War Baby (27 page)

Webb stood at the window, staring at the cove. The tide was out; the crabs would be clicking and over the rocks and the seagulls would have left hundreds of arrow imprints in the mud. Peace.

He stared at the framed photographs lining the study wall, found the one of himself, Crosby, Cochrane and Ryan standing side by side on the Tu Do. They were in their field gear and he and Ryan had Leicas slung around their necks. They looked young and arrogant and bullet proof. Those were the days.

He heard the door open behind him. ‘Uncle. Can I come in?’

‘Sure.’

He was ready for another tirade. But instead she said: ‘I guess I’m sorry, Uncle.’

‘It’s okay,’ he managed.

She came to stand at his side. ‘I get lost in my head sometimes,’ she said.

‘Will you tell me what really happened to you in Saigon?’

‘It’s such a long time ago. Sometimes it seems like a whole lifetime.’

‘For you, I guess it is.’

He let her collect her thoughts. Finally: ‘When the communists came we were living in an apartment, in Cholon, I think. My father was American.’

‘Did your mother ever tell you his name?’

‘No, she never did.’

‘Do you remember him? Remember what he looked like?’

She shook her head. ‘I just remember my mother was very frightened of the communists. But she told me it was okay, because my father was going to take us away from Saigon before they came. But then one night I was asleep in my bed. I remember waking up and it was very dark. My mother was shouting and pressing her weight down on me. I cried and cried. I thought I was going to suffocate. Then there was a big explosion, so loud I thought my heart had stopped, and then the whole apartment seemed to move like a giant was shaking it in his fist. I screamed and screamed and screamed to try and block out the noise. That is all I remember until I woke up in the hospital.’

‘The hospital?’

‘My mother was burned very bad, her right arm, here on her chest, this side of her face. We had to stay in the hospital. By the time my mother was well again the communists had been in Saigon a long time.’

‘Did you ever find out what happened to your father?’

‘No, we never did.’

‘What happened after you left the hospital?’

‘Because of the rockets my mother was never beautiful again. We had to live on the street and beg to stay alive.’ She held onto his arm. ‘So you see how it is, my mother is not rich, she is not beautiful, and my father does not love us. I am just a bit of dust blown around by life, worth nothing, going nowhere.’ She stroked his cheek. ‘So sorry, Uncle. I don’t mean to make you mad with me. But you cannot live my life, okay? If I want to be sad, you have to let me be sad. I can’t go round being happy all the time for everyone, I can’t be saying thanks to everyone every day. Some days I don’t feel like saying thanks to anyone for anything at all.’

* * *

She went into her room and lay on the bed, staring at the pictures she had tacked to the walls. She closed her eyes and listened to the cries of the women in the market and the roar of the Hondas on the Ham Nghi Boulevard.

She thought about meeting her round-eye father, wondered what she would say to him. Why didn’t you come back for us? Why did you leave us behind in Saigon, with the communists?

* * *

Webb picked up the phone in his study and dialed the Washington number. He had never rung the number before but he had memorized it anyway. It answered on the third ring. ‘Mickey?’

‘Hugh? Jesus, I never expected to hear from you.’

‘How’s things?’

There was a pause. ‘Okay.’

‘I was worried about you. Thought I’d see how you were travelling.’

‘Hey, I’m okay. How about you?’

‘Great.’ Another silence. There was no easy way to do this. ‘Is Sean there?’

‘He’s gone, Hugh. He left for Peshawar two days ago. I haven’t got an area code for the
mujahideen
. Is it important? I mean, you can get messages to him and everything. Eventually. Through the agency.’

He wasn’t sure if he should feel disappointed or relieved. ‘No, I guess it can wait.’

‘You don’t sound so sure?’

‘It’s a bad line.’

‘Only you won’t be able to get me on this number after next week. I won’t be here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve quit my job. I’m moving back to San Diego. Need some time to get my shit together again.’

He wanted to say:
I still think about you
. He wanted to say:
Please come out to Long Island for a few days. I’m a good listener
. But he didn’t. She had hurt him enough. Let her go to San Diego. ‘I’m sorry things didn’t work out with Sean.’

‘I guess you knew all along they wouldn’t.’

‘But I hoped they would.’

‘Well, you were right, everybody was right. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ll write.’

‘Yeah, do that. Get me an address.’

‘Yeah. I’ll see you.’

‘Take it easy, Mickey.’

When he hung up he felt curiously light. He finally had her out of his system. Ryan was back chasing ambulances, Mickey was going to San Diego. Let them g, take the same advice you gave to Jenny, leave the past behind and get on with your life.

Doesn’t that feel better?

He picked up his notebooks, swept them off his desk, and threw his cup at the wall. It hit exactly where it was aimed. The glass on the picture frame shattered and Cochrane, Crosby, Ryan and Webb tumbled from the wall, leaving behind a coffee- brown stain.

Seventh Regiment Armoury

Only the diehards left. Once, they called two in the morning an early night. Now most of them had wives and families to go home to and golf games to play in the morning.

Crosby went to the sideboard and returned with more drinks. They would probably have to get the Marines to fling him out into the street.

‘I still don’t understand why she married him,’ Doyle said.

‘Mickey was a very complicated person in those days,’ Cochrane said. ‘She loved mankind but she didn’t get along with most people.’

Webb shook his head. ‘So it was her fault?’

‘No. I think she set herself up. Jesus, anyone could have told her that marrying Ryan wasn’t a good move.’

‘I think she was damaged goods,’ Crosby said. ‘That’s all.’

‘And what about Ryan?’ Doyle said.

Crosby threw back his port. ‘Ryan was just being Ryan.’

‘No, I think he really meant to turn his life around back then,’ Cochrane said. ‘He wanted this thing with Mickey to last. Hell, I wouldn’t have given him the Washington job if I thought he was just resting up.’

‘He didn’t need much persuading to go to Afghanistan,’ Crosby said.

‘Ryan was like an alcoholic,’ Webb said. ‘If a boozer wants to stay dry they have to accept that sobriety is a lot more boring than being drunk. Ryan couldn’t live without the adrenalin rush. Some people are scared of dying. The only thing Ryan was scared of was being bored.’

They had all, at some time, faced the same decision. Cochrane had opted out. Crosby was still hooked. And Webb? He had made and remade that decision more times than anyone at the table.

‘I want to know what happened to Jenny,’ Doyle said.

Webb smiled. ‘Jenny and I survived each other.’

‘But did you ever tell her about Ryan?’

Crosby interrupted. ‘You can’t leap ahead too far. I guess if you want to find a place to end the story you have to go back to the summer of ’91.’

Webb nodded. ‘We were still living out on Long Island. Jenny was a grown woman by then. She’d done well at school, she could have gone on to Columbia, but she was too impatient. She persuaded a friend of mine to swing her a job in the mail room at the New York Times. Her naturally pushy personality took things from there. She moved up to court reporting, she even got a couple of small features in the back of the paper. But nothing ever moved fast enough for her. I suppose I related to some of that ambition.’

‘And that was when you told her about Ryan?’

‘No, that was when Mickey came back into my life.’

Lincoln Cove, Long Island

September 1991

‘Perhaps everyone who reports on war is in part sating their own dark curiosities. I know I will return soon.’

Askold Krushelnycky, war correspondent

They were having a cook-out next door and playing soft rock on a radio. Webb and Jenny sat on the deck, nose to nose like gladiators, a bowl of green chilies on the patio table between them. Webb had just beaten his all-time record of five, but Jenny showed no sign of breaking under this pressure. Sweat ran down Webb’s face.

‘This time let’s make it interesting,’ she said. ‘Two at once.’

Webb got up and ran inside to get iced water from the refrigerator.

‘Wimp!’

When he came back his eyes were red. He had just drunk three glasses of water and he was chewing on a piece of dry bread. She had told him the bread was more effective than the water in putting out chili fires.

‘You know what I said about being pleased you came up for the weekend,’ he said. ‘I lied.’

She laughed again. ‘No way you’re ever going to win. Vietnamese mothers give their babies chilies instead of dummies.’

‘Another lie.’

‘At work they believe it.’

‘How is work?’

‘Frustrating. Do they give out Pulitzers for court reporting?’

‘Only if the court is the Supreme Court and the plaintiff is the President.’

‘I might as well be invisible. How am I going to get anywhere writing about men masturbating in Central Park?’

‘Philip Roth did okay out of it.’

She made a face. Very funny. ‘Seriously.’

‘I did my apprenticeship with a provincial newspaper where the fifth anniversary of a fire at the church hall warranted a color supplement.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I went to Vietnam.’

‘Maybe I would like to go to Vietnam.’

He went inside to check on lunch. In honor of Jenny’s weekend visit he had cooked two fillets of swordfish on the barbecue, and prepared noodles, green salad, roasted peanuts and a sauce made from
nuoc mam
, lemon and oil.

She helped him carry the plates out on to the deck.

‘If you went back to Vietnam what would you do? Discover your roots?’

‘All my roots got pulled up. I don’t know. Maybe it would just be good for me to see the place where I was born. Through adult eyes.’

Uh-huh.’

‘And there’s my father. I’ve been thinking a lot about him, lately. I was wondering if I might be able to track him down.’

Webb took the fish off the hot plate and brought it to the table. ‘Ladies first,’ he said, handing her the serving forks and poured more wine.

‘I’m waiting,’ she said, after she had filled her plate.

‘What would you do - if you did find him?’

‘Sometimes I think I’d like to kill him. I’m joking. Don’t look at me like that.’

‘It would be pretty hard to find him after all these years. Is it that important?’

‘To me it is.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s things I’d like to ask him.’

‘You start,’ he said, and drank his wine, gave himself time to think. Well this had come out of nowhere. How could he tell her, after all this time, that he had known - or suspected - who her father was all along?

He wondered where Ryan was these days. He had followed his progress in newspapers and magazines through Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Gulf War. The last dateline had been somewhere in Yugoslavia.

‘I’d think it would be just about impossible to find him after all this time. Where would you start?’

She selected a piece of fish with her chopsticks, held it poised between the plate and her mouth. ‘Sometimes I thought you might be my father.’

He looked at her in amazement. ‘Me? Why?’

‘I don’t know. A feeling. Some of the things you’ve said.’

‘What things?’

She shrugged her shoulders, without answering, and tasted the fish. She closed her eyes. ‘Not bad.’

‘Would it make any difference if I was your father?’

‘Yeah it would make every kind of difference.’

He had always known this day would come while somehow hoping that it wouldn’t. He had read somewhere that the concentration camp survivors who had coped best after liberation were the ones who had blocked out the past, pretended none of it had ever happened. ‘I don’t know if there’s much to be gained by digging up the past.’

‘You never had a past like mine.’

‘True. Well, personally, I wouldn’t know where to start. But I’ll help you out any way I can, if you decide to go ahead.’ Time to change the subject. ‘Are you still going out with, what was that guy’s name, the one with the ring through his nose?’

‘Enzo.’

‘That his real name?’

‘He’s Italian.’

‘Tell me, what does he do if he gets a head cold. I mean, how does he wipe ... ?’

‘You are so retro.’

‘Is he dealing drugs?’

‘Why, do you want some?’

‘He looks like a substance abuser, okay?’

‘Of course, you never touched drugs when you were my age.’

‘That was different.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘We know better these days.’

‘Meaning you’ve had
your
fun.’

‘Don’t you ever get sick of winning arguments?’

‘Never.’ She had moved out several months before, now had an apartment with three other street smart young women in Tribeca, out there with the rest of her trendy crowd. ‘So what were you doing when you were my age?’

‘I was taking photographs of church fetes and scout jamborees.’

‘You were in Vietnam reporting on a war.’

‘Not until I was an old man of twenty-two.’

‘Maybe that’s what I should be doing. It would keep me out of trouble.’

‘Don’t even joke about it.’

‘Another sexist remark. I can’t believe you came from the same generation as Jane Fonda.’

‘Please don’t mention me and her in the same breath, there’s a good girl.’

‘Now you’re being patronizing. You need a woman to straighten you out.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘What about that woman down the road, the one who always comes round here in a lycra suit pretending she’s just come from aerobics classes? The one reeking of Chanel instead of sweat?’

‘She tries too hard.’

‘You have to stop playing so hard to get. It’s about time you settled down.’

‘I’m a writer. I’m supposed to be Bohemian.’

‘You need someone to take care of you now I’m not around.’

‘I’m forty-three years old. I think I can look after myself by now.’

‘Look, I found a grey hair.’

‘Don’t pull it out! It makes me look distinguished.’

‘You’re going to need someone to wheel you around on Sundays. I can’t be around forever.’

‘I’ll get by.’ It was a joke, of course. But the way she said it, he realized later it should have been a clue to what she was planning.

* * *

The woman pulled the Pinto to the side of the road. She could see the cottage from here, and the open redwood deck; she saw a man sitting out on the deck with a young Asian girl. She checked the mailbox again. It was the right house:
Webb
.

She studied her reflection in the rear-vision mirror. Not bad, considering everything. But she couldn’t compete with a twenty-something. What was it with middle-aged men and teenagers?

Perhaps this isn’t such a hot idea.

She had not seen him in eight, nine years. There had been occasional letters and phone calls, but that was different to showing up on his porch unannounced wearing French perfume. What arrogance. He had his own life now, and it looked as if he was doing well at it.

She turned the car around and drove away.