Lark and Termite
Page 27
Now that she’s here, she’s calm, settled. It’s the right thing. The baby’s breathing is good, clear. He’s strong in his way. He doesn’t move much but still she’s got him propped with rolled blankets, every side, so he’s safe and doesn’t stir. She’s nursed him just now in this chair, whispering songs, and now he’ll sleep the night. He sleeps more than most babies, and he’s quiet, doesn’t cry. In those ways, he’s easy. He can hold his head up now, and his arms. He moves his fingers. He moves them fast when he’s agitated, and his skin flushes. He goes rigid if he’s scared. He’s silent then, but anyone caring for him knows what’s wrong, begins to know. She’s left a list. He takes formula and she’s brought plenty, but her milk calms him most. It’s the only thing she regrets taking from him.
She’s been here a week, long enough that the girls have learned how to care for him. In case Noreen won’t take him, or not right away. But she will. The letter, the instructions, are in the big valise. It will all seem backward to Noreen. She’ll be angry. Don’t I have enough to do, she’ll rage at Charlie, but not when Lark can hear. They’ll care about him, protect him, even if they don’t understand. She can’t take him, though she’s decided to stop. She thinks Bobby would forgive her. She went on as long as she could, until she knew what to do.
She reaches for a cigarette to steady her hands. Lights up and leans toward the open window so the air will take the smoke.
She’s careful what he breathes, careful about noise. He loves music, or he’ll focus on a sound so small she barely hears it. Drip of a faucet, night cries of those penny-sized frogs in the grass in Coral Gables, the hush of the surf across the little road. Confusion scares him. Doctor’s visits. Strangers. So it was just her, the days filled with taking care of him. Onslow sent them money. Charlie wrote every month. Then the soldier came with his Korean wife and gave her the picture Bobby prized and carried with him. The cigarette pack, the little photo slipped inside the cellophane, still seemed curved to the contour of Bobby’s chest or the shape of his hand. The Korean girl only nodded, smiled. Not much English, Tompkins said. Her parents were dead, so he’d married her, and the government let her leave. She’d worked on gaining weight here, to look older. Still, now that he had the limp and the cane, people thought she was his nursemaid or his daughter. Watching them, she realized she’d been waiting, but Bobby would never be here, on a cane, in a wheelchair, missing whatever parts of him the war took. She had the house in the quiet town. They could have lived simply, on disability like half the retirees in Coral Gables. Instead she had the widow’s pension, and a survivor’s benefit, for the baby. She’d make sure Nonie got it. The thought came to her then, sitting in Coral Gables with the Korean girl and Tompkins. She’d wait a month, more, so Tompkins wouldn’t feel responsible. She’d make plans. She could plan now. She could look at the picture and see all that might have happened if the war hadn’t. And read Bobby’s letter, the one Tompkins brought her.
She smokes, closing her eyes, upright and tense in the chair. She senses the trail of the smoke, doesn’t watch it. She knows it curls and weaves, blue in the late-afternoon light, moving away from her.
She left the house as it was, only paid the man who mowed the grass to pack up the carriage and high chair, send them to Win-field slow freight. They’d arrive in a week or so, about as long as it would take Onslow to contact Tompkins and his wife, fly them up to drive the car, arrange for a nurse. And take the baby to Noreen. With the valise, his clothes, blankets he was used to, her perfume bottle with the moon face he liked to hold. The girls smiled when they saw it: it was part of that novelty perfume set they’d bought for her trousseau.
She pulls her upright chair soundlessly closer to the window. She knows these rooftops, this skyline, and she leans out to look. They’d lie in bed with these windows open, the smoke of their cigarettes curling over them. Breath of their bodies, moving in the air, drawn to the open.
She smokes her cigarette. It’s dark enough that fire glows in the ash. She looks now, and follows the smoke with her eyes. Air pulls the thin blue trail out the window, into the evening.
Lola’s the cat.
They brought the yellow telegram to her hospital bed, days after the birth. She knew before she read it. Bobby was missing, presumed dead. She was too weak to hold the baby but she wouldn’t let them bind her breasts. She made them help her feed him, prop him on pillows. She coaxed him to nurse until he did. He began to move his hands. Never his legs. His head was too big for his small, thin body. The baby has problems, they told her. You have problems, she said. She needed rest, they said, she’d lost a lot of blood. They kept trying to take him from her but she wouldn’t let them. He was going to live, she told them. No one should presume, she said. Rest, they said. No one is trying to take your baby. Is there someone we can call? No one who can hear you, she told them.
Now she knows how to sense him. Tompkins brought her the letter, but she waited until they left to read the words. If you’re reading this, it means I’m not coming back. Just like that, it was true. It was his voice and she believed him, when before all she’d had was the folded flag. She read the words and read them until she could feel him near her. It’s as though he’s released now into his son’s breath and smell, into the baby’s eyes and hands. The baby moves his fingers every moment he’s awake, slowly, carefully. The birth certificate she brought from Florida says his name, but she’s never called him by a name. She sings to him while she feeds, bathes, rocks, carries him. He answers in sounds, singsong tones.
At night, on this mattress on the floor, like their bed before Bobby left, she falls asleep holding the baby. She says Bobby’s name into his skin, against the cloudy pale hair, the broad forehead. Delicate blue veins are visible at his temples, just beneath the flesh. In the first weeks, she was sure he would stop breathing. Now he’s a year old, almost exactly. She can see some blended distortion of them, a resemblance transformed and shattered into what he is. He’s not like her or Bobby. He’s what happened to Bobby. He’s where Bobby went, where Bobby is. How can she reach Bobby. Maybe not touch him, but find him. Know where he is. She thinks it’s all still happening, existing where she can’t see. It doesn’t end until she ends it.
Lola’s the cat. She takes a last drag on the cigarette and stands, watches the smoke unfurl. The little derringer Bobby gave her is in her purse, with the folded flag, the telegram tucked into the front. We regret to inform you. She’ll walk to the police station down the street. They’ll take care of everything. She knows the baby is safe and she’ll think about Bobby. She’ll be on her way.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony for the gifts of time and space in which this book was written. Thanks to the Howard Foundation for crucial support. Thanks also to Ann Close, my generous editor at Knopf, to Lynn Nesbit, my agent and friend of many years, and to Tom Jenks, Jo Ann Beard, Mark Stockman, Ivy Goodman, Pamela Rikkers, and Jill McCorkle, who read early drafts. Thanks to artist Mary Sherman, whose long-ago gift of a drawing of Termite became his image. Thanks to traveler and author Robert Nilsen (Moon Handbooks: South Korea), who sent geographic details and present-day photographs of the tunnel at No Gun Ri; to Suki Kim and to Suji Kwock Kim, who advised on Korean words and phrases; to Colonel Jeffrey J. Douglass, U.S. Marine Corps Historical Division, who corresponded regarding KMAG and Task Force Smith; to the late David Halberstam, who offered advice and counsel on the Korean conflict; and to Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, and Martha Mendoza of the Associated Press, who broke the story of No Gun Ri.
Portions of this book appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: “Termite’s Birthday, 1959” in Granta; “Termite, 1959” in Southern Review; “Nonie’s Words” in nerve.com; “The Bad Thing” in Ploughshares; “Termite Makes the Shape” in Murdaland; “Language Immersion Seoul” in Narrative Magazine; “Solly and Lark” in Granta 100; “Leavitt’s Dream” in Conjunctions; “Nonie Talks About Lola” i
n Appalachian Heritage. “Termite’s Birthday, 1959” was included, with permission of Granta and Alfred A. Knopf, in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, ed. Suzanne Kamata, Beacon Press, 2008.
A Note About the Author
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of three previous novels, MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994), and Machine Dreams (1984), and two widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). Her works have been translated and published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hebrew, Greek, Danish, and Dutch. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, and an Orange Prize nomination. She was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper’s, Granta, The Southern Review, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, Boston University, and Brandeis University. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Information, essays, and text source photographs can be viewed at www.jayneannephillips.com.
A Note on the Type
This book was set in Adobe Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach, the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have followed the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letter we now know as “old style. ” He gave to his letters a certain elegance and feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.
Composed by North Market Street Graphics,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by R.R. Donnelley & Sons,
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Designed by Anthea Lingeman
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2009 by Jayne Anne Phillips
All rights reserved.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Jayne Anne, 1952–
Lark and Termite : a novel / by Jayne Anne Phillips.—ist ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27127-3
1. West Virginia—Fiction. 2. Nineteen fifties–Fiction. 3. Korean War,
1950-1953—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.H479L37 2007
813'.54—dc22 2008033453
v3.0