My father’s father was a beloved doctor in West Hartford, Connecticut. He was something of a local hero for performing the first open-heart surgery in recorded history. The patient was an eight-year-old boy who had caught a bullet, fired accidently by his father when the kid stepped between him and a twelve-point buck.
In those days, anyone brought to an emergency room with a gunshot wound to the heart was considered a hopeless case and left to bleed out rather than risk such a daring procedure and the lawsuit certain to follow. Why Dr. Richard Dunne chose this day or this boy to hold a beating heart in his hands is unknown, but his Hail Mary pass was regarded as a watershed event in coronary medicine and encouraged the advancement of open-heart surgery.
When I was about six, my grandmother, whom we called Gammer Do, brought me up to the attic of her house on Albany Avenue in West Hartford. She opened a footlocker filled with black-and-white portraits of long-dead ancestors and explained their history and how we were related. I was bored silly until she took out a little silver nugget from a yellowed envelope and placed it in my hands. It was the bullet that had killed the little boy.
At least I thought she said it killed him.
I remember her telling me that it was the first surgery of its kind, and though the boy died soon after, the operation was considered as much a success to medicine as the brief flight of the Wright brothers was to aviation. That made perfect sense to me and was the first time I considered that failure could also be looked upon as success, an insight I would draw on for encouragement when faced with future disappointments. But at the time, I just thought how cool it was that an old lady kept the bullet from a dead kid. It wouldn’t be until I was in my sixties that I found out, to my dismay, that the operation was a total success and the boy lived to a ripe old age.
When Dr. Dunne wasn’t mending hearts, he was breaking my father’s, with routine beatings from a Brooks Brothers belt. Dad was a sensitive kid and a passionate fan of movie stars, whose pictures he pasted on his side of the bedroom he shared with his older brother. The other side of the room was adorned with athletic trophies and football pennants.
My father once recalled to me that during a particularly brutal beating, when he was about the age of the kid who caught the bullet, the Doctor had worked up a sweat, calling him a sissy between blows, stopping only when their maid interrupted to say his hospital was on the phone. Dr. Dunne left the room and went into the hallway, where telephones were jacked in those days, to take the call.
“Ten ccs of corticosteroid budesonide should do the trick,” Dad heard him patiently instruct the attending nurse on the other end of the line.
“Well, thank you, Sister Shannon, for the update. Feel free to call me anytime,” said the Doctor, whose son was at that moment prone on his bed, immobile with pain and shame. The Doctor then returned the phone to its cradle, came back into the room, and picked up where he’d left off.
These bedtime assaults usually started after family dinner, likely because Dad had been warned to stop explaining the plot of Becky Sharp or whatever recent picture had moved him, which no one else at the table gave a shit about.
“And Miriam Hopkins finally gets invited to the ball—”
“All right. Enough, Nicky,” warned the Doctor.
“But they don’t know she’s from a different class—”
“I said enough!”
“But when they find out her life is ruined, and she gets so sick that—”
“Shut up!”
Dad couldn’t help himself. Tears filled his eyes and his voice broke, but he kept on in defiance and disbelief that the plot, costumes, and Ms. Hopkins’s luminescent performance would never mean as much to his family as it did to him.
Only his maternal grandfather, Dominick Burns, appreciated my father’s passion for a story well told. In the mid-nineteenth century, when he was ten years old, Burns escaped the famine in Strokestown, Ireland, and made the crossing with a card tied around his neck so his relatives on shore might recognize him. He went right to work sweeping out a grocery store in Frog Hollow, the Irish slum of Hartford. Within twenty years, he would own that grocery store and earn the nickname the Saint of Park Street for never letting a penniless immigrant leave his store empty-handed. As his wealth grew, he opened a bank that offered loans to newly arrived immigrants no other bank would dare give money to, and his philanthropy got the attention of Pope Pius XII, who made him a papal knight.
Dominick Burns was a literature lover and autodidact who compensated for his lack of education by insisting his grandchildren be well read. Dad was his prize student, though the fifty-cent pieces awarded for reciting a Shakespeare sonnet from memory was incentive enough. My father and his younger brother John would become well-known writers, and both credited their “poppa” as a major influence. Like Dominick Burns, I also lacked formal education, and though I can’t blame a famine for not getting past the tenth grade, I can credit my becoming a voracious reader to my shame as a dropout.
Dad was the second oldest in a family of six children, four brothers and two sisters. Their mother, Dorothy, was a devout Catholic and doting mother who worshipped her husband despite the routine beatings upstairs that she pretended not to hear. There was a six-year age difference between my father and John, and far more serious differences in their future, the first being that John never fully believed that their father beat Dad at all. John’s memories growing up on Albany Avenue were wistful, and though he agreed the Doctor was strict, he never considered him to be cruel.
Toward the end of World War II, Dad was drafted into the army in the middle of his senior year at Canterbury, a boarding school run by Benedictine monks. John F. Kennedy had left the year before he arrived, much like his future wife, Jacqueline Bouvier, had left just before my mother started at Miss Porter’s.
The monks were tough on my father, but they were tough on everybody, and he enjoyed not being singled out for discipline as he had been at home. Dad had been in a few plays and decided he’d like to be an actor, but with the war still raging in Europe and Asia, he feared he might not live long enough to get the chance. He was only seventeen when he was given an early diploma and sent to boot camp until he turned eighteen, when the army could ship him overseas.
His older brother, Dick, the Good Doctor’s namesake, had already enlisted in the navy and was attending Officer Candidate Training School. Richard E. Dunne Jr. was his father’s favorite and a football tackle so fearsome his nickname was Tarzan. He was everything my father was not. But while Dad couldn’t catch a football if it were stapled to his forehead, Dick didn’t know Bette Davis’s last line in Now, Voyager or how to write a cogent fan letter to Tyrone Power.
After basic training, Dad boarded a troopship called the Mariposa, bound for Southampton, England. The Germans had just killed eighty-four American POWs, in what was known as the Malmedy massacre, not far from his company’s destination in Belgium.
The first action he saw was when a train transporting him and the 95th Infantry to the front lines was strafed by a Messerschmitt. My father’s terror brought on hysterical laughter he was helpless to stop, even when his sergeant slapped him in the face, yelling at him to shut the fuck up. This caused the soldier next to him also to burst into horror-filled hilarity, and while bullets ripped into the train, the two of them hooted convulsively, each taking turns getting slapped and punched by men in their company to snap them out of it.
The other soldier was named Hank Bresky and would become Dad’s only friend while in the service. He was also the only other man whose masculinity was called into question, prompting their sergeant to nickname them the Golddust Twins.
As forward observers, Dad and Hank’s job was to go behind enemy lines in the Ardennes forest and report activity. One night, in what would come to be called the Battle of Metz, the 95th met such intense fire that they were forced to retreat. The order passed down the line, but by the time it reached Dad and Hank, they’d heard two soldiers crying for help deep into the enemy’s position. Without a word between them, they headed in the opposite direction from their retreating platoon. The soldiers were seriously wounded and possibly dying. Dad and Hank had no idea who they were or how they’d gotten there, but each put a man on his back and carried him for miles through the dark forest, lit only by shells exploding all around them. At daybreak, they finally came across a unit loading their wounded into an ambulance. When they tried to hoist the men they’d been carrying all night into the back, they were told there was no room. My father lost his shit, calling the medic every name in the book until the guy relented and let the men they’d brought join the rest of the wounded. The soldier Dad carried had not uttered a word the entire night, but as Dad loaded him into the ambulance, the wounded man reached out and squeezed two of his fingers in gratitude. Dad never knew if the guy made it, but suspected he probably did not.
The Golddust Twins rejoined their company at a German castle the army had requisitioned and were awarded Bronze Stars in front of the men who’d mercilessly mocked them. Those same men had to sleep in pup tents on the grounds while Hank and Dad were given opulent bedrooms in the castle, which had been reserved for officers.
To the astonishment of Dr. Dunne, the wrong son came home a war hero. His eldest and favored son served dutifully as an officer in the navy but never saw combat. The Hartford Courant placed Dad on its front page, praising “Corporal Dunne’s courageous performance and devotion to duty.” The household on Albany Avenue filled with his parents’ friends, eager to shake his hand, and young ladies wanting to see his Bronze Star.
A dinner dance was given in his honor at the country club Dominick Burns had founded as an alternative for Catholics restricted from Protestant clubs. Dr. Thomas Hepburn, the father of the blue-blooded Katharine Hepburn, lived across the street from Dr. Dunne, but neither wealth nor their common profession could overcome centuries of prejudice, and the two families never spoke. Those early years of being snubbed, or “high-hatted,” as Dad used to say, laid the groundwork for a social insecurity that never placed him in the right club, but just across the street from the swells who “belonged.” Horatio Alger tales embarrassed him, and he preferred to describe Poppa Burns as “a wealthy banker” rather than a grocer who fought his way out of an Irish slum.
During the dinner dance in his honor, which also celebrated his entry into Williams College, Dad looked up from a conversation he was having with a debutante to see his old sergeant, who had once cruelly christened him a Golddust Twin, busing plates from his table. When their eyes met, they both quickly looked away in mutual shame. The sergeant quit his job the next day.
When Dad came home with a medal, he sensed a grudging respect from his father, but after dodging incoming artillery, he no longer feared his Brooks Brothers belt or even cared what he thought. I once asked him if he ever felt like shoving that medal in his father’s face, yelling, “What do you think of your sissy son now, old man?” He said he didn’t feel that, because after many years, he’d finally let go of his anger toward him. I’d grown up hearing him rage against his father, but if he was feeling sanguine in that moment I didn’t want to spoil it, and I let the answer slide.
When Dad turned nineteen, his father died quite suddenly. The Wright brother of coronary exploration was felled by a heart attack that left my father numb. Rather than mourn with his family at the wake, he disappeared with a boy his age to Poppa Burns’s golf course and had sex in the back of Dr. Dunne’s Buick. The war had taught him to be reckless with his life and take risks with his reputation, especially at a time when one’s sexual preference could get you killed. This was only the beginning of a game of chicken he played all his life.
Dr. Dunne’s casket was in the living room, as was the custom, where it lay in state during the wake. When the guests had left after a boozy evening of reminiscence and song, my grandmother stood with her children over the coffin, gazing down at her husband, lost in grief. After a respectful silence, she softly said, “I wish…I wish we could have him stuffed.”
The Dunne siblings collapsed in laughter, rolling on the floor in hysterics as Dorothy begged them to behave themselves. If I ever wonder where my dark sense of humor comes from, I look no further than that moment.
Forty-five years after the war, Dad had become a famous bestselling author who used to gripe, half in jest, “I have to pick up another goddamn award.” He was never shy about recounting his latest accomplishment, or gleefully repeating a fawning compliment from a cabdriver, talk show host, or movie star. He once called me in New York in a fit of excitement. “You are not going to fucking believe who just recognized me in the elevator at the Chateau Marmont…the rock star Bone-O! Bone-O knows who I am. Do you believe it?”
So I was not only more than a little surprised to find out my father was a war hero but shocked it took until 1998 for him to tell me.
We met at one of his favorite overpriced restaurants, where the waiters always fussed over him. The day before, he’d asked to see me with such urgency that I canceled whatever I had planned. He’d recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and I feared he would tell me that it had spread.
After our drinks arrived, a Diet Coke for him, a martini for me, he took a breath and I braced for what he was about to say.
“Yesterday, I saw the movie Saving Private Ryan.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Did you see it?”
I had. The movie had just come out, and I was impatient to discover where this was going.
“You know, I fought in that war.”
As someone who considered himself a bit of a history buff, I suddenly realized I knew more about the evacuation of Dunkirk than I did about that part of my father’s life. I’d examined Robert Capa’s photographs and cried during The Best Years of Our Lives, but I couldn’t recall asking my father a single question about the war. I think when I was very young I sensed it was a subject best not brought up, and then, as I got older, I simply could not imagine him in uniform.
“Griffin, that movie was exactly like what it was to be in combat. I sat alone in the theater and relived every terror I ever felt then. I was sent overseas for eight months, and for every one of those days I was so…afraid. I remembered all the bodies and the blood I had managed to forget. I didn’t forget it, I just put it somewhere, and that movie brought it all roaring back.”
His hands were shaking, but he managed to pull something out of his blazer pocket. It was the Bronze Star.
“Did you know your old man was given a medal of honor?”
Then he told me how he got it: the two wounded soldiers, the bombardments, Hank, being called the Golddust Twins, the squeezing of his two fingers. His voice cracked and then found its footing, and cracked again throughout his telling. I thought of getting out of my seat to hug him but didn’t want to interrupt his flow.
“I don’t know where that came from, Griffin,” he told me. “That impulse to run toward the enemy for those guys, but Hank and I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. I can’t believe that was me…but it was. I did that. That was me…”
I picked up his medal and he watched me. The ribbons were crisp, the colors still vibrant, and the thick bronze metal weighted with the gravitas it deserved. I pictured my father as a boy half my age and two inches shorter, surviving in conditions I knew only from novels by Vonnegut and Mailer.
How could I have been surprised that he would defy an order to retreat to save a wounded comrade? His reporting had brought him death threats and blackmail attempts. He was an Irish terrier in a Turnbull & Asser shirt, who struck fear in the hearts of those who had it coming. An image crossed my mind so absurd that I smiled. As Dr. Dunne tries to beat the sissy out of my father, the defiant little boy yells out the last line of Now, Voyager: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.”
“What are you smiling about?” my father asked.
“I was just thinking how nobody fucks with a Golddust Twin.”