Sweet Talk (11 page)

“I am having jumbo shrimps,” I said. “And some lemon.”

In this way, the platter moved around the table. My mother was having lamb. My grandmother was having pork chops. My father hesitated before he took the meat fork. All his life, he had been shooting game for the dinner table. He believed he was teaching his family a lesson in economy and his son a lesson in wilderness survival. No one had ever made a joke about these meals. He looked at MacArthur. Although my father had never said it, MacArthur was exactly the kind of son he had hoped to have—tall and good-natured,
smart and obedient, a boy who could hit a bull’s-eye on a paper target with his .22 rifle. “All right,” my father said at last. “I’m having a steak.”

However, after dinner he said, “If you want to play a game, let’s play a real game. Let’s play twenty questions.” He took a pen from his pocket and flattened a paper napkin to use as a scorecard. He looked at MacArthur. “I am thinking of something. What is it?” We were all going to play this game, but my father’s look implied that MacArthur was the principal opponent.

MacArthur tried to assume the gamesman’s bland expression. “Is it animal?” he said.

My father appeared to think for a while. He mused at the candles. He considered the ceiling. This was part of the game, trying to throw the opponents off the trail. “Yes, it is animal.”

“Is it a toad?” my grandmother said.

“No, no,” MacArthur said. “It’s too soon to ask that.”

“It certainly is not a toad,” my father said. He made a great show of entering a mark against us on the napkin. This was another part of the game, trying to rattle the opponents by gloating.

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?” my mother said.

“Yes.”

“Is it bigger than a car?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Is it bigger than a house?” MacArthur said.

“Yes.”

“Is it the Eiffel Tower?” my grandmother said.

Again my father used exaggerated motions to record the mark. MacArthur dropped his head into his arms. This was an unmanly response.

“Settle down,” my father said. “Think.”

“Can’t we play some other game?” my grandmother said. “This game is never any fun.”

“We are not trying to have fun,” my father said. “We are trying to use our minds.”

So the game went, until we had used up our twenty no answers, and my father revealed the thing he had been thinking of. The thing was “the rocket’s red glare”—the light from exploded gunpowder. Gunpowder, if you analyzed its ingredients, was actually animal, vegetable,
and
mineral—providing you agreed that the carbon component could be derived from animal sources. He poured a drink and leaned back to tell us a story. The first time he had played the game he was a soldier on a ship going to England. The ship was in one of the largest convoys ever to cross the Atlantic during the Second World War. The sea was rough. German submarines were nearby. Some men got seasick, and everyone was nervous. They began to play games, and they played one game of twenty questions for two days. That was the game whose answer was “the rocket’s red glare.” My father had thought that one up.

That was as close as he ever came to telling us a war story. He had gone from England to Normandy
Beach and later to the Battle of the Bulge, but when he remembered the war for us he remembered brave, high-spirited men not yet under attack. When he had finished speaking, he looked at his glass of scotch as the true drinker will—as if it contains a prophecy.

The spring following the season in which we ate whole generations of doves, MacArthur acquired two live chicks. A Woolworth’s in the town near the post was giving chicks away to the first hundred customers in the door the Saturday before Palm Sunday. MacArthur was the first customer through the door and also the fifty-seventh. He named the chicks Harold and Georgette. He made big plans for Harold and Georgette. He was going to teach them how to walk a tightrope made of string and ride a chicken-sized Ferris wheel.

A week later, Harold and Georgette were eaten by our cat while we were at church. The chicks had been living in an open cardboard box on top of the refrigerator. No one imagined that a cat as fat and slothful as Al Bear would hurl himself that high to get an extra meal.

Looking at the few pale feathers left in the box, MacArthur said, “He ate them whole. He even ate the beaks.”

“Poor chicks,” my mother said.

“They were making an awful lot of noise up there,” my grandmother said. “They should have kept those beaks shut.”

Everyone looked to see if MacArthur was crying. In our family, people believed that getting through a hardship intact was its own reward. “This is nothing to be upset about,” my father said. “This is the way nature works.” It was in the natural order of things for cats to eat birds, he told us. Even some birds ate other birds. Some animals ate cats. Everything we ate had once been alive. Wasn’t a steak part of a steer? MacArthur looked away just long enough to roll his eyes at me. My father began to gesture and to project his voice. Now he was lecturing on the principles of Darwinian selection. He used the phrase “nature red in tooth and claw.” He seemed to like that phrase, and used it again. The third time he said, “nature red in tooth and claw,” Al Bear walked up behind him and threw up on the floor, all the little bird parts of Harold and Georgette still recognizable on the linoleum.

MacArthur never became a hunter of birds. By the time he turned twelve, and was given a shotgun for his birthday, we were stationed in Italy. The Italians, who for generations, perhaps even millennia, seemed to have a limitless appetite for small birds, had gone through entire species of game birds and were now working on the European songbirds that flew south in the winter. Thus, the diminishing numbers of thrushes, larks, and swallows in the Italian countryside made it impossible for my father to find a place that he could hunt with a
clear conscience and allowed my brother to turn from real birds to imitation ones. Soon after his birthday, he was taken to the skeet range at Camp Darby, where he was permitted to shoot fifty rounds at black-and-yellow disks, called pigeons. Fifty recoils of a large gun are a lot for a boy, even one big for his age, like MacArthur. By the time he got home that day, there were bruises beginning to bloom across his shoulder.

“Maybe he should wait until he’s older,” my mother said.

“What ever happened to the all-American sports?” my grandmother said. “Couldn’t he learn to throw or kick something?”

Months later, when we all drove into the post to see him shoot in his first tournament, MacArthur kept saying, “See Kid MacArthur forget to load the gun. Watch fake birds fall whole to the earth.” “Kid MacArthur” was what he called himself when something went wrong. He did not like the general whose name he bore. He did not admire him, as my parents did, for being the man who said, “I shall return.” MacArthur was not one of those ordinary names, like John or Joan, which you could look up in my grandmother’s
Dictionary of Christian Appellations
. MacArthur was a name my brother had to research. General MacArthur, he decided, had talked a big game but then allowed his entire air force to be bombed on the ground the day after Pearl Harbor. General MacArthur had sent his troops
into Bataan but had not sent along the trucks that carried food for the battalions. The general had fled to Australia, uttering his famous words, leaving his men to perish in the Death March.

“You’ll be fine if you don’t look out any windows,” my father said. “Looking out the window” was his expression for allowing the mind to wander. “I’m pulling down all the shades on my windows,” MacArthur said. “I’m battening all the hatches in my head.”

Something overtook MacArthur when the tournament got under way and he finally stepped onto the range, the only boy among the shooters. The bones of his face grew prominent. His eyes became opaque, like the eyes of a man who can keep a secret. By the second time around the stations, he was third among the five shooters. No one spoke, except a man named Mr. Dimple, who was an engineer working for the American government in Italy, and the only civilian on the skeet range.

“That gosh-damned sun,” Mr. Dimple said. “Those gosh-damned trees.” It was a hot, bright day, and the angle of the sun made it difficult to see the disks as they sailed in front of a pine forest at the back of the range.

“Maybe we need a fence in front of those trees,” Mr. Dimple said. After his next two shots, he said, “Damned if the wind didn’t get to those birds before I did.” It was clear that Mr. Dimple was disgracing himself before the cream of the American Army. When he
spoke, the other men looked at the grass. The women, seated behind the semicircular range, looked at each other. Their eyes seemed to say, “Our men are not going to complain about any trees. Our men are not going to complain about the wind or the sun.”

“I’m not wearing the right sunglasses,” Mr. Dimple said.

MacArthur stepped up to the station just in front of the viewing area and called for the pigeons. “Pull!” Swinging to his right, he aimed just ahead of the flying, spinning disk. He pulled the first trigger and began the swing back to his left to get the second sailing bird before it touched the ground. The first bird exploded in a star of fragments and fell to the earth with the sound of raining gravel. The second bird fell untouched and landed on the ground with a
clack
as it struck another unexploded bird. Perhaps because his swing back had seemed so sure, so exactly timed, MacArthur could not believe he had missed. He shook his head as he stepped away from the station.

My father looked over at him and said within hearing of everyone on the range, “Whenever you step back from that peg, you step back the same way, hit or miss. You do not shake your head.”

Mr. Dimple put his hand on his hip and sighed at his gun. Colonel McGrath and Major Solman looked away.

“Do you understand?”

MacArthur did understand. He was embarrassed. “Yes, sir,” he said. As the group moved to the next station, the other men nodded at my father and gave MacArthur friendly punches on the arm. He was not going to grow up to be a Mr. Dimple.

The next year, MacArthur won a place on the championship team my father took to Naples. For years, my father liked to tell about MacArthur’s first day on the range. “He was black-and-blue all over,” my father said. “But he never spoke a word of complaint.”

Two years later, we returned to the States to live on a post on Governors Island, which was in the middle of New York Harbor and so close to the Statue of Liberty that we could see her torchlight from our bedroom windows. It was on Governors Island that my father received a letter from the government that seemed to imply that MacArthur might not be an American citizen, because he had been born in the Philippines. He was not quite a foreigner, either, because his parents had been born in Ohio.

“He’s a juvenile delinquent, is what he is,” my grandmother said one day when my father was trying to explain the citizenship difficulty. She had slipped into MacArthur’s room and found a cache of cigarette lighters. “Where does a fourteen-year-old boy get enough money to buy these things?” she said. “What does he do with them, anyway?”

“He doesn’t smoke,” I said, although I knew that with my father the health issue would not be the central one.

My mother beheld the lighters with great sadness. “I’ll have a talk with him tonight.”

“No one will speak to him yet,” my father said. He was troubled because the evidence of MacArthur’s criminality had been gathered in a kind of illegal search and seizure.

“Does this mean that MacArthur can never become president of the United States?” I said. In our family, we had been taught that if children were scrupulously honest, and also rose from their seats when strangers entered the room, and said “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” at the appropriate moments, and then went on to get a college education, they could grow up to be anything, including president of the United States. Even a woman could be president, if she kept her record clean and also went to college.

No one smiled at my joke.

The document my father held seemed to suggest that even though MacArthur was the son of patriots, someone somewhere might question the quality of his citizenship. It was a great blow to learn that he might be a thief as well as a quasi foreigner.

The document was a letter from the judge advocate of the post advising that foreign-born children
be interviewed by the Department of Naturalization and Immigration. It also advised that they attend a ceremony in which they would raise their right hands, like ordinary immigrants, and renounce any residual loyalty to the countries of their births. It did not “require” that they do these things but it did “strongly recommend” that they do so. We never learned why the government made its strong recommendation, but there was something in the language of the letter that allowed one to think that foreign birth was like a genetic defect that could be surgically altered—it was like an extra brain that could be lopped off. (A communist brain! A socialist brain! The brain that would tell the hand to raise the gun against American democracy.)

“What were you doing in his chest of drawers?” my father said.

“I was dusting,” my grandmother said.

“You were dusting the contents of a brown sack?”

“This would never have happened in Ohio,” my grandmother said. “If we lived in Ohio, he would already be a citizen and would not have to hang around that neighborhood after school.”

“In this house, we do not take other people’s possessions without asking.”

“That’s the point.” My grandmother picked up a lighter with each hand. “These
are
other people’s possessions.”

• • •

It was dark when I slipped out to intercept MacArthur. At night, it was always a surprise to ascend the slope of the post golf course and come upon a vision of New York City standing above the harbor, the lights of Wall Street rising like fire into the sky, all the glory and fearfulness of the city casting its spangled image back across the water to our becalmed and languorous island. If you looked away from the light of the city, you looked back into the darkness of the last three centuries, across roofs of brick buildings built by the British and the Dutch. The post was a Colonial retreat, an administrative headquarters, where soldiers strolled to work under the boughs of hardwood trees, and the trumpetings of the recorded bugle drifted through the leaves like a mist. It was a green, antique island, giving its last year of service to the United States Army.