You Are Not Forgotten Page 4
Ryan had been away at flight school for the past six months. He missed strolling with Ma and the girls around the Battery, the promenade along the shores of the peninsula. He and his youngest sister, Claudia, had dreamed up countless stories about the brightly colored eighteenth-century mansions with their wide porches and carefully sculpted gardens, competing to see who could come up with the most outlandish yarn about the mysterious people who lived behind the high brick walls and iron gates. How many afternoons had he sat with his sister Uranie in the shade of old Castle Pinckney, the masonry fortification constructed in 1810 in Charleston Harbor, or shared a steak with Ma at the Huguenot Tavern, that “hot, close, dusty little place” in the French Quarter, with its legendary desserts? The four of them—Ryan, “Claudie,” Uranie, and Ma—had enjoyed countless pictures at the Riviera, the majestic Art Deco movie house on King Street, knocked around the white sandy beaches on the nearby Isle of Palms, and cooled off from the summer heat in the hidden coves snaking through South Carolina’s Low Country.
The familiar sights and sounds of Ryan’s Charleston were still here, but almost everything was now drowned out by the drumbeat of war. He continued a few blocks farther down Meeting Street and was engulfed by a hive of activity surrounding the City Market, the series of open-air buildings spreading northeast for four blocks to the Old Custom House on East Bay Street. The lazy seaport he once knew now swarmed with sailors, soldiers, fliers, construction workers, cooks, and countless other new arrivals. The restaurants and taverns were bursting with customers and the rooming houses crammed to capacity. Perhaps the starkest sign of the changes the war wrought were the military police keeping a watchful eye over the Friday night revelry.
The city’s population had doubled to 220,000 in just two years with the expansion of the Charleston Navy Yard. Located about ten miles west along the Cooper River, the facility employed more than twenty-five thousand workers and operated around the clock, six days a week, building and repairing warships for the Allied invasions of Europe and the Pacific. At night, according to one observer, the sparks of molten metal from the welder’s arcs and the glow of their forges made the shipyard look like a giant amusement park.
The hum of activity was fueled by the nearby Charleston Army Airfield and other military installations that had sprung up around the city, including the Army’s Stark General Hospital in North Charleston, where wounded soldiers returning from the battlefields of North Africa were being nursed back to health. The changes had been profound in the five months since the Japanese attack on the American fleet moored in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. County Hall was now the offices of the U.S. Army, the Calhoun Mansion was boarding Army and Navy personnel, and the Fort Sumter Hotel was headquarters for the Sixth Naval District. Charleston was struggling to keep up with the influx. On Broad Street the newly established Committee for Congested Production Areas was overseeing the construction of new restaurants, cafeterias, and living quarters while working feverishly to improve the disposal of garbage and expand medical, fire, and police services.
Those not serving in uniform, meanwhile, worked in munitions factories, sold war bonds to finance the effort, volunteered for the Red Cross, or planted “Victory Gardens” to supplement the depleted supplies of fresh vegetables. Countless others served as nurses’ aides, salvage workers, or aircraft spotters. Indeed, the dangers of the war were not just something feared from far across the sea. Earlier in the war German submarines had been spotted just outside Charleston Harbor. Beach patrols were established to prevent enemy infiltration, while the bridges over the Cooper and Ashley Rivers on either side of the peninsula were patrolled to look for saboteurs.
As in the rest of the nation, rationing was part of the new way of life. Shortages of sugar, meat, coffee, shoes, gasoline, tires, and other staples were common, while luxuries like perfume, whiskey, and nylons were almost impossible to come by, found only on the black market. City leaders were trying to locate enough rice and grits to keep the natives happy. They met with only modest success. Most Charlestonians, turning up their noses, had to settle for yellow grits instead of white grits for the remainder of the war. The signs of the collective effort were everywhere. “Support the War Effort. Make Do, or Do Without,” urged one entreaty tacked to Charleston’s faded brick storefronts. “Gasoline Is Vital. Save!” appealed another.
The tumult was wholly unfamiliar to a city that a novelist not long before described as “a beguiling old place with the smell of the sea, a place that spells leisure in a manner quite un-American.” The Charleston Post and Courier summed up the new landscape in a recent editorial. “The old Charleston is one of the casualties of the war,” the editors wrote, “and there is no time for mourning over it now.”
But after all, this was still the same Charleston where Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind shops for her elegant accessories in the boutiques lining King Street. Some things were still sacrosanct, including the treasured tradition of socializing. The grand balls, hops, receptions, and debutante teas continued virtually unabated despite the war. Tonight was no different.
A few blocks beyond the City Market, Ryan arrived at the wrought-iron gate and glowing gas lamps of Hibernian Hall, the benevolent society and private social club where his sister Uranie was waiting in her white gloves and gown for him to escort her to the Medical Ball.
Ryan and Uranie ascended the stairs and proceeded through the six pillars of the imposing Hibernian Hall, a fixture of antebellum Charleston built in 1840. They stepped through the two heavy wooden doors and beneath the benevolent society’s seal of a harp with the words, inscribed in Latin, “Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco”—“Being familiar with misfortune, I learn to assist the unfortunate.” They stood in the grand foyer, a triple-tiered rotunda with two facing staircases. Along the ornately wallpapered central hallway hung the portraits of past presidents of the society, and on each side were spacious sitting rooms with imposing marble fireplaces furnished with plush antique lounges and billiard tables covered in red velvet. At the rear of the hall was a small, elegantly appointed ballroom decorated with large hanging mirrors and, just beyond it, a cozy barroom with high-backed leather chairs.
They ascended one of the staircases to the ballroom on the second floor but found it nearly empty, barring a stag or two. The orchestra was just setting up onstage for the dance. Undaunted by the lack of music, Ryan took Uranie by the hand, twirled his sister around, and they danced a few steps beneath one of the five golden chandeliers hanging in the cavernous room. They glided along the dance floor before the tall open windows, the curtains drawn, looking out over Charleston and the imposing stone spire of the Unitarian Church two blocks south on Archdale Street. The orchestra, Skura and His Boys, quickly took Ryan’s hint and started up.
Uranie, with her brown eyes and dark curls cut attractively short, had creamy white skin and radiated a wholesome beauty like their mother, Grace. She was a student at the medical college and had a buttoned-down air about her. To Ryan, it seemed that the only time he got to spend with her was while driving her to and from her classes in Ma’s car. But if anyone could bring Uranie out of her shell, it was her brother, Ryan. In earlier times the two of them went horseback riding in Hampton Park, the former plantation adjacent to the Citadel, sharing a bock beer afterward at Harry’s Tavern or the Huguenot—once in a while even ordering a scotch and soda or a Bloater’s Punch. Like Ma and their younger sister, Claudia, Uranie adored her older brother, who had been the man of the house ever since their father left, and was helping to pay for her schooling. When he had been ill, Uranie doted on him, making sure he took a cold capsule or a dose of salts. Last Thanksgiving, she went to visit him in Jacksonville, where he was in flight training, so he wouldn’t be alone for the holiday. Ryan never forgot Uranie’s birthday or failed to mark a special occasion with a postcard, telegram, or orchid.
Though just five feet seven inches tall, Ryan, with his wiry athletic frame, cut a dashing figure in his dress uniform
. He wore a form-fitting flannel coat and collar with gold buttons, a white belt with a solid brass buckle, and blue doeskin trousers with a red stripe running down the side of each leg. His white cap—which was never worn indoors, of course—had a black brim to match his spit-shined shoes, and his shoulders glimmered with the gold bars of a second lieutenant. The ornaments of an eagle, globe, and anchor were pinned to both his cap and his collar. Most of all he proudly displayed the shiny new wings of a Marine Corps aviator on his chest.
He had sparkling sky-blue eyes and a stubborn cowlick that made almost a complete swirl of reddish-blond hair across the middle of his forehead. His most recognizable trait, however, was the left-eye squint. Ever since he was a boy, his left brow hung a little lower than his right, almost as if he were about to wink but the muscles around his eye froze in place just before he could do so. The feature accentuated a friendly, open face that smiled easily.
As a lifelong Charlestonian, he spoke in that low-sounding drawl where “cooper” becomes “cuppah,” “house” sounds like “hoose,” and one-syllable words are especially drawn out, so that “state” comes out sounding more like “stey-it.” He also had a habit of turning nouns into adjectives, especially when talking about the weather, which as a pilot was never too far from his thoughts. It could be “rainy and squally” or “sunshiny.” His favorite colloquialisms appeared frequently in everyday conversation—say, if things were going well, they were “smooth as cream.” In the rare instances when they weren’t, he would mutter, “No soup,” or might propose that things were “tense as hang.” When something captured his imagination, like a motion picture or an especially entertaining floor show, it was the “darnedest thing.”
Marion Ryan McCown Jr., at twenty-five, was a mirthful spirit with a whimsical, even mischievous streak that gave him the urge to dance without any music or—as he did when he was a student a few years earlier at Georgia Tech—purloin a ladder from one of the dormitories so he could sneak a peek at Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh when Gone With the Wind was premiering in Atlanta in 1939.
The Hibernian Hall ballroom soon filled with more people, many also wearing the crisp uniforms of the Army, Navy, or Marines. The orchestra struck up a waltz, and a few of the fellas broke in to dance with Uranie. Ryan soon found a group of friends from the old neighborhood on Trumbo Street, where he and the girls lived for a time with Ma’s brother after Dad had left, in the large three-story white house with black shutters on a sleepy palm-lined side street next to Colonial Lake. Harriette King, herself now a Navy ensign, arrived at the ball along with Ed LaRoche and Sue Legare. Ryan reminisced with them about when they were still in knickers and the neighborhood kids would pair up and pretend to get married in ornate mock weddings. They got a good laugh at the innocence of it all.
“What a thrill,” Ryan wrote later in his diary, “to see a hall crowded with people you’ve known all your life.”
Then, just before the intermission, Helen Miller arrived, “making the dance a mighty bright spot.”
Ryan picked Helen out of the crowd in her blue dress, fitting snuggly on her petite frame. Her auburn hair was crowned with yellow flowers, and her lips were painted a deep red. Ryan vowed to dance with her during a no-break—when rivals couldn’t interrupt the dance—before one of the other fellas beat him to it.
Four years his junior, Helen had been an acquaintance of his sister Uranie’s from the hospital. She was now working as an X-ray technician up at Stark General Hospital, and he had been courting her during his intermittent visits to Charleston. They had been introduced the previous May in the Fort Sumter Hotel, when she had become the first girl who ever asked him, “Do you like to cast for shrimp?” Ryan and Helen quickly found they had a lot in common.
He danced with Uranie for the first no-break. It was a version of Tommy Dorsey’s “I’m Getting Sentimental over You,” and it brought back a flood of memories of his high school days. He waited impatiently for the second no-break to ask Helen for a dance, and when it finally came, the two of them pressed closely together, making hushed small talk, as Skura and His Boys started up a waltz medley with “I Love You Truly.”
Life with its sorrow, life with its tear,
Fades into dreams when I feel you are near …
Ah! Love, ’tis something to feel your kind hand,
Ah! Yes, ’tis something by your side to stand.
How many times had he danced in this hall, to the same music by the same orchestra? Ryan thought. But Helen was different. He concluded privately that she rated as “old folks” but “with new ideas”—maybe just his type of gal. He vowed to see much more of her before his leave ended. He would be departing for the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, in a few weeks—and then who knew where? There was little time to waste.
Every chance he got, Ryan took advantage of his leave and the spring weather to inhale his beloved South Carolina Low Country. One of his first stops after he arrived home was Middleton Place, with its breathtaking gardens, near the banks of the Ashley River. Planted two centuries earlier, the gardens were patterned after Versailles with its bowling greens, canals, sculptures, and twin lakes shaped like a butterfly’s wings—all designed with a mathematical precision that was especially pleasing to Ryan’s eye for geometry. On another day, he and an old friend paddled in a heavy downpour through a black-water swamp of cypress and tupelo trees out in Moncks Corner, in Berkeley County. “Add under memories,” Ryan scrawled in his diary after drying out.
Ryan had cherished the outdoors ever since he was a boy and joined the Boy Scouts. He loved to build fires under the moonlit sky on Folly or South Edisto Beach—an activity, he was recently disappointed to learn, that had been suspended due to the war. His urge to be in nature was also why he had decided long ago that he was “not open to clerical work.” He liked to get his boots dirty scrambling up the riverbanks or, as he did one recent summer, being pelted in a squall while setting tidal gauges and recording sounding data in Charleston Harbor, rough work that required pulling cable and anchors for the sounding party. Nor was he afraid to drink river water out of a clamshell.
The job he previously held as a surveyor and draftsman for the U.S. Engineering Department made him intimately familiar with the waterways that snaked through the coastal areas of South Carolina. He knew where the eagles circled over the rice fields and recognized the green salt water of the marshes that gave way to the red tinge of the Santee and Sampit Rivers, where the ducks hugged the swamps. He had plied the Pee Dee and Black Rivers up to Winyah Bay and the old seaport of Georgetown, where young girls still stood on the shore shucking rice with a mortar and pestle, remnants of a bygone era. But it was the banks of the Waccamaw he liked best, with its old and twisted cypress trees that seemed to have died once, only to begin growing again. When he wasn’t on the water, he traced the back roads on a motorcycle. He relished even the simplest of pleasures of his native surroundings, like the honeysuckle twining outside his open bedroom window at Ma’s or the song of the mockingbirds in the moonlight.
The Low Country was in his blood. As the eldest child of Grace Emilie Aimar and Marion Ryan McCown Sr., he had deep roots in South Carolina. The first McCown who came to America was a Scottish Highlander from the clan Colquhoun, pronounced “Coheen,” who arrived in 1756. John McCown later served in the Pee Dee Regiment of General Francis Marion’s brigade in the Revolutionary War and provided provisions and cattle to the Continental Army and Militia. Family history held that John’s three younger brothers, Samuel, Moses, and Alexander, all died fighting for American independence. In 1825, one Annie McCown, along with her classmates from the Female Academy, was selected to chant an ode of welcome to the Marquis de Lafayette, the French major general and hero of the Revolution, as he walked through a petal-strewn path on the green in front of Cornwallis House in Camden, South Carolina. Ryan’s grandfather Robert Maxcy McCown had served as South Carolina’s secretary of state from 1906 to 1916. Grace’s family, too, boasted a storied
tradition that began in the early years of the Republic. Her forebear Sebastian Aimar had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army in France and was said to have hid under a coffee sack on a ship bound from Havana to Charleston in 1810 and later owned a store at 199 East Bay Street near the City Market.
Ryan’s parents had been married in the Unitarian Church of Charleston in February 1916, and he arrived eleven months later, on January 14, 1917. Two years after that came Blanche Uranie, followed by Claudia Merritt McCown in 1921. But their parents’ marriage didn’t last. Ryan senior, a lawyer with interests in several hotels along the East Coast, divorced Grace in 1922, when Ryan was just five, Uranie three, and Claudia barely a year old. Gracie, as Ryan’s mother was affectionately known, once remarked about her marriage that she and Ryan senior had one thing in common: three children.
The Unitarian Church, however, where Grace was active and her children marked key milestones, remained a stable force after the divorce and played a central role in molding Ryan and his sisters. The oldest Unitarian church in the South, the Gothic-style cathedral was built in 1772, its lush churchyard and cemetery thick with flowers, shrubs, and trees and rooted in history and legend. The church had been occupied by both American and British troops during the Revolutionary War, and one romantic embellishment was that the ghost of Annabel Lee, the heroine in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name, haunted the faded headstones and overgrown pathways searching for her lover.
But while the church was a fixture of the Old South, its members left most of the traditional conservative beliefs of fellow Charlestonians at the stone archway. The Unitarians were guided by a Universalist compass that declared that every person had inherent worth. The ownership of slaves by some church members became a highly contentious moral dilemma during the Civil War. The church espoused a liberal acceptance of other religious denominations and a deep compassion for others. When Grace and her children attended, there were sermons on Shakespeare, and once even Hindu worship sheets were handed out to the congregation. The transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke before the congregation in 1827, described the church’s worldview as living “through the fire of thought” and engaging in religious worship that does “not fence the Spirit.” Amid the orthodoxy of 1930s South Carolina, the Unitarian Church was a welcoming and comforting shelter for a divorced woman like Grace working as a social worker at the police station while raising three children on her own to stake their claim in the world.