The Office of Historical Corrections(23)

For years they lived together in the imaginary places, a world you could only be kept from by enchantment, but as soon as she was old enough, my mother left and kept going too, left that house and let the business of loving the man who raised her be confined to telephone calls from faraway places. It was a decision that probably saved her life, and one for which she never forgave herself. I didn’t—and still don’t—dare compare the terms of my life to my mother’s, the stakes of my choices to hers, but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself. Or maybe I understood it even then but couldn’t have told you how.



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Here is what you have to understand about Charlie Sullivan: his life at home as a child was bad enough that joining the army at the tail end of World War I seemed like a safer and more cheerful alternative. At fifteen he falsified his birth certificate and enlisted. A captain decided he was too scrawny to be sent overseas. Instead, he was stationed as a border guard, where he spent his days looking backward toward California because his orders were to shoot anyone coming from Mexico, and he figured he couldn’t shoot anyone if he didn’t see them. They’d given him a gun that didn’t work right anyway; it stuck sometimes when he tried to fire, which at first struck him as fortuitous. When it occurred to him that it might also be dangerous, he complained to a commanding officer, who told him if he wanted a real gun, he’d have to be a real soldier.

Stop complaining, they said, and so he did, until the night he was cleaning his gun and it fired accidentally, putting the same bullet through his best friend and an officer who’d been standing in the doorway. It had happened that quickly, the blast of the gun catching his friend in midlaugh, then silencing the commanding officer’s scream. The first men to arrive at the scene had found Charlie sobbing over the body of his best friend, a nineteen-year-old kid from Jersey who wanted to be an architect. It wasn’t until the base commander showed up that anyone even suggested he’d done it on purpose, but as soon as he did, Charlie was led off in handcuffs, and the previous reports of his gun malfunctioning vanished. They sent him to Alcatraz where he was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad. They dragged him out of the basement for his execution twice, only to find it had been stalled. His appointed lawyer, an old army man who thought he’d seen enough evil to know what it wasn’t, wouldn’t retire until he got Charlie Sullivan out of prison. He managed to get sworn statements about my great-grandfather’s faulty gun, his temperament and friendship with the deceased, the medical report that concluded one bullet had killed both men. It was enough to get him pardoned, though he was still dishonorably discharged. The army would admit only to procedural error.

When my mother left, he was alone with his ghosts. He didn’t have my mother’s patience for strategic approaches, didn’t go through all the proper channels. He called and wrote letters to the Pentagon, trying to get his dishonorable discharge changed to an honorable one, trying to get the veterans’ benefits he’d been demanding for forty years, trying to get a person instead of letterhead to answer him. He wrote to whom it may concern, but it concerned no one. When at last he got a personal response, a We are very sorry but no, from a Maj. Johnson somewhere, he dressed himself in a uniform he’d bought from an army surplus store, stood in the living room, and shot himself in the head.

My mother was a junior in college then, already engaged to my father. She spent money they had saved for her wedding to have him buried properly. It was nothing glitzy, no velvet and mahogany, but there was a coffin and a church service. My mother and a sprinkling of neighbors came to pay their last respects. Nancy’s father was shamed into his Sunday best. He brought his children, including Nancy, but not his wife. They sat on the opposite side of a half-empty church. They didn’t speak.



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When I am angry at my mother sometimes, I tell myself this story. If you really want to know what the six of us were doing on a boat to Alcatraz, here is what you need to understand about me: at eighteen I’d joined a college literary club, whereupon we came up with the brilliant idea of tattooing ourselves with quotations from our favorite authors. Mine says The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. Growing up I watched my mother’s every strategic move with some mixture of awe and resentment. I watched her stand up to lawyers who were better dressed and better paid, to imposing men in uniform, to friends who begged her to let the whole thing go already. I wondered sometimes where she got the strength for battle after battle, but more often than not she answered my question for me. After setbacks it was my comfort she sought, my hand she held, and for every word of encouragement I gave her I found myself swallowing the bitter declaration that I had never signed up for any of this—not the paperwork, not the support, not the faith in the ultimate benevolence of the universe that she seemed to take for granted that I shared with her. And yet, faith like that is contagious: I greeted her plans to spend the money she thought was coming to us by donating a bench in her grandfather’s name to the city park with the wary reminder that we had no money coming to us yet; still I pictured him smiling down at us as we sat on it, the first generation in the family to achieve some semblance of peace. I rolled my eyes at my mother’s occasional fantasy of being sought out by her missing cousins, but I memorized their names in case I ever ran into them, regularly looked over my shoulder and peered into the faces of strangers to see if I could map out any family resemblance.