JD (5 page)

WASHINGTON, March 20, 2003
. President Bush ordered the start of a war against Iraq on Wednesday night, and American forces poised on the country's southern border and at sea began strikes to disarm the country, including an apparently unsuccessful attempt to kill Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office at 10:15 p.m. Wednesday night, about 45 minutes after the first attacks were reported against an installation in Baghdad where American intelligence believed Mr. Hussein and his top leadership were meeting. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war,” the president said.

I don't know what to think anymore. I watch TV and I see their tyrant and our tyrant, their scared children hustled off to war and ours, and I don't know what side I'm on. Most of my friends say this is crazy, Bush was just looking for a reason to invade because he wanted to be bigger than his daddy. But then some of my friends say that Hussein wants to blow up Israel, so he can go down in history. I guess everyone wants to go down in history.

I wonder what Jonathan would have thought. He was kind of a Zionist; like many apostate Jews of his age, he got a little misty about Israel. But that was the Israel of kibbutzim and folk songs, not ultraorthodox settlers and nuclear missiles, and it isn't hard to imagine how he'd have felt about Cheney and his ugly little minions. I suppose on balance he'd have been against this war. Either way, though, Jonathan would have known what to think. Almost nonsense words:
know
what to
think
. But Jonathan always did, he was a man unfettered by ambivalence or second thoughts. Of course there are lots of men like that, fanatics, idiots, presidents.

Mr. Fleischer cautioned that “Americans ought to be prepared for loss of life.” He noted that while the White House sought “as precise, short a conflict as possible,” the unknowns—from how American, British and Australian troops would be received to the elements of weather, accident and so-called friendly fire—were numerous.

I don't need any help knowing what to think about this. All those people who drive around with Support Our Troops bumper stickers are, I am sure, prepared for loss of life, ready to read the weekly roll call of the dead—Juarez, McGiver, Brown—with perfect equanimity. And the mothers: they are prepared, too. They have already, even as they kissed their boys good-bye, clawed out a hollow space in their hearts, so that they will be empty when the word comes.

You think you're prepared.

M
ickey was delivered by caesarean section on Tuesday, April 8, 1952. We knew ahead that I'd need a C-section, so I got to pick the day, Tuesday or Wednesday. I ruled out Wednesday because Wednesday's child would have been full of woe. He would also, in the draft lottery for boys born in 1952, have had the lucky number 289. Tuesday's child was supposed to be full of grace, but his number was 35, and he was one of the last sad cohort of boys ever drafted. In the summer of '72, just a few months after his twentieth birthday.

He had finished boot camp and started his infantry training in North Carolina when Dr. Kissinger intoned, in October, that Peace Was
at Hand. Mickey was
in country
, as they said, somewhere undisclosed in South Vietnam, when the peace talks broke down in December. Then the talks started again, to our great relief, and by the end of January 1973 there was a cease-fire.

Except our doorbell had rung already; it rang in the middle of January. The buzzer to let people in was broken. I had to go down three flights. As I rounded the last turn of the stairs I saw, through the glass door, the uniform. It was late afternoon, already getting dark. But I could make out a uniformed man, headless from my angle, waiting in the vestibule. I didn't know that was how they were doing it now, if anyone had asked I would have thought they were still sending out Western Union boys with those macabre telegrams: “The Secretary of War regrets …” I hadn't known, but I knew at once, and I just sat down on the landing, unable to go down the last flight.

The doorbell rang again, I could hear it through the open door of the apartment. Then Jonathan's voice: “Martha, goddamn it, why don't you—?” Now I saw the officer's face; he had crouched down to look up the stairs. He saw me and called through the glass door: “Mrs. Ascher?” I heard Jonathan on the stairs; he reached the landing where I sat and, after a moment, sat down next to me.

We were silent a long while. We just sat, as if you could turn away death by refusing to answer the doorbell. Finally Jonathan went down, but by the time he got there the officer was out of sight. Jonathan went out the door and didn't come back for hours.

He had caught up with the officer down the street, he said. Mickey had been shot. He was by himself for some reason, just Mickey and a Vietcong alone together in a clearing. One shot to the head, they were sure he had died instantly. I learned later that the parents usually got some sort of letter, giving a little more detail about what happened and how valiant their boy was. Maybe we did. Jonathan always picked up the mail, maybe he got the letter and spared me the details. So I am left with just a picture of Mickey in fatigues and another boy in black pajamas, facing each other in a clearing.

T
he body was shipped to Williams-Cabell on East 38th Street. We went and had the required colloquy with the man in the black suit.
He whispered some rehearsed language about Michael's sacrifice for his nation and said he needed to call right away if we were going to want the military honors, they were kind of backed up just then.

“The what?” Jonathan said.

“Well, you know, they fold the flag and present it to the …” He looked away from me. “To the mother, and they play Taps.”

“We can't do that, Jesus,” Jonathan said. “Imagine people sitting there and …”

He didn't need to finish, I knew what he imagined. Our friends all sitting around a flag-draped coffin and thinking, “war criminal.” They knew he'd been drafted, they all commiserated with us, but something inside them would whisper that any boy who'd been to Vietnam had to be a monster, the place turned boys into monsters. Maybe they were even right. The boy-man I kissed good-bye at Fort Dix, with his taut shoulders and his nervous smirk: how do I know what he might have done? If his buddies were doing it, or some officer ordered it, how do I know he wasn't torching villages and bayoneting children? Because he was my baby? All the monsters were somebody's baby.

No, we weren't members of any church, Mickey hadn't been baptized or bar mitzvahed or anything else except tonsillectomied. No, there wasn't any family plot.

We hadn't talked about what to do; we had ridden over in a taxi in silence, our permanent silence. Even then, in the office, we weren't able to think about it. The man in the black suit was unperturbed. “I understand, I understand,” he whispered.

Finally, I said, just to settle things, “Cremated, I guess we want him cremated.” I closed my eyes, picturing the flame.

Jonathan said, sharply, “We don't cremate.” “We,” I realized, meaning Jews.

I was ready to say that Mickey wasn't a Jew, Jonathan might have taken him over in life, but he wasn't Jonathan's anymore. But instead I said, “All right, buried. And with full military honors.” The man in black turned to Jonathan for confirmation, and I said, “I am his mother. I brought him into this world …” Brought him in on the wrong day. And would see him out of it with the flag and everything else he had … earned.

I said I wanted to see him, but I was smoothly dissuaded. We stepped outside. While Jonathan looked for a cab I glanced at the basement windows, just caught a glimpse of white tile and naked bulbs. I remember thinking: he's down there. I should see him. But Jonathan was already holding the cab door open, waiting for me to slide in.

On the appointed day we took the Long Island Rail Road to the Pinelawn Station, just after Farmingdale, walked the half mile or so to the gate of the veterans' cemetery. We were led to the grave site by a man with the smeared countenance of a figure in a Brueghel crowd scene. We hadn't, in the end, asked our friends; we were too craven. My niece Emily—Mickey's favorite cousin—was in California, too far to come. Jonathan wouldn't hear of calling his brother, Bernie. So at the grave the crowd consisted of the man in the black suit and three boys in uniform, one of them clutching a bugle. Under a canopy was Mickey's coffin, draped in a flag; far too many folding chairs were lined up facing a hole in the ground.

Jonathan murmured, “We should have had
platshkes”

“What?”

“Professional mourners. You give 'em a few kopeks and they wail.”

I went to the coffin and touched it.

You watch on TV the women who go to reclaim the bodies. Perhaps the victims of some tyrant, exhumed from their mass grave and lined up in rows. The women walk up and down, slowly checking the corpses, calmly as if they were cruising the aisles in a supermarket. If one of them finds her son or husband, knows him by a ring or a tatter of the shirt he wore that last morning, she will have found only a heap of bones, already half dissolved into dust. But she will have something to touch. I touched a wooden box, on its lid a polyester flag. I sat down next to Jonathan.

The man in black looked around uneasily. Hadn't we brought anybody—priest, rabbi, shaman? At last Jonathan mumbled, “I guess I should say a few words.” Oh, I could hear them coming. A diatribe about the war and Nixon and Kissinger and …

“Mickey was a beautiful boy, such a beautiful boy, my darling.” Jonathan said this to the soldiers, almost conversationally. “All these
years, I've gone out every day trying to slay dragons, and it was all for him. You don't know it, you think it's all about principles and vocation, and it's just about making the world safe for your kid. You'd wrestle angels if you had to.”

The soldiers looked down at the ground; perhaps one of them suppressed a snicker. I thought, poor babies, the things you must have to listen to, all your days washed in strangers' tears for strangers. Then I thought, poor babies? They get to ride around going to funerals, and it's never their own.

Jonathan went on. “Now I don't give a fuck.” The soldiers stirred uneasily. This was perhaps not the funeral oratory they were accustomed to. “I could close my eyes and if, when I opened them, the world was gone I wouldn't give a fuck.”

I felt the same way, of course, with this difference: Jonathan seemed to believe that, if the world ended, he would still be here, eyes open. The witness, the
dichter
.

I thought he was just getting started, but he abruptly sat down. The soldiers looked around, bewildered: was that it? After a minute they went about their drill. A little ballet of folding up the flag, performed so mechanically they might have been figures on a Swiss clock. One boy handed me the flag. He was perfectly expressionless: he didn't look sad or grim or sympathetic. I suppose they taught him this, to make of himself a blank screen on which the next of kin could project whatever feelings they brought to the occasion. Finally the boy with the bugle played Taps, so terribly slowly.

I had thought it was right that Mickey should have a soldier's burial. But when I sat there, clutching a flag I didn't know what to do with, when I heard the boy stutteringly play Taps, I realized: what I had done was give him over to them utterly. He had been a soldier for just five months—a brief awful episode at the end of a life that should have just been starting—but these strangers were burying a soldier, in a row of soldiers' graves.

Mr. Bush stayed largely out of sight until his speech, save for a brief meeting Wednesday morning with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, to review New York City's needs to prepare for any new terrorist attacks.

That word again: prepare. All the nonsense about duct tape and canned goods, preached to us by men who prepare by descending into their bunkers. I prepare, as people always have, by going on about my business. Which today consists of trying, one more time, to paint a dead daffodil.

In the days since I brought it home it has gone crisp and translucent as parchment, with pale intricate hatching. The trumpet, once golden against the white petals, has taken on their pallor, only a slender halo of yellow left, like a last faint breath.

I have sketched the daffodil over and over, turned it a few degrees, tried it from another angle, but I still can't get it right. My pictures are deader than the flower. I should have left it where it was, at St. Anselm's, painted it in the garden where it was innocently going about its business of dying.

It has no context here. I guess I could supply the context. An extinguished candle, a scattering of coins, a skull: all the components of that classic genre of still life known as a
vanitas
. Except these cruel admonitions about the vanity of human wishes always have live flowers, not dead ones—that's the whole point, that the flowers go on and we don't.

Oh. Here it is, here is what I have not been able to shake off. I do not believe the flowers will go on without me. What do I suppose will kill them? Terrorists, global warming, nuclear winter? Asteroids, a burned-out sun, a jaded God? Oh, could anything be more self-centered! I do not believe that when I am gone the world will go on.

I do not believe that Mickey will go on, that is it. There was a world in which Mickey was a contingent possibility, then a world in which he breathed, then a world without him. My world, from which my baby is a constant absence. And when I die no one will feel his absence anymore. I will take Mickey with me as surely as if I had perished with him still kicking in my womb. The true unMickey: he will not even be dead.

Only Philip Marks could save us, Mickey and me. If he cared to mention us.