Absolution, p.19
Absolution, page 19
“No, I’m not,” she said in her matter-of-fact Charlene way. “I’m talking about increasing their value—babies, children, their mothers, too.” She grimaced, letting me know it was an act of supreme generosity on her part to take the time to explain to me what should have been perfectly clear.
“The streets of this city, Tricia, the orphanages, the hospitals, would not be so filled with lost and damaged children if anyone believed in their value.” A brief twitch of contempt crossed her thin lips. “Imagine that every street kid you see, every orphan, every baby held up to us by a desperate mother is, instead,” and now her smile was in appreciation for her own cleverness, “a Hasselblad, a quart of Johnnie Walker Black, a Dior gown, a Rolex. Do you think such expensive items would be left to languish in parks and squalid institutions, neglected, ignored?”
She reached back to touch her spine, her trim torso, her small, firm breasts thrust forward.
“It’s all about value assigned, Tricia. How in the world do you think we’re getting twenty-five bucks for our silly little dolls?”
I suppose it was Stella’s voice that I heard when I thought to say, The madams in the whorehouses assign value, Charlene. Or maybe, Pimps assign value.
But I was not Stella. And I had never before said those words out loud.
“It doesn’t seem right” was all I managed to whisper.
Now Charlene’s mouth beneath the dark glasses had aligned itself into a kind of thoughtful pity. Suddenly, she slipped her bare arm under mine—our hips were already aligned—and lifted my hand. There was the impression of the concrete edge of the pool on the fleshy heel of my palm, and she gently brushed it away.
She said, smoothing my hand with her own, “I made every bargain I could think of, the other night. When I thought the twins were there, at the theater. My own life for theirs was the first, Tricia, the easiest one to make. Take my life, but keep them safe.”
She didn’t look at me, only at our hands as she gently swept her fingers over my palm, heel, lifeline, fingertips. “It’s the offer any mother would make. You’ll see when you have a baby of your own. My life for my child’s, my happiness for theirs. It’s immediate. Instinctual, I guess. A mother will bear any pain, any loss, if it means her child will thrive.”
She stopped stroking, but held on nevertheless.
“The women in this country,” she said, “at home, too—don’t kid yourself, it happens at home, too—are making the choice every day. Leaving their kids at orphanages. Putting them up for adoption. Offering them to us passing American ladies as we make our way to lunch. You know they are, Tricia. They’re willing to have their own hearts broken if it means their kids will live. Any mother would.”
She returned my hand and my arm to the concrete surrounding the pool, adjusted the glasses on her nose. “I’d just like to see them get paid for it.”
I can’t say now if Charlene knew what she’d done, or if she had done it with full intent, but she had nevertheless utterly defused my disapproval, my dismay, even my jealousy, with that simple phrase “You’ll see when you have a baby of your own.”
She had kindled my heart’s keenest desire. No objection, no other thought, moral or otherwise, could survive that vision: a baby of my own. I was so disarmed, charmed, I suppose, by her easy conjuring that I failed to understand at first the way she suddenly shuddered, there at the edge of the pool.
All around us, there were the calls and cries of the children at their game, the thin music of transistor radios, the rhythmic lapping of the women in the water. And beyond these, that bone-on-bone rattle of palm leaves above the club’s lush grounds, the gentle plock of tennis balls, the distant, oh so distant, clamor of the streets.
Your mother trembled beside me. Behind her grim, determined smile, her stylishly pale and carefully applied lipstick, her teeth were chattering.
Startled, I put my hand on her bare thigh. “Are you cold?” I asked her.
I saw her take in the placid scene, the children especially. Even with her dark glasses, I could see her eyes narrow. Her voice took on its own hissing breathlessness. “Do you mean am I nowhere near the prize?”
It took me a second to know she was referring to the children playing across the way. But she didn’t wait, she never waited, for my full comprehension.
“Then yes,” she said. “Still cold.”
* * *
AS IT TURNED OUT, Phan wanted to keep her child. Or that’s what Charlene told me when next I asked. She was vague about it, might have been lying. I had the sense that she regretted the scheme. Or regretted discussing it with me.
I think of this from time to time: Phan’s baby would have been about twelve years old when Saigon fell. An adult now, perhaps with children, even grandchildren, of her own, wherever he or she might be.
And even all these years later, I can’t say with any certainty what I hope for: that Charlene actually sold Phan’s newborn to those wealthy Americans, got the child to safety—even prosperity—so early in the war, or that Phan kept her baby with her through all that was to come.
Disorienting, this not even knowing what to hope for.
A blessing, too, I suppose. The shrug that casts off guilt.
THAT NIGHT IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, when the mosquitoes became annoying, we went inside for coffee.
While Aunt Lorraine and the professor were in the kitchen, Stella gave me a tour of the artwork. I recognized none of the artists’ names, although Stella assured me I should. Two or three of the smaller paintings were Aunt Lorraine’s own—indistinguishable, I thought, from the ones Stella claimed to be “incredibly valuable.” But I didn’t say so. And, of course, after four years of Marymount, I knew enough not to say, “Why, I could have drawn that myself.”
Although I do remember thinking that if I ever owned a house like this, I would want something warmer, friendlier on the walls. Nothing quite so chaotic and puzzling.
Aunt Lorraine carried the tray with the coffee service into the living room, the dogs trailing her. The professor excused himself and went to his study. Coffee at this hour, he said, was something he had, alas, outgrown.
Stella and I sat side by side on a low-slung couch as Aunt Lorraine handed us our cups, the dogs sniffing at our knees and then settling themselves around our feet. Once we were served, Aunt Lorraine straightened to her full height and walked languidly across the room. At the fireplace, she turned, her hands on her hips.
I was not to go to Birmingham, she announced. I was, in fact, to go straight back to New York in the morning. The professor would take me to the train. He would pay for my ticket.
Stella said, “Excuse me?” She executed one of her slow-burn frowns. “What?”
But Aunt Lorraine held up a hand. She herself, she said, would drive to Birmingham with Stella. They would take her car, not Stella’s tiny jalopy.
“Fifal,” I heard Stella say, resentfully, as if defending one of these smelly dogs.
It was not right, not right at all, Aunt Lorraine declared, for me to put myself at risk like this when I was “all the world” to my father. His only child, only family, sole companion and comfort for the coming years.
Stella laughed. “And what am I? Chopped liver?”
“You have a mess of siblings, darling,” Aunt Lorraine pointed out. “Your parents have one another. An abundance of family.” She shook her head. “Why, we have enough cousins on our side alone to fill a stadium.”
Should anything happen to Stella, terrible as that would be, Aunt Lorraine said, there would be plenty of comfort, plenty of comforters, “for those who grieve.”
Not so for my widowed father.
“He has his friend,” Stella said, whining, suddenly childish. “Mr. Tannen.”
Aunt Lorraine touched her forehead. “Oh, please.” A flash of impatience.
Stella looked at me, crossed her eyes behind her glasses. “This is nuts,” she whispered. And then turned back to her aunt. “You’re kidding, right?” she demanded. “This is a joke, right?”
The tumult inside my own head and heart at the moment was somewhat akin to the whirring that went on in the back seat of Fifal. I was confused, wary, flattered by the attention yet troubled by the directive. I retreated to my natural state: shyly silent, watchful.
“I am perfectly serious,” Aunt Lorraine said. “I’ll go with you. We’ll do what we can. Put ourselves in harm’s way if it comes to that. But”—she shook her head—“I’m sorry. I cannot in good conscience allow Patricia to do the same.”
She repeated her logic, a little less imperiously this time. “We are all obliged to one another, of course, but Patsy is obliged to a single person in a very specific way. No one can replace her. Not in the least. She is not free to put herself in danger.”
Her shoulders fell. She seemed, once again, genuinely sorrowful. “I know you girls want a heroic life. You want to show your courage. But self-sacrifice is never really selfless. It’s often quite selfish.”
Now she shifted her gaze, her deep-set eyes, to me alone—the distance from our sofa to the fireplace making me feel as if I had caught the attention of an actor on the stage, as if she’d memorized these words long ago and chose to direct them at me, at this moment, somewhat arbitrarily, for effect alone. A proclamation about the state of the world, the nature of life, that only incidentally applied to me. Like a horoscope, or one of the psalms.
“None of us is unfettered, dear,” she said. “Each of us is fettered in some way. You are constrained by love and obligation. You are not free.” And then, ending the discussion, “I will not allow you to leave here and put your father’s life, the rest of your father’s life, at risk. I have my own conscience to live with.”
Stella argued. Not vehemently, as I recall. Undermining her own Joan-of-Arc-at-the-stake declaration at dinner’s end, she told her aunt now that it really wasn’t all that dangerous, what we were about to do. No one, seriously, was going to get hurt. We might get teargassed, but—she laughed—we’ll hold our breath. We’ll probably get arrested, but that didn’t mean the electric chair. We would take the professor’s advice and fill our pockets with dog biscuits, if that would please her.
But Aunt Lorraine was unmovable, and we were still young enough, still polite enough in the way of that time and place, to realize argument was futile.
When we went to our room that night, Stella was still angry. “We don’t have to listen to her,” she whispered. “We can leave right now. Tonight. She can’t tell us what to do.”
But I said it would be rude. To leave here like that, after our lovely dinner. She and the professor had been so very nice.
“You go down there with her,” I told Stella gently. “I think she’s really looking for an excuse to go. You know, to make her own restitution. For slavery. For Sonia.”
Although I think I understood even then that Aunt Lorraine was not interested in going to Birmingham to make amends for her family’s shameful history. She wanted to go only to keep Stella in check, to keep her safe from harm.
* * *
AFTER WE TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS, I thought about my father alone in our house, winding his bedside clock at this hour. It was the sound I heard from my own bedroom every night of my life. Or every night but those I had spent at Stella’s. I imagined him pushing off, toe to heel, toe to heel, his scuffed bedroom slippers. Lifting the blanket, drawing his legs underneath. A sigh—I always heard that, too—as he blessed himself, lying on his back. Then the click of the lamp. Soon he would be snoring.
In the morning, I knew, he would indeed press his shirt, as my mother had always done. The warm scent of steamed fabric in the air. He’d been proud, during all those years he worked at the school, of the neat crease in his uniform trousers, along the length of his starched sleeves.
He would make his tea in the kitchen, the sun coming through the window above the sink. He would boil an egg.
Earlier that evening, when I told Aunt Lorraine and the professor that my father worked at a high school in the Bronx, I knew they would assume he was a teacher. I knew this even as I said it. Knew I was, among these brilliant and interesting people, ashamed of him.
I turned on my side. Against the moonlight through the double window, I could see the silhouette of the lilacs in their vase. The crystal decanter of water on its silver tray. If I were to marry Peter (Please, God, I prayed), I might someday have a large house of my own. With a guest room such as this, redolent of flowers and clean linen. A room for my father—who would always, I understood, curtail my freedom, my independence, my flight. At least for as long as he lived.
I began to cry. Either at the thought of this constraint or at the thought of the hour and the day when it would be forever lifted.
Stella said into the darkness, “You crying?”
With my back to her, I managed a muffled “No.”
And then she was climbing in beside me, into the narrow bed. She patted my shoulder, stroked my hair. She draped her heavy arm along my hip, entwined our fingers. I knew her scent. Knew the size and shape of her damp hands.
“We’ll have lots of other chances,” she whispered. “There’s going to be a reckoning, wait and see. This summer is just the start.” She sighed, her breath warm on my shoulder, her lips against the thin fabric of my nightgown. “We are on the precipice of tremendous change.”
In truth, it took me a second to remember what she was talking about.
* * *
I SAW THEM BOTH OFF the next morning, the professor at my side. I felt, as soon as they pulled away in Aunt Lorraine’s big wood-sided station wagon, a certain kinship with Fifal—who looked very small and foolish, abandoned as he was in their long driveway. Earlier, Stella and I had covered the open passenger window with the plastic sheeting and tape her father had provided.
The tiny car now looked as if it wore an opaque eye patch, as if it had taken a beating.
And yet it seemed happy, I thought. Sitting alone under the safe harbor of a fragrant magnolia.
Looking at that badly painted, bright green, battered yet becalmed little thing, I felt, somehow, absolved.
EVENTUALLY, THE GOOD DOCTOR disappeared from our midst.
Not so unusual in those days when Americans were always dropping in and dropping out: Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, Hilsman, Rusk, Bundy, Forrestal. Men whose names, I suppose, are of fading significance to you, and of no significance at all to your children. Ambassador Nolting took his family on vacation to the Aegean, and the stalwart Trueheart took over. Then Nolting was replaced by Henry Cabot Lodge.
My husband always liked and admired Frederick Nolting. A gentleman farmer, he called him. A true Virginian, soft-spoken, deferential, patrician in a distinctly American way. Certainly, Peter approved of the way Nolting supported and encouraged Diem.
He was less enthused about Ambassador Lodge, who had arrived as Nolting’s replacement late that summer. Not only because Lodge was a Republican, but because on his arrival, our new ambassador delayed presenting his credentials at the presidential palace until he had first visited the protesting Buddhists at Xa Loi.
As you can imagine, Peter thought this rude. Dishonorable. Naive.
I recall a story that went around that fall, how the visiting Maxwell Taylor, who was then the head of the Joint Chiefs, had played a vigorous game of tennis with the head of Diem’s military, Big Minh. The rumor mill said both Ambassador Lodge and Secretary McNamara were much impressed by the American-size stature of General Minh, so different from Diem, the diminutive, aloof mandarin.
“We’re going to sell out Diem for a guy who looks good in tennis whites,” Peter told me.
I suppose we shared a working-class disdain for the sport.
* * *
IN MID-OCTOBER, another rabbit died, and I learned Dr. Navy did indeed wear a Rolex.
He assured Peter that I would be fine to travel through the early spring, so he could serve out his assignment. Or, the doctor suggested, I could go home by myself. Live with my father for a few months until Peter’s work here was over.
Which brought me to another vision of my father meeting me at Idlewild. This time I was upright, but holding my breath, walking off the plane—in my imagination—with infinite care, tiny steps, eyes focused as if on a glass brimming to the top with, well, with something precious and precarious and easily spilled.
Days later, we had just turned off the bedside lights, the overhead fan was turning, the joss stick burning in its pail of sand. Peter told me he had purchased our return tickets that afternoon. With his own money. He had offered his resignation. He saw the handwriting on the wall, he said. Kennedy had spoken publicly about his willingness to see a change of personnel in Saigon. The U.S. was ready to let Diem fall. No good would come of it.
He said, “I want you out of here.” He said, “I want us both out of here.”
I said, “The three of us.”
He looked at me in the mottled darkness. His eyes paused for a moment in their darting. I knew, I knew, it was on the tip of his tongue to ask, “Three?” But he caught himself. Patted my thigh. “Right,” he said.
I sometimes suspect that even in those days, Peter never truly imagined full life for any child of our own making.
By the time we landed in Hawaii, Diem’s overthrow was in the news. When we left for San Francisco the next morning, we heard he was dead. He and his brother both shot in the head, their hands tied behind their backs. Madame Nhu was on a tour of the States—something, I learned years later, Peter had helped to arrange; no one in the Catholic Intelligence Agency wanted to see a woman, any woman, murdered in the coup.
News reports said she was desperate to get her own children out of Saigon safely. The Dragon Lady was a mother, after all. Even she had managed that miracle.
It was in the hotel that night that I saw the first spot of blood. We stayed an extra few days until the miscarriage was complete.
