Democracy (7 page)
Of my three-score years and ten
These twenty would not come again.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over
Twenty years and the spring is over.
This was the school in which we learned
That time was the fire in which we burned.
Sentimental sojourn.
Less time left for those visions and revisions.
In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.” Many of the students to whom I spoke said “being liberated.” “The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news,” one said, and when next we spoke I modified “falling” to “closing down.”
Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco
Chronicle
, the Los Angeles
Times
, and the New York
Times
. Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco
Examiner
, the Oakland
Tribune
, and the Berkeley
Gazette
. Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.
I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were
EAGLE PULL
and
FREQUENT WIND
. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was
MONEY BURN
. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.
I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repetitions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined
CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN
HONOLULU
, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the
Chronicle
and a separate sidebar in the New York
Times
,
VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY
, were Inez and Harry Victor.
That was March 26, 1975.
A Wednesday morning.
I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.
12
S
EE
it this way.
See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.
From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.
The warm rain down on the runways.
The smell of jet fuel.
The military charters, Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, clustered around the service hangars.
The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land masses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.
The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.
Five-thirty-seven A.M.
The ground crew in thin yellow slickers.
The steps wheeled into place.
The passenger service representative waiting at the bottom of the steps, carrying an umbrella, a passenger manifest in a protective vinyl envelope and, over his left arm, one plumeria lei.
The woman for whom both the passenger service representative and Jack Lovett are watching (Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport is not the same as Jack Lovett’s reason for being in the operations room at the airport) will be the next-to-last passenger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another glass of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and lustreless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark glasses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the passenger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.
The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as
DILLON, R.W
., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.
She looks up, smiles at the passenger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.
Aloha, he would be saying.
So kind.
Tragic circumstances.
Anything we as a company or I personally can do.
Facilitate arrangements.
When the senator arrives.
So kind.
As the passenger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as
DILLON, R.W
., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a glass window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.
This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.
Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.
Jack Lovett watching her.
“Get her in out of the goddamn rain,” Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.
Two
1
O
N
the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. “No trick to heat a pool,” Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. “Trick is to cool one down.”
It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.
“Haven’t spent time in the Gulf, I see.” Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. “In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco. Cost-efficient. Used it there and in Dubai. Had to. Otherwise we’d have sizzled our personnel.”
A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.
That was Dwight Christian.
“Visited
DWIGHT
and Ruthie (Mills College ’33)
CHRISTIAN
at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our classmates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front,” as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.
On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. “Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists,” he said, over
rijstaffel
on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as “a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States.” The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent echo of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.
“What they want, in other words,” Frances Landau said. “From the United States.”
“Which is usually nuclear fuel,” Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau’s rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. “I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean,” he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.
“Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders,” he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: “ ‘I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”
That was Harry Victor.
My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.
They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes.
Kona
means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the edge of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence, water as the end to which even the island will eventually come, and a certain restlessness prevails. Men like Dwight Christian watch the steam rise off their swimming pools and place more frequent calls to project sites in Taipei, Penang, Jedda. Women like Ruthie Christian take their furs out of storage, furs handed down from mother to daughter virtually unworn, the guard hairs still intact, and imagine trips to the mainland. It is during these days and nights when sheets of rain obscure the horizon and the surf rises on the north shore that the utter isolation of the place seems most profound, and it was on such a night, in 1952, that Jack Lovett first saw Inez Christian, and discerned in the grain of her predictable longings and adolescent vanities an eccentricity, a secretiveness, an emotional solitude to match his own. I see now.
I learned some of this from him.
January 1, 1952.
Intermission at the ballet, one of those third-string touring companies that afford the women and children and dutiful providers of small cities an annual look at “Afternoon of a Faun” and the Grand Pas de Deux from the “Nutcracker”; an occasion, a benefit, a reason to dress up after the general fretfulness of the season and the specific lassitude of the holiday and stand outside beneath an improvised canopy drinking champagne from paper cups. Subdued greetings. Attenuated attention. Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark glasses (wearing dark glasses because, after four hours of sleep, a fight with Janet, and telephone calls from Carol Christian in San Francisco and Paul Christian in Suva, she had spent most of the day crying in her room: one last throe of her adolescence), pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One glass won’t hurt you, Inez, it’s your birthday. Inez’s birthday. Inez is seventeen. Inez’s evening, really. Inez is our balletomane.
