Strangers at the Feast (30 page)

Ginny froze. After ten years, he decided to read her papers? He barely ever asked about her work. “Dad, it’s an academic article. We
come up with arguments that haven’t been made before, and we write articles. I told you, I need to publish for tenure.”

“So you don’t believe what you wrote? That’s unimpressive.”

Then he lifted the massive drumstick and, with a quick tilt of his head, bit into the bulbous thigh. Grease slid across his lips as his teeth churned at the meat. He was breathing noisily, and she could feel his anger across the table; it was frightening, and strangely comforting. It was, finally, emotion.

She didn’t want to let it go. “Actually, I completely do.”

“What’s this article?” asked Douglas uncomfortably.

“It’s about how Vietnam killed manhood.”

“Jesus, Gin.”

Ginny took a deep breath. “Dad, I take it you disagree with the article?”

“Oh, is this for Ginny’s keynote address?” Eleanor asked.

Her father looked up from his drumstick and his eyes roved slowly, then deliberately, around the table. As he studied each of their faces, Ginny waited for a flash of rage, for an explanation of what she didn’t understand about Vietnam, about him. But he set the drumstick down and rubbed his eye, and for a moment Ginny wasn’t certain if she saw a streak of grease on his cheek or a tear. He swallowed deeply, his Adam’s apple bulging as though holding back… was it pain? Ginny leaned forward, tried to meet his stare, but he turned and smiled at Priya, methodically wiping each of his fingers with his napkin. “Silence is a good thing, Priya. We live in a noisy world.”

Her mother, with a lifetime of practiced cheer, said, “Darling, how do you like the cranberries? This year, instead of sugar, I used Splenda.”

And her father said, “They’re perfect.”

The moment vanished; platters were passed. Ginny felt the familiar sorrow of being silenced. As though she were saying good-bye to him, as though every conversation with her father were somehow a
good-bye. He popped in from time to time, but within seconds he was grabbing his coat. He could never stay for long.

Brave face,
she thought. As though she were reading Ginny’s thoughts, Priya touched her arm. Ginny set her hands on the table. She looked again at her father and the memory came, as it often did, in a flash.

Ginny was seven. She had gotten food poisoning, so the school nurse arranged for the music teacher to take her home early.

Her mother was at a flower show in Greenwich. But there was a key under a rock by the front door.

Mrs. Cullman did her best during the walk to convince Ginny to take up an instrument; she thought Ginny had piano fingers. But Ginny’s stomach still felt awful and she could muster only a grunt of disagreement.

At her house, the lights were all out. “Now, you know where the spare key is?”

At that moment, the door opened and a woman, a friend of her mother’s who lived nearby, stepped out. Her name was Martha Bixby, and Ginny had always thought her very pretty. She was slipping on a long, beaded turquoise earring. Behind Martha stood Ginny’s father, wearing an expression of annoyance.

Ginny didn’t remember what she saw or what she thought; she remembered clearly that Mrs. Cullman came to a dead stop. She touched Ginny’s shoulder and in her opera-singer’s voice said, “Dear, you mustn’t harp on this,” before hurrying off.

Martha cut across the lawn and did not look back. Her father fixed his stare on Ginny. “What’s wrong, tiger? Bellyache?”

The look of annoyance was overlaid by a calm, distant smile. He touched Ginny’s forehead and he smelled salty, like the ocean. She threw up on his shoes.

It was strange how you could forget things, essential details about people you knew. You remembered, re-remembered, then wanted to forget.

Everyone continued to pass the platters, a tangle of outstretched arms, serving spoons clattering.

“Little Priya here will make a great confidante,” her father said, eating contentedly. “Just think how people will trust her. I’m going to whisper all my confessions to her.”

“Like confessing that you just took the last hunk of breast meat for yourself?” joked Douglas.

“She’ll talk eventually, Dad,” Ginny said. “Be careful.”

Her father did not look at her.

“Be careful of what?” asked Eleanor.

GAVIN

The girl’s name was Nam Hà. Gavin had one picture of her. Seated at a restaurant, her raven hair spilling over her shoulders, her head tilted coquettishly. She’d had her picture taken only twice in her life, and she wouldn’t tell him who had taken the other photo, no matter how often he asked.

She knew it would drive him mad. He was pretty sure she wanted to drive him mad.

He’d met her in Saigon in 1968, right after he’d been assigned the desk job. He was bored and restless and everyone had girls in Saigon; Gavin considered it a mark of character that he had just one.

Nam Hà was sixteen.

She had a room in Cholon, next to a tobacco shop. Her grandmother was a great healer and Nam Hà dabbled in herbal medicine, making Gavin teas for strength, for courage, for falling madly in love with her. She kept a parakeet, three cats, a turtle, and what Gavin thought was a lemur. These were animals she had found wounded while she bicycled around the city, and she often arrived to meet him with a bandaged squirrel or crow in her basket, postponing a hello kiss until she had settled the creature into one of the blanket-lined baskets she used as her infirmary.

She questioned him about medicine in America, about the machines that would breathe for a person. She’d also heard they could give you a new kidney, a new liver, a new heart. She said America must be the land of miracles, that in America she could be an
actual doctor, that women there wore pants and had robots to wash dishes. She said in America she would have to have a new name, an American name, so joining the name of the president’s widow (of whom she had seen many photographs) and the largest automobile she had ever heard of, she decided she would be called Jackie Limousine.

“You know I can’t take you,” he always said when she spoke of America. It would have been cruel to let her hope for the impossible. Not that Gavin didn’t think about it. He once asked his supervisor about the likelihood of getting her papers. The man laughed and said Gavin was the third person that day to ask that question. “You know a war is a real shit storm when love spreads faster than syphilis.”

At night Gavin lay beside Nam Hà, her birds and squirrels chirping and scurrying. “You are the queen of the jungle,” he’d whisper.

“A queen needs a king.”

“I have a wife.” He sighed.

“In America, you can speak many languages, practice many religions, drive many cars, but you can have only one wife? This is no fair. When your wife is busy with the robot in the kitchen, who will take care of you?”

She joked about America being the land of one wife, the land of sad men. Until the day Gavin was to ship home. Then the jokes stopped and she cried, “You are the best man I will ever meet. You are smart and you are nice. You listen when I talk. You are good to my animals. What do I do now? Go work in the rice fields?”

Gavin wanted to tell her that she would be fine, that she would meet a nice Vietnamese boy, but most of them were dead. He gave her what money he had. He kissed her and promised to write.

“Maybe I come find you,” she said. “Maybe I learn to fly an airplane and come fly over your house. Can wife number one fly an airplane?”

He lifted his bag, her cats meowing fiercely around his legs. As he opened the door onto the noisy street. He felt her hand on his back.

“You don’t have to marry me,” she whispered. “I will be your
mistress. I will clean your house. But please, bring me.” She slid her arm tightly around his stomach. “I am begging.”

He turned to face her. “I love you.”

“Then how come you leave? How come you say good-bye forever?”

“Not forever.”

She moved away, scooped a wounded squirrel from a basket, and held it to her chest. Her eyes watered, appearing for a moment in the room’s dim light to be the eyes of an old woman. “You lie, Mr. American.”

Eleanor once found her picture.

Gavin kept it in the box with his dog tags and his piece of shrapnel and snapshots of his original platoon. On the back of the photo, Nam Hà had left a lipstick kiss, which, over the years, had turned from bright red to brown. It hadn’t been easy for her to part with the photo, but Nam Hà’s greatest fear was that he would forget her. He hadn’t.

“Who is this?” Eleanor asked. “Let me guess, a translator? A special aide to your platoon?”

Gavin had had no communication with Nam Hà in fourteen years. He’d written one letter, just after he returned home from the war. In a fit of frustration one night, during the long tortured months of being turned down for jobs, he wrote that he would come for her and bring her to America, that his life was dead without her.

But he never heard back. He didn’t know if Nam Hà had found another man, if she never got the letter, or if she had died. At first, the silence crushed him. In the ensuing years, he tried not to think about her, but sometimes, at night, when he lay beside Eleanor, he recalled the slow spin of Nam Hà’s ceiling fan, the warm breeze, the chirping of her pets, the downy insole of her foot where he nestled his toes. They had often chattered late into the night about his parents, about what he planned to do when he returned home. This was before he had decided that if the world would withhold from him, he, too, would withhold.

He had last seen Nam Hà when she was sixteen. In his mind, she was a child still, and when Gavin conjured their time together, so was he.

“God, look at your little fortune cookie!” Eleanor said. “I’ve heard about those women. Did she walk on your back? Did she wash your feet with her hair? I didn’t treat you well enough? I took care of my dying mother and waited for you and you needed something more. Shame on you.” She crossed her arms, raised her chin, and basked in a self-righteous silence, until her need to talk got the best of her and she plunged her hand into the box. “What else have you got tucked away?”

She waved the small plastic bag that held his shrapnel.

“That’s the little piece of metal that probably saved my life.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“Eleanor, this is all fifteen years old. I was a kid, and it was a war. Let’s put the box away.”

“It was an
idiotic
war, and you couldn’t go to Canada like everyone else. You’re the only man from Yale who
wanted
to go to Vietnam. And look what happened!”

What happened? Gavin thought. Nothing had happened to her. She got two children and a house with a yard and a gardening club. And he worked fifty hours a week in a windowless room to give that to her. She had everything she ever wanted.

“Eleanor, you have made a career of self-pity.”

She tightened her lips and shook her head; she began pacing, then came to a halt.

“Where are my panties? The ones I gave you before you shipped out. Did you throw them out? Give them to your little friend?”

For the life of him, Gavin couldn’t remember what had happened to the pink and white lace panties she’d handed him at Fort Benning.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he said.

“Give that picture to me. Give me your little fortune cookie.”

“Eleanor, she’s probably long dead by now. She was a friend during a confusing time. This is all I have of her.”

“And to think, when you got back, all your moping and brooding and I thought you’d been through something horrible, that you were suffering some kind of trauma. You were just… you were missing her.” She began to cry, gulping several deep breaths. “I’m your wife.”

He handed her the photo.

“She looks like a prostitute.”

“Yes, Eleanor.”

Her face was working through some thought. Finally her voice softened and she knuckled the tears from her eyes.

“You couldn’t have really loved her, though, because you came back, to me.”

“That’s right.”

“She couldn’t have been so wonderful after all.”

She looked at the photo one more time, furrowing her brow, and then slowly tore it into pieces. “You’re a good man, Gavin. A decent man. And I’ve always loved you. We will put this behind us.”

DENISE

Maybe, after all, the day had worked out, thought Denise.

She looked around the room: the twins cheerfully licked gravy from their forks. Cranberry sauce gleamed on her daughter’s lips. Douglas had pushed back his chair and stretched his legs beneath the table. His face, no longer twitching, looked tranquil. Denise was full and groggy, and in her relaxation she let herself, for the first time in months, see a glimmer of hope.

After all, this table was laid with her wedding china. In the kitchen beyond, her daughter had first said “Mama.” Upstairs was the bedroom where her sons had woken her in the night, flashlights beaming at their chins, to proudly show their missing teeth. How could they lose this house?

Denise had always considered nostalgia dishonest. She thought people lied to themselves about the past, clinging to imagined beauty, and that they also clad the future in impossible happiness. Denise had never indulged. She had fled her family in Pittsburgh, not once looking back. And she had never believed, nor did she now, that her future held infinite promise. She simply wanted this moment to endure.

She tried to sear the scene into her mind. Time now seemed like a monster, devouring each instant—the one monster children were not afraid of.

The Indian girl stood and straightened her dress.

“Sweetheart,” said Ginny, “you’ve barely touched your yams.”

Brian and Brandon jumped from their seats, and Laura, half-tangled in her tablecloth, struggled out of her chair.

“Children,” said Eleanor, “the meal is not over.”

Denise, who did not want the moment to end, had to force herself to say, “Why don’t we let them play while I heat up the pies?”

“Let’s teach Priya how to play Mercy!” said Brandon.