It turned out that the embassy said my father was right: I couldn’t go. It was weird, though. The embassy said Gabrielle Black, whose father also worked at the embassy, could go. What was the difference, I wondered. It must have been that my father was more important.
Mr. Leonard scowled when I told him, and then humphed, as if this confirmed something he’d known already. Because of me, Mr. Leonard had to change the class trip to Vienna.
Without warning, my father was sick, with a high, high fever. Crawling with a raging infection, he was lying in bed with his eyes closed and his mouth open, making strange groggling sounds as he tried to breathe through his swollen throat. I stood in the doorway, peering in while my mother leaned over him, moving a wet washcloth over his face. “Oh Charlie, Charlie,” she was saying.
Later, I stood at the banister, looking down to the ground floor. My mother was in the entryway with three tall men in identical tan balmacaan raincoats: my father’s colleagues who had just been up to see him. The men huddled in the hush of the hall seemed like more than just a group of friends worried about one their chums. It was like they were members of a secret club, gathered like elephants around an ailing member of the herd, to keep my father safe. The huddle seemed important and charged with secrecy—like spies in a movie.
The men and my mother spoke in hushed tones for a while. Then my mother went to the telephone. She called for a cab that took my father away with one of the men.
“Mr. Rogers saved your father’s life,” my mother told me the next morning.
My father climbed mountains, he traversed cities, but there was something deeply vulnerable about him. I sensed rather than knew this: he was delicately made, like an artist or philosopher. It was as though, if the wrong person tapped his shoulder, or a particular germ found its way into his water, or a high wave caught him on the beach, he would be too skinny and trusting to fight back, or swim to shore. (If I’d known to ask, I would have questioned: How can an artist or a philosopher—a person attuned to subtleties, however brave—engage in covert operations?)
As he lay, weak and thinly dressed, in his bed, I felt shaken. It was like an important layer had been stripped away, and I could now see the naked body underneath everyone’s clothes. I sensed the undertow pulling at my father, from under the surface of the sea. A deep and ominous chill ran through my own bare trunk and trickled down into my limbs.
My father’s dangerous fever and his weakened immune system would seem to me later—from the vantage of decades—linked to what must have been the enormous strain of the events of that year. What must it have been like to be involved— in any way—with the Chinese man’s death? The events must have haunted him.
I went upstairs for a while and sat on my bed, where I, myself, had lain in soaking meningitis fever a year and a half before. I shivered. I fiddled with a pencil, I looked at a hyacinth in a pot, trying not to think about my father’s close call—about the giant squid of fear down in the deeps, lurking.
13
nicole
The tide was midway up the sand. We were trudging just below the mound of cracked fishing boots, caved-in baskets, broken planks, kelp, and shells cast at the tide’s uppermost rim—the waves at Scheveningen rolling into the strand. In many parts of my life I felt as though I was, at last, on sturdy ground. I was in the eighth grade, the top grade at school—on Mount Olympus. On the other hand, it was like the sea was continually sucking the sand out from under my feet, and simultaneously like the horizon was widening in front of me. I was beginning to see new possibilities and new mysteries—and to lose my grip on past assumptions. With each thump and hiss of the sea, the cold mist hit my cheeks, calling “Wake up! Wake up! Open your eyes to the world!”
I had just turned thirteen, and I had achieved one of my two big goals. Through desperation and grit, I had proven myself worthy: a red, white, and blue American. I could, by now, affect the blase banter of a cowgirl, and I had gotten good at going against my grain, mustering my courage, and speaking out in class. When Mr. Leonard, our eighth-grade teacher, asked a question about current events these days, I could bomb back an answer with the speed of a B-52. There was always the shy, scarecrow part of me, and the embassy princess, but I had a cocky Sara Taber now well in hand.
This year, 1967—as I’d learned from my father and current events at school— forty-three people had died in Detroit race riots, the first human heart transplant was accomplished, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album had come out.
My father said hundreds of thousands of American troops were fighting for Vietnam’s freedom now, but a lot of the Europeans and even a lot of Americans thought this was wrong. In October, thousands of antiwar protestors massed at the Pentagon, and hundreds of them were arrested. The Netherlands was one of the countries at the helm of the antiwar movement. Holland was teeming with provos, provocateurs, people who held rallies and marches to protest governments’ actions. When we’d first come to Holland, the provos were leading the Ban the Bomb movement; these days they were protesting the war in Vietnam. Everywhere we went now, there were rants about Amerika: hippies at the train station said to us as we passed them, “Amerika go to hell,” in perfect English, and as casually as if they were saying “Good morning.”
In the face of this, I stolidly maintained my America-is-best stance, but some things occurred that rocked the simple cleanness of my patriotism.
We were in the auditorium again, eating lunch on a day of cold drizzle. Needing to move around, we went over to the front window so we could look out while we ate our identical sandwiches. To our surprise, the sidewalk beyond the ironwork fence was being patrolled by a handful of Dutch teenagers walking back and forth in the rain with peace signs over their shoulders. When they saw us, they stopped marching and put their noses up against the wrought iron rails and started yelling and raising their fists.
Back in class, like he’d had a burst of determination brought on by the provos, Mr. Leonard suddenly turned his chair backward in front of his desk, plopped down, straddled it, and faced us over the backrest. His face became serious. “It’s time to talk about current events,” he said.
Mr. Leonard had a beard and thin, scraggly poodle hair that curled around his ears. My father had commented that Mr. Leonard was a beatnik, like Joan Baez. I didn’t really know what that meant, except that he was a little cool and a little weird. He used slang, was an actor, and slouched around and sometimes put his feet on the desk, like he was a teenager.
“I want to know what you students really think about the war in Vietnam,” he said, leaning toward us.
Margrite jumped in, the girl with the Dutch mother. “Those were the provos on the walk. You guys know what they are, don’t you?” she said with a tone implying that we were so dumb we probably didn’t. “They’re protesting the war America started in Vietnam.”
Immediately, just like Gracie’s fur when she sensed threat, our hackles went up. A clean martial urge surged in all of us pure Americans.
Billy said, “My dad’s told me about them. They’re really stupid. Our country is right to attack the North Vietnamese.”
Margrite tossed her beautiful head and looked superior. “Mum said America is being a big bully in Asia. You think you’re so great because you can push around a little tiny country like Vietnam. That’s really impressive. . . .”
“Holland is probably more violent than we are,” someone said.
“Holland is not violent,” Margrite said. “We don’t believe in imperialism. America might be big but you aren’t gentlemanly. You’re out for yourselves. My mum said what you’re doing in Vietnam is criminal—killing all those mothers and children. You’re just big bullies.”
Candy said, “Why don’t you just leave the school. You don’t belong here if you’re not on America’s side.”
“My father’s American and he agrees.” She winked her eye, flirting, to Richard, and tossed him her beautiful, knowing smile. Showing us he di
dn’t think she should leave the school.
Then Mr. Leonard looked straight at me. At first, I assumed he thought I should have something special to say—maybe because my father had an important job at the American embassy. But no, as some more kids responded, and his eyes continued to flick back to me, a queer nervousness came over me. It was not, after all, like he thought I had some special knowledge because of my father’s work. Instead, it was as though he was waiting for me to blurt out a secret—or for me to make a mistake.
Quickly, I considered: What does Pop always say when Dutch people ask him about the war?
I found it, and raised my hand. “I think we’re doing the right thing,” I said when Mr. Leonard called on me. “We’re giving the Vietnamese help little by little, and seeing if it helps their cause.”
Mr. Leonard scowled and shook his head and said, “That’s what your father thinks. What do you think?” It was like he had suddenly yanked my chair out from under me and I’d been plopped on a cold, hard floor of shame—and shock that my teacher wasn’t playing by the usual rules.
At dinner, I told my father about the provos and about what Mr. Leonard had said.
“Was I right, Pop, in what I said about the war?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I say to Dutch people I meet. It’s part of my duty to tell Dutch people what our government thinks.”
“Margrite said America is a big bully. Isn’t that dumb, Pop?” I knew my father would agree with me. But he said something I didn’t expect.
“Well, sometimes we should listen to smaller countries,” he said, looking at me intently through his horn rims and leaning forward in his crisp suit. “Might doesn’t always make right. Sometimes we should take time to consider. . . .”
My father wasn’t agreeing fully enough. I felt an urgency inside, like a fighter jet lost in fog that needed to find its way back to base.
“But the provos are bad, right?”
“Well, our government thinks they are wrong, that we should aid the South Vietnamese. But I can say privately, as an American citizen now, not as a Foreign Service officer, that there might be something to what the protestors are saying.” He told me, “As a representative of the embassy I must take certain positions in public and at official parties, but when I am with friends, even Dutch friends on the weekend, I can say, ‘Our government policy is such and such, but personally I don’t agree.’ And, of course, I am allowed to speak my own views in private, and privately I do have some questions.
“Next time he asks, you can tell him what you think,” my father said. I was confused. I thought what my father told Dutch people was what I thought. Now I had another odd tweak. I suddenly had the sense that my father was expecting me to think something he thought but couldn’t say out loud. It was like I was supposed to stand in for him—put on his Chinese cloth peasant shoes. But I didn’t know what he was groping for.
“But America is right, right, Pop?”
Looking at my face, he said, “Okay, basically . . . yes.”
Back at base camp, restored to my job of being a patriotic American kid trying to be like everyone else, I headed safely for bed.
But even though I tucked it away, like a spy, I had noticed my father’s hesitancy; the doubts had been sown. The grand white marble statue of America’s greatness had been nicked.
In Amsterdam, having just come from a visit to the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum, we wound our way through the warren of narrow cobbled streets and then came to the plein in the center of the city. There, in a shouting, chanting mass, were thousands of Dutch provos demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. A lot of the provos, who hated our country, were wearing U.S. Army surplus jackets with the American soldiers’ name badges still sewn on their chests. (Years down the road, I would note that this was often the case. People of warring countries commonly wear, on their person, some sort of emblem of the other side, of the enemy. It is as if inconsistency is the only consistency, and it is as if warriors can’t help unconsciously acknowledging the humanity of the other side: the truth that we’re all the same.)
Ignoring my mother’s nervous protests, my father took each of our hands and led Andy and me straight into the thick of the crowd. We stood there among the long-haired, ragged hippies in loose Indian print clothes and saggy jackets for several minutes as my father translated the placards. There, among the demonstrators, a strong blended smell of bodies, marijuana, patates frites, and wurst filled the air—an aroma that opened my senses and lingered long after. Just before we left the horde, a tall, thin man in a shaggy, patchwork jacket, fixed a pair of fierce eyes on my father and said, “You dirty Americans, get out of Vietnam!”
Though he ignored me and focused on my father, I felt the Dutch man’s anger like a blade slashing into me. More than I had before, I wondered what this was all about. What is it about this war in Vietnam that makes people so mad at America; and why did Pop go stand there—almost like he wanted to be there—in the demo? Why doesn’t Pop say the provos are all wrong?
I didn’t know that not only my father’s actions, but many of his emotions were covert—and that I needed to read his feelings in his behavior, his gestures, the angle of his body. My father’s wading into the demo was a message he had dead-dropped, waiting for me to find.
One long weekend, we joined Meneer Wandersee, his wife Riet, and their three children on a canal boat they had rented. Meneer and Vrouw Wandersee liked us, I could tell, because we were American. I could tell that, from the outlook of their little country, our country offered a sense of exciting possibility, and my parents were full of praises for Holland. But it was different for us kids.
While our parents drank Heineken—and toward sundown, Dutch jenever— and droned on and on, on the deck of the little red-and-blue boat, Andy and I and the Wandersee girls charged across the lumpy, squishy fields to the neighboring farm. Waving to the heavy-breasted farmer’s wife, in her apron, we headed for the barn.
We clambered up the ladder to the hay loft and, at first, flopped down on the quilted mattress of hay. Without our parents to smooth the way, we felt awkward—and so we spent a few minutes grinning uncomfortably and picking at the hay as the swallows swooped overhead. It wasn’t clear who tossed the first handful of hay, but before long we were in an exhilarating all-out, everyone-for-himself hay battle, often falling down on top of our victims as we heaved our heaps of hay.
There in the barn, for hours, we hurled hay at each other, as though we were American soldiers fighting provos—hurling and hurling, and laughing and thrusting so hard we eventually had to flop back onto the resilient hay to chase down our breaths and calm the hearts that were jumping like tennis balls in our chests.
Mid-fray, at one point, Trina pointed at Andy and said, “Your nose is ugly!” “Well yours is black,” he retorted. We soon discovered that all of us—no matter what country we were from—had nostrils blackened with hay dust. This led us to another bout of hilarity as we blew our noses and showed the black smudges on our white pocket handkerchiefs. We battled in the barn until we were ravenous as starved wolves, and then raced back to the boat for rations of salami and cheese. Once replenished, we sped for the barn again—back to the hay war.
On the playground, too, things had gotten murky with regard to this matter of the United States being superior to other places, and Americans being the coolest people.
We were discussing the paper dresses that were in all the windows in the centrum this year. Candy seized the reins and led our wagon train in the direction she wanted to go. “Paper dresses are dumb. The States is way better,” she said with absolute authority, “but I’d take the Dutch boy who lives near my house,” she added, laughing and flipping her bangs. Then, having delivered the gospel, she flounced off to flirt with some boys across the blacktop.
I started to re-spout the gospel, but before I could . . .
“America’s stupid,” Barbie, a seventh grader, abruptly said. We were all stunned. “Where I lived, in Sout
h Carolina,” Barbie said, “there wasn’t even a Sears. All we had was a post office and a gas station. My mother had a cow about it all the time, and I thought I was going to die of boredom. Have you seen those knee-high boots at the de Bijenkorf? I think Holland’s ten times better than the States. The Dutch are much more mod.”
At this, we subtly edged away from her, but our ears remained pricked.
Margrite jumped on Barbie’s lead. “Holland’s fashions are way ahead of anything in America.” Her Dutch mother wore clothes from all the fashion magazines like Vogue and Elle. We heard the authority in Margrite’s voice, but we pretended she hadn’t said it.
Only—maybe because Candy had disappeared—we didn’t.
Barbie continued her thought. “And a lot of American kids are delinquents. They shoplift and do stuff that’s against the law.”
I flashed to our last home leave, the summer between sixth and seventh grades, when, while my father checked in at the office—he wasn’t supposed to work on home leave, but he had worked like fury—I had gotten to visit Lucy somewhere in Virginia for the day. While her mother sunbathed in just her bikini bottom on their back patio with a fan blowing on her, Lucy, Jen, and I wandered around their sprawling suburban neighborhood of ramblers and split-levels. When we reached the shopping center, Lucy had an inspiration. “Hey, Jen, let’s go papering!”
Jen said, “Yeah!” and they led me straight into the five and dime, regaling me with tales of draping their classmates’ trees with toilet paper. Each skinny, fly-away-haired girl tromped straight down a certain aisle, like she knew it by heart, and picked up a six-pack of toilet paper. As they walked—with me trailing them—back toward the front of the store, the store manager came barreling out of his office toward the back, saying “Oh no you don’t,” and took the pack of tissue out of Jen’s hand.
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