Absolution, p.18
Absolution, page 18
* * *
AT CHARLENE’S, YOU CHILDREN WERE IN BED and Kent was out. The villa was lit with low lights that somehow only increased my weariness—I don’t know that I’ve ever been so bone-tired—as well as my uncertainty as to the time. I felt it should have been three a.m. It wasn’t even ten.
Our clothes were hanging in Charlene’s office, and Lily and I changed there. The morning’s modesty, each getting dressed in a separate room, seemed silly now. I just wanted to get home.
The servant who had let us in came to the door, and Charlene spoke to him rapidly in French. I thought she was asking for some dinner, and told her I wouldn’t stay to eat. I was just going to get a cab and get home before Peter began to worry.
She said, “I asked him to bring the car around. He can take you and Lily home.” And then added, “Your French comes and goes.”
“My French has yet to arrive,” I told her, putting on my shoes. “I have no knack for it.”
She was still in her fatigues, but she had let down her hair. I could now see how the sun had brought out the freckles on her face. “You understood him well enough,” she said. “His butcher-shop tale.”
It took me a minute to know who she referred to. “The doctor?”
She nodded. “You followed him pretty well.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” I said. I was wary, but only of Charlene’s dismissiveness. I didn’t know what she was getting at, but I sensed it would not reflect well on me.
“His French,” she said.
I was still uncertain. “But he spoke English,” I said. “He’s an American.”
She was smoking a cigarette, and I saw the fingers beneath it move together. “No, he didn’t,” she said. “Not in the truck. He spoke French. For Lily’s sake, I think. To frighten her. Make her believe her fellow countrymen are barbarians. I was surprised you followed so well.”
“He spoke English,” I said again. And laughed at the absurdity of this conversation, of such a weird misremembering. “I heard him.”
Lily was watching us both. She was very solemn. Or perhaps she, too, was bone-tired. Charlene turned to her and asked her, in French, if she had understood the man—that terrible man, she said. That much I took in. I don’t know why her description so surprised me.
Lily said in French that she had understood him clearly. His Vietnamese and his French were both very good.
Charlene put the heels of her hands to her eyes. She stood like that for a few silent minutes, the cigarette burning between her fingers. I had the very brief notion—very brief—that she was going to cry. Some movement of her chin, I guess.
All about her feet, the indications of her efforts—crates and boxes and piled baby clothes. It all looked a bit forlorn to me, in my exhaustion, in the room’s low late-night light. While she stood there, we heard a tap at the door, the servant saying the car was ready. She lowered her hands and flicked her cigarette in the vague direction of her ashtray.
She said, “I’ve got four bolts of silk to fetch in the morning. I’ll bring them over to the Cases’ by ten. I’m going to talk to Marcia about letting Lily get away from her domestic duties. Get these outfits finished quickly.” And to Lily, “Let’s see if you can get your friend Phan to help out.”
If Wally was in trouble for bringing us along today, she went on, or reluctant to bring us again, she would ask one of the other corpsmen who’d been on their last trip. Or another medic she knew, an older doctor, always amused by her efforts. He’d find a way to get us back. She also knew a young American nurse at the station hospital. Had lunch with her just the other day. An adorable young woman. Head of nursing. She might be of some use if we needed transport.
The light was the light of three a.m.: vague and pointillist, colors washed thin, edges ill-defined. My feet ached after a day in those boots. My back was sore. I wanted to interrupt her to say, “We should go. The car is waiting. Peter is waiting.” But I didn’t. Couldn’t. I knew we were watching Charlene at some essential work of her own. She was resetting her bearings, shoring up her confidence, reconstructing her faith in her own silly way of doing good. I understood without much thought that this faith had been toppled today, mocked and trivialized by someone whom we all, all unaccountably, had wanted to please.
Finally, Charlene said, “I refuse to say another word about him.” And screwed out her cigarette in the silver dish, scattering ash.
LATE THAT SAME SUMMER, Jacqueline Kennedy’s baby was born prematurely. All of us in the American community in Saigon—all of us women, anyway—kept breathless track of the news: the baby had been flown to Children’s Hospital in Boston, as I recall. The president was with him.
For the Catholics among us who had waited for news of the dying pope, it was the summer’s second sad vigil.
Finally, there was a press conference. Pierre Salinger told the world that the baby had died, the brevity of his little life making the details of such an announcement, the day, the hour, the minute of his death, all the more heartbreaking. There was a sympathetic intake of breath from the gathered press. And then a question: “Has Mrs. Kennedy been told?”
“No,” came the answer. “Not yet.”
No doubt this seems unbelievable to your generation, that she was the last to be told. But you have to understand what it was like in those days, for us, the wives.
* * *
WHEN IT CAME TIME TO RETURN to the leprosarium with the pretty clothes, I told Charlene that Peter wouldn’t allow it.
Things in the city were getting difficult. (The public record is reliable.) Late that August, Diem’s secret police raided a dozen Buddhist pagodas throughout the city, cleared them of demonstrators, arrested hundreds. He closed the university, declared martial law.
I can’t recall for certain if I cited any of these wider-world situations when I told Charlene that Peter wouldn’t allow me to leave the city, but, in those days, I’m not sure I needed to. “My husband won’t let me go” would have been sufficient enough explanation, even back home.
“Confined to quarters,” Charlene said, amused but also, briefly, I thought, disappointed. And then annoyed. And then—all these emotions passed over her face in the time it might take a bit of cloud to obscure the sun—she shrugged, dismissed me with a wave of her hand.
I knew there were plenty of other women in her cabal.
ON A SUNDAY EVENING in mid-September a plastic bomb went off in the back of the Kinh Do movie theater. No one in the theater was killed, as it turned out—not this time, anyway—although there was damage to the surrounding buildings.
It was a Disney movie they were showing. Lady and the Tramp, I think. You and your brother were supposed to have been there.
I imagine you remember this, or at least remember being told about it.
Charlene and Kent were out that night. One of their servants had promised you both a trip to the movies. But at the last minute Ransom came down with a bout of Ho Chi Minh’s revenge—“that boy will have his street snacks,” Charlene said later—and the trip was canceled.
When word of the bombing reached the party your parents were attending, your mother left immediately—another guest had offered his car. Kent, calmer, as I imagine him, stayed behind to call the villa. Phone service in Saigon was often unpredictable, but eventually, he got through and discovered you children were there.
Charlene was already on her way to the movie theater, through the dark streets. Frantic, she said.
We were side by side at the edge of the pool at the Sports Club as she told me this. I recall how she spoke over her tanned and freckled shoulder, slick with baby oil, while our toes stirred the blue water. She had her hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail—she had just played tennis—oversized sunglasses on her pert nose. So svelte in her black bathing suit. Sophisticated. I noticed then that her small feet had an unusually high instep.
She laughed—at herself this time. All around us the bodies of the children, American and European dependents, mostly: toddlers draped in beach towels, and their splashing older siblings—you and your brother somewhere among them—as well as jittery teenagers who tugged at wet bathing suits, eyed one another.
There were the bodies of women, too, the wives mostly at that weekday hour, in modest two-pieces and large sunglasses, Barbie bubble cuts and jaunty flips, scattered across the lounge chairs that ringed the periphery or swimming languid laps at the far end of the pool. That endless glare and heat and tinny transistor rock and roll that defined those long, idle afternoons. Idle for me; it was unusual to find Charlene here at the pool. You children usually came with a sitter or some other American family.
I remember flattering myself to think she’d come there that afternoon to seek me out.
Charlene said, “The most obnoxious shopkeeper in the Central Market couldn’t have matched my bargaining skills that night. In the car to the theater. I offered God everything. If there’s a spiritual equivalent to an eternal blow job, I offered it.”
And she elbowed me until I laughed with her.
The street was in chaos, of course. The police and an ambulance or two. Barricades were already up so she had to run the last few blocks. Ruined her stockings, she told me, since she’d had to kick off her heels. Burning in the air. There was much shouting, and yet, in spite of it, a strange stillness as well. Confusion, of course. Broken glass. She thought she saw blood on the sidewalk. Probably mud. It was hard to tell in the darkness. Scraps of clothing, she thought.
Looking for her twins among the crowd—looking for the two of you in the chaos.
She ran through every street and alleyway she was not turned away from. Without luck—no clear sense of where the injured had been brought—she ran back to the car, limping now, her own feet bleeding. Kent was there by then, standing with the guy who had brought her. They were laughing together before they saw her. She must have looked, she told me, like a madwoman.
“They’re fine,” Kent said, when she drew near. “They’re home. They never went. Ransom’s got the runs. They never left the house.” He put his arms around her, perhaps a little annoyed, a little impatient, a little ashamed of his blubbering wife in front of this other American male, the man who had driven her there.
And then he repeated, as if she were an irrational child, “They aren’t even here, Charlene. Calm down.” With feigned patience. “I told you they’re safe.”
The other American joined in, patting her shoulder. “Safe at home,” he said.
Of course, I knew from the start who he was. I’d seen him around town in the days that followed our trip to the leper colony. He’d cleaned himself up, his nails trimmed and polished, shirt and trousers crisp. His hair, washed and combed, had more gray than I remembered. I hadn’t spoken to him, and if he’d noticed me, or remembered me, he gave no indication as Peter and I walked past him at a crowded reception, and then again at another garden party, where I saw him absorbed in conversation with a small circle of men.
I’d glimpsed him again at a table at the Majestic. On the street hailing a cab.
Just another one of the tall, sunburned Americans you could find anywhere in the city, carrying a shopping bag or two, a leather briefcase, a golf bag.
“I’ve seen him around,” I told Charlene. “He’s clipped his nails.”
Charlene nodded. “He has. He cleans up very nicely.”
I thought, She’s kissed him, too. I was that kind of innocent.
We were side by side in our bathing suits—hers a black maillot, mine a madras two-piece, modest compared to the French bikinis the European women wore.
I might have cried out with the envy I suddenly felt for all the good use Charlene was getting from her freckled flesh—three beautiful children, Kent, Wally, and now—I was certain—the dirty, handsome Devil himself.
“We have a negotiation going on,” Charlene said.
We were looking out across the sun-struck pool, she and I, across the dark, wet heads of the calling children and the swiveling, fish-mouthed faces of the solemn lap swimmers—idle wives in their rubber swim caps festooned with starbursts of plastic peonies, daisies, tulips. For a moment, I imagined these splashing children and the women’s determined progress through the water as somehow related. As if the kids had been spawned in their mothers’ endless wakes.
Without turning to me, Charlene said, “Tell me what you think of this.”
It was the same phrase she’d used in her office that day when she showed me the little non la. I knew by now that it wasn’t really my opinion that she sought.
She asked if I remembered Phan, Lily’s seamstress friend who was helping her out. I said I did: missing husband, ancient in-laws, two small children. Lily’s generosity in giving her work. Sweet Lily, I’m sure I said.
“She’s a widow now, this Phan,” Charlene went on. “Word reached her. The husband was killed in a motorcycle accident. At least that’s what Lily said.” Charlene shrugged. “I didn’t question. I’m pretty sure he was a sympathizer.”
“Poor girl,” I muttered.
“It gets worse,” Charlene said. “She’s pregnant. Nearly eight months on.”
I feel sure I leaned away at this. Envy like a rusty fishhook in my throat.
“Phan came by the villa with some Barbie clothes. We got to talking. Her English isn’t bad, but her French is impeccable. She told me she and her husband had been saving up to open their own little clothing business. They’d already arranged to purchase a number of Singers at a very good price—a result of Marilee’s much-maligned Commercial Import Program, I gathered. Of course, when he disappeared, all their plans collapsed. And now she knows he’s not coming back. And she has this baby due. And two toddlers already. His aging parents to take care of.”
Charlene’s big sunglasses reflected the sunlight, the bright pool water creased by black currents, by the bodies moving within it.
“So she asked me while we were chatting, rather shyly, if I knew any American couples who were looking to adopt.”
I’m pretty sure I leaned away at this, too. But Charlene forged on, speaking to the air.
“He,” she said, the pronoun emphatic somehow, utterly defining, “knows an American couple, quite wealthy, who are desperate for a baby. They would like a newborn. And they’d prefer a child who hasn’t spent time in an orphanage, picking up disease.”
Our bare arms were touching, our bare thighs.
Charlene said, “I want to get Phan five thousand dollars for her baby.”
I could see my own fish-mouthed astonishment reflected in Charlene’s big glasses.
The money would allow the girl to set up her shop, Charlene said, help her to feed her children and her old in-laws. It would buy her and her family a better future. “She’s a very enterprising young girl. Not the seamstress Lily is, but more sure of herself, certainly more savvy. I can see her in business, if this government ever rights itself. I know she’d make good use of the money.”
I swallowed some air with the same gaping expression of my lap-swimming compatriots. I think I said something like “You’re kidding.”
Charlene lifted the sunglasses from her nose, perched them on top of her head, and for a second her green eyes seemed as reflective as the dark lenses had been. She gave me her Isn’t that just like you? smile.
Beyond the pool, a small swarm of wet children was playing a game among the chairs, searching for some hidden thing while a slim American teenager called out their names, saying who was getting warmer, who was cold. We watched them silently for a moment. I could feel Charlene’s impatience with me as if it radiated from her flesh.
“Look,” she said, finally. “It’s not so rare. Do you know how much we had to dole out for Roberta’s baby? A nice donation to the orphanage, to the church, to the powers that be for the paperwork. In fact, everyone along the way had a palm greased. Everyone was paid a little something. Except, of course, for the mother who gave birth to the child, who did all the work.”
She shifted her bottom on the damp edge of the pool, stirred the water with her pretty feet. Raised her slick and freckled shoulders.
“Five thousand is perfectly reasonable,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
A small cheer went up from the searching children—whatever was hidden had been found. In truth, I’m not sure I knew what to think. She was talking about selling a baby.
Complicating it all—I would say, in retrospect, overriding it all—was the bitter, consuming envy I felt for the time she’d spent with our jungle doctor. For all the good use she was getting out of that body of hers.
I asked her, “What does he think?”
She didn’t hesitate. She knew who I meant. “He thinks it’s possible. If the baby is perfect.”
I felt some further recoil—in the Christian part of my conscience, I suppose. I managed to say, “Couldn’t you get in trouble for this? If word got out?”
Charlene was squinting at the children across the pool. The little ones were now kneeling in a row, their wet heads bowed, their faces in their hands. They counted together, sweet and breathless voices, as the lithe babysitter moved among the chairs, looking for another hiding place.
“I suppose,” Charlene said without much interest. “But in some ways, that would be fine. If word got out.” Even though she had turned away from me, I could see, as we used to say, the wheels turning.
“If we could set it up right,” she went on, “we could make similar offers to other pregnant women. Maybe give them an advance on the final payment so they can afford to take care of themselves in the last few months, take care of their newborns. It could be a marvelous incentive. The mothers get a nice payoff at the end, and we get healthy babies to offer for adoption. At a premium.”
“You’re talking about selling babies,” I said.
Charlene turned back to me with a laugh that just couldn’t be suppressed. Her laugh. She pulled the shades from her head and once more placed them over her eyes, but still our faces were just inches apart, and I knew her eyes were on mine.
