Absolution, p.14
Absolution, page 14
The second time, he’d looked at me warily afterward. “You okay?” he asked. I answered honestly that I didn’t know.
The third time, he asked me if I would ever again simply enjoy this, simply relax. In the days—I should say nights—that followed he seemed more and more like a man who was growing impatient with what he had thought would be an easy repair: a bit of glue, a bit of pressure, should have been easy … but the broken thing would not mend.
Shyly, he told me one night as I wept, “It’s really not that important to me. A kid of my own.”
I understood he meant to be kind. He was of that generation of men, among the last, I suppose, who opened doors for women, or gave up their seats on the subway, who stood whenever a woman walked into a room, and rushed to relieve any female companion of even the slightest burden—taking from her arms a bag of groceries, a basket of laundry, a briefcase, or a book. Instinctively. I recall an evening in New York when I looked out our apartment window and saw Peter walking home from the subway with the wife of our super beside him, her ungainly three-year-old, who had fallen asleep on the train, in his arms.
I understood that he wanted to take this burden from me, this burden to procreate, by telling me it really didn’t matter. And I loved him for that kindness.
But I also feared my miscarriage had given him permission to tell the truth. Peter was the third of nine children. Five boys, four girls. One sister and one brother never married. Another sister became a nun. A brother became a priest. The other four siblings married and produced one child each. I guess they were all aware of the burden of an overcrowded household, too little money, too little space. Parents who seemed so fond of each other throughout the day and yet became so wary when evening approached.
Peter said his mother slept on the floor in his sisters’ room for much of his childhood because—so the family joke went—their father’s snoring could wake the dead.
The other family joke went that Peter and his brothers, and one of his sisters, joined the military straight out of high school in order to get some privacy.
* * *
HERE’S A STORY my sister-in-law, by then an ex-nun, told me: Late one night when she was a kid, their father came to the door of the bedroom the four girls shared, calling for their mother, and then, in an instant, before any of them was fully awake, he shoved open the door and flipped on the overhead light. Blinking and squinting, the four girls saw that the old mattress on the floor between their bunk beds, the mattress where their mother usually slept, was empty. Their father saw this, too, and bellowed.
He was not a drinker but they knew he’d had a few that night.
He demanded to know where their mother had gone. The girls shrugged, told him she had been there when they fell asleep. He stormed out, went to the boys’ room, and then through the rest of the small house, calling for her. When he came back upstairs, he launched into a rant about their mother’s obligation to him, her duty to him as ordained by God and the one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
And then he said, somewhat unsteady on his feet, “I could divorce her for this.”
By now all nine of the children were gathered, either in the girls’ bedroom or out in the narrow hallway, all standing in their pajamas, in the strange, cold light of a household awoken suddenly at three a.m. They looked at their father in hushed fear— “divorce” was a terrifying word. You could hear the clocks ticking, Peter’s sister said.
And then, from somewhere in the room, came their mother’s voice: “There’s no divorce in the one, true, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church,” she cried. “You big lug.”
There was another second of fraught silence, and then their mother peeked out from under the bed, from behind the pink ruffled bed skirt, and stuck out her tongue.
The kids, all nine of them, collapsed into wild laughter. The sound of it drove their poor father back to his own bed, alone.
He seemed quite ashamed of himself in the morning, Peter’s sister said.
Another sister told me once, and this was only a few years ago, that menopause fell like a gentle grace on her parents’ loving marriage, made them free to be affectionate once again.
In Saigon that year it occurred to me that with a childhood such as his, it was not inconceivable (forgive the pun) that Peter would be perfectly content to be childless.
My miscarriage had now given him permission to say so.
A tincture of self-interest mixed into his determination to be kind.
And yet, it was his kindness, I think, that made me lie to him about Charlene’s latest scheme. With the innate, gentle solicitousness that was so much a part of who he was—a part of his upbringing, his self-esteem, of the time and place in which we were young—I knew he would not want me to be upset by what such a visit might bring. Not just the health risk—although Charlene had assured me, as Dr. Wally had assured her, that most of the patients at the colony were “dry” and that, despite the worldwide (not to mention biblical) misunderstanding, leprosy was not so easily transmittable—but the emotional risk of the visit, of the sight of such suffering.
I lied to him about my whereabouts that day because I feared he would, out of the goodness of his dear heart, want to shield me from that sadness. Relieve me of that burden. He would want me to look away.
A small evil, as Charlene said.
I LEFT THE HOUSE at seven that morning wearing pink pedal pushers and a sleeveless cotton blouse. Having amused myself the night before with the unspoken question: What do you wear to a leper colony? Wishing I had Stella nearby to share the joke.
Of course, even at that hour, the wet heat was oppressive. Peter put me in a cab with a peck on the cheek. At Charlene’s, I was surprised to find Lily seated demurely in one of the chairs in Charlene’s office. She sat on the edge of her seat, her hands folded before her. She stood, shyly smiling, when I came in. I thought at first—some version of the lie I had told my husband—that she was there to watch the children while we visited the lepers, but Charlene made it clear right away that Lily was coming with us.
We need a real seamstress, Charlene said, to take proper measurements.
And then she produced for us both—“I’m guessing you two are about the same size”—a set of freshly laundered army fatigues: pants and jackets and T-shirts. She had even procured two pairs of boots. This, she told us, was Dr. Welty’s idea. He always asked Charlene to wear the same whenever she tagged along, unauthorized.
I recall that the name stenciled on my shirt was O’Connor. On Lily’s it was D’Angelo. I pictured two teenage GIs, both of them short and skinny, sitting somewhere in their boxers and socks, awaiting our return.
We went to change—I to your bedroom on the second floor, a pretty room with a small Juliet balcony and a view of the yard. Your Barbie was there in Lily’s ao dai, but I was amused, and appreciative, to see that she no longer wore the non la secured with straight pins. Rather, you had fashioned the ties so that the hat could be worn, just as authentically, on her back. There were two or three stuffed animals on your bed. I understood that should I ask you, you would recite for me their complex biographies.
We’d been, I think, the same kind of child.
I glanced in the mirror, felt ridiculous, and returned to Charlene’s office in my new getup, fully prepared, of course, to endure Charlene’s particular laugh. But she only shook her head. Charlene and Lily had both pulled their hair back into ponytails, but I still wore mine in my usual bouffant, flipped at the ends. I’d spent the night before sleeping in rollers, and I suppose I was reluctant to spoil the fruits of my discomfort.
Charlene said only that we looked like the Andrews Sisters on a USO tour. And then she gave us each a market basket of goodies to carry to the car.
* * *
OUTSIDE, AN ARMY TRANSPORT VEHICLE, not unlike the one Charlene often “borrowed,” was waiting for us. This one had a large red cross painted on its canvas. As we came through the gate, long-legged Wally Welty unfolded himself from the passenger seat and Dominic, shorter and more solidly built, came around from the driver’s side. Both men quickly took the baskets from our hands and stored them in the back. Then they helped us climb inside, holding open the canvas flap, taking our fingertips, and telling us to watch our step, as if we were three Cinderellas in army fatigues getting into our elegant pumpkin. Neither said a word about the fatigues.
I noticed Dominic did not drive with Charlene’s maniacal aplomb. He braked more often and took the time to look over his shoulder—which she had never done. Of course the only view we had was out the back of the truck, and as we drove through the city I could see the puzzled looks of the Vietnamese—cabbies and bus drivers and boys and girls, even whole families, perched on cycles and motorbikes—when they pulled up behind us and glimpsed what must have appeared to them as three most peculiar GIs. Lily kept her head down and Charlene was leaning forward, speaking into Dr. Welty’s ear, so I was left to meet these puzzled, sometimes amused, sometimes hostile stares. It was the hostile ones that made me finally flatten my careful coiffure.
While still talking to Dr. Wally, Charlene reached into her pocket and handed me a rubber band. “To tie up your bonnie brown hair,” she said.
Once we were out on the highway, I could see Dominic’s shoulders relax a bit—they’d been up around his flushed ears— as his hands on the wheel regained some color.
I don’t know how much you traveled when you were there. Even in those days we were advised not to leave the city. I’m sure you saw all the usual tourist sights. (I do remember a conversation you and I had at one of your parents’ parties, about the zoo, and the Xa Loi Pagoda, which you were very taken with.) You also had your daily commute to the American school, in your father’s car or on the school bus. Certainly, you’d had your view of the place coming in from the airport. So I can’t say how much you saw, no less remember, of the flat rice paddies shot with silver eddies, the bent peasants in the fields, the dark, slow-motion apparition of the water buffaloes, too large to seem real. From the back of the vehicle I felt I was seeing it all as I do now: in some vague, perhaps detached, retrospect. There were the slums and the ramshackle huts that bordered Saigon, and the thatched villages here and there as we moved farther from it. Away from the city scent of diesel and trash and waste, there was now the hot, damp smell of wet dirt and foliage, of the impending or leftover rain—a scent that mixed now and then with the truck’s exhaust. I recall a sense of being underwater, what with the humidity, the low clouds, the passing downpours—as well as the filtered light of the canvas over our heads. Out of a dream once again, or so it seems now.
But this much I remember: I was truly happy—perhaps for the first time since the miscarriage. Happy to be bumping along through this lovely and exotic country, in the company of so many good people. To be Tricia in army fatigues and heavy boots. A young woman on an adventure that was safe (I’d been reassured) and yet daring (my husband had no idea where I was). A young woman who had never been shy. A kind of saint.
We had in the narrow space at our feet the baskets of usual treats for the children, tea and cigarettes for the adults and the Sisters. (Charlene had discovered on earlier trips that two of the nuns enjoyed an occasional smoke.) Wally had his medical bag with him up front, but there was also, in back with us, a green footlocker filled with the bandages and medicines he would need. In another basket, four whiffle ball sets for the boys and seven boxed Barbies in white ao dais for the girls. On her last visit, Charlene had counted only four girls, mostly young adolescents, but thought to bring along a few extra, just in case the numbers had changed.
I’d wondered if it was cruel to bring these doe-eyed and big-breasted effigies to the sick children, but Charlene was quite confident—needless to say. She thought giving the girls a Barbie now would only enhance their wonder when we returned in a few weeks’ time with the same silk ao dais for the women.
There were also two rifles secured to the bed of the truck, just behind the front seats. A safety measure, I imagined. Not one I took very seriously.
* * *
ONCE WE WERE OUT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, the road growing steep as we climbed into the hills, Dr. Wally turned to offer me, and Lily, a history of the leprosarium, giving us the names of the nuns and some of the lepers we would meet, each with a short personality sketch. “Sister Antoine will find us something to do the minute we say it’s time to leave,” he said. “So I always start saying goodbye an hour before we’re gonna go. Vu, the caretaker, speaks in full paragraphs, sometimes pages. It doesn’t bother him in the least that you don’t understand a word.”
I was reminded of the “rundowns,” the biographical précis Peter always coached me with before a cocktail party or a company dinner, here or back home.
The difference being, I realized, that Peter’s briefings always made my palms sweat while Wally’s were putting me at ease.
He lectured us a bit about leprosy itself, repeating what Charlene had already told me about infection and contagion, wet and dry, treatments and prognosis and all the various myths about the disease. There was nothing conceited or condescending in this (no mansplaining, you would say now). Wally offered information the way another young man might casually hold out a pack of gum, a pack of cigarettes—from courtesy, yes, but also out of some shared taste. If he was interested, he was pretty sure you’d be interested. Apparently, he’d done some similar work with American lepers, in Louisiana, when he was in med school. It was a disease he had some interest in, he said, given how feared and misunderstood it was. “I’m always on the side of the misunderstood,” he said.
I’d read a book about Father Damien and the lepers in college, and I spoke up, like a good student, to tell him so. Dominic said he’d read it, too. “Beautiful book. Made me want to be a missionary,” he shouted as he drove. “For about a week.”
Wally mentioned, too, a Vietnamese poet who had died of leprosy—someone the Sisters had told him about.
He said he’d hoped to find a French or English translation of the man’s work but had been unsuccessful thus far. In fact, he’d been told the work was untranslatable. He asked Lily if she knew of this man, and she nodded.
Then he asked her, switching to slow French that was charmingly distorted by his drawl, if she’d ever seen versions of his poems in another language? Chinese, perhaps? She shook her head. She said, in English, that there were too many different words, in English and Vietnamese. Too many words that cannot be translated. She held out her palm, made a wall with the other, a chopping motion to indicate that there were some barriers words could not cross.
Wally shook his head at this. “That can’t be true,” he said, in English. Poetry, he said, is in the world well before a poet finds it. Its source is the unspoken. The unspoken is always translatable.
Charlene laughed, but it was not her usual sneeze of a laugh, with its aftermath of disdain and faux contrition. Or maybe the sound of the truck’s engine, gears grinding, merely obscured the unkind edge.
“Dr. Wally,” she cried. “You are a regular Confucius.”
Wally laughed, too, abashed, I think. I don’t know that I ever before, or since, saw him blush. “Of course I am,” he said. “I’m a Southerner. Ancestor worship is in my blood.”
“You build little altars to them?” Charlene asked. She waved her fingers in the air, coy and amused. I had never seen her flirt before.
Wally nodded. “All over town.”
He went on to describe how the Sisters had told him that the man’s early poems were beautiful, quite formal celebrations of love and the natural world—trees, sky, flowers, sunrise and sunset—but then, as his leprosy progressed, as he’d moved toward the end of his life, his work became wild and experimental, pretty much nonsensical.
“Le chaos,” the Sisters had said. Wally shook his head. “Chaos poetry. I’d like to read some of that.”
He was lanky, long-faced, with standard-issue dark-frame glasses, big ears, and a wide, ready grin. The calmest, most easygoing—these days you might say “centered”—young man I’ve ever met. Southern charm, I thought then.
Charlene repeated the term “chaos poetry.” And then she asked him, “Is it poetry about chaos, the way a love poem is about love, or is it just gibberish? Chaos itself.”
Wally had turned awkwardly in his seat, the long length of him, trying to see her fully, I suppose. He said he figured there was meaning in it somewhere. “The guy’s dying of leprosy. His hands probably swollen. Fingers missing. His eyesight gone.”
With all that pain, Wally argued, why would he torture himself with writing it down, putting it to paper, this chaos poetry? Why bother if the words were mere nonsense? Meaningless. Why go through all the trouble?
Charlene narrowed her eyes, still taking him in as she considered this. When she spoke, I heard that slight impatience with the slow-witted world she so often used with me. With everyone, I suppose.
She said, “A man who’s been writing poems about love and the beauty of the natural world finds himself consumed by a terrible disease, racked with pain, ostracized from society. Finds his flesh falling from his bones. Who can blame him if he wants to amend his earlier praise? Take it back. Fling his own gibberish into the gobbling whirlwind?”
Wally turned away from her briefly, looking out through the windshield, which was now pocked with rain. I saw him exchange a look with Dom, who, ever conscientious, only briefly took his eyes from the road.
I suspect even gentle Wally Welty, a man of his time, was surprised to be talked back to in this way by a smarty-pants corporate wife.
Wally said, “If I remember my Old Testament right, it’s God who speaks out of the whirlwind. Justifying his ways to man.”
