Saigon (32 page)

In the chauffeur-driven limousine that took them to Union Station, Joseph sat apart from his wife in one corner of the back seat, staring out at the grandiose buildings of official Washington without really seeing them. Even after they were settled in their seats on the Richmond train he remained silent, and Tempe, sensing that he wished to be left alone with his thoughts, didn’t venture to question him; instead she got on quietly with the woolen shawl she was crocheting for their baby son. Sometimes she caught him watching the little ivory crochet hook abstractedly as she worked the wool, and whenever their eyes met she smiled quietly at him. But these gestures of sympathy did nothing to soften his mood, and the train was approaching Richmond through the gathering darkness of the wintry afternoon before he finally spoke. 

“I’m sorry, Tempe,” he said, reaching out to take her hand in a conciliatory gesture, “I just couldn’t stay in that gallery a moment longer.” 

“I know.” She smiled fondly and put down her work. “You’ve never liked the museum, have you? It brings back too many unhappy memories, doesn’t it?” 

He stared at her, surprised by her intuitive understanding of his feelings. “How did you know that? We’ve never talked about it.” 

“We’ve only been there once before together. I made you take me soon after we met the moment I discovered you were one of those famous museum Shermans, don’t you remember? You explained everything very politely, but even then you looked uneasy —just as you did this afternoon when we went in.” 

“1 suppose it brings back the memory of Chuck’s death too vividly — but I didn’t know I was that transparent.” 

“You’re not transparent — you just underestimate the power of female in tuition.” She covered his hands with both her own. “I have a feeling it wasn’t just the war and your father’s insensitivity that made it worse today She hesitated and dropped her eyes. “I think perhaps, Joseph, those animals help to remind you of something else too, don’t they?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“When I first met: you, you’d just come back from Indochina. You were tense and fretful for a long time — even for a while after we were married.” 

“The Frenchman who took us hunting on our first trip was killed while I was there,” replied Joseph hastily. “I think it upset me more than I knew at the time. It probably helped open the old wound of Chuck’s accident — that’s all it was.” 

Tempe let go of his hand and took up her crochet-work once more. “I sometimes wondered, Joseph, if you’d had an unhappy love affair.” 

For a second or two he gazed at her in astonishment. “How did you guess?” 

She frowned and bent her head suddenly to unravel a snag in one of the loops of the shawl. “There’s only one thing that makes a man behave the way you did, Joseph. I didn’t ask you about it then because it wasn’t any business of mine what had happened before we met. But I often used to feel your thoughts were far away. And since we left the museum this afternoon, it’s been like that again — as if I’d lost you somehow.” 

Joseph stared at her, perplexed, aware that she had put her finger on a truth he’d previously refused to admit, even to himself. 

“Do you mind talking about her?” 

Joseph turned away quickly to look out of the window. “It was all such a long time ago.” 

“Who was she?” 

“An Annamese girl — a mandarin’s daughter in Saigon.” 

“Was she in love with you?” 

Joseph shook his head uncertainly, still gazing blankly at his own reflection in the darkened window. “No, I don’t think she was.” 

“But you loved her?” 

“Perhaps 1 did — I don’t really know anymore.” He shook his head again and sighed loudly. “But I guess you’re right, I did let her get under my skin for a while.” 

Tempe succeeded in righting the faulty stitch, and Joseph watched her hands resume their rhythmic movements in her lap. 

“Did you make love with her?” 

She half whispered the question, and for a moment he continued staring at her moving hands as though hypnotized. “No, I didn’t,” he said slowly. “Annamese mandarin families are very strict about those sort of things.” 

Tempe didn’t look up, and Joseph felt the rocking motion of the train begin to change as they slowed on the approach to Richmond. “Let’s just forget all about it, shall we?” he said, standing to put on his coat. “It’s all in the past. We’ve got enough to worry about now with Pearl Harbor.” 

As they drove down the mile-long drive flanked by tall poplars, the lights of the tall Queen Anne plantation house were visible through the misty darkness. Inside the front hail the smiling black nursemaid for the children who greeted them assured them that their sons were peacefully asleep, but Tempe nevertheless ran up the great curved walnut staircase to look into the nursery. When she came down again to join him in the paneled dining room her eyes were brimming with tears. 

“The sweetest sound in the world, Joseph, is the whisper of a sleeping child’s breath,” she said softly. “I can’t bear to think our happiness might be spoiled by the war.” 

He switched on the radio in his study while she was upstairs and he nodded absently in reply as he listened to the voice of a newscaster reporting details of the new Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and Malaya. In Europe the Russians were claiming to have repulsed Hitler’s forces around Rostock, but fifty German divisions were still reported to be pressing around Moscow. Not until her shoulders began to shake did he notice she was crying, and then he put a comforting arm around her. They stood listening to the news together for several minutes before he signaled for supper to be served, but when the food came neither of them was able to eat much. 

“I shall have to go, of course,” he said in a flat voice when the servants had removed the last of the dishes. 

She nodded numbly from the other end of the table, realizing there was no choice. “What will you do?” 

“The air corps, I think — if they’ll have me.” 

Later, as he sat at the leather-topped desk in his study writing a letter applying to enlist in the air corps and undergo flight training, she came up behind his chair and put her arms around him. “Mark told me he would like to give you this to keep you safe wherever you go,” she whispered, pressing something soft into the palm of his right hand. 

Joseph smiled as he looked down at the lucky rabbit’s foot mounted on a little gold chain that Tempe’s father had given them as a christening gift for their second son; since the baptism six weeks before, the talisman had hung on the baby’s cot. 

“Is Mark sure he can spare it?” asked Joseph, smiling. 

“He absolutely insists.” Tempe blinked back her tears. “He says he feels lucky enough already having such a fine Daddy—and you might need it more than him.” 

Joseph slipped the rabbit’s foot into his pocket. “All right — I know better than to argue with a two-month-old Sherman male who’ll surely scream the house down if I make him sore.” 

After she’d left the room Joseph sat down beside the log fire that crackled in the hearth and looked over the letter he’d written. As he finished reading it he felt again a faint tremor of exhilaration pass through him; whatever the war held in store, it would take him away from the soporific daily round of Charles County, and for that he was at least grateful to the Japanese militarists. He folded the letter and was sealing it in its envelope when a sudden rushing noise in the chimney startled him, and the next moment a shower of soot cascaded into the grate, extinguishing the fire and filling the room with smoke. A series of muffled shrieks echoed from inside the old flue, and Joseph dashed outside to peer up at the roof. 

Against the faint light of the night sky a dark wedge of shadow was visible on the rim of the chimney, and as he watched, it seemed to grow larger. Another series of shrieks echoed across the silent Virginian countryside, and Joseph’s heart beat faster suddenly as he realized that one of the garden peacocks had flown onto the roof and was spreading its tail above the chimney stack. Frantically, he scooped up several handfuls of gravel arid flung them at the tiles until the frightened bird flapped away screeching into the darkness. 

After he had damped down his study fire he went upstairs and found Tempe seated in a nursing chair in the children’s bedroom. Their baby son was drawing contently at one of her exposed breasts, but her own face was pale with anxiety. “I can smell burning, Joseph — and what was that terrible noise?” 

“One of the peacocks got up onto the chimney,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual. “It knocked some soot down into my study — that’s all.” 

“But didn’t you once tell me that’s always been a bad omen in your family — when a peacock flies to the roof?” She started up in the chair, her eyes widening with alarm, and her movement plucked the nipple from the baby’s mouth. Immediately the child began to scream, and Joseph dropped to his knees beside them. 

“Relax, both of you,” he whispered and stroked Tempe’s hair as she settled the baby at her breast again. “I did mention it, I guess — but its just a crazy old wives’ tale. Don’t worry.” 

Within a few minutes the baby fell asleep, and Joseph took him from her and lowered him gently into his cot. When he joined her in the canopied Robert E. Lee four-poster which she had renovated for their own use, she was still tearful and she clung to him fiercely in the darkness, Inside his head he could hear still the eerie wail of the peacock on the roof, but the heavy maternal ripeness of her body pressed against him gradually aroused him, and before they slept he made love to her, whispering all the time tender protestations of affection and devotion which he knew in his heart he didn’t really feel. 

The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter-bomber of the Fourteenth United States Army Air Force bucked and bounced in the strong December winds driving down out of China as it climbed and banked above the convoy of Japanese supply freighters plowing doggedly across the Gulf of Tongking into Haiphong. Two of the ships had already been hit and were burning, and other planes of the Fourteenth’s 308th Squadron were plunging through the smoke to bomb and strafe the remainder. As Captain Joseph Sherman leveled out at the top of his climb and brought the nose of his P-40 around to dive for a second time, a third ship, obviously carrying munitions, exploded, shooting a tumbling fountain of orange fire high into the air. Flying level above the coast, Joseph watched the flames consume the ship and saw clearly the antlike figures of the Japanese seamen flinging themselves into the sea; for an instant their tiny, helpless bodies were silhouetted against the glare, then they were gone. 

Without any feeling of compassion Joseph eased his stick forward to drop the nose of the P-40 once again into an attitude of attack and held his hands steady as the aircraft rushed down towards the vessels leading the frantic dash for the safety of the harbor. Liquid tongues of flak from the Japanese shore batteries were already licking up towards other Warhawks of the squadron as they wheeled above the fleeing ships, but the closeness of anti-aircraft fire had long since ceased to unnerve him. He watched carefully for a second or two, then adjusted his controls fractionally to steepen his dive, confident that he would be able to unload his two remaining hundred-pound wing bombs and climb away to the east before the harbor guns could pick him up. 

As the P-40 gathered speed, a stray shell exploded close in front of its nose, rocking the whole aircraft, but it failed to deflect its dive, and Joseph released his hundred-pounders onto a limping freighter and pulled out in time to rake the bridge of the ship ahead of it with six 12.7-millimeter Browning machine guns mounted in the plane’s wings. A new blaze of light lit his cockpit from behind as he flew on, indicating that his bombs had found their mark, and when he had put himself beyond the range of the harbor guns, he turned and saw that the freighter was burning furiously. 

As usual he watched the flames with a detached feeling of satisfaction; the burning vessel looked like so many others that he had seen during nearly three years of combat flying. Now it was just like watching magic lantern slides appear on the glass of his windshield; bullets and bombs exploded, ships, tanks, trucks caught ,fire, oily smoke and flame billowed ferociously for a moment or two, then as quickly as they had come they were gone, and the windshield of the swooping Warhawk was immediately redecorated with a fresh sheet of pale blue sky, darker blue sea, or perhaps the black cloak of the night blocked out all sight of the earth below. 

Because of this feeling of detachment, it often seemed to Joseph that he had been fighting the war for much longer than three years. It was difficult to remember sometimes that he’d ever done anything else. He had been assigned to Midway Island to fly P-40s of 495th Squadron in late May 1942 on finishing his Right training; because of the emergency, the primary, basic and advanced stages of his training had been shortened from the normal seven months to less than six and he had difficulty identifying now with that dry-mouthed second lieutenant who had claimed his first “kill” in the famous rout of the Japanese fighter escort that came with their massive fleet to pound Midway in early June. He had surprised himself in the first place by volunteering for combat flying, and in the early days whenever he reached for the trigger of his wing cannon or the bomb release control, he had experienced the same deep repugnance of killing that he had felt when he held a hunting rifle in his hands earlier in his life. But in the end the fierce determination to overcome these instincts, born in him after Chuck’s death, had helped make him one of the most successful combat pilots in the Pacific. The aerial mauling at Midway, which destroyed the myth of Japan’s naval invincibility and turned the tide of the Pacific War in America’s favor for the first time, had been a baptism of fire for Joseph, and when American Marines finally drove the enemy’s land forces out of Guadalcanal early in 1943, his squadron had been moved there to help force the Japanese onto the defensive. It was the constant sorties flown from the Solomons that had inured him to the devastation he and his fellow pilots inflicted almost daily on ground and sea targets, and because of his growing reputation, when Japan launched its massive offensive in China in the summer of 1944, he had been promoted to captain and reassigned to the 308th Squadron of the Fourteenth, the force based in southern China that had been built around the nucleus of Major General Claire Lee Chennault’s widely famed prewar group of volunteer aviators, “The Flying Tigers.” 

Japan had thrown two million men into her China offensive, and the pilots of the “Flying Tiger” squadrons had for many months been operating around the clock countering land and air attacks and striking at vital Japanese supply routes into China and Indochina. Joseph had already flown several sorties over Tong- king and Annam to attack bridges, railroads and supply depots being used by the Imperial Army, and the jungle-covered limestone crags of Tongking had become a familiar sight as he beat back and forth to his base at Kunming. But as he turned the nose of the P-40 northwest towards the Chinese border on that night in mid-December I9, there was no moon, and darkness was descending swiftly over the two-hundred-mile stretch of mountainous jungle that separated the pilots of 308th Squadron from their home landing strip. The early winter monsoon was strengthening too, and because of the blustery wind the squadron reformed itself more slowly than usual as the glow of the burning ships outside Haiphong fell away behind them. 

Joseph listened carefully as each pilot reported his presence to the squadron commander and when it became clear there had been no losses, little bursts of relieved banter began to crackle back and forth between the pilots. After a few minutes the engine-note of Joseph’s Warhawk began to fluctuate, rising higher than normal then falling again, but at first he didn’t worry unduly; several times in the past he had limped back to base with his engine misfiring, and he’d got used to finding, his wings and fuselage riddled with holes on landing. But when the engine faltered and coughed suddenly, he felt instinctively for the furry rabbit’s foot that he wore on a chain around his neck along with his dog tag; he had never once taken off without the good-luck charm, and over the three years had developed a deep superstitious attachment to it. 

Touching it now made his thoughts turn for the first time in a long while to Tempe and his sons. He hadn’t seen them for more than a year, and Gary and Mark, now seven and three years old respectively, knew little of their father. The long periods of separation and the exhaustion brought on by constant combat had seemed to dull his sensibilities, and there were times when he wondered whether he cared deeply for anybody, even himself. At thirty-four he was older than most of the other pilots in the squadron, but off-duty .he drank as much as the younger ones, although without getting drunk in their presence. He had always made a point of avoiding their wild squadron sorties in search of sexual novelty, hut the tensions of facing death and physical danger daily had sometimes led him to indulge in discreet bouts of sexual gratification from which he invariably emerged filled with self-disgust on account of his seeming lack of feeling and respect for his wife. During his rarer spells of home leave, his lovemaking with Tempe had become forced, without spontaneity, and although neither had left the marital bed, each of them had begun to retreat from the other. For that reason he hadn’t returned home for his last leave but had spent ten anonymous days in Hawaii, drinking too much and waking to a succession of blurred, impersonal faces on the pillow beside him. 

A moment or two after he pressed his fingers against the rabbit’s foot, the Warhawk’s engine settled to its normal steady drone again, and he smiled wryly in the darkness of the cockpit; at least that still retained its magic powers. Then almost immediately a little red light began to glow intermittently among the luminous green dials in front of him to indicate that the engine was overheating, and for the first time a cold shiver of fear crawled up his spine. He remembered then the stray shell that had burst ahead of him as he began his second dive and guessed that shrapnel fragments may have penetrated the cowling and possibly damaged the propeller blades. Over the next fifteen minutes the P-40’s speed quickly fell to less than one hundred and fifty miles an hour and gradually the rest of the squadron drifted ahead of him, disappearing one by one into the black, wind-filled night. 

He flicked the “transmit” switch of his radio and told the squadron commander tersely what was happening to him, then turned his full attention to trying to nurse the damaged plane home. Soon he was sweating profusely inside his flying suit from the effort of trying to hold the controls steady in the face of the rising wind. The red light that had been winking on and off became a bright, continuous glow only a second or two before he noticed the tiny tongues of flame licking around the engine’s cowling. He considered feathering the propeller briefly in the hope that the fire might blow out and be could then restart the engine — but a renewed fit of mechanical coughing confirmed beyond any doubt that the P-40 had been fatally damaged by the close shellburst. He knew that if he lost power completely in the high winds he would plunge immediately into a downward spiral, and the plane would become a fiery coffin from which he would be unable to escape. In the few remaining moments that the afflicted engine would hold the plane in a level, head-up attitude, he knew if he was going to survive, he had to haul open the canopy and go over the side into the roaring, black void. 

At the bottom of that void, his maps told him, lay only jagged, jungle-covered mountains slashed through with steep-sided tributary streams of the Li Chiang River. He calculated he was around twenty miles from the Chinese border, perhaps a hundred miles north of Hanoi where a million years before, it seemed, he had spent two weeks poring over ancient documents detailing the tribute paid by the ancient Annamese emperors to Peking. The prospect of pulling back the canopy that protected him from the hostile night outside filled him with dread, but the flames were spreading quickly, and the plane’s progress had already slowed close to stalling speed. Feeling its nose begin to drop, Joseph grasped the canopy handle above his head and pulled sharply. When the release mechanism failed to operate, he sat staring at the white knuckles of his clenched fist in disbelief. He tried again with two hands, using all his strength, but it remained jammed, and in the next instant the P-4o rolled lazily onto its back. 

It sank spinning slowly through the inky waters of the night like a dying fish, and the whirling of the aircraft whisked Joseph’s senses into a froth of agonized perceptions. A cruel fate had obviously torn his P-40 from the sky over the Annamese lands with great deliberation! There his mother’s betrayal had overnight changed the first elation of manhood to despair, and years later when he had at last surrendered himself to the joy of an overwhelming love, Lan too had in her turn betrayed him. With a blinding clarity he saw that the sense of emptiness and desolation that had always dogged him had sprung from the jungles and mountains below, and suddenly it seemed right and fitting that his life should end with those same jungles swallowing up him and his Warhawk, Sure that he was going to die, he was seized by a furious sense of regret that he would never see Lan again, and as the Plane spiraled downward trailing flames from one wing, this feeling expanded until it seemed to fill his whole body. 

But even though these thoughts dominated his conscious mind, his hands and feet still struggled instinctively with the controls, trying to correct the Warhawk’s spin. He had automatically hauled the stick back as far as it would go and because the plane was spinning to the right, he kicked the right rudder all the way forward. He knew that he ought to hold the P-40 through at least four turns like this, but because he had no idea in the inky blackness how near the ground was, after only three, he snapped the stick away from him again and hit the opposite rudder as hard as he could with his left foot. As a result, the fighter-bomber righted itself as it plunged towards one of the highest mountains in the region and went into a glide for a few seconds before scything into the treetops at a shallow angle. One blazing wing was torn off immediately, and burning gasoline from the ruptured fuel tanks showered in all directions, setting a broad swathe of jungle alight. A hundred yards farther down the mountain the second wing broke away, and the bole of a tall tree shattered the jammed cockpit canopy. In that instant Joseph’s conscious life exploded in a ringing burst of white light, and a few seconds later the remains of the P-40’s fuselage came to rest on the lower slopes, with its nose buried in the moist earth and its tail snagged high in the branches of a creeper-choked tree.