The Christmas Kid

A Hero of the War

BILLY FITZGERALD IDOLIZED HIS father and nobody in the neighborhood could blame him. Paulie Fitzgerald was, after all, a hero of the war. In the bars, in the veterans’ clubs, they all knew the story well: how Paulie had gone to Korea in that first brutal winter of the war, when the ground froze to iron, and how his outfit was cut off in the night and the flanks were overrun, and how Paulie fought off the Communists all by himself, killing eleven of them, until help arrived in the morning. Billy knew the story as well as anyone, although his father was a modest man and didn’t talk about it much, except when he was drinking.

“Let’s just say it was terrible,” his father would say. “War is hell, kid. War is hell.”

But there were medals and ribbons in the top drawer of the bureau in his parents’ bedroom and, in their way, they were enough. Sometimes when nobody was home, when Billy was a boy, he would take them out and examine them. The Bronze Star. The Distinguished Service Medal. The Purple Heart. They thrilled Billy and, handling them, he would imagine his father, young and tough, with a machine gun in his hands, marching across barren hills, and then fighting hard through fear and blood to save his buddies. Sometimes, Billy would wear the medals, pinning them to his chest, as his father did on Memorial Day, when he marched with the other veterans. In some important way, the medals made Billy feel directly connected to that larger, braver world that seemed to exist only in movies.

“I don’t talk about it,” his father said one night, after coming in late from Rattigan’s Bar and Grill, across the street. “But I must have fired three hundred rounds. Cohen got it, and Lloyd, and Charlie Ramirez, and I kept shootin’ and the Commies kept comin’ and I thought the night would never end.”

In 1971, when Billy was eighteen, he felt it was his duty to volunteer for the army. His mother cried and protested, and his younger brothers told him not to do it, but Billy insisted that as the oldest son he had no choice. In his time, his father had done his duty; now it was Billy’s turn.

At night in basic training, he was tormented by fear, afraid that in a crisis he would never be as brave or as tough as his father. He would falter. He would cry. He would break and run. But in the end, none of that happened. Billy was assigned to Germany, not Vietnam, and his father remained secure as the only hero in the family.

“You’re better off,” his father said. “That goddamned war’s just not worth fightin’.”

This was on a night in Rattigan’s, as Paulie stood with friends at the bar, while a ball game droned away on TV. His son was in uniform, leaving in the morning.

“What outfit were you with anyway, Dad?” the son said.

“First Cav,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. That was long ago and far away.”

Then there was basketball excitement on TV, the others shouted, the conversation shifted. In the morning, Billy left for Germany. He came back almost two years later with a German wife, tall and blond and placid, and announced that they were moving straight to California. He took a job at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, went to night school on the GI Bill, learned drafting. Once a year, he came back to New York with his wife, and then with his kids, and each time his father was fatter. Chins multiplied; blue veins blossomed on his nose; his belly made him look as if he’d swallowed a safe. Billy had to explain to his children that under the layers of flesh there was a man who had once been young and tough and a hero.

“Always remember that about your grandfather,” he said. “He was really something once.”

One afternoon at McDonnell Douglas, the foreman called him to a phone. It was Billy’s wife. She told him in her precise English that his mother had just called with terrible news. His father was dead. Just like that. A heart attack. Billy began to sob, and the foreman put his arm on Billy’s shoulder and told him he’d better go home.

“He was only fifty-something years old.” Billy protested. “I loved him. He wasn’t just my father. He was a hero in Korea. A real-life hero.”

“Then bury him like he was a hero,” the foreman said. “He deserves it.”

All the way across the country, with his wife beside him in the plane, and the two boys in the row in front of them, Billy kept thinking about one thing: Arlington. He must bury his father in Arlington. There would be a flag on the coffin and a bugler playing taps and Paulie Fitzgerald would join the endless rows of white crosses that marked the presence of men who had fought and sometimes died for their country. Some of them might even have been with him that terrible night in Korea.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he told his mother, who just wanted her husband buried in St. John’s cemetery, close to home. “He’d want it that way, Mom.”

The undertaker told Billy what he had to do to get Paulie buried at Arlington. There was a number to call in Washington and he’d need discharge papers and his father’s service number and the name of the outfit in which he served. For a full day, Billy rummaged through his father’s papers and drawers, but could find nothing. Nothing, that is, except the ribbons and medals.

Finally, he called the number in Washington again, got a young clerk who called him sir, explained his problem, gave his father’s name and years of service and the part about the First Cavalry. The clerk said he would call back, and Billy returned to the business of the wake, the loss and grief of his mother and brothers, the sad admiration of his father’s friends. On the morning of the third day, the clerk called from Washington.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk said. “Our records show that nobody by that name served with the First Cav during the Korean conflict, sir.”

Billy insisted that there must be some mistake, and repeated his father’s name. He was told that a man by that name from Brooklyn, New York, had served in 1951 and 1952 on Guam, not in Korea. He gave Billy an address in Brooklyn; Billy’s heart split and flew away and then reassembled itself. The clerk had given his father’s old address, the house he’d shown him so many times on trips to the old neighborhood. Quietly, Billy thanked the young clerk and hung up.

“The poor man,” Billy said to himself. And then he slowly rose and went out to walk alone through the chilly afternoon. Everywhere he walked, he saw his father. He was throwing a football in Prospect Park in the fall, or hitting grounders to kids at Park Circle in the spring. He was standing outside Rattigan’s on a summer afternoon, talking with the other men, quiet and proud. He was marching with the veterans in the parade along the park side of the street, the medals like patches of color on his chest.

And in a grove deep in the park, Billy began to cry again. To cry for his father and the lifelong trap of the lie. He had no idea how the lie had started, and now, of course, it was too late to find out. But he cried for his father’s silence, his isolation, his inability ever to be plain Paulie Fitzgerald. And when he stopped crying, Billy thought that it had been a tough, hard life for his father, after he had shouldered the role, assumed it, and played it out for a lifetime, living every hour of his day with the knowledge that, at any moment, he could be found out. And in that moment, deep in the empty park, Billy Fitzgerald loved his father more than ever.

The next day, there was a Funeral Mass for Paulie Fitzgerald. The coffin was draped with an American flag and there was an honor guard from the American Legion. The organist played “America the Beautiful,” and Billy’s mother was comforted by her son’s decision to take the body to St. John’s after all. At the end of the Requiem Mass, Billy Fitzgerald, the bearer now and forever of his father’s terrible secret, placed his hands on the shoulders of his sons.

“Remember,” he said to them as the Mass ended. “Your grandfather was a hero of the war. A real American hero. Remember that. Don’t ever forget it.”