Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [13]
They were married on December 30, 1947, in my grandparents’ house in a simple nondenominational ceremony. My father had to report to the Naval Air Station Jacksonville in early January. Jacksonville was followed by the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point, in Rhode Island, followed by a deployment to Europe. When he returned to the States, my father discovered he was being stationed back in Jacksonville, and my mother discovered she was pregnant. I was born in the hospital at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station on July 3, 1949. I was named Mary Elizabeth, after my mother—although I was called Mary Beth, and my brother, born a year later at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, was named for my father, although he was called Jay. My sister, born a year after that, was named Nancy, after my mother’s sister; with no competition in the immediate family, she was called Nancy. As my mother left the hospital with Nancy, the doctor—who had also delivered Jay fifty-three weeks earlier—cheerfully bid Mother farewell, saying, “I’ll see you next year.” My mother, her baby in her arms and two toddlers waiting at home, just looked at him and replied, “Don’t count on it.”
We outgrew the Washington, D.C., apartment my parents first rented, so my parents bought a tiny bungalow—a dollhouse, my mother always said—in Falls Church, Virginia. Mother promptly filled the yard with trees and signed up to be the neighborhood military wives’ liaison. And just as promptly, Dad got transferred again, this time to Japan. But first he had temporary duty in Korea, which was still at war. Mother packed up the dollhouse alone and drove us to Pensacola. When Dad wrote that he was ready for us, my mother took a train across the country and boarded a military transport ship for a thirty-day trip across the Pacific with three toddlers. If you have ever been on a cruise and are imagining its bright staterooms and open corridors, you are not imagining a military transport ship. Imagine instead everything painted battleship gray and the hallways periodically interrupted by raised hatch doorways that—while they undoubtedly provided a measure of safety had we been hit by a torpedo—were a tremendous hurdle to climb over, and over, and over for children not quite two, three, and four. Every time I feel overwhelmed as a mother, I try to remind myself of what this first trip with three young children must have been like for my mother.
The hardest part was keeping track of us. Mother bought each of us new outfits for the trip: matching navy blue coats and hats, just like real sailors. Afraid, however, that we would fall overboard and she would arrive in Japan with fewer children than she had when she left, she also bought each of us a harness that went around our chests and attached to a leash. While it meant we were always no more than a leash’s length away from her for the thirty-day voyage, it also meant that she could never be more than a leash’s length away from three toddlers for thirty days. When the ship finally prepared to dock at Yokohama, my mother dressed us in matching outfits. When we were ready, she took a few minutes in the outer section of the stateroom to make herself look as good as possible for the husband she hadn’t seen in months. When she returned, wearing a fresh dress and smelling