B is for boy

"My boy, my little Harold. You'd really have to meet him. He's got charts of freckles on his white cheeks, just below his ocean blue eyes and his red hair with chopped-off bangs. He looks like me. Grace might look like her daddy, but Harold looks like me. He loves playing with cars, has ever since he was a toddler. He'd sit on the stoop outside the house watching cars drive by. But he's been disappointed in recent years, since rationing has pretty much taken the cars off the street. So I'm always taking little Harold to the movies. He loves the Keystone Cops because they've got a car.

"What might he be doing now? If I had to guess I'd say he's in the toy department at G.C. Murphy's, looking for match-box cars. You know, a little pickup here, a convertible there. If he isn't playing with the cars, then it's fire trucks. And if it isn't fire trucks, it's dump trucks. He's got a precocious buoyancy about his walk, cocking his head to the left when he meets someone he doesn't know or someone he does know says something he just doesn't get -- you know that self-confidence of the young, when they think they know everything there is to know and someone has said something that turns it all upside down. Harold's get that certainty that the other person is simply crazy stupid.

"You asked if something might've scared him here. Well, his daddy died at the beginning of October. He's been pretty quiet about it since then, but I know he's been traumatized by it. Who hasn't? We've all been through hell since the Navy sent the chaplain that rude Monday morning. And something else happened, just before his father went into the service, only a few months after Pearl Harbor. He saw his father and me during an intimate moment and ran all the way to Independence Hall. Thank heavens he got cold and asked a night watchman to call us! But he's a little survivor, just like my grandmother. He never met her; she died a year before he was born.

"So that's my son, my little boy. Officer, he and his older sister were with Mr. Larney and me at Macy's one second, and they were gone the next. Grace might've escaped from that man's grasp, but now he's got my son only God knows where. You've got to find him. I can deal with losing my husband this year but I can't also deal with losing my son."