The Souvenir (2 page)

T
HE SORROW OF WAR
inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past.

Bao Ninh,
The Sorrow of War

I
N
J
ANUARY
1944 when my father crossed the Pacific for the first time, he did not know where he was going. He did not know he was headed for New Zealand. He did not know that after a year of training and waiting, first in New Zealand then in New Caledonia, he and his army buddies in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division would be transported to northern Luzon, the Philippines, where they would sweat out five and a half months of combat.

The monotony, the uncertainty of the destination, the hot sun, the loneliness, the roiling sea all took their toll on him. “I've never felt so blue. It's the thought of leaving you. I hope I can get over it soon, because it's a terrible state of affairs,” he wrote to his wife—my mother—from the confines of a transport ship.

As the realization of a long separation sank in—months, possibly years—his mood veered toward panic then settled into depression. Writing letters was his only relief. “Dear Anne,” he wrote home, “I'm sorry that you won't hear from me for such a long time until you get this letter, but because of the safety precautions and secrecy involved (for our own good), I wasn't allowed to tell you when I left the States.” To describe his location, he wrote simply “Somewhere at Sea” in the upper right-hand corner of each letter.

My father—a graduate of De Witt Clinton High School in the
Bronx, with a math degree from New York University—was lacking his usual reference points. No Sunday
New York Times
, no conversations with his parents, no weekly lectures at the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. And the most grievous lack of all—his wife.

It was not like the pragmatic father I knew to daydream, sitting motionless, spinning in his imagination every inch of his wife's body. Her hair. Her smile. The way she wore hats. He composed letters in his mind, wrote them down when the seasickness abated.

The churning motors of the troop ship carried United States Army Private Norman Steinman, serial number 32983436, age twenty-eight, to a latitude farther south than he had ever ventured. Farther from my mother, pregnant with my sister, their first child. Farther from the future he had imagined before the war. Farther from the self he inhabited and could never return to, farther from the person his children would never meet.

And at the same time, the troop ship carried him closer to an enemy he did not know and did not understand—an enemy he was in no hurry to encounter.

 
Stateside

“Y
OU
'
RE NOT LISTENING,
” my father used to say when I tried to slip an opinion in edgewise. In any discussion, his was always the last word.

Norman Steinman was a patriarch. Responsible, overburdened, overbearing, tender in his distant way. My father loved to give advice. Even more, he expected to be asked for advice. A Rexall pharmacist, he believed there was a palliative for any kind of illness or physical distress. Emotional distress was not in his purview. His own, he kept private.

Except for some well-worn anecdotes about bossy sergeants and his camaraderie with the characters Captain Yossarian of
Catch-22
and Hawkeye from
M*A*S*H
, he never talked to his children—or anyone else I knew—about his experiences in the Pacific in World War II. He discussed neither his losses nor his sorrows.

In our permissive household, there were few edicts beyond the obvious, like “Stay away from the stove, it's hot.” Perhaps that's why the few my parents insisted upon stood out. There were three. The first: Never cry in front of your father. Why? “It reminds him of the war.” The second: Never wear black in your father's presence. Why? “It reminds him of his sister, Ruth, who died when she was fourteen.” The third: Don't question these rules. Though debate and questions were encouraged in our rambunctious household,
these givens were so absolute, my three siblings and I simply accepted them. Whatever happened to him “over there” in the war was off-limits, like a nuclear test zone.

We were admonished never to provoke my father's anger—infrequent but explosive. We were told it was a function of his fatigue. When he was angry or depressed, a familiar and untouchable bad feeling permeated the house. Usually, he just smoldered, but on those occasions when he blew his top, the household froze in its tracks until he retired to his room and slammed the door with reverberating force.

Our doting Russian grandmother used to sigh and say, “The war changed your father. He never had a temper before the war.” I never tried to imagine what Norman Steinman was like before the war changed him, or just how this change might have occurred.

After his big heart attack, when he was fifty, my father's doctor advised him to avoid emotional outbursts of any kind. Yet some were as unavoidable as they were inexplicable. One night my mother served him sauerkraut, and he threw the whole plate against the wall. “Something to do with the war,” she mumbled as she cleaned up the mess. The mere smell of “Oriental” food made him nauseous. “Reminds him of the Philippines,” my mother whispered. The whistling tea kettle was banned from our kitchen. The hissing sound unnerved him. Again, “something to do with the war.”

Were it not for a chance discovery, my father's silence about the war might have accompanied him to his grave. While cleaning out my parents' condo in 1991, after my father and then my mother died, I unearthed a metal ammo box from a storage locker in the underground garage. Inside were hundreds of letters my father wrote home to my mother from the Pacific War. In one of those envelopes was a Japanese flag with handwritten characters inked across its fragile face.

These letters, this flag, propelled me on a circuitous, decade-long journey that challenged me to learn more about my father and the men of his generation who fought in the Pacific. To the question, What was Norman Steinman like before he went to war? I would find some answers. But new mysteries would also reveal themselves.

I
N THE DECADES
after he returned home from the Pacific, my father's attention, like that of so many others of his generation, was focused on building a business, providing for his family. He opened his first pharmacy in 1951. Pinned to the bulletin board over my desk is a black-and-white snapshot that shows my parents standing behind the counter on opening day.

They were in their thirties, younger than I am now. My father looks dapper in his white druggist's smock. My mother wears a shirtwaist dress and pearls. They had followed his parents west from New York City after he was demobbed from the army in 1946. They were both eager to raise their children in the bright California light. Wanting a fresh start, my father attended the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy courtesy of the GI bill. My mother ran the house until the youngest of her four was junior high age, and then she embarked on a twenty-year career as a Head Start teacher.

Small and stalwart, my parents both smile into the camera. A banner behind them—
OPEN SUNDAY
9 a.m.
TO
9 p.m.—testifies to my father's impossibly long hours. In the early years of establishing his business, he worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Most nights, he came home and went straight to bed, waking an hour later to eat supper alone. Displays of Ace combs and Gillette razors, Crest toothpaste, laxatives, and a zany pair of giant cardboard spectacles with the phrase “Look to Us!” surround the beaming couple.

In the fifties, Edwards Rexall Pharmacy, my father's store on Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City, was the hub of our family's well-being and a regular hangout for the neighborhood. (The business came with the name Edwards but we never found out who he was.) The regulars parked themselves in the chrome armchairs by the back counter, airing and comparing their malaise. Those without prescriptions consulted with “Doc” Steinman. He recommended tranquilizers for the nervous rabbi, Kaopectate for the wife of the high school principal, Vi-Daylin to pep up Mr. Alfano from the Villa Italian restaurant next door. A “cousins club”—one large extended family including new arrivals from Kiev and Buenos Aires—received discounts on aspirin, cosmetics, antibiotics.