I was in the kitchen this morning, carefully avoiding stepping on my lounging cat, while mindlessly making coffee for my wife and myself. In the background, I heard Steve Inskeep introduce his interview with Michele Norris, about her book, The Grace of Silence. When Inskeep noted that Michele’s father “walked with a touch of syncopation,” my attention intensified, since it easily could have applied to my father. As she described how her father had remained silent about his gunshot wound for all his life, I thought of the time when I bought my first suit, when I was almost twenty. At my father’s urging, I had gone to the tailor he had frequented for many years. As the tailor was measuring for the length of the pants, the tailor said, in an off-handed, almost joking, way, “Well, at least we don’t have to worry about measuring each leg separately, like I do with you father.” “What are you talking about?” I asked. The tailor, obviously taken aback, said, “Well, you know, um, because of, you know, his war injury.” “What on earth are you talking about?” I repeated. “Didn’t you know?” the tailor responded, obviously embarrassed. “Your father lost almost two inches of his left leg during World War Two.” Dumbfounded, I stammered, “I never knew that. He never mentioned it.” I rushed home, eager to fathom and dispel my ignorance. Unwilling to confront my father, I asked my mother about this revelation when she came home from work. “Well of course he never mentioned it,” she said. “His father lost his right arm when he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Why would your father mention losing a couple of inches from his leg?” The “grace of silence” indeed.
-Antony Pate
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