Once a Warrior (21 page)

She snorted indelicately at that last. “So you waited to tell me in person.”

“I had to come to you whole.”

Anne-Marie thought of all the soldiers she’d seen who were missing an arm or a leg or an eye. Or burned so badly that their own families would have trouble recognizing them. And then there were the men who looked physically fine but whose minds had been permanently scarred. In a way, their wounds were the deepest and most devastating of all.

She said a small, silent prayer of thanksgiving that Mike had been spared before tipping her head back and smiling up at him tremulously. “And now that you’re here?”

He tightened his hold. “Now I’m asking you to marry me. And to go home with me when I’m—”

“But—” Reeling at how fast this was all happening, she said the first thing that popped into her head. “America has such bad laws about the strangers!”

“Strangers?”  Now it was his turn to play the parrot.

“People from other countries.”  Before he could correct her erroneous impression by telling her that America was the greatest melting pot on earth, she bombarded him with her other concerns. “What would I be?  French or American?  Would I be able to go to school?  I want to become a history teacher, like my mother. And what about
your
mother?”

“My mother?”

She dropped her gaze. “How would she feel about her son marrying a French girl?”

“If I love you, so will she.”  That settled, he tried to answer her other questions in the order she’d asked them. “You’ll always be French by birth, but as my wife you’ll have the opportunity to become an American citizen. And yes, you can ago to school. I’m planning to go too, on the GI Bill that our Congress has passed, because I want to be a lawyer.”

He felt his heart swell as she lifted her eyes, her beautiful amber-brown eyes, and said haltingly, “My father was a lawyer.”

“If I could bring even one of them back for you, I would.”

She coughed rustily to clear her throat. “I know.”

“But all I can do is offer you a new family. The family we’ll make together.”  He gently cupped the sides of her face. “So, what do you say?  Will you marry me?”

“
Oui
,” she whispered. And then, just so there would be no mistaking what her answer was, she practically shouted, “
Oui, oui, oui
!”

Mike didn’t need an interpreter to tell him that Anne-Marie had just said “yes.”  He understood her perfectly. And when she dropped her shoes and her purse and flung her arms around his neck, he knew that the war was truly over and that their life together was about to begin.

PART TWO

PASSION FLOWER

CHAPTER  ELEVEN

Kansas City, Missouri; 1968

“Good evening, my fellow Americans.”  President Lyndon Baines Johnson looked earnestly into the camera as he began his televised address to the nation.

Catherine Brown hated coming home to an empty house. Especially on Sunday—the loneliest day of the week if one was leading the “single married life” of a soldier’s wife. So she’d turned on her portable TV when she got back from that student teacher’s weekend seminar, more to keep her company while she went through her mail and scrounged up something to eat than because she was interested in the news. After all, the news never changed. If the networks weren’t showing “peaceniks” like her younger brother burning their draft cards in public or marching on the White House chanting “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” they were broadcasting footage of soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam.

But now, still in shock, she was sitting on the sofa with Johnny’s letter in her hand, staring vacantly at the black-and-white screen.

“Tonight,” the President said in his slow Texas drawl, “I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia . . .”

Peace
?  Cat frowned as the word penetrated the fog of despair that surrounded her. She blinked her eyes and looked around her, noting almost absently that the late March sun had set and the living room of her two-bedroom rental house had grown dark. The only light came from the television that sat on the four-wheeled stand in the corner.

“We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations . . .”

She needed to move too, Cat realized numbly, but she was so tired, so confused, so sad, that she couldn’t make herself do it. Her legs felt like lead and her arm was so heavy that she couldn’t raise it to turn on the lamp. Even her tears seemed to be dammed up in her eyes.

“With America’s sons in the fields far away . . .”

Johnny
!  Cat sucked in a sharp breath and curled her hands into fists, crumpling his one-page letter. Because he wasn’t much of a writer, they usually exchanged cassettes to play on their matching recorders. It felt awkward at times, speaking of her love for him and her dreams for their future into a machine, and she absolutely hated the way her voice sounded on tape. But it was always comforting to listen to her husband’s deep voice expressing his own feelings and emotions in return. She hadn’t heard from him in a couple of weeks, though, so finding a letter from him when she got home had come as a pleasant surprise.

Certainly more pleasant than the shock that had followed it.

As the memory lanced through her, Cat finally moved, folding her arms across her stomach and doubling over until her head almost touched her knees. She had just finished reading Johnny’s letter and was wondering what to make of it when the knock came. Thinking it was probably one of the neighborhood kids selling tickets for the school carnival or candy bars for their baseball team, she had instead opened the door to a man in uniform who had solemnly introduced himself before saying those awful words, “It is my duty to inform you . . .”

“ . . . with America’s future under challenge right here at home . . .” the President continued.

Cat shut her eyes against the wave of guilt that swept over her. She was supposed to see Johnny in Hawaii next month for his R & R, and it was a trip she had really been looking forward to. Partly because they’d never had a honeymoon to speak of—only an overnight stay at the Phillips Hotel, courtesy of her parents, before he’d helped her move into the house and then left her to arrange their furniture on her own. And partly because final exams had kept her from meeting him in Hong Kong during his first tour of duty. But mostly because she’d hoped they could start all over again after their bitter arguments during his thirty-day leave home about his volunteering for a second tour in Vietnam.

“ . . . with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day . . .”

Three days ago, the Air Force chaplain had said. Now she wondered what she’d been doing at the time. It almost killed her to realize that, three days ago, while she was either giving a spelling test to her second-graders at Hale Cook School or working part time as a sales clerk at Harzfeld’s to help defray her college expenses, Johnny may well have been dying in some faraway jungle.

Sitting up, Cat opened her tear-blurred eyes and looked at their wedding picture, which she proudly displayed on the wicker end table for all the world to see.

Images of the past filled her mind as she studied the smiling bride in white satin and lace and the square-jawed groom resplendent in his dress blues. Johnny and she had married a year-and-a-half ago, after he’d graduated from pilot training and before he’d shipped out to Vietnam the first time. He’d wanted them to wait until he finished his stint—just in case something happened, she was sure—but she simply wouldn’t hear of it. She had known him all her life, had loved him since she was a little girl in pigtails, and she believed with fairy-tale certainty that he was her Prince Charming.

As she reached out to touch his likeness behind the cool, unyielding glass, it suddenly seemed impossible that his heart could have stopped beating without her own breaking in half. But in retrospect, she realized that she had felt nothing. Neither a falter nor a fissure. Which told her that one of two things had happened. Either the ties that bound them had been sundered by their physical distance and differences that seemed almost petty at the moment. Or, he was still alive.

She retracted her hand and drew a shuddering breath, clinging like a drowning woman to that hope.

“ . . . I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.”

How long had she been sitting there? Cat wondered now. She squinted down at her slim gold watch—a wedding present from Johnny—and was astonished to see that nearly three hours had passed since her world had been turned on its head. Then she reached up woodenly to switch on the table lamp and smoothed out his letter so she could read it again.

The black ink that he’d used seemed to dance before her confused eyes as she scanned the words that he’d scrawled on the thin airmail sheet. It was a short letter, only three paragraphs long. He’d spent the first thanking her for sending those cotton socks to help keep his feet dry and the packages of grape Kool-Aid that made the drinking water more palatable, and the second telling her how his plane’s computer had fouled up and thrown a bomb into the boonies.

“Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President,” Lyndon Johnson said in a startling conclusion to his speech.

But it was the third paragraph, especially the last sentence, which completely baffled Cat. She read it over and over, struggling to make sense of it. Then she stopped, trying to fathom what kind of terrible premonition had prompted such an urgent plea on Johnny’s part.

If
anything
—underlined twice—happened to him, he’d written, if he was reported as missing in action or presumed dead, she was to contact a man in Saigon by the name of Cain. Whether Cain was the man’s first or last name, he hadn’t said. He’d just scribbled an address on Truong Minh Gian Street, then closed by saying, “And remember, no matter what, you’re the only woman I ever really loved.”

Cat was still staring at the letter, dumbfounded, when she made her decision. If it meant that much to Johnny, she would contact this Cain. But first, she would call her parents.

* * * *

Mike Scanlon elbowed that messy stack of papers aside before setting the plates he’d carried in from the dining room on the kitchen counter. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that boy, but I’m sick and tired of these stupid leaflets littering up every room of the house.”

Anne-Marie Scanlon shrugged and began scraping garbage into the disposal. “Think of him as a modern-day Thomas Paine.”

But her husband refused to be placated. “Thomas Paine, my ass.”  Picking up the top sheet, he read the smudgy mimeographed words aloud. “‘Make Love, Not War.’  What kind of crap
is
this, anyway?”

“Free speech.”  Still infused with an immigrant’s straightforward patriotism, she ranked the Constitution right up there with the Bible and Dr. Benjamin Spock on her list of required readings.

“Free, hell.”  He balled up the leaflet and sent it sailing across the kitchen. Two points, he congratulated himself when it landed in the wastebasket. “Who paid for the paper and printing?”

“Drew did.”

“With what?”

The plates rinsed, she reached for the silverware. “With the money he collected at the peace rally in Volker Park.”

“And where did all those political Katzenjammer Kids get their money?” he retorted as he began filling the dishwasher that had been installed when they’d remodeled the kitchen. They’d spent a small fortune having walls knocked out to turn three rooms into one and innumerable layers of linoleum pried up to expose the original pine floor. Still, his wife insisted that the family sit down together every Sunday evening at the dining room table that was graced by her grandmother’s candelabra. “From the hardworking parents they take such delight in denigrating as ‘Tools of Capitalism’, that’s where.”

Sensing another futile argument about their son’s anti-war activism in the offing, Anne-Marie turned off the water and dried her hands on a towel. Then she reached up to run her fingers through the sideburns he’d let grow a little at her urging. Despite the silver that was beginning to fleck his hair and the fine lines that already flanked his eyes, he was as handsome as ever.

Mike responded to her caress by pulling her into an embrace. He rested his chin on the crown of her head, while his arms slid around her waist and linked at the small of her back. It never ceased to amaze him, how much strength and comfort he drew from her slender body. Or how easily she could distract him with a gentle touch or her trademark sass.

“It’s a nice suggestion, no?”  Her French accent had faded somewhat, but her voice was as soft and smoky as it had been that long-ago August day when he’d first heard it.

“What?”

“‘Make Love, Not War.’”

“Don’t humor me, Anne-Marie.”  But knowing she’d outmaneuvered him yet again, Mike tipped her chin up and bent his head to cover her mouth with his own.

Nearly twenty-three years of marriage hadn’t cooled their passions.
Au contraire
. As their family and friends liked to tease, they still had the “hots” for each other. They also had three healthy children, a comfortable old Craftsman-style home just south of Loose Park, and careers that both challenged and fulfilled them.

Now if their son would only quit threatening to flee to Canada after he graduated from high school in June in order to avoid the draft . . .

Despite his success as a lawyer, Mike was beginning to think that he was a complete failure as a father. At least where Drew was concerned, anyway. There were times, like this evening, when he wished the boy would go ahead and make good on his threat. Lord knew, he wouldn’t miss those dinner-table diatribes that invariably left him reaching for the Alka-Seltzer!  Then there were other times, like late last night when he’d peered into Drew’s room and watched him sleeping the innocent sleep of a child, when the thought of losing his son damn near reduced him to tears.