We Were Beautiful Once (19 page)

Abaigeal was cautioned not to make contact with her boyfriend, because she was being watched. After six months of dipping into the poor box, Frank had steerage for a tramp that would take him and Abaigeal to Boston. He was returning to Dublin to find her when he was informed that his arrest was imminent. Without hesitation, he headed for the port, where he boarded a departing ship. When he landed in Boston, he tried reaching Abaigeal, but she had disappeared. Six months after landing, the parrish priest at St. Conan provided a letter of introduction that would grant him admission to St. Cyril, a Vermont seminary. He took his vows in 1942. His first and last assignment was St. Patrick's.

1951–1954

 

 

ONE NIGHT IN MID-FEBRUARY 1951, WHILE JULIE serenaded beasts burrowed in the snow-filled yards behind the houses on Willa Street, Nonna Rosa took her last breath. The funeral director from
Piagente's Funeral Parlor
spared the family the high cost of dying and laid the old woman's body in the front room so the few people who remembered her could pay their respects. Following Rosa's burial, Julie decided to keep a lilied wreath from the coffin, but in less than two weeks the bluish-white flowers turned brown and stiff. After the death, winter stayed long, dark and cold, and Julie hardly left the house—except to buy a pack of Pall Malls at the pharmacy every other day. Months had passed since she had heard from either Roger or her brother, adding to the slowly rotating lamentation of late winter blues a resurgence of the introverted obsessive patterns that had plagued her childhood.

Her mother worried about the incessant singular arpeggio Julie practiced and the odd vocalizations she heard when the music stopped. She arranged for Julie to visit her older cousin upstate—a recent divorcée who lived in the woods to escape people's problems and not be bothered.

With the physical reminders of her loss left behind at Willa Street, her mother told her she would eventually escape her long moment of suffering, but she could not. After three weeks at her cousin's place, she still muttered under her breath. Not only did she imagine Roger in all kinds of peril, she missed her brother—though she was grateful that they hadn't gotten a letter from the army saying he was missing, or worse, dead. She made fruitless attempts to tell her cousin what she was feeling, but dealing with her own problems, the woman remained distant.

For Julie, the world had ripped from its moorings one year to the next. No one noticed. To add to her distress, she woke one morning with flu-like symptoms: a recurring nausea, headache, a nagging back pain, stiffness in her arms. To feel better, she decided to walk down the dirt road beyond the next farm, which turned into a murky backcountry trail, and back again. She did not remember passing out. Her cousins Abel and Mathew found her folded along the side of the trail when their flashlights swept across her body. She did not remember the white-uniformed ambulance driver and his assistant porting her through the woods on a stretcher, or the thirty mile race to Danbury Hospital.

Julie woke up three days later, with two doctors at the foot of her bed. She had been diagnosed with a mild form of polio.  After several weeks in isolation, she was transported to Taylorsville Rehabilitation Center where she learned to walk with a limp, where she clutched a broken spirit with a partially paralyzed hand. She never asked what would become of her, but in the weeks and months that followed a new reality set in. She accepted that she would never play the violin again, that she would never run again—like the time she ran into Roger's arms. She would be an invalid, never quite normal, someone that even Roger would not want to look at.

Three years passed, and Julie, once the
goddess of late summer
,
beautiful and jubilant, a Persephone who had held a violin in one arm and her lover in the other, fell into a long winter of solitude. The violin slept in its scuffed case and neighbors no longer heard her play at all hours. Her mother brought her flowers and new dresses, but she refused to look at them; brought her music and a canary, but she refused to hear it; spoke to her about a new life and times, but nothing changed her outlook. When the armistice ended Korean hostilities, she hardly noticed. All was quiet on the Eastern front, all was quiet on Willa Street.

1955–1979

 

 

IN PANMUNJOM IN 1953, WARRING FACTIONS IN spotless three-piece suits turned in their licenses to kill for a paper armistice. Prisoners of war were repatriated. One day passed into the next, seven days turned into a week among many, and turned into years that cast an indelible pall over the Girardin household. Over time, the news of Roger's disappearance dissolved into the plume of history and the woe and sympathy expressed in a casual hello faded. An all-pervading conviction took root among mother, father, daughter Berta and son Arthur, that Roger remained alive, lost someplace on the other side of an unreachable underworld.

 In 1955, the parents received a final notice:

Since your son, Private Roger F. Girardin, RA 22 006 482, infantry, was reported missing in action on November 24, 1950, the Department of the Army has entertained the hope that he survived and that information would be received dispelling the uncertainty surrounding his absence. However, as in many cases, no information has been received to clarify his status. Full consideration has been given to all information bearing on the absence, including all reports and circumstances. Accordingly, an official finding of death has been recorded under the provisions of Public Law 450, 77th Congress, approved March 7, 1942, as amended.

“Damn it!” hollered Girardin, so loud his wife came running.  

“What's the matter,
cheri
?” she asked, drying her hands on her favorite, thinned apron.

“Those idiots are giving up,” he clamored, flapping the letter. “I know Roger's out there somewhere, they're just giving up.  I'm calling Congressman McKnight.  We need answers.”

Lisa rushed to the kitchen, her head in her hands. She wept inconsolably. Jean wondered if she would ever stop.  He sat in the living room and later heard a pot boiling in the kitchen, but Lisa's sobbing persisted. Thoughts about what he might possibly do raced through his head. He wanted to comfort his wife, but thinking about what to do next, while fighting his own grief, took all his strength. He went to his room, threw the letter on his desk, and sat, head on his chest.  He waited while the letter faded into the silhouettes of late afternoon, waited while the moon cast its penumbral light on the last letter he would receive about his son's fate.

The next day, Girardin called McKnight's office. A staff member listened politely and promised he would get back in a few weeks. He received a letter from the congressman the following month telling him there was nothing he could do. To McKnight, Girardin was a potential liability to the image he was polishing up for the '56 campaign. In fact, his re-election manager told him to avoid the subject of MIAs at all costs.  What McKnight did not share with anyone, including his staffers, was that he attended a meeting between the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on National Security and President  Eisenhower, where the President said, “We have had long, serious discussions with the Chinese Communists, trying to make them disclose where our approximately 450 prisoners are being held. We might be making progress. Just last month four F-86 pilots were returned. They'd been shot down in Manchuria. Gentlemen, I trust you will keep this to yourselves.”

 

Art Girardin never discussed the idea that his brother Roger might still be alive beyond the occasional commiseration with his parents when Roger's birthday rolled around.  But it wore at him through his college years, then his marriage, and the death of his mother in 1976. Following the Vietnam War, a new controversy erupted over claims that Americans were still captives in Vietnam and Laos. In March of 1977, Art was listening to the radio in his living room, when he heard a newscaster report that a U.S. commission had traveled to Vietnam to make inquiries about GIs missing in action and to lay the groundwork for diplomatic relationships. During the visit, the Vietnamese surrendered the bodies of eleven identified American servicemen. Art could not stop thinking about what he had heard. The next month he took time off from his job at the Department of Transportation to travel to the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C. to investigate whether there was anything that might shed light on Roger's disappearance. Under the heading “
Korean War
” he found a yellowed folder on POWs/MIAs, including something McKnight apparently did not share with his father: HR Resolution 1957-3544 titled
Korean War POW Initiative-A309
demanding an account of 450 POWs. He leafed through dozens of official documents. The papers came in a variety of forms, from thick, brown thermographic paper to an occasional onionskin carbon copy. A document in the last category listed more than 400 names under the heading POW. His fingers trembled while he scanned the list.  Under “G” he saw
Girardin, Roger. Pvt. RA 22 006 482, infantry
. How could Roger have been listed MIA if the government knew he was a POW? Struggling to contain his wide-ranging emotions, he managed to calmly ask the clerk for a Xerox.  He went back to the carrel where he was working and held the copy under a lamp, studied it like a Dead Sea scroll, praying it would lead to answers about whether or not Roger might still be alive.

Armed now with a piece of evidence concerning his brother's possible fate, Art wrote the Army requesting the last known whereabouts of the men who had information about his brother. He received a tersely worded letter signed by an Army captain, indicating that such a review or hearing would be “impracticable.” The refusal came in a four-line letter read to him by his wife when he spoke to her one afternoon from a payphone on a noisy street.

“Yeah, Art, the letter just came.  It says...  ”

“I can't hear you, Marge, talk louder,” he yelled anxiously.

Raising her voice she continued. “It says, your letter doesn't provide ‘sufficient specificity'... it says that ‘if it did, we have insufficient resources to gather up information of this kind for matters long since disposed of...  We appreciate your request...  ”

Art finished the sentence, “But unless you have political pull, we'll dispose of your request in the circular file.” At that moment, an eighteen-wheeler raced by.

“I can't hear you,” Marge yelled.

“Goddamn it!” Art yelled back, hanging up the phone.

The following week, Art made a trip to Stamford to visit Dave Walkovich, his congressman, who held Saturday “Meet Your Representative” forums. When he arrived the congressman was out of town, so he only spoke to a clerk. But through the clerk's efforts, Walkovich did send a letter to the Office of the Secretary of the Army to ask if the Army might provide a “better answer” than the one Art had received. August and September passed. In October, Art received an envelope with a transmittal letter from the same captain he had heard from earlier, that began, “Dear Mr. Girardin, The army has reconsidered...  ” Attached was a freshly typed list naming two soldiers, Broadbent, who had died in 1960, and Montoya, who had seemed to have disappeared.

The following June, Art went back to the Archives. In a dark corner of the public vault that he had passed by on prior visits, he found a 1952 account by the International Red Cross (IRC) following its inspection of North Korean prison Camp 13. Again, Roger's name was listed among the other POWs. This time he thought Roger might still be alive. After all, he reasoned, the IRC does not list as “alive,” someone who is “dead,” despite having been “pronounced dead” by the Army.

In April 1978, Art filed a petition with the U.S. Army Board for the Correction of Military Records requesting an amendment to the record, from the
presumptive finding of
death
to that of
prisoner of war
. Even after several appeals by Congressman Walkovich—the last one in 1980—the Army refused to change the record. A short time later, on account of fried fish, one might say, Art met Nick Castalano.

1983

 

 

BEFORE THE TRIAL RESUMED ON the second day, Nick met Mitch and Kathy for breakfast at Zorba's Luncheonette. He took a sip of black coffee from the bone white, chipped mug that Annie saved for her best customers.

“Wow, you missed a good day in court yesterday!” ribbed Kathy, as she poured syrup over her French toast.

“All right, no need to rub it in. Nick, why am I point man for the library?”

“Because you're the best.”

“You're the only one he's got, so it's a shoe-in,” smirked Kathy.

“Next assignment, ‘presumptions.' Let's see what Connecticut law is on that. The judge has to take certain things for granted. No one has to prove that the Korean War happened. But that's also a problem—the system takes things for granted.”

Mitch, pushing aside the remains of a browned Spanish omelet covered in ketchup recalled his evidence class. “You mean legal presumptions, right?”

“Exactly, like the presumption that the government's actions are reasonable. Sometimes a judge, who let's not forget is a government worker, stretches this too far. Like, in our case, Uncle Sam would not forget to repatriate a POW. Would they? He might answer, ‘No, they wouldn't' and that's what I'm afraid of. The court's letting the Army get away with this. It happened when the Feds locked up thousands of Japs during WWII. The Supremes held it was constitutional because the government had the presumption of legitimacy, though looking back, it's hard to believe.”

“Japanese, Nick, Japanese,” Kathy chided.