Sons (40 page)

“Bert,” she whispered, “a person’s not worthy of the honeycomb if he shuns the hive because the bees have stings.”

I nodded in the darkness.

“Don’t you
want
to do it to me?” she asked.

“Yes, sure... what’d you say?”

“I feel like one of those women you told me about a long time ago,” she whispered. “The ones who jazz,” she whispered, and suddenly, surprisingly, began giggling, and threw herself into my arms, and kissed me with her mouth open.

At the end of January, we climbed the steps to Dr. Brunner’s office again, dreading what he might tell us. He shook hands with me, nodded to Nancy, and then led us into his consulting room, where we both took chairs opposite his desk. Dr. Brunner glanced at a sheaf of papers, moved a tongue depressor to the side of the desk where he neatly arranged it parallel to the edge of the blotter, cleared his throat, and told us that there was nothing wrong with either of us, the laboratory tests had shown the number and motility of my sperm to be normal (how casually he discussed
my
sperm in the presence of
my
wife!) and he had been able to determine from the daily record of Nancy’s oral temperature that she was indeed ovulating. In other words, we were both healthy and normal and not what could be even remotely considered an infertile couple. Very often, though, perfectly healthy normal couples like us could go for five years (Nancy winced) or even ten years (she turned to give me a swift hopeless glance) without having a baby, but then suddenly the woman would get pregnant, and would go on to have a dozen children after that, it was all a matter of patience. Nancy cleared her throat and asked the doctor whether the influenza might have had something to do with her not being able to conceive, and he said, “Nothing at all, Mrs. Tyler, I’ve just told you, there’s nothing wrong with either of you.” But she persisted, asking next about the encephalitis, and receiving the same response, and then telling him that she had come out of her illness a bit deaf, wasn’t it possible that something else — finally causing Dr. Brunner to shout (I remember thinking he would not have lost his temper that way if we’d been rich) “My
dear
child, I assure you you’re a healthy young horse, and that you
can
have children and probably
will
have children if only you’ll be patient.” Thank you, Nancy had said politely, and we left his office in silence.

As we walked down the narrow steps to the street outside, I said, “Well, Nance, we’ll just have to keep trying, that’s all. He says there’s nothing wrong with us.”

Nancy only nodded.

I remember thinking that if a woman could get pregnant just by nodding her head in a certain way, Nancy would have conceived right that minute on Twenty-sixth Street.

A paper mill is not an attractive place.

Aesthetically, Ramsey-Warner Papers, Incorporated, was perhaps as beautiful, say, as the prison at Joliet, with stacks puffing great billows of smoke onto the air, giant digesters rising like steel barn silos from the landscape, concrete buildings cramped side by side, each a different height and shape, some as tall and as narrow as machine-gun towers, others squat and lying close to the land, railroad sidings twisting past the mill or curving into it, freight cars clacking and clattering, huge rolls of stacked wrapped paper silently waiting, jackladders lifting logs onto stockpiles, chains clanging, wood looming in tangled pyramids, trucks and men in motion, everything painted a flat institutional gray, as bleak as February itself, as depressing as my own state of mind. I needed something to happen, but nothing ever did. And so I shouted my complaints over the tumbling bellow of the drum barker, and Allen Garrett shouted back, and in that way we made the days pass.

“I’m not siding with the radicals, Allen, but you can’t expect me to side with Palmer, either!”

“He’s a good man!”

“Oh sure! ‘My motto for the Reds is S.O.S. — ship or shoot.’ Is that a way for the Attorney General of the United
States
to be talking, like some ignorant uneducated greenhorn? ‘Ship or shoot,’ what kind of language is that for a man in high office?”

“You always quote only half!” Allen shouted.

“That is not half!”

“He also said, ‘I believe we should place them on a ship of stone, with sails of lead...’”

“All right, all right.”

“ ‘... and that their first stopping place should be Hell.’ That’s good language, Bert. It’s almost poetic.”

“Poetic or not, it’s crazy! Reacting this way to some kind of imaginary takeover of America...”

“It’s
not
imaginary, damn it!”

“... is just plain crazy. And I don’t care if you start calling me a Red or a Communist or...”

“Did I call you anything?”

“... whatever, I just refuse to get as crazy as everybody
else
in this country is getting. Do you know how many Communists there are in America?”

“Yes.”

“Why, if there are fifty thousand...”

“There’re more like five
hundred
thousand!”

“Oh
sure,
there are! Who’s counting them, would you like to tell me? And why aren’t we worrying about the Klan, that’s going around tarring colored people and hanging them, now
that’s
a terrible thing, Allen, that’s worse than what we were told the Germans were doing during the war. But instead — now here’s what I mean, Allen, here’s exactly what I mean...”

“I think you’d
like
some coon to get your job, that’s what I think.”

“No, you just listen to me. There’re two Dixieland bands right here in Chicago who wear the same costumes that the Klan docs, the same white sheets and hoods, you know, with the eye holes in them, and one of the bands calls itself The Phantom Four, and the other one’s The Night Riders. They’re both very good bands, I hear, but what happens to the whole idea of right and wrong, Allen, if you can wear the same costumes as killers and make
music
in them? Where’s the reality, Allen, do you see what I mean? What’s real?”

“These logs are real, the drum barker’s real, the mill is real. America is real,” he said.

I was in Saigon.

The Army had flown me (via a commercial carrier called Saturn Airways) to Cam Ranh Bay three days ago, with orders to report to the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry in Cu Chi, about eighteen miles northwest of Saigon, and not too distant from the Cambodian border. From Cam Ranh, a Chinook had lifted me to the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where I was billeted at a processing center called Camp Alpha, awaiting transportation.

There was a permanent party of about forty-five men on the post, the rest of us being soldiers in transit to base camps all over the country, or headed out on R and R tours. Peter Lundy was a guy from Stamford, against whom I’d played football when I was on the Talmadge team. He was in Army Finance now, and part of the permanent party at Tan Son Nhut. I met him in the mess hall my first night there. We talked a little about the old rah-rah days, and then he filled me in on the chow situation, and the girl situation, and told me how fortunate I was to have run into him because only permanent party were allowed off the post and into Saigon, but he thought he could get me past the security guards at the gate if I wanted to go in with him tomorrow afternoon.

He also told me that I had arrived in Vietnam at a particularly bad time weather-wise, since the country was blessed with a monsoon climate, which meant that there were only two seasons, the wet and the dry. The worst time of the year was between February and April, when the weather was hot and humid, as I may have noticed. He then went on to tell me some other pleasant little tilings about this prize nation we were saving for democracy, like the fact that the rats in Vietnam were as large as alley cats, and that there were twenty known species of poisonous snakes here, including cobras, kraits, and vipers, and that there were sharks in the coastal waters and leeches in the jungle underbrush, and mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue fever, not to mention spiders, bedbugs, scorpions, and cockroaches, an altogether delightful place. Not for nothing had Saigon been named Pearl of the Orient. I thanked Pete for the information, and made a date to meet him at four o’clock the next day. The night air, as he had promised, was oppressively muggy. In the distance over Saigon, I could see flares drifting brightly against the sky, like a summertime fireworks display over Playland. There was not much else to see. I went back to the barracks to write a letter to Dana, expecting to be bitten on the ass by a spider at any moment. I was asleep before lights-out.

The next day, we passed through the guards at the gate without any difficulty. Pete was known to them, and all that was required was a discreet nod from him; it was nice to have important friends in high places, even if the importance was only that of a slick-sleeve sergeant. I was wearing a boat-necked sports shirt and pale blue slacks, loafers and socks. Pete, who had been a pretty flashy dresser even back in the old days, had on a bright purple silk shirt that had been made for him when he was on Rest and Recreation in Hong Kong, together with a pair of beautifully tailored tan slacks and a pair of sandals he had bought for 1200 piasters on Le Loi Street. In the fifteenth century, Le Loi had waged ten years of guerrilla warfare against the occupying Chinese, finally driving them out of the nation and becoming a king, only to die of beri-beri in Hanoi six years later. It was an interesting comment on this new war five centuries later, that the street named after a famous Vietnamese hero was one of the two streets in Saigon notorious for the sale of black market goods.

We had our choice of transportation from Camp Alpha — taxi, minibus, or cyclo. My mother had once shown me pictures of herself and my father on their Atlantic City honeymoon, and they were both being pushed along the boardwalk in a big wheelchair with a canopy over it. A cyclo looked something like that, except that the man pushing it was not on foot. There were, in fact, several varieties of cyclo, and all of them were on display and being hawked by their drivers outside the base. The cheapest cyclo (five to ten pee for the ride into Saigon, depending on how strenuously you felt like arguing) was a wheelchair with a bicycle attached to it; you sat in the chair and the driver pedaled the vehicle from behind. A cyclo with an attached motorbike was twice as expensive to hire, and a Lambretta with a van behind it had a variable fare that depended on how many passengers were being carried, its capacity being eight. Pete and I chose two motorized cyclos at an agreed price of fifteen pee each. The exchange rate in 1966 was a hundred and seventeen piasters to the dollar, so when you considered that the ride into Saigon must have been four or five miles, for a fare of less than fifteen cents, we weren’t doing too badly. My driver, sitting behind me and wearing Army fatigues which he had undoubtedly purchased on either Le Loi or Nguyen Hue Streets spoke English reminiscent of the chop-chop variety invented by Chinese cooks in Gold Rush movies.

“You here long time?” he asked.

“Just got here yesterday,” I said.

“Oh, you like Saigon,” he said. “Much nice thing in Saigon. Number One town. Same like Paris.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Connecticut,” I said.

“You like Saigon,” he said. “Better than Kennycunt.”

As we came into the city, as the city opened before us the way a melody line will open into a wider exploration of theme, implemented by a full orchestration where there had earlier been only a piano statement; as Pete in his bright purple silk shirt purchased in Hong Kong and I in my boat-necked shirt purchased in New Canaan came into this city that was the Paris of the East, I experienced the oddest sensation of believing suddenly and with the sharpest sense of conviction, that the entire war was a put-on, that there really
was
no war in Southeast Asia, that the daily communiques from the battlefield (together with the ghoulishly required body-count of enemy dead) were comparable to the battle-action reports in
1984,
Eastasia is winning, Eurasia is losing, War Is Peace, Saigon Is Schenectady.

There were, of course, clues in these traffic-cluttered streets that this was the capital of a nation at war, the Army jeeps, the two-and-a-half-ton trucks, the Skyraiders streaking contrails over head in a sky as blue as that of Talmadge in the spring. But the Army no longer required its officers or men to wear uniforms except while on active duty, and it was impossible to tell whether the hundreds of Occidentals riding cyclos or taxis or stepping out of buses or standing on street corners or ogling girls or idly looking in shop windows were civilians or servicemen since they were all dressed, like Pete and myself, in clothes that would have been acceptable at any second-rate American resort. The city did not look truly oriental. It had instead the half-assed appearance of a movie shot on the back lot in the thirties or forties, a
Shanghai Gesture
that didn’t quite make it for believability. Even the Vietnamese women, strikingly beautiful in their traditional
ao-dais
with paneled overdresses and satin trousers, seemed to have been supplied by Central Casting to satisfy the American stereotype of what an oriental woman
should
look like, long black hair and slanting brown eyes, narrow-waists, delicate smiles, a France Nuyen or a Nancy Kwan to play the romantic interest in a movie about a white man in love with a Negro girl (carefully disguised as a white man in love with an Oriental) the motion-picture clichés springing to life everywhere around us, these slender inscrutable lovely girls chirping to each other in singsong ululation on every street corner or shouting in pidgin English across the bedlam of tooting horns. Saigon was
Dragon Seed
and
Macao
and maybe even
The General Died at Dawn,
and I was Gary Cooper, grinning somewhat sheepishly when a Vietnamese male approached my cyclo to satisfy yet another stereotype, that of the working pimp in a sinful city. He had undoubtedly learned his trade in the years when the French still controlled this garden spot, there was the promise of Parisian sin in his eyes and on his mouth as we waited for the light to change,
Quelques choses que vous desirez, monsieur?
the master pimp peddling pussy and pornography. But he recited it instead the way they’d written it in the hack script about the Mysterious East, gold tooth flashing in his mouth, lopsided grin (what no pigtail?), “You like Number One fuck, GI, I fix?” I shook my head as the light changed, and he shouted after me, “You lousy Number Ten, GI,” and Pete yelled over from his cyclo, “That’s the gook version of the bestseller list.” To Pete, every Vietnamese in the country was a gook. The Vietcong were gooks, the ARVNs were gooks, the NVA were gooks, the Buddhists were gooks, the cyclo drivers, the bar girls, the policemen, the Prime Minister, each and all were only gooks. We moved slowly through tree-lined streets echoing Aix-en-Provence, designed by the French colonialists for a projected population of half a million people, and now trying hopelessly to cope with more than two million people, 150,000 automobiles and trucks, and another 500,000 bicycles and motorbikes. The sense of unreality persisted, was there truly a war being fought a hundred miles, fifty miles, twenty miles away? The horns honked, the lights changed, the cyclo drivers called to each other in Vietnamese over the roofs of Fords and Volkswagens, Toyotas and Triumphs, Citroëns and Chevrolets. I could not believe I was really here, but more than that I could not believe that here was real.