by Andrew Lanh
“Simon told you this?” I asked.
Lucy looked surprised. “Yeah, why not? Simon always talks to me.” She paused. “Or talked to me. He liked to talk to me. Used to. We’d sit in the kitchen”—she pointed—“and he’d go on and on.” A slight sob escaped her throat. Mike frowned at her.
“Simon.” Mike’s one word filled the room.
“They’re gonna put him in jail for life.” Lucy’s voice shook. “Frankie ruined him. He was a sweet boy, lovely, my Simon, but he’s turned…bitter. We never see him. Juvie. Jail.” She shuddered. “We can’t call anyone. Who do we talk to? Who understands? We don’t want…”
“No.”
We all jumped.
Wilson had walked down the stairs, unseen, and slipped into the living room. He stood there, a book—Moby Dick? I stupidly wondered—cradled against his chest. He was shaking. His eyeglasses were crooked on his nose.
“No!” Louder this time.
“What?” From his father.
He started to say something, but the words were a mishmash. He breathed in and started again. “You all talk like he’s this…this evil kid. He’s…Simon.” His voice broke. “Aren’t you supposed to love him to death?”
With that he spun around, bumped into a wall and stumbled back up the stairs.
Mike dropped his voice again. “Wilson. Christ Almighty.” He looked at me. “You have kids, easy, but you spend a lifetime not understanding what the hell they’re talking about.”
Chapter Ten
We sat in the kitchen watching Hank’s mother chop cilantro on a cutting board, her head bent in concentration. Occasionally, listening as Hank and I chatted about Jimmy and the death of Ralph, she’d flick her head toward us, but avoiding eye contact. Finally, placing the sharp knife on the board carefully and wiping her hands on her apron, she faced us, her face flushed.
“You two bring death into this house.”
“Mom,” Hank began, but she held up a hand.
A forced smile directed at me, the visitor. “It’s like the bad luck people bring into the house after a funeral. Sometimes the dark spirits come off the clothing.”
Hank was exasperated. “For God’s sake. Mom, this is America.”
His mother frowned. “And there aren’t dark spirits in America? Seems to me they follow you around.”
Hank laughed. “Some folks get lint on their clothes. I get the dust of death.”
His mother started to admonish him, but looking down into her son’s face, she found herself smiling. “You have all the answers.”
Hank beamed as he reached over to touch her forearm. “I’m glad the world is starting to pick up on that.”
She faced me. “I’ll never win any battles with my son, Rick.”
I was sitting in the warm kitchen of the Nguyen household in East Hartford. Once an alien space for me because my mixed blood made me unwelcome, I now was comfortable there—in a fashion. Hank’s obsession with making me part of his family hadn’t been easy, although his mother and grandmother—the old woman I called Grandma—drifted into companionable and sweet attention. His father and irascible grandfather—Hank’s father’s father, not Grandma’s husband—were bitter holdouts, although Hank’s father now talked to me. Battles are won, I soon learned, in tentative baby steps. But the craggy grandfather was the cement wall I constantly crashed into, ego bruised, feelings hurt.
“Everybody’s gonna love you, Rick.” Hank’s mantra.
I’d shaken my head vigorously. “If everybody loves me, I’m doing something wrong.”
“Did Buddha tell you to say that?”
“Not specifically, but he’d agree.” I grinned. “Ask Grandma.”
I loved the feel of the small kitchen with the wrinkled wall calendars from Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants, the small altar suspended near the ceiling with its allegiances to two cultures—a gilded Buddha with the bright-red oranges, joss sticks, and incense—and the Virgin Mary, equally glossy, a crystal cross speckled with gold chips, and dried palms. A happy marriage, that union, though sometimes there were field skirmishes.
Hank, the infidel, viewed it all as anachronistic, though he honored it all. On the other hand I welcomed its power over me because it filled me with dreams I carried from my own childhood.
Hank looked toward the doorway. “Where is Grandma, Mom?”
“I’m right here.” A voice in a shaky Vietnamese, but laced with laughter came from the hallway. She stepped into the room. “It is nice to know I’m missed.”
She headed toward me as I stood up, bowed down to kiss the tiny woman on the cheek. Probably in her eighties, she got smaller each time I met her. Her white hair, so skimpy her scalp showed through, was covered with a small white bonnet. Her eyes were lively in a wrinkled face. She grasped my arm affectionately.
“Sit down, sit down.” She pointed to my chair.
While Hank’s mother poured jasmine tea, Grandma leaned against the counter, picked up a knife, and began working on the evening meal. Hank sat back, stretched out his long legs. No one wore shoes in the home, of course, and Hank’s white socks caught his mother’s eye. “A disgrace, Hank.” She pointed. “You walk through mud?”
He smiled. “Rick’s apartment, Mom. It’s been condemned.”
We were having pho, the Vietnamese comfort soup, strings of raw beef, some clinging to the bone, cooked in a hot broth that simmered for hours on the stove. An aromatic feast: charred onion, potent ginger, fresh ground cinnamon, star anise, thin white rice noodles. A dash of hoisin sauce, speckled Thai basil, a handful of basil sprouts and cilantro.
“Let me help,” I suggested, but the women paused, both with knives held out, frozen in place, a moment that looked like a scene from a comedy skit.
Hank groaned. “You know they won’t let you.” He teased his mother. “You know, I offered to do all the cooking in the household.”
Grandma eyed him, a twinkle in her eye. “Then I would have to say prayers for the dead.”
Hank’s Mom groaned. “I was just telling them”—her knife motion included me and Hank—“that they talk of nothing but death.”
Grandma shrugged. “Is there any other topic? Death defines us. Listen to Buddha.” A pause as she furrowed her brow. Then her voice got soft, “Sang hen cung ba tac dat la xong.”
My Vietnamese failed me, as she noticed. So she whispered, “In the end even the great become a pile of ashes.”
Hank’s Mom rolled her eyes to heaven.
“Grandma saw you, Mom,” Hank teased, delighted with the exchange.
Grandma ignored that. “Did you see the photo of Hank in his uniform?”
I smiled at her. “No. I didn’t know he allowed such pictures to be taken.”
Hank grumbled. “I had no choice. State troopers gotta follow orders.”
Grandma swelled with pride. “The handsomest boy on the earth.”
Hank blurted out, “Grandma, no. Well, maybe…in Connecticut.”
Again his mother rolled her eyes.
“Let me see.”
Grandma reached up into a basket on top of the refrigerator and took down a manila folder.
“Here.” She handed it to me.
I slipped the large color photograph out of the sleeve and stared into a resplendent Hank in dress uniform. When I glanced at him, he was watching me closely, a little embarrassed though a little bit tickled. In the photo he looked boyish, and I was reminded of the skinny young man who’d sat, years back, in my criminal justice course at Farmington College. Dressed in his uniform, he seemed even younger, a fresh-scrubbed boy, that severe face unsmiling, determined to look authoritative, but like he was suited up for a parade.
At that moment, gripping the photograph, panic swept through me. I was young, fresh from Columbia College, newly sworn in as a policeman in Manhattan. Liz, my new bride
who frowned on my decision to become a cop, stood next to the photographer as I was photographed in my dress uniform, a cynical smile on her face. “A little boy.” That what’s she’d said then.
There I was, filled with hope, idealism, drunk with the same unbridled passion Hank possessed. That uniform suggested I could change the world—make things right. Yet the photo of Hank brought me back to that awful night when I struggled with a crazed druggie. I fired. Over and over, insane, out of control. The moment took away my hope and led, ultimately, to my leaving the force.
I sputtered. “You look very handsome.”
Hank was glowing. “Yes, I know. Women will follow me in the street.”
“Most of them will end up in the backseat of your cruiser, handcuffed.”
A sly grin. “Don’t get me excited.”
“Stop this,” his mother chided. “You two are…”
Grandma broke in, delighted. “Boys.”
Within minutes, Hank’s father joined us, slipping into the room quietly and sitting down at the end of the table. His hands fiddled with a pair of chopsticks. He nodded at me, a slight movement of his head that communicated volumes. Nguyen Tuan Tan was a sinewy man, a warrior’s body with wide shoulders and a barrel chest, a Saigon native who’d battled the Cong, endured a year in a Reeducation Camp, and whose long journey into America was hated exile. America, to him, was a failed enterprise—too much softness, too many souls who didn’t understand that life was an endless test.
Now, listening as Grandma talked of Hank as trooper—“The rhythm of life, the wheel of justice rolling on”— all spoken in high-pitched Vietnamese—he drew his lips into a thin line, buried his head in the pages of a newspaper rolled up on the table. Tien Phong, a Vietnamese language tabloid from California that he bought weekly at A Dong.
He tapped the paper. “In some parts of America they are waiting for rain.”
His words shut Grandma up, though I detected a whisper of a smile as she walked back to the counter.
“Where’s Grandpa?” Hank asked.
His mother nodded toward the back of the house. “Napping. He’ll eat later on.” She shot a glance at me. “He says he’s under the weather.”
“A family eats together.” Then Grandma added, “If you are sick, food is medicine.”
I squirmed in my seat. When I’d arrived an hour or so ago, I’d heard Grandpa’s irritated growl coming from a back bedroom. “He’s here.”
The ghost in the house.
Dust under foot.
Hank’s younger brother and sister trooped in from their rooms, jostling each other, and settled at the table.
We ate in silence, our chopsticks dipping into the broth, the long strands of vermicelli noodles twisting on the ends, delivered dripping into our mouths. Slivers of beef, gleaming red when placed in the hot broth, immediately darkened. Finished, we sat back, sated, Hank groaning his pleasure with a belch that met Grandma’s approval, me with a lazy drawl of thanks.
“Tell Rick about Lucy,” Hank began.
Finally. The reason for the invitation to supper: Hank’s insistence that his grandmother flesh out the biography of the Tran family.
“That sad family,” his mother hummed. “Simon. That poor little boy. In the market on Saturday everyone talks of him.”
His father sneered, “A delinquent. A disgrace. Sent away to a prison, that boy.”
“To juvie,” Hank said quietly.
“Same thing.” He thrust out a hand, an abrupt gesture, and pushed back his chair. He fumbled for his pack of cigarettes and headed out the back door. I could see him standing on the back landing, lighting a Camel and staring out into space. A cloud of smoke covered his head.
Hank’s Mom shooed the younger kids out of the room, “Homework? Yes?” They nodded at everyone and left the room.
“Well,” Grandma began, savoring the moment. “I have a story to tell, and it does not say good things about myself.” She stretched out the Vietnamese words, lots of space between them.
Her words surprised me. “I don’t understand.”
She began again as she sat back, folding her hands into her lap. “Before she was the wife of Mike Tran, she was Lucy, a little girl I knew briefly in Saigon. I knew her family, especially her parents. They were not good people, lazy, conniving. The mother, I am sad to say, ran the streets. Their children were in the way. They bit into bitter lemon and demanded that it be gold.”
“What does that mean, Grandma?” Hank looked puzzled.
“They were lost in a world of scrounging for money. Pennies here, there. They didn’t like working.” She paused. “Tay lam ham nhai.”
I translated the old saying in my head. If you don’t work, then why should you enjoy food?
“Sometimes they remembered to feed their children—two boys, the little girl Lucy. Sometimes the children stole mangoes from the market stall to fill their stomachs. A handful of old rice, thrown away.”
Hank’s Mom tsked. “Children in the way.”
“But they came to America, all of them, right?” Hank went on. “They settled in Hartford.”
“I heard they stole gold coins and bought their way to America.”
“The whole family?”
“All of them. Two streets over. In a housing project. The worst. Dutch Point. Crime everywhere. Bars in the windows, rats in the hallways, gunfire at night, needles on the doorsteps.”
“Where is this going, Grandma?” Hank was impatient.
Grandma smiled. “Impatient, impatience. In America children rush the conversations of their elders.”
Hank laughed. “Grandma!”
Grandma put her fingertips on her lips. “Shush, boy. Then they died, the two parents. Within months of each other. The father drinking. The mother weeps. She got afraid of everything. Of everyone. Well, she stopped caring about living, hiding away. It was hard for us to believe she really loved that cruel man, but she did. She faded away. A late summer flower afraid of winter.”
“People die for love, Grandma, not from love.”
She eyed him closely. “They’re the same thing, my boy. Remember that love doesn’t start or end—it’s just there.”
I smiled. “Don’t look for love in the sky. You find it in your heart.”
Hank groaned. “You two should write romance movies for the Hallmark network.”
Grandma nodded at me. “My Buddhist son.” Then a look at her real grandson, sitting with his arms folded across his chest, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “And the American shiny coin. A boy with too much love.” Thuong nhieu qua.
Hank saluted her.
“You were friendly?” I prompted.
“Lucy and her brothers lived with cousins who didn’t want them around. Lucy was shuttled around, unwanted, until the state gave her to a couple for safekeeping. When she was a young woman, maybe eighteen or so, I met her in the market. We talked. I liked her. Another daughter for me. Then her brothers disappeared. One sent a postcard from Texas. She showed it to me. ‘People here like me.’ That’s what it said. The other went to California to look for happiness. Then silence. Lucy lived a street away. We’d walk to the supermarket and then have tea at Pho Linh on Park. We liked each other. She called me her mother.” She stopped, her voice trembling.
Into the silence Hank’s mother spoke. “She was a friendly girl. I remember her.” She shrugged. “But…so lost.”
“What does that mean?” said Hank.
“Always looking over her shoulder or staring into space. Like she was hoping something good was waiting for her.”
Grandma spoke over her daughter’s words, “Yes, lonely.”
“But what happened to your friendship?” I asked.
Grandma was nodding her head vigorously. “What happened is a failure of my spirit.”
Hank, exasperated,
“What?”
“I betrayed her.”
Grandma’s words hung in the warm kitchen, and we waited.
Her small gnarled fingers trembled. “We were close, the two of us. She had no one else. We chatted, gossiped, even prayed together. She had settled her life into mine, and welcome.”
“I don’t understand.”
“One day, excited, she told me she’d met a man, but she kept him away from me. I asked her over and over about him, this mysterious man. She was happy, always laughing, never so happy. She talked about the man who had no name. But one day in Walgreen’s, I spotted them.” A deep intake of breath. “She was arm in arm with Mike Tran.”
Hank’s Mom muttered, “Tran den.”
The black man.
A long silence, painful. The words exploded in the room, whole paragraphs filling in the blanks surrounding his mother’s terse phrase.
“Yes.” Grandma stared into my face. “A different world back then, Rick. So close to the old country—the war, the American GIs in the street. The Cong soldiers. Mike Tran was left out of the Vietnamese community. You know that. He had been brought to America with deceit, then tossed onto the street. But a man who was not only forbidden—a dust boy”—her voice lingered on the words bui doi—“but the impure blood was…African.”
The black man.
Suddenly I flashed back to the orphanage in Saigon and Le Xinh Phong, the black kid shunned by all—and gleefully attacked by me. Sitting in Grandma’s kitchen now, I found myself alternating pictures in my head of Mike Tran and that never-forgotten kid in Vietnam. The memory of my cruel hand across the side of his trembling face.
Wildly I thought—karma. Dao phat. It waits decades to find you, and then you lie awake at night.
Grandma sighed. “Lucy fell in love with him. A good man, hard-working, who saved his pennies, sweated away at every job he could find, and managed to create a life.”