Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (37 page)

Then again, I was also practicing speculation, since on February 29, 1945, which was the second date on the white cross closest to the camera in the picture, my daddy had been nineteen years old. My continuing awareness of this was to make my own twentieth birthday, when I reached it, seem unusually special and fraught, but I will get to that. The point I was making just now is that my daddy was only in tenth grade at Russell High on December 7, 1941, although as that was a Sunday I don’t mean literally in a classroom. He and my mother, the future librarian of Russell, were listening to a ball game on the radio with her folks, she said. But the war had gone on; gone on just long enough, I guess you could say, and then six months more afterward. I’d have met my daddy if the scientists had hurried, I’d have run to the door and opened it for him. But they didn’t know him and now neither did I.

One summer Sunday when I was small, my mother didn’t lead me back to our house after services. Instead, she took me to the courthouse, where the rest of Russell also stood, having assembled from our sixteen churches. The only people from our town who weren’t there were in Korea. The Russell High girls’ choir sang “America the Beautiful,” and then the sheet that had been put over the World War One memorial was pulled off again by my mother, the librarian of Russell. Pointing with her white-gloved finger, she showed me where my daddy’s name was, along with the other new names from 1941—45 carved under the ones from 1918. The other mothers did the same with their children, and the parents of the men who hadn’t been daddies went up and looked at the memorial, holding hands that they had to untangle if one or both of them wanted to touch the carving of that particular name. Then the girls’ choir sang “Amazing Grace,” after which we dispersed to our homes, primarily on foot except for the people from outlying farms, who were starting their pickup trucks to return to them as we left.

The photograph of my daddy that my mother kept on the mantel in our living room was his high-school graduation picture rather than their wedding photo, which was in her bedroom, or the one of him in his
Marine Corps uniform, which was in mine. Tucked into the back of the graduation picture was a V-mail letter that my mother had gotten in the summer of 1945 from someone who had been in the war with my daddy, and after I grew somewhat older I often plucked this letter out and read it. I always waited until my mother, the librarian of Russell, was away from the house before I did so, although she had never forbidden me to read it or given any indication that she would prefer not to see me in the act. As the letter was often tucked into the frame somewhat differently than it had been the last time I replaced it, I knew that she did exactly the same thing, but we never discussed it. Anyhow, this is what the letter said:

June 31, 1945

Dear Mrs. Kilroy,

You don’t know me, and I guess our CO has probably already written you about Eddie, since I know he always writes to all the families. I don’t know if the regs say he needs to or he just does it, but I hope his letter helped. I know a couple of the other guys’ wives wrote him back that it did, and maybe you did too or just felt that way. Anyway, I promised myself I would do this, and I’m sorry I didn’t sooner. But they’ve put our outfit on a pretty heavy training schedule and so there isn’t a whole lot of spare time, but I should have done it sooner anyway and I don ‘t mean to make excuses,

To tell you the truth, the training is irksome because all of us who were on Iwo sort of feel we have the gist, but we know the replacements don’t. If I write where I think we’re going next, the censor will just black it out. But I guess anybody can look at a map and see that there aren’t many places left after Iwo and

The censor had blacked out the next word, probably because there was still fighting going on there. But it could only have been Okinawa, since that was the last battle.

Anyway, I don’t know if Eddie ever put my name in any of his letters to you. But he wrote you so many that I guess I probably must have cropped
up in some of them, even if I was just the SOB yelling at him to hurry up and finish because I was collecting them from everybody He and old Duke Stryker were pretty much my best friends in the whole outfit. I know Eddie said he was going to find out from our CO if Stryker had been lying about not having a family and write them, just to get Stryker’s goat wherever he was now he said, but maybe Eddie didn’t have time. So I should probably find out and then write them too, when I finish this one to you.

I don’t know how much the censor will let me tell you about it or even if you want to hear the details, so you shouldn’t keep reading if it would make things harder for you. I guess the important thing you need to know is that he didn’t suffer at all.

After the first two days, Iwo was nothing but
[there were a dozen or so words blacked out here by the censor].
We were going after one when a Jap came out of the ground with a
[there was a word blacked out here],
and Eddie had just stopped him from throwing it when it happened. I think he was gone right away, anyway he was gone by the time I got to him and that was about three seconds after, so I hope that’s some kind of consolation to you. Anyway, I don’t know if this will sound stupid to his wife and maybe I should cross it out or start over, but when I picked him up the only thing I could think of was how embarrassed he always was about still looking like such a kid, even though
[there was a word scratched, not blacked, out here, although the apostrophe was still visible]
he was two years older than me. The bar girls used to tease him about it when we were on pass, I don’t mean that he was interested in the girls but they teased everybody, but anyway I thought that at least he wouldn’t have to complain about the unfairness of me looking older than he did anymore. Otherwise, I guess we damned near looked like twins, excuse my French.

I guess that’s about it. If I’m still around after the war and anywhere near
[he had scratched out “Russell,” and written]
Kansas, I’ll be sure to look you up. I’ll call first to make sure you don’t mind, I mean if I can. I don’t know if you have a phone.

Yours very truly,

John G. Egan (Cpl, U SMC)

For whatever reason—and I can think of one which would make me very unhappy—Corporal John G. Egan never did look us up, or try to; and it may seem a very long leap from here to Paris, France. But my ambition to attend the Sorbonne was conceived in honor of my daddy. I don’t mean that I had any knowledge of a thwarted ambition on his part to attend it, which in fact strikes me as improbable, or even of a thwarted ambition on his part to see Paris, although since almost everyone does the odds on that one are much better. Because of the way his eyes looked in two of the three pictures on display in our house, I had simply developed a conviction that he was someone who would have liked to see all sorts of places, and it didn’t matter much which ones.

The exceptional picture, of course, was the one of his wedding day. In it, he was looking at my mother, and the news that rocket ships were waiting outside to take anyone in Russell who was interested to see the Taj Mahal for free wouldn’t have budged either one of them. As far as they were concerned, they were already there.

In any case, if I was going to travel in his stead, I figured I might as well start with a place whose name drew me compellingly. This the Sorbonne’s name did from the moment I first read it on a page, although I concede the effect would have been less magnetic had the next words to greet me been “in Toledo, Ohio,” rather than “in Paris.” Above all, it was the first syllable that made my eyes dawdle before they resumed hightailing it after Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective, who actually was from Toledo, Ohio, or had been earlier in the series. But just now she had not let that deter her from chasing after some jewel thieves up a road called the Boulevard St. Michel, as soon as she had untied her fabulously wealthy father and pulled him up out of the Seine—which could have been anything, but was clearly wet. Once she had caught the brigands, I thought of being someplace I could soar, from which I could wave to my own daddy, and in vague imagination had Sukey Santoit untie him so he could wave back.

In any case, I now had my girlhood’s magic thing, and no one ever knows what those will be. Becky Baum, who sat next to me in school,
owned a dollhouse in which she kept discovering new rooms. Dorothy Haze, who joined us at lunch, had a turtle that talked to her, but only when they were alone. I had a mysterious place called the Sorbonne, which I soon learned was a university, not a restaurant, and which was magic because no one else but me had ever heard of it. In my mental picture, whose lack of confirmable particulars may well have been an advantage, even the wine-imbibing Kansans in slipshod berets and mustaches with whom I peopled the place had somehow never heard of it, because I wasn’t there yet.

However, having made the point that magic things are unpredictable, I should rebut any implication that they are totally haphazard. Before she was born, Becky Baum’s parents had lost their farm in the Depression. Dorothy Haze had an “uncle” whose visits to her house, whenever her father was away pursuing his profession of land surveyor, she continued to dislike even after mama’s friend had bribed her with the turtle; any child, which we all were, could see that she was trying to turn the animal against him. My daddy was Eddie Kilroy, who had gone far away and not returned—and my mother was the librarian of Russell, Kansas, which was why I got to read every new Sukey Santoit book ahead of anybody else. If it wasn’t for that, either Becky or Dorothy might well have had a pied-à-terre in the 6ième Arrondissement today, although you should not infer from this that I, Mary-Ann, do.

Then again, the turtle baked to death in Dorothy’s back yard one day. The dollhouse fell prey to termites, who discovered more new rooms in it than Becky had thought possible. All three of us joined the Russell High girls’ choir, and even after we had sung “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “Rock of Ages” at the somewhat more sparsely attended ceremony unveiling the names of the Korean war dead on the memorial on the courthouse lawn, the Sorbonne remained intact. In fact, it grew more so, if that’s possible—which it is with magic things, at least if they are purely mental and not made of either tasty wood or all too cookable turtle meat. At the same time, I having reached an age when college gradually quits shimmering to materialize as a tangible prospect, the Sorbonne also grew, at least in theory, attainable.

I had already learned that a government allotment for the children of
daddies who hadn’t come back from the war might well pay for part or all of my tuition. As I knew that no one else from Russell had even considered applying to the Sorbonne, I also can’t say I was feeling much heat of competition. My mother’s bemused but staunchly professional resourcefulness as a librarian having enabled me to lay my hands on the correct address, I wrote away for an application in the best French that two years of high-school language study unblemished by so much as a single Β plus or lower could attain. At the post office, trying to enter into the spirit of the occasion—it was his way, the post office itself not having much spirit to enter into—Mr. Clark the clerk made a small production out of selling me an international “Par Avion” stamp. Yet while grateful for his support, I was also wildly impatient to see the letter pass from his hands into the bin behind him. Once out of my sight, it would be closer to Paris, if only by some eight feet.

Then came days of racing home from school to see if they had replied to me—as I commenced to do the very next afternoon, although I knew this was unrealistic. After a week, I started cutting girls’ choir practices to get to the mailbox an hour earlier. On what turned out to be the day, I had just whizzed out the door of Russell High and was preparing to gather speed when I saw our County Attorney walking back to the courthouse from lunch. He had probably come from either Dawson Drug, where he had worked as a soda jerk back before I was born, or Maple Street, which was where his family’s house was.

He was one of the men of Russell who had come back from the war my daddy hadn’t. But as he had been badly hurt in Italy, and even closer to the end of the war in Europe than Iwo Jima had been to VJ Day, I felt closer to him than I did to the veterans who had come back more or less intact, although like everyone in Russell I felt that none of them could do wrong in my eyes. In fact, almost my earliest memory was of being held up by my mother so that I could empty my piggy bank, which probably only had about twelve or fifteen pennies in it, into a cigar box that our Legion post was using to collect money for an operation that he needed in Chicago, not long after he came back from the war.

In fact, I sometimes felt that if I got accepted to the Sorbonne and left Russell, I’d miss our County Attorney most of all.

He had an interesting face, and sometimes it looked as if it caused him more pain than his right shoulder, which the operation hadn’t been able or intended to fix, just reorganize. I saw his mouth and eyes as betraying an acute curiosity about the expressions they might have if everyone in the world were merry and kind, and regretting their relatively scattered opportunities to explore this. But since I was only a senior in high school, and had been raised to be unfailingly pleasant, polite, and cheerful, I guess I was an opportunity.