Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
bikes, but this afternoon, the day of my first real memory, it was crowded with people.
A couple dozen wood folding chairs were set up in the turnaround, under the big tree in front of Omer Arsenault’s house. Sawhorses marked POLICE kept cars out. Omer was my best friend. He lived on the third floor of a yellow tenement overlooking the turnaround. As if chairs in the street weren’t strange enough, who was sitting in the front row but Mr. and Mrs. D’Andrea, and my other best friend Angelo and his sisters. Angelo lived the next street up and his birthday was the same month as mine, June, but a week earlier. When Angelo spotted me he started making faces until his father saw him and gave him a whack on the ear.
A number of soldiers with musical instruments stood in the street, one with a huge drum hanging from a strap around his neck. Then everybody sat down and they started to play. I was so close, my throat and chest pounded like it was me being played, not the drum. When the music stopped a soldier with shiny metal on his collar got up. He said something in Italian then the name of Angelo’s brother Cosmo. The soldier was tall and serious and said how brave Cosmo was. Then he went over to Mrs. D’Andrea and placed the flag in her lap. I had never seen a flag folded. I didn’t know they let you do that. She crossed herself, pulled her veil down and placed her hands on the flag. I could tell she’d been crying.
Then some man in a suit came to the microphone. My mother’s hand tightened on mine and she gave my father a look. The man stood right at the microphone, so close it looked like he had it in his mouth. PUHH! PUHH! PUHH! His words exploded on me! You could even hear him breathing. He kept looking over at Mr. and Mrs. D’Andrea. The man’s face was very sad, he was crying or sweating, maybe both. Councilman Napolitano, my mother told me that’s who it was, he went on and on and finally he stepped across to the telephone pole next to Omer’s tree. I hadn’t noticed the cloth on it before. He yanked a cord and the cloth fell away and you could see a piece of dark wood with gold letters and two little crossed flags, also some flowers.
A few people started clapping but my mother grabbed my hand tighter. Now she was crying too but I figured I’d better not say anything. Then Father Maloney from St. Teresa’s came forward. He was wearing a black suit and said some prayers in Latin which I came to know a lot about later, let me tell you, and finished by spraying everybody with holy water from this stick with a ball on the end but I only got a few drops which was too bad, it was so hot. He sat down, then the soldier with the trumpet started playing a slow sad song all by himself. I sneaked a look around, now everybody’s crying, but soon it was over and the band marched off down the street, drumming as they went.
We went back to my house and had Sunday afternoon dinner as we always did, my brother Jim, Catherine and me. My parents were quiet, which for my mother was very unusual.
2. The Home Front
“YOU WERE TELLING ME about yourself – the early years, Berkeley.”
The rain has stopped but the deck is still soaked, and with the wind leaves are everywhere. Have to get Joseph to do some picking up. “I’ll keep this short,” I say. “I was the first, then came nine more. It wasn’t for nothing our name was Flynn, if you follow me. Stevie was killed in France, he was Ma’s favorite, only nineteen, she took it very hard. Two others and I, we made it through.”
“Quite a record. Didn’t you feel lost in such a big family?”
“Being the oldest helped.” That little machine of his is on the whole time. “Why do you need that thing?” I say.
“The recorder? What’s wrong with it?”
“Just another damned gadget. I’m for cultivating the memory – otherwise where is it when you need it? There are even exercises you can do.”
“I’ll take that into consideration. If I remember, that is.”
“Now where was I?” I say. “Oh, yes, in Berkeley I had a mountain, too. Tamalpais, it was called, in Marin across the Bay. Those days I was a night person but being eighty-four now, I celebrate the dawn. Coming back here I see as a completion of the course, maybe a preview of the next act. I have a bet with myself there is a next act. Nobody knows, of course, but every year goes by I am more interested in the question, I’ll tell you. For me faith always was the problem, but my desire to believe never wavered, in fact these days it’s stronger than ever, as if bit by bit hope moved in and took over the place faith once was, or was supposed to be.”
“Tell me more about California.”
“We bought the house in forty-nine, a rambling one-story, eucalyptus everywhere, fragrant but a very dirty tree. Looking forward, we were, we had such plans. There was a stand of redwoods, new growth. I’ve thought about this a lot – wouldn’t you know those trees growing up and the students coming through, they turned out to be our family, our only family. Nowadays, all this technology, miracles in biology. Not so, then. Ah well, timing is everything. My friends said I lost it when Akiko passed and they were right. I was damned low, miserable – nobody you’d want to be around.”
“I take it Paul was a special person for you.”
“For both of us.” I have to pause to collect myself. “Well, enough of this.”
“Keep going. This is good!”
I put my hand up. “No, though I do appreciate the attention. Closest I’ll ever come to a four-part article. After all, what do you say about a teacher? A teacher’s glory is of the reflected variety – the doing’s more interesting than the telling.”
* * * * * * *
I’M NOT TELLING YOU ANYTHING NEW, GUS, but the war was all anybody ever talked about. The doorbell was an instrument of torture. That next ring could be the one telling you a brother, a son, a father wasn’t coming back. My Uncle Antoine’s oldest son Maurice didn’t come home. I knew him from the pictures in the place of honor on the mantle above our fireplace, and from the stories. The photo on the left has Maurice in the cockpit of his RCAF Spitfire during the Battle of Britain. In the other he leans against the wing of his P-38, his cap at a jaunty angle, a big grin on his face. It was in the P-38 he made those screaming low passes over our house before zooming straight up into the sky and away. My mother told me she asked him if that wouldn’t that get him in trouble. Maurice just shrugged. “Hell, what more can they do to me?” The next week he left for North Africa to fight the Nazis. Six months later he was dead.
Others from the family were also away in France and Germany and the Pacific, but Maurice was the family hero, the legend. Maurice also had a square named after him, another gold-lettered thank-you on a phone pole, this one near their home off Manton Avenue going toward North Providence. I thought about these things a lot.
Late afternoons I listened for the thud on our front step, pouncing on the smooth roll of the Evening Bulletin with its front-page maps and lines and arrows showing the Allies advancing across Europe, daggers aimed at the black heart of the Axis. The Pacific War was more complicated, vast areas with dots for islands, but the outcome would be the same, for bullies and murderers dumb enough to tangle with our country.
The war had theaters but nobody could tell me why they were called that. What did my sister making like she was a Christmas angel have to do with the war? Nor was the war anything like the clippings my mother kept in the folder with the green ribbon in her top drawer that she pulled out when she was feeling sad. She’d show us her original name, Fiona Kelley, under the picture of a pretty woman in some pose with men in suits smoking cigarettes. At such times she’d go on it seemed like hours, reciting from memory some play or other she’d been in before she quit to get married and have us. So, you see, to call the war a theater made no sense at all.
My real love were the comic strips. On darkearly winter afternoons, I would unfurl the Bulletin and sprawl over it, digging my elbows into the living room carpet. With Terry and the Pirates I flew the Hump, matching wits with the mysterious Dragon Lady and her band of wily, pinch-faced Orientals. I was Buzz Sawyer’s wingman on a carrier in mid-Pacific, our Wildcats tangling with the nimble Jap Zero. After supper, it was