“You there, Joey?” I was staring at the receiver. “I asked you, how’s your family?”
“M’wife’s fine,” I said. How long had it been since Al and I spoke—three years? Five? “So’re the kids. Barry’s in the Marines. My son the corporal. Stationed in Saigon. The Embassy, no less.” I could feel my chest puffing out even though I was tired and it was the middle of the night.
Car lights shone outside. I stiffened. What if… The lights passed. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Thank God.
Al and the beer hooted approvingly.
“And Steffie’s in college. Some damn radical Quaker place. I wanted her to stay in Ohio, be a nurse or a teacher, something practical in case, God forbid, she ever has to work, but my wife wanted her near her own people.”
“She getting plenty of crazy ideas at that school?”
“Steff’s a good kid, Al. Looks like a real lady now.”
What do you expect me to say? That after a year of looking and acting like the big-shot debs my wife admires in the New York Times, my Steffie’s decided to hate everything her dad fought for? Sometimes I think she’s majoring in revolution. It wasn’t enough she got arrested in 1968 campaigning for McCarthy—clean up for Gene, they called it. Clean? I never saw a scruffier bunch of kids till I saw the ones she’s taken up with now. Long hair, dirty—and the language? Worse than an army barracks.
She’s got another campaign now. This McGovern. I don’t see what they have against President Nixon or what they see in this McGovern character. Senator from South Dakota, and I tell you, he’s enough to make Mount Rushmore cry. I swear to God, the way these friends of Steff’s love unearthing and spreading nasty stories—this Ellsberg character Steff admires, you’d think he was a hero instead of some nutcase who spilled his guts in a shrink’s office, so help me. Or this My Lai business: things like that happen in war. You just don’t talk about them. Still, what do you expect of a bunch of kids? We made it too easy.
I keep hoping. She’s such a good girl, such a pretty girl; one of these days, she’ll come around and say “Daddy, I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
Never mind that.
Al had got onto the subject of jo-sans. Cripes, I hadn’t even thought of some of them for twenty years, being an old married man and all. What if Margaret had walked in? I’d of been dead. Sure, I laughed over old times, but I was relieved when he switched to “who’s doing what” and “who’s died,” and then onto current events. We played armchair general, and I tell you, if the Pentagon would listen to us, we’d win this turkey and have the boys home so damned fast…
About the time we’d agreed that this Kissinger was a slippery so-and-so and that bombing Haiphong was one of the best things we could have done, only we should have done it a whole lot earlier… hell of a way to fight a war, tying General Westmoreland’s hands, I heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” Margaret asked me.
I gestured he called me! at the phone, feeling like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. My wife laughed. “Going visiting, is he? Well, let his wife give him aspirin for the hangover I bet he’s going to have. You have to go to the office tomorrow and…” she paused for emphasis like I was six years old, “you need your sleep.”
She disappeared back up the stairs, sure that I’d follow.
“That was the wife,” I told Al, my old good buddy. “Gotta go. Hey, don’t wait five years to call again. And if you’re ever in town, come on over for dinner!”
God, I hope she hadn’t heard that stuff about the jo-sans. Or the dinner invitation. We’d eat cold shoulder and crow, that was for sure.
FALL OF ’72, we kept hearing stories. That Harvard guy that Kissinger was meeting with Le Duc Tho in Paris, and he was encouraged, but then they backed down: back and forth, back and forth till you were ready to scream. “Peace is at hand,” he says, and they say it in Hanoi, too. I mean what’s the good of it when the commies and your own leaders agree, and the army doesn’t? No news out of Radio Hanoi can be any good. And the boys are still coming home in bags, dammit.
Meanwhile, as I hear from Margaret, Stephanie is doing well in her classes. The ones she attends in between campaigning for this McGovern. At first I thought he was just a nuisance candidate. You know, like Stassen runs each time? Then, when they unearthed that stuff about Eagleton, and they changed VP candidates, I thought he was dead in the water for sure. But Shriver’s been a good choice: drawn in even more of the young, responsible folk and the people who respect what he did in the Peace Corps. But the real reason McGovern’s moving way up in the polls is that more and more people get sick and tired of the war. We just don’t believe we can win it, anymore. And that hurts.
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.