Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (5 page)

Fern grew stickier with a certain group of especially rich, especially pretty girls and she started to ignore her brother even at home, left him to coast in her wake. Because Ben was almost part of her, because their bodies had invented themselves together and they could never be completely prized apart, Fern thought she could afford a little meanness. She would never have risked it if she had known she could lose Ben.

Then, when she was seventeen, came Edgar, Yale senior, thick glasses, whippet arms and storm of ideas, and there went Fern: any retaining walls that had been built around or inside her burst open. She was all shatter and splinter, all grateful wreckage. Through the summer it was Edgar at her side with no place behind her for Ben. Ben spun in the eddy while Fern went downstream fast.

Ben’s circuitry fizzled at the ends. He felt amputated. It was all right to be less than whole when his twin could stand in for the rest, but without her, all the missing pieces turned bright and burned. He tried to steady himself in his old books: butterflies, bats, stories of sailors and treasure and islands where the only drinking water was a brackish spring. Evelyn and Paul did not notice that Ben was a flickering bulb. Out of habit, Evelyn continued her blind attempt to make a man of him and signed Ben up for the crew team. He was never put in a boat because his oars always bit the water too early or too late, so while his sister spent the summer falling in love, he spent it sitting on the lakeshore beach littered with dead herring while he listened to the other boys work their bodies back and forth as one. Ben lay his huge body back on the sand, smelled the fishrot, while the coxswain’s voice blew over the water. “Catch! Drive! Finish! Recover!”

Meanwhile Fern and Edgar were driven the hour to downtown Chicago by her parents’ chauffeur where they sat in the park with a picnic of cold grapes and cucumber sandwiches and watched a play (parents felt entirely safe sending their teenaged children into the city alone if Shakespeare was involved). It was humid and hot and there was no shade and all around the park were glass skyscrapers reflecting the sun, but they noticed none of these discomforts. Neither did they remember the play or even really see it. What occurred for Fern and Edgar was this: they held hands. Sometimes they entwined their fingers, sometimes they rubbed the other hand softly with a thumb, and to the two of them it felt as if their entire lives, the history of every civilization, the smack of the universe being born, were all together in that hold. Their palms sweat and every once in a while they would break to wipe them on their thighs, laugh, then quickly rejoin. Until now, the fact that Fern was a girl had rendered her purposeless. Suddenly there was a
reason for her. She knew that she was standing at the entrance to the express path that her mother so hated but to Fern it felt like she was about to be born. Love might make her, finally, visible.

Fern tried to talk to her parents about Edgar at dinner one night. She wanted to tell them that she was in love, that she could not contain the feeling within the bounds of her body. It was harder than expected to explain. “Edgar is amazing,” she said. Paul smiled at her. He was all the way at the head of the table, too far to put his hand on hers, which was what he would have liked to do.

“I’m happy for you,” Ben said. He was. But also endlessly sorry for himself. He was being replaced, and Fern, though she knew this too, could see her brother receding in the distance, yet was so happy that she couldn’t help but leave him behind.

Evelyn did not want to be cruel. Fern was so earnest at her seat, napkin in her lap, ankles crossed, cutting a green bean into bite-size thirds with a knife and fork, dabbing at the corners of her mouth—a lady. She was falling into the domestic void as happily as if it were a warm bath. Evelyn could see love like sweat on Fern’s skin. See? It was better that no one had expected Fern to do or know something—the flood of love would have washed it all away no matter what. “I don’t like his parents,” Evelyn said. It was the nicest statement she could muster.

“What’s wrong with his parents?” Fern asked.

To Evelyn it was obvious: they were a new family with new money and a new house and every movement they made was filled with effort. It hurt to watch all that trying—the endeavor was belonging yet every movement made them more obvious as outsiders. If his family stayed for three generations they might pick up the scent of the place, start to seem less like foreign animals. Evelyn did not have another nice thing to say and she knew the rule. “Pass the salt, would you, Fern?”

Ben harbored a selfish hope that his mother’s cruelty would puncture the balloon of love that was carrying his sister away. He would catch her if she fell.

Paul attempted to raft them out of the muck with a conversation about
War
and Peace
, which he had been trying to read for months, but the women refused to be saved.

—

Fern and Edgar went for horseback rides in the prairie and walks by the lakeshore. They listened to the Beatles. They celebrated with root beer floats when the Civil Rights Act was passed. The war in Vietnam began, escalated. Fern and Edgar tried to articulate the feelings they had: like a quiet fusion, he said; like a meeting of two breezes or streams, she tried. Both agreed it was inevitable.

Then, a cut in the form of a letter. It was addressed to Ben. He had been drafted.

For people like these, people who lived aside from the scramble and burn of work and the city, it was easy to think of current events as happenings restricted to the news. These were stories, not real events, not real boys in a real war. At least not their boys.

But President Johnson had announced that he would double the monthly draft calls to thirty-five thousand. The war’s arms were getting longer, the fingers greedier. Young men departed for Vietnam and came home weeks later, sometimes days later, in body bags. The ones who survived described an invisible enemy—the people they were supposedly there to protect looked identical to the ones they were meant to kill. There were boys who believed they were helping. There were boys who did not trust the mission or the President but soon it didn’t matter anymore what they thought. They were all boys who slept in swamps, watched their wounds rot, dragged their maimed friends to reed beds where
another teenager tried to sew closed whatever part had been ripped open. They were all boys who killed or watched while someone else killed. They were all boys who looked up while a helicopter reeled in the bodies of guys who had been alive the day before, guys who had love letters in their pockets and bullets in their stomachs. They were all boys who remembered home.

Evelyn and Paul had sat in their living room and watched while US Marines set fire to the grass roofs of a village and women and children wept at the edge of a rice paddy. They had watched while bodies were hit and fell. In cities across the country boys burned their draft cards and were arrested. Protesters gathered in Washington, New York, Chicago, and at the edges of these protests were people yelling at the ungrateful kids, people who believed that America was doing the right thing and hated these indulgent teenagers who were trying to take a flame to the needs of their great country.

Evelyn held her son’s draft card in her hand. She understood that so, so many young men were dead, but she had another thought, unbidden:
Manhood, inevitable in war
. Paul thought:
I hope, I worry, I hope.
Fern woke back up to the truth of her brother, thought:
No
. She told her mother that it was a mistake, that he would never make it out alive, even in the best of circumstances. “They’ll devour him,” she said.

“He’ll be fine,” her mother told her. “People from here don’t get sent to the frontlines. He’ll sit in an office someplace. He’s big and he’s smart.” Even in Evelyn, least mothering of all mothers, there were twin knots of concern and kindness. She thought that a man who acted like a man could do anything he wanted, that his whole life would be easeful, and she wished this for her son. She wished for him a world of unlocked doors. With the armor of money and stature there to protect him from being sent
overseas, maybe the war would be a favor to Ben. A means for him to grow up.

Fern said, “Have you ever watched him in a room full of people he doesn’t know? He disappears. He’ll be trampled.”

“How can he disappear? He’s enormous,” Evelyn said. “Anyway, it’s not a choice, he’s been drafted. What am I supposed to do, send him away to San Francisco to be babysat by those hippies?”

Over the last few weeks of summer, Ben’s fuses all shorted out. He came downstairs on the day he was to be driven away wearing dress pants with his undershirt and a pair of slippers and a straw hat from the attic. He stood at the door and tapped his fingers on his heart in counts of sixty, over and over. “Ben. What are you wearing?” Fern asked. She brought him a real shirt and buttoned it, tied his shoes. She brought the suitcase she had packed for him. She had tried to calculate the books that would be least likely to get him beaten up (nothing about birds). She had written down a story he could tell about a girlfriend and sealed this in an envelope. In a second envelope she included evidence of this invented love: two letters written by the unreal girl, a locket engraved with her name on the back. And inside? A week before, Fern had disguised herself with a wig and makeup, slipped out of her clothes, taken a grainy photograph in half light. Sex might offer some protection, even if it was fictional. A sister would have been no armor at all.

Ben had no clear thoughts in his head. Without his sister and his home he felt that he might simply cease to exist. And that did not even take into account the air raids, the helicopters, the guns. He tapped his heart. His eyes darted.

“Stop being theatrical,” Evelyn said. “You are going to be no less safe than you would right here at home.” She knew she was cold. She tried to say she loved her son because she did—she had practiced saying it in her head but now her mouth was unmoved.
Paul stood by, still circling a headache, trying to comprehend what was real.

Fern hugged Ben. She felt the body that had once been her counterpart, such a different body from the one she had lately been snuggling into. Ben smelled like he had not showered in too long. “You just have to go unnoticed,” she whispered. It seemed like his best hope—so far, he had done this without trying. “Call me and I’ll come rescue you anytime. We’ll all run away to Italy.” His eyes looked foggy.

Ben started to laugh and could not stop. At first they all laughed with him, his parents in their summer linens, his sister in a sundress, none of them knowing what the joke had been, all of them trying to survive an unsurvivable moment, but then they stopped laughing and Ben kept going and going. He laughed while they hugged him and put him in the car. He was still laughing when the door closed and sealed him into the chamber, still laughing when Evelyn tapped on the trunk to tell the chauffeur,
Okay, all set. Take him away
.

Fern called Edgar from the phone in the hallway. He did not ask her to explain anything, just listened while she wept.

—

Edgar went back to college in the fall and they wrote letters while Fern took Home Economics with the blue-haired Mrs. Sparrow and Edgar studied Greek History and Sociology, subjects his parents would never have approved of. It was 1965. Most of the students looked the way they had for ten years: smooth hair, neat dresses and pants. A cigarette if they were feeling rebellious. Maybe they drank beer. There were a few boys who grew their hair long. Jack Kerouac was on certain bookshelves. There was a new thing to smoke. On the weekends, a new kind of girl showed up from
other campuses, from the city, wearing jeans and cropped shirts, pale bellies exposed to the sun. Edgar stood at the outskirts of the tame anti-war protests on campus and once went to New York for a bigger one, but like most of the students he also went to class on time and studied in the library, some because they were good kids on their way to good lives and others because college was their pass out of the draft. Edgar read Marx and he also read William Butler Yeats. He listened to folk music while he studied sine, cosine, tangent. He tacked up a picture of Malcolm X on his dorm wall and then he put his head down and wrote his papers and passed his tests.

Edgar and Fern confessed the things that young lovers do:
my parents are horrid; it feels as if there’s a hole in me that needs filling; I worry about the way I look; I worry about dying and other times I wonder if dying is the answer; I want a different kind of life, a bigger life; the world is terrifying and unjust and we have to change it.
They wrote the names of big cities as shorthand for
A place where no one is watching
: New York, San Francisco, Paris.
I’ve never met anyone like you,
Edgar wrote. How was it that out of the perfectly tended soil these two weeds had been allowed to grow?

They wanted to travel but not in the luxury their parents did: they imagined riding the mail boat through Polynesian islands, a rickety train filled with the smoke of a coal-powered samovar across the USSR. Fern said she wanted to be an archaeologist. Edgar did not know what he wanted to be but not because he was stagnant. He was a typhoon inside, a fast-moving storm, the whole brunt of which blew
against
. He did not want to own or be president of a steel company. He did not want to send lesser men into the mines to breathe the black air. He did not want to know the names of cigars or scotches or sit in endless conversation about which of the obviously crooked politicians would best protect his business interests. Edgar said all of this to Fern and Fern wrote
back that she understood, that there were much more important things than money, that art mattered and education, justice. Knowledge, philosophy, poetry. Fern talked to Edgar about Ben who sent letters of quiet desperation.
I have a black eye but it’s healing up. The guy in the bunk above me spits on me in my sleep. I keep my shoes shined. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

To Edgar she said, “If only my brother was a girl. They don’t send girls to war and my parents wouldn’t have cared what he turned out to be.”