Red Ice

His boat was assigned to the Coastal Forces and saw only a moderate amount of action. He met my mother, a U.S. Army nurse assigned to patch up Rangers who were attending the Achnacarry Commando Course in Inverness. “Butcher and Bolt School” he’d called it. His Fairmile had ferried Rangers across the Channel on D-Day.

Time softened his recollections. It must have been rough on him in many ways. The Regular Royal Navy did not look upon engineering officers with high regard… or officers with RNVR commissions… or officers without university degrees… or bookish officers with broken fingernails and noses… who ran bloody piddling little boats. I could tell he had been proud of that commission. He had been a naval officer. And that meant something.

My mother, a Dolliver, one of the Salem Dollivers, came from a family of steady distinction and little cash. My mother had never said much about the courtship with the raven-haired Scot, but the family album of World War II pictures was treated like a rare book. I often wondered how my father had managed to win her affections in the running competition with the cocky Rangers and Commandos.

After the war he took a job in the States, in the industrial New England town of Pequonnock, where my brothers and I were born. He had worked his way up to plant manager by the time I graduated from Berkeley.

There was the unspoken assumption that my brothers and I would serve someday. I knew the periodic skeet-shooting sessions were not purely recreational. Nor were the camping trips and long hikes. Doing your duty required a little hardening in the formative years.

“There’s a grand lot of bullies can’t abide a Frazer. Remember that,” he’d say on those stiff-legged hikes. “We’re no’ big but we can terrier the hell oot a them. And mind you, no’ all bullies are big or found in a schoolyard.”

Later, when I went into the Navy, he added, “Bear in mind, too, that no’ all villains wear a different uniform than you do. I can remember a grand lot of toffy-nosed, ring-cuffed blokes in the Andrew whose actions really helped the other side. There are Chinamen who play three-sided chess. ’Tis a more realistic game. It’ll be a rare war when you’re fighting only one enemy or where all your enemies are out in front of you.”

My second year in the Navy, he died in a plant explosion. They say he was seen rushing to close several key valves when the second blast came.

My mother died of cancer two years later.

A passenger train whizzing by in the opposite direction made the train wobble. Two children in school uniforms played with a toy robot or spaceman the size of my thumb.

Why?

Was it factors beyond my control? Environment? Had there been something in my food? Water? Air?

The town of Pequonnock was a brick-and-cobblestone collage of rubber factories, shoe and sweater mills, and heaps of bivalve shells. It was jammed with a little bit of everything. You could go a mile down the coast from the coal barges and see some of the most impressive sailing yachts in New England. Not many of the townspeople had anything you could call a yacht, though more than a few had boats.

The style was smokestack exotic. Some joked that our phone book had the greatest concentration of consonants in the state. We had pastry shops in four languages. It took a month and a half for the divergent groups to stop celebrating their different Christmases.

My memories were of boyish games played in and about the railroad sidings, the piers, and the barges near where my father worked. And of flashlight tag, led by an Estonian scoutmaster, around upstate ponds. It was a game at which I excelled. You could will yourself into invisibility. Conform to the low-lying scrub, and don’t move. Don’t flutter an eyelash.

In later years I remember roaming the dunes and tidal marshes that formed an L at one end of town. These coastal badlands were the site of endless imaginary adventures. The occasional old tire, the abandoned refrigerator, and the three-wheeled shopping carts became props for my solitary fantasies. But Pequonnock had a way of jarring you back.

The Hungarian revolution left its mark on the town. The work force, already heavily central European, swelled with Hungarian refugees within the year. A year later a tufted-browed teacher arrived at our school. His fastidious manner, Gabor-sister accent, and firm sense of discipline did not sit well with his students. On my way out of the school building one day, I spotted two schoolmates with DA haircuts loosening the lug nuts on Mr. Horvath’s tires.

“Get away from that car.”

“Aw, get stuffed, rah-rah.”

“You heard me, get away from that car.”

I waivered.

“It’s old man Horvath’s, an’ he gets what he gets. Man, you ever hear ’im talk? Sounds like a fairy kraut or weirdo Russki or somethin’.”

“You’d be the funny-sounding one where he comes from,” I said lamely.

“Well, send him back. Hey, smartstuff, just get out of here. Or maybe you wanna stop us?” one said, working himself up.