The Souvenir (6 page)

Between Brooklyn and the Pacific Islands, my parents' letters frequently crossed in the mail. Correspondence lagged, arriving fifteen days late in bunches of three or five. Once the mail was so backed up, my father received thirteen letters from Brooklyn in one day.

On my mother's twentieth-sixth birthday, her father died of stomach cancer in New York's Bellevue Hospital. That same night, she wrote a long letter to her husband, one of the few letters of hers to survive the war.

That sad letter crossed with my father's V-mail, written that same day during combat in Luzon, apologizing for forgetting her birthday. Three weeks later, he still did not know his father-in-law had died.

Not until June 1945, a month later, did he finally write his tender letter of condolence, ending with, “We all have to take the passing of our parents at some time in our lives. It is the most bitter pill to swallow in one's life. And so much harder for you because you didn't have me with you to help share your burden. I hope this letter helps a little.”

M
Y FATHER
'
S LETTERS
ranged widely in tone. In moments of boredom, lying in a hammock on a troop ship, he offered practical advice: what to say to tactless friends whose husbands weren't away at war, but home making money. Or, words of comfort, reassurance that they would start over once the war ended: “Everything will be different when we move from New York to Los Angeles, the ideal place to raise our family.” During his first days of combat in Luzon, in January 1945, he described the appalling conditions that prevailed in a war zone: “My mother told me there would be nights like this! It rained so hard it broke down the stakes supporting our ponchos that were over our holes—our hole began to fill up and we were sleeping in mud. After a while the heat of our bodies made the mud tepid and it was a little more comfortable. The medics cooked some chicken in a helmet—and I had some of it for chow.”

After that, something mundane follows: “When you enclose stamps how about putting them in between wax paper—because they are always stuck to the envelope.” In February 1945, already combat-hardened, he requested, “Please don't use the salutation ‘Hello Angel' in your letters.”

The military censor always read over his shoulder. “I have an idea this letter is going to be a very long one. At this stage, the censor must be getting tired,” he wrote solicitously at one point.

The censor knew specific things about Private Steinman; he knew, for instance, that he had no respect for the chaplain. (“The
Holy Mackerel” he called him, complaining that “the Chaplain is always telling me
his
problems.”) The censor knew intimate details: During rifle drill, Private Steinman had been daydreaming about his wife's earlobes. The censor knew that Private Steinman's dreams almost landed him in trouble with his tent mate:

They both learned to read between the lines. There were code words to elude the censor's eyes. Either my parents had agreed upon them in advance, which is unlikely since they didn't know what combat would be like, or they counted on each other to decipher the meaning in context.

I puzzled over the enigmatic phrase “Hal Rubin's gift” that surfaced so many times, as in “I'm nowhere near where I can get that gift for Hal Rubin.” It took me weeks to decode its meaning.

Hal Rubin must have been a friend or acquaintance back home in New York, the kind of pushy guy on the dance floor who'd cut in when you were happily partnering with your wife. Hal Rubin had apparently requested a war souvenir, the kind that could only be procured where there were dead Japanese soldiers around. The name served as a code word for the front lines during combat, and sometimes even for the enemy himself. My father's use of the enigmatic phrase shows how he both dreaded combat, and, conversely, yearned to get it over with.

The correspondence I was reading was, however, just a one-sided dialogue. My father had no choice but to destroy most of his wife's letters to him as he moved from place to place. He kept them as long as he could, and read them over and over again.

Reading my father's letters brought back memories. I remembered our walks to buy milk at Taylor's Liquors, around the corner from our house in Culver City. We often passed Mr. Roberts, who wore dirty overalls and muttered to himself. A nervous tic rhythmically distorted his unshaven face. His unkempt son, Michael (who later died in Vietnam), was my older brother's age. His daughter, Freda, was in my fourth-grade class. Nobody would go near Freda. The boys made faces if they had to hold hands with her. No one ever asked her to be on their kickball team or to be their partner for square dancing because Freda, with her dirty hair and rumpled dresses, always smelled like she had messed herself.

Now I remembered how, when we had safely passed, my father admonished me gently. “You should always be nice to Mr. Roberts,” he said. “Mr. Roberts is shell-shocked.”

That was the first time I'd ever heard the expression “shell-shocked.” It made me think of those little chicks I loved to watch in the incubator at the science museum. They pounded their beaks against their shells trying to hatch, then emerged stunned, dripping wet and exhausted. Even as a child I knew that “shell-shocked” had something to do with why Mr. Roberts talked to
himself and why his poor daughter smelled so bad. The war had wrecked them both.

I recognized the man in my father's letters by his humor, his steadiness, his logical explanations. But now I encountered a side of the man that he had never revealed to his four children, a side that was passionate, unguarded, emotional, poetic: “Remember how I used to enjoy the beauties of nature, especially the Heavens at night?” he wrote from Luzon to his young wife, “how we used to like a bright moon and a starry sky? Well it's so hard for me to enjoy anything now.” I began to understand why he would never camp or hike when I was growing up.

The man who wrote these tender letters was different from the man I had known. My exhilaration at glimpsing my father's former self was tempered with sadness when I understood how the war had sealed off his emotions.

N
O SHOTS WERE
ever fired from the high cliffs of Fort Worden, where Lloyd and I were staying. During World War II, the soldiers here were battle-ready but never saw combat. They waited. Each day, each night they scanned the sea for the enemy, but the enemy never arrived. The army melted down the big guns for anchors in 1943, and abandoned the fort altogether ten years later.

Now Mother Nature was reclaiming the place. Glimpsed at a distance through the dense foliage, the massive abandoned gun batteries could have been mistaken for Mayan ruins. Iron doors guarded vacant rooms etched with graffiti. Scotch broom and horsetail ferns sprouted between the metal tracks that had once moved cannons.

Behind our cabin were miles of trails crisscrossing the woods of Douglas fir, cedar, and madrone that lead to concrete battle fortifications dug deep into the earth. Every morning we went out, we took different back roads and trails around the fort, our terrier
gamely rooting through the underbrush. After our walk, I'd read some more letters.

Norman Steinman was a city boy from the Bronx; the jungle was completely alien to him. So too was darkness.

Stygian, from the dark river Styx in Greek mythology, across which all dead souls were ferried to the underworld. My father was writing from the embrace of death, and he would need help to feel the forces of life again.

I waited patiently on our daily walks as Lloyd and our dog enthusiastically explored connecting tunnels and empty concrete vaults. I had no intention of ever going into an abandoned bunker myself. I don't like the dark.

One morning we hiked out to Battery Kinzie at the end of the beach near the old lighthouse. The concrete was stained dark from the rain. Brushstrokes of an antigraffiti campaign, in quasi-camouflage pattern, had taken on a shiny patina over the years. The sun came out. We ran in crazy circles over the broad cement roof of the bunker, staring out over the dunes to the sea, where a tugboat was hauling two huge barges through the choppy Straits of Juan de Fuca. The wind was wicked. My parka was zipped up to my ears.

I noticed a set of stairs disappearing down in the dark. I whistled
for Lloyd to come see. I wanted to point out to him how dark it looked down there. He charged down the stairs, dog at his heels, shouting back at me, “C'mon!”

“But I'm afraid of rats,” I whimpered. “Nothing here for the rats to eat!” he shouted back, his voice growing fainter the deeper he went. I waited for them to come out. And waited. I felt stupid. I was afraid of going down into a dark tunnel in peacetime while my father had slept in cold mud night after night during combat.