We Were Beautiful Once (18 page)

Fall 1950

 

 

A POSTMAN DELIVERED A LETTER FROM THE Army to an old man painting a green fence. The next day, the man visited a barbershop with the red, white and blue pole spinning out front. The barber, bloodletter of older days, was now the unofficial sympathizer to eight blocks in the west end of Bridgeport. Trimming straw-like hair from the old man's ears, the barber said gloomily, “You son's missing? He might be found!” On that note of hope, the barber seamlessly passed the scissors to his left hand, which held a comb, so that he could make the sign of the cross.

The clip, clip of the scissors cutting short strokes across the man's thin, white hair echoed off the hard, mirrored surfaces. The barber moved behind the patron. For a fleeting moment, he lifted his gaze into the full length mirror, and the men locked eyes. The barber stepped back and inhaled the smells of soap and alcohol that saturated the air—odors that served the barber as a poor man's incense, a way of suffusing an inner sanctum filled with hushed grief. For fifty years he had listened to men like Girardin while cutting their hair and watching them through the silvered mirror, searching for words that might console them.

“
Pazienz
a
.
Gone in the middle of the nowhere they say, between
il presidente
and
la Madonna a mia
, and you read this, from a big a shot in a Washington, somebody you willa never see...  
Madon
.”

The barber, like a local crier, shared the news that Roger had disappeared with patrons and with those who stopped by to catch up on news. They, in turn, passed it on to their wives. The next day the wives ensured the reliable propagation of the account, and in a short while, all eight square blocks had learned of the old man's tragedy.

The next Sunday, under a steady rain, friends bearing baked breads and cold cuts stopped by the white house with the green fence to commiserate with the Girardins. The old woman kept a clean and neat place that carried within its walls the smells of cleaning fluids and moth balls, and all who came were careful to wipe their feet at the door. But a child lost at any age, under any circumstance brings with it a stench of casualty, a dark dampness in a room filled with people neither mourners nor well wishers—fatalists sober in the face of uncertainty.  

***

 

By late October, Julie hadn't received a letter from Roger for seven weeks.  She waited for the postman. Nothing came. Outside, the rain pelted the house, the last leaves of fall abandoned their branches, the clock ticked past 5 a.m. and Julie had already written for ten minutes.

Dear Roger,

I hope this letter finds you safe and warm. The picture of me is from last May with my brother Jack (in case you're wondering who that guy is). We have not heard from him in almost eight weeks. I'm frightened. But I refuse to give in to it, and lose faith that he, and you, are okay and doing what needs getting done to come home as soon as heavenly possible. I know there are thousands of our boys over there, but if you run into him, tell him his mother is worried, and he should write.  I read about the war twice a day, can't take myself away from the radio. Mrs. White has a new TV & lets me watch the news when I want, & it's always on Korea.

To let space separate her from the page, she poured a cup of coffee and went to the small room where her violin laid in its velvet case. She plucked the strings—so, re, la, me—and imagined the sound of Roger's voice.  She returned to her letter.  

The newspaper tells us the Army crossed the 38
th
Parallel, so I guess you are in North Korea. It had an article on Oscar Hammerstein that said he was against the government setting up a group to censor entertainers. The world's gone crazy.
 

It was 6 a.m. when she heard her mother turn on the shower. Not wanting to let go the quiet time she had with Roger, she penned one more thought before starting her day.

Oh Roger, it might be years before I see you again. I can't stand to bear it. I heard you call my name a little while ago when I plinked on the violin, so I tell myself, you are, at least, in my music.

In late November, newspapers reported that the Chinese invaded Korea, but Julie's attention to the day to day war reports was diverted when Nonna Rosa had a stroke a few days before Thanksgiving—confining her to a wheelchair. Grandfather Libero had passed away the year before, so Mary, who worked at the hospital, and Julie, who faithfully practiced her violin, managed to take care of Rosa around the clock. Eventually the calendar flipped into December and Julie found her rhythm again—waking before sunrise, writing and posting letter after letter to Roger's last known APO, Pusan, Republic of Korea.  

 

Julie went to Sunday mass the week before Christmas. The air was crisp, like the day Roger told her he had been drafted. Leaving church, she bumped into a high school friend and they talked about Roger's long silence. Her friend suggested she visit his parents. Julie had never met them, but knew they lived somewhere across town. She went into the Silver Streak Diner to look up Girardin in the white pages and saw one listing, Jean Girardin, First Avenue. She called the number and a man with a French-Canadian accent answered.

“Hello.”

Julie's throat tightened, and she hung up, afraid to learn what may have happened to Roger. She walked to the counter, ordered a coffee, but before she took her first sip, she was headed for the door and the address listed in the phonebook.

The Barnum line dropped her at the one room Greyhound terminal on Center Street, where she transferred to the Oxford line that took her to the West End. She found the house on First Avenue, a white Cape Cod with a green picket fence. At first she walked past the gate, thinking that Roger might be all right, that he and his parents were in touch, or that she might learn Roger had another girl, a sweetheart, a Canadian beauty, engaged, married—who could tell? She returned to the bus stop and waited a few minutes, but the house and those inside who had the answers she desperately needed drew her back.

She knocked. A plump, white haired woman in a cardigan and a over a flowered housedress came to the door. The woman smiled, revealing several crooked teeth.

“Yes?” she asked. Her voice put Julie at ease.

“Is this the home of Roger Girardin's parents?”

“Yes, I'm his mother...  and you are?”

“I'm a friend...  of your son.”

Mrs. Girardin wrinkled her brows, tightened her lips, and gave Julie the once-over. “Come in, let me take your coat.”

Sitting on a red, tufted sofa, Mrs. Girardin leaned forward. She moved her foot over a frayed spot in the red and gray circular rug.

Julie sat in a stiff side chair next to a maple coffee table adorned with a bouquet of fake blue irises, and surveyed the sparsely furnished room: a bulb was missing in the small, plastic chandelier in the center of the room, but otherwise the home was neat, with a hint of mothballs. Above the sofa, a lithograph of a huntsman with brown and white hounds in an ornate gilded frame suggested a different time and place.

The old woman stirred. “Can I get you something?  Water, coffee?”

“Oh no, thank you.”

“How long have you known my son?”

“Oh, we go back to August '48. Was a Friday. I saw him for the first time at the art museum in New Haven.”

“Roger wanted to be an artist, then a writer. His father wanted him to learn a trade. He'd helped his dad from the time he could carry a hammer.”

“Told me he made cabinets.” Julie smiled faintly and tried to see Roger's face in Mrs. Girardin's.

“A cabinetmaker, like my husband. Do your people live 'round here?”

“My dad works at Colt Cosmetic Cases. Mom's a nurse.”

“And, you? Do you work?”

“I play violin. And my grandmother, she had a stroke, so I take care— ” Julie could not hold out any longer, “Mrs. Girardin, have you heard from Roger?”

“Oh, my dear, Roger is missing!” She plucked a tissue from her sleeve to dab her eyes. “I suppose you had no way of knowing.”

“Missing?” Julie could not make sense of it. She bent forward. “Missing?”

“Yes, my dear.”

Julie cocked her head, struggling to get the words out. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

“About ten days ago, we got a letter from the Army.  Said he's missing. Let me get it.”

When she rose from the couch, Julie saw that the woman wore an apron stained with blue or blackberries.  She heard Mrs. Girardin blow her nose. Water flushed.  A door creaked open and the woman called, “Come upstairs, we gotta friend of Roger's here. I think you should meet her.” Julie heard someone climbing stairs.  Roger's mother returned with a brown envelope.

“Julie, was it?”

Julie straightened her back. “Yes, Mrs. Girardin.”

A white haired man with horn rimmed glasses appeared, dusting off brown overalls.

“Jean,” she pronounced it in the French way, “This is Julie. Roger has a girlfriend.” She smiled.

“How do you do, sir?”

“Very, very pleased to meet you, young lady,” he said with the French-Canadian accent she had heard on the phone.  He sat next to his wife. He raised his eyebrows, and Julie felt a familiar warmth in the soft, blue eyes behind his thick glasses. “You know my son?”

“Yes. We were going out.” She wondered how she seemed to him: neat, polite, pretty enough.

“Oh, we figured Roger had a girl,” he chuckled, “didn't we, Lisa? But he's so private, that one.”

Mrs. Girardin plucked a letter from a wrapper with an official government seal. “I told Julie we hadn't heard nothing,” she said in a clear-cut manner. Reaching across the coffee table, she handed it to Julie.  “Well, here it is...  from the Army.”

Julie unfolded the paper thinking it was stiff in an official way, like the letter saying she had been accepted to music school.  This one used fewer words to say much more.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Girardin:

The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deepest regret that your son, Private First Class, Roger Girardin, has been missing in action in Korea since the 24th day of November, 1950. Casualty code D-- Jonathon S. Wortz, Major General of the United States Army.

Julie laid the dispatch on the coffee table.  She twisted her hands, digging her nails into her palms. She closed her eyes and moved her lips almost imperceptibly, quietly spelling the word “missing” forward and backward.  She pictured him alive, walking a no man's land, strong sun to his face, determined to find home.  If she opened her eyes or raised her head tears would follow. She did not wish to make it any harder on the couple than it already was, but finally she could not hold back the emotion.  “Did you know Roger and I would meet at the art museum?  Did you know we used to take long walks?  Did you know...  ?  He was such a gentleman to me.”

All was quiet when a cuckoo clock sounded.  Julie glanced at her watch.  An hour had passed trading small talk of the kind that all polite and decent people do linked by common interests in an uncommon tragedy. The afternoon enveloped three lost spirits, joining them to the one they cherished. The cuckoo clock again signaled them to bid sympathies and well wishes. And as people do in such times of grief, each expressed invitations to stay in touch, to let one know should the other hear something, to stay well,
ayez une vie heureuse, bon soir
.  She gave a hug to
madam
and a handshake to
monsieur
, and left for the East Side the way she had come, via the Oxford line transferring to the Barnum.

Familiar neighborhoods rushed by, but to Julie the streets and buildings were from another place. At the end of the line, she walked across the street to the fortress-like church. Beyond the foyer, candles drew her to an alcove where she beseeched the Virgin Mary to intercede in the matter of Private First Class Roger Girardin, missing in action, Korea, last seen the 24
th
day of November 1950.

***

Father Ryan heard weeping coming from the direction of the blue and white Holy Mother statue.

“Julie! Whatever is the matter?”

Startled, she turned. “Oh Father, it's Roger, my boyfriend. He's missing in action.”

Expressing both sympathy and alarm, Ryan took her by the arm. “Let's sit down.”

Julie explained how it had been months since she had heard from her brother and her man, and how she had just learned that Roger was MIA. Ryan fingered a strand of prayer beads that he often carried in his pocket, wondering how he could console his young parishioner. He stared up at the cavernous ceiling where shadows danced from scores of yellow votive candles lining the alcoves. He searched for words that would be meaningful or comforting. He had neither.

 “Julie, God hears you, and maybe Roger hears you too.  Do not lose faith, my child.  Hope, yes, hope, and keep listening, you will hear, you will hear the Lord in good time.” He knew this was just another Jesuit sop, for he knew, he could no more speak for the Lord's predilections than he could explain his own shortcomings on such occasions. He knew the absurdities of war, the promises of honor and glory, the poor who fight for the rich, the bizarre earthly deceptions, ironies and ambiguities that boys with good intentions fight and die for. Yes, if this were a wake, he would have the right words, but few men of the cloth were prepared to offer condolences for a life that may be far from dead, that may be lost and never be found.  

***

 

The Jesuit knew about violence, love and loss long before he emigrated to the U.S. In Ireland, he was Frank Kennedy, part of a band of social radicals in the Irish Republican Army. The IRA had recruited him and his friend Kevin McLoughlin in 1934 to fight against the fascist Blue-shirts. During the next three years, the two, not yet having reached their twentieth birthday, brawled in the streets of Dublin, disrupting social gatherings and political meetings whenever they could. By day, Frank lived in a shack in the back lot of a sympathizer and by night, wreaked havoc on the fascists, if conditions were right. It was in this revolutionary atmosphere he met Abaigeal Quinn at a dance one night and immediately fell in love. In a week's time they were living blissfully in Frank's one room shack.  In early '37 Frank's cohort Kevin went missing after a raid on the O'Dougherty Social Club. Suspecting that his friend had been kidnapped, Frank spent every waking hour searching the backstreets. The rumor was that Blue-shirt leader Ian Finn knew what had happened to Kevin. One night while looking for Finn, Frank and his gang busted into O'Farrell's—a pub in Ballyboden parish. Frank was shot in the leg and Finn was killed. The Blue-shirts plastered Frank's face on every signpost in Dublin's poorest neighborhoods, so he went into hiding, seeking refuge at St. Conan—a church fifty miles away—under the alias Aloysius Ryan.