—
In the evening, the phone rang and Fern picked up. “It’s Ben,” her mother said. The kitchen lost its air. Her voice sounded like a rattle; this could only be an ending. Fern sat down on the floor.
“What happened?” she asked. Ben had not been deployed yet. He should have been safe.
“He’s not dead,” her mother said. “He’s all right. They say he’s going to be fine.”
Fern imagined lost limbs, severed arteries, blood lost. In a single second she had pictured a hundred accidents: a misfired gun, a grenade that was supposed to have been fake, a car crash, a fight. “Tell me what’s happening,” she said.
“I don’t know exactly. They just said they’re sending him to a hospital. He’s seeing things. He tried to fly away.”
In the morning Fern took the train to Indiana and stood in the hospital room with the pale yellow walls where her brother lay in bed, his arms and legs encased and strung up from the ceiling. She asked him what happened and he told her that he had only meant to fly a short distance, just to the grassy place outside his room. He said, “I really thought I could do it. I never meant to hurt myself.”
The nurse came with fish sticks and a pool of corn pudding and a slice of white bread. Ben, broken Ben, was so calm. He ate and they turned on the television and he laughed at places where a person was meant to laugh. Fern understood that he had indeed flown himself away. He had broken six bones to do it, but tonight Ben was not going to sleep in the Army barracks where he would be spit on from the upper bunk. He was not going to wake up to a hundred push-ups or the names, over breakfast, of the soldiers who had died in the war the day before. Fern was proud of her brother. Before she left she found a marker and drew a cluster of stars in the crook of his elbow.
—
On the day Edgar was to leave, Fern put on the green sheath dress she wanted him to remember her in and she melted the last-day-butter in the last-day-pan, and flipped his eggs without breaking them.
He said, “My girl, what a girl I have.”
Fern said, “I’m about to get a lot better in your mind,” and smiled. “When you come home, you might be disappointed.” She did not want to say everything—she did not want it to be complete so that some god would think they had said goodbye so well that when someone needed to die, he would direct the bullet or the mortar in Edgar’s direction.
“No matter what happens—” Edgar started, but Fern cut him off.
“You’re going on a journey, an adventure. Your whole regular life will be here when you return. It’ll be just as plain as ever.”
Fern wanted to sit on his lap and kiss him all over his tanned face and give him the store of good-luck charms she had been gathering—the red-to-grey feather from a cardinal, her father’s watch, a lock of her hair, a square of satin from her wedding dress. Instead, she let the silence settle in. She let Edgar mop the yolks and drink his coffee.
As they waited on the platform, a higher-up approached Edgar and said, “Change of plans, son,” and handed him a folded piece of paper. “When you get to St. Louis, you’ll be taken to the airport.” Edgar looked at the typewritten page.
“Alaska?” he asked. “What do they need me to do in Alaska?” He looked at the paper again. “Because of my eyes? They didn’t seem worried about that before.”
Edgar looked like something shaken out, wet fabric in the wind. Fern stared at the ground. She did not explain that she had called his father after Edgar had gone to sleep the night before and asked for help. That she had begged him to find someone who knew someone.
“Oh, sugar,” Hugh had said, “I already have.”
It had been easier even than Fern could have dreamed. Edgar’s father had had to make only one phone call to a college buddy, a General, and in his conversation he had not even had to ask for the favor—just in mentioning that his son was bound for the central highlands of Vietnam, Edgar had been rescued. The two men had spent the rest of the conversation talking about football, and within an hour, Edgar’s assignment had been changed from the frontlines in the jungle to a post in the icy north where the only threat was an impossibly unlikely attempt by the Russians to cross the frozen churn of the Bering Strait.
“Thank you,” Fern had whispered into the phone.
“Don’t worry—I’ll never tell him that you called.”
When Fern had woken up in the morning and there had been no messenger at the door to tell Edgar that his post had changed, she had thought they had forgotten or that the message would be too late to save him or that she had dreamed the whole thing.
“Did you do this?” he asked. Was he angry? His face was red.
Here was money, rafting Edgar northward, alone again.
—
The base was a tatter of lonely women. The black women must have gathered in a different house because the luncheons Fern was invited to were populated with girls as pale as her. When they gathered, the sound of them was shrill and made Fern nervous. It was as if they had all grown up together in the same house, were all sisters.
“What would you like to drink, Fern?”
“Water? Please,” Fern said. The next person wanted punch, and the person after her.
“Sure, punch would be nice.”
“I’d love punch, if you have it.”
“Punch, punch, punch,” they all said with the same cheerful smile.
A tray came out of the kitchen with twelve glasses of bright red and one clear. Fern lowered her head. She had no problem with being just like everyone, but here she wasn’t.
One of the girls asked Fern where she was from.
“Chicago,” she said.
“Me too! Whereabouts?”
“North Shore,” she said.
“Oh, fancy,” the girl said. “What are you doing here? I thought people like you got out of situations like this.” Indeed they did—all of Fern’s and Edgar’s classmates were in medical school, working towards PhDs in Russian Literature or already employed by law firms. They were secure in the idea that they were more valuable at home than in the jungle. Fern did not mention that while all the girls from the city, the girls from the town and farms had boyfriends and husbands who had been deployed to the jungle, her love was in Alaska. She was on an unknown planet, the only one of her kind. Fern wished for her brother. She was a person who had a match in the world—someone who had been born beside her, grown up beside her, who knew the particular nick and burn of their family and home.
The girl pressed for more details. Town, street. She kept knowing the places Fern described right down to the fence, the meandering drive at the end of which was a perfectly calculated view of a big house. “It’s white with blue shutters, right? Aren’t there some kind of pink flowers in window boxes?”
“Geraniums,” Fern said. She felt as if someone had removed her skin.
“We used to go for Sunday drives up there. Papa liked to look at the big houses and pretend we were going to buy one.” She turned to the group. “We should be nice to Fern,” she said. “She lives in a mansion.”
“It’s not a mansion,” Fern said.
“You should be happy. Aren’t you happy? Don’t you wake up every morning and think how lucky you are?”
—
When Fern got home, there was something in her mailbox. It said only, Miss you. He did not sign his name but she knew the writing: Ben. She called the rehabilitation facility and asked for his room.
“Am I crazy?” Ben asked.
“You are you. The world is what’s crazy.”
—
Edgar, in Alaska, was a misplaced toy soldier. He had been flown to Fairbanks then Nome and then driven in a jeep by a logger with a black beard and no eyebrows to an expanse of white tundra that seemed to be edgeless. There were no roads, just snow and snow and snow, and in the middle, a tiny log cabin with a curl of sm
oke coming from its chimney. Edgar could not have conjured a scene less reminiscent of war. The jeep stopped and the driver said, “Welcome home, soldier.” He threw Edgar’s rucksack on the snow and drove away. Edgar stood there and the wind kicked snow onto his face. He was wearing the same clothes that the boys going to the hot jungle wore. He had no hat, no coat, no gloves. His boots, as he walked to the little cabin, began to soak through.
Inside: a single room with four bunk beds along one wall, a metal table and chairs, a sink, hooks with parkas and snowboots below. A young man, fat and pale, was sitting in front of the fire with a sketchpad. Edgar could see the drawing—a naked girl lying on her side, a kitten curled up in front of her. “Nice,” Edgar said, gesturing towards the drawing. The man looked up at him and said, “Welcome to nowhere.”
Another man came in later, spit blood into a cup, his lungs wracked from running for hours in the cold. He did three hundred push-ups, four hundred sit-ups, then went outside naked and stood there in the arctic evening, the sunlight hardly more than a grey fog. Edgar, from the window, looked at the man’s body, imagined his sweat turning to a crust of ice. It got dark and Edgar checked his watch: 4:00 p.m.
“We call him Runner,” the fat kid said. “By ‘we’ I mean ‘I.’”
“Is there anyone else here?”
“Nope.”
“What are we supposed to be doing?”
“Fuck if I know, brother. I’m drawing fucking kittens. Best job in the Army. Better than getting my legs blown off.”
They had a radio, which Runner knew how to use, but no one ever called them on it. Runner ran every day and hardly spoke. The other boy, who Runner called Fatty, kept a series of jam jars filled with urine under his bunk. They had rations in crates in the corner. The sink didn’t run so they melted snow in a pot over the fire. There was a pit latrine out back and Runner had built a wooden platform on which to stand while he poured a pot of boiled snowmelt over his head.
Edgar figured that both of the others were also rich, that they had the kind of fathers who knew whom to call to move the game pieces of their children into safe territory. He hung on to the thread of anger at Fern for rendering him so useless at the very same time that he was eaten up by gratitude for not being imminently dead in a rice paddy. Next he hated himself for ever having thought he might serve a purpose in the world, that he might ever have been anything but a rich kid. Edgar wrote to Fern and described the whiteness, described the silence. For three weeks no one came or went.
Then, across the ice came a sled pulled by dogs. Runner was out but Edgar and Fatty sat at the window, watching the approach. “Who the fuck is that?” Fatty whispered. He seemed terrified. He was sweating. They had their guns at their sides.
The sled stopped and a person stepped off, yelled at the dogs, which all lay down in the snow. The person, almost child-size, was wearing a fur coat and fur boots and carried a leather bag. The voice at the door was high and then whoever it was came inside, and Fatty pointed his gun until the hood came off and it was a girl, dark-haired, pretty, her cheeks red with cold.
“Put those things away,” she said. “And make me some coffee.”
The two men scurried like mice. The girl sat down on the floor by the fire, opened her bag and took out a stack of newspapers, magazines and books. She worked for the library, she explained, and had the assignment of bringing materials to the far-flung villages, mines and outposts. She drank her coffee and said, “Here’s your fucked-up war,” and shoved the newspapers towards Edgar.
“Are you an Eskimo?” Fatty asked, as if he had encountered a unicorn. Edgar could see him imagining undressing this girl in an igloo carpeted with otter pelts.
“I’m Inupiat,” she said. “But I’m also American. I’m here to make you feel guilty about your job.” She drank her coffee, left the cup and shut the door hard. Edgar jumped up, got the letters out from under his pillow and chased the girl. It had started to snow.
“Will you mail these for me?” He explained that they were for his wife, because having such a person made him feel credible, worth saving.
“Are you grateful or angry?” the girl asked.
“Angry,” he admitted. “And grateful.” He thought of Fern. Her absence was a bee sting that had suddenly ceased to be numb. He could have scratched his skin off with want for her.
“You should be,” she said and took the letters.
The other boys went to bed and Edgar stayed up. He had read the papers before he left but now, in this quiet, the stories hit him. There was a sound outside the cabin and Edgar sat up. He took a flashlight and cracked the door. Two reindeer pawed at the ground. They looked up at Edgar’s light, their eyes bright marbles, and then they turned and ran.
—
After Edgar had been in Alaska for six weeks, the jeep returned with more food and also a box of stationery and three typewriters. “The guys down in Nome sent these,” the logger said.
“They couldn’t be bothered to come themselves?”
“I’m the only one who knows how to get here.”
There was a list of names and no one had to tell the boys that this was a catalogue of the dead. Just to see them laid out like that—all men, their rank, two dates. The driver said, “Guess they need more letter-writers.” There were mothers upon mothers upon mothers who needed to be told that their sons were dead.
The man said he would be back every day. Right now, today, there were thousands of living bodies in the war but everyone knew that a certain number of them would die by nightfall, by morning. The question was which ones.
The three men put matches to the wicks of their kerosene lanterns that night and began to type.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kingsly,
Please let me be the first to tell you how bravely Private First Class Kingsly fought and how respected he was. He died the way he lived. You should be proud. We thank you for your service and patriotism and offer our sincere condolences.
Dear Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Abbot,
I cannot imagine the loss you feel at this time. First Sergeant Abbot was a generous fighter and a good friend. He was one of the finest men we had. Our hearts go out to you.
Edgar tried to make each letter unique even though he knew nothing of the boys he was writing about. These were whole lives, or had been. He tried to say the same thing a new way dozens of times a day. Later there would be a handwritten note stapled to the newest list: Lieutenants, Just follow the script. Please and thank you.
At night Edgar used the typewriter to write to Fern. He told her that he had started to write a novel. He described a plot: a young man with money that he didn’t earn or necessarily want, a father who did nothing but acquire, a question of how to create a meaningful life of one’s own. In the letter, Edgar wrote that he was working on a few pages a day, between work orders. It’s really cold. There’s nothing else to do. He tried to describe the place where he was, the way ice gave way to ice and how the line between sky and land was just a smudge. That was it. There was nothing else to look at or see. Just white and white and white. Privilege was a kind of nothingness, suspending him outside of the lived world. Not even color joined him there.
Fern did not ask where the character of the wife was in this novel. Instead of asking, she wrote, I wish you were here.
And then: Edgar, my love, I’m pregnant. We’re going to be parents. We are going to be a family.
1976
THE NIGHT AFTER the dinner party at which he had failed to pair his wife with John Jefferson and thereby even out all wrongs, Edgar stood with Glory at the milks in the health food store, looking for her brand and fat percentage. She liked the farmed stuff, something that still had a faint cow scent. Edgar never shopped with Fern. He was used to the items in their cupboard. He thought of them as the foods that were available to the American family—he had not ever considered Fern as a choice-maker, rumbling down the ai
sles, editing what her family would be made of. Glory, holding the basket against her bright, smooth legs, had a different list: dark bread, black grapes, yogurt and a shining ham for her husband. While they walked the sugars, the cereals, she played with the hair on the back of Edgar’s neck, which he had meant to trim but now felt grateful that he hadn’t.
The night before, he had begun to walk towards Harvard Square where there was a hotel, but Glory had run after him. “She’s going to forgive you,” she had said. “Yours is a good marriage and it’ll survive this. But in the meantime there’s no sense in being alone.” Edgar had slept in the guest room that night while John’s snores had rattled the walls. Edgar had felt displaced, distant. He had thought about the day they had received the keys to their new house in Cambridge. How he, Fern and Cricket had sat on the polished floor of the big empty living room, the bay windows a clean view into the thick green of a summer maple. It had smelled like fresh paint. Cricket had said, “Can this be my room?” and Edgar had laughed and said, “Maybe.” They had walked through the house: the kitchen with its views of the roses in the backyard and the lawn, the long creaky stairway to the huge basement, the winding staircase up one, two, three stories, with bedrooms everywhere. The bathrooms with their claw-foot tubs and leaded windows that made the leaves outside go slightly out of focus. Cricket had said, “Do we really get to live here?” She had only known the Army base. She had not realized that she was a child of privilege, that houses like this for people like her were supposed to be perfectly normal.
Edgar had known his daughter would adapt and come to think of this as regular. He had seen that they stood at a junction and a part of him had wanted to put the house back on the market and move into an apartment, but there were his girls at the window, and everything outside had been bright, bright green. “We do really get to live here,” he had said. Fern had kissed him on the back of the neck and laughed when the short hairs had pricked her lips. What would it be like not to fight against himself? Edgar had wondered. What would it be like to say yes instead of no? He had tried, he told himself. See?
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 8
