Untitled; From AMONG THE MISSING...

In 1946 my mother and father sold the house in Hudson where we had lived for the past six of my eight years and we went on the road, south out of New England into some deep unknown country to follow Harry in his army postings. I'm not sure whether it was by choice, or whose choice it was. Perhaps my mother simply loved him. Or perhaps she thought it was better that her children have a father than a stable home. In my memories, he seemed mostly absent from our lives, so given the preference I might not have agreed. But nobody asked.

In my fervid imaginings the war had been a time and place of high drama and vicarious heroism. But I soon came to know that army life in peacetime, at least for the family of a private soldier, was dreary and rootless, a succession of rented spaces furnished with nothing more than the landlord's discards, a few kitchen utensils, and our warm bodies. We had a small, plastic radio on which, when the weather conditions were right, I could sometimes listen to Red Sox night games or my favorite serials in the dark when the squalid realities of our surroundings were invisible, my ear pressed against the speaker trying to hear through the fading and the static the exploits of Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, or "The Phantom," "The Green Hornet," or "The Lone Ranger..."

In the meantime, you had come back to Columbia Avenue from your war and settled once more in the childhood home and your old room. My attachment to all that, my grandparents, Fred and Lela, and even Olive my unfriendly aunt, and you my unmet hero had got more intense as we bounced from one strange landing to the next: from Philadelphia, to Baltimore, to Savage, Maryland; to Camp Picket, Virginia; to Ocean Park, New Jersey, with each new adaptive layer having to be peeled off and laid raw again in each new place. Whatever was left of my identity, formed in the habits and rituals of early childhood-- the walk along enervated Oak Avenue to the old brick elementary school looming over the corner, the drives across the bridge and through Nashua to my grandmother's cookies, and my grandfather's quietly amused responses to my endless questions-- reformed as a fierce and resentful nostalgia, and a numb hatred for each new place that was not home. And these feelings seemed to be all that I was anymore. I remember asking my parents once if I could go to church, and, if so, which church I should try. They shrugged, indifferent, against my thought that maybe in a church mandated to kindness, people might be nice to me. Perhaps with similar motives, from the estrangement of having been away for so long and then encapsuled in the war, you joined a bible reading group at your parents' Methodist Church.