Mary looked about her for the ticket counter. Some committee of Pennsylvania Railroad officials had installed a modern booth that mimicked those of the new international airport at Idlewild. Perhaps they had been embarrassed, in the age of Sputnik, that the railroad connection of Manhattan to the West was begun in a model of a two-thousand-year-old European bathhouse; in any event they had suspended a glass oval on thin steel wires, like a clamshell in a church.
Having bought her ticket, Mary found herself with ten minutes before her train left. With an overnight bag only, she strolled past the chrome-trimmed interior concessions, a bar, a florist with deco lettering, Savarin’s restaurant and a tobacco shop where she asked for a pack of cigarettes. Her mouth felt dry from the martini she had drunk with Frank, and, overcoming her unease with American coins, she bought a paraffined-paper cup from a vending machine for a penny and filled it from a drinking fountain as she went down the steps from the classical waiting area to the gothic steel of the concourse below, where elegance gave way to power. In repeating loops and intersections above her head, the lattice of functional metal bent and bubbled under its glass ceiling, like the Gare St. Lazare in Paris imagined for a world more filled with possibilities. Huge steel pillars rose in bolted verticals, supporting splayed arches in a show of colossal, calculated strength.
Mary boarded her train and found a seat by the window. There was a tightness in her chest as the locomotive took the strain and jerked the coaches as it picked the current from the wire and the train crept slowly out beneath the Hudson. She gazed at the subterranean tracks and sidings that converged and crossed like veins and arteries in the lamp-lit darkness; she saw the abandoned trucks and rusting engines she had noticed in the Stygian fog in her entrance to the gridlocked city. Fifth and 58th; Sixth and 21st; Seventh and 34th: she thought of all the factors, all the sums and all the calculation in the right-angled world that she was leaving, where everyone was searching for a new prime number.
Suddenly the daylight burst into the carriage, the train gathered speed; they were out in fields, in countryside, with a high blue sky above them, cool and free, shaken loose from the tyranny of the grid, and she felt the blocked air rush out of her with a gasp.
Chapter 11
Frank was on the afternoon press flight from New Mexico to Minneapolis, where Senator Kennedy was due to speak at a Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. It was a day with no slack in the schedule, but the reporters had just had four days’ rest in California and many of them had found it difficult to fill the time.
Frank went down to the waterfront in San Francisco because he wanted to hear something his brother Louis had once described to him: the wild and unexpected honk of seals. In August 1945 Louis had been on a troopship in the bay, waiting to depart for the invasion of Japan. Many of those on board had already fought the Japanese in the Pacific and were finding it difficult to envisage the scale of what it might be like to fight for two years or more in Japan itself against an entrenched army on its home soil. One morning as they were laying out their gear for inspection, news reached them that United States planes had dropped atomic bombs. The ship lay at anchor in the sunshine for a week before the men were allowed to disembark; from the shallows they could hear the applauding seals. They had been ready to invade.
In New Mexico the newsmen raised their eyebrows and muttered as they climbed aboard the aircraft, shepherded along by the campaign staff anxious to deliver the candidate to Minneapolis in time, but they could not conceal their delight that the game was on again. Although he nodded and exchanged brief greetings with his colleagues in the morning, Frank did not like traveling in a pack; it went against what, to him, was the point of journalism. After he left Michigan in 1951 to take up his job in New York, he covered the mayor, the Yankees, the Mob; he was on call for fires, homicides and accidents. It was thought to be a shrewd move to put an out-of-towner on the local job; he was encouraged to find his own stories, away from the other reporters, and he liked the days he spent alone in the less-regarded areas of town. Yet everyone in the newsroom wanted to travel; the ambition of most was to be a foreign correspondent, which implied that you were either a man of education and taste, speaking a different language and charging your expensive life to the newspaper, or that you were a commando to be parachuted in to salvage truth and color from a tangled foreign conflict.
The following year Frank was taken out of the city to follow Eisenhower’s first campaign for the presidency, and one morning in the autumn of 1953 he received a call from the foreign editor, a studious man named Maxwell Johnson, asking him to step into his office.
“I’m told you speak French,” Johnson said.
“I picked up a little toward the end of the war.”
“Girls and menus? That kind of thing?”
Frank thought for a moment. “A little better than that.”
“Know where Saigon is? I hear things are going to warm up there. We’re pouring money in to help the French. They’ve got some crazy plan to lure the Vietminh out of the bush and blow them away once and for all. They’re setting a big trap. Question is: who’s going to fall into it. Normally we’d send Wes Cornish, but after three years in Korea he’s beat.”
In the newsroom Frank looked at French Indochina on the map of the Far East; he followed the course of the Mekong back into the hills and looked at the names of the cities: Phnom Penh, Da Nang, Hanoi … It was not far from places he knew; he could almost have been on leave there with men of his platoon, Billy Foy, Wexler, Douglas, Kilkline and the wretched Godley. But for its proximity to China, the country looked a secondary, marginal kind of place.
He found a room in a side street off the rue Leclerc in a large wooden house that reeked of opium. A family lived below, but all the upper rooms were let and there was a communal air about the building, with women sitting, gossiping on the stairs and landing. He had to share a bathroom with two other tenants, one of whom stole the blade from his razor if he left it on the basin. His room was spacious and cool, with wooden blinds and an immense, steady fan in the ceiling. It was easy to meet people in Saigon; the officers of the Press Liaison Service called him daily to let him know how well the French forces were progressing and to invite him up north to see for himself; two American special advisers called Barrett and Walther took him to the Croix du Sud, a restaurant with a military police post just inside the door and wire mesh over the windows against grenades. They explained the John Foster Dulles strategy of “massive retaliation” over escargots with Brouilly and navarin of lamb and pommes dauphinoises with Côtes-du-Rhône.
“There’s every kind of loser in this place,” Frank wrote in a letter to Billy Foy in New York. “At least with ‘advisers,’ you know what their game is. But I met a guy named Moone the other day, a thin streak of East Coast piss, looks like a ghost with bad skin, about twenty-five. He took me to this place the Charrette Rouge and asked me a lot of questions over the frogs’ legs. I never did discover what he wanted, but he had a bad gleam in his eye.”
It was a lackluster war. Occasionally there would be the sound of mortar and rifle fire from the outskirts, but it only happened after dark, and the French and Americans knew which side of the river to stay on and where not to go when night had fallen. “You never see the Vietminh,” Frank’s letter went on. “You can hear their weapons, and if you go north in a press plane you can see the French bombing the jungle where they think they’re hiding. Of men, women or children there’s no sign. They’re ghosts in the woods, shoeless men in the forest. They rearm their front line by carrying supplies on reinforced bicycles. This war could go on for a hundred years and the people in Saigon would hardly know. They play checkers and mah-jongg and some crazy dice game. It’s kind of picturesque, the women sitting in their loose silk pants and mollusc hats. The Americans and the Europeans drink pastis and vermouth, though you can get scotch if you ask around. The locals smoke opium and I have a friend who wants me to try it. She says you should be careful because the French
run a monopoly on the low-grade stuff.”
The friend was a lover, a twenty-year-old girl with large eyes whose Annamite name was unpronounceable to Western tongues and who had been nicknamed Tilly by her previous boyfriend, also an American. She was slim and modest, with a light touch in her fingers but a stubborn and persuasive character that revealed itself to Frank slowly over the months. She required movie magazines and chewing gum and that he should have no other lover; in return she slept in his room if he wanted it, or went back to her grandmother’s house if he did not. She liked to sit cross-legged on the edge of his bed, beneath the bundled haze of the mosquito net, and gaze at him as he typed on the Smith-Corona portable; something about the make and size of him seemed to amuse and fascinate her. She talked of how it would be when they were married.
Frank got coffee at ten at the American Legation and looked through the rival newspapers; the situation was covered mostly from Washington, where it was a matter of furious debate. The French government had long since stopped paying for its army, which was now funded by the United States; American planes and matériel followed the dollars, and naturally they needed mechanics to service them. The point at which engineers became troops was a matter of intense concern, since it would then become an American war, something not even Dulles wanted. His strategy was to present the conflict as one in which other nations must take an interest: supporters of the nationalist Vietminh were Marxist in their belief, the State Department argument ran; therefore they must be allied in some unspecified way to the Soviet Union; therefore the French must not be defeated. Dulles turned the full force of his persuasion onto Winston Churchill, a man with some record in conflict, but received in return only a lecture on colonialism and the loss of India.
The papers gave him the politics; for the local developments Frank would go before lunch for a drink with an officer in the French Sûreté. It might be Chevannes, a heavily perspiring man of about fifty, who, after handing over a list of the previous night’s arrests and charges, would turn the conversation to the question of whether Asian girls made better lovers than European, a subject in which he was indefatigably interested. Frank suggested he should try a particular half-caste girl he had been told was available for 300 piastres; coming from both cultures, she would offer scientific evidence better than anything in the Kinsey Report. On other days he would have his drink with Bretenoux, a thin man with a high color who felt homesick for his village in the Lot and would require Frank to join him in a game of boules in the courtyard.
Nowhere could a war zone have been more torpid, Frank thought, as he walked down the dusty streets with their Second Empire façades and backyard chicken runs. America was there and not there in this humid and beautiful backwater; the wishes of the Dulles brothers, the tense edicts of Langley and Foggy Bottom, the phrases such as “line of dominoes” were discounted and absorbed by the air in which they were uttered, with the smoke of opium and the steam of noodle soup from the open-backed kitchens. It was a lazy town, unwilling to confront the world; it reminded Frank a little of New Orleans, and it seemed to him a natural home for people on the run from their responsibilities.
He had not pictured himself as such a person, yet he felt liberated by the life he led. Chicago and its icy winters, the offices and streets of the Loop, seemed to have been experienced by someone from another generation, unrelated to himself. He believed he had shed the memory of the streets where he had grown up, that the war, then college had cleared his mind. Yet perhaps these things were still in him; perhaps even his attitude to Tilly, frictionless as it seemed, was influenced by the circumstances of his youth. Did she represent the rejection of a Catholic upbringing whereby he was meant to marry an Italian, or did she show that he still had a need to grab something wherever he went, something to show he was not just another self-invented man with no belongings in the world? He believed neither of these things, yet Saigon was certainly solving something; and how could you feel relieved unless you had been in pain?
The city made him feel he could be many people, that in his middle thirties he was nowhere near the finished version of himself, and that even if he ever got there, that too might turn out to be provisional—not a stable compound of temperament and experience, but a bundle of momentary inclinations.
Frank crumbled his roll onto the table and sipped the ice water. Kennedy’s speech in Minneapolis had a little more Democratic self-congratulation than usual for the sake of his Jefferson-Jackson Day audience, but otherwise varied little from the set routine. Alcohol was not served, and when Frank returned to his hotel he went to the bar.
After two whiskey sours he felt better, and was thinking of going up to his room; he was returning to New York the following morning and had arranged to see Mary in the evening. From the reception area he heard an English voice.
“Can you tell me where the downtown is?”
“What exactly are you looking for, sir?” said the desk clerk.
“Anything. Some sign of life.”
The voice, though neither raised nor slurred, was recognizably Charlie van der Linden’s.
“What do you mean there’s no downtown? There must be.” Charlie’s manner was playful rather than abusive. Frank found a smile twitching at his lips, but made no move from his seat.
It was inevitable, he thought, that Charlie, thwarted in his search for action, would resort to the hotel bar, and a few moments later he was aware of a tall presence and an English voice muttering amiably beneath its breath a few feet away.
Frank turned to him in the cocktail gloom. “Welcome to Minneapolis, pal.”
Charlie peered for a minute, partly because it was so dark, partly, Frank thought, because he was trying to remember his name. “Frank!” he said triumphantly. “Christ, it’s nice to see you.”
Frank had never before come face-to-face with a man with whose wife he was sleeping, but the tone of Charlie’s voice was familiar enough: it was that of a lonely traveler whose problems have suddenly been solved.
“Have a drink,” Charlie said. “God, what a place.”
Frank thought any sign of reserve might seem suspicious, so he accepted the drink and the prospect of a long evening. It was the last Kennedy event Charlie was required to attend before the convention, and he was clearly relieved that the end was in sight.
“You heading back to Washington?”
“You bet. Even the tedium of the Embassy’s preferable to … this.” Charlie made a gesture that included hotels, travel, politics, teetotal dinners and all of Minnesota.
But your wife won’t be there, thought Frank. She’ll be naked in my bed.
Charlie looked at him and smiled. Frank looked back into Charlie’s face. Its handsome lines were starting to break up; the cheeks were badly shaved, there were gathering pouches on the jaw and fleshy rings developing beneath the eyes. Frank smiled back candidly.
He drank quickly, to quell his misgivings and to catch up with Charlie. He started to grow used to the strange nature of his situation; the guilt began to ebb. It reminded him of what he had told Roxanne about killing a man. After a while it feels like everything you do: it feels like nothing at all.
By the time the barman said he would like to close up, all that Frank felt toward Charlie was a sentimental warmth, a desire to put his arm around him in a sincere embrace. When Charlie mentioned the supply of scotch in his room, Frank accepted with vehement gratitude. By two in the morning, he was even drunker than Charlie; he was sitting on the edge of the bed, haranguing him about the FBI.
“This beautiful country … Such a time in its life. But those bastards, you know, they killed my best friend … They almost finished my career. They’re in everything. A mist you can’t see.”
“I know,” said Charlie, blinking at Frank’s passion. “There was someone I met in Vietnam—”
“Yeah, what the hell were you doing in Vietnam? I meant to ask you.”
“We were in Tokyo at the time. The Ambassador was getting leant on by t
he Foreign Office in the usual way. Eden was getting an earful from Dulles about why didn’t Britain join in. And we’d just finished in Malaya, given up India, we didn’t want to get involved in a French problem, particularly when they’d been so useless in the war.”
“Sure. But how’d you get up to Dien Bien Phu?”
Charlie was leaning against a warehouse off the boulevard de la Somme, overlooking the Saigon River, where American planes were being unloaded from transport ships by the light of flares. He had been taken to dinner at a restaurant on the boulevard Charner and afterward felt the need to see something for himself, without Barrett and Walther interpreting everything for him through the lens of American interest. He had asked if they could organize for him to go up to Dien Bien Phu, where the French were preparing for a decisive head-on conflict with the Vietminh, but they seemed unwilling. He thought that perhaps they had scented a gestating disaster, which made him more curious, but without the help of an authorized agency he could not make the trip. His British colleagues had been correct but uncooperative, and he had just arrived at the stage in his life when he was becoming reckless.
He was mildly drunk on French wine and had his fortune told with cards on top of an upturned crate in front of a warehouse. “You will be a rich man,” the fortune-teller told him in his almost incomprehensible French-Vietnamese. “You will be rich in love. You will not live to old age. Many dangers lie ahead.” Seldom could a greasy jack of clubs have been so eloquent, Charlie thought, as he produced some coins from his pocket and moved off.