Strangers at the Feast (29 page)

Despite the absence of animal predators in the modern human environment, a vestigial fear has lingered. In 1965, a study of urban schoolchildren showed that students were barely concerned with nuclear war or germs, the predominating dangers depicted by the media; 80 percent named wild animals as their greatest fear, mainly lions and tigers and bears.

Darwin himself wondered, when his two-year-old son developed a terror of caged zoo animals: “Might we not suspect that the… fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers… during savage times?”

But as our predators vanished from the landscape, the weapons we evolved to repel those beasts were turned on other humans. The strong fear and aggression impulses remained.

Thus emerged, Pethica argues, the ritual of war. The first evidence of what looks like war is a rock drawing from the Spanish Levant dating back twelve thousand years, in which a band of stick figures brandish bows and arrows against one another. The rise of war roughly corresponded to the decline of mammoths, bison rhinoceroses, and megafauna in the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, the arrival of the Clovis people 11,500 years ago heralded the extinction of thirty-five mammals, which has been attributed, by many scholars, to “overkill.”

Humans had made an unprecedented evolutionary leap up the food chain, but carried the fear of their ancient ancestors.

As hunter-gatherer societies became more sedentary, turning to agriculture, they broke into distinct tribes and communities, eventually erecting permanent shelters to store grain, in case of drought. But where would they have channeled the lingering fear and aggression?

In
Violence and the Sacred,
Rene Girard argues that war
evolved as a means to limit intracommunity violence. By redirecting aggressive energy toward an external entity—the foreign enemy, the
other
—groups could maintain cohesiveness. War became an outlet for human vestigial fear. An enemy would always exist, but the details were irrelevant: a shark, a tiger in the night, a neighboring tribe. Modern humans would always be afraid of
something
.

In these communities, the male, who had once fought off fang-bearing predators, who had once hunted bison and rhinoceroses, became a “warrior.” Twelve thousand years ago, this societal role emerged: to re-enact, through violence and aggression, the role of his male ancestors. By doing this, the warrior could assure his community and family of their safety.

If we now examine the American family in the twentieth century, we can see these primitive instincts and rituals at work.

Throughout America’s short history, the bonds of the nuclear and extended family have been at their strongest in the face of danger: the original Plymouth pilgrims forged strong family networks during the first brutal New World winter; those ties were only strengthened during the ensuing violence with Native Americans. Only after the slaughter and deportation of most Native American tribes did the colonial family begin to break down.

Contrary to myth, the bonds of the African-American family were strong during slavery. Slaves defied law to marry in secret. Most runaway slaves fled their plantations in order to find relatives, and thirty-five years after the Civil War, the
Richmond Planet
continued to publish the letters of former slaves looking to find their parents, siblings, or children in the column “Do You Know Them?” Early twentieth-century European immigrants, facing discrimination and poverty, housed newly
arrived cousins in their crowded tenements, hired nephews; during and immediately after World War II, American men and women married younger, bore more children.

In violent conflict, men have traditionally been asked to make the “ultimate sacrifice” to protect their communities. But the recent American manufacture of “false danger” has poisoned the tradition of sacrifice, and the warrior’s status in society.

Both the unethical warrior (Vietnam) and the damaged warrior (beginning with the shell-shocked men of World War I , but fully entering society’s consciousness with the traumatized veterans of Vietnam, and, more recently, of Iraq) place great strain on traditional notions of masculine and feminine.

The warrior is the most strictly gendered role left in society; in the face of women obtaining property and voting rights and entering the workforce, the presence of the male warrior has, from the American Revolution to World War II, sustained a societal belief in male “power.” As women have become property owners, professors, doctors, lawyers, politicians, the role of physical protector has remained almost exclusively male. Adrian Vergara has argued that the need for warriors permitted men a privileged access to work and wealth because women ceded power millennia ago in exchange for physical protection. This is perhaps why men have sought to maintain a political conversation of danger; it is through physical threat that they derive their social and domestic authority.

But during the Vietnam War, when the American warrior, for the first time ever, lost his standing—his efforts to defend his community were deemed not only unnecessary but also unethical, shameful, and eventually, unsuccessful—American women made unprecedented political and social leaps; since then, the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only solidified women’s social and economic gains.

The turn of the millennium may have marked the death rattle of American warriorhood, an obsolete form of manhood that has undermined the very basis of patriarchy.

A pain shot through Gavin’s knee. He dropped the journal on the floor and limped to the window.

“Dad, you okay?”

Gavin waved his son away. It was a clear night, the sky black and cloudless; he wanted to get back to Westport. To his telescope.

He dug in his pocket, shook an aspirin from the bottle, and swallowed it.

Unethical, shameful.

Gavin felt suddenly angry. Maybe the country hadn’t seen
real
war in fifty years, but his daughter should have known enough history to realize that war had a way of cropping up. What would happen with a nation of men who sat around discussing how they would be judged twenty, thirty years down the line before lifting a finger to defend their country?

Because they didn’t want to end up like him—pitied.

Gavin had traveled thousands of miles and killed men and risked his life and all he had received was pity.

The word made him sick. He preferred being spit on.

Long ago he’d made a choice not to pity himself; a man owned his choices, his mistakes. And over time, a mistake of such magnitude hardened like a growth; misshapen flesh on his body that, in the depths of night, roused from sleep, Gavin probed with his fingertips: that is
me
. Over thirty-six years, his anger had amassed, like thickened tissue, around the moment he stepped onto the army-transport plane for Vietnam. That wrong turn—it was
him
. His life was so defined by that choice, how could he say he would have chosen differently? We
were
our mistakes; we breathed them daily. In summer, they seeped from our skin. Gavin understood that he smelled to the world like a man who had taken a bad
turn. But was it so much to ask that his own children look to him with some respect? Some recognition of what he had done for them?

Yes, there had been moments—he could see it in the way Ginny looked at him—when he had failed her. Had not known the right thing to say.

But there were the times, too, when he carried her with a bleeding foot to the emergency room. When he took her ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, waited for hours in line with her, and then rubbed her head forgivingly when she was too shy to step onto the ice. These were brief moments, amid many years, but Gavin was proud of them.

To his daughter he wanted to say, I fed you; I clothed you. I made certain you were always safe, never without shelter. I spent my days at a desk, living a life I felt beneath me so that you would never have to do the same. So that you could get a PhD, flaunt your cleverness, gallivant around the world, pursue every fleeting interest, and toss aside any man who bored you, knowing that if you ever stumbled, ever fell, I would catch you.

Was that not being a father? Being a man?

Gavin looked up at the star-blown sky. Its beauty, its familiarity, sometimes tightened his chest. There was Mars glinting in the northeast; Jupiter—the brightest point—getting ready to set for winter; the archer Sagittarius; Castor and Pollux; such radiant and faraway points of light.

At home he would be able to see them closely. Alone on his deck, the cold air on his face, his eye pressed to his Celestron. It was the Cadillac of telescopes: a 1976 C8-SGT Schmidt-Cassegrain. All metal with anodized aluminum, stainless-steel screws. Over the years, he’d used it to see the red spots of Jupiter, dust storms on Mars, binary stars and whirlpool galaxies. He’d pull out his
Cambridge Star Atlas
and peck around the sky, but always ended up looking at one thing: the moon.

As a child, he’d eagerly tracked the progress of Luna 2 and Luna 3.
But in 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin finally stepped out from the lunar module, when millions sat glued to their televisions to witness them plant a flag on the moon, Gavin was in a small bar in Cholon, beside a girl he loved and would never see again once he returned home; they held a crackly radio to their ears, trying to imagine what it looked like.

Now, night after night, he’d stare at the East Crater, where Armstrong had left his thirteen-by-six-inch footprint. Night after night, it amazed him.

But when Gavin spoke of Armstrong and Aldrin, his children shrugged. Of course men could walk on the moon. A shuttle launch couldn’t hold his grandchildren’s attention. It was as though mankind’s greatest feat had never happened. As though landing on the moon had made it vanish.

Just after he had accepted a senior sales manager position at Reynolds, recognizing, finally, that he’d spend the rest of his days selling insurance, Gavin wrote Neil Armstrong a letter:

What do you think of the fact that a man could do what no human being has ever done, what the whole world prayed for, and then one day it’s forgotten? Are all astonishments eventually meaningless? All accomplishments overlooked?

Armstrong never wrote back. Maybe he thought Gavin was after an autograph to cash in on. Maybe he hadn’t read the letter. Or maybe what Gavin said had struck him as true. But Gavin respected a man’s need for silence. He knew that silence could be a comfort.

When Gavin looked through the Celestron at night, he sometimes wondered: Was it all darkness and dust out there, particles and nebulas, or was anything looking back at him?

GINNY

Ginny watched her brother carve the turkey, his forearm pumping so vigorously it appeared as though he were punching the bird. She poured the wine, crossed her fingers:
Please let that bird be cooked.

“Well, look at this splendor!” her mother said, having laid a tidy line of calcium and zinc supplements above her plate. “Who would know that this was thrown together unexpectedly? Such lovely china. And the silverware!” Eleanor admired the tongs of her fork.

Ginny poured Priya some apple juice. As the wine was passed around the table, her mother said, “Oh, no more for me, I really couldn’t. Well, maybe just a touch.”

Douglas grinned and mouthed
refuse and booze
.

After her mother snapped a series of photographs, the table fell strangely silent. Everyone seemed to be marveling at the steaming food, the elaborate feast they had been awaiting for hours.

“Oh, how about a poem,” her mother said.

“Mom, I can’t just make up poems on the spot.”

“I thought people did that all the time.”

“You’re thinking of limericks,” Ginny said. But she lifted her glass anyway. “Okay, Mom. Since you were so helpful with the kitchen mishap:
There once was a turkey from Perdue, / But being cooked would simply not do. / It sat in my oven, / Demanding some lovin,’ / A thing only Denise Olson’s KitchenAid Electric Master 3.1 could do.
”

Denise raised her glass. “To functioning kitchen appliances!”

Douglas raised his. “To houses with safe wiring!”

“Well, and of course to the newest addition to our family,” her mother said. “Dear little Priya.”

Priya’s face brightened. And as everyone clinked glasses, Ginny felt a long-buried mass of gratitude rush to her skin. Her mother, with all her flaws and her fumbling, would embrace Priya with the same strong loyalty with which she embraced Ginny and everyone she loved. It was the one thing Ginny’s mother did perfectly and fiercely: love.

“Now can we please, please eat?” Brandon asked.

“Mangia, everyone!” Douglas speared a slice of turkey.

As the bowls and platters commenced their orbit around the table, the clank of cutlery filled the room.

“So, did you know that on average,” Douglas began, “stocks go up the day before a holiday, but dip the day after. Except for… drumroll, please… Thanksgiving. It’s the only holiday that shows gains both the day before and the day after. Which means tomorrow should be a good day.”

“We could go to the movies tomorrow,” said Eleanor. “Who wants to go to the movies?”

Tomorrow Ginny would be cleaning up her kitchen, calling an electrician, trying to get her house in order for the home-study.

“Gavin,” her mother said. “Let’s go to the movies.”

Her father sat at the head of the table. He cut a large piece of meat from a drumstick and shoved it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, and seemed to be deep in thought. He sipped his water, eyes darting around the room, then set his glass down with a thump.

“I would like,” he began slowly, “my daughter to explain her sources for her extensive article about the—what was the word, Ginny?—
emasculation
of the American warrior.”