Eli the Good (8 page)

When the song was over, Yvonne told my mother she was welcome to their home anytime. “We’ve eaten together, and we’ve sung together,” she said, “so we’re family now.”

Then Yvonne grabbed the Gibson and sang “You Are My Flower” with her eyes closed, her left hand sliding up and down the fingerboard like an expert guitarist.

Later that night, my mother thought of what Yvonne had said about them being family. She lay in the twin bed across from Nell’s, unable to sleep because of her joy.

After only a few visits, she found herself sitting on the back porch with my father, alone. “We talked about
everything,
” she’d say.

He was already crazy over her by the time she told him that she was three months’ pregnant. So there was no turning back. “He said it didn’t matter,” Mom told Stella. “He said the past was the past and that everything would be fine. He even said he’d treat the baby just like his own. He promised.” Stella leaned forward, causing her knees to loom dangerously close to my face. “And did he?” she asked. Apparently my mother nodded. “Well, that’s all anyone can ask,” Stella offered. (Was it possible that something so large was handled so simply? With my father it was. When he loved someone, that was all that mattered. Mom had turned eighteen and was able to leave the orphanage, so it was all decided. Besides, he had some news of his own: he had already enlisted.)

My parents were married in my grandmother’s living room. I have studied the picture of that day many, many times. They’re both looking right into the camera, leaning into each other. Already they are a part of each other, as if shoots of light are evident there between them, connecting them. My mother is wearing a straight blue dress (there is no sign of so much as a bump, much less a pregnant belly) with a white rose corsage pinned high above her heart. She has a stiff white collar and high heels, and her face looks exactly the way it did when she was dancing. My father is a movie star in a plaid blazer and tan slacks. He looks like Paul Newman and has pennies in his loafers. What I love most is the way they are holding hands, like people in an old painting: his palm out as if cupping a cool drink of water, my mother’s hand lying atop it, straight, yet relaxed.

Daddy went off to basic training and came back home for a week, and then, somehow, my mother found herself in Fort Hood, Texas. She was excited that this was where Elvis had done his training when he served in the army only six years before. She took up housekeeping, all the while knowing that she would someday be able to take the college classes that would make her into a science teacher. This is all she had ever wanted to be her whole life.

Six months later, Josie was born in Texas. On that day my father was the first one to hold her. Mom told Stella that when the nurse laid her in his arms, she saw a jolt run all through him. “She’s
ours,
” Daddy whispered, not taking his eyes off Josie.

Those four years were a time of change for everyone. Nell kept on working at the House of Wax and was working there the day Kennedy was shot. She closed the store and rushed home to Yvonne, who was devastated, inconsolable.

On one of those long summer evenings when I was ten, Nell told me that on her way to work in March of 1965, she heard something on the radio news that changed her life. She heard the report that an eighty-two-year-old Quaker woman named Alice Herz had set herself afire on a Detroit street corner in protest of the impending war in Vietnam. Once Nell got to the record shop, she clicked off the radio, then the engine, and sat there a long while, listening to the cooling click of the motor and picturing this old woman dying in such a way. And she knew what she would have to do.

Right around that same time, Daddy came home one day with an important announcement. My mother was washing dishes while Josie played at her feet. Her hands became still in the warm dishwater. “No,” she said, a single word she thought would do the trick, but he didn’t budge. Then: “They won’t make married men go overseas.”

“I volunteered,” Daddy said, and put his hand on her damp wrist.

She jerked away from him and took a step back, holding on to one of the wheat-patterned plates that Yvonne had bought for their wedding. She turned the plate in her hands as if sliding her fingers over a steering wheel. “Why would you want to do that, Stanton? It don’t make no sense.”

He told her that it felt like the right thing to do. He believed in fighting for his country. He had always longed for an adventure, and now one loomed before him. Plus they needed the money. A particular kind of patriotism, promises of adventure, finances. This is how boys end up soldiers.

“But it’s getting bad,” Mom said. “Real bad. Men are getting killed every day. It’s all over the news.” Her voice grew jagged and loud and she kept backing away from him, holding on to the plate. “Have you lost your mind?”

“They’ll end up sending me anyway, Loretta,” he said, his hands still out in front of him. “Come on now, baby. This way I’ll only be over there a year. If I wait for them to send me, I’ll have to go for two years.”

“No!” she screamed, and slammed the plate onto the floor for emphasis. The plate broke into six neat pieces, one of them scattering across the floor to rest very near Josie’s bare foot. Josie started crying and my mother gulped, “Oh, my God,” realizing what she had done. She bent and gathered up Josie and stormed away.

(The thing that neither of them realized was that she was carrying me, too. She had become pregnant only the week before.)

When Mom remembered that day, she always recalled that President Johnson was on the television later that evening. She was so struck by part of what he said that she wrote it down and put it under a piece of sticky cellophane in her photo album. President Johnson said: “I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth . . . into battle . . . I have seen them in a thousand streets of a hundred towns in every state in this union — working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow.”

After Daddy left for Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he received special training before being flown to San Francisco (where he would board a boat that would carry him across the Pacific), my mother drove their green Corvair — loaded with Josie and everything they owned — for twenty hours straight. She staggered into Yvonne’s house at three in the morning and collapsed on the kitchen floor.

Three months later she was certain that I was growing in her belly. About this same time, the first major antiwar rallies were being held in forty American cities. My mother and Nell and Yvonne watched the news coverage of the battles and the marches while the evening mists seeped in over the river. Often they prayed together, too.

Yvonne and Mom became very good at praying, but Nell’s requests to God were often interrupted by the nagging fire of revolution that had been recently lit in her stomach. She couldn’t stand just sitting there watching Walter Cronkite while the world went up in flames. She had to do something.

Nell had another clear memory of listening to the radio in November 1965, when she heard that four hundred soldiers had been killed in one ambush, at Ia Drang. “I drove straight on over to the college,” I heard Nell tell Josie once, “and found the student group that was organizing protests.” Ten days later, thirty-five thousand people marched against the war in Washington. Nell was one among them.

I had never heard Nell talk about her times on the road, roaming around the country fighting for peace or falling in love or the many other things she did. And my father never ever talked about the war. No amount of eavesdropping ever gave me that. All I knew about those two things were that Nell floated around and came back home occasionally and that Daddy served his time, got out of the army as soon as his tour of duty was over, and came back home for good.

So, in many ways, the most important parts of the stories were blank pages for me. And although I was good at making up my own tales to fill in the holes, I was never really able to do that with either Nell or my father. I knew that my imagination was not nearly good enough to envision what either of them had gone through, even when I tried many years later. Ultimately reality is far worse and far better than anything that either adult or child can ever dream.

A
fter much thought, Nell had decided she needed a toothbrush, but it was important that she go to the Rexall and pick it out herself. Josie wanted a new bathing suit, and although she said it would be much cooler if Charles Asher would come and take her to town, my mother insisted that she had to help her choose the suit, since Josie would come home with a bikini otherwise. After the big gas shortages of a couple years before, smart people like my mother only went into town once a week, so after enough planning to take a trip overseas, she and Stella and Nell and Josie all loaded into my mother’s amber-colored Cougar and drove into Refuge for groceries, swimwear, and a toothbrush.

I was lectured to stay close to the house. Even though I was no baby, Mom had never completely gotten over seeing
The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case
on television a few months ago and stayed in fear of my being snatched away. I acted as if I was put out by her concern, but secretly I relished these moments of motherly action on her behalf.

I stood in the front yard and waved to them as if they’d be gone a very long time, and as soon as they were out of sight, I sprinted to Edie’s and found her sitting by her willow tree.

Edie wasn’t crazy about the idea of going into my parents’ bedroom, but her curiosity outweighed her trepidation, so she followed along when I told her what I wanted to do.

When we made our way into my parents’ bedroom, my stomach flipped up at the corners. I knew what an invasion of privacy I was committing. I didn’t fear being caught; instead I dreaded lying awake and feeling guilty about this for nights to come. We were not a family who went to church much — both my parents believed that God could be best served by being the best people they could and treating everyone right and being thankful for all they had — so my guilt was not the kind that is created or fostered. I was simply made that way: a boy who cared too deeply for everything and therefore felt that any wrong in the world was partly my fault. In retrospect I see that this is a good way to be, but it also makes for a miserable existence.

The shades were drawn so that their room was as dark and cool as a cave. Everything was immaculate. My mother couldn’t stand to go anywhere without first making her bed. On the dresser, one side was devoted to Daddy’s cologne and a leaf-shaped dish that held tie tacks (which were never worn, since he never wore ties). The other was reserved for Mom’s Charlie perfume, a bowl for hair barrettes, and last year’s picture of Josie and me, which had been taken at the fire department. In the middle sat the big cedar box that my mother had bought in Texas. I had seen her carry important things into her bedroom, bound for the box, enough to know that this was her hiding place for letters and souvenirs.

I put my hands on either side of the box and sat in the floor, Edie nearby. When I lifted the lid, the scent of cedar washed up over our faces, musky and cold, like the inside of an ancient tree.

In the box were my parents’ marriage certificate, both my and Josie’s birth certificates, a collection of movie-ticket stubs, a dried-up flower that looked like a shrunken, darkened version of the rose my mother had worn on her wedding dress. There was a ring with a small, brownish pearl; three of my or Josie’s baby teeth in a baby-food jar; and a yellow Juicy Fruit wrapper that had
I am yours
written on its white side in slanting, cramped pencil. This was my father’s handwriting, which I liked to study on the little receipts he wrote out for his customers at the gas station garage. There were deeds and insurance papers and many saved Hallmark cards (mostly from my father) and a postcard from the Mississippi University for Women with
I am here if you need me
scrawled across the back. And below all of this was the stack of letters, bound together by a black ribbon. The letters were housed in small white envelopes that had red-and-blue borders around the edges. Each was addressed to my mother, and in the upper left corner was a San Francisco Army Post Office Box number. In the space where the stamp should have been, my father had written
Free.
The packet felt as heavy as a big rock in my hands.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Edie said. She had slid down to the floor and sat leaning against the bed, her arms wrapped around her knees. “It feels wrong to me.”

“Don’t you want to know what it was like, though?”

She looked troubled, her normally blue eyes turned into dots of thundercloud gray. Her face was flat and square. “Yes, but not like this. You ought to just talk to him, Eli.”

“He won’t tell me anything.”

“Maybe if you asked him the right way.”

“I’ve asked every way I know how.”

She sighed, her shoulders coming down with the long breath. “Well, maybe just a couple, all right?”