The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Page 11

  I get letters from Barry, too. He’s good at that. Writes each one of us. I think he’s having a good time in Saigon. I hope he’s careful. You know what I mean.

  Barry says he’s got a lot of respect for Ambassador Bunker. Says he was cool as any Marine during Tet, when the VC attacked the Embassy. Says the Ambassador’s spoken to him a couple of times, asked him what he wants to do when he gets out of the service. Imagine: My boy, talking to a big shot like that.

  And Margaret sent Stephanie a plane ticket home in time for the election. Sure, she could vote at school, but “my vote will make more of a difference in Ohio,” she said to me. She was getting a fancy accent.

  “You gonna cancel out my vote, baby?” I asked her.

  “I sure am, Dad. D’you mind?”

  “Hey, kid, what am I working for if it isn’t for you and your mom? Sure, come on home and give your fascist old dad a run for his money.”

  That got kind of a watery laugh from her. We both remembered the time she went to Washington for that big march in ’69. I hit the ceiling and Margaret talked me down. “She didn’t have to tell us, Joe,” she reminded me.

  No, she didn’t. But she had. Just in case something happened, she admitted that Thanksgiving when she came home from school.

  I didn’t like the idea of my girl near tear gas and cops with nightsticks when I wasn’t around, so I pulled a few strings and sent her Congressman Kirwan’s card. Mike, the Congressman says I should call him when he comes to the lawyers’ table at the Ohio Hotel. And I wrote down on it the home phone number of Miss Messer, his assistant. If anything goes wrong, I told her, she should call there. And I drew a peace sign and signed the letter, “Love and peace, your fascist father.”

  She says I drew it upside down. Well, what do you expect? Never drew one before.

  Anyhow, she’ll be home for Election Day, and Barry’ll vote by absentee ballot. I’m proud that both my kids take voting seriously. Maybe that school of hers hasn’t been a total waste: Steff still takes her responsibilities as a citizen very seriously.

  Meanwhile, things—talking and fighting both—slowed down in Paris and Saigon. I remember after Kennedy won the election, Khrushchev wouldn’t talk to President Eisenhower’s people because Ike was a lame duck. As if he weren’t one of the greatest generals we ever had. I tried to listen to some of the speeches by this McGovern Stephanie was wild for. Mostly, I thought he promised pie-in-the-sky. Our boys home by June, everyone working hard and off welfare—not that I’d mind, but I just didn’t see how he was going to pull any of it off. I really wanted to ask Barry what he thought, but I didn’t. Might be bad for morale.

  Then things started to get worse. They stepped up the bombing. Tried to burn off the jungle, too. And the pictures . . . Dammit, I wish I could forget the one of that little girl running down the road with no clothes on screaming in pain. Sometimes at night, it gets messed up in my mind with that thing from Kent, with the girl kneeling and crying over that boy’s body. Damn things leap out at you from the newspaper or the news, but I can’t just stick my head in the sand.

  Maybe the kids . . . maybe this McGovern . . . I’ve been under attack, and I tell you, there comes a time when you just want it to stop. Never mind what it costs you. You’ve already paid enough. I think the whole country’s reached that point, and so McGovern’s moving way up in the polls.

  ELECTION DAY STARTED out really well. The day before, letters had come from Barry. One for me. One for his mother. And even one for Stephanie. I suppose she’d told him she was going to be home, and APO delivery to the Embassy in Saigon is pretty regular. We all sort of went off by ourselves to read our letters. Then Margaret and I traded. I hoped Stephanie would offer to show us hers, too, but she didn’t. So we didn’t push.

  You don’t push, not if you want your kids to trust you. Besides, my son and daughter have always had something special between them. He’s a good foot taller than she is, but she always looked out for her “baby brother” in school. He never minded that she was the bright one, the leader. Not till he decided not to go to college, and he overheard one of the family saying that Stephanie should have been the boy. So our Bear joined up, not waiting for the draft or anything. I expected Stephanie to throw a fit—Margaret certainly did, but all my girl said was, “He needs to win at something of his own.”

  I wouldn’t have expected her to understand what that means to a boy. Maybe she’s growing up.

  But it’s still all I can do to keep a decent tongue in my head toward my brother-in-law with the big fat mouth.

  Election Day, it’s a family tradition that everyone comes over to watch the returns on TV. There were going to be some hot words over the cold cuts, if things ran true to speed. And I couldn’t see Steff sitting in the kitchen putting things on trays and talking girl talk with her aunts. Steff calls that sort of thing sexist. That’s a new word she’s got. Don’t see why it bothers her. It’s not like sometimes the women aren’t talking the most interesting things.

  For a while, I really thought we were going to make it through the evening without a fight. Stephanie came in, all rosy-faced and glowing from voting, then marching outside the poll all day. She’d left her protest signs in the garage, and she was wearing one of the good skirts and coats she took to school. When everyone said so, she laughed and went up to change into a workshirt and jeans.

  “But you looked so pretty, just like a real college girl,” her aunt told her.

  “That was just window dressing,” Stephanie said. “Can I help set the food out now? I’m famished.”

  She’d wolfed down about half a corned beef sandwich when the phone rang, and she flew up the stairs. “You’re kidding. Massachusetts already? Oh wow! How’s it look for Pennsylvania? I’m telling you, I think we’re going to be lucky here, but I’m worried about the South . . .”

  “You want another beer, Ron?” I asked my brother-in-law, who was turning red, pretending like he had swallowed something the wrong way and would choke if he didn’t drink real fast. Personally, I think he voted for Wallace in the last election, but you can’t pry the truth out of him about that with a crowbar.

  We settled down to watch TV. Margaret and my sister Nance turned on the portable in the kitchen. I kind of hoped Stephanie would go in there, but she helped clear the table, then came in and sat beside me.

  You could have knocked me over with a feather. Maybe the kids were right and people were sick of the bombings, the deaths, the feeling that Vietnam was going to hang around our necks till we choked on it. But state after state went to McGovern . . . “There goes Ohio! Straight on!” Stephanie shouted, raising a fist.

  I don’t know when all hell broke loose. One moment we were sitting watching John Chancellor cut to President Nixon’s headquarters (and my daughter was doing this routine, like a Chatty Cathy doll, about Tri-cia Nixon). The next moment, she’d jumped up and was stamping one foot as she glared at her uncle.

  “How dare you use that word?” she was saying to Ron, my brother-in-law. “They’re not gooks. They’re Asians. And it’s their country, not ours, but we’re destroying it for them. We’ve turned the kids into fugitives, the women into bar girls . . . and they all had fathers, too, till we killed them! What kind of a racist pig . . .”

  “Who you calling a racist, little Miss Steff & Nonsense?” asked Ron. By then, he’d probably had at least two beers too many and way too many of my daughter’s yells of “straight on.” “Why, when I was in the war, there was this Nee-grow sergeant . . .”

  “It’s ‘black’!” she snapped. “You call them black! How can you expect me to stay in the same house as this . . .”

  She was out of the living room, and the front door slammed behind her before I could stop her.

  “That little girl of yours is out of control,” Ron told me. “That’s what you get, sending her off to that snob school. OSU wasn’t good enough, oh no. So what happens? She meets a bunch of radicals there and picks up all sorts of crazy ideas. Te
ll you, Joey, you better put a leash on that kid, or she’ll get into real trouble.”

  I got up, and he shut up. Margaret came in from the kitchen. I shook my head at her: everything under control. I wanted to get a jacket or something. Stephanie had run out without her coat, and the evening was chilly.

  “I’d teach her a good lesson, that’s what I’d do,” said Ron.

  Damn! Hadn’t I warned her, “I know you think it’s funny calling your uncle Ronnie the Racist. But one of these days, it’s going to slip out, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” But she’d said what I should have said. And that made me ashamed.

  “She shouldn’t have been rude to you,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that. But you know how she feels about words like that. I don’t much like them either. Besides, this is her house, too.”

  Ron was grumbling behind my back like an approaching thunderstorm, when I went into the front hall, took out a jacket from the closet, and went outside. Steffie was on the stoop, her face pressed against the cold brick. I put the jacket over her and closed my hands on hers. They were trembling. “Don’t rub your face against the brick, baby. You could cut yourself.”

  She turned around and hugged me. I could feel she was crying with anger and trying hard not to. “I’m not going in there and apologizing,” she told me.

  “Not even for me?” I coaxed her. There’d been a time she’d do anything in the world for her old dad.

  She tried to laugh and cry together, and sounded like the way she used to gurgle when she was a baby.

  “I’ll promise not to start any fights,” she said. “But I won’t promise to keep quiet if . . .”

  “I told him you shouldn’t have been rude to an elder and a guest . . .”

  She hissed like the teenager she wasn’t. Not anymore.

  “I also told him this was your house and you had a right to have your wishes respected, too. Now, will you come in and behave like a lady?”

  “It’s woman, Daddy,” she told me.

  I hugged her. “You know what I mean. Lady or woman, you’re still my little girl. You’re supposed to be for peace. Can you try to keep it in your own home?”

  She looked up, respect in her eyes. “Ooh, that was a nice one,” she told me.

  “Then remember, tantrums don’t win any arguments. Now, you go in. Maybe your mother needs help with the dishes.”

  “He ought to help,” she muttered. “You do. It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” To my surprise, I agreed. “But if we wait for him to get off his butt, your mother’s going to be stuck with all of them.”

  The gift of her obedience hit me in the face like a cold wind when you’ve had too much to drink. My eyes watered, and the lights up and down Outlook Avenue flickered. Everyone was watching the returns. Some of them had promised to drop in later. The Passells’ younger boy had gone to school with Steff. He was the only boy on the street still in school, studying accounting. The Carlsons’ middle son, who’d played varsity football, but always took time to coach our Bear, had left OSU and was in the Army. So was the oldest Bentfield, who’d been our paperboy. Fine young men, all of them. And the girls had turned out good, too, even Reenie, who’d got married too young.

  Just a one-block street, but you had everything on it. Even a black family had moved in. Maybe I’d had my worries to start off with, but I was real proud we’d all greeted them like neighbors. On some streets when that happened, the kids dumped garbage on the lawn or TP’ed the house.

  It was a nice street, a good block, and we’d all lived on it a long time. Nothing fancy, but solid. I wished my father could have seen my house. We’d come back since he’d lost everything in the Depression. But that’s the way of it. Each generation does a little bit better than the last one and makes things a little easier for the ones next in line.

  We’ve been five generations in Youngstown. I like to think our name counts for something. Now, this is sort of embarrassing. I don’t go to church much, but I looked out over that street and hoped, that’s a better word for it, that my kids would make that name even more respected. My daughter, the whatever-she-wanted-to-be. A lawyer, maybe. And my son. Who knew? Maybe he’d come home and go back to school, and then this Ambassador—I couldn’t see my Bear as a diplomat, but . . .

  “How many beers did you have?” I asked the sky, gave myself a mental shake, and went back in in time to watch President Nixon’s concession speech. It wasn’t, not really. You remember how close the race was against JFK. And the 1962 California election when he told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

  I don’t know. Man’s a fighter, but he’s not a good loser. I tell you, I don’t know what a recount’s going to do to this country just when we need a strong leader in place.

  “Country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Ron grumbled. “I’m going home. Hey, Nancy? You going to yak all night? C’mon!”

  After he left, my wife and daughter came back into the living room. Margaret brought out a pot of coffee.

  Stephanie sat down to watch McGovern’s victory speech. She was holding her mother’s hand.

  “I admit I am distressed at this demand for a recount at just the time when our country needs to be united. But I am confident that the count will only reaffirm the judgment of the great American people as the bombing has gone on, pounding our hearts as well as a captive nation, that it is enough!

  “Now, I have heard it said,” the man went on with shining eyes, “that I do not care for honor. Say, rather, that I earn my honor where it may be found. Not in throwing lives after lives away in a war we should never have entered, but in admitting that we have gone as far as we may, and that now it is time for our friends the South Vietnamese to take their role as an independent people, not a client state. Accordingly, my first act as Commander in Chief will be . . .” his voice broke, “to bring them home. Our sons and brothers. The young fathers and husbands of America. Home.”

  Tears were pouring down the women’s faces. I walked over to Margaret. All the years we’ve been married, she’s never been one to show affection in front of the kids. Now she leaned her head against me. “Our boy’s coming home!”

  Stephanie’s face glowed like the pictures of kids holding candles in church or the big protest marches. She could have been at McGovern headquarters; that school of hers has enough pull to put her that high, but she’d chosen to come home instead.

  I put a hand on her hair. It was almost as silky as it had been when she was in diapers. Again, my hand curved around her head. It was so warm, just like when she’d been little. “Baby, it looks like you and your friends have won. I just hope you’re right.”

  SOMETHING WOKE ME EARLY that morning. Not the house. Margaret’s regular breathing was as always, and I could sense the presence of Stephanie, a now-unfamiliar blessing. I went downstairs, ran some water in the sink, and washed off the serving dishes Margaret had set to soak overnight. Nice surprise for her when she got up.

  Of course, I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang.

  “Hey, Al,” I greeted him. Drunk again. “What’s the hurry? It’s only six months, not five years between calls this time.”

  “How d’you like it, Joe?” he demanded. “Those little bastards pulled it off. They don’t want to go, so, by God, they stop the war. Can you believe it? Not like us, was it. I tell you, ol’ buddy, we were suckers. Go where we were told, hup two three four, following orders like goddamn fools, and these kids change the rules on us and get away with it.”

  Maybe it would be better. Margaret and Steff had held hands and cried for joy. I had to believe it was better, that I wasn’t just bitching because other men’s sons wouldn’t have to go through what I had. I started to talk Al down like I had in Korea, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  The sky was gray. All the houses on Outlook were dark. Soon it would be dawn and the streetlights would go out, regular as an army camp.

  But what were those lights going
on? I levered up from my chair—damn, my bones were creaking—and peered out. Lights on at Bentfield’s? And, oh my God, Johnny Bentfield . . . no. Oh no. Not my son, thank God! Dammit, what kind of a man was I to thank God like that? Sometimes I make myself want to puke.

  “Al!” I broke into his ramblings. “I gotta hang up now. Something’s going on on the street.”

  “Probably a bunch of stoned kids, celebrating the new age. Well, they’re welcome to it. Let ’em come running to me when it blows up in their faces. I’ll laugh.”

  “Yeah, Al. Sure. But I gotta go.”

  Moving more quietly than I had since Korea, I slipped upstairs and slid open drawers for undershorts, slacks, a sports shirt. Very cautiously, listening to see if they’d wake up, I dressed in the bathroom, then left the house, moving as cautiously as if I were scouting out my own neighborhood. I sneaked over to Bentfield’s and peered in the window. At least they didn’t have a dog. If what I feared was true, they’d have more on their minds than listening for prowlers. And if I were wrong, please God, if I were wrong, they were good enough friends I could always make up something.

  But they were in robes in the living room. Alma Bentfield sat hunched over, hands over her face, while Stan came in, gray-faced, with coffee. The two little girls clutched each other, too sleepy to feel yet how badly they were going to hurt.

  God damn! Just a little longer, and we’d have brought Johnny home safe. Someone must have called from Vietnam. Unauthorized. Don’t ask me how.

  I slipped out of their yard and back home.

  “What’s wrong?” Margaret’s voice was sharp and came from outside Stephanie’s room. She must have heard what she thought was a prowler, found me gone, and run to see if our daughter needed help.

  “Better get dressed,” I told her. “There’s a light on at Bentfield’s. I’ve had a crazy feeling. I went over and looked. It’s about as bad as it can get.”

  My wife’s face twisted, and she clenched her hands.

  “I’ll wake Steff, too,” she said. “She’s grown up enough to help out.”