There was just one small obstacle: the draft.
“I was such a dick then,” he said. “That’s when I started paying attention to the war.”
When the sheer stupidity of it became clear to him, he began, suddenly, to notice other things as well. Outside the narrow, easy life he’d led, people were hungry, degraded. He saw them standing at bus stops in tattered clothes, on street corners, begging. For the first time, a barrage of conflicting emotions threatened to overwhelm him. His parents couldn’t understand his confusion. What did the existence of poor people have to do with his future? Why did the war itself – whether it was moral – have anything to do with his decision about the draft?
They hadn’t raised him to consider whether things were fair or right, he’d realized, but only whether or not they were expedient. And it was expedient for him not to go to Vietnam.
Cam glanced at Tom. “My old man said law school was the way to go and pulled some strings and got me a 4F. He laughed. “He about shit when I joined the SDS and just walked away.”
Listening, Jane argued with herself, the same argument she knew she’d have with Tom later, when they were alone. Wasn’t it an exemplary thing to give up everything to fight against the war? Why couldn’t Cam have fallen in love with Bridget at first sight? Didn’t Tom always swear that he’d fallen in love with her exactly that way?
Cam segued into an account of the trip to Cuba he’d made not long after Che Guevara’s death, and Jane noticed that his hand had moved from the table to Bridget’s thigh, his thumb rubbing small circles high on the inside seam of her Levi’s.
“It was so fucking amazing there,” Cam said. “The people. They sang in the fields.”
Tom looked skeptical.
“No shit,” Cam said. “It’s not at all like what they want us to believe. Debray. I met him, man. He knows where it’s at: ‘The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution.’ Right on! But you have to do it small. Foco. You make a thousand small motors to set the big one going.”
“Weather,” Tom said.
Cam laughed. “Weather’s over, man. I’m talking bigger shit than that.”
“Like?”
“I’ve been looking.” Cam glanced at Bridget. “Or I was till now.”
“For – ?”
He shrugged. “The right person. The right place.”
“That would be me,” Bridget said, brightly. “Here. Now.”
Tom gave her a long look, then pushed back from the table. “I’ve got to study. I’m going to the library,” he said.
Jane got up, too. “I’ve got papers go grade. I’ll go with you.
“I don’t like him,” Tom said, closing the front door behind them. “All that Cuba bullshit. He’s lying. Régis Debray wasn’t even in Cuba when Cameron said he was there. He was in Bolivia. In prison. He’s a fucking fortunate son, though. I believe that.”
He shrugged. “But you know Bridget. Nobody can tell her anything. If she goes, she goes. We can’t be responsible for that.”
Jane pulled her coat closer against the cold, and they walked the rest of the way to the library in silence. There, Tom bent to his books, fell instantly into deep concentration. She watched him, as she had done so many times, envying his ability to shift so completely from one moment to the next, while she remained caught in an agitated tangle of emotions: relieved that Bridget had made the decision to go, yet fearful about what might happen to her once she was gone.
11
“Gimme Shelter”
Maybe Tom was right in his belief that they were better off not having any contact with Bridget. He probably was right, Jane thought. She still would have worried, of course, but it would have been a different, abstract kind of worry, not the kind born of some small thing Bridget had said during one of her occasional phone calls that burrowed into Jane’s mind, mixing with all the other small, disturbing things she’d said since she’d left with John Cameron more than a year before. If Bridget stopped calling, maybe it wouldn’t feel as if her volatile spirit lived on in the house, too often edging its way into her relationship with Tom.
If he answered when Bridget called, he handed Jane the receiver without a word. More often than not, she was already talking when Jane put it to her ear.
“Fucking Idaho, can you believe it?” she said, when she woke them late one night last summer. “At a truck stop. Cam’s got this friend whose parents have this big bourgeois house in Sun Valley and we were up there for a week. Holy shit, you wouldn’t believe these digs. And the mountains! We hiked twenty miles every day – and did a hundred push-ups when we got to the top. You should have seen me!”
She rattled on, pausing only to add coins when the phone beeped a warning. “You’re okay?” Jane asked. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, I’ve got to get off. Cam’s coming out.”
There was a click, and she was gone.
“Idaho,” Tom said. “What the fuck are they doing in Idaho?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Good,” he said. “We don’t want to know.” He punched his pillow a few times, positioning it, and within moments was fast asleep again.
But Jane lay awake. The way Bridget had hung up at the sight of Cam: did that mean she was calling Jane in secret, against his wishes? Or had she hung up to avoid answering Jane’s question? Neither of them mentioned Bridget’s call in the morning. In an unspoken agreement between them, Jane didn’t expect Tom to talk to her about Bridget if he didn’t expect her to talk to him about her family, or to spend time with his. In the absence of these tensions, they led what seemed to Jane a fortunate life, happy in their work and in each other’s company – and without the money problems that had plagued Jane’s childhood and adolescence.
The summer before Jane’s third year of teaching, Tom’s father had a mild heart attack, and his parents decided to retire to Florida in January. It was a good idea, Tom thought. He’d miss having his dad within easy driving distance, but he would not be sorry to have his mother farther away. Since his graduation from law school, she’d nagged at him about staying in Bloomington, working as a public defender, when any of the good law firms in Evansville would be thrilled to have him. She disapproved of his living with Jane, whom she’d never liked – although she’d never have admitted it.
Tom and Jane had planned to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Bloomington, as they usually did, and Jane looked forward to the long weekend and the time together. But that year Mrs. Gilbert asked him to come home.
“Our last holiday season in the house you grew up in,” she said.
And, “Your dad’s health. Well, we just don’t know how many more Thanksgivings we’ll have together anywhere.”
“Come with me,” Tom said. “We’ll get there for dinner and leave right after. Plus, you know my mom – it’ll be a cast of thousands. You probably won’t even have to talk to her.”
Jane agreed because she didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving alone. But once they got there, she felt like she always felt in Mrs. Gilbert’s presence: awkward and small. She had given up trying to explain to Tom why the little things his mother said and did made her feel that way. He honestly couldn’t see why Jane would let them bother her. His mom was a pain. Everybody knew it. He loved her, he guessed. She was his mother, after all. But what she thought meant next to nothing to him.
“See?” he said, when they got in the car to go home. “It wasn’t so bad.”
But Jane was in a black mood by then and didn’t answer. It was bad. And didn’t he understand that going had made her feel even worse about not having spent Thanksgiving with her own family – or any other holiday, for that matter, since the Christmas after Bobby’s death? Five years ago, now. For a few years afterwards, she’d gone home occasionally, just for a day. But the visits were difficult and, in time, she had just quit going at all. Most of the time she managed to keep her guilty thoughts at bay, but the holiday season never failed to bring them to the surface.
Each morning that December, Jane woke full of sorrow that she could not shake until she stood in her classroom, looking over the bent heads of her third-graders, busy at some task. There, among her students, she felt hopeful. Herself. This was the one thing in her life that she knew she did absolutely right, the only thing that never, ever disappointed her. It was as natural to her as breathing – and she could be the giver instead of the given-to, as she all too often was with Tom. He loved her too much, she thought sometimes. He believed that the force of his love for her could shelter her and make all things right. But some things just could not be right, not ever. The world! The fact that she’d failed Bridget, broken her parents’ hearts!
The children had such extravagant hopes for Christmas, Jane knew – most of which would be crushed when they woke Christmas morning to the few meager gifts their parents could afford. So she threw herself into making the Christmas season at school something special for them. Every morning, she drew a name from a hat to see which student would get to open the door on the advent calendar she had brought. Then the class made some new decoration for the room: candy canes made of twisted red and white pipe cleaners; cotton ball snowmen; angels made from toilet-tissue rolls, with glittery cardboard wings. She read Christmas stories after lunch, taught Christmas customs from all over the world for social studies.
Then, on the Tuesday before Christmas break, days after it had been announced that the peace talks were at an impasse again, news came that President Nixon had ordered the resumption of bombing in Vietnam. Jane saw the headline on an abandoned newspaper in the teachers’ lounge when she went there to put her lunch in the refrigerator. She picked it up to skim the story.
Devastating air attack . . . waves of U.S. planes dropped mines in Haiphong Harbor . . . rocket attacks on civilian targets near Hanoi . . . the red glow of fire . . .
“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck.” When she looked down, she saw her hands were shaking.
Through the window, she could see the school buses arriving and she was thankful that the other teachers had already gone to prepare for the children just beginning to spill out of them. She felt nauseous. She thought of going to the office and saying she thought she might be coming down with the flu. But she knew if she left school, sick, the children would find out and worry about her. And it wasn’t as if going home would make her feel any better.
They were scheduled in the music room first thing, to practice for Friday’s pageant. Usually, it pleased her to lead the children in a long, straight line down the corridor. That morning, though, all she could think was that most of them would spend their whole lives this way: well-behaved, in line, doing what they were supposed to do. Their poor, hardworking parents had done it and their older brothers, as well – too many of whom had ended up in Vietnam. A bulletin board near the principal’s office had photographs of a dozen boys in uniform who’d gone to school here and gone on to serve in Vietnam; some had wallet-sized school photos clipped in the corner. Goofy-looking little boys with freckles and crewcuts, grinning.
Tom was working late that night. Jane had intended to have a quiet evening, planning lessons ahead for January so that she’d have Christmas break completely free. But after watching footage of the bombings on the evening news, she knew she would not be able to concentrate. She left a note for Tom and set out walking toward Dunn Meadow, where she found a few dozen people holding a vigil. She took the lit candle one of them offered and bent over the flickering flame to protect it from the wintry air. This was nothing like the demonstration on that spring night after the news that Nixon had ordered the bombing in Cambodia, when thousands of people had gathered to express their rage, to organize, to do something. Tonight there was utter silence. No speeches, no signs. Just sorrow as dark as the night surrounding them, and the small comfort of being with people of like mind. Jane recognized only a few of them: Professor Farlow, from whom she had taken an honors course her freshman year; a woman Tom had done draft counseling with when he was in law school; a guy from the public defenders office, where he worked. There was nobody under twenty, except for a group of self-conscious high school kids huddled together against the cold. Jane wondered half-seriously if Nixon had planned it this way: get all the college kids home for Christmas break, then bomb the shit out of Hanoi. Who would protest?
“Who’d protest anyway?” Tom said, when she posed the question to him later that evening. “In case you haven’t figured it out, the draft lottery killed off all that. You’ve got to admit, it was a genius move on Nixon’s part: once you know you’re not going, what do you care?”
“But Cambodia. Kent State. They were after the lottery.”
“Different,” Tom said. “Besides, everyone we knew, everyone with any history in this is out of here. They’ve got jobs. Kids. What Nixon does doesn’t affect them any more. Students now, all they care about is getting high.”
“You sound like an old person,” Jane said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But what I’m telling you is true.”
“So that means we just do . . . nothing?”
“There’s not a goddamn thing we can do about Vietnam,” he said. “But we’re not doing nothing. We both do good work, Jane – real work, in the world. That’s what we can do, and we’re going to keep on doing it – long after we get out of Vietnam. Listen, I’m not saying Nixon’s not a fucking asshole. He’s a fucking asshole!”
“So we just accept that, and . . .”
But he wouldn’t argue.
The last few days before Christmas break began, Jane went through the motions, the news reverberating in her head: Heaviest bombing in history . . . as of late yesterday, more than 100 B-52’s and 500 fighter jets dropped an estimate of 5,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnamese military targets, including sites in downtown Hanoi and Haiphong . . .
Any kind of social studies lesson she could imagine making of the bombing she’d almost certainly have been fired for, so she didn’t mention it to the children at all. Plus, she thought, why upset them? They did math problems; she listened to them read. She walked them down to the music room to practice for the pageant at their scheduled time, but she could not bear to hear the sound of their voices, singing, and fled to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stall and sat, the heels of her hands pressed against her eyes, until it was time to go collect them.
“Are you sick, Miss Barth?” Judy Unger asked on Thursday.
“No,” Jane said, blinking back tears. “I’m not sick, Judy.”
“Are you sad, then?”
“Heavens no! It’s Christmas!” she said.
Friday afternoon, she walked the children to the gymnasium and settled them into the rows of folding chairs assigned to their class. They wiggled and twisted in their seats, waving to their parents and grandparents, making faces at their younger brothers and sisters in the audience. The gymnasium smelled like sweat and damp wool. It had been foggy that morning, the world no more than the few feet of road her headlights illuminated, and now a dull, gray light seeped in through the high, caged windows. The music teacher took her place at the piano on the stage at the far end of the room, the principal nodded and the curtain rose on a group of sixth-graders in the traditional Christmas tableau. There was Daniel Pettus, a goatherd, in the tunic his mother had made from a burlap bag, and blond Kathy Frank in her mother’s Madonna-blue housecoat, bent prettily over the doll in the manger.
“ ‘As it came to pass in those days, that there went o
ut a decree from Caesar Augustus . . .’ ” began Letty Shoemaker, in her sweet country drawl.
It moved Jane so to see the children she’d taught her first year so grown up, proud sixth-graders now. And the little ones! Kindergartners and first-graders dressed in angel costumes made from white sheets, tinsel halos bobby-pinned to their hair, filed onto the risers and when they began to sing “Away in the Manger,” she was glad that the lights had been lowered for the performance, because tears ran down her cheeks and she thought her heart would break at the sound of their high, flutey voices.
One more hour, she thought, and she’d be on her way home, where she could collapse into bed and sleep as long as she wanted to. Days, maybe. Tom would drive to Evansville on Christmas Eve morning and come back that night, but she had decided against going with him. She felt depleted, weak with sadness, more vulnerable than usual to Tom’s mother’s cool, unspoken disapproval. If the subject of the bombing came up, she did not know how she could keep silent and feared what she might say.
“You go,” she told Tom. “Really. I’ll be fine.”
Though, in truth, when he made up his mind to go, she felt hurt and abandoned.
Jane had made gingerbread men, decorated with icing and sprinkles, and she passed them out just before the last bell rang, along with a wrapped gift for each child: a paperback copy of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which she had inscribed “Merry Christmas with love from your third-grade teacher, Miss Barth.”
They had brought her gifts, too, which were piled on her desk. She did not have to open them to know what was in them: knick-knacks, perfumed soaps and lotions – things she did not want and would not use. She’d unwrap them and write thank-you notes, then wrap them back up again and deliver them to the nursing home where a friend worked to be given to elderly residents whose families had abandoned them. Still, the thought of the children spending their money on the gifts for her oppressed her, and she was reminded of countless wrong gifts her mother had chosen for her over the years, the edgy disappointment she had felt opening them. If you could have so little, couldn’t it at least be something you want?
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