Does Anyone Know What a Melee Is?

The papers called it a melee. My cousin was nineteen, almost back to the ship, and supposed to come home.

This weekend, we laid June to rest in Maine. Being there brought back memories I hadn’t expected. Maine does that to me. One memory opens, and suddenly the rest start pushing through.

We used to go there every couple of years to visit my Aunt Gloria, June’s sister. Gloria had grown up and gotten married in New Jersey, then moved to Maine after her third child. She had six children in total, and Paul was closest in age to me.

Maine had been part of June’s childhood too. Her father, my step-grandfather, was born and raised there, and every summer he took June and Gloria back for a few weeks. There was a camp he had gone to since he was a boy, with cabins and a dining hall, fishing and swimming, and relatives who still lived nearby. June once told me those summers were the only time her father seemed happy. The only time his strictness loosened. The only time the grumpy man she knew became someone else for a little while. I understand that now. Some places hold the version of a person they could only be there.

But that is not what I meant to write about.

I was sitting in the front row at the cemetery, in front of June’s casket, next to my dad and my husband, when I saw Paul’s gravestone. He was nineteen years old when he died. For years, I thought he was twenty, but I had the math wrong. He was a year younger than me. His picture is on the stone, dressed in his Merchant Marine uniform, frozen in time. Almost exactly as I remembered him.

The last time I saw Paul alive was the summer after I graduated high school. Dad, June, Wanda, and I went to Maine for a few weeks before I left for college. June had recently stopped drinking, so things were not as awful as they usually could be. For a little while, everyone seemed lighter. Or maybe I was lighter because I was about to leave.

We were at Aunt Gloria’s house, and I remember Paul and me sitting outside on the swings, talking about life like life was something we were about to enter, not something that would one day ambush us.

Paul was going into his senior year. He had been voted captain of the football team. He played football, baseball, anything anyone wanted to play. He was one of those people who seemed good at being alive. Kind, smart, athletic, curious. The kind of person people describe as well-rounded because there is no easy way to say he had everything going for him without sounding like you are begging fate to prove you wrong.

Growing up in Maine did not seem that different from growing up in the one-horse town I was trying to escape. Paul wanted out too. We talked about wanting to live in cities. Travel. Meet new people. Do new things. Become whatever we thought we were going to become. I remember thinking, good for him. He was getting out too.

A few weeks after I graduated college, I found out Paul was dead.

At first, the story was unclear. He had been in port in Portugal on a training trip with the Merchant Marine. The ship had stopped in England, Ireland, and Portugal. Maybe there were other stops planned after that. I don’t remember. What I remember is that it took time for the truth to come out. Or maybe not the truth exactly. Maybe just versions of it.

The school was not exactly forthcoming. The wire stories used words like “brawl” and “melee,” words that make violence sound foggy and mutual, like everyone was just swallowed into chaos and no one can really be blamed.

A melee. That word bothers me. A melee is what newspapers call something when they want to blur the edges. A confused fight. A disturbance. A mess involving a lot of people. It sounds almost weather-related, like a storm rolled in and everyone got wet.

But Paul was not the melee. Paul was my cousin.

From what I’ve found so far, the ship had docked in the Madeira Islands, in Funchal. The cadets were allowed to leave the boat. There were curfews, but they were encouraged to see the places they visited. That was part of the point, I suppose. Travel. Culture. Experience. All the things Paul and I had talked about on the swings when we thought the world was waiting to be discovered.

There were hundreds of students on that ship. Some of them went to a nightclub. One account said the bouncers or employees would tell the cadets they could come in one at a time, then lock the door and beat them before letting the next one in. Eventually, some of the beaten students went back to the ship and returned with reinforcements. Thirty, maybe fifty cadets. They forced their way inside, picked up anything glass, and started throwing it. Damage estimates varied. The numbers varied. The accounts varied. What does not seem to vary is that the nightclub employees were furious.

A few hours later, Paul was returning to the ship in a taxi with a female cadet. They were near the pier, near the place where the cadets entered to get back to the ship. The men were waiting. They had sticks, pipes, possibly knives. They were looking for the cadets who had trashed the club. Maybe they recognized the uniform. Maybe they recognized the gate. Maybe Paul was simply a young male cadet returning to the wrong place at the wrong time.

They pulled open the taxi doors. They dragged Paul and his date out. They hit her in the face, then shoved her back into the car when they realized she was a woman.

They kept Paul.

That is the part I can’t get past: he was almost back.

The taxi driver took off and called the police, who did not arrive quickly enough. Divers later found Paul in the harbor. The official cause of death was drowning, but the autopsy also said he had suffered severe head injuries. One article said he would have died from those wounds even if he had not drowned.

Some accounts suggest Paul may have been at the club earlier but was not involved in the fight. Others say he had not been there at all. The version I grew up hearing was that he had been protecting the woman he was with. Maybe that was the family trying to make sense of it. Maybe it was true. Maybe both things can be true in different ways.

What seems clear, the more I read, is that Paul was not the one who started it. He was not one of the cadets who went back with reinforcements. He was not the broken glass, the damage estimate, or the brawl. He was nineteen years old, on a date, trying to get back to his ship. And because other people wanted revenge, he never made it.

There were lawsuits later. His parents, Aunt Gloria and her husband, tried to hold the school accountable. There were questions about discipline, supervision, shore leave, curfews, and whether the whole thing had been a powder keg waiting for one spark. Those questions mattered. But I also understand why institutions might want to make Paul part of the larger mess. If everyone is part of the mess, maybe no one has to stand too close to the body.

But families do not remember people as legal claims. They remember them on swings, in uniforms, before the headline.

My Aunt Gloria was never the same after Paul died. I don’t think any of them were. How could they be? Your son goes away on a training trip, full of promise and future, and comes home as a body flown back from another country. That is not something people get over.

They may keep living. They may raise the other children, go to work, attend weddings, cook dinners, mow lawns, send Christmas cards, and learn how to say his name without collapsing every time. But they do not get over it.

This weekend, sitting in front of June’s casket, I looked over and saw Paul’s grave, and it broke my heart all over again. Not just because he died, though that would be enough, but because for a moment I remembered him alive. The summer heat. The yard. The swings. The easy confidence of a boy who had not yet been turned into an incident.

He was going to travel. He was going to leave Maine and see the world. He did, just not long enough.

The papers kept reaching for words like brawl and melee, as if those words could explain what happened or make it less unbearable.

But Paul was not the melee.

He was nineteen, almost back to the ship, and he was supposed to come home.

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