Combat Zones[1]

 

by Louise DeSalvo

 

 

1942

    On Sunday, September 27, the rainy day that I am born at the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey, toughened, sunburned Marines cling tenaciously to a beachhead on Guadalcanal; leaders of the Czech Orthodox Church are sen­tenced to death by the Nazis; gasoline rationing is announced in the United States; Soviet troops push forward into German posi­tions northwest of the smoking city of Stalingrad; Allied bombers attack three Japanese transports east of New Guinea; the Bureau of Vital Statistics predicts a bumper crop of 10,000 new babies in New York City for October; Bloomingdale’s Department Store in New York City is selling warm and cozy quilted bath robes (in a choice of solids, big prints, or little prints) for $3.98, on sale; and Abraham & Straus announces a special on a 4-pound box of cook­ies (including butterscotch, caramel, and lemon), perfect for men in the service for just $1.19, including mailing.

    My mother’s labor is long and difficult, but she considers her­self fortunate nonetheless. Unlike many other women on the ma­ternity floor, my mother has her husband with her; her husband hasn’t yet gone off to war. As my mother told the story, my fa­ther, though he has received his orders to go into the Navy, is unwilling to leave me at such a young age. (My stepmother tells another version: my father doesn’t want to leave my mother be­cause he is concerned that she might be too anxious to care for me properly). Because my father has already served one tour of duty in the Navy, before the war, he can strike a bargain: in return for delaying his entry a year, he signs on for an extended tour of duty.

    Still, the spectre of my father’s leaving hangs over our family during the first year of my life, a year during which, among other wartime events, Germany renews its air attacks on London, the Russians destroy the German army southwest of Stalingrad, the Royal Air Force begins to bomb Berlin, the massacre in the Warsaw ghetto occurs, United States’ forces capture the Aleu­tians and land in New Guinea. Unless the war ends quickly, and no one thinks it will, my father, like so many other fathers, will be assigned to go off to one combat zone or another, and my mother and I will stay behind to wait and see whether he will survive the conflagration. (In consequence, I will spend much time study­ing the lives of writers profoundly affected by war.)

 

* * *

 

1942–1943

    While my parents wait for my father to depart, their lives are far from serene. Of course, they worry about the war. But I am a difficult infant, I am always crying, and my mother feels so distressed that she seems unable to comfort me.

    My mother has read Dr. Spock who tells parents that babies should be fed on a strict schedule, every four hours. Feeding babies “on demand” or comforting them or even picking them up to quiet them between feedings, my mother reads, will spoil them.

    My mother, to both her and my detriment, complies with the doctor’s directions.

    “Feed the baby every four hours, even if it cries between feed­ings. Do not pick the baby up between feedings or you will spoil the baby. Sooner or later, the baby will learn that it will need to eat at these scheduled times.” This is the gist of the routine she practices.

    But I don’t learn sooner, and I don’t learn later. Instead, I con­tinue to always cry. And I suspect that my mother, whose sense of her own worth is always fragile, believes that my crying means that she is an incompetent mother, and that, the more powerless she feels, the more depressed she becomes.

    Feed the baby every four hours, whether or not the baby is hungrier earlier. Watch the baby while it cries. Watch the baby splutter and gasp. Hear the baby scream for hours on end. Stand by the crib and watch the baby howl. But, under no circumstances, comfort the baby, or hold the baby. The baby must learn to take its feedings every four hours. If you give in to the baby’s whims, you will create a monster.

    My mother tells me that sometimes I scared her and my father because I cried so hard that I seemed to lose my breath. When my mother reports this to the doctor during a visit, the doctor tells her that some babies are more willful than others, that it is important to stick to the regimen, and that, in time, I will learn that I am not going to get my way by crying.

    But I don’t learn, and I cry, my father tells me, for the better part of the first eight months of my life. Throughout these long, agonizing months, their lives are accompanied by the unending cacophony of my screaming. I howl with the blaring of the air raid drill sirens. I continue to howl as the sirens signal “all clear.” Still, my mother dutifully enacts the program she has read about. Still, my parents wait it out, still they let me cry. And still, they feed me on schedule, as Dr. Spock directs, every four hours.

    In my very earliest memories, I am hungry, always hungry. I suck the edge of a pillow or blanket for comfort. Or I take deep, shuddering breaths, trying to get enough air into my lungs. But no one comes to take care of me. No one comes to relieve my distress.

    In the first pictures taken of me as an infant, I am lying on my back in my crib, looking dazed, wearing far too many clothes. Or my mother is balancing me on her lap, uneasily. There are no pictures taken of my father and me until I am eleven months old, but in the first picture of us together, he is dangling me, to my delight, in the waters of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, our family’s favorite summertime destination. By this time, in my pictures, I am a cheerful and satisfied baby. Sitting on a blanket by the beach, my difficult infancy behind us, we seem a very contented family.

    But this doesn’t last for long.

 

1943

    I am fourteen months old when my father goes away to war. I have no memory of this event. In the pictures that are taken of me just after my father goes to war, I look shell-shocked. The real father whom I experienced has been wrenched away from me and will be replaced by a father whom I will know only through my imagination.

    I know that children who lose caregivers at this young age can become withdrawn and there is something of that look about me. I have the feeling that I experienced the loss of him profoundly, that I mourned his loss as surely as if he had died, and, to protect myself, I locked him out of my heart.

    As I grow older, I tell myself stories about how we were hap­pier without him, better off without him, about how all the mothers and children were better off without their husbands and fathers, and that all the trouble started in my life when my fa­ther came back from the war a changed man, an angry man, a man against whom I will wage my own war. But I know this isn’t true.

    My mother was such a timid woman that I’m sure that having her husband in a war zone was agony for her. My mother was a peace-loving woman, who detested violence of any kind. Reading the daily reports of barbarities and atrocities during the war surely took its toll, surely eroded her fragile reserves.

    “On August 6, 1945, when I heard about how we had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima,” my mother tells me, years later, when I’m studying World War II in high school, “I wept. I did not join the people celebrating in the streets, sure that, now, the war would soon be over, that our boys would be coming home. All I could think of was all those innocent people dying. I was ashamed of what my country had done. I couldn’t look at the newspapers.”

 

    From time to time, during the war, my mother shows me a pic­ture of my father so that I won’t forget him, so that I will re­member what he looks like.

    He is standing in his Navy uniform, on deck. Giant coils of rope are behind him. He is clowning around. His cap is pulled back on his head so that you can see his curls. He has a silly grin on his face.

    (Now, so many years after this picture has been taken by one of his buddies, so many years after my mother has received it, so many years after she has shown me this picture of my father in his bellbottoms for the last time, before he returns home from war, I detach the tape that holds it in place, and take it out of the album, carefully, and turn it over, wondering whether, so many years ago, he has written any message to his wife on the other side.

    “Me trying to look funney,” he writes, misspelling that word, as he has misspelled it throughout his life. I experience an al­most unbearable surge of love for him, for his ability to feign happiness, to try to look “funney” for that family he has left be­hind, for the family that he knows he might never see again.)

1943–1945

    This is how I remember the war years, though I know that it is not altogether true, and, maybe that it is not true at all. Maybe this is the story that I tell myself about that time in my life be­cause it is too difficult to remember what I really lived through.

 

    Soon after all the husbands in our working-class apartment building in the Italian section of Hoboken, New Jersey, left for the war, the geography of the place changes so completely that life itself took on an antic, festive, tribal quality. Anarchy pre­vailed, and it was good.

    Before, each family was locked together to carry on its claus­trophobic life in its tiny three-room cell. There was a funeral-parlor-like quiet to the building, though if you listened closely enough, you could hear raised voices or howls or sometimes even smacks and screams behind closed doors. Parents and children were stuffed together in single bedrooms in the apartment’s cen­ter; meals were taken at predictable hours at kitchen tables; laundry was done on Mondays in kitchen sinks with washboards and hung outside to dry on lines strung like a giant’s version of cat’s cradle, one of our favorite games played with string.

    Before the war, hellos between women and children were exchanged, politely and briefly, as we passed one another on the stairs, or on the streets outside (the men merely grunting, or nod­ding in grudging recognition). Families went to church on Sundays when everyone dressed up in their best to show how affluent they wished they were, and parents trundled their children in perambulators or strollers up and down sidewalks.

    But after the men left for war, the women, who were left behind to raise their families single-handedly, threw open all the doors to their apartments, and children began to clatter up and down the five flights of stairs at all hours of the day and night. Women and children wandered from one apartment into another without ceremony or invitation. Children played together on landings, and in the weedy enclosed courtyard behind the apartment, which was completely off limits when the men were in residence—the sound of shrieking voices was too trying for them after their long, hard day’s work.

    Meals were taken, picnic-style, in the strangest places—on fire escapes and parlor floors, in the cellar where my grand­father made wine at Easter, on the stoop out front, or in other people’s kitchens. Bedtime, naptime, came whenever you were tired and you fell asleep wherever you were, and not necessarily in your own bed.

    Mothers ducked into churches for prayers for the safe return of their husbands on their way to and from markets or playgrounds and they generally avoided the place on Sundays.

    Children, even girl children, were allowed to play hard enough to get dirty and rip their clothes. Heads, examined for lice regularly, were found to contain them more often than not; children with infestations were gathered into one kitchen or an­other and lined up for the kerosene shampoos that were guaran­teed to kill the lice. Skating contests were held routinely on the sidewalk out front. Mr. Albini, the owner of the drugstore on the corner, too old for the war, tended to our cuts and bruises with nei­ther panic nor warnings that, next time, we should be more care­ful.

    Gangs of women—five, six, or more—gangs of children—nine, ten, or more—would gather together in the tiny parlors of apartments during birthday parties (which seemed to occur weekly) or holiday celebrations or for no good reason at all, except for the pleasure of being together.

    The children, when they think of these years, will remember the happy press of hordes of bodies in one tiny place or another; they will remember drinking juice without being afraid they will spill it; they will remember licking the icing off the cake before it was cut and not getting yelled at for it; they will remember their mothers’ thinking that jumping up and down on someone else’s bed was the funniest thing in the world.

    After the party, the women scrunch together, happily, on the sofa, for a picture-taking session. They have had their sherry; they are very happy. They lean against one another’s knees, lean into one another’s bodies, caress one another’s shoulders. They are all smiling; they are always smiling. They decide to have six copies of the picture made to mail to their men at war.

    (In various combat zones, on battlefields and battleships throughout the world, six men will later open their letters, look at this picture, and wonder to themselves, what is going on, and why on earth these women look like they’re having such a good time.)

    Then, it is the children’s turn to take pictures to be sent off to their darling daddies away at war. The four smallest toddlers stand in front, holding hands. The bigger children stand behind, making faces. The tiniest babies hang off their mother’s laps, their mothers aglow with female talk and companionship. One child decides to walk out of the picture; something else has cap­tured his fancy. No mother bothers to stop him. The mothers do not care whether he appears in the picture or he doesn’t.

    Although the women say they miss their men (and try to teach their children to miss them as well), and although they spend hours of every day penning long accounts of their brave and unhappy lives alone to their husbands in combat (often staring into the distance as they chew on the ends of their pens to collect their thoughts before composing the next sentence), their lives, and those of their children, are far happier than either before their husbands go to war or after their husbands return home.

    This is my story about the war, and, as I have said, I’m sure it can’t be all true. Yet, in many photographs that my mother sends to my father during the war, she smiles broadly and seems happy. In one, deeply tanned, hair atop her head, she is gather­ing me close, as she kneels next to me in the surf of a beach. In another, on a snowy winter day, in winter coat and scarf, she kneels behind me; I am all bundled up, sitting on my new sled, my Christmas present. In still another, I am perched atop her knee in an armchair in our parlor and I am wearing my sailor dress; again, she smiles (though I do not).

    It may have been that she doesn’t want to show her sorrow, which would demoralize him, and so she feigns her wide smiles. Or, released from wifely responsibilities for the duration of the war, she is, from time to time, truly satisfied.

 

    At regular intervals throughout the war, my mother rounds me up, washes away my scruffiness, clothes me in my best clothes, arranges my banana curls perfectly, and poses me for a picture to be sent to my father so that he can see how well I am doing and how big I am growing.

    It is Christmas Day, 1944, and I am standing in our parlor, in front of the table-top Christmas tree, in my brand new pajamas with feet attached to them. They are way too big for me—so big that every time I try to walk in them, I fall down. My mother has already begun what becomes a habit with her—buying clothes a size too big for me so that I’ll grow into them. Under the tree, on the fern-patterned carpet, there are four Christmas pre­sents. Under my right arm and in my right hand I clutch two more. I am neat, clean, and my hair is combed. I am as clean and neat as if I am going to church, or to a party.

    Less than a month after Christmas, my mother fixes me up to pose again. This time, I am standing in our kitchen, dressed in my sailor dress, feet crossed, demurely, bow in my hair. On my chalk board, my mother has penned the message “hello daddy. we love you.” On the counter behind me, is our new telephone.

    After the photo is developed, my mother writes a message on the back of it from me to my father.

    “January 17, 1945. Dear Daddy:—How do you like our tele­phone. Gosh mommie & I are just wishing we get a call from our favorite sailor real soon. We love you daddy. Louise.”

 

1945

    When the men came storming back from the war, I remember staring at them in their uniforms as they walked down the street, and I remember not liking what I saw. From as far back as I could remember, the streets of Hoboken were inhabited only by women, children, and old men. Men my father’s age were a species I hadn’t grown up with, didn’t remember, wasn’t familiar with, and now, there was an invasion of these men into what I had come to consider my private territory.

    Everything changed for me when the men came home from the war. It was harder to see my friends. Gangs of cheerful women and exuberant children stopped getting together for the im­promptu potluck suppers that were a mainstay of the war years. All the doors in our apartment building were, again, closed. All children were cautioned to play quietly, if we were allowed to play at all, because the fathers needed their peace and quiet after what they had been through. Nighttime story hours were shortened or curtailed altogether. Snacks were forbidden. Moth­ers hushed their voices, and hushed us, to listen with deference and awe to whatever the men had to say.

    (And, as if it weren’t bad enough that our fathers had dis­placed us, a year or two years later, there would be a spate of squalling babies who would come along to complete the separa­tion of us wartime children from our mothers.)

    My father is lucky to be coming home alive and unharmed. Although he was in constant danger from submarine attacks on the way to where he is stationed, he spent the war on an island in the Pacific at a seaplane base after the Japanese had left the island. His job was to repair seaplanes that had been damaged in battle or maneuvers. And, although he saw a man crushed by a truck, rescued a buddy engulfed by flames from a gasoline fire, and watched a ship transporting munitions explode, killing all four hundred men aboard, he himself made it through the war years without injury. He knows he has gotten off easy.

 

    I remember staring at the rows of buttons on my father’s Navy pants as he walked through the door of our apartment on Adams Street in Hoboken, back into a life that would never be the same for me. I don’t remember whether I thanked him for the cowrie shell bracelet he had made for me or for the baby doll he was thoughtful enough to buy though he was in a rush to get back home, or whether I liked his presents.

    But not too long after he came back home, I took to “punishing” this doll for being a very bad girl by scraping her face against the bricks of the building across the street. When I got finished torturing her, she looked as if she had been through the war. When I realized that I had damaged her permanently, and that it was impossible for her to heal, I mourned her lost perfection.

    To appease my pain, I plastered her battered face with an elaborate assemblage of Band-Aids I bought with my meager allowance from Albini’s, and I prayed to the picture of the Sacred Heart that was tucked into the corner of my mother’s chifforobe mirror, that one day I would wake up in the morning to find that the ugly scars on Patricia’s face had miraculously dis­appeared.

 

    I never forgave my father for coming back from the war. I never forgave my mother for letting him make the rules as soon as he came back home.

 

    “No backtalk.”

    “‘No’ means ‘no.’”

    “No slouching at the dinner table.”

    “No playing with food.”

    “Bedtime at seven o’clock.”

    “No wise remarks.”

    “Do as you’re told.”

    “Clean up that mess immediately.”

    “Did you hear what your mother just told you?”

    “What are you, deaf? stupid? or just not listening?”

    “‘No’ means ‘no.’”

    “I’ll teach you a thing or two.”

    “My word is law.”

    “This is my house.”

    “How often do I have to tell you that ‘no’ means ‘no’?”

 

    I thought that the luckiest girl in the world was the girl at the end of our block whose father was killed during the last days of the war. Everyone else thought it was a disaster. Thought that she’d never recover. I knew better.

    When I saw her on the street with her mother dressed all in black, to me, she looked happier than those of us with fathers who had come home all safe and sound. In my imagination, I trade places with her. I pretend that it is my father who hasn’t come home from the war. I pretend that he has gone down in a ship at sea, down into waters populated with shark and octopus and eels and crabs and the other sea creatures whose names I do not know.

 

    Soon after my father came home, I started to make him pay.

    On a sunny day, my mother decided that it would be a good idea for my father to take me to a playground that was some dis­tance away from our apartment, so that we could have some fun together, so that we could get reacquainted.

    My mother had given us our assignment, our mission, as it were. We were to a) go to the park together, b) have fun, and, c) get to know one another again. The mission could not be consid­ered a success unless we successfully accomplished each of our three sub-tasks. After years of executing orders so well that he returned home from war without a scratch on him, my father probably believed that this was a simple mission, that it would present him with no problems, that he would complete it success­fully and be rewarded with my mother’s praise and gratitude and with my love.

    What my father didn’t count on was that, unlike combat-ready soldiers and sailors, I wasn’t used to taking orders. I was used to getting my way, doing what I wanted, when I wanted.

 

    As I recall, the trouble started soon after we left the apart­ment, while we were still on our own stoop. I wanted another drink of water, something that never presented a problem to my mother, who waited downstairs while she let me toddle up the stairs by myself into my grandmother’s apartment.

    My father, though, thought it was a dangerous threat to our park-going mission to allow me to retrace my steps so soon. The park was our destination, and we were to get there as quickly, as efficiently, and with as few casualties as possible. He thought that it showed a serious lack of discipline on my part, and that this bad behavior had to be stopped before it undermined our mission completely.

    “No,” he said. “You can have a drink when we get to the park.”

    “But I’m thirsty now, I want a drink of water now,” I re­sponded, stating what I thought should be perfectly obvious to my father, and turned to reenter our building. It seemed impossi­ble to me that an adult with any sense could deny me my request. Why should I wait for hours to slake my thirst when water was so close by, a few flights of stairs away?

    I felt my father’s hands around my waist, and, before I knew what was happening, he had picked me up as if I were a baby (an insult to my pride), and he was carrying me down the stairs.

    “No,” he repeated. “You can have a drink of water when we get to the park.”

    “But I need a drink of water now,” I persisted, throwing the words over my shoulder at him, knowing that the word “need” conveyed an urgency that the word “want” did not, and that whenever the word “want” failed, you moved on to “need” before resorting to the last-ditch effort of “have to have.”

    “No,” he repeated in my ear, as I squirmed, trying to wriggle free. “You can have a drink of water when we get to the park.”

    “But I have to have a drink of water now,” I countered.

    “No,” he insisted. “you can have a drink of water when we get to the park. ‘No’ means ‘no.’” By now he was shouting. He is sur­prised at how headstrong, spoiled rotten, and needful of training and discipline I have become during his absence.

 

    We aren’t more than a few feet away from our front door, more than a few moments into our time together, when I know that I am in dangerous territory. This place with my father isn’t a place I have been, isn’t a place I want to be.

    I stiffen, I wail, I wave my arms, I kick my feet. I want him to put me down, let me have my way, let me have my water, let me return to the soothing, comforting arms of my mother, my grand­parents. I don’t want to be with him. I want him to go away.

    He retaliates. I have overstepped my boundaries, challenged his authority, sabotaged his mission. I have to be held account­able, reprimanded, punished.

    We haven’t even made it to the park, and we have already declared war, we are already enemies.

 

* * *

 

My favorite memory from the wartime years

    My mother, framed in the kitchen window of our apartment, in the warm light of a summer evening, is singing, as she takes the washing off the line. She has protected her hair from the work of the day by tying a scarf around her head.

    I am in the courtyard below, still playing. I am digging in the claylike soil at the edges of the scruffy yard with an old beat-up spoon that she has given me. I am pretending that I am creating a beautiful garden. Tiny pebbles are the seeds that I am planting. When I hear my mother singing, I stop my work to look up at her. She is singing her favorite song, one that she sings to me some­times to ease me off to sleep. It is a peculiar lullaby.

    “Show me the way to go home / I’m tired and I want to go to bed / I had a little drink about an hour ago / And it went right to my head. / No matter where I roam / On land or sea or foam / You will always hear me singing this song / Show me the way to go home.”

    Her voice is loud, clear, strong. It echoes off the walls of the other apartment buildings. When she finishes, she pauses a minute or two before beginning the song again. In the hiatus between her songs, I can hear the clanging of pots and pans as some other mothers begin their evening’s meal.

    She disappears into the kitchen.

    I continue with my planting.

    If I listen hard enough, I can hear my mother going about her work. I have never been, will never be, happier.

 

 

 

 


[1]Excerpt from “Combat Zones,” Vertigo (New York: Dutton, 1996). Printed with the permission of the author.