Family Vows
by Mary Jane Aklonis

George pulled the first cigarette from his pack, an Old Gold that left tobacco bits on his tongue. Now that his doctor had diagnosed a “suspicious spot” as the real thing, there seemed no point in quitting. Since Iwo Jima, he’d rarely seen the point of anything except the pleasure of inhaling smoke, or the anticipation of a brew swirling through his gums. Four fifteen, and he’d yet to drink, holding off until after the appointment. None of the med’s business anyway if he wanted to down a six pack every night, or two, but Virginia, his wife of thirty-five years, cared about proprieties. Propriety, he snorted to himself, as he thought of ten or more soldiers around him simultaneously screaming for help. Wasn’t he a lucky bastard to have bouts of malaria as his only war wound? No bronze star, but he could walk on legs that weren’t blown off, and still admire a moonlit sky. Mostly he liked to sit on a barstool in a tavern in North Philadelphia, watch news anchor John Facenda report on President Ford tripping again, or catch an inning of a Phillies game. 
	Where was Virginia anyway? She’d opted to say a rosary at the Catholic Church down the street from the doctor’s office, rather than sit in the waiting room inhaling Lysol and human leakage. He remembered how a young grunt’s brains looked as they leaked out of his skull and into his hands. He lit another cigarette, spat with machine-gun rapidity to expel the leaf remnants, and then placed a straw fedora on his balding head. He mopped sweat from his face with the clean handkerchief his wife handed him every day before he left for work.  
	The July sun emerged from behind a thundercloud, illuminating the chubby form of his short wife approaching from north on Germantown Avenue. Virginia had been overweight since the birth of their second daughter Joan, but he loved to squeeze her anyway on the few days a month she allowed him to touch her. Graying hair and a lined face betrayed her age, but she’d maintained a certain girlishness that still appealed 
As a twenty-six year old marine with a family, George had carried a different sense of mortality than his nineteen-year-old counterparts. The image of his babies gazing at him before he hoisted his duffel bag drove him to stay alive, and he was determined to insure his own safety.
	Impatient to get away from the doctor’s office now, he climbed into his white Ford Fairlane leaving the passenger door ajar for Virginia. To block the sun he pulled down the visor and cursed at the St. Christopher medal his wife insisted on clipping there. “To keep us safe in the Lord’s hands, George.” He looked at his spotted hands, arthritis in them loosening even his ability to grip a cold brew, hands that had to haul corpses through black sand and snake-infested jungle. After a quick, last puff before his wife got into the car, he coughed the unsatisfactory cough of the chronically ill.
	He smiled as the passenger side dipped slightly, “Here she is, the Crisco kid.” Mimicking light heartedness, he pinched a roll of fat that Virginia’s high-waisted dress couldn’t hide.
	“Oh Georgie”, she batted her eyes coyly, “You don’t mean it.” She giggled in the same girlish manner that attracted him to her those thirty-some years ago. 
	No, he didn’t mean it, not in the cruel way one might think if he or she didn’t know the couple. They sat for a moment as she placed crystal rosary beads in a small leather purse, blessed her self, and asked how he made out at the doctor’s.
	“Looks like those prayers of yours and the girls have paid off.” He snorted, ran his index finger back and forth under his nose, and adjusted his glasses, which had slid on sweat. He flipped the visor back up and turned the ignition key too quickly. “Cheap piece of s-h-i-t,” he grumbled as it stalled on his second try. 
“Holy shit!” he’d uttered at the Japanese soldiers emerging on fire from a volcanic cave George’s unit had torched. His buddy, a young corporal named Ed, mumbled the same expletive before observing that they didn’t even scream. George couldn’t stop staring as an arm melted, a leg, a face. Ed tugged at his sleeve and forced him away from the spectacle. Maybe he’d only dreamed of a hell without words.
	“Georgie, George, it’s okay, kiddo.” Virginia was patting his arm, her cue to help pull him out of his trance. In the early days after the war, he’d awake screaming and thrashing, causing her to hold him for hours. Only once did she ask for details. Her question arose from his inability to stop sobbing after he’d been asleep. At the time, he couldn’t remember what specifically triggered his tears, so he didn’t reply. She never asked again. 
	“All in God’s hands, dear,” her answer to everything. “Let’s get a pizza and a cheese steak at Marciano’s. Then I can tell the girls you took me on a dinner date, you foolish man.” She smiled, but then looked away quickly.
	The engine caught and he shifted into first before heading to the dark paneled tavern with its smell of olive oil and oregano, and its chilly temperature from an air conditioner that dripped water onto linoleum.  
	He winked as she turned back to him, saying he’d hoped she’d prefer an informal evening. “Besides, you forgot to wear chiffon, and my tux is at the cleaner’s.” He hadn’t felt hungry in weeks, but the prospect of noisy customers and a frosted mug stirred pangs in his gut. He particularly liked the hum of talk and clattering dishes: it dimmed the constant ringing in his ears, a by-product of bullets grazing too close to his skull.
	As soon as they got seated in the tavern, Virginia pulled her dark framed glasses from her purse and began reading the menu. “Why do I even bother?” She replaced the spectacles in her bag as the young Italian waitress approached, the girl who always wore a black sweater, even in July. “I’ll have a highball straight up and a cheese steak.”
	“Maam, fries with your steak?” She snapped her bubble gum as she stared deliberately at Virginia’s girth.
	“No thanks, just the sandwich will do.” 
	George ordered his younger daughter’s favorite, pizza with the works, and a Bud. The waitress reminded him that pizza took a lot longer to prepare than the cheese steak. “Okay to wait?” 
He nodded, wondering how he’d manage to down one slice let alone a whole pie. “Don’t forget the anchovies.” He winked as if it was a private joke between them.
“Honey Pot, how can you stand the sight of those little skeletons?” Nancy, their older daughter, reacted just like her mother to anything on a plate that resembled what it really was, but not his Joan. She adored anchovies, not even blinking at their strong salty taste threatening to choke you if you ate too fast. 
He stared at his wife from across the table of their favorite booth, the one where both his Nancy and Joan had sat with them on countless Friday nights, chatting and rolling their eyes with pleasure as they inhaled the aroma of spicy tomatoes on baked dough, sometimes daring each other to see who could eat more at one sitting.
He shouldn’t have been so strict with them, but after what he saw and heard in the Pacific, he barely let them out of his sight. When Virginia took them to daily mass, placed a statue of the Virgin in their room, he protested but felt secretly relieved. They’d done too good of a job and now both girls were out of their lives. 
After the drinks arrived, he took a quick gulp and headed for the men’s room. Don’t touch my drink while I’m gone, Tubby.” 
“I only indulge in one vice at a time, Georgie”. She lifted the small glass and he watched as her cherry bobbled on the surface. 
In the men’s room, George gave into a minute-long coughing spell, culminating in a mouthful of bloody phlegm. And there he was, the nineteen-year-old Ed with a bullet in his heart, blowing red bubbles as George held him, first in the jungle, now in his memory while urinating in the bathroom of an old bar. The place stank and was at least ten degrees warmer than the dining area with its canned cold air.  
His Nancy was only nineteen when she told him of her intentions. How could such a young girl act so definitively?  God damn, first in her class, brilliant in science, he insisted she sell clothing at a men’s retail shop for a year before leaving. 
“But I don’t know anything about clothes, Dad, except that you only wear brown suits and shoes.” A year to the day later, she quit, not having met any bachelors as he’d hoped to dissuade her from joining the convent. 
He still had his Joanie back then, and doted on her with all of his paternal instincts. Sweet and giggly like her mother but slower than Nancy, she had the appetite of a lumberjack. They ate their way through pizza, cheese steaks, hoagies, and fried clams whenever they visited the Ocean City boardwalk. His three women, laughing, and cleaning the apartment where he insisted they live, but praying together as well. Maybe if he’d moved them to a suburb…
When Joan entered the Little Sisters of the Poor, a semi-cloistered order that demanded its nuns beg for money and live in prolonged silence, George stopped attending mass.  The thought of his lusty child shut away in a nunnery, face pinched in a hard-starched habit that made her look like a chipmunk, depressed him more deeply than war memories. He upped the number of beers he consumed and expanded his smoking to two packs a day. Virginia said novenas and attended at least four retreats a year. Maybe she’d sign up for the convent too, after he kicked the bucket.
Before returning to the booth, he stopped at the cigarette machine, placed two quarters in the slot, and pulled the lever for Old Gold. He caught Virginia looking pitifully at him. Sometimes, she actually resembled a basset hound with her sad brown eyes and long face.  
He’d kept the gun all these years without ever telling her or the girls. Weeks ago, when he first spotted the blood, he removed it from the case where he’d hid it in the back of a storage closet. While Virginia was at mass, he examined the pistol with its cold metal so menacing and oily, the trigger curved so his knotty fingers could still wrap around easily.
At the table, they drank, ate, and avoided each other’s eyes as he ordered a third, then a fourth brew. “Don’t give those disapproving nun looks of yours. Beer brings me peace. For you it’s prayers.”
She began to tear up, pushed her half-full plate toward him, and announced she’d forgotten her Tums for heartburn. “I can walk the few blocks to home. It’ll do me good to get some fresh air.” She declined his offer to drive her.
“I may be a while, Indigestia. The pie probably won’t be out of the oven for another ten minutes.” He sipped from his mug as she nodded.
“Don’t gulp, George, or you’ll feel like I do right now.’
He stood at his place while she gathered her jacket and bag, fighting an intense urge to cough. “Bye, Virginia.”
He knew she’d fall asleep later in the girls’ room, rosaries entwining her hands as his fingers wrapped around the gun he’d placed in the trunk earlier that day. It was a short drive to Fairmount Park with its huge trees and remote areas away from the Park Police. With Virginia and the girls praying for his soul, perhaps he could withstand hell, if it existed, but would he be able to keep from screaming? 
He stared at the cherry sitting at the bottom of his wife’s glass and started daydreaming in a haze of cigarette smoke. When the pizza round was slid onto the table, he was startled and turned nervously toward the waitress. He noticed the black sleeve of her sweater seemed looser, the cuff a bell-like opening he hadn’t remembered being that way before. It resembled a nun’s habit, and then there she was, his Joanie, sitting across from him, her smile and sparkling eyes exuding excitement, her bonnet off and her nun’s dress loosely draped over street clothes. “Dad,” she said, “You have the first slice.”
He picked up the steaming triangle with its melted cheese and herbs and took a bite-delicious. Joan followed, closing her eyes with pleasure as the combination of flavors slid through her mouth. They didn’t speak, sharing their mutual appetites in joyful silence.  He could get to the park any time, he thought, and then sank his teeth into the next slice.