Prince of Peace (68 page)

She leaned against me, and I felt the tension drain out of her. "You mean I can?" she asked. "I really can?"

"What, go back to painting?"

She nodded.

"Darling, you must."

Her arms went around me. "Oh, Durk, you know me, don't you? You take care of me. No one takes care of me like you do."

"That's my job, love. I'm your husband."

"You're my best friend."

"Same thing."

"It's why you put up with me."

"I put up with you because I love you, Caro."

"Oh, Durk." She surprised me then by kissing me passionately. We fell back upon the bed, at the mercy of her emotions, which I took to be gratitude, relief, and the old affection.

"I love you," she said. "I've never loved you more." She clung to me so fiercely I believed her.

Of course I was conscious of Michael's presence in the room beyond Molly's. I was both grateful to him—he had drawn from both of us entirely new capacities for feeling—and sorry for him because he would never experience with either of us the fullness of intimacy that Carolyn and I, to our mutual surprise, shared then. I remember restraining myself at orgasm that night and subsequent ones at Lake George so that he wouldn't hear, so that he wouldn't feel bereft.

 

That August Michael and I climbed Black Mountain, one of the highest peaks in the Adirondacks. Carolyn and Molly had gone down to Westchester to see her parents. The heat was ferocious and by the time we arrived at the top of the mountain we were soaked with perspiration and too weary at first to bother with the view. In our packs we had liquor. We sat against the rocks and traded swigs. When I finally looked out across Lake George the vista—a spine of mountains running north—made my mind reel. In my dehydrated state, the gin helped, of course. I felt instantly drunk. I faced away, but behind us was an even grander view, the Green Mountains of Vermont. I faced west, nestled in the crevice of the rock and tried to focus, for sobriety's sake, on the sun. It had fallen to within two or three hands of the horizon.

We sat in silence for a long time. Maybe we did get drunk. Maybe that was why we said those things.

He began, "All of this I will give you."

"If?" I knew the phrase, the opening of the devil's temptation of Christ. If you will fall down and worship me.

But he said, "I'll just give it to you. There."

"Thanks."

"I would though, Durk. I'd give you the whole goddamn world if I could, for what you've done for me."

"Michael, it's been a privilege. You're a fucking hero. Have a drink."

"Don't say that."

"But it's true."

"I'm not interested in being a hero to you. One time we sat in the Cloisters. Do you remember that?"

"Sure."

"We covered the same ground."

"You were a hero then too."

"Do you remember the Unicorn Tapestry?"

"The Unicorn in Captivity."

"That's right. I pointed out to you that what looked like the blood of the Unicorn was actually the juice of the pomegranate tree dripping down on it. Do you remember?"

"Yes."

"Guess what."

"It was blood after all."

"That's right. And if it wasn't for you I'd have bled to death."

"Get out of here."

"I would have, damnit. I still might." He took my sleeve. "Durk, I've got to tell you, I'm bleeding right now. I'm scared shitless. I think prison is going to do me in."

"Come off it, Michael. You know about fear. It's a reflex. It just gets you ready. Fear's your friend."

"No." He draped my neck. He was drunker than I was. "You're my friend."

"We're all your friends, hero!"

"Goddamnit, listen to me! Don't call me that. I'm telling you I'm afraid. I'm afraid because I know the stakes now. I didn't before. When we were kids, you and me, we hadn't a clue how fucking easily things get lost."

"What, like youth?"

"Like faith." He hesitated, took a breath, then declared, "I think I'm losing mine."

Michael was serious. Even in my fog I sensed that he was talking about something important, something more profound than his alienation from Church authority. Michael Maguire was nothing if not a believer. "You mean in God?" I asked carefully.

"I don't trust Him to sustain me. Isn't that the point of faith?"

"I guess." My mind went blank. After all the months of being at the mercy of this man's ordeal, of being, however willingly, at the service of his vaunted integrity, this was impossible to take in. Michael had to believe in God, he was that kind of priest, of man. He had thrown himself over Kierkegaard's edge where there was either grace or nothing. If God did not sustain him—we knew the Church wouldn't—who would or could? Then I panicked; not me, I thought, no way, bud! I can be your friend, but not the Ground of Your Being.

"In China," he said, "the guards told me that World War Three had started, remember that?"

"Yes."

"They told me New York had been hit with the A-bomb and for a time I believed them. I believed that everyone I knew and loved was dead and that half the cities of Europe and America were ash and that a cloud of radiation was hanging over the world. I believed all that, Durk, but I still believed in God. I still believed He loves us and takes care of us. But now..." He fell silent.

I became increasingly desperate. He gave me the feeling that somehow I had to rescue him—his faith!—with what I said. I wanted to recite a whole litany of reasons for belief, but I could not think of one. After several swallows of gin I swept my hand toward the horizon grandly. "But look at the view, Michael. It's the fucking world at our feet. You see any fucking radiation cloud? Hey, you wanted to give it to me as a token of your gratitude, right?"

"That's right."

"Well, that's how God feels. There it is. Mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, animals, Vermont, New-fucking-York, Cana-fucking-da, the whole fucking earth!" I slugged his shoulder. "And God puts it there for you, hero! Out of gratitude!"

"You're not listening to me."

"Because you manifest His conscience for Him, hero. Nobody does that like you do it. That's why He put you here."

"Durk, listen to me, will you? None of that means shit to me!"

"So you're having a little Dark Night of the Soul, that's all."

"No, that isn't all."

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Look, Michael, if I were you I'd be sick thinking about what's coming up. But I'm not you. More to the point, you're not me. You can deal with it."

"And you couldn't? Why the hell am I special?"

"I don't know. But you are. That's the fact of it, Michael. You have a strength the rest of us lack. You're stuck with it. And that's why more is asked of you."

"No, more is asked of everybody. If we filled the jails the war would end."

"If we filled the jails we'd fill the jails, that's all."

"Well, that makes me a chump, doesn't it?"

"Why? For manifesting God's conscience on earth? What better thing for a priest to do? You're a
priest,
Michael! That's the difference between you and me. It's a big difference. Priests sustain the rest of us. We draw on you for courage and for gentleness and for moral example. Maybe we suck life out of you. That's what we need you for. I see the problem; I see
your
problem. Who do priests draw on? Who do priests suck life out of? Who sustains the sustainer? Well, you have to answer that one. I can't."

"In theory, God does."

"He always has, right?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"It's different this time."

"Why?"

This was when he could have told me. He was silent for some moments, then took a hit of gin. "I guess because I'm older. I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid of dying. I told you. When we were kids we didn't know how easily things get lost."

I put my arm around his shoulder. "Michael, you won't lose me."

He looked at me sadly. This was the last time we got drunk together. "Just don't call me 'hero,' all right?"

 

When the appeals process had finally run its futile course, Michael was ordered to begin serving his sentence on the first day of December 1969.

And he might have.

But in late November news stories began appearing about an "alleged massacre" of civilians that was reported to have taken place in a Vietnamese village variously referred to as "Pinkville,"

"Songmy" and "My Lai." The story came out in disjointed pieces and at first without sensation. Courts-martial of certain junior officers were discreetly under way, and that was what began attracting the attention of reporters. At first the civilian death toll was put at forty-three, then at "somewhat over a hundred." By the end of November more than ten American GIs who admitted participating had given reporters their accounts of the incident.

For most of a day in late March of 1968, dozens of American soldiers, acting under orders of officers, had herded more than five hundred old men, children and women into the village square, into fields and into a large drainage ditch where they fired their automatic weapons on them at close range. This was not the act of frenzied, panic-stricken boys, but of lucid soldiers who had come to regard every Vietnamese person—every "Dink"—of whatever age or position as the enemy. There was one American casualty, a GI who shot himself in the foot rather than obey. The "Combat Action Report" about the incident, filed by the lieutenant colonel who supervised from his helicopter, called it an "attack that was well-planned, well-executed and successful."

When
Life
magazine, the last week in November, published nine gruesome photographs, eight in color, showing corpses of babies piled on one another, of toothless old women and Pappa-san men strewn in paddies, of hundreds of villagers stretched along a ditch, the world was stunned. The photographs had been taken secretly and held back until now by a disgusted but frightened army photographer. His pictures and his testimony were the most damning revelations of the whole war.

Only two weeks before, on November 15, a quarter of a million Americans had marched on Washington, the largest demonstration in the capital's history, demanding an immediate end to the war. They had thought that they grasped its horrors in full dimension, but they didn't. Now suddenly the rhetoric of the radicals, crazy youngsters who threw stones at cops and broke windows at peace marches, seemed justified. The first shock of My Lai would lead to others, and it would take months before the full story of that and related atrocities became known. But in those first weeks of the My Lai disclosures Americans grasped viscerally, finally, what the Vietnamese had long known. The war itself was the atrocity.

Still, I was surprised that that was what Michael wanted to talk about. It was snowing lightly, but neither of us paid much attention to the weather. I was aware of Michael's weighty mood and thought he had a right to one, since this was his last day of freedom. We were walking across the plaza at Lincoln Center. It was where we habitually strolled when he came to see me at my office in the new Fordham building on Sixtieth Street. The huge Chagall tapestries dominated the square even from inside the glass facade of the Met. Ahead of us snowflakes dusted Henry Moore's reclining nude, that massive stolid sculpture which I'd come to think of as the steely heart of New York City. It was noontime.

Why the hell was he going on about the war? He was on his way to jail! Wasn't Vietnam someone else's problem now?

"Did you read that about Calley? How he tore that infant from the Buddhist priest's arms so that he could shoot the priest? And then how he shot the infant? His M-16 must have cut that baby in half."

Michael's agitation made me impatient, but it alarmed me too. I hadn't felt it at such a pitch since Nicholas Wiley's death. We turned the corner at the far side of the reflecting pool in front of the Vivian Beaumont. In reply I was reduced both by my concern for him and by my despair at the war to saying simply, "It's grotesque."

"No, no, Durk! You miss the point if you think of it as grotesque. Don't you see, it's ordinary! It's commonplace! Calley is what this war has become. The army is full of Calleys now. He's no exception."

"Come on, Michael. Don't go SDS on me."

"Calley does it up close, that's all. But it's the same thing."

"I don't think it's quite—"

"Ask the Vietnamese! It's the same to them!"

"The point is, Calley's being court-martialed, isn't he?"

"Yes, because some kid blew the whistle and forced the issue. So they string up an imbecile lieutenant and a few Pfc's from Tennessee..."

"And Captain Medina."

"...when it's the generals who should be hung, especially Sennett."

"Who's Sennett?"

"Brigadier General David Sennett, the commander of Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn."

"I don't get it."

"He was the Eleventh Infantry Brigade commander in March of sixty-eight. Calley was his boy. My Lai was his operation."

"Look, Michael, if you think the brass will be held accountable for this thing you're wrong. You might as well hope they bring Agnew and Nixon to court for it. Somebody has to be tried for shit like My Lai. Why not the animals who actually did it?"

"Durk, listen to me!" He took me by the arm and pushed me to a low, concrete parapet. We sat. "My Lai gives us a brand-new chance to force the American people to look at what this war has become, what it's been for years. I'll tell you who's responsible for My Lai:
we
are! Goddamnit, isn't that the point, finally? We rejected this war as a people two years ago, but it's worse than ever! So everyone marches on Washington. But Nixon ignores it. Thieu uses his army against his own people. Agnew rants about the kooks. A few of us timidly break the law and get locked up. And we all throw our hands in the air and say, 'Well, we tried!' But meanwhile our boys keep going over there by the thousands after raising pet rabbits in boot camp so the DI can snap their necks. And yes, then they're animals! And they
will
do anything! To anyone! Do you hear me? That's what this war has done! Our soldiers will do anything to anyone! Do you hear me?"