Clattering Sparrows (8 page)

7

AT TIMES IT AMAZED me that I could keep my mind on my own studies. Judy was my dearest friend, but she had unwillingly burdened me with her dire situation. As her only confidant besides Maria, I wanted to be there for her; I had to be there for her; and I was, but there was really nothing else I could do. Her irrational phone calls became a problem, especially when she unrelentingly hunted me down if she was unable to reach me immediately. Each time I spoke with her, I hung up the phone left with the feeling that she was growing more desperate with each passing day, and for days on end, our conversations stayed on my mind.

Then in early May, I received a call from her one evening, and she was more like the Judy I grew up with—sweet and bubbly and full of enthusiasm. We chatted for a few minutes about school and insignificant things like we used to do, and then she told me that with Maria’s help her plans were set for the birth of the baby.

Maria had arranged for her to stay at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers in Rochester, New York, to await the arrival. She had not decided whether to keep the baby or not, but if she chose to place the child up for adoption, Maria and her husband, Frank, offered to be the adoptive parents. The choice was hers, and she had three months to make her decision. She also decided not to tell her parents of the pregnancy unless she decided to keep the baby.

She was fortunate that she was healthy, had little or no discomfort, and that her pregnancy barely showed. Simply wearing larger tops and bottoms were sufficient to keep her secret. Her fabricated story, that she had secured a summer position at a day camp for young children through a college friend, satisfied her parents, although they were not pleased at the prospect of not seeing her until summer’s end. Her promise to make a brief visit to see her ailing grandmother in New Jersey, prior to heading upstate, further pleased her parents enough for them to send her a check, in case she needed some extra cash. With her plans in place and her self confidence restored, Judy managed to finish her first year of college with mostly A’s and one lone B.

There had been no further word about Tony, and the Navy continued to list him as missing.

***

Caught up in Judy’s world had put somewhat of a strain on my first year at George Washington University, but all in all it was a pretty good year for me. I managed to maintain a 4.0 average which more than assured my scholarship renewal for my sophomore year.

I applied for and was one of three journalism students chosen to intern at The Washington Post for the summer. There was no pay, but the experience of seeing how a newspaper was run, and to be allowed to observe news coverage and interviews firsthand was extremely exciting for me. The Post which had recently purchased The Washington Times-Herald was now the City’s only morning paper with the largest circulation in the DC-MD-VA area.

Jonathan Miller and I had been steadily dating since our junior year at Eastern, and since he was taking pre-law at Georgetown, we were both local which allowed us to see each other whenever we could during the school year. Jon was easy to be with and we were slowly but surely falling deeper and deeper in love. My mother adored Jon from the onset of our relationship. He was tall, dark, and handsome and a real sweetheart to boot. She often told me he reminded her of my father when they met and he was a struggling med student.

My internship at The Washington Post was a great experience, and I loved every minute of it. The reporters that were assigned to the interns were very informative and helpful and by the end of July, the three of us felt very lucky to have been chosen. Our last day on the job, they had a small farewell party for us and wished us well. We were also surprisingly given a $100 bonus for our efforts.

Since my internship lasted the months of June and July, my parents planned a week’s vacation at the Jersey shore the first week in August.

I spoke to Judy as often as possible. She was quite content awaiting the birth of her baby and making some important decisions, and she had even taken up knitting. After considering all of her options, it was evident there was simply no way she could care for a child, not now and certainly not in the future, without an education.

She came to the conclusion that Maria and Frank would be excellent parents especially since they were family. The one stipulation that she insisted upon was being a part of the child’s life, and they readily agreed. When everything was settled, Judy was overcome with relief. She spent her last weeks awaiting the birth, relaxed and content in the decisions she had made both for herself and her unborn child. She was due mid-August and if she delivered on schedule with no complications, she could make a quick trip home before returning to Barnard at month’s end. And her parents would be none the wiser.

On the afternoon of August 17, I received a call from Tony’s sister Maria telling me that Judy had given birth to a boy, but the elation quickly turned to sadness when she told me that the baby had died of respiratory failure just one short hour later. She told me that Judy was having a hard time dealing with yet another loss, but physically she was fine, and would call me prior to leaving the Home by week’s end.

The childhood friend that I welcomed home was no longer a bubbly teenager. She was a mature woman and though beautiful as ever, there was a remarkable difference about her. For hours on end, she exposed her innermost thoughts and feelings about her ordeal to me and in the process began to move forward.

For ten days she took it easy, and each day reinforced her strength and stamina. Her parents were so happy to have her home, even though it was only to be a short visit before beginning her second year at Barnard. They knew nothing of the distress she had been through, and she felt fortunate to have been able to pull the entire thing off. In a way, she felt quite relieved she had averted bringing shame and sadness to her parents who she dearly loved and respected, but she knew all too well, she faced living with her deception for the rest of her life.

In hindsight, the fact that she deeply and truly loved Tony Russo was her only salvation, for she was well aware that her obsession with him had almost ruined everything. She also realized that a main part of that obsession was due to the fact that her parents did not approve of him.

Knowing how much I missed seeing her, my mother invited Judy and her mom for lunch and a game of Mah Jongg before we returned to school. What a great afternoon we had. We laughed and joked like we used to do when we played with Su Ling and An Lei. How long ago it all seemed. I even took out the old set and we fondly recalled our last game, the Tarot cards, and of course how the butterfly had landed on my wall. I felt Judy was finally on the road to recovery and putting the past year behind her when she eagerly started talking about returning to Barnard.

I knew from our many conversations over the course of her visit that at least part of Judy’s eagerness to return to New York was attributed to her main priority which was to get some answers from the Navy about Tony Russo. Since she certainly couldn’t do it on her own, she planned to contact Maria as soon as she returned to the City. Losing Tony and their child presented her with a desperate need for closure in order to move on with her life.

***

The excitement of my first year at George Washington University most definitely carried over into my second year, but my studies were categorically more difficult. I found myself spending endless hours typing away on the portable Smith-Carona typewriter that my parents had given me for graduation.

Judy and I tried to touch base once a week by phone since neither of us had much time to write. She still connected with Jenny Kiatta in the City and conveyed to me all the news she heard from her about Billy McAvoy. The latest news was that he was madly in love with a California girl. His mom was due to get married at Christmas, and he was definitely coming home for the wedding. At the end of every call, Judy added that there had been no word about Tony.

Thanksgiving brought a wonderful reunion. My mother once again had the turkey feast and all the trimmings at our house, and it was great seeing everyone. My brother, having been discharged from the service, was home and attending American University. To my parents’ delight, the house overflowed with family and friends. Jon had dinner with us, but we went to his house for dessert. Judy and Jenny were both home for the long weekend and we managed an afternoon together before returning to school. With Christmas break only a short month away, we parted knowing that we would see each other soon.

The holidays came and went all too fast. Billy’s mom got married as planned, and the four of us got together while he was home. He was madly in love with “Sheila” and said he was going to pop the question very soon. We spoke sadly about Tony. It was all too obvious that one of
The Fabulous Five
was missing, and the ache in our hearts was mutual.

8

WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, our childhood memories seemed to fade away until it was almost as if they never existed. From time to time when I took An Lei’s Mahjong set from the closet and gently ran my fingers across the beautiful tiles, my heart would fill with such longing and sadness that I would quickly put it away. And once when I was going through some pictures of our senior year at Eastern, I stared at Tony’s handsome face wondering would we ever learn what really happened to him. And so the years passed, and we eased into adulthood with grace and purpose, finishing our studies and moving on with our lives.

On May 10, 1958, Jonathan Evan Miller proposed to me. Jon was truly the love of my life and I loved him with all my heart. I couldn’t imagine my life without him. In June I graduated from George Washington University, and Jon having asked my parents’ blessing, gave me a beautiful diamond solitaire. As I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, I once again recalled An Lei’s predictions as I pictured the beautiful butterfly in my mind.

Through the recommendation of one of my professors, I secured a permanent position at The Washington Post covering the local news scene. My starting salary was $55.50 a week and I was on my way. Jon was clerking for McDougal and Williams, a law firm in the District that specialized in corporate law, and was set to attend Georgetown University Law School in the fall. We were both on top of the world.

Judy graduated from Barnard with honors and a degree in elementary education. She planned to pursue her master’s at the University of Maryland in the fall and live at home.

Jenny Kiatta was scheduled to go on tour with the Metropolitan Opera Company, starting in October, with rehearsals in New York throughout the summer.

Billy and Sheila McAvoy were expecting their first child any day, and Billy’s mom had flown to the west coast to be with them to await the birth of her first grandchild.

There had been no word on Tony Russo.

***

As the 1950s drew to a close, Jon and I were married at Indian Spring Country Club. My parents went all out and threw us a beautiful wedding for 300 guests. After a week’s honeymoon in San Francisco, we returned to our newly rented apartment in Bethesda. Jon entered his second year of law school and I returned to my job at The Washington Post.

At our wedding rehearsal, our Maid of Honor and Best Man hit it off immediately. When Judy met Ira Singer, there was an instantaneous spark between them, and when Ira graduated from George Washington University School of Pharmacy, they were married. I was her Matron of Honor and very pregnant with our first child. It seemed as though Judy had made peace with herself and put Tony and the loss of their baby to rest. She was once again looking to the future which included raising a family.

That summer Judy and I became next door neighbors again. We bought houses in a new neighborhood in Silver Spring, Maryland, that her father’s construction company was building. It was a tract development offering the latest in ranch, split level, and split foyer models. Judy secured a job teaching at Sligo Junior High School, and when our son Sam was born in September, I took an indefinite leave of absence from the paper.

When we moved into our new home, it was almost déjà vu, and I couldn’t help but wonder if our children would develop lifelong friendships with the children in our new neighborhood as we had on Oates Street.

After Sam was born, I wanted to spend every possible moment with him. I was thoroughly enjoying my new role as fulltime housewife and mother. As houses were completed and occupied, the neighborhood became a small village of mainly young couples with small children. One day when I was walking Sam in his stroller, I stopped to introduce myself to two of our new neighbors. We engaged in polite conversation for a few minutes and then one of them asked, “You don’t happen to play Mah Jongg do you?”

I laughed and said, “I certainly do, and I would love to get in a regular game. My friend Judy who lives next door to us also plays and can be our fourth. We haven’t played regularly for quite some time.”

And so began our Wednesday night Mah Jongg games that would forever be a part of our lives, but then I seemed to have realized long ago that we would always have that link through Su Ling and An Lei.

***

We were living the American dream. When we were younger, adulthood and responsibility seemed far off into the future, but as we sailed through our twenties—finishing college, getting married, and having children—the years melted away. Upon graduation from law school, Jon joined the law firm of Arnold and Porter. Ira who graduated from pharmacy school was working in the family’s drug store on Connecticut Avenue, but would soon take over the operations of their new location under construction in the Chevy Chase Medical Building. Their new pharmacy would not be open to the public. Its business would be to supply over the counter medicines in bulk and dispense prescription drugs to local nursing home facilities on a per-prescription basis at discount prices.

When Judy and Ira’s son Kevin was born, Judy reluctantly gave up her teaching job. Three years after Sam was born, our daughter Mindy arrived and the very next year Judy and Ira welcomed their daughter Michelle as well.

We were true 1960’s suburbanites with station wagons and carpools and PTA meetings—the works. We had steady babysitters lined up for Saturday nights because that was our big night out. But deep down inside, both Judy and I were itching to get back into the workforce. We were now in our early thirties; the children were growing up; and we found ourselves with too much idle time on our hands. Housework, PTA and community involvement, as well as charity volunteering aside, we decided to work around the children’s schedules and look into returning to our chosen careers.

While we were innocently living in our own little domestic world, the vast world around us was changing dramatically. At home, as we looked forward to new leadership under John F. Kennedy when he took office in January 1961, most of us felt that our handsome young President and his beautiful wife Jacqueline were as close to royalty as this country was ever going to get. As America’s space program took off with Alan B. Shepard flying above the earth for fifteen minutes, followed months later by John Glenn circling the earth, none of us anticipated that the major focus of this very new administration would almost immediately become the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis.

In addition, the 1960s were plagued with the Civil Rights unrest spilling over from the 1950s, starting with lunch-counter sit-ins in North Carolina. From the March on Washington in August 1963 led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the long hot summer of 1967 when riots broke out in many major cities in the United States including Washington, D.C., and plagued with the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., all indications warned the turmoil was far from over.

In August 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. Three North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly fired torpedoes at the USS Maddox located in the international waters of the Tonkin Gulf, thirty miles off the coast of North Vietnam. The incident directly led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution approved by Congress, authorizing President Johnson to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States, and to prevent further aggression. The House passed the Resolution unanimously and the Senate by a margin of 82-2.

The Resolution allowed President Johnson to wage all out war against North Vietnam without ever securing a formal Declaration of War from Congress. Once again American blood was shed overseas.

Sustained American bombing raids of North Vietnam, dubbed “Operation Rolling Thunder” began early the following year and would go on for three years.

Throughout the remainder of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the war escalated, and anti-war demonstrations were rampant throughout the country. From massive antiwar demonstrations in DC, to perhaps one of the lowest points in our history, the Kent State Incident occurred when the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student antiwar protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University, resulting in the death of four students and the wounding of eight others. One of the students killed was our neighbors’ nephew, a brilliant young man with everything to live for in the bright future that lay ahead of him.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts made its public debut on September 8, 1971, and Judy and Ira joined us at the gala opening performance featuring the world premiere of a Requiem Mass honoring President Kennedy, a work commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy from the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

The New York Times wrote in a front-page article the next morning,
“The capital of this nation finally strode into the cultural age tonight with the spectacular opening of the $70 million Kennedy Center, a gigantic marble temple to music, dance, and drama on the Potomac’s edge.”

After a wonderful evening, we arrived home only to receive the disheartening news that Billy McAvoy’s plane had been shot down, and he had been taken prisoner by the Viet Cong.

In 1972, Nixon was reelected but on the threshold of his second inauguration, the Watergate incident exposure began to unravel. Little did anyone foresee what the months ahead would bring, but we would soon learn. From the convictions of many former Nixon aides to the Senate Watergate Committee’s nationally televised hearings, the saga would last for well over a year, until faced with impeachment, Richard Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974. The very next day, Gerald Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth President of the United States.

In September 1974, President Ford unveiled a conditional clemency program for Vietnam militia deserters and draft evaders. It was estimated that 70,000 “draft dodgers” were living in Canada alone. Although “War” was never officially declared by the United States, it was the longest war in our history—lasting eleven years. It wasn’t until April 1975 that the last American soldier was killed in Vietnam, and the official American presence in Saigon ended when the last Americans were evacuated by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy roof. Within hours the Saigon government surrendered to the Viet Cong.

Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, but his one term was not an easy one. In November 1979, the Iran hostage situation would seal his fate and the American people denied him reelection to a second term. Ironically, the hostages were released on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.

Three years after the Paris peace talks began, a ceasefire agreement was finally signed. In the first exchange of prisoners of war, Billy McAvoy arrived in the States. After spending months at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., he was released. His wife Sheila and their two children, who came east and stayed with his mother during his rehabilitation, took him home to California. Although his medical wounds were well on the mend, purging his mind of the atrocities he had witnessed against his fellow prisoners was another matter.

For the next year, with the help of his family and the military doctors that provided hours upon hours of therapy, he emerged from the deep recesses of his mind with a purpose. Twenty years after enlisting, he was honorably discharged and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was now free to pursue his new mission. He contacted several of the prisoners of war that had been released at the same time as he had been, and together they forged an alliance to work through Congress in an effort to determine the fate of the thousands still missing in Vietnam.

***

Our children were maturing into young adults in a world that seemed at times to be out of control. Our childhood during World War II had introduced us to loss and death at an early age, and when the war was finally over, our generation grew to believe that our children would grow up in a better world or at least a peaceful one.

Although historians credit the Computer Age beginning in 1945 with the debut of the first multipurpose computer—the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)—they didn’t deliver their first growth until the 1970s. Bill Gates and Paul Allan started a company called Micro-Soft, the first computer store selling assembled computers opened in Los Angeles, and Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak started Apple Computer Inc. and introduced the Apple II.

Once Nintendo began selling computer games, our children were hooked. And although we worried that they weren’t growing up in a peaceful world, twentieth century technology was definitely setting the stage for all their future endeavors.

Ira knew that Judy’s dedication to her students when she was teaching was exemplary, and when she decided to return to teaching, he supported her decision wholeheartedly. She accepted an interim position as a counselor filling in for a fellow teacher on maternity leave, and ended up heading a new program at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School working with troubled students. Her unique way of capturing their attention and enlightening them of their own self worth helped dispel their disadvantages and minimize their weaknesses. Many went on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and pillars of the community.

My entrance back into the workforce was for WTOP-TV. The station which was owned by The Washington Post was also the local CBS affiliate. They were initiating a new program of consumer awareness and were looking for a combination ombudsman/advocate to represent the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints reported by individual citizens. I loved reporting for the newspaper, but this position was tailor made for me.