Tree of Smoke (85 page)

Yes, she remembered the uncle. He was impressive at a glance. Prowess, a word she’d never used, came immediately to mind. Dangerous, but not to women and children. That type.

Skip she didn’t remember nearly as well. More boy than man. He joked, he evaded, he dissembled, he lied, he gave you nothing to remember. This current representation of himself—even as it tore at her, she wasn’t sure she believed it.

She looked again at the photograph, dozens of Filipinos surrounding a stalled jeepney, and felt very moved—more so than by the news photo of Skip, the smeary fading face and its crippled arrogance and self-pity, more so than if he’d sent from that Damulog era a photo of himself, or of her, or of both of them together.

She put it all back in her purse and sat with her eyes closed. She hardly remembered saying goodbye to Ginger. Had she been unkind?

“Are you Mrs. Benvenuto?”

It was the woman handling the tickets, no taller standing up than she’d been sitting down.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry—I didn’t realize.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s intermission now. Mrs. Rand’s probably in the basement. The dressing rooms.”

“I’ll be right along.”

Kathy followed down the slate-tiled, echoing hallway, thinking of gangster films and the Last Mile, and the woman led her to a door not far from the big ones to the auditorium and down a flight of steps. The walls twittered, and young models raced everywhere in their glad bodies, deaf to their matron, who stalked them calling, “Girls?—Girls?—Girls?—Girls?” as Kathy entered a large, low-ceilinged chamber. Lovely models posed. Flashbulbs popped. The girls themselves popped in and out of cubicles made of dividers on casters.

“Mrs. Keogh,” her escort called, and the girls’ matron waved and came over. “This is Mrs. Benvenuto.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“We’re all late! I’m just glad you made it. I’ll tell Mrs. Rand. If you want to sit in the audience—is that all right?—if you just wait in a seat, she’ll call you up and introduce you after she talks about the Orphan Flight. We’ve got a couple of girls here from the same flight—from the same—
your
flight. Three girls.”

She referred to the evacuation flight out of Saigon, the plane crash that had broken Kathy’s legs. Forty of the survivors had gone out on a later flight. Only a few had been adopted in the U.S. and a couple, apparently, here in Minneapolis.

“Three of the orphans?”

“Yes! A kind of reunion. Li—where’s Li? She’s not dressed! Girls!” cried Mrs. Keogh.

Kathy left her without saying goodbye, because a young Eurasian girl had just passed them to go out the “Exit” door across the large chamber, and Kathy felt compelled to get a look at her. She followed the girl out and up the concrete steps, at the top of which the girl leaned against the wall in an alley, alone. She moved aside slightly to let Kathy pass. Kathy went two steps beyond her, bringing into view the river at the alley’s one end, the street at the other. Kathy thought she recognized this Eurasion child, or Amerasian, who would have been four or five years old the morning of the crash, thought she recalled her standing up on her seat on the plane, remembered her uncharacteristically long legs and round eyes and the brown tint to her hair. Kathy had seated one of her own exactly next to her in the plane’s upper compartment, the lucky compartment. Many of her own had been in the upper deck and had survived. She’d put her children aboard, helped with the loading of others, had left the plane to head back to Saigon and at the last minute was offered a seat by an acquaintance from the embassy who’d decided not to go, not just yet—she couldn’t remember his name, they’d never met again—to this day, he probably thought her dead in his place—and she’d leapt at the chance, not to escape the downfall, but to help, to be of use, to ease the terrors of tiny pilgrims. She hadn’t even known the destination. Australia, probably. They hadn’t made it. And eventually this child’s journey had ended in St. Paul. In two-inch heels and a blue skirt and yellow T-shirt tight across her training bra, with lipstick and mascara, she looked like a little whore, arrogant and sullen, her auburn hair twisting in a wind that blew from the street through the alley and down the Mississippi. She opened her purse and found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Her cheeks pouched as she shielded the flame with her hand and lit a filter-tip cigarette. She exhaled and the breeze snatched the cloud from her mouth.

Kathy again slipped past the girl, down the stairs. She negotiated the basement’s bedlam and went to the auditorium above, a decent space for public events, with firm, cushioned seats and a steep rise, though the walls gave back the PA in a slight echo, and the mike made piercing sibilants and popping
p
’s. The event’s second half had begun. The house had been darkened, but lights brightened the stage, and she saw her way. Many seats remained empty. So as not to make a disturbance she took the first vacant place on the aisle. At the podium a large-jawed, stately woman with a tight gray hairdo, presumably Mrs. Rand, in a pink ensemble, spoke of orphans. Apparently Mrs. Rand dealt with a small delay, going past her text, extemporizing valiantly. She talked about the “orphan runs” that had flown so many children to new lives in the very last hours of the terrible, terrible war, of Flight 75, which Kathy had ridden and which fate had brought down like a dragon; and Kathy reflected, certainly not for the first time, that the war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment, death itself might erupt from the fabric of this very breath, unmasked as a friend; and she mourned the passing of a time when, sitting in a C-5A Galaxy airplane as it bounced into paddies suddenly as solid as rock, hearing the aluminum fuselage tear itself into jags and swords, she’d pitied only the children around her and regretted only the failure to get them out of the war, when the breaking of her own legs had meant not shock or pain, but only bitterness that she couldn’t help the others. Mrs. Rand now introduced the three girls from Flight 75, including Li, the Amerasian, all wearing the ao dai, the flared shift over satin trousers, pacing one by one to stage left and again to stage right, compellingly self-conscious and poised, spirits quivering in flesh, and seating themselves on folding chairs so that their shoes were visible, black pumps with two-inch stiletto heels. Mrs. Rand described the crash, eight years ago almost to the day, she said—although she was off by a month—one of the worst aircraft disasters in history, she was sad to say, with more than half of the three hundred children and adults aboard, almost everyone in the bottom cargo compartment, the majority of them children under two years of age, taken away to Heaven. A mechanical failure. For some years afterward Kathy believed a missile had shot them down. Mrs. Rand knew more about the mishap than Kathy herself and described the final few seconds, the plane breaking into burning parts that boiled in the wet paddies, the clouds from ignited oil. On impact Kathy must have shut her eyes. She remembered only sounds, predominantly rending metal—a very vocal idiom of many vowels and grinding consonants, ragged gutturals, magnificent vowels, all the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, urgent, bewildered, gigantic. Then a general black silence lacerated by pleas and outcries and weeping, including her own. And one or two children laughing.

The girls left the stage to small applause. Mrs. Rand spoke of MacMillan Houses and its good, good work, its excellent relationship with the government of Vietnam. Rather than listening, Kathy prepared her own remarks, it’s wonderful to see so many, this kind of effort requires more than private donors alone, therefore government grants and legislation, therefore your congressmen, your senators, above all your hearts, new lives given hope, tremendous gratitude, no, stress private donors, the annual expense for postage for just one office can amount to, food for a single mouth for a year can exceed, no, not a mouth, a single child, good food for a single one of these wonderful children can cost about, the buildings and facilities, education, your generosity, or rather education out of poverty, your heartfelt generosity, or rather shelter, food, and warmth for young bodies, education out of poverty, true hope for lives just beginning, all depend on your unflinching, heartfelt generosity, or just unflinching. Or just heartfelt. And, no, sacrifice. Dig at them. On more than just the kind generosity of people like you and me, ladies and gentlemen, but on, yes, our unflinching sacrifice. Dig away. To her right in the dimness the ring glinted on the finger of a gentleman propping his cheek on his hand. He’d shut his eyes. Some of the men, in order to endure this, may have given up the season’s first afternoon of golf. On the women near her she saw the bright, interested faces of people trying to stay awake. A little lad with his finger firmly in a nostril, doing nothing with it, just parking it there. The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking—someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.