Julianna McCarthy
Lifeboat
We walked out of Shea’s theatre into an electric hour.
Three weeks of happiness had passed
since the Allies entered Germany, marked by
special events like after-school movies with my parents.
We’d seen Lifeboat, a Hitchcock film
about survivors of a torpedoed liner:
Tallulah Bankhead in a sopping mink,
fishing with a diamond bracelet for bait;
the handsome stevedore; the cynical newsman;
Heather Angel rocking her dead baby;
the nurse; the kindly black steward – and the Nazi.
All cast adrift on a suspicious sea of dependency.
They kill the Nazi, of course.
We walked blinking from the theatre
and found the street filled with noise.
Newsboys shouting, arms filled with papers:
“Extra! Extra! ‘Roosevelt Dies in Warm Springs.’”
Crumpled faces, red-eyes, men cursing –
“Oh my God” from my mother. My father,
the history teacher, buying half a dozen copies
of the Erie Daily Times for us and his students.
One of the newsboys wore a black band on his sleeve.
Someone began to sing “Home on the Range,”
Roosevelt’s favorite song. A few people joined in,
unsure of the words, fumbling its course
along an indecisive passage to the promise
that “the skies are not cloudy all day.”
We lingered a while on Tenth Street,
my parents talking to people I didn’t know;
but finally my father, holding my mother’s hand,
then took mine and we drove home.
Long after I went upstairs,
I saw from my window my father
still sitting in the car, smoking.
