The week after that, Kip joined ROTC—the corps that had its office in Hamilton Hall, officers’ training corps—just at the time when I had befriended some fellow classmen who were the precursors to the Students for a Democratic Society, and one of whom, a kid named Epstein, had persuaded me to consider coming to some of their meetings, hearing what they had to say, learning a little about the lies that are used, as he put it, to glue together the fabric of our society as it exists now. Epstein was my guide into this new world, and I was tentative about it because while I did have strong beliefs about the valuelessness and dishonor of war, I didn’t yet have whatever it took—nerve? strength of will? courage?—to make a commitment. And commitment, said Epstein, was all that mattered. Commitment was consequence in and of itself.
—Make the commitment and already you will have changed the world a little bit, he told me, and I felt myself being drawn in to this idea. Epstein said, —Everything else is bullshit.
Kip’s uniform lay on his bed and the manual was on our kitchen counter. Kip had set them there, I am sure, in part for himself and in part for me. I responded, as he’d have predicted.
—Rotsy? I said. —Are you kidding me?
Kip was curt with his response, —Tell you what. I’ll do what I want to do, you do what suits you. Let’s don’t talk about it.
—Rotsy, I said. —I don’t believe it.
—You hear me?
—What?
—Did you hear what I said?
—I heard you, Kip. I heard you.
Commitments were now being made. The drifting was over.
Dusty millers, petunias, and geraniums in a pot on the porch. The pot is one of the same pots that stood on the porch of the old Sundt house where we grew up. Extraordinary that it escaped destruction all these years—the pot, I mean, for the Sundts have all but one been demolished. Yet this nondescript clay pot endures. Leave it to Bonnie. Nothing new under her sun. Not if she can help it.
This is why my sister possesses the capacity to strike terror in me, I think. It is because rather than leaving, she accepted and accepted again. Then, after she was done accepting she began the process of preserving. The flowers my mother raised are those you would find in Bonnie Jean’s garden. The afghan coverlet in septagonals of different colored yarns that her mother used to crochet while outside the snow fell and frost made ice ferns on the windowpanes, this was just the selfsame afghan my sister in the winter would make to spread on her children’s bed. The chicken and dumplings, the mincemeat pie, the ham loaf prepared from Mrs. Norris Bradbury’s recipe, with bread crumbs and brown sugar, cloves and apricot halves, she probably served to her family with the same bit of doggerel verse our mother used to recite when serving it to us—
Some hae meat and canna’ eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
Like mother like daughter, it was uncanny how perfectly Bonnie imitated with the slightest will to emulate so many of our mother’s tastes, her choices, her way of doing things. As I got out of the car and strode up the walk to her front porch, pushing my hands down into my pockets and then pulling them out again, I wondered whether she’d be smoking a white clay pipe and sipping a glass of straight gin.
One of my nephews stood at the screen door. Which one is he? I wondered. Their names are what?—I should have planned this with a little more care. Charlie and Sam, but which one’s the younger? Shall I make a guess? Shall I really say, Hey, nephew—it’s your uncle Brice? and hope for the best? I could run back to the car and be gone before he even knew what happened.
“Mom, there’s somebody at the door,” he announces, and saves me from either dubious choice.
“Bonnie?” I call into the darkened house through the screen.
I hear nothing, then I hear her say, “Ask what he wants, Sam.”
“What do you want, mister?”
“Sam, don’t you recognize your uncle Brice?”
My nephew looks me up and down. He has quite the crop of acne, doesn’t he, I think. Must come from Charlie Sr.’s side of the family. We were always dry-faced and dry-footed. Eczema and cracked calluses were more our problem. How old is this child? I wonder, and calculate. Ten, eleven.
“Who is it, Sam?” Bonnie Jean calls again from another room.
“He says he’s my uncle.”
More silence. I smile at the boy who doesn’t smile back.
“Well, tell him to hold on a minute, I’ll be right there.”
“Hold on a minute—”
“—she’ll be right here,” I say.
The boy stares at me without moving, then says, “You really my uncle?”
“Why would I pull your leg about something like that. Sure I’m your uncle. I brought you a present to prove it.”
He brightens some. “What present?”
“It’s in my car.”
He opens the screen door and comes outside. “Let’s see.”
Where is my sister? I wonder. “All right, come on.”
We walk to the car and I produce a Yankees baseball cap for him. “Thanks,” he says and tramps toward the house.
“Hey, wait, aren’t you going to try it on?”
“Okay,” he says.
The cap is far too big for his head. I have another, a Mets cap, for his brother, Charlie Jr. I’d bought them both on a last-minute impulse at La Guardia, and now I’m glad I did.
“You’ll grow into it, if you eat your greens,” I say.
“What are my greens?” he asks.
“You know, like collard, kale, spinach.”
I’m speaking in the singsong voice of an uncle. He doesn’t know what I am talking about and stares at me with an open mouth.
“You know, like salad, lettuce?”
“I hate salad. You know what?”
Despite myself I look heavenward, close my eyes, say “What?”
“If I put this hat in really hot water it’ll shrink and then I can wear it right now.”
“You’re sure that won’t wreck it?”
“Yes,” says he, turning his hat in his hands round and round, picturing it—I assume—the perfect size.
Then Bonnie finally emerges onto her porch.
The day Kip brought Jessica Rankin over was the most momentous since our flight to Chimayó. Yet for all the consequences of her entry into our lives, and for everything we would come to mean to her, the occasion didn’t seem so laden with possibilities at the time. After all, by that April—April 1965—we had been gone from Los Alamos through nearly three-quarters of our tenure at the university, and Jessica was by no means the first girl Kip had brought around. Some had been more suited to him, some less, some lasted weeks, some only a night, and I’d watched not without awe how he attracted them. A waitress, an aspiring actress, a teaching assistant. His reclusive days were over.
—You’re like catnip, I said once. He didn’t react to the little provocation, other than to raise an eyebrow, which notified me to keep my opinion to myself. But I couldn’t resist, and a few weeks later said it again, —Just like catnip to kittens.
To which he did respond by saying, —Listen, you nun you, you lily white wimple. If you want to be purer than the blessed virgin, go right ahead, but don’t be jealous of those of us who aspire to be fallen angels.
—If you’d stop flapping your wings in my face maybe I could see the light, I answered.
That April day, Kip came in, cheeks aglow, eyes alight. One glance at him and I knew he was in love with this girl who was holding his hand, a little awkwardly, at his side.
No, I withdraw the notion that the encounter wasn’t fraught with potential. I knew at once that something was different, why pretend otherwise? Kip’s smile was irrepressible, hers more demure but, for lack of a better image, very much alive. My mother would have said, had she seen them, that they looked sweet. She would not have been wrong. Beatific would be more like it. They l
ooked beatific, and I looked out the window. What I saw framed there, above the vined building across the street, was a dying day, white sky, neither cold nor warming, neither wintry nor quite yet spring. A precarious, equivocal day. This was the time of year people fell in love, I supposed, but maybe the reason the meeting didn’t seem too significant was because like a child I refused to admit to myself the quality of emotions I saw revealed in Kip that day. There was nothing equivocal about him. He was transformed in her presence.
—Brice, this is Jessica.
—Hello, she said, and shook my hand, a notably firm grasp.
—Hello, Jessica.
—Jess is fine, she said. She glanced at Kip. How her eyes shined.
—Jess, I said, mesmerized, and looked to Kip myself, neither smiling nor seeing him but trying to remember something, I wasn’t sure what, something about her that struck me as familiar beyond her more than passing resemblance to Kip. I thought, God I know this person from somewhere.
Kip broke the lull, —And Jess? For better or worse this is Brice.
Again I brought myself to look at her. She was more worldly than we, I thought, and it was true she looked like Kip. Those wide-set eyes they shared, their depth and darkness and waxmoon shape, invited the admirer in, as I have said, drew him down, captured him in a way. Before I knew what I was doing, the words came out of my mouth, accompanied by a cough, —Do we know each other?
—I’m sorry?
Embarrassed and reddening, —No, I mean—you—
I didn’t continue.
Kip left Jessica’s side, threw his arm around me, —Don’t worry about Brice. He means well. It’s just sometimes he loses track of his manners.
—Kip’s said a lot about you, Jessica recommenced, and the spell, or whatever it was, broke so that now I recognized I had probably never seen Jessica Rankin before.
—That’s good. I guess.
—All good, she said.
—Don’t worry, Kip laughed. —I made a few revisions.
She was dressed in a plaid shirt, baggy black corduroys, and though I have no idea what she was wearing on her feet it would be a safe guess they were clogs rather than sandals. Black clogs, with low heel, and worn in well from the first day when she walked them through the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and along the canals there during a yearlong ramble over Europe and North Africa, by herself most of the way, a free spirit, the year before. Jessica even then was one to affirm her confidence with the resonant tap of a wooden heel. Her hair—a jostle of deep brown, with strands of auburn and premature silvers—was parted on the side, a furrow the work of a meticulous combing that belied her otherwise hearty air of unkempt defiance, and came down in bunches, graceful wild augers and coils, like a thatching. She wore several rings, which set off her fingers, which were long and strong, and on her wrists were bright bracelets of thirties bakelite, which clattered when she gestured. Her eyes were, as I say, the most dark olive brown; astute—quick but not quicksilver. Strong, clear forehead, taut but fluid skin across it and her nose, which was prominent and straight as a ruler. Wide cheeks, the narrow hips of a boy. But not a willowy woman, rather an outright presence.
She was someone to reckon with, it was clear at once. As we used to say, and sometimes still do, she occupied her space. There was a calm to her, a powerful reserve. She didn’t trade in airs. Jessica insists to this day she was “almost a virgin” when I met her (what happened to her in Tangiers —Hardly counted because it barely mattered, she maintained) and that I am the third of the three men she’s ever been with, but I, wary, stubborn I, used to presume there must have been others. I presumed wrong, I’ve come now to think. And I never succeeded in getting her to tell me the story of her Moroccan romance. Maybe one day. She is not, as a rule, a withholder of details.
—Wait till you see what we’ve got, said Kip, lifting high a large heavy white bag, then holding it out to me.
—Where’s the kitchen? Jessica asked, at the same time that I opened the bag to see dozens of fresh mussels.
—In here, such as it is.
She rolled up her sleeves, found a big aluminum pot left by a prior tenant in one of the lower cupboards, and soon enough the scents of butter, garlic, white wine, and the salty sea-smell of steamed mussels filled the apartment. It was a feast.
We talked, the three of us, into the night, our conversation punctuated by the clatter of black shells dropping into a bowl. Kip drifted in and out of a kind of proprietorship, as I understood it, manifest by the hand on her shoulder, the many smiles, complemented by moments in which he’d jump up, midthought or midsentence, and still thinking or talking, leave the room to get more bread or a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, leave us sitting there until he burst in once more picking up where he’d left off, or where we’d proceeded. Was that a warning, that look he’d give me? Instinct proposed that his little moves were made more for my benefit than Jessica’s. That was fine by me. She was interesting but didn’t interest me, I told myself at the time, and still seem to want to—that is with regard to our first encounter—though subsequent events would come to contradict any claim of indifference on my part, or intimidation on his.
We talked about music. We talked about school—Jessica was two years older than we, had graduated from Barnard with a degree in biology and resolved not to go on to graduate school as her parents hoped, hitched overseas, and returned broke to the Upper West Side until her next direction showed itself. We talked about poverty, our own but more the ghetto poverty of others. Though now, as she put it, she checked coats at a restaurant for the rich, she hoped one day to be able somehow to provide them for the poor. She, too, was an idealist, I remember thinking. After all, surely she hadn’t paid for the mussels and wine any more than she had for the food her employers provided, anonymously and in ignorance, to a neighborhood shelter where on weekends Jessica worked as a volunteer.
Inevitably, as the wine bottles emptied, we talked about Vietnam and the unrest it was beginning to cause on campus.
By that spring the war was developing into an obsession of mine, one that would join, if not replace, my passion against the bomb. Kip had learned to hate it when I brought up Vietnam, much as Bonnie Jean had fled the room when I carried on about nuclear weapons. He even shocked me, some months before this introduction to Jessica, by saying, —World War Two was what brought us together, are you gonna let Vietnam pull us apart?
—Listen, I already know you’re for Vietnam—
—I don’t know enough about it to be for or against it, and neither do you.
—If you were against it, you wouldn’t be doing those ridiculous drills with all your rotsy friends.
—They’re not friends. And stop calling it rotsy.
—You bet they’re not friends, man. They’re the enemy.
—And so am I, is that what you’re saying?
—I don’t know what I’m saying.
—If you don’t know what you’re saying, why are you talking?
All this was the result of my urging Kip to sign a petition that was being circulated by several professors—Dean, Kahn, and Martin—which called for a “stop to the bombings” and for the parties to begin “work toward a negotiated settlement.”
—I’m not going to be kahned by Dean Martin, he laughed.
I had already showed the temerity of signing, with a hundred and fifty other students, a telegram of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh: WE ARE AMERICANS WHO ARE DEEPLY OPPOSED TO THE UNITED STATES BOMBING RAIDS AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF THE DRV. WE ARE DOING WHAT WE CAN TO STOP THESE BARBAROUS ATTACKS. YOU HAVE OUR RESPECT AND SYMPATHY.
Kip said, —As if Ho Chi Minh is actually going to sit down and read a telegram from a bunch of college kids.
Whether it had to do with my father’s role at Los Alamos or not, whether I would have arrived at these same convictions about Vietnam even if he’d not learned here at Columbia—over in Pupin Hall, where Fermi had gotten the football players to stack graphite columns, where Segrè, Rab
i, and others had worked before joining the Manhattan Project—what he would later use in Los Alamos to make his contribution to the military industrial complex, I can’t be sure about to this day. Either way, I was getting into it deeper and deeper. I’d attended a teach-in at the McMillin Theatre in the basement of Dodge Hall, eight hours of speeches, over a hundred faculty members there, from midnight until morning, a gathering sponsored by the Ad Hoc Teaching Committee on Vietnam, and whatever Kip said to the contrary I was beginning to know enough to be not just against the war but adamant in my horror of what we were getting ourselves into there.
That night, when the subject came around, I remember that Kip and I fell into debate in front of Jessica. —Advisors? those weren’t advisors, I said.
—Of course they were advisors, Kip disagreed.
—They weren’t any more advisors then than what we’re dropping now on the Ho Chi Minh Trail are water balloons filled with eau de cologne.
—All right, so what were they?
—What they were was scouts. Like outriders not much different from what the cavalry sends out in a bad cowboy movie, and all they were there to do was get the lowdown on the situation so the Pentagon would know how many troops to deploy.
—He’s starting to sound like a broken record, Kip assured Jessica.
—When people can’t hear you, you have to repeat what you’ve said. It’s only polite, I retorted.
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