The Hellfire Club(17)
“I was about to ask how it could be possible that my baby is officially an adult, but you still order like a nine-year-old,” Mary Marder teased.
“Martini for me, dry as a desert,” put in Winston. “I want to see tumbleweeds skimming across the meniscus. Oh, and get one for my boy too. Eighty-six his milk shake unless you plan on bringing it in a bottle with a nipple.”
Mary did her best to ignore her husband’s crudities, as did Charlie, who began to tell his parents about his upcoming exams while he and his father pretended they weren’t also listening to the football game blaring on the radio behind the bar. Mary had just asked Charlie about his plans, or lack thereof, after graduation in June when Winston shushed them so he could hear more of the important bulletin interrupting the game.
“Flash: Washington,” barked the broadcaster. “The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
As the waiter delivered the martinis, the restaurant fell into silence except for a man’s tinny, scratchy voice on the radio.
“Hello, NBC. Hello, NBC. This is KTU in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am speaking from the roof of the Advertiser Publishing Company Building. We have witnessed this morning the distant view of a brief full battle of Pearl Harbor and the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done.”
Gasps throughout the restaurant. Waiters stood frozen in place; diners stared at one another in disbelief.
“This battle has been going on for nearly three hours,” the man continued. “One of the bombs dropped within fifty feet of KTU tower. It is no joke. It is a real war.”
Mary Marder looked at her husband gravely and then at her son. Her eyes welled up and she reached across the table to grasp Charlie’s hand tightly. Winston pulled out his wallet and threw bills blindly on the table, then he pulled Mary to her feet and shepherded his reeling family outside.
In their brownstone on the Upper East Side, Winston, Mary, and Charlie spent the rest of that Sunday the same way millions of Americans did, huddled around their radio, terrified that Japanese planes would soon be attacking the U.S. mainland.
Charlie became filled with an emotion other than fear. He was furious. A sneak attack on Honolulu by the Japanese—he could think of nothing more cowardly.
The moment had been inevitable. Anyone with basic cognitive skills had been able to see for months that sooner or later the United States was going to have to make a choice about whether it was going to enter the war or allow the Fascists to seize Europe.
Charlie had long ago concluded that the United States needed to do the former. He had listened to all of Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts about the Nazi bombing of London the previous year, in September 1940. Since then, the Germans had started attacking American ships in the Atlantic Ocean; a U-boat had torpedoed the USS Kearny in October, killing eleven navy men. President Roosevelt had begun painting a dire picture of what the Western Hemisphere would look like under Nazi control; in a speech just a few weeks before Charlie’s birthday, the president had claimed that he’d obtained a secret map made by the Nazis showing how after they seized Europe, they intended to carve up Central and South America into five vassal states. Message: they’re headed to our hemisphere next.
Neither Charlie nor his parents were fans of FDR, but that speech had affected him. The president had acknowledged how difficult it was for Americans to grasp what the Nazis were doing, “to adjust ourselves to the shocking realities of a world in which the principles of common humanity and common decency are being mowed down by the firing squads of the Gestapo.” FDR added that some critics thought perhaps the American people had grown so “fat, and flabby, and lazy” they would be “now no match for the regimented masses who have been trained in the Spartan ways of ruthless brutality.” But nothing could be further from the truth, he’d said, as if anticipating the Pearl Harbor attack: “We Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations. We stand ready in the defense of our nation and the faith of our fathers to do what God has given us the power to see as our full duty.”
Our duty, Charlie recalled. And our homeland is now directly under attack.
His father was studying his face. “Don’t get any ideas, Charlie,” Winston said.
The news got worse throughout the day. Wave after wave of Japanese aircraft had killed at least four hundred Americans, though accurate numbers were difficult to come by; it was possible that thousands had been killed. The governor of Hawaii revealed that it hadn’t just been sailors killed; civilians in Honolulu had been slaughtered as well. Unconfirmed reports suggested that the U.S. battleships Oklahoma and West Virginia had been sunk, along with up to seven U.S. destroyers. More than three hundred American airplanes were believed to have been obliterated.
Later that night, after Mary had fallen asleep on the couch, Winston turned off the radio and guided his son into his study, where he poured eighteen-year-old scotch into two glasses. A single lamp illuminated the wood-paneled room, which was packed with books of law and history and held one small locked file cabinet where he kept papers too important to leave at his downtown office.
Winston eased his bulky frame into his favorite leather chair and motioned Charlie to the sofa. They sat silently for a few minutes, the only sound a muted tick from the nearby desk clock. Charlie looked at his dad, a big bear of a man whose hair was beginning to thin up top. Winston looked at his son, his only child, the person he knew best in the world.