The Nuclear Age (19 page)

Yes, I’ll
do
it, and they’ll understand.

But now I find comfort in vacuuming the living-room rug. I’m domestic. I have duties. I dust furniture, defrost the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor. Ajax, I think, the foaming cleanser … I sing it. The house seems empty around me. In the basement I toss in a load of laundry and sit on the steps and sing,
Clean clear through, and deodorized too, that’s a Fab wash, a Fab wash, for you!
I watch the clothes spin. My voice is strong. In Key West we’d sit out on the back patio and one of us would start singing, maybe Tina, and then Ned and Ollie … Are they dead? What happened? They knew the risks, they indulged in idealism. There was evil at large. Vietnam: the word itself has become a cliché, an eye-glazer, but back then we recognized evil. We were not the lunatic fringe. We were the true-blue center. It was not a revolution, it was a restoration. And now it’s over. What happened? Who remembers the convoluted arguments that kept us awake until five in the morning? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a tyrant, and if so, was his tyranny preferable to that of Diem and Ky and Thieu? What about containment and dominoes and self-determination? Whose interests were at stake? Did interests matter? All those complexities and ambiguities, issues of history, issues of law and principle—they’ve vanished. A stack of tired old platitudes: The war could’ve been won, the war was ill conceived, the war was an aberration, the war was hell. Vietnam, it wasn’t evil, it
was madness, and we are all innocent by reason of temporary insanity. And now it’s dropout time … 
Be young, be fair, be debonair
 …

We pat ourselves on the back. We marched a few miles, we voted for McGovern, and now it’s over, we earned our rest. Someday, perhaps, we’ll all get together for a bang-up reunion, thousands of us, veterans with thinning hair and proud little potbellies, and we’ll sit around swapping war stories in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, the SDS bunch dressed to kill in their pea coats and Shriner’s hats, Wallace in his wheelchair, McCarthy in his pinstripes, Westmoreland in fatigues, Kennedy in his coffin, Sarah in her letter sweater. We’ll get teary-eyed. We’ll talk about passion. And I’ll be there, too, with my hard hat and spade. I’ll lead the songfest. I’ll warm them up with some of the old standards, and we’ll all get soppy with sentiment. We’ll remind ourselves of our hour of great honor. We’ll sing,
Give peace a chance
, then we’ll drink and chase girls and compare investment portfolios. We’ll parade through Lincoln Park singing,
Mr. Clean will clean your whole house, and everything that’s in it
 …

The world has been sanitized. Passion is a metaphor. All we can do is dig.

I put the laundry in to dry.

Upstairs, I smoke a cigarette, stand at the bedroom door. It’s not a pleasant thing.

If I could, I think. If there were no Minutemen. If we could somehow reverse the laws of thermodynamics.

Around midnight I lie on the sofa. Can’t sleep, though. I get up and clean the oven. Scour the sinks, apply Drano, carry out the garbage, make coffee, plan the breakfast menu.

It’s nearly dawn when Melinda begins banging on the bedroom door.

“Daddy!” she cries, and I’m there in an instant. I tell her to calm down, but she won’t, she keeps yelling and thumping the door. “Have to
pee!
” she says. “Real bad—I can’t
hold
it!”

It’s a dilemma. I ask her to hang on until I’ve had time to work out the arrangements.

“Wait?” she said. “How long?”

“Not long. You’re a big girl now, go back to bed.”

“
Wet
the bed. One more minute and—”

“Use a bottle, then.”

“What bottle?”

“Look around,” I say. “Check Mommy’s dresser.”

“Gross!”

She hits the door. I can picture the droop in her eyelids, the tightening along her jaw.

“Bottle,” she says, “that’s stupid. I’m a
girl!
God, I can’t even believe this.” Then she moans. “Daddy, listen, don’t you think maybe something’s
wrong?
It’s not too nice, is it? First you lock us in here, like we’re prisoners or something, and then you don’t even let me go to the
bath
room. How would you feel? What if I did all that stuff to you?”

“Bad,” I tell her. “I’d probably feel terrible.”

“So there.”

Leaning against the door, rocking, I listen to a silence that seems to stretch out forever.

“Daddy?” Melinda says.

“I’m here.”

“You know what else?”

“What else?”

“I’m scared, I guess. And real sad, too. If you were me, you’d get so sad you couldn’t even stand it.”

“I know, honey.”

“Like right now. I’m sad.”

“Yes.”

“Let me out,” she says.

It’s a rocky moment, the most painful of my life. I hesitate. But then I tell her it can’t be done, not yet. “The hot-water bottle,” I say quietly. “Wake up your mother, she’ll handle it.”

“Please, can’t you—”

“I’m sorry, angel.”

She’s right, I can’t stand it. When she says she hates me, I nod and back away. I turn off the hallway light and move to the kitchen and drink coffee and try to patch myself together.

It’s a splendid sunrise. No more rain. The mountains go violet, then bright pink.

Just after six o’clock a taxi pulls up the long driveway.

Willpower, I think, and I write out a handsome check. “Tip?” the driver says. He’s just a kid, granny glasses and a sandy beard, but he clearly knows what it’s all about. He takes a twenty without blinking. “Could’ve called,” he says. “Six o’clock, man, no fucking courtesy.”

And that’s it.

Inside, I roll out my sleeping bag before the bedroom door. I strip to my underwear and curl up like a watchdog.

What more can I do?

Melinda hammers on the door.

“Daddy,” she shouts, “you’re crazy!”

FUSION
 

8
The Ends of the Earth
 

“
I
F IT WERE UP TO
me—” my father said, but he had the courage not to finish. Instead he said, “What can I do?”

“The money, that’s all.”

“Cash? Play it cozy?”

“Probably so.”

“And you’ve got a place to—you know—a place to go?”

“It’s being set up,” I told him. “I’ll know tonight.”

“That’s good, then. Fine. So what about the basics? Toothbrush, clothes. A new wardrobe, what the hell.”

“Not necessary.”

He smiled and touched his jaw. “On the house. Any damned thing you want, just say it.”

“A wig,” I said.

“Right. What else?”

“I’m kidding. No wig. Nothing, just the cash.”

“A coat, though. You’ll need a coat. Definitely. And new shoes—some decent leather.”

“It’s not a funeral,” I said.

“No?”

“It’s not.”

My father jiggled his car keys. “Shoes,” he said, “let’s not argue. Shoes, then a coat, then we’ll see about a haircut.”

At the shoe store on Main Street, my father sat beside me, draped an arm across the back of my chair, and told the clerk he wanted the best. Leather soles and rubber heels, no plastic. The clerk said, “Yes, sir,” and hustled off to a back room. My father lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he sat watching the smoke, legs crossed, and then he shook his head and said, “Christ.”

“If you want,” I told him, “I’ll call it off.”

“I don’t want.”

“If you do, though.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a crime, that’s all I mean. Just a sick rotten crime. No other possibilities, right?”

“Except to call it off.”

He nodded. “Except that. And there’s Doc Crenshaw.”

“Yes, but I can’t—”

“Who knows?” he said. “A heart murmur maybe. I read somewhere—I think it was in
Time
—I read how heart murmurs can do the trick, or else asthma, a hundred different things. You never know.”

“I won’t beg.”

“Of course not. But we can hope, can’t we? Heart murmur, we can damn well hope.”

“Or cancer,” I said.

My father laughed and clapped me on the leg.

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Cancer.”

He bought me shoes and a wool overcoat and shirts and jeans and a big green Samsonite suitcase. In the barbershop, he smoked cigarettes and flipped through magazines, keeping his hands busy. “Lop it off,” he told the barber. He made a slicing motion across his neck. “Amputate. Major surgery. The kid’s growing corn up there.” The barber chuckled and my dad went back to his magazine while I watched myself in the mirror. September 1968, and there was a thinning out in progress, a narrowing of alternatives. The scissors felt cool against my ear. The smells were good, I thought, all those lotions and powders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and when I looked up my father was studying me in the
mirror. He turned away fast. “What we need,” he told the barber, “is one of those heavy-duty lawn mowers. Scissors won’t hack it.”

After dinner that night, when the dishes were done, I modeled my new clothes. An off-to-camp atmosphere, jokes and smiles, a nervous twitter when my mother said, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”