When the boy was feeling especially mean, he might even say, “Aging hippie.…”
But this?
“I think you know that I don’t see the war that way,” Mike said, in a calm measured manner so like his father. “Presidents of both parties thought it was a good idea. And the spread of communism has to be stopped.…I want to serve. Like Dad.”
She turned to her husband, who looked pale and shell-shocked himself; he and the boy were dressed for golf, in pastels that suddenly struck Pat as blood-drained. “Tell him, Michael! Tell him this is a bad idea! Explain that you fought in a good war!”
“No such thing,” Michael said, quietly.
“Michael! Hitler and the Holocaust, for God’s sake! Pearl goddamn Harbor! But this, this, this, this war…it’s not about anything! Not…about…any-thing!”
“It’s Mike’s decision,” his father said.
“Just about boys dying!”
“I want you to be proud of me, Mom. Like Dad is proud of me.”
She almost snarled at her son. “He isn’t proud of you!”
“Actually, I am,” Michael said.
She had begun to cry, then, but did not allow either of them to comfort her. Michael was telling Mike that his mother was right, that this war was not the same as World War Two, and he would still be proud of Mike if his son would just take his chances in the lottery like any other good all-American boy, and in the meantime there was that scholarship to Fresno.…
But it was too little too late, and that night she had told Michael that she would never forgive him, and she made her husband sleep in his study for a week. Then she forgave him, because they were after all best friends, and still lovers, and she could not face this horror without him.…
The terrible thing, the worst thing, was she could never work up even false enthusiasm for her son, for this decision he’d made that was so important to him. Even when she kissed him goodbye at the bus station in Reno, she had sensed resentment in him—in his expression, even in the words “I love you, Mom,” though she treasured them no less.
When Michael had been on Bataan, in the early days of the Second World War, Pat had written to him daily, and he never wrote her back once. That had been part of his attempt to distance himself from her—he’d broken up with her, or pretended to, before he left—but she later learned he had read and treasured every page.
Over these last almost three years, she had written her son every week, and she had received only half a dozen very sporadic letters in return. Part of it, she knew, was that Mike just didn’t like to write—English and literature, her specialty, had been her son’s worst subjects. Words came hard to him, self-expression a chore, and the handful of letters the parents had received were chatty, strained things that spent all their time assuring her he was doing fine, and in no danger.
That was one small solace—his job was some kind of company clerk, and he had seen no combat.
I’m perfectly safe, Mom. His handwriting was small and cramped and very neat, and looked no different than it had in junior high, her little boy. Please don’t worry a pretty hair on your head.
Now, with this horrible stupid goddamn fucking immoral goddamn fucking war all but over, Pat allowed herself—finally—to experience hope. Allowed herself to believe that the danger was over, that Nixon suffering all that Watergate heat was leading to the administration finally getting something done about the South Asia mess, and Kissinger had reached a peace agreement in Paris.…
Hell, by the end of last year, just months ago, almost all the boys were home! Only twenty-five thousand remained—why did one of them have to be her son?
Michael had soothed her saying, “He has to follow orders, dear—he says in his letters, when his three-year stint is up, he’s going to college. What more can we ask?”
Then, a couple of months ago, finally, finally, finally a cease-fire agreement had been signed, and all of the boys were scheduled to be home by the end of this month. She would feel better if they’d had a letter lately from Mike, explaining his situation exactly, letting them know when they could expect him. Knowing her son, he’d probably just show up at the house one of these days, and grin the half-smile he inherited from his father, and say, “Still mad at me, Mom?”
She took a break from her mowing.
She left her mower in the middle of the backyard—the lawn was big, and Michael would gladly have hired someone to do it, but she considered the task part of her exercise-and-fresh-air regimen—and walked around the empty pool (they’d fill it in a month) to go in the glass doors into the kitchen. The interior of the house she redecorated (and sometimes remodeled) about once a decade. Michael humored her in this department, and their home had gone from Country House to Mediterranean to the latest: International.
And of course her husband saw to it that she got nothing but the best—in the living room, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe furniture, their geometric coolness warmed up by an antique throw rug and a tufted wine-leather Chesterfield couch and two armchairs. The whole house was a study in yellow and white, set off by geometric paintings in green and black and red and white. This tranquil setting Pat adored, though Michael (she knew) found it sterile.
Only two rooms had been spared her modernistic touch: Michael’s study, and their bedroom; the former was a bookcase-walled shrine to her husband’s reading habits—to call his tastes middle-brow would be generous—and the latter a simple ivory-walled chamber with an antique oak four-poster they’d splurged on the first year of their marriage, which had somehow managed to sentimentally weather all of Pat’s decorating styles over the years.
At the round kitchen table in the modern white-and-yellow kitchen with its travertine surfaces and floors, she had an iced tea and (you’ve come a long way, baby) shook a cigarette from her pack of Virginia Slims and lighted up with a Bic.
She had quit the vile habit many times over the years, but with a husband who worked for those employers of his, and a son in Vietnam, she felt she had every reason to risk her own life any way she chose.
Still, she had promised Michael that when Mike came home from Nam, safe and sound, she would indeed quit. Finally. Once and for all.
“Gonna hold you to that,” he’d said, shaking a finger, but smiling the half-smile she loved so much.
With the war over and her son safe now, Pat was in a position to indulge herself in concern over her daughter.
With no real sense of hypocrisy—though the teenage life her daughter was living was a slightly updated version of her own—Pat wished her daughter, a senior at Incline Village High, would not obsess over such unimportant things as getting the lead in the chorus’s spring musical (she always did), being chosen prom queen (the girl had already been homecoming queen), and maintaining her four-point average (Patsy Ann O’Hara had been valedictorian of her class, and so what?). Even worse, Pat was certain Anna was getting serious with her boyfriend, Gary Grace.
Sighing smoke, the mother knew she was being a hypocrite. She and Michael had become intimate—all right, started screwing in the backseat of the O’Hara family Buick—back in high school. But that had been prom night, and they’d become engaged, and eventually married, and.…
Pat had not meant to find the birth control pills (actually, she’d been looking for her daughter’s diary); but there they were. How had the child managed it, without parental consent? Or could a girl these days get the pill when she was just seventeen, like Anna?
Well, things had changed, the Sexual Revolution and all that, but that didn’t make Pat feel any the more comfortable about her high school daughter fucking the Boy Most Likely to Succeed (which he certainly had). And she didn’t dare tell Michael, who adored the girl, because he might explode. She knew the world thought Michael was one cool customer, but she had seen him lose his temper, and it wasn’t pretty.
For almost a week, Pat had been struggling with this—how to confront Anna? Better still, how to talk to her while taking the “confrontation�
�� aspect out of the equation; but when Anna learned her mother had been snooping in her bedroom, how could it be anything but confrontational?
By the time Pat had finished mowing the backyard and started on the front, she had held the conversation with her daughter thirteen times—baker’s dozen. It would always start out as a rational, reasonable speech, a kind, understanding motherly discourse, until she was screaming at her daughter in her mind, and her daughter was screaming back.…
What was it Anna was saying these days?
Yow.
Yow indeed.…
She was leaning on the Lawn Boy when the Chevelle rolled up at the curb. The car was dark green, nondescript, and did not immediately come to mind as anything anyone she knew drove.
Tentatively, she started down the long, gently sloping lawn, to cautiously greet her unknown caller.…
…who stepped from the car to reveal his crisp green Class-A uniform with cap shadowing his face, a slender young soldier about five ten.
Her heart leaped with joy—just as she’d predicted, her son had surprised them, showing up unannounced. Wasn’t that like him! She was within five feet of him when she realized it wasn’t Mike at all, but another young soldier, whose face was serious even for a military man.
And she stumbled to a stop, her brain making the connections quickly, because any mother of a boy in service knew that when a soldier came around who was not her child, the only possible news was.…
Patricia Ann Satariano said, “Oh God, oh my God,” and tripped and fell to the freshly cut grass, and—mercifully—passed out.
When she woke in their darkened bedroom, her mouth was thick with sleep and sedation; somehow she’d gotten into her nightclothes, and she pushed up unsteadily on her elbow.
Michael was sitting on the edge of the bed. The room was dark. The world, outside the windows of the bedroom, was dark. Suddenly it wasn’t afternoon anymore.
Then she shook her head and said, “Oh, Michael…I just had the worst dream…the most terrible dream.…”
He clicked on the nightstand lamp, to a subdued setting that nonetheless washed the room in more light than either of them might desire.
“Not a dream,” Michael said.
But she already knew that, just looking at him. He was in a white shirt, from work, collar open, no tie, the sleeves rolled up, and his face was pale, his hair askew, and his eyes red.
“Our son…our son can’t t be dead,” she said. “Oh, Michael, tell me he’s not dead!”
“We don’t know, Pat. We don’t know.” He moved next to her and put his arm around her; they half-sat, supported by the headboard of the four-poster. “There is hope. Some hope.”
“Some…?”
Michael sighed, swallowed, nodded. “Mike has been declared missing in action.”
And hope did spring within her, desperation-tinged. “So… he could be alive?”
“He could. But we have to be honest with ourselves. The odds.…Well, we have to be honest with ourselves.”
She didn’t want to talk there, and he got her her blue silk robe, and walked her to the kitchen, where he had coffee waiting, and served her up. As they sat—where a lifetime ago she’d had a smoke and contemplated problems about her daughter that seemed so small now—she had several long drinks of coffee, as if hoping the hot liquid might rejuvenate her.
Then she said, “Anna? Does she know?”
He shook his head. “She’s still at Sound of Music rehearsal. I’ll tell her. I’ll handle it.”
She touched his hand. “How is this possible? Michael, the war is over.…All the boys are coming home.”
He sighed again. “Not all.…Not right now, anyway.”
“What did they tell you?”
The young soldier had been a staff sergeant from the Reno recruiting office—where in fact Mike had enlisted—and he had carried the unconscious Pat Satariano into the house. Down the street, her friend Trudy had been out in her yard, watering some flowers, and saw Pat collapse and ran over and helped. And had called Michael over at Cal-Neva.
“Mike is officially listed MIA,” Michael said. “We’ve been left a document that details what happened, anyway what’s known.”
“But Michael…the war is over.…How…?”
“This happened in January.”
“And we’re being told now?”
Michael shrugged and sighed. “Apparently some kind of negotiations were under way, to try to determine if Mike and some other boys had been taken prisoner. To ascertain, at least, that they were alive…or.…”
“No,” she said bitterly. “I’ll tell you what this is about—god-damnit! This is something secret, isn’t it? And they didn’t want it getting out! Because of the cease-fire and.…”
Her anger choked off the words.
Michael said, “Do you want me to tell you about it? Or do you want to read what the staff sergeant left us…?”
She swallowed thickly; she felt numb. She shook her head. “Tell me, Michael. Just tell me.”
“Well, putting it simply, Mike’s position was attacked by communist forces—troops and tanks, they were invaded, literally. This was in a place called Tanh Canh Base Camp, Kontum Province…South Vietnam. He was in a water tower observation post and got the warning out, saved a lot of lives. Right away they started what are called E & E operations—evacuate and evade—and a group of perhaps fifty men tried to get away from hundreds.”
“Is this…this where Mike was company clerk?”
Michael hesitated. Then he said, “Darling…that’s something Mike told you, to put your mind at ease. He’s been in combat more or less since he got there.”
“Oh God. Oh Jesus. And you knew?”
“I knew. Be mad if you like, but he made me promise not to tell you.”
She felt her chin quiver, but willpower—and the sedative—allowed her to maintain her composure long enough to hear the rest of it.
“Go on,” she said. “Go on.”
“Helicopters came in to rescue these boys, and Mike was among those staving off the onslaught of enemy troops. I guess he had a…a machine gun, and was just facing them as they came.”
“Mike and…and how many other boys?”
“At the end it was just Mike. They were coming down a hill, the enemy, and he…he was going up. That’s what he was doing when the last helicopter left.”
“They…they left him there? Just left—”
“They had to get away while they could, and.…”
“And no one thought he had a chance?”
Michael nodded gravely.
“Did he have a chance?”
Michael’s eyes tightened. “Yes. With a machine gun? He had a chance, all right. He was using a Thompson.”
“A what?”
“It wasn’t government issue. These kids use whatever they can get their hands on—it was a tommy gun.”
“What…like in the old gangster pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Where would he get such a thing?”
Michael said nothing.
Over the years, another of the rare things they had fought about was Michael’s weird insistence that his two children learn how to handle firearms. Since Michael was not a hunter, Pat always thought this was ridiculous. Stupid. Barbaric. And yet, since grade school, both Mike and Anna had been members of the Crystal Bay Gun Club, with their father—a bonding exercise the mother had never condoned.
She glared at him. “You? You? You sent that weapon to him?”
“If he’s alive,” Michael said, “that’s the reason. You can kill a lot of people with a machine gun.”
She let out what was only technically a laugh. “Well, I guess you would know.”
“Baby.…”
She got up and poured herself more coffee; she was filled with rage and disgust and grief, but it was all just bubbling, like the coffeepot.
“If he’s alive,” she said, sitting, “where is he?”
“A camp some
where.”
“A camp somewhere. You make it sound like where we used to send him and Anna in the summer. Prison camp, you mean.”
“Prison camp.…He’d be a POW. But with the war over, the Cong won’t be as rough on those kids. We’ll make deals; we’ll negotiate.”
“We?”
“The government.”
“What, fucking Nixon?”
“Patsy Ann—don’t make this something political.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t politics killing our kids? Haven’t these bastards killed Mike?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know that. We can hope.”
“You hope. I think I’ll settle for despair. It’s easier.”
“Something the sergeant said…” Michael’s voice was strange, strained.
“What?” She looked carefully at her husband. “What?”
“I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“What, Michael?”
“They say he’s being put up for the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
She didn’t say it. She didn’t have to. Just like his father.…
“If he gets it, Mike’ll be the last Medal of Honor winner of the Vietnam War.” Michael laughed. “How about that? Like father like son?”
And Michael collapsed onto the table, weeping, tears streaming over the yellow-and-white daisy design.
She scooched her chair over near him, and patted his back, and soothed him. They would take turns, over the coming days, weeks, and months, knowing that if they both succumbed at the same time, they could not bear it.
THREE
A week passed in a blur of tears, recriminations from Pat, apologies from Michael, anger from Anna, and constant phone calls from well-meaning friends, relatives, and business associates who put Michael (he protected his wife from these) through the painful procedure of filling them in about Mike and his MIA status.
Pat was doing better, now—she was on Valium, and she clung to a quiet, almost religious belief that Mike was after all only missing, and would be back in the family’s bosom when all the POWs were returned in the aftermath of “that terrible war.” She never used the word “Vietnam,” or for that matter “war,” without preceding it with “that terrible.” She had no anger in her voice—perhaps that was the Valium—reflecting an acceptance of the difficulty of life, but despite this seeming fatalism, nowhere in her was there room for the possibility that Mike might be dead.
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