C Hribal - The Company Car

“What?” our father asked our mother. “What’s all over? What?”

Between bouts of weeping our mother sobbed, “E-e-e-e-e-ver-ry-y-y-y-thing!”

When confronted with female weeping, men generally are at a loss. The most they can do is offer perplexed comfort, stroking hair and shoulders, kissing foreheads, whispering, “There, there” and “It’s all right,” as though they know what the matter is when frequently it is their not knowing, their absolute ignorance, and/or their inability to intuit or ferret out what’s wrong that is the problem’s root. Our father was a prince in the principality of not knowing.

Another truism: Men like facts; women prefer feelings. Men like facts so much they are comforted by them even when the facts are against them. “Just give me the facts,” men say. “Give it to me straight, I can handle it.” Men like facts so much that what most people would consider opinion men turn into facts: “These are the cold hard facts,” a man will say, when what he’s just voiced is his own dubious view of a situation open to any number of interpretations. Women do the same thing, but there’s no alchemy involved: “That’s just how I feel, ” a woman says, and the wall she puts up with her feelings is as solid and unscalable as anything a man puts together with his Erector set of facts. What women do that men don’t is allow their feelings to change. Facts, being hard, impenetrable objects, do not change. A man will not allow that to happen. A wall of feeling, on the other hand, can be disassembled. Our father, therefore, wanted to know what the facts were, at least as they pertained to him. He stayed away from what he couldn’t know, couldn’t intuit, and for him the facts were these:

For most of the past four years he had been serving his country. For the second time, the second war. The first one he had lied his way into. Well, not exactly lied. He’d joined the Coast Guard at seventeen; his mother had signed for him. She thought he’d guard the Chicago River or something. Early in the war she’d seen Coast Guard boats slip upriver. She’d thought he’d do that. Pilot a patrol boat upriver and be home each evening for dinner. She wasn’t far off. But when the war ended his ship was designated a troop transport—all over the globe troops were waiting to come home. So off he went through the Suez Canal to Egypt, to the Philippines, to India, to Japan, and back home by way of Hawaii. He made several of these trips before he was mustered out and met our mother. He stayed in the reserves, though, and when Korea heated up he received his commission. But spent only part of his hitch in Korea. He was called up while the French were losing their taste for colonialism, and as they were pulling out of French Indochina (now emerging as the politically schizophrenic Vietnam), his ship was assigned the task of evacuating citizens from North to South, and vice versa. Years later, as our own country became mired in that debacle, and sentiment for and against the war was waged in the streets and in newspapers and on television sets, our father always nailed shut his end of the argument by saying, “Look, bucko, I was there. In ’fifty-four and ’fifty-five, when the French were pulling out.”

He also suffered a double ulcer and got shipped stateside for treatment. Like many of the boats in the “mothball fleet”—ships used in World War II that were put back in service first for Korea and later for Vietnam—his was understaffed, and the junior grade officers picked up the slack. Our father was in charge of a landing boat, a gunnery crew, served as the ship’s decoder, the morale officer, and a medic, his time usually spent giving penicillin shots to men returning from leave—the men having found their own means of raising their morale. One of his men had had his morale raised so high he went AWOL and got courtmartialed. Fallen in love, the man said. Love, said our father. Right. To make sure the man remembered his indiscretion, our father dropped the syringe needle point first on the table—plonk! plonk! plonk!—before giving him his shot. Then our father got him off on a technicality. That kept the man from being dishonorably discharged, but afterward our father was continually passed over for promotion. The Navy, like an elephant, never forgets. The accumulated stress, coupled with the ingestion of quarts and quarts of black coffee, ate not one but two holes in his stomach, and since his being shipped stateside coincided with the end of his four-year hitch, he decided it was time to become a civilian again, start being a daddy to his two kids, and start being a husband to his wife.

His wife, who had done what exactly during these past four years while he was serving his country? He didn’t know. He had ensconced her before he shipped out in a one-bedroom ranch linked by a shaded walkway to the larger Mission-style ranch in front of it. The owner, an elderly woman named Mrs. Mapole, had lost a son early in the Second World War. She and her husband, a machinist from Chicago, had moved out here after the war and had hoped her son’s wife would move into the guesthouse, but the daughter-in-law had stayed among her own people. Mr. Mapole had suffered a stroke and was rarely seen. Our parents’ rent helped cover expenses. Our father thought Mrs. Mapole could help with the babies and provide company for our mother, and vice versa.

It was a fine philosophy when prescribed for other people. For our mother it was a death sentence. She liked the house with its sweeping lawn and its views (it was set on a hill above San Diego Bay, and the street, gracious and old, was lined with palms)—she could see the ships enter and leave the harbor, and watch the planes take off from the Naval Air Station at Coronado across the bay—but she would have been happier being right on base with the other wives.

That’s about all we know of our mother’s story from that time. Our father talks of his war years constantly, and we have his ship’s yearbooks, which chronicle his travels, but we know next to nothing from our mother’s perspective. I’m thinking of this as I hand another little stack of photos over to Dorie: our mother sitting on the big expanse of lawn with first one child and then two, our mother and Nomi, our mother’s mother, holding Sarah, who’s trying to walk while clutching Nomi’s and our mother’s index fingers in her chubby little fists.

Dorie flips through them, saying, “You know what these remind me of? The aftermath of that famous photograph by Elliott Erwitt. You know the one I’m talking about? It’s called California Kiss or something, and it’s like from the mid-fifties and it’s in black and white and what you see is just part of the flank of one of those rounded fifties-bodied cars, the kind with the round rearview mirror, you know, that perfect circle, and there’s a couple kissing with the woman’s head thrown back, and her mouth’s open and her eyes are on the sky, and her husband or whoever she’s with is mooching her neck, and in the background is the sun setting over the ocean and all you see in that moment are possibility and romance. It’s like they’re so into the moment they don’t have a clue what’s coming down the pike at them, and even if you told them, right at that moment it wouldn’t matter anyway. They wouldn’t believe you.”

I nod like I understand—and I do—but Dorie catches the consternation on my face.

“What, Ace, you don’t believe me? You didn’t like what I said, what?”

What bothers me is the offhand way Dorie said, “and her husband or whoever she’s with.” That’s what bugs me, but I can’t say that. I wonder about the way women can hold things in about themselves, can lead two lives, a hidden one and the one everyone can see, and the only clues to the hidden life are when something bubbles, however obliquely, to the surface. It’s popular to ascribe this dual life to men, but being married to Dorie, I know better. But because she’s so good at living this dual life with equanimity, I doubt I’ll ever know what’s going on in the life she’s kept hidden from me. All I can do is wonder, just as I wonder now why our mother, in driving back to Chicago, would burst into spontaneous weeping soon after the border guard let her and her contraband fruit out of California.