Bobby Cohen
a pint of Guinness
When I was a little girl, I always knew what my parents were thinking. I
didn’t have to make any special effort, or do anything weird—I just knew. It was
the same as if they were talking—to me, to each other, or to anyone else. I
actually heard the words. It took me quite some time, as I recall, to be able to
tell when they were really talking and when I just heard them in my mind. Of
course, when they spoke normally, their lips would be moving, but as a child, I
didn’t think about that. By the time I started school, I began to realize the
difference.
My first day at school was the most confusing day of my life. I could hear
what everyone was thinking—my classmates, the teacher, even passersby in the
hallway. The profusion of garbled words in my mind was beyond frightening. I
didn’t know what to do, having never told my parents about this strange curse. I
cried all the way home, but when I got to our West Philadelphia row house, I
made sure my mom, who worked at night, and my dad, who had a disability pension
and stayed home to care for me, never saw my tears. I was afraid they’d be
disappointed with me.
By the end of the first week, I learned how to focus only on what the
teacher was saying, and could avoid the other voices. Doing that made me a
better student but also had the effect of isolating me from my classmates. They
said I was stuck-up and thought I was better than they were. If they only knew
how I really felt.
By the end of the school year, I had figured out how to hear some voices
while avoiding others. That control came too late for me to become more popular
with the other kids that year, but at least I could get a fresh start the next
semester.
Summer vacation made things much easier because I had fewer voices to worry
about—only my parents and two neighborhood girls that I saw for short periods of
time each day.
With each passing week, I learned more about my curse and how to control
it. By the time I was in junior high school, it was no longer a curse, but a
gift that I could put to my advantage. Knowing what people were thinking, it
turns out, made me not only a straight A student, but also a very popular girl.
When I was twelve, my father died. Mom said he had a very sick liver, and
after many years of struggling, his body was too weak to fight it anymore. I had
spoken to him just before he passed, so I knew exactly what she was talking
about, but I never told her how that came to be, although I suspected that,
somewhere in her most hidden thoughts, she already knew.
I had always been closer with Dad because Mom worked at night and slept a
lot during the day, while he was home all the time. I was able to talk to him
more, and eventually told him about my strange gift. He accepted my story
without comment, other than to say he loved me very much and always would, but
his thoughts told me that he knew exactly how I felt and he couldn’t wait to
share it with Mom. I was asleep when she got home from work, but I knew later
that she not only understood, but somehow even expected me to be special. It was
unsettling for me to realize it was something that both of them thought about
regularly, but never spoke of to me.
I can never forget my last conversation with Dad, shared as he lay on his
death bed. He wanted to tell me about how he met Mom and the source of my gift.
As he rambled on, only half conscious from pain medication, I could hear the
whole story, the true course of events, from what I heard in his memory, far
more than from those last delirious words.
What follows is the real story of Joseph and Mary MacDougall, my beloved
parents. I tell it as if I were simply an observer, relating it as objectively
as I can.
Joe MacDougall brought five things home with him from World War II. He got
them all as a result of his fourteenth, and, as it turned out, his last combat
mission, in February, 1945.
Joe was a waist gunner on a B-17. A waist gunner sits in a glass bubble
which protrudes like an outie navel from the belly of the Flying Fortress. His
only protection, on the theory, he supposed, that a good offense is the best
defense, were the pistol grips of the two .50 caliber machine guns, with which
he was to shoot German aircraft from the sky.
On that particular day, Joe’s plane was carrying forty 500-pound bombs to
drop on the city of Dresden. The mission should have been a milk run. Dresden is
fewer than six-hundred miles from London, not far from where the flight
originated, and what was left of the Luftwaffe was busy trying to stem the
Allied invasion of the German homeland. To make things interesting, the Nazis
peppered the sky with anti-aircraft fire, a rarely effective device.
Not being preoccupied with Messerschmitts, Joe watched through his bubble
as the bomb bay doors opened, just forward of his position. He saw the dark
finned Blockbusters fall, two by two, fluttering in the air like cardboard toys.
Through his headset, he heard the bombardier, Lieutenant Gibson, yell,
“Bombsawayletsgetthehellouttahere!” He felt the plane bank sharply to starboard
to come about to due west, the shortest route back to base.
Joe was still watching the bombs fall, now seemingly moving at some crazy
angle toward the tilted landscape, when he met hell.
The explosion was deafening, filling the fuselage above him. Amidst the
screams he heard the skipper, a Midwesterner named Braun, yell, “MacDougall, can
you hear me?”
“I hear you, Skipper,” he said.
“Then get your ass forward to the cockpit, now.”
The cockpit was a disaster. There was a hole in the starboard fuselage, aft
of the glass. Stein, the co-pilot, lay dead in his seat, the right side of his
head gone. The turret gunner, Joe’s best friend, Matt Pocock, hung like a rag
doll from his bubble overhead, blood dripping from his lifeless left arm onto
the remaining half of Stein’s face. Gibson was unconscious in the bombardier’s
seat. Braun’s right arm, riddled with shrapnel, lay useless at his side, his
left hand on the yoke in a death grip.
“Are you all right?” Braun said, his voice distorted by pain.
“I think so,” Joe said. He was preoccupied with grief and anger over losing
Matt, but barely had time to realize it.
“Good. Then get him out of there,” he chin-pointed at Stein, “and climb
in.”
Robotically obeying his skipper’s orders, Joe unbuckled Stein’s seatbelt,
pulled his body onto the deck, and dropped into his place. The belt was
shredded, the buckle torn half away from the strap, so he didn’t take the time
to try to re-buckle it.
“Is your head okay?” Braun said.
“I guess so. Why?”
“Because it’s bleeding. But never mind that. You’re going to fly us home.”
Joe remembered hitting the left side of his forehead on one of his pistol
grips when the explosion came, but never felt the blood dripping down onto his
cheek.
The ship was way off course, never having completed its turn. Through his
headset, Joe got a quick flying lesson in a shaky voice from Braun, and, his
face blasted by the force of inrushing air from the hole next to him, guided the
plane out to the Channel, leaving the mainland north of Le Havre. Joe looked
through the glass and saw nothing but choppy green-gray water. He turned to
Braun only to see him passed out. If it weren’t for the blood bubbling in and
out of his nose, Joe would have thought him dead. He’d never felt so alone, so
filled with fear.
After an interminable length of time, during which he was sure he’d strayed
too far off course and would eventually crash into the Atlantic, he saw
coastline starboard-side. Praying that it was England and not some hostile land,
he ditched the plane as carefully as he knew how, as it turned out, between
Brighton and Southampton. When the plane hit the sea, Joe, still beltless,
smashed his left leg into the instrument panel hard enough to shatter both bones
below his knee. Somehow, the ship stayed afloat long enough for Joe, Braun,
Gibson, and the two tail gunners to be rescued.
Two surgeries were needed to insert stainless steel pins in Joe’s tibia and
fibula, and to cut skin from his buttocks to be grafted onto his shin. By the
time he was able to get out of his hospital bed and move around, the doctor told
him he was lucky to be alive, let alone able to walk. But walking was a painful
process at best, despite his cane. It was a herky-jerky motion by which he tried
to relieve the pressure on his injuries, but at the price of considerable lower
back pain. That, in addition to the lower leg pain, which was almost constant
after the last of his morphine prescriptions elapsed, would have confined a
lesser man to a life without physical activity. But Joe refused to become a
“basket case”, as he would say to anyone who cared to listen. His way of easing
the pain was drinking gin and taking aspirin, both of which were readily
available without prescription.
As soon as it became possible to walk far enough to leave the base, Joe
began spending his time at a nearby pub, The Quarterdeck. Southampton, on
England’s southern coast, was a seafaring town, and Joe became absorbed in the
stories that salmon fishermen swapped over their beers, not to mention the
green-eyed, red-haired barmaid who worked there. Mary O’Brien was a perky lass
with a turned-up nose and a set to her chin that spoke of stubbornness, and
before long she took a liking to the dark-haired yank who walked with his head
held high and a defiant glint in his deep blue eyes, despite his strange limp.
Though she was only twenty, she could tell by the way he held his liquor, and
the stolid front he put up, that he had character. It didn’t take long for the
soldier and the barmaid to fall in love.
Joe arrived at The Quarterdeck every evening and talked with Mary whenever
she wasn’t busy. Long past the time when the alcohol had lost its power of
intoxication, he sipped his gin for the gentle numbness it brought, which was
his only means of tolerating the cruel trick life had played on him.
Every night, when Mary finished her work, he walked her down to the modest
cottage near the coast where she lived with her father, a retired seaman, and
her grandmother. What little lovemaking that took place between them was
accomplished awkwardly and incompletely in Mary’s front yard, on a wooden bench
shielded from the house by an ancient privet. When it became apparent to them
that they would marry, she brought Joe inside to meet her family.
Sean O’Brien was a tall, spare man with large features, his weathered face
a series of broad, flat surfaces, upholstered in wrinkled leather, framed in a
Lincolnesque, salt and pepper beard, and punctuated by sparkling, ice-blue eyes.
He sat in a cushioned rocking chair, chewing on the stem of a curved meerschaum
pipe, smoothed and yellowed, with a patina that bespoke years of fondling. His
white knitted turtleneck sweater and blue denim trousers hanging from his frame
like scarecrow’s rags, he eyed Joe critically, unaware of the pain he’d endured
to walk to this first meeting. Joe stood proudly before Sean O’Brien, wearing
two ribbons above the left breast pocket of his olive-drab uniform blouse,
representing the Distinguished Flying Cross and, though he disdained it because
he did nothing positive to earn it, the Purple Heart. Mary stood beside Joe,
clutching his left arm and smiling inanely at her father and his mother-in-law,
who sat sipping tea at a nearby pine table.
Sean looked at the old woman, bald save for a few wisps of silky, white
hair, her face a lumpy mass of wrinkles protecting a pair of green eyes clouded
from age. He spoke to her in a language Joe could not understand, after which
she glared at the soldier, pulled her grey, woolen shawl around her bony
shoulders, and took another sip of tea. Then she spoke to her son-in-law,
talking at length in the same strange tongue he’d used.
Her father turned to Mary, removed the pipe from his mouth, and said, “It
can’t be done,” then clamped his jaw resolutely back onto the meerschaum.
“I will marry Joe,” she said, putting extra emphasis on the “will”, her
chin jutting defiantly.
“You heard your grandmother,” he replied, removing the pipe from his mouth
with an unsteady hand. “There’s the curse. You can’t marry the Yank.”
“What curse?” Joe said, his first words since entering the house.
“It’s not fair to me,” Mary said, interrupting Joe’s question. Her
petulance drew his attention from Sean.
“It’s not fair to the Yank, girl,” her father said, ignoring Joe’s
question.
“Excuse me, sir,” Joe said, his voice louder than he might have
wanted. “I’d like to know what you’re talking about. If something isn’t fair to
me, I think I should be the judge of it.”
Sean’s gaze flicked from his daughter’s defiant green eyes to Joe’s
determined blue ones, and back again. He sighed heavily, shrugged, struck a
match on the underside of the rocker, and held it to the bowl of his meerschaum,
sucking the stem and puffing smoke. All of these gestures were performed slowly,
deliberately, as if he were alone in his parlor. Once he had the pipe going to
his satisfaction, he returned to his daughter’s impatient, but still respectful
stare, which spoke of having endured similar situations many times before, and
said, “All right, then. Tell him.”
Mary grasped her lover’s hand and led him to a tweed covered divan placed
against the yellowed plaster wall. After a few seconds of silence, her fingers
fidgeting in her lap, she said, “There is supposed to be a curse on my family
that was put there hundreds and hundreds of years ago by the Blue People.”
“Do you mean real blue people, like with blue skin?”
“I’m not really sure. I don’t know how it got started, but it had something
to do with Saint Augustine and the Druids, who were called the Blue People.” She
paused, reluctant to continue.
“And…?” Joe said.
Mary glanced at her father, who kept his icy eyes on her, pipe clamped
firmly between his teeth.
“They had magic men,” she continued, “who were supposed to have somehow
made themselves blue to frighten their enemies. They felt it would make them
more powerful. They were said to be able to use the forces of nature and the
change of seasons in their magic, and…and…it’s all just superstitions and
whatnot, you know, from so long ago.” She stopped again, unsure of herself.
“Please go on,” Joe said.
“It has something to do with those converted by Saint Augustine to
Christianity. I’m not sure of all the details—don’t know if anyone is, really,
but the Blue People cursed those who became Christians. What it means to us is
that…that no sons are born into our family, only girls. You see, no one to carry
on the family name. I’m still not sure it has anything to do with it, but my
mother fell from a cliff into the sea many years ago. She was eight months
pregnant. It was ruled an accidental death.”
“I’m so sorry,” Joe said.
“It was long ago, but thank you.”
“So that’s it? No sons?”
“No, there’s more.” She looked back at Sean, who tapped his pipe into the
ashtray and refilled it, now avoiding her eyes.
“Any one of us born at the equinox, Spring or Fall, is cursed with strange
powers, witch’s powers. Those born at the solstices die by their own hand. My
mother was born on June twenty-first.”
Mary glanced at her father, his eyes squeezed shut as he puffed on his
pipe. Her grandmother, mumbling softly to herself, had also closed her eyes.
“The curse ends only when one of us dies childless.”
“How could you possibly know all these things?”
“From my grandmother, who heard it from hers, and so on, back into time.”
“It’s only superstition, you know.” Joe spoke softly, as much to calm Mary
as to avoid being heard across the room. “Certainly, your mother’s death was a
coincidence. Nobody can prove that it wasn’t.In either case, I still want to
marry you.”
“Let’s walk outside,” Mary said, her heart filled with joy, now that Joe
had confirmed his love for her.
Joe looked back to find Sean O’Brien and his mother-in-law still sitting as
they were before, their eyes closed. He never saw them again.
Mary O’Brien and Joe MacDougall were married by a United States Army
Chaplain on what would have been her mother’s fifty-third birthday, June
twenty-first, 1945.
Two weeks later Joe brought five things home with him to Philadelphia: his
limp, his addiction, his Distinguished Flying Cross, and his new bride.
The fifth thing was me, Barbara MacDougall, at that time barely the size of
a fingernail clipping while I grew in Mom’s womb. I was born on March
twenty-first, 1946.
About the author
Bobby Cohen has taught in the School District of Philadelphia, Temple
University, Peirce College, and Holy Family University for fifty-three years. He
is an active member of the Bucks County Writing Workshop. He and his wife have
lived in Richboro for the last forty-five years. He is the author of three
novels, and numerous short stories, four of which have been published. An avid
tennis player for over fifty years, Bobby is known primarily for his dogged
persistence.
