Squared Away

I GREW up at the end of World War ii not far from Quantico, Virginia, the U.S. Marine Corps officer-training base near Washington, D.C., and only about twenty miles from Fredericksburg. Many of my family members worked at Quantico, as I did off and on through high school and college. Several of our family members had served in the marine corps and found work in the postwar period by commuting the short run up old Number One Highway to Quantico. Many more marine veterans lived around us—men in my childhood for whom Guadalcanal, Tawara, Saipan, Pelilu, and Iwo Jima were only five or six years past. These men sat on grandfather Junie’s porch and sometimes talked about their experiences. While there were some tales of combat, they seemed most impassioned not about “Japs” or the harrowing experiences of the war, nor even about their grief at the loss of friends, but about their treatment by civilian support groups. In one incident on Junie’s porch where all the orderings and sortings of my childhood seemed to take place, an American Red Cross worker soliciting donations had come to Junie’s porch crying. She, like nearly everyone we saw on our street was a cousin, of some more distant relation, but cousin nonetheless. Here she stood crying and being embraced by Aunt Thelma. “What happened? Did you hurt yourself, did you fall down?” No, that wasn’t it, she was not hurt. “What happened? Did somebody bother you?”

“Up there,” she pointed, “that man on the corner. Richard. He scared me. He is really mean.”

“What did he do to you? Did he hit you?”

“No, he didn’t hit. He really scared me. He chased me off his porch and made me run. I thought he was going to hurt me.”

By now, Thelma had been joined on the porch by matriarch Hattie and Aunts Virginia and Nellie. Hattie took over simply by walking out the door from the kitchen onto the porch. She had heard enough of the conversation through the kitchen door to know exactly what was going on. Hattie always knew what was going on. She especially knew what the backstory was with whatever was going on. Hattie took one look at Helen, our cousin, who was dressed in her blue-gray Red Cross uniform with red and white accents. “You been up there bothering Richard?” Hattie asked. She did not seem susceptible to Helen’s tears or sympathetic to her for the intimidation she had experienced. Hattie had a way of making nearly anyone feel it was their fault, no matter what had happened. “You stay away from that man. He’ll hurt you. Damned old marine.”

Helen looked bewildered, “I was just making my calls for the donations. I have all the houses up this way. All I did was knock on the door and ask him for a donation to the Red Cross.”

Helen was sniffling but she had stopped shaking. Handkerchiefs produced out of apron pockets had dabbed her tears. Hattie resumed her case, “Don’t go back there. Stay away from him. Richard hates the Red Cross.” Helen was naïve and innocent, caught up in her belief in helping out and doing good and thinking that such good intentions would be recognized and validated.

“I was just trying to do my job. All I did was ask him for a donation.” She paused and looked back up the street, “He came after me. He ran at me yelling and cursing: ‘Get out of my house, you damned bitch. Get out of here. Get off my porch.’”

And Helen ran. She saw the instantly reddened face, Richard’s hard jaw and clenching fists. He began to move quickly toward her and all the deep somatic signals in her body fired at once—and she ran, fearful, knowing, without understanding, a vector of threat was headed straight for her.

“Just stay away from him,” Hattie pronounced, “Don’t go back up there.” After a bit she added, “Richard had a bad experience over there,” using the generic and universal...