White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Nhu says that so many Americans have arrived in Saigon in the last few months, it is as if they are taking over country. That instead of being a French colony, Vietnam is becoming an American colony.’

  Nhu was her mother’s sister in Saigon, from whom letters were received regularly.

  ‘Nhu is being ridiculous,’ Gabrielle said briskly.

  She loved her pretty, decorative mother dearly, but intelligence and a grasp of current affairs were not her strong points. ‘Without American aid, the Viet Cong would be victorious and Nhu would be under a Communist regime. She doesn’t want that does she?’

  ‘No,’ her mother said uncertainly. ‘But Dinh believes is the only way and that communism under Ho will not be as bad as we fear.’

  -Gabrielle sighed. ‘It will still be communism,’ she said impatiently. Her mother’s trouble was that she wanted to be loyal to all the people that she loved. Whenever she was reminded of Dinh, the dearly loved brother she had not seen for nearly twenty-five years, she wondered if the Communist threat was not as terrible as her sister said it was.

  On a dark evening in 1963 he had knocked at Nhu’s door and had stayed until the early hours of the morning. It was the only time that any of his family had seen him since he had walked north so many years before. He was now a colonel with the North Vietnamese forces. He had come south on an undercover mission for General Giap. The General intended to infiltrate large numbers of his forces into the south and he wanted the situation in the south assessed before he committed them. Together with a dozen military specialists and a handful of civilian cadres, Dinh had trekked down a jungle trail that threaded its way through southern Laos and north-eastern Cambodia, into the highlands of South Vietnam.

  ‘But how can they sweep south now that the Americans are helping us?’ her mother had asked him bewilderedly. ‘The North Vietnamese are peasants. They cannot fight America!’

  Now she said, still bewildered, ‘It is so hard to understand what is happening at home when we are so far away.’

  Saigon was still home to her mother, though neither of them knew if she would ever see it again.

  Gabrielle finished her glass of kir. ‘I want to go over my repertoire for this evening, Maman. I don’t want anything to eat before I go. Save me something for when I come home.’

  Her mother nodded. Gabrielle had been singing in Montmartre nightclubs for over two years now, but it had been two weeks since her last engagement and she had been carefully putting together a whole new selection of songs.

  Gabrielle went to her tiny bedroom and picked up her guitar. When she sang in the clubs she sang to piano accompaniment, but there was no room in her parents’ flat for a piano, and even if there had been, there was no money for one.

  Painstakingly she went over all the songs that she intended to sing. Her musical style was very strongly her own. Although she often sang songs that internationally known stars had made famous, she had the ability to take the most well-known lyric and transform it so that her audience felt as if they were hearing it for the first time.

  The club circuit was highly competitive, and though she was not aware of it, her growing success was due to the perfect match between her voice and her personality. She had a husky, knowing voice, with a sensual chuckle deep inside it, the kind of voice that announces its owner loves not always wisely, but too well, and who doesn’t give a damn one way or the other. Though she’d become popular singing standard love songs by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Lerner and Loewe, she had begun to write her own songs: committed, passionate love songs that sent tingles down the spines of her audience.

  Satisfied with the selection she had made, she bathed in the apartment’s ancient, iron-framed bathtub and dressed for the evening’s performance.

  The fresh skirt that she stepped into was a little longer than her previous one had been, but was still black. The sweater she wore was also black, long-sleeved, and fell low over her hips, the neck high and straight, every inch covered in a mesh of tiny, glittering sequins.

  She slipped her feet into high-heeled black suede pumps, and dropped her list of songs and the accompanying music into a small black shoulder bag.

  ‘Au’voir Maman! Au’voir, Papa!’ she called out as she walked out of her bedroom and towards the apartment’s front door.

  ‘Au’voir, chérie!’ her parents called after her from the kitchen, where they were eating their evening meal. ‘Good luck!’

  Gabrielle closed the door and started down the three flights of stone steps that led to the street. Her parents always wished her luck, and her mother often waited up until the early hours of the morning so that she could make her an omelette and coffee when she returned home, but nothing Gabrielle could do would persuade them to come and watch of her performances.

  She hurried down the last of the steps and walked quickly through the lobby and out into the spangling blue dusk. They never said so, but she knew it was because no matter where she appeared, striptease artistes invariably preceded and followed her act. Girls who took off their clothes before men were, in her parents’ eyes, little more than women of the streets, and they did not wish to be reminded of how closely their daughter worked with them.

  The dome of the Sacré-Coeur was pale against the evening sky as she hurried past it, towards the Black Cat. She wondered if Philippe would keep his word and visit the club that evening. She doubted it. He would be immersed in work, already making sketches and drawings for whatever his next project was even though his present painting was incomplete.

  ‘Good evening, Gabrielle,’ the porter at the Black Cat said to her as she hurried down the steps into the club. ‘You’re early this evening.’

  ‘I want to run through a couple of songs with Michel,’ she said, flashing him a smile that made the bulge in his crotch harden. He knew that his employer had tried hard to persuade her to remove her clothes as she sang; regrettably he’d been unsuccessful. It was a pity. It was a sight he would have given a year’s salary to see.

  Gabrielle greeted Henri, the barman, as he busily polished glasses. ‘Is Michel here yet?’ she asked, sitting down on one of the high stools.

  Henri paused in what he was doing and poured her an anisette. ‘He’s in the dressing room, trying to persuade Paulette to sleep with him.’

  Gabrielle laughed. Michel was her pianist, a tall, thin, bespectacled youth who could play the piano like an angel, but who enjoyed a spectacular lack of success with women.

  ‘I’ll go and rescue her,’ she said, draining her glass and pushing it back across the bar toward him.

  Henri removed it with a grin. ‘It is not Paulette who needs rescuing so much as it is Michel who needs helping!’ When she laughed, he added, ‘It’s nice to have you back, Gabrielle. The last couple of singers have been long-haired beatniks who looked as if they never washed. At least tonight, with you and Paulette on the bill, the club will be full.’

  It wasn’t hard to fill the Black Cat. Even when packed to capacity the large below-street-level room held only seventy people, and then the tables and chairs were squeezed so closely around the tiny stage that Paulette often complained that she could feel the audience’s breath on her flesh.

  That evening Paulette performed to a boisterously appreciative audience, coming offstage with the perspiration breaking through her makeup. ‘Mon Dieu, Gabrielle. I should have listened to my mother and become a schoolteacher! It would have been an easier life!’

  ‘You wouldn’t have liked it,’ Gabrielle said impishly. ‘It would have been far too boring!’

  When the applause for Paulette began to fade, Michel began to play her introductory music. She waited for a moment, judging her timing, and then walked out on to the stage.

  Gavin Ryan was no expert on nightclub singers, especially singers who sang in clubs as small and sleazy as the Black, Cat, but he had known the first time he had seen her, nearly three weeks before, that the audience’s response to her was unusual.

  Singers in
Montmartre clubs were given far less attention than the strippers. When the strippers had departed and the singer came on, it was generally the signal for the audience to turn its attention to the bar and order another round of drinks while they discussed the merits or faults of the last stripper.

  Gabrielle was different. When she came onstage, she commanded the audience’s attention even before she began to sing. After the excess of flesh that had preceded her, and that the patrons were accustomed to, her black skirt and glittering black high-necked, long-sleeved sweater were as stark and uncompromising as a nun’s habit, the spicy red flame of her hair almost indecent by contrast.

  She made none of the usual efforts to woo her audience with flirtatious words and smiles before she began to sing. Instead, as Michel played the first few bars of her opening song, she stood perfectly still, insolently indifferent to them, and when she sang, it was as though she were singing for herself and herself alone.

  Gavin put down his glass of cheap champagne. He had seen her twice before, in a different club, and was as riveted by her now as he had been then. She had the most extraordinary face, both sensuously feline and appealingly, childishly gamine, and there was the merest hint of duskiness in her complexion, as if she were of mixed blood, Moroccan, perhaps, or Algerian.

  The fellow Australian he was sitting with the first time they had seen her had said to him, ‘I agree with you that she’s amazing-looking and that she has a terrific singing voice, but I wouldn’t go near her if I were you, cobber. They’re all on the game, the lot of them. No telling what you might catch.’

  Gavin rather reluctantly agreed with him. At twenty-three, he’d bummed his way from Brisbane halfway round the world, and miraculously caught nothing worse than influenza in India. The hostesses in the club were certainly prostitutes. He had already spurned two very definite propositions. It was a pity though. There was something mesmerizing about Gabrielle Mercador. She had the rare capacity to be completely still, and yet to command unwavering attention. When she sang, the emotion in her voice was naked, raising goose pimples on his flesh. Her opening song was followed by one he had never heard before, then she sang La demoiselle élue, by Debussy, and then the most evocative rendering of Fever that he had ever heard.

  When she walked off the stage to enthusiastic applause he felt a devastating sense of loss. Telling himself he was a fool, he rose to his feet. As he did, a young black girl strutted on to the stage dressed in thigh-high black boots, white satin shorts, and a revealing scarlet bolero. He turned away, uninterested, squeezing his way through the crowded room towards the bar.

  The bar was deserted. Every back was turned toward it as the black girl divested herself of her bolero, throwing it wide and high into the audience to thunderous wolf whistles and shouts of crude encouragement.

  ‘A beer,’ Gavin said to Henri, wondering if he was going to have enough sense and willpower to resist coming to see Gabrielle Mercador the following evening.

  He wasn’t aware of her approach. One minute he was deep in thought, the next he heard a husky, enticing voice asking the barman for an anisette with water.

  He turned his head swiftly, eyes widening in disbelief. She was standing next to him, so near that he could smell her perfume. Her makeup was heavier than he had expected, but almost immediately he realized that that was because of the strong spotlight under which she sang.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said in halting French before he could lose his nerve. ‘But could I have the pleasure of buying your drink?’

  ‘Non, merci.’ Her response was automatic. She never socialized with the patrons. They were nearly always sweaty and lustful and drinking too much.

  She hadn’t looked at him when he had spoken to her, but now, as she turned to move away, she did so, and she hesitated. He wasn’t the usual sort of patron. He was young and clean-cut, with a mop of shaggy, sun-gold hair. His disappointment was obviously so sincere that she said impulsively, trying to soften the blow she had dealt him, ‘I’m sorry, but I never drink with the patrons.’

  Gavin was nonplussed. In all the other clubs that he had been into, all the girls – singers, strippers, and hostesses – touted for laughingly expensive bottles of champagne.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he said, not wanting her to walk away from him. ‘Couldn’t you make an exception? Just this once?’

  He had strongly marked brows bleached blond by the sun like his hair, and his eyes were a deep, warm grey.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, breaking one of her cardinal rules. ‘A lemonade please.’

  He quirked an eyebrow. ‘Not another anisette?’

  She laughed. ‘No, I have to perform again in half an hour.’

  ‘I saw you last week at the Columbo,’ he said, searching for the correct French words with difficulty. ‘I thought you were sensational. That’s why I came here tonight. I wanted to see you again.’

  ‘Oh, how nice!’ Her pleasure was genuine. There was nothing hard or artificial about her. Prostitute or not, she was the nicest girl be had ever met. He cleared his throat.

  He was far from sexually inexperienced, but he had never before attempted to do what he was going to do now.

  ‘Are you, er, available later on?’

  A small frown creased her brow. ‘Pardon? I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Could I see you later on, after the show?’

  He wondered if his French was totally incomprehensible to her and put his hand inside his breast pocket, withdrawing his wallet, hoping to indicate that he knew what the situation was.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at his wallet and realized what he was trying to ask her. If it had been anyone else, she would have walked away indignantly, but he looked so uncomfortable and so agonized that instead of being insulted she began to giggle.

  He flushed scarlet, not knowing what he had done or said to make himself ridiculous.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, still giggling. ‘It’s just that you have made a mistake. I am a singer. That is all. Only a singer.’

  Relief swamped him, and he didn’t care that he had made a first-class fool of himself.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, grinning. ‘My name is Gavin Ryan, and I still want to take you out after the show.’

  ‘I am not sure,’ Gabrielle said truthfully. ‘I will make up my mind later. Where are you from? New Zealand? Australia?’

  ‘Australia,’ he said, wondering how he could have been such a fool and determining to sock his friend on the jaw the next time he saw him.

  ‘And what are you doing in Paris?’ she asked as the black girl finally divested herself of her last article of clothing to wild applause.

  ‘I’ve just gotten myself a job as a reporter with a press agency. What I really want to do is to go out to Vietnam and cover events there, but the agency has a rule that you have to work for three years in one of the European offices before being assigned as a war correspondent.’

  Gabrielle’s eyebrows rose slightly. ‘And what do you know about Vietnam?’ she asked teasingly.

  ‘I know there are some big stories brewing there,’ he said, loving the way she spoke. ‘And there’s going to be one hell of a lot of action now that the Americans are beginning to fight.’

  A three-piece band had begun to play, and couples were starting to cram the tiny dance floor. She put her glass of lemonade down on the bar. ‘I have to go now,’ she said regretfully. ‘I am onstage again in ten minutes. Good-bye, Mr Ryan, it has been nice talking to you.’

  ‘But I thought you said I could see you after the show?’ His alarm at the prospect of losing her was so naked that she burst out laughing again.

  ‘I said that I would think about it,’ she said reprovingly.

  ‘And have you?’

  His anxiety and urgency were so raw that she couldn’t resist teasing him just a little longer.

  ‘I will let you know, when I sing,’ she said, moving away from him. ‘My first song will be my answer.’

  He watched as
she moved away from him and then ordered himself another beer. If her song was a refusal, he would come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the night after that. He would come back every night until she agreed to see him. Until he could talk to her in clean air, and not in a smoke-filled cavern packed with a lecherous audience totally unworthy of her.

  When she walked out onstage, his chest physically hurt. She stood for a moment, perfectly poised, effortlessly in command of her audience, her spicy red curls burning liker a candle flame. The pianist began to play and a tiny smile quirked the corners of her mouth as she turned towards the bar where he was standing and began to sing, I’ll Be Seeing You.

  He had his answer. His grin was so wide it split his face. He wanted to shout a loud ‘hooray’; to push to the front of the stage and seize her and hug her until she was breathless.

  ‘A bottle of champagne,’ he said to Henri. ‘A genuine one!’

  When the last notes of the song died away, she began to sing Irving Berlin’s Always. Though neither of them could possibly have guessed it, it was a song that was appropriate for the long, agony-filled years that lay ahead.

  Chapter Four

  Abbra had never been happier. Lewis was given a special two-day pass and they were married in the military chapel at Fort Bragg. The only thing marring the day was the absence of Scott. He was at football training camp and was unable to be best man though he had sent his congratulations and his apologies. A friend of Lewis’s, who had been his classmate at West Point, was best man.

  After the wedding her parents returned to San Francisco, and after her one-night honeymoon Abbra had followed them by train.

  It was a strange feeling, becoming a married woman with so little warning. A married woman whose husband was, in twenty-four hours’ time, going overseas to fight in Vietnam.

  Once she was back home the feeling of strangeness increased. Outwardly her life was the same. She still lived with her parents in Pacific Heights; she still attended college. Yet inwardly she’d changed. She no longer had any interest in parties or dances. They were for girls who were on the lookout for men, and she was no longer looking; she was married to Lewis and she had no desire to behave as if she were still single.