At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott

would say of the other, wasn’t that a pretty setting, with the trees and the lawn, or wasn’t that one with the sleeping porch just great? and yet seem perfectly surprised when their mother suggested that they should have taken that one again.
    He liked variety, he would say. He liked a different point of view. He liked the wealth and the elegance of the South Shore in some years and the hominess of the North in others. He liked Mr. Porter, he liked Mrs. Smiley, and he liked not to have to deal with either one of them year after year.

    And while the children accepted each and every one of these explanations as reasonable and true (and preferred themselves the novelty of a different cottage each summer) they suspected too, perhaps because of their mother’s sullen response and the consistency with which she found last year’s place so much better than this one, that the different cottages were yet another result of what according to their mother was their father’s chief malady and source of all her grief: he was not the man she’d married.
    It had all to do with the war, of course. He was a young soldier when they’d married, and when he returned from overseas he was someone else. Who he was or what he’d been was never clear to the children, nor could they ever, even as adults, get a good sense of what it was that had changed him.
    He’d been in the infantry, he’d been all through the European Theater. He blamed the army for a case of shingles and a shiny scar across his right elbow and a lifelong aversion to Spam. He would not go camping, not even in the pop-up trailer a neighbor had once opened in a driveway, giving the children a marvelous, musty-smelling afternoon on lumpy mattresses under mellow, canvas-filtered sunlight, because, he said, he’d had enough of that in the army. He spoke of the war as easily as he spoke of anything and as often as the company would allow, but the stories he told were benign anecdotes about boyish pranks or clever moments of resourcefulness, nothing life-threatening or heartrending, nothing that could account for what it was that had made him a different man.
    Except once, perhaps. He was with his two daughters, both grown by then and one of them married, on a beach in Amagansett when a heavy gray military plane buzzed the shoreline. It was a cool day in early fall and there were few bathers, but all those who were there put their hands to their hearts or
their ears, terrified for one second, a thoughtless, scampering terror, by the sheer, overwhelming sound. His daughters felt their own hearts pounding and there was a quick and general covering up all down the beach, the empty sleeves of shirts and the legs of shorts and pants suddenly thrown up into the air. (They heard later that one of the bathers there had been to Vietnam and woke screaming that night, all of it brought back to him by the sound.)
    Their father, in a webbed beach chair beside their blanket, shook his head and said, when his two daughters had finished composing the letter of outrage they would send to the army, that once during the war he had been carrying a tank of gas across the open road that bisected their camp when suddenly, out of nowhere, a plane appeared, and in the same second he realized it was a German plane, he saw that it was heading right toward him and that he was close enough to see either his own terrified face reflected in the cockpit glass or that of the pilot’s, as surprised and terrified as his own. He threw the gas can to one side and himself to the other just as he heard the sound of the American artillery. They pulled the pilot from the broken plane but he’d been hit by the gunfire and was dead already. He was twenty years old and carried a photograph of a middle-aged couple and a young girl with a baby. The best anyone could figure was that he was lost, probably undertrained—it was late in the war—and out of fuel. It may have been