In Pharaoh's Army (21 page)

Jan had her eyes on me. “Were you a captain?”

I’d told her I’d just come back from Vietnam, but nothing else. I shook my head no.

“But I tell you straight,” Dicky said, “no bullshit. If they’d of had me and my team back in Whirl War One we coulda turned that shit around
real
fast. When Heinrich starts waking up in the morning with Fritzy’s dick in his hand, maybe they decide to do their yodeling and shit at home, leave these other people the fuck alone, you hear what I’m saying?”

Sleepy’s chin was on his chest. He said, “I hear you, man.”

“What were you, then?” Jan said to me.

“First lieutenant.”

“Same thing,” Dicky said. “Lieutenant, cap’n, all the same—hang you out to dry every fuckin one of em.”

“That’s not true.”

“The fuck it isn’t. Fuckin officers, man.”

“I didn’t hang anybody out to dry. Except maybe another officer,” I said. “A captain, as a matter of fact.”

Dicky ran a napkin over his wet face and looked at it, then at me. Jan was also looking at me.

As soon as I started the story I knew I shouldn’t tell it. It was the story about Captain Kale wanting to bring the Chinook into the middle of the hooches, and me letting him do it. I couldn’t find the right tone. My first instinct was to make it somber and regretful, to show how much more compassionate I was than the person who had done this thing, how far I had evolved in wisdom since then, but it came off sounding phony. I shifted to a clinical, deadpan exposition. This proved even less convincing than the first pose, which at least acknowledged that the narrator had a stake in his narrative. The neutral tone was a lie, also a bore.

How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you
were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?

As it happened, Dicky took the last problem out of my hands by laughing darkly when I confessed that I’d omitted to offer Captain Kale my ski goggles. He grinned at me, I grinned at him. Jan looked back and forth between us. We had in that moment become a duet, Dicky and I, and she was in the dark. She had no feel for what was coming, but he did, very acutely, and his way of encouraging me was to show hilarity at every promissory detail of the disaster he saw taking shape. He was with me, even a little ahead of me, and I naturally pitched my tune to his particular receptivities, which were harsh and perverse and altogether familiar, so that even as he anticipated me I anticipated him and kept him laughing and edgy with expectation.

And so I urged the pilot on again, and the Chinook’s vast shadow fell again over the upturned faces of people transformed, by this telling, into comic gibbering stick-men just waiting to be blown away like the toothpick houses they lived in. As I brought the helicopter down on them I looked over at Jan and saw her watching me with an expression so thoroughly disappointed as to be
devoid of reproach. I didn’t like it. I felt the worst kind of anger, the anger that proceeds from shame. So instead of easing up I laid it on even thicker, playing the whole thing for laughs, as cruel as I could make them, because after all Dicky had been there, and what more than that could I ever hope to have in common with her?

When I got to the end Dicky banged his forehead on the table to indicate maximum mirth. Sleepy leaned back with a startled expression and gave me the once-over. “Hey,” he said, “great shirt, I used to have one just like it.”

I
CALLED
Vera the next morning from a pancake house, my pockets sagging with quarters. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in over a year, and the sound of it made everything in between seem vaporous, unreal. We began to talk as if resuming a conversation from the night before, teasing, implying, setting each other off. We talked like lovers. I found myself shaking, I was so maddened not to be able to see her.

When I hung up, the panic of loneliness I’d come awake to that morning was even worse. It made no sense to me that Vera was there and I was here. The others too—my mother, my friends, Geoffrey and Priscilla. They had a baby now, my nephew Nicholas, born while I was in Vietnam. I still hadn’t laid eyes on him.

I made up my mind to fly home the next day.

That last night, the old man and I went out to dinner. For a change of pace we drove down to Redondo
Beach, to a stylish French restaurant where, it turned out, they required a coat and tie. Neither of us had a tie so they supplied us with a pair of identical clip-ons, mile-wide Carnaby Street foulards with gigantic red polka dots. We looked like clowns. My father had never in his life insulted his person with such a costume and it took him a while to submit to it, but he came around. We had a good time, quietly, neither of us drinking much. Over coffee I told him I was leaving.

He rolled with it, said he’d figured it was about time I checked in with my mother. Then he asked when I’d be coming back.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“If you’re thinking of going to school here, you’ll want to give yourself plenty of time to look around, find some digs.”

“Dad, I have to say, I’ve been giving that a lot of thought.”

He waited. Then he said, “So you won’t be going to school here.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

He waved away the apology. “All for the b-best, chum. My view exactly. You should aim higher.” He looked at me in the kindest way. He had beautiful eyes, the old man, and they had remained beautiful while his face had gone to ruin all around them. He reached over and squeezed my arm. “You’ll be back.”

“Definitely. That’s a promise.”

“They all come back for Doctor Wolff’s famous rest cure.”

“I was thinking maybe next summer. As soon as I get myself really going on something.”

“Of course,” he said. “Filial duty. Have to look in on your old pop, make sure he’s keeping his nose clean.” He tried to smile but couldn’t, his very flesh failed him, and that was the closest I came to changing my mind. I meant it when I said I’d be back but it sounded like a bald-faced lie, as if the truth was already known to both of us that I would not be back and that he would live alone and die alone, as he did, two years later, and that this was what was meant by my leaving. Still, after the first doubt I felt no doubt at all. Even that brief hesitation began to seem like mawkish shamming.

He was staring at my wrist. “Let’s have a look at that watch.”

I handed it over, a twenty-dollar Seiko that ran well and looked like it cost every penny. My father took off his Heuer chronograph and pushed it across the table. It was a thing of beauty. I didn’t hold back for a second. I picked it up, hefted it, and strapped it on.

“Made for you,” he said. “Now let’s get these g-goddamned ties off.”

Geoffrey noticed the chronograph a few nights after I got home. We were on his living room floor, drinking and playing cards. He admired the watch and asked how much it set me back. If I’d had my wits about me I would have lied to him, but I didn’t. I said the old man had given it to me. “The old man gave it to you?” His face clouded over and I thought, Ah, nuts. I didn’t know for sure what Geoffrey was thinking, but I was thinking about all those checks he’d sent out to Manhattan Beach. “I doubt if he paid for it,” I said. Geoffrey
didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “Probably not,” and picked up his cards.

V
ERA’S FAMILY OWNED
a big spread in Maryland. After a round of homecoming visits, I left Washington and moved down there with her to help with the haying and see if we couldn’t compose ourselves and find a way to live together. We did not. In the past she’d counted on me to control my moods so that she could give free rein to her own and still have a ticket back. Now I was as touchy and ungoverned as Vera, and often worse. She began to let her bassett hound eat at the table with her, in a chair, at his own place setting, because, she said, she had to have
some
decent company.

We were such bad medicine together that her mother, the most forbearing of souls, went back to Washington to get away from us. That left us alone in the house, an old plantation manor. Vera’s family didn’t have the money to keep it up, and the air of the place was moldy and regretful, redolent of better days. Portraits of Vera’s planter ancestors hung from every wall. I had the feeling they were watching me with detestation and scorn, as if I were a usurping cad, a dancing master with oily hair and scented fingers.

While the sun was high we worked outside. In the afternoons I went upstairs to the servants’ wing, now empty, where I’d set up an office. I had begun another novel. I knew it wasn’t very good, but I also knew that it was the best I could do just then and that I had to keep doing it if I ever wanted to get any better. These words would never be read by anyone, I understood, but
even in sinking out of sight they made the ground more solid under my hope to write well.

Not that I didn’t like what I was writing as I filled up the pages. Only at the end of the day, reading over what I’d done, working through it with a green pencil, did I see how far I was from where I wanted to be. In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.

In the servants’ quarters I was a man of reason. In the rest of the house, something else. For two months Vera and I tied knots in each other’s nerves, trying to make love happen again, knowing it wouldn’t. The sadness of what we were doing finally became intolerable, and I left for Washington. When I called to say my last good-bye she asked me to wait, then picked up the phone again and told me she had a pistol in her hand and would shoot herself if I didn’t promise to come back that same night.

“Vera, really, you already pulled this.”

“When?”

“Before we got engaged.”

“That was you? I thought it was Leland.” She started to laugh. Then she stopped. “That doesn’t mean I won’t do it. Toby? I’m serious.”

“Bang,” I said, and hung up.

A
WEEK LATER
I traveled to England with friends. When they returned home I stayed on, first in London, then in Oxford, reading, hitting the pubs, walking the countryside. It was restful: the greenness, the fetishized civility, the quaint, exquisite class consciousness I could observe without despair because as a Yank I had no place in it. My money stretched double and nobody talked about Vietnam. Every afternoon I went back to my room and wrote. I saw little to complain of in this life except that it couldn’t go on. I knew I had to make a move, somehow buy into the world outside my window.

Some people I’d met encouraged me to take the Oxford entrance exams in early December. That left four and a half months to prepare myself in Latin, French, English history and literature. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, so I hired university tutors in each of the test areas. After they’d made it clear how irregular this project was, how unlikely, they warmed to it. They took it on in the spirit of a great game, strategizing like underdog coaches, devising shortcuts, second-guessing the examiners, working me into the ground. After the first few weeks my Latin tutor, Miss Knight, demanded that I take a room in her house so she could crack the whip even harder. Miss Knight wore men’s clothing and ran an animal hospital out of her kitchen. When she worked in the garden birds flew
down and perched on her shoulder. She very much preferred Greek to English, and Latin to Greek, and said things like, “I can’t
wait
to set you loose on Virgil!” She cooked my meals so I wouldn’t lose time and drilled me on vocabulary and grammar as I ate. She kept in touch with my other tutors and proofread my essays for them, scratching furiously at the pompous locutions with which I tried to conceal my ignorance and uncertainty. All those months she fed her life straight into mine, and because of her I passed the examination and was matriculated into the university to read for an honors degree in English Language and Literature.

Oxford: for four years it was my school and my home. I made lifelong friends there, traveled, fell in love, did well in my studies. Yet I seldom speak of it, because to say “When I was at Oxford …” sounds suspect even to me, like the opening of one of my father’s bullshit stories. Even at the time I was never quite convinced of the reality of my presence there. Day after day, walking those narrow lanes and lush courtyards, looking up to see a slip of cloud drifting behind a spire, I had to stop in disbelief. I couldn’t get used to it, but that was all right. After every catch of irreality I felt an acute consciousness of good luck; it forced me to recognize where I was, and give thanks. This practice had a calming effect that served me well. I’d carried a little bit of Vietnam home with me in the form of something like malaria that wasn’t malaria, ulcers, colitis, insomnia, and persistent terrors when I did sleep. Coming up shaky after a bad night, I could do wonders for myself simply by looking out the window.

It was the best the world had to give, and yet the very richness of the offering made me restless in the end. Comfort turned against itself. More and more I had the sense of avoiding some necessary difficulty, of growing in cleverness and facility without growing otherwise. Of being once again adrift.