To Sail Beyond the Sunset (36 page)

Woodrow I did not see even once until the war was over. I received a Christmas card from him in December 1941, postmarked Pensacola, Florida: “Dear Mom and Pop, I’m hiding out from the Nips and teaching Boy Scouts how to fly upside down. Heather and the kids are stashed for the duration at Avalon Beach, PO Box 6320, SO I sleep home most nights. Merry Christmas and have a nice war. Woodrow.”

The next we heard from Woodrow was a card from the Royal Hawaiian at Waikiki: “The service here is not quite up to peacetime standards but it is better than that at Lahaina. Despite any rumors to the contrary the sharks in Lahaina Roads are not vegetarians. Hoping you are the same. W.W.”

That was our first intimation that Woodrow had been in the Battle of Lahaina Roads. Whether he was in the
Saratoga
when she was sunk, or whether he ditched from the air, I do not know. But his card implies that he was in the water at some point. I asked him about this after the war. He looked puzzled and said, “Mom, where did you get that notion? I spent the war in Washington, D.C., drinking Scotch with my opposite number in the British Aircraft Commission. His Scotch, it was—he had worked out a scam to fly it in from Bermuda.”

Woodrow was not always strictly truthful.

Let me see—Theodore Ira, my World War I baby, went to active duty with Kansas City’s 110th Combat Engineers and spent most of the war in Noumea, building air strips and docks and such. Nancy’s husband and Eleanor’s son, Jonathan, had stayed in the Reserve but not in the Guard; he was a column commander in Patton’s Panzers when they drove the Russians out of Czechoslovakia. Nancy helped organize the WAAC and finished the war senior to her husband, to the vast amusement of all of us—even Jonathan. George started out in the Thirty-fifth Division HQ but wound up in the OSS, so I don’t know what he did. In March 1944 Brian Junior made the landing at Marseilles, caught a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh, and wound up back in Salisbury, England, an executive officer in the training command.

My letters to Father were returned to me in 1942, along with a formal letter of regret from the national headquarters of the AFS.

Richard’s wife, Marian, stayed in nearby San Juan Capistrano while Richard was at Camp Pendleton. When he shipped out, I invited her to move in with us, with her children—four, and one that was born shortly after she arrived. We could make room for them and it was actually easier for us two women to take care of seven children than it had been for each of us to cope with our own unassisted. We worked things out so that one of us could assist at Letterman Army Hospital every afternoon, going to the Presidio by bus (no gasoline ration expended) and coming back with Brian. I was fond of Marian; she was as dear to me as my own daughters.

So it came about that she was with us when she received that telegram; Richard had earned the Navy Cross on Iwo Jima—posthumously.

A little over five months later we destroyed Tokyo and Kobe. Then Emperor Akihito and his ministers shocked us all by ritually disemboweling themselves, first the ministers, then the emperor, after the emperor announced to them that his mind had been quieted by President Barkley’s promise to spare Kyoto. It was especially shocking in that Emperor Akihito was just a boy, not yet twelve, younger than my son Patrick Henry.

We will never understand the Japanese. But the long war was over.

I am forced to wonder what would have happened if the emperor’s father, Emperor Hirohito, had not died in the “Star Festival” air strike, July seventh? He was reputed to be so “Westernized.” The other pertinent histories, time lines three and six, give no firm answers. Hirohito seems to have been the captive of his ministers, reigning but not ruling.

Once Japan surrendered Brian asked for early separation, but was sent to Texas—Amarillo, then Dallas—to assist in contract terminations (the only time, I think, that he regretted having passed his bar examinations back in 1938). But moving away from San Francisco at that time was a good idea—a change of background to a place where we knew no one—because on arrival in Texas Marian became “Maureen J. Smith” and I dyed my hair and became her widowed mother, Marian Hardy. None too soon; she was already showing—four months later she gave birth to Richard Brian. We kept it straight with the Foundation, of course, and registered Marian’s new baby correctly: Marian Justin Hardy + Brian Smith, Sr.

What happened next is difficult for me to talk about, because there are three points of view and mine is only one of those three. I am certain that the other two are each as fair-minded as I am, if not more so. “More so,” I think I must concede, as Father had warned me, more than half a century earlier, that I was an amoral wretch who could reason only pragmatically, not morally.

I had not tried to keep my husband out of my daughter-in-law’s bed. Neither Briney nor I had ever tried to own each other; we both approved of sex for fun and we had established our rules for civilized adultery many years earlier. I was a bit surprised that Marian had apparently made no effort to keep from getting pregnant by Brian…but only in that she did not consult me ahead of time. (If she consulted Briney, he never mentioned it. But men do have this tendency to spray sperm around like a fire hose while letting the females decide whether or not to make practical use of the juice.)

Nevertheless I was not angry, just mildly surprised. And I do recognize the normal biological reflex under which the first thing a freshly bereft widow does, if she can manage it, is to spread her legs and sob bitterly and use her womb to replace the dear departed. It is a survival mechanism, one not limited to wars but more prevalent in wartime, as statistical analysis demonstrates.

(I hear that there are men who watch the newspapers for funerals, then attend those of married men in order to meet new widows. This is shooting fish down a well and probably merits castration. On the other hand, those widows might not thank us.)

So we moved to Dallas and everything was satisfactory for a while. Brian was simply a man with two wives, a situation not unknown among Howards—just pull the shades against the neighbors, like some Mormons.

A short time after the birth of Marian’s new baby Brian came to me with something on his mind, something he had trouble articulating. I finally said, “Look, dearest, I am not a mindreader. Whatever it is, just spill it.”

“Marian wants a divorce.”

“Huh? Briney, I’m confused. If she’s not happy with us, all she needs to do is to move out; it doesn’t take a divorce. In fact I don’t see how she could get one. But I’m terribly sorry to hear it. I thought we had gone to considerable trouble to make things happy for her. And for Richard Brian and her other children. Do you want me to talk to her? Try to find out what the trouble is?”

“Uh—Damn it, I didn’t make myself clear. She wants you to get a divorce so that she can marry me.”

My jaw dropped, then I laughed. “Goodness, Briney, what in the world makes her think I would ever do that? I don’t want to divorce you; you’re the nicest husband a gal ever had. I don’t mind sharing you—but, darling, I don’t want to get rid of you. I’ll tell her so. Where is she? I’ll take her to bed and tell her so as sweetly as possible.” I reached up, took his shoulders and kissed him.

Then I continued to hold his shoulders and look up at him. “Hey, wait a minute.
You
want a divorce. Don’t you?”

Briney didn’t say anything; he just looked embarrassed.

I sighed. “Poor Briney. Us frails do make your life complicated, don’t we? We follow you around, climb into your lap, breathe in your ear. Even your daughters seduce you, like—what was his name? Old Testament. And even your daughters-in-law. Stop looking glum, dear man; I don’t have a ring in your nose, and never have had.”

“You’ll do it?” He looked relieved.

“Me? Do what?”

“Divorce me.”

“No. Of course not.”

“But you said—”

“I said that I didn’t have a ring in your nose. If you want to divorce me, I won’t fight it. But I’m not the one who wants a divorce. If you like, you can simply do it to me Muslim style. Tell me ‘I divorce you’ three times, and I’ll go pack my clothes.”

Perhaps I should not have been stubborn about it but I do not see that I owed it to either of them to go through the fiddle-faddle—the trauma—of finding a lawyer and digging up witnesses and appearing in court. I would cooperate…but let them do the work.

Brian gave in once he saw that I meant it. Marian was vexed with me, stopped smiling, and avoided talking with me. Finally I stopped her when she was about to leave the living room when I came in. “Marian!”

She stopped. “Yes, Mother?”

“I want you to stop pretending to be aggrieved. I want to see you smile and hear you laugh, the way you used to. You have asked me to turn my husband over to you and I have agreed to cooperate. But you must cooperate, too. You are acting like a spoiled child. In fact, you are a spoiled child.”

“Why, how utterly unfair!”

“Girls, girls!”

I turned and looked at Brian. “I am not a girl. I am your wife of forty-seven years. While I am here, I will be treated with respect and with warmth. I don’t expect gratitude from Marian; my father taught me years ago never to expect gratitude because there is no such thing. But Marian can simulate gratitude out of politeness. Or she can move out. At once. Right this minute. If you two expect me not to fight this divorce, you can both show me some appreciation.”

I went to my room, got into bed, cried a little, then fell into a troubled sleep.

A half hour later, or an hour, or longer, I was awakened by a tap on my door. “Yes?”

“It’s Marian, Mama. May I come in?”

“Certainly, darling!”

She came in, closed the door behind her, looked at me, her chin quivering and tears starting. I sat up, put out my arms. “Come to me, dear.”

That ended any trouble with Marian. But not quite with Brian. The following weekend he pointed out that the
sine qua non
of an uncontested divorce was a property settlement agreed to by both parties. He had fetched home a fat briefcase. “I have the essential papers here. Shall we look them over?”

“All right.” (No use putting off a trip to the dentist.)

Brian put the briefcase down on the dining table. “We can spread them out here.” He sat down.

I sat down on his left; Marian sat down opposite me. I said, “No, Marian, I want to go over these in private. So you are excused, dear. And do please keep the children out.”

She looked blank and started to stand up. Brian reached out, stopped her. “Maureen, Marian is an interested party. Equally interested.”

“No, she’s not. I’m sorry.”

“How do you figure?”

“What you have there, what is represented by those papers, is our community property, yours and mine, what you and I have accumulated in the course of our marriage. None of it is Marian’s and I don’t care to go over it in the presence of a third party. At a later time, when she divorces you, she’ll be present at the divvy-up and I will not be. Today, Brian, it is between you and me, no one else.”

“What do you mean?—when she divorces me.”

“Correction: If she divorces you.” (She did. In 1966.) “Brian, did you fetch home an adding machine? Oh, all I really require is a sharp pencil.”

Marian caught Brian’s eye, left the room, closed the door behind her. He said, “Maureen, why do you always have to be rough on her?”

“Behave yourself, Briney. You should not have attempted to have her present for this and you know it. Now…do you want to do this politely? Or shall we wait until I can call in a lawyer?”

“I see no reason why it can’t be done politely. And even less reason why a lawyer should look at my private business.”

“And still less reason why your fiancée should look at mine. Briney, stop behaving like Woodie at age six. How did you plan on whacking this up?”

“Well, first we must plan on the marriage allotments for the kids. Seven, that is. And Marian’s five. Six, now.”

(Each time we had “rung the cash register”—received a baby bounty from the Ira Howard Foundation—Brian had started a bookkeeping account for that child, letting that amount enhance on his books at 6 percent compounded quarterly, then passed on the enhanced amount to that child as a wedding present—about three times the original baby bounty. In the meantime Brian had the use of the money as working capital for eighteen or more years…and, believe me, Brian could always make working capital pay more than 6 percent, especially after 1918 when he had Theodore’s predictions to guide him. Just one word—“Xerox” or “Polaroid”—could mean a fortune, known ahead of time.)

“Wups! Not out of this pile, Briney. Richard received his marriage allotment from us when he married Marian. Her children by Richard are our grandchildren. What about our other grandchildren? I haven’t counted lately but I think we have fifty-two. Are you planning to subsidize all fifty-two out of what we own today?”

“The situation is different.”

“It certainly is. Brian, you are trying to favor five of our grandchildren at the expense of all our other grandchildren and all our remaining unmarried children. I won’t permit it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“No, you will not. It will be a real judge, in a real court. Or you will treat all our children equally and not attempt to favor five grandchildren while ignoring forty-seven others.”

“Maureen, you’ve never behaved this way in the past.”

“In the past you never broke up our partnership. But now that you have done so, that breakup will be on terms that strike both of us as equitable…or you can tell it to the judge. Brian, you can’t cast me off like an old shoe and then expect me to continue to accept your rulings as docilely as I have done all these years. I say again: Quit behaving like Woodie as a child. Now…stipulating that we have agreed, or will agree, on what is earmarked for marriage allowances, how do you want to divide up the rest of it?”

“Eh? Three equal portions. Of course.”

“You’re giving me two portions? That’s generous of you, but more than I had expected.”

“No, no! A share for you, a share for me, a share for Marian. Even all the way around.”