Absolution, p.7
Absolution, page 7
You didn’t travel, in those days, without bringing back a souvenir for everyone you knew, so we all had long gift lists to consider. Something nice for Stella and Robert, who were on the West Coast by then. Something for their baby. I also had Peter’s big family to shop for, as well my own friends from high school and college and my kindergarten year. And my father, of course, and Mr. Tannen, his best friend from his boyhood days on Tremont Avenue. All of my mother’s neighborhood girlfriends as well.
It was one of the ways I shaped my idle days, even found some sense of satisfaction with how I’d spent an afternoon—determining just the right gift for just the right person.
Something to take home with you, as Lily said.
* * *
AS I IMAGINE YOU and your husband have begun to do, I long ago went through that winnowing of things—clothes and books and papers, excess kitchen gadgets, knickknacks, so many souvenirs: the Saigon souvenirs, and the Paris souvenirs, London, Ireland, San Francisco—souvenirs I had bought myself and all the souvenirs I’d been given by family and friends, who were also, one by one, being winnowed from life.
Evidence of where we’d been, stays against forgetfulness, I suppose.
The process—the privilege of a long life—fills you with the lingering sense of uncertainty. Why did I buy this in the first place? Who gave it to me, anyway? What am I keeping it for?
You have your children to pass the most precious, or perhaps the most practical, items along to—although a friend once said giving such stuff to your children is only a shifting of responsibility (let the kids be the ones to finally toss the thing when they come to their own sorting)—but with no children, I was free to be somewhat ruthless about all we had acquired. First when we moved from our house to the condo, then from the condo to this place.
I had letters from your mother. They were brief and chatty, maybe half a dozen of them, no more. All on her heavy stationery—she hated air-mail tissue paper. Notes mostly from just after we left Saigon, and then a few more scattered across the years. They were brief, as I say. I can’t imagine Charlene writing a tome like this one.
I should have sent the letters to you then—it did cross my mind—but there were boxes and boxes of paper to be sorted through, letters, receipts, cards, and invitations—what was I saving all this for?—and I had no idea where you’d landed.
I did find the few letters my father had written when we were in Saigon. He of course would only use those regulation Par Avion sheets with their careful folds. His letters were also brief, reticent: the weather in Yonkers and the neighbors who were moving away, a word or two about the advancement of communism in the Far East, and then a reminder to be safe, a touching but uncharacteristic closing: I keep you and Peter in my prayers.
These I still have—let some stranger toss them. But your mother’s letters I sent to the shredder with everything else.
I’m sure you have your own letters from her. I’m sure they survived your own first sortings. Still, I’m sorry I don’t have them to give you.
I suppose all this—this saga or whatever it is—is my way of making amends.
And, of course, of answering your question about Dominic. Small world, right? Although in truth it seems to me that it’s not the world that’s small, only our time in it.
ON SATURDAY MORNING I took a cab back to Charlene’s villa, my third trip, then, after I’d delivered Lily’s doll clothes that Wednesday. The houseman let me through the gate again, but there was no one in the foyer or the salon. He gestured that I should follow him into the dining room, where, once again, Charlene’s lovely family seemed poised for a pretty photo. Kent at the head of the table, in an open-collared, short-sleeved dress shirt, pale blue, crisply ironed. (Oh, our marvelous servants!) Charlene at the other end in a sleeveless shirtwaist, pale yellow—the same shade as the sunlight that came through the lightly curtained windows. The baby in a high chair to her right. Little you and—new to me on that morning—your brother on the left. Kent stood and the boy stood the moment I appeared. Both came forward to shake my hand. Ransom. Rainey and Ransom. Twins. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.
I hadn’t known you were a twin, and, I suppose, Charlene hadn’t thought to mention your brother before this. Apparently, he’d been at a friend’s birthday—bowling—the day of the garden party. Another handsome child, slim and blond.
I felt the envy, the ache of it, that would become so familiar. That very morning our plan to start a family any month now had been set back once more.
I felt, too, the smallest tug—no, that’s not the word, but “cut,” “pain,” is too strong; a “whiff,” a “curl”—of another disappointment. How little Charlene and I had really shared.
“Am I too early?” I managed to say. I must have been blushing.
Charlene touched her napkin to her lips and stood. “No, no,” she said. “You’re right on time.”
She turned to her family. A female servant came in to clear the plates. Another, younger one followed to take the baby away. “You all be good for your father and have a lovely morning,” Charlene said. She went to the other end of the table and leaned to kiss Kent’s cheek. I saw him pat her hip, but when she turned away I saw, too, a weariness on his face, beneath his robust tan, more an absence than a mark or a dark line or two—just some former health or youth subtly missing. Maybe it was the end of the long week. Maybe it was life with Charlene the dynamo.
As we crossed through the salon, I heard Ransom tell his father, “But she was gone yesterday. All day.”
I followed Charlene out the door and across the portico. I thought we’d go through the gate to hail another cab—I also wondered where our gifts for the children were—when she led me around the villa to a narrow driveway where a jeep was parked: military green cab, beige canvas canopy over the truck bed. The kind you usually saw transporting baby-faced Vietnamese soldiers. This one, however, Charlene explained, belonged to the company. “Kent sometimes finagles it for our errands.”
“Are you going to drive?” I asked.
She gave me that brief Looking through your cluelessness stare. “Of course,” she said. And then, “Behold!”
She lifted a flap of canvas. There on the floor of the truck, between the two narrow benches, were four large market baskets, like Easter baskets but bigger, painted in bright colors, lined with pastel calico, and each one fitted tightly, beautifully, with small toys and gifts, candies, whiffle balls, little stuffed bears, tins of tea, packs of cigarettes. “See what Barbie’s earned us?” she asked. “So many goodies. I usually barely fill two of these.”
As we climbed into the cab, I saw her elderly houseman waiting to open the gate at the end of the drive. Charlene waved to him. Inside, she found the keys in her purse, tucked her purse behind the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition. I recall she wore some rather flashy sandals, no stockings, but with her tan she didn’t need them, a perfect pedicure.
She pressed the clutch, shifted, turned to look over her shoulder, and with steady speed backed the truck through the gates, steering with one hand while with the other she leaned on the horn—for so long I was tempted to put my hands to my ears. We bumped over something (a curb, I wondered, a pedestrian?). And then we were in the street, cyclos and small Renaults, bicyclists, buses, more military vehicles swarming around us. Charlene shifted again and we were moving with them.
Every ride in Saigon traffic was a wild ride, but as a New Yorker who seldom drove herself (I had a license but never used it), I was accustomed to climbing into the back seat of a taxi and pretending the chaos was of no matter to me—that it pertained only to the stranger gripping the wheel.
I can’t account for it, that taxicab oblivion, but I’m sure it’s the very blithe, trustful ignorance that allows couples in New York to, well, couple, in speeding taxicabs, allows young girls and old matinee matrons to gossip happily in their back seats, allows ambitious businessmen to make deals, to make complicated plans, all while an absolutely unknown person—whose face you have seen only in a postage-stamp-sized photograph, a person who is in truth only the back of a head and a pair of shadowy shoulders—gets you where you’re going, your life and health, your future, for whatever time it takes, completely in his hands.
Peter and I had brought that happy New Yorkers’ faith in back-seat immunity, invincibility—or is it fatalism?—to Saigon with us. We had been well steeped in it during that first cyclo tour. But now, with Charlene, I was up front, at the dashboard, right beside an utter madwoman. Fearlessly, amid the speeding flotsam and jetsam of this crowded city, she steered us through the chaos, into the careening roundabouts, where the white mice were waving their batons with abandon but achieving no visible organizing effect.
I was certain we would die. No, certain that I would die, because, well, that was how the relationship between women like me and women like Charlene went. I imagined my last words—spoken through broken teeth and smashed windshield glass and her own I know I shouldn’t laugh at you but I can’t help it, if you could only see how you look laugh—would be a breathless apology for keeping her from her appointed rounds.
I held on to a strap in the door as a thousand different vehicles veered toward us, veered away—or was it vice versa? Tried not to show her how terrified I was as I braced my feet against the floorboards, straightened my spine, gasped a little, and even—more than once—cried out.
I suppose it’s to her credit that Charlene said nothing at all—no obscenities tossed off to her fellow travelers, no sounds of impatience or even delight. I suppose it’s to her credit that she drove with full concentration, leaning over the wheel. But also with utter confidence.
I don’t recall how long it took us to get to the hospital. I can only gauge the distance by the length and breadth of my imaginings: my father at Idlewild, receiving the coffin that contained my broken body. A funeral in the church where we’d been married not a year ago. Peter, distraught, giving up our place in Arlington, returning to his own parents’ house, riding the subway to work once again, reading a lonely paperback as he grasped the pole. Excuse me, miss. Clang, clang, clang went the trolley.
I might have wept, thinking of what a cute widower he was going to make.
* * *
THE MAIN PART OF THE HOSPITAL was in a French colonial building, still lovely if a little worn looking, with a dusty sweep of sparse lawn before an elaborate entrance. Charlene parked in what looked like a small lot, where Helen (today in a polished cotton blouse and skirt, warm pink) and another woman were waiting for us. Charlene handed out the baskets—my hands were still trembling a bit, and I was, I realized, soaked in perspiration under my clothes. The four of us walked toward the hospital with our bright baskets hung over our arms like, I don’t know, milkmaids? cigarette girls? candy stripers? colorful matrons out of some colonized Toyland?
The place was rather sprawling, as I recall, but Charlene led us through the gate, through one building and then out again, across another hot and dusty courtyard and into what seemed a somewhat modern concrete building in need of repair.
She greeted a number of Vietnamese nurses and physicians, as well as one or two Americans, along the way: bonjour, bonjour.
At that time, my experience of U.S. hospitals was limited to an appendectomy I’d had when I was seven, and while the strong odor of ether brought those days back to me, nothing else seemed to match what had been my expectations for a children’s ward. For one, it was terribly noisy—crying, chattering, rattling carts.
(I remembered from my own surgery a sacred hush soft enough to hear the squeak of white nursing shoes on the hallway linoleum, or the sound of my mother approaching in her heels.)
And crowded.
(There had been only two other children in my room.)
The two long rows of cribs and small beds were squeezed together, barely enough room for the parents—or, as Charlene had said, grandparents—who sat at the foot or the bedside of so many. Barely enough room for the few nurses, for that matter. Or for us with our silly baskets.
Helen and the other woman, who knew the routine, sailed down the center of the room, nodding and smiling at the nurses, skirting the carts, gathering in their wake a trail of small children who were not bedridden. When they reached the far end of the ward, they turned and began to offer their goodies, smiling and nodding to the children around them, expertly sidling along, their hips turned as they made their way between the tiny cribs.
Charlene indicated I should take one side at this end of the room, she would take the other.
Smiling, soaked with sweat, I approached the first mama-san, who was leaning over the chipped white railing of a crib, waving a paper fan over a sleeping child. She was a tiny woman in the ubiquitous black pajamas, hers faded to a dusty gray. She wore a long gray braid. It was impossible to tell if she was a hunchback, or if it was only her weariness, as she leaned over the child. I had the sense she had been leaning there for hours. There was the odor of cooking grease about her. An odor of urine about the crib. I said bonjour and she turned and grinned and answered in Vietnamese. She bowed a little but never paused in her fanning. Her teeth were stained with betel nut.
The child, perhaps about three, was on his back, sunk into that deep oblivion with which only small children can sleep. The curled fingers, the dark circle of his tiny mouth. He wore just a diaper; I could see it was wet. Under it, and up to his waist, he was wrapped in overlapping bandages. I felt a strange, delusional (I’m sure) hand of God in the meaningless coincidence of this.
I asked the grandmother, “Appendix?” Gesturing toward my own middle and grinning as if to convey “Me, too”—as if our identical experience, the sleeping child’s and mine, were some supernatural revelation of our shared humanity.
But she only turned away from me to continue gazing into the crib. And in an instant I went from feeling amazed and ordained to feeling idiotic and intrusive.
I touched her arm. Hoisted the basket that was hung from my elbow, offered the array of its content. She looked. Nodded. And then plucked from the crowd of goodies a pack of red licorice and a pack of cigarettes. She nodded her thanks and turned back to the child. I felt she had merely humored me. With something of Charlene’s persistence, I took one of the small teddy bears from the basket and placed it at the foot of the crib. I said, in English, “For when he wakes up,” and then squeezed my way over to the next bed.
A child with the lower part of her face wrapped in gauze, the aftermath, I was to learn, of a repaired cleft palate. A child listless with fever. With typhoid or tetanus or diarrhea. (At one point during this visit, or maybe another, my toe struck a full bucket of waste that had been pushed under a bed, the odor of it rising, turning my stomach.) Congenital malformations of limb or skull. Malformations from polio. Abscesses. Burns.
I am conflating here, of course. I trailed Charlene on these missions of hers during the next few Saturday mornings, until I began to suspect we had finally (as Peter put it) hit the mark, and we both agreed a children’s ward was no place for a newly pregnant woman. We might have said American woman. And then I began to join her again after I lost that pregnancy. So what I’m describing here is an amalgam, of course.
What stands out in my memory is the noise, the odors, the heat, the dim walls that more than once we women considered painting ourselves. (We never did.) And, of course, the suffering of so many sick children.
I mentioned there were burns. On a few occasions, Charlene learned from the nurses that a child had been scalded in a household accident, or splashed with hot oil, or hit with the coals of a sidewalk cooking fire. But there were others whose burns were spotted, oddly placed, a hand and a hip, for instance, the side of a face and the opposite leg and foot. These burns were raw, but with a distinct shape. I knew very little about napalm then and don’t claim to know now that this was what I was seeing there, among these children. In fact, I only made the connection years later, when that terrible photograph of the little girl first appeared. But neither were the answers forthcoming when I tried to understand what had happened to these children, how such odd, accidental burns could have occurred. I confess I wondered briefly if they were indications of some terrible ritual I didn’t understand. Or even manifestations of a new, unmentioned disease.
I guess you could argue, if you’re so inclined, that I was right on both counts. Metaphorically, anyway.
One girl in particular stands out—no doubt the very child I remembered when I later saw those heartbreaking photos from the war.
She was wailing when we came into the ward that morning. A child who had not been there the week before. The sound of a child wailing was not unusual, someone was always bawling, but her cry was sustained and unwavering, almost adult. My father would have said she was wailing like a banshee. The poor girl was about halfway down the row of beds, on the side of the room I was attending to, standing in a crib that was too small for her. From the moment I began my rounds, bed after bed, I was aware of how I was slowly approaching her—moving toward that unrelenting cry of distress, misery, pain. In truth, I was dreading the approach. I’m sure I even lingered a bit longer with the children and the grandparents as they chose their little gifts, shouting my bright bonjours and mercis and you’re welcomes in tortured Vietnamese (com pah yeah) over the little girl’s terrible, sustained keening. Wanting, in all honesty, to pass her by.
But there was nothing to be done. Soon she was my next patient. She wore only a small shirt that barely covered her taut belly. Her size made her nakedness all the more difficult to see. The slim hip and thigh, not quite adolescent, but not mitigated either by a toddler’s plumpness. The folded bud of her bare privates. The sweet tenderness of her undamaged skin. Her backside and the backs of her legs bore most of the burn, which was not new but perhaps only just beginning to heal, bordered as it was with the spotted, yellowish scar tissue that seemed to illustrate the moment of contact with the heat, the moment the flesh was melted away—I’m thinking here of the cinematic image of a match lighting celluloid. Terrible to consider. Her hair was cut raggedly short—there were also burns on the back of her neck. She was standing up, gripping the metal railing, her mouth open, her dark eyes—which she immediately turned on me without any change in the pitch and volume of her voice—were terrified, there is no other word.
