Roy Underwater

Every family has its casualties, and Roy was ours. My mother’s first cousin, the son of my great-aunt Sam, he was both legend and shameful secret at once. His glorious moment and his defeat happened at precisely the same instant: during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For years I had the story wrong, and told people that Roy was one of seven survivors of the Arizona. Actually, I don’t know how many people survived the Arizona. In my mind, that famous image of the ship blowing up as the bomb went down its smokestack must have melded with the story of Roy. Roy served in the army, not the navy, so he must have been on land, not on the Arizona. But another detail of the story, this one not invented by me, had Roy swimming in the fiery waters of Pearl Harbor for three hours.

This was his calling card: Roy, Survivor of Pearl Harbor. I’m not trying to make light of that because his is not a funny story, but it was a fact on a flashcard, an object lesson, something to be memorized whenever I saw him, which was not frequently because he lived in Connecticut with his family. My family was always moving around the Midwest, and we only came together in the summers, at my grandmother’s beach house in Long Beach, Long Island. He swam around Pearl Harbor for three hours! He had to swim underwater. Never mind that the attack lasted twenty minutes. Roy swam and swam. I envisioned him almost fishlike, diving deeper as dead men bobbed and sank around him. When he emerged, he was changed forever, of course, but not like America: cleansed by its blood sacrifice, reenergized, mighty in its resolve. Oh, he had resolve, I suppose, eager as anyone to win the war, to lick the Japs, but he spent the next year in a mental hospital in Denver, recovering from wounds as deep as the Arizona, a ship named after that parched desert state and lying like a contradiction at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, still trying to float, still manned, sending up coded oil slicks to the surface. From the hospital, he sent photos of himself pre-Pearl: pearly youth, his face so open and beautiful, so confident and naive. This was the face he sent to friends and relatives: Roy in pith helmet, arms crossed, not in defense, but in youthful invincibility. I love this Roy, this one I never knew, because, of course, I see myself—all of us, in fact—in him. Such a hopeful gesture; how was it received by my family? I think most likely with a shake of the head. Poor Roy! Three hours underwater. Faintly, he has written of victory on my photo of him: WE’LL BEAT THEM YET!

We did, of course, but not with Roy’s help. He was done for, marked by those three hours, those twenty minutes, that stay in the hospital. But outwardly, he hadn’t changed much. My mother, whose war job was to teach photography to the Army Air Corps in Denver, visited him in the hospital there and remembers him as sweet and funny. When he returned home, his father was willing to do anything for him. Roy enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Art. He built toy furniture. He took up photography, which he loved. My mother says he was too scatterbrained to be involved in anything for very long. His father, my great-uncle Rob, was wealthy, made leather desk sets. Roy lived off his father. He saw himself as an entertainer, always smiling. He stayed for a time with my great-grandmother in her large house in Brooklyn, but one day, he burned the bed in his room and narrowly avoided setting the whole house on fire.

He married Muriel, sister to Riva, my mother’s best friend. They had met at my mother’s twenty-first birthday party, a surprise party arranged by my uncle Alan. My mother hates surprises. Alan invited everyone, she says, friends and enemies alike. She introduced Roy to...