Message from Nam (19 page)

“Is that how they do it out there? They just
mail
you the diploma? How disappointing.”

“Not really. It’s alright.” Paxton’s voice was almost completely toneless.

“Why aren’t you graduating in June?” There was a tone of faint accusation.

“Oh … I’ve had a lot on my mind this spring. And I’ve been pretty busy.”

“Doing what?” She knew better than to continue to ask if she was still going out with Peter. It just set them at each other’s throats. And she had even suspected for the past year that they might even be living together. As long as she didn’t try nonsense like that in Savannah. What she did in California was up to her. She was over twenty-one, and Beatrice Andrews was smart enough to know she couldn’t stop her. “Going to too many parties?” She was just making idle chitchat.

“Not really.”

“Well, if you’re not graduating in June, when are you coming back to Savannah?”

She sighed. “I don’t know … I don’t know anything.” And she had to fight back tears as she said it, but Beatrice Andrews didn’t hear it “If I have to go to school, I can’t start work until September.” She had been planning to work for the
Morning Sun.
But she had also been planning to get married sometime that year and now that wasn’t going to happen either. Nothing was. Nothing was ever going to happen to her again. And in the midst of it all, Savannah seemed totally unimportant. “I don’t know when I’ll come home, Mama.”

“Well, try and come home for a few days this summer. Little James Carl is so cute you won’t believe it.” It seemed odd to hear her getting excited about her grandson, but Paxton was pleased for her. Even that didn’t matter to her anymore. The hope of any semblance of a relationship between them was long since over.

“I’ll see how school goes.” But she was only pacifying her. She had no real desire to go there. She was just planning to finish school, go to work, and maybe, if she had no choice, she would go to Savannah for Christmas.

But most of the time, she didn’t think of them. All she thought of was Peter, as she tried to finish her courses. There were dozens of papers she had left undone, tests she had to retake. As she looked back over her work for the past four or five months, it was miraculous that they were willing to let her graduate at all, but when the dean had called her in and wanted to know why her grades had slipped, she had told him about Peter dying in Da Nang, and as far as they were concerned that explained it.

She was almost beginning to get a grip on it in June, when she was coming home from the library late one night, and heard a piercing scream. She looked around her, and a few people nearby were running. She couldn’t begin to imagine what had happened. An accident? A demonstration? Other people had heard it too, and people began asking each other what had happened. And it was like 1963 again, people were crying and running, clutching radios and hurrying inside to watch television, and Paxton could feel a chill run down her spine as she watched them. She didn’t know what or who, but it was obvious that something terrible had happened.

“What is it?” she asked someone standing next to her as they crowded around a girl with a radio, sitting on the steps and crying.

“RFK … he’s been shot … in L.A.…”

“Kennedy?” Someone nodded. Another Kennedy. Another death. His brother and then Martin Luther King and Viet Nam … and Queenie … and Peter … and now this … it was too much, too often, too long … and too much to hurt for. They had all cared so much, about so many things, and now all the people they had cared about were dying. It was a hard way to grow up, to grow old, to give up hope, to become a “grown-up.” And who cared anyway? Who wanted what they had to give? What was it that was so sacred that it killed everyone who cared. The torch had finally come to burn everyone’s fingers.

“Is he?… Shhh!” The radio was turned up louder and the announcer’s voice cracked as he said, “Robert Kennedy is dead.” He had been shot as he gave his victory speech after the primary in California. He had won, and lost, and died, all in one moment. And so had his children and his wife, and the people who loved him.

Paxton listened and turned away, and she walked home, leaving her books on the steps of the library. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want them.

She sat in her kitchen that night, alone, thinking, looking out the window, and knowing there was nothing left for her here, nothing she wanted to do or learn, or take with her. She had learned all she wanted to, and the lessons had come dear. And all she felt now was sadness. Not grief, not pain, not despair, just sadness. Robert Kennedy was gone, and too many others had gone with him. At that precise moment twenty-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-one men had died in Viet Nam.

That night Paxton packed a few of her things, and she arranged the rest of her and Peter’s things, neatly in the closet. In the morning, she drove into town and went to see Ed Wilson at the paper. He looked at her as she came in, and saw the toll it had all taken on her. Everyone at the paper was going crazy over Kennedy’s assassination. Another Kennedy. Another brother. Another victim. But Paxton seemed oddly aloof from it, strangely cool, and sadly older. She was a beautiful girl, but she had aged. The years were in her eyes, in the way she moved, in the things she didn’t say but felt. She had lost too much, and believed too strongly. She had believed in good, and happiness, and trust. And they had all been lies. The happy ending doesn’t always come. And Camelot does not go on forever. For anyone. You grow old, you die, or sometimes you die young. Too many had in her short lifetime, and Ed Wilson, with his wealth of years, and his own sorrow over his son, felt sorry for her.

“What can I do for you, Paxton?” He looked serious, but he smiled at her as he leaned over and kissed her. “You’re getting too thin. You need to come in and have dinner with us more often.”

“I left Peter’s things at the house just now, in Berkeley.” The way she said it seemed strange to him, and he looked at her oddly.

“Are you going somewhere?” He frowned as he watched, there was something so sad in her eyes, he wondered if anyone would ever touch it.

“That depends on you,” she said calmly. “I’ve decided to leave school.”

“I thought you got an extension to graduate in September.” She had told him that when she’d gotten it and he was relieved for her. He knew how important finishing school was to her, so her announcement that morning surprised him. “What’s this all about, Paxton?” He almost sounded like a father, and she smiled. In the past four years, he had been more than a father to her, and she wondered if he would give her what she wanted now. But if he didn’t, she knew someone else would.

“I want a job.”

“You have a job here anytime. You know that. But doesn’t it make more sense to stay at Berkeley this summer and get your degree? What’s the hurry?”

“I’m not going to finish school.” She knew that morning when she left, she would never go back there. She had taken the only things of Peter’s that she wanted. Three poetry books he had given her, the watch he had worn since he was a boy that the Wilsons had given her and she wore now, and his dog tags. “I want to work for you, Mr. Wilson.”

“Here?” Something in her eyes told him that there was more to it than she was saying. And he was right. She shook her head quietly when he asked her.

“No, not here. Not yet anyway. I want to go to Saigon.” She said it quietly and calmly, but his eyes widened as he watched her. She wanted to go for all the wrong reasons. To find Peter. To die. To avenge him perhaps. Or maybe just because she had lost faith in her own country. He knew only too well that this second Kennedy’s death, so soon after Martin Luther King’s, was going to shake the nation’s youth to their core, and it was obvious that it had already shaken Paxton. She had a broken look in her eyes, and she was sitting ramrod straight in his office, a girl who had given everything up, or lost it all, or maybe both. But whatever she wanted to do in Saigon, for whatever reason, he was not going to help her.

“That’s out of the question.”

“Why?” Her eyes shot bullets into his, and he could see that however wrong she may have been, she meant it.

“Because that’s a place for seasoned correspondents. For God’s sake, Paxton, that’s a war zone. You know better than anyone what can happen there. And even if we never send you to the hot spots, you can get blown up sitting in a bar, or from ‘friendly fire,’ just like Peter.” The mere mention of him hurt them both, but he knew he had to say it, for her own sake. And nothing she could say to him would change his mind, or so he thought, but she was bitterly persistent.

“There are people going there to fight and be killed who are four years younger than I am.”

“Is that what you want?” Tears filled his eyes as he asked her. “To die in the same place he did? Is that your gift to him? Is that all you can do with your life, Paxton? I know how you feel, you and your whole generation think this country is going to hell in a handbasket and right now I’m not sure I disagree with you. But going to Saigon on a suicide mission is
not
the answer.”

“I want to tell people here the truth, whatever that truth is. I want to see it for myself. I want to know what’s going on, without having it fed to me on the evening news. I’m sick and tired of sitting in a library for the rest of my life, nice and safe, reading about other people dying.”

“So you
want
to die, is that it?” He was trying to force it out of her, but if that was the truth, she wouldn’t admit it.

“No, I want the truth. Don’t you? Don’t you want to know why he really died? What’s
really
going on over there? I want to see us get the hell out of Viet Nam, and I want to know why we haven’t gotten out yet. And if I go down there, I’m not a tired old correspondent with jaded political views and an ax to grind and an ass to protect, and no, I don’t want to die, but if I do, so what, maybe if I die, it’ll be for a good cause, the cause of truth, maybe then it might even be worth it.”

“Paxton …” He shook his head from behind his desk. “It’ll never be worth it. Nothing was worth Peter dying for. And it won’t be worth your dying for that misery over there either. I was wrong. You are right. And so was Peter. We don’t belong there. I don’t think we can win. I’d like to see us get out too. And I never thought I’d hear myself say that. I met with the new Secretary of Defense in Washington last week, Clark Clifford, and he’s convinced me. If you want a story, go talk to him. Sure, I’ll give you a job. Go anywhere you want in this country and get a story. Be a roving reporter, a troubleshooter, be anything you want, but I’m not sending you to Viet Nam. If anything happened to you there, I couldn’t live with myself. We owe it to Peter’s memory to take good care of you, and you owe him that too.” He looked sternly at Paxton, but it didn’t convince her.

“I owe him more than that.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the man who had almost been her father-in-law but now never would be. “And so do you.” She stood up with a determined look. “Mr. Wilson, I’m not going to sit here like a coward, waiting for other people to find the answers. I’m going, whether you send me or not. If I have to, I’ll go on my own, and sell my stories from there. Maybe someone will want them.” He stood up and faced her across his desk, as he reached out and touched her arm.

“Paxton, don’t …”

“I have to.” He stood there for a long time, looking at her, knowing she had changed since just being the girl who was going to marry his son. She had grown up, the hard way, with heartbreak and grief and bitter disappointment.

“Can’t I reason with you? Can’t you wait? Think about it for six months. Maybe we’ll even be out of there by then.” He sounded hopeful.

“We won’t be. They’re lying to us. That’s what I want to see for myself now.”

“Paxton, all you’ve done is work for the paper here in the summer, you have no idea what it’s like being a correspondent in a place like that. It takes years to prepare for an assignment of that kind.”

She smiled sadly as she listened. “Funny, they don’t take years to prepare the grunts, do they. They just ship them over to die, ready or not. I’m ready, Mr. Wilson, I know I am.” And a part of him knew that she had the right attitude. She was sad, she was tough, she was smart, and she cared … because of Peter. The old newspaperman in him was convinced, but the father of his son felt he had to do everything to stop her. “Will you send me?” She looked him straight in the eye, and he felt like crying again. He wanted to do anything but send her, but he knew that she meant business. And if he didn’t send her, someone else would, someone who would send her right into the combat zones and maybe get her killed. Maybe if he hired her, he could protect her.

“I’ll agree if you swear to me you’ll do just what we ask for, and follow orders to the letter.” Her eyes lit up like the Fourth of July, and for the first time in months she looked happy. “Did you hear me?” He spoke to her like a wayward child who was being allowed to go to the county fair, but only under certain conditions.

“No garden parties and no fashion shows, right?” They both laughed. They were not likely to be the daily fare in Saigon.

“You’re really serious about this, Pax? You’re sure I can’t dissuade you?” He sat down heavily in his desk chair again, with a defeated look as she shook her head. And she beamed. She had won. All the night before she had known what she had to do, and for the first time in a long time, if she wasn’t happy, at least she felt peaceful.

“I know I’ll do a good job for you. I swear.” She sounded enthusiastic and excited and alive again. In a way he was relieved for her, but he was also frightened. He would have preferred it if she had looked like that because of a boy she had met at the library. Even at Berkeley, that would have been safer.

“I’m not worried about your doing a good job. I’m worried about your ass,” he confessed bluntly. “You’d better take care of it, or I’ll come over and kick it myself, and I mean it.” And then he groaned and ran a hand through his white hair that was so much like Peter’s. They had the same hairline, the same look, the same eyes, but Paxton tried not to see it. “Marjorie is going to kill me for this. And Gabby … oh, my God … I almost forgot.” He looked horrified as he looked at Paxton. “She had the baby last night … a little boy. They’re calling him Peter.” It wasn’t surprising. Nothing was anymore, and Paxxie was happy for her. A life for a life. As Robert Kennedy left the world, at the hands of a madman, Gabby’s little boy entered it, with a life full of hope before him, and Peter looked on, wishing them well, and lending him his name, because it was no longer needed. The spirits came and went, changing places, changing hands, some dreams ending as others began. It was strange to think of.