“But again I did not function—I registered impressions in a disengaged sort of way, with the sound switched off. People led me over to the side of the road. An ambulance man patched up my forehead and stopped the blood draining into my left eye, as it had been doing. A fire truck arrived and sprayed foam on my car and the road around it. Various police cars at irregular angles pulsing blue lights into the evening. Hefty, tattooed driver of the truck, looking a little distant himself, kept repeating, like some kind of saving mantra, ‘You came up too fast.’ And I said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you there,’ which was greeted approvingly as some kind of laconic witticism, but I was out of it. I got no details; when they took me off to hospital to stitch me up, and observe me for concussion overnight, I knew nothing—where the truck driver was from, what license number, what company, what make, year, color of truck, what insurance—nothing. The police, who see many worse things every day, had all the details, but I had nothing.”
“So why won’t that happen to me, when I go into the crunch?”
“Yes, that’s the question, and I kept asking it of myself: why won’t it happen again, when the big guns go off in the navy, and the killing starts? And the answer I found is that it doesn’t happen to you when you’re in a situation of responsibility for others; there the button is pressed that has you scurrying for answers to the problems besetting your group, under great compulsion— I must make this better for us. But when you are on your own, interestingly, it seems to me, self-preservation, if anything, magnifies the enormity of the threats to oneself, and that seems to invite the freeze—you have no part in any wider context to reduce it all to proportion, or to get something happening. You can simply sit and become the rabbit in the headlights.”
“Dad, you should have been a psychologist.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, my bet for what it’s worth is that you’ll never freeze, so forget about it.”
“Do you think also that sometimes, the level of expectations directed towards you compels you to rise higher, to be more than yourself?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Thinking of Mom and you will keep me on my mettle.”
“So will thinking of your fireman’s son, as you told us yesterday.”
“Yes.”
The cleanup at Yale went much faster than MacIver expected. And there was much less for old Big Blue to carry back with them, in part because David gave a lot of very nice things to his friends, who had come by in large numbers to wish him well. The mood, MacIver thought, taking its temperature, was quieter than the normal undergraduate gathering; “warm but subdued,” he decided. He used the same sort of oxymoron when a young man asked him how he felt about David’s decision, and he replied, “I suppose unhappy about it and proud of it, if the two can go together,” and the young man had looked at him a little sadly, and said that it was the perfect description of how they were all feeling, except that in his own case he would have to add the tag “ashamed of myself.” And MacIver said, to ease his embarrassment, “No, no, lad. The hard, painful decisions have to be taken in one’s own time; you’ll make them when you’re ready.”
The dinner was as good as Margaret had promised, the mood quite close to the Yale dormitory’s, though there was more laughter. And in the intervening days, everything moved along exactly as David would have wished. Yes, he could sign up for the medical corps, pending a physical and some other tests for suitability. And yes, he could request, and was likely to be granted, service in Vietnam; that was currently the area of greatest need. And for Margaret and MacIver there was the temporary relief that after boot camp at Fort Dix the medical training would be conducted at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, and the interval between first enlistment and posting would be five to six months. The mills of the military, as MacIver remembered, grind as slowly as those of God, but just as inexorably.
The next intake for the medical corps was scheduled for April 6, a little more than three weeks away; he should move very fast, if he wanted to be included in it. The one after would be at the end of May. He made the April date, of course, and after Fort Dix was off to Texas. Margaret and MacIver met him twice in San Antonio and once in Austin on his weekend leaves over the summer, and he came home for a final four days before leaving for Vietnam on October 8, 1968, ten days after his twentieth birthday, and precisely a week after his father’s sixty-second. On this last trip, they both noticed a more serious set of mind, even more determined, with his eye always on the distant object, but also, MacIver thought, undistractible from his anxieties. Even while still in America, David had seen clearly that ardor was a discounted value in the army (“Just do it by the book, soldier”); it would become even more so in the field (“Cool the gung ho, buddy; carry on like this, and you’re going to get us all killed”).
So MacIver, the military historian, was back in the business of reading letters home, but in this case, of course, letters read and scrutinized for every nuance with an intensity he had never mustered before. And they were wonderful letters. The description of the base, the insulated bastion of home away from home, where familiar music plays over and over from the speakers and the menu does its crazy dance through everyone’s ethnic food. There was interdivisional baseball, and David played shortstop for the medics. (“We have real umpires here, Dad, so of course no errors on the shortstop!”) And then the telling of explorations farther afield, the temple, the market, the children’s fishing pool for carp, and the lovely gifts sent home—a silk shawl of heraldic colored birds passing through branches, for Margaret’s birthday, and for MacIver on Father’s Day, a beautiful lacquered bowl, gold within, jade colored on the outside, with two panels on opposite sides showing herons, very finely drawn and subtly different, fishing among reeds on a lake. He was telling them he was thinking of them and the Wellfleet house.
There was a simple progression of escalating danger for the medics—base hospital, field hospital, assignment to soldiers’ units in the field, and then medevac helicopter personnel, rescuing the wounded from the battlefield itself. They knew he would not rest till he was in the helicopters. As Margaret said, “He’s not just testing himself, he’s determined to place himself on precisely the same ground as his fireman and the injured man in the burning car about to explode. I don’t mind telling you, I pray every day to anyone out there that this will not be the day.”
The phone call came on July 3 at nine-fifteen in the morning, and Margaret picked up; MacIver was out running.
“Mrs. MacIver?”
A tremulous yes.
“Mrs. MacIver, my name is Stafford Dionne, and I’m a friend of David’s, and he asked me to make this call. He’s a little groggy right now, because he’s taken a hit, but he’s going to be fine. The hard thing I have to tell you is that he’s lost the lower half of his right leg just above the knee, but they’ve saved the rest of the leg, and they have no doubt that he will heal up well. He lost a lot of blood, and he’s also picked up a fever, so they’re working on getting the fever down and the blood level up to normal. He’s groggy now mostly from the aftereffects of the surgery and anesthesia, but he will be much more himself, I am sure, in two days. So I will phone you again tomorrow about the same time if that’s all right, to tell you how he’s getting along, and the day after that, my guess is, he’ll be calling you himself. Are you okay, Mrs. MacIver?”
“Yes, thank you, Stafford, I’m sort of pulling myself together here; it’s awful but in a sense it’s a relief. . . . It’s so much less than we feared. Do you know what happened and when?”
“Yes, it was about four o’clock in the afternoon out here two days ago, so that would make it early yesterday morning on your clock. Exactly what happened is hard to say in this sort of situation. You fly in low over the trees taking fire, you land in a clearing taking fire while you pick up casualties, and then as fast as you can, you take off still under fire. Dave was on the ground loading stretchers when he got hit, but we will probably never know by what—could have been
a mortar round, a piece of shrapnel, a buried mine being exploded nearby. There’s always a lot happening in those situations, a lot of yelling and a lot of dust in the air from the chopper blades.”
“They fire on medical planes and personnel?”
“I’m afraid they do. I’m afraid this is not a war on either side where people keep a copy of the Geneva convention in their pockets.”
“Are you a medic, too, Stafford? And where are you from?”
“I’m a helicopter pilot, ma’am, from Oakland, California. Dave and I work a lot together.”
“He’s very lucky to have you as a friend. Are you all right yourself?”
“I’m just fine, Mrs. MacIver, and so will my buddy be. I look forward to talking to you again tomorrow, and hope we can all meet sometime real soon. You can tell your husband that I try to play a little rugby, but I’ll never be up to his level.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Margaret, “but I know what he would say: ‘You’re the helicopter pilot who saved my son, and I was just a piddling center for Scotland.’ Thank you more than I can say, Stafford, and God bless you.”
“You’re very gracious, ma’am. Speak to you tomorrow. Good-bye now.”
Next morning the phone rang at nine-twenty and MacIver, as they had agreed, picked it up. Stafford on the other end, his voice audibly upbeat: “Mr. MacIver? I have a surprise for you both,” and he handed the receiver to David, who sounded a little quiet, but firm and fully himself.
So they got him back, and the price was high, though there had been many days, they knew, when they would have told each other that no price would be too high, as long as they got him back. But it seemed afterwards that he was only grudgingly given back. The fever had turned out to be far more obdurate than anyone had warned them, and in fact its cause was never diagnosed. Eventually in September he had been well enough to be moved to a hospital in Hawaii, which had seemed the perfect halfway house for a jaunty reunion, but the sun was dimmed for them when they saw how wasted he was—not just wounded, and they had tried to prepare themselves for the sight of it, but clearly still unwell.
Three weeks in Hawaii seemed to put the fever behind him, and he was moved to a new orthopedic ward set up for physiotherapy at the Kingsbridge VA hospital in the Bronx. Good for easy visiting, and in fact they all celebrated both David’s birthday on the twenty-ninth there and MacIver’s on October 1. The boy had almost come home. A few days after that on a Saturday, MacIver, who had always been good at working bureaucratic fiddles, had arranged with both hospital authorities and the head office of the city water supply to take David, the returned wounded veteran, in a wheelchair down Sedgwick Avenue and up to the big reservoir at the far end, where they would be admitted to the perimeter track beside the water for some bird-watching. Good for his morale, everyone had agreed, and was happy to collaborate. Margaret and he had always visited him together, but for this she suggested he do it alone. “I think there may well be things he wants to talk about,” she said, “but to protect me from.”
“What sort of things?” said MacIver, instantly alarmed.
“I can’t give you an agenda, but perhaps pain, for one,” she said.
It was the perfect day for the visit, at the heart of the migratory season, when waterbirds in large numbers would be using this sanctuary for a staging ground before their long flights south. A completely still afternoon, with a ribbed canopy of cloud like a scallop shell held motionless overhead, so hushed and windless that on Sedgwick Avenue you could hear ragged cheers rising from Baker Field at the tip of Manhattan a couple of miles away—Columbia bravely supporting another mismatched football team.
MacIver had lived on Sedgwick Avenue as a graduate student more than thirty-five years before, poised for a plunge down the hill to the IRT at 231st Street, and remembered how the icy wind could hone that crest in winter, sharpening the bulk of the ugly old hospital into still more ascetic lines. But now all was mildness. Everything had been very affable as they set out, nurses busying with rugs around the chair, pressing bread for the ducks on them. Up Sedgwick Avenue, the quiet fall Saturday, boys in sneakers leaning idly against the cars, past the Catholic church and the playground. They were quite at ease with each other, no need to talk but no difficulty about saying anything they felt like, either. MacIver was moved by time taking him back—from the stroller to the wheelchair, the old feeling of the weight on the arms, taking longish steps to get a low center of gravity.
Down alongside the reservoir, where the slim maples and plane trees had buckled the concrete path with the vigor of their roots. Then cut through the playground at the far end, up the hill again and through the gatehouse. As promised, there was a genial Guardian of the Water there to let them in, who was very deferential to David. This was going to be a good afternoon. No glare on the surface of the water, but enough light to make large reflections, and smooth as pewter.
They went a little way around the side, and MacIver sat on the grass beside him, and gave him the binoculars. Scaups and canvasbacks for the most part, but some mallards too, and two pairs of Canada geese with a Westchester look about them—lost their bearings, no doubt. That elegiac feeling of Indian summer, no chill, but the sap and the life quietly seeping out of things, under the distant monochrome arch of sky.
They talked about the war, and whatever anger there had been seemed to have been bled out of the boy. “A complete make-believe world,” he said. “No good railing against this distortion of news, that cover-up. Whole thing so misconceived, so many spokesmen warping the turn of events, that even the planners probably ended up duping themselves, and therefore to some extent sincere. All the more dangerous because they believed their own shit.”
They sat a long time. Every now and again a pair of ducks would come in to land on the reservoir, their lovely long-necked, fast-drumming flight, and then the wing-back, down-tailed braking onto the smooth surface. Sometimes a few quick scudding motions, as intruders were chased out of claimed territories. The ripples from these little turbulences lapped ever so gently on the stone wall below them. They absentmindedly ate some pieces of the bread the nurses had given them, and then, to complete the necessary rituals of childhood, threw some onto the water to bring the ducks closer. Eventually, a small detachment of mallards and scaups swam lazily over to indulge them, and they paused in their talk to admire once more the beautiful livery of their uniform markings.
MacIver asked about the pain of his ordeal, but David had pretty much put that behind him, too. Occasional echoes of it would run through his body, or tug at his unsightly amputation, but he was not going to linger on the memory of its full rampage. “It owns you, and it’s determined to kill you,” he said, “and the longer it lasts, the further you can feel it pushing you away from any contact with the world or with living. A sense of reprieve when it recedes—reprieved and somehow innocent. Innocent and weak, like children; in this case, all one’s strength and evil purged away together.”
“What does he know of evil?” thought MacIver sadly, but did not say.
It was starting to get dark when they headed back. The motionless leaves above the path stood out black against the deepening sky, except under the streetlights, whose amber glow lent them some almost tropical greens and yellows. The lights from the Lehman College library beat across the water strongly to them.
On the way back, David was so silent, MacIver thought he was asleep. He seemed to have sunk down into the chair. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he said they had decided he needed another operation on his stump. A piece of jagged bone was disturbing the nerve tissue and preventing healing, and they could not fit him with a prosthesis with it in that condition. It would be a relatively simple operation, and would set him up for full mobility before Christmas came.
The operation was done at the end of the next week, in a big city hospital by a distinguished orthopedic surgeon, who was also a consultant for the Kingsbridge hospital and was thoroughly familiar with David’s case. The operation we
nt as routinely as the surgeon had said it would, and David was back in his room before lunchtime. Margaret and MacIver visited him again that evening, and found him looking well, and of very high morale: the dreaded onslaught of pain, which he had been waiting for since he left the recovery room, had clocked in so far at a much reduced and more tolerable level than he had let himself hope for; he would be all right now.
This time the phone call came at 7:35 the next morning. A nurse making a routine check at 4:30 had found David dead in his room; an embolism had formed in his wound and moved to the heart. There had been a frantic effort to revive him after the fact, but he was dead. MacIver took the call, and he and Margaret were at the hospital soon after eight. And here they were the victims of a large and humiliating bureaucratic error. On arrival they went straight to David’s room: he was not there—in fact, there were two hospital orderlies cleaning out his effects and making up the room. They had been told it was urgently required for another early-morning admittance. Inquiries revealed that David had been taken down to an operating theater a while before. Sleepy ward nurses, coming to the end of their shift after a harried night, started to make anxious calls. He was no longer in any of the operating theaters or recovery rooms. By now a hospital administrator was hovering with expressions of concern.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 11
