Zoe
On my wedding day, I was awake before dawn. Lying in the bed of my childhood, I couldn’t help thinking of the biblical advice to “put away childish things” as I reminded myself that next time I slept in this room it would no doubt be with Spence as a guest in my parents’ home. The subtle light from the rising sun played over the things I had left behind even before I headed off to college. The expensive and collectible dolls—more Mom’s attempt to “normalize” me than a reflection of my own interest—are gathered on the shelves that Dad built for me.
Our little girl—all grown up and soon to be married.
In so many ways my parents are the products of another era—an era of rules and order rather than the chaos that seems to rule my times. They built a life based on certain values, certain beliefs. Dad’s inherited fortune from his father and grandfather, who made their money in the stock market, has given us a life most people only dream of living. Yet every Monday through Friday morning, Dad heads downtown to his office in Lower Manhattan to play Monopoly with real money, and helps out the economy by employing several dozen people to play the game with him.
Meanwhile, Mom has filled her days and weeks and years with traditional roles of her era—raising two children, lunch with “the girls,” bridge in the afternoon and the opera at night and enough hours spent in charity work to qualify for a full-time career. Theirs is a solid marriage—a fine example for me to follow. I couldn’t help but wonder if Spence and I had any chance of being so lucky. The fact was that ever since I’d gone out to California with Spence’s parents to welcome him home, I had been wrestling with second thoughts. Prewedding jitters, my mother assured me. Nothing so frivolous, I told myself.
Spence has changed. Or maybe the world has changed us both. Outwardly, he’s still the same quiet, patient, gentle man I’ve been unable to stay away from since Ty’s funeral. But inside, the man who got off the plane in San Francisco and limped across the tarmac to where I stood with Marie and Hal was not at all the same man who had boarded that bus in Madison. It was as clear to me as if he had worn a billboard.
Even his physical appearance has changed—it’s more mature and hard, all traces of the boy gone. His features have lost a little of that original tightness and suspicion he wore in those first days back. But that day of his return the deep furrows and valleys of his face were a road map of everything he’d seen over there. Even now the change is still there in him. He’s lost that certainty and assurance of who he is and what he believes that I’d come to respect.
After a few weeks I finally understood that what I was really seeing that day was disbelief. I’ll never forget how he described it when I was finally able to get him to talk about how it felt to be home. “It felt like stepping off that plane into a world as foreign to me as Oz was to Dorothy.”
Of course, I didn’t know any of that as we stood on that tarmac, and I hesitated, afraid that everything had changed. That we would never find our way back to each other.
“Go,” Marie urged when I glanced her way, wanting to give her the first chance to hold him. “Go,” she said again, and smiled as Hal took her arm.
I didn’t need to be told three times. I ran toward Spence, my sandals slapping crazily on the pavement, my long skirt tangling around my calves and ankles until I grasped the folds of it in one hand and raised it to my knees so I could cover the distance faster. When I reached him, he wrapped his arms around me and buried his face in the crevice between my shoulder and cheek. The cane clattered as it hit the hard pavement.
When his parents joined us, Spence released me and folded his arms around first his mom and then his dad. Marie blubbered her relief and fussed over the obvious aftermath of his wound, while Hal retrieved the cane and handed it back to Spence. Spence laughed as he assured all of us that the cane was window dressing. “I’ve got some physical therapy ahead of me, but I’m luckier than most.”
Perhaps realizing that he’d dampened the spirit of the occasion, Spence struck a pose and grinned. “Makes me look dapper, don’t you think?”
Then he focused on his father. The two men stared at each other for a long moment. Hal’s eyes were red-rimmed but dry as he straightened and offered his son a military salute. Spence returned the salute, and as he hugged his father, I saw the shuddering sob that rocketed across his shoulders and down his back. He was home. He was safe. But how could he ever be the same? And how could I ever be anything but a constant reminder of the other side—those who had protested and defected and refused to serve?
At the hotel, where Marie and I shared one room and Spence and Hal took the connecting room, I begged off joining the three of them for lunch and headed upstairs. I told myself that I wanted to give Spence this moment with his parents. I told myself that we would have plenty of time now—years and years together. But when I entered the room and closed the door, I started to shake and then I started to sob.
“Zoe?”
I didn’t answer. Spence tapped again and opened the connecting door between my room and his. “Zoe.” This time the speaking of my name was an overture, a gesture toward peace. I turned but didn’t look at him, certain that my face would reveal just how frightened I was for us now that he was back.
He crossed the room and put his arms around me. “Let’s go for a walk,” he whispered and I nodded.
We walked mostly in silence, occasionally commenting on one of the many painted-lady houses that lined the streets or the quaint sound of the cable-car bells. Later at a café table in Ghirardelli Square, we shared cups of rich, foamy hot chocolate. In spite of the fact that it was June, the breeze off the bay was chilly. Spence pulled his chair close to mine and draped his arm around my shoulders.
“Zoe, it’s going to take me a little while to…” He shook that thought off and began again. “It all seems pretty unreal right now.” He smiled and ran his fingers over my face. “I keep thinking that all this is nothing more than a dream and I’ll wake up—back there.”
I caught his fingers in mine and kissed them. “I’m here,” I promised him, “for as long as you want me to be.”
“How about forever?” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a ring box. It was old—royal blue velvet rubbed threadbare on the corners.
He fumbled with the box, opening it and removing a simple silver band engraved with intertwined vines and flowers. “I asked Mom to bring it along with her. It was my grandmother’s,” he explained, holding it out to me. “Or we can buy you what you want—something more traditional with a diamond,” he hurried to add as he searched my face for some response. “I just thought…”
“When have you ever known me to be traditional?” I held out my ring finger. “I love it,” I whispered as he slid the ring into place. “And more to the point, I love you.” I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him.
When the kiss ended, he was grinning—a flash of the man I’d known before. “So that would be a ‘yes’?”
I kissed him several more times and punctuated each with a “yes.” And I ignored the niggling doubts that earlier had taken root in the recesses of my heart. The doubts that had warned me we’d both changed and would need to get to know these two new people shaped by a war we had each fought on different battlefields.
So now the day is here. At sunset Spence and I will be married in Central Park under the arching canopy of an oak tree. After dinner and dancing at the Tavern on the Green in the park, we will spend our wedding night at the Waldorf Astoria—Spence insisted.
“It’s the best, right?” he asked, and my parents had assured him it was, indeed.
Tomorrow we’ll leave for a honeymoon in Paris—a gift from my parents. By this time in three weeks, we’ll be back in Madison, where Spence will start his residency in psychiatry. I’ll go back to my job at the Legal Aid Society and set up a home for us in the small apartment we’ve found just off State Street. We’ll be married—and for the first time since his return from Vietnam, we’ll be truly alone “back in the world.”
Spencer
In the year since I’d returned from ’Nam, the sheer normality of my daily routine made my stint over there exist only in the nightmares that haunted me when I least expected them. I would dream that I was in the fields, harvesting the corn or baling the hay with Dad, and then everything would change and I would be performing surgery in a paddy. The water running with blood, the rice field littered with wounded soldiers or villagers I couldn’t rescue because my boots were mired in the muck of the field. I would wake suddenly, sitting upright, gasping for air, my body bathed in sweat. I told myself—and Zoe—that in time the dreams would go away. Normal, I assured her, laughing off her suggestion that maybe I should see about getting some help.
Zoe had moved in with Sara and two other women her last year of law school, and had decided to stay with them until after we were married. She had taken a full-time job with Legal Aid, which limited her on-campus protest activities and time with Peter Quarles and his group. I couldn’t deny that I was relieved.
For the first several months after I got back to the world, I stayed on the farm whenever I could be away from the hospital. I told Zoe that it was because I had noticed a change in Dad—he had aged and the heavy chores took a lot out of him. I told her that they were struggling—which was true—and Zoe agreed that my place was with them.
“Besides,” she joked, “the bride and groom aren’t supposed to shack up before the wedding.”
“I thought that was just the night before,” I replied with mock surprise.
“We’ll start a new tradition,” she said, and I loved her more for accepting that for the moment my folks needed me more than she did.
But my parents were only part of my reason. The truth was that I couldn’t get used to the way things had changed. The television news, the campus, everywhere I looked it seemed that people were up in arms about the war—and blaming those of us that had served. The antiwar movement even infiltrated the small rural community I’d grown up in. People who had known me my whole life were polite enough when I ran into them in the grocery or stopped for gas, but few showed any real appreciation for the job that I’d gone to do.
“It’s the times,” Dad maintained. “The war—well, folks are confused. Nobody seems able to tell us how we got mixed up in this thing to begin with.”
But in spite of all that, I kept finding new things to love about Zoe. Away from campus and the politics of war, she was the girl Ty had told me about—sweet, loving, completely unselfish in giving her help and understanding, and in sharing her obvious joy in planning the wedding. It was Zoe who was adamant that my older brother’s wife, my younger brother’s girlfriend and even my aunt Rose must have a role to play at the wedding. It was also Zoe who insisted she must have a full year to put this thing together.
“What’s so complicated?” I protested. “You get a dress and I get a suit and we book the church and minister and—”
“I have dreamed of this day practically my whole life,” Zoe replied, and when my eyebrows must have shot up in astonishment at that admission, she added, “Go ahead and laugh. Go ahead. Ty would. But the truth is that I only plan on doing this once and I want stories to tell our grandchildren.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender and ignoring the grin that spread across Mom’s face just before she turned her back to me and continued slicing strawberries into a fruit salad.
I expected Dad to offer some male support, but he was no help. He just shrugged and went back to his newspaper.
And over the next several months the traffic between Wisconsin and New York became a fairly regular thing. Zoe’s parents came to Madison and then ended up staying on the farm when the hotel overbooked and didn’t have a room for them. They returned for Thanksgiving, and we all went out there for New Year’s. Dad was blown away by the very idea that Zoe’s parents had lived in NYC practically their whole lives and never once seen the ball drop in Times Square. The six of us spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square dressed in silly party hats, rattling noisemakers and tossing confetti as the countdown began. Afterward we feasted on Nathan’s hot dogs while Dad and Mike Wingfield discussed the economy, Mom and Kay Wingfield discussed the latest doings on the soap opera they had discovered they were both devoted to and Zoe and I sat on the sidelines beaming like proud matchmakers.
On our wedding day Zoe arrived by horse-drawn hansom cab and then walked down the aisle created by the rows of white folding chairs where our guests stood and smiled and murmured their comments to one another. Sara sang the song she’d written for the occasion—her wedding gift to us—as Zoe’s dad offered his arm and led her toward the altar.
After years of turmoil and chaos, once again everything seemed possible. Once again the world felt the hope and promise that had been wiped away in the hail of bullets that had taken the Kennedys and the Reverend King. It was a new world, I thought, as my eyes met Zoe’s. And there was no one I wanted to share the adventure of discovering this new world with more than this woman. I stepped forward a minute before my cue and, without my cane, walked more than halfway up the aisle to meet Zoe.