The office of the city historian is downhill from the Parque Cespedes, on a street corner that was the site of Cuba’s first cathedral. After the church, Santa Catalina, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1528, the lot was occupied by a hospital for more than a century; then, in 1828, the governor-general ordered the construction of a prison. The lockup wasn’t completed until 1845, but it was built for keeps, with walls so thick that windowsills on the ground floor are much deeper than my arm can reach.
It had to be solid, to hold hundreds of men at a time. In 1867. a riot by more than two hundred prisoners, including some revolutionaries, was put down with fourteen executions. Most of Virginius’s crew were held here through tense months in 1873, when street feeling was so outraged that Spanish authorities must have prayed the walls would prove as good at keeping Cubans out as they had at keeping them in.
What was a security measure in the mid-1800s is an energy-saver today; all that masonry helps keeps two stories of offices, classrooms, archives, and reading rooms a few blessed degrees cooler than narrow, sun-blind Aguilera Street. A single fan in any of the rooms off the central atrium seems to do more good than an air conditioner in some other Santiago public buildings.
Still, it was demasiado calor, plenty hot when I visited on a late June day, even in the city historian’s upstairs corner office, where Jorge lifted a battered cardboard box from an elaborately carved case and brought it over to his absent boss’s desk. I was sweating hard, pulling my sticky shirt away from skin and flapping it, but the effort only seemed to make me hotter. Juan Manuel looked thoroughly cool, despite his excitement over the box’s contents.
“Mira,” he said, unfolding the dusty flaps and revealing a jumble of bones. “At first it was a criminal investigation. When these bones were revealed by weather and time, the police thought there might have been a recent murder. Things rot fast here, and a body can be reduced to a state that looks a lot like this very quickly. But then they looked closer, and they called us.”
Like his colleagues at the office, Jorge is a historiador, but he’s also an archaeologist, so he was the one who went to see the bones and the one who eventually brought them back to the Office of the City Historian.
“The site is about where the fighting was fiercest on El Caney,” Jorge said. “We don’t know who it is, but it could be an American soldier. But it’s right where the Spaniard commanding El Caney, General Vara del Rey, was last seen. And his body has never been found.”
The bones were stained from years in the burnt-sienna soil. Dirt still clung to some of the ribs, vertebrae, and arm and leg bones all mixed up in the box; at the bottom, hand, foot, and other little bones rested in fine red-brown silt. I felt as if I were staring into a portable, cardboard grave. The ends of bones had worn away to reveal a porous pith, like fossilized sponge. Jorge lifted a yellow plastic grocery bag and said, “El cráneo.” The bag was semi-opaque, but its flimsiness revealed the shallow bowl shapes of pate and brow bones, the crook of a jaw.
Mesmerized, I stared but didn’t touch. Jorge might not have objected, but my curiosity was overruled by an unexpected superstition or scruple: I felt that the bones should be handled as little as possible, and only by those who could read them. Since my touch couldn’t contribute a speck of knowledge to the dead man’s identification, I had no right to touch. It would have been disrespectful.
The idea of respect broke the spell for a moment, making me self-conscious and aware of my surroundings again. Without thinking, I had put my dusty camera bag down on the city historian’s desk. Olga Portuondo Zuniga is a formidable scholar and author whose work has helped shape Santiago’s—and the nation’s—Revolutionary identity. Her handsome, high-ceilinged office is decorated with paintings in styles that vary from an abstraction of yearning figures to a surreal vision of a naked man with an umbrella contemplating the cathedral from Parque Cespedes. The third painting is a larger-than-life portrait of Santiago himself, St. James, the city’s patron saint, hanging behind the city historian’s chair. This canvas is done in a folk-art style and shows the saint as santeros see him, as an avatar of the orisha Oggún, whose many attributes and powers identify him with hard work, justice, righteous war, and iron. In this painting, Santiago wears the broad-brimmed hat of a peasant—or a mambi liberation fighter—and carries his great sword, symbolic of his martyrdom by King Herod and his triumph over evil. It’s a potent image of the city, its spiritual strength and, by its placement, of the power of the city historian. I hadn’t met Olga Portuondo Zuniga, but I got the message and moved my bag off her desk and onto the floor.
Jorge was clearly excited by the idea that these bones could be those of the gallant Spanish general who commanded the defense of El Caney, a village in the foothills of the Sierra de la Gran Piedra about three miles northeast of Santiago. On July 1, 1898, General Shafter divided his V Corps into two wings, sending one of his three divisions north to ward off any moves against the rear of the divisions attacking Santiago. In the aftermath of the July 1 fighting, U.S. reportage focused on the heroes of the attack on Santiago, with its climax at San Juan Hill. Spanish and Cuban imaginations focused on the image of Vara del Rey—a soldier who’d battled the mambises for three years, scoring significant victories, only to go down fighting the yanqui juggernaut.
The historical record insists that the general fell in the battle’s last moments, shot through both legs just after he’d shouted, “¡Salvase quien puede!” “Save yourself if you can!” Stretcher bearers took him up, but before they could get far the general was shot through the head. The next day, his remains were said to have been positively identified by Spanish officers before American soldiers buried him in a shallow grave. A Spanish commission recovered his body months later, and it was transported back to Spain for a hero’s interment.
However, rumor and a dissenting few voices testified that the general’s body was lost, the commission deceived. The mystery—if it is mystery, and not just a persistent shred of the fog of war—seems about as consequential as claims that George Armstrong Custer survived the Little Bighorn, but it has never quite been dispelled. Jorge was, apparently, a believer.
“Look at these buttons,” he said. “For now, they’re our only clue.”
They were brass, as weathered and dirty as the bones. “We don’t know who they belong to,” he said, meaning which side. It was obvious to me—there’s Columbia’s shield, there’s the eagle—but then, I’d been to scores of U.S. history museums. American military uniforms weren’t Jorge’s specialty, and I realized that he and his colleagues couldn’t do what scholars almost anywhere else in the world would have done weeks earlier: Google something like “button 1898 ‘u.s. army,’” click on “Images,” and solve the problem. Cubans don’t have that kind of Internet access. Sometime soon, perhaps, he’d be able to compare these buttons to some on display in the museo de la guerra hispanocubanonorteamericano, the Museum of the Spanish-Cuban-North American War, south of the city on the road to Siboney. Or one of its scholars would find time to make a trip to see this box of bones.
I told Jorge that I thought the buttons were definitely from a U.S. soldier’s uniform, and we talked about what that could mean.
It was possible, he supposed, that a Spanish or Cuban corpse could have been wrapped in an American tunic for burial. Perhaps even Vara del Rey! Or there was the possibility that a Spanish soldier, “saving himself” as the general ordered, might have taken a fallen U.S. soldier’s shirt as getaway camouflage. From what I’d read of the fighting, that seemed highly unlikely; the Americans were either too far away, enduring Spanish rifle fire, or they were too close, inside Spanish works and demanding surrender.
It seemed much more likely that a Cuban mambi would be wearing an American shirt. The mambises were famously ragged, and many of them added cast-off yanqui clothing to their meager wardrobes. These bones could, with luck, answer a question for a Cuban family who never knew what happened to its son.
The simplest-seeming explanation—that the man in the box was a dead U.S. soldier—wasn’t simple at all. Eighty-one Americans died at El Caney, and some 360 were wounded out of 6,600 engaged. Only one was reported missing in action. In the entire campaign, only a handful of American soldiers remained listed as missing a few weeks after the battle, and most of those seem to have been cleared up, one by one, over time.
How likely is it that an American soldier at El Caney went missing and stayed missing?
If this simplest explanation were true, it would mean that some family in the United States might be able to bury its almost-forgotten great-grandfather. I told Jorge that the U.S. Army has tremendous resources for identifying the remains of missing soldiers, developed in the ongoing search for Vietnam War MIAs. If the Cuban government told the U.S. Army about these bones and invited its help, this mystery might find a quick and happy ending.
“Perhaps so,” Jorge said. He’d mention it to his colleagues. We put the box back on its shelf, and I gave him all my contact information, asking him to keep me informed of any progress.
As far as I know, those bones are still entombed in cardboard.
Today the village of El Caney is considered part of the municipality of Santiago. Plenty of people who work in the city live out that way, in El Caney or in houses and hamlets strung along the road, commuting in by guagua (bus) or camion (truck).
But in 1898, El Caney was an isolated outpost. Though the city can be seen from the village, the intervening valley had been owned by the mambis since the War of Liberation began in 1895.
Records in the city archives, stored downstairs from the historians’ offices, show that in the years 1895–98, Spanish search-and-destroy missions sallied frequently from Santiago. Outposts such as El Caney needed supplies and replacements, which could not reach them without such escort; along the way, the patrols were almost certain to find or be ambushed by mambis, most likely killing a few and suffering a few casualties in return. To the Spanish generals who represented the Spanish government’s unwillingness to let go of Cuba, the point of these exercises was the reinforcing of strongpoints and the killing of mambis. If Spain still held the cities and towns, and the enemy body count kept rising, wasn’t that winning?
Maybe, in some other kind of war. But Cuba in 1895–98 was no different for Spain than the thirteen North American colonies had been for England from 1775 to 1783, or than Vietnam was to be for the United States from 1965 to 1973: a litany of bloody but pointless triumphs that only delayed inevitable defeat. Time and again, as the archives show, captains and colonels might “have the honor of informing” their superior officers of “glorious” and “victorious” combats that supposedly killed more rebels than Spaniards. Vara del Rey, the general who died defending El Caney against the Yankees, the one whose body was never found, led many such expeditions when he was a colonel; the archives’ crumbling pages include proud after-action reports graced by his handsome signature.
Yet the sameness of these reports, over months and years, tells a less glorious story. As much as the generals might deny it, or be unable to see it, the significance of resupply or search-and-destroy missions wasn’t the number of enemy killed or hamlets burned or supplies captured. It was what happened when each Spanish column had expended enough blood and ammunition to make its commander worry about having enough men and bullets to make it home. Month after month, year after year, at the end of every mission, the Spaniards retired to their forts, and the insurrectos remained in possession of the country.
That’s not winning. Even Spanish successes, such as the killings of Martí and Maceo, only increased support for the insurrectos at home and abroad. In August 1897, reinforced and at last supplied with a modicum of effective artillery, Máximo Gómez besieged the little city of Las Tunas. During the Ten Years’ War, successful resistance to the mambis had earned this bastion of Spanish loyalists a new name, Victoria de las Tunas—“Victory of las Tunas.” But “Victory” didn’t seem to prefer one side over another, and this time the mambis took the town. After Las Tunas, the Spanish started surrendering forts and towns, one by one, to rebel sieges.
If that was winning, only pride, politics, and greed could distinguish it from losing. But those items are never in short supply, especially in wartime. Even as late as the fatal spring of 1898, some Spanish ministers and newspapers were promising a quick finish to the rebellion, saying an army of ignorant blacks could never defeat imperial Spain. Loyal—or at least white—Cubans were sure to rally. The rebellion could not exist without the aid of domestic traitors and foreign meddlers. Past policies might have failed, but the latest combination of combat strategies and political concessions was certain to divide and conquer Cuba’s so-called patriots, just as Zanjon had in 1878. Victory was near.
Far from dispelling such Spanish fantasies, the United States’ intervention gave them new life. Congress’s declaration of war treated Spain to a shot of that intoxicating but spurious unity familiar to nations newly under attack. Predictably, imperialists were joined by many of their opponents in declaring that the American outrage “changed everything.” Demands for an end to partisan bickering effectively silenced debate about questions that were, if anything, more urgent than ever: Why was Cuba in revolt? Could a counterinsurgency succeed? What is the cost of empire, and who pays it? Who benefits? The United States’ interference absolved Spanish politicians and generals of responsibility for all past mistakes, putting Spain in the right again. Surely the righteous would prevail.
Walking back into town, I stopped at the Hotel Melía to check for faxes or e-mail from the Reverend Esau Onyegoro and Overwater Missions. No OFAC license extensions, and not a word. But there was news from home, in an e-mail from my mother. My stepbrother Peter was making a brilliant recovery from brain surgery. And Papa O’Brien had lied about San Juan Hill.
Peter’s news was wonderful. Credit for his recovery went to Peter and the doctors, but I thanked Nuestra Señora de la Caridad y Remedios del Cobre, Our Lady of Charity, anyway. It’s wrong to ask for a blessing and not say thanks when it arrives.
The news about Papa lying simply made sense. My mother had forwarded a few facts from our cousins’ genealogical research. Thomas Francis O’Brien had been a secretive man, but a baptismal certificate had led to a church, to cemeteries, census records, and muster rolls. What I read—there in the hotel, and more fully back home, as cousins contributed their findings and memories—was sad, but it made many other things begin to make sense at last.
Almost all of the little we knew about my great-grandfather dated from the years after he started a family with Maria Louisa Botana. Known to her grandchildren as Mother Mamie, Maria was a Spanish beauty with a glossy black braid hanging all the way down her back. She was one of eleven children born to Joseph and Louisa Maria Botana, immigrants from the impoverished countryside near Gibraltar who had come to the United States to cook for a living. Joseph was a chef. Louisa may not have worn the title, but her cooking was fine enough to win her every-summer employment at Theodore Roosevelt’s mansion on Sagamore Hill.
Louisa’s daughter, Maria, married Thomas O’Brien on March 17, 1900—St. Patrick’s Day—in Boston, where he was a waiter and she was, apparently, more than a few weeks pregnant. Whatever his war experience had been, apparently it was over. The 1900 census found him employed as a coachman—a new job already—and living on St. Germain Street with his new wife, his mother-in-law, and a lodger. Louisa and Joseph Botana had separated.
The newlyweds’ daughter—my grandmother—was born six months into their union and christened Louise Marie, Americanizing the two first names passed down by her mother and grandmother. The 1910 census showed Thomas and Maria living with Louisa—a widow since 1907—and three children, Louise, Thomas, and John. But by then Papa was no longer a steady presence in their home.
Maria and Papa may have had all kinds of problems, but the only one we know about is sufficient to explain any amount of heartache: the drink. Thomas was the kind of drunk who alternated long stretches of arid control with sodden benders. Early in their marriage he had worked waiting tables, cutting meat, selling groceries … and had lost jobs by disappearing for days on end.
When he was at home, Papa delighted the children with jokes and stories. He could cook, specializing in omelettes and delicious soups improvised from whatever was in the refrigerator. He was irreverent, rascally, and Maria adored him, but he couldn’t be counted on to bring home the bacon. She put herself through school to get a teacher’s certificate, which kept the kids from going hungry.
Despite the drinking, Papa was able to use his grocery experience as a bridge into the restaurant business. In the 1930s he worked for hot spots such as the Music Box, and became the floor manager at Boston’s racy cabaret nightclub Lou Walters’ Latin Quarter.
The Latin Quarter made burlesque respectable by linking it to bohemian Paris, which somehow squared the seminude cancan dancers with Boston’s prudish blue laws. Walters mixed the more or less naked girls with top “legitimate” acts, and the formula was such a hit that he soon opened more famous Latin Quarters in Manhattan and Palm Beach. Lou’s daughter Barbara Walters once told my mother that she remembered Thomas O’Brien, her father’s floor manager, as an Irish raconteur with “a huge personality.”
It was somewhere in this nightclub period that Papa made his bargain with God. He managed more than one club, driving from one to the next—trips that were sometimes the start of benders, leading to days of anxiety for Maria Louisa. By the 1930s she was Mother Mamie, several times a grandmother; when Papa disappeared, she’d call her grown children, who’d help call the hospitals and police stations while Mamie worked her rosary.
One rainy night, as Papa was driving home from a club, he struck a woman who darted into the road, rushing to mail a letter. Waiting at the hospital, praying for the woman’s life, Papa made his promise of absolute abstinence. She lived; he never drank again.
Deals like that seemed to run in the family. Mamie made many such bargains. She was devoted to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and had a relic of the saint that she lost just at the time her daughter Louise was about to give birth. Mamie promised to show her gratitude if the relic was returned by making sure the baby’s middle name would be Therese. The relic came back to her; my mother was named Eleanor Therese. When illness caused Eleanor to miss much of third grade, Mother Mamie—grown stout in her fifties—promised not to eat candy for a year if only her granddaughter could be made well.
The other side of bargaining is holding a grudge, and the family seemed to do a lot of that, too. Although Papa’s sons were devastated by his callousness toward their mother, John and Thomas tried to accept the father they’d been given. Louise loved her father but couldn’t forgive him for breaking Mother Mamie’s heart. Louise expected Papa to die first, which would free Mamie from waiting at home, saying rosaries for him; then Louise could take Mamie to her house and treat her right. But Mamie died in 1941, at sixty-four. By then Papa was already keeping company with stylish Leone Rydalth, a strait-laced but sophisticated lady who fit in with his nightclub connections. Louise’s grudge deepened, and was still unreconciled when she died, suddenly and much too young, in 1952.
As Walters sold the Latin Quarter and Boston’s nightlife faded, Papa and Leone began a new life as a husband-and-wife traveling sales team. An elegant, petite old lady with gently mischievous blue eyes, Leone was the ideal representative for a line of knockoff perfumes. The O’Briens would make a deal with a department store, and Papa, a charming old man in a sharp suit, would take a station at the front door. Select customers would be greeted with blarney and a free coupon entitling them to exclusive samples at the perfume counter. There, Mrs. O’Brien would let them sniff smell-alikes of the most pricey popular scents. If Tresor was chic, she had Treasure; if the customer yearned for Magie, she had Magic. Between the blarney and the bargain prices, who could refuse?
It was a gypsy life, and they loved it. Leone kept the restless man close by keeping him on the road. They were good companions, creating domesticity in motel rooms by hard-boiling eggs in their electric coffee percolator.
Their circuit swung them down to winter in Florida, where they could visit with Leone’s daughter, a cabaret dancer who had married a horse-racing journalist. Another family story says that once, when they were out on the race tout’s yacht, they hailed and exchanged greetings with Franklin Delano Roosevelt—perhaps aboard the presidential yacht Potomac. The punch line is that Papa had been cooking clam chowder, and thought enough of it to send a bowl across to FDR.
This is the man who resolved the crisis of Leone’s coma—and the dilemma of her Christian Scientist faith—without a second thought, authorizing surgery despite Mary Baker Eddy’s belief in prayer and divine intervention.
That cocksure, flamboyant fellow is the Papa I remember. He wasn’t a big man, but his personality was outsized, and when he told the story of how he stormed San Juan Hill, his outstretched arms and quick features could conjure the heights, the armies, the bugler, the flag-tipped charge.
But he shrank his past to nothing. What kind of man never tells his grandchildren and great-grandchildren where he came from, what became of his people? He said he was an orphan, said there was no one living who knew him before he’d met Mamie. It seemed an unbelievably thorough extinction for a man who seemed to accept his burgeoning tribe of grandchildren as if he’d been born into a typically large Irish family, a man who made friends everywhere.
Though he said next to nothing about his past, Papa didn’t want to withhold vital health information from his children and grandchildren, so he told them that he was a twin, and twins ran in the family. His twin brother had died, he said … but family memory preserves a couple of instances of a man calling the house saying he was Tom’s twin brother. One time, the caller asked for money. But Papa neither accepted nor even acknowledged the calls. He answered no further questions.
His grandchildren refused to settle for silence and, starting with the baptismal certificate, began to unearth Papa’s past.
The first discovery, in the parish records of St. Thomas Aquinas in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was that Thomas O’Brien wasn’t the only son born to Thomas O’Brien and Mary Hanley—but the other brother was no twin. Papa had had an older brother, Christopher, born in 1877. The census of 1900 revealed the family Papa fled, living on Spring Street in Watertown, where twenty-three-year-old Christopher was employed as a driver. Christopher died of epilepsy in 1906, at age twenty-nine.
Christopher wasn’t the only sibling to turn up in census records. Going back to the 1880 count, Thomas, a forty-three-year-old laborer, and Mary, thirty-two years old, both born in Ireland, had a nine-year-old, Maggie, in school. Little Christopher was three, and Thomas just six months. By the 1900 census, Maggie was out of the house, and Thomas, too. But parents Thomas and Mary had Christopher still at home, as well as real twins, Mary Ann and Catherine, born in 1883, and the baby of the family, Bridget, born in 1890.
Papa had five siblings. His children—Louise, John, and Thomas—never had a chance to know their uncle and aunts. Louise, born in 1900, might have been able to remember her grandparents, Thomas and Mary, if she’d been allowed to meet them.
What was so awful about these people? What was Papa running from when he enlisted on May 31, 1898?
The O’Briens seem never to have been far from poverty, if they escaped it at all. Thomas emigrated in 1849, a boy caught up in the mass exodus of the potato famine. Mary didn’t leave Ireland until 1860, but the country had hardly recovered from the trauma of watching a million starve and another million sail away: a quarter of its population lost to what many Irishmen considered English economic warfare.
In his life as a husband and father, which began in 1868, Thomas’s jobs included shoe finisher, laborer, building mover, and teamster. He never seems to have found a successful niche; his daughters took in laundry. His wife, Mary, died of complications from flu in 1904. She was fifty-six years old. Thomas died of lip cancer in 1906, at age sixty-nine.
Sometime after he joined Mary in St. Patrick’s cemetery in Waverly, Massachusetts, their headstones were cleared away to make the place tidier. Their graves are unmarked, but graveyard records reveal another of Papa’s secrets. Regardless of what he told Mamie and his children, he was still in some kind of contact with his family. When old Thomas died on May 1, 1906, the burial plot was still unpaid for; Papa paid the twenty-five-dollar fee on May 12.
Before he died, the elder Thomas finally received a Civil War disability pension. He’d been applying for it since the Pension Act of 1890 made financial help available to veterans who hadn’t been wounded or otherwise directly incapacitated by wartime service. His pension was only granted in 1902, when he was declared eligible because of his complete inability to earn a living by manual labor, owing to “rheumatism, blindness of right eye, and impaired vision left eye, disease of heart and kidneys, lameness of back and loins and malaria,” as well as “senile debility.”
Under the Pension Act of 1890, a Civil War veteran who couldn’t work and whose infirmities weren’t the result of “vicious habits” was eligible for a pension. Thomas’s examiners certified him free of vice and indisputably infirm. Thomas’s war-time service was exemplary: two years and eight months campaigning with the 16th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, from 1861 to 1864, and two years and four months’ service, extending into peacetime, with the 1st Regiment, 26th Company, U.S. Artillery.
The 16th Massachusetts had a hard war. It was in on every major battle fought by the Army of the Potomac between the Seven Days Battles before Richmond in 1862 and the commencement of the siege of Petersburg in 1864. It was a first-rate combat unit, and commanders put it to the test at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Spottsylvania Court House. The regiment lost sixteen officers and 134 enlisted men to mortal wounds, and two officers and ninety-three enlisted men to disease, a total of 245 dead, or a quarter of a regiment’s full strength. Sick and wounded men took the casualty total above 50 percent. By July 1864 there wasn’t enough of the regiment left to rehabilitate; the Army broke the 16th up, transferring its veterans and recruits to the 11th Massachusetts.
Thomas was among the men mustered out. When he reenlisted in October, he pulled Washington garrison duty with a heavy artillery regiment that lost a total of twenty-five men to disease.
Papa’s father was discharged from the artillery in February 1867. By 1890 he claimed to be unable to work for the pains in his hands and kidneys. These don’t seem to have been sudden developments. Malaria never quits. How many reasonably good, healthy years did Thomas have after the war? Fifteen? Twenty? No more.
There’s something querulous about the elder Thomas’s pension applications. The first, filed promptly in 1890, is filled out by a medical examiner who can barely suppress his impatience with the old man. Yes, his kidneys hurt; he passes brown urine, and little of it. Yes, his hands hurt, apparently from rheumatism. Neither problem strikes the doctor as deserving of twelve dollars a month, or even a fraction thereof. Thomas is a complainer. This application is stamped DENIED.
By the second, filed in 1902, Thomas has declined so rapidly and deeply that a second doctor can’t write enough about his symptoms, listing them in two dense columns. Thomas is a complainer, but his complaints have made themselves too obvious to ignore.
These documents are all we have of this Thomas O’Brien, Papa’s father, my great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-great-grandfather to our family’s latest generation. It’s hardly fair to read too much into them … but it seems that any chance old Thomas had of coming out ahead was ruined by the war, which broke his health and doomed him to poverty.
What was young Thomas running from when he joined up for the Spanish-American War? Our only, best guess: the wreck the Civil War had made of his father.
Papa wanted more than escape from his father’s house. He wanted abnegation and erasure. Whatever his family had been, he would be nothing like: divorced, opposite, quits. The story of his life would be a story he’d tell as he pleased, alone and beyond contradiction.
It would have no beginning—not until May 31, 1898, the day of his enlistment. And so what if the only clue left in that new start—the Rutio and Werblasky portrait—made a lie of his story about charging up San Juan Hill? He was wearing the uniform of a private in the U.S. Marines. But the Marines never got anywhere near Santiago.
Papa joined the Marines ten days before the Corps fought its only severe action of the war: the taking of Guantánamo on June 10. By the time he got to Gitmo, in July, the fighting was over all over the island. His unit delivered supplies and turned back toward Boston. He served until June 22, 1899, and there’s reason to believe he spent much of his service time courting Mother Mamie, who may have been pregnant by November.
Mamie took him at face value, and with the creation of a new family Papa fulfilled an American dream more primal than home ownership or a chicken in every pot: the dream of a disposable past, of being only who we say we are.
So Papa was never in Santiago, never dodged bullets at Teddy’s stirrup. What’s important about the story is not that he lied to his great-grandchildren. How many men have embellished their war stories with motives much more sinister than making little kids laugh? No, what was important about Papa’s San Juan Hill story was that he never divulged anything about his life before 1898: not to the kids, not to the grown-ups, not to Leone, and not to Mamie. From the moment Papa went to war, no one in his life knew much about who he had been.
I wonder whether Papa’s prime mover was guilt. Paying for his parents’ burial plot; punishing himself with drinking bouts that left him sick and helpless: to an Irishman and an alcoholic, these read as familiar signs. And then there’s that great proof of guilt’s power over his supposedly self-powered life: the woman in the rain, the accident, the bargain. He got sober on guilt, remorse doing for him what he could not do for himself. That’s one reading of his inscrutable life, but my guesses are only signs and wonderings.
Papa died a mystery, an enigma his surviving grandchildren are still trying to pierce. As a great-grandfather, he taught me the costs of self-invention. What happens when we choose to forget our history? What kind of hurts do we inflict—on ourselves, on generations to come—when we insist that we aren’t who we are?