Railroad ties form 123 tall stairs that, without handrails, make slow going to China Beach’s long, thin strip of sand. Peace and quiet are the hike's rewards, a rarely visited beach conducive to study. Seeing the westward side of the Golden Gate Bridge is an aesthetic bonus.
The M-line streetcar squeals to a stop in front of San Francisco State. As I board, I request a transfer for the Geary bus and, around 25th Avenue, I pull the stop-cord and hop off. Winding down through the mansion-lined streets of Sea Cliff, afoot, is a nice stroll through one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods. Even in weather, it's enjoyable.
China Beach always feels special and I’m here three to four times a week to study. For solace. For meditation. Or, sometimes, to enjoy an impromptu picnic with my girlfriend. Because it’s San Francisco, I pack a sweatshirt and rain gear or jacket. The water temperature, cold air, and dangerous currents make this a bad choice for swimming, attributing to it’s lack of beach-goers.
This memorably nondescript afternoon was perfect for homework. I noticed a woman sitting on a blanket with her thermos and day pack. I wondered how she could negotiate the steps for, her spine bore the telltale curve of scoliosis.
She wasn’t reading, nor was she listening to music. She sat quietly, her lined rain shell quietly flapping as her thinned white hair was spritzed by bursts of breezes from scattered directions.
Another day, I saw her again. And again. And it was always the same: no book, no music, no sketch pad. Nothing but a day pack, a small blanket, a thermos, and her thoughts that might be as swirling as the currents of sea and air, or maybe as tranquil as a poet’s mindful compositions.
I was in summer school, bolstering my credits to graduate a semester early. A Monday exam found me heading to China Beach on Sunday, July 16th, laden with filled spiral notebooks and two books. Just as I began my descent, I saw her now familiar profile on a date she'd have me long remember.
The weather’s never nice in midsummer on that beach. With mist from the ceaseless chop, the fog will often roll in and make it shivering cold and inhospitable. Yet, she and I were there, and without another soul, prompting my recall that it seemed odd to see just one car in the lot. It was faded blue and road-worn, a battered and rusting old Plymouth.
There’s a respectful distance I figured to give her, but not too far in case she might sense another’s presence as welcoming. Probably a hundred feet from her, I spread my blanket, emptied my pack and hunkered down.
Ninety or so minutes later, movement pinged my concentration as she caught my peripheral vision. She struggled to her feet, hunched over and reached into her pack. Okay, a cupcake. 'But why struggle, why stand up to eat it,' I thought.
She walked into ankle-deep water, cupcake in hand, and turned her back to the sea as she squatted. Her free hand emerged from the jacket pocket. She poked a candle into the cupcake. A lighter appeared from the same hand that held the candle. I watched the wind thwart attempts to light the candle. I couldn’t warn her in time to keep a feisty little wave from knocking her onto her side, claiming the cupcake and drenching her.
I bolted upright with the edge of my blanket in-hand, spilling my stuff onto the sand, and trotted over to dry and comfort her.
“Are you okay?,“ I asked.
She was weeping, shivering, and looking at me with eyes as blue as helplessly lost.
“Just shaken, I think, soaking wet but okay.”
I righted and raised her, wrapping my blanket to warm and shield her from the buffets. With an arm around her shoulders, she slipped her arm around my waist and we headed for her blanket.
“I’ve never seen a wave do that here!” I observed.
“I haven’t either,” she said, “and I see you here often, too.”
“I’m a student at S.F. State…Tim.”
“I’m Helena,” she volunteered.
We reached her blanket and I eased her down, taking the liberty to sit beside her, eyeing my stuff getting wind-whipped but still there.
“I’m shaking too much to pour some tea. Do you mind?” she asked, nodding toward the thermos. I obliged and she clutched the cup with two palms, its warming effect immediately lessening her shivers.
“I think you love this place as much as I do, Helena,” I ventured.
“Love-hate. That cupcake was love and, again today, that ocean’s hate. You’re young, and, oh, can I tell you about love and hatred,“ and she relaxed to unfold her story.
She was nineteen, a student at San Francisco State Teacher’s College when she was swept off her feet by a handsome young sailor.
“Once I told him my name was Helena, that was it! He said it was fate because he was recently assigned to a light destroyer, the USS Helena, under repair at Mare Island for damage at Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t at Pearl. He was just out of boot camp and we only knew each other for a few months. But, in war time, it’s plenty-enough time for a girl to fall in love. Especially with Dino's wavy black hair, dark eyes, and all that in a uniform?
Her eyes brightened as she added, "No young girl has a defense for that!”
“So, the cupcake that the ocean just grabbed--that’s about Dino?”
“And more,” she said, aiming her blue gaze into my pupils.
“He was killed. I’m sorry…what did you say your name is?”
“Tim.”
“The Helena, was sunk by torpedoes in 1943, on July 6th.”
As she spoke, I could see an attractive nineteen-year old living behind her expressive eyes.
“This is the 16th, Helena. Your anniversary?”
“We never had the chance to marry. He shipped out and a Jap submarine sank the Helena at Kula Gulf, in the Solomons.
"Japanese ships outnumbered ours. Before fleeing to safety, one our ships dropped four launches near the Helena’s swimmers and wreckage. The superior Jap navy force busied itself chasing our ships.
Tears trickled from the corners of her eyes.
“Come daylight, before the launches had gotten them all, the Japs strafed them, Tim.
"Cary, Dino’s buddy, and he were hit by bullets. Cary got an arm wound, but Dino.... Cary kept Dino afloat until a launch made it to them. Cary doesn’t remember what day it was, but Dino died in that launch and they lowered him into the sea.
"Over the next ten days, those lifeboats evaded Jap patrols and reached an enemy-held island where they hid-out. "The survivors were liberated by a beach rescue from two ships on the night of July 16th but Dino wasn’t among them.”
The aged woman reached into her pack for a scarf, using it as a handkerchief.
“Helena, how’d you find all of this out with the war going on?”
“Cary wrote to me when he got out of the Navy. Despite torpedoes, strafing being adrift only to land on an enemy held island, it's a miracle only 168 of the Helena’s 888 men were lost, don't you think?
But my love, my Dino, was one of them....
"They all had a chance, Tim. Cary said their guns fired through the night of the 5th, and the Helena ran out of flashless powder. The Japs sighted-in on their guns' flashes on the night of the 6th and sank her."
"So it was the Helena's captain's fault!"
"No, no, Tim! The blame falls on wars and men who wage them from afar in the smugness of their own personal safety.
"That cupcake was for my Dino, honors Cary, too, because he died in an accident in ‘46. So the sixteenth is an anniversary of sorts, just like the sixth.
I wrapped my arms around the her frail shoulders and pulled her to me, thinking of nothing appropriate but offering, “I’m so sorry. So you find peace, here, Helena, even though it’s love-hate?”
“I loved him, still do. Hate war, and still do. I come here, Tim, because I hear him. I hear Dino,” she paused. She looked up, managing a chuckle, and said, “Oh, not like a voice, like a crazy person hears. But I hear him in an extra-sensory way. I know the enemy…the war…and not the ocean took him.”
I saw Helena at China Beach as often as a couple times a week. She’d always wave or shout a hello. Sometimes we’d close the distance to chat. But we respected each other’s purpose, her regard for my studies, and my respect for her longing and quiet time. Occasionally, she’d bring me cookies or a sandwich. And she’d always offer me hot tea on colder days.
Helena seemed to be more frail over the following weeks and months. Once in awhile, she’d slip and call me “Dino” on our waved exchanges. There were hugs she instigated.
Then, I saw her no more.
I wondered if the stairs had finally trumped her mobility. Worse, I wondered if she died. It was one of those things that didn't occur to me, to get contact information from her. If she ever mentioned her last name, my memory wants to say it was too common or difficult common that I forgot it from lack of use. An oversight, an occasion of honest innocence when the ignorance of my youth found the hard boot of regret striking a square blow to the backside of my conscience.
Now a senior, I was in my usual study sprawl on China Beach on another unremarkable day that would be fire-branded into memory.
A fifty-ish looking woman was among the other souls braving the unwelcome charms of China Beach’s elements. I would never have given notice to her or anyone else approaching the water’s edge. But this woman had a cupcake, and placed it on the sand so the lapping swells could catch it and take it away. Then, she lit a candle that instantly extinguished in the breeze, and cast it into the water.
Despite it was March not July, but the act, her countenance was so curious that I was up and moving as soon as I spotted the cupcake, powerless to leave it alone.
"’Scuse me?“ and she turned, the black and grey pony tail, with huge curls, swinging from the pivot where it was pulled through the back of her ball cap.
“I don’t mean to be weird or forward or anything, but I knew a woman who used to come here with cupcakes and…,“ and the woman’s eyes widened and she blushed, giveaways that there was a connection.
“Helena,“ I stammered. “She was a frail, elderly lady..."
"Helena, my mother. She came here, often,“ the woman said, more comfortable with my approach.
“My name’s Kula,” she said, extending a hand.
Hearing that name struck me, blinking a pause before shaking her hand. Seeing hair beyond the rubber-banded pony tail, black and curly… but blue eyes. I wasn’t just looking at Helena’s daughter. She was Dino’s, too.
“Is your mom okay? I haven’t seen her around?” Kula's expression answered before the words came.
“She passed away three weeks ago after a stroke. Her deathbed wish was that I come here and send a cupcake and candle into the surf. She wasn't very forthcoming or demanding. But I honor it as one of her last wishes, maybe out of guilt or something.”
Kula, a daughter Helena had never mentioned, invited me to share her blanket. I told Kula the story Helena related, to the best of my memory, because Helena had told her story only once. Kula listened attentively as I related the twenty or thirty encounters I had with Helena following that day I lifted Helena out of the drink and listened to the life of the mother to the woman now in front of me.
Kula and I were both fighting tears that crowded our eyes once I had was spent of every detail in Helena’s conversation about Dino and the war. Kula cleared her throat and began.
“Mom said my father was killed in the war, that he was a good man, and that I was to honor him. For her.
“She said that the last time she saw him was at the bus stop next to the gate at the Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo. Because they weren’t married, she couldn’t get onto the base to see him to his ship. They kissed goodbye, and he made it about 20 yards beyond the gate before calling to her through the chain-linked fence, “I love you, Cupcake!”
“She stared at him walking into the early morning sun with a Navy strut, she called it, a seabag atop one shoulder, until he was no longer in sight. She returned to the bus stop, sullen, and waited. She came back to The City and walked out onto the Golden Gate. I think she was out there almost 9 hours, weak from hunger and sorrow, until my father’s ship, the Helena, passed underneath, headed to war.
“My mother waved and dropped little love notes into the breeze, knowing neither gesture would arrive as intended. She was distraught and came here, to China Beach, where she cried all night and was nearly swept out by the tide, awakening on the steps. “
I finally knew the why of Helena’s connection to China Beach. Kula continued, sniffling.
“She agonized at Dino’s telling of the Helena’s checkered past before he was assigned to her."
“Checkered?”
"Cursed and blessed, a continuing cycle flip-flopping from triumph to tragedy."
"She was cursed at Pearl Harbor, tied up in the berth the Japanese charts identified, by name, as that for the USS Pennsylvania. But it was the USS Helena's curse to be there, and she managed to limp away, heavily damaged."
"And that blessing," I observe, "or miracle, gets the ship back to California, just as Dino's getting orders and meeting your Mom. He had to have heard about that ship, right?"
“My mother… even Dino had misgivings about him going into combat aboard the Helena. It broke her heart to watch him walk away from the gate toward his ship. And she swears that his look back to her, his last words to her…. Mother said she was troubled by something in his eyes, that he may have known his fate.
"With my father aboard, the curse hits the Helena again at Guadalcanal, where--in the Navy's eyes--her captain made a bad judgment call. There were fierce naval battles and Japanese submarines were involved. The USS Juneau was hit and was sinking. Sixty of the Juneau’s sailors were in the water.
"Instead of ordering a rescue operation, the Helena’s captain led other ships away for reasons he felt were justified. The curse: All but ten of those sixty Juneau sailors died. They held Captain Hoover responsible, relieved him of his command. In one of his last letters, Dino wrote the Helena's crew was sullen and angry at leaving sailors behind, fearing fate would deal them the same hand."
"And didn't it?," Kula said, breaking into a soft sob.
I filled the awkward silence.
"Yeah, almost as if the ship was between two, supernatural pendulums, striking that ship again and again, with good fortune on one side and war's evil on the other."
Kula curled her legs under her on the blanket and spoke more softly.
"Running out of the no-flash gunpowdered shells gets the Helena spotted. She's attacked and sinking. The big ships leave after rescue boats were dispatched and my father makes it aboard. Japanese fighters strafe and kill him instead of his friend, and miss most of the others. Then, a daring nighttime mission rescues the survivors.
"Oh, Tim, all of the almosts, here...."
Tears cascaded, and I poured us some tea which Kula sipped with shaking hands. Her streaked eyes met mine, and it was almost too much when she pleaded, "I almost had a...a.... What little girl doesn't want to know her daddy, Tim,” and this woman older than my mother, leaned into me and wrapped me in a hug as if I was her own son returning from battle.
"I'm sorry I did that," she murmured, feeling a little bit after-the-fact uncomfortable.
"It's alright...all so terrible and sad. But how...why did the Helena's story never get out?"
"Thousands of our ships were lost in that war, Tim. And I'm sure they all had stories. We learned this one's, painfully," she said, attempting a smile.
We feigned composure in a few moments' silence, just listening to the surf and shore birds. Kula was the first to speak.
"One of high points of her history was that the USS Helena was the first ship to win the Navy Unit Commendation. But because of that Helena, my mother, my Helena, Dino's Helena endured so much heartache and suffering that she despised her own first name. That's why I was shocked when you said it; I would have figured her to lie, but then I never got a chance to know her, Tim.
"Just before she passed away, she said it again, that she hated her name. I told her something that made her smile and cry at the same time, Tim. I said, "Mom? Don't you see it? Your name gave a handsome, young sailor the unshakable conviction that your name and his ship's name were fated as convergent destinies of love!"
Gulping away the lump in my throat seemed audible.
"My coming along continued the curse."
"How so?? You kept Dino alive in her heart, his presence ongoing, Kula."
"No. I made her life hell. Her pregnancy brought all the scorn and negative social consequences scandalous women suffered back then.
“So, she only kept me a few months. Had I been born in the '60s, I would have been considered a 'love child.' Bastard children and their mothers weren’t warmly welcomed commodities in the '40s, so she gave me up. I had great adoptive parents and have had a good life. But I wanted to know, tracked her down but didn’t find her until four months ago. She had suffered mini-strokes, and sometimes had trouble communicating, until the big stroke took her....”
We sat quietly, awhile. This time, I broke the reverent serenity of the moment.
"I think I see it, now."
"What's that?" she said, looking over.
"The whole cupcake thing. How all the right things, natural things, can come together and produce something positive. Something good. But something as delicate as it is savory. And then, like the ocean, the basest elements of men and war and their machines cause it to disintegrate, and it's swept away as if it were never there."
Kula was wide-eyed at first, then looked away, down to the sand, making circles with her index finger as I went on.
"Like that cupcake you had today, taken apart and only the memory, its story remains, but it only remains if someone's around to tell it.
"Your mom was here and I happened to be the one to whom she told it, but only parts of it. Because you're here, like...alive kind of here, you put what you knew together with what I had."
Kula suddenly looked up.
"That's the cupcake, Kula, whole and complete because all the ingredients of your parents' lives have come together, and just as fragile. You, the missing ingredient, validated your parents' lives without the benefit of having gotten to know them," and she hugged me again, this time, keeping a palm on each of my shoulders.
"You're just a kid, and I think you've just given me the greatest gift I've ever gotten, Tim."
"What's that?"
"Clarity, Tim. Clarity and vision."
We sat awhile. We chitty-chatted awhile to relieve the burden of the conversation’s weight.
I exchanged information with Kula and we maintained a Christmas card-only relationship for a few years.
I can’t visit San Francisco without visiting China Beach. Long ago, I dismissed the notion to take a cupcake and toss it into the surf as some sort of tribute or offering, reasoning that it would be an emotional trespass on a love ritual that spanned more years than my lifetime, then and now. I think of Kula now and then.
I get teary at China Beach, choked-up for missing my sweet, happenstance friendship with a little old lady, for her Dino, for lost sailors. Maybe I weep for all the love destroyed by wars, and all the loves who are taken by wars.
Someday on China Beach, I hope I’ll hear Helena just as Helena heard Dino. I have faith it'll happen because--and I know this sounds crazy--I have faith because I can feel her there, just off in the surf, with her back to me. Waiting. Watching. Wanting. Grieving. And still loving.
#
[
The foregoing is fiction, with factual bases in the historic events of the USS Helena during WWII]]
Dedicated to my sister, Christine, whose candle is still lit for her sailor, Bob, to whom she's been married for nearly fifty years and counting-- J.G.
