Our big finale was a number called “No Time for Coffee!” about how important it was at the Navy Yard to keep on schedule at all costs. The song contained the ever-so-catchy line: “Even if we had coffee, we wouldn’t have had the milk! / War rations made coffee just as valuable as silk!” (I don’t like to boast, but I did write that snazzy bit of brilliance all by myself—so move over, Cole Porter.)
Then we killed Hitler, and the show was over, and everyone was happy.
As we were packing up our cast and our props into the school bus we had borrowed for the day, a uniformed patrolman approached me.
“May I have a word with you, ma’am?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry we’re parked here but it will just be a moment.”
“Could you step away from the vehicle, please?”
He looked terribly serious, and now I was concerned. What had we done wrong? Should we not have set up a stage? I’d assumed there were permits for all this.
I followed him over to his patrol car, where he leaned against the door and fixed me with a grave stare.
“I heard you speaking earlier,” he said. “Did I hear you correctly when you said your name is Vivian Morris?” His accent identified him as pure Brooklyn. He could have been born right on this very spot of dirt, by the sound of that voice.
“That’s right, sir.”
“You said your brother was killed in the war?”
“That’s correct.”
The patrolman took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. His hands were trembling. I wondered if perhaps he was a veteran himself. He was the right age for it. Sometimes they were shaky like this. I studied him more closely. He was a tall man in his middle forties. Painfully thin. Olive skin and large, dark-brown eyes—further darkened by the circles beneath them and by the lines of worry above. Then I saw what looked like burn scars, running up the right side of his neck. Ropes of scars, twisted in red, pink, and yellowish flesh. Now I knew he was a veteran. I had a feeling I was about to hear a war story, and that it would be a tough one.
But then he shocked me.
“Your brother was Walter Morris, wasn’t he?” he asked.
Now I was the one who felt shaky. My knees almost went out of business. I had not mentioned Walter by name during my speech.
Before I could speak, the patrolman said, “I knew your brother, ma’am. I served with him on the Franklin.”
I put my hand over my mouth to stop the involuntary little sob that had risen in my throat.
“You knew Walter?” Despite my effort to control my voice, the words came out choked. “You were there?”
I didn’t elaborate upon my question, but clearly he knew what I meant. I was asking him: You were there on March 19, 1945? You were there when a kamikaze pilot crashed right through the flight deck of the USS Franklin, detonating the fuel storages, igniting the onboard aircraft, and turning the ship itself into a bomb? You were there when my brother and over eight hundred other men died? You were there, when my brother was buried at sea?
He nodded several times—a nervous, jerky bobbing of the head.
Yes. He was there.
I told my eyes not to glance again at the burn marks on this man’s neck.
My eyes glanced there anyhow, goddamn it.
I looked away. Now I didn’t know where to look.
Seeing me so uncomfortable, the man himself became only more nervous. His face looked almost panic-stricken. He seemed legitimately distraught. He was either terrified of upsetting me, or he was reliving his own nightmare. Maybe both. Witnessing this, I gathered my senses about me, took a deep breath, and set myself to the task of trying to put this poor man at ease. What was my pain, after all, compared to what he had lived through?
“Thank you for telling me,” I said, in a slightly more steady voice. “I’m sorry for my reaction. It’s just a shock to hear my brother’s name after all these years. But it’s an honor to meet you.”
I put my hand on his arm, to give him a little squeeze of gratitude. He cringed as though I had attacked him. I pulled back my hand, but slowly. He reminded me of the sort of horses my mother was always good with—the jumpy ones, the agitated ones. The timorous and troubled ones that nobody but