The Deepest Water (18 page)

Sister Monique moved a straight chair close to the bed, glanced around the room, then said, “Ring if you want anything, Father.” A call button was pinned to the comforter near his hand.

“Mrs. Connors? Jud’s daughter?” the old man asked in a whispery voice.

“Yes, I’m Abby Connors,” she said and sat in the chair close enough to touch him. The room was claustrophobic; it contained a bureau, the chair she was in, a bedside stand. Potted orchids in bloom filled the window sill, gay yellow, a deep rosy red, white. A crucifix hung on the wall opposite his bed. A CD player on the bedside stand played the Berlioz.

She shouldn’t have come here, Abby thought despairingly. She didn’t know what to say to him, what to ask him. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said finally. “You wrote me, and I—”

“Did he find peace?” the old man asked, his voice almost inaudible.

She nodded. “Yes. He found love and peace before he died.”

He closed his eyes and mumbled something, and she wanted to touch him, not let him fall asleep yet, but she didn’t dare. He was praying, she realized. In Latin.

“Thank you, child,” he whispered after a moment. “I prayed that he would find peace. In the bureau, top… “A spasm shook him, the comforter rippled with his movement. “Papers,” he said. “They’ll tell you.” He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

This time he did not open his eyes again, and for a moment she was afraid he was dead, but his fingers twitched on the comforter, as if feeling the texture of it. Silently she stood up, put the chair back against the wall, then went to the bureau and opened the top drawer.

There was a sweater, bed socks, a few sheets of letterhead stationery and some envelopes. She looked in the other two drawers, empty. Slowly she returned to the bedside stand and opened the single drawer there. Hospital items, lotion, powder, a small basin… There was nothing else in the room. There was no closet, nowhere else to look. She went back to the bureau, picked up a sheet of stationery, and drew in a sharp breath: Xuan Bui Institute. Vietnamese. They would tell her something. That was what he had meant. She folded a sheet of the stationery and put it in her purse, then gazed at the dying man for a moment, wishing she knew how to pray, wishing she believed it would do him any good for her to try. Quietly she slipped out.

It was nearly noon when she left a taxicab on Tenth Street, and looked about apprehensively. A warehouse district? Massive buildings lined both sides of the busy, wide street, warehouses that had been converted to other uses. Some upper windows were curtained; Venetian blinds hung at some of them, and small business establishments were housed on the street level. She started to walk, passed a Korean restaurant that advertised Hot Pepper Ribs, a Brazilian restaurant with
Feijada
in fading letters on the window. A used-furniture store with sad-looking beds and dressers on display. And then windows with drapes, and a door that had a neat little sign:
Xuan Bui Institute
.

It also had an
Open
sign. A bell announced her presence when she opened the door and walked inside to a room outfitted as an office with file cabinets, a desk, telephone, a computer, another door that opened as she entered. A beautiful Vietnamese woman came into the office and smiled at her. “Can I help you?”

Staring at her, Abby said, “I was looking for an institute, a school or something like that.”

“Xuan Bui Institute,” the other woman said, her smile broadening. “This is the office; the school, I’m afraid, is in Vietnam. What can I do for you?”

She was dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt with silk-screened water lilies on it, Adidas shoes, no jewelry. Her hair was short and straight, gleaming; she was very lovely, her face ivory-toned like an antique cameo, with fine bones.

“I don’t know,” Abby said almost helplessly. This woman was too young to tell her anything she needed to know, she thought. And Americanized, not really Vietnamese. Her diction was flawless, without a trace of accent. “Father Jean Auguste said someone here could tell me something. Is there anyone else?” A nameplate on the desk had the words
Thanh Bui
. A name? Abby didn’t know.

“Father Jean? He sent you?” The woman’s eyes widened, and her smile vanished. “You’re Judson Vickers’ daughter?”

Abby nodded.

Swiftly the woman crossed the office space and turned the
Open
sign around. “I was going to close up and have lunch,” she said. “I’m Thanh Bui. I can answer your questions. I addressed the note to you, but Father wrote it himself. Please, have lunch with me.”

Abby hesitated only a second, then nodded again, and they walked from the office out to the street. Neither spoke as Thanh led the way to the corner, past a few businesses, then into a restaurant. “Vietnamese,” Thanh said. “We’ll have
pho
, my daily lunch.” She smiled slightly, spoke in Vietnamese to a counter man, and went straight to a booth. There were a dozen or more other customers in the restaurant, most of them Vietnamese. Some of them spoke to Thanh as she passed, in Vietnamese, English, even in French. She responded to each in kind. “What do you want to drink?” she asked when they were both seated. “I already ordered soup for us. I’ll have jasmine tea; it’s very good here.”

Abby shrugged slightly. “That’s fine.” She didn’t care what she ate or drank, and doubted that she could eat anything. “You knew my father?”

“Just a second,” Thanh said, as the counterman approached, bringing them water. She spoke briefly to him, and he left. She studied Abby for a moment before she said, “I never met him, but I know much about him.”

Abby’s disappointment must have shown, she thought, leaning back, exhaling. Another dead end. Pointless.

Thanh regarded her with sympathy. “I’m very sorry about your loss,” she said. “I didn’t know him personally, as I said, but I share your grief. Many people share your grief.”

Abby’s hands were folded on the table, and for a moment she feared that Thanh was going to reach across, take her hand, touch her; she put her hands in her lap.

“Here’s our tea,” Thanh said, as the counterman returned to place the pot and cups on the table. When he left again, she poured for them both. “I’ll tell you what I know, and afterward you ask your questions.”

She did not wait for a response. “We lived in Saigon when I was very young, no more than a baby,” she said. “My father was an engineer and my mother worked for the French embassy as a translator. She speaks six languages fluently,” she added. “When the French left, Father Jean told my parents that others would come, the Americans would come, and they should return to the countryside where they might be safer. He got her a job teaching at a convent school not far from our grandmother’s village, and that’s where we moved. My parents, three brothers, and my sister. We had been relatively wealthy—middle-class I suppose you would say—and suddenly we were peasants.”

She sipped her tea and drew back as the counterman placed large soup bowls on the table, and a number of small condiment bowls. Thanh named the various additions to the soup as she added them to her own bowl: cilantro, flakes of red pepper, rice noodles, other things that Abby had never heard of.

“Try it,” Thanh urged her gently. “I imagine you haven’t recognized your own hunger.”

Following Thanh’s example, Abby added some of the condiments, and the soup was delicious. She really had not recognized her hunger pangs.

“So,” Thanh said, continuing her story as she ate, “it happened as Father Jean had predicted; the Americans came, the war became a ravenous monster. My father was conscripted and we never saw him again. Then my oldest brother vanished into the forest one night when he was sixteen. The next year another brother went into the forest. No one told me anything: I was too young. Later I knew that they had both joined the forces from the north. When my sister Xuan was sixteen, she began to work for the Americans as a translator. My mother had taught us all well; Xuan was a good translator.”

She put down her spoon and gazed over Abby’s shoulder, her expression remote now. “One day Father Jean came to tell us good-bye. The school would be closed, the nuns recalled, and he would be sent to the United States, to work with the Vietnamese refugees. He had come from a town in France, in the Burgundy region; it was his dream to return to his own village one day, but he never did. Then the Americans burned the school; they said the Viet Cong were using it as a meeting place.”

She drew her gaze back to Abby. “This was all a very long time ago,” she said softly. “Before you were born even. And I was a child. For us it’s no more than history.”

For Thanh it was more, Abby knew; pain of the memories was clearly written on her face.

“By the time I was eight,” Thanh went on briskly, “I was seeing what I had not seen before although it had been there to see. Xuan was meeting with our brothers in secret. A few miles away from our village was the American camp where she worked, and from it missions were sent out daily. The soldiers from that particular camp were greatly feared; the captain who ordered the missions was considered one of the best soldiers, very smart and cunning, and without mercy. My brothers and sister, and others, of course, were plotting to entrap the best unit from that camp, the best soldiers, the most hated lieutenant, and destroy them.”

She lifted her tea cup, then set it down without a sip. “My sister was a very important part of the trap,” she said slowly. “Her job was to seduce a soldier, to make him fall in love with her, and pretend love for him, and to confide in him, tell him about an important family meeting that would take place on a certain day. A meeting that would bring in officers from the Viet Cong to participate in a celebration. She knew that what she had to say must be reported to the soldier’s superiors, or at least be overheard by them. I don’t know how they managed the details, but that is what happened. She used the young soldier; his own officers used him and learned of the celebration, and they planned to raid it, to capture and kill important officers, destroy their rendezvous site. Everyone used the innocent young soldier,” she said faintly. “He was your father.”

For a time neither spoke; Abby couldn’t have spoken, her mouth was too dry, her lips too stiff. The same story her father had told in the novel, a few details changed, but the same story. The Vietnamese translator had seduced him, used him, discarded him, just as he had written about Temple, who had seduced the boy Link and discarded him.

Thanh seemed lost in the past. She broke the silence. “Most of this I learned from my brothers later,” she said. “Over a period of several days the villagers quietly left the village; my mother took my youngest brother and me and our grandmother to my uncle’s house. The Cong moved into the village to keep up the appearance of normalcy, to light cooking fires, tend the vegetable gardens… Then they left also, but the fires were burning, cooking smells in the air, a few animals wandering about. Normal village life. The Americans moved in, and someone began to run from house to house warning the people that they were coming, or so it appeared. The Americans began to shoot. And the Cong sprang the trap. They annihilated the American unit that day. No American in it survived, and only one of our people was killed. My sister. She was the person they saw running from house to house.”

Abby remembered what Jud had written; the beautiful girl, his lover, had taken him into the forest and left him. She knew what was coming; she wouldn’t have gone back to the village.

Thanh said very quietly, “The plans went awry. She was not supposed to fall in love with the big American, but she did. And she betrayed him. She made our brothers promise not to hurt him, to ensure his safety, and she took her part in the final scene, her act of atonement. He saw her get shot, and he saw the helicopters come in later and firebomb the village. He knew. He collapsed, and my brothers stood guard over him until the American rescue team arrived. They did not harm him, but they believed he would also die. They said he became a ghost that day.”

Abby wanted to cry out, No! He hadn’t written it that way. Up until now she had believed every word, but not this. It was Teri Frazier he felt guilty about, not the Vietnamese girl. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Thanh reached across the table and touched her hand.

“Let’s walk back to the office,” Thanh said. “I told them I’d pay the bill later. I think we’re finished here.”

On the sidewalk, oblivious to the busy street, the traffic, passersby, Thanh began to talk again. “Back in nineteen ninety-one, Father Jean told us a man appeared on his doorstep one day, your father, who had brought with him a cashier’s check for four thousand dollars. He asked Father Jean if he knew about the family of Xuan Bui, if any of them had survived the war, if the village had been rebuilt. The check was for the village, he said, and his name could not be revealed. At that time he didn’t even tell Father Jean who he was. He was afraid they would reject the money if they knew the source, Father said, and he said the man apologized for the meagerness of the check. Father assured him that that much money in Vietnam was a fortune.

“The following year he came back, with a bigger check, and that time he began to ask questions about the school, had it been rebuilt, or a different one built. When Father told him there was no school near that village, he became excited, and said he wanted to build a school there. That it would take time and patience, but he would do it.”

They had reached the office; she unlocked the door and they entered. She did not remove the Closed sign. Motioning for Abby to follow, she led the way through the office to the next room. “We’ll be more comfortable here,” she said. She smiled and gestured toward a round table with half a dozen chairs drawn up to it. “Not much more comfortable, but a little. This is where we plan and scheme.”

They talked for a long time. With the American’s money, and the priest’s influence in the church they had acquired the land and construction had begun; her mother was the school administrator, and Thanh was the American coordinator, the one who hunted down the best bargains in computers, in paper, textbooks, even teachers. She brought out photographs that showed the development of the school, from a forest reclaiming the land, to a clearing, a tiny one-room building, another, then a larger building that housed three classrooms, a dormitory, and an office. She gave Abby copies of legal documents that detailed where every penny had been spent.