Strangers at the Feast (11 page)

“Do I need to serve Ritalin on the rocks to you people?”

The twins nodded with devilish grins, and Ginny sighed.

“Come on, kids,” Douglas said. “We’re playing a word game! This will be good for us! We’re all going to finally learn to
speaka da inglish
!”

Ginny shot him what he had long ago coined her John Rambo,
First Blood
stare. It was a look that said, I am now your enemy.

“Now, Priya and I need to go back into the kitchen and check on some things, so why don’t you all go ahead and enjoy the game.”

“Okay,” said Douglas. When Ginny was out of earshot, “I propose we do away with the little strips of paper. Just go up there and pluck one from your head.”

“I have one!” his mother cried, shuffling in front of the couch and standing perfectly still.

“Mom? We’re ready.”

She remained still and tightened her lips, but Douglas saw her eyes dart wildly toward the wall, toward a large maroon poster that said
LUCINDA WILLIAMS, LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN.

“Mom, it’s not Lucinda Williams…”

She clapped. “Yes!”

“We don’t know who Lucinda Williams is,” Brian huffed.

“Well, in that case, it wouldn’t have mattered. Just follow Grandma’s eyes.”

The twins moved to Ginny’s laptop, their fingers attacking the keyboard to see if they could download World of Warcraft.

“Boys, come on, we’re all playing together.”

“But this is stupid,” Brian whined.

“That may very well be, but we’re still all playing.”

“I’ve got one,” said Brandon, climbing up onto the sofa. He narrowed his eyes. “I am going to kill you.”

Everyone was silent.

“Champ,” said Douglas, “this might be a little morbid.”

“I am going to kill you in your
sleep
,” he continued.

“Stroke!” Eleanor shouted. “Oh, wait. No. Heart attack?”

Brandon twisted his face ghoulishly, wagging his tongue. “I am going to kill
all
of you!”

“Al-Qaeda,” said Denise.

“Anthrax!” yelped Eleanor, sliding so far to the edge of her chair, it nearly toppled over.

“I’m going to kill you in your dreams.”

“Sleeping-pill overdose.”

Brandon shook his head with exasperation. “In your school, down by the pipes…”

“Asbestos!” Eleanor yelped.

Douglas could see that Laura was chewing on her tablecloth. “Let’s take a time-out, champ.”

“Trench-coat mafia,” declared Denise.

“Lead-paint poisoning?” his mother asked.

Brandon rumbled out a long, annoyed breath. He pulled one sleeve over his hand and sliced at the air. “I’m your nightmare, on Elm Street,” he said, at which point Brian leaped up from the floor.

“Freddy Krueger! Why didn’t you say
Nightmare on Elm Street
to begin with?”

“I’m confused,” said Eleanor.

“It’s a movie,” Douglas explained.

“Well, what is that rated?” his mother demanded. “Is that a
horror
movie? Why are the children watching horror movies?”

Laura’s eyes were wide. “Daddy, what’s anthrax?” Douglas looked at his wife, stumped.

“A city in Nova Scotia,” said Gavin.

GAVIN

Gavin’s father, Alrek Olson, came to the United States at seventeen and worked as a fishmonger. From a cart along Boston Harbor he sold shellfish, cod, flounder, and striped porgy. His palms were like leather from handling the cracked shells of clams and scallops, his fingers blistered from packing the fish in ice. Decades after he stopped working the port, his wife claimed his hands still smelled of fish oil.

He vowed he would never leave the sea, until he took to the air.

During World War II, for three years he flew P-47 Thunderbolts over France and Germany. Alrek received a Medal of Honor and had his photo taken with Dwight D. Eisenhower. For the rest of his life, the photo hung framed on the wall of his office.

During the war, he met Christina Davenport, who, against the wishes of her well-to-do Boston family, served as a nurse in the Italian rear hospital where Alrek had been laid up with a neck injury. When the war ended, they married and returned to the town of Winthrop. With the GI Bill, Alrek attended the University of Massachusetts, finally giving up fishmongering to become an accountant.

Gavin was their only child. “We got everything in our first try!” his mother said, though he later suspected she had wanted more but had been unable to conceive again.

Things came easily to him: blue ribbons in science fairs, first chair in violin. By sophomore year of high school, he was captain of the track team and class president. He graduated Winthrop High as valedictorian and won a full scholarship to Yale. Most important,
Winthrop was a small town, and he was Alrek Olson’s only son, which meant he was beloved. The town had lost 111 sons and brothers in the war, and Alrek had not only survived but returned with a medal.

People sought Alrek’s advice on investments and wills, on building additions to their homes, on whether to vote for Kennedy or Nixon. He had even saved the marriage of the town tax collector, after talking with the couple for sixteen straight hours in their kitchen. He accompanied Marjorie Plymouth, the town librarian, to visit her estranged father in prison, where he was serving ten years for grand larceny. In 1954, when Hurricane Carol came north, Alrek went house to house helping people board up their windows. That same year, he was elected mayor.

Gavin’s father was also a licensed justice of the peace and officiated at thirty-seven marriages. He was godfather to six children, one named Alrek, another Oslo. He taught Gavin to fell a tree, to make snowshoes from twigs and bark, to catch and debone a fish, to skin a deer, to clean a gun. He was a volunteer firefighter, and in 1969, while Gavin was thousands of miles away filling out supply forms on a Smith Corona in a stuffy Saigon office, his father, at age fifty, died pulling Abigail Kentworth, Gavin’s eighth-grade teacher, from the second floor of her burning house.

It was Alrek who had first wanted Gavin to fight in the war. Before the political problems were clear, when Gavin was home from college they would watch the news on their small television. “First the Nazis, now the communists,” his father said in his thick Norwegian accent. “Good men have to clean up these messes.”

So after graduation, while his classmates were driving overpacked station wagons to Canada, or posting applications to medical and law schools, veterinary college, any institution that would keep the draft board at bay, Gavin walked into the naval air program recruiter’s office and asked to be a fighter pilot. But because of his vision, they wouldn’t take him. The army, however, had different standards.

Eleanor, whom he’d been dating for six months, was crestfallen.

“What if something happens to you? Why do
you
have to go?”

This was 1968. As Gavin later told himself many times, the draft board would have gotten its hands on him soon enough.

Eleanor Haggarty was the daughter of a French Protestant mother and a lapsed Catholic, Irish-American father. She wore short skirts and had a waist Gavin could practically put his hand around. He called her his Little Huguenot.

He met her the summer before her junior year at Wellesley. He had just graduated from Yale, and for one long June weekend, they were both on Cape Cod.

He had noticed her sunning herself on a small raft, dipping her hand in the water every so often to moisten her slender arms. She seemed at first to be with a group of friends, but had floated off on her own, and when she realized how far out she was, slipped off her raft and began swimming somewhat urgently toward the shore. Finally wrestling her raft to the sand, she stood dripping before him, shaking water from her ears. She had a swanlike neck, a delicate and pointed chin, flirtatious lips.

“That was some situation out there,” Gavin said.

She thumbed her red gingham swimsuit off her thigh and something plopped onto the sand. “Ick, jellyfish.”

“Can’t blame them for wanting to get close to you,” he said.

“Well, look at you, standing there all amused. What would you have done if I were drowning?”

“Give you the kiss of life.”

“Don’t you wish, Mr. Shy.”

She was a girl who turned heads, and knew it. Her mother, Yvette, kept her on a tight leash. Gavin couldn’t take Eleanor out for dinner without first having a glass of apple juice in Yvette’s living room and discussing the works of Tolstoy, or Sigmund Freud. Yvette hadn’t gone to college, but she loved “talking to big men about big ideas.” “And you, mister,” she always said to Gavin, “are going places.” Yvette had met Eleanor’s
father at age sixteen when he helped liberate her small village of Gravelotte. She’d been in the United States long enough to shed her accent and all evidence of her Frenchness. Yvette—which she pronounced
I-vet
—was more American than Betsy Ross. On the Fourth of July, Yvette cooked them a five-course meal, pinned small flags on their lapels, and set off her own backyard fireworks.

The Irish-American father was long dead by then, and not much spoken of. When Gavin asked what he died of, Eleanor looked off and said, “Liver trouble.”

There had been a sister, too. Simone. A year younger than Eleanor. She had died of polio. Yvette and Eleanor never spoke of her, except once a year on August fifth when they quietly celebrated her birthday. As an adult, long after her mother had died, on that date Eleanor would sit alone in the kitchen at night and blow out three candles on a cupcake.

Yvette was an anxious mother. She wanted to know exactly where Gavin and Eleanor were going, when they’d be back, that they would wear seat belts and stay below the speed limit, that they’d avoid Boston’s bad neighborhoods, that they wouldn’t fool around with marijuana. Gavin thought it stemmed from the pain of losing her other daughter. Or her childhood under Nazi occupation. Eleanor shrugged off her mother’s worries, inventing elaborate stories about puppet shows and choral groups they had seen to cover for the hours they spent making out in Gavin’s red Chevrolet.

A month before Gavin shipped off, Eleanor took the bus to Fort Benning to see him. Yvette came as well, nervous about Eleanor traveling, but kept herself tucked away in the Farewell Motel. Eleanor wore a red seersucker dress and yellow high heels and looked so pretty Gavin felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. She had brought scissors and cut off a lock of her hair and tied it with a ribbon.

“Keep this in your pocket all the time. Over your heart. And keep these under your pillow.”

From her purse she removed a pair of panties: pale pink with small white flowers and lace trim. She twirled them around with her fingertip, giggling, a blush creeping across her face, before flinging them at his face.

“You’re killing me, Ellie.”

“Promise me no matter how long they keep you there, you’re mine.”

“How about I promise in front of a judge?”

His father, his training captain—they both advised him to get hitched. The war could be long, and a wife might be the only sure thing to come home to.

Two days after they married, as Gavin stepped onto the transport plane, he had the deep sense that he was about to prove himself, to define his character in some fundamental way. He imagined becoming a man like his father. Though later he would never admit this to anyone, he was filled with grand visions of heroics, scenarios in which he rescued scores of wounded men, men who, unlike him, had been careless enough to get shot.

But during Gavin’s third week in the infantry, while leading a jungle patrol, a piece of shrapnel pierced his knee. And that was that. The three-millimeter sliver of metal, which he would save and occasionally look at his entire life, ended his frontline duty.

He spent his final eighteen months of duty as an REMF—a rear echelon motherfucker. College grads were pressed to work as typists, and Gavin became a clerk in the Administration Company of the 101st Airborne Division. He spent long, hot days writing reports on promotions and demotions, filling out supply requisitions, typing up weather forecasts. He once wrote a report on the plant and insect life of the Ban Me Thuot region, and spoke to a medical-research team about insect-borne illnesses. In eighteen months, those were his most exciting five days.

In the evenings, before dinner, he drafted a letter to his father. Although the war was looking bloodier and more misguided every
day, Gavin feared his desk job would disappoint his father. Gavin had written four drafts, but had sent none, when he learned of his father’s death.

In 1971, he got his discharge.

A couple of dozen men flew in a military-transport plane to Travis Air Force Base, cheering raucously when they landed. They strolled from the plane to the terminal gulping down the evening air, laughing, and bumping shoulders. To get a half-price standby spot on a commercial airline, they had to arrive in uniform. At the San Francisco airport, the gate attendant told Gavin it would be another hour before she knew if he had a seat to Boston.

He hadn’t been in an American bar, hadn’t sat on one of those vinyl bar stools, in two years. He was in heaven. He scooped a fistful of salted peanuts into his mouth and ordered a Budweiser.

Down the bar stood a girl with blond hair; a rainbow ribbon fastened a ponytail on each of her shoulders. She looked barely old enough to be drinking. She wore bell-bottom jeans and noisy platform clogs, taking short, heavy steps, as if in leg chains, as she came toward him with her drink. A black beauty mark underscored one eye, and her teeth were perfectly straight and white, the kind of teeth the girls in Vietnam dreamed of. She propped her hand on her hip in that same sassy way Eleanor always did before telling him he’d done something wrong.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare,” he said. “But you don’t know how good you look right now.”

“Really?” She leaned close, her ponytails brushing his pants, and whispered, “And how good did all those babies look before you killed them?” Gavin felt the icy liquid on his chest before he saw her emptied glass. “Fucking monster.”