Authors: John M. Del Vecchio
“Makes sense,” Bobby answered.
“A code,” Grandpa said. “You know. That way you’re not having to figure out everything from scratch. You plant in the spring, you reap in the fall. You know that. You don’t have to waste time or energy or seed experimenting.”
“Yes Sir.” Bobby teased the old man, teased him politely, lovingly, thinking he knew what his grandfather was doing, thinking that his grandfather didn’t need to do it for there was plenty of time and California wasn’t permanent, wasn’t a disease.
At lunch Grandpa gave Bobby a photograph of himself and Brigita taken on February 22, 1947, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. At dinner Grandpa produced a photo of himself and Bobby and Josh, which Red had taken in September. With the second photograph he gave him a simple list.
- Lead others through your service to them.
- You are special, your family is special, your country is special. You and they are something sacred, something to be honored.
- You are here for a reason.
- A man must be able to make money and be able to keep some of the money he makes. Take care of business first—plant before you play. You’re not finished until you’re finished. Unfinished business has a way of haunting you.
- Don’t get hooked on values that aren’t valuable.
Each day from the moment it was acknowledged Bobby would move, Pewel gave him something. At one dinner Pewel handed Bobby an envelope with one hundred twenty-dollar bills. “I can’t take this,” Bobby said.
“Yes you can,” Pewel countered.
“No Granpa. It’s not right.”
“It’s seed money,” Pewel said. “I can do it and I want to do it.”
“I can’t do it,” Bobby said. “If I ever need it, I’ll ask you for it. Okay?”
“There’s a card in there. It’s something I remember from my father. The words mighta changed but the meaning’s the same. He said it was the oldest prayer of the Old Testament. Maybe older than Judaism itself. Keep God in your life Bob. Someplace. Not necessarily like they teach at St. Ignatius’, but someplace.”
“I think He’s in the land,” Bobby said.
Pewel Wapinski nodded. Then quietly he said, “Dear Lord, please bless us and watch over us; deliver us from evil; forgive us our trespasses; and give us the strength and guts to try hard and never give up.” He paused again. “That’s for your sons.”
“Sons! Granpa, I don’t have—”
“That’s for your sons when you have sons.”
Every day Pewel Wapinski gave his grandson something more, and every evening Bobby Wapinski packed the items in his footlocker. Still what grandfather wished to give to grandson was not physical or financial but spiritual—words, ideas, ideals that to the old man were poignant. “Civilized people ... civilization, Bob, this is a gift of God or of circumstance, and of five hundred generations that have gone before us. You’ve got the ability to control, to some extent, today’s circumstances. That’s a responsibility. Try hard. Never give up!”
“Granpa, I never knew you were such a philosopher!”
Pewel chuckled. “Only on midwinter nights like this when there’s not so much to do around here.” The old man lay back in his overstuffed chair in the dimly lit, dingy living room. “Take these with you, Bob,” he said. He did not move. Inside, dimly, he was thinking about his daughter-in-law, thinking vaguely, She drove my son away and now she’s driving away my grandson.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“These words,” Pewel said. His eyes were closed. “Integrity. These words are principles. Virtue. Pride. Confidence. Responsibility. A man must live not by expedience, not by quick gratification, but by principles. Liberty. Independence. Freedom. Faith. Family. Courage.”
During the last week of January 1970, after having rebuilt the Mustang, Bobby sold his car to John Lutz for $900, not even the price of the parts. He finished packing his footlocker, sent it via Greyhound to the depot in San Martin where Red said she’d pick it up if it arrived before he did. He heard from Red one more time. She was taking a real estate license course at Academy Schools and already had a test date of Saturday, February 14th, Valentine’s Day.
On January 27th Grandpa drove Bobby and Josh to Williamsport. He put them both on a flight, via Philadelphia, to SFO.
“Y
OU CAN CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES.”
That was the birth of the code. He didn’t listen. Not at first. None of us did the first time we heard it. And I’m not sure I can interpret it now. Isn’t that the way it is with codes and canons, principles and plans? They’re okay until you hit an extreme, then it’s a matter of figuring out how they apply, how to decode them, what’s relevant.
The raccoons haven’t come. For a week there’s been no lights in the house. None in the barns. It is cool, cold. My body is stiff, chilled, and I can barely bend my right leg. The fire hardly warms me. Three days ago I dug the pit and chimney. Nothing much, really—a small one-man kitchen with a flat stone over the fire pit, an entrance flue downhill, a six-inch-deep exit tunnel-chimney, a covered trench, snaking back up into the pines there, maybe thirty feet away. The tunnel-chimney controls smoke. Moisture and particulants cool, condense, fall out. What comes out the far end is pretty minimal—a crude scrubber, the kind the VC used in old Nam Bo when they didn’t want us to know where they were.
This morning, at first light, I got off my duff, descended to the pond, washed my stinko bod, my pits. Shaved. Dove in with my clothes on and used the soap to wash them before I took em off and washed me. Could hardly believe yesterday. Of all people! I’d slipped back into the pines to watch. Thought maybe she’d notice the firepit, start snoopin around—maybe freak out, split, notify the authorities, send somebody up here to evict me. I didn’t realize it was Joanne, Wap’s sister, till she parked behind the house and got out of the car. I’d already sanitized my camp as much as I could. There wasn’t much I could do with the firepit except cover the opening with the dirt I’d dug out making it. Still, I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice. Of all people she woulda been the last I’d of expected to come up and plant flowers. It blew my mind. Couldn’t rest, couldn’t meditate. Felt like shit at first light. That’s why I went down below, cleaned up, filled my water blivet, changed my duds, came back up and hung the wet ones on a line I’d stretched at the back of the pine break. Controlling circumstances.
While I was in Philly there was always something in the pipeline—something from the rumor mill about drops—early-out programs tied to Nixon’s reduction in force. It was really a matter of laying guys off, of firing them, because Viet Namization was going to turn the war over the ARVN. No severance pay. No bonus. Just get out. I was discharged 123 days early—discharged not with a bang, barely a whimper. Crocco, Williams and Lambert went out and got drunk for me, then they disassembled Lieutenant Mulhaney’s car—doors, wheels, hood, wires, even the windshield—and left it there for him to put back together. The rumor mill said I did it but I was in Boston and Mulhaney never laid that rap on me. Still, I say, thanks guys. Mulhaney deserved it. I left without a whimper. Just collected my pay, signed the papers, caught a bus to Scranton and one to La Porte where my mom came and got me and drove me home and all I could think of was leaving for Boston and the most wonderful woman in the world. But first there had to be another family party! I hung around for a respectable bit until I figured I could go to Boston to “visit.” Oh God, how I missed her.
In Mill Creek Ma’d say, “Tony, you decide yet what you’re goina do?” She really liked having me home but the nicer she was the more I wanted to go. I felt like I was caught in a niceness trap and bein mushed to death like when I was seven and she’d make me sit on her lap and hug me against her big plump motherness while she’d be talking to Aunt Isabella who’d be doing the same thing to Jimmy. “I think I’m goina go to school,” I’d tell her. “Maybe become a doctor like Joey.” She believed me. “Ma, I’m going to be a college kid.” She believed me and that meant it was okay for me to believe it too. “Where are you going to go to school?” Mark asked. “I don’t know,” I lied. I’d already applied and gotten the conditional answer. “Maybe BU, you know, in Boston.”
Jo would never of understood if I’d said, “I’m going to Boston to be with Linda.” At least that’s what I thought. I mean, her boys didn’t set their life’s course by following girls to far-off cities. Go to Budapest or Timbuktu to go to school, or to Guantanamo Bay or Dong Ha to shoot people, that’d be respectable ... but to Boston to get laid!!!
Jimmy came back from his second tour more gung-ho than ever but that’s not surprising. He spent the entire time with 4th CAG doing combined action duty. They kept moving him, letting him help set up CAP units in five or six different villages. He was becoming a real papa-san to a lot of people. He loved it, they loved him. And he was great for Marine morale. Sixty percent of the enlisted men in CAPs extended for at least six months. That’s how much they believed in the program. But he came home to completely different circumstances than the first time. This country was different. Our family was different.
And I was up in Boston with Linda, in an apartment she’d found just off Commonwealth Ave., in Allston, the cheap side of the Ave. with lots of students, versus the swank side, which is Brookline. Linda was studying really hard and working hard too, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I got a job almost right away—driving an ambulance. Anything, I reasoned, to be near her. She was so damned focused at that time. I was anything but focused—except on her. But she had the drive for both of us. It was Linda who’d gotten the applications, who’d gotten me to enroll at BU where I started classes in September ’69. I was a “conditional” student and had to take a study-habits course that summer—but Linda was really all I could think about.
“You can control circumstances.” But we didn’t know, hadn’t developed the code, had left previous codes behind. The new code would need to be tempered in the ovens of alienation, estrangement, self-imposed exile, expatriation. Where once we believed in everything and our beliefs were supplanted, suppressed, or shattered, in the void we lost all beliefs or came to believe in someone else’s beliefs. When we lost our beliefs we lost too the adjunct discipline and were without discipline. When we gave our minds to someone else, we adopted disciplines attached to their interests. We wallowed, unfocused, numbed out, wide-eyed, movin ’n’ groovin without thought. We floated, without production, without achievement, without direction, without ideals, without ends. There was no one, no thing, to follow—no leadership of ideas, no models of service, no rituals, no codes.
B
OSTON, AUGUST 1969: TONY
was tense, cold, wet. He’d dreamed again but was again unable to recall the dream. Scattered flickerings of city light came in through the narrow French doors. He looked at Linda. In sleep her mouth maintained a slight smile that warmed him but which could not dispel his tension. Quietly he pulled back the sheet, rolled off the bed, fell into a crouch. He scanned the room, the French doors that led to the two-by-six-foot third-floor balcony, the transom light of the interior bedroom door. It was four o’clock in the morning. He heard squealing tires on Commonwealth, the crashing of garbage cans in the alley behind their apartment, the moan of an airliner circling, awaiting clearance to land at Logan, and the barely audible riffs of Judy Collins’s “Vietnam Love Song” seeping up from the apartment below.
Slowly Tony rose. He stood perfectly still, listening, sensing. He walked around the bed staying close to the foot, away from the French doors, walked to the bedroom door, froze. Again he listened. Linda had studied all afternoon and into the early evening while Tony had watched first a Red Sox–Yankees game, then several game shows. At each break she’d encouraged him to hit the books but he’d been unable to tear himself away from the game and by the time it was over he’d gelled into position on the sofa. She’d finally gotten him up when Rachel and Larry from the studio upstairs came in with a six-pack. They drank quickly. In the heat the alcohol gave them an immediate buzz and they’d decided to catch the T up to Clarendon Street and walk to the Combat Zone—bars, dancing, music, prostitutes, booze, hippies, go-go girls, drugs, more music, more dancing. They met other friends, and all danced and drank till midnight. Then Tony and Linda left, rode the T back as far as Nickerson Field, walked the last half mile, laughing, looking into each other’s eyes, running, chasing each other all the way to Long Ave., Tony catching Linda on the first landing, she escaping then trapping him on the second, laughing, kissing then darting up the last flight, Linda fumbling with the two keys in the two dead bolts Tony had insisted upon, Tony fumbling with Linda’s clothing, unbuttoning her blouse as she’d opened the door and pulled him in by the belt.
Quietly Tony turned the knob. The bedroom opened onto the living room. This room too was at the front of the apartment building, and it too had French doors and a small balcony. He visually checked the balcony, then the door to the stairs, finally the hallway to the bathroom, kitchen and second bedroom which they used as a study. For a moment he looked at the sofa where earlier they’d made love.
Tony stepped into the living room. He moved along the sofa to the front wall, to the edge of the curtained French door. Slowly he slid a hand beneath the curtain, checking the lock. He knelt, checked the floor locks, moved to the stairway door, checked the locks there. The hall was dark. He didn’t turn on the light but slid into the darkness. He checked the bathroom, the kitchen, the windows above the alley, finally opening the study door where Linda had a desk clock with a backlit face that Tony abhorred because of the glow it cast, backlighting anyone in the darkness of the room, freaking him out because there could be someone outside, someone who could shoot in without detection. Tony turned the clock facedown, covered it with a dark shirt.
Now he breathed more easily. He shuffled to the desk, ran his hands to his own small pile of books, felt to the side for the cigarette pack. It was easy during the day to read, to smoke, but at night it was nearly impossible. He removed a cigarette, closed the pack, replaced it. He put the unlit smoke between his lips, touched the tobacco with the tip of his tongue. Now he needed to taste smoke. He moved back to the living room, into the bedroom. Linda had rolled onto her stomach, her feet protruding from the sheet. To Tony she looked wonderful. Downstairs someone had flipped the albums. Judy Collins’s voice seeped up with “All Things Are Quite Silent.” Tony’d read the album, knew the song from which the royalties were being donated “to people dedicated to resisting the United States draft on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, immoral and indecent.” Collins’s voice was soothing. He tried to tune it out. He sat on the edge of the bed tonguing the tobacco, its taste stinging like spicy food.