“It won’t be pleasant,” I warned him.
“As a young boy, I sometimes held the hand of my teacher, Miss Imogene Blackthorn, whom you may remember. Although she turned out to be a eugenics enthusiast and generally nasty piece of work, I somehow survived. You flatter yourself to think you could be even five percent as repulsive as she was.”
“Miss Blackthorn was not a star of the Museum of the Strange. For you, dear brother, I’ll deep-six the wordfreak. But we can’t ignore the fact that for many years I was boldly billed as a ‘human oddity,’ and no one ever accused Captain of false advertising.”
I took off my glove and counted on the low light of the moon to minimize the visual impact if not the tactile shock. He took my hand once more and held it for a moment and said, “Well, thus far I have survived.”
We sat there for more than another hour, each of us with much to say before Franklin and Loretta drove him to the induction center in the morning. Sometimes, depending on the subject of discussion, we held each other tighter than at other times, but not once did he recoil from my touch. When the time came for him to go to his room and pack what little he was permitted to take to the training center in San Diego, he kissed my hand and released it.
As I worked my fingers into the glove, Harry said, “You are in fact a human oddity, sis, but for one reason only. You’re far more human and humane than ninety-five percent of the species.”
I slept that night, but restlessly. In the morning, Harry had left for the induction center in Los Angeles.
Forty-One
In those early months of the wars—one in the far Pacific, the other in Europe—every day was so busy even for civilians committed to the cause that there was little time to dwell on fear of defeat. And though we slept well through the first half of the night, worry often troubled our sleep during the second half.
Our Harry came home from basic training on Saturday, April 4, the day before Easter. Of the sixty recruits in his platoon, he had excelled above all others. His physical fitness score was 290 out of a possible 300, best in his series—a series being four platoons undergoing identical training at the same time. On the rifle range, he held the series record at 234. On his first try, he had qualified as an S-3 swimmer. His special drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Detwiler, designated our Harry as the honorman “for his outstanding leadership qualities and overall performance” and awarded him a meritorious promotion to Pfc. His achievements were recognized on graduation, when he was the only recruit in his platoon presented with the Dress Blue uniform. Others had the option of buying one like it later. S/Sgt Detwiler suggested to Harry that, under these circumstances, returning home to his family to await orders was an occasion for which Dress Blues were appropriate.
After coming north by train, Harry took a cab from the Los Angeles terminal. All of us at the Bram, family and the extended family that was the staff, gathered in the portico to welcome him home. He presented such a picture when he stepped out of the taxi with his seabag that, to a one, we were briefly left speechless by his transformation. He wore the high-necked navy-blue jacket with red piping and brass buttons, sky-blue trousers with a red stripe down each leg, and spit-polished black shoes. His white barracks cap with navy-blue bill featured a brass quatrefoil, and though the face below it was recognizably Harry’s, his features were chiseled as never before. I thought no one in the wide world had a brother handsomer than mine. We grievously wrinkled that fabulous uniform by the time we had all hugged him sufficiently.
He dressed in a civilian suit for church on Easter Sunday. The service, as all of them had been since December 7, was more solemn than those we were accustomed to before the war. However, by the time we returned home, we were determined to embrace a spirit of celebration not just because He was risen, but also because Harry was home and because we knew he would not be home for long.
Just four days later, April 9, seventy-six thousand exhausted American troops on the Bataan Peninsula, on the primary island of the Philippines, were forced to surrender to the Japanese. Grim news. Already the singular brutality of Hirohito’s army was well known. Much later we would learn that, during the 65-mile forced march to a Japanese prison camp, ten thousand of our troops were bayoneted, shot, or beheaded. Thousands more died of dehydration, starvation, and other preventable causes. World War I, the “war to end all wars,” taught only one lesson to despots—victory required greater savagery than any known before in history.
Harry had been home just two weeks when he received his orders to report to naval operations on Coronado Island, in San Diego Bay. His ultimate destination was not revealed in the notice, and when eventuallyhe would learn it, military rules of secrecy forbade him from telling us. He promised to write frequently, and we promised to send him packages of Chef Lattuada’s best cookies whenever we knew where he was stationed and that he would be there long enough to receive them. Although I’d had some experience of the pain of separation when he went off to basic training, I was not prepared for the terrible anguish of this more solemn goodbye.
Faithful to his word, Harry wrote often during the year and a half that followed, several times during each of two R&R leaves in Australia. His letters consisted of only observations he made about nature and people, never about combat, which we took to mean that he must be seeing a lot of action. He wrote about fellow Marines with whom he served and had become fast friends, using only their first names. Now and then, a letter had a melancholy quality for a paragraph, but mostly he seemed to be in good spirits, and always he sought to give us a few laughs in each missive.
The war in the Pacific had gone badly in the beginning but gradually began to turn around, starting with the Battle of Midway in June of ’42, though there were still setbacks from time to time. On the home front, we were so busy with war-related work piled atop the conduct of our personal lives that I found less time to devote to this memoir. My habit had been to write as if keeping a diary and then to edit it twice a year to carve away the mundane material. Our family life was filled with interesting and amusing developments even during the months that Harry wasn’t with us, more amusing as America and her allies made steady progress in battle and the cloud of totalitarianism began to lift. I had no chance to edit those pages in ’42 or ’43; they just kept piling up.
Then came Tarawa. Tarawa was an atoll of small, strategically important islands that lay like a necklace around a lagoon that was the sunken crater of a long-extinct volcano. Betio was the largest island, thoughonly a half mile wide and three miles long. Twenty-six hundred Japanese manned heavily fortified, often concealed concrete pillboxes that were thought to have been largely destroyed after three days of bombardment. When the first wave of LVTs—amphibious, tracked landing vehicles known as “amtracs,” each carrying twenty-four Marines—entered the lagoon with the intent to capture Betio, they encountered fierce artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire that they had not expected. Although many Marines lost their lives in that initial assault, the 500-yard-long pier was secured. The subsequent waves of LCVPs, which had a deeper draft than the LVTs, made it into the lagoon but got caught on the coral reef several hundred yards from shore and could not advance. The Marines aboard had no choice but to jump into the waist-deep water and wade to shore through a storm of automatic weapons fire. More than five hundred died in the surf.
The battle for Betio and the Tarawa atoll began on November 20, 1943, and ended late on November 22. Second Lieutenant Harold Fairchild did not die in a landing craft. He did not die in the bloody surf. He reached the beach with 70 percent of the men who served with and under him, some of those about whom he had written in his letters. From pillbox to pillbox, they moved along the strand and near twilight rejoined their commanding officer, Colonel David Shoup, who, in spite of a grievous leg wound, led others of the Second Marines to take the pier and move inland. Harry died late the next day, November 21. Nine hundred and eighty-four Marines were killed in action, and more than two thousand were wounded.
The chaos of war and the staggering number of deaths in this world war in particular made accounting for casualties a difficult task for the military, and the notification of the family was often delayed for weeks. The bodies of some of the heroic men who perished at Tarawa were claimed by changing tides and carried out to sea; the deep waters became their grave. Proof of death wasn’t always easy to come by. Noone in authority wanted to rush to inform a family that a loved one perished, only to discover the man said to be deceased was aboard a ship in transit to his next game of tag with Death.
Thanksgiving that year was on November 25, four days after our Harry moved on from this world, but we did not know we had reason to grieve. As always, the family and the staff prepared and ate dinner together on that special day. Among those in the large and festive gathering, the topic of conversation was frequently Harry. Indeed, Gertie and Izzy and I each read aloud an amusing paragraph from one of his recent letters. Prayer at table included the usual thanks for the food before us, for the good fortune granted us, for the love and friendship that we shared. As we joined hands with those sitting beside us, Franklin concluded with an invocation for Harry’s safety and for his return before another Thanksgiving was upon us. During those war years, worry was such a constant that sometimes it could wear out; for a short while the heart would not countenance anything but hope, as on that Thursday, November 25, 1943—Thanksgiving.
We learned of Harry’s passing twenty-three days after the fact, on December 14, as the war in the Pacific grew ever more fierce. The special nature of the messenger who brought the news and what else he had to say made the announcement both more devastating and more bearable. A telephone call preceded his arrival, and it came to the main house number, which Lynette Rollins answered. She knew what the visitor must have come to the Bram to report, yet she had the fortitude to gather everyone in the library without hinting at the reason either by her words or demeanor. I believe we all knew but were in denial, each of us concocting a reason of his or her own for the gathering, to delay even the consideration of the truth.
When, last of all, Lynette brought Major Talbot Collings into the library, we could no longer doubt that the worst was to be laid before us. He wore Dress Blues. Judging by the battle streamers, the unit citationribbons, and the commendation medals that were worn on the left breast of his jacket, he had been in combat often and served with such distinction that it was a rare honor for a Marine of his caliber to be the one to perform this service to the family. We held up better than I expected. We had no choice. Harry did not shrink from duty, even kept a sense of humor when he wrote us from between his experiences of hell on Earth, and we could not dishonor him with a public collapse of our own courage. Major Collings came with a letter from Colonel David Monroe Shoup, under whom Harry had served through four campaigns. As he read it to us, most of us were weak in the legs, but none of us sat down. In that crisp, direct, unsentimental, and yet somehow deeply moving prose with which the best military leaders speak of the valor of their comrades, Colonel Shoup praised Harry for his intrepid actions, valiant achievements, and selfless devotion to duty and to his fellow Marines. Such was the gallantry of Second Lieutenant Harold Percy Fairchild that the lives of many others were saved by his sacrifice of his own life, extraordinary bravery that the colonel witnessed. Consequently, he was recommending that our Harry receive the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor for valor in combat.
Lynette had been wise to ensure that the news was delivered to us as a group, for we are a species that has more fortitude in the company of friends than we have alone. If Major Collings had told Franklin and Loretta in private, it would have fallen to them to tell Izzy, Gertie, and me. Receiving such terrible news is hard, though being the bearer of it, loved one to loved one, is harder still, for one has to suppress one’s own grief to deliver such information with compassion. I would never have had the resolution to be the first to say to anyone,Harry is dead.
The days—weeks—of mourning that followed are fixed as vividly in memory as the books I’ve read and everything I have experienced in my strange yet blessed life. I am not able to escape the perfectrecollection of them, but I won’t write about any of that at this time or possibly ever. Grief can never be adequately described, and every effort to do so diminishes it. The best of novelists tell us that grief will in time subside from painful, excruciating anguish to enduring sorrow that takes a more modest toll of the heart. As I write this, a month after Major Talbot Collings delivered the news and the colonel’s letter, grief is anchored in me, and mere sorrow is not in sight.
The expectation of receiving Harry’s body, even in a closed coffin that would remain closed, was anticipated by all of us with both dread and longing. Most bodies of men who die in war are left in circumstances that make retrieval impossible or require burial in foreign graves, some well memorialized and others anonymous. We were given to understand that our Harry’s body—along with those of certain others—was in transit and soon would be in our care. This, too, was not to occur. The transport conveying him was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the near Pacific. Remains are not the person, only the flesh he wore when among us. Nonetheless, some comfort can be had by visiting the plot where a carved stone marks the resting place of cherished bones. Perhaps that is because many of us believe that one day, when reality as we know it rolls up like a scroll and a new reality is unfurled, body and soul will be sewn together again, as if the threads between them were never broken.
With no reason for a funeral and interment, we held a small memorial service. Gertie wrote and delivered the eulogy. Izzy sang so beautifully. I found the courage to say a few words, which I took from “The Marines’ Hymn” while changing just two pronouns. “In many a strife they fought for life / And never lost their nerve / If the Army and the Navy / Ever look on Heaven’s scenes / They will find the streets are guarded / By United States Marines.”
In the days that followed, whether still in grief or moving toward sorrow, we got on with our lives. Such is the world.
Forty-Two
Throughout January and February of 1944, Gertie worked harder than ever, at last focusing on a piece she expected to be of novel length when completed late that year. As I suspect might be true of many novelists, writing was her consolation. She found much solace in eight- and ten-hour sessions at the typewriter. Often when she gave me pages for comment, she would say, “I think I would have gotten a good laugh out of Harry with that paragraph,” or “Harry probably would have teased me about that metaphor, but I think he would have come around to liking it.” I approved of nearly all she did; she was maturing as a writer faster than I would have thought possible.
On the night of March 2, a Thursday, I was sitting in bed, reading one of Gertie’s chapters that sparkled even as it darkled, when Rafael padded into the room. He stood staring at me with that expression that I took to mean,Am I welcome? If I’m not welcome, I’ll be devastated. Am I welcome? Whaddaya say?I patted the bed, and he sprang onto it as if he were only seven in human years. He stretched out beside me, his head raised on a pillow so he could watch me, and he thumped his tail against the mattress half a dozen times to let me know he was happy just to be there and snooze. If he had wanted to cuddle, he would havesignaled his desire by lying on his back, baring his tummy, and letting his forepaws go limp. He was sixteen, old for a shepherd, but still spry, free of all illnesses and infirmities since that day in 1934 when he was poisoned. Now and then over the years, I’d given some thought to his health and vigor, but I always decided the explanation which occurred to me couldn’t be proven and that I was too full of myself just for considering it. Perhaps ten minutes after Rafael put his big head on the pillow, he thumped his tail again, thrice this time, and let out the longest canine sigh I’d ever heard. When I looked at him, his eyes were closed. When the sigh concluded, he was still; his mouth remained open. I held a hand before his nose, but he expelled no breath.
