On Park Avenue right before Forty-eighth Street, Jeff MacDonald got an egg right on the forehead. The egg broke and splattered over his glasses, and David almost laughed but didn’t. Debbie ducked — another egg hit the ground in front of her feet. Then they all started looking up and hurrying a little bit, but there was no panic. Jeff just put his glasses in his pocket and kept shouting. They passed three guys with short hair, holding a sign that read “Hang the potesters!” “Protesters,” Debbie wanted to stop and point out, was spelled with an “r.” But the march pressed forward, so she just raised her fist and gave them the finger.
Debbie didn’t start crying until Phil Ochs started singing. Debbie was not a screamer. She had one Beatles album, and she liked to listen to the acoustic Bob Dylan. Her sole pop-music memory was from three years ago, her freshman year, at a Peter, Paul and Mary concert, when she had gone up afterward to get an autograph from Paul. She was six people back in the line; it was late; she yawned, and Paul saw her. He looked right at her and sang, “On a Desert Island.” But Phil Ochs was handsome and graceful, and he had a rich voice, even in this crowd. And when he looked out at them and sang “Is there anybody here who’d like to wrap a flag around an early grave?” she decided that he was singing to her, for Tim, and she burst out — wa-wa-wa — very embarrassing, so upsetting that David Kissell put his arms around her. And he followed that with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” She heard David whisper the words “Her brother was killed,” and then there were a few tentative pats on her shoulder. Would Tim have come to this march? Debbie had no idea. But maybe his ghost would, knowing what it knew now.
—
JANET, TOO, was at the march. The week before, she had gotten a letter from Aunt Eloise. Aunt Eloise was interesting to Janet, if only because every time her name came up Dad laughed and Mom said, “Oh, Frank,” then laughed, too. They thought Aunt Eloise was an embarrassment, but she wrote more faithfully than either Dad or Mom.
Dear Janet—
Thanks for your letter! I’m always happy to read anything you have to say, and no, I am not at all tired of you talking about your cousin Tim or telling me how much you miss him! You should miss him. I consider him a murder victim, not murdered by the Viet Cong, but by Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the imperialist pigs who are perpetrating an illegal war that they will never win. I know that you don’t hear such things at THE MADEIRA SCHOOL, but you are old enough to know the truth. When I was your age, I was walking around the farmhouse, staring out the windows, and wondering what was out there. Now I know, and I can’t say that it has made me happy, but it has made me strong. There have been many things that we have not been able to do anything about, but the Vietnam War is something that we can do something about. There is going to be a march in New York on April 15, a Saturday (here in San Fran, too). You should think about how you might get to that march. I don’t know the rules at your school. But there is never anything wrong with breaking rules, and in fact, you should practice as soon as you can. You are a good girl, which is a convenient cover story for you. No one expects you to misbehave, so, at least for a while, you can judiciously misbehave (not sex and drugs, if you know what I am getting at and I hope you do not).
Then there was stuff about Rosa and her daughter, Lacey.
By midnight that night, Janet had forged a brief note from her mother: “Back from Florida the other day. See your Dad is still in Palm Springs. Guess the hotel is a mess, and he needs to stay for at least another week. By the way, Nedra is very ill, and she asked to see you. A Surprise. Don’t know what is going to happen, but you should come home this weekend, Love, Mom.” She’d stuck it in the envelope from an earlier letter, careful to tear off the postmark in a ragged way, as if she had ripped open the letter. When she took it to Miss Green, her housemother, the next day, she saw instantly what Aunt Eloise had been getting at. Miss Green barely glanced at the letter, just gave Janet a big smile and said, “Of course. Do you have train fare?” And, yes, she did.
The most adventurous part of Janet’s trip to New York was something she would not be telling Aunt Eloise: that she spent Friday night on a bench in Penn Station. She did fall asleep, but only for an hour or so, with her purse between her chest and the back of the bench and her arms through its handles. She was awake by the time the crowds began to trickle through the building, and when she saw two girls in pigtails walking with two guys in army-surplus jackets, with long hair, she followed them as they headed uptown.
When the protesters began to head out of Central Park to Fifty-ninth Street, Janet was toward the front. She didn’t dare speak to anyone, but she smiled several times and got smiles back. When they passed in front of the Plaza Hotel, where her mom had taken her for tea a couple of times, Janet looked east down Fifty-ninth Street; it hadn’t occurred to her until right then that there were lots of people she knew who might see her, even if everyone in her family was out of town. The barriers were jammed with old people gaping. The only shouting was coming from the protesters, who were screaming “End the war! Stop the bombing!” Janet screamed that, too. Aunt Lillian had said that Tim was killed by a grenade — a piece of shrapnel had entered the back of his head, and he died right away — and that was all Janet needed to know. She screamed until she was hoarse, thinking of Tim pitching balls to her when she was eight, and of herself striking out over and over until, finally, he tossed it right at the sweet spot where her bat was headed, and her bat hit it.
At some point, Janet realized that the tall white man and the shorter black man that she was right behind were Dr. Spock and Dr. King. There was a way in which Janet had not quite believed that Dr. Spock existed, like Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima, but here he was, smiling and laughing, even when they passed a sign that read “Traitors!” And then she looked back. Because there was a little dip in the road, she saw the most thrilling sight she had ever seen, which was miles of people extending as far as it was possible to extend, into the buildings, into the clouds. They marched toward the East River, to the UN. The last time she was here was a field trip in sixth grade. She found herself a spot.
Janet was sure that Tim’s ghost was right there with her, practically touchable, a figure in the crowd, maybe standing behind the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s placard. Tim had written her only one postcard from Vietnam, postmarked Nha Trang, and all it said on the back was “Hey, kiddo! Everything is fine here! Send me some more Hershey bars! Love you, Tim. xxx.” Aunt Lillian had let her read his last letter after she asked three times. Both she and Aunt Lillian knew that she would cry for days afterward, but that was good, according to her mom. As Phil Ochs sang “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Janet closed her eyes and mouthed the words, and imagined that it was Tim singing. Just as he had sung all those songs with the Colts.
—
THE APARTMENT WHERE Henry was staying for a long weekend, at Eighty-fourth Street and Broadway, had one window that faced east, and maybe Henry and Basil Skipworth heard the noise of shouting wafting on the breeze from the park, and maybe they didn’t. As the crow might fly, they were only a mile or so from where the protesters were gathering. They had talked about joining the march but had indulged themselves in not doing so. Thinking of Tim, Henry felt a little guilty. But when he came to New York, he’d somehow not put two and two together about the protest; he had been thinking of this weekend as a break from everything about Tim that was putting his mother and Claire and Paul and Lillian — and himself, for that matter — at loggerheads. Basil taught German at Yale. Even though he often said “my dear boy,” he was two years younger than Henry and about six times more sophisticated, if by that you meant that he read Balzac in French and Boccaccio in Italian as well as Goethe in German (and Kafka, too). On the other hand, he had only the most rudimentary grasp of the etymology of “foot” (fot, föt, pes (Latin), pod (Greek), pada (Sanskrit), — ped (Indo-European), much less that of “penis,” which meant “tail” in Latin and was almost unchanged from earlier forms. Basil, who had gone to Cambridge, was much more sophisticated than Henry in many ways, but, they both knew, not nearly as good-looking. He had started subtly pursuing Henry at the Modern Language Association meeting in December. Henry had allowed capture in March, intrigued by Basil’s courage, since he himself had never been bold enough to push any pursuit to its logical end. They were using an apartment belonging to some friend of Basil’s, who was back in England for a month.