Original Love. J.J. Murray

in 1942, he had nothing to do with any of it. He was just a seventeen-year-old boy with a healthy imagination and probably heard John Cullen—the real Coast Guard hero—retell the tale of the shovel, a detonator that looked like a pen, an Army cap, and explosives disguised as a hunk of coal.

      After that particular act of heroism, the Captain lied about his age and joined the U.S. Navy, shipping out on the battleship Iowa during both World War II and the Korean War.

      And that’s all I know about his war experience. He rarely told me anything about life aboard a battleship, not that I ever asked. I just assumed that he saved the country again and didn’t want to brag about it. Other than the plank of wood from the Iowa’s deck that he had encased in glass to display on the Argo, there are no other artifacts from his military service. I’ll have to do some more research here. It was such a huge chunk of his life—almost twenty years. Knowing him, he was hiding something. Either that or nothing on the Iowa required his particular brand of uncommon valor. I make a note to myself on a legal pad:

      Research IOWA (1942–1953):

      areas of conflict (if any)

      Check Internet, USN records

      “Now we can go to Levittown,” I say to my last cup of Earl Grey. I’ll have to get some more tea bags. And some more brown sugar, too. Regular sugar just isn’t sweet enough.

      When the Captain got out of the Navy after serving twenty years, primarily on and off the Iowa, he scraped up enough money to put twenty percent down on a house in Levittown—the so-called “Potato Field Miracle,” America’s first planned community. Then he retired and let his military pension pay his bills, acquiring his boat, the Argo, and sailing it whenever he pleased. The Captain seemed to prove the Old Norse adage: “Brave men can live well anywhere.”

      The Captain must have liked what he saw at first. He lived in a cramped, tiny house farther from the Sound and the ocean than he probably would have liked, and the house had one spindly tree in the yard, but somehow he stayed and found himself a wife. Maybe he liked Levittown because it was a town full of WW II and Korean War vets. Maybe he liked the block parties, the pig roasts, the volleyball and basketball games, and the conformist nature of the development itself. Maybe he liked the fact that all the houses looked alike, that no homeowner could say that his house was better. Maybe he just liked the closeness of it all, as if he were living on a beached, cramped battleship.

      But there isn’t a “maybe” about it. The Captain liked Levittown because it was one hundred percent pure Caucasian.

      I save my work so far and run a few searches on the Internet for information on Levittown today. Not much has changed. Just three percent of Levittown is nonwhite, 1,600 (or 0.4%) of 40,000-plus residents are black. Houses that cost $8,000 back in 1948 are selling for $160,000 and up now. The racial covenants in the housing contracts are supposedly a thing of the past, but there are some awful long memories on Long Island. And I doubt that Levittown even has a single nonwhite realtor selling those little boxes.

      The Captain was a racist

      my fingers type before I can stop them. I pause a few moments. I’ve been thinking this about my father since I was thirteen, but I’ve never actually typed it or written it down. It’s a powerful statement, and though it’s true, do I want to brand my father a racist forever?

      Of course I do. It’s almost as if I have to.

      The Captain was a racist. He oozed it in nearly everything he said or did from the time WPA workers showed up along Long Island’s south shore after that terrible storm in 1938. Men, many of them black, were making two dollars a day cleaning up after a storm that wiped out his father. He didn’t see them as helpful.

      He saw them as responsible.

      “Damn n———showing up like they could do anything useful, getting paid for our misery.”

      From that point on, he hated anyone nonwhite. He was culturally, linguistically, institutionally, and environmentally racist, using the N-word and “colored” long after it was socially unacceptable or politically incorrect to do so, even among other racists. He was the only man Peter ever knew who cheered whenever Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson struck out, the only man in Huntington to root for the hated Boston Red Sox because they “only had that one Spic pitcher” (Luis Tiant). Peter remembered him rooting against the Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl since Joe Namath was an “eye-talian” with “hippie hair.” The Captain made Archie Bunker, his favorite TV character, look like the Pope.

      “Once them pickaninnies started getting into Levittown,” he would say, “I knew it was time to leave before Levittown became a ghetto like every other colored neighborhood in this country.”

      He packed up in the fall of 1963 during “the third year of the reign of that Catholic anti-Christ”—John F. Kennedy, who the Captain considered a “snot-nosed rich kid who got lucky during the war”—and the Captain and his wife Helen Pearson Underhill (a waitress formerly of Troy, New York) moved to Huntington to a house they could barely afford in a neighborhood of upper-middle-class snobs who wouldn’t give him or his family the time of day.

      And that’s when Peter Rudolph Underhill was born…

      I can’t write anymore. I’m getting too wired. All the tea, the brown sugar, Stevie Wonder, the memories.

      To wind down, I surf the Internet for news of the outside world—much of it about the recovery efforts at Ground Zero—and decide to search once again for Ebony.

      I’ve been looking for her online for five years now, without much success. Most people are anonymous online these days, using strange mixtures of numbers and letters for screen names. I’d plug in “Ebony” at the AOL or Yahoo member directories and watch the screen fill with possibilities. Two years ago, I came across an “Ebony Mills” living in Jamaica, Queens, found her phone number in the online White Pages, and gave her a call:

      “Hello?”

      I was so excited. “Is this Ebony Mills?”

      “Yes, who’s calling?”

      I couldn’t tell if it was Ebony or not since I was calling long distance. “Hi, this is Peter, Peter Underhill.”

      “Um, Peter who?”

      “Peter Underhill. From Huntington.”

      “From Huntington.” She had paused. “And you’re calling because…”

      “I want to see you.”

      “You do? Man, I don’t even know you.” Click.

      I haven’t called anyone named Ebony Mills since.

      And I’ve always been afraid to take the next step once I had a list of all those screen names: sending an e-mail.

      Until now.

      I reduce my search on AOL to all females in New York using “Ebony” somewhere in their screen names. That leaves me fifty or so in the state. I remove anyone not on Long Island—I can only hope she’s still here—and have forty-four e-mails to write. Yahoo only yields six more, so it’s an even fifty e-mails to send before I can sleep again.

      After adding all these Ebonys to a temporary address book so I can write one letter and shoot it off to the entire group, I freeze.

      I have no idea what to write.

      I have been writing my ass off all day, and I can’t write a few sentences in an e-mail to a group of perfect strangers—one who might be my Ebony. If I were Ebony, would I be offended if someone shot off an e-mail bomb like this to so many other people? I can’t get too specific. Ebony would be pissed if I shared our business with the world…but then again, I already sort of have done that with my novels. Hmm. Short and sweet, just keep it short and sweet. I type “In search of Ebony Mills” in the subject line.

      “Here goes nothing,” I say as