The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  She cannot show Anthony how afraid she is, seeing nothing but flocks of ravens flying over the heads of all the people in her lovely desert house.

  The Long Gray Line

  Anthony spent the summer at home, playing wild, out-of-control war and pool games with his siblings, and left for Vietnam in August 1965. Pasha, Harry and Janie missed him when he went.

  Every day when Alexander came home, the first thing he said after kissing Tatiana was, “Any news?” Meaning, any letters? Any phone calls?

  He’d call during the day and say, “Did the mail come?”

  And if the mail did come and bring tidings from La Chu, from Laos, from Dakto, from Quang Tri, Alexander took his smokes to the garden outside their bedroom and sat by himself and read his son’s letters.

  Alexander was slightly graying. The fierce Arizona sun had darkened his face. Lines came to his eyes. But the genes were good from his Italian mother and his Pilgrim father. Though he had gained a little weight, Alexander worked too hard and trained too hard at Yuma to feel the years. Upright, wide-shouldered, watchful like always, he carried his large frame with the unspoken but clear, don’t even think of messing with me air. No one could mistake him for anything but a military man.

  As they had during the Korean War, his combat support duties increased. He often spent more than seventeen active duty days a year at Yuma—still the largest weapons testing facility in the world. In the late fifties and early sixties, when the boys were infants and toddlers, and Anthony came to help, Tatiana still went with Alexander once a month, and their baby carriages were arrayed in a row with the others outside the married barracks. But once the boys got too big for carriages, and Anthony went to West Point, and Janie was born, vast Yuma became too small for her two untamed sons and their baby sister who thought she was a male cub herself. It was either rein themselves in or stay home with Mom, while their father went alone, translating volumes of raw data coming in from Russian services and conducting extensive training drills and weapons tests.

  The children reined themselves in.

  In 1966, after his widely read translation of the criticism the Soviets were heaping on the first generation of the M-16—the U.S. version of the Kalashnikov rifle—which tended to jam if you didn’t clean it, Alexander was finally promoted to major, having served twenty years as captain. Richter telegraphed him congratulations from Saigon with the words—“YOU INSUFFERABLE BASTARD. STILL, I’M A LIEUTENANT-COLONEL.”

  Alexander telegraphed him back. “YOU INSUFFERABLE BASTARD. WHEN IS MY SON COMING HOME?”

  After a successful twelve-month tour with the 2nd Airborne, Anthony signed on for a second tour and moved over to train under Richter, who ran the Special Forces central command post out of Kontum under a quaint and harmless moniker of Studies and Observation Group. Anthony joined an unconventional warfare special ops ground unit. He led a recon team, he led a Search, Locate, Annihilate Mission (SLAM) team, he led a Hatchet force. He became a Green Beret. He re-upped for a third tour and lived through a bloody 1968, through Tet, and reupped again, and lived through the 1969 Viet Cong spring offensive. During one of his recon missions in early July 1969, he captured Viet Cong documents that showed that the enemy was much larger and better equipped than the U.S. high command pretended, and that the NVA were wildly inflating the numbers of the American casualties, claiming 45,000 armed U.S. troops had been killed in the spring offensive when the actual number was 1718, against 24,361 enemy dead. He was promoted to captain.

  Copies of Anthony’s seven citations came home. Two Purple Hearts for a shoulder wound and a leg shrapnel, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, and a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism during an assault in Laos on his long-range recon platoon. After he was promoted to captain, the letter from Richter said, “RHIP—RANK HAS ITS PRIVILEGES: AT LEAST NOW OUR BOY IS SUPERVISING GROUND STUDIES GROUPS, NOT LEADING AMBUSHES DOWN THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL.”

  What was amazing to Alexander during those years was that his life went on. His three blond children grew like saplings, Christmas trees were bought, large custom homes kept going up, new people were hired. Johnny-boy left, got married—twice. Amanda abandoned Shannon and her three kids for a migrant construction worker from Wyoming, and disappeared across state lines. The Barringtons went on vacation to Coconut Grove, and to Vail, Colorado so that the children could see something called “snow.”

  They went out with friends, they played cards, they went dancing, they swam. They celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1967 with a seven-hour mule ride to Phantom Ranch by the Colorado River, celebrated with advanced married love, and his whispering words and her tears.

  Every night when he came home, the house smelled of warm bread and dinner, and Tania was nicely dressed and smiling, and walking to the door to greet him, to kiss him, with her hallowed hair down her shoulders, and he would say, “Tania, I’m home!” and she would laugh, just like she had when she was seventeen in Leningrad, on Fifth Soviet. She took care of him, of his children, of his house, of his life, like she had in Coconut Grove, like she had on Bethel Island.

  They lived—while their firstborn son was in the mountains of Dakto in the mud. They lived while he was in Cambodia and Khammouan and forcing the Viet Cong from Khe Sahn. They lived while he fought on the Perfume River in Hué. They lived and felt guilty, they sent care packages and felt better, they heard from him and felt better still. During these years, he never did come back stateside, but he would call Christmas Day and talk to his mother, and at the end say quietly, “Say hi to Dad,” and Dad was on the other extension listening in, and he would say quietly, “I’m here, son.” And they would chat for a few brief minutes.

  “So how’s it going over there?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. A lot of hurry up and wait.”

  “Yes, sometimes it’s like that.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Yeah. I did too.”

  “No fields of Verdun here, no tank battle of Kursk. We’re always in the jungle. And it’s damnably wet. Must be what Holy Cross, Swietocryzt, was like for you.”

  “Swietocryzt was ice cold,” says Alexander. “Well, watch your back.”

  “I will, Dad. I am, Dad.”

  Gordon Pasha was nearly 11, Harry was 9, Janie almost 6. Tatiana was 45. Alexander was 50.

  On Sunday evening, July 20, 1969, they all sat with their eyes riveted on the television. Tatiana had been thinking that she wished Anthony were here with them, watching, and Pasha said, as if reading her mind, “Ant would love this.” And Tatiana asked Alexander, “What time is it now in Kontum?” And Alexander replied, “In Kontum it is tomorrow,” as Neil Armstrong took a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind, and set foot on the moon.

  And the phone rang.

  When the phone rang, Tatiana and Alexander turned their heads away from the TV to stare at one another. Their gazes darkened. It could not be anyone from the United States. Because in the United States everyone was watching Neil Armstrong.

  Tatiana couldn’t go pick it up; Alexander went.

  When he came back his face was gray.

  What would her kids remember about their mother from July 20, 1969?

  She struggled off the couch and went to stand with Alexander in the archway to the den. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. What? she wanted to say. What?

  Ant’s missing, he mouthed inaudibly back. She had to cover her face from them, she had to cover her face from Alexander most of all. She didn’t want him to see her like this. She knew her impassable weakness would frighten her husband. With her faith shaken, his would positively crumble down like his bombed-out village huts. But how does she hide from him that Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, bearing ill will, has entered their house? She is blinded by the ravens, their horny beaks in her eyes.

  She was going to ask him not to touch her, but, true to himself, he wasn’t coming anywhere near her.

  She had a terrible fifteen minutes by herself in the bed
room. Maybe twenty. Then she flung open the bedroom door.

  “What do you mean missing?” Tatiana said when she found Alexander outside. “Missing where?”

  Alexander, less able to fling open any doors, sat mutely on the deck watching his sons in the night-time, lit-up pool. Janie was in front of him, adjusting her mask and fins. Tatiana fell silent until he finished helping the girl. No one was interested in the man on the moon anymore.

  When Jane plopped away in her fins to jump in the water, Alexander turned to Tatiana.

  After his successful recon mission earlier in the month, Anthony had been given a seven-day leave. He was supposed to report back for duty on the 18th of July. He had not.

  “Maybe he just forgot when he was supposed to come back,” said Tatiana.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Are they looking for him?”

  “Of course they’re looking for him, Tatiana.”

  “How many days has it been?”

  “Three.”

  Vanished with him were his weapons and his MACV-SOG special pass card, which allowed him unrestricted privileges across all South Vietnamese roads and towns. All he had to do was flash the pass and he could get into any plane, any truck, any slick and be taken anywhere he wanted to go. The pass had not been flashed; he had not gotten into anything; had not been taken anywhere.

  “Who did he go on leave with?”

  “Alone. He signed out to go to Pleiku.” Pleiku was a town fifty kilometers from the Kontum base. Lieutenant Dan Elkins, Anthony’s friend and recon leader, told Richter that the only odd thing in retrospect was Anthony going on leave by himself. He was doing that a lot in the past year. Normally, Dan and Ant, friends since ’66, traveled together to unwind; they would go way down south to Vung Tau, hit the bars, the officers’ clubs, get a little R&R.

  The other thing that was odd in retrospect was that Anthony had not yet re-upped for another tour. His current year was ending in August, and he had not yet said he would be renewing his commission.

  Tatiana and Alexander were silent, their stares on the splashing kids. “So what does Richter think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not Richter, am I?”

  “Alexander!”

  “What are you yelling at me for?” He pointed to the nearby children.

  She lowered her voice. “What are you all clipped with me for? What does Richter think happened to him?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “What are you yelling at me for?” Tatiana took a breath. “Did they list him as MIA?”

  Motionless at first, Alexander finally shook his head. “He wasn’t in action.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Where is he?” Alexander asked Tatiana in a faint voice. “Aren’t in you the answers to all things?”

  She opened her hands. “Darling, let’s just wait and see. Maybe...”

  “Yeah,” said Alexander, abruptly getting up. “Maybe.” Both of them couldn’t speak about it anymore. Thank God for the three wet puppies in the pool, thank God for their irreducible, incontrovertible needs.

  But at night after the kids were asleep, they went through Anthony’s letters. They sat on the floor of their bedroom and obsessively read and reread every one, looking for clues, for a single word.

  “Situation here worse than we realized . . . Communist will to persist very strong...U.S. measures will not deter the Vietnamese . . . Mom, I’m just gathering intel, don’t worry about me . . . Most of the indigenous mountain men we train, the Montagnards, speak no English . . . good guys, the Yards, but no English! Except for one, and I’m always with him because of it. Ha Si knows English better than me. Dad would like him; he is some warrior . . . Devastating storms . . . Torrential rains . . . Oppressive wet heat . . . Loneliness in the jungle . . . Sometimes I dream of the lupines in the desert. I must be mistaken. I’ve never seen them in Arizona. Where were we, Mom, where I could’ve seen fields of purple lupines?”

  Anthony asked after his brothers and sister, talked a little about his mates: Dan Elkins, Charlie Mercer; about Tom Richter and what a fine commander he was. He did not write about girls. He never mentioned girls, not in his Vietnam letters, not in his conversations from West Point. He had not brought anyone home since his high school prom. He did not talk about his injuries. He did not talk about his battles, or about the men he had lost or saved. Those things they heard about from Richter and from copies of Anthony’s citations.

  There was nothing that raised a flag for a numb Tatiana. “He’ll turn up any second,” she said bloodlessly to Alexander. “You’ll see.”

  Alexander said nothing, still holding the letters in his hands, grim, mute, white-faced. Tatiana brought him to her on the floor and they sat with Anthony’s letters between them. She held his head and whispered, Shh and It’ll be all right and There’s a simple explanation. He was so crushed in her arms that she stopped talking.

  They waited to hear.

  A day went by.

  And then another.

  Richter’s men combed the woods and the trails and the rice paddies in the flat distance between Pleiku and Kontum, searched the hooches, the rivers, the mud, looking for a trace of Anthony, or his weapons, or his ID. He must have stepped on a mine, Richter finally, resignedly, said to Alexander. He must have been booby-trapped. He must have walked into an ambush. The dirt road between Pleiku and Kontum was relatively safe and full of American troops traveling back and forth, but perhaps he veered off course for some reason, perhaps...

  But without a trace of evidence, the command could not firmly declare anything.

  Tatiana kept praying they wouldn’t find a trace of him.

  “He’s not MIA,” she said to Alexander after another three days had passed. “So what are they calling him?” She had followed him into his shed and now stood near him, staring at him.

  “Nothing. Just missing.” He didn’t look up from his work table.

  “Missing? There’s a designation called missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the official name for that designation?”

  There was a long pause. “AWOL.”

  Tatiana stumbled out of the shed and stopped asking him things.

  Three days became a week.

  A week turned into two.

  She began to step over the stones, to gnaw over all the sticks on the paths of her life, lamenting, exalting, breathing over them, examining them, as if by raking up the limbs of memory she could find the ones that had broken and repair them perhaps, mend them, or yank them away and destroy them, do anything so that on July 20, 1969, Tom Richter would not call them from Vietnam. Maybe if she had died in the blockade. Maybe if she had died on Lake Ladoga, on the Volga, from TB, from her collapsed lung. Maybe if she had not fallen for Alexander’s damnable lies. Go, Tatiana. I’m dead, Tatiana. Leave me dead and go—oh, and remember Orbeli. Maybe if she had stayed in Stockholm when she was seven months pregnant. She would be a Swedish citizen now. Anthony would be a Swedish citizen. No Vietnam War for the Swedes. She knew she mustn’t think like that, knotting herself up inside. If only, if only, if only.

  While Tatiana was busy with knots, Alexander was on the phone. He talked to the commander at Yuma, to the commander at Fort Huachuca, to the Director of DIA. He talked to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he talked to the President of the Defense Military School. He talked to Tom Richter nearly every day. Richter who ran MACV-SOG Command Control Central out of Kontum interviewed three hundred people who knew Anthony, who had seen him, here, there, everywhere. He had four RT teams looking for Anthony from Vang Tau to Khe Sahn. No one had seen him.

  Part of the difficulty was that SOG soldiers fought secret missions with no dog tags, no identification, no bars or stripes, no whistles of any kind, fighting and falling in complete anonymity. But Anthony had not been on a secret mission. He was on official leave. And now he was absent.

  Alexander sat stretched out on the floor of the living room. Janie was
on his lap, Harry was on one side, Pasha on the other. Tatiana was lying on her side on the couch behind them, her hand lightly caressing the back of Alexander’s head and neck as they watched Mission:Impossible. The kids sat raptly until the commercial break, during which Janie stood on her head, Pasha bent one of Alexander’s knees over the other and started hitting it with a metal hammer to see if he could get a knee-jerk response and Harry straddled him, hands on his face, asking if Dad could help him make a timer to a balloon water bomb.

  “Make a timer?” said Alexander. “You mean, rig a timer, Harry?”

  “No, Dad, I want to make a custom timer first, then rig it.”

  “Dad, look, I’m standing on my head. Mommy taught me. How am I doing?”

  “Dad, do you feel that in your knee?”

  “Yes, Pasha, I feel the metal hammering at my knee.”

  Alexander tilted his head up and back. Tatiana was gazing at him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead.

  “What’s with the forehead?” he said to her. “What is this, Deer Isle?” The commercial break was over—and then the phone rang. In two seconds, all the kids off him, Tatiana’s lips off him, Alexander was up and in the gallery by the receiver, talking quietly, talking low, having forgotten about everything.

  “I don’t understand,” Tatiana said to Alexander later that night. “Why are you talking to the Director of Military Intelligence? What would he know about Anthony?”

  “I’m just trying all the options,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can.”

  “That’s good, but why are you calling the commander at Arizona’s military installation? Why would a nice man, who has not left the base in thirty years, know anything about Anthony in Pleiku?”

  “Just trying all the options, Tania.” And Alexander turned his back to her.

  And so Tatiana turned her back to him, turned her back to the fortress they had built around the two of them, the fortress around which the moat was wide, and the gates were shut, and there was no entry for anyone but them. The things that had brought them together, that had kept them together—no one knew those stories, only they knew them— and Anthony, the boy who had lived Deer Isle with them, who had lived through being orphaned for Berlin with them. Their later children, their later friends, none of them knew. The stories fell into the forested chasms of the past.