by Neil Gordon
There’s a window, over the backyard—a huge leaded-glass window, lit silver now by the moon—and in front of the window, a deep feather couch, all blacks and grays until she flips on the light, when it turns to reds and oranges. The slipcover was sewn by her mother, the couch purchased by her grandmother. In front of it is a rug, holding the moon’s light in its center. On the rug is an oak chest, darkly stained, on which sit a vase of dried flowers. On the wall are paintings, one of which is a winter landscape by Jervis McEntee of a field of cows and, in the distance, a red barn—the dairy, when the Bentley farm was still a farm. And behind this picture, in turn, is a wall safe, which she opens to take out, from under a small pile of deeds, and passports, and bank books, and jewelry boxes, and old report cards, and legal papers, and backup Zip disks, and all the things that need to be saved, when a house burns, including a single blue airmail envelope.
Is this part of Molly’s plan? Has she know, from the moment she sat down to think, what seems like years ago, of how she was going to tell Jason that his father, my grandfather, had died, that this was going to be the end of the plan?
Maybe if Little J. had let her, if he had not cried so, she would have avoided this. Maybe if he had not, suddenly, so profoundly doubted the very principles on which his life was based, she would have avoided this. As she has been avoiding it for thirty years. In other words, Molly is not doing anything she needs to do. She is doing something, now, only for my Jason. Something so huge that if Jason gets it wrong, Molly will be paying for this the rest of her life.
But she is already passing into the hallway now, closing the upstairs parlor door, passing the empty third-floor rooms, turning off lights as she goes, and going back down the stairs.
In her bedroom, the demented moonlight is directly on Jason now, as if imprisoning him in a painting by Salvador Dali. The symbolism is not lost on her; she even smiles, slightly, for a second.
She sits, puts her hand on the small of his back, feeling its warmth even through the covers, and rubs. But J. has not slept properly in days, and it takes more than this to wake him. The rub turns to a shake, and then she speaks his name several times into the hush of the room before, with a glacial movement, he turns to his back and rises on one elbow. The movement leaves his body in the moonlight, but his face in shadow. And quickly, Molly understands that if this is going to work for her, she must start, and finish, before the moon shifts more. And so, in an even, expressionless tone, she tells him.
“When Donny died, they sent two Marines in full dress. That’s what they do. It was January.
“They came during lunch. To the front door, not the kitchen, where we ate. It was lunchtime, I was with my folks. I went to the door myself and when I saw who it was I took them to the sun room. I let them tell me their news. They said Donny was killed walking point in Songh Be Province on January 14, 1965. They said it was a booby trap, and that he was killed instantly. I asked if they’d return his remains for burial. They said there wasn’t enough left to bury. Then they left, and I went to tell my parents in the kitchen, and everyone cried, and then I went up the mountain to tell Donny’s father, and then I ran the eight to Dutcher’s Notch, and then I found out I was pregnant, and then the rest of my life happened.”
She is still talking to a headless body. But the moonshadow is not going to wait forever. She understands that. Already the light has crept up Jason’s chest, showing the edge of the still-red hairs between his pectorals, and Molly goes on.
“But that’s not how Donny died. A week earlier I had gotten this. It was airmailed from Saigon. You can see the postmark. Just dropped into a mailbox—nothing special. It had Donny’s driver’s license, and a picture of me. And there’s a letter, in French.”
Molly unfolds the letter now, a sheet of airmail paper, and places it on the cover. The moonlight is actually bright enough that she can read it—or rather, that she can remind herself of what it says, because whatever you say, no moon is that bright.
“It says: ‘Dear Mrs. Sackler, I send you these few of your husband’s effects, sorry that I can not send more, but a package will attract the notice of the army censors, and a letter will not.’ This is good French, nearly poetic. Lots of subjunctive. Il se pourrait que vous doutiez de la vérité détenue par un tel gouvernement – le vôtre de surcroît. Vous en auriez raison. Il se pourrait que vous souhaitiez connaître la vérité sur les circonstances de la mort de votre mari. You can’t really translate the subjunctives. It’s like: ‘It is possible that you doubt the truth of that which a government—above all your own—tells you. You would be wise to. It is possible that you wish to know the truth of how your husband died. The Marine Force will tell you your husband died fighting the good fight, perhaps heroically. I am sure he was a heroic man, and I’m sure he thought himself a good man, but that is not how he died. He was put to death by a sixteen-year-old soldier, one of the two who bombed the Quan Loc Hotel in Saigon on Christmas Eve. Your papers told you of the bombing. They may even have told you that two Vietminh soldiers infiltrated the Quan Loc Hotel. But they did not tell you that they conducted the execution of your husband, and they did not tell you why. They did not tell you what your husband’s job was, an interrogator of our comrades, so widely despised that he is nearly myth; they did not tell you the horror that he, with his colleagues, rained down up on our country; they did not tell you how shocked they were at our infiltration of the hotel and our execution of this war criminal. And they did not tell you because they are afraid for you to know.
“Mrs. Sackler. In 1943 at the height of World War II Jan Karski traveled from the Warsaw Ghetto to America to tell President Roosevelt what was happening there, and no one would listen. Now you must do the same. Your country is going to lose this war in my country. Your husbands and sons and fathers are dying for nothing, nothing. Their deaths are meaningless. Tell them that. Tell them that they are dying horribly, and for nothing, because you can never, ever win.’”
When she finishes, the moon has finished its tour of the bed. It’s climbing the wall now, at the most extreme angle possible through the window, nearly upwards. From the darkness in the bed, for a long time nothing comes, just Jason’s hand on hers. Finally:
“Molly. A nineteen-year-old romantic wrote that in 1964.”
Her voice is nearly conversational. “But he was right. And I didn’t tell them.”
“Everyone’s right in hindsight. Except those who were wrong.”
Aware of the absurdity of their position, each arguing what the other believes, and in a far part of her mind, she thinks, so this is love.
But she’s crying too much to say any more, which is perhaps the right way for such conversations to end.
Molly thinks that her life will never move from this moment, this moment when thirty years of interior scaffolding collapse and for the first time since she was a child bride she cries in someone else’s arms. She’s wrong, of course, and you, if you’ve been paying attention, know exactly what’s going still to come to her. Within the year Jason will be forced to surface, betrayed by his ex-father-in-law when he divorced his wife, then smoked out by a journalist in Albany, a journalist who does so well at his job that he also will discover the existence of my half-sister, Beck, and go so far as to marry her. She doesn’t know that, and she doesn’t know Jason’s plan, which he has thought about for a long time, and which will work. That means that contrary to all she has always thought, there’s no jail time ahead for Jason, which is lucky, because within ten years Leo will be killed in an embassy bombing in Kabul, along with his wife, and after Leo and his wife die Jason, who will be her husband, will be able to raise her two grandchildren with her.
At least for a while.
Then he will die too.
But she doesn’t know any of this right now. Right now she only knows that for the first time in thirty years she is leaning her head against the chest of a man she loves and crying.
These massive symmetries, measuring your life. You
only see them two-three times, no matter how long you live. These two moments of crying. Those two tasks of delivering news of death. Those two runs on the Dutcher Notch Trail.
But I don’t think that’s what’s making Molly Sackler cry.
Do you want to know what I think is making her cry?
I think it’s that girl who learned that the President had been shot while shopping in a supermarket in Kingston. That girl who drove her Dodge Dart up the mountain to deliver Don Sr. the news of his son’s death in Vietnam. I think it’s because now, thirty years later, she is realizing how she had given that girl everything, everything she wanted. A husband, a son. A house in the Hudson Valley. A career, a lover. And how different it had turned out to be, even when they were exactly the same, the thing you wanted and the thing you got.
“Of course, I disappointed her, too.”
“What?”
Dimly, realizing she had spoken. She pulled her head from his chest and wiped her eyes, her nose, on the back of her hand. This wasn’t what she wanted to say to Jason. What she wanted to say was what she said next, and it was exactly what she wanted to say, and had been wanting to say for years.
“We were never going to win the war. It was 1964, and already, everyone knew we weren’t going to win. They walked right into his room, shot him in the head. They will have interrogated him, and tortured him. Then they blew up the hotel and drove away. The next day was Christmas morning. And the war went on for ten more fucking years.”
“Moll. Take it easy.”
“Donny knew it the second he got there. He told me so in Okinawa. He said the whole thing was a lie, from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on. It’s exactly what he said, just like the guy wrote in Ramparts: the whole thing was a lie. He said that the North Vietnamese were fighting for their existence, and they were never going to stop. He said Ho was a genius, and he could have been our genius had Truman not turned him down. He said the South Vietnamese, the folk he had to deal with? They were like gangsters. They were corrupt like fucking hoodlums. The war was like looting a shopping mall for them, everything free for the taking. He said that Johnson and McNamara knew it even back then. They were lying through their teeth to protect the war effort. In ’64 Ho had an eighty percent approval rating in South Vietnam. Then two Vietminh drove into American-occupied Saigon, walked into Donny’s hotel, tortured him, then shot him through the head. It was so leisurely, he took Donny’s tags, his wallet, everything. Then he sent me a letter. You see the postmark? Saigon, December 27. He was still in Saigon, mailing a letter with perfect impunity, three days later.”
“Okay. Enough.” Now that she isn’t crying any more, Jason has a hand on her shoulder, watching her from the remove of his arm’s length. “Why did you never tell me this before, Molly?”
“Because you guys. You and your friends. You were so fucked. The way you treated those boys? I remember when we were in San Francisco, before Donny’s intake, we went to the Haight? We wanted to cop a loose joint somewhere so we could fuck stoned? All Donny had was a military haircut—he was still in civvies—and just that, that alone, the haircut and nothing else, was enough. I had never heard anyone speak like that before in my whole life. To Donny! The last time he was on American soil. Fuck you. Fuck you and your friends.”
“Molly, for God’s sake.”
She regards him coldly. “You want to know what I think, Little J.? Because if you want to keep going with me, you need to know. I think you were just as bad as they, and you know what? I think that if by some far out, impossible chance, one of you had ever gotten into any kind of position of power? You, Jeff Jones, Billy Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, their sanctimonious bullshit? I think you’d have been as bad as anyone else. Probably worse. You’d have been another god damned martinet. You were a god damned martinet. Weather Bureau my fucking ass. You people would have been ordering invasions and executions by their second day in office, and you god damn well know it. Democratic process meant nothing to you. You stole SDS and if you could have you’d have stolen the whole fucking country.”
Jason takes this, not quite with bowed head, but not far from. She was wrong, about some of them at least, although not necessarily him, nor the ones she had named. But that doesn’t matter now. And when she was done:
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Oh.” She moves away from him now, to the window. Most of the lawn is under the shadows of the maples, just the border of the garden still lit by the setting moon in the valley. She has to struggle to reassemble the present, to recapture the events and reasoning that explained why she was telling him this now. What all these differences all are, these things that have seemed, for so long, to matter so much. For a time it passes through her, one image after the other, all equally meaningless, Then, in the swirl of elements in her head, her mind catches on Leo, and then on me, and then she turns again from the window to J. and says, simply:
“It was time. You’ve been in mourning long enough. Now he’s really dead, J. Really dead. I’m sorry you’ve lost him. I really am. I’m sorry like only someone who loves you, as deeply, as completely as I do, can be sorry. That you lost him then, and that you lost him now. I loved Donny, J. He was a dear, kind boy and I think he would have grown up into someone much like us. But he’s gone now, and your father is gone, and the past thirty years are gone, and you and I, we have a lot of our lives yet and a child to raise, and we can’t go on like this any more. We can’t go on like this any more.”
Her voice is raising, dangerously, at the end. “Okay. Okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. You have to promise, me, J. It’s bad enough that I can lose you any day to a jail term. But you have to promise me that you’re not going to fall apart now. You did what you did. Right, wrong, that’s just noise now. You were wrong, I was wrong, who cares? The only difference was how we were wrong. Now you have to step up to the god damn plate and not fall apart. We have a child to raise.”
And Jason answers: “All right. I hear you. I’m not going to fall apart.”
My father says more things that night. He brings Molly back close to him again, in the now pitch-black room, at last convinces her to let him put an arm around her and, with a hand on her back, says many more things. Maybe he even convinces her to take one of the Lorazepams in the bathroom. He gets her to lie down, at last, and then lies next to her, perhaps with an arm around her neck, perhaps he even holds her tight against the red hair of his chest, and maybe they make love, maybe she cries again.
All that is what it is. I don’t need to know about it. But I do know that after my father falls asleep Molly lies for a long time on the bed, eyes wide open, watching the last of the moon, from the western edge of its declination, cast its light nearly upwards now across the ceiling of the room. Of course, it isn’t really upwards, it’s just a trick of the fact that it’s setting into the valley. The moon can’t really throw light upwards into a room. But it seems like upwards, and when Molly finally rises, walks to the window, and looks out, the illusion is still there, as if the moon were sinking into the earth below her. She watches it set, watches it until it has altogether disappeared under the tree line, holding her arms, shivering slightly in the cold through the glass. Behind her, in the bed, my father gives a long sigh and says, in a normal voice, “Bedford Street.” That’s where, she thinks, his family is gathered now around his mother—his brother Daniel, the Columbia professor, his wife Maggie Calaway, the lawyer, their children. His adoptive sister Klara Singer may have flown in from Israel, where she works for the American Commerce Department Mission, a Clinton nominee. She knows all about them, a family of left-wing aristocrats, gathered to bury their dead, and then carry on his legacy of moral certainty. She knows more about them than just that: she knew what my father had done to them all, which was not, as it happened, what he thought he had done. He had not, for example, ruined my grandfather’s life—Molly felt that strongly, throughout the hours my father had spent telling her about his father—but he had, s
he was fairly sure, ruined his brother’s, a fact of which he was totally unaware. There are still two hours till dawn. She sighs, a huge sigh, and pads quietly to the door. First she will check on Izzy. Then she will check on Leo. And then?
Well, then, there is that pack of Marlboro Lights on the counter, and she could—and believe me, she would—smoke one of those.
Chapter Ten
Isabel Montgomery
July 12, 2011
Los Angeles
1.
In April of 1996, a few months after my grandfather died, my Aunt Klara was recalled from Tel Aviv to Washington for a series of meetings by Deputy United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, her boss.
This is a matter of record. A trained baboon could find it, and in fact one did, Little Lincoln to be exact, in response to a very broad query from me to find out what the entire family did that spring, so far as he could.
One of the things he found was that my Aunt Klara had been recalled to Washington, a fact not in itself remarkable. What was, however, remarkable, was something else that he found: that after several days in Washington, for the first time since she had left, ten years prior, she had come to New York, that spring. In fact, according to a footnote in a biography of Nathaniel Singer, my grandmother’s first cousin, who served in Defense under Forrestal, Johnson, and Marshall, Klara attended Passover that year on Bedford Street, the first since my grandfather died—she had not, in fact, come for the funeral—and, according to my Aunt Maggie, the last time Klara ever came to the States.
Shortly after returning to Israel, she resigned her posting at Commerce and took on a professorship at Bar-Ilan University, where she eventually became a dean.