As soon as Phac finished the bacon and eggs, Trai sprang up and poured him a cup of tea. He gulped it without a word of thanks. “What are you learning in school today?” he asked Suong in Vietnamese. Phac too found American a difficult language.
“We are having mathematics and social studies this morning,” Suong said. “We will study the history of the American Revolution, which happened two hundred and eight years ago.”
“What about the Vietnamese Revolution?” Phac asked. His voice was bitter.
“Our teacher says we will study it later. We have many other wars and crises to study first. But he says there is a similarity between the American Revolution and the Vietnamese war. He says the Americans in Vietnam were like the British in 1776, fighting guerrillas they could not conquer.”
“Tell your teacher he is spreading duck shit,” Phac said.
“Oh?” Suong said, looking dismayed.
“Guerrillas in tanks. Tell him that is what conquered Vietnam.”
“Maybe he could write an essay on it. You could help him,” Trai said.
“Shut up, ignorant cunt,” Phac snarled. He gestured to his cup and she poured him more tea. He gulped it again, although it was almost boiling. Perhaps he was trying to set himself on fire inside so he could endure the sleet and cold on the ocean.
“Ignore what I just told you,” Phac said to Suong. “You must pretend to admire your teacher’s wisdom. That way he will give you higher grades and you will have a better chance of a scholarship to the college of Princeton. A degree from there will enable you to become a rich man.”
“Yes, Father,” Suong said. Trai sensed that he did not believe this. He was learning more about America than Phac. It was such a confusing, complicated country. Men like Mick O’Day, who had strode through Binh Nghai like a god, who had fought the Viet Cong and smashed them, were not wealthy. An American policeman was paid little, and people did not give him presents and money like the police in Vietnam.
Mick still gazed at her with hungry eyes. He still remembered. But there was no forgiveness in those eyes. Sometimes Trai dreamt of him in her arms beside the river. It was different from the dream of Ha. There was deceit and evil in it. But there was also a kind of love. Such dreams only proved Father Nhu was right, she was an unclean woman. Perhaps when she prayed before the crucifix today, Jesus would come and console her.
Phac put on his yellow slicker and fisherman’s hat. He pulled on thick gloves to keep his hands from freezing. “Good-bye, Son. Work hard today. I will do likewise.”
“Yes, Father.”
Every day for seven years Phac had said the same thing to Suong—every day since they had come to Paradise Beach after a year in the refugee camp in Hong Kong, where Phac could not work and the Vietnamese government demanded he be sent back to Vietnam to stand trial for murder.
Phac departed without even looking at Trai. She waited until she heard him start the old car, which Mick kept repairing for him. Then she got out some rice and poured nuoc mam, the pungent sauce made from sun-ripened fish, over it. She poured tea for herself and Suong and let him have a few bites of the rice. A taste of home.
He thanked her and then frowned at his empty dish of cornflakes. “I hate it when he hits you like that.”
“I deserve it. I am a very ignorant woman. I’ve committed many sins. I am paying for them.”
“I don’t believe that! Everyone commits sins. Why do you have to pay for them all your life?”
“I don’t know. Go study your lessons now until the school bus comes.”
Suong retreated to his room. He arose in the dawn with his father because Phac insisted on it. He said it gave Suong more time to study. Suong complained that he did not have to study so much. He was already getting the highest marks in his class. But Phac told him to study anyway. Suong obeyed. He was the hope of Phac’s life. His only surviving son.
Suong was why Phac had brought Trai with him from Binh Nghai. Their marriage had been entirely political. But he expected her to embrace Suong as her only chance to practice phuc duc, the creation of family strength through descendants. He knew how deep this instinct was implanted in her. She would be a good mother to Suong, no matter how much she hated Phac.
When Suong left for school, Trai cleaned the house. The other four rooms were freezing, but she cleaned them anyway, scrubbing the icy floors and walls, wiping the insides of the windows. Phac did not let her turn on the heat in these rooms because he was saving money to buy a boat of his own. He had saved almost $20,000 in seven years. It was extraordinary because his employer Desmond McBride paid him only $90 a week.
When she finished cleaning, Trai turned on the small television in the kitchen and listened to a man named Phil Donahue. He had a number of women on a stage; they talked about sex. That was an easy American word to understand. The Americans used it a lot. Trai was not able to understand what they were saying about it, but it seemed to be serious. One woman on the stage wept Phil Donahue talked in a strange, rapid way. Trai could not understand a word of it, but it was all about sex. He waved his arms and rushed up and down asking people to talk into a microphone about it. The Americans were strange. No self-respecting Vietnamese man or woman would ever discuss sex in public.
A knock on the door. Who should be standing there in the blowing sleet but Father Philip Hart, the pastor of St Augustine’s Church in Paradise Beach. Father Hart was tall like most Americans, but he had lost some hair, an oddity for a comparatively young man. He had a long, earnest face and a nose that turned up at the tip and pale blue, anxious eyes. He was not at all like Father Nhu, from Binh Nghai. He had been like a stern grandfather. Father Hart was like a worried brother.
“Trai—Mrs. Phac—how are you today? I just thought I’d drop in to see if everything was all right.”
“Oh, all fine. All okey doke.” With Father Hart, Trai relapsed into the pidgin she had learned when the marines had come to Binh Nghai.
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes. Tea?”
“Why, thank you. I could use a little internal heat.”
They sat down at the kitchen table. Father Hart talked about Vietnam. He did not approve of President Ronald Reagan’s refusal to open diplomatic relations with the communist government. Father Hart thought Mr. Reagan was a terrible president.
If America had diplomatic relations with Vietnam, people like Trai and Phac might be able to go home. Trai nodded and smiled. She was obeying Phac’s orders to agree with the Americans no matter what they said. The idea of Phac, a man with Sat Cong, “Kill communists,” tattooed on his chest, going back to Vietnam was ludicrous.
Father Hart reached across the table and took Trai’s hand. “Mrs. Kilgore told me what you revealed to her. About Phac beating you.”
“Beat-ing?” Trai asked, although she understood.
Mrs. Kilgore was the social worker for the Catholic agency that had settled the Phacs in Paradise Beach. Mick was the reason they had come here. He had joked about “his village,” which was also on the ocean, and when the refugee authorities in Hong Kong had asked if the Phacs knew any Americans, Trai had blurted out Mick’s name and the name of the town. Phac, in his rage at the Americans, had forgotten it. Phac had wanted to go to France.
When Mrs. Kilgore had visited last week, she had amazed Trai by asking if Phac beat her. A study of Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles had discovered a high percentage of wife beaters. Taken by surprise, Trai had admitted Phac beat her. She did not tell Mrs. Kilgore why.
Now, here was Father Hart, determined to put a stop to it. Trai was terrified. Phac was perfectly capable of killing her. She had seen him kill many people, men and women. She had seen him kill her own father.
“Oh, no.” She smiled. “Is confusion. I … no understand.”
“You mean you didn’t understand Mrs. Kilgore? She asked if he hit you. Like this.”
Father Hart slapped himself in the face. “You have a bruise on your cheek right now.”
&nb
sp; “Oh, no. Oh, no. Mistake. I bump face in dark.”
“You’re trying to protect him. You tell Mr. Phac I want to see him at the rectory tonight. I’m going to warn him if he so much as touches you again, he’ll be on his way back to Vietnam.”
“What? Oh, no,” Trai gasped. She understood the word back It had the clang of doom in it.
“You don’t have to worry. You’ve got a friend here, Trai. A friend who cares about you and your country.”
Father Hart talked about how much, how deeply, he cared for Vietnam. The more he talked, the more Trai saw that he was talking about a country that had never existed, except in his mind. His intentions were noble but his knowledge was nil, and the combination was deadly. Only one person could help her in this emergency. She dreaded even speaking to him, much less asking him for help.
Trai nodded and smiled as Father Hart wrote out the request for Phac to come to the rectory. Suong could read it to him if he had trouble understanding it.
Father Hart squeezed Trai’s hand again and departed. Trai flung on the cheap blue winter coat that the Catholic relief agency had given her and rushed into the wind and sleet. A half mile down the highway stood a lonely telephone booth. She was drenched and shivering violently by the time she reached it. On the way she had repeated the number over and over again. She dialed it and a woman’s voice answered, “Hello?”
“Mick. Can I speak Mick?”
“He’s sleeping. Who’s this?”
“Oh, please. So—urgent.”
It was a word Trai had heard on the Phil Donahue show.
In another minute, the deep voice spoke in Trai’s ear. “What’s up?”
For a moment, surrounded by the sleet-drenched American pine forest, Trai was flooded with incredible warmth. She was back in Binh Nghai, sitting in the doorway of her father’s house, watching the big, yellow-haired marine saunter up and say those very words.
“Oh, Mick,” Trai said in Vietnamese. “You must come see me right away. I’m in terrible trouble.”
WELCOME TO PARADISE BEACH
Not bad for an amateur, eh? My friend the reporter, who is helping me write this tale, opines that by now you will be intrigued, hooked, sucked into what happens to everybody in this interesting clash between good and evil. He has begged me not to intrude my opinionated commentary.
The reporter, who yearns like every newshawk to become a novelist, believes the artist should stand outside the story à la James Joyce, cleaning his fingernails (or was it trimming them?). I say bushwah. I am writing history here, a yeasty slice of the American past—and a tragedy in the bargain. Moreover, in the marvelous way that America crosses breeds and mingles races, I am part of the story. Although I do not have a drop of Irish blood in my veins and can confidently trace my ancestry back to the first criminal who wandered to the wilderness of South Jersey, I have breathed the rank odor of this tragedy, tasted its brutal flavors, wept over its incredible mixture of heroism and stupidity, love and hate, sacrifice and venality.
Ultimately, like most historians, I am not telling a comprehensible tale. I am exploring a mystery. For the idiots among my readers who think history should be comprehensible, I recommend a close reading of the papers of the Continental Congress in the American Revolution. He or she will discover a tale of blunders, self-interested intrigues, blind idealism, and wild-eyed ignorance of military realities that will make our victory in this eight-year struggle totally mysterious.
In this excursion into the intricacies of Paradise Beach, I may even be creating a parable. Have you ever tried to make any sense—real sense—out of the parables Jesus told, or Buddha? They speak to the higher reaches of the soul, beyond the brain stem. Parables are necessarily opaque. If you stay with me long enough, you may become that most dolorous of beings, a metaphysician, searching in a darkened room for a black hat that isn’t there.
I stole that line from G. K. Chesteron, the kind of hearty optimist and glib apologist for orthodoxy that I despise. That may give you a glimpse of my philosophy. If it does, that puts you one step ahead of me.
Alexander Oxenford is my name. I am better known to Mick and other patrons of Paradise Beach’s premier bar, the Golden Shamrock, as the Professor. During the daylight hours, when I manage to maintain a precarious sobriety, I teach history at the Island Regional Senior High School in Paradise Beach. They don’t call it history anymore, of course. It is now called social studies, a weird mixture of paeons to democracy and misinformation about everything from slavery to women’s liberation.
I am a lineal descendent of Octavius Oxenford, who arrived on this impudent strip of sand between the Great Bay and the Atlantic Ocean about two hundred years ago. He was probably a deserter from the Continental Army of George Washington. Family legend maintains that Octavius enlisted three or four times in various regiments to get the handsome bounty they paid the suckers to risk their necks for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, freezing their toes and fingers off at Valley Forge and Morristown, while 99 percent of the population stayed home and made money.
You think our fondness for sending the dumbest and dullest to fight in Vietnam was an exception? Tell it to the poor Irish immigrants who were paid by heroic abolitionists in Boston to replace them in the draft for the Civil War. Either Octavius the first got wise to this scam or he felt the hot breath of the inspector general on his neck. At any rate he equipped himself with a complaisant camp follower and headed for South Jersey, where miles and miles of pine forests enabled a man to disappear with impunity.
There Octavius encountered a rabble of fellow deserters from both armies, wandering whores, and an occasional honest fisherman. The ex-soldiers supported themselves with a desultory combination of piracy and highway robbery. When the war ended, the more unregenerate among them wound up on the gallows, but Octavius reformed sufficiently to escape the noose.
Translating his doxy into a wife, Octavius began producing little Oxenfords. For the next century, their descendants settled into an Edenic existence. Fish flopped into their nets summer and winter, and ducks darkened the skies each spring and fall. Back in the pines, on the other side of the bay, it was a simple matter to build invisible distilleries that produced from the juice of apples and peaches a substance capable of inducing trances and hallucinatory states. Some people called it Jersey lightning.
Perhaps this trance state had something to do with the passivity with which my immediate forebears and their friends permitted some real estate developers from North Jersey to rename our town in the 1920s. From Havens Harbor it became Paradise Beach, a detestable moniker reeking of grandiosity, promotion, and the fast buck—the trinity of values that has made America what it is today.
The Oxenfords were mute witnesses of this debacle, as they have been of all the other catastrophes that have engulfed the continent, from the Revolution to the Civil War to the mass slaughters of our glorious century. For some reason we have never mastered the greatest of American arts—making money. Honesty was never our problem. We just never produced anyone with the ambition to get ahead. A skeptical streak inclined us to ask: Get ahead of what?
Perhaps that was why we welcomed with surprising tolerance the post—World War II arrival of Irish-Americans who came, not to pay the outrageous prices we charged the wealthier members of their tribe each summer, but to join us permanently as voters, neighbors, fellow inhabitants of Eden.
Like us, they seemed to have no strong desire to pile up mountains of pelf. Their priests, whom they brought with them, counseled resignation and acceptance of the world’s cupidity and corruption. They also preached a sexual purity and an elevated view of women that we descendants of whores and buccaneers never espoused, except for a week or two in the fervor of a camp meeting.
They were fascinating creatures, these Irish-Americans, who called themselves Irish, a cognomen we readily accepted. They were knowing in one way that we, with our stubborn isolation and bizarre individualism, had never achieved. They were all poli
ticians. It was born into them, a combination of clan spirit and a readiness to accept the monotony of the civil service. In five years, they had taken over the political apparatus of the town. We had an Irish-American mayor, an Irish-American police chief, and a mostly Irish-American police force.
In school I occasionally tried to teach them the truth about the ambiguous country to which their great-grandparents had emigrated. But they seldom listened. Their patriotism was as compulsive as their Catholicism. They did not know how to think about America anyway. Their minds were lost in a dream of somehow regaining the northern city they had ruled for forty years.
Few of them had ruled personally, of course. Others, shrewder or tougher, had grabbed most of the power and the cash. But they had all felt the pride, the swagger of ruling. Call it political or ethnic solidarity, call it atavism, it had been real. The proof was the existence of their chieftain, Sunny Dan Monahan, in his bright green house on Delaware Avenue. The rest of them lived in amateurishly insulated summer cottages, but Dan, with his green Cadillac at the curb and his hospitality on St. Patrick’s Day, was proof that the years of glory had been real.
For forty years the Irish had ruled the other emigrants in their native city. They were led by a chieftain named Frank Hague, who summoned all the detritus of Emma Lazarus’s incantation to the Statue of Liberty to join him in a titanic struggle to get their slice of American action from the smug bankers and the mealymouthed Protestant ministers who justified the WASPs’ grasping supremacy. They had succeeded to an almost unparalleled degree. Frank Hague became as rich as any Wall Street tycoon and proportionate amounts of cash descended to some of his followers such as Sunny Dan, who ran Jersey City’s waterfront Second Ward.
I have interrogated witnesses who saw Dan in his days of power, sitting in a railroad car on an obscure siding in Jersey City, while shipper after shipper, labor leader after labor leader, deposited mountains of money on a crude table, a door stretched over two wooden horses. On any day during payoff week, a half million dollars would be on that table. Most of it went down to City Hall, but Dan took his slice and, with the help of some gentlemen on Wall Street, put his share into bearer bonds—a wonderful device invented by the American banking community to permit people to steal money without the trouble of carrying it around. A bearer bond is, as the term implies, translatable into cash no matter who happens to possess it at any given moment.
Hours of Gladness Page 4
