I remained on the pier until dusk. Gulls wheeled overhead, their wings tipped with fire. A new group of fishermen arrived, and bathers came to the beach after work.
As I got up to leave, the mermaid from the aquarium appeared in her street clothes: a cotton dress and sandals. She wore a seashell necklace. Her hair was still green, combed back wet. As graceful as she had been in the water, on land she seemed disjointed, slightly pigeon-toed. She had plain features and pale skin. She walked to the beach and removed her dress, beneath which was a blue bathing suit. I would have thought the last thing she wanted to do was swim, but she dove right into the water, swam about fifty yards underwater, emerged briefly, then continued on beyond the buoys and disappeared.
I scanned the harbor for a long time, until I risked missing my flight. The moon had risen by then. But she didn’t reappear.
Perhaps, I thought, hailing a taxi, that wouldn’t happen until morning, when she had to return to work.
IN SAN FRANCISCO, I found two letters that had never reached me in Vietnam: one from my father’s lawyer, which had first been forwarded from Boston to San Francisco, and one from Lena. The letters must have been held at Central Command in Saigon until some clerk, discovering I had been hospitalized and discharged in Honolulu, sent them back to San Francisco.
Pericles Arvanos’s letter, postmarked in Athens in March, was, as usual, all business: because I had left school, and had not been using the Boston apartment, he requested my current address. He also wanted to know if my allowance should be wired to another bank: the one in Boston reported that my checking account had been inactive for months. Apparently my blip had grown so faint on my father’s radar screen that it actually caught his attention. Of course my father had no idea I’d been sent to Vietnam. I’m sure he would have thought me a fool, putting myself in a position to be drafted and nearly killed. To his credit, I had never heard him wax patriotic, about the United States, Greece, or anyplace else. He was apolitical and unsentimental, as indifferent to flag-waving as to religious piety. During the Second World War, he had served briefly as a seaman in the merchant marine, running U-boat blockades in the North Atlantic; later he insisted it was just like any other stint at sea, except the pay was worse.
In truth, I preferred the letter from his attorney to another cryptic postcard. Fortunately (as it turned out) I didn’t reply at once, though I had already decided I didn’t want any more money from my father. All those years, there had been a disconnect between the financial support he provided and the emotional support he withheld. I had one pressing financial need—the tuition for my final semester of college—and that was already covered by my veterans’ benefits.
Lena’s letter was devastating. I tried to phone her, but the Morettis’ number had been disconnected. I would have to wait to see her; I had already booked a flight to New York for the day before Thanksgiving, with a brief stopover in Chicago. On the flight east, the American continent below me for the first time in a year—the desert, the Rockies, the lights of cities like mica—I reread her letter.
Carl was still nosediving. Picking up in the morning and drinking into the night. He was suspended from the police force. Irene took a job at Alexander’s, demonstrating vacuum cleaners. Every half hour she poured dust onto a square of carpet and vacuumed it. Mrs. Moretti also had to get a job, working for an insurance agent in a walk-in storefront. The widow of a Fire Department captain who dies in the line of duty receives a decent pension, but not enough to offset a large mortgage, loans, and lots of medical expenses. Mrs. Moretti couldn’t hold the job, anyway. Her hands shook. Her hair was turning white. She started smoking again after twenty years. Lena was a junior now at Brooklyn College, living at home. With her aunt and mother out working, she ended up doing the housework and seeing her cousins off to school. She was dying to get away. She had been accepted as a transfer student at Georgetown, but couldn’t afford the tuition. As for Bruno, he had graduated from Penn in three years. They awarded him a B.S. and an M.S. at the same time and put him on a fast track for his Ph.D., with instant tenure awaiting him. He was a prodigy. He lived in special housing and got shuttled around with other disabled students, but he was doing what he always wanted to do. Something Lena could only dream of.
At O’Hare Airport I made a phone call and was excited to hear a familiar voice on the other end of the line. An hour later, my Checker cab pulled up in front of a big brick house on a colorless street in Cicero. I walked up the flagstone path to a door flanked by dusty evergreens. When I rang the doorbell, a dog barked. A gray-haired woman with thin lips opened the door. She wore a blue woolen dress. The dog was a German shepherd that sniffed my hand.
“Xeno,” Evgénia said, embracing me.
In the ten years since I had last seen her, she had married and been widowed. After I went to boarding school, I rarely heard from her. That first year there were birthday and Christmas cards, and then nothing. A letter I sent to her Brooklyn address was returned. Several times over the years I wanted to contact her, but didn’t act on it. Then, when I was drafted, I felt a more urgent need to find her, but didn’t learn her address until I was already in Vietnam.
She was running the failing nightclub on LaPointe Street she had inherited from her late husband, a fellow Albanian named Zoran Melkind. Melkind had been a bookie in the postwar years. Then he opened a nightclub. When he died of a stroke, Evgénia learned how much they were in debt.
“I made my choices and I have to live with them,” she said over a pot of black tea. “Zoran Melkind and I had some good years, but he wasn’t honest with me. I came out here soon after you went away to school. I worked for two families. At the second, Zoran was the kids’ uncle. He asked me out. I could have been a domestic the rest of my life. I wasn’t so young anymore. So when he proposed marriage, I accepted.” She patted my hand. “I’m sorry. Here you were a soldier, who lived through God knows what, and I’m telling you my troubles.”
“You always listened to my troubles.”
“Well, we have other things to talk about. Let me get my bag and we’ll go out for lunch.”
As a child, I had never visited Evgénia’s home. Walking through her house now, I saw familiar touchstones: an aquarium filled with fantails; jade plants and potted palms; and alpine photographs. The furniture was dark and heavy. In the living room there were black-and-white shots of the tallest mountains in Albania: Gramoz, Jezérce, and Korab, whose twin peaks were home to the two-headed eagle on the Albanian flag. The Albanians call their country Shqipri, “land of the eagles,” and when I was a boy Evgénia told me that this two-headed eagle, the largest in the world, divided his time between the two peaks of Mount Korab. He had golden plumage and coal-black eyes. When he looked at the sun, his eyes turned into diamonds. Before he died, he drank from a river of fire and went up in flames—like the phoenix—leaving only the four diamonds behind in his nest. The man who found them, Evgénia concluded, would live forever.
ON THANKSGIVING DAY Lena and I had dinner at a Moroccan restaurant on Broadway. Lena was a strict vegetarian now. But she didn’t eat much. Bruno was being driven up from Philadelphia, and the next day we would all celebrate Thanksgiving at the apartment Mrs. Moretti and Lena had moved into. It was in a run-down neighborhood in Kingsbridge, a block from Van Cortland Park.
Lena was wearing a black sweater and jeans. Fastened with a black barrette, her hair shone brightly. She was twenty-one now, a year and a half younger than me, but we both seemed older. It was a clear cold day and we had walked for hours, through Central Park, up along the Hudson, and back across town. Lena was like a sister to me, and from the moment we’d met at Grand Central, as she waved smiling and hurried through the crowd into my arms, I wished that weren’t the case.
She had brought me up to date on the previous few months.
“Irene finally split, taking the kids to her parents’ house in Bayside. After that, Carl drove Mom and me crazy. He brought home other drunks. Fought with the neighbors. To
taled his car. Mom pleaded with Irene to help, but Irene wouldn’t come near him. Then one day he disappeared. A week later, a woman from a real estate agency knocked on our door, all cheerful, to inform us that Carl had sold his half of the house. The new owners would be moving in the first of the month. Mom said it was time for us to get out of there, too. She sold our half and rented this apartment. It’s cramped, but, hey. For Mom, life’s simpler. For me, it’s difficult. I have no privacy. No social life.” She pushed aside her plate. “I have to get away, Xeno. And I need to make sure I have the credits for veterinary school. But, as a transfer student, I would only receive a token scholarship from Georgetown.”
The waiter brought us a pot of mint tea, and I filled our cups.
“I can give you the money for tuition,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know I’ve been getting an allowance from my father. I don’t need it anymore. I’ll instruct his lawyer to wire the money to a bank account in Washington, where you can draw on it.”
She looked at me in disbelief. “You’re serious.”
“Once my father sends the money, it’s mine.”
“But what will you live on?”
“I have some money put away. And I get veterans’ pay now. Lena, your family took me in when I was a boy. Without all of you, I don’t know what I would have done.” I took her hand across the table. “Let me give something back, now that I can.”
The next day, when we told her, Mrs. Moretti was also hesitant. “I can’t let you do this,” she said to me.
Bruno stepped in gently. “Mom, it’s between Xeno and Lena. He knows what he’s doing.”
Bruno had, literally, become the man of the family. Physically he looked as if the wind could carry him off: his wispy hair and transparent skin, the tweed jacket that swam on him, his shoes with the corrective heels; but his voice was forceful, confident. And, despite his youth, it carried authority. University life agreed with him. He was thriving, despite his infirmities. In that competitive, rarefied world, even in the company of senior faculty he was nearly always the smartest person in the room. He knew it, and they knew it, and few doubted that, in time, he would also become the most accomplished person in the room. The only question was whether his health would hold up.
Mrs. Moretti hugged me. By now, her hair was completely white. Though thin, it was carefully coiffed. And she had put on a festive green dress. Pinned to her breast was a gold brooch Mr. Moretti had given her, a salamander with lapis-chip eyes. “Xeno,” she said, on the verge of tears, “you’ll always be a member of our family. Thank God you’re home safe.”
“I’m happy to be here—more than you know.”
“But you look so tired. And you’re white. Bruno told me about your wound. Did the army give you decent care?”
“It was fine. I saw a doctor on my own in San Francisco. He checked me out.”
“That’s good.” I could see her mind was wandering. “Did you bring your medals, like I asked you?”
She examined them closely. “Frank would’ve been so proud of you.”
She fell silent. In the short time I’d been there, I saw how difficult it was for her to focus on anything. “My cousin Nat was in the V.A. hospital in Newark after the war,” she said abruptly, coming back from wherever she’d gone. “He was wounded in Sicily.”
After dessert, Bruno and I took our coffee to the window. There was a pan with bird feed on the fire escape and two pigeons were pecking. While I sat on the sill and he in an easy chair, his bad leg propped on a stool, he told me about his continuing research into extinction and its earliest indicators. His main interests had remained the same since childhood and were now his life’s work. His fervor was as great as ever, stoked by the sheer volume, and sophistication, of the information available to him. Facts that I found overwhelming led him to concoct ever more practical means of action; even then, as a doctoral candidate, he was revising the statistical models and methodologies in his field.
“Until the eighteenth century,” he said, “an average of .25 animal species per year became extinct. In the nineteenth century, it jumped to one species per year—and that was considered a big jump. Today the rate of extinction is one thousand species per year. By 2000 it will be 40,000—110 per day. And that’s a conversative estimate. In our lifetime, the hippopotamus, the gorilla, and the polar bear may all be gone. Twenty percent of the birds, twenty-three percent of mammals. Fifty percent of the turtles—an animal so durable it can live for centuries. As for plants, one a day now becomes extinct, and that will double in twenty-five years.” He shook his head. “In any other branch of science, figures like these could only be termed catastrophic. But when we say that, we’re accused of crying wolf.”
“Why, when you’ve got the data?”
“Oh, it’s not the data. People don’t want to hear the word ‘catastrophe.’ To them, that’s drama, not science. In fact, in this situation, it couldn’t be more scientific.”
There was dismay, not bitterness, in Bruno’s voice.
“All we can do is save as many species as possible,” he went on. “I don’t want to spend my life writing postmortems—or obituaries. Ever hear of the wisent?”
I shook my head.
“It was the European bison—but even unluckier than its American cousin. The last wild wisent was hunted down in the Bialowiecza Forest in Poland on February 19, 1921. The last sea mink, a shy, beautiful creature, was harpooned off Greenland on April 2, 1860. The one surviving Réunion Island sheldgoose, a multicolored ground bird, died in captivity on Christmas Day, 1710. It’s obscene when we can pinpoint the last member of any species, and the exact date of its death, which is the death of all those that came before it. Most species die off anonymously. A species down to its last hundred members is on a precipice. Right now, I’m tracking a couple that are teetering: the wild Bactrian camel and the nomadic Saiga antelope, which roams the desert steppes from Iran to Mongolia. The Chinese poach it for its horns, which they grind into aphrodisiacs. You know what tipped us off to the Saiga’s disappearance? The disturbance in the food chain. A proliferation of the sagebush and saltwort it feeds on, and the fact its main predator, the red wolf, was attacking domestic sheep. Only later were Saiga herds sighted that should have been forty strong and instead were down to six head.” He sighed. “But enough. I want to know what you’re doing. After all you’ve been through—are you really okay?”
“I’m going back to school. To get my degree. As for the war, I’ll give you the short version.”
The war Bruno was fighting interested me more. The human race had yet to render itself extinct; perhaps the animals were just a dry run. Once you believed animals were insensate things, disposable, of utilitarian value only, it wasn’t so hard to move on to people.
Riding back to the airport in Chicago, I had passed the ruins of the old stockyards. They were demolished the previous summer, but at twilight, with dust clouds sifting into the smoky sky, it was as if the wrecking balls and bulldozers had just finished their work, leveling the vast holding pens, cattle walks, and slaughterhouses, where blood ran ankle-deep on the killing floors. The air was dense with the spirits of the animals that had passed through there. Someone like my grandmother, who could detect an ailing pigeon in a crowded park, would have been overwhelmed in that place. The blood heaviness was still palpable, misting over the lake, clouding the car windows, streaking the horizon. I felt as if I would choke on it.
“Science is on the march in Vietnam, too,” I concluded sarcastically, rising from the windowsill. “They’re napalming whole villages, Bruno. Entire swaths of jungle. Frying every living thing by the square mile.”
He was staring past me, out the window. Since he was a boy, when he was truly upset he grew silent. Finally he reached for my arm and pulled me down and embraced me.
In the living room Lena was sitting alone on the sofa, immersed in the Georgetown course book.
I was happy to see thi
s. But I was also sad. It was not the first time Mrs. Moretti had declared me a member of the family; but it felt as if I had officially cemented my role by helping Lena out financially. I would always be like a sibling to her. As it was, I had long feared that if I initiated a relationship with her which didn’t work out, my ties to the family, and my friendships with her and Bruno, would evaporate.
I was taking the last shuttle to Boston, at ten. After I said my goodbyes—and promised Bruno I would visit him in Philadelphia—Lena walked me downstairs. We stood in front of the building, the wind buffeting us, the Broadway subway screeching on the elevated tracks a block away. She looked so beautiful at that moment. I didn’t want to leave her. I wished we had more time alone. I noticed then that she was wearing her gold locket, engraved L.M.; either she had slipped it out of her sweater or had just put it on.
Following my gaze, she smiled faintly. “You were admiring my mother’s brooch,” she said. “My father gave it to her, but told her not to wear it until he died. She’s worn it every day since.”
That seemed a mysterious request for a straight-ahead type like her father. “Why was that?”
“I asked, but she wouldn’t talk about it. At my father’s forty-day mass, I asked one of the men from his squad. He told me that some firemen wear a salamander amulet. My father’s amulet was pinned inside his slicker when he died. He gave my mother that brooch years ago.” She shook her head. “My mother’s not altogether with us anymore. You saw it, I know you did.”
“She’s taken a lot of hits.”
“I know. But I still have to get on with my life.”
She put her arms around me, then rose up and kissed my cheek. “I’m glad you’re back safe, Xeno. Thanks for everything.”