Absolution, p.15
Absolution, page 15
I saw that snap of lightning in Charlene’s eyes. She was enjoying this.
“Yes, Job,” she told him. “Of course. God telling the poor man to go scratch his boils and hush up.” She was meeting his drawl with her own. “Throwing his eternal weight around. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ Isn’t that right?”
Wally had turned to face her fully once again. He was grinning, admiring, even, but nevertheless chagrined. “That’s it,” he told her.
“Which is why I said ‘into the whirlwind,’ Dr. Wally.” Despite the adamancy of her words, there was still what we used to call a come-hither in her tone. A tone, I suddenly imagined, that she must have put to good use as a teenager, surrounded by besotted boys. “You don’t just give up when the whirlwind throws its nonsense at you. You shout back. Even if it’s chaos for chaos.”
Wally took her in, amused, engaged. In the fatigues—which did as much for her eyes as the green silk dress had done—and with her hair pulled back, she seemed to me younger, less feral, less searching. Some softening of the edges. Or maybe it was just the diffuse light of the canvas covering over our heads.
Or maybe she, too, felt the freedom from all we had briefly left behind.
“You might be right,” Wally said.
“You know I am,” she told him.
THE PLACE WAS AS BEAUTIFUL as Charlene had described. Breathtaking, I want to say. Lush and green with bright flowers here and there.
We arrived just as another rain had passed, when some indication of sunshine broke through the clouds and made everything suddenly steamy, streaming, glazed with light. We stepped out of the truck—Wally and Dom again acting as liveried footmen attending us princesses—and into the heat and the humidity and the sudden glorious glare: green shot with yellow, shadow shot with light, bursts of red and pink. The sandy grass at our feet flashed diamonds. The white and blue of the buildings before us (we shaded our eyes as we stepped out of the truck), the green foliage, the white sand and blue water, all seemed briefly unmoored. A floating kingdom by the sea. Immediately, figures began to emerge from the shade of the building’s porticoes. I thought at first they were all children—it occurred to me that we had not brought enough Barbies—but quickly saw that I could not be sure how old they were.
It was that uncertainty, that sudden transformation of skipping innocents into hobbled lepers, right before, you might say, my squinting eyes, that unnerved me.
I was suddenly afraid. Suddenly doubtful of my own abilities here. My ability not to look away.
Behind the approaching patients, I glimpsed the white shape of one of the Sisters, coming forward as Wally and Dominic and Charlene greeted the first figures to reach us. Lily and I were still by the truck. I was happy to have her beside me, all uncertain as I was. But then a small woman, not a child, passed through the first group, coming toward us with increasing agility. She scurried crookedly, held out both her arms. One of her swollen hands was fingerless, the other wrapped in gauze. A supplicant from some nightmare. Her face—I lowered my eyes before I could take it all in. As I did, I heard Lily cry out, felt her brush past me.
And then the two women were laughing, and crying, holding each other in their arms. I saw the wrapped hand beating gently, steadily, against Lily’s thin back.
Charlene was at my elbow, moving me forward. “Her cousin,” she was saying. “They grew up together. Lily hasn’t seen her since she was sent here. They were as close as twins, growing up. Twins shouldn’t be apart for so long.”
Charlene the dynamo.
“Lily’s not here to take measurements, then?’ I asked her. Thick as mud, as my father would have said.
“Of course she’s here to take measurements,” Charlene told me with her faux tolerance for the idiots in the world. “We all have work to do. It’s just nice that she can see her cousin as well.” And then she added, leaning into me, “Marcia Case thinks she’s at my house all day, making doll clothes, then watching the children. Not sure she’d be delighted to know one of her house girls has been hobnobbing with lepers.”
We were crossing into the building. “Same story I told Peter,” I said. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”
Charlene pulled her head back a bit, made wide her green eyes. “You liar you,” she said. I felt like a star pupil.
* * *
WE WALKED TOGETHER into what was something like a small dining room, where the Sisters had a table prepared for tea. Charlene introduced me all around, to the nuns—there were maybe six of them, as I recall—and to the two lepers who stood at the periphery, both lanky adolescent boys, shadow-thin, but without any outward signs of disease. Which I was grateful for, relieved not to feel again that initial failure of nerve, that panic. But I’m not sure I felt any pity, either, or compassion. I was holding myself back, I think, holding my fragile courage, as well as my fear, in a kind of defensive crouch, somewhere behind my ribs.
Dominic, on the other hand, was just open. I’m sorry I keep using that word, but it seems the one that suits him best: open-hearted, open-faced, open-handed, no guile, no self-consciousness or pride. I’d already noticed this about him in the children’s ward, that he had no sense that he was watching himself, admiring himself, as he went about being a good and generous guy—that kind of clawing self-consciousness that I’ve observed over the years in many an altruist: priests, missionaries, ACLU attorneys, the leaders of certain charities, or all the well-dressed elites at black-tie global fundraisers. Performative bonhomie. Self-congratulatory demonstrations of their limitless agape.
Bestowers of favor, as Marilee might have put it, well pleased with the favors they bestow.
Maybe it was because Dominic was so young, and looked even younger, but everything he did—every polite and grateful gesture, his eager conversation with the nuns, his easy camaraderie with our teenage waiters—seemed infused with his own wide-eyed appreciation that he was here, having an interesting life. Like a newly released prisoner, perhaps, or, more apt, a young man newly escaped from a safe and boring middle-class childhood. Look at us, his blue-eyed joy seemed to convey, convey to everyone, even those poor young men whom he was somehow managing to make laugh. Look at us, here on earth, having an interesting life. Jesus. Aren’t we something? Aren’t we great?
I recalled how another GI on the children’s ward had once called Dom the Buddha from Baltimore.
Before we sat down, we ladies were offered a visit to the nuns’ small outhouse in the back. A primitive toilet with a cistern and an earthenware sink. French milled soap, lavender, on a string beside it. A luxury the nuns allowed themselves, Charlene told me as we walked back. Courtesy of Sister Étienne’s family in Marseilles.
This was when she told me, too, about Lily and her cousin. Raised as if they were twins—they were born in the same month and year although Lily’s mother did not survive the birth. The aunt and uncle who raised her were both employed in a tailor shop in Saigon, but when Lily’s cousin began to show signs of ill health—she was about twelve or thirteen—her parents sent her to their hometown—hometown is how Charlene put it, although I gathered she meant some rural village. Away from the noise and dirt of the city. Of course, Lily had wanted to go with the girl—her twin, her heart (as Lily had said, telling Charlene the tale in bits and pieces as she fitted that green shantung dress)—but by then her aunt and uncle had grown dependent on Lily’s skills, her good eye and delicate hands. It wasn’t long after the cousin left Saigon that a local priest gave a name to her ailments and she was sent here. And then, two years ago, the aunt and uncle closed their shop—“There was an opportunity to follow some Frenchman out of the country,” Charlene said—leaving Lily alone in Saigon. Marcia Case, “a clotheshorse if there ever was one,” had been a customer at the shop and was delighted to bring Lily into her household.
So it had been nearly a decade since Lily had seen her cousin, her twin, her sister, her heart. Ten years since they’d been together. “Not acceptable,” Charlene said.
When we returned to the table, I saw that Sister A already had Wally off in a corner, whispering into his ear. She was explaining something, or asking for something—her gestures were gentle, but tense, somehow. Wally, bending to listen, nodded and then shrugged, and then nodded again—reassuring her. The woman did not look reassured.
After our brief tea, while Wally and Dom and Charlene went to the truck for the footlocker of medical supplies, the nuns showed Lily and me where we could set up our little tailoring shop. It was a small, spare room that opened directly onto the outdoors so it got good light. There was a desk and a chair for me and, for Lily, a wooden crate on which our “patrons” could stand while they were measured. There was also a narrow bed in the shadows on the far side of the room, carefully made up. I gathered it was a room waiting for its next occupant. Or recently abandoned by its last.
Lily’s cousin followed us in and took a seat on the edge of the bed. She sat there in shadow throughout the morning, watching us at our work, smiling and nodding—although it was not until every other woman had been measured that she allowed herself to be measured as well. Every now and then as we worked, the two girls exchanged a happy look or a few words. And Lily’s cousin would then hug herself, her damaged hands at her bony elbows, rocking with pleasure.
Charlene had to coax the first few women to our door. She and Dominic were assisting at the outdoor medical station Dr. Wally used, and our first few “customers” were women who had just been seen. Some had new bandages, others newly applied antiseptic gels on ulcerated wounds or infected insect bites. Charlene steered them to us, touching elbows and shoulders. She’d provided me with a small notebook, where I took down each woman’s name—Lily tried to spell each one for me, although in truth I wrote them down phonetically as well. I also gave them, parenthetically, little nicknames, so I would remember who they were when we returned—names like Chubby Cheeks, and Toothless. Not nice, I know. I then listed their measurements as Lily showed me the numbers on her cloth tape: height, sleeve length, inseam, shoulders, chest, and waist. After the initial (it seemed to me at first insurmountable) reluctance, there was a good deal of giggling, especially when chest and waist and inseam were involved. And soon we had a small crowd of women outside the room.
At lunchtime we returned to the dining area, where the Sisters had set out a simple spread: rice and a flaky kind of fish. Lemonade. More tea. It was so hot. Both Wally and Dominic were soaked across the back and under their arms. Charlene and I took off our socks and the ridiculous boots and waved our bare feet under the table. It didn’t help. As we ate, another sudden rain moved in off the ocean. It was the kind of tropical rain that seems to build to a crescendo, and then, confounding some expectation that the worst has passed, builds again, builds further, louder, more intensely, so that you entertain the notion that it might never stop building, that it will, finally, overwhelm.
A sound to spark some primitive—or maybe only childish—fear. A flash of ancient, ignorant panic, tickling your spine. A brief awareness of how the natural world might, in an instant, reduce you to a brief, trembling, and utterly inconsequential detail of its larger machinations.
Somewhere at this point, this noisy pinnacle—I recall it as the intense height of the storm—a man stood briefly in the doorway, and then slipped into the room.
He was American. I knew that instinctively, before he said a word, by the way he moved. He was dark-haired, in need of a shave, as tall as Wally, as broad and fit as Dom, much older than them both. Fifties, perhaps. His khaki shirt and pants were wet with rain, especially across his shoulders and along his thighs, but nevertheless I could see that his clothes were also filthy. His pants were rolled at the ankles. His feet, splattered with wet mud, were bare, like ours. Sister A stood immediately to greet him, even as Wally stood, too, and, much to my surprise, saluted. Dominic, two seconds behind, did the same.
The man returned the salute somewhat casually, as if only to swipe the rain from his brow. And laughed, and said, “At ease.” He was handsome, no question he was handsome. Older than Wally, than the rest of us, but now I saw it was impossible to say by how much. He said, “Ladies,” coming forward to offer us his hand. That’s when I saw his shirt was unbuttoned and his chest bare, his pants low-slung—understandable in this heat, I supposed. His hairless chest and belly were filthy as well.
Being who I was in those days, I smiled up at him with my garden-party smile and shook his hand politely—I remember thinking his grip was weirdly dry, reptilian. I instantly disliked whatever change he had brought to the air in the room, to our company. Although he, too, was smiling, good teeth, his eyes skipped over me dismissively (too young, too plain, not interesting enough) and settled themselves on Charlene, who, when he offered her his hand, hesitated, unsmiling, brazenly assessing him for just long enough to make me embarrassed for her, as if she, of all people, was edging toward some terrible rudeness.
His name was Smith or Jones or Brown or Bates—something comically short and familiar and American. Perhaps you can ask Dominic if he remembers. I’ll say Bates. A colonel or a major, I don’t recall that, either. I learned over the course of the conversation that he’d arrived at the leprosarium yesterday morning at dawn, coming out of the jungle alone, on the black bicycle we had already seen propped against the wall outside one of the rooms. His room, I gathered, where he had been sleeping until now.
The Sisters had been saying their first prayers at the little outdoor chapel beside the path to the beach. He emerged from the trees, and as soon as he’d introduced himself, Sister A told him that some of his compatriots were due tomorrow. She was certain they would give him a ride back to Saigon.
I could tell even now that she wanted to be rid of him.
Up until this moment, she had been a gracious host, sitting with us at this morning’s tea and now taking a leisurely lunch with us, clearly enjoying our company, Wally’s and Dom’s especially. She was middle-aged, I guess. Had come to Vietnam in the 1940s, working first at an orphanage in the north, then moving here just after the war (the French one). As she chatted with us in her accented English, I had the clear understanding that she knew she would never go home again. That she would live out her days here, die here—whether she died of leprosy, like Father Damien, or of old age, or of some other inevitability would be irrelevant, I supposed. She was here until her end.
This struck me, at twenty-three, as remarkable. I’d known plenty of nuns in my Catholic school days, but I don’t know that I’d ever come face-to-face with any woman who had so thoroughly eliminated, erased (that’s how I thought of it) every future option, every other possible life. Maybe because I was so young myself, I was amazed to think that she faced—had, in fact, willingly accepted—a future that was so stunted. She had finished with possibility, willingly. This astonished me. A kind of death in life, I thought. Admirable, I suppose. Suffocating as well.
I wondered: In a life so prescribed, so determined, what happened to the pleasure of expectation?
It had been clear to me this morning that the nun thought our little project frivolous. But by lunchtime I was sure she’d noticed how much laughter had sounded from the room where we took our measurements. And by now I’d concluded that Sister was willing to admit that even though she had taught herself to live a life—a holy life, no doubt—stripped of anticipation or change, or even some silly thing to look forward to, her patients did not necessarily need to do the same.
At lunch she told us that the ladies in her care would surely be counting the days until our return with their silk clothes.
But her entire demeanor changed when this American colonel or captain or whatever he was showed up. In my father’s words, she wanted nothing better than to show him the door.
I thought at first this might have had something to do with his bare chest and belly, something obscene in it, in the way, as he sat, joined us at the table, his uncovered navel disappeared into a slight roll of muddy flesh. In front of nuns, no less.
He accepted some tea and wolfed down a bowl of rice. He told us where he was from in the Midwest—Iowa, Wisconsin, one of those places. He was a physician himself. Retired Army Medical Corps, but now here in the country on his own dime. Or on the few collected dimes of some Christian group associated with his hometown. A medical missionary of some sort, I gathered. (I’m sorry the details barely registered with me then and have long since been forgotten.) I know he said he’d spent some weeks in the highlands with the Montagnards, was making his way back to Saigon, stopping to do what good he could at orphanages and villages here and there.
He said, “Whatever small good.” And then he grinned at us, at me briefly, at Charlene with more leisure, as if he knew he was paraphrasing her. Just short of mockery. I’m certain I remember this correctly. I’m certain Charlene looked as though she wanted to show him the door as well.
But Wally was his gracious self. And Dominic grew shy, I thought, listening to him. Maybe it was the presence of a superior officer, an older man. Maybe it was that he was tall and unshaven and movie-star handsome—despite how filthy he was, grime on his neck and hands, black fingernails in need of clipping, that bare, hairless chest under his opened shirt—a muscular chest, sculpted (I would say now) but streaked with dirt.
I wondered—being who I was in those days—if he even knew he was so unbuttoned. Wondered as he spoke if I shouldn’t give him a subtle sign, as I would do with my father whenever he had a label sticking out of his collar, or his fly unzipped. I believe I even tried: my eyes to his face as I smiled at him, and then, with some small movement of my chin, my eyes to his breast— I might have nodded subtly—and then, trying to catch his eyes again, nearly mouthing the word “unbuttoned.”
What a fool I must have seemed.
There was a damp, smoky smell about his clothes, as if he had spent many nights before an open fire—had doused the ashes and then rubbed them over his skin.
