INTRODUCTION: THE
PILOT’S HOUSE
Mary Lawlor
The
pilot’s house where I grew up was mostly a women’s world. There were five of
us. We had the place to ourselves most of the time. My mother made the big
decisions—where we went to school, which bank to keep our money in. She had to
decide these things often because we moved every couple of years. The house is
thus a figure of speech, a way of thinking about a long series of small, cement
dwellings we occupied as one fictional home.
It
was my father, however, who turned the wheel, his job that rotated us to so
many different places. He was an aviator, first in the Marines, later in the
Army. When he came home from his extended absences—missions, they were
called—the rooms shrank around him. There wasn’t enough air. We didn’t breathe
as freely as we did when he was gone, not because he was mean or demanding but because
we worshipped him. Like satellites my sisters and I orbited him at a distance,
waiting for the chance to come closer, to show him things we’d made, accept
gifts, hear his stories. My mother wasn’t at the center of things anymore. She
hovered, maneuvered, arranged, corrected. She was first lady, the dame in
waiting. He was the center point of our circle, a flier, a winged sentry who
spent most of his time far up over our heads. When he was home, the house was
definitely his.
These
were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured
nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I
did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold,
metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might
get burnt by the air you breathed.
Every
day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near
horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from
ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of
an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on
earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in
straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against
Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling
alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements,
marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would
often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he
and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals
and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen.
They had to be ready for it.
A clipped,
nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move
efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just
a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an
hour.
This
was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of
meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that
counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you
could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for
an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign
language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.
I
remember my father warning of sudden invasions, Russian tanks and banners poring
through the Fulda Gap from East Germany into the West. Jack taught us to expect
these advances, the sudden appearance on a near horizon. I imagined the
aftermath of the lost war. American kids and mothers too lined up like soldiers
submitted to an oppressive regime’s harsh discipline.
These
scenarios were worse in some ways than the nuclear night- mares, the scenes of
the great nothing—empty streets, trash blowing in the toxic wind; no people, no
nature. The bomb, soon after it was launched, would wipe out everything.
Readiness would prove an illusion. Suddenly engulfed in toxic airwaves, my
sisters and I—if we were still alive—would have to grow up fast. Left to wander
a scorched earth, we would “live” in bafflement at the memory of our
duck-and-cover preparations.
In
spite of all the breath-holding and panic practice, my sisters and I were given
to think ours was a world of sunny liberty; and the target, of grim, determined
men far away. They watched for the chance to catch and smother our happiness. The
horror visions came and went because we, like millions of other kids, were told
again and again that liberty, the exclusive property of America and its
friends, was and always would be held up by its own, natural strength. This
strength had to be cared for, tended, groomed, protected. That’s what our
fathers did. They took care of liberty. The carefully guarded strength meant
the invasion might not happen. But then it might.
Our
fathers knew the particulars in threats of war, but we, the daughters, sons,
and wives known collectively as “dependents,” found ourselves on the receiving
end of terrifying, half told stories of what sounded like imminent catastrophe.
The stories were maimed by our fathers’ commitment to a code of military secrecy,
to a self-censorship we sort of knew about. That was how things were, floating,
half told, partly known but mostly not. Dads were present, intermittently, but
even the youngest kids could sense there were limits to what you could ask,
fences around what they could say. Our fathers were divided, distracted,
distant, even when they paid attention to us.
When
I think back now, this not-knowing was one of the strangest things about life
inside the walls of our “quarters,” as houses on the post were called. The
waiting and watching weren’t based on the knowledge of anything. We tried to
decode our mothers—to interpret their facial expressions and body
language—while they tried their best to fathom the moods of our fathers.
Growing up in a military family during the Cold War was an experience in not
knowing. It was like living in a censored document; with black tape partly
blocking everything you saw and heard. If Dad understood things clearly and
definitively, he never let on. So we lived in this half-light. It was as if
something was always up, something threatening on the edge of what you could
see and hear, but you never knew what it was.
In
our household, the horror of imminent, total destruction was compounded by the
sort of Catholicism we practiced. Our religion emphasized the last chapter of
the Christian narrative, the story that told of the end of the world, when time
itself would come to a conclusion and we’d all be judged. The image of Christ
coming in a fury to sort the evil from the good faded as my sisters and I grew
older, but while we were young, it sat reasonably well beside the fearful image
of a bombed and desolate planet. The ruins of the nuclear nightmare would
simply be a prelude to the judgment. The United States, gone up in mutual destruction
with the malignant powers of the Soviet Union, would be resurrected in the
aftermath. Christ would come riding in on a cloud; point this way and that as
trillions of souls climbed out of their graves. The sorting would send the
mournful damned to an eternal twisting and turning in endless discomfort. It
wasn’t pain exactly, not everlasting torture, but a constant squirming and
fidgeting, a ceaseless effort to position yourself comfortably. The good
people, on the other hand, who were more substantial than just souls, would get
clouds like Christ’s and ride up to heaven with him. You would always be at
home there, light, comfortable. And heaven would be full of Americans.
Visions
like these would later seem laughable, but in the 1950s they were powerful
motivators for good behavior. If you didn’t do all the things your parents and
the military leaders wanted you to, you could weaken and fall prey to the
devil. He—the devil was absolutely, profoundly male—was always around,
hankering, watching, waiting to get at you. So you had to be good all the time.
Goodness was a shield, a force field that kept the devil back. He was always
ready to slip inside the webs of imagination, whisper something in your ear,
put an image in your mind that was bad, bad, bad. If you weren’t washing the
dishes or doing homework or giving up some shiny object you liked so your
sister could have it, the devil could get at you.
Similarly,
if you weren’t careful and aware all the time of the kinds of ideas you heard,
you could be influenced by communists. A communist would whisper mal influence
in your ear, like the devil did, or slip you a note with some corrupting
thought scrawled on it, now in your brain forever. These were some of the
arguments J. Edgar Hoover spelled out in the doggish prose of Masters
of Deceit,
a book I never read because I was afraid it might show me more about communism
than I wanted to know.
We
were quiet when our father came home from work every day and even quieter when
he came back from TDY—temporary duty assignments that could take him away for a
week or months at a time. Mom and Dad would have a cocktail, alone in the
living room. They murmured to each other in tones we could barely hear. Dinner
was formal. We used the silver every night, a linen tablecloth, and candles. We
sat up straight, napkins in our laps. We used the knives and forks in a very
particular way. My three sisters and I were raised to be “ladies,” to reflect
my mother’s identification with an Irish Catholic, anxiously upper-class
culture. Being a lady didn’t necessarily involve being feminine. It was the
right set of codes for the class my mother—we called her Frannie behind her
back—wanted us to mirror.
Not
long ago the journalist Mary Edwards Wertsch, another Army daughter, published Military
Brats: Legacies of Childhood inside the Fortress, a vivid account of
military family life with The Great Santini tagged as “our first family
portrait.” The general tone of discipline that characterized the Santini
household reflects pretty accurately the obsession with order and control in
many of the military homes I saw growing up. And Santini’s acute consciousness
of how the family looked to his superiors—the men who would decide on his next
promotion— reflects the careerism deeply embedded in military culture. But
formal rituals of inspection and strict daily codes like the Santini kids had
to endure under their father’s literal command, wasn’t the pattern in our
household. We followed our father’s rules for being tidy, punctual, and concise
because there were no alternatives. These practices were internalized in us
early on. Drills and inspections at home would have been redundant.
Of
course, many of the formalities of military professionalism as it was conducted
on post found their way into daily life at home. In our house, your bed had to
be made as soon as you got out of it, and you couldn’t sleep late, even on
weekends. If I was too sick to go to school, my father would keep a close eye
on me, as much out of suspicion I might be playing hooky as for concern about
my health. But Frannie would never have put up with his addressing us as
soldiers or line us up for inspection.
It
was a matter of taste. At the dinner table, there was a certain script we were
expected to follow, but it had more to do with my mother’s concerns that we be
shaped according to the expectations of our social class than with military
rigor. My parents would start the dinner conversation, and we spoke whenever we
found an opening. If one of us was in high spirits, we might tell a story or try
out some joke, and laughter might follow. Still, when the story or the joke
fell flat, you felt estranged and lonely. It was the loneliness of an isolated
voice in a frightening time, a voice cut away from the common banter, left out,
understood by nobody.
My
father, John LaBoyteaux Lawlor, known by everyone close to him as Jack, was a
decorated military pilot. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for
action during the Korean War, eight Air Medals, and the Cross of Gallantry for
service in Vietnam. Because he specialized in testing new planes and teaching
people how to fly them, we moved a lot—almost every two years. I went to
fourteen schools by the time I graduated from high school. This was not unusual
for military kids during those years, and I know of many who moved even more.
My
mother was Frances Walsh, who everyone knew as Frannie. Her people had been
well positioned socially, inheriting, losing, rebuilding small fortunes over
the few generations they’d been in the United States. Frannie always had mixed
feelings about military culture, embarrassed by the uniformity, indignant at
the obsession with polished brass and straight lines. But she was also proud of
the worldliness in military life and the ethics of heroism. Although she took a
back seat to Jack whenever he was home, Frannie was “outspoken.” She often re-
fused to acknowledge his opinions or desires when they conflicted with her own,
revealing a sharp anger at the patriarchy that always counted her second. Of
course, she never said a word about women’s rights and certainly never used the
word “patriarchy.”
Jack
and Frannie fought a great deal; but between the fights they liked each other
immensely. Their experiences during the many separations were vastly different,
and I think it was hard for them to under- stand each other, to really get what
the other had been through. Jack would have been in an all-male environment,
sometimes for as long as a year, under conditions of ever threatening violence.
Frannie would have been trapped at home with kids, trying to entertain herself
and keep her idea of a cultured imagination going. The uneven communications
hampered their ability to fathom each other too. Dad didn’t write regularly.
During the longer absences, we sometimes wouldn’t hear from him for months.
Frannie, on the other hand, sent off letters to him every week. He had the reports
of our accomplishments and of mishaps in the household, but we got few pictures
of the man’s world he inhabited.
When
he came back Frannie would be gleeful, nervous, expectant. Things between them
would seem romantic for a while. Eventually her not-so-subtle forms of
resistance would irritate Jack. My sisters and I heard and saw a lot of tension
and open hostility between them. The sharp words and ice-cold tones got to be
so common we took them— and the dramatic zigzagging between tension and
affection that defined our parents’ marriage—for normal.
The
moving fostered a feeling of not belonging. To the degree identity depends on
place, we were out of luck. These days the Department of Defense maintains a
“Youth Sponsorship Program” that puts military kids whose families are about to
be transferred in contact with their peers at the new location. This child
becomes an information source and social guide for the new arrival. Nothing like
this existed for us. A Family Services Program was created in the office of the
Army Deputy Chief of Staff in 1962, but for us this never meant more than a
sponsor meeting us at new postings. The sponsor was first and foremost a
liaison for my father at his new job. Any help from the sponsor’s family for
the rest of us was secondary. The kids weren’t necessarily eager to show you
the ropes. When my sisters and I were older, we had access to the post teen
clubs. These could be interesting, but you had to find your way into them, just
as you had to negotiate space for yourself at each of the many new schools.
I had
lots of fantasies of belonging. I dreamt of living with my New Jersey cousins,
of going to the same school with them, year after year. Of living, like they
did, in the same house until I would go away to college. But place wasn’t
something we could ever claim.
For
the kids at the new schools we’d soon leave behind, I made up identities. My
family was rich, and I had lots of fancy clothes. What did they know? How would
they ever find out? Identity was a streak of invention, nothing real necessary.
So I made stuff up whenever I felt like it.
For
all the fearful religion in our house, ethics weren’t cultivated much. Manners,
good manners, but not ethics. Sometimes I think it’s lucky I didn’t turn out to
be a professional fraud, a con artist. It would’ve made sense for me to become
an identity thief. I think it was the fear that kept these things from happening
as much as anything else: fear of God, of all authority; fear of the end of the
world as pictured in the Bible and in all those stories about the bomb.
The
experience of being a constant stranger taught me many things, among them a
shallow sociability. I see now there was something thin about my connections to
others as a child, and a corresponding lack of dimension in myself. Even then I
felt as if I could evaporate at any moment. This thinness and a nagging sense
that the lack of substance paradoxically shows itself even now was part of what
drove me to write this book. If I could take the sights and sounds and fleeting
bits of dialogue out of memory and put them on a computer chip, I might be able
to see the substance in the story of my growing up. Finding the borders of
something that’s lacking is a tricky thing to do. I depend in this book on the
people, places and events of my upbringing to tell the story, but the sensations
and the feelings I register in response to them are my own. I can’t claim my
sisters always share the perspectives on these pages. They were and are my
closest friends, but they have their own stories to tell.
As we
got older, ordinary worries—do other kids like me, should I speak, am I
pretty—really shot out of proportion. Always in new territory, unfamiliar faces
judging our looks, speech, movements, we spent a lot of time dazed and
tentative. One morning—our first day at a new high school—the four of us were
following a narrow cement path into the cafeteria, carefully avoiding the wet
ground. My foot slipped into a big puddle beside the path. Now our anxious
little skirts and blouses were dotted with mud, and we had the whole school day
before us. In a way, the mud splash was a relief. It broke through the steel
trap of self- consciousness and put the edginess out in front us. The awful
moment brought us back to ourselves, to our reality as outsiders who belonged
only to each other. But I’m sure my sisters didn’t feel that way, and I didn’t
either at the time. I wince over it now, how that mud made them feel. We
couldn’t even try to be cute or blend in. We crept through the day trying to
hide the mud and ourselves from the silver disdain in other girls’ eyes.
Puberty
and adolescent social life presented the same traumas girls everywhere endured.
Without a neighborhood or a set of old friends we could take for granted, the
physical developments compounded the feeling of alienation. The bumps, the hairs,
and bleeding were signs of my strangeness—to myself now as well as in the mirrors
of other kids’ faces. There was something sinful about these things. Their
origins lay in my secret, devil-inspired thoughts. Self-consciousness got
louder. At the same time, the acquaintances that passed for friends on the post
got more serious: talk went to the bodily changes and boys. A feeling of closeness
might develop. When the time came to move, those girls receded in the back
window of our station wagon. The connection would be lost. At the next place,
first day of school: isolation all over again.
Behind
the social fears and disconnections lurked this monster feeling that
large-scale disaster was waiting to happen. I don’t mean the prospect of
nuclear holocaust caused the social anxieties. The niggling apprehensions about
what other kids thought had their own origins and didn’t need a global horror
show to keep them going. It was more like when you looked up from one panic and
saw this heavier, darker dread looming on the horizon, the sense that all was
not well deepened and hardened. There was one option: you could look way up,
past the world before you to visions of Mary and Christ. Interestingly, that
could help with bomb terror, but it wasn’t so effective against social alarm.
In
spite of all the trouble it brought us, the moving gave my sisters and me the
chance to see and feel, if not exactly know, places that would’ve been out of
reach if our father had kept on as a salesman for National Cash Register and
Purina Feed in South Orange, New Jersey. We lived in the North East and the
Deep South, in Miami, California, and Germany. Each new place refreshed our
disconnectedness, but it also had its intrigue—even Alabama. The spookiness of
the South brought out not just timidity but adventurousness. California showed
us there was beauty in the world. It was worth seeing even if it didn’t belong to
us, even if we had to leave it behind. If Europe brought on a deeper
alienation, it also made us feel more American than we ever had. Talk about
adventure, Europe was this in spades. And through it all, my sisters and I
shared not just anguish but amazement at so much that was constantly new.
Strangers
to everybody else, the four of us became each other’s most important company.
We were our best friends and most aggravating intimates. The twins, Nancy and
Lizzie, were the oldest. Four minutes apart, and fraternal (the kind of twins
who don’t look alike), they were simultaneously very close and very different
from each other. Nancy came first, and she was always our leader. Her sandy
colored hair was lit by a brilliant streak of blonde across the front—the kind
of thing women pay serious money for at the hairdressers’. It was like an
advertisement for the lightening in her character—the smarts, the fun, the energy.
Lizzie was dark haired, shy, soft spoken. Her bangs protected her brow and eyes
from too much direct contact with the rushing world. Photos show them holding
hands, ready for school, Lizzie’s smile show- ing her sweetness and reserve,
Nancy’s aimed at the plans she’s cooking up for the moment the camera turns elsewhere.
Sarah
was the baby. Because she was a plump infant, the unfortunate nickname “Pudgy”
followed her through girlhood. We stopped calling her that as she grew into a
svelte, elegant woman. The littlest, Sarah got lots of pinching and cooing from
everybody. She and I were a pair, the “little ones,” while Nancy and Lizzie
were always “the twins.” They had a room, we had a room; they had bunk beds, we
had bunk beds. For how many years, Sarah was either above or below me, tossing
around in the narrow space our bed took in the narrow bedroom of our quarters?
As we grew older, the twins and I punched through one wall of generational
difference with my parents after another, leaving the openings a little easier
for Sarah to come through. Sharply perceptive even as a teenager, she saw the
elementary struggles under way that she wouldn’t have to face. Amazingly for
one so young, she acknowledged our fumbling efforts, worried about what marks
they left.
It
took a long time to get to the point of resisting Jack and Frannie’s authority.
In the teen years, when most people our age were breaking away from their
parents, creating their own worlds, we still spent many evenings and weekends
with ours. They were in our bones. If moving made friendships hard to fasten, the
tight family culture kept us isolated too. It made us less available to others.
We didn’t know how to manage the different expectations that came with
friendships—the easy, fluent movements, the sharing, the airy feeling of not
having to be together.
As
they were for many other military kids of our generation, friend- ships were
also hobbled by the blazing reality of social class in Army society. Subtle
differences in rank counted for a lot in our eyes. My parents would gloss them
over, claiming it was character, intelligence, and whether a person was
interesting that mattered, not their rank. But my sisters and I felt the
differences sharply. Most Army kids did. We knew the ranking system too well;
and could be rigid, mean, short sighted in our class prejudices. Our fathers’
ranks were the first marks of our own identities in the small, intricately
woven post societies. An officer framed himself and his family in the straight,
elegant lines of a portrait, with depth and shading for romantic appeal. Enlisted
men, from our point of view, were formless people who maintained the facilities,
whose families lived in smaller houses, whose kids dressed in bad taste.
When
I was in second grade, Jack transferred from the Marines, where he’d had the
rank of major, to the Army, where he was made a chief warrant officer. A CWO is
an officer, but it’s an odd rank occupied largely by aviators and military
police—professionals in particular, technical fields. It’s rather obscure in
the Army hierarchy, and I felt more than a little anxious about it. Such a
ratty feeling is hard to admit, but it was the source of deep sensitivity.
People who didn’t know would ask if a CWO was some non-officer rating, and I
was quick to clear them up. It was crucial to see and represent myself as an
officer’s child; otherwise my family would flounder on the margins of
acceptability. The fear was real whenever rank came up, and it came up often.
In
addition to the murky status within military society and the alienation that came
with the shifting series of schools, I felt tertiary inside the immediate
family. I was in the middle, without a clear corner in the family structure; my
sisters, including baby Sarah, seemed more significant and clearly placed
within the household and more confident than my declining self. On the edges of
family life, I was suspicious of myself. The stern eye of Cold War Catholicism
was well internalized. I wanted to be honest, disciplined, saintly, but that
eye always picked out the deceit and the indulgence. Being alone so much wasn’t
an effect of our migratory life: I was selfish, willfully isolated. Fractured
in myself, with- drawn inside the family, intimidated by kids on and off the
post, I was nowhere and nobody in particular. It took decades of weaving in and
out of situations and identities to give up the dream of finding bottom and
seeing I had a presence anyway.
The
1960s brought dramatic changes in the culture of the Cold War. The conflict in
Vietnam mushroomed from an unknown mission to a full-scale colonial war, and
the international student antiwar movements grew alongside it. 1968 was a
pinnacle year for the resistance, with massive demonstrations everywhere. Not
unlike the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Your City movement that began in 2011, the
indignation spread throughout the United States and Europe. The issues were different:
in 1968 the anger of students and labor was directed at elected rulers and
their corporate funders; in 2011 the unelected, financial elite incited wrath
across class and generational divides. But the methods are often parallel:
groups in distant cities bolster each other; and the Situationists
International, an anarchist collective made famous by Guy Debord and the
Society of the Spectacle, gets cited as an important model.
One
of the most widely remembered demonstrations that spring took place in Paris. I
was attending the American College there, a small liberal arts school on the
banks of the Seine. This had been my choice among the colleges my parents had
made available to me, most of them in Europe. Jack and Frannie were hoping to
shield me from the fray and the hoo-rah, as Jack called it, on campuses all over
the United States.
In
April 1968 French students began demonstrating against the educational policies
of the de Gaulle government. Not long before the marches started, a group of
draft resisters from Madison, Wisconsin, had come to Paris. My roommates and I
befriended them. A few came to stay in our apartment. Things began to change.
A
dream image came to me one night while I was writing this: a girl, good, well
behaved, standing on the curved earth. She crosses her arms over her chest,
levitates, and starts to spin. Like a tornado, she picks up speed, whirls so
fast she becomes a blur. The spinning slows, and she is transformed to a black
haired punk rocker, a serious, dark person. The punker mode is out of time, but
the idea’s clear. This is what happened to me in the Paris days. I spun out of
the cocoon my parents, the church, the Army, patriotic America, and I myself
had spun around me.
That
spring my father was in Saigon, flying Huey Cobras—the helicopters he helped
arm—and cargo planes into combat areas near the North Vietnamese border. The
draft resisters in Paris meanwhile were setting up a union to protest that war.
I was one of their supporters. I stopped going to classes. My mother called me
home to Heidelberg and panicked when I left again. Dad came back to Europe on
emergency leave and took the first train to Paris. Turning up in the city by
surprise, he shocked me, rattling memories of who I was supposed to be. There
he was one day, with his long-distance, aviator’s stare, his war-exhausted
body, dressed up in a suit and tie. The sight of him was terrifying, and I went
back to Heidelberg without a fight. For the rest of that month, we avoided each
other as much as possible, exchanging fire only in the accidental gaze. He was,
in my perception, not just the father who had always been distant and
frightening but the uniformed image of the “system,” with all its violent
powers. His glare and his angry questions made it clear that I stood in his
eyes for all the leftists he despised. He insisted the Paris students, and
myself among them, were allied in sympathy with the manipulative Soviets. One
afternoon I spun on him, flipped too much attitude, and it all blew up. When he
went back to Saigon, peace returned to the household; but when his tour was
over, we still weren’t speaking. The strain between us lasted for decades.
By
the mid-1970s when the United States finally gave up in Vietnam, the common
fears of the Cold War had to a great extent subsided. Fifteen years later, with
the break-up of the Berlin Wall, those fears started to look like symptoms of
another time and another reality. Documentaries of the Cold War in print and
film appeared. Among the many frameworks they offered for understanding the
social psychology of the postwar period, the idea of a complex of mass
pathologies gained a lot of ground. My family had been sorely infected by the
national illness, and we did our part to help the U.S. military spread it
around the world.
Jack
retired from the Army in 1978. In the novel situation of a steady life in one
place, he went through some of the most important transformations he’d ever
experienced. It was hard for him to stay put, and he was bored. Anger and
discontent hung on him like a bad odor. He worked through it, wrestling hard
with the monsters in his past and a few that clung to the present. Eventually
he found honor in ordinary home life. He learned to trust people with different
political views from his own. To my great joy, we became very close, and by the
time he died in December 1993, the weight of our difficult past was more of an
anchor attaching us than an obstruction keeping us apart.
In
May of 2001, almost eight years after Dad passed away, Frannie died. She hadn’t
taken much to the role of widow. Frannie had made a real go of it on her own.
For a while she worked. She liked being out, part of the public, engaging with
people. The seaport gallery, where she presided over the reception desk,
specialized in two kinds of art: maritime adventure scenes that recalled the
ideals of military heroism; and images of a picket-fenced domesticity—tidy
houses and gardens nestled by the shore—that Frannie had dreamt about for
years. In her late fifties she had finally gotten a house like this, but the
image still played in her head, still an object of desire. From the desk by the
door, her inner eye traveled back and forth between these two kinds of
pictures.
Like
my dad, Frannie had softened in her later years. The fierce military mother who
kept her chin up and shoulders back in the middle of adversity, expecting the
same of us, wasn’t so necessary after Dad retired. The edgy warrior’s wife, so
sharp during our girlhood, faded like the old uniforms hanging in the attic. A
different kind of toughness emerged in her. Bent first on staking out a place
for herself in the work world, Frannie later, without Dad, girded herself up
for sheer survival. This was never a matter of physical care-taking but of
determination— to save money, to keep her house, to do what she wanted. To the
end, she remained a devotee of cigarettes, whiskey, and meat, never seeing any
problem in this diet. At the same time, an appreciation of the beautiful that
went back to her girlhood took on weight and depth in Frannie’s mental life.
She had always seen to it that there were good books on the shelves—Twain,
Shakespeare, Yeats, Conrad—and classical music on the record player. In the
later days she bought beautiful paintings, not the dramatic or sentimental
scenes in the gallery where she worked, which were after all quite expensive,
but smaller, more subtle ones she could afford. In her last years, the walls of
the house in Noank were covered with artwork. She put all her money into it, as
if this would be a more stable investment than stocks or money markets.
With
her gone, I thought I’d lost my first model of womanhood, a strange mixture of
Heddy Lamar, Olive Oil, and Pamela Livingstone (the bird-watcher of “The Bob
Cummings Show”). But Frannie is still around, ready to step in and speak, handy
with a posture or an inspiration that somebody else in my head might be happy
to recognize; or might prefer weren’t there.
A
certain heroic glamour like that of the flyers in Top
Gun cuts
in and out of the images in my head of Jack’s life as a military pilot. My
mother liked to cultivate pictures like that, of energetic, talented young men,
when she talked to friends and especially to her siblings about Dad and his
various aviation brotherhoods. In Frannie’s visions they were gentlemen indeed.
Their specialness for her was founded on a kind of gracious morality she saw
anchoring all their behavior, even the drinking and gambling. She passed these
pictures along to my sisters and me. Eventually we would see and hear things
that weren’t in these portraits—anger and exhaustion in Dad’s face, criticism
of their bosses which made the pilots’ world seem more complex. By the time we
went off to college, a lot of the glamour had drained away from Frannie’s
shining images of Hollywood aviators.
I
look at Army
Wives,
the TV series that started airing in 2007, and see little that’s familiar. The
wives of officers and enlisted men regard each other with a fondness and
familiarity I don’t recognize. Psychological problems produced in hazardous
duty are dealt with by kind, competent therapists. Thoughtful mothers and
fathers are quick to identify the disorientations their children endure with
parent’s deployment, with the moves. Tony Richardson’s 1994 film Blue
Sky,
on the other hand, gives a disturbingly familiar picture of Frannie’s own
domain during those years. The quarters the family inhabits at Fort Maxwell,
Alabama—the square, cement surface, the carport, and crab grass lawn—bring back
memories of places where we actually lived with haunting clarity. They looked
temporary, and not just because we knew our time in any one of them would be
limited. It was the thinness of the walls, the absence of real foundations. The
military houses we occupied always looked like they’d been put up a few months
before and would last another couple of years. They felt exposed and
vulnerable, like they’d be the first destroyed in the next natural, much less
nuclear, disaster. In retrospect, I see an emotional vacancy in these
landscapes. At the time, they were just the raw settings of newness. Life there
would be a track of blunt surprises; and then it would disappear. A next place
would open up. There would be trees, boulevards, customs we’d never seen
before, people we didn’t know. So we could make ourselves up again, over and over,
finding temporary voices for the temporary sites.
Looking
at those flat-roofed houses and tiny carports with storage sheds (like the one we
had on Red Cloud Road at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where my dad’s cache of
home-made beer blew up one sullen summer afternoon) from the vantage point of
the present, they seem terrifying. Now I’m older than Carly, Jessica Lange’s
character in Blue
Sky,
and I would be as depressed and horrified as she is at the prospect of living
there. For a grown woman, it would have promised not the next adventure, but a
dull, soundless world without depth or height. An empty shell of a house where
she was responsible for making a home. That’s what Frannie faced, again and
again.
Carly,
of course, reminds me of my mother. The similarities aren’t in the elaborate
sexiness or the well-tended beauty, but the exaggerated
performances
of herself as a character. Frannie spoke loud, laughed hard, moved in long
strides and reaches. She was bossy with everybody, even people she had just
met. In subtle ways, like Carly, she flirted with my father’s friends. It was
all part of an ongoing performance. She watched herself from the front row of a
theatre in her head as she played the part of a spirited, intelligent woman who
was married to an accomplished and worldly flyer. Who was the person watching?
Was it the Frannie who looked out from school pictures, the shy, handsome Walsh
girl whose father and mother had had so much trouble? Was it a woman bored with
the shabby banality of domestic life in the military, like Carly Marshall? Or
who, along with Carly, made up for the lacks by alternating indignation with
visions of herself as a character in a dashing, romantic world, full of bravery
and excitement.
Frannie
was practiced at revising the raw data of her life, as Carly is, especially in
the aftermath of her father’s scandalous abandonment of his wife and children.
He was an alcoholic who ruined his own and their lives, but she always talked
about him as if he were the most elegant, gifted gentleman she had ever known,
as if he were for her the standard of masculine grace. He may, indeed, have
been all this; but there were dark, cavernous places in that story where Mom
never went, at least not in our hearing.
My
mother also shared with Carly Marshall an explosive anger at the abusive
arrangements the Army imposed on us. She argued with my father about the orders
that came down from on high, as if he’d issued them himself. While the moving
was in full tidal shift, Frannie fiercely resisted what she understood to be
the common profile of the officer’s wife, the mild manners, pleasant
resignation, the hopelessly faint shad- ow of her husband’s career. She refused
to spend time with the Offi- cers’ Wives clubs, choosing instead one or two
select friends, not necessarily from the military community. She bonded with
them in reading, walking, and thoughtful conversation, ignoring the female hierarchy
that paralleled the military’s.
I
remember Frannie generalizing on several occasions about women being “tough”
and not nearly so “nice” as men. She was talking about the bourgeois bitchiness
of military wives—the competitive housekeeping, the sidelong glances at each
other’s clothes and hair. Men, she claimed, were more honest and
straightforward. What you saw was
what
you got. It was a haughty and unjust portrait—a cartoon that allowed her to see
herself as different, more intelligent and cultivated.
She
was forthright, opinionated, funny, anything but shy. So when we saw her from
our beds passing down the hallway on Dad’s arm heading out to a party in a
black cocktail dress, red lipstick, pearls and gold bracelets, her black hair
in a pageboy and smelling of Joy perfume, we could easily imagine her at the
party, armed in this Vogue
style,
severe in its simplicity. She would move through the room, claiming people,
overtaking conversations, placing herself and my tall, handsome father in his
dress blues at the center of the buzz and the chatter.
For
all her indignation, Frannie, like Carly and a lot of women of her generation,
was enchanted by men in uniform. The Army identity had a powerful charm for
her, beyond the stability and security it meant. This was the domain of
heroism, of sacrifice for the country, of princely masculinity. But her pride
in military life stood right beside her disdain for the service and for the men
who maintained it. She once confided to me that in the aftermath of the Korean
War, when all the husbands and brothers came home, it wasn’t considered “nice”
for them to stay in the service. A man of any substance, got out, got a job,
left the military to memories and stories. “Everybody would be trying to find a
job for you; they thought you were having a hard time” she said eagerly, as if
taking that point of view. This, of course, meant Dad’s entire career had been
déclassé.
Frannie
passed away before the twin towers came down. I’m grateful she didn’t have to
see that. The sight of the airplanes crashing into the skyscrapers, demolishing
a skyline we assumed so profoundly, would’ve been obscene to her. All the
fortitude in the world wouldn’t have helped her take in the dreadful facts of
that day. On the other hand, I’d have liked to hear her take on it. I try to
imagine this but come up with nothing.
The
“war on terror” that followed 9/11 had many things in common with the Cold War
my family knew. The element of surprise, the clan- destine nature of the
enemy’s work, the call to be on watch, these things the two “wars” have in
common. And our own nervousness about national security wouldn’t have made her
any more anxious than the nuke fears so familiar in her time. The Patriot Bill,
introduced during the George W. Bush years, outlined a program of clandestine
watchfulness not unlike the covert informing that went on during McCarthy’s
hey-
day.
Efforts at phone tapping and the surveillance of private correspondence that we
learned about in the aftermath of 9/11 were familiar to citizens of early Cold
War America.
Talk
of the war on terror, amplified so much during the Bush years, has given a kind
of after-life to Cold War paradigms. Andrew Bacevich, author of The
New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War,
tells us they never really disappeared. No sooner had the Ber- lin Wall come
down, Bacevich points out, when, in 1990, the United States invaded Kuwait and
pushed the Iraqis back across the border. Behind this first Gulf War, Bacevich
finds a military hierarchy and a cadre of old cold warriors directing the show.
The conflict worked for them, he writes, as a demonstration to the American
public that the defense budget couldn’t be cut back without leaving the country
vul- nerable and unprepared to defend U.S. interests elsewhere.
When
he points to the Cold War as the model that ended up being adapted for the new
world order, Bacevich emphasizes the structure of absolute opposition and the
need for budgeting not only a standing military but a continuous state of war.
And you only have to look at the cabinet George W. Bush chose to run his
administration to see how much he dedicated his presidency to pursuit of a Cold
War on new terms. How many people in his White House were there too during the
Reagan and George H. W. Bush years? Dick Cheney, Richard Perl, Paul Wolfowitz,
Donald Rumsfeld were all in Washington during the 1980s and the early 1990s,
pushing for U.S. global hegemony. When the younger Bush brought them back on
stage, they were ready. In the intervening years, they’d put their heads
together to influence Defense Planning Policy statements, making them echo the
language of Truman’s NSC 68, composed in 1950. NSC 68 charted the global order
as a contest of moralities, with the U.S. purpose in absolute conflict with the
USSR’s designs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the others must have had NSC 68 in mind
as a template when they charted the need, in 1992, for the United States to
enjoy unchallenged military and economic hegemony throughout the world. Their
imperial vision, challenged by many voices in the middle of the political
spectrum as well as on the left, upheld the conservative, hawkish side of the
culture wars that had begun in the 1960s and remain with us to this day.
But
sharp differences stand between the tensions of the Cold War and those of the
post-millennium period. The profile of the unnerving other has little in common
with the twentieth-century communist. The ideas the Soviets brandished had to
do with economy and the distribution of wealth, however close or distant they
came to Marx’s actual program. Radical terrorism in the twenty-first century
generally faces the world with a religious drive—the kind of thing Marx
dismissed as a drug, the opiate of the masses. And the horrors—images of
beheadings, a medieval disregard for women’s lives—are shocking, blood curdling
beside the banal representations of communism in decades past. The shooting of
Nan Perry and Alec Leamus at the Berlin Wall in The Spy Who Came in
from the Cold is
less terrifying for many of us than the image in The Kite Runner of a
burka-clad woman screaming as she is lifted from the back of a Toyota to be
stoned.
At
home, the contrasts with the Cold War are undeniable too. The probing of
private communications after 9/11 was hotly contested as soon as it surfaced in
2002. To raise your voice in defense of the Holly- wood Ten or the college
professors accused of sympathizing with the enemy at mid-century was dangerous.
McCarthy, of course, was eventually brought down and the scandals of his
witch-hunts exposed, but while his investigations and those of the House
Un-American Activities Committee were in full swing, to object was to risk
being brought in yourself.
Frannie
and her generation worried in the 1950s about the next- doors and people in
office coming under the influence of communism. In the 1960s she was wary of
strangers enticing her college-age daughters to identify with socialist
ideology. Middle-class Americans now don’t generally fear our neighbors or our
own grown children might be drawn to terrorism. During the George W. Bush
years, our expectations of a strike faded and grew as the color warnings moved
up and down the intensity scale. The better part of a year often intervened
between orange moments. The fears of Frannie’s young adulthood, by contrast,
made a steady background hum. The Russian threat made for a continuous,
mid-conscious dread lurking behind the optimism of the American 1950s. And that
threat provided an easy explanation to her and to Jack for all the political
uproar of the counterculture during the 1960s: the Russians were seeding it,
encouraging it, waiting for the results.
I
started writing this book twenty years after the Cold War ended. The memories
and feelings about our family life recorded here are very much my own. I can
deliver the dates and places of our story as we all knew them. But as close as
my sisters and I are, we have separate visions of what it all meant and
certainly of how it felt. I don’t presume to speak for them or for our many
cousins who turn up in the chapters that follow.
That
winter when the idea came to me, I was running a seminar on literature and film
of the Cold War at Muhlenberg College. Bringing memories into the classroom of
my Catholic, military girlhood, I thought, might offer illuminating counterpoints
to the fiction we were reading and the more abstract historical and political
facts of Cold War history. The students seemed willing to listen, even rather
interested. They started soliciting stories of Cold War days from their mothers
and fathers. These home memories became part of the class discussions and made
for some vivid course papers. Through it all, I kept thinking about what had
happened in the Lawlor-Walsh family during those years and about my own
formation as a daughter of the Cold War. Soon the thinking became writing.
Several
years earlier I had asked my mother to tell me her stories of those days. At
the time, I wasn’t planning to write anything. I simply wanted a record.
Frannie’s stories—no doubt elaborated for effect— filled in many of the gaps in
my own. I’ve tried here to stick to the facts she gave me and at the same time
make clear where I’m not sure to believe her. Frannie’s embroidery as a
storyteller is all of a piece with the difficulty of actually knowing things in
our household; and very much a part of the story too.
My
father, on the other hand, kept his memories in careful, edited ways. There
were things he wasn’t supposed to tell and I suppose never did. As I figured
out many years ago, he also upheld the practice common among men of his
generation of keeping more grisly episodes from girls’ ears. But he was always
telling us stories of his boyhood in South Orange, his first days at sea,
learning to fly. I’m grateful to my grandmother for keeping Jack’s letters, which
helped me immensely in putting together a narrative of his early life. My
sister Nancy held onto them after Frannie died; but before writing this book, I
had never seen these letters. Reading them for the first time, I was
overwhelmed by the youthful energy coming off his pages. In addition to vivid
scenes of daily life at the Merchant Marine Academy and flight school, they
offer striking glimpses of his character as a young man.
My
parents’ recollections run through this book, parallel and in marked contrast
to each other. For myself, the process of remembering has brought up fears,
hopes, fantasies that still thrive. They aren’t so much the stuff of the past
I’d thought they were. My old diaries and journals and the books of photographs
my mother carefully put together during the 1960s and 1970s brought back the
sights, sounds, and moods of those years in a flood of unsorted emotions.
I
remember my parents in a palimpsest of images. In their youth, they were a big,
glamorous pair, well dressed and full of an almost uncontrolled energy. In
their forties, they seem lined and angry, tense, even sullen. They don’t stand
beside each other so easily. They’re not really a couple anymore. Then they are
old, retired, living by the sea. Frannie exchanges her long dark pageboy for a
shorter cut that hides the gray better. She has a home that’s hers for good. My
sisters and I don’t live with them anymore, and when we visit, it’s like a
return to some ancient order of seeing and believing. It’s also great fun, not
like it used to be. Frannie still embarrasses us with her exuberance and her
life-long inclination to drop hints about our social status (as if it weren’t
impossibly nebulous). At the grocery store, she tells the checkout clerk how
much better butter was “when we lived in Europe.” She is also as funny and eccentric
as ever. Visiting Hawk Mountain with us during the fall raptor migration, she
walks past the park guard shack, smoking— the only one for miles, it seems,
with a cigarette—and complaining in her loud, alto voice, “I don’t even like
hawks. They kill small birds.” At the corn maze, hunched over a smoke, she
interrogates the kids as they come out. “So how was it?” Like the maze was some
sort of existential test.
Jack,
in the meantime, grows dark and troubled in retirement. The trouble reaches a
climax, and he has to deal with it. There is too much drinking; too much time
spent looking at maps and remembering. He’s a little thicker now. He climbs out
of it with the help of AA. He softens. He becomes a grandfather in fact and
figure. We get close, and I know he loves me. He has a small-scale stroke one
night, and the result is the loss of vision in one eye. He begins to wear an
eye patch, which makes him look like a pirate to the little kids that now come
with us to the house. He likes this and begins to play on his old roles as a
dangerous man, exploiting them for maximum performance effect. I love him
dearly.
The
feelings pile up with these images. They’re confusing and contradictory. I am
utterly different from Frannie and Jack, or I want to be; I am totally
identified with them and can’t help it. They are the most meaningful people in
my life; the most distant and irrelevant. They were hard on us; they were
affectionate, playful, attentive parents. My father’s fury and my mother’s edgy
hauteur ran absolutely opposite to the silly, even foolish, behaviors they were
capable of. Jack and Frannie—the syllables have an almost cute rhythm, and I am
not supposed to call them that. They were anything but cute, even in clowning
mode. They were cultured, literary, intelligent. And they were shortsighted,
easily frightened ideologues. I do not know them. I know them too well. I love
them, I hate them.
In
the process of writing, I’ve come to see that through the years, I’ve not only
maintained what many people would consider a critical reaction to the
overwhelming climate of fear we lived in during the Cold War. I’ve also been
dodging acknowledgment of something else: the attractions to the mysteries and
the depths, to the sense that there were things people weren’t telling you,
that you might get lost in a funhouse of the wrong ideology if you flirted with
communism in any form. The military itself, held together with a rationalism
that bordered on mysticism, was part of this strange attraction. I wince at
what I know to be fascination with the mystifications, the secrets glistening
like the polished edges of coal in the periphery of our vision. Someday I may
write about the pathology of these attractions. For now, my hope is that the
pictures of military domestic life here will resonate with people born in the
Cold War decades before 1980. And that in my story they will recognize those
familiarly strange times—not just the fears but the dark enchantments that kept
us down, ducking and covering, for more than forty years.
