A Good Soldier

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He never joined the VFW. Almost never spoke about what he had done in the Second World War. I have only a childhood memory of his once saying that he had fallen asleep on his feet when his infantry division had moved on foot from Naples to Rome.

I knew which drawer in their bedroom hid the two daggers he had brought back from that war. A standard issue American one in a military-green painted metal sheath, and a menacing deco one of black leather and silver with an inlaid swastika.

I was fascinated watching him watch his one TV show, “Combat!”, knowing to relinquish my front and center position in advance of its start and moving to a corner of our living room where I would watch him on the diagonal. Knowing not to cross between him and the set, I would study his face in the explosive flashes of black and white from the Emerson floor model, the machine gun reports timpanizing the thin gold-threaded maroon fabric stretched over the dinner plate sized speaker. (In those days, I wanted to change my name to Emerson, not understanding that it was only a boy’s wish to be closer to his father, and uniquely, in my case, to be a guardian angel brought in from the future to guide the man safely back through his dangerous and private past.)

Our silent ritual was repeated weekly, like church, as he sat upright and motionless in his easy chair, his fingers spread over its arms, gradually darkening the upholstery with engine grease. Years later, soon after their divorce and his forced departure, I would return home from college and touch the ends of the arms of that chair, bending to receive the aroma of his work, his smoke, his skin. For quite a while, she was afraid to throw it out, afraid her sons might see it as an act of murder. She was right about that. I sat in that chair on that first evening home and wondered why I had never spoken up from the corner of the room to say “Dad, is that what it was like? Did you fight like that? Hand to hand? Did you kill? Did you see men die? Were you afraid?” He did not move far away. A few minutes drive. I could ask him those things any time but I never did.

Several years later, as an adult with mistakes of my own under my belt, I visited him, and we bonded quite completely when I said, “She’s nuts. What were you thinking?” He smiled and shrugged, probably not understanding his own history as much as I did. The war had ended, and the nation was splitting its seams with prosperity. Men returned to marry, to build things and to father curious boys like me. They were not trained to think or to analyze women for a lifetime of suitability. Luck of the draw, and he, on the rebound from a girlfriend who had written to him throughout the war but had chosen someone else, met and married a mistake.

After their divorce, he seemed happy enough, retired and living alone for the rest of his life. (Although, when I cleared out his house during the settling of his estate, I was surprised to find a package of condoms and a bank account referencing someone named Zena who shared our family name. A mystery to this day. I felt envy for his ability to maintain an entirely private life, an uninherited skill.)

Always glad to see me drive up to his house, he would ignore my succession of showy new cars and once when I reminded him ruefully that all the cars he had given me when I was in high school had been in need of serious repair, he said, “I thought you’d figure out how to fix them up, just like I did.” He clearly had not understood his firstborn child, this man who had grown up on 164th Street in the Bronx, who had been a shoeshine boy and a Western Union messenger boy, who had raced stock cars, who had built jet engines, who had raised a family and had a heart attack, who now took it easy and lived by a lake full of trout, who told me as we stood by that lake that as a boy, he had had a dream in which pennies were raining down on his old neighborhood and he was running about picking them up. When he awoke, his fists were tightly closed and he was afraid to open them and to find them empty.

What I came to like best about him was that he was without judgement. He never asked me why I left the priesthood. Never asked me about C, accepting him as part of my life and liking him without reservation.

One Thanksgiving, C and I held the feast at our house, and both my parents attended amicably, the years having burned out their old battles like the sputtering picture tube of the old Emerson.

He came into the kitchen to speak with me alone. “When I die, I want to be buried in a military cemetery.”

I looked up from the sink surprised. “What are you talking like that for? You’ve got another twenty or thirty years.”

Three days later, he had another heart attack while driving, and died an hour later.

Some say I have his eyes. I do have the two daggers, his medals and his tools. I think I had his love from the day I was born.