Saving Graces (7 page)

CHAPTER 4

ZAMA

O
NCE WHEN MY
older children were in school, they asked me to show them on the globe all the places I had lived when their grandfather was a pilot. I traced my history with my finger: a single line that crisscrossed the Pacific, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth again. It seemed so simple, but with each reversal of direction, our family’s lives had changed. In the winter of 1961, when I was eleven, the line took us from Japan to Norfolk, Virginia, to a new school and new quarters, and by the summer of 1962, it had taken us from Norfolk to Annapolis, Maryland, Annapolis Junior High School, and grand quarters on the parade grounds at the Naval Academy.

By the fall of 1962, Wednesday parades became a feature of our lives, a line of junior high school girls sitting on the top row of the bleachers, pointing at—and in our imaginations choosing from—the four thousand college boys marching in front of us. With Wednesday parades came Wednesday tourists who walked our streets, peered in our windows, and sometimes even came in and sat down in our living room. Mother would find them running their fingers across the spines of books on our shelves or lifting a frame to look closer at a photograph of my grandfather in his Navy uniform walking with Eleanor Roosevelt in Trinidad. Sometimes they would be nice, and sometimes Mother would even talk to them a bit, asking where they were from as she gently led them back out to the porch. Some, however, were not so malleable. When we would ask the most unpleasant visitors to leave, they would stomp out, muttering something about their tax dollars paying for the house. It was good for a laugh—and good training, too, for years later, when John and I were staying in a private home during a retreat on Nantucket for senators and I arrived back in our room to find a fully dressed man who, mistaking the house for his guest cottage, had stretched out on our bed, his shoes neatly tucked under the footboard, his jacket hung on the desk chair. I simply tiptoed in, retrieved my book, and went downstairs to the parlor to read there until the man’s nap was over. Our host was terrifically embarrassed, but it honestly didn’t bother me at all. At least the sleeping man hadn’t yelled at me. I figure I have those tourists in Annapolis to thank for my mellowness that day.

Life inside the yard, as the Naval Academy grounds are called, was idyllic.

And we imagined life on the parade field at Annapolis was just like life in any other American neighborhood. Jay played Little League again, and warm summer nights would find all of us piled in the Ford station wagon and then in the bleachers of a dusty field to watch Jay pitch and hit. When we got to Annapolis, he heard about a terrific Pony League team, but he would have to try out for it. The coach was an Annapolis native in the construction business, and the tryouts and practices were in a large field his business owned. Jay showed up to try out and found out there weren’t really any places. Last year’s team had returned in full. The coach asked for his name and phone number in case the situation changed, which was probably his nice way of shuffling Jay off the field. He even started to write it down.

“Jay,” my brother said, waiting to say and, he knew, spell his last name.

“Jay.” The coach wrote.

“Anania,” Jay said. “A - N—”

The coach looked up. “Are you Vince Anania’s boy?”

This man was a few years younger than Dad and had watched Dad when he was a midshipman. It wasn’t just that Dad had been a great athlete, which was true enough. It was that Dad had been great to the boys who hung out at the sides of the practice field every day. He’d learned their names and teased them about their girlfriends. And he’d made a friend and admirer of a boy who would later grow up and own a construction company. The end of the story tells itself—though that won’t stop me. Jay made the team, and the coach was not disappointed, not by the boy on the field or by the man in the bleachers.

By the next year, it was time for orders again. And again it was Japan. So in the late summer of 1963, we were headed back to Atsugi Naval Air Station, where Dad had been stationed when we were two, three, and four. But now we were twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and this time Dad had command of a squadron, VU-5. We had changed, and so had Japan. The oxcarts that had slowed our travel in 1953 and the bicycles that had clogged the roads in 1958 had been replaced by kamikaze trucks. There were still
benjo
ditches and expanses of rice paddies, but Japan was becoming Westernized. Beautiful kimonos gave way to pleated skirts and shirtwaist dresses on the streets of Tokyo. Shopkeepers still watered the dirt in front of their small storefronts. But
A Hard Day’s Night
played at a movie theater on the Ginza in Tokyo. It was the Japan of the early 1960s, a Japan that existed for a few years, then disappeared. The awkward, forgettable teenage years of a country in transition as old traditions and ways yielded uneasily to modernity.

My father, who had been the circus father up until then, suddenly set out dozens of rules for his teenagers facing physical maturity. I couldn’t be outside the house after dusk alone, and whomever I was with had to be acceptable to Dad. I couldn’t go to the snack bar unless I was with my parents or my brother. I could not do more than nod in greeting to an enlisted man. Dad overreacted, but it hadn’t been so long since he had written his mother about the wilder girls at the air station in Pensacola when he was single. He needn’t have worried about me, though. I was deciding whether to quit Girl Scouts—I had already gotten to Curved Bar and there wasn’t anything like Eagle Scout for which to shoot—not deciding which sailor to date. Besides, we all knew that we had to behave—for Dad’s career.

Each officer in the military had regular evaluations, called Fitness Reports, completed by a superior officer; they rated the officer’s performance and conduct. On the Fitness Report forms, there was a place to comment on the conduct of the officer’s family. Everything we did was watched and recorded, and if it was unbefitting an officer, it could hurt Dad’s chance for promotion. That same thing was true in every house, in every service, on every base. When a teenager did something bad enough to be mentioned on the Fitness Report and a family was sent back to the States, we all had an unforgettable lesson in cause and effect. No one talked about it, but everyone knew it. We all had as our first allegiance the professional reputations of our fathers. If someone’s mother was drunk at the Officers’ Club, if a teenager had a fight at the Teen Club, if someone’s daughter got pregnant, all the things that might be talked about for a few days in the States, but here meant a ruined career, a shortened tour of duty, a life spoiled by an indiscretion.

My father didn’t need to have a single rule. We had them for ourselves, and so did our neighbors and our classmates. We knew that getting caught doing something “unbefitting” had consequences beyond being grounded. It didn’t mean anything to us when we were younger, but now that we were in high school, it was different. Alcohol could be—and was—purchased outside the gate or at a thousand places in Tokyo, a short trip by train. We had boyfriends and girlfriends and lots of time on our hands. Those who broke the rules went to extraordinary lengths to make sure they weren’t caught, and no one turned them in because we all appreciated and feared the very real consequences. The result of this shared fear was that, without thinking about it, we developed an intimacy, an alliance, with the people we protected, who protected us. And it wasn’t just the children; it was the mothers, too. One mother used to call our house at least weekly, drunk and crying. My voice sounded like my mother’s on the telephone, and often she would be well into a sobbing rant to Mother before I managed to tell her my mother was not home. Sometimes I didn’t bother; I just listened sympathetically. I never told anyone except my mother. And my mother never told anyone at all.

When I was in college taking a journalism class on reviewing, a fellow named Todd Cohen wrote a review of a soap opera, writing about how, in every scene, someone was drinking coffee—coffee, coffee, coffee. When we lived in Japan, the story of our lives could have been centered on military buses—buses, buses, buses. When I think about what made us so cohesive, what stuck us together in such a way that years and distance and different lives haven’t torn us apart, I think of the Fitness Reports and buses. The bus was more than a means of transportation; it was a meeting place. It was like the bedroom where we told our best friends our dearest secrets, or like the back row of the theater where we would kiss a special boy, or like a pep rally, or a songfest, or a giant sleeping bag at the end of a long trip. I suppose everyone who grew up in a small town can imagine it to some degree—the closeness, the intimacy, the innocence—but what is harder to imagine is that we were never ever apart. We didn’t have summers at the beach or Christmas at our grandparents’ house. And although it was theoretically possible to go to the next town on a Friday night, or in our case the next base, we didn’t do it much because there wasn’t any easy transportation. No one stayed home and played video games; there weren’t any. No one stayed home and watched television; there wasn’t any.

What we missed also bound us. We missed the trends in fashions, and we missed teenage music. I remember sitting in geometry my freshman year of high school and reading a letter from Linda Stuntz from Annapolis. The Beatles had performed in Washington, D.C., and Linda wrote that Susan Schwartz had passed out at the concert. I leaned over to the next desk and pointed to a word in the letter.

“Can you read that? What is that word?”

“It’s Beatles, I think.”

“With an
a
? Is that right?”

Then from another desk, “Yeah, they’re a new band from England.”

Susan Schwartz was passing out, and I hadn’t even heard of them, couldn’t even spell their name. And so it went.

We recovered from the missed music. We were spared the missed shopping malls. But we missed big events in America. We shared our through-the-keyhole, everything-at-a-distance look at them, but always with a difference. My dad was the officer of the day on the day President Kennedy was shot. The job of officer of the day, who is responsible for order and security on base, rotates among various officers. News such as the death of the commander in chief would come first to the OOD. So the news of the assassination of the President came first to our house, by telephone, in the middle of the night.

Everyone woke to the ring. We could hear Dad hurry down the hall to the only phone. We could hear him moan Oh my God. And then we were all up, all crying. What is it? It couldn’t be. The crying had to stop so Dad could make the calls he needed to make, and then he dressed and left, and we could only turn on the radio and listen for details. There was mourning in our community, but for us, the President’s death was accompanied by an eerie ghost-town-like feeling on base as fathers involved in intelligence disappeared for weeks and by a heightened degree of alert whenever we stepped off our base.

If it wasn’t enough that we all had the same code of conduct, that we all wore clothes from the narrow selection at the exchange, that we went to the same theater, the same teen club, the same school, there were still other things that bound us together. At sunset, the flags on base would come down, the sound of Evening Colors would roll across the station, and the world would come to a halt. The baseball game would stop. Mother would stop the car, and we would all get out. No one would speak. The world inside our gates, inside our world, would be completely quiet save for that single bugle. And we would all face the sound of it and the flag, even if we could not possibly see it. When Evening Colors was over, and the All Clear sounded, life would begin again as quickly as it had stopped. The Pledge of Allegiance in school assemblies, the National Anthem before every movie, and the shared knowledge that when our fathers were buried, we would have to stand, backs straight and jaws set, as the most mournful call of all, a lone bugle playing Taps, said goodbye to a soldier, a sailor, an airman.

It is not like we were little cut-outs of the same people. Far from it. Guy Decker wore white all the time; we thought he played tennis, but he thought he just looked best in white. He turned down a singing career in Japan when he was eighteen. Gayle Steele, pretty and affable, spent a lifetime trying to replicate the close community of Zama and finally found it in a Minnesota town. Jim Little played Big Ten football. Paul Bolinger carved Christmas ornaments while his brother Jan flew airplanes. We produced our fair share of lawyers—Eddie Northwood and Martha Hartmann and me—and a few nurses, Barbara Bradford and Glenn Tart. Keith Carmack is a doctor. My brother is a filmmaker. Jean Freeman teaches college. Misty Draz teaches elementary school. Barry Doyle went to Dartmouth, Kele McDonough to Sofia University in Tokyo. A lot of us went into the military ourselves or, like Donna Grounds, married into the military. The world was wide open to us.

And there were extraordinary things, too, such as the 1964 Olympics. There was a lottery on base for tickets, but tickets could also be purchased in Tokyo, so nearly everyone went to one event or more. My dad and Jay walked into a USA basketball game by simply following the Soviet team into the arena. Benny Graeff and Dan Doherty were mistaken for athletes on the New Zealand team by the gate attendant, misled by the Zs on their letter jackets, and they enjoyed the Olympics from prime athletes-only seats. Tina Morgan was down near the finish line when Bob Hayes won the gold in the one hundred meters. Barbara Bradford made her way to a chair on the field of the track and field events. When an official tried to chase her off, Don Schollander, the swimming sensation, told the official she could stay, she was his sister. (Yes, she is very pretty.) And I was with my dad trying to buy tickets in the lobby of the Tokyo Hilton when my father did his typical bellowing “Hey! Great to see you,” and reached his hand out to a muscular older man. Dad pulled him toward us when their hands met. “Jesse,” he said, in that intimate way he had of talking to everyone, “I want to introduce you to my daughter.” Did he know absolutely everyone? I wondered. “Mary Beth, this is Jesse Owens.” The great American Olympic star who taught Hitler that the black man could compete. It was an extraordinary time.