What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  After that meeting, she begged off cocktails, saying she needed to rest—no one questioned that after you turned seventy—and went back to the hotel room, André walking with her. She was clearheaded, the landscape familiar all the way. In the hotel room, she removed her shoes and her earrings and sat on the bed in her clothing, putting both of the pillows behind her to prop herself upright. She didn’t want to sleep. She had to plan.

  The disorientation had come on without warning, and resolved just as suddenly. It had been, in fact, very much like her old temperamental slide projector that would sometimes stick, the motor whirring and clunking and failing to drop the next slide while a white dirt-speckled square hung on the screen. She’d coddled that machine, learned its every infinitesimal whim. In the end, an unnecessary roster of skills: a slide presentation could now be carried on a chit of plastic-wrapped metal as small as a thumbnail.

  Genevieve has so many useless talents. How to tie Windsor knots and half-Windsors, four-in-hands—you never know what your husband will favor, her mother said—and bow ties; the exquisite nuances of etiquette and place settings and proper forms of address. So many, many rules; her young life had been poured into their conduits. Not to mention all of the hours she had spent on her hair. Sleeping on enormous uncomfortable rollers, backcombing and brushing, crafting spiraling pin curls. Whole mornings and afternoons in a salon, each appointment counting double in woman-hours, if one considered the hairdresser’s time as well. Cropping her hair short after the return to America had added an almost bewildering amount of time to Genevieve’s day.

  She finds that she’s closed her eyes after all, sitting up on the hotel bed. She touches her hairstyle, jokes to herself that now perhaps hair can take on a new usefulness: when she feels herself unmooring she can put a hand to her head and by the feel under her fingers—soft or stiff or feathered or shorn, or the current old-lady cotton-candy texture—orient herself.

  Not a joke she can share.

  She takes the paper from her pocket.

  I’m in Bangkok, she adds to the list. I am going home on Wednesday. Checks the day on the glowing glass telephone. That’s tomorrow, and adds the date. For completeness, she writes Home: and puts the address of the Tudor. She doesn’t think she could possibly forget something so basic, but she keeps surprising herself.

  * * *

  She regrets so deeply now her inactivity in the weeks after Philip vanished. How she’d opted out and elected to sleep. It had been selfish, a way to limit her own suffering; she’d allowed others to do the looking. And after the sleep ended, she hadn’t fully returned to herself. She’d remained elsewhere, loose in her body like a ghost. How else could she have left him there? He hadn’t discorporated into fog; he was somewhere. Yet she went back home without him, docile in a way she had never been, sleepwalking through nearly two years before coming awake abruptly in 1974, while watching the television news. The American president had resigned, something that had been until that very moment inconceivable. Watching Nixon waving goodbye, Genevieve realized suddenly: she could go back.

  At the thought, she felt a tug in her chest, as if something were pulling on a thread from her heart to Philip’s, wherever he was. She wanted to jump up, go quickly before the thread stretched too far and broke. She turned to Robert. Let’s go back, she said.

  He looked confused at first; then as she talked his face grew sad. Darling, he said, there’s nothing we can do there. You know that as well as I do. He talked for a while and she nodded, not hearing, still feeling the thread pulling, pulling. He went up to bed while she shut up the house, turning the lights off and locking the doors. The next morning she rose, fed everyone breakfast, kissed them off to school and work, and telephoned a travel agent. She had to repeat herself half a dozen times: yes, she was traveling alone; no, her husband wasn’t traveling with her.

  She tended to a thousand details before she left, battening down the household against her absence. Still, she boarded the airplane feeling like a criminal, the world dropping away below her, the taut thread pulling her to Philip while the threads that stretched from her to the girls paid out, rattling their spools.

  Many of the Bangkok policemen remembered the lost American boy from two years before and were sympathetic, but they did not seem to know what to do with Genevieve, why she was there, what she hoped for. After a dazed minute—what was she doing there, what did she hope for—she collected herself and left. She caught a tuk-tuk to go back to the hotel. As it bumped along through traffic, she felt a jangling collection of regrets: Robert had been right, this trip was wrongheaded, purely magical thinking. She’d return home the next day, do what she could to gather the fragments of her life together.

  The tuk-tuk slowed going over the bridge on Sang Hi Road; she sat with the sun beating on the back of her head and looked out at the brown surface of the khlong, dimpling and moving, going away and yet staying in place. Upstream, a woman was bathing a child in the shallows; downstream on the opposite side, a man washed melons. Two or three longtail boats puttered along in the middle of the water. An ordinary day in Bangkok.

  Somewhere in this city. Philip was somewhere. Wouldn’t Genevieve have felt it if the thread between them was broken? Wouldn’t she know? She was gripped by the thought: she could not leave him here again.

  Back in the hotel, she began making phone calls. She reached out to the embassy and hired an interpreter, and the next day began going everywhere, talking to everyone. Always the same question—had they ever met or seen this little American boy in the picture, his name is Philip? He would be older now, almost two years older.

  The city was very different now that the war was finished. The sprawling red-light district had shrunk significantly; many of the cheap R&R hotels had shuttered. As Genevieve walked through the streets with the interpreter, stopping everyone, asking everyone, she saw a lot of unaccompanied children, too little for school, begging or playing together or just squatting on the sidewalk. Again and again, Genevieve would presume that one or another nearby woman was the mother, but that woman would move on and the child would not follow. They hadn’t been there before, these babies all alone—or had they, and Genevieve had tuk-tukked past them fretting about the heat and whether her makeup was running?

  “Where are the parents?” Genevieve asked the interpreter, Bun Ma.

  Bun Ma grimaced. “Not nice, Madame.” The classic Thai response when something was too unpleasant to discuss.

  A little girl of about eight pointed at the photo and nodded; Genevieve’s heart leapt.

  “She says she knows this boy,” said Bun Ma. She spoke some more to the child.

  “Where?” said Genevieve, almost breathless. “Where did she see him?”

  Bun Ma said, “She wants a pancake and she will tell you. Madame, she is lying.”

  Genevieve bought the pancake; the girl snatched it and ran. Other children crowded around Genevieve.

  “They want pancakes too,” said Bun Ma, with an air of reproof: See what you started.

  But why not? Genevieve was already buying more pancakes, handing them out, the children surging around her, calling out words she didn’t understand. She waded through the bold ones at the front of the crowd to the wary ones hanging back on the fringes, made sure they ate too. She gave Bun Ma money and they bought from all the stalls on that block, the children dividing into two flocks to follow.

  An old man who had been watching called over something in Thai.

  “He’s saying feeding one time does nothing, Madame,” said Bun Ma, reluctantly translating after multiple mai pen rais had failed to put Genevieve off. “He’s saying, they’re American, you take them.” Eyes down, embarrassed by the man’s rudeness.

  “What does he mean, they’re American?” said Genevieve.

  “They are luk khrung, Madame,” said Bun Ma. “Fathers not Thai.”

  “Are you sure?” said Genevieve. The children looked completely Thai to her.

  Bun Ma nodded, and Genev
ieve understood. Apparently, when the Americans had evacuated from Bangkok like water rushing toward a drain when the plug is pulled, they’d left behind not only gifts like the beautiful Fifth Field Hospital, built at stupendous cost, but also a sediment of children.

  The idea was born then, on that street. It was simple, and selfish. Not a grand altruistic plan, but merely a way to justify Genevieve’s presence there and allow her to come back. A way to do something while keeping the thread taut, following it to her hidden son.

  * * *

  “You can do good here,” said Robert, when she returned and explained her idea to him. From this she understood that he wouldn’t financially support it. “Your own children need you.”

  She knew that wasn’t true. She knew what kind of mother she was.

  “They see more of us than we ever saw of our parents,” she said. It was true: she and Robert had both gone to boarding schools.

  She raised the money from her own pocket—more accurately, from the pockets of her ancestors. An only child of two only children, Genevieve had been born at the bottom of a funnel of antiquities, a precious legacy rattling down to her from grandparents and great-grandparents and great-greats. She had loved these things, had cared for them like holy objects. Now she saw them only as a fragile and needy clutter of goods through which she’d waded all of her life, and she sold it all off without a pang. The girls came home from school to an emptier and emptier house. They said nothing and asked no questions, but one evening Genevieve came upon Beatrice standing beside the Sheraton desk. It had already been cocooned in packing cloth for transport to auction the next day; the girl rested her hand on it as if comforting an animal going to slaughter.

  “Beatrice,” said Genevieve, and the girl startled. “Do you like that desk?”

  Beatrice nodded, her jaw tight. She would not cry.

  “Do you understand why I am selling things?”

  Beatrice shook her head.

  “You know there are hungry children in the world.” Beatrice nodded; she knew about those from the orange UNICEF boxes she and Laura had carried at Halloween. “I am going to use the money that people are paying for these things to help some of those children.” She looked at the swaddled desk, at Bea’s hand. “This desk needs a lot of care,” said Genevieve. “All the little niches need to be kept clean. No spray polishes. A lightly moistened cotton swab and a dry swab immediately after. A dry soft cloth for the rest. Never wax. It mustn’t be kept too close to a radiator or a fireplace. Climate-controlled storage, if you ever have to store it. Can you do all that?”

  Beatrice nodded.

  “Why this desk?” asked Genevieve. “You could have asked for any of these things.”

  When Genevieve revisits this moment during time slips, she wants to whisper to herself, Why didn’t you offer, why did you require her to ask?

  “You used to write letters at it when I was little.” Bea’s face was flushed.

  Long-ago early-morning Saturdays when the nanny was off and Robert was still sleeping, Genevieve would take an hour or two in the quiet to do paperwork: bills or the Arts Council newsletter, thank-you notes, cards for one occasion or another. Beatrice would play quietly with her dollies at her mother’s feet. Beatrice was only four when those Saturday mornings came to an end, with the birth of first Philip and then Laura. How much memory did one store before the age of four? But, Genevieve recalled, Philip had had a whole life in eight years; that early time was not negligible.

  Beatrice sighed; Genevieve saw that although the girl could not follow the path of her mother’s thoughts, she knew their destination. Back to Philip, always back.

  “You don’t have to do the same things I do,” said Genevieve.

  “I know,” said Beatrice. “Thank you for the desk. I’ll take good care of it always.”

  That money provided the capital for the first fundraiser. As a social event, it was a great success, but at the end of the night, couples swept out of the door without having donated, gushing It’s so good to have you back, Genevieve, and You’ll need to give me the name of the caterer as if it had been a party and not a benefit. These same people gave freely to allay every kind of disease, wrote generous checks to support the habitat of a bird not one of them had ever seen. Why would they shun hungry children? Genevieve was puzzled, until one woman remarked as she was leaving, “It’s terrible, how they’re neglecting their children over there.”

  Their children. Southeast Asia was a generic beige swirl to most Americans; Genevieve realized that to the fundraiser attendees, the Thai children in her slideshow might as well be Vietnamese. Children of the enemy, in a war freshly ended. Genevieve hadn’t mentioned the probable mixed heritage of many of them; even hinting at the sex industry to this audience would ensure that no one attended any of her events again.

  At the next fundraiser Genevieve showed the same slideshow, with one additional slide at the end. A photograph of Philip, which she could barely stand to look at, could barely stand to look away from. In the dark room, no sound but her own voice and the whirring projector, she told the story of how one Wednesday afternoon her little boy had gone to a lesson and never come home. How, in his memory, she wanted to feed hungry children and help keep them safe. At the end of that evening, the donations poured in, and when the next event was packed, Genevieve knew that word had spread. They were avid for the spectacle of her pain, and she gave it to them in a quiet clear voice, Philip smiling on the screen behind her. It never became a routine recitation; it felt each time as if she were peeling away her skin to show her beating heart. But those pindrop-quiet minutes also felt necessary. They felt like penance.

  * * *

  Once she thought she saw him. It was just after dawn on an October morning in 1976, and Genevieve and her interpreter were going into the market when she noticed a slender, tanned tall boy with dark blond hair, not thirty feet away from her, staring. He looked like Philip would, if he’d been washed with coffee from head to toe and pulled thin and long like taffy. She stood still, staring back, her breath astonished from her lungs, and then she started toward him. He turned and fled. She ran after, in her slight shoes not designed for more than a stroll, tripping and catching herself, keeping her head up, keeping him in view. He plunged into a narrow street and she followed.

  A burst of firecracker sound, then long wails of screaming, a mob of humans crying and shouting and running toward her. Genevieve clung to the side of a building while the crowd surged past. She saw the white iron fence around Thammasat University and realized that she had broken a promise to Robert. He had warned her before she left, speaking from some deep well of secret knowledge, to stay away from that area. Genevieve had chased the boy into Sanam Luang square, right beside the university where students had been protesting for weeks.

  Across the square, Thai police crouched outside the white fence, holding long black rods. Guns, she realized. They were taking aim. She felt her arm being pulled and she resisted, watching the police remove a panel of fencing and disappear through the gap.

  “Hurry please.” Her interpreter’s voice in her ear. He pulled Genevieve’s arm again, and she allowed herself to run along with him, out of the square and into an alley. Through that alley, stumbling over cooking pots on the pavement and through washing flapping on lines, into another street, where they hailed a tuk-tuk. As they bumped through traffic, the interpreter, a college student, wept.

  “They are my friends, Madame,” he said.

  They stayed in the hotel the rest of that day, the rain thick outside the windows, with the television on, hoping for news, but the screen was a snowy square, no programming on any channel. The radio played only Thai marching songs until the evening, when the music was interrupted for an announcement: a curfew had been imposed, and anyone out between midnight and five a.m. would be shot on sight. After that terse declaration, the military songs resumed.

  When she finally got out, Robert met her at Dulles, something he didn’t always do.
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br />   “I still don’t know what happened,” said Genevieve, staring out at the colorful autumn landscape flanking the highway.

  “The students put on a puppet show,” said Robert. The show had a lynching scene, and the rumor had started that one of the hanged puppets resembled the prince. Insulting the royal family was a crime; the perceived slight instigated a strong pushback. Genevieve had seen only the beginning of the police action: after shooting into the courtyard, Robert told her, they had crashed buses through the gates and flushed the students onto a soccer field, where they stripped them of shoes and shirts, watches, eyeglasses, religious jewelry. Some students were herded onto the buses under arrest while others were left to the mercy of a growing mob and executed, shot while lying on their bellies on the grass, or lynched, their hanging bodies beaten and set on fire.

  Genevieve felt dazed, listening. She couldn’t imagine the sweet-natured Thai beating or lynching anyone.

  “Was that on the news here?” she asked.

  “No,” Robert said shortly.

  “They had grenade launchers,” she said.

  His face darkened at that; he hadn’t known she’d been so close to the action.

  “I told you to stay away from that area,” he said.

  “I thought I saw Philip,” she said. She put her head against the car window, felt the rumble of the road transmit itself to her skull.

  She hadn’t meant to say that. Robert had tired of the sightings, the false leads that popped up every now and then, whipsawing them both with hope, every time leading nowhere. She waited for Robert to say something that would widen the chasm between them: You need to accept that he’s gone or simply This has to stop.