Saving Graces (4 page)

It was not as easy on the other side of the family. The fact that my mother had been married before was a source of tension for my father’s mother. In addition, Nana took her Catholicism very seriously, and my mother was a Methodist. And…well, there was probably an endless list. Not long before the wedding, my mother wrote to Mary Anania in Pittsburgh: “I am sorry for the circumstances that make me not exactly what you wanted for your son, but I shall try to make up for that in other ways. Please believe me—no one could love him more or be more interested in his happiness.” I believe that from then on, my mother never spoke to anyone of her life as Liz Hallen, and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I even knew of my mother’s first marriage. Although I had seen my parents’ wedding invitation when I was snooping around as an eighth grader, I had just assumed that she was keeping it because of the novelty of the printer’s error, having printed some other bride’s name, Hallen, instead of Thweatt.

They were married on December 30, 1947, in my grandparents’ house in a simple nondenominational ceremony. My father had to report to the Naval Air Station Jacksonville in early January. Jacksonville was followed by the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point, in Rhode Island, followed by a deployment to Europe. When he returned to the States, my father discovered he was being stationed back in Jacksonville, and my mother discovered she was pregnant. I was born in the hospital at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station on July 3, 1949. I was named Mary Elizabeth, after my mother—although I was called Mary Beth, and my brother, born a year later at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, was named for my father, although he was called Jay. My sister, born a year after that, was named Nancy, after my mother’s sister; with no competition in the immediate family, she was called Nancy. As my mother left the hospital with Nancy, the doctor—who had also delivered Jay fifty-three weeks earlier—cheerfully bid Mother farewell, saying, “I’ll see you next year.” My mother, her baby in her arms and two toddlers waiting at home, just looked at him and replied, “Don’t count on it.”

We outgrew the Washington, D.C., apartment my parents first rented, so my parents bought a tiny bungalow—a dollhouse, my mother always said—in Falls Church, Virginia. Mother promptly filled the yard with trees and signed up to be the neighborhood military wives’ liaison. And just as promptly, Dad got transferred again, this time to Japan. But first he had temporary duty in Korea, which was still at war. Mother packed up the dollhouse alone and drove us to Pensacola. When Dad wrote that he was ready for us, my mother took a train across the country and boarded a military transport ship for a thirty-day trip across the Pacific with three toddlers. If you have ever been on a cruise and are imagining its bright staterooms and open corridors, you are not imagining a military transport ship. Imagine instead everything painted battleship gray and the hallways periodically interrupted by raised hatch doorways that—while they undoubtedly provided a measure of safety had we been hit by a torpedo—were a tremendous hurdle to climb over, and over, and over for children not quite two, three, and four. Every time I feel overwhelmed as a mother, I try to remind myself of what this first trip with three young children must have been like for my mother.

The hardest part was keeping track of us. Mother bought each of us new outfits for the trip: matching navy blue coats and hats, just like real sailors. Afraid, however, that we would fall overboard and she would arrive in Japan with fewer children than she had when she left, she also bought each of us a harness that went around our chests and attached to a leash. While it meant we were always no more than a leash’s length away from her for the thirty-day voyage, it also meant that she could never be more than a leash’s length away from three toddlers for thirty days. When the ship finally prepared to dock at Yokohama, my mother dressed us in matching outfits. When we were ready, she took a few minutes in the outer section of the stateroom to make herself look as good as possible for the husband she hadn’t seen in months. When she returned, wearing a fresh dress and smelling of perfume, she found us sitting quietly on the floor, me with a pair of scissors in my hand and most of the hair from the right side of my head on the floor beside me. With barely a word, she pulled my sailor hat over the mess I had made, clipped on the harnesses, and led us toward our new life in Japan.

Because my father was a junior officer, we didn’t qualify immediately for base housing. Dad had rented a small Japanese version of an American house in Minami Rinkin, a village tucked in a valley near the Atsugi Naval Air Station where he worked, on a road filled with bicycles, oxcarts, and mud. We had a round-faced Japanese cleaning lady—as did all the military families at the time—named Koko-san, who saved my brother’s life after he scooped kerosene from the heater that warmed the living room and drank it, and who taught my sister to speak English—with a Japanese accent that she had until she was a teenager. We would walk with Koko-san into the little town to shop, and when we did, we drew a crowd—that is, if my sister was with us. Jay and I had dark, nearly black hair, and if you looked across a group of Japanese children, you wouldn’t pick us out unless our round blue eyes were fixed on you. But Nancy had sunshine yellow hair, and wherever we went, Japanese children in their school uniforms would follow her like she was the Pied Piper, jostling to be closest to her, reaching their hands out to stroke her unimaginably beautiful hair. Nancy has always been pretty and has always garnered her share of attention, but never again like it was in Minami Rinkin. I’ve often thought that a lesser person than Nancy might have found life to be a disappointment after that opening act.

Dad eventually qualified for on-base housing—a one-story, three-bedroom stucco house that looked like every other one-story, three-bedroom stucco house in the Army housing area at Sagamihara. The houses looked the same on the outside, and they were all the same on the inside. Not just the same floor plan—living room in front, dining room to the left, bedrooms back to the right—but all painted the same, too. In the military, you didn’t choose your wall colors. The military painted the walls an eggshell color, and when you moved out and another family moved in, they painted them eggshell again, and the houses perpetually smelled of fresh paint. We lived there for two years, and Koko-san—now a part of the family—came with us.

Just as we had begun to settle into our lives and I had started first grade at the base school, it was again time for my mother to pack up the house. My father got word he was being stationed back in Jacksonville. I was leaving the fifth house I had lived in during my six years, but that didn’t bother me. I was already used to that. What did bother me was that I was leaving Koko-san. She was plain and sturdy and warm, and Jay, Nancy, and I loved her completely. It was the first time I had to say goodbye to someone I thought—rightly, it turns out—I would never see again. Although my mother had my father to help her cross the Pacific this time, now she had three young crying children, grieving the loss of Koko-san. It may have been an easier crossing than the first, but only marginally so.

When we moved back to Jacksonville, Florida, it was the middle of the 1950s and we were the prototype for the 1950s family. In Japan, we only found out about the changes in American fashion or American music or even American restaurants when magazines—consistently two months late—arrived at the Navy Exchange or when there was a revealing section in the News of the Day reel that preceded each movie at the station theater. The result was that what we thought was fashionable might be unrealistic, as if aliens had dressed for school by looking at old
Vogue
magazines and what the First Lady was wearing as she greeted a visiting head of state. That’s how it came to be that the Anania family arrived at the first community picnic at the Naval Air Station Jacksonville in matching outfits. My mother had gotten some blue and white Japanese cotton, and she had a Japanese seamstress Koko-san knew make jumpsuits—little shorts with attached blouses—for Nancy and me, and button-up skirts that went over the shorts. That part was cute. My mother had a shirtwaist dress of the same material, and maybe that was cute, too. But then Jay had shorts and a shirt, and it didn’t end there; my father had a matching shirt. After the reception we got at that first picnic—hoots as if we had dressed that way as a prank—my father never wore the shirt again.

Not that he wouldn’t wear ridiculous outfits. He wore a revealing wrapped skirt to a luau on the base. He wore a truly ludicrous plaid suit and a matching plaid oversize hat and “played” a guitar, gyrating like Elvis, at the officers’ club talent show. He and a few other brave men wore pink bikini tops and matching skirts and did a Rockette-ish routine—hairy legs and all—at another club event. And that was all just while we were in Jacksonville. It wasn’t complicated; my father liked to make people laugh. Absolutely nothing embarrassed him. And when I was seven, nothing he did embarrassed me—although that would change over the next few years. At this point, though, I was a child living in the circus. Other children went to watch
Peter Pan
? Well, Dad was in it, and so my brother and I got to be Lost Boys. Then he was Captain “Ironsides” Brackett in Jacksonville’s Starlight Theatre production of
South Pacific
. And then he was Harry Brock in
Born Yesterday
. But he didn’t need a play—anywhere was a stage to him.

It never occurred to me that there could be people who were shy or reclusive. We certainly weren’t; we couldn’t be. Believe me, once you have seen your father dancing in a pink bikini, walking into a new school or playing a boy in green tights onstage is a piece of cake. So suburban Venezia Elementary School, my new school, was just a new school, and I made new friends, fell for a civilian boy—Steve Alston, who chased me on the playground, which I think means he fell for me, too—and had my first of a series of teachers who enchanted me.

The summer I turned eight my father got orders to return to Japan, this time to the Marine Corps Air Facility in Iwakuni. But first Dad would be in survival training in California for several months, so the remaining four of us moved in with my grandparents in Pensacola. Not every place has a smell you can remember, but my grandparents’ house did, and it was the smell of starched and ironed linens, fresh starched linens in those days, and later, when the bedrooms of their house were no longer regularly filled with family, the smell of stale starched linens. Anyone who has been in a Southern home where the heat collects in every fold of cloth or skin and undoes every sweet odor in time knows the difference.

There we played with cousins and—for the first time—really got to know our grandparents. Grandmother Thweatt would spend her days in the kitchen, while my grandfather sat in his leather chair in the living room playing solitaire or Scrabble. The grandchildren would gather around him and watch him play. Every once in a while, someone with a short memory would ask him what a word he had put down on the Scrabble board meant. Then, as he did anytime he thought we didn’t know the definition of a word, he would send us to the back hall, where the
Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary
stood on a tall stand. None of us was tall enough to reach it, and we had to pull a stool from the kitchen to read the words at the top of the page. When my grandmother died, nearly thirty years after her husband, that dictionary stand and
Webster’s Third
were all I wanted. They sit in my house today, and I play the role of my grandfather.

CHAPTER 3

IWAKUNI, JAPAN

W
HEN
I
COMPLAINED
to my mother that I was called Maleficent after a base theater showing of
Sleeping Beauty
featuring the evil witch of that name and that some of the children had thrown stones at me, she promptly cut my long straight black hair into a boyish cut. Based on the photographs of me at the time, it is safe to say that she cut it rather than she had it cut. When it grew out, I got my first Toni, as we called all permanents, and my hair looked more like Jacqueline Kennedy’s than any witch’s.

Mother was there to solve that problem. Harder to solve was the smart-girl dilemma. It wasn’t that I was so smart; it was just that the base in Iwakuni, Japan, was a very, very small pond. I had only one real competitor in the classroom, a pretty waif named Daryl Mayer, but more often than not, I bested her by a little, which made me feel good when Mrs. Defenderfer handed out the papers but didn’t serve me well when we were released to the playground. In fourth grade, when I won out over fifth and sixth graders in art and poetry contests, my fate was sealed: I was a square, what my children now call a nerd. And looking back over the years that followed, I was always a square, or at best on the edge of it. I made many of my own clothes when I was in graduate school, for crying out loud. Roll that image back to a fourth grader, and you get a pretty clear picture of me.

Despite all that, and except for the rock-throwing incident, I don’t think of that time as unhappy. In fact, quite the opposite. Even if I wasn’t the popular Noony Bemis or the blonde and beautiful Christine Rodgers, they were my friends. There were so few people with whom you could play tetherball or bike along the edge of the seawall that everyone, even squares, was included in the fun. We all were Girl Scouts; we all sang in the choir. What else was there to do?

It was 1959. I was nine years old, wearing dresses ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalog and riding my bike around our new base. I spent the greater part of my days in the Matthew C. Perry School or on the playground with other children whose fathers also wore the Navy uniform, most of them pilots, many of them reconnaissance pilots. My father was an aviator trained in intelligence, and his squadron, VQ-1, patrolled the borders of North Korea and what we then called Red China. Though he never talked about what he did as a reconnaissance pilot, not then, not ever, that was the first time I thought I understood his job. It didn’t occur to me, however, that what he did for a living was extraordinarily courageous, even though I had warnings, as when the screen at the base theater would go black during a showing and a message would appear telling all military personnel to go immediately to the terminals. Single men would don their hats, fathers would bend over and kiss their children, the aisles would fill for a few minutes and then be still, and the movie would start again. Or I might have guessed about the danger when Dad said he would be back by Jay’s baseball game on Saturday and he wasn’t, but the newspaper was full of stories of violence in Laos that erupted Friday—maybe Dad was there. In my world, fathers did dangerous work. It wasn’t that they had more courage. It was simply what fathers did. As far as I knew, every nine-year-old American girl lived exactly the same way. As far as I knew, all their fathers—the fathers of every nine-year-old girl, the fathers of every girl—got in a plane and flew away and didn’t come back for days or weeks or even months, and sometimes didn’t come back at all.

And that is what happened to April Decker.

Just before Memorial Day 1959, a plane from my father’s squadron stalled on its approach to the Iwakuni runway and crashed into the Sea of Japan. Four men—one of them April’s father, Lieutenant Commander Ben Decker, who had been a classmate of my father’s at the Naval Academy—were dead.

Within hours of the plane’s tumble, my mother was at the Decker home, breaking the terrible news to April’s mother, Helen. It was news Mother had heard herself before, when she was told that Carl Hallen had died, so she knew what to do and what to say, and what not to say. Mother took April, then only two, to our house, and returned to help Helen dismantle the life her family had shared in Japan. Helen’s parents and Ben’s were half a world away, and the Iwakuni military community that had become her family in the last year would soon be far away. She had to move, quickly. The protections of the military overseas extended to wives but not to widows. Helen needed to pack up what she could of her life in Japan, literally and figuratively, and begin to prepare for the unknown life she and April now faced. But, for the time, she wasn’t alone. She had my mother by her side.

Helen and April stayed with us that first night, and then April stayed on with us for the next week while Helen went home to pack. Mother stayed with her each day until Helen slept and tried to arrive in the morning before she awoke. When some other wife would spell her, Mother would rush home to check on April and on us. She was so tired she could hardly move, but she never thought of stopping.

Oblivious to the pain in her own home, April was happy with the new adventure with our family. She slept with my sister and me in our small bedroom. She went to the pool with us in the day. She ate dinner with our family. Each night one of us would bang an antique Japanese gong to call the family to our happy dinner. April shared the side of the table my brother usually had to himself. When everyone was at the table, one of us children would say grace. It was all a delightful mystery to a young only child.

One night, April said, “I want to say it.”

“What?” my mother asked.

“Grace.”

“That’s fine, hon,” then, turning to us, “April is saying grace tonight.”

The table got quiet. Everyone folded their hands. April, with a resoluteness she would need in life, took over. She had never said grace before. It was quiet a bit too long, and my brother squirmed. Finally it came. One word.

“Grace.”

April unfolded her hands and picked up her fork.

We all opened our eyes over our folded hands and looked to my mother for guidance. Mother gave the unmistakable signal that we were to treat April’s version as a real blessing. Because, of course, it was.

It was impossible at nine to understand the reach of April’s blessing. The terrible, heartbreaking circumstance that brought her to us was in impossible juxtaposition with the completely open happy way in which she accepted our embrace, as if we were her closest cousins.

We knew, she didn’t. Every spoken word—even for seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old children—was burdened with double meaning. But we each played our parts. The natural way that my mother had of taking this child and, for as long as we were needed, pulling her into our family was probably learned from her mother, also the wife of a Navy pilot. Wherever she learned it, Mother taught it to each of us the way all real lessons are taught, by simply doing it: when you are needed, you step up, and you don’t step up reluctantly or self-importantly. I was blessed to learn this lesson at nine. I have needed it over the last forty-eight years, for in this life I have been my mother, and sadly I have been April.

Maybe the examples were there all the time, but I was too young to absorb the lessons until they had a name—April’s name. From that day on, I knew that I too had a community around me that would be there for me if I fell from my bike, or if my father’s plane fell from the sky.

As far as bases in Japan went, the Marine Corps Air Station at Iwakuni was remote. And it was small. The high school graduating class of 1959 had three seniors. My class that year, the fourth grade, was one of the classes that didn’t share a room with another grade, but then we had the school library at the back of the room. Fortunately, we had Edna Defenderfer at the front of the room. Teachers in the overseas schools run by the Department of Defense come from all over the country. Mrs. Defenderfer came from Green Bay, Wisconsin, a hometown she loved and shared with us in details we found fascinating, as when she told us about contests they had when she was young to guess when the winter ice would melt. A class of nine-year-old nomads, we were warmed by her tales of a hometown, even such an icy hometown. In the Democratic primary race in 2004, I visited Green Bay for the first time, campaigning for my husband. I spoke at a county Democratic dinner. I looked out at wholesome Wisconsin faces and felt right at home. And I told them why.

“All my life,” I started, “I have wanted to come to Green Bay.” I told them about Edna Defenderfer and how she had shared Green Bay with a room full of nine-year-olds, forty-five years before, and how I knew that if she loved Green Bay, I loved Green Bay. When I stepped down from speaking, a man came up to me and said that Mrs. Defenderfer had been his teacher in Green Bay, and he knew her daughter. That night, I spoke to her daughter, and the next day, I spoke to Mrs. Defenderfer herself, then in a nursing home, and listened to her recount moments in that classroom decades and continents away. She remembered me as “Mary Beth”—the name by which I was known until college. All the affection I felt at nine came flooding back, and—honestly—it comes flooding back now, as I type.

That classroom was magical to me, and although the building is no longer there—on the Internet I have seen the sparkling school that replaced it—in my mind I can walk through that old school. Our room was second on the right down the main hall, and I sat in the second row, midway back, and listened to the best teacher I ever had.

I had junior choir and Girl Scouts. My brother, Jay, had the baseball field, and my sister, Nancy, had her bicycle and then, when the hula hoop hit Japan, she had that. She’d walk to school spinning a hula hoop around her waist, stopping traffic as she stepped down from the curb, spinning and talking to friends. She would turn and wave to Mother without slowing the hoop’s speed.

It always amazes me that such different children can grow up in precisely the same soil. My mother found the perfect way to describe the differences when she wrote to her mother, “From now until eight tonight I lose all personal identity—I’m Mary Beth’s ‘Mother’—very dignified—Nancy’s ‘Mommie,’ and, since last week—horrors—I’m Jay’s ‘Mama Guitar.’” Different as we were then, and are now, what binds us is family and years of being each other’s most constant friends—and, until we were adults, each other’s most constant enemies as well.

The summer that I was between fourth and fifth grades, we had a base-wide war between the boys and the girls. We were all enemies. There were no malls, and there was no television—unless you wanted to watch sumo wrestling or
I Love Lucy
in Japanese (which, frankly, everyone should see at least once, just to hear Ricky Ricardo dubbed in Japanese). So fifty military children of all ages did what you might expect: we waged a war. My parents had had a piece of furniture delivered that spring, and the empty crate sat in the backyard. The garbagemen ignored it, so I asked my mother if the girls could have it for a fort. Of course, every day the boys would take it over by force, and every day Nancy or I would march home to complain, and Mother would come out and tell the boys that the prized crate was ours.

The movie theater. The pool. And the war. That was Iwakuni.

Or it was Iwakuni inside the air station gates. Outside was Japan, a Japan almost untouched by Western culture. The roads were usually dirt with
benjo
ditches running along the side and separating rice paddies or other fields from the road. The Japanese had an efficient, if fragrant, way of dealing with human waste. Receptacles in the houses emptied into open wide ditches along the road. Every road. Periodically, a man with a wooden bucket would walk beside the
benjo
ditches and scoop out the floating waste, which he then put in his wagon—which we called a honey wagon—and carried it to a version of a compost heap to later be used as fertilizer. As hard as it is to believe, it wasn’t difficult at all to get accustomed to the unrelenting odor. On our second and third trips to Japan, we arrived, took a deep breath, and said, “Ah! The smell of home.”