The councilman turned to face the granite wall in the sudden quiet of the Memorial Day crowd, with the microphone still hot on its stand, and he began to run his finger down the fourth panel of polished stone. He counted slowly. One, two, three. At the ninth line he stopped. His lips moved. Then his voice came through the speakers, and it was not the voice of a politician. “Sergeant Daniel Esposito,” he read. “United States Army. Two thousand and four.” I am Marjorie Esposito, seventy eight years old, and I stood in the front row, in the place I had chosen, in a spring coat with a small gold star on its lapel.
Daniel was my only son. He was twenty six when he fell in service, in the autumn of 2004, on a road outside Baghdad. I was fifty six. His father, Michael, had gone ahead of him by a year. I did not know how to live in the house, so I took a job as a crossing guard on Third Street, because it gave me a reason to stand outside in the morning, and I stood there for twenty one years. Every Memorial Day, I come downtown and stand in the front row, so that he can find me if he looks. No one has ever asked me to move.
The old man in the VFW cap, who had put his cap against his chest, stood very straight. His name was Walter, and he had been in the unit of my husband. “Mrs. Esposito,” he said, loudly, so that the people around him could hear, “I carried the flag of Michael for you in 1969.” The little girl in the red dress looked up at her grandfather. The color guard, six young soldiers in crisp uniforms, had turned their heads. Councilman Holt, at the microphone, took a long breath, and his shoulders shook. He did not turn around.
A name found on a granite wall gave one crossing guard the Memorial Day morning to bring a young councilman back to the honor of the fallen in Columbus.
I gave my terms from the front row, when Holt turned and came down the steps of the platform with the program trembling in his hand. “Councilman, I did not come to be honored. I came because my son is on that wall, and I like to stand where he can see me. I will tell you what I would like, and you may do as you wish. Next year, I would like you to read the names yourself, every one, the way you read his just now, slowly, with your finger on the stone. And I would like you to keep the front row open for the mothers.”
The eyes of Holt were wet. “Mrs. Esposito, I have chaired this ceremony for three years,” he said, in a voice that broke. “I have read the program every time. I have never once read the wall.” He swallowed. “My own father served in the Navy. I told people that this was his day. I said you could not wear that pin. I am more ashamed than I have ever been in my life.” He took the microphone off its stand and held it down at his side, forgetting that it was on, so that his sob echoed over five hundred people.
The aide of the councilman, a pale young man in a gray suit named Tim, who had been standing at the edge of the platform with a clipboard, panicked. He stepped forward, snatched the gold star pin from the lapel of my coat, perhaps believing, in his confusion, that he could make the whole thing go away, and ran toward the white tent behind the stage. He got ten feet. The old man in the VFW cap stepped into his path. Behind him the six soldiers of the color guard, in perfect formation, had turned and presented their rifles across the walkway.
Tim stopped, with the pin in his fist, staring at the polished barrels and the white gloves. The old man in the cap said nothing. He simply held out his open palm. The young aide looked at the pin, and at the wall, and his chin began to tremble. He laid the gold star in the hand of Walter, who carried it back to me across the grass with a deliberate step and pinned it on my lapel with fingers that shook. Then he stepped back and saluted, and so did the color guard, and the band began, very softly, to play.
The consequences were quiet and lasting. That year, and every year after, Councilman Holt read the names on the wall himself, all eleven hundred, standing on the platform from the first light until noon. The front row of the Memorial Day ceremony in Columbus is now reserved, with a printed sign, for the mothers and widows of the fallen. Tim, the aide, wrote me a letter that I keep in my Bible. And the city quietly named the crosswalk on Third Street where I worked after my son.
In the name of my son Daniel, who passed in 2004, I started the Daniel Esposito Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of soldiers who fell in service and for family counseling for military families, in Franklin, Delaware and Madison counties. In the first year we sent twenty six children to college and counseled fifty eight families. One was a boy of nineteen from Grove City whose father had fallen in 2008, and who is now studying to be a teacher.
On the next Memorial Day, the sun was warm, and the band played, and I stood in the front row at my place, in my spring coat. Councilman Holt came down from the platform when the names were done, and offered me his arm. “Mrs. Esposito,” he said, “would you stand with me for the wreath?” We walked together to the foot of the wall. I laid a bunch of red geraniums at the fourth panel, the ninth line, and put my hand on the cool stone, and he stood beside me with his head bowed.
