The Snug: A Blog

We don’t remember days. We remember moments.

                                             Cesare Pavese

     Two years ago, when I was trying to sell property in France, the French authorities, in their inscrutable Chinese way (not for nothing is the French ruling elite called Les Mandarins), instructed me to furnish them with the address of my parents’ first conjugal domicile, or the sale, for unspecified reasons, was off. As it happened, I was wading through piles of old family documents at the time and actually had at hand said address (which of course I would have otherwise unhesitatingly made up): 12 Dove Court, Wilmington, was where my Mum and Dad first dwelt as man and wife in the years immediately subsequent to the Second World War: 1945 to 1948, years rendered falsely glowing to me by a surfeit of Hollywood, everything from (of course) It’s a Wonderful Life to The Best Years of Our Lives, with a soundtrack of Bing Crosby and Irving Berlin. Still, these years had their romance, even then. Back in’44, Dad was a Sergeant in the Signal Corps of the National Guard’s 29^th Infantry Division, which—and I knew this from The Longest Day—was the first unit to hit Omaha Beach on June 6th (and they were commanded by Robert Mitchum in the film). According to the alternative histories which Dad later offered me, on the morning of June 6th, 1944, he was a) dining at Simpson’s on the Strand with his British intelligence counterparts; b) recuperating from double pneumonia in an American Army hospital somewhere in that same ancestral Northern Ireland I was fated to live in and leave, thirty years later; or c) already back in the U.S. and paying for his booze, his wide ‘40s ties, his cocked fedora, and the two-pack-a-day cigarette habit that was later not to kill him, by buying and selling radio stations with other people’s money. That he was, in fact, on Omaha Beach on the morning of the 6th, and was wounded and later invalided out, is borne out by the decorations still adorning his faded uniform, which hangs in a place of honor in a family closet. Such decorations were not handed out to shirkers or absentees.

    So the rest was all blarney; an unlikely hero at best, and an individualist to his dying breath, he’d just really rather not have been there, because everybody else was. Furthermore, according to him, he hardly needed to re-hit old Normandy beach on 6/6/44. Sure, hadn’t he already dropped by on a recon mission with Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery on a moonless night a month or so before D-Day? Wait till I tell you (as he used to say): Seems that Ike wanted to show Monty the probable invasion point. Dad, being a dab hand with maps and radio communications, was ordered to go along; so the three amigos, plus crew, checked out Hermann the German’s defenses together, Dad taking notes and fiddling with radio knobs and keeping the other two lads civil with anecdotes and jokes, told of course sotto voce given the circumstances. This memorable vignette was one of his favorite recollections, salvaged from the bottom of many a can of Olde English malt liquor over his many declining years; and I will say that in all the times I heard him tell the tale in varying states of sobriety, I never heard him alter the slightest detail. The dramatis personae never varied: Dad, unnamed harbor pilots and/or steersmen, Ike, and Monty. Monty was always a “Limey prick” (in actuality, an Ulster Protestant: far more prickish, some might say), and Ike “very polite, very refined, a real gentleman.” He never felt the need to throw in Churchill and FDR for variety’s sake; it was always a moonless night, “right off Omaha”; and he never mentioned inky darkness, Morse signals, flares, or muffled oars. Strongly in his favor is the fact that he never read enough bad fiction (or history, so often indistinguishable), or indeed fiction of any kind, to become acquainted with those clichés; truth to tell, Dad didn’t read much of anything, bar radio trade journals and car magazines and the occasional Time.

     So the ill-matched couple eloped, mostly because of how Dad looked in his uniform; and their first home after the war was Dove Court, just off Delaware Avenue in the heart of the Delawarean metropolis, a small red-brick apartment building with a pleasant courtyard. I was taken there, later, as to a historic monument, by my mother, who, given subsequent developments and her firmly no-nonsense character, must have been marveling at her earlier wildness, at the ill-fated merger between the well-brought-up lace-curtain girl and the lean and sardonic would-be adventurer from the wrong side of … not the tracks, but Wilmington’s invisible divide between the haves, west of Adams Street (now I-95 cutting directly through my grandparents’ plush Victorian parlor that hovers ghostily above the roaring traffic and can still be vaguely discerned on cold, moonlit nights, I like to imagine, floating in the air like the Loreto house above the southbound lanes), and the have-nots, or have-lesses, east thereof. There tended to be a distinction in religious affiliation, as in the old country, west of Adams being the realm of the Big House, mostly snob-Prod, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, many of them ex-Catholic converts like the ex-McRorys. Eastward, in the boglands of the Second and Third Wards off French Street, lurked the unreconstructed papists, the Boylans and Tribianis and other Domkowskis, micks and wops and polacks united in their (then) un-American Popishness. Westward ho! was their credo, and not a few ended up in the desirable First Ward through hard work, judicious groveling, marriage, and/or religious conversion. Dad was certainly guilty of the first three but never of the fourth: he never converted, religion not being much of an issue with him one way or another, except late at night when he’d had a few and grew, in his tiresomely clichéd Irish way, sentimental and scared of the dark and desirous of seeing some old Papist lares and penites glowing here and there to light his stumbling way. With my mother’s lot the church’s prime function was social, and her parents were the same way, adorning themselves in their severe Sunday best every Sunday morning and with shining morning faces lining up in the pews of the local Episcopal Church to hear of their probable fates in the hereafter: blessed and bland, with guaranteed passes to the country club in the sky if they behaved themselves; decidedly dodgy if they didn’t (demons, pitchforks, dark-skinned immigrants, etc.). No fear: They behaved themselves, hewing closely to their newfound Protestant traditions of sobriety and repression. Only Mum was the wild one—wildish, really, context being everything. Not content with eloping with a husband of inferior social rank, she became a journalist with the Journal Every Evening and covered, of all things, sports, her coup de maitre being an interview with the Italian heavyweight champion boxer Primo Carnera, who was kind and slow-witted and, judging by the old photo clip yellowing in a family album, towered over tiny Mum during their interview like a redwood over a fern. She became a local celebrity, the “sportswriting gal.” Then, in 1947, fed up with Wilmington’s airless respectability, she exceeded her earlier follies by moving to the sunny south long before retirement age–or rather, my dad, who had taken the helm of a South Florida radio station (exactly what he did there I never found out) moved there first and she followed.