A Mother's Heart (17 page)

“Always will?”

“That’s a no-brainer.”

“So…” She sidled up to him, all warm curves and promise. “Want to go wild?”

“You need to ask?”

“Let’s go upstairs…” she spoke slowly, suggestively “…and have missionary sex in a bed with the lights out.”

“Whoa.” He pulled her close, surrounded her leg with both of his. “That’s almost too wild for me.”

“Rather do it on the eighteenth hole at Beden’s Brook Country Club?”

“Too long a trip.” He turned her toward his staircase. “Let’s go crazy and risk the first option.”

“I’ll get the pizza, you get the beer.” She picked up the box and climbed the stairs eagerly, Grant a step behind her. They put the beer and pizza down, already taking off their clothes while tumbling onto his bed.

A lo-o-ong thrilling time later, they sat contentedly side by side against his headboard, having lukewarm pizza and beer. Grant wasn’t sure he’d internalized that they had all the time they wanted now. No limits, no end. She wasn’t about to go to college or back to another life in Chicago. Her life would be here, with him. He’d wait until she was settled in Princeton, then he’d ask her to marry him, plan some spectacular way to do it that she wouldn’t expect, put the ring in the finger hole of a bowling ball or plant it in a Thomas Sweet ice cream cone. Now he still had to pinch himself that this was really happening, but someday soon he no longer would.

“Mmm, I’m stuffed.” She licked her fingers and drained her beer.

“Now
that
was a pizza.” He patted his stomach with satisfaction. “See, Maggie? Vegetables don’t belong on a pizza. They belong in a salad.”

“If you say so.”

“And you…you belong to Princeton. And to Clara.” He kissed her, draped his arm around her shoulders so she was as close as possible to his side. “But most of all you belong to me.”

For my mother

1975

T
HE STACCATO TAPPING
of the keys on Melanie Ames’ portable Smith-Corona was echoed by the monsoon rains beating relentlessly on the tin roof of Mr. Bao’s tea house across the alley from Mel’s open window. Sweat dribbled down her neck below her cropped, dark brown hair as the ceiling fan cranked ineffectually above her, shoving the moist overheated air from one side of the cramped one-room flat to the other. Mel reached for another Marlboro from the pack in the breast pocket of her loose-fitting shirt. Close up, in the yellow pool of the light cast by the lamp on the table, one could see the slender wrists emerging from the sleeves of the shirt, the delicate bone structure of her face. But from a distance, as she moved in and out of the shadows in a disintegrating Saigon, the casual observer might not notice that she was a woman. It was one of the ways she protected herself. She defined it as making herself invisible, something she had learned as a young girl living abroad with her father on diplomatic missions. People tended not to notice or realize she was there because they didn’t expect her to be. And thinking she was not there, they often said or did things she was not meant to hear or see.

She now used that talent in her profession as a journalist. People trusted her: bar girls in the noisy clubs that
lined the teeming alleys of the city; shopkeepers; Navy lieutenants who ran river operations in the Delta; South Vietnamese army officers who talked to her over a beer and a cigarette.

Above the night voices of the rain and the ancient fan she heard the far-off reverberation of an explosion, then another. Despite the South Vietnamese government’s insistence that it could defend Saigon, the word trickling through the city like the overrun sewers in the monsoon was that, as in Yeats’ poem, the center would not hold.

Mel knew it was time to go. But after three years of writing about the country, Vietnam was under her skin. Her pulse beat to the singsong rhythm of its language. And she knew she still had one more story to write in the mounting panic and confusion of impending loss.

Her journalism professor at Columbia had described it as fire in the belly. If you didn’t have it, the burning desire to get the story no matter what the cost, you’d never make it in the news business. And Mel knew she had it.

As she hit the return on the typewriter and rolled out the thin sheet of paper with her latest story, she heard tapping on her door.

“Missy! Telephone call for you.”

It was late, and there were few people left in Saigon close enough to her to call her here. She followed Mrs. Bao down the narrow stairs to the phone in the teahouse.

“Melly, this is Anh. I call because I have no one else to turn to. Please, I need your help.”

Anh was a bar girl Mel had first met when she arrived in Saigon three years before. Where Mel had camouflaged her femininity to work and survive in Saigon, Anh had flaunted hers to the same end. Both had paid a price, and in that had found some common ground to ease the loneliness of life in a war zone, cut off from family. But
Anh had dropped out of sight, and Mel hadn’t seen her for over a year.

Her distress on the phone was palpable. She was insistent, a rising note of desperation in her voice that Mel had never heard before. Anh, the one with the veneer of bravado, the silken note of teasing promise, was voicing the despair whispered all over the city.

“I have to see you. Tonight. Can’t talk on the phone.”

Anh was working and Mel reluctantly agreed to meet her at the bar. She threw on a poncho and hurried the few blocks in the rain to meet her friend.

When she arrived she bought a drink for each of them to appease Anh’s boss and Anh sat with her at a battered, sticky table. The place, once swarming with American servicemen and throbbing with Motown music, was nearly deserted.

Anh reached into her purse and pushed a photograph across the table to Mel. She looked at it, a smiling image of Anh in traditional Vietnamese dress (not the miniskirt and halter top that was her working outfit). In her arms was a baby.

“Who?” Mel asked.

“My daughter, Tien.”

Mel knew that she and Anh had secrets, pieces of their lives they hadn’t shared with one another. But this piece stunned her. Anh, at nineteen, was like a kid sister to twenty-three-year-old Mel. How could she not know Anh had a daughter?

“Where is she?”

“In the St. Agnes Orphanage on the outskirts of the city. I—I cannot care for her. Every month I send money. I thought, when I first left her there, it would be only until the end of the war. But now, I think there will be no end for me. That is why I am turning to you.

“I am thinking, if I can get her out of Vietnam to America, you can find her a family who would care for her. She is half-American. She will have no life here.”

“Does her father know about her?”

Anh shook her head. “He died before she was born.”

“I don’t know what I can do, Anh.”

“You are smart, Melly. You have power—your boss in America, your father. Help me. I beg you. There is nothing I am asking for myself. Only for Tien. Please!”

Anh clutched Mel’s hand, and in her touch Mel felt a force that she knew would stop at nothing to save her daughter. Mel had already witnessed that force in her friend.

Anh had once saved Mel’s life. The first year she was in Saigon, Mel had made mistakes, not knowing whom to trust, where it was safe for a woman to walk alone. She’d been grabbed, dragged into an alley. Anh had seen her attacker, followed them and put the knife she always carried against the attacker’s throat, spewing a string of expletives and threats. The boy let go of Mel and ran.

It was after that experience that Mel cut her hair and took to wearing baggy clothes.

Mel knew she could not refuse to help.

“Take me tomorrow to St. Agnes. I’ll see what I can do.”

The next morning before she met Anh at the orphanage, Mel made some calls. She learned that some American agencies were indeed trying to arrange for adoptions of Vietnamese babies, especially those with American fathers. At least she could try to get Tien onto the list.

The morning rains had eased some when they arrived at St. Agnes. The woman at the door greeted Anh with a cold familiarity. It was clear to Mel that, while the children might be welcomed here, their mothers had earned only disapproval.

The stench of unchanged diapers assaulted Mel when the woman who had greeted them opened the door to Tien’s ward. Two dozen cribs, most shared by two babies, filled the room. Mel saw a nun, harried but caring, moving from crib to crib changing diapers. It was quiet. No babbling or even crying followed them as they walked down the aisle to Tien’s crib.

Anh reached for her daughter and murmured to her. The little girl, about six months old, was thin and pale, with dark eyes that moved solemnly from Anh to Mel and back again to her mother. She didn’t smile in recognition, and Mel had no idea how often Anh had been able to visit.

They took the little girl to a small room where Anh bathed her and dressed her in fresh clothes she had brought with her. Then she fed her with some formula she’d asked Mel to buy.

“They do the best they can with so many children. But I know it’s not enough. And can you imagine what they will face when the Americans are gone? You see why I have to get her out!”

Mel left Anh to spend a few more minutes alone with her daughter and wandered through the maze of rooms in the building that had once been one of the villas housing some expatriate merchant during the French occupation. Its former elegance was lost in the aging, dilapidated rooms now crowded with nearly four hundred children. Unlike the nursery, the rooms filled with older children echoed with the shouts and energy of kids cooped up after too many days of rain.

In one room she saw a small group clustered around a man chatting animatedly with them as he examined throats and listened to heart beats.

Mel was surprised to find a doctor. Behind her, the Mother Superior spoke, as if anticipating her question.

“He’s Doctor Phillip Coughlin. One of your countrymen. An ex-Marine who came back to help us care for the children. He’s a gift from God.” Then with a wry smile, she added, “And he knows it.”

With a swish of her skirts, she walked away.

Mel was waiting for Anh in the vestibule when Dr. Coughlin emerged like the Pied Piper, trailed by several of the children.

He stuck out his hand. “Phil Coughlin. Are you here to help?”

He flashed a smile, his brilliant blue eyes meeting her hazel ones with a direct and intense gaze. Mel imagined that he was one of those people who could walk into a room, address a crowd of people and have each one believe he was speaking only to him or her. He was arresting. But rather than finding it attractive, Mel was uncomfortable with his attention focused on her. She felt far too visible. Too vulnerable.

“No. Rather, I’m here to help one of the children. I’m trying to arrange for her adoption.”

“Who the hell are you?” Coughlin’s welcoming charm had been abruptly short-circuited.

“Mel Ames.
Newsweek
correspondent.”

Coughlin was silent for a moment.

“I know your work,” he said thoughtfully. It wasn’t clear
what
he thought of her work, however.

“You’re younger than I imagined. And I didn’t know you were a woman.”

Mel was used to both perceptions, but they still made her bristle. She had trained herself not to take the bait and simply smiled.

“You could do something more with that pen of yours, you know. You’ve got the talent, and you’ve probably got more of an audience than you realize.”

She didn’t like people telling her how to do her job. She was used to the military, the politicians telling her what she should write, how she should slant an article. She never listened to them. And she had no intention of listening to Phil Coughlin.

“You say you’re trying to help one baby. Why that one? Why only one?”

“I’ve made a commitment to a friend to help her get her daughter on an adoption list. It’s a personal request from someone I care about.”

“You could save this whole orphanage.”

“What are you talking about? You’re as naive as my friend. I don’t even know if I can get
one
child out of here, let alone hundreds.”

“You underestimate your own power. Or you are incredibly selfish, to see only the suffering of one you know and ignore the others.”

“I’ve seen the others. I’m not blind to the need here.”

“Then
do something
about it! Of all the people who have walked in here with their hearts on their sleeve bearing boxes of formula or clothing donated from their neighbors, you can do more with your words than a hundred of them!”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell the world about this place—and the tens of others in the city—caring for the children abandoned by their sons and shunned by their mothers’ people. Tell the world.”

And he walked away, dismissing her.

Despite her dislike of Phillip Coughlin and her resistance to being told what to do, Mel admitted to herself that rescuing one child was not enough. The already desperate conditions in the orphanage, coupled with the uncertain fate of the country, were overwhelming. She still
doubted that her words alone could make a difference, but now that she had seen St. Agnes she didn’t think she could forget it.

She spent the rest of the morning talking to the Reverend Mother, got a list of contacts and went to the
Newsweek
office in the Hotel Continental on Catinat Street to start making phone calls. She talked to adoption agencies, government officials, her editor in New York.

Within a few days she had accomplished her original mission—one of the agencies agreed to include Tien on its adoption list, provided Anh was willing to sign away her maternal rights. Mel found Anh at the bar that evening.

“Were you able to find a way to save Tien?” Anh’s face was tight with hope.

Mel nodded and handed her friend the papers she would need to sign.

“Do you understand what this means? Relinquishing your rights to your daughter?”

“I have no choice, Melly. This is what I must do.” She hesitated. “One more thing. I can still see her at St. Agnes, say goodbye?”

“I’m sure Reverend Mother wouldn’t keep you away.”

Anh’s hand trembled as she put her signature on the pale yellow sheets Mel placed on the table. When she was done, she blew on the ink, quickly folded the papers and thrust them into Mel’s hands.

“Take them away from me before I change my mind.” She got up and strode away from Mel without looking back. At the bar she slid next to one of the few customers, whispered in his ear and then led him onto the dance floor. As Mel left, she saw a vacant, haunted look in Anh’s eyes as she melted into the stranger’s embrace.

That night in her flat Mel pounded out her story—the
desperate conditions in the orphanages, the excruciating choices and personal cost of the war to women like Anh, the thousands of children who were innocent victims and the individuals who were racing against the approaching North Vietnamese army to rescue them.

She had gotten permission from the Reverend Mother to bring a photographer to the orphanage and had managed to convince one of her
Newsweek
colleagues to take the photos. The next morning she sent the film and the story via courier to her editor in New York. She went back to her flat, thinking she was done.

But she was mistaken. In the short time that she had spent at St. Agnes, its children and the adults caring for them had affected her more than anyone else she had encountered in Vietnam. She found a reason every day to return to the orphanage—sometimes meeting Anh there as she spent her final days with her daughter and other times arriving with whatever she could scrounge from the dwindling number of expatriates in the city.

When her article appeared the following week, it set off an avalanche of concern for the orphans of Vietnam and launched an extraordinary concerted effort to rescue them. Mel was astounded. Her years in Vietnam had hardened the armor around her soul. What she had seen and reported on had accumulated and weighed upon her—young men with broken bodies and shattered minds; an unseen enemy hiding among the innocent; villages burned; trees stripped bare. She had not anticipated that this story of hers would have such impact.