I think one of them is a photographer. The older one. And then the younger woman seems to be married to that army guy.
I got that, but who are they?
Milo, you know as much as I do.
It was the first time she had said his name. All I know is that these stories seem to be inside you. And that somehow when I touch you they come out. If you let us keep going maybe we can get some answers. But maybe not, she said.
He smiled at her.
So we’re the blind leading the blind.
So to speak, she said.
He rolled back onto his chest and spread his arms out like wings. The muscles in his back where his wings would have attached rippled like water under wind. He splayed out his fingers and she thought that he might fly off the table.
Okay, he said. Bring it on.
All around Joe and Vivian it was getting dark. Glowing white lights were arriving in the streetlamps and in the windows of the buildings.
Do you know what we’re doing? she said.
There were high trees along the sidewalk and the October wind that was blowing in her hair blew through the trees and seemed like it would blow out all the lights.
Iris
They moved the trial to New Orleans. The heat was just as bad. In the new courtroom Iris fanned herself with the newspaper. The story was all over the papers. It had started, probably, with a newspaper. She had been upset. He was gone. She was expecting their first child. He was drafted from the reserve. He was supposed to stay in Saigon. There were other doctors there who were regular army doctors but they were not sent to Soc Trang and he was.
Why was he sent instead of them? That’s what she wanted to know. But no one would tell her. She wrote letters to her senators. She wrote to the Army Surgeon General’s office. She was alone in New York and he was in South Vietnam. She was upset. It was perfectly understandable. But nobody understood. No one would tell her why.
The letters she received back on official stationery did not explain why her husband had been sent and not the army doctors and although the stilted words tried to convey sympathy for her situation they mentioned that many other wives were in the same position. Many hardships were necessary during wartime. Iris held the letter against her belly and closed her eyes. She was not an idiot. She was not a child. She knew that she was not alone in her misfortune. Did that make it any less unfair? Her husband was a reserve doctor. They had not bargained for this. She took out the heavy black manual typewriter in its case from the closet. Her back ached and she nearly dropped it on the floor. It was the one that he had had in medical school but she had always done most of his typing. As soon as she had finished an essay of her own she would roll in a fresh piece of rough paper for him. The sound of their marriage was the sound of typing, an uneven marching beat that unwittingly foreshadowed his uneven military career. He had no dreams of advancement in the army. He just wanted to help people, and at this rate to stay alive. But now here he was being court-martialed for nothing and she was worried that it would ruin his medical career. And that it was her fault.
Was it her fault? The newspaper. After the letters to the senators and the surgeon general went nowhere she had sent a letter to the editor. Of a major newspaper. In it, she had said that the secretive nature of the conduct of this war was unconscionable. She said that national security was a smokescreen the government was hiding behind to prevent the truth from being known. The letter was printed. There was a feeling among Captain Michaels’s family and friends and associates that in spite of his own casual and critical behavior in Soc Trang it was this letter more than anything else that had resulted in his court-martial. His mother did not come to New Orleans for the trial. His father, who owned a pharmacy in Reading, Pennsylvania, had flown in and was sitting next to his daughter-in-law. But he did not look over at her during the proceedings. Sometimes she thought he had forgotten, happily, that she was there.
She was listening to the testimony about Captain Michaels’s missing buttons from his uniform when the baby kicked for the first time.
Honor
Tomorrow’s his birthday.
What?
Your friend. He turns twenty-five tomorrow.
Honor was standing at the nurses’ station reading the paper. Her hair was undone and fell in a curtain shielding her face. She pulled it aside and looked at the nurse.
Do you think he would like a cake? she asked.
Everyone likes a cake.
Can he have one? Can I bring one in for him?
The nurse checked his chart. He’s allowed to eat anything. He has physical therapy until eleven tomorrow. Then occupational therapy. Why don’t you come in around lunchtime.
Will he be in our room? I won’t have enough for everyone. And he wouldn’t want a party anyway. We should be alone.
I’ll get him there.
He’ll probably hate it.
He hates a lot of things. Doesn’t mean we should let him get away with it.
Honor flipped the pages of the paper.
He trusts me a little now. I don’t want him to think I’m pushing it.
The nurse slid the paper over to her side of the counter. She started reading.
Don’t forget to bring a candle, she said.
1936
It was late when Joe came home. He had been studying, he said. He had an exam. I know, she said, as if he’d already told her. She had dinner waiting for him and they sat at the little table in the kitchen. She had pot roast, his favorite, and string beans and roasted potatoes. No matter how little money they had she always managed to feed him well. She watched him while he ate and she seemed to enjoy just the movement of his jaw, the way he held his fork, the way he organized the remnants on his plate.
He closed his eyes when he took a sip of water.
I saw that bandleader you like is coming at Christmas.
Oh really? he said.
It was advertised in the paper.
He kept eating.
I thought we might go, she said.
He kept eating.
Then he said: Isn’t it too expensive?
Yes, she said, it is. But I thought we deserved some fun.
It’s very expensive, he said.
She stood up and took his plate.
If you think so, she said, scraping the plate.
No, no, he said, leaning back in the chair. Maybe you’re right. He smiled. Maybe we should go.
•
They dismissed the charge of feigning mental illness. They refused to withdraw the two remaining charges. Then they called Captain Michaels as a witness.
The Captain testified in a calm voice. He responded to all of the accusations with reasonable defenses. Yes, he had complained but not because he wanted to be sent home. Yes, he had said there was a lack of vital surgical tools on the base. In fact, the shortages had proven on more than one occasion to be fatal in the operating room. Yes, he had let his facial hair grow, but when he returned to base, his commanding officer had ordered him to shave and he had.
He answered all of their questions and sat down. When he said fatal, his voice had faltered in a way that only his wife noticed. As he walked back to his seat, he made sure not to catch her eye.
The seven-man board deliberated for less than an hour. When they returned with a verdict Captain Michaels’s wife was still sitting in the heat. The perspiration bloomed in large spots across the back of her dress. The head of the board gave the verdict. The verdict was guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer. The sentence was dismissal from the army. Captain Michaels was also convicted of a lesser charge of failing to shave, thereby presenting an undisciplined appearance. When the decision was read Captain Michaels showed no sign of emotion. According to the newspaper accounts, his pregnant wife who sat behind him in the courtroom showed signs of strain.
2005
The cake was vanilla with chocolate icing. Honor had stayed up late baking it. She used a mix from the health food store but still it took he
r a long time. She double-checked every instruction and ingredient. She made the icing.
She carried it on a plate and covered it with tinfoil. She leaned it against her body when she pushed open the door. He wasn’t there yet and she set it out on the table. She put a candle next to it. She took off her coat and left the room to wash her hands. When she came back he was there, early, sitting in his wheelchair.
What is this? he said.
A cake, she said.
What for?
I heard it was your birthday.
He closed his eyes and rolled his head and his hair moved and he made a disgusted gesture with his mouth.
So this is a party? he said.
Not exactly. Not a party. I just thought it would be nice to celebrate.
She tilted her head. She bit her lip. She felt afraid of him for the first time.
You and your pity.
It’s not pity. Look, if you don’t want the cake we don’t have to have it.
She walked over to take the cake away and he slammed it off the table with the back of his hand. The plate broke.
See that? he said. That’s you, he said. You think you’re so good but you’re just using me to feel good. You and these goddamned stories. What do they have to do with me anyway? You’re just some crazy lady with a fucked-up need to mess around in my head. You can just forget about it. I don’t need this kind of help.
Okay, she said. She was looking at the cake on his arm. It was like pieces of flesh stuck all over.
So we understand each other? he said. This is all over, right? Because I don’t know what it is you’ve been doing to me but I’m better off without it.
I wish you’d give it another try, she said. She was scared of him now but so scared that she felt she could say anything.
He pushed over the whole table. It dropped on its side like a fallen horse. They both looked at it for a long time.
I’m sorry about the cake, she said.
His eyes looked hurt like a boy’s. They squinted up at her with a blue fire.
It’s not the cake, he said. It’s you.
PART TWO
Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down.
We make a little history, baby,
Every time you come around.
—NICK CAVE, “The Ship Song”
CHAPTER SEVEN
They lived happily ever after. Anna gave birth to a baby girl at the tender age of seventeen and it was the beginning of a great love story. She had never known such joy. The round head burst forth from her like a marvelous idea. Her body shook with the revelation of new life. Her family, however, did not share the same attitude, and so the baby was taken from her and given to a respectable and grateful couple who were waiting anxiously outside the delivery room. It seemed that everything was right again with the world, except to Anna. Her father and mother handed the child over with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Pride and revulsion were popular sentiments in the late twentieth century. Ronald Reagan was president. For years, people had believed in believing in things, and when they went as planned the entire nation took credit; when they didn’t, the country blamed someone else. But ever since the Vietnam War some people had started blaming themselves for things that did not go right, and because it was so unlike the national character to do so, an element of self-hatred had crept into the culture. On the streets you saw young people with hairstyles like a crown of fangs. The music blaring from enormous boxes sounded menacing and deranged. A lot of people wore black. It was also a very innocent time. Telephones were heavy and stayed at home. Sometimes they had buttons. Girls waited by the phone, literally. Boys did not dream of owning their own jet. Women who were not even old looked old. There was plenty of drug addiction, but not a lot of rehab. There was no Ecstasy. There were no antidepressants. There was no global village. There was no Internet. On the day that Anna gave birth to her daughter the sun was shining. Out the hospital window the East River flowed past like one long silver muscle, the way it had when Walt Whitman had mused over it in the preceding century, and like it would look to the passengers of a plane flying low over the city in the next century. Anna cried. She was too young and inexperienced to have truly maternal feelings yet, but the emotion she felt for her new baby was an uplifting, cosmic, unbounded passion. Her father, a surgeon, tried to explain to her that her feelings were largely hormonal, a result of chemicals released during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and that eventually, rather quickly even, they would pass and she might think about the child wistfully from time to time but that she would not regret her decision. She argued, through her tears, that it had not exactly been her decision. Her father gave up and left the room. Her mother, a woman at this point in her life too vain and too horrified by the idea of becoming a grandmother to entertain the thought that her daughter might actually keep the baby, emphasized how much work it was to raise a child, and how much early adulthood of her own Anna had left ahead of her, too much to derail or squander on an infant. She herself had had an abortion before she had gotten married, she reminded Anna, and to this day she rarely thought about it. (This was not entirely accurate: her own parents had wasted no opportunity to make her feel terrible about the scandal, and every subsequent decision in her life had flowed from that experience of profound shame.) She had not made her own daughter feel ashamed about getting pregnant; on the contrary, she felt modern and compassionate for having accepted Anna’s determined stance against having an abortion, although it could be surmised that this was in no small part because it was so late in the pregnancy when Anna had revealed the state of things. Now the sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the city, and the light was fading over the river. This was the time in American history when photographers were discovering new lenses and filters and retouching techniques that gave the glossy images in magazines a burnished, affluent glow. This was the glow that was spreading across the sky right now, a sheen that gave the river a metallic, artificial magic and glimmered bewitchingly on the buildings and highways. Anna’s mother did not leave the room. She sat in the silence. She observed an orange triangle of light reflected from the window onto the blank television screen suspended from the ceiling. Had Anna turned on the television she might have heard about the death earlier that day of Count Basie, the celebrated bandleader whose music had captured the romance and optimism of another era. Or she might have caught a glimpse of a new form of entertainment called a music video, on a new channel known as MTV. But Anna did not turn on the television, and she did not respond to her mother. She was unmoved by her parents’ arguments, unruly in her devotion to her infant daughter, and unhinged by the possibility that she might never hold her baby in her arms. She screamed. She screamed until the nurses and orderlies had to medicate away the screams. A doctor spoke to Anna’s parents and wrote a prescription. Evidently there were antidepressants. They had not yet been perfected, however, and so Anna’s screams continued long after her parents had brought her home. Finally, after two weeks of uninterrupted screams, it was arranged for the respectable and now ungrateful couple who had been waiting outside the delivery room to adopt a different baby. Their new baby was also American, not a Chinese or African baby. There really was no global village. It was 1984. When Anna finally had her beloved back in her arms, she gazed into her daughter’s eyes for a long time. Then she looked up at her parents, whose own expressions were no longer able to conceal their disappointment and disgrace, shook the bangs from her eyes, and deadened her gaze somewhat before breaking into a smile. Then she said:
I’m going to name her Honor.
Anna’s mother, in spite of herself, fell deeply in love with the child. She had imbued the drama of her only daughter’s illegitimate pregnancy with all of the pathos and regret that she felt about her own marriage and divorce and therefore once the baby was born believed strongly that this child in possession of a single teenage mother must be in need of toys. She thought about her granddaughter all the tim
e, took care of her while Anna finished high school, and was heartbroken when Anna took Honor with her to college. Her apartment was covered in pictures of the little girl. Most of these showed Honor staring into the camera, a profusion of curls dancing around her head, one hand reaching out to touch the lens. Her eyes were a startling, electric blue. Her nose a squat pug. Her neck thin like the stick of a lollipop. Her mouth curved in a mature amusement beyond her years. She had caused the ruination of one life, so her grandmother believed, and resuscitated another, and from this the woman deduced that the child was destined for calamity and splendor.
The afternoon was a cloudy haze. The branches of the trees in the park trembled like etchings come momentarily to life. The little girl, just walking, bent down and found a penny on the path that encircled the toy-boat pond.
It was a dirty copper specimen bent slightly at one edge and embossed upon it was the date 1923. What the little girl did on that cloudy day with the March wind tossing her curls into her face was to lift the penny to her lips, put it on her tongue, taste its cold filthy sweetness, and swallow it. Pigeons sailed overhead, their shadows skating on the pond, and in front of the little girl, out of the sleeve of a wool coat, a gloved hand emerged and pulled her toward home.
Over the years the little girl had moments of sudden restlessness when she would begin to feel the quickening motion of the globe as well as her own small self delicately balanced on the spinning ball. She sensed the rapid palpitations of her heart. She was aware of her blood pulsing through her limbs. She had reached an age when her young mother felt that she could leave her alone without worrying, and consequently Honor was deeply acquainted with solitude. She read early and often and was currently, at the age of eight, inhaling, if not actually comprehending, Gone with the Wind and the complete works of Agatha Christie. She felt that her tenuous circumstances—the two of them lived now in a college town while her mother was in graduate school, with only minimal support from Honor’s grandparents, who were upset by Anna’s refusal to return to New York—created an uncertain, wavering, and often wondrous atmosphere around their daily life which was not at all like the concrete, material world she read about in the newspapers, or even novels. The days seemed to float along without any tether to the organized rituals she observed at friends’ houses: dinnertimes, bath-times, bedtimes. In her house, time was a fluid, untamable vapor and anything, Honor felt, could happen.
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