I Shall Return

I heard myself saying it to my son as I let myself out of the house: "I shall return." In an arch, mock-stentorian voice. He didn't react. He never does, and I'll bet I've said it a thousand times. I didn't intend to say it, but I know where it came from: My dad used to say it to me when I was a kid, in exactly the same circumstances, when he'd leave me alone in the house and wanted to make sure I noticed but didn't want to make a big deal out of it. I never said it back to him; in fact, for the first forty-some years of my life I may never have said it at all. But from the time my son hit the age when he was conscious of me leaving the house but no longer needed real reassurance that I'd be back soon, I think I've been saying it a lot. I say "think" because I'm sure I don't always notice. I definitely don't plan it. My father's words just appear in the air.

       For my dad the words were an in-joke. Not only a self-consciously wry phrase to cover a slightly awkward social moment, which was always his way, but also a reference to General Douglas MacArthur's pronouncement upon retreating from the Philippines in the face of the Japanese invasion in 1942: "I came through Bataan...and I shall return." Russell Jones was a Marine, stationed on a Navy ship, and the Marines and Navy did not think much of the performance of MacArthur's Far East Army. My father was in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, and his ship was sunk off Guadalcanal. He lost a lot of friends there, and he knew a lot of Marines who would fight in the horrible island conquests to come. As far as he was concerned, MacArthur's fixation on retaking the Philippines was all posturing. By the time the Army got there, the Philippines had already been cut off by Navy and Marine combat, and the Japanese withdrawal was inevitable. The newsreels of MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte after the shooting was all done and declaring "I have returned" were just showbiz as far as he was concerned, and an expectoration in the faces of the men who'd died.

      Then my dad read somewhere that when MacArthur had first declared, "I shall return," President Roosevelt had asked him to amend the line to, "We shall return." MacArthur refused. That sealed it. From then on, he was going to trivialize "I shall return" by intoning it every time he went to the hardware store or the auto parts store and left his kid watching Bullwinkle on the couch.

      My son knows a bit about World War II. He watched the whole Ken Burns series. He's heard me tell retell a few of my dad's war stories. He can't ask my dad anything directly, because he's pretty much lost in dementia now. He would probably be interested to know about the MacArthur connection if I ever remember to tell him. And if he's ever even been conscious of my "I shall return." But he wouldn't think much about it. He could never feel the pain and indignation that his grandfather somehow managed to convey with that ironic cliché. It would be a bit of family trivia, quickly tossed into whatever half-memory holds such things.

      I wonder, though, if it's in him somewhere, the same way it was in me for decades before it came out again. I wonder if he'll ever find himself saying "I shall return" to his own kid as he lets himself out the door. If, even just once, that phrase, that tone of voice, the veiled satiric stance that's found its way from World War II to the '60s suburbs to San Francisco in 2008 will reach another set of ears, who knows where, who knows whose, carried from one slightly stilted dad to another to another, a century after it was born.