Absolution, p.12
Absolution, page 12
He gazed at Stella across the candlelight, a favorite student. “The Jews know that everything God has created is in need of repair, flawed and imperfect.” He gestured. “Kind of like this house. Fix one thing, for certain something somewhere else is already broken.”
Aunt Lorraine laughed quietly, her eyes cast down.
“Easy enough to live with this when you’re old like us,” he went on, “but when you’re young,” and he paused to run his hand over his bald pate, his little apostolic flame of white baby hair. “When you’re young, it’s fuel to the fire of a sympathetic heart.”
He smiled at Stella again.
“Tikkun olam,” he said. “Go forth and do likewise.”
* * *
AT SOME POINT during our time together, I gave the phrase to your mother. It might have been the only thing I ever gave her. I watched her turn the words over in her mind. In my memory, I see her turning it over, quite literally, in her hands.
I also see her—more fairy-tale recollection—tossing it back to me playfully, like one of our whiffle balls or pink Spaldeens.
“Repair the world.” She shook her head. Said something both condescending and admiring about the hubris of the Jews.
And then she looked at me with her smarter-than-everyone smile.
“But don’t you know, Tricia,” she told me, “the Buddhists say, ‘Mend yourself.’”
ISN’T IT AWFUL, really, how days and dates disappear, how the bright routines that absorb our attention for so many hours of the living day fall away so easily over the years, obscure and confound memory’s precision. Was that last Monday or last Tuesday? Last month, the month before? Sometime last year? Some season of my childhood?
I regret now that I never kept a diary while we were in Saigon, but I suppose I believed the letters I wrote, filling each folded side of those delicate blue pages, were record enough. Not because I thought they would be returned to me (at twenty-three, I would never have imagined myself grown so old that my girlish jottings might become artifacts, even treasure), but because I had made some record of things, and that record, I assumed, had been read. By my father. Or by Stella. By Peter’s parents or his siblings or our New York friends.
How innocent it seems now: to have ever believed that words written for, read by, one alone, only one, were sufficient unto themselves. Sufficiently shared. Sufficiently saved.
But the public record is helpful, as I struggle to get the dates clear.
Late in the same month as my miscarriage, good Pope John XXIII died in Rome. There had been a few days of worldwide vigil—for us Catholics, anyway—and then he was gone. I remember bowing my head at Mass that Sunday, tears falling on my folded hands. I recall the sound of other women weeping, a soft echo through the cathedral—a faraway grief folded into my own.
It was June as well when the first Buddhist monk set himself on fire in front of the Cambodian embassy. I was at home when it happened, but Peter was nearby. He heard the nuns praying, caught a whiff of the gasoline, even saw the black smoke rise above the crowd. Peter told me that as the man burned, another monk spoke into a microphone, a surreal narration in that hollow, open-air echo that was to become so familiar to us in the years ahead, especially when we took a Sunday stroll along the Mall. The sound of some protester’s voice, amplified and indistinct, littering the air with anger or imprecation, slogan and cliché.
“A Buddhist priest burns himself to death,” the monk chanted into his portable mike. “A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.”
One witness said it was astonishing to see how swiftly a human body could melt out of existence.
I shuddered as I listened to Peter’s account—we all shuddered, of course, when we saw the terrible photo.
But in the days that followed, Peter was sweetly, even boyishly, puzzled by the suicide. He thought he understood Buddhism. He had taken two semesters of world religion at Fordham. He’d read Thomas Merton. He understood the Vietnamese Buddhists to be a gentle people who cherished life.
The Western cliché in those days was that a Buddhist wouldn’t crush a biting flea or swat a buzzing fly, and Peter believed this. He believed the Buddhists understood better than anyone the brief nature of our lives, and so they eschewed all politics, certainly all political protest.
He couldn’t reconcile this image of a gentle, deeply spiritual people with the photograph of that dark figure engulfed by flames, or with the eyewitness accounts of how the younger monks had helped the stumbling old priest from a car, carried the gas can for him, doused his head. Peter’s usual wry, forgiving, good-humored sympathy for what he called the naturally occurring inconsistencies of the convoluted human brain gave way in this instance to a stubborn skepticism, a childish objection that I thought was somehow inadequate, even irrelevant, to the horror of the tragedy. The awfulness of it.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he told me again and again in the days that followed, resentful as an adolescent of a world that had not conformed to what he was certain he knew.
I recall a dinner party with some American friends when he turned briefly, almost rudely, adamant about it all. An apartment party, as I recall it, all of us gathered around a small coffee table with our drinks, hand-carved souvenir bowls of mixed nuts and potato chips before us, everyone newly showered and powdered and shaved, the wives tucked comfortably beside their handsome husbands.
Religious persecution, Peter pronounced, persecution against the Buddhists or anyone else, had never been a problem in Vietnam. This was a country, after all, that included the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, the “pagan” Montagnards, Confucians, Catholics, Protestants even.
“A mishmash,” I might have added.
There were Buddhists in Diem’s cabinet—“for heaven’s sake,” Peter said.
There were Buddhists everywhere you looked, pagodas galore. The Buddhists moved freely about the city.
“How are they being persecuted?” he asked our friends. “Where are they being persecuted?”
“Hue,” someone answered—where Buddhist protesters had recently been killed by Diem’s troops.
But Peter argued that even the facts of that confrontation were in dispute. It was an explosion, a bomb, that had killed the protesters, not government bullets.
And—he was raising his voice now—Diem himself had launched an investigation into the incident. Reparations had been paid to the families of the dead and injured.
So what, he asked our American friends, or the men among us anyway, “what in God’s name,” was the old monk’s awful suicide really meant to prove?
And why was the young monk with the portable microphone reciting his chant in English if it was Diem’s government he meant to address? Why had the monks invited the AP to attend?
The other men—how young we all were—merely shook their heads, amused and unserious, unwilling, I suppose, to disrupt the evening with debate. They dismissed Peter’s arguments with a laugh, or the single word “kamikaze.”
Solicitously, sociably, they explained to Peter that suicide was easy for a Buddhist, a shortcut to a better next life.
“A brief bonze fire,” someone said, “and you come back as Rock Hudson.”
I suppose I was the only one among us who saw how quickly, how adeptly, Peter responded to this: how he checked himself, tamped down his voice.
He smiled gently, dipped his chin (it was his way), offended by their dismissal, I knew, but utterly, politely, conciliatory. “I may be wrong,” he told them, smiling. “I may be missing something.”
I suppose this was his natural instinct: to defer, to deflect, to remind his betters that he knew his place by a humble display of good manners. A habit born of his lace-curtain upbringing, I suppose, as well as the time he’d now spent among the Ivy Leagued.
A false humility, in truth.
Because when we were alone that night, in bed, he took up the argument again, speaking vehemently into the dark.
The Jesuits, I recall him saying, require twelve years of training before a man can make his vows. But in Buddhism, anyone can shave his head and become a priest. So how easy would it be for the communists to infiltrate a few pagodas, to infiltrate and then to encourage, even to coerce, certain others to commit suicide in this public and horrific way?
How better to turn the West against Diem, to undermine his war against the North? How better to embarrass Diem’s American allies?
Buddhist protesters, he argued, should be an oxymoron. “Communist infiltrators is more like it,” he said.
Of course I took the Buddhists’ side—sounding like Stella, I’ll admit. I must have reminded him of Madame Nhu’s notorious barbecue remark. Or her husband’s secret police. Or Diem’s icy indifference.
I know I made the case, cribbed from The New York Times, I believe, that the Buddhist protests in Saigon were akin to the Civil Rights Movement at home. A repressed people trying to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
Which led me to recall for him our dinner in Charlottesville, Stella and me—our great adventure. A way to distract him from his seriousness so we could go to sleep.
But Peter would not be distracted. When I’d finished my tale, he patted my thigh and muttered something like “Good for you.”
But all civil disobedience was not equal, he declared. “American Negroes,” he said, “want reform, even restitution, and rightly so, but the militant Buddhists”—another oxymoron, he pointed out—“want only chaos.”
I told him he was beginning to sound like my father, who called every righteous outlier a communist, not just Dorothy Day but Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr., Norman Mailer, even Peter’s own guy, Thomas Merton, who my father thought was both a communist and a “bit of a kook.”
We had a laugh over this, finally, side by side in the dark.
* * *
PETER BELIEVED FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE that the Buddhist suicides were political theater, part of a communist effort to embarrass Diem, to turn the West against him.
He told me once, toward the end of his life, that the tragedy of the U.S. role in Vietnam had at its roots an insidious kind of anti-Catholicism: a Catholic administration, a Catholic intelligence agency, so anxious to prove their impartiality that they all too readily abandoned a fellow Catholic president in Vietnam because he was getting bad press.
He called it a kind of self-immolating reverse discrimination, turning against an ally like that precisely because he was one of our own. An ally who had been, Peter remained certain, that beleaguered country’s best hope. Even if that hope lay in Diem making an agreement with Ho Chi Minh to divide their country between them. A pact with the Devil, as Peter saw it, that nevertheless would have saved so many lives.
I guess you could say that the miraculous, portentous, historical alignment of the stars that had so inspired my husband before we got to Saigon—two Catholic presidents standing together to defeat the march of communism, to fulfill Our Lady’s promise at Fátima—had become in retrospect the very thing that sent our good intentions all awry.
They never saw the hand of God in it, Peter later said of his superiors in Saigon. “But they made useful fools of those of us who thought we did.”
* * *
DURING THAT SAME SUMMER, Jacqueline Kennedy was pregnant with her third child.
Of course, I was always studying her clothes and her hats, her long shoes and her breathy voice. Now I studied her demure smile and the delicate hand she placed on her growing belly. I allowed Charlene to remind me that Mrs. Kennedy, too, had suffered a miscarriage in years past.
This was at a christening party in July, a party your mother threw for the Vietnamese orphan whom Roberta and her USIS husband were taking home. A lovely gathering—all your mother’s parties were lovely. Tiny American flags on toothpicks anchoring the canapés.
As I left, Charlene walked me out. You came along, too, as I remember, in another pretty pastel dress. I recall how you slipped your hand into mine. We had shared some playtime during the party. There were new Barbie clothes, just arrived from the aunt in New York. Once again, I was grateful to give you my attention. A way to avoid taking Roberta’s new baby into my arms, as all the other women were doing. Protecting my dress, I told myself.
We were at her gate when Charlene mentioned that Jacqueline Kennedy had had a stillbirth and a miscarriage—did I know this? I nodded, reluctant to say more about it in front of you. The mechanics of childbirth—from bedroom start to bloody finish, so to speak—were not a fit subject for small ears. Not in those days.
But Charlene didn’t hesitate. “And now here she is,” she told me. “Pregnant again. About to deliver her third child.”
I smiled, nodded, holding your hand.
“Hope springs,” your mother said. As if she were making me a promise.
* * *
WHEN I WAS READY to join her again on the visits to the hospital, Charlene offered to drive to our place to pick me up. The wheels and the underbody of the truck were spattered with rust-colored mud. The rainy season had begun—your mother liked to call it “Rainey’s season” because there was nothing you liked better than to stay indoors with your Barbie and your books.
Not a tennis player at all, I had learned by then.
I assumed the truck had been used during the week at one or another of the construction projects Kent’s company was involved in, but I think the sight of it, or of me climbing into the cab, was a shock for Peter. As we pulled away, I saw him looking warily from behind our gate.
Dominic was among the first to welcome me back, and I asked him right away how his wife was. I thought maybe Charlene had told him something about my miscarriage, because he blushed deeply under his already sunburned cheeks. She had, just days ago, been delivered of a healthy baby girl.
I told him I was delighted. I tried to mean it.
BY MID-JULY, the foreman of the loading dock at Macy’s in Herald Square had secured—“Don’t ask me how,” Charlene said, “my sister is a woman of incalculable charm”—four cases of brand-new Barbie dolls, something like thirty-six to a case.
Each doll was in a narrow cardboard box. In two of the cases, they had those glued ponytails and curled bangs, and were dressed in a strapless striped bathing suit. In the others, the dolls were dressed in red bathing suits and had short bouffant hairdos—a bubble cut, Rainey informed me.
The blondes looked like Marilyn Monroe, but the brunettes looked like Mrs. Kennedy. I gathered they were meant to.
Charlene had befriended—in her own inimitable, dare I say “transactional” way—an American woman who worked as a manager of sorts at the Brink, the officers’ club.
She was another American dependent, the wife of a major, as I recall.
I was beginning to know these military wives. They were stoic and efficient. They would, at the easiest provocation, or no provocation at all, recount for you (at garden parties and cocktail parties, over lunch or after lectures at the Vietnamese-American Association, even sunbathing by the pool) their husbands’ various postings, to Guam, to Hawaii, to North Carolina, Germany, Italy, Colorado, the Philippines, wherever, easily enumerating the years of each deployment, each settling in and each uprooting, with benign sufferance. They seldom expressed a preference for any particular place, but neither did they offer any complaint. Good soldiers all.
The understanding among them seemed to be that their peripatetic lives were simply the inevitable result of their marriages to these particular men, their fate: part accident, part unintended consequence, all inescapable. The unpredictable fruit of any American romance. Yet another ramification of clang, clang, clang went the trolley.
And while some of these women instantly embraced wherever they found themselves—studying the language, bartering in the market, going to every State Department lecture, every cultural exchange—others simply brought their stateside lives with them, packed hermetically into whatever family unit they traveled in; some even brought the family dog, the family station wagon—well contented with themselves and the utter impenetrability of their American lives.
According to Charlene, the major’s wife was one of these. She absolutely hated Saigon, the food, the heat, the noise, the people. Once she’d settled her three children in the American school, set up her furniture from home, joined the proper social club (Le Cercle Sportif), and disabused her cook of any notion of providing them with native cuisine, she’d found this job at the Brink billet, the bachelor officers’ club, because, she told Charlene, she was accustomed to being a working woman.
She arrived at the Brink early every morning and stayed as late as she could each afternoon in order to convince herself, for as many hours of her day as it was possible to do, that she was still living in New Jersey. Or so said Charlene.
She was nice enough. Marilee was her name. She was tall, broad-shouldered, thick-armed, somewhat homely. These days you might wonder if she hadn’t been born a man. She kept her dark hair carefully curled, wore cat’s-eye glasses on a chain, a cardigan over her shoulders, neat skirts, and sleeveless blouses. Charlene and I met her for lunch at the rooftop restaurant of the Caravelle, and I sat mostly quiet as Charlene made her pitch. She wanted to display our Saigon Barbie on a table at the Brink, with a simple sign-up sheet that Charlene would gather every morning as she delivered the previous day’s orders. The money—American dollars only, of course—would be left in a marked envelope. The honor system.
“If we can’t depend on an honor system in the officers’ club,” Charlene said, “then where?”
Marilee eyed the doll. Without much interest, it seemed to me. Charlene had propped up the Barbie in her ao dai and her non la on the little wire display stand that came with each doll. I thought our Saigon Barbie looked quite, well, cunning, and noticed a few of the other ladies who lunched, many of them military wives, glancing over as well. But Marilee was not charmed. I feared for a moment that what was crossing her mind was some version of Charlene’s crude suggestion about our generals and their whores.
