The Beneficiary by Janny Scott

Author:Janny Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

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At the “cottage” in Maine, a shadow fell over the summer of 1941. War was raging in Europe and Asia. The United States would soon join. My father’s uncle Warwick had joined the Naval Reserve and was now a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific, deputy to the director of the port at Manila. Maisie Scott, the Scott family matriarch, was unwell. On the advice of a doctor, she departed from Chiltern in midseason, leaving her eldest daughter in tears. Back in Pennsylvania, a surgeon found, in Maisie’s intestines, a cancer so advanced, he simply took note of it, then stitched her back up. “Don’t bring me back to any half-life,” she’d instructed him in advance. When she died that fall, at sixty-nine, the town of Bar Harbor shut down for the afternoon of the funeral. The selectmen turned out to pay their respects. My grandfather and his sisters carried their mother’s ashes to the top of Newport Mountain, then scattered them on the rocky slopes where she’d hiked, her voice slicing the still air as she called to her dogs.

Manila fell to the Japanese that winter. With the rest of the naval forces, Warwick retreated to Corregidor, the largest of the fortified islands protecting Manila Bay. American and Filipino soldiers held out there for four months against Japanese bombing and shelling. “I note one thing,” Warwick wrote to his family, two months in. “—that I love you all very much. Don’t ever forget that! I note another thing—that this existence being unguessable from day to day and not free from danger, does not inspire me to write you great things about life and death or to memorialize myself in some poetic effort about self giving his all in distant Asiatic sea or shore or wherever it is I am.” On May 6, 1942, the commander of Allied forces in the Philippines, Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, surrendered. “There is a limit to human endurance, and that point has long been passed,” he radioed to President Roosevelt. Taken prisoner along with seven thousand other Americans, Warwick was listed as missing in action.

Human endurance was to be tested further.

For nearly a year, the family received no word of Warwick. My grandfather, courteous by temperament and training, tapped his connections in the military, politics, and the press in pursuit of news of his brother. (“Dear Cabot,” he writes to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.) At one point, he was told that Warwick was a prisoner in a camp in Japan—“the model Japanese prison camp,” someone assured him. But letters to that camp were returned. Later, word came that Warwick was in a camp in the Philippines. A series of small, regulation-style, fill-in-the-blank postcards from him trickled in, bearing the minimal news permitted. Then communication ceased again, in late 1944, as the Allied campaign to take back the Philippines, the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific War, commenced. As the Allies retook the country, news of liberated prisoners trickled home; family friends hovered near their radios, in shifts, recording names.

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