Chapter Ten: Hidden Cargo
Each marriage embarks with stowaways, and my grandparents' was no exception
Welcome to the next installment of musings on the women in my family. If you’re hopping in for the first time, start at the beginning by clicking here.
There are only so many nights you can spend sipping whiskey and listening to sad songs before your best friend intervenes. Or at least that’s true for Barbara. As far as Maureen’s concerned, when Bob was ordered to Fort Hood and didn’t take Barbara as his wife, Maureen was commissioned to find a better man for Babs. So she sets my grandmother up on a blind date with a longtime friend.
Enter John Patrick Hughes, dapper as hell, a heart-seeking missile. As an adult I saw this man enter Union Station in Kansas City on a winter night and I shit you not that it was like being on the set of Casablanca. He wore a trench coat and a fedora and he entered through a glass door with spirals of fog trailing him. My eyebrows rose involuntarily and I stood up taller even though he was in his 80s.
When Barbara and John met, he was in law school and was selling real estate on the side. He hardly studied for the bar exam and failed. But he wasn’t concerned because he loved money and was already making lots of it through his side gig. Unlike Bob he was a terrible dancer. Unlike Barbara’s first husband, Roger, he’d actually been in the theater of war as a Navy pilot. Unlike both of them he was flush with cash. In short, he was utterly different and that suited her rather well. And in fact she was shocked to discover that after Bob and Roger she could care passionately for a man like she did for him.
To be clear, Barbara wasn’t cheating on Bob. But when she talks to me about John I can hear a tinge of remorse even though she knows that Bob was far from celibate while out in Texas pulling teeth.
I imagine Barbara and John in her bed smoking and listening to Bing Crosby when “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” begins. Bing sings, ‘Haven’t felt like this, my dear, since I can’t remember when’ and she feels indicted by the lyrics, so she asks him to lean over and move the record needle to the next song. For a moment she dives deep within and wonders at her heart—what it’s seeking behind the faces and caresses, the chivalry and chauvinism of young men—but before her mind is allowed to return to that breakfast nook from her childhood, he’s extinguishing his cigarette and rising to answer the phone.
It’s a call from Fort Hood.
She wraps herself with a sheet and takes the receiver from him, and he returns to the bed for another smoke.
Say Babs, Bob says with a spike in his voice. Who was that?
The coal of John’s cigarette blazes as he watches her, squints.
Shocked, she bumbles, Well Bob! I…I’m surprised to hear from you, while she claws around in her mind for a believable story… That’s a friend of Maureen’s. We’re all about to go out for dinner. I was powdering my nose when you called.
Oh, he concedes. Well, I need to speak with you tonight. When’ll you be alone?
A clutch of winged beasts hatches in her belly and the four-paned, gray view outside her window is no longer parallel with the floor. She tries to steady herself and bleats out, Is everything alright?
He chuckles, then says cryptically, Yeah, it is. There’s a long pause on his end of the line and she can’t take her eyes off of John’s cigarette which she now imagines is being pressed into her chest cavity and she can’t let go of the receiver which now feels like a lead weight in her hands and she wonders which of these pains will become unbearable first when he says, I’m being shipped to Alaska next week. I want you to come with me. As my wife.
She barely finds the ottoman as her knees give way. John stubs out his smoke, and she finds enough air in her lungs to say, I’ll call you in the morning, Bob.
Before she can put the receiver down he answers, Babs, it’s got to be now. Or never.
And she nods as if he’s in the room and hangs up the phone.
When she narrates this moment in her life it’s with penetrating detail. It’s a moment of anguish, but not the kind of anguish that makes a person repress the memory or keep it as a blunt object like she does the memory of her father abandoning his family at the breakfast nook. This memory is an alloy of a difficult decision and the fulfillment of her intense desire to be desired. Who wouldn’t treasure every detail of this moment after being abandoned by a father and cheated on by a husband? To have two men want her was an exquisite torture, the makings of a thing she’d pet in her mind over and over again even though it bit her finger each time.
Once, when my youngest daughter was three, my husband and I pretended to fight over her. She stood between us and we each grabbed one of her arms and pulled her to and fro playfully saying, No! I want her. I want her! When we stopped she sang, Eeny, meenie, miny, moe/catch a tiger by the toe and then she picked one of us. She wanted to play this game all the time. It was a ritual that made our want of her as concrete as it could be, and no matter who she chose, she would find herself in the lap of love.
Barbara only got one round of Eeny, meenie and she made the decision to go to Alaska with Bob. Seventy years later, she can still recall the sound of John’s footsteps on the terracotta tile outside her apartment after she phoned to say she’d be leaving in the morning. She let him in and he sits and watches her as she irons her clothes and packs. He is quiet, resigned to her decision but there all the same. A scorned lover with a menacing broken heart. I can’t help but believe they spent the night together one last time though she hasn’t said so.
Whatever the case, in the morning he drives her to the train station where she catches a ride to Burkburnett. He helps her into the railroad car and there on the platform, with a cloud in his eyes, he makes a stunning promise, I’ll wait for you.
***
It’s a simple ceremony in Burkburnett’s Methodist church followed by cake at Putt and Jingle’s home. And then they’re off to the stark, mythical stretch of land on Prince Williams Sound in the Gulf of Alaska. Bob has orders to ensure the dental health of 2,000 men and just a handful of officers’ wives at Camp Sullivan in Whittier.
I see her there at the dock in a heavy coat and pill-box hat. She’s wearing red lipstick and her cheeks are flushed and she’s cradled by the cerulean bay, blanketed by spruce forest. Glaciers jut out of the water like huge, frozen incisors. She hopes this displacement, this new home, will help erase John’s face, wash it away like the tide does a sand castle. Bob stands beside her nervous and proud and glad she’ll keep him warm at night.
When we talk she explains to me that Whittier was a port of debarkation. A ship would come in so loaded down with cargo that its deck was right at sea level. The stevedores would work through the day to unload it and then the boat would rise up high and show you how big it was. I can’t help but think of this symbolically, a perfect image for the hidden cargo my grandparents brought with them into their marriage. In her jacket, a lock of John’s hair. In his, a thin flask of whiskey and on his collar the scent of a woman he’d kissed before leaving Fort Hood.