Heartwood

by Belva Plain

  “When I was younger, I used to wonder why the hell they ever got married. Now I don’t care, I just know that I want to make life better for her.”

  He said it so earnestly. Laura propped herself up on one elbow. “What do you mean? You can’t do that—for anyone.”

  “All I have to do is be a success. That’s all she needs.” His eyes were shining in the half light now. “She used to read to me when I was a kid, Laura. She’d come home from working all day, clean the house, make dinner, put me to bed, and then she’d read to me—not kid stories, books like Ivanhoe and A Tale of Two Cities. Sometimes she’d be so tired she’d nod off in the middle of a sentence, and I’m not sure she even liked what she was reading—she picked those books because my Aunt Margaret said they were intellectual.

  “Mom bought the collected Shakespeare and one summer we tried to plow through it.” He laughed softly into the darkness. “She’s probably the only person in the world who ever tried to read Timon of Athens for the fun of it.” He stopped chuckling. “And she did get something out of all those words. She loved stories about honor and nobility. That’s why she likes it that I’m going to be an archaeologist. She read somewhere that archaeology is the occupation of aristocrats. To her, that means I’m like Ivanhoe.” He turned to Laura. “She meant it when she said I was the apple of her eye. I’m the reason she gets out of bed every morning.”

  Cruel, selfish woman, to put such a burden on him! “That’s a big load to be carrying.”

  “Oh she’s never said that, she wouldn’t.”

  Not in so many words, Laura thought. But she’s let you know all the same that you are supposed to make it up to her for every disappointment, every unhappiness she’s had. And that is so unfair!

  Robby stroked her face. “Hey, stop looking so tragic! I’m not some driven Mama’s boy. If I worked a little harder at a math problem when I was a kid, or if I studied a little harder for an exam because I didn’t want to fail her, where’s the harm?”

  He did have a point. And she didn’t want to argue. “There isn’t any, I guess.”

  “I’ll admit, I’d like to be famous. I’d like to discover a new dig site that’s named after me and write bestselling books. But if all I ever do is add to the store of human knowledge, that’ll be okay too. It’ll be an honorable way to spend my life.”

  When Robby talked this way, he could quell every doubt. Especially when he was lying in bed next to her with his body pressed against hers and his fingers playing idly with her hair. “You and Ivanhoe,” she breathed.

  “Exactly,” he whispered as he kissed her. And then they didn’t say anything more as they came together in the way that had always banished all thoughts except those of bliss for both of them.

  Finally, when they lay next to each other spent and out of breath, Robby whispered, “Laura, we’re going to have a great life! You’ll see. I’m going to make you so happy.”

  At that moment she hadn’t doubted it. And if, later, as he slept and she thought back over what he’d said, she did have a doubt or two, she told herself she was being foolish. Robby had a first-class mind—their professors all said so—so of course he was ambitious. And if his mother had nurtured that ambition, there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Most people who achieved greatness had at least one parent who had pushed them.

  It wasn’t until years later that she realized that perhaps her first instinct had been right.

  Chapter Four

  Laura might have developed doubts about her marriage over the years, but in the months before her wedding she didn’t have time for doubts—or even for thinking. During the turbulent winter that spanned the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, while the Vietnam War was still raging, things were moving fast for most young people, and Robby and Laura were no exception. As with everyone else their age, their main topic of conversation was the sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of all the young men—the draft lottery.

  For the rest of her life, Laura would remember December 1, 1969, when she and Robby and most of the students on their college campus sat glued to the television watching as strangers they’d never met dipped into a big glass bowl and pulled out the little blue plastic capsules that would decide Robby’s fate and that of every American male aged eighteen to twenty-six. Each of the capsules contained a birth date, one for every day of the year, and a boy’s number on the draft list was based on how early or late in the drawing the capsule containing his birthday was picked. Early meant a low number, late meant a high one. A low number meant you would be going to fight in the war you probably didn’t believe in anymore, if you ever had; a high number meant you could go on living your life.

  All over the campus as the drawing continued on that day, spontaneous groans and cheers went up in every dorm. After the drawing was done, the lucky boys with high numbers tried to hide their relief so they wouldn’t be rubbing salt in the wounds of those less fortunate. Many of those with low numbers cried openly in the hallways and the student lounges as hopes and dreams were replaced by fear and anger. Boys with numbers in the middle huddled in anxious groups and tried to calculate the odds of being called up or escaping. Girls like Laura held their boyfriends in their arms and searched for comforting words. By nighttime it seemed as if everyone knew what everyone else’s number was, and most people were trying to get drunk or high as fast as they could. It didn’t matter if they were celebrating or mourning.

  Robby didn’t cry or get drunk, he laid down on his bed, and stared at the ceiling with the closed-off look that Laura had come to dread almost as much as the draft itself. His number was in the first third of the drawing. This meant he probably wouldn’t be drafted that spring, so he’d be able to graduate and he and Laura could get married. But Laura estimated that he’d be called up sometime during the summer. Unless they could find a way out.

  “There must be something,” she cried. “Didn’t you tell me your father knows some people who are high up in Veterans Affairs? Couldn’t he pull some strings?” There was no sound from the bed. “Robby, you have some time. If your dad talks to his friends right now …”

  Robby turned and sat up. “My dad pull strings so I can be a draft dodger?” he sneered. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “A draft dodger? What are you talking about? You don’t support this war …”

  “Draft dodger is what my father will call it. The McAllister men go to war, Laura. They don’t ask questions, they don’t wonder if their country is right, they just fight. Get my dad to tell you sometime about how he saved his buddy on Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy. It was his finest hour. If you want to know the truth, he hasn’t done anything better since.”

  “But that was different. That war was justified.”

  “It doesn’t matter. ‘America, love it or leave it.’ That’s what my father says.”

  “But when he stops and thinks about what we’re really doing over there—”

  “You don’t understand!” he shouted. “Your parents think. My father doesn’t.”

  “My father supported the war at first.”

  “But eventually he saw the light! Mine never will. He’s never read the kind of books that make people question themselves or the things they believe. He’s never traveled and tried to understand a different culture, or studied a religion other than the one he grew up with. He doesn’t live near a big city with different people and ideas that aren’t exactly like his own. He doesn’t think, Laura.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “When she hears about my number, she’ll be scared to death. She won’t care about patriotism or any of that crap, she’ll beg Uncle Donald to fix it, which he can’t do.”

  “But your father could.”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because he won’t. Because Uncle Sam will make a man of me. I’ll go into the army and get rid of all those crazy notions about making mud pies in the desert.”

  Laur
a finally accepted reality; even if Robby’s father could have helped, he wouldn’t. And there certainly wasn’t anything Iris and Theo could do except worry about their daughter and the young man they were so fond of. It didn’t help matters any that the war that was probably going to take Robby away had nearly torn their own family apart and because of it their son Steve was still estranged from them. Laura did her best not to talk about Vietnam in front of them.

  But it seemed to her as if that was all her contemporaries were talking about. In every dorm, coffeehouse, or hamburger joint where the college kids congregated, no matter how the conversation started, eventually it would turn to Vietnam and the draft. Or, more specifically, avoiding the draft. There were few supporters of the military on Laura’s politically liberal campus, where most of the students and faculty had been taking part in protest marches long before the televised images of young Americans coming home in body bags, and Vietnamese children burned by American napalm, finally turned the rest of the country against the war. In 1968 their school had firmly supported the peace candidate Eugene McCarthy. Robby and Laura, and everyone they knew, attended rallies wearing black armbands for the slaughtered Vietnamese and bracelets for American soldiers missing in action. But before the advent of the lottery, those protests had been intellectual exercises engaged in for abstract beliefs. The new policy brought the war and fear of dying onto their lovely campus and into their protected dorm rooms.

  Suddenly Robby had a new circle of friends; all of them boys who had low- or middle-range draft numbers and would probably be inducted by the end of the year. Before the lottery had gone into effect, most of these boys had planned to wait out the war safely tucked away in graduate school, or in jobs deemed vital to the national interest. But the government had declared most of those deferments unfair and ended them. Now the boys gathered in Robby’s dorm room every night to rant and rave about the old bastards who had started this mess. And to spend hours trying to figure out how to get out of it.

  Robby was always the one who brought up the subject of leaving the country or going to jail. “It’s the only honorable way,” he said over and over again. And Laura would remember the night when he’d told her that he’d wanted to be Ivanhoe when he was a kid.

  Sometimes Robby talked about Laura’s brother Steve, who was now deeply into the underground movement. Steve was doing it the right way, Robby declared. Laura was torn when Robby started saying things like that. She was proud of Steve’s courage, but she knew what her brother was doing was illegal and dangerous, and although he had never hurt anyone, members of his movement had, and that was as wrong as the war itself. And Steve had caused such pain and suffering at home. No, she didn’t want Robby to follow in Steve’s footsteps.

  But she knew that Robby and his friends never would. The smart boys who gathered in Robby’s dorm room were opposed to the war but they weren’t fighters like her brother. They just wanted to get on with the future, which had once seemed so bright for them, and they were furious because they couldn’t. Furious and scared out of their minds. That was the worst part: underneath all the shouting and self-pity—fueled by what seemed like endless amounts of alcohol and other substances—was a horrible truth. These boys were right to be terrified, because thousands just like them had already died.

  –—

  But then there was the night when the group had assembled in Robby’s room and the usual ranting and raving was well under way, and all of a sudden everyone was silent. Laura’s attention had been wandering but she looked up to see that a guy named George who lived at the other end of the hall had just rushed in. All eyes were on him.

  “Well?” One of Robby’s friends demanded as the others sat forward eagerly. “Is it true?”

  George laughed. “Oh yeah! Larry got himself his little deferment. He and Nancy are off getting married right now, then they’re going to drive up north to tell her folks. They’ll probably be mad because their little girl is knocked up, but Larry’s going to be sitting out LBJ’s war.”

  There was an explosion of hooting and cheering from the boys and someone raised a bottle of beer in a bleary toast. “Let’s hear it for Nancy!” he shouted.

  “Let’s hear it for the Daddy Deferment,” someone else added. “And for Larry, the lucky S.O.B.!”

  That was when Laura remembered that Larry Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was, had talked about having a baby as the one foolproof way to get out of the draft. “I call it getting a Daddy Deferment,” he’d said. “Not only do you skip jail and hang on to your citizenship, you can have a good time while you’re working on it.”

  Everyone had laughed except Laura. She couldn’t imagine having a baby unless she knew she and Robby were ready to love, support, and care for it—draft or no draft. Anything else was unthinkable, even as a joke.

  But now, as the boys continued to cheer for the father-to-be, she heard Robby’s voice at her side. “I never thought Larry would actually go through with it,” he said softly.

  She glanced up and saw that he was staring at her. He turned away quickly; the look only lasted for a second. She told herself it didn’t mean anything.

  But after everyone had finally straggled off to their own rooms, and she and Robby were alone, he didn’t take her in his arms and begin the long, slow process of kissing and undressing each other, which had always been their prelude to a night of lovemaking. Nor did he yawn and flop down on his bed the way he did when he was tired and wanted her to know that there wouldn’t be any sex that night. Instead, he avoided looking at her, and began cleaning up the debris from the evening. Laura watched as he lined up empty beer bottles neatly in a corner of the room, and folded the pizza boxes so they’d fit in the incinerator at the end of the hall. Normally Robby was a slob—his clothes stayed on the floor where he’d dropped them, and it could take him days to clean up after an all-nighter. Usually it was Laura who got rid of the garbage and washed his dirty laundry. But now he was cleaning up. And not looking at her. He was building up to say something. Suddenly she knew she didn’t want to hear it.

  “I think I should go to my dorm tonight,” she said. “I have that test in Poli Sci on Wednesday, and I need to hit the books.”

  “You’re not going to study tonight, it’s too late,” he said.

  “No, but first thing in the morning.”

  “Stay here now. And you can leave early. I’ll set the clock radio.”

  She still didn’t want to stay with him, but she couldn’t think of any good excuse not to. “All right.” She sat on the edge of the bed and began taking off her shoes.

  Robby continued clearing up. His back was turned to her. “Wasn’t that something? About Larry and Nancy?”

  She drew in a deep breath. “I think it’s wrong,” she said.

  He turned to her. “That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?”

  “I just don’t think it’s right to have a baby for any reason except that you want one.”

  “Perhaps they do.”

  “He doesn’t have a job. They don’t have a place to live. They aren’t even married …”

  “Wow. You really are being judgmental—we both know people who slipped up and she got pregnant before they were married … and you never said a word.”

  “Yes. Because it was an accident.”

  “That makes it okay?”

  “It’s better than a cold-blooded decision.”

  “How do you know it was cold-blooded? What if Nancy and Larry were planning to have children someday anyway, what if they just hurried it up a little bit?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What I know is, Larry’s draft number was 77. If it weren’t for this baby he’d be fighting a war he hates. He might have gotten killed. For nothing.”

  “I know that.”

  “Nancy loved him enough to save him. What’s wrong about that?”

  She wanted to say that Larry shouldn’t have let Nancy do it for him even if she had begged him to. But then she looked at Ro
bby. His face was pale; he knew what she was thinking and he probably agreed with her. But she also knew that at that moment, if she said she’d have his Daddy Deferment, he’d jump at the chance. She watched him look down at his hands, which were clenched into fists, and she could tell he was ashamed of himself. A part of Robby would always want to be Ivanhoe, and that part wanted to go to jail for his principles, or cross the border into Canada and live as an exile. Those were the honorable choices—that was what he’d said.

  But everyone had heard horror stories about what happened to conscientious objectors in prison, and giving up your American citizenship was a huge price to pay for someone else’s mistake. Because that’s what it was—this war that no one could explain, no one could end, and no smart person thought America could still win. It was a horrible, bloody mistake made by men who were too old to fight and too proud to admit they were wrong. How could anyone expect a boy like Robby to be strong and selfless when he knew his own country was willing to get him killed so that those evil old men wouldn’t have to look bad? How could anyone be honorable when every week there were more pictures in Life magazine of dead soldiers and Vietnamese children being burned in their rice paddies? When you thought about all of that, having a baby to get out of the draft didn’t seem that terrible.

  Laura reached out to take Robby’s fists in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “This shouldn’t be happening to you.”

  There were tears in his eyes. “I just don’t want to die,” he whispered.

  “And I don’t want you to.”

  And so, in spite of everything she believed, the seed of an idea was planted in her.

  –—

  Robby never actually asked Laura to have a baby to keep him out of the draft, and she never said she would. But over the next few weeks whenever she saw Robby smile, or heard him laugh, or watched him study, biting his lower lip and puckering his forehead in concentration, Laura knew that seed was growing in her. And when at night he lay next to her in his narrow bed and together they began the sweet journey that melded them into one, she knew that she was like Nancy and so many other girls in that terrible winter of 1970. She could not let the boy she loved die.