Her brother came home for a weekend during spring break, and he and her father announced that Alex had enlisted in the reserves, which her father remained convinced would protect him from winding up in Vietnam as a foot soldier, or at all, but now the army owned him for the next four years, and if there was trouble, he could be one of the first to go, not the last. And if he didn’t graduate from college, he wouldn’t be an officer anyway.
She went pale when they said it at the dinner table, and she talked to her father alone afterward.
“Do you realize how dangerous this is?” she asked, and he dismissed it.
“He’s a student, he’s safe. They’re not going to call up the reserves, and if they do, wouldn’t you rather have him there as an officer than an infantryman?”
“No,” she said angrily. “He’s my brother and he’s a baby. I’d rather have him in frilly pink underwear claiming to be gay and sitting it out in Canada. I don’t want him to go to war.” She was nearly in tears, and cried when she heard what they’d done.
“Neither do I. But they’re unlikely to ever send the reserves. They never do.”
She wanted to scream, but her father was certain that what he’d done was the right thing, and it was too late now anyway. Alex had signed up for the reserves, with his father’s blessing. At his insistence, in fact.
A month later, they got a letter from Harvard. Alex had three Ds, an F, and an incomplete, all in required courses, and while they acknowledged that his high school grades had qualified him for admission to Harvard, he clearly was not mature enough to handle it. Rather than expelling him totally, they were “releasing” him for a year until the following spring semester, when he would be welcome to return and try again, on academic probation. Until then he was no longer enrolled in Harvard University. They hoped that he would benefit from a year off. Her father was shaking as he read the letter, and handed it to Meredith when she next had dinner with them. She came home for dinner two or three times a week, even though she had her own apartment, so they didn’t feel as though she had abandoned them.
“Shit,” she said when she read the letter. “Now what?” she asked her father.
“He should get a job. There’s no point sending him to another school for a year. He’s obviously not ready for college.”
“But he also won’t get a student deferment if they call anyone up,” Merrie said clearly, and her father knew it too.
“We’re covered with the reserves now,” Robert said, but she didn’t believe him. He called his son that night and told him to get his ass back to New York immediately. The party was over. Alex sounded heartbroken at the news. He’d been having so much fun, and had so many friends at school. He didn’t want to come home and get a job.
He took his time getting back to New York and arrived on the weekend. Meredith had dinner with her family, so she could talk to him too. He was deeply apologetic when his father scolded him, and said he hadn’t realized he was doing so poorly.
“Did you ever go to class?” Meredith asked, and his answer was noncommittal, which told her he didn’t. The biggest part of the problem was that he was immature. She had known boys like him in college, who just couldn’t function without being policed constantly, and they all wound up flunking out.
His father told him he had to get a job, and he agreed to it. But three weeks later none of them were prepared for the letter he got in May. It advised him that a single unit of the reserves had been chosen to join the advisors and combat troops in Vietnam. He was to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, the following Monday, for a two-week preliminary training period and then he was shipping out to Vietnam for additional training. He had lost his student deferral, and since he hadn’t graduated he was going to Vietnam as a private, not an officer after all. Meredith was stunned. It was exactly what she had warned her father could happen. According to the letter, he would be on a flight to Vietnam on June 1. She couldn’t believe it, and her father had tears in his eyes as he stared at her.
“They can’t do this,” he said in a choked voice.
“Yes, they can,” Meredith answered him. “Can you pull any strings to get him out of it?” Her grandfather probably could have, if he were willing to, but he was gone. But her father was a federal judge. “Can you claim some kind of physical or psychological problem? Whatever works.”
Her mother had been silent until then, listening to them, and then asked if it was a good idea to have Alex saddled with a diagnosis of psychological problems that could trail him forever. She had a point, but it was worth the risk, and her father agreed with Meredith. He had to get him out of it, if he could.
“It doesn’t matter, Mom. The alternative is worse,” Meredith explained to her mother about the psychiatric diagnosis.
Her father stayed home for two days, and canceled his court calendar. He called everyone he could think of, but they all told him the same thing. Once accepted by the reserves, which Alex had been, he was stuck, and it was too late to get him off the hook. They would have had better luck with a draft board, possibly, than a contract he had willingly signed.
Alex burst into tears when they told him, and he accused his father of lying to him. “You said they’d never call me up.”
“They shouldn’t have, but apparently this is an unusual occurrence. It’s the only reserve unit they’re calling up. They needed another battalion, and they’re taking it from the reserves.” It was, in effect, the whole purpose of the reserves, to fill in when they didn’t have enough regular troops.
“Can I go to Canada?” Alex asked, looking desperate, but Robert shook his head.
“You’ll never be able to get back in this country. That’s too big a chance to take.”
Meredith liked the idea, but Robert didn’t want his son to be an outcast forever from his homeland, and a criminal for desertion.
“So is dying in Vietnam,” Alex said angrily, in tears.
There was nothing they could do, and Alex reported to Fort Dix the following Monday, for a speedy preliminary basic training before he shipped out. He was terrified. In part, it was his own fault for screwing around and getting sent home from Harvard, and his father had given him bad advice about the military. There was nothing they could do to stop it now. And on June 1, after spending the night with them following his brief training, he left for Fort Dix at 5 A.M. and was put on a military transport plane and flown to Guam, and from there to Saigon to Tan Son Nhut for intensive combat training. Meredith and her parents looked devastated after he left. They had all gotten up that morning to say goodbye.
He called from Guam to say he had arrived safely, but they never heard from him in Saigon. He had been taken straight to a base for combat training. And no one cared that he said he was in the reserves, didn’t mean it when he signed up, and didn’t want to be there. Neither did anyone else.
It was five weeks before he called them on the Fourth of July. He said he was miserable. The heat was unbearable, he’d had dysentery since he arrived, and the training was brutal. All he wanted was for them to find a way to bring him home. He’d turned nineteen while he was there, and Meredith felt sick every time she thought of him, and she could see that her parents did too. She never said a word to her father about it being his fault for talking Alex into joining the reserves. It had been a terrible idea, but it was too late now, and she could see how horrible her father felt about it. No one had expected this to happen, or not this fast.
They were at the Vineyard when he called them. All Alex’s friends were there, and asked for him, and they had to explain that he was in Vietnam. They were all shocked, and thought he’d been at Harvard, having fun. He’d had too much fun, and was now paying a heavy price.
Meredith was in her office after the weekend, when her mother called her and asked her to come home immediately. It was four in the afternoon, and she had just seen her last client. “What’s wro
ng, Mom?”
“Just come home,” Janet said in a strangled voice and hung up.
She took a cab uptown and let herself into the apartment with her keys. The lights were off, and she could see Adelaide in the kitchen crying. She found her father in his study, in the dark, with the shades drawn. He looked at her blindly and handed her a telegram. “I killed him” was all he said, and then her mother walked into the room and started to sob.
The telegram told them that Alex had died on July 5 in a skirmish with the Vietcong. He had been felled by a sniper bullet, while defending himself and his unit honorably. The United States Army extended their deepest sympathy and commended him for dying a hero’s death. And then further went on to say that they would be contacted and notified as to when their son’s body would be shipped home so they could make the appropriate arrangements. He had died one month and four days after he had flown to Vietnam.
“Oh my God,” Meredith said, as she felt her legs turn to Jell-O underneath her, and sat down next to her father and took his hand in hers.
“It’s not your fault, Dad,” she said in a desperate voice. “You didn’t know this could happen. He flunked out of school. It was a series of bad circumstances. It was fate,” she said and put her arms around her father as he was convulsed with sobs.
“I killed my son. I killed my son,” he kept saying over and over, and then Meredith pulled her mother into the embrace with them. As terrible as she felt herself, she couldn’t imagine how they felt losing a child, with her father convinced it was his fault.
Adelaide came in and was crying as hard as they were. “I’m so sorry….I’m so sorry….He was my boy.”
Meredith couldn’t even imagine never seeing him again. He was her baby, and so ridiculously young and immature to be sent to war. It was such a waste and a travesty. She didn’t know what to do, except to keep hugging her parents. They were inconsolable. And finally she put them both to bed.
She went to her own room then and called Claudia, and broke down in sobs the moment she answered the phone.
“Oh my God…what happened?” Claudia started crying too as soon as she told her. “He was such a sweet kid. Your father must feel responsible for pushing him into the reserves.” Meredith had complained about it to her several times.
“I’m not sure he’ll ever recover from it, or my mother. I just put them to bed. Oh my God, how do things like this happen? How did a sweet boy like him get sent to a hellhole like Vietnam and get killed in a month? He would have been better off in Canada for the rest of his life.”
“There are some things we just can’t explain,” Claudia said sadly. She knew it better than anyone, and had lost her own brother twenty years before, and all the others. But now she had Thaddeus and Sarah, so sometimes life compensated for the cruelties one couldn’t understand. “What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Nothing. They’re going to send his body home, but they didn’t say when. I don’t know how my parents are going to survive this.” Meredith sounded desperate as she said it.
“I’ll come in tomorrow,” Claudia promised.
Thaddeus drove her so she didn’t have to take the train eight months pregnant, and they both extended their deepest condolences to the McKenzies, and spent some time alone with Meredith afterward. They thought her parents were still in shock, which was easy to understand. It was hard to know what to say to them. They had sat in the living room like zombies with Claudia and Thaddeus.
Claudia hugged Meredith hard before she left. “Call me if you need me,” she said softly.
Meredith and her father both took a week off from work, and then they had to go back to their respective jobs. The agony continued when they were notified that Alex’s body had been sent to Fort Dix and was waiting for them there.
Robert didn’t want Janet to go through it, so he went with Meredith. They had made all the arrangements at Frank E. Campbell, who sent a hearse for them.
“I’ll never forgive myself,” her father said to her in the car on the way home.
“You have to, for Mom’s sake,” she said quietly. “She needs you. You didn’t know this would happen. It’s not your fault. We just have to live with it now.”
“I don’t know how,” he said sadly, as tears poured down his cheeks and she held his hand.
“We’ll get through it together, one day at a time.”
* * *
—
The funeral was another intolerable agony. They put the obituary in The New York Times, and a surprising number of Alex’s school friends showed up, in spite of it being August and many people being away. The Steinbergs came too, and Claudia came in from Connecticut again. She could hardly walk, she was so big and so far along.
After that, they had to learn to live with the loss. When people asked about Alex, and how he was liking Harvard, they had to say he had died in Vietnam, and then see how shocked people were. It would be a long time before everybody knew and stopped asking.
Meredith hated to leave her parents, but she had her own grief to deal with, and she needed a break. She was trying to do everything she could for them when she wasn’t working, and her mother was like a child. She was totally lost. They went through his room together, and framed some photographs and awards that were loose on his desk. Janet folded his clothes lovingly as though he were coming back. She didn’t want to throw anything away, and Meredith didn’t push her. They had to learn to live with this however they could.
She went to spend a weekend with Claudia after the funeral. The apartment was so oppressive she couldn’t stand it anymore. It was a relief to be with Claudia and Thaddeus and hold Sarah in her arms. She was a happy child. And Claudia’s baby was due any minute.
As it turned out, she had it while Meredith was there. It went very quickly, and Claudia asked Merrie to stay in the labor room with them.
“Are you sure?” Meredith looked scared. She’d never seen anyone give birth.
“If I scream too loud you can leave,” Claudia said, grimacing through the pains. She’d done it naturally with Sarah and wanted to try again.
Meredith and Thaddeus were at her head, encouraging her and telling her to push, while the doctor and nurse were at her feet, watching the baby’s progress. Meredith winced when Claudia cried out in pain and then pushed again. It looked brutal to her, but an hour after they got there, she gave one big push, with Thaddeus holding her shoulders and a nurse holding each leg, and a tiny face appeared between her legs screaming loudly. Claudia shouted with delight, and they waited to find out what they had, as the doctor gently eased the baby’s body out of her.
“It’s a boy!” he said, Thaddeus was already crying, and so was Merrie. She had never seen anything so moving in her life. And suddenly she realized that life came full circle. Her beautiful little brother had died, and now this wonder of a child was born, from a woman who had almost died herself as a child, and only been spared by some kind of miracle after the atrocities she’d been through.
Claudia lay peacefully with the baby in her arms after they cleaned him up and wrapped him in a blue blanket. She smiled at Meredith with tears in her eyes. “We’re going to call him Alex. Thaddeus and I decided before he was born. Alexander Johann Friedrich, for my father and brother and your Alex, if that’s all right with you.” Meredith couldn’t even speak, she was so touched. She could only nod as she sobbed. They hugged each other, and their tears mingled as they cried for the boy who had died, and the one whose life had just begun. Meredith prayed that he would be blessed and lead a long, happy life.
Chapter Fourteen
The rest of the summer was difficult for all of the McKenzies. It was impossible to understand that Alex was never coming back. That his room would forever be empty, his clothes would never be worn. He wouldn’t be going back to Harvard to redeem himself, his friends would never visit again. He was gone. Meredith had
trouble with the idea too. And her father had guilt weighing on him with the loss. He looked like he had aged a dozen years overnight. At sixty, he wasn’t old, but he suddenly appeared to be an old man. And her mother just hung around the house, wandering in and out of Alex’s room, smoothing the bedspread, opening the curtains, closing them again so nothing would fade, straightening his trophies, just standing in the doorway staring, or sitting on the bed. Meredith didn’t know what to do to turn the tides of grief for them. She was desperately sad, but she was angry too. She hated the war in Vietnam, and the hypocrisy of it, and wanted it stopped.
There were mass demonstrations against the war now, in front of government buildings and in public places. The voice of the doves was growing louder. And after losing his son, Robert was no longer a hawk. He was a grieving parent whose boy had been killed by a Vietcong sniper in a war they shouldn’t have been fighting.
Meredith went to rallies and protests regularly, but never told her parents. They’d been through enough, and she didn’t want them to worry about her. She had been told about a demonstration on a Saturday night in October, she dressed warmly for it, and left from her apartment in Gramercy Park. It was to be held in front of the Federal Building downtown, and she got there as the crowd was gathering, each one holding a candle for the boys who had already died in the war.
They sang the songs that were familiar to her from protests in the South, including “We Shall Overcome,” and at one point the crowd sang “God Bless America,” and everyone had tears in their eyes or on their cheeks.
They linked arms and stood together, holding up signs against the war, and she saw the riot police arriving and didn’t care. She’d been to jail before, in tougher crowds than this.
She was bracing herself to make sure that the force of the crowd didn’t knock her down, and turned to see what the police on horseback were doing so she didn’t get trampled, and farther back in the crowd she saw a familiar face with a determined look. He was crying, and he had locked arms with two women who were crying too. It was her father, and she was stunned that he was there. She pushed her way backward into the crowd until she reached him, and looked into his eyes. He looked better and more alive than he had since July.
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