Early Warning (24 page)

They had been mostly inside their hootches for about two days, waiting out what was expected to be a typhoon. The rain stopped in the night—Tim woke to the silence. The air was still hot and wet. In the morning, right after breakfast, Captain Bloom was on him first thing—these storms meant havoc at the bases. They needed to communicate with them right away, find out what was going on. By the time they had the jeep ready and the radio stashed behind Tim's seat, the sky was clear and the air merely damp. Tim drove slowly, creeping along the road out of the base. The parade of families had diminished but not halted; everyone was dripping wet.

The road hooked left, and Tim had to slow down. He turned the wheel. Captain Bloom had his weapon across his lap, and he was leaning forward, looking down the road. As Tim pressed the brake pedal, he just happened to glance to the right, and he saw a boy with thin arms and thick black hair staring at him, and then a grenade flew into the back of the jeep. It landed just behind the radio and rattled around. Tim yelled something, and the last thing he saw was Captain Bloom's face turning toward him, and then fragmenting into the wet air.

—

LILLIAN RECEIVED
Tim's last letter the day after the telegram. It was wedged benignly between the electric bill and a letter from her mother. His handwriting, always nearly illegible, now looked terrifyingly meaningful. It took Lillian several seconds to make herself touch the letter, and then she could not help putting it to her nose and sniffing it. It smelled, like all of his letters from Vietnam, faintly of sandalwood. She stared at it for a long time before walking back to the house and placing it on the dining-room table, next to yesterday's
New York Times
, which Arthur had been reading when the telegram arrived. He had left it open to an article about Nixon addressing the American Legion at the Hilton. Arthur had been supposed to attend, but had not done so. Now Lillian looked away from the letter and stared at the article. Nixon had declared, “Those who predict the Vietnam War will end in a year or two are smoking opium or taking LSD.” Lillian looked at the letter again.

Arthur had pulled a string, and would be driving out to Andrews AFB to watch them bring the casket. He was taking Dean. Debbie, who had already left for Mount Holyoke, would be home for the funeral. Tina had been in her room for twenty-four hours, working on a memorial painting. As Lillian stared at the letter, she had to put both her hands on the table to prevent herself from passing out and falling out of her chair. The letter was addressed to her—that's what he had done since heading off to boot camp, address letters to her, not Arthur, knowing that she would read them aloud. She and Arthur had discussed this quirk, and they agreed that addressing the letters to her let Tim more easily reassure everyone that he was fine, that he had simply embarked upon a classic masculine adventure. Letters to his father might have consisted of only the fewest words—“Okay here. The colonel is an asshole. Shot two Cong yesterday.”

It was dated a week previously.

Dear Mom,

It's been raining again, pretty hard. It's such a swamp here, I don't know how they stand it. Thanks for the books. I started the one
Cat's Cradle.
It is pretty good. I loaned the one
Dune
to another guy in my hootch who was reading
Atlas Shrugged
so many times that his book fell apart, but when he started reading
Dune
, he finally shut up about it. I bought this Vietnamese guitar. It is pretty bad, and because of the rain, even worse, but I can get some sound out of it. I play it with one of the other guys who is from North Carolina and really good. His guitar is better than mine. Another guy, who is from Austin, Texas, plays the drum, which is really a mermite can, but he gets great sounds out of it. If I had a band again, I would definitely include a mermite can or two. Also thanks for the cookies. I think I had one. As soon as the guys saw them, they passed them around and they were gone. Captain Bloom says, “More more more.” I suppose you could say that that's an order, Mom. Otherwise, things are pretty quiet, I guess the infantry is doing their job, which is called Operation Byrd, though I call it Operation The Byrds just for a joke. I guess we talk a lot about music here, because Billy Copps was in a band, too, before he came here. Austin, Texas, sounds like a pretty neat town.

Okay, well, I am going to wind this up, because I have to do some stuff for Captain Bloom. Don't worry. Nobody gets killed anymore around here. The civilians always smile at us. Love to Dad and the kids. A message for Dean: Bite me.

Love, Tim

Lillian left the letter open on the table. She didn't think she was going to be able to read it aloud. After a moment, she got up from the chair and walked out the French door to the pool, where she picked up the skimmer and walked around, removing leaves and unrecognizable bits from the surface of the water. She looked out, down the hillside, toward the tree line. She had the strongest feeling that she had foreseen this, that a voice had spoken to her in the night, three nights ago, and said, It's time. But she knew that this feeling was wrong, that nothing of the sort had happened. If it had happened like that, then all of this would be part of a pattern. But it wasn't. Tim had vanished; that was all. He had escaped her long ago—as soon as they moved to this house. It was not that she had seen him more and more intermittently (at first a few times a day, then every few days, then every few weeks, then every few months, then hardly at all); it was that he had gotten less and less corporeal, at first visible from time to time, then almost always invisible, only manifesting very rarely in unexpected spots—at the bottom of the pool, in her shower, in the attic looking for something. It was quite likely, she thought, that he would manifest again. But this conviction was not something she planned to confide to Arthur.

T
HEY WERE NAKED
on his fold-out couch. The treatment room was warm enough (he turned up the heat to eighty) so that they required no covers, even though the windows were uncurtained and the weather outside was frigid. Andy remained positioned as he had instructed her, on her back, her arms above her head, her hands beneath her neck, her knees bent, and her feet flat on the mattress. Dr. Smith was sitting up. His body was much hairier than Frank's—the first time, she had stared. The hair was gray over his shoulders and got darker over his chest. His very thick pubic hair was black. Andy said, “You told me you worked with shell-shocked soldiers in the war. Did you notice a connection?”

“Between…” said Dr. Smith.

“Between, I don't know, between being a little wild and being a casualty? Frank came home without a mark on him, and he was over there the whole time—North Africa, Italy, Germany. He didn't even get a hangnail.”

“He was—”

“He was a sniper. Why didn't you serve, again?”

“I did serve, though not in a combat capacity. I had asthma. However, psychiatric work was service.” Now that his treatment plan had proceeded to greater intimacy, Dr. Smith sometimes offered little nuggets of personal information. Andy knew that they were supposed
to help her see him as more human—a man with an inner life and a history, vulnerable and worthy of compassion. His mother, for example, had been an exceptionally cold woman, heavyset and determined; one of his earliest memories was of helping her unlace her corset. But this old fact was not dramatic. Though it had been frightening at the time to see her flesh billow forth, with therapy he now pondered all of his memories with equal disinterest, which was not lack of interest, but a state of emotional remove. What was there to learn from these episodes? If he had persisted in endowing them with the emotions that they aroused at the time, then he could learn nothing from them. Such was his goal for her, too. “You keep coming back to this topic, Mrs. Langdon. The young man was killed months ago.”

“Janet wrote me about it again. I guess she told one of the girls at her school that she would rather it was her who died, and the girl told one of the teachers.”

“Are you worried?”

“I'm not worried that she's going to do anything, but…”

Now he stood up and went to his mat, where he assumed his cross-legged position. He had made it absolutely clear that he did not love her—love was neither his purpose nor his aim (he was, after all, a married man), and if she were to fall in love with him (impossible, Andy thought), then it would be his job to deflect and analyze those feelings as a variety of transference. For now it was sufficient that she almost always had an orgasm, and, with increasing frequency, they had simultaneous orgasms. Simultaneous orgasms were a learned behavior, just like any other. So, indeed, was love.

“But what?”

“But I think her reaction is extreme. I've always thought she was rather remote.”

“We see in others what we feel in ourselves, Mrs. Langdon. When you've tapped your own passions, perhaps you will understand your daughter's.”

He waited for a moment, then said, “Now, in series of tens, I want you to tighten your pubococcygeus muscle.” He began to count, and Andy, still lying on her back, did her best, though he went a little fast for her. He counted three sets, and then said, “You may rest.” Next he had her straighten and bend her left leg ten times, then her right
leg, then her left leg, then her right leg again. He said, “Turn over.” She turned over. He said, “Now tighten your gluteals.” He counted to ten three times. This was easy for her—she had been improving her posture since she was ten years old and first heard the word “posture.” When he finished counting, she sat up. “I don't know what to say to comfort her. If I say nothing, she says I don't care, and if I say something, whatever it is, she says I don't know what I'm talking about.”

He was still cross-legged, still hairy, still self-possessed. He said, “What have you said?”

“My sister-in-law and her husband let those children run wild. It seems to me that, if they had exerted a little control, he might have had more direction, and this wouldn't have happened. I guess that was exactly the wrong thing to say to Janet. I mean, I actually criticized her aunt Lillian and uncle Arthur, which is
not
to be done.” Andy knew she sounded a little incensed.

“I thought you were a believer in fate, Mrs. Langdon.”

“Yes, but—” Andy fell silent, momentarily startled. And it was true: a year ago, she would have viewed such a thing quite differently. Even as recently as September, she had told Janet that Tim's death was meant to be. Now, five months deeper into her treatment, she couldn't help seeing cause and effect, paths not taken, things that could have turned out in another way.

Dr. Smith looked at his watch, then rose to his feet without his hands touching the floor. It was this act that held her whenever she wavered in her dedication to her treatment. He went to his book and said, “We can take up this topic again.”

Andy sat up and reached for her clothes and her handbag. She said, “Friday.” He gazed at her expectantly while she put on her brassiere and underpants. She rummaged her bag for her checkbook. He handed her a pen. She wrote him a check for five hundred dollars. About this, as about everything else, he was very strict. He often said, “It may have seemed to you when you were a child that your father was a kind man, but his kindness, so called, had no direction, did it? And so, as a woman, you are untrained and adrift.” As she handed him the check, Andy couldn't help agreeing.

—

DEBBIE
'
S ROOMMATE WENT STEADY
, and her best friend dated three guys at Amherst in a round-robin arrangement, but Debbie maintained that she had set her sights on real intellectual achievement: she was not going to graduate school at Harvard, she was headed for Oxford. Uncle Henry said this was possible. Debbie knew that if she had gone to U.Va. or even UMass, her late nights at the library could have turned into dates with boys also spending time in the library, but if you were at a Seven Sisters, at Mount Holyoke, this was not the case.

So now she was at a mixer, standing in the corner, dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin, because every boy reminded her of Tim—not because they looked like Tim, but because they filled spaces that her brother should have filled. One gawky kid after another walked across the dance floor, dribbling his beer, his Adam's apple poking out, and his mouth half open. Always, Debbie had known that Tim was better-looking than she was, because the eyes of strangers slid past her and rested on him. Always, she had known that he got away with murder and so she had to do everything right. Always, she had been petty and irritable. Well, now she had taken Psychology 101, and Family Dynamics, and Elementary Freudian Theory, and she had identified herself as the wicked stepsister whose foot was too big for the glass slipper no matter what size the glass slipper was. In other words, she was a realist, surrounded by fantasists.

One of the gawky boys, this one at least six four, came to a halt in front of her and said, “You dance?”

“I have danced,” said Debbie.

“I danced, I have danced, I had danced, I might have danced, I could have danced, I should have danced.”

“English major,” said Debbie.

“Might you dance in the near future?” said the boy.

Debbie stepped away from the wall. The song was “Ruby Tuesday.” Debbie moved around, and the kid moved around near her, but not too near her. The song changed to “Georgy Girl,” which Debbie didn't like, so she stood still for a moment, then backed away. Unfortunately, he followed her.

After ten the same evening, Debbie was still talking to this guy, whose name was David (not Dave) Kissell, a junior at Wesleyan. He already knew her entire name, Debbie Manning, and he also knew
that her brother Tim had been killed in Vietnam, something only her best friend and her roommate knew. David Kissell's eyebrows had not risen. He had not backed away from her in either horror or disapproval, and when the tears came, he had supplied her with a clean paper napkin and a fresh beer. He said, easy as you please, “Come with me to the march. Someone in my dorm has a car. Three of us are going, and you can come along.” Debbie said, “I don't know. Maybe.” And then they went back into the dining hall and danced to “You Keep Me Hangin' On,” and David said he was from Long Island and had seen Vanilla Fudge live. When he walked her back to her dorm in time for midnight curfew, he kissed her not on the lips but on the forehead.

He met her at the corner where her ride to Middletown dropped her off. She saw the three other girls stare at him for a moment and then dismiss him—he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and his hair was below his collar (though clean—he smelled good). He took her little bag, and they walked to a pizza parlor. There were two guys he knew there, about halfway through a sausage pizza with mushrooms. Debbie sat down. She had the shortest hair at the table, and the most boring color, plain brown. The guy across from her was wearing a long wool army-surplus coat with a belt, even though it was April, and he had a carefully trimmed mustache. He was clearly the leader. David introduced her to him first—Jeff MacDonald.

They went back to Jeff's room, and pretty soon the boys were passing her a slender cigarettelike object which she knew was a joint. She took it, but when she sat staring at it, David gently removed it from her fingers and passed it to Jeff, who nodded thoughtfully and took another “hit.” He had a nice stereo, and they were listening to the Electric Prunes.

The plan was to leave for New York by six, so she slept in David's single bed with him, which, in spite of years of slumber parties, she could not say she was used to. But he was nice, and anyway, he took a sleeping pill.

Jeff MacDonald knew somebody on East Seventy-third Street, so they left the Falcon there and walked to the park. Even by 9:00 a.m., Manhattan was so busy that Debbie had to grab David's hand so as not to lose him. When they got to the Seventy-ninth Street entrance, a small sign directed them to gather with other students, but it looked
to Debbie as though everyone was milling around together. The official signs were large and white—Debbie thought the one that read “Children were not born to burn!” was more effective than “Stop the Bombing!” Other signs were homemade: a pair of twins had two signs, “Hey Hay LBJ How” and “Many kids U KILL 2DAY?” They marched shoulder to shoulder through the crowd, deadly sober and carefully holding the signs so that they could be read together. There were families, too—couples with babies in carriages, old ladies, even some men in old army uniforms from the war. Just before eleven, she and David followed Jeff to the rocks near the bottom of the Sheep Meadow. There Jeff climbed on a rock and burned his draft card with a lighter, while she, David, and the other boy, Nathan, formed part of the human chain protecting the small group of draft-card burners. Debbie looked over her shoulder to see if they were going to be rammed by police, but she could see no police, only more protesters lining up behind her, shouting, as the cards burned. When his card was a blackened ash falling into a can, Jeff raised both his arms in a salute, and everyone shouted “Hell, no! We won't go! Hell, no! We won't go!” Then everyone got organized and headed downtown.

On Park Avenue right before Forty-eighth Street, Jeff MacDonald got an egg right on the forehead. The egg broke and splattered over his glasses, and David almost laughed but didn't. Debbie ducked—another egg hit the ground in front of her feet. Then they all started looking up and hurrying a little bit, but there was no panic. Jeff just put his glasses in his pocket and kept shouting. They passed three guys with short hair, holding a sign that read “Hang the potesters!” “Protesters,” Debbie wanted to stop and point out, was spelled with an “r.” But the march pressed forward, so she just raised her fist and gave them the finger.