MARCH 1943
Several months before that first German fighter plane swept out of the low-lying Sicilian hills and strafed Plunkett, months before they bore down on the Germans at Salerno, before the conflagration of the Newfoundland, before the rending of the Buck and the calamity at Anzio, more than two hundred of the Charley P.’s sailors and their dates and families crowded the Rooftop Ballroom for a Ship’s Party at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. Tall, narrow windows flanked the sides of the room, rising from waist height to fifteen feet, which was where the ceiling began to arch in a vault. Ornate Corinthian sconces glowed off the walls, and one tall, narrow mirror at the rear reflected the backs of the enlisted men’s dress blues. The photographer captured them in a surge of attention, as if all had been up dancing and called to face the bandstand. If you look closely enough, you can hear drummer Gene Krupa in the near distance, and Harry James blowing the trumpet, rolling out the same notes louder and louder, Krupa urging him on, and then the segue to Benny Goodman purling notes on the clarinet as limpid as brook water, piping all the way up to a magnificent high C before Jess Tracy grabs the baton and dances over the ivories, all the way to his own high C. It’s one of those pictures you could dwell in for an hour or two, drifting from personality to personality, each a story in his or her own right, some more dramatic than others by the looks on their faces. The women in their fantastic hats and hairdos, their corsages and ribbons, the men mostly in uniform, all of them exuberant and so engrossed in this one moment, memorialized in a picture.
There is the elegantly beautiful woman in pearls and a fur stole and shoulder-length hair standing a sister’s distance from an enlisted man beside her, an older couple behind them. Another young couple who’ve forsaken the lens for each other, the enlisted man turned in profile to gaze upon her. She is facing the camera but has swerved her eyes up at him, lips pursed. The couples cheek to cheek. The enlisted man who looks no more than fourteen years old. Some of the women were USO girls, recruited for the party and minded by chaperones. You can see as much in their tentative regard for dates who seem altogether more bullish on their prospects for the evening. There was a war going on outside of this ballroom, and this borough, and many of the men in this picture—countless dozens—would be dead within the year, but they were as alive as any of us can be for a flash that evening at the Hotel St. George. The picture’s in black-and-white, of course. In fact, it’s hard to believe life was lived in color back then, so conditioned are we to seeing it in black-and-white.
It’s almost as if the world only brightened in color and complication with Vietnam, and the advent of the Baby Boomers. Before then everything was black or white, this or that, good or bad. It was two good nights in a row for Irvin Gebhart, who, after getting two teeth filled at the dentist’s the previous afternoon, had been out to see Benny Goodman on liberty. Afterward, he’d met a bunch of the men from Plunkett at Rogers Corner across from Madison Square Garden and drank until there was only time to get back to the ship for 6 a.m. In the photo, he stands shoulder to shoulder with his USO-girl date, and leans his head slightly toward her, a gesture she isn’t returning. One or two sailors and dates away, there’s Jim Feltz, not shoulder to shoulder with another USO girl, but behind her and closer to the table he sat up from for the picture, because he hadn’t been out on the floor dancing. Edward J. Burke is standing front and center, as was customary for the ship’s captain, and Dutch Heissler is five places to Burke’s right, with a white carnation pinned to the left breast of his uniform and his wife, Ginny, on his left arm. On this March night of 1943, Ken Brown is three rows behind Burke and slightly to the right.
I’d never seen this picture before and didn’t know it existed until I’d walked into a room in Jim Feltz’s house where he’d memorialized the Plunkett. I’d stood a long while, rummaging among the hundreds of faces, and found another young man, toward the front of the crowd, three deep from the first row, leaning in from behind a woman with an awesome crest of permed hair, his hand draped over the shoulder of a young woman nowhere as tentative as Gebhart’s. His hair was up and off his forehead, and his eyes were bright with the night, and there was that gap in John Gallagher’s teeth, and so much surprise in his face. Because he’s looking across the stretch of this ballroom at a camera, but he’s looking across decades, too. Aha, you found me!
Coming home from Casablanca, the eponymous movie was still queued up to play matinees and evenings at the Hollywood in New York as Plunkett steamed through the submarine net gate by Hoffman Island. Jim Feltz idled topside as the ship came into harbor, awake since before dawn when Plunkett’s sonar picked up a sound contact and Ken Brown chased it down. As officer of the deck on the morning watch, Ken decided to drop a few ash cans, and then a half dozen, more on what may or may not have been a U-boat. The three-hundred-pound depth charges sunk at a rate approaching fifteen feet per second and could split a submarine’s hull if they detonated within twenty feet of the vessel. Hit or miss, no one could sleep through that, or all of the ship’s maneuverings as Ken puttered about the vicinity, looking for oil slicks or wreckage indicating a hit. He wanted confirmation, they all did, for only then would they get to post a silhouette of a submarine on the bridge as a token of their success. But there was nothing. The war was out there, and they were getting close, but they hadn’t quite touched it yet. Nor had it touched them.
They’d come into Norfolk thirty-six hours earlier, but Norfolk was no great harbinger of America. Trash banked against the Navy Yard’s fences and walls there, and the locals looked only half-awake most of the time. The yard reeked of exhaust fumes, and moreover whatever it was they stored in the warehouses—fruit mostly, it seemed. Indeed, Plunkett topped off with apples, oranges, grapefruit, cabbage, and cauliflower before heading up to New York. At the Narrows, the ship steamed between Brooklyn and Staten Island and made straight for the Statue of Liberty, standing tall in relatively welcoming forty-degree weather and fresh winds. Nothing said home like Lady Liberty, and Jim Feltz was about ready to fling himself with relief into the flowing folds of her robes. He’d been away from home for six months already, and though he wouldn’t get to Overland this trip, home was coming to him.
On the bridge, Captain Miller was at the conn and Jack Simpson stood nearby as they channeled between Governors Island and Red Hook, and then past Brooklyn Heights. Lower Manhattan loomed off the port beam, its waterfront bristling with piers, its mid-day thrum like a siren song to the crew. Miller was in a lighthearted mood. They’d come back from the first invasion of the war, and there would be people waiting for them in the city. “There’s going to be a symphony of bedsprings in town tonight,” Miller said.
Outside Wallabout Bay, Miller held the ship in the East River, steady in stream, maneuvering with both engines as he waited for a tug that would take them to its pier. In Norfolk, he’d sidestepped the squadron commander’s suggestion he wait on a pilot and made quick work of tying up. New York was different, tricky. After a half-hour wait, Plunkett’s tug nestled up against the port beam and nudged the ship broadside to the wind and current. The ship started drifting toward the pier heads, and Plunkett queried the tug captain on their pilot. Was he with them? He was not. Meanwhile, Plunkett was drifting toward the Renshaw, another destroyer tied up at the pier. Miller called for his engines full astern in an attempt to back out of trouble. They struggled nine minutes against the current but lost the battle when the ship’s stern swung into the pier head and Plunkett’s bow whacked Renshaw amidship. The current jostled the ships against each other, until the deckhands ran lines through the bullnose openings in the bows and fastened the ships to mitigate the abrasion. Renshaw was hardly damaged, but Plunkett had snapped a stanchion and broken a lifeline. There was also some damage to a bilge inside, and a three-inch hole in the bow above the waterline. Twenty minutes after that first nudge into the current, a pilot finally came on board Plunkett and called in a team of tugs to bring Plunkett to berth. The ship tied up at last, men flew from it on liberties as long as eight days. Some men went home; others checked into hotels for 50 cents a night, preferring a bed to a berth in a Navy yard noisy with incessant hammering; and one other man off Plunkett, a sailor named Stripling, checked into the Naval Hospital that night with severe lacerations all over his scalp. You had to fight somewhere.
Two weeks out from Christmas, Plunkett was in a festive mood. Ken Brown, who’d spent all of 1942 as the ship’s commissary officer, coordinated with Dutch Heissler on a Christmas menu that would feature roast young tom turkey with an oyster dressing, mashed potatoes, Harvard beets, buttered peas, giblet gravy, and cranberry sauce, as well as cigars and cigarettes. They printed a menu, and Captain Miller offered up good wishes in a message they ran on the back: “Let us hope that the spirit of the PLUNKETT will carry us on to victory, that this Christmas will be one of happiness to all, and the New Year will bring us those good things for which we are fighting.” Miller, more than most commanding officers, invested in the happiness of his crew, and if his men couldn’t be home with their families, they’d at least have a fine meal and a memento of a menu.
In the meantime, there was a Ship’s Party scheduled for December 21 at the St. George, not quite two miles from the Navy Yard. The St. George was not only the largest hotel in New York City back then, it may have been the largest in the world. With 2,632 rooms, the hotel was an agglomeration of ambition and opportunity that consumed an entire block of space in Brooklyn Heights several streets in from the East River. Seventeen ballrooms attracted all manner of parties, including Plunkett’s in a venue on the rooftop. Venetian blinds concealed the extraordinary view, as per an Army dim-out ordinance that called for veils on windows above fifteen stories.
At the party that evening they learned that Captain Miller was being relieved of command of Plunkett, not for what happened with the Renshaw in Wallabout Bay five days earlier but for what happened seven days earlier in Norfolk when Miller failed to heed the squadron commander’s suggestion that he take on a pilot.
Miller’s three months on Plunkett had been an antidote to Standley’s high-minded tenure, and the prospect of rolling the dice on a new CO was more than some of the crew could bear, especially when the mixers ran out at the Ship’s Party, and they started taking their whiskey neat. At some point, some of Plunkett’s crew rang the front desk and summoned a boy from Western Union. He showed up, one of those kids in a pillbox hat with a modest beak and red stripes on the shoulders of his uniform jacket. They dictated their message to the boy, a rather lengthy message that pointed out that many men, and some of the officers on Plunkett, wanted to keep their captain. Someone tallied the words and called for every man who wanted his name on the telegram to cough up some dough. The telegram boy held his hand out to the drunken crew, and they slapped bills into it. Where was this telegram going? The White House. Who was it going to? Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Since before they’d left for Casablanca, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas had been in the No. 1 spot at the top of the Billboard charts, and it was parked there all the way through November and into December. Christmas at home, like the ones he used to know, was not to be for Gallagher. No matter his mother’s shock, or the imminent birth of a niece, he could not get leave. Some of the crew were going home to Boston, and he steered them toward Callahan’s, his favorite bar. Callahan’s was so much a part of where he was from that he wrote the name of the place, Callahan’s Tavern, under the address of his Oakton Avenue home in Jim Feltz’s address book. Someday if Jim ever came looking for him, and he wasn’t on Oakton Avenue, he might find him there. A few days before Christmas, a small gang of Plunkett’s crew entered the brick-front bar with the big plate glass windows and found Charlie Gallagher on station, just as they’d been told they would. They informed Charlie that John had told them to come and say hello to the Weatherstrip, as Charlie called the infant son who’d affected his draft status, who’d kept the draft out, as it were, sealing him off from the war. “Weatherstrip,” they told him, and “Callahan’s Callahan’s Callahan’s” were a big part of John’s talk. They had to see the place. They had to see the kid. Charlie led them up the hill on Adams Street, retrieving the Weatherstrip on the way, and brought them to the house on Oakton Avenue for a visit with John’s mother and sister, who promptly took to the stove to make a meal.
The White House received the telegram sent by the disgruntled Plunkett crew and routed that letter into Navy channels, where it wound up eventually on the desk of the squadron commander who quartered on Plunkett. Sherman Clark didn’t excite much feeling among junior officers on the ship. In general, squadron commanders didn’t. He had his own cabin, his own staff, his own dining venue, his own steward, his own agenda, and a unique ability to instill a general feeling of anxiety on the bridge. Mostly, he stayed out of the day-to-day operations, though he was on the bridge at general quarters, and when the ship came into port. Complicating the institutional drag of having someone looking over your shoulder all the time was Clark himself, whose short stature and pompous nature seemed to magnify the feeling against him. At the Naval Academy, they’d called him Shrimp and Cutie, and when he came back from Antwerp, where he’d been coxswain on the remarkable Navy rowing team that won fame and a gold medal on a Belgian canal at the Olympics in 1920, another nickname layered onto the degradation—Petit. His boyish looks were an insult to the injury of his modest frame, but this didn’t depress him. He evolved in cocky fashion and had ambitions that wouldn’t countenance a captain’s decision to pass on his order, however ambiguous.
First, the forty-three-year-old squadron commander mustered the ship’s enlisted men to his cabin, demanding they show up in dress blues. They crowded into his stateroom. Jim McManus had no idea why they’d been called by the squad dog. That their telegram about Miller to the president had precipitated this summons wasn’t flashing on Mac’s radar screen until Clark broached the subject. Clark said he was bound to investigate the matter and wanted to know whether the CO had put them up to it.
They all liked Captain Miller, and they couldn’t, not one of them, back off their feeling for the CO. It was possible, in retrospect, that whiskey might have had something to do with that enthusiastic telegram, they said. But no, Miller hadn’t put them up to it.
Clark dismissed the men, and then called the officers to his room, including Jack Simpson.
“Young man,” Clark said, addressing Jack outside the usual and customary form of address. “I don’t know where you got the idea that you can just do what you want.”
Jack heard him out.
“You do not bypass the chain of command in the Navy,” Clark told him. “You go through the procedures that have been established.”
He told Jack he was closing the matter then and there. There would be no punishment for this violation. But he’d been warned.
Two days after Captain Miller was detached from Plunkett with orders for a new assignment at Newport News, the ship cast off from the 33rd Street Pier in Brooklyn, steamed through the harbor’s submarine net before dawn, and took up position as an escort on an eastbound convoy. This one would be a slower proposition than the last, moving east at nine knots, the fastest speed attainable by the slowest ship in the forty-four-vessel convoy. Plunkett steamed along its edges at thirteen knots, herding the lumbering, overladen vessels like a cowboy his cattle. The ships were carrying tanks, railroad cars, aircraft, jeeps, gasoline in drums, poison gas, telegraph poles, ammunition, and sundry other materiel to prosecute the war in North Africa. At one point, with one of the ships failing to make nine knots, Ken Brown hailed the master of the merchant ship through the bullhorn, a bridge-operated loudspeaker. He signaled the need for the skipper to pick up the pace. Despite the security of a convoy, the “old shellback masters” loathed being convoyed and let their minders know with “belated turns, unanswered signals and insolent comebacks.”
The merchant skipper signaled back to Ken with a gesture that advised Plunkett’s officer of the deck to screw off. Ken stared at the man a long moment, remembering Captain Standley’s tactic for incentivizing stragglers to speed up—depth charges dropped at the stern of a malingering vessel. But there was a new skipper on board, and no one quite knew the mettle of the man, though they’d been warned.
Shortly after they’d learned they were losing Miller, one of Jack Collingwood’s buddies off an old four-pipe destroyer told them they were getting their man Burke—or “that man Burke,” as they’d known Edward J. Burke at the Naval Academy. Burke had captained the Navy football team that went down in defeat to Knute Rockne’s Fightin’ Irish, better known then as the Ramblers, at Soldier Field in 1928, and his team had lost another major game to Army at the Polo Grounds. That loss notwithstanding, Burke was one of thirteen players named to the 1928 College Football All-American Team selected, in part, by the legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice. That same fall, Burke also lost the intercollegiate, light heavyweight title in the final bout of that year’s championship. In a profile that Rice wrote in October of 1928, and that was syndicated in newspapers throughout the country, he attributed Eddie Burke’s stamina and “never say die” spirit to a “rough and ready” upbringing around the coal breakers of Northeast Pennsylvania. Rice noted that although Eddie didn’t have to drive mules underground like some of his peers in coal country, he was surrounded by boys “less fortunate” and was obliged to fight opponents of a far different sort than he faced in the intercollegiate boxing ring. Though modest and soft-spoken, and one “who always lets the other fellow do the talking,” Eddie deployed what Rice called a “cyclonic offense.” He noted a certain fidgetiness in his twenty-year-old subject, a kid who would just as soon “start out for a hike over a mountain, or to break the bonds of civilization and shove off for wide-open spaces.” Rice anticipated far-flung adventures for Eddie, expecting that one day he might “shove off for some little island where the natives are rebellious and need someone to get rough with them.”
In the fourteen years since he’d left the Academy, Burke had climbed a few notches to rate a lieutenant commander’s stripe. He’d married a woman who stood stately and glamorous in heels, and whose auburn hair and refined beauty were counterpoints to his rudely forged features. The older Eddie Burke got, the more he looked like a union boss, a man who’d dug himself out of the coal mines but wouldn’t ever look as if he had. He’d segued from the Academy to service on two battleships, transitioned to submarines for several years in the mid-1930s, then did a stint in the Asiatic fleet in the late 1930s, racking up laudatory comments from his superior officers. The men who reported to Burke were less inclined to commend his abilities and more likely to begrudge the demeanor of a skipper who, when he had to, would physically knock a junior man out of his way on the bridge. One thing became quickly clear to some of the junior officers on Plunkett: that if Captain Burke were detached from this ship anytime soon, no one would feel compelled to send any kind of telegram.
After three weeks in Casablanca, Plunkett started back to the States with five other ships on February 21. They met a cluster of eleven merchant vessels the following afternoon and then, two days out, rendezvoused with yet a larger group out of Oran. It was a slow crossing, with little more to say officially about it than “steaming as before,” a phrase scribbled repeatedly into the ship’s deck logs, and that served as euphemism for the tedium that characterized so much of their time on the water. They dropped a depth charge on a school of fish. They practiced firing their 20mm, and their five-inch guns, too. One sailor failed to mind the stand clear signal during one test of the big guns and had his eardrums “broken.” The days blurred into one long three-week crawl across the water, segmented by trips to the mess, duty on watch, drudgery, and hours at sleep, or attempted sleep, in the ship’s compartments. At night, the men in the engineering department lay down in a soundscape of white noise: the blowers moving fresh air into the lower compartments, the rushing of seawater against the three-eighths-inch steel hull, and, governing all, the reassuring turn of the ship’s screws. Jim Feltz labored through an obligatory stint as a mess cook. Irvin Gebhart and Ski slept in one day and were both put on report by Jack Collingwood. While a card game was played by the radio one morning, Gallagher cleaned his locker and later filled out the paperwork for a four-day leave, not liberty. His mother hadn’t gotten any better, but she hadn’t gotten any worse, either. In letters subsequent to the one that first reported her stroke, he learned more about her evening out with the Looney Band at an old-age home up off Adams Street. Something had gripped her from within, and she’d collapsed to the floor. Her blood pressure ran high, always had, and she’d never followed through on doctor’s orders for potassium thiocyanate, or any of the medicines that might have helped relieve the symptoms, not the bromides or barbiturates or bismuth. She carried too much weight for her frame, she wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t slow down, and wound up for a spell in Boston State Hospital as a result. When she came out, and came home, her mind was intact but her mobility was ruined.
The morning after they docked in Brooklyn, Gallagher crossed the East River to Manhattan and boarded the New Haven Railroad for the five-hour run to Boston. It was a Saturday morning, the cars crowded with service personnel and civilians, all of them now more dependent on public transportation since the country had cold-turkey quit making automobiles after Pearl Harbor.
At South Station in Boston, John shunted from the railway to the streetcar and rode the familiar line into his Dorchester neighborhood. The home at No. 58 reared up out of a cluster of two dozen mature fruit trees—two varieties of peaches, the big Elbertas and a smaller one, too. There were pears, plums, apples, and cherries, both sweet and preserving. A bough from one tree reached so close to one of the kitchen windows they could literally lean out and pick fruit. As kids the children had harvested the sweet cherries and dragged them around the neighborhood in a cart, selling them for ten cents a square. As fast as they could pick them, they could sell them. Nothing was blooming yet as John came upon the house, but they all still stood in the yard by the recently turned earth where his brother Frank had buried another wreck of a car, John’s car!, before he went off to the war.
On the porch that evening in March of 1943, a service banner hung in the window with a blue star each for him and Joe and Frank. Otherwise, little had changed in the months he’d been gone. He opened a door that was never locked and stepped into a foyer where a fine oak stairway climbed and turned for the second floor. There was the piano at the foot of the stairs, though none of them could manage much more than “Chopsticks.” And there was The Best Loved Poems of the American People, with its purple dust jacket, on the telephone table, as if someone might be in need of verse during conversation. Ordinarily of a Saturday evening he’d have spotted his stout mother in the kitchen at work on the cast-iron stove she preferred, her gas stove notwithstanding. Supper on Saturday always included the beans she’d prepare in a crockpot, and the bread she’d baked on Friday. But Martha was bed-bound now, and he’d known he wouldn’t greet her downstairs, but upstairs.
The stroke had spared her mind, and the mother he found was as ebullient as the woman who’d taught them how to spell “Mississippi” M-I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, P-P-I, and who once shocked her children by placing these four tiles in a game of Scrabble: F-A-R-T. After Martha’s husband died, she supplemented the residual income from her husband’s employer with work, first in a nearby laundry when her youngest started school, then at sales in Cambridge, and finally at sales in a dress shop near Oakton Avenue. Until her sons went away to the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), she’d enforced a rule that had them home in the house by nine or nine-thirty, even when they were eighteen or nineteen years old. “What could you be doing out?” she’d say. “There’s nothing out.” She might discipline them by slapping their arms, but she was more likely to invoke the threat of “a thousand mortal sins” as a hedge against bad behavior.
With John’s homecoming, and before she’d followed him up the stairs, his sister Helen dialed Charlie and Bernice, summoning them to the house at once. She wouldn’t tell them why, just that it wasn’t bad news. They gathered in an upstairs bedroom, Helen and Tom, and their sister Gertrude. Charlie and Bernice arrived with the Weatherstrip and the baby Mary, and John took to them at once, the baby first while the eighteen-month-old boy clung to his father’s side, unnerved by a man who’d been a regular presence his first six months but who’d been gone since. It had been more than six months since he’d been home, and it seemed incongruous he could actually be here, while the globe was otherwise wracked with great convulsions. In Krakow that day, Amon Goeth and the SS had begun liquidating the city’s Jews. Hitler flew back from Smolensk on a plane with a concealed bomb planted by an assassin that didn’t explode because the cold air at high altitude froze the acid in the detonator cap. Frank Gallagher was still stateside, as was Joe Gallagher, so there was that much solace for Martha. And now John was home, and talking, catching them up on all the things he couldn’t put in his letters. They were writing to him all the time, sending V-Mail. They’d get letters back from him with some parts excised by his censor, Plunkett’s engineering officer. For all the good the Navy had done, Charlie pointed out that evening, John still couldn’t spell worth a shit, and didn’t care much for apostrophes. As an example, he trotted out a classic line from a recent letter. “Hopping to here from you reel soon.”
So much had changed since he was last home. The corner was not “what it used to be with all the boys in the Army, Navy, and Marines,” John would write, waxing nostalgic for his old gang. He noted similar sea changes up at the Baker Chocolate factory, where he’d stopped to see the fellows still at home and to thank the union steward for mailing him copies of the Boston Post, which plopped onto Plunkett’s deck at mail call in bundles of fifteen and thirty-five. His friend, Ruthie, and Frank’s girl, Sophie, visited and commented on his appearance, which he later crowed about in a letter: “Thanks for the compliment on my marvelous looks and personality. I wish they were all true.”
On John’s last evening at home, Tom took out a small guitar he’d taught himself to play. He sang “Let the Rest of the World Go By” in a tremulous falsetto that ached melancholy over all of them. These concluding hours of his visit were inevitable, and they’d all heard them ticking ever louder as the evening approached and his night train to New York beckoned. He was in his dress blues now; they all had to travel in them. With the night deepening, the kids grew cranky, and Charlie announced the need to go back and warm up the apartment. He shook hands in the nonchalant way that brothers will, cognizant of the need to observe the moment with a gesture but cognizant, too, of the fact that a gesture between acquaintances felt somehow strange when applied to a brother. The lump in Charlie’s throat prevented any talk, and so he hoisted the Weatherstrip and hurried from the room. A moment later, Bernice bundled Mary and stood to leave. John offered to walk her home, and Bernice demurred. He should stay with his mother. She was on her way across the street anyway to say good night to her mother and father.
She crossed the street to the home she’d moved into as a teenager, and that was bereft now of one son who’d been called up a year earlier, on the same day Joe Gallagher had, and another son who was only waiting for his birthday so he could enlist in the Navy. The Meehans had lost two sons-in-law as well, and the house was crowded with daughters who’d moved back home, each with a child and each of whom was a reminder of Bernice’s own fate should Charlie get called up. Twenty minutes later, with Charlie having had time enough to stir the coals in the boiler down in the cellar, to lie in a bed and bank it for the evening, she kissed her mother and father good night, and started back up Oakton Avenue toward Adams Street. There was snow on the ground, and the temperatures had dropped into the thirties, but it wasn’t bitter. Not fifty yards into her trudge up the road, John caught up with her.
He’d had the Weatherstrip and Mary in his arms as long as he’d been home, and this one last chance to feel the heft of a little Gallagher in his arms was more than he could resist. There’d been the pudge of little Charlie in his arms when he’d come along that summer before the war, and Mary with the same thing, a weight, yes, but weight imbued with soul. It was as if he could feel the whole long promise of their lives in his arms as he held them. He wanted one last grasp of family before heading to South Station. They walked without talking as far as the Pierce house, the uncle gurgling baby noises at a niece who was soon asleep. The front of the Pierce house stretched a long way and featured two front doors. It had been there since the 1600s, when Dorchester was still far from the hum of settlement in Boston.
Bernice asked if John minded going back to the war. He told her he didn’t. The fact was he minded a lot, but it was only the saying goodbye that he dreaded. Homesickness, like seasickness, no longer plagued him on Plunkett. It was the parting of the ways that hurt bad.
Charlie was itching to go now, never mind that hardship deferment. The incongruity of his relative youth (he would be twenty-eight that year) and his presence on the home front was abrasive. He’d recently stopped in a bar room and was set upon by a woman who wanted to know why he wasn’t in the service, a confrontation that haunted him and wouldn’t ever stop troubling him. The local draft board, they knew, had decided to retain one of the five Gallagher brothers, and it had been decided that Charlie would be the one. John and Frank and Joe were gone, and Tom was 1-A, and Charlie was going to stay 3-A. Bernice knew that he might try to override the draft board’s objections, and she believed he would have, except for her. She lived in terror of irrational happenstance, especially the spontaneous combustion of appliances. She’d been afraid to learn how to ride a bike, or drive a car, and she’d been afraid of the two miles between her home and her mother’s after marriage, and so she insisted Charlie move them back to Dorchester’s Neponset neighborhood. She felt bad for him, but not so bad that she could release her grip.
At the top of Oakton Avenue, she and John looked up to the third floor at 677 Adams Street. The windows were bright, the apartment warmed. Mary’s weight was all the more compelling as John walked her up the stairs to the landing. He passed off the baby to Bernice, and told her he wouldn’t go in. She smiled and leaned in for a kiss, then went inside. Downstairs, he crossed the streetcar tracks on Adams, and at the corner of an intersection that lacked any appreciable urban appeal or a design that was anything but functional but would be dubbed a “square” one day and named for him, he turned and looked back up to the third floor. His brother Charlie stood in the window, the room warmed to yellow behind him, his figure in silhouette. John hoisted a hand quickly to dispel any more pathos, then turned, drew up the collar of his pea coat, and jogged back up Oakton Avenue.
Gallagher returned to the Navy Yard on St. Patrick’s Day, in time for yet another Ship’s Party at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. His date was an attractive moon-faced girl with an engaging smile. A ruffled collar bordered a V-neck that plunged just low enough to make it interesting, and an elastic waist pinched her dress, leaving the pleated lower drape free to swoosh as they jitterbugged the dance floor. One of the USO chaperones introduced Jim to a girl who smiled so brightly her eyes squeezed shut from friendliness. Jim had to own up to the fact that he didn’t dance, though he had recently vowed to learn: His girl back home in St. Louis had made him promise.
Jim was a day or two away from receipt of a letter Betty had penned the day before. She was working now at the Wagner Electric Corporation in St. Louis, in an office at the heart of a massive brick plant that made electric motors, transformers, fans, hydraulic brakes, and air brakes. She was at last putting her secretarial school skills to work, and tweaking Jim with jokes she admitted were corny but that she couldn’t resist.
“Why did the moron cut off his arm?”
“So he could write shorthand.”
Jim had turned eighteen on February 5, and Betty had followed him across another threshold, to seventeen, on March 7. Over Christmas, at the Hotel New Yorker, during the time they’d had alone and after they’d declared their commitment to each other, Jim had said, “If you feel the same way on your birthday, I’ll give you a ring.”
His words had been echoing for Betty ever since. Seeing him at Christmas, and hearing him say this, crystallized her affection into something she knew was love. When they’d started going out, she didn’t like him much. Passion hadn’t got them together; her aunt Mickey had. Jim was just a boy who worked with Mickey at the dime store, and he was company when they went out to the show. She’d kept him at arm’s length early on and remembered that she’d been “sorta mean” to him even. Through January and February, writing letter after letter, Betty declared herself without reservation in language that Jim called “mush,” and that he himself shied away from and advised Betty to shy away from, too. But she was having none of it. She wrote day after day, a dozen letters to every one she had from him, and she never failed to make a turn toward sweetness and light after she reported the news from home. “To begin the mush, I miss you…,” she wrote on a Monday in February when Plunkett was moored to the Jetty de Lune in Casablanca, and a record on the Victrola in the engineering department played ten times straight before the complaints finally got someone to shut it off.
Betty reminded him of her birthday in letter after letter and qualified her expectation with a side note that said if there wasn’t any ring, she would understand that, too. There wasn’t any ring for Betty on March 7. She had no idea where Jim was that day, whether he’d shipped out, or was in New York or Virginia. In fact, Plunkett was underway in the Atlantic making thirteen knots in rough seas. He phoned her as soon as he could when the ship docked in Brooklyn. Hearing his voice after more than two months without a letter, she nearly cried. And then he asked her if she felt the same way she said she had at Christmas. Hearing that question, she “nearly passed out.” Jim promised to write immediately, and Betty then began a vigil, hoping against hope he might write a letter that had some mush in it. She’d never got a letter like that. Nor had she got any reciprocation to all of her declarations. “You know what,” she wrote to him the day before the March 19 party at the St. George, “you never really did say you loved me nor have you wrote it. I tried to get you to say it over the phone, but you wouldn’t so I just gave up.” Betty rarely succumbed to frustration in her letters. She knew he was in the middle of this big thing, and she was writing about boys coming home wounded to St. Louis, and about others like Jim’s friend Bob Bunch who wouldn’t come home. And then, on the last day of January in 1943, Betty wrote this: “I hope you aren’t one of those 53 that were lost.… I don’t think you are because, well, it just won’t be. Anyway, to me it seems that way but if you were, it is God’s will and regardless what happens he will take care of you.”
At the St. George that night in March of 1943, the chaperones spirited Gallagher’s and Gebhart’s girls away with a commitment to the same clock that doomed Prince Charming. Their girls worked at the Kearny Shipyard. They could do it all—rivet steel plates by day, jitterbug by night—but they wouldn’t do everything. That Gebhart and Gallagher managed to hang on the entire evening without being prodded back to the ship by junior officers was accomplishment enough. They descended an elevator to the ground floor and emerged onto Clark Street, where the night hardly felt over, though liberty almost was. There would be no further options but for Plunkett. Checker cabs advertising fares at 20 cents for the first quarter mile, and a nickel for every quarter mile thereafter, swerved against the curbs and inhaled a half dozen pea-coated sailors at a throw for the three-mile trip back to the Navy Yard. Gallagher and Gebhart hopped into a cab first and were jammed by two more sailors coming in the other side. No one had to tell the cabbie where they were headed. He had steered beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, heading for Sands Street, when some unaccountable fracas broke out in the cab. A fistfight ensued within the confines of the vehicle, as Gallagher and Gebhart mixed it up with the other two passengers.
The night was not yet over—it never was—on Sands Street, which stretched from the head of the Brooklyn Bridge to the gates of the Navy Yard. The bars and grills steamed at full throttle, the street “as vivacious as a country fair,” albeit with none of the wholesome pretensions. The uniform and clothing shops had battened down their hatches and stood between the bars like caesuras in the hubbub. This street was where some sailors hoped to end up when they died. In the meanwhile, the street funneled them toward the gates of the Navy Yard, bracketed by two gatehouses where the Marine Guards were tapping down the hordes of drunk sailors, confiscating bottle after bottle.
Jim Feltz, who would one day strap a plundered German Mauser rifle to the inside of his trousers, feign a stiff leg, and secrete the thing out between these same gates in a throng of sailors bound for liberty, had come back to the ship with a clear head, and a uniform none the worse for wear. He didn’t know what to tell Gebhart about his girl from Kearny. Maybe it was because he didn’t drink himself into la-la land, or because they all sensed there was a stream of sugar flowing from St. Louis that he would not risk, or because he’d learned the ins and outs of the fire room so fast and with so much authority, but Jim, young as he was, was the man you went to when you had a problem and wanted a willing ear. This reputation was partly a function of not having much advice to give, a reticence that was widely interpreted by drunk men as wisdom. Jim shook his head, nodding. He’d listen, but what the hell could he tell Gebhart?
The Marines patted them down, and they passed into the yard, walking quietly past the somnolent Marines’ barracks, the pipe and copper shops, the smithery, up Third Street, with the racket still general all over now. Hammers sounded off everywhere, and the smell of the acetylene torches made breathing an aggravation. Trying to sleep in the Navy Yard was miserable business, and when they didn’t have to they wouldn’t, preferring the YMCA or, better yet, a hotel in midtown where you could double or triple up in a room for 75 cents a night. But they were all on the ship tonight, tied up at Pier C, and minded by one of the ship’s lieutenants (jg), a 1941 graduate of Yale University, John “Jack” Oliver, up on a wing of the bridge, wearing the khaki garrison cap he favored, watching them return.
For those who’d been home, there was the proximity of refreshed memory to savor, the afterglow, the phantom weight of a baby in arms to remember, and all those things said and unsaid. They couldn’t know where they’d be headed tomorrow, but one thing Gallagher did know, and that he hadn’t aired out on Oakton Avenue, was that he’d got a new job on Plunkett, courtesy of Ken Brown. From here on, he’d be a gunner on a 20mm Oerlikon machine gun, mounted in the no. 3 tub on the starboard side of the ship behind the no. 2 stack.