Heartwood (6 page)

But she knew that Robby and his friends never would. The smart boys who gathered in Robby’s dorm room were opposed
to the war but they weren’t fighters like her brother. They just wanted to get on with the future, which had once seemed so bright for them, and they were furious because they couldn’t. Furious and scared out of their minds. That was the worst part: underneath all the shouting and self-pity—fueled by what seemed like endless amounts of alcohol and other substances—was a horrible truth. These boys were right to be terrified, because thousands just like them had already died.

–—

But then there was the night when the group had assembled in Robby’s room and the usual ranting and raving was well under way, and all of a sudden everyone was silent. Laura’s attention had been wandering but she looked up to see that a guy named George who lived at the other end of the hall had just rushed in. All eyes were on him.

“Well?” One of Robby’s friends demanded as the others sat forward eagerly. “Is it true?”

George laughed. “Oh yeah! Larry got himself his little deferment. He and Nancy are off getting married right now, then they’re going to drive up north to tell her folks. They’ll probably be mad because their little girl is knocked up, but Larry’s going to be sitting out LBJ’s war.”

There was an explosion of hooting and cheering from the boys and someone raised a bottle of beer in a bleary toast. “Let’s hear it for Nancy!” he shouted.

“Let’s hear it for the Daddy Deferment,” someone else added. “And for Larry, the lucky S.O.B.!”

That was when Laura remembered that Larry Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was, had talked about having a baby as the one
foolproof way to get out of the draft. “I call it getting a Daddy Deferment,” he’d said. “Not only do you skip jail and hang on to your citizenship, you can have a good time while you’re working on it.”

Everyone had laughed except Laura. She couldn’t imagine having a baby unless she knew she and Robby were ready to love, support, and care for it—draft or no draft. Anything else was unthinkable, even as a joke.

But now, as the boys continued to cheer for the father-to-be, she heard Robby’s voice at her side. “I never thought Larry would actually go through with it,” he said softly.

She glanced up and saw that he was staring at her. He turned away quickly; the look only lasted for a second. She told herself it didn’t mean anything.

But after everyone had finally straggled off to their own rooms, and she and Robby were alone, he didn’t take her in his arms and begin the long, slow process of kissing and undressing each other, which had always been their prelude to a night of lovemaking. Nor did he yawn and flop down on his bed the way he did when he was tired and wanted her to know that there wouldn’t be any sex that night. Instead, he avoided looking at her, and began cleaning up the debris from the evening. Laura watched as he lined up empty beer bottles neatly in a corner of the room, and folded the pizza boxes so they’d fit in the incinerator at the end of the hall. Normally Robby was a slob—his clothes stayed on the floor where he’d dropped them, and it could take him days to clean up after an all-nighter. Usually it was Laura who got rid of the garbage and washed his dirty laundry. But now he was cleaning up. And not looking at her. He was building up to say something. Suddenly she knew she didn’t want to hear it.

“I think I should go to my dorm tonight,” she said. “I have that test in Poli Sci on Wednesday, and I need to hit the books.”

“You’re not going to study tonight, it’s too late,” he said.

“No, but first thing in the morning.”

“Stay here now. And you can leave early. I’ll set the clock radio.”

She still didn’t want to stay with him, but she couldn’t think of any good excuse not to. “All right.” She sat on the edge of the bed and began taking off her shoes.

Robby continued clearing up. His back was turned to her. “Wasn’t that something? About Larry and Nancy?”

She drew in a deep breath. “I think it’s wrong,” she said.

He turned to her. “That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?”

“I just don’t think it’s right to have a baby for any reason except that you want one.”

“Perhaps they do.”

“He doesn’t have a job. They don’t have a place to live. They aren’t even married …”

“Wow. You really are being judgmental—we both know people who slipped up and she got pregnant before they were married … and you never said a word.”

“Yes. Because it was an accident.”

“That makes it okay?”

“It’s better than a cold-blooded decision.”

“How do you know it was cold-blooded? What if Nancy and Larry were planning to have children someday anyway, what if they just hurried it up a little bit?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What I know is, Larry’s draft number was 77. If it weren’t for this baby he’d be fighting a war he hates. He might have gotten killed. For nothing.”

“I know that.”

“Nancy loved him enough to save him. What’s wrong about that?”

She wanted to say that Larry shouldn’t have let Nancy do it for him even if she had begged him to. But then she looked at Robby. His face was pale; he knew what she was thinking and he probably agreed with her. But she also knew that at that moment, if she said she’d have his Daddy Deferment, he’d jump at the chance. She watched him look down at his hands, which were clenched into fists, and she could tell he was ashamed of himself. A part of Robby would always want to be Ivanhoe, and that part wanted to go to jail for his principles, or cross the border into Canada and live as an exile. Those were the honorable choices—that was what he’d said.

But everyone had heard horror stories about what happened to conscientious objectors in prison, and giving up your American citizenship was a huge price to pay for someone else’s mistake. Because that’s what it was—this war that no one could explain, no one could end, and no smart person thought America could still win. It was a horrible, bloody mistake made by men who were too old to fight and too proud to admit they were wrong. How could anyone expect a boy like Robby to be strong and selfless when he knew his own country was willing to get him killed so that those evil old men wouldn’t have to look bad? How could anyone be honorable when every week there were more pictures in
Life
magazine of dead soldiers and Vietnamese children being burned in their rice paddies? When you thought about all of that, having a baby to get out of the draft didn’t seem that terrible.

Laura reached out to take Robby’s fists in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “This shouldn’t be happening to you.”

There were tears in his eyes. “I just don’t want to die,” he whispered.

“And I don’t want you to.”

And so, in spite of everything she believed, the seed of an idea was planted in her.

–—

Robby never actually asked Laura to have a baby to keep him out of the draft, and she never said she would. But over the next few weeks whenever she saw Robby smile, or heard him laugh, or watched him study, biting his lower lip and puckering his forehead in concentration, Laura knew that seed was growing in her. And when at night he lay next to her in his narrow bed and together they began the sweet journey that melded them into one, she knew that she was like Nancy and so many other girls in that terrible winter of 1970. She could not let the boy she loved die.

She didn’t want to be a pregnant bride, she was her mother’s daughter and Nana’s granddaughter after all. But after the wedding, without really admitting what they were doing, she and Robby started taking chances. Laura had never gone on the pill like some girls, Robby had always been the one who took “the precautions,” as he called it. But now he was less careful than he had been. And she didn’t stop him. That was all it took. One month after they’d moved out to the archaeological dig in New Mexico, Laura and Robby knew that he wouldn’t be going into the army after all. There was a baby on the way.

L
aura got up, and carried the overnight bag full of cooking utensils, along with the bulky springform pan, into the kitchen. She was going to have to repack the bag, and find a way to fit in the pan, or she’d have to leave something else home—maybe her whisks or her copper bowl—even though she knew her mother didn’t have either. As she dumped everything out onto the countertop she went back to her thoughts.

If Theo and Iris had suspected that Robby’s draft status had anything to do with Laura’s “accidental” pregnancy they’d kept it to themselves. They had simply sent a loving note of congratulations to the young couple in New Mexico, and renewed their offer of financial assistance—and Laura had rejected it again. But Robby’s father had come to his own conclusions and he sent his son a four-page letter in which he called Robby a gutless traitor, half a man and a coward hiding behind a woman’s skirts. To Laura’s amazement the vitriol from his father devastated
Robby. She couldn’t believe the man had that much influence over her husband. But when she looked back on it later she would realize that letter had seriously damaged Robby’s spirit. It had torn at his self-esteem. Maybe it was because Robby feared his father was right. Or maybe it was just that children are never immune to attacks from their parents.

Laura had tried to comfort her husband as much as she could, but the truth was, she was struggling too. In all of her charmed, happy-go-lucky life she had never been as miserable as she was during that summer in New Mexico.

She and Robby had rented an ancient trailer near the dig where Robby would be working. They would live in the desert for three months, as would Professor Hawkins and the rest of his students and volunteers. Robby would be the professor’s right-hand man, and Laura had signed on as a volunteer. At the end of the summer, the dig would close down until the following year, and the professor and his students would return to the San Fernando Valley and the small but prestigious school—Custis University—which sponsored the dig. This was where Hawkins taught and Robby would begin studying for his PhD.

When Robby and Laura had first made all these plans for the summer, it was right after their wedding, and Robby, who had volunteered on digs before, had warned Laura that conditions could get primitive.

“You know this is my first time working with Hawkins,” he’d said. “But I’ve been told by some of the other guys that it’s no picnic. Deserts always get boiling hot during the day and freezing cold at night, and this site is smack in the heart of the desert. There will be bugs and snakes and some really nasty critters.”

“Critters?” she’d mimicked him. “Did you actually say ‘critters’?”

“Wise guy! But you get the picture. And the trailer isn’t going to be a luxury hotel.”

“I can take it, don’t worry about me.”

But Laura had said that before she became pregnant. Before the morning sickness that lasted all day. Before her energy seemed to drain out of her, leaving her continually exhausted. She hadn’t expected to feel like that. Her mother had always had an easy time with her pregnancies; she’d been one of those women who actually did glow. And even now, after all these years, there was a joyful shine in Iris’s eyes when she reminisced about that part of her life. Of course Nana had not talked about being pregnant, she came from a generation that didn’t share that kind of intimate detail. But Laura was sure that her grandmother had handled the whole thing gracefully and cheerfully—as she did everything.

Laura tried to do that too. She tried to be cheerful as she nibbled on the soda crackers her doctor had suggested for her nausea. When Consuelo, the local woman who worked on the site as a cook, took pity on Laura and brewed a special chamomile tea for her, Laura drank it with a smile. And each morning she told herself that today she would feel better. Today she would go to the site to work with the other volunteers, and she wouldn’t mind the blazing hot sun or the bug bites that gave her a rash. Today she wouldn’t mind the fact that no amount of air-conditioning could cool the darn trailer and no amount of scrubbing could clean the pitted linoleum floor. But each day she minded it all a little more. And sometimes when even the soda crackers and the tea wouldn’t stay down, Laura would wonder if in some awful way the baby she was carrying knew why she and Robby were bringing it into the world now instead of waiting until they were really ready for it, and it was protesting
from the womb. She knew such fantasies were ridiculous, and she pushed them away. But she couldn’t get the words “selfish” and “irresponsible” out of her head. She didn’t tell Robby what she was thinking, she didn’t want to hurt him. But the words kept coming back. Until they finally burst out of her.

It happened because of a dog who had wandered onto the site. Actually, it was a large puppy, a half-starved female, with huge feet, and ribs sticking out under her skin.

“The poor thing!” Laura cried. “Robby, we can keep her, can’t we?” Any member of her family could have predicted she’d say that; Laura had been adopting strays since she was a child. “We’ll name her Molly, I’ve always thought that would be a great name for a dog …”