Absolution, p.13
Absolution, page 13
But what Marilee said, after a dramatic pause, was “The poor you will always have with you.” She said it gravely, but also with some smug condescension. Which I suppose is exactly the way Christ said it, too. And everyone since.
I was taken aback but—my own default position—simply smiled. Charlene ducked her head. She was holding a lit cigarette in the hand she had rested on the tablecloth, and I saw her rub her thumb and ring finger together impatiently. I knew that gesture.
“I admire your good intentions,” Marilee went on. “But, honestly. How much are you two going to raise and how much good will it do? The American taxpayer is already supporting this country in an exorbitant way. And for what?”
Her husband, she told us, had just shown her an article about the Commercial Import Program, which, she hoped, the U.S. was—or so rumor had it—about to suspend. When Charlene and I made no intelligent response to what was clearly for Marilee a delicious possibility, she took on the burden of enlightening us.
The CIP, she informed us, involved our government pouring American money into Vietnam’s economy. American taxpayer dollars that the Vietnamese would change into piastres and then—“Can you believe the gall?”—sell back to us at a distorted rate.
I glanced at Charlene, who kept her head down.
Free money, essentially, Marilee exclaimed. American taxpayer money that the regime, as well as the wealthy exporters and importers, were using however they pleased. Not to help the country but to help themselves.
She mentioned the cheap electronic equipment available in Saigon. How much her son had paid for a certain camera. I confess I began to lose the thread.
Marilee repeated the phrase “free money.” I could imagine her and the square-shouldered major squawking about it over breakfast. “We’ve built them roads,” she went on, “dredged their ports. Given them schools, orphanages. Ammunition. Our best and brightest are here to advise them. Have you ever seen so many generals in one place? And what are we getting in return? They’re taking potshots at our boys. Turning a blind eye to their murderous communist friends.”
I was beginning to suspect that Marilee was the kind of woman, numerous in those days, who strove to parrot her husband—not as an act of fealty, not even of admiration or love, but as an attempt, I think, to appear masculine herself. Strong and wise. A kind of verbal cross-dressing. Talking down to other women in this husbandly way was just a part of it.
She informed us of Vietnam’s recent history—something else she and the major had read about together. They’d tossed the Chinese out. Tossed the French out—despite all the lovely buildings the French had given them. “What makes you think they aren’t going to throw us out, too?”
Charlene and I both shrugged.
“And charities?” she asked us, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “How many charitable organizations have stepped in? And still the place is a mess, and getting messier, if you ask me. Diem’s a crook. His brother’s worse. And his wife!” She held up her hands. “The Vietnamese don’t care about their war. You saw what happened at Ap Bac.” (In truth, I’m not sure I had.) “My husband says they’re the first to disappear when any fighting starts. Our pilots call the guys from the ARVN who go up with them ‘sandbags.’ Dead weight in the cockpit. And the officers! They aren’t soldiers, they’re the spoiled children of the elites. They care more about their pretty uniforms than their troops.”
She brought her fingertips to both edges of the tabletop, as if seeking to steady it against the wobbly spot of earth on which it stood, and leaned, chest first, toward us both.
“Honestly,” she said with amused frustration. “How much good can we really do here? How much good can the two of you do?”
With her head still down, her fingers moving, Charlene said, “Very little.”
“Exactly my point,” Marilee said, satisfied.
I was beginning to think she would have made a pretty good major herself, her chest a broad calico field for the pinning of medals. She was very sure of herself, of her husband, of what she’d just been reading.
“Look,” she began again. I could tell she was enjoying the opportunity to set us straight. “I’m happy to help out.” She gestured toward our Barbie. “These are very cute. I’ll definitely get one for my daughter. But why not raise the money for the American school instead? Let your own children, and mine, get some benefit. You know as well as I do, Charlene, the classrooms are overcrowded. Why not give the money to the American school and save us mothers from all the bake sales we’ve been having? I mean,” and here she seemed to make an effort to soften her expression, “the children here—I have the deepest sympathy for them—but they aren’t going to have their lives improved by a toy or a lollipop. Let’s face it: their fates are sealed. Their fates were sealed the moment they were born in this godforsaken place. Arrange an airlift, if you really want to help. Get every newborn out of here. Get them American parents.” She laughed at her own absurdity. “Why kid yourself? Nothing less will do any good.”
As Marilee made her pronouncements, Charlene’s short, well-groomed, but nevertheless painfully cropped fingertips, flickering impatiently under her cigarette, were the sole indication of her fury. But no other was needed.
Marilee saw this, too. The woman’s breast was on the rise. The little bit of dark cleavage that showed above the top button of her blouse seemed to edge closer to her chin. And then, as if Charlene had offered some rebuke—though she’d said nothing—I saw Marilee’s face grow stony; her mouth, her rose-colored lipstick, drew itself into a firm line. She was an opinionated woman, certain of her opinions—that is, her husband’s opinions—and she was ready to talk some sense into us.
She took off her cat’s-eye glasses, left them to dangle over her décolletage. Without them, her eyes seemed palely innocent, undressed, but in a sweet, even childish way. “There’s a real danger here,” she said, and paused to let that sink in. I wasn’t sure if she meant here at this table or in the country at large. “There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.”
She paused, as if to admire the way she’d put this. She might have grown a little cross-eyed.
“A real danger,” she said again. After she’d let that sink in, she added, “It encourages self-righteousness in the one even as it destroys self-determination in the other.”
Or so, I thought, says the major.
Marilee returned her glasses to their perch. Paused to let her eyes refocus. She executed an elaborate squint, like a man flexing his fists after he’d struck a triumphant blow. And then she added, one more jab, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
With her head still bowed, Charlene put out her cigarette, straightened her spine, adjusted the napkin on her lap. (I saw Stella Carney’s own revving-up in the gesture.) Then she glanced at me, the slightest trace of her smarter-than-everyone smile.
Charlene brushed back her hair, although it was already well tamed under a wide headband. Drew in her breath as if to accept wearily the burden she bore. Then she looked up and aimed her green eyes at Marilee.
“On sundry days, mostly Thursdays,” Charlene said, nearly whispering. We both had to lean forward to hear her, clever girl. “I’ve been visiting a leper colony out on the coast. It’s a beautiful place, run by some French nuns. Some of our boys, our medics, have been going out there to do what they can. To do some good. Surgeries when our surgeons are available, but palliative care for the most part. And now and then I’ve gone with them. I shouldn’t. I’m not authorized. But they indulge me, let me tag along, because I bring a basket or two of our inconsequential little toys for the children. Little somethings for the adults as well, sweets and cigarettes. For the lepers.”
She smiled. I was certain she’d added the subtlest drawl to her words.
“You can’t imagine two things more incongruous, Marilee, the absolute beauty of the place, the beach, the blue water and the white sand. The lovely trees—tamarind, pine. And the wonderful flowers, orchids and hibiscus, the scent of jasmine, even roses. The buildings are lovely, too, Marilee. French-built, as you say. Open corridors. Beautiful tile floors. All of it immaculate. The Sisters keep it very well. And you can’t imagine how incongruous all that beauty is when you meet the patients themselves. The lepers, Marilee. The terrible distortions to face and limbs. The grotesque transformation of the human form. The human face. You recoil. It can’t be helped, Marilee.”
And then she turned to me. “Isn’t that right, Tricia?”
Of course, I had never been there. Never even knew until this moment that Charlene had gone. “Yes,” I said.
Marilee shot me a look. I moved my head, not quite a nod, a vague confirmation. Marilee’s own, unplucked eyebrows might have been arranging themselves into the one word “unauthorized,” in careful cursive; her thoughts were that apparent.
Charlene raised her elbows to the white tablecloth. Gestured with her open palms. “And that recoil, Marilee. That perfectly reasonable impulse to turn away, to gag, you might say, to close your eyes at the sight of this suffering is, to my mind, Marilee, a kind of evil.”
The poor woman made some sound of rational objection—she might have said, “Come now,” or “Really”—but Charlene stopped her with her palm.
“It’s a very small evil, of course,” she said pleasantly enough. “That impulse to turn away. It’s not murder. Nobody’s getting corrupted. It’s not even something we can be blamed for, really.” A breath of a laugh. “Surely we can’t be held responsible for the madness of”—she waved her fingers—“creation.”
She seemed to consider for a second the insufficiency of the word.
“Turning away,” a gentle indulgence now in her voice, “it’s an honest reaction, isn’t it?” As ever, she did not pause for reply. “But it’s an indication nevertheless of what we’re capable of, it seems to me. We’re capable of turning away. We’re capable of despising the sight of something so awful, something so incongruous to the good order we prefer. The beauty we prefer. I mean, Marilee,” she added with a huff of breath, “suffering.”
She made the word itself sound like a fashion faux pas: like white shoes after Labor Day. An ill-fitting Guy Laroche. “Honestly, Marilee. Who wants to gaze at suffering?”
And then she smiled sympathetically across the table. “Do you see what I’m saying?” Conveying as she said it the full confidence that Marilee did not.
A flush had begun to spread from under the neat collar of Marilee’s starched blouse, across her ruffled breast. “I thought we were talking about raising money,” she said, and then added with a small laugh, “for little toys.”
“We are,” Charlene said, utterly patient. “It’s just that you said there’s very little good we can do. In this place. And I agree, I do. But that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil—that impulse to turn away.”
Marilee laughed again, vaguely. “This is all very philosophical.” She paused. Made her own spine a bit straighter and threw back her broad shoulders as if to show she would not be drawn into these emotional, female, arguments.
“I thought you said you wanted to make some money, with your dolls,” she said sensibly, “for your little gifts and things.”
She suddenly glanced around at the other tables, aware, I think that she had raised her voice.
“I don’t know why you’re talking about lepers. Of all things. Like something out of the Bible.” She made an attempt at lightheartedness. “My goodness, ladies. Forget the little toys. Maybe you should buy yourselves some paper parasols. You’ve gotten too much sun.”
I laughed, politely.
But Charlene grew languorous, full of tolerant sympathy. She brought her forearms to the table, folded them together, and leaned down, as you might do to help a child struggling with her homework. Again she glanced at me but this time as if, together, we’d often had this very conversation with multiple other fools. And then she turned back to Marilee.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. She let out one of her softest Forgive me for laughing at you laughs. “I let myself get way ahead of you.” Classic Charlene.
She said we were, in fact, looking to purchase more than toys. She said I had been inspired—“It was Tricia’s vision,” she said—after visiting the lepers, after working with Lily on our Barbie clothes, to do more than bring our little gifts and toys to these poor, suffering people.
“Tricia said to me,” Charlene went on, without the slightest indication that the majority of us at this table knew she was lying, “‘What if we could raise enough money to make the same lovely ao dais for the women and girls at the colony? Perhaps some nice silk tunics for the men as well?’ Tricia thought that bringing such gifts to these poor people, the lepers, would be the clearest indication we could give them that they, too, were beautiful in spite of their disease. Still beautiful. Still human. And we will not look away.”
As Charlene spun this noble fiction, I was aware of Marilee glancing at me from across the table. There was a transformation taking place. I saw I was being reevaluated: when I shook Marilee’s hand outside the restaurant, I’d been Charlene’s petite young friend, pretty enough but with a shy woman’s bad posture, a hardly memorable girl Charlene had brought along to lunch. As we ate, I became what I was quite certain Marilee would later describe to the major as a quiet one, remarkable only because I had an impressive young husband with a law degree and an assignment here with the navy, since my only real contribution to the conversation thus far had been my usual recitation of Peter’s accomplishments, as well as some anodyne agreement that the Central Market was impossible to navigate.
But now I saw Marilee assessing me with a kind of enlightenment, even respect. I was, she seemed to be discovering, a quiet, shy, yet plucky American girl with that quintessential, somewhat naive but nevertheless admirable American virtue: a good and generous heart.
I can’t say I actually got it that afternoon—what Charlene was up to, as far as I, or our friendship, was concerned. But certainly it was then that I had my first inkling.
It wasn’t merely that everyone in the American community in Saigon, the other women at least, were sick to death of smarter-than-they-were Charlene. It was that Charlene was complex and I, to all observers, was simple.
Charlene plotted and schemed and traded on the black market; she pushed people around, drove like the devil, swept into rooms, popped pills, raised money; she was a dynamo. She laughed readily at other people’s foolishness, and while she might suppress her anger at their stupidity—confining her fury to two impatient fingertips flicking each other under her cigarette like a flint against a stone—she did not let that stupidity pass. When her husband belittled her, good-naturedly, of course—it was the way all husbands belittled their wives in those days—she replied silently; she ducked her head demurely but managed nevertheless to make the gesture seem as defiant as a raised gun.
She was not, in short, a saint.
I was to be the saint. The saint in her cabal.
And all my naiveté, my shyness, my lousy French, but most especially my foolish, innocent plans to do good in this godforsaken place, could thus be accepted as a sweet faux pas that might nevertheless be indulged.
From across the white tablecloth, across our empty coffee cups and ice-cream dishes, across Charlene’s ashtray and the sprig of bright bougainvillea in the centerpiece, I saw Marilee smile at me the way you smile at modest girl saints: ruefully, admiringly, amused by the poor idiot, yet sympathetic.
She said, to me, not Charlene, “I’m sorry. I guess I misunderstood. It’s really a lovely idea.”
Charlene turned to me as well. “Yes, isn’t it?” she said. Now she and Marilee were allies in their admiration. “Tricia’s out to repair the world,” Charlene pronounced, as if I were a precocious child. “She taught me the Hebrew phrase for this: tikkun olam. Repair the world. It’s her cri de guerre.”
Marilee shook her head and breathed an admiring “Ahh”—won over completely, although, in truth, She certainly doesn’t look Jewish was written plainly across her big brow.
* * *
THUS WAS OUR PROJECT not only conceived but made inevitable in that conversation on the roof of the Caravelle.
Charlene told me later that the whole idea, the idea to bring lovely new clothes to the lepers, had probably been somewhere in the back of her head, in her unconscious, she said, but it had only sprung to the forefront when she heard Marilee’s perfectly rational argument against our altruism.
“My first impulse was to screw my cigarette into her face,” Charlene said later. “She was so smug. Lecturing me about the Vietnamese economy. But then I thought, well, poor, homely Marilee is as much a product of her birth, her genes, her confining circumstances, as she’s right now saying the Vietnamese are. I thought, you know, she probably dresses this way—I mean, that blouse—because she doesn’t believe her homely face and dimpled biceps deserve better. Probably married the major for the same reason. I thought, listening to her go on, that something in silk might improve her outlook. An ao dai for Marilee, I thought. Despite that face. Despite those linebacker’s shoulders. And then I thought of the lepers. And then I was telling her about your wonderful plan, which, I’m afraid, I’d just hatched.”
WE MADE THE TRIP to the leper colony on a Thursday—in late July or early August.
Lying, surely the first time I lied to him about my whereabouts, I told Peter I would spend the day at Charlene’s, making doll clothes. Then I would stay to have dinner with the children while Charlene and Kent went out for a night on the town.
I didn’t say—I didn’t have to—that this diversion would be good for me, lift me out of my disappointment and sadness. I’d burst into tears the first time we made love after the miscarriage, and while Peter held me patiently, I had the sense, too, of some coolness in his touch, as if my tears had hurt his feelings.
