure-shunning person, a professional nurse with a palate anesthetized by hospital food and the chicken croquettes served at the Bide-A-Wee Tearoom, where she and her fellow spinster nurses dined in the years before she snagged my father, could prepare not merely an edible but a, by God, truly flavorsome meal. I suspect it was due to my father’s influence. While scarcely a gourmet he had been reared on traditional southern cooking, which at its best is delectable; despite the fact that she had him pretty well under her thumb he had made it clear, I think, that he expected her to set a good table and she had risen to the challenge. So I had to chalk one up for Isabel. Her labors downstairs at breakfast—at least considered from my vantage point in bed, before we came face to face—always left me better disposed toward her than at any other time of the day. Even though she made a lot of noise. She was an ungainly woman, angular and raw-boned, and she tramped about the kitchen with a kind of hulking agitation; I wondered how she had succeeded at her nursing chores, which I conceived as requiring a low-keyed gentleness, an adagio grace beyond this woman’s capacity.

Lying there, I occasionally reflected with a chill upon what might have happened to me had my father married her, say, five years earlier than he did, when I was a child of ten or so; she would have gobbled me up. As it was, I was fifteen when they tied the knot, and so I was able to avoid any real damage she might have inflicted, chiefly because school and college claimed me, and then the marines. So I wasn’t at home all that often. I racked my head in an attempt to figure out the cause of our mutual hostility, but came up with nothing. From the beginning I was not so naïve as to be unaware of the wicked stepmother myth. A stepmother was
supposed
to be a termagant, a ball-breaker. Lucky was the boy or girl (especially an only child like me) who drew a sweet and loving stepmother; they were
supposed
to be ungenerous, jealous, spiteful, suspicious, uncompromising, judgmental, and so forth. Still, I thought I might escape, and the problem for me was that Isabel, with certain modifications,
was
all of these, a living, breathing validation of the archetype. What prevented me from truly hating her—what caused me, rather, to squelch the upwelling of extreme dislike that her charmless character traits called forth—was my devotion to my father, whom I loved despite the baffling absence of taste that caused him to choose this homely middle-aged dominatrix for a wife. His love for me was obvious, transparent, and it would have been a body blow to him had I given her the snarling comeuppance I thought she deserved and slammed out of the house for good.

So Isabel and I maintained a frosty politeness and I tried hard to repress my rage at what I conceived to be her irrational antagonism. Likewise, I’m sure she put a stopper on the resentment she felt whenever she regarded her stepson: the ungenerous, self-indulgent, supercilious, arrogant, potentially
alcoholic, masturbating, parasitical, egomaniacal young lout who lolled around the house with his balls hanging out of his green marine skivvy drawers. God knows—especially given the emotional upheaval I was going through at the time, my unheroic though spellbinding escape from death, my survivor’s guilt, my sexual insecurity—I was no prize myself. Anyway, only a few months after the end of one war I was in another one—a cold war, to be sure, like the one that had begun to engulf the world (just recently annunciated by Winston Churchill at some Missouri cow college) but no less ominous and nasty.

Supine, gazing gravely across my midriff, I blessed the tent-post rigidity that made a modest canopy of the sheet that covered me, and I worked at pushing back the urge to dally a bit. I did, however, give the upright a token stroke, more like a benediction, and saved for the last the luxury of assessing that part of me that took priority over hands, fingers, legs, arms, even eyes—even
brains. Especially
brains! Who needed brains? Marines had shed seas of sweat before a Pacific landing, tormented with fear over the safety of their adored apparatus. Nature had positioned the whole works in a relatively sheltered place; wounds there were relatively infrequent, yet young men in battle had sometimes been converted into instant eunuchs. It was another piece of myself whose survival was something to praise.

Well, just one more squeeze, I thought—a thought that coincided with a flash of flesh (what part of her I could not tell, though she was clearly unclothed); the translucent gauze of her curtained window prevented anything but a rouged phantom that as always nearly stopped my heart. Mamie Eubanks, right on time to the dot, toweling off after
her morning shower. The Eubanks house, next door, was disturbingly near, Mamie’s bathroom at such close remove from my bedroom window that, were it not for the intervening curtain and its frustrating semi-opacity my marine sharpshooter’s eyes would have been able to discern each pore on her beautifully proportioned twenty-year-old bottom. As it was, the voyeur’s anticipation in me, whetted by the sound of splashing water and Mamie’s larky voice, usually warbling a hymn, was always ruined by the drapery beyond which she would float, revealing a distant rosiness or an instant’s smudge I assumed was pubic hair, and that was all. Most of this to such inspiring tunes as “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine” or “Shall We Gather at the River.”

It was a routine that had gone on for several weeks. My father had moved into a neighborhood which, despite the elegance of the view, would have to be described as “mixed income.” He was not rich but richer than his neighbors. The Eubanks family were hardworking and respectable people from some remote rural area across the James River, uneducated, decent folk with whom my father got along amiably, especially since his own origins were humble enough. But as there was nothing much in common between the Eubankses and my father and Isabel, the house next door remained largely an undefined presence and nothing more, though its proximity caused certain vague irritations. Mrs. Eubanks cooked constantly for a tribe of poorer relatives spread across the town, and the smell of her heavy country cuisine—ham, gravy, snap beans, black-eyed peas—often invaded our rooms. We inhaled a perpetual atmosphere of warm collard greens. Mr. Eubanks, a sometime preacher and part-time undertaker, had a deviated septum; his snores on still summer
nights, when the windows were wide open, were often vibrant and alarming. On those nights my father, sleepless, would moan and call Mr. Eubanks “King Kong.” Mamie Eu-banks had become my own personal thorn. When, some years before, I had gone off to boarding school, she had been an awkward and nondescript tyke with an unattractive pink frosting of acne.

Now I could scarcely believe the transformation. In those days the phrase that defined a young woman who had achieved an obvious sexual potential was “sweater girl,” and this Mamie was beyond question. Her complexion had the sheen of a gardenia, and beneath the cashmere she was all delicious bounce when she skipped up the walkway next door and sent me an inviting “Hi!” This had been several weeks before, just after she had returned from summer session at some Bible college in North Carolina, and from the instant of our reacquaintance I harbored an ineluctable craving to do with her what I had been deprived of doing for so many months in the Pacific. I was surprised that I’d held off so long. I didn’t know whether she was a virgin or not—as a Southern Baptist, member in good standing of the Baptist Young People’s Union, she was most likely utterly unsullied—but it excited me to think that discovering whether she really was or wasn’t could be part of an imminent erotic adventure. Lying there, I resolved to give her a phone call, as soon as my tumescence subsided, and arrange for a date, if possible that evening. She was of course so close I could just as easily knock on her door and ask her in person, but I was still a bit shy, and the telephone might provide the right margin of distance.

I glanced at the albums which I’d been leafing through
the night before, and had left on the bed beside me just before nodding off to sleep. One of my recent delights had been that of encountering anew some of my boyhood mementos and treasures, items that had been stored in closets ever since I’d gone off into the marines. I’d remembered a number of these possessions at odd moments while on Saipan or on some troopship or other, but I’d never thought I would see them again; to look at them now, to touch them and ponder them, connecting them to mementos of bygone experience, gave me a rich feeling of privilege, as if I’d come back from the dead (which I had) to reclaim objects made immeasurably more precious because they once seemed forever lost. There was my Remington .22 rifle, still rust-free and smelling of oil, which I’d shot squirrels with in the woods near the C&O tracks. There was a set of bound mimeographed editions of the
Seahorse
, the literary magazine I’d edited at boarding school. A silver cup I had won racing my Hampton One-Design, the little wooden-hulled sloop I’d helped build with my cousin. The twelve volumes of
The Book of Knowledge
, published in England circa 1910, which I’d read tirelessly between the ages of eleven and thirteen, brooding over its photographs of children my age on the beaches at Blackpool and Brighton, and playing cricket, and eating things like bubble and squeak and scones and other confections that American boys had never heard of. There were my Charles Atlas lessons, mailed to me weekly during the summer of my fifteenth year, when I was anxious about my attenuated physique and had ordered (for the then-prodigious sum of twenty-five dollars) these dozen booklets, sent at two-week intervals, instructing me in “dynamic tension,” a weight-free technique whereby the ninety-eight-pound
weakling would grow biceps the size of melons if he opposed his own muscles against each other long enough and hard enough; I had abandoned the regime after the second week, worn out from standing, jockstrap clad, in front of a mirror, futilely pulling and stretching my skinny limbs.

Then there was my album of photographs. On Saipan, during the days and nights when I was most certain that my death was foreordained, I longed for this album with a sorrowful sense of loss I’d never thought possible. The album was the collective memory of my early youth, containing the images of those who had been dear to me, family and friends locked away in a closet ten thousand miles from the island where I was stranded in a near paralysis of fear. And so, having been persuaded that I would never see these likenesses again, much less their flesh-and-blood avatars, I pounced on this tacky leatherette volume with greedy pleasure. Looking at these dozens of snapshots was like re-entry into a boyhood where all my friends and companions had been brought back to life even as I had been granted a commutation from a sentence of death. But because that morning I would not, try as I might, rid myself of a nagging prurient fever, I returned once more not to my boarding school pals or buddies from grammar school days but to my cousin Mary Jane. There she was, four and a half feet tall, too cute for words, mugging shamelessly as she always did whenever I hauled out my Kodak during that summer before the war, in the aftermath of my mother’s death, when I was sent to estivate with my nice aunt and her nice state cop husband in a tiny Carolina town just over the border. My stay there, asphyxiatingly lonely, produced one ineffaceable memory: the onset of my hormone supply, like the Johnstown Flood.

I had just turned fourteen. I’d half-forgotten the worst of that interminable summer—the loafing around in the airless bungalow, the radio’s hillbilly strumming, the afternoon sacrament of ice cream, the forlorn moviegoing—but I couldn’t possibly forget my lust, a brand-new sensation (late bloomer that I was, I’d not begun to practice the Secret Vice) and oddly scary, inasmuch as I found it focused on the loudmouthed moppet of the house, Mary Jane. How could I have such feelings about a
relative?
And one so
young?
Consanguinity, I thought, and fear of incest were supposed to prevent the desires that were overwhelming me for my maddening kinswoman, age eleven, with the Juicy Fruit breath and the precocious boobs who would plop herself, giggling, into my pajama-clad lap and howl,
Momma, Paw-ul’s teasin’ me!
Little did she know who was teasing whom, nor the effect she had one morning when, prying herself out of my now eager clutches, she innocently grasped my engorged rod and demanded, “What’s that?” Hysterically I replied, “I don’t know!” and bolted to the bathroom for the sweet cataclysm of my first orgasm. Lucky for us both, no doubt, my sojourn ended soon afterward. But that noisy little hoyden would remain my Circe forever, and Ahoskie, N.C. (pop. 4,810), my unforgotten Babylon.