She retrieved the bag from under the seat in front of her and unzipped the outside pocket, extracted the manila envelope that she’d retrieved from her mother’s desk drawer. She punched on the reading light above her and put a fingertip to the inked whorl of the capital P. Genevieve’s handwriting had always been beautiful.
The envelope wasn’t very full. Back then, childhoods were largely recorded in memory: school portraits once a year, clusters of snapshots at birthdays or on holidays. No selfies, no burst-clicked digital images that could be inspected on the spot and deleted, reposed and recaptured as many times as needed to achieve perfection. How blindly Laura’s cohort had fumbled through their lives, pointing their cameras and hoping, the developed film coming back weeks later with so many dud images, blurry or underexposed, eyes closed or mouth open or hair blowing across a face.
Philip’s existence, as attested to by the contents of the envelope, amounted to a thin sheaf of paper: a couple of snapshots, an accordioned yellow vaccination card gone fuzzy at the folds, some newspaper clippings, and the records from his birth in 1963, in Pennsylvania of all places.
Genevieve had told Laura that story, one snowy day in the Tudor when Laura was about twelve. She’d come downstairs to find her mother seated with hands in her lap, staring out the sitting-room wall of windows at the blur of fast-falling white. It was such a rare sight, Genevieve doing nothing. Not on her way in or out of a room or the front door, not packing or unpacking or talking into a telephone while ticking items on a list. As Laura hesitated in the doorway, her mother spoke without looking over.
“Philip was born on a day like this,” said Genevieve.
Laura had gone into the room and sat down to listen to the rest. Every detail stayed with her forever after, as vivid as if she’d been there: Genevieve and Robert, driving home from New England two weeks before Christmas, a light snowfall tumbling against the windshield, the baby who would turn out to be Philip due in a month and toddler Bea asleep in the back seat. The snow thickened, and Robert adjusted the wipers. He was leaning forward to scrub the fog from the inside of the glass with the side of his hand when his wife’s sharp cry pierced the quiet.
Genevieve’s story included the cry, not its provocation. She made no mention of pain, certainly did not hint at water breaking or other nether-region events. Urgency was conveyed by other details: the snow waxing into a blizzard, the windshield whiting out. The lighted letters HOSPITAL appearing in the sky above the roadway like the star above Bethlehem and Robert fishtailing the car onto the exit ramp, following the sign until they reached the hospital beneath it, careening through undulating drifts in the empty parking lot right up to the building. Robert getting out of the car almost before it had stopped and running around to open Genevieve’s side, helping her out. The two of them struggling together toward the entrance, pulling the door open to see the bored staff looking up from their cups of coffee.
The narrative made a jump cut then, from nurses whisking Genevieve into a wheelchair to a soft-focus Philip tucked into a blue receiving blanket, ten rosy toes at one end and a puff of startled-looking white-blond hair at the other. Babies of that era appeared in a cloud of mystery, not mucus. At this point in the story, Genevieve exclaimed, “He looked just like a little Dutchman!” and added with a low laugh, “At first, Robert thought they must have given us the wrong baby.” Robert, not your father. Laura knew then that her mother wasn’t telling the story specifically to Laura—she was merely telling it.
A long silence had followed. Laura was caught in a blend of emotions, pinned by fascination yet made uncomfortable by the intimacy that hadn’t clearly been intended to include her. A thousand questions crowded into her head; she felt too awkward to voice them before Genevieve spoke again.
“Snow always makes me think of him.”
It was said almost apologetically. She smiled at Laura and got up, left the room with those words still in the air. Even at twelve, Laura perceived the lie in them, and for the first time understood: her mother was always thinking of him.
The two photographs in the envelope had both been taken not long before Philip had disappeared. One was a color school portrait from that spring; he was wearing the sea-green sweater with the crest, and his hair was slicked down and parted above his gapped smile, two front teeth peeking their triplicate points from his gums. The other photo was a black-and-white snapshot captured at a Fourth of July picnic, judging from the striped bunting just visible in one upper corner. The photo had been enlarged and then cropped to show Philip in three-quarters view, standing with one arm up, his elbow crooked and his finger pointing (at what?). The photograph demonstrated his height in comparison to a nearby table, possibly why it had been chosen.
Laura examined the rest of the items from the envelope. The birth certificate, embossed with the seal of Pennsylvania. A card with a yellowed sawtooth of Scotch tape along its top edge that had probably been affixed to his newborn crib: it featured a jaunty cartoon stork with a cigar in his beak leering beside spaces for name, sex, length, and birth weight. The canary-colored vaccination record had scribbled, impatient-looking initials and dates in the cells beside typhoid, yellow fever, polio. Clippings from the Bangkok Post and International Herald Tribune, wearing through at the creases from having been unfolded and refolded many times. The last item was a brittle ivory onionskin sheet with a set of tiny inked footprints on it, one slightly ahead of the other. As though Philip were going somewhere on the day he was born, already disappearing and leaving tracks so they could follow.
1972
Chapter Four
THE DRIVER had been with the Prestons two full years, and in that time his service had been exemplary. He had never been involved in a collision of any significance; he employed the horn only when necessary; and he was always where he was asked to be, at the time he was asked to be there: idling outside Phloenchit Market or the PX or the salon or the tennis club, parked in the shade outside riding or ballet or piano lessons, crawling the white Mercedes up Soi Navin to collect the children after school. He was utterly dependable, staunch as the name Mrs. Preston had given him: Fred. But despite that blotchless record, one midsummer Tuesday he went home and never came back, and the next morning there was a different man in his place, polishing one of the twin sedans that stood in the driveway.
The Preston children were accustomed to unexpected adjustments in the household staff; they understood not to inquire. Doing so would elicit only a nonanswer from their mother, Let’s not dwell on unpleasantness. Consequently, none of the children asked after staunch, dependable Fred once he was gone. They may not have given him another thought. Certainly none of them ever suspected that they themselves had been instrumental in his disappearance.
It had been Laura who had run to their mother on that Tuesday, on the balls of her bare feet across the blazing driveway and over the warm grass, up the three steps to the side terrace. The ground level on that side of the house lacked a proper wall; instead, a long screen of interlocked panels was drawn open each dawn and pulled back into place at dusk. Laura ran through that wide opening, through the ground floor, and up the front staircase.
Genevieve was at her desk in the alcove off the master bedroom, flipping through her glass box of gilt-edged address cards, drawing up the guest list for that weekend’s dinner party.
“What is it?” Genevieve asked without looking up when her younger daughter appeared in the periphery of her vision. She had her fingertip on a card, in the process of making a decision. One couple was a colossal bore, but the other had a wife with the tedious habit of requesting plain soda water at parties instead of alcohol, and who—much more annoyingly—was always seemingly on the point of explaining why.
“Mum,” said Laura.
Genevieve was Mum to the children. Not her choice. She would have been Mama like her own mother; she’d called herself that, but her children had instead chosen to mimic their English father, who was always saying Mind your mum and Look, here
’s Mummy.
Genevieve looked up to see her younger daughter standing on one leg like a stork, scrubbing the top of her other foot against her calf, her mouth slightly open.
“What is it?” Genevieve said again. Adding the slightest edge to each word, a change imperceptible to a casual listener but not to one of her children.
Laura hesitated. Not too late to turn back, to say Mai pen rai and run away. Perhaps dropping a quick curtsy before she did: things from Home, like curtsies, were often helpful to ward off her mother’s irritation. Laura, who remembered nothing else of any other place, was nonetheless keenly aware that this place was not Home. At Home, the water came drinkable from the tap, and things were civilized, which Laura construed to mean snakeless. Snakes were a constant concern. Earlier that week there had been one in the garden, dropping inquisitively from a low tree branch in a complicated pattern like dark lace. Beatrice had cried to the gardener, who snared it with a long, loop-ended pole and chopped it into two pieces on the grass, the children watching from the safety of the side terrace as the wedge-shaped head whipped back and forth, biting at the air.
Her mother dipped her pen into the inkwell, having made her choice—she’d exclude the couple with the tiresome wife. Asia was no place for teetotalers.
“Fred’s locked the car, and won’t let me and Bea in,” Laura finally said.
“And what do you need to get in for?” Genevieve said, inscribing the names on her list.
“But he’s let Philip, and he won’t let us,” Laura said. Her mother had picked out the flaw immediately: there was nothing to get into the car for. “It’s not fair.”
“What have I told you about bothering the servants?” asked Genevieve, never pausing in the perfect upstroke of an R.
“He likes Philip more than us,” Laura said, dropping her head, looking down at her dirty feet. Knowing that she’d failed; she’d said the wrong thing, in entirely the wrong way. She awaited the corrections that surely were coming: Stand up straight. For heaven’s sakes, don’t whine.
Instead, Genevieve raised her head, her brows drawing together, and replaced the pen in its inkwell. She pushed her chair back, got up, and went to the window.
Laura held her breath, hoping that the scene outside was as it had been when she’d left it: the fat man laughing inside the car, Beatrice running round and round it knocking at the windows, and Philip making faces from the front passenger seat, having locked all of the doors.
Genevieve stood for a moment looking down through the glass, her expression changing and hardening.
“I’m coming down,” she said.
Laura hadn’t really expected her mother to validate her outrage. Somewhat cowed by what she had instigated, she followed down the hall, down the stairs, across the warm tile of the foyer, where her mother didn’t even stop for a hat; she pulled open the front door and strode outside bareheaded. Genevieve stood on the step with a hand raised to shield her eyes; at the sight of her, the movement of the three figures in and around the car ceased.
“He won’t let us in!” cried Beatrice, and Laura thought, frightened and triumphant, She knows that, dummy, I told her—I brought her here.
“Fred, unlock the doors,” said Genevieve.
Although she had not raised her voice, although the car windows were rolled up tight and the air-conditioning roared behind the glass, the driver heard her and obeyed. He pulled up the lock on his own door, reached across Philip and did the same for the passenger door as well, then snapped off the engine and got out of the car.
“Philip,” said their mother. “Come out of the car.”
Philip hesitated. Laura could see him turning his head and considering, looking away from his mother and toward the man who was now standing on the asphalt straightening his suit jacket. Philip turned his head again toward the house and the tall woman standing before it, and his defiance wavered and broke. He pulled up the door handle and pushed the door open, sliding out of the car to stand on the driveway, an uncertain, blinking figure in a white singlet and navy shorts.
But the scolding that all of the children expected did not come. Their mother kept her eyes on the driver as she spoke.
“Children,” she said. “Go and ask Annie if your suits are ready.”
They ran off immediately, toward the porch side rail where their bathing suits were drying, guarded by Choy, the second house servant, until the requisite hour after breakfast had passed. Choy, who was also Annie. Daeng, the Number One, was also Harriet; Noi, the Number Three, was Sarah; Kai, the gardener, was Stephen. Before them had been Ruth, Nancy, Mimi, and George, as well as a stream of forgotten others who hadn’t lasted long enough to earn what the children’s mother called a more manageable name.
They snatched their suits from the rail as they ran into the house, Philip shouting “Mum says it’s all right!” over his shoulder to a protesting Choy, and thundered up the steps to the second floor. Bea, who had recently become private about some things, went into the bathroom to change. In the girls’ bedroom, Laura and Philip scrambled into their bathing suits without speaking.
“She’s wrong—it hasn’t been an hour yet,” Laura said, finally, ingratiatingly.
“Tattletale,” replied Philip, pinching her arm with fingers still cool from the air-conditioned car interior.
She rubbed the place, accepting the punishment. That he had spoken at all was a kind of truce. The nastiness between them was settled, and soon would be forgotten. Philip never held a grudge for long.
* * *
The children didn’t hear the rest, not the tight-lipped exchange that followed immediately between their mother and the driver, nor the conversation between the parents hours later, after the children had been put to bed.
“What kind of person, Robert?” Genevieve said with distaste. “What kind of person locks himself into a car with an eight-year-old boy?”
There was a pause, then “I’m sure it was nothing like that,” said her husband comprehendingly and dismissively, lighting a cigarette and looking with meaning at his empty coffee cup.
Genevieve lifted the coffeepot and filled first his cup, and then her own.
“Good old Fred,” Robert said, smoke parping out with the syllables. “How could you say such a thing about him?” He sipped at his coffee, then took up the morning newspaper that had waited for him all day. At home, newspapers opened with a snapping noise, but here the humidity made their pages soft and they wafted lazily out of their creases. “Oh, before I forget,” he said, the cigarette clamped between his lips as he unfolded the paper and smoothed it out. “Can we squeeze Maxwell Dawson in this weekend?”
Had he been looking, he would have seen that Genevieve’s expression registered, if not exactly surprise (for the expression of surprise had been bred out of her by generations of poised forebears), then its restrained cousin.
“He’ll be an odd man, I’m afraid,” added Robert, leaning the paper against the coffeepot and taking the cigarette from his mouth, tapping ashes from its end into the brass ashtray on the table. Three pairs of taps, as always, evenly spaced. Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. Genevieve knew the action would have to be complete before he resumed speaking. “His wife’s stayed behind in the States.”
Maxwell Dawson. A man Genevieve had heard of but had never met. He was Robert’s boss’s boss, ultimately in charge of the dam that Robert’s firm was endlessly designing but apparently never actually building in the north of Thailand. Maxwell Dawson would trump that soft-shelled person, Robert’s immediate superior, whom Genevieve had to meet twice before she could reliably recognize him, whose gray eyes never settled down on anything and whose conversation, murmured and vague, never supplied any information. How long does it take to build a dam? she’d asked him once, as point-blank as she could bring herself to be, only to win the meaningless reply, Well, there are so many factors. And then, when her fixed gaze with raised eyebrows forced more speech: And always complications. It was no surprise that such a person c
ould find himself relegated to the obscurity of Southeast Asia for so long.
By now, everyone else the Prestons had come overseas with had gone home. Robert could have (should have) inquired about repatriation after the first year, demanded it after the second. That he hadn’t done so was beyond exasperating, but after thirteen years of marriage, Genevieve had to accept that the husband she’d chosen was himself rather soft-shelled. He was a tall man and handsome, with an athlete’s poise and a good-natured, confident air. At home, it might never have been necessary to face his more disappointing qualities. There, his mild temperament might have counted as a virtue, sparing Genevieve many of the trials that other wives reported. No fits of peevishness or violence, no migraines to be cosseted, no dramatic confrontations about expenditures. At home, Robert’s little habits—the tapping, the fussbudgeting microadjustments of cutlery on either side of the plate before he could begin eating—might have been her worst complaint about him. Here, his complacency blotted out everything else. Complacency here was a terrible flaw.
Apparently sensing something in his wife’s silence, Robert looked up.
“If this weekend won’t work, it’s not important,” he said. “We can have him another time. He’ll be here all summer.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Genevieve. “I’ll adjust the guest list.” No hint of You could have told me before now, I worked on that list all morning.
“As long as it’s no trouble,” he said. “No need to fuss.” He lifted the newspaper and opened it wide, flaring the headline BOMBING RESUMES IN HAIPHONG, folded it back to follow an article to an inside page.
No need to fuss. A sit-down dinner for twenty. Husbands understood nothing.
She’d discard the list and start again, compose a roster entirely of Robert’s colleagues. Such a dull assembly! But she couldn’t simply mix Maxwell Dawson in with the planned group, which included an ambassador. Maxwell Dawson would need to be the guest of honor. Maxwell Dawson: the name had started a little efflorescence of hope in Genevieve’s mind. Maxwell Dawson oversaw a great many people—he might not realize how long one specific family had been in Asia. Perhaps he just needed to be reminded that it was well past time for the Prestons to go home.
What Could Be Saved Page 5
