right off him, right in front of me. We weren’t even under fire—just a routine day on the deck. Now we have a headless body on the deck, and you better hurry and clean it up, because more planes are coming in, landing every two minutes. You gotta keep the flight deck clear at all times. But I just freeze. Now here comes Tom Denno, and he grabs the body by its feet and drags it away—probably the way he used to drag pig carcasses back on the farm. He doesn’t even flinch, just knows what to do. Meanwhile, I can’t even move. And then Tom’s gotta come and pull me out of the way, too, so I won’t be the next one killed. Me—an officer! Him, an enlisted kid. This was a kid who’d never been to a dentist, Vivian. How the hell did he end up as a Manhattan lawyer?”
“Are you sure it was him that you saw today?” I asked.
“It was him. He knew me. He came over and talked to me. Vivian, he’s one of the 704 Club. Jesus Christ!” Frank threw me a tortured look.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said as gently as I could.
“The men who stayed on the Franklin when we were hit that day— there were seven hundred and four of them. Captain Gehres named those guys the 704 Club. He built them up as heroes. Hell, maybe they were heroes. The Heroic Living, Gehres called them. The ones who didn’t desert the ship. They get together every year and have reunions. Relive the glories.”
“You didn’t desert the ship, Frank. Even the Navy knew that. You were blown overboard in flames.”
“Vivian, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was already a coward long before that.”
The panic had drained from his voice. Now he spoke with dreadful calm.
“No, you weren’t,” I said.
“It’s not an argument, Vivian. I was. We’d been under fire already for months before that day. I couldn’t handle it. I could never handle it. Guam in July of forty-four—bombing the hell out of Guam. I couldn’t imagine how there was even a single blade of grass left standing on that island when we were done with it, we rained such hell on that place. But when our troops landed at the end of July, out come all these Japanese soldiers and tanks. How did they even survive it? I
can’t imagine. Our marines were brave, the Japanese soldiers were brave, but I wasn’t brave. I couldn’t bear the noise of the guns, Vivian— and they weren’t even being fired at me. That’s when I started being like this. The nerves, the shakes. The men started calling me Twitchy.”
“Shame on them,” I said.
“They were right, though. I was a pile of nerves. One day, we had a bomb fail to release from one of our planes—a hundred-pound bomb, just got jammed in the open bomb bay. The pilot radios in that he’s got a bomb stuck in the bay, and he has to land like that, can you imagine? Then, during the landing, the bomb kind of shudders lose and falls out, and now we have a hundred-pound bomb skittering across the flight deck. Your brother and some other guys just ran right at it and pushed that thing over the edge of the ship like it’s nothing—and again, I’m frozen. Can’t help, can’t act, can’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t matter, Frank.” But again, it was like he couldn’t hear me.
“Then it’s August 1944,” he went on. “We’re in the middle of a typhoon, but we’re still running sorties, landing planes even while the waves are breaking over the flight deck. And those pilots, landing on a postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific, in the teeth of the gale— they never even flinch. Here I am, my hands can’t stop shaking, and I’m not even piloting the goddamn planes, Vivian. They called our convoy ‘Murderers’ Row.’ We were supposed to be the toughest guys around. But I wasn’t tough.”
“Frank,” I said, “it’s all right.”
“Then the Japanese start suicide-bombing us in October. They know they’re gonna lose the war, so they decide to go down in glory. Take out as many of us as they can, by any means necessary. They just kept coming at us, Vivian. One day in October, there were fifty of them that came at us. Fifty kamikaze planes in one day. Can you imagine it?”
“No,” I said, “I cannot.”
“Our guys knocked them out of the air, one after another, but they sent more planes the next day. I knew it was just a matter of time before one of them would hit us. Everyone knew we were sitting ducks, not more than fifty miles off the coast of Japan, but our guys were so cavalier about it. Strutting around like it was nothing. And there was Tokyo Rose on the radio every night, telling the world that the
Franklin was already sunk. That’s when I stopped sleeping. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Terrified, every minute. I’ve never slept right since then. Some of those kamikaze pilots, when they got shot down, we fished them out of the water as prisoners. One of those Japanese pilots, he was being marched across our flight deck to the brig, but then he broke away and ran right to the edge of the ship. Jumped off and killed himself, rather than be taken prisoner. Death with honor, right in front of me. I looked at his face as he was running to the edge, Vivian—and I swear to God, he didn’t look anything near as scared as I felt.”
I could feel Frank spinning back into the past now, hard and fast, and it wasn’t good. I needed to bring him back home—back to himself. Back to now.
“What happened today, Frank?” I asked. “What happened with Tom Denno in that courtroom today?”
Frank exhaled, but gripped the steering wheel even harder.
“He comes up to me, Vivian, right before I’m supposed to testify. Remembers me by name. Asks how I’m doing. Tells me about how he’s a lawyer now, where he lives on the Upper West Side, where he went to college, where his kids go to school. Gave me a speech about how well he’s done. He was one of the skeleton crew that sailed the Franklin back to the Brooklyn Navy Yard after the attack, you know, and I guess he never left New York after that. Still has that accent from right off the farm, though. But wearing a suit that probably costs more than my house. Then he looks me up and down in my uniform, and says, ‘A beat cop? That’s what naval officers become these days?’ Christ, Vivian, what am I supposed to say? I just nod. Then he asks me, ‘Do they even let you carry a gun?’ And I say something stupid, like, ‘Yeah, but I’ve never used it,’ and he says, ‘Well, you always were a soft apple, Twitchy,’ and he walks away.”
“He can go straight to hell,” I said. I felt my own fists balling up. A wave of rage overcame me so fiercely that the noise of it in my ears—a roar of rushing blood—was, for a moment, louder than the roar of the plane landing in front of us. I wanted to hunt down Tom Denno and slit his neck. How dare he? I also wanted to gather up Frank in my arms and rock him and comfort him—but I couldn’t, because the war had bunged up his mind and his body so badly that he couldn’t even be held in the arms of a woman who loved him.
It was all so vicious and it was all so wrong.
I thought of how Frank had once told me that—when he came up in the water after being blown off the ship—he emerged into a world that was completely on fire. Even the seawater around him was on fire, blanketed with burning fuel. And the engines of the stricken aircraft carrier were only fanning the flames. Burning the men in the water even more severely. Frank found that if he splashed hard, he could push the fire away and create a small spot in the Pacific that was not on fire. So that’s what he did for two hours—him, with burns over most of his body—until he was rescued. He just kept pushing the flames away, trying to keep one small area of his world free from the inferno. All these years later, I felt like he was still trying to do that. Still trying to find a safe radius somewhere in the world. Someplace where he could stop burning.
“Tom Denno is right, Vivian,” he said. “I’ve always been a soft apple.”
I wanted so badly to comfort him, Angela, but how? Aside from my presence in the car that day—as somebody who would listen to his awful story—what could I give him? I wanted to tell him that he was heroic, strong, and brave, and that Tom Denno and the rest of the 704 Club were wrong. But I knew this wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t have been able to hear those words. He wouldn’t have believed them. I had to say something, though, because he was in such pain. I closed my eyes and begged my mind for something useful to offer. Then I opened my mouth and just spoke—blindly trusting that fate and love would grant me the right words.
“So what if it’s true?” I asked.
My voice came out harder than I’d expected. Frank turned to look at me in surprise.
“What if it’s true, Frank, that you’re a soft apple? What if it’s true, that you were never made for combat, and you couldn’t handle the war?”
“It is true.”
“Okay, then. Let’s agree that it’s true, just for the sake of argument. But what would that mean?”
He said nothing.
“What would it mean, Frank?” I demanded. “Answer me. And take your hands off the goddamn steering wheel. We’re not going anywhere.”
He took his hands off the wheel, set them gently in his lap, and stared down at them.
“What would it mean, Frank? If you were a soft apple. Tell me.”
“It would mean I’m a coward.”
“And what would that mean?” I demanded.
“It would mean I’m a failure as a man.” His voice was so quiet I could barely hear him.
“No, you’re wrong,” I said, and I had never been more fiercely sure of anything in my life. “You’re wrong, Frank. It would not mean that you’re a failure as a man. Do you want to know what it actually means? It means nothing.”
He blinked at me, confused. He’d never heard me speak as sharply as this.
“You listen to me, Frank Grecco,” I said. “If you’re a coward—and let’s just say that you are, for the sake of argument—it means nothing. My Aunt Peg, she’s an alcoholic. She can’t handle drinking. It ruins her life and turns her into a mess—and do you know what that means? It means nothing. Do you think it makes her a bad person, that she has no control over booze? A failure of a person? Of course not—it’s just the way she is. Alcoholism just happened to her, Frank. Things happen to people. We are the way we are—there’s nothing to be done for it. My Uncle Billy—he couldn’t keep a promise or stay faithful to a woman. It meant nothing. He was a wonderful person, Frank, and he was completely untrustworthy. It’s just how he was. It didn’t mean anything. We all still loved him.”
“But men are supposed to be brave,” said Frank.
“So what!” I nearly shouted it. “Women are supposed to be pure, and look at me. I’ve had sex with countless men, Frank—and do you know what it means about me? Nothing. It’s just how it is. You said it yourself, Frank—the world ain’t straight. That’s what you told me, our first night. Use your own words to understand your own life. The world ain’t straight. People have a certain nature, and that’s just how it goes. And things happen to people—things that are beyond their control.