Saigon (61 page)

“I guess I find it difficult to talk about my sons because I realize I’m mostly responsible for the bad blood that exists between us,” said Joseph, speaking very quietly. “Even while they were growing up I didn’t spend as much time with them as I should have, because I was always on the move traveling all over Asia, They went to school hack home here, and my mind always seemed to be more on my job than on my family. Then I left my wife and disappeared from their lives completely when Gary and Mark were in their teens — when they were just beginning to think about what they were going to do with their futures, It took me a year or two to realize just how badly I’d neglected them. Then one day I got a letter from my wife in which she mentioned Gary had made tip his mind to go to West Point and Mark was beginning to think about a career as an air force pilot — and I got a rush of blood to the head.” 

“Why?” 

Joseph rubbed a hand agitatedly across his face. “Because that was the last thing I wanted for my sons. My own father tried to persuade me to take up a military career when I was their age, and I had to fight tooth and claw to go my own way. My wife got married again quickly after I left her to a full colonel in the Pentagon and I suddenly realized that his influence or maybe even that of my own father had replaced mine.” 

“And what did you do?” 

“I wrote to Gary and Mark asking to see them both urgently. Mark turned me down flat. Both of them took my leaving their mother pretty badly, but Mark was totally uncompromising. Gary at least agreed to talk, and I flew down to Washington one weekend to see him.” 

“And did that do anything to help heal the breach?” 

Joseph shook his head emphatically. “On the contrary —. we were at daggers drawn. In the end, during a visit to our family museum, Gary let rip with a few home truths that still hurt whenever I think about them.” 

“And is the letter that arrived today very hurtful too?” 

Joseph sighed again. “Not exactly. I took the plunge and wrote to him first a couple of months ago after the Buddhists in South Vietnam began to complicate things. He was sent out there earlier this year, and I couldn’t stop thinking how damned confusing it must he for him. I just offered a few insights that I hoped might help him feel less at sea — and if I’m going to be really honest I suppose I hoped it might be a lever to help me get on better terms with him too. I thought for a while he wasn’t going to answer at all 

“But he has, so things are better between you now?” 

“Maybe a little — hut his reservations are still fairly pronounced.” 

“I’ll fix us a drink, Joseph — you need to relax.” She squeezed his hand, slipped off her sandals and ran barefoot into the kitchen. He listened for a moment to the rattle of the cocktail mixer, then his glance fell on the headline about the pagoda raids and he picked up the newspaper once more. When Emerald returned with two martinis, lie sipped his distractedly while reading accounts of the stunned reaction in Washington, and gave no sign that he’d noticed when she unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt and began stroking his chest. 

“Sitting here worrying in Cornell won’t change anything on the other side of the world, Joseph,” she whispered, brushing the lobe of his ear with her parted lips. “Please forget it all for a little while. I’ve been looking forward so much all day to seeing you — let’s go to bed now.” 

Reluctantly he put the newspaper down and finished his drink. She helped him off with his jacket, then he let her lead him by the hand into the bedroom. When they had undressed, he stretched out on his back on the quilted teak bed and lay staring at the ceiling while she continued to caress his bare chest. Slowly her movements gained urgency and she began to stroke his thighs with the tips of her fingers. 

“You’ve got the body of a much younger man, Joseph,” she murmured, nuzzling closer to him. “I can’t think why you should have worried that Gary was my age.” Taking his hand she drew it between her thighs and her breathing quickened. ‘Ching Ping Mei would tell us now we shouldn’t worry about the sinister flight of the crows, isn’t that right? When the Pillar of the Heavenly Dragon is ready to enter the Jade Pavilion, doesn’t the wise monk say that we should think of nothing else?” She gasped and shifted her body onto his, and when he finally tightened his arms around her, she closed her eyes and responded avidly to his movements. But before he was fully aroused his passion subsided abruptly and she opened her eyes to find him gazing at her with a remote faraway expression in his eyes. 

“Emerald, I can’t — I’m sorry.” He made his apology abruptly and rolled away from her, pulling the sheet over the lower part of his body. 

“Joseph, what’s the matter?” Her voice was suddenly tearful and indignant. “When you look at me like that I sometimes think you’re looking through me. It’s as if I weren’t there — as if you weren’t really seeing me at all.” 

She continued- to gaze uncomprehendingly at his naked shoulders, but Joseph neither turned back to face her nor offered any answer. 

It had been one of those stifling Washington summer days with the temperature hovering around the hundred mark and low gray clouds as dank as wet rags oppressing the city; lying restlessly awake on the teak bed beside the sleeping Emerald, Joseph found he could still remember the clammy feel of his shirt sticking to his back, although seven years had passed. He recalled too with a surprising clarity that even the pinnacle of the Washington Monument had been shrouded by cloud when the taxi that brought him from the airport drew up outside the Sherman Field Museum of Natural History in the Mall. He had agreed to go there at Gary’s suggestion so as to avoid both the home in Maryland where Gary and Mark lived with Tempe and her new husband, and the complications that would inevitably intrude in the presence of the senator and Joseph’s mother at the family mansion in Georgetown. 

The museum had been closed temporarily for redecoration at the time, and Gary had greeted him politely inside the front entrance; their feet, he remembered, had echoed hollowly in the empty, sheet-draped galleries, and Gary’s face had begun to betray something of the embarrassment he obviously felt at having to talk alone with him after so many years of non-communication. Over coffee in the public cafeteria which had been kept open for the decorators, they had exchanged small talk, then Gary had offered to show him around the refurbished displays. It was as they strolled together into the memorial wing dedicated to his brother Chuck, Joseph realized later, that any slender chance that their meeting might turn out well had been fatally undermined by an unthinking remark he had made. 

“1 haven’t been through here, Gary, for about fifteen years,” he had said conversationally — then immediately regretted his words. 

“Why not?” 

He hesitated, realizing the true explanation was unlikely to help his cause. “1 disagreed strongly with my father about the wisdom of setting up some of the exhibits here....” 

“You mean the animals shot by Uncle Chuck?” 

Gary’s tone was distant, disinterested, and Joseph wondered then whether it might be wiser not to try to explain further. They were passing the glass-fronted tableau of the big game animals killed in Cochin-China over thirty years before, and he had been startled to find that due to the meticulous care with which they’d been preserved, the baleful banteng and buffalo looked as lifelike and glossy-coated as they had When they were roaming the plains beside the La Nga River. The newly painted frames and surrounds also gave the tableau a shocking freshness, and he had felt a renewed sense of horror as he stared at the murderous horns of the massive, hump-necked seladang that had gored Chuck to death. Glancing up he had found Gary watching him intently. 

“Why did you think it was wrong to show these exhibits?” he had asked quietly, as though suddenly sensing his father’s embarrassment. 

“1 wasn’t fond of shooting at that age, Gary. I thought this tableau would always be seen as a memorial to the misplaced pride of the Sherman family. We’re all likely enough to fall prey to the worst sides of our natures, God knows. Too often we get carried away by the idea of wanting to win at all costs — worrying about our goddamned virility being doubted drives us to all kinds of excesses. This tableau is just a painful reminder of all those things as far as I’m concerned.” 

Gary listened in silence, a puzzled frown crinkling his brow. “And you said all that to my grandfather — to his face?” 

“Maybe I didn’t say it all to his face, no. You’re probably aware that I’ve never been that close to him.” 

Gary had turned his head away then, and an awkward silence had expanded between them; something, however, kept them rooted to the spot before the tableau and he realized suddenly what Gary must have been thinking. There was no way of preventing him from seeing the parallel between their feud and his own quarrel with the senator, and in desperation he had decided to try to make a virtue of it. “We both know why I asked to talk to you, Gary,” he had said quietly. “When I heard you’d decided to go to West Point I couldn’t help remembering that your grandfather tried to push me into a military career at your age. I resisted because I was damned sure it wouldn’t be right for me — and I guess because I haven’t been around for a couple of years I’ve got to worrying you might have been influenced unduly by the senator — or your stepfather. Have you really thought it over carefully, Gary? I think you’re worthy of something better — the military’s not what I want for you in peacetime.” 

He had been unable to keep an imploring note out of his voice, and he watched with a growing sense of hopelessness as an expression of distaste spread across Gary’s normally cheerful, boyish features. 

“Unlike you, Dad, I don’t hide my feelings, so let me ask you one thing — what right do you think you’ve got to come here interfering? You went off, remember, for your own selfish reasons, leaving Morn and us to make our way as best we could. You were too busy then with your oriental concubines to bother with me or Mark — so why the sudden interest now?” 

“How much did your mother tell you about that?” 

“Not much at all — but enough to make Mark and me not think very highly of you for what you did to her. She said you never really had your feet on the ground — and she was right. I’d like to have had a father whose eyes didn’t get a kind of glazed look whenever I talked to him. Somehow you always managed to make Mark and me feel we weren’t really worth wasting your precious time on!” 

“Haven’t you ever considered that I might have changed — that I might have regretted doing what I did?” 

Gary had laughed then, and the sound of his laughter had echoed hollowly through the deserted gallery. “That’s incredible, really incredible! You haven’t changed at all — you’re still so selfish you can’t see that what’s important is what I want to do with my life — not what you want me to do.” 

“You’re making this all the harder for me, talking that way. Maybe some day you’ll live to wish you’d done something differently.” 

“If you’ve decided now you made the wrong choice, that’s just too bad,” replied Gary coldly. “But don’t expect any sympathy from us. Mark was right — you’re not worth the trouble it takes to talk to you.” 

He had turned on his heel then and walked out of the museum, leaving Joseph standing alone before the tableau and glancing down at the wickedly curved horns of the seladang, he had shuddered; the ferocious, glassy-eyed animal made the empty museum feel like a haunted tomb, and he had wandered out into the stifling heat of the Mall again, feeling depressed and sick at heart. 

The memory of that desolate moment, brought vividly to mind again by Gary’s letter, produced such a feeling of agitation in Joseph that he found it impossible to lie still any longer, and rising from the teak bed with care so as not to disturb the girl, he put on a silk kimono-style dressing gown and slippers and tiptoed out of the bedroom. One end of the long, overfurnished sitting room served as a study, and collecting Gary’s letter from the table where he had dropped it earlier, he went to his lacquered Chinese desk and sat down. When he switched on the desk light a small clock beneath it showed three AM., and he rubbed his eyes wearily and ran a hand through his tousled hair before taking the letter from the envelope. After reading it through quickly once more, he picked up a sheaf of paper and a pen and started to write. 

“My dear Gary,” he began, 

I can’t tell you how delighted I was to get your letter today. I’ve been feeling worse and worse about being estranged from you and Mark as the years have passed, and more than anything else in the world I guess I’d like to get back to some kind of understanding with you both. I’ve had a lot of time for regret and remorse to do their job, but as you say, I guess letters aren’t the right place to unburden ourselves on that score. Let me just say that my thoughts are constantly with you even more so since your letter arrived here simultaneously with a copy of the New York Times announcing the storming of the Buddhist pagodas. I was so shocked by that and so moved by some of the things you said about your growing attach- merit to Vietnam that I’ve not been able to sleep or think of anything else since. I’ve just got up now in the middle of the night in fact to write you. 

His hand flew across the page, and because he kept his head bent intently over his task he didn’t notice the naked figure of Emerald appear silently in the bedroom doorway behind him. She stood watching him sleepily for a moment, then began wandering through the deep shadows of the room, stopping now and then to caress a piece of jade or porcelain or run her fingers over the finely worked silken embroidery of a mandarin’s sleeve. 

I guess I’m at a bit of a loss to know what to say to you now, but. let’s begin with something impersonal — the answer to your query about why we decided “to go to hat,” as you put it, for the Ngo family. The story’s a sad and sorry one — and I know because I was closely involved for a time. Several things, you see, happened all at once about the time I left your mother. Maybe I’ll say more one day, but as a result I decided rather hastily to give up my career as a newspaperman that same year and returned home to bury myself away as far as possible from Asia in the quieter realms of the academic world. But it was harder to shake off that part of my life than I thought and I couldn’t settle at first at Cornell. When Michigan State invited me to participate in a government-financed program in 1956 to create a modern government structure for Diem I went back to Saigon very much in the spirit of trying to contribute something. But it was not long before disenchantment set in. 

Joseph stopped writing and sat back in his chair, lost in thought. Some of his deep personal disillusionment, he knew, had been directly attributable to the fact he had been unable to find any trace of his daughter Tuyet in those six months he had spent in Saigon. From Gary’s remarks at the museum he was almost certain Tempe had never told his sons of her existence, but he had always been aware that his desire to find her again had contributed to his decision to return to Vietnam. To his dismay when he arrived there he discovered Tuyet had disappeared overnight without trace in 1954; she had gone “underground” after informing Tam and his family she was marrying a member of the Viet Minh and to all intents and purposes she had ceased to exist. After that discovery Joseph had found that the painful memories the city held for him had weighed on him increasingly; above all else he had never been able to pass the Continental Palace without a feeling of horror when he reached the spot on the sidewalk where Lan and her father had died so bloodily before his eyes, and gradually the desire to leave and never return had grown in him. 

A rustling sound interrupted his train of thought, and he swung around to find Emerald in the act of removing a sea-green court gown front one of the life-sized porcelain statues. Knowing she had attracted his attention, she smiled wanly and wrapped it slowly about herself, hugging the silken material to her naked body with both arms. 

“Sometimes I can’t help thinking, Joseph, that I’m just another object in your oriental collection.” She spoke plaintively, without any note of accusation in her voice, but her lips trembled as though she might be on the brink of tears. In the shimmering mandarin’s robe, her face seemed more classically Asian, the slant of her cheeks more pronounced, and Joseph stared at her transfixed for a moment; then he gathered himself again. 

“Please go back to bed,” he said quietly. “I’ve got to finish what I’m writing.” 

“I can’t sleep without you.” 

“Please go and try.” Joseph turned back to his desk, and after watching him for a minute or two she wandered away sulkily into the shadows once more. 

“I found that the Michigan State Group wasn’t all it seemed to be,” Joseph wrote, his pen gather speed once again. 

There were about fifty professors, some doing legitimate work on the constitution and the civil service, but a big part of it was a cover for intelligence operatives who were channeling guns, ammunition, grenades, and tear gas to the secret police outfit they were training for Ngo Dinh Nhu in the likeness of the FBI. They were also building up a paramilitary police force, arid political repression seemed to become the focus of the group’s efforts. Soon this overshadowed all the attempts we were making to install democratic institutions, so I resigned after six months. I’d never been enthusiastic about Diem. He’s not the sinister character that his brother Nhu is — he’s never been interested for example in getting rich himself, but he’s always turned a blind eye to corruption to keep himself in power. He’s a strangely remote, inflexible man, with fixed ideas of Confucian loyalty to family which have always stopped him dispensing with the assistance of his corrupt brothers and his sister-in-law who’ve poisoned his relations with the people. Perhaps the best construction to put on President Diem is that he’s a victim to a large extent of his ruthless, power-hungry family — but that’s maybe being too kind. 

Closer to home for you, the arrogance of some of your ARVN officers doesn’t surprise me. Southerners in Vietnam, you see, have traditionally enjoyed an easy life in the fertile delta region and as a result they’re a different breed to the tougher Vietnamese from the harsher lands in the center and the north. The southerners were also colonized more thoroughly and they collaborated more closely with the French, so they developed an intense desire to emulate their colonial masters. The officer corps in South Vietnam for instance practices a more rigorous form of class distinction than any other similar country in Southeast Asia — but at the same time they feel a kind of schizophrenic compulsion to show their contempt for their foreign lords — once the French, now the Americans — who brought them wealth, privilege, and the very idea of superiority. I don’t know whether this will help you get on any better with your next ARVN lieutenant when the bullets are flying across the paddies, but it’s offered in the hope that it might.