Section V
2022
The Incessant j o a n r at c l i f f e
I
can still see the sickened look on my father’s face—the twirling madness of the blue eyes unbelieving—when he told me as a teenager that “those two people”—meaning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—should never have gone to the electric chair. And nobody in their family would even step up to adopt their two orphaned children. Dad cursed the U.S. government over and over—there was more going on in his head, appalled at every turn, than he would let out, probably for fear of being called a communist. One time, sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove through the Dracut woods returning from our grandparent’s house in Methuen, I asked him, “Dad, are you a communist?” “No, I’m a socialist.” On the way home that day, we stopped at the Finn’s house to pay a visit, and my parents went in for the first time to meet this family, who a mailman in our neighborhood had said received incriminating mail in brown wrappers. “He shouldn’t be talking like that,” Dad responded, as we passed Brox Farm, the apple orchards of East Dracut, and the entrance to the pond dotted by cabins where we swam with cousins of screen door summers. Running up the steps into the house to see my schoolmates, I was sent back out to get my parents, who came in smiling—especially my father—to greet these wonderful people who had a bunch of kids—with a great picnic table in the kitchen for the chow hounds who wouldn’t dare miss the dinner bell—the colossal casseroles of their saintly mother gone in a swoop of hands; coming out, my father grinning and finally being asked the question of all questions from his eldest daughter, and incriminating himself irrevocably in my heart, glad. He had never quite explained how it had happened—and I never understood until later— but he had somehow become the only leftist in his Republican family. But there was one story he liked to tell, which might hold a clue to Dad’s pure paranoia. During the Second World War he had been hospitalized at the Naval Hospital at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, after receiving his vaccinations to go overseas. The hospitalization went on for a year or more, during which time he had been severely ill and confined to a wheelchair. I’ve never been able to ascertain exactly what disease he had—and he had only a vague idea himself—but he claimed it had been something exotic, and possibly more than one disease. He insisted he had been a “guinea pig” for some experimental vaccine, and “they”—the “bastards”—had purposely given him the disease. Dad had a postcard of the USS Incessant—an Admiral class, the largest of the minesweepers charged with anti-submarine warfare—on which he had been consigned after recovering sufficiently enough for the government to try to kill him a second The Lowell Review
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