Absolution, p.9
Absolution, page 9
We came up with a compromise: he would go to the cocktail gathering, then come back to see how I was doing. We would decide then whether or not we would go out to dinner.
I suppose I slept heavily for a while. When I woke—the cramps were now full-blown menstrual style—the lights in the room had been lowered, the air conditioner was humming, and a joss stick burned on the dresser. I went to the bathroom, more blood, but nothing copious, and when I crawled back into bed Minh-Linh appeared with a tray: a teapot, a delicate cup and saucer, a plate of rice crackers.
I hadn’t known until that moment that she knew I was expecting.
She was middle-aged, thin, with a quiet industriousness about her. She looked humorless on first encounter, but we’d quickly learned that she laughed easily. Peter claimed that she understood English very well and was also fluent in French, but I hadn’t had much occasion to speak with her at length. She’d been taking care of whoever occupied this house for years, and my impulse had always been to accede to what I thought must have been her well-established routine.
She placed the tray on my bedside table and poured a cup. I sat up to take it from her. Then she went to the window to turn off the air conditioner, and then turned on the overhead fan. She knew this was how I preferred the room when I napped. She came back to the bed and asked, “Feeling better?” I only shrugged, too exhausted and worried to be perky. She patted her flat stomach.
“Much pain?” she asked.
I nodded. And then raised the teacup to my lips to keep from blubbering. But the tears came anyway.
Gently, she took the cup from me. She ran a comforting hand over my hair, still stiff with going-out hair spray. I suppose it felt odd to her. She went into the bathroom and found my brush. Then she nodded that I should move over. She sat beside me, slightly behind, and slowly brushed my hair until the hair spray was combed out and I’d cried all I could cry. And then she gently pulled my hair back over my ears and braided it neatly. When she was finished, she returned the cup to me. I drank the now tepid tea, ate a tasteless cracker. She fixed the pillows behind me and said, “Sleep, please.”
I recalled Lily’s “All will be well.” Which Minh-Linh did not say, but conveyed nonetheless. I thought, as I slept again, that my sincere affection for these women was surely purer, less condescending, less self-satisfied, less colonial, certainly, than that of the other female dependents here in Saigon. Another kind of American hubris, I suppose.
I woke again when Peter came in, my navy doctor just behind him. They both had their jackets off. Peter wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, his collar was opened and his tie unknotted. The doctor was in his military beige. They both filled the room with the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat.
Peter said, cautiously, “How are you feeling, honey?” He stood at the foot of the bed. He seemed a little shy, maybe embarrassed, and I suddenly touched my hair—Minh-Linh’s French braid coming undone. Not a look he was accustomed to. I suppose it made me look weaker than I felt. I struggled to sit up. I knew I was bleeding heavily now.
Dr. Navy moved into our bedroom with more authority than my husband had, tossing his jacket on the bed, coming toward me as if to make some small adjustment to my head and neck that would restore proper order. He felt my forehead. His hand was large and soft, the backs of his fingers covered with manly fur. I felt a rough callus or two. A golfer or tennis player, I thought. He wore a handsome wristwatch.
“No fever,” he said, and then sat heavily on the side of the bed. “Any pain?” he asked.
Reluctantly, I told him I was a little uncomfortable. Not much.
“You can take some aspirin,” he said. “It won’t hurt the baby.”
I knew he was drunk. I could see how he struggled to keep his eyes properly focused, and yet his words filled me with hope. If he believed the baby would not be harmed by an aspirin, then he believed the baby was still there, still headed for his birth in this exotic place.
“There was some blood,” I whispered, and glanced at Peter, who glanced away.
The doctor waved his hand. “It happens,” he said. “My wife was always springing leaks when she was expecting—we’ve got five.”
He showed me his palm, fingers spread and wiggling, as if to illustrate five plump children with hair on their backs.
“Nothing unusual. You first-timers fret about everything.”
He patted my thigh. “Get yourself some rest, little mother,” he said. “Take an aspirin if the pain gets bad.” He gestured toward Peter. “I’m going to take this man of yours out for a good meal. Things will look better in the morning.”
Peter asked, “Do you want me to stay?”
I waved him on. He’d probably had a few too many himself. “No, go,” I said.
In truth, I wanted them both gone so I could get to the bathroom and see the extent of the blood. I wanted to take that little bit of assurance this drunken doctor had given me and hold it up against the fact of whatever it was my body was determined to do.
They lingered a bit longer. Discussed bringing something back for me to eat, some soup or some pho. Peter told me he had already asked Minh-Linh to stay close. She’d spend the night in the second bedroom. She’d offered to cook some eggs.
I said, perhaps impatiently, that I was fine. Rest was what I needed.
The navy doctor said, “Absolutely. R and R. The best medicine.”
As they left the room, my husband asked the good doctor, “Is that a Rolex?”
I waited until I heard them go out through the gate, until I heard the car—it might have been waiting—take them away.
In the bathroom, I saw the blood was copious. And then I saw, in the midst of it, the small sac of the embryo. I reached into the toilet, into the water and the blood, and scooped the tiny thing out. Held it in my cupped hands. It was so small, but still I recognized the pale seahorse shape from college biology texts. The curve of it, the dark indication of an eye. I slid it from my palm to a folded towel on the side of the sink, washed the blood from my hands, changed into another nightgown, and went back to bed.
So now I was a woman who had had a miscarriage. So now we would begin again, the monthly hope and disappointment, now with a little more caution, a little more fear. Now the easy, fertile future—my part in our successful life together—was no longer so easy. Or so assuredly mine.
I heard from downstairs the buzzer at our gate. Heard Minh-Linh go out. Heard her voice as she returned, intertwined with— I felt another elevator drop—Charlene’s. I heard Charlene come up the stairs.
She wore a sleeveless cocktail dress of the same deep green shantung of the dress Lily had made for Mrs. Case’s daughter. It had a slim skirt, a V-neck in front, and a raised collar in the back, regal. She’d been right: it was the perfect color for the season. Her hair was up in a French twist, her diamond earrings sparkled. Her hazel eyes were now deep green. She really was, in that dim light, remarkably attractive. Some cross between Grace Kelly and Maleficent.
I was braced for her reflexive sneeze of a laugh, but all she said as she came into the dim room was “Kiddo.” It was neither maternal nor condescending. It was—for lack of a better word—businesslike, efficient, authoritative, even. Queenly. “What’s going on?”
I told her, without weeping, that I had miscarried. That I’d been almost three months along.
She said, “Shit.”
In those days, I was not—I dare say most of us were not—accustomed to hearing women like Charlene curse like that. It startled me, but also made me want to laugh.
She frowned. “You’re sure?”
I nodded toward the bathroom and she went right in—she was wearing strappy black heels—businesslike, as I said. When she returned, she had the towel that held the embryo folded in her hands. She sat beside me on the bed. I sat up, leaned forward. With hardly a thought, hardly a doubt, I put my cheek to her tanned and freckled arm, which was surprisingly cool. There was the metallic tang of perspiration just beneath her lovely perfume.
Charlene placed the towel on her lap, over the gorgeous green silk, and unwrapped the little thing, barely distinguishable now against the blood-soaked cloth. We looked at it together, silently, for what seemed a long while. I was aware of the click of the fan above our heads, the encroaching heat, some distant sound of traffic and voices in the street, Charlene’s flesh against my own. The joss stick had nearly burned down, but the scent of it was certainly on the air.
And I suppose it was this scent that made me aware of both how far from home I was, how strange and exotic this place was, and yet how confined and familiar everything now felt, as if, with my own small failure, my own small grief, the world had shrunk, distance had lost its meaning. Nothing was foreign. No one was a stranger.
I mean, here was Charlene, beside me in my own bedroom, my cheek to her bare arm.
Gently, she placed the towel into my hands. She reached for the half bottle of Vichy water on my bedside table and poured a drop into her palm. She wet the fingertips of her right hand and made the sign of the cross over the tiny thing. Softly, she said, “I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Then she bent her head and whispered an Our Father. I joined her—pausing awkwardly as she spoke the final, Protestants-only (as I thought of it) phrase “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.”
They seemed very grand words for a such a small gathering of cells.
She took the towel from me, folded it over again.
“What should I do?” I asked her, not wanting to say, “What should I do with it?” But I knew she knew this was what I meant.
Charlene said, “Let’s think for a minute.”
She carried the towel back into the bathroom, rested it again on the edge of the sink.
When she returned, she emptied the bottle of Vichy water into a glass. Then went to her purse and found one of the small prescription boxes, slid it open, and shook out a pill. She handed the pill to me, with the water. Said, when I hesitated, “You might as well.” I swallowed the Librium and some water. She seemed satisfied. Took the glass from me and then bent down to whisper in my ear.
“I hate this,” she said, hissing the words. “I just hate it.”
There was a small bamboo chair in the corner of the room, and she carried it one-handed over to the side of the bed. She sat down, kicked off her heels, rubbed her stockinged toes. Casually, casually gossiping, she mentioned who had been at the party that night. The usual suspects, she said. I think it was at this time that the American ambassador was off to the Aegean on a family vacation and the chargé d’affaires was acting ambassador. Charlene couldn’t say his name, Trueheart, without some venomous irony coloring her voice. “Like something out of Ivanhoe,” she said.
The gossip in those days was about a new ambassador—there was an American delegation in town, perhaps related to this. I remember Charlene telling me that the Washington contingent couldn’t stop perspiring.
She kept talking. She’d taken orders for six more Barbie ao dais. Lily had enlisted the help of a friend, a girl named Phan, another seamstress with a Singer sewing machine of her own and two small children, as well as a pair of elderly in-laws and a husband gone missing.
She said Lily was already helping Phan to stay afloat financially, passing along her Barbie earnings. “So like our Lily,” she said.
Charlene had told her that Phan could help out, could run up the little clothes on her own machine, but she had insisted Lily still do all the hand stitching. It was the beauty of Lily’s stitching that everyone noticed, the thing that made the outfits so unique.
What else did she say during that long night? I recall how she leaned across her lap and spoke in the tone you might use (I myself had used it) to distract a small child from a chicken pox itch, a scraped knee, a fever.
She’d caught a glimpse of Madame Nhu somewhere: beautiful, tiny. Maybe a bit heavy-handed with the eyebrow pencil.
“The Dragon Lady,” I said, to show I was grateful for her efforts to distract.
Charlene gave me her cool, assessing green eyes. “Don’t fall for it,” she said. “She’s a woman with spunk. Which is why men want to hate her.”
She went on: a higher-up at one of the U.S. agencies—USIS, USOM, I can’t recall—had been at the party with his unhappy wife. Apparently, he’d been off in the countryside for six weeks, something to do with the rural hamlet program, and the wife had been left alone in Saigon.
Charlene insisted I’d met the woman somewhere—she’d introduced us, she was certain, on one of our hospital visits. “She’s a clotheshorse,” Charlene offered. “Tonight she was wearing Guy Laroche, two pieces, coral pink. Would have been lovely if it fit her right.” She shook her head—what to do with these women?
“Girl spends a fortune on clothes,” Charlene said. “But not successfully. It’s all higgledy-piggledy. She doesn’t want the clothes. She just wants her husband to pay for them.” She arched a brow, amused. “Revenge spending. She’s bought ten ao dais already, and she’s only got a son, in boarding school in Virginia.”
At one point during the party tonight, Charlene said, this woman’s husband took her elbow to turn her toward an introduction, and “the poor girl” pulled away from him as if she’d been scorched. He cursed her under his breath. Everyone heard it. Everyone saw it. Awkward for all.
“Plenty of rocks in that marriage,” Charlene claimed.
And Helen Bickford had a tale to share. Charlene leaned over her skirt. “This is just between us.”
Apparently, Charlene said, Helen had a friend back home, who had a friend at the Pentagon, who was the friend of a woman there who projected the draft call numbers for the Joint Chiefs. Five years out.
“It’s quite complex,” Charlene said. “She takes all kinds of things into consideration. Retirements, re-enlistments, men who’ll be drafted and then rejected, all overseas deployments, of course. And she needs to project five years out. Across all the services. She needs to be extremely accurate. It’s quite a job.”
I tried to attend. I know I asked, “A woman does this?” But as she spoke I was listening, too, for Peter’s return, hoping this time he would not bring the doctor with him. I was considering whether I should show him the little embryo. I decided no, I should not.
I was thinking of how naive we had been, he and I, over these many months, believing that all our fun, our passion and delight, would lead only—joy upon joy—to a healthy child in our arms, our own.
Charlene was saying that Helen Bickford told her tonight that last month this woman at the Pentagon was asked to go back and recalculate her projections for next year, 1964. This never happens, Helen said. These are careful numbers, carefully calculated five years out, there’s never a need to reassess. Pretty clear the order had to come from the White House.
This friend from McLean told Helen Bickford that this woman at the Pentagon was ordered to recalculate next year’s draft projections based on a full withdrawal from Vietnam. Everyone. All the brass, all the GIs, pilots, MPs—all. All out of here by the end of next year.
“Picking up our marbles and going home,” Charlene said. “Not just the troop reduction JKF’s been talking about. Total withdrawal.”
I moved uncomfortably in the bed; a cramp was cresting. I was remembering, too, adding up the extent of my disappointments, that this was the week I was going to write to my father, to tell him the good news about our baby. His grandchild.
With my father in mind, I asked, “What about the communists?” Hoping to prove I was listening.
Charlene stood, walked around the room until she found an ashtray. She took a cigarette from her purse. “What about the peasants?” she asked, lighting it. And then, with a laugh, “What about Brown and Root? What about Esso? What about the porcelain-faced Madame Nhu?”
She came back to the chair, shrugged, went on talking.
She said she’d looked for me at the reception. Found Peter, who told her I was under the weather. And then, of course, she saw him leave with Dr. Navy.
“Don’t go back to that guy,” she said, “Next time around. The last thing you want is a navy doctor. They hardly know what they’re looking at. They get your feet in those stirrups and their ears between your knees and suddenly it’s all Up Periscope. They spend the rest of the exam trying to figure out what’s port and what’s starboard. Wondering where the hell the penis is.”
I smiled. Still shocked, but growing less so, by Charlene’s use of words.
“I went to a Frenchman for little Roger. He’s had a practice here for years. All the elites see him. He came right to the house for the delivery. Kent wanted me to go to Hong Kong, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Leave the twins alone here?”
She brushed the suggestion away with a wave of her cigarette.
“Go to my guy. He’s getting on in years, but he has a deep and abiding love for women. It’s delightful. I’m thinking of getting pregnant again just to see his brown eyes above my belly. You’ll swoon.”
She paused. I had the sense that she was taking charge of this part of my life, gently wresting it from my clumsy control.
“Next time,” she said.
When Minh-Linh came in with her tray, more tea for us both, she asked me if I would like some eggs, and Charlene replied, “Good God, no.” Which was my sentiment exactly. I was happy to let her speak for me.
Minh-Linh poured the tea and handed us each a cup. I saw her glance into the bathroom; she seemed about to go in to tidy up when Charlene said something to her in quick French. Minh-Linh paused, then glanced at me. Then nodded. She said, softly, “I understand.”
She went out with her tray but returned later with another joss stick and what looked to me at first like a small gray stone. She lit the stick and placed it in the little sand-filled pail where we burned our incense. And then she placed the stone before it. It was in fact a small, smiling Buddha.
Sharp-eyed Charlene, smarter than everyone, said, “Jizo?” And Minh-Linh shook her head. “Dizang,” she whispered.
