My Father Before Me Read Free Page B

arms, her arms wrapping fully, decisively, around his neck, and he leans down and kisses her on the mouth. It is their version of the famous Times Square VJ Day sailor’s kiss, but they seem to mean it more.
    In this brief moment, existing only in each other’s arms, they are citizens of a kingdom of innocence and bliss; they wear its white uniform. If only they could stay here, stay in this moment—alive in it, alive to it—in the way the image of their kiss will remain, unchanging, in the photographs. If only they could remain as they are: impossibly young, impossibly happy, possibly wrong for each other, but with no clue of that yet. If only they could cling to each other on this dock forever: marriageless, childless, deathless, eyes half closed, each wave of lake water stilled, the camera in mid-click.

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    They were thinking about the future; they were getting serious. College—that would come next. They would go together. But Eddie’s grandparents, who had been raising him for the past five years, didn’t see much point in college, and it wasn’t likely they would have money to help him, anyway. There was this, though: the war was over at last—not a bad time to join the military. If Eddie could find a way to leave high school early, skip out on his senior year, and enlist, he could take advantage of the original GI Bill, which might expire soon, and get government help with tuition. As many soldiers and sailors were doing, he could try to earn his high school diploma by passing the GED tests.
    He picked the marines—maybe they were the only branch that would take a recruit so young. One of Eddie’s first orders: return to the orthodontist. “If you’re old enough for the marines, son,” he was told, “you’re old enough to get those braces off.” His grandparents, my mother imagines, must have been livid; living on little, they had nonetheless scraped together enough to fix their grandson’s teeth. The braces came off. Until his death, my father’s teeth stayed crooked. Semper fidelis.
    He might have had a steady girlfriend, his best pals might have been tossing spit wads at each other in chemistry and trigonometry, and he might have just celebrated only his seventeenth birthday, butEddie was suddenly in San Diego, at boot camp, all 140 scrawny pounds of him, crawling across the dirt on his belly, rushing up steep hills, breathless, suffering rope burns on his palms and thighs, being deprived of food and sleep, being jawed at by a pit bull of a drill instructor until he was mentally broken, until he thought of himself as nothing, until he did not think of himself at all.
    In a boot camp photograph, wearing his khaki service uniform, utility belt, and garrison cap, holding his upright rifle at his side, Eddie is gaunt; the brilliant southern California sun bleaches his pale Irish skin. He looks done in, ready to come home.
    He did come home, in time for Christmas, but within weeks he was off again, this time for his twenty-month assignment to a military base where, six years before, he would have had a target on his back. Now the most meaningful thing on his back would be tanning oil. He was going to Pearl Harbor.
    For the two-thousand-mile journey from Seattle to Hawaii, he boarded the USS General William Mitchell, a troop transport that, during the war, had carried soldiers to England, North Africa, and the Pacific; on return trips, it had brought home veterans of battle: the weary, the wounded, the dead. The hulking ship must have felt thick with ghosts. It was enormous: two football fields long, its sides lined with gun mounts, two mammoth smokestacks looming above. I can picture, some late evening, Eddie on the ship’s deck, leaning on the rail, peering at the ragged spumes of the Pacific, wind whisking through his crew cut and billowing through his jacket sleeves. A century earlier, his father’s father’s father had sailed west