In War Times (49 page)

“For now.” She finished piling up hatboxes and gave Sam a long, tight hug. “Sam. It is not your fault.”

“Are you kidding? Of course it is.”

“It’s Hadntz’s fault,” she said.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “Absolutely, completely my fault.”

“It’s my fault too. I could have insisted that we get it out of the house. But I thought that here it would be more secure.”

“All the things I wanted to protect them from—they’ve seen it all. The events that have given me nightmares my whole life. They’re scarred. It was so bad that Megan doesn’t even want to remember it.”

“Those events made you want to do something,” said Bette.

“Yes, and what have I done? Just left that device for my kids to play with. And I’ve put it everywhere I possibly could. The Pacific. Europe.”

“Speaking of Europe,” said Bette, “I told you about the plane, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Something about the Messerschmitt caves.”

“Maybe you can help me figure out what it does.”

“Some other day, Bette. I’m not feeling very good right now.”

The next morning he put the HD10 in a safety deposit box.

E
ARLY IN FEBRUARY
, Sam parked his car next to a mound of depressing gray slush. He and Bette had spent the past few weeks in intense, nonstop preparation for the reunion, and this evening they would do more of the same. As he climbed the front stairs, he scanned the front flower bed for early irises, as usual. No luck.

He heard shouting, and hurried across the porch. He opened the door to find Bette yelling at Brian.

“I can’t believe—oh, Sam! Thank God you’re home. Tell him, Brian.”

“Dad, I’ve enlisted.”

Sam tried to be calm. “With who?”

“The Navy.”

Sam looked back and forth from Bette to Brian. Bette’s face was splotched red with anger and wet with tears. Brian had a stubborn, yet patient look on his face. Sam knew at once he couldn’t be moved, that he did not regret his action. And he knew why. Terence had just come over last week, agitated because his son Doug had joined the Army. Doug’s cousin had died in Vietnam a month earlier, just after Christmas. They all knew the boy, and attended the funeral. Sam kicked himself for not understanding that Brian would want to do the right thing, as he saw it.

“Shall we go sit in the living room?” Once they were seated, he said, “Why the Navy?”

“I want to be on ships. Or maybe fly planes.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?” asked Bette.

“About six months, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you talk to us about it?” asked Sam.

Brian looked at Bette, rolled his eyes, and said, “Isn’t it obvious? Look, it’s what I wanted to do since I was a kid. Now’s the best time—there’s a war.”

“Now is the worst time,” said Bette.

“It’s what Dad did.”

“I was older.”

“Yeah, but you would have done it when you were younger if the war had started, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess, but—”

“But what?”

“It was a different kind of war, Brian,” said Bette.

“You enlisted too, Mom.”

“I did. I—” She looked at Sam for help.

“I enlisted because Germany was a growing threat,” said Sam. “My older brother—”

“Keenan. I know. He died at Pearl Harbor.”

Sam regretted allowing Brian to wear Keenan’s perfectly kept pea jacket and bell-bottoms for the past year. “
This
war just doesn’t make any sense.”

Jill came in from work and closed the front door as Brian was saying, “Communism is a big threat. Once China gets hold of Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia will become communist. We held them back in Korea. That’s what we have to do now.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Jill said, hanging up her coat and scarf.

“You need to speak more respectfully to your brother,” said Bette.

“We’ve been over it a thousand times.”

Brian said, “You’re just a radical hippie, Jill. And you’re a girl. You don’t have to make a choice.”

“I’ll ignore that first part, seeing as how I’m working on a degree in political science. And I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.”

“Right. You want me to sneak away to Canada like your friends did. Well, I won’t. I’ve enlisted.”

Jill stared at Brian. Tears trembled on her eyelids. “I’m sorry.” She went over to him and hugged him tight.

Brian sighed. “I’m sorry, sis,” he said, when she withdrew. “I guess I didn’t think it would be such a shock to everybody.”

Jill perched on the edge of a chair. “But we’ve been talking about it for months. You’ve been accepted at MIT. You’ll get a deferment.”

“Brian, you can do a lot more good once you know something,” said Sam. “I’d had three years of college.”

“The Navy will train me. And pay for my college too.”

“You’ve always known that’s not a problem,” said Bette.

“I’d rather do it this way. I’m going to be a SEAL.”

Bette lit a cigarette and shook out her match. Finally she said, “They’re not going to follow through. That’s just what they told you, Brian.” She got up and looked out the window. “Why do you think those recruiters have been sharking around at your school? That’s what they’re doing, isn’t it?”

“I went to their office,” Brian said.

“Sometimes I hate this country,” said Bette.

“You don’t mean that.” Brian’s eyes were wide with shock.

“Right now, I absolutely do. I hate all countries, all nations, every entity that forces children to go to war. Do you know what the original definition of a nation was to the first United Nations? A nation was a group that had the capacity to wage war. Period. Not, a nation is a unique cultural entity. Not, a nation is your homeland, the place you love because your family lives there. No. A nation is simply that which makes war, and I don’t like it, and I’ve never liked it, and that’s why I enlisted. I don’t think that nations are a good development at all. And this particular military involvement is based on greed, Brian. Pure greed.”

“I don’t believe that!” he said heatedly.

“I can prove it. Unfortunately.” Her cigarette crackled as she drew on it hard. Finally, she said, “I’m going to get you out. I can do that, Brian.”

Brian stared at her. “What do you think I am? Some kind of coward? Do you all want to die in a nuclear war? Where do you think they’ll aim the first missiles, anyway? Kansas? I grew up hiding under my desk at school once a week. I don’t want my kids to have to live that way.”

“She just means that we love you,” said Sam. “We just want to make sure that you have a chance to—” He stopped.

“To live!” said Jill. “We want you to
live
, you idiot! Not get killed like Doug’s cousin!” She burst into tears and hurried from the room. Her sobs became louder as she ran up the stairs.

“That’s what I plan on doing,” he shouted at her. “But I don’t want just
me
to live. Don’t you understand? I want
everyone
to live!” He turned back to Sam and Bette and now Megan, who’d come in from the kitchen. “All of you! I’ll be fine!” He grabbed his coat and left, slamming the door.

Bette watched him go down the walk and sighed. She shook her head. “I’m completely at sea.”

“I wish he’d talked to me first,” said Sam. “I don’t think I ever…glorified things. Did I?”

“He’s always been impetuous.” Bette sank into a chair, thinking. “I’m not sure what I’ll do. They’re training SEALs for covert operations. He’s too young for that. He’s just a kid.”

“He’s a young man, Bette,” said Sam gently.

“SEALS are involved in extreme missions. Dangerous ones, the ones that no one else is remotely qualified to do. The main point, for me, is that it’s not necessary. They’re just using the patriotic feelings of these boys and their families. It’s very cynical.”

“He’ll hate you the rest of his life if you pull any strings. And honestly, I don’t think it would be a very good thing to do. It would remove his dignity.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I know it with every bone in my body. He’s my boy and this is what he’s going to do. Damn this country! Damn all these goddamned idiots! How did this happen? Millions of people died so that this wouldn’t happen again. But war is like quicksand. It just sucks everybody down again. We’ll never get out of war. Never. We’ve been at war this entire century. And all of the other centuries too.”

For a few weeks after Brian left for basic training, Jill was inconsolable. “It’s my fault,” she insisted, even though everyone told her again and again that it was not.

On April 30, Nixon announced his plans to escalate the war by invading Cambodia.

“Yeah,” said Jill at dinner one night. “He got elected because he had a plan to end the war.
This
is the plan! He’s been bombing Cambodia for a year already, did you know that?”

Bette and Sam looked at each other.

“No,” said Sam.

“Yes,” said Bette.

Nixon’s decision ignited the firestorm that had been smoldering throughout the country. Students, and many professors, took over campus buildings in protest. Four important staff members of the National Security Counsel resigned. Huge student marches swept the country.

Nixon’s way of dealing with this was to crack down, to limit protest.

To send out the National Guard.

I
T WAS SATURDAY
, May 2, 1970. The reunion attendees able to come on short notice grumbled about every little thing—the accommodations, the tours Sam and Bette arranged, the food, and the unseasonable heat that had settled over the District. They complained about plane service into Washington and about how everything seemed strangely old and shabby here. They never mentioned, though, the fact that they were in frightening downtown, Washington, D.C., recently the center of some of the most terrible riots in the country. To tell the truth, Sam wasn’t sure what they saw, what they knew, or how discontinuous this reality might seem. They were only here, hopefully, as Wink’s vehicle, though Wink had as yet not shown up.

“It doesn’t seem to me as if they are living in a better world,” Bette commented as they trailed the group up the broad marble stairs of the Natural History Museum.

“Yes, it’s so much better that this place is miserable. They just can’t exactly figure out why.”

“That Jimmy Messner hates his job in China.”

“His wife hates it. Did I tell you that he used all the money we made on the
biergarten
to marry her?”

Bette laughed. “What did you guys do?”

“Nothing. I guess he could afford to pay it back now. They’re not all grumbling. Grease—Bob Crick—is pretty excited about being a consultant for the international moon base project. I sure would be.”

“I’m so sorry.” Bette touched his arm. “You’re still upset about the astronaut fire, aren’t you?”

“I probably always will be. It was a terrible way to die, senseless and unnecessary. I don’t know if our space program will ever get back on track.”

“Is that why you didn’t want to take them to the Air and Space Museum? You just want to show them some stuffed animals instead?”

“I guess that’s kind of silly. I mean, the whole sociopolitical construct is different here. But…they’re here.”

“I heard Mrs. Crick say that this was just a backwater.” Bette laughed. “You don’t have to be from another time to think that. You just have to be a New Yorker.”

“Maybe that’s how they mentally adjust.”

“What do they think when they read the newspapers?” Bette looked around for stragglers, waved to one couple down on the sidewalk.

“Maybe they just see a different newspaper. Different news. That corresponds with their world, where JFK is about to pass the crown on to his brother. Like this city is just a tiny intersection; as if they are somehow able to just ignore small details that don’t fit, such as Nixon is president here and we’re mired in a war that nobody but the generals want. That’s my theory, anyway. Hey, Jake, glad you could make it. Go on inside.”

Bette said, “That’s actually a viable theory. There’s a lot of research showing that people can tune out an awful lot of information if it doesn’t correspond with what they think they ought to be seeing.”

Sam paused on the broad portico at the top of the stairs, turned around to survey the Mall, thick with tourists. The carousel was running gaily just opposite them, but there was no traffic, for some reason, on the one-way street in front of them, which would have been heading toward the Washington Monument, their next tour stop. “Where the hell is Wink?”

“What the hell is that?” Bette pointed down the Mall.

A crowd advanced down the narrow street. As it came closer, the antiwar slogans grew louder.

“It’s Jill!” said Bette, pointing. “See her?”

Sam took off running down the stairs. He caught up with Jill and fell into step with her.

Her long brown hair flowed loosely down her back; her cutoffs were raggedy, she wore no bra beneath her tank top, and her costume was completed by her black armband and black Converse basketball sneakers. Under one arm was a rolled-up
Washington Post
. She did not stop walking, but unscrewed her Army canteen and took a long drink. “Water?”

“No, thanks.”

“What’s the plan?”

“We’re going to sit on Constitution Avenue and stop traffic. Nixon can’t get away with invading Cambodia. It’s barbaric. All those innocent people. They’re going to be driven from their homes, just like the Vietnamese, their children murdered—”

Then Wink was beside them, strolling easily through the noonday haze, mostly bald now with just a halo of pale orange frizz. “Can I go with you?” he asked.

Sam said, “Jill, meet my Army buddy, Wink.”

“You’re Wink,” Jill said. She stopped walking for a second and looked at him closely.

“That’s me.”

Later in the day, Sam climbed uphill from the bus stop, relieved to see a small figure, which was Bette, at the top of the hill. She wore a tropical-print dress and a pink headband, to absorb sweat generated by the heat and humidity. The afternoon sky was that smoggy no-color that promised a spectacular thunderstorm within hours.