I tried a different tack.
“What’s your name, sailor?” I asked in a more gentle voice—almost a teasing voice.
“I’m Frank Grecco.”
He didn’t reach out for a handshake, so I didn’t, either.
“How well did you know my brother, Frank?”
He nodded once more. Again, with that nervous bobbing. “We were officers together on the flight deck. Walter was my division commander. We’d been ninety-day wonders together, too. Went in different directions at first, but ended up on the same ship at the end of the war. By then, he outranked me.”
“Oh. All right.”
I wasn’t sure what any of those words meant, but I didn’t want him to stop talking. There was somebody standing right in front of me who had known my brother. I wanted to find out everything about this man.
“Did you grow up around here, Frank?” I asked, already knowing the answer from his accent. But I was trying to make things as easy for him as I could. I would give him the simple questions first.
Again, the twitchy nod. “South Brooklyn.”
“And were you and my brother good friends?”
He winced.
“Miss Morris, I need to tell you something.” The patrolman took off his hat once more and jammed his trembling fingers through his hair. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Why would I recognize you?”
“Because I already know you, and you already know me. Please don’t walk away, ma’am.”
“Why on earth would I walk away?”
“Because I met you back in 1941,” he said. “I was the guy who drove you home to your parents’ house.”
—
The past came roaring up at me like a dragon woken from a deep slumber. I felt dizzy with the heat and the force of it. In a vertiginous series of flashes, I saw Edna’s face, Arthur’s face, Celia’s face, Winchell’s face. I saw my own young face in the back of that beat-up Ford—shamed and shattered.
This was the driver.
This was the guy who had called me a dirty little whore, right in front of my brother.
“Ma’am,” he said—and now he was the one grabbing my arm. “Please don’t walk away.”
“Stop saying that.” My voice came out ragged. Why did he keep saying that, when I wasn’t going anywhere? I just wanted him to stop saying that.
But he did it again: “Please don’t walk away, ma’am. I need to talk to you.”
I shook my head. “I can’t—”
“You need to understand—I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Could you let go of my arm, please?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, but he dropped my arm.
What did I feel?
Repulsion. Pure repulsion.
I couldn’t tell, though, if it was repulsion for him or for me. Whatever it was, it was growing out of a trove of shame that I thought I’d buried long ago.
I hated this guy. That’s what I felt: hate.
“I was a stupid kid,” he said. “I didn’t know how to act.”
“I really must go now.”
“Please don’t walk away, Vivian.”
His voice was rising, which disturbed me. But hearing him call me by my name was even worse. I hated it, that he knew my name. I hated that he’d watched me onstage today, and knew who I was the whole time—that he knew this much about me. I hated that he’d seen me get choked up about my brother. I hated that he probably knew my brother better than I did. I hated that Walter had attacked me in front of him. I hated that this man had once called me a dirty little whore. Who did he think he was, approaching me now, after all these years? This sense of rage and disgust compounded, and it strengthened something in my spine: I needed to leave right now.
“I have a bus full of kids waiting for me,” I said.
I started walking away.
“I need to talk to you, Vivian!” he cried out after me. “Please.”
But I got on the bus and left him standing there by his patrol car—hat in hand, like a man begging for alms.
And that, Angela, is how I officially met your father.
—
Somehow, I managed to do all the things I needed to get done that day.
I dropped the kids back at the high school and helped unload the props. We returned the bus to its parking space. Marjorie and I walked home with Nathan, who could not stop chattering on about how much he had loved the show, and how when he grew up he wanted to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Of course, Marjorie could tell I was upset. She kept casting glances at me, over Nathan’s head. But I just nodded at her, to indicate that I was fine. Which I decidedly was not.
Then—just as soon as I was free—I ran straight to Aunt Peg’s house.
—
I had never before told anybody about that car ride home to Clinton back in 1941.
Nobody knew how my brother had savaged me up one side and down the other—eviscerating me with rebuke, and allowing his disgust to rain down upon me in buckets. I had certainly never told anyone about the double disgrace of having this attack occur in front of a witness—a stranger—who had then added his own coup de grâce to my punishment by calling me a dirty little whore. Nobody knew that Walter had not so much rescued me from New York City as dumped me like a bag of garbage on my parents’ doorstep—too sickened by my behavior to even look at my face for a moment longer than he had to.
But now I rushed over to Sutton Place, to bring the story to Peg.
I found my aunt stretched out on her couch, as she was wont to do those days—alternating between smoking and coughing. She was listening to radio coverage of the Yankees. As soon as I walked in, she told me that it was Mickey Mantle Day over at Yankee Stadium—that they were honoring his stellar fifteen-year career in baseball. In fact, when I burst into the apartment and started talking, Peg put up her hand: Joe DiMaggio was speaking, and she didn’t want him interrupted.
“Have some respect, Vivvie,” she said, all business.
So I shut my mouth and let her have her moment. I knew she would have liked to be there at the stadium in person, but she wasn’t strong enough anymore for such a strenuous excursion. But Peg’s face was awash with rapture and emotion as she listened to DiMaggio honoring Mantle. By the end of his speech, she had fat tears running down her cheeks. (Peg could handle anything—war, catastrophe, failure, death of a relative, a cheating husband, the demolition of her beloved theater—without shedding a tear, but great moments in sports history always made her weepy.)
I’ve often wondered if our conversation would have gone differently, had she not been so saturated with emotion for the Yankees that day. There’s no way of telling. I did sense that it was frustrating for her to turn off the radio once DiMaggio was done talking and give her full attention to me—but she was a generous person, so she did it anyhow. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Coughed some more. Lit another cigarette. Then she listened to me with full absorption, as I began to tell her my tale of woe.
Midway through my saga, Olive came in. She had been out shopping at the market. I stopped talking in order to help her put away groceries, and then Peg said, “Vivvie, start from the beginning again. Tell Olive everything you’ve been telling me.”
This wouldn’t have been my preference. I had learned to love Olive Thompson over the years, but she would not be the first candidate I would run to if I needed a shoulder to cry on. Olive wasn’t exactly a soft bosom of overflowing sympathy. Still, she was there, and she and Peg—as they had gotten older—had increasingly become my parental figures.