“There is a kind of crab, the hermit crab he is called, who occupies the shells of tulip snails or conches, lives in periwinkles or whelks. The hermit crab comes in many varieties—the long-clawed hermit, the hairy hermit, the star-eyed hermit—but all share this characteristic of moving into somebody else’s home and calling it their own. As the hermit crab grows it has to change shells from time to time, and it does so whenever it comes upon a shell it fancies as better than the one it has already appropriated. In it moves and on it goes. Often the hermit is joined by others, the parasitic parasitizing the parasitic. A funny sort of animal called the Snail Fur—pale pink and whitish—has been known to colonize the surface of the hermit crab’s shell, and will contentedly go wherever it is taken. The Fur is made up of several kinds of tiny polyps and as it’s carried into new waters it can use its stinging cells to get its food. As spongers go, the Snail Fur is a decent companion, and often protects the crab itself from being eaten, by stinging this predator or that and making them wish they’d never got stranded in the same tidal pool as the hermit.
Others are known to join the mooching hermit and his furry adjunct. Sometimes you can find a Zebra flatworm sharing the snail shell with the hermit crab. And there’s another, the little Say’s Porcelain crab, that will work its way into the shell, too, and live right there—cheek to jowl, so to speak—with the larger hermit crab. The hermit is a sloppy eater who shreds his food into bits and pieces, getting some into his mouth but leaving much afloat. And this is why the Say’s is there, to snag the leavings for himself. The hermit crab, the Fur, the flatworm, the Say’s: they’re a veritable ship of fools.
“Masters of leftovers, all these fellows: why do we view them with contempt, not admiration? Isn’t it true they’re economical, and awfully ingenious? Isn’t there even a bit of whimsy, of the black-humor kind perhaps but whimsy nonetheless, that is evidenced in their manners and mores? The chickadee can find itself a hollow in an old tree and there lay its eggs and raise its brood without so much as a how do you do. The little wren does the same and is shy but smug in her self-reliance. The hawk circles until it finds a hapless mouse in the field to bring home to its young for food—it would never consider letting another bird near its chicks, let alone leaving the task of child-rearing to someone else. And shrimp and lobsters can swim along, nestled in their own exoskeleton, proud of their autonomy, triumphant in their godlike wholeness, just a bit superior for having an existence that neither depends upon the kindness of strangers nor forces them to annex the property or products of others in order to make their way through the world.
“But the cowbird and hermit crab can make no such claims. They have other fates to realize. And though the hawk is magnificent in her way, and the lobster is king of what he is about, who is to say their lives are superior to those of the crab and cowbird?
“I wrote this down, son, so that I could answer that question. My answer is, Not I. What’s yours?”
She had made her point with as light a touch as she could manage. It was a good try, but just as the cowbird is one with her habits, I seemed to be one with mine.
I think of that letter now as I begin to look, in the morning sunshine, for Kip.
Ariel was born in the earliest hours of the first day of March. Her maternal grandparents had come to New York for the occasion. Aware of my peculiar status there at her birthing, but unable to suppress my real excitement about the event, I behaved in many ways as if I were the child’s father.
By then, Jessie and I had developed into some kind of couple, however unconventional and undefined, however unconsummated was our affection, and so I didn’t even attempt to disguise my elation about the baby being a girl. —That’s what I’d been hoping for all along, I said, shaking the hand of the newborn’s grandfather with both my own.
—I’m delighted you’re pleased, he offered with a slight smile, rightly convinced that my passion was ingenuous and that at worst his daughter had a good friend in me, even if I was a little touched.
Seeing that response, I wondered, just for a moment, whether Jessica and I should have gone ahead with the idea that all this might be easier if I’d pretended to be her husband, Ariel’s father, the whole bit. It had been her proposal, so to speak, a few months before she was due to deliver.
—There’d be a lot less explaining to do, she said.
—Maybe for you, but what happens when Kip comes home?
—You and I—I guess we get divorced.
—I still can’t believe you’ve never told them about Kip.
She tossed her head, —And what precisely was I supposed to tell them?
—That you met this interesting guy, that you’re seeing him, that you decided to move in.
—I could never tell them that.
—Why not?
—Because I don’t want them prying into my life.
—So what’s with the pretend marriage? Aren’t you contradicting yourself? Here you are keeping them at arm’s length about who the father is, but then you want to fake up a marriage to make them feel better.
She said, —It isn’t for them, the marriage. It’s just another way to keep them from prying. One less question for them to ask.
—There’s a point when independence becomes so much work that it turns into a form of slavery.
Jessica gathered her hair with both hands and turned the length of it at the back of her head until it formed an impromptu bun.
—This isn’t logical, anyhow, I continued. —You want to keep them from prying by falsely assigning me the role of husband and father but at the same time are afraid they’ll pry if you tell them the truth about Kip? I don’t get the difference.
—They know how I feel about Vietnam.
—So what?
—So they’ll say, what’re you doing getting engaged to a pilot who’s going off to war, having his baby and all? It won’t work, is what they’ll say.
Many possible responses to this that came to mind, and I discarded them. I said, —So we’re married and Kip comes home. What do you tell them’s the reason you and I are getting a divorce?
—Irreconcilable differences, she said.
—Irreconcilable differences. All right. And what kind of alimony do you intend to pay me?
—What alimony.
—A good lawyer has to think ahead in these situations.
—Never mind, the marriage is off.
—So’s the divorce.
What quaint, peculiar flirtation, I thought.
—I guess you’re right. Just tell them the truth, Jess finally said.
—They’re your parents, not mine.
—But what do you think?
—I’d rather not think about it anymore.
The parents received the news of Jessica’s pregnancy complete with an accurate description of her romance with Kip and a firm recommendation that if peace were to be kept in the family there should be no insults, no sarcasms, no denunciations. If they wanted to be supportive, she would welcome their support. If they found they couldn’t in their consciences support what she was doing, then that would be legitimate. Her parents—I think to her surprise—hadn’t the least interest in argument or anger.
Ariel Rankin, then. If Jessica considered using Kip’s surname, she never mentioned it to me. It seemed to make sense that Ariel would take her mother’s name, at least temporarily.
Through the fall, through winter, until we stood at nascent spring, neither Jess nor I had any word from Kip. On one hand, it seemed extraordinary, it seemed unforgivable. On the other, Kip had proceeded only to do nothing more or less than what he indicated by proxy he would do. His telegram must have crossed her letter, and Jessica and I both thought that the only viable explanation for this prolonged silence was that he’d never received her news of the pregnancy. Still, it seemed inconceivable that Kip’s mission could be so clandestine and his separation from the outside world so hermetic that he wouldn’t be allowed by his superiors, whoever they were, to r
eply to his fiancée in light of the news he was going to become a father. Even the most obsessively secretive military administrator would see a way clear to allowing a man to respond to such tidings as that, we’d agreed, and back in early October Jessica had written again, and again there had been no reply. I took it upon myself to telephone some armed forces administration office—or should I say offices—in Washington and explained the situation to whoever would hear me, and while each of the people I spoke to was sympathetic and concerned, each with unerring obtuseness passed me along to someone else at one extension or another until I recognized that there was nothing whatsoever to be learned in this bureaucratic labyrinth. Even now, I don’t think it was that they were purposely trying to keep us from finding out William Kip Calder’s whereabouts; instead, I think it’s possible the lower-level functionaries with whom I talked just didn’t know the answers to my questions. And long ago I forgave myself for not pushing a little harder. It had occurred to me, of course, that the threat of legal action against them might have prompted some more lively assistance. I knew more than one law professor at school who was hostile toward the military and would have been all too eager to figure out a way to litigate, or at least cause them a little trouble.
But I held back. I was torn in two directions and rather than try to force matters one way or the other I thought it best to let fate seek its own resolve.
What was happening to me was that I was falling deeper in love, and now my love wasn’t only for Jessica but for Ariel, too.
Paterfamilias. That had always been a rich word to me. Truth to tell, I found myself infatuated with the idea of family and the creation of this new home.
He started going, he said, and he kept going. And after the crash he found that rather than withdrawing or recoiling, he pushed even harder into his work there. Three- and four-flight days again became the norm for him, more hours above the earth than on it. When he was up in the air he was engaged, his spirits prospered and his intellect was keener than a needle. When he was back on the ground he mostly slept a deep, free sleep—no demons and no dragons. The only American there he felt a kinship with was an older guy who was from the Four Corners area, and also happened to be madder than a March hare.
The first time Kip met Wagner, he said, his expression brittle and serious, without so much as a twinkle in his eye, —Hey, Calder, were you there the day they crucified the Lord our God?
—Weren’t we all? Kip answered, affable and in stride. He was crouched over his map pack before taking off on a mission and this man ranged over him, casting him in shadow.
Wagner said, —I thought you looked familiar, and walked away.
Kip had made it a practice to stay off on his own for the most part, but this Wagner intrigued him. Like many of the Ravens, he was outgoing in a quirky way. He was known for non sequiturs and off-the-wall commentary. He also had been on more missions than just about anybody here, and above all seemed to have an unusual rapport with the Hmong. He’d mastered the language better than any of the others, a language whose meanings were often carried by intonations of words rather than the vocabulary.
Lao was tonal, and its grammar seemed flexible as gum. The tones were high or low, and they might rise and fall from a midrange, or they might start deep and in the same syllable arc upward. The Hmong were called Meo by their American comrades and other foreigners—an unintentional derogatory, means “barbarian” in Chinese—and indeed it sometimes sounded, when a group of them were talking together, like a meowing of articulate cats. Wagner was also said to have embraced the animist beliefs of the Meo, whom he called Hmong, while at the same time not abandoning his Baptist background or the Buddhism he picked up while serving his first tour over in Vietnam.
Kip asked him once, regarding this animist belief of his, —So you think there’s a god in every bush?
—If a devil didn’t get there first.
Another time, when Kip asked him about how he could reconcile one creed that held there were guardian spirits in most every object with another that quite clearly disavowed such things, Wagner said, —If I could reconcile everything, I’d lose my faith, wouldn’t I now. And when Kip asked him what religion he was, saying, —Like a pantheist of some sort? Wagner looked at him and answered, —I’m not anything but if I was something, I’d be a devout potpourrist is what I’d be, and potpourrism would be my religion. You’ve heard the phrase, Spread the wealth? Well, I believe that it’s also a pretty good idea to sample the wealth. Sample and spread, spread and savor. I’ve never met a religion yet that I couldn’t learn something from, and when I believe in a cause I do something about it, you know?
Kip observed this Wagner from a distance at first, watched where he went and when. None of the other Anglos stationed at Long Tieng ate with the Hmong as did Wagner, none seemed as well connected to Vang Pao, the Hmong general who ran operations here. In a community of eccentrics, Wagner became, in Kip’s eyes, a kind of guru. But a quasi guru, given he refused to accept any such role. —Places animate people, people animate places, he told Kip once.
—So?
—So you’re from Los Alamos, right?
—Who told you that?
—Pajarito Plateau. I’ve flown over there once, very beautiful the way the tuff has flowed out in fingers away from the rim of the volcano skull itself.
—Who told you I was from Los Alamos?
—But what I was saying about places and people, I’ll bet you didn’t know about old man Pond and flying, did you?
—Old man Pond?
—You know, the man who founded that boy’s ranch there for frail kids, boys with respiratory problems and flat chests, Ashley Pond? Don’t you know about where you grew up?
—I know who Ashley Pond is—
—And there’s a pond there named after him, Ashley Pond. I think that’s rich, don’t you? Strictly speaking, it should be called Ashley Pond Pond, shouldn’t it?
—What about him?
—He was a dreamer, was Pond—not at all unlike Robert Oppenheimer in that respect. The place draws dreamers in. But you’ve got a little of Pond in you, too. Did you know that more than anything in the world Pond wanted to be a combat pilot in World War One?
—You’re making that up, said Kip.
—It’s true: 1918, he left Los Alamos and wanted to go to war, but he was told he was too old to get his wings. So he worked for the Red Cross in France, instead.
—Then he never did become a pilot?
—He was almost sixty, but he finally got his license. You see what I mean about places animating people? —No, said Kip. Wagner said, —That’s too bad.
My love of law is almost equal to my aversion to lawyers. Even now, despite what good I have managed to accomplish over the years through my practice, whenever I read the words Attorney-at-Law beneath my name, a part of me withdraws—recoils, even. There are lawyers who are proud of their craft, and get defensive at the mere mention of lawyer-bashing. The joke that asks how do you tell the difference between a dead skunk in the road and a dead lawyer (there are skid marks in front of the skunk) will irritate many of them, and though I maintain a distance from most of my colleagues, I can respect their sentiments.
But still.
Benders of the truth, sculptors of sorts, was how I first began to think of attorneys. Cajolers, shaders, subtracters, adders—adders as in those who augment and those that slither and bite. A breed of men to whom truth was open not just to minor revisions and nice distinctions, but to management. Truth management. And though such assessments were not altogether wrong, they were cynical maybe, precocious perhaps too. Children of scientists learn early on just how relative everything in the universe really is.
Yet the law itself, like any law of physics, is as beautiful as the workings of a clock, immutable and always in motion. And practicing law—I like it that one practices the law, and thus never fully masters it, as such—has given me the chance to witness its balances and intricacies, to come to appreciat
e it, especially when it functions just as it should. It is flawed, of course, as are most beautiful artifacts, but is often so precious, it seems a crime that law is the province of lawyers.
My practice started small, after I graduated from Columbia Law School, and has remained as small as I could manage to keep it. My success as an attorney I chose early on in my career not to measure in fees. I still care most about getting an acquittal for my client, especially when I’m defending idealists—people who range from saints to the scurrilous (never think that the spirit of an idealist doesn’t sometimes live in the body of a scoundrel, it happens all the time).
Flower children and insurrectionists never had money to compensate lawyers, and more often than not, no matter that public opinion about the conflict in Vietnam had swung from pro to contra in the early seventies, conscientious objectors were still being jailed with regularity, and boys were in exile in Canada and Sweden and elsewhere even though the lottery had come into being and the unwinnable war was grinding down. So these were my clients, and because I worked for barter or a pittance or often pro bono, Jessica supported us through those years—a special-education teacher, a halfway-house worker, an English-as-second-language tutor; the jobs were various and many—and only sometimes doubted her sanity. When I stopped to contemplate her sacrifices, her towing Ariel from place to place, I never doubted Jess’s sanity—she loved me and believed in what we were doing—but I did doubt, from time to time, whether my activities were entirely responsible. There is nothing worse than a self-doubting ideologue. Guilt and virtue make for uneasy partners—and so for a while it was, with me. The virtuous defender of the rights of all oppressed but myself and my foursquare wife.
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