Anyway, she showed me a letter from a guy who was in Jimmy’s outfit. This guy, from Kansas, heaped praise on Jimmy—everybody looked up to him, brave, honest, etc. Nothing new there, but he also wrote about what happened the day the chopper got shot down. He said Jimmy had hitched a ride at the last moment on the chopper. He had to deliver some deployment papers to Saigon in a hurry. Normally they traveled in a truck in the daytime, when it was safer. But the chopper was delayed going back and it got dark. They went down in a patch of forest and the pilot hit the trees.
Ann, I hadn’t realized it was dark. We didn’t know that, did we? And I didn’t know he hitched a ride. Oh man, hitchhiking through the Vietnam War. Imagine. Well, that’s Jimmy.
I thought this added a tiny glimpse into the past, for what it’s worth.
And one more thing, this guy in the letter said Jimmy was always reading a book, and that he had a girl he really missed. He read her letters over and over. A girl named Ann. I should have asked to copy the letter for you.
Oh. Anyway, I thought the letter was a nice reminder of the Jimmy we remember.
Well, kick me in the caboose next time I see you if you want to, but I did not go to the grave this time. It was fifteen below, the ice on Lake Michigan was like an ice carnival, and I could imagine Jimmy laughing at me for freezing my butt off.
Ann, I always think of the sixties with nostalgia. It was the best time of my life, and of course the saddest.
Love to you and your family, as always. Sally sends a hug to your brand-new college freshman.
Chip
THE STEWARD REMOVED a wilted freesia-carnation bouquet and left composed towels—a giraffe and a cat—on the narrow twin beds jammed together. While rummaging in her bag for reserve lip salve, Ann inadvertently sobbed.
“Are you all right?” Richard asked.
“Allergies.”
“Why would you have allergies out here on the ocean?”
“There’s all sorts of stuff in the air. The ocean exhales poison. Cruise ship crap, for instance.”
She hadn’t meant to snap at him.
He had called the ocean glorious, a word he often used without real meaning. Not like magnolious, a word of genuine power, she thought.
“What’s on that eternal iPad?” he asked.
“‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’”
“The guy with the bird around his neck?”
“Yes.”
“Hand me The New Yorker,” he said.
“I could read the poem aloud to you.”
“I would just fall asleep.” He smiled then. “Thank you.”
THERE WERE MORE and more periods of fatigue. They skipped San Juan and Port-au-Prince. Ann had thought the cruise would be important, the least she could do for him. She knew she hadn’t been the most attentive wife, and she was troubled by her remoteness, her habitual withdrawal into reading. She could bore into a book in an instant.
Now Richard lay in the infirmary, too weak to sit up. The ship medics had jumped, ready to isolate him and test him extensively for pathogens. Ann explained that he had a blood disease. No, it was not contagious, she said. He might need a transfusion. She could give blood. She had done it twice before. It made her light-headed, but she didn’t mind.
She did not know how she and Richard presented themselves as a couple. She was self-effacing, receding into the background, declining her social role (confabs, openings, “cultural events”) and refusing to wear the proper outfits. Since the sixties she had had strict rules against pretentiousness in dress—preferring faded, worn garments. But Richard was a careful dresser, fastidious though never flashy. When she first knew him, he was a typical informal professor in jeans who called students by their first names and invited them to supper, but after he became department chairman he became fond of turtlenecks.
“I think you’re unhappy, Ann,” Pixie had said years ago.
“He leaves me alone,” Ann said. “He doesn’t get in my way.”
Pixie’s own husband glad-handed his way along, spouting platitudes. But Richard could build a boat and had even shellacked their floors. He was an agreeable man—reliable, always punctual. Ann often told herself how lucky she was.
“He goes off on those exploratory missions, or whatever they are,” Pixie said. “And he never takes you.”
“School trips,” said Ann.
“I’ve divorced men for less than that.”
In his formal portrait that hung on the Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Wall, he was turned slightly aslant, like someone being interviewed on TV. His shoulders signified solidity and dimension.
Now, gaunt and unsteady, outfitted in nautical leisure wear, he was a stranger. He had always been a stranger, really. Not that he was so hard to understand. But she was a mystery to him and he didn’t even know that.
Richard was good with gifts, always remembering anniversaries and birthdays, even for many years honoring with chocolate the anniversary of their first meeting, at a chocolate shop in Boston. There had never been a good reason to divorce Richard, as Pixie had suggested. Pixie, a neuropsychologist, had divorced three men on what Ann thought were flimsy pretexts. Pixie confessed once that she had lost count at sixty-six bed partners, including one memorable fling through the Kama Sutra with a man who said he was from India but who turned out to be from somewhere else, Ann couldn’t remember where. Not Sanjay.
When Richard was first diagnosed, Ann began to retreat even more, sensing that he wanted to be alone, private, with his dying. She behaved calmly, doing what was needed (taking him to appointments, mixing the probiotic smoothies, listening to his familiar laments on the decline of Western civilization), but her mind was turning away. How had they come to be? How had they pulled off over forty years together? It was not a marriage made from youthful romance. It was a sigh of relief, a settling, a feeling of order at last, a normal life with a house and children. But its insides, the vital sparks that would have made it dance and glow, were absent from the start.
When she thought of her folders of letters from the sixties, she could imagine them addressed to a naive Kentucky student at Stanford who was flummoxed by the intellectual sport of the seminar room. If she could start over, knowing what she knew now—but what she knew now was how naive and untutored she had been. No one would believe that.
If she had gone to California, perhaps she would have been swallowed up by the parade of tired images that were always hauled out on TV specials about the sixties—hippies at Haight-Ashbury, a daisy in a gun barrel, dead rock stars, flower children dancing in the mud at Woodstock, antiwar marchers chanting—all accompanied by a soundtrack of a limited playlist of now-mainstream songs. But Ann knew that decade wasn’t really like that. The real story had settled to the bottom. Nothing was ever its synopsis. And she did not think she would have encountered much at Stanford that Albert hadn’t already told her about. Except for the weather, wasn’t 1967 much the same in upstate New York? She might have flunked out of Stanford, but she didn’t really believe California excess would have ruined her as long as she held on to a kernel that was herself.
Mama was the key. Without her, Ann wouldn’t have survived Jimmy. Mama had had a way of laying things bare, naming what was true.
Mama said, “When you finally told us about Jimmy, your feathers just fell.”