A Nameless Night
Let’s choose a nameless night, sometime in late 1967. The movie Camelot has opened. I see a matinee at The Boulevard Twins. When, in their passion, Guinevere and Lancelot betray King Arthur, I’m salty-eyed. When King Arthur finds these two beloveds have impaled him on a dilemma, my tears spill. But when his disloyal Knights ride horses over the Round Table—the Round Table, symbol of equality, harmony, peace—fracturing, then splintering, its splendor, I sob outright—noisy, uncontrollable, inconsolable. Theatre patrons turned to shush me in the dark. I, too, am shocked at my intense response.
It takes almost fifty years to recognize that what was cracking under those hooves was our dining room table.
•••
The surface of landscapes comes from below. The sixties shifted our tectonics. Crack to chasm to canyon broke open, unspannable.
Our dining room went nightmare, its rosy walls grayed, then blackened with flung blood. The weight and rage and passion of the fight shook us to the core: warring over war. No sidelines. Anywhere you stood, earth tore.
•••
That nameless night, I come home for a hoped-for ordinary dinner, knowing dinners are no longer ordinary. That nameless night, one of many identical preceding nights, one of many repetitively following nights, but with its own specific wounds.
•••
Mom and Dad are drinking martinis with dinner; John sips bourbon. Since earning his gold watch for not smoking or drinking until his eighteenth birthday last February, he is making up for lost time. Mom and Dad make no bones about this. I drink a Tab; milk for Jim and Ro. I can’t wait to tell everyone about seeing Camelot, but before I can, Mom says:
“We’re looking forward to seeing Mary at Thanksgiving, John.”
“Oh well, she’s really busy, Mom. Papers due, her job and everything.”
“Did you invite her?”
“No—I—that is—”
“We haven’t seen her in a while. Is everything—?”
“She’s tired of taking the bus, okay? I told her I can’t support GM and big oil and what they do to people, and if someone as smart as she is doesn’t understand. then it’s not my fault. Anyway, I have to practice. I may have a gig at the Scholar.” John says.
I’m impressed. “On the West Bank? That’s great, John. I heard Leo Kottke there. When? Are you singing, too? Need backup?”
“Just guitar. Pretty soon. I’ll let you know. A guy’s teaching me fiddle, too.”
Mom dabs her lips with her paper napkin. (Only Dad merits a cloth one.)
“How are your classes coming, Son?” Dad wants to know. Uh-oh.
“Frankly, not worth going to. The profs are all windbags. Textbooks dull as the students. Nothing’s relevant.”
Dad puts down his knife. “What are we paying for, then? If you don’t go to class, your student deferment won’t hold.”
“I’ve told you, Dad, I’m not deferring service. I’m never going.”
“If you’re drafted, you’ll go. In this house we respect the law.”
“Not if it’s an unjust law.”
“If you don’t like it, get a degree, get elected and change the law. Until then you must obey it.”
“I must obey my conscience. At least that’s what you taught me.”
Jim and Ro and I exchange looks. Better bolt our food and beat a retreat.
We were accustomed to friction—it gave a discussion its traction. Dad played devil’s advocate to sharpen up our minds. But at some point, things took an ugly turn, as if he had sons to burn.
“I understand if you’re afraid, Son—”
“I’m not afraid. I don’t want to go to war.”
“No one wants to go to war. We were as anti-war as you kids. But Hitler had to be stopped.”
“There’s no Hitler in Viet Nam. It’s civil war in a tiny country that’s no threat to us, of no strategic importance—”
All my life, Father had Known Best. But John had a point.
“He’s right, Dad. It was different for you. I read Anne Frank, but—”
“Civil war my eye. They fall to the Communists, other countries will topple.”
Dad’s ignoring me.
“‘The Domino Theory is bull,” John growls.
“Watch your language. It happened with the Nazis.”
“Maybe Communism’s fairer anyway. Equal distribution of wealth instead of clutched in a few dirty hands.”
“You want another Berlin Wall? Missiles in Cuba, fifty miles from us? This isn’t a chess game, Son. Where’s your common sense? You won the ‘Voice of Democracy Contest’ last year, for Pete’s sake.”
Mom beams. “We’re still proud, Dear. Why, when our representative read your speech into the Congressional Record—”
“That’s what opened my eyes, Dad. When I went to the regionals in Chicago, I took myself to the South Side. Horrifying. And after the finals in DC, I saw the slums. In our nation’s capital. You can’t believe how people live—the filth, the windows blasted out. Democracy’s just words.”
“That’s my point! You have to back it up with your courage and your service if you’re called up.”
“I’ll do community service, but I won’t carry a gun.”
“See, Dad? He’s like our Prussian ancestor, right? Who threw down his rifle and wouldn’t fight any more? It’s in our blood.”
I’m siding with John? But I’ve never seen Dad so fierce, so unyielding—bullying John. As John bullied me. As the US bullies that little country. Did I wish it on him? Would Dad bully me if I found the balls to disagree?
But John, that man of peace, is a wicked fighter.
“Tom might die over there! Don’t you even care?”
A short pause as his blade finds its mark. “I am proud of his choice. Your brother is a brave man. Know why he became a paratrooper? He was afraid of heights. Jumped out of planes ’til he got over it. And then he enlisted.”
“I can’t help it if he’s a fool.”
How could John say that? I yank his arm. “John! Shut up!”
“He’s in Viet Nam defending your freedom to be a heartless ignoramus.”
This is bad. “Dad, please—”
They butt heads like creatures prehistoric, shaking the very ground. Mom’s face is a braid of heartache. We glut our bellies, gnaw our nails, fall mute as their voices rise.
“Tom’s not afraid to fight.”
“I’m not afraid to fight; I just want to fight for what I believe in. This war isn’t even declared.”
“We’re not privy to classified information, as it should be. You don’t know beans.”
“I know it cost 4.5 billion dollars this year, money that should go to health and housing and education, not slaughtering peasants scrambling in the hills, defending their lives. Not, by the way, holing up like you guys in some Navy destroyer.”
I cannot breathe for shock. Our hallowed dinner table has degenerated into desolate foreign terrain two strangers battle over. Each deluded, convinced he can convince the other, if only he hurts him enough.
Dad is silent, one hand a fist, temple veins visibly pulsing. Don’t have a heart attack, please. Don’t slug John.
“You. Don’t. Know. A Damn Thing. We were not holed up. I was on deck every day supervising the guns, the men. North Atlantic. South Pacific. Omaha Beach. Japan. You think I don’t know what war is? What it does? We watched the Susan B. Anthony sink. You watch a ship die, it’s sacred.
“Two weeks after the A-bomb I was in Hiroshima. Just ash and wilted steel. People picking through rubble like blackbirds in a wheat field. The blast drove a stem of straw into concrete. I’ll never forget. Just sticking out.
“But love of my God and my country and my family is stronger even than that, Son. Even than war.”
“Veterans don’t even believe in this war. They marched on Washington—a hundred thousand—”
I want to slug him myself. “John. Let it alone. Can we sing a little?”
John ignores me, goes into the kitchen to refill his glass.
Stunned into silence from the start, Jim and Ro grab their escape. “What say we do the dishes, Ro? May we be excused?”
A nod suffices. They clear the table and head into the kitchen. I know they want to calm John down, and I know it’s useless. I want to leave, too, but my own delusion is that I think I can help somehow. Explain them to each other. Remind them, maybe, who they are. Or were.
John comes back waving a box of plastic wrap.
“Dow Chemical! How can we even have this Saran Wrap in the house?”
He throws it on the floor.
“Pick that up. Show your mother some respect.”
John retrieves it. “These are the people who make napalm, Dad. Which they blast on mothers and children like scalding honey. The screams, the smell of burning flesh—”
Mom pales, stands shakily. “I’m going to get a little bicarb of soda, and go on up. Good night.”
She leaves.
“I hate this! I hate this!” I shout. “If anybody really loved peace, they’d shut up!”
I run upstairs, bang my door shut.
Underneath my feet their voices boom: Dad’s thunderous professional artillery alternates with John’s higher submachine-gun staccato.
Though only some words rise, all of the emotion does.
“Values…crapper!”
“…human life.”
I try to read. Shut up shut up we plug our ears, we swallow our fears and shut up.
“…Your mother…you’re no help…Sleep ’til noon…job…discipline!”
“…Bellyful!…military academy…demerits…federal inspection…”
Oh God, should I go down? Can I do anything? I crack open my bedroom door as John bellows:
“Only difference is you don’t have to memorize Thomas Aquinas and Advanced Calculus and two centuries of English literature in the jungle. Just shoot people and come home in a body bag.”
“Thin ice, Buster. Skating on thin ice.”
“Sorry if facts upset you. Suffering upsets me. Did your heart stop feeling when you had your heart attack?” Oh, John.
“That’s enough! Get out of my house. Stay somewhere else tonight. Maybe in Canada with the flock of chickens.” Oh, Dad.
“I won’t run away. I’ll get Conscientious Objector status and stay here and fight.”
“Not here. Not tonight.”
“Fine.”
The front door slams like a crack of thunder. Like a cracking table.
•••
I rummage in the rubble of those years piecing out portraits from the chips and crush. What could sap away Dad’s love for his son? A son’s love for his father?
Dad must have seen his ghost in John: feelings it took a lifetime to stifle or to train or drain; terrors Dad had calmed in himself by leading his men in the war. But he couldn’t give John orders or reason with him or lead him anywhere.
John must have seen his ghost in Dad: he fought like someone who would never give up fighting, who never saw the irony of waging war for peace. Like a guerilla with grenades and sniper shots, he ambushed Dad, goaded him, threw human history in his face. Dad crushed him like a cigarette.
From the firestorm of blame, table linen burst in flame. Who was right was all that mattered. Childhood, like a china vessel, shattered.