“Always remember that about your grandfather,” he said. “He was really something once.”
One afternoon at McDonnell Douglas, the foreman called him to a phone. It was Billy’s wife. She told him in her precise English that his mother had just called with terrible news. His father was dead. Just like that. A heart attack. Billy began to sob, and the foreman put his arm on Billy’s shoulder and told him he’d better go home.
“He was only fifty-something years old.” Billy protested. “I loved him. He wasn’t just my father. He was a hero in Korea. A real-life hero.”
“Then bury him like he was a hero,” the foreman said. “He deserves it.”
All the way across the country, with his wife beside him in the plane, and the two boys in the row in front of them, Billy kept thinking about one thing: Arlington. He must bury his father in Arlington. There would be a flag on the coffin and a bugler playing taps and Paulie Fitzgerald would join the endless rows of white crosses that marked the presence of men who had fought and sometimes died for their country. Some of them might even have been with him that terrible night in Korea.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he told his mother, who just wanted her husband buried in St. John’s cemetery, close to home. “He’d want it that way, Mom.”
The undertaker told Billy what he had to do to get Paulie buried at Arlington. There was a number to call in Washington and he’d need discharge papers and his father’s service number and the name of the outfit in which he served. For a full day, Billy rummaged through his father’s papers and drawers, but could find nothing. Nothing, that is, except the ribbons and medals.
Finally, he called the number in Washington again, got a young clerk who called him sir, explained his problem, gave his father’s name and years of service and the part about the First Cavalry. The clerk said he would call back, and Billy returned to the business of the wake, the loss and grief of his mother and brothers, the sad admiration of his father’s friends. On the morning of the third day, the clerk called from Washington.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk said. “Our records show that nobody by that name served with the First Cav during the Korean conflict, sir.”
Billy insisted that there must be some mistake, and repeated his father’s name. He was told that a man by that name from Brooklyn, New York, had served in 1951 and 1952 on Guam, not in Korea. He gave Billy an address in Brooklyn; Billy’s heart split and flew away and then reassembled itself. The clerk had given his father’s old address, the house he’d shown him so many times on trips to the old neighborhood. Quietly, Billy thanked the young clerk and hung up.
“The poor man,” Billy said to himself. And then he slowly rose and went out to walk alone through the chilly afternoon. Everywhere he walked, he saw his father. He was throwing a football in Prospect Park in the fall, or hitting grounders to kids at Park Circle in the spring. He was standing outside Rattigan’s on a summer afternoon, talking with the other men, quiet and proud. He was marching with the veterans in the parade along the park side of the street, the medals like patches of color on his chest.
And in a grove deep in the park, Billy began to cry again. To cry for his father and the lifelong trap of the lie. He had no idea how the lie had started, and now, of course, it was too late to find out. But he cried for his father’s silence, his isolation, his inability ever to be plain Paulie Fitzgerald. And when he stopped crying, Billy thought that it had been a tough, hard life for his father, after he had shouldered the role, assumed it, and played it out for a lifetime, living every hour of his day with the knowledge that, at any moment, he could be found out. And in that moment, deep in the empty park, Billy Fitzgerald loved his father more than ever.
The next day, there was a Funeral Mass for Paulie Fitzgerald. The coffin was draped with an American flag and there was an honor guard from the American Legion. The organist played “America the Beautiful,” and Billy’s mother was comforted by her son’s decision to take the body to St. John’s after all. At the end of the Requiem Mass, Billy Fitzgerald, the bearer now and forever of his father’s terrible secret, placed his hands on the shoulders of his sons.
“Remember,” he said to them as the Mass ended. “Your grandfather was a hero of the war. A real American hero. Remember that. Don’t ever forget it.”
THE LITTLE GRAY-HAIRED MAN walked into Rattigan’s a few minutes before closing time and went straight to the bar. He was wearing a navy peacoat and faded jeans, and bounced when he walked. He was carrying a Pan Am flight bag. Jabbo Collins knew him right away.
“Harry Willis,” Jabbo whispered, reaching across the bar with both hands to grip the little man’s shoulders. “I don’t believe it.”
