Absolution, p.21
Absolution, page 21
* * *
DOUGLAS STOOD, made his final pronouncement on our scrambled-egg dinner: “Let’s throw those steaks on the grill tomorrow. It would be nice to have a real meal for a change.” And then he carried his refilled wineglass into the little hearth room to watch TV.
“We’ve had real meals all week,” I said. But I lacked the energy to argue. So many of our conversations over the past year had involved a host of other people—the carpenters, the plumbers, the roofers and landscapers, the architect and the contractor—that I now felt the loss of them.
Thrown together again, in our brand-new but no less empty nest, it seemed we had little left to say.
“What the hell number is CNN?” Doug called out.
“You’ve already passed it twice,” I said, and saw him pass it a third and then a fourth time, until his attention settled on a show featuring a young couple who were searching for a vacation home in Cabo San Lucas. I knew he would be asleep in his chair before it ended.
I carried our plates to the kitchen sink. Through the open window I could hear, faintly, the voices of Dom and Ellen’s grandchildren as they played some game in the fields behind the house, catching fireflies, no doubt. Mixed among their piping was Jamie’s hoarse voice, deep, delighted, and punctuated every now and then with an excited call to his father.
I leaned toward the window screen to listen, but I couldn’t catch Dominic’s reply, only the vague tenor of his voice, reassuring the boy that he was there.
I called to Doug, “How many children did they say they have? Our new neighbors?”
There was a pause. He might have been asleep. But then he said, “Seven. He must have knocked her up in high school.”
Through the screen, I heard Jamie’s voice calling again, followed by his rough and delighted laughter when his father called back.
“What a mistake,” Douglas said from the hearth room. “House number two was the deal. The place is a money pit.” His voice was rising. “You stupid fools.”
I tried to laugh. “You sound like a crazy old man,” I told him.
“I am,” he called back. “I’m a crazy old man. But they should have taken the house by the beach.”
A SPATE OF WEDDING WEEKENDS kept us from driving out to the house through most of that fall, although the beauty of autumn in the country had been a selling point.
Happily, the weddings were all tasteful, with good wine and food. Not a clunker among them. A marked improvement over what had gone on when Doug and I were young, when tacky tradition still vied with loopy counterculture. When one friend’s wedding might feature tulle and morning coats and another’s batik peasant dresses and embroidered tunics. Music from Mendelssohn or the Carpenters or Ravi Shankar. Long-haired grooms, visibly pregnant brides, first dances to a schmaltzy 1950s rendition of “More,” even as pot smoke drifted out of the catering hall bathrooms.
Your generation escaped all that confusion. My own kids find it laughable.
At my mother’s insistence—you can imagine Charlene planning a wedding—my own had been traditional enough, except for the few, unattributed lines from Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I’d asked the best man to read from the pulpit. Except for the hash-laced brownies that had passed from knee to knee under the head table.
* * *
IT WAS MID-NOVEMBER before we got out to the house again. I saw Dominic and Jamie crossing their field on Friday morning, both bundled in identical down jackets, and then met them that afternoon in the tiny grocery store at the crossroads.
When his son wandered down one of the narrow aisles, Dom leaned closer to say that the boy had had some surgery last month, a heart valve issue that had turned out fine.
I apologized for having heard nothing about it. We’d been away so much. He touched my elbow.
“We’re fine,” he said. “It was practically routine. But I’m pretty sure he’ll want to tell you all about it before we leave here, and I wanted to give you fair warning.”
Sure enough, as we waited in line together, Jamie described the ordeal, making a little cross over his heart as he told me about his operation, and then assured me, as his father had done, that he was fine, fine, patting my arm. But something aged had come into his round and boyish face since last I saw him. I recognized it in his mouth first, the smacking of his lips over his small teeth, the pucker that caused his chin to protrude, and in a new sunken darkness about his eyes. There was the black stubble of beard on his throat—I hadn’t noticed this before—and seeing it now in the ugly light of the store, I felt the weariness of his parents’ long haul, loving this child.
Jamie touched my elbow, his father’s gesture. “It wasn’t bad at all,” he said.
I told him he looked great. And was very brave. And then smiled at Dominic behind him, who seemed, too, older than I remembered him. In need of sun and rest. And a haircut, I thought. A wifely habit.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I made two lemon pound cakes and brought one over. When Dominic came to the door, he insisted I come in. Ellen was at her yoga class. He and Jamie were finishing up the sandwich-making for what Dom called their “D.C. run,” but there was fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen, I really had to come in … and then he stopped himself, shaking his head and looking as if he knew I understood that he was making too much of the invitation, while at the same time acknowledging that he also knew I would forgive him for it, his awkward offer of friendship.
“Just come on in,” he said finally. “Jamie will love to see you.”
I followed him into the kitchen, which was broad and cluttered. Jamie was sitting on a stool at a long, high butcher-block table, carefully spreading peanut butter on a slice of wheat bread, his tongue caught in the corner of his mouth. His concentration was so great that he didn’t look up until his father whispered, “Jamie. We have a guest.” Then he grinned and slipped off the stool and came to me, putting his arms around my waist without the slightest hesitation, resting his head against my coat. Touched and surprised, I kissed his fair hair.
I asked to help. It seemed only polite. And was set up at what they called the jelly station, where I was to swipe each piece of bread with grape jelly and then match it to Jamie’s peanut butter side. I saw as I placed the first that the boy had traced a heart into the thick peanut butter with the tip of his knife.
“That’s so nice,” I said, and he grinned, but whispered, “No one will see it,” as if to assure me that he understood this.
I said, “You never know.”
His father was wrapping the completed sandwiches and piling them into the empty bread bags. When we were finished, he poured the coffee and sliced the cake.
In the way of new neighbors—“country living,” Doug liked to say—we talked about our renovations, comparing plumbers and electricians. I asked him who he used for snow removal and he said, “Us,” volunteering to hit our drive with his own plow whenever—if ever—we had an accumulation. At some point, I followed him through the house to see the skylights they had added to brighten a back stairwell, and as we passed through a narrow corridor lined with bookshelves, I saw one of our own Saigon Barbies—white ao dai, faded non la—propped inside a plexiglass case.
“You have one,” I said.
It took him a minute to see what I saw, and then he laughed. “My daughter’s,” he told me.
I said, “My mother made these. Or had them made. The ao dais. Exactly the same. She sold them. In Saigon.”
Dominic said, “Charlene?”
I know it’s ordinary magic at best, this kind of weird coincidence. But I think we both felt the astonishment of it. I mean: to find ourselves standing together in the narrow corridor of that crooked farmhouse, under the early winter light of—let’s face it—the early winter of our own lifetimes—two utter strangers, hardly even neighbors, and to discover—amazing—this long-ago and faraway thing we had somehow shared.
Dominic shook his head. “She gave me this when my daughter was born,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-three. Jesus. She’s your mother? She’s some lady, Charlene.”
He turned to Jamie. “Isn’t this something, honey? We just found out we were in Vietnam at the same time, like a million years ago. When I was younger than you and”—he glanced at me—“you were a kid. One of Charlene’s kids.”
He reached up to take the doll from the shelf, lifting it out of its careful display case—Ellen’s idea, he explained—and placing it in my palm. The white silk had yellowed, and the hat had grown brittle but was still intact. Mine had dried and crumbled years ago when my daughter confiscated my own Saigon Barbie, joined her to a slutty pile of bimbo versions in cheap hot-pink clothes—all of them now gone to Goodwill.
I brushed my fingers over Lily’s perfect tiny stitches at the neckline and the waistband.
I felt suddenly overwhelmed—with heartache, regret, nostalgia, who knows? Blindsided by it: lost time, lost childhood, lost years. I let out a stifled sob.
Sweet Jamie put his arms around my waist once more, and Dom, poor Dom, patted my shoulder.
“Has she passed?” he whispered.
I tried to laugh, at myself. “Over twenty years ago, for God’s sake,” I managed to say. “You’d think I’d be over it.”
Dom returned the doll to the shelf, gently apologizing. I shook my head—“Not your fault”—and sucked back those unshed tears. A trick I had mastered—as you noticed—in Saigon.
* * *
LATER, I HELPED JAMIE zip up his jacket, and then I walked with father and son as they carried the bags of sandwiches to the car. Once again, Jamie put his arms around my waist to say goodbye.
Dom said, “I remember your mother so well.” And then he put his hand to my cheek. A gesture that both startled and pleased me. I felt a rush of affection—another kind of memory restored to me in that instant. The memory of what I once would have identified as a new infatuation.
“You take after her,” he said.
It was only the long habit of the years that made me tell him, “I hope not.”
WHEN I WAS IN BOARDING SCHOOL—exiled there in my turbulent teens—each of us girls had some image of our mother, some broad caricature, that we wore pinned to our lapel, so to speak. Like those little political buttons of the era. There was the warm but clueless mother, easily fooled. The ambitious working mother, easily avoided. There was the social snob, easiest to ridicule. There was the mother who hovered and manipulated and made her daughter cower—the source of many late-night tears. The homely mother envious of a beautiful daughter. The beautiful mother disappointed by a homely child. And always, it seemed, a mother who was ill, or fighting some illness, whose story (whose daughter) made us pause briefly in our boisterous ridicule of our own, but only briefly. Mine was the “mother’s little helper” mother, and our own obsessive pursuit of hash and grass and stolen Valium did nothing to mitigate how funny I could be about her Manhattans and tranquilizers.
The fact that she was also a church lady made my comic riffs even more delightful to my peers.
I knew plenty about the Librium and the Manhattans, but the night terrors were news to me. Maybe she got over them once we got home.
* * *
WE RETURNED FROM SAIGON in the summer of 1964. My father, like your husband, didn’t want any more overseas assignments after the chaos of those final months in Saigon: the bombings and barbed wire, the appearance of armed American soldiers on our school buses. The feeling that our servants might as easily slit our throats as make our beds. At least that’s how my father put it.
He told me his new title back home would be General Manager.
I had my own image of generals by then, those confident, talkative men who had come to my parents’ parties at the villa.
It was the generals who filled our house with the smell of cigar smoke; whose manly voices rose up above the twittering sound of the other party guests and whatever music was on the record player.
I remember Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera.”
On those many nights my parents entertained, I loved to fall asleep listening to the bright voices that percolated through the floor—bursts of laughter or chitchat or sing-along: “Whatever will be, will be.”
But it was the voices of the generals that set the floorboards humming, that sent a metallic thrum through the frame of my wrought-iron bed and all along my spine.
And yet, once we got home, I associated my father’s new title not with the military but with the manager at our local A&P— a plump, affable man out of central casting who always had some interesting treat for us kids: sample packs of cookies or tiny loaves of Wonder Bread.
I thought a general manager meant a watchful guardian, a genial shepherd. My father exactly.
I guess we were both devoted daughters. Or maybe we both preferred men to women.
* * *
IT’S MY BROTHER RANSOM who has made a study of our time in Saigon. He’s got a Facebook cohort of former dependent kids, all old geezers by now, who compare memories of the American school or the Central Market or the odor of nuoc mam with a kind of desperation—a contradiction in one post can set off a flurry of insistence, speculation, indignant documentation, and the combative parrying of Wikipedia timelines, historical accounts, eyewitness testimony from parents now dead.
I’m not sure, exactly, what this pursuit of collective confirmation does for them all. What they’re afraid to lose, or hoping to retain.
My own recollections of Saigon are distinct but disorganized. I’m happy enough to keep them uncorroborated, mine alone.
I remember the bedroom you described.
The room had been Ransom’s when we first arrived. He’d claimed it for himself as we made our first crazed run through the villa—jazzed by exhaustion and excitement and all the candy our mother had doled out over the endless flights.
It was a pretty room, with its two windows and French doors and the Juliet balcony. I remember how badly I wanted it for myself.
But my parents agreed that since it was the larger of the two guest rooms, it was only reasonable it should go to Ransom because he was a “big boy,” although barely an inch taller than I was then.
I was disappointed, but as the world turns, male privilege gets put to the test. Or so I like to believe. Only a few days or weeks after we settled in, the moon rose over Saigon and a swath of lunar light spilled through the French doors. A path of light that was alive with the diving, veering, flitting shadows of the bats that lived under our eaves. Big, brave Ransom lost it. Woke up the entire household with his screams.
The next morning, the room became mine.
My father told me that I should take this as a stroke of luck—the bats, he assured me, were dive-bombing the mosquitoes outside my window, keeping them from my tender flesh.
But my mother gave me only an assessing glance when I assured them both I was not in the least bit afraid.
Still, I kept my bedside light on that first night in my longed-for room.
When I woke up—who knows what time it was?—the lamp was off. It took me only a few seconds to see that the path of moonlight cast across my floor was swarming with the small black silhouettes of darting bats.
I know I sucked in a breath—preparing to scream, or to cry out.
My mother was in a chair at the foot of my bed, just beyond the moonlight, awake, watching me. I caught the flash of her eyes, a nod that said, “Good for you. You’re terrified. You’re keeping it to yourself. Good for you.”
It was all I needed: her smile, her nod, her wordless attention, there in the terrible darkness.
* * *
I ALSO REMEMBER an afternoon when Ransom and I were called in from the garden by the servants, an abrupt flurry of commands, a rush of Vietnamese and French and harsh words in English: “Now, now.”
I was coloring, making my way through a pile of Halloween candy. My brother was gluing together one of his models—a PT boat.
Although we had by then grown accustomed to the street noise that reached our little yard, that day we heard something else in those moments before the servants shouted us inside. Something unusual, heavier, louder, was in the air. Ransom and I looked at each other, not in fear but in giddy anticipation. By the time the servants appeared on the patio, shouting and waving, pushing at our shoulders, we were poised to run. We nearly danced into the house. The radio in the kitchen was on, the same American music the servants always played while they worked. Weirdly placid now, in the excitement.
They herded us under the dining room table. Some fun. And joined us there—two of the housemaids and the amah who had baby Roger pressed against her chest. By now there were explosions rattling the windows and ringing the glass and crockery, smaller, jangling explosions all around us as things fell from shelves. The retort of distant, whining fireworks.
I looked up at the underside of the table, the struts and dull hardware and unvarnished wood marked with chalk, all of it familiar to me from rainy-day games of hide-and-seek. I wasn’t afraid. There was Ransom, who, uncharacteristically, had his arms around me, and the two servants and the young nursemaid who was holding Roger. I don’t remember where my mother was.
I wasn’t afraid. I’d always believed that as long as I wasn’t alone, I’d be protected, cared for, immune from all harm. A confident if untested faith that there was safety in numbers. I’m sure this had something to do with being a twin.
At some point my father came into the house—through the kitchen, which he never did—calling for the housekeeper, for Ransom, for me. And then he was peering under the tablecloth, grimacing like a backstage comedian peeking out before curtain call. He lowered himself—he was six feet two and broad shouldered—so that his torso, at least, was under the table with us, his legs still sprawling, unprotected, into the rest of the room. Somehow he managed to get his arms around both of us, my brother and me. I could smell the Brylcreem in his hair, feel the stubble of his cheek under my hand.
