Hayes lifted the boy in his arms and they climbed the stairs to a spacious second-floor office where a man with thin, graying hair listened attentively as Gerard explained the situation.
"And you would like me to act as an intermediary?" he said.
"If you would be so kind," Gerard answered with the slight lilt of sarcasm old friends use with each other. Very quickly, May and Hayes chimed in to say how grateful they would be as well, and it was settled.
"My venerated friend," the ambassador began when An's father came on the line, "I have here before me in my office your grandson, quite well and healthy, and the good people who have rescued him." He gave a brief account of what had happened, emphasizing Hayes's determination to return the child.
The ambassador told them, "He has asked that you bring the boy to his villa. He has agreed to allow his daughter to speak to you in his presence."
May and Hayes exchanged glances, May's more triumphant than Hayes's.
The Le family lived in a walled villa on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street near the diplomatic quarter. Driving down the tree-lined street. May noticed shadows swooping in and out of the trees, flickering in the street lights.
"Bats," Hayes told her. "They live in the plantain trees." May shuddered.
A servant was waiting at the gate. He held it open long enough for them to hurry through, then bolted it with a loud scraping. They followed him along a path that led to the house.
An's formidable father waited for them. A small, fragile man with the eyes of a hawk, he ushered them into a dimly lit courtyard. At that moment, Hao's mother rushed to her son, her cry hanging in the night air.
She held the boy close to her, her eyes closed as if in prayer. Then she opened them and saw Hayes and wavered. Her beauty was soft and luminous and complex.
The child was turned over to an amah. Hayes stood, bowed, and spoke in French.
"We beg your forgiveness," he began, addressing the mother but including her father. "Hooligans who learned we wished to see you took your child. Our first concern was to return the child safely to you, so we did as they asked. Hao was frightened, but he was not harmed. He is a brave little boy. We are very sorry that this should have happened. I should never wish harm to come to the child of my brother, or to the mother of his child. Nor would my wife, whom I would like to present to you."
May bowed, lowering her eyes before the father's piercing glance. "You are Chinese," he said, in ragged Mandarin.
"My mother is Chinese," she responded, in properly low tones. "My father was an American. Like your grandson, I am a child of two cultures."
He turned his back on her. She understood the disdain Southeast Asians feel for the Chinese, for mixed races even more. There was nothing she could say to him.
Le Tien An bowed to May. "Thank you for returning my son. It was kind of you, and I am grateful with all my heart." She turned to Hayes, then, and said, "Thank you, the brother of my son's father. I have received your messages, and those of your mother in California, and I must say to you that it is the wish of my father and my mother to stay in this land where our family has lived for many generations. Elder Brother died in the war with Japan, Second Brother was killed while serving with the French forces, and Youngest Brother left one year ago and we have not heard from him. I am all that is left to my parents. They have accepted my son, Hao. They revere our country and can never leave, nor can I leave them."
"We believe Saigon will fall," Hayes began, a pleading note in his voice, "and we feel certain that the son of an American soldier will face great hardships under a Communist regime, as will his mother and her family. All we wish is to ensure your safety, to try to make certain my brother's family is spared unnecessary suffering. In a letter written only days before his death, my brother asked me to care for his family. He wished to bring you to our country. I loved and honored my brother, and I am pledged to do this for him. If you do not wish to come to America, perhaps you would consider France . . ."
The old man stood, anger rising. Hayes saw it and finished, rapidly, handing An one of his cards, "This is very important. All you have to do is to let me know and I will arrange everything. We want you to know that you can trust us, that we honor you and . . ."
The father stepped in front of his daughter, his small legs spread, and slapped the card to the earth. "Enough," he said with a flourish in English. "You leave. Now."
"Please, sister . . ." May tried, reaching out to An, but the old man and his servant intervened, pushing at them.
"I'll be back," Hayes called to An as they left.
The ceiling fan rasped as it turned, stirring the heat above them. They lay on their backs in the bed, trying not to listen to the fan, wanting and needing to sleep. They were exhausted from the long flight, drained by the encounter with Sam, with their meeting with Hao and An. It was too much to grasp, she could feel the tension in the muscles in her chest, her arms. She shook her hands to try to loosen them.
"Are you all right?" Hayes wanted to know.
"If I could just stop thinking, I would be. Everything keeps whirling in my head."
"Sam," he said.
"Yes Sam—my God, Hayes, I thought Bangkok was as bad as it could get, but this . . . stealing Andy's boy, what could bring him to this venality? And Hao and An, and her father, and Gerard and the ambassador, why would they help us?"
The fan made several grinding rotations while she thought, and when she spoke again, she started in mid-sentence, ". . . in Hawaii that last time, when he talked me into going into China through Burma, I knew something had changed with Sam—he was doing a lot of dope, for one thing. Bells should have gone off in my head when they came to my house, after only two hours in the Islands, with a stash of Maui pot. Sam was already stoned, and later on he got a little drunk too. Faith tried to warn me that something was off, but I wanted so much to believe he could do what he said he could do. Then, it never occurred to me that he was capable of betrayal. And now, this—it is evil, truly evil." Her voice slipped away into the heat.
Hayes laid his hand lightly on her thigh, a comforting touch. "I wanted to kill him," he said, "I've never felt that way before, I didn't think I could. Jesus. But it's the truth, May."
"I think he won't live long," she answered. "He's been eaten from within, like wormwood . . . it's been this long process, all the resentment and anger and envy. But why your family? He seemed to focus so intensely on your family . . ."
"And you," Hayes said, "he shifted part of his rage to you."
She thought about that. "Sam brought us together. It's strange, but I remember thinking once, at the beginning, that it was purposeful—I'm not certain why, but I think he meant to set up some sort of tension among the three of us . . . as if he was using me to get at you. I don't know, this doesn't make sense, but I think he wanted to be you . . ."
". . . No, he wanted to destroy me, and he's come too damned close . . . first, sending you into Burma, and now this with Andy's boy."
"I don't know," she said, "it doesn't seem to me that he's capable of revenge any more . . . he's too burned out. I get the feeling it's survival of a sort now. He saw a chance to make money to support his habit, that's all. I don't think it mattered who we were, and that's even more frightening . . . betrayal of that magnitude, I mean. I just don't think he's capable of feeling."
"Or that's what he wants us to think, to get himself off the hook. 'It's the drug talking, man. Can't help myself.' Bull. He can help himself, and he's doing it by extortion and blackmail and kidnapping. He should be locked up for all those reasons. Hao and An are my first priorities."
"Sam is going to destroy himself, Hayes. Faith tried to warn me. She sensed the struggle going on inside of him long ago. That last time we saw Sam, she told me she thought he was losing. She helped him get a start in photography because she felt he was an artist at heart, and she thought that somehow that art might turn out to be his salvation. In Hawaii, she knew it wasn't going to be enough. I didn't listen
to her because I couldn't, not then. I was afraid if I waited any longer, I'd risk losing you. Again, you, me and Sam."
For a moment she thought Hayes had drifted off to sleep. "Honey?" she asked, quietly.
"Yes," he answered, so she knew he was thinking. He took his time; the room filled with the sound of the fan as it rasped through the warm air. "So you're saying Sam's whole life has been an act of self-destruction? That the only way he could live with it was to direct his self-hatred somewhere else, and my family was it?"
"Something like that. Love and hate all mixed up."
"Maybe. I know people become unhinged over here. It's not hard to see why . . . our motives are so goddamned mixed. Remember Gerard's remark about Vietnamese and Americans bringing out the worst in each other? Sam proves his point. If he weren't so dangerous, I might be able to dismiss him. Gut he knows about Hao now, and things are so goddamned volatile here, I've got to do something about Sam."
"You don't think he'll just nod off into oblivion?" she whispered.
"I can't take that chance. And there's Galt, too. Hao and An are too important."
Her stomach rumbled. She put her hand on it, felt the sticky dampness of her flesh. A faint light filtered into the room from the street, casting shadows on the wall. She thought about the bats in the plain tain trees and shuddered. In Hong Kong, Hayes had talked about her money and the complications it would bring to their lives. She felt a sharp cramp in her stomach. The faint light that filtered in from the street was enough to guide her to the bathroom. She poured herself a spoonful of Pepto Bismol, drank it with a shudder and thought, Hayes was right. First Eli, now Sam. Flesh for money. Her money was the draw. For a moment she thought she was going to retch. She felt dizzy, her skin was cold and clammy to the touch. She forced herself to drink two more spoonfuls, and drank some of the bottled water.
When she returned to bed he asked, drowsily, "Okay, babe?"
"Yes," she whispered, "go back to sleep." She wanted to say how sad it made her, how sorry she was. She lay her head close to his, and listened to his sleep breathing, in rhythm to the turning of the fan. Sleep, when it came to her, was troubled.
When they woke it was full light, the ceiling fan had ceased to revolve, and the air pressed heavily on them, as if their bodies had to carry the burden of the pressure of this country.
Before sunset that day, Sam Nakamura was on one flight out of Saigon, Galt was on another. The South Vietnamese functionaries who escorted them to the planes made it clear that if either attempted to reenter the country, he would be imprisoned. Sam left with only a navy blue nylon flight bag, in which he carried all of his worldly possessions—two or three changes of underwear, several shirts, a shaving kit, and fifteen rolls of unprocessed, uncaptioned film. His cameras were gone, he could not remember when he sold them, or how much Mud they had bought. Mud. Asian Mud. Opium. He was rolling in it now, he was up to his neck in mud and it soothed and comforted him. Words sang in his head. I am the kingdom and the glory, come unto me, come into the mud, sink into the mud. He wondered how it would feel, when finally he slipped under, into the cool, cool dark.
When the cabin attendant reached for the blue nylon bag to stow it above his seat, he had to stifle the urge to grab it back, to hold tight to it, to feel through the cloth the canisters of film, wherein lay his security, his Mud.
Hayes was shaving when the first call came through. "Get your body back here on the double, boy-o," Davis in the deputy director's office shouted over the bad connection. "You are being summoned to the Presence. Your star is definitely in the ascendency. The word is, big things are in store, buddy."
"What does it mean?" May wanted to know.
Hayes grinned. "Hard to say. I hope it means my radical background is going to be less of a stumbling block. Since Congress has overridden Nixon's veto of the law limiting the president's right to wage war, the writing is pretty much on the wall—for him, and for Vietnam."
"All the more reason to get Hao out," she said.
"All the more reason," he repeated, grim.
The second call was from Karin, in Honolulu. "Israel is gone," she said, her voice hollow with grief.
May felt the tears slide down her face, the salt taste of them in the damp heat. A blotch fell onto her silk slip, leaving a wet mark. Hayes sat next to her on the bed, touched the wet place with his fingertip as if he could absorb some of her grief. "It is all so hard" she cried, and he had no answer except to hold her and rock her in his arms.
They left without seeing An or Hao. None of their calls were answered, and when they stopped by the house on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street on their way to the airport, the servant said no one was there, that everyone had gone, that they should leave and not come back. They stood in the dusty street, under the plantain trees, and May thought about the bats and felt the futility of it. "How do we make them understand?" she said, knowing he had no answer.
That same day Hayes returned to Washington for his command appearance, while May returned to Hawaii for yet another funeral.
On the long flight over the Pacific she thought about Israel, and about Andy and Dan and Vietnam, and about Eli and Sam, and lost battles. Her stomach felt tight from sleeplessness and grief and the strange, unsettling spell cast over her by Vietnam. She drifted into a troubled sleep, filled with the choking smell of burning trees from which bats escaped, and a child's scream for help. Struggling out of the dream, she wakened to the bright glare of a moonset. She opened her eyes to the white-silver light, to the full moon shining over the empty sea, and she blinked and saw it, as clear as day: The rabbit in the moon.
May wants me to stay on but I cannot. Now that Israel is gone . . . buried in Punchbowl, not far from Daniel Ward . . . it is time for me to go home.
"Why?" Annie and Karin ask me, why when you love it so here where the weather is warm and the sky is forever blue and your bones don't ache all the time?
"Because," I tell them stubbornly, "I have to go home." How can I explain the hold that old cottage has on me? It is silly, of course, to be so attached to a collection of old boards, many of which have had to be replaced in the sixty years I have lived there. How to tell them what comfort there is in knowing every inch of a place, of being able to run one's fingertips over a soft redwood window ledge which bears the imprint of Emilie's baby teeth?
Emilie. I want to be closer to my daughter. And my granddaughter needs to return to the mainland and get on with her life.
I need to finish my work on the archive, to get it ready to pass along to the next caretaker. Kit writes from the Malibu that she will have time, now, to go over the work I have done and decide, with my help, who is to succeed me. She hopes I am in no great hurry.
I am in no great hurry, but I am eighty-one. My candle burns low, at times the light is not bright. I must use a magnifying glass to read. Old age is such a bloody nuisance! Annie threatens to become my eyes and my ears, and I must be diligent not to let her become indispensable. She is such a big, robust, generous girl, but she blows with the wind. She has talent and energy to spare, but little ambition, I think. "Big girl, big heart," Abigail said of her, approvingly, but then she had added, "She better watch out, that one, before she gives it all away."
I didn't need to ask Abigail what she meant by "it." There are always boys who hang around, hankering after Annie. Sometimes, late at night, I can hear them laughing and singing out by the beach. Her voice is a firm, steady contralto, Annie's candle is strong and bright and burns at both ends, and she flings herself into the storm, lighting the way for everyone. That is what distresses Emilie, of course. That her girl cannot take what she calls "any of the ordinary precautions." Even when she knows that Annie is neither ordinary nor cautious, and can never be.
So it is settled; we are going home, and I am going to concentrate on the "May Papers," as I call them.
After the funeral, Karin and her Paul came back to the Big Island with us for a few days. Abigail welcomed him like a lost son, they
have so many family connections. He is a quiet man, there is no small talk in him. I believe he is responsible for the new calm I sense in Karin. He may not have much to say, but his eyes follow her with such unabashed love that I take heart.
She is carrying his child. Annie suspected, but said nothing. (I was relieved to learn that Annie is capable of knowing when to say nothing.) Karin talks happily about the baby, and Paul smiles when she does.
"She's already married," Annie jibed when I brought it up. "Who needs two husbands? Or even one for that matter?" I shot her what was meant to be a black look and she burst out laughing. Still and all, Kit has told me that divorce proceedings are underway. She and Philip tried every which way to make a large settlement in Karin's favor, but Karin would have none of it. She begged Kit to understand why she could not take any settlement, and Kit did understand.
Four well-known island artists are opening a cooperative gallery in Honolulu and they have asked Karin to manage it for them. She likes the idea, she says, her hand placed protectively over her belly. She is not showing yet, but you can tell that she can hardly wait.
Kit wants to know what I think of Paul Hollowell. I will tell her the truth, that he loves Karin as she is, and I think he is the constant she has always sought.
Annie, of course, tells me what she thinks—even when I'd rather not know. Annie thinks he turns Karin on in a way other men never have, that's what Annie thinks. I didn't ask her how she knows, but I suppose she'll tell me that too, one day.
I cannot escape from Sam; he has invaded my thoughts since May told me what happened in Saigon. I search my memory for clues, thinking back to the early days in Berkeley, when May and Karin and Sam were a trio. Sam. I think I have never known a soul so ill at ease with itself. I had prayed that his passion for photography might prove his salvation.
Gift of the Golden Mountain Page 49
