by D. W. Buffa
The fourth and last picture was a photograph Jimmy Haviland had sent to Vivian Malreaux from Vietnam.
He was standing in front of a sandbagged bunker, grim faced and unshaven, bent dog tags hanging around his neck on a thin chain. His shirtsleeves were hanging out; a thin T-shirt, dark with sweat and dirt, clung to his chest. A cartridge belt was slung loosely over his right shoulder. The butt of his rifle resting on the ground, he gripped the dull metal barrel with his hand. His eyes belonged to someone I did not know, someone waiting to die, his only wish that he would not have too long to wait. I wondered—anyone who saw that picture would have wondered—why he had sent it to her, why he would have sent it to anyone he did not want to hurt.
Then I remembered that if there was anyone who could look at things straight on, it was Vivian Malreaux. They had shared the death of her daughter, her only child. Is that what he was doing—inviting her to share his death as well? Not because he wanted to add another injury, another wound; but because she was the only one he could trust, the only one who could understand and, by understanding, give some meaning to the death he must have thought might be only days, or even hours, away. It was the only way he had not to die alone; it was a way to have in death what he had not had in life: Annie, the girl he loved, joined forever in the living memory of the one person who had known and loved them both. The few lines he wrote her, the short letter he sent with the picture, seemed to suggest it was true.
“We lost three men on patrol last night; two more the night before that. No one says too much about it. There isn’t too much you can say. We’re losing, and even if we wanted to win, I’m not sure we would know how. Put a flower on Annie’s grave for me. I don’t think I’m coming back.”
The letter was written on the narrow lined paper of a tablet, a few words scribbled late one night while the tracer bullets flew like fireflies in the restless jungle heat. When he wrote it, Jimmy Haviland must have thought he was already dead. I folded the letter along the well-worn crease and put it, with the photographs, inside the envelope.
From the window of my office, down the narrow, busy street, I watched the bay glistening silver gray. It was a soft, hazy, sunlit afternoon, one of those days between summer and fall when you remember things with nostalgia and without bitterness or regret, and when even the things you wish had turned out differently do not seem to matter very much. I remembered as a boy— or perhaps I remembered what others had told me—the ships that came home from the war in the Pacific, the sailors flinging white caps into the bay, soldiers shouting and laughing and waving, as they sailed under the Golden Gate, home for good. Jimmy Haviland’s war had a different ending. There had been no cheering crowds waiting on the San Francisco docks, no jubilant Market Street parades for him. He landed at an air force base forty miles north, put on civilian clothes and disappeared, an unwelcome stranger, home from a war that had not even done him the favor of letting him die.
Of the three of us, Haviland, Browning, and myself, he was the only one who had answered the call of his country and gone to war. I used to think it mattered that the war was unpopular and that so many people opposed it. I do not think so anymore. Browning never thought so. He used to argue—or rather, suggest in that understated way of his—that there was something terrifically obscure in the reasoning of all those spoiled and affluent children of the white upper middle class, protesting a war from the safety of their college deferments while other young men—young men who could not get into college, or could not afford it, young men who instead of being born rich had been born black—were being killed in their places. Of course, Browning did not go either, and knew there was not any chance he would: He was 4-F, or would have been had he ever gone for an army physical and his lame foot been discovered. That did not happen because he had the same student deferment as the rest of us; and because, though no one ever spoke about it, everyone knew that in that war at least, the sons of prominent and powerful families did not serve. Every draft board met its quota; how they did it was largely up to them.
I took my deferment with the rest of them, but I agreed with Browning: There was something wrong about insisting too loudly that a war was immoral when you were safe at home and others were dying in your place. So I waited my turn, knowing full well that my turn would probably never come. When I finished law school I had only a year or two left before I would be too old to be drafted; I was already of an age where I would have been taken only as a last resort. If Browning had been drafted, I think he would have gone, if not eagerly, then without hesitation. If I had been drafted, I would have gone too, but I would have wished I did not have to, and I would have been scared to death.
Jimmy Haviland did not have to go either. Unlike Browning, and unlike me, he opposed the war and did it with the kind of passion that did not leave room for argument. He agreed with Browning on one point, however. He agreed that it was wrong and unfair that if you did not go someone else would go instead. He had come to that conclusion on his own. He did not need Browning or anyone else to point out the moral tension in which he was placed by his own argument. So he protested the war, and mentioned to only a few of his friends that beyond his student deferment he would do nothing to avoid the draft. Then Annie died and he did not care so much about the war, and he did not care anything at all about what happened to him. He finished law school, but I think only because, with the best of intentions, Vivian Malreaux had told him that she was certain it was what Annie would have wanted him to do. Then he joined the army and went to Vietnam, which meant that there was someone else who did not have to go.
It’s been a long time since Vietnam, but whenever someone remarks on the courage I have supposedly shown by taking the case of a defendant no one wanted to represent, or by standing my ground under a barrage of invective from some vain and arrogant judge, I remember a few people I knew like Jimmy Haviland, not all of whom came back, and I cringe a little that I was once so willing to let someone else take my place and risk his life for mine.
The day was drawing down to a listless close. Nothing seemed very important; there was nothing I had to do, nowhere I had to be. High above the clattering noise of the narrow city streets, I sat in the quiet stillness of my office, feeling a little sorry for myself. The room had the look of a private club, one of those rooms with thick carpets and thick wood-paneled walls, with overstuffed chairs into which you sank so deep that someone on first entering could not easily tell if anyone was there or not.
There were a gray marble fireplace and two tall windows covered with heavy, velvet drapes that let in a discreet and measured light. On the mantel of the fireplace, off to the side, three leather-bound books with pages that, so far as I knew, had never been cut, stood between two white marble bookends. My eye wandered along the rich, gleaming paneled walls, the shining reddish hue of the antique rosewood desk, the whole, entire quiet opulence of the room. Other than those three unread leather volumes on the mantel, there was not a book in the room.
Every morning, I sat in a wing-back chair, wearing one of my tailored suits, holding the newspaper open in front of me, pausing occasionally to lift from the table next to me the cup of fine china filled with coffee made the way my secretary knew I liked it. The newspaper was the only thing to read. There was not a bookcase in the room, none of those shelves that used to line my law office walls, groaning under the weight of each new addition to the reported cases of the appellate courts.
The firm had a complete and up-to-date law library.
When I needed something, the law librarian, or one of his several assistants, would find it for me. If I needed a book, they would get it; if I needed a citation, they would find it. If I needed more than a citation, if I needed to know the current state of the law on a legal issue that might decide a case on which I was working, there were law clerks, eager to make an impression; there were associates, anxious to make partner; there were even junior partners, hoping to learn something from me about criminal law, to take care of it.
There were no bookshelves on the walls; there was no paper on my desk. Everyone fluttered around me, making certain that everything was done that needed to be done: that all the messy, annoying details—the sweating, swearing effort required to get ready for trial— were handled by someone else. It was simply assumed that I was much too busy for work. All I had to do was speak a word and the whole machinery of the firm rumbled into motion with the same heartless efficiency, the same narrow and specialized division of labor, that had been Zachary Browning’s industrial dream.
I had everything I once thought I wanted and yet I felt sorry for myself, because it did not measure up to what others had done. Thomas Browning had almost become president, and there was still a chance that he would. But it was not Browning who mattered; it was not Browning who made me feel uncomfortable. It was Jimmy Haviland. He was a wreck, his life a shambles, accused of a crime he did not commit, and yet… and yet there was a sense in which I envied him for what he had done, and for what he had tried to do. He had had his heart broken and he never recovered from it, but when you got right down to it, when you summed it all up, what that really meant was that unlike so many of us with our changeable lives and replaceable dreams, Jimmy Haviland had at least had a heart that could be broken. More than that, he did what he could to make things come out right: He fought in a war he did not think should be fought because he thought his own life was over and that he ought to take the place of someone who still had a reason to live. And what at the end would be listed among my accomplishments? That I had kept countless evil people from suffering the punishment they deserved? Perhaps my only hope left was to do everything I could to keep Jimmy Haviland from being punished for something he did not do.
It was time to leave. The letter from Vivian Malreaux, the photographs and the letter Jimmy Haviland had written were on the desk, enclosed in the envelope in which she had sent them. It occurred to me that I ought to take them with me, that the photographs might bring back the memory of something important, something that might help Jimmy Haviland.
The car picked me up in front of the building; the driver had been told where to take me. Ten minutes later, when he pulled up in front of the address he had been given, I had that strange feeling, almost a form of precognition, of knowing something without quite knowing what it was. I had seen this house before. I had walked past it—I do not know how often, perhaps once a week—on my irregular wandering jaunts down from Nob Hill and through Pacific Heights. And all this time I had, without knowing it, known the woman who owned it, the woman who had lived there for years.
The dark brown shingle-sided house was on a corner, the street in front straight and flat, the other one, like a picture postcard of San Francisco, so steep that it seemed to fall right into the bay. I crossed the brick courtyard, went up the steps and rang the bell. A Chinese houseboy answered the door. I gave him my name; he stepped back from the door, gestured toward a large, brocaded chair with dark curved wooden arms, and disappeared.
There was a heavy scent of jasmine in the air. The furniture, the rugs, the silk tapestries on the walls, the vases with their intricate and colorful designs, all of it was Chinese; all of it, I was certain, old, ancient, authentic, and not just expensive, but priceless. Minutes passed and the silence was so profound you could hear it, that thin, distant hum, the sound in your ear like the sound trapped in a seashell. More time passed. I began to feel ill at ease, as if I had stumbled into a place where I was not supposed to be. The chair was taller than my head, so narrow that my elbows were forced onto the wooden arms. I felt like one of those full-size toy soldiers displayed in store windows at Christmas. I got up and began to look around the long rectangular living room.
There was a grand piano at the far end of the room, and bookshelves on the wall across from the windows that gave an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate. The books were neither very old nor very new. They all had dust jackets, and the titles suggested a comfortable middle-class taste. They were the sort of things that were discussed in reading groups of well-intentioned people and then, within a year or so, put away and forgotten, something worth keeping even if they were never going to be read twice. I suddenly became aware that I was not alone.
“You have some interesting books,” I said as I turned around, ready to say hello to a woman I had not seen in half a lifetime, the woman who had once been Annie Malreaux’s best friend.
My first thought was that I had made a mistake, that I had either come to the wrong address or that Helen Thatcher and Helen Thatcher Quinn were not the same person after all. The woman who was standing at the entrance to the living room was older—I do not mean older than she had been—older than she should have been, twenty years older. She was dressed impeccably —too impeccably—in a black knit suit and black high-heeled shoes, with a gold necklace and gold earrings, like a woman with a luncheon engagement at a private club that only let in a new member when an old one died. Her hair, shiny black and as stiff as if it had been lacquered into place, had the look of something kept at night on a mannequin. Her eyelashes had the same hard brittle look as they beat in a false even rhythm across her cold, distant eyes. She was as heavily made up as an actress onstage, with blushing cheeks and a red painted mouth. Everything about her was a costume and you had the feeling that each night, when she went to bed, she slipped out of the whole thing, the clothes, the hair, the makeup, and left it hanging, like a clown’s suit, on a hook on the bathroom door. There was something strangely familiar about her. I had seen her somewhere before, sometime in the last few years; but I could not remember where.
“Mr. Antonelli,” she said with a civil smile as she extended her manicured and painted hand. “Please,” she added, inclining her head ever so slightly toward the sofa a few steps away.
She sat at the opposite end, perched on the edge, her knees pressed tight together and her small hands in her lap. She looked at me without recognition and without any apparent interest.
“It’s nice to see you again,” I said, watching her eyes for a sign that she remembered. There was nothing. “We knew each other at Harvard, not very well, I know; but you were a friend of Annie Malreaux’s and I was Thomas Browning’s roommate. I was also a friend of Jimmy Haviland.”
There was a slight movement in her eyes, a slight tremor at the corner of her mouth.
“I knew Annie Malreaux, yes.” She said this with a kind of caution, an admission she was forced somewhat reluctantly to make, afraid perhaps that it would lead to something with which she did not want to be involved.
“You were her best friend,” I insisted.
“She was a friend of mine,” she replied as if it were a barely remembered fact of no importance.
I began to be irritated, and I let it show. I reached inside my jacket pocket for the envelope. I found the picture I wanted and handed it to her.
“You were her best friend; you went everywhere together. You were in New York the day she died, the day she fell out of a window at the Plaza Hotel. You knew Thomas Browning; you knew Jimmy Haviland; and if I’m not mistaken, you knew me.” she glanced at the photograph. A thin smile started onto her mouth and then stopped. She looked at me.
“I knew Annie Malreaux. We were friends.”
I handed her the next photograph, the one taken of Jimmy and Annie holding hands. “And you remember Jimmy Haviland, too, don’t you?” she glanced at it and gave it back. “Yes, I remember Jimmy Haviland.”
I handed her the next one and asked her as she looked at Thomas Browning standing next to Annie Malreaux if she remembered him as well.
“Yes, of course. I remember. But I don’t know anything that could possibly help you, Mr. Antonelli.”
“Then you know that I’m representing Jimmy Haviland and that Jimmy has been charged with Annie’s murder?”
“Yes, I know that.”
It was stunning how indifferent she seemed, stunning and inexplicable. She had changed—we had all changed—but was it possible t
o forget entirely someone with whom you had once been as close as she had been to Annie Malreaux? “You don’t seem to be much bothered by it,” I remarked, running out of patience.
Her made-up eyes flashed with contempt, as if I had forgotten my proper place. She got to her feet. I did not budge.
“You were in New York the day she died?”
“Yes,” she said with a rigid glance.
“You were at the hotel?”
“No, not when it happened. I had left hours before that. I left that morning. I went home. It was Christmas Eve. I really can’t help you, Mr. Antonelli. I tried to explain that. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have other things I have to do.”
Embarrassed, I got to my feet and tried to apologize.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Quinn. I didn’t mean to suggest that you didn’t care about what happened to Annie, or what might happen to Jimmy. I know it was a long time ago, and that a lot has changed.” she acknowledged, and at least in a formal sense accepted, my apology, but she did nothing to suggest that she wanted me to stay. She started to walk me to the door when she suddenly stopped, told me to wait and went across the room to the piano. There was a picture on it, a framed photograph. She brought it over and showed it to me.
“This is my daughter, my only child.”
I looked at a photograph of a quite beautiful woman in her late twenties or early thirties and somehow I knew. “Annie?” I asked, as I gave it back to her.
“Yes, Annie. It was the only name I wanted to give her.
I suppose I hoped she would have something of that same bright intelligence, that same amused detachment that Annie had.” She paused, pondering some thought that had come to her, some reason that might explain why she had not wanted to talk about it. “Some things are too painful to remember very clearly, or to think about too often. I thought about Annie all the time after she died; I could not get it out of my mind—the way it happened, on that day of all days, Christmas Eve nineteen sixty-five. I did not really stop thinking about it until I wrote about it, in that first novel of mine, the one that started everything.” she saw the look of puzzled astonishment in my eyes.