A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [2]
I was struck by the realization that Greer would leave soon, and I felt the same kind of agony as when we broke up years before. I had needed to see Greer on some business, and knocked and entered her room. She had been on the bed with Rita, passed-out drunk. Rita had held her and soothed her as though she were a little girl, and Rita had put her finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet.
Well, there was life without Greer, but there could be no life without Rita. Yet it still hurts.
I watch the hours flow in the passageway behind me like the tick of a suppressed bomb about to be released. I am through with a draft. I write another.
As the hours to dawn tick off, it all seems to come down to the same basic questions. Am I telling the truth? Do the American people have the civility and the decency to take the truth and rise with it?
Why me, Lord? Haven’t I had enough of your pranks? Isn’t slamming the White House door in my face just a little much, even for Your Holiness? I’m at the landing over the reception foyer of the White House. The Marine band drums up “Hail to the Chief” and the major of the guard proclaims, “The president of the United States and Mrs. Horowitz.” Oh, come on now, Lord. Aren’t you carrying this a little too far?
Well, all the stories of the good Irish lives are best passed on around the old campfire from schanachie to schanachie, and I’ll not spare you mine.
In actual fact, my own beginnings began at the end of World War II, when my future adopted father, Daniel Timothy O’Connell, returned from the Pacific with a couple of rows of ribbons and a decided limp.
BROOKLYN, AUTUMN 1945
The war to end all wars had ended. The Military Air Transport DC–3 groaned as the cables stretched in a turn, and a piece of the plane’s skin flapped against the pilot’s window. The tail swung. A queasy contingent of soldiers, sailors, and a few Marines were losing the battle with their equilibrium.
Staff Sergeant Daniel Timothy O’Connell tried to suck oxygen from the wilted air as beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. The sergeant mumbled into his beard that he had come all the way from San Diego without puking and damned if he was going to puke in front of a planeload of swab jockeys and dog faces.
In the cockpit a pair of MATS women flew the craft, adding to his discomfort. “Guadalcanal,” he continued mumbling, “Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa, only to crash ten miles from home!”
Crossing the United States was no simple matter. There was no commercial air service to and from San Diego. MATS, which took as many discharged veterans as it could, had hundreds on their waiting list.
O’Connell had caught a train from San Diego to L.A. From there, two different airlines making nine stops over a twelve-hour period landed him at Wright-Patterson Field outside Dayton.
There was a delay of several hours before another MATS plane could get him to the East Coast. He checked in and segued into a bar just outside the gates and sashayed in with a sailor he had teamed up with named Gross. Marines seldom used first names, so Gross was Gross.
They entered the Blue Lady lounge to see a half dozen women lined up at one end of the bar.
“Could be a B-joint,” O’Connell said. “Got your dough safe?”
“Money belt.”
“You see,” O’Connell went on, “they know a lot of GIs are coming through Wright-Patterson Field loaded with back pay and that we have to be out of town soon.”
“I know you’ll protect me,” Gross said.
“Beer.”
“Jim Beam with a Jim Beam backup.”
“A couple of ladies would like to treat you boys.”
“I’ll bet they would.”
“Hey, take off your pack and stand at ease,” the bartender said. “I’m Army, myself. These are a lonely wives club. Some of them have been without for two years. Just women without men. They work at Wright-Patterson.”
“You know,” Gross said, “I might settle in here for a few days.”
“Yeah, only after we find a Western Union and you wire home the money you’re carrying.”
“You going to stay?” Gross asked.
“No,” O’Connell answered.
“I mean,