by Tobias Wolff
“She must be one of these mama-sans,” I said.
He looked up at the women moving around us. “You think she’s one of them?”
“I imagine so.”
Captain Kale carried the picture over to one of the women and held it out to her, but she wouldn’t look at it. When he touched her arm she pulled away and went on with her work. He offered the picture to another woman and she wouldn’t look at it either. None of them would. Someday it would end up in his Bavarian trophy case, with his Chicom rifle and VC flag and all the medals he was going to write himself up for, but Captain Kale didn’t know that yet. He was new here. He went from woman to woman, begging them to examine the picture, holding it out as if it proved something important. His voice was cracked, he sounded close to tears, but they were deaf and blind to him. They wouldn’t look, they wouldn’t listen, and they couldn’t have understood him anyway. He was speaking English.
The Rough Humor of Soldiers
MY LAST NIGHT in My Tho. The battalion officers were giving me a farewell party. We began the evening at a bar in town, then moved on to Major Chau’s house for dinner. Madame Chau was nowhere in evidence, nor were any of their children. When we’d all assembled and settled ourselves in a circle on the floor Major Chau rang a bell and a young woman entered the room. She was made up heavily, even ceremonially, her face whitened, her cheeks rouged, her lips painted red. Her perfume was thick and sweet. Major Chau introduced the young woman as his niece, Miss Be. She bowed, then took a tray filled with brandy glasses from the sideboard and moved around the circle of men, bending before each of us with downcast eyes. Captain Kale took his glass and thanked her and she moved on to me without a word, but in passing looked back at him and gave him what might have been a smile; it was gone too soon to say. The face she presented to me was impeccably bland.
Then she came around with a large bottle of Martell and filled our glasses. Again she looked at Captain Kale, and again, unmistakably this time, smiled.
“What’s your secret?” I asked him.
“Knock it off,” he said.
Captain Kale had a wife to whom he intended to be true.
Miss Be returned the bottle to the sideboard and took the empty place to Major Chau’s right. This was the first time in my experience that a woman had joined a circle of officers rather than serving and leaving. Captain Kale was watching her with a rude, unconscious fixity. No one took any notice. The room was blue with smoke, loud with boasts and insults. Pots banged in the kitchen.
We emptied our glasses and Miss Be went around again with the Martell. She gave more to Captain Kale than to anyone else. When she resumed her place beside Major Chau she turned and whispered in his ear.
Major Chau leaned forward. “My niece says the American captain is very handsome.”
Captain Kale shifted, shifted again. The lotus position was torture to those pumped-up haunches. There were wet patches on the back of his shirt, widening rings under his arms. His pink face shone. “Please convey my compliments to Miss Be on her extremely nice looks,” he said, and nodded at her. “Miss Be is very beautiful.”
The other officers whistled and slapped their knees when Major Chau translated this. Miss Be spoke into his ear again.
“My niece says the American captain looks like the great Fred Astaire.”
Miss Be said something else to Major Chau.
“My niece asks, Has the great Astaire found his Ginger Rogers here in My Tho?”
“No,” Captain Kale said in Vietnamese.
Major Chau got up and went over to the stereo Sergeant Benet and I had bought him at the PX. He put on Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and motioned for Captain Kale to rise. “My niece would be honored to dance with the great Astaire,” he said.
“I’m not that great,” he said, but he stood and walked over to Miss Be. He held out his hand. She took it and rose lightly and without hesitation moved into his arms. They danced in the center of our circle, swaying to the music, hardly moving their feet at all. At first she looked up at him, then slowly let her head fall forward against his chest. Her eyes were closed. I could see the play of her fingers on the back of his neck.
Then Captain Kale closed his eyes too, and his face became gentle and calm. He was transfigured. The Vietnamese officers were watching him with peculiar concentration. Major Chau rolled his shoulders to the music, mouthing words as he stacked more 45s on the turntable:
They tell me
Mistakes
Are part of bein’ young
But that don’t right
The wrong that’s been done …
After the song ended, Captain Kale and Miss Be went on swaying together to their own music, then roused themselves and stepped groggily apart, her hand still in his. The officers called out encouragement. I joined in, though I was nearly deranged with envy and incomprehension. A record fell, the needle hissed, Connie Francis began to sing.
Evening shadows make me blue
When each weary day is through
“You need more room,” Major Chau said. “In here is too many peoples. Come.” He beckoned to Captain Kale and gestured toward the doorway leading to the back of the house. “Come!” Captain Kale looked at him, looked at Miss Be. They were still holding hands. She gave him that ghostly smile, then led him out of the circle and through the doorway behind Major Chau. The major returned, took his place, and rang the bell again. A pair of old women carried in trays from the kitchen.
While we filled our plates Major Chau raised his glass and began reciting a toast to me. He praised my implacable enmity toward the communist insurgents, my skill as a leader of men, my reckless courage under fire. He said that my presence here had dealt the Vietcong a blow they’d never recover from. Through all this Major Chau maintained an air of utmost gravity, and so did the other officers. When he was done the adjutant proposed a toast even more elevated. They were all stuffing themselves now, except the adjutant and, of course, me. That was part of the prank. As long as I was being toasted I had to sit there and listen with an expression of humility and gratitude. Lieutenant Nam spoke next. Then another officer stepped in.
I was hungry. Somewhere in the back of the house Captain Kale was slow-dancing with Miss Be. The toasts went on.
I’d expected something like this, but I didn’t know what a nuisance it would be to sit through. Behind the understanding that all this was a joke, we had another understanding that it was not a joke at all, that in my time here I had succeeded only in staying alive. Their satiric praise created by implication a picture of me that was also a picture of what I feared I had become, a man in hiding.
At last they stopped and let me eat. Spring rolls, clear soup, fish and rice, noodles stirred up with shoots and greens and cubes of tender meat. “Where’s This Place Called Lonely Street?” was on the record player. I’d just about finished my first helping when I heard a yell from the back of the house. The officers sat up, searched one another out with swift glances. Silence. Then another yell—a roar, really—and the sound of Captain Kale coming our way. He stomped into the room and stood there, staring at me, his face bleached white. His mouth was smeared with lipstick. He held his hands clenched in front of him like a runner frozen in midstride. I looked at him, he looked at me. Then Lieutenant Nam made a sobbing sound and buried his face in his hands and fell sideways onto the floor. He kicked his foot out like a ham playing a dying man and knocked over a bowl of rice. Major Chau let off a series of shrill hoots—whoo whoo whoo—and then they all doubled over. They were wailing and shrieking and pounding the floor. Captain Kale gave no sign that he heard them.
“Did you know she was a guy?” he said.
I was too surprised to speak. I shook my head.
He gave me his full attention. Then he said, “I’d kill you if you did.”
I understood that he meant it. Another close call.
Captain Kale looked at the others as if they’d just materialized in the room. He walked around them and out
the door. After I heard the jeep start up and drive away I couldn’t keep from treating myself to a few laughs while I ate my dinner. The officers kept trying to pull themselves together, but every time they looked at me they blew a gasket. At first I played along like a sport, thinking they’d lose interest, but they’d entered a state where anything I did—spearing my food, lifting my fork, chewing—set them off again. Finally Lieutenant Nam managed to sit up and catch his breath. He watched me fill my plate yet again with noodles and diced meat. “Bon appetit,” he said.
“This is good,” I said. “What is it?”
He pitched over onto his back and let out a howl. He lay there, drumming his feet and panting soundlessly. I looked down at my plate. “Oh no,” I said. “You didn’t do that.”
But of course that was exactly what they’d done. What else could I expect? What else could he expect, with a name like Dog Stew? That pooch was up against some very strong karma, far beyond the power of my stopgap, sentimental intercessions. In moments of clarity I’d known he would come to this. He knew it himself in his doggy way, and the knowledge had given him a morose, dull, hopeless cast of mind. He bore his life like a weight, yet trembled to lose it. I’d been fretting about his prospects. Now my worries were over. So were his. At least there was some largesse in this conclusion, some reciprocity. I had fed him, now he fed me, and fed me, I have to say, right tastily.
There was only one way left to do him justice. I bent to my plate and polished him off.
Part Three
Civilian
I WAS discharged in Oakland the day after I stepped off the plane. The personnel officer asked me if I would consider signing up for another tour. I could go back as a captain, he said. Captain? I said. Captain of what?
He didn’t try to argue with me, just made me watch him take his sweet time fiddling with the file folders on his desk before handing over my walking papers and separation pay. I went back to the bachelor officers quarters and paced my room, completely at a loss. For the first time in four years I was absolutely free to follow my own plan. The trouble was, I didn’t have one. When the housekeeping detail asked me to leave I packed up and caught a taxi to San Francisco.
FOR OVER A WEEK I stayed at a hotel in the Tenderloin, hitting the bars, sleeping late, and wandering the city, sharply aware that I was no longer a soldier and feeling that change not the way I’d imagined, as freedom and pleasure, but as aimlessness and solitude. It wasn’t that I missed the army. I didn’t. But I’d been a soldier since I was eighteen, not a good soldier but a soldier, and linked by that fact to other soldiers, even those long dead. When, browsing through a bookstore, I came across a collection of letters sent home by Southern troops during the Civil War, I heard their voices as those of men I’d known. Now I was nothing in particular and joined to no one.
In the afternoons I put myself through forced marches down to the wharf, through Golden Gate Park, out to the Cliff House. I walked around the Haight, seedier than a year before, afflicted like the faces on the street with a trashed, sullen quality. Sniffling guys in big overcoats hunched in doorways, hissing at passersby, though not at me: a clue that I was radiating some signal weirdness of my own. No hug patrols in evidence. I went there once and didn’t go back.
As I walked I kept surprising myself in the windows I passed, a gaunt hollow-eyed figure in button-down shirt and khakis and one of my boxy Hong Kong sport coats. Without cap or helmet my head seemed naked and oversized. I looked newly hatched, bewildered, without history.
There might have been some affectation in this self-imposed quarantine. I didn’t have to stay in a seedy room in San Francisco, broodingly alone; I could have gone on to Washington. My mother and brother gave every sign of wanting to welcome me home, and so did my friends, and Vera. She had parted ways with Leland soon after they took up together, and her most recent letters had spoken of her wish to try again with me. All I had to do was get on a plane and within hours I would be surrounded by the very people I’d been afraid of not seeing again. But I stayed put.
I thought of my friends and family as a circle, and this was exactly the picture that stopped me cold and kept me where I was. It didn’t seem possible to stand in the center of that circle. I did not feel equal to it. I felt morally embarrassed. Why this was so I couldn’t have said, but a sense of deficiency, even blight, had taken hold of me. In Vietnam I’d barely noticed it, but here, among people who did not take corruption and brutality for granted, I came to understand that I did, and that this set me apart. San Francisco was an open, amiable town, but I had trouble holding up my end of a conversation. I said horrifying things without knowing it until I saw the reaction. My laugh sounded bitter and derisive even to me. When people asked me the simplest questions about myself I became cool and remote. Lonesome as I was, I made damn sure I stayed that way.
One day I took a bus over to Berkeley. I had the idea of applying for school there in the fall and it occurred to me I might get a break on admission and fees because of my father being a California resident. It wasn’t easy to collect hard intelligence about the old man, but since the state had kept him under lock and key for over two years, and on parole ever since, I figured his home of record was one thing we could all agree on.
I never made it to the admissions office. There was some sort of gathering in Sproul Plaza, and I stopped to listen to one speaker and then another. Though it was sunny I got cold in the stiff bay breeze and sat down by a hedge. The second speaker started reading a list of demands addressed to President Johnson. People were walking around, eating, throwing Frisbees for dogs with handkerchiefs around their necks. On a blanket next to me a bearded guy and a languorous Chinese girl were passing a joint back and forth. The girl was very beautiful.
Microphone feedback kept blaring out the speaker’s words, but I got the outline. Withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam. Recognition of Cuba. Immediate commutation of student loans. Until all these demands were met, the speaker said he considered himself in a state of unconditional war with the United States government.
I laughed out loud.
The bearded guy on the blanket gave me a look. He said something to the Chinese girl, who turned and peered at me over the top of her sunglasses, then settled back on her elbows. I asked him what he thought was so interesting and he said something curt and dismissive and I didn’t like it, didn’t like this notion of his that he could scrutinize me and make a judgment and then brush me off as if I didn’t exist. I said a few words calculated to let him know that he would be done with me when I was done with him, and then he stood up and I stood up. His beautiful girlfriend pulled on his hand. He ignored her. His mouth was moving in his beard. I hardly knew what he was saying, but I understood his tone perfectly and it was intolerable to me. I answered him. I could hear the rage in my voice and it pleased me and enraged me still more. I gave no thought to my words, just said whatever came to me. I hated him. If at that moment I could have turned his heart off, I would have. Then I saw that he had gone quiet. He stood there looking at me. I heard the crazy things I was saying and realized, even as I continued to yell at him, that he was much younger than I’d thought, a boy with ruddy cheeks his beard was too sparse to hide. When I managed to stop myself I saw that the people around us were watching me as if I were pitiful. I turned away and walked toward Sather Gate, my face burning.
I GOT TO Manhattan Beach just after sundown and surprised my father once again. He was in his bathrobe, about to pop some frozen horror into the oven. I told him to keep it on ice and let me stand him to dinner at the restaurant where we’d eaten the year before. He said he wasn’t feeling exactly jake, thought he might be coming down with something, but after we had a few drinks he let himself be persuaded of the tonic potential of a night on the town.
So we gave it another try, and this time we got it right. Again we stuffed ourselves with meat and drink, and again my father grew immense with pleasure and extended his benevolence to everyone in range. The old rich rum
ble entered his voice; the stories began, stories of his youth and the companions of his youth, rioters whose deeds succeeded in his telling to the scale of legend. He found occasion to invoke the sacred names (Deerfield; New Haven; Bones; the Racquet Club), but this time I managed to get past the lyrics and hear his music, a formal yet droll music in which even his genuine pretensions sounded parodic. I asked no questions about Hadassah. I let him roll. In fact I egged him on. I didn’t have to believe him; it was enough to look across the table and see him there, swinging to his own beat.
I had come back to Manhattan Beach, I surely understood even then, because there could no longer be any question of judgment between my father and me. He’d lost his claim to the high ground, and so had I. We could take each other now without any obligation to approve or disapprove or model our virtues. It was freedom, and we both grabbed at it. It was the best night we’d ever had.
I paid the next morning. So did he, and then some. Late into the day he was still in bed, flushed and hot, and I finally realized that he really had been coming down with something. I called his doctor, who stopped by the apartment on his way home that evening, diagnosed the flu, and prescribed something to bring the fever down. He wouldn’t let me pay, not after my father sneaked it in that I was just back from Vietnam. I followed the doctor to the door, insisting, wagging my wallet, but he wouldn’t hear of it. When he left I went back to the old man’s bedroom and found him laughing, and then I started laughing too. Couple of crooks.
That night and the next day he was too sick to do much of anything but sleep. In his sleep he moaned and talked to himself. I came into his room now and then and stood over him in the dim slatted light cast by the streetlamp. Big as he was, he looked as if he’d been toppled, felled. He slept like a child, knees drawn up almost to his chest. Sometimes he whimpered. Sometimes he put his thumb in his mouth. When I saw him like that he seemed much older than his sixty years, closer to the end and more alone than I wanted to think about.
