You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  The church’s teachings had an enduring impact on Ryan’s own thirst for knowledge and understanding—for a deeper connection to the world around him. He fancied himself something of a Renaissance man who liked to draw and paint, especially scenes of his beloved Low Country. He read Poe and the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, the nineteenth-century French writer. He was also captivated by motion pictures, the way they transported him to exotic places, seized his imagination, and stoked his sense of wanderlust. If he had a down day or “busted” a physics quiz at Georgia Tech, Bing Crosby and Bette Davis or Gary Cooper and Gloria Jean on the silver screen would make it all right again. Some of his personal favorites were adventure movies like Suez, in which Tyrone Power played a diplomat who envisions building a canal on the Isthmus of Suez. He was naturally drawn to stories of chivalry like the serials of the comic book hero Captain Marvel that debuted in 1941. The romantic in him was drawn to fairy tales.

  “Swell!” was his one-word verdict for The Wizard of Oz. When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened at the Riviera to much fanfare in 1939, twenty-two-year-old Ryan McCown saw it three times.

  He also had a deep appreciation for the simpler things in life. Ryan embraced—even relished—experiences that most others considered mundane. To him, taking a stroll down a traffic-clogged street in a downpour could be a grand activity. He was struck sometimes by how little feeling or emotion people around him often displayed, going through life barely noticing life itself. He had a name for them: “automatons.”

  Grace was initially less than thrilled when she learned that Ryan was dating Helen. She had been wary of all his female companions, a reaction stemming not only from her desire that he find the right match but also perhaps from a selfish impulse. When Grace had visited Ryan at the air station in Jacksonville the previous fall and he told her about a girl he had recently met there, he was surprised by her reaction, blurted out with a tinge of fear in her eyes. “Are you engaged to the girl?”

  Tonight, he was planning to call on Helen at her parents’ house and take her for supper at a nice place downtown. To his surprise, Grace offered to make dinner for them. “I wouldn’t have asked [Helen] to go home with me,” he wrote in his diary later, “but I noticed that in spite of Mother’s negative attitude, she had set a nice table for a buffet supper, so Helen and I rode out there.”

  Ma’s house at 1023 Ashley Avenue was a simple, one-story redbrick cottage with a small front porch and white awnings, located in a middle-class neighborhood a few miles west of downtown. The entryway to the right opened to the parlor, about twenty feet long but only six feet wide, leading to a small kitchen and laundry room in back. The other half of the cottage contained two bedrooms with a bathroom between them. The rear bedroom was partitioned so that Ryan and the girls had some measure of privacy; when Ma had a full house, which was rare these days, it was a tight squeeze. Ryan would sleep in a little nook created by a small supporting wall in the corner of the back bedroom.

  After supper, Ryan, Helen, and Grace spent the evening sitting in the parlor. Ma identified Helen, as she did every girl Ryan ever dated in the insular world of Charleston, by who her mother was. “It turns out that Helen and I should have grown up together,” Ryan discovered after hearing the two of them chatter. Helen’s father, a pharmacist, had trained in Aimar’s drugstore, which was owned by one of Grace’s relatives. It turned out to be a pleasant evening as the three of them stayed up late talking, playing party tricks and parlor games, and even dancing to some music on the radio.

  Helen sensed from Grace’s increasingly friendly and welcoming demeanor that she was deeply appreciative that Helen was sharing Ryan with her for the evening. Helen could see how attached they were, in so many ways. Grace had bequeathed her bright blue eyes to Ryan, and her thick, wavy hair, usually tied in the back with a silk scarf, was the same hue of reddish blond as his. But their physical similarities were only the most immediate sign of their connection. They had that special bond of a single mother and her only son, whose identity from a young age was molded by a sense of responsibility to play the role of protector. Ryan had been the man of the house ever since Ryan senior left, and he had taken that role seriously. Whatever Grace needed, Ryan was usually there, whether it was taking her to work, fixing a broken screen door, or scraping and painting the roof. When it came to raising Uranie and Claudia, too, Grace often sought his advice. When Claudia’s fiancé, Leonard Almeida, an Army officer, wrote Grace a letter, Grace dispatched it to Ryan to get his opinion.

  In turn, she doted on him, buying him new clothes and cooking his favorite dishes like rice and fried chicken with strawberries and cream for dessert. And like many mothers, she also tried to get him to go to church more often. But she didn’t smother him. Grace was a full partner in her son’s dreams and encouraged him in all his endeavors. When he was learning how to fly, she went out to the Charleston Army Airfield to watch him. When he got his license, she even went up with him on a twenty-five-minute flight. The previous spring the two of them took in the local air show, thrilling at the sight of the famous pilot Beverly Howard and his barnstorming aerial acrobatics.

  Her boy was never far from Grace’s mind, even if, due to his military duties, he was no longer around very much. When he was in naval flight training, she had dropped him a postcard from a whistle-stop. It read: “I keep seeing across the table an inquisitive little blue-eyed boy who was with me on another trip some 16 years ago. Remember?” Grace visited Ryan several times while he was stationed in Jacksonville, and as his training grew more intense and the war clouds inched closer, her letters and telegrams to him grew more frequent. Sometimes she penned one every day. For his birthday in January, she sent him a portable typewriter so he could write to her more often.

  “Hope she isn’t worrying,” Ryan remarked in his diary at the time.

  But spending time with Ma rarely felt like a chore. In many ways they were kindred spirits. The two of them went for drives in the countryside and enjoyed listening to Hans von Kaltenborn, the radio commentator known for his knowledge of world affairs. They liked to ride the bus downtown to see a picture and then enjoy a strawberry sundae at Walgreens drugstore. They saw the famed opera singer Lawrence Tibbett perform in County Hall—a grand experience despite the train whistle interrupting the show. Grace was an anchor in Ryan’s life, and he showed it. He named his small sailboat after her, calling it the Lady Grace, and would often take it out on Wadmalaw Sound in search of a bed of oysters to take back for Ma to cook up. On his travels through the South he mailed her small boxes of sweets—pralines and marmalades were among her favorites. He recently bought her a cast-iron doorstop that she had fancied when she noticed it in a shop window. On other occasions he sent her bouquets of roses, especially right before he was planning a rare visit to see his father in North Carolina.

  As for a twenty-one-year-old X-ray technician like Helen living in wartime Charleston, there was no shortage of invitations for dates. But Ryan was special. He had a maturity about him that many of the other boys lacked, but he was easy to talk to and interested in so many things. Helen, who considered herself a bit of a prude, would drink ginger ale or Coca-Cola at social events, and she liked that Ryan only drank and smoked on special occasions. In his mild-mannered way he was, she believed, the epitome of the southern gentleman. Perhaps the best compliment of all, she considered him a true Charlestonian. He had taken her boating in the marshes, for strolls along the beach on the Isle of Palms, and for dinner by the pool at the Villa Marguerita, the nineteenth-century mansion on South Battery and East Bay Street facing the White Point Gardens. And, oh, boy, the electricity Ryan gave off when he talked about flying, the way his eyes lit up when he recounted being at the controls in the cockpit, was infectious. Still, Helen couldn’t help but think that what he was doing was dangerous. He was almost certain to be going overseas, and she knew from her shift at the hospital that a lot of boys were getting badly hurt and many weren’t coming back at all.
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  When Grace finally retired to her bedroom for the night, Ryan and Helen sat for a while on the small swing on the front porch. Ryan unscrewed the lightbulb so that the two of them would have more privacy from the prying eyes of neighbors.

  “Helen’s mighty nice,” Ryan wrote later in his diary. “Think I could go for her with half a chance—if I were sure she isn’t a flirt.”

  “RHIP,” as Ryan liked to say. “Rank has its privileges.”

  He grabbed Helen by the hand and led her through the crowded ballroom of the Fort Sumter Hotel. There was a wedding reception going on—“some lowly Citadel cadet,” he quipped—but it was the swiftest way out to the hotel balcony, with its sweeping view of Charleston Harbor and the historic Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began.

  Ryan was wearing his dress whites with a gardenia boutonniere and set of small gold wings pinned on his chest, and Helen was wearing a yellow dress with matching gardenias pinned in her hair. They had enjoyed a Saturday evening supper in the hotel’s restaurant. Now, as Ryan and Helen gazed out over Charleston Harbor, the moon hung low in the east, giving the June haze a reddish hue. Strangely, the view made Ryan think of something he had heard during night flight training in Miami: “The only way you can see a sub at night is up moon.”

  He glanced over at his girl.

  He reached into his pocket for another pair of wings and, holding the pin between his fingers, handed them to her.

  “They’re like yours, aren’t they?” she said, looking up at him. “Exactly.”

  “I’m glad they’re like yours, because then I’ll look like you,” she whispered.

  “Take care of them,” Ryan told her. “They’re kinda special.”

  In the small box to store them, Ryan included a little inside joke on the note, a reference to how she wasn’t like the other girls.

  “Helen,” he wrote in clear print, “you were always such a swell guy. Love, Ryan.”

  Not wanting the evening to end, they later sat on Ma’s front porch, “enjoying a quiet summer night,” he recorded. “I could notice the creamy odor of her flowers. It is so nice being with Helen even if she embarrasses me. She is a little vixen.”

  By the time he drove her home, it was past midnight, and the military police were clearing the streets.

  “Migawd,” he recorded in his diary later. “She even wore gardenias!”

  At the end of April, after a precious few weeks of leave, Ryan was all set to take the overnight train north from Charleston to Quantico, Virginia, to report for duty. In the afternoon he phoned Helen one last time to say good-bye and tell her he would be back as soon as he could get away for a few days.

  “There were a lot of things I wanted to tell her,” Ryan wrote later in his diary, “and probably a good thing that I didn’t say any of them. I am going to miss Helen.”

  With evening approaching, Ryan dashed to pick up Uranie at the medical college, then back to the house to collect Ma, change into his uniform, and take them both for supper at the Fort Sumter Hotel’s dining room, with its “termite-eaten paneling and rafters.” Just as they were finishing their meal, a chorus from the Jenkins Orphanage, established before the turn of the century for Charleston’s African-American children, filed into the lobby to sing for the passersby.

  “It couldn’t have been better,” Ryan wrote.

  After dinner they barely had enough time to drop by and see Grace’s sister before Ryan had to pack and head to the train station. They walked into her house just as the president’s speech was coming on the radio, and they all gathered around to listen.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s twenty-first so-called fireside chat was, like most of the nationwide broadcasts these days, about the war. Roosevelt’s strong and steady voice filled the room at 10:00 p.m. sharp.

  “My fellow Americans,” the president began:

  It is nearly five months since we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. For the two years prior to that attack this country had been gearing itself up to a high level of production of munitions. And yet our war efforts had done little to dislocate the normal lives of most of us. Since then we have dispatched strong forces of our Army and Navy, several hundred thousand of them, to bases and battlefronts thousands of miles from home. We have stepped up our war production on a scale that is testing our industrial power, and our engineering genius and our economic structure to the utmost. We have had no illusions about the fact that this would be a tough job—and a long one. American warships are now in combat in the North and South Atlantic, in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean, and in the North and South Pacific. American troops have taken stations in South America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East, the Continent of Australia, and many islands of the Pacific. American warplanes, manned by Americans, are flying in actual combat over all the continents and all the oceans.

  In a call for national unity, Roosevelt then recounted for his listeners some of the exploits of those serving in uniform. One of them was about the crew of an Army Air Corps B-17 Flying Fortress on a mission over the Philippines:

  As it turned back on its homeward journey, a running fight between the bomber and the eighteen Japanese pursuit planes continued for seventy-five miles. Four pursuit planes … attacked simultaneously at each side. Four were shot down with the side guns. During this fight, the bomber’s radio operator was killed, the engineer’s right hand was shot off, and one gunner was crippled, leaving only one man available to operate both side guns. Although wounded in one hand, the gunner alternately manned both side guns, bringing down three more Japanese “Zero” planes. While this was going on, one engine on the American bomber was shot out, one gas tank was hit, the radio was shot off, and the oxygen system was entirely destroyed. Out of eleven control cables all but four were shot away. The rear landing wheel was blown off entirely, and the two front wheels were both shot flat. The fight continued until the remaining Japanese pursuit ships exhausted their ammunition and turned back. With two engines gone and the plane practically out of control, the American bomber returned to its base after dark and made an emergency landing. The mission had been accomplished.

  Roosevelt then closed:

  As we here at home contemplate our own duties, our own responsibilities, let us think and think hard of the example which is being set for us by our fighting men. Our soldiers and sailors are members of well disciplined units. But they are still and forever individuals—free individuals. They are farmers, and workers, businessmen, professional men, artists, clerks. They are the United States of America. That is why they fight. We too are the United States of America. That is why we must work and sacrifice. It is for them. It is for us.

  After the speech, Ryan went home and finished packing his things. He decided to call a taxi to take him to the station in North Charleston—much against the wishes of his mother, who wanted to personally see him off on the train. After he settled into his berth in a Pullman car filled with soldiers and sailors, he noted in his diary why he didn’t want Ma to see him off.

  “I didn’t want her hanging around the station then going back to the house.” Without him.

  It was Saturday, May 30, 1942, the morning of the regimental parade, and Ryan was up before dawn in his quarters at Quantico, the sprawling Marine Corps base on the western bank of the Potomac about thirty-five miles south of Washington, D.C. He was “awfully proud” to learn that he had been selected to lead the men as the parade formed and the band passed in review.

  Ryan had taken quickly to military life when he joined the Navy Reserve back in 1937, at the age of twenty. With his affinity for athletics—boxing, tennis, swimming, and running—he liked the physical and mental challenge of drill, the highly choreographed and complex formations and movements that were military tradition. When he later enrolled in Georgia Tech and transferred to the Navy Reserve unit on campus, he found himself leading the student battalion’s morning drill.

  “How I like
to be battalion commander,” he remarked during his freshman year in 1939.

  But even better than leading the men in that day’s parade was Helen’s upcoming visit. Ryan had been waiting excitedly all week to see her, especially after what happened three weeks earlier. He had hopped the Friday night train to Charleston after getting an unexpected weekend pass. After pulling in, he drove up to Stark General Hospital in Ma’s car to see her and was crestfallen to find out she had a date—a previously issued invitation for the weekend at Porcher’s Bluff—and planned to keep it.

  “By all means, let’s observe all the proper proprieties,” he said then, rather caustically. “What do we care if the world is crashing around us, and it is later than we think. Let’s be Charlestonian about this thing.”

  So when Helen proposed to visit him in Quantico, he didn’t get his hopes up. “I seriously doubt it,” he wrote that lonely weekend. He just wasn’t sure if Helen was serious about him. She had a steady stream of invitations to balls and dances, he knew, and she probably had many other dates these past months while he was away. How he stacked up against all the other suitors in uniform competing for her affections, Ryan didn’t know. Besides, Quantico was a long way from Charleston, at least twelve hours on the overnight train. So he was particularly delighted to receive her letter a week ago alerting him that she and her mother would be getting into Washington early Saturday.