American Romantic Read online

  Jesus Christ, you idiot, the sergeant said when Harry reached the boat.

  What are they doing now? Harry had his back to the village. The boat was under way.

  I can’t see them, the sergeant said. Crazy goddamned stunt you pulled. Get us all killed, you.

  They weren’t interested, Harry said. They had other things on their minds. I think it was a long day for them, too.

  Yeah? How could you know that?

  I knew it.

  Even so—

  Fuck you, Sergeant.

  They motored west from Village Number Five. Harry stood in the stern, watching the village disappear, dusk coming on. In a few minutes they were around the bend in the river and the helmsman throttled back until they reached the point where the river narrowed sharply. Then he gave the little engine all the speed it could manage. The river opened up again but the helmsman did not slow the boat; and then it was dark except for the gibbous moon, lazy in the night sky. When the boat began to tremble and visibility went to pieces the helmsman throttled back once again. Harry saw flashes off the starboard side and realized someone was firing on them. But the distance was too great and the bullets went astray. He said nothing to the others, concentrating on the riverbanks ahead. Harry cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. He knew he would remember that village forever, the headman and his burden, the smoldering clinic, the nine shades of blue and his own disarray. His surprise when the soldiers appeared without warning, dirty faces, torn fatigues, carbines, wire-rim eyeglasses. He had the idea they were not skilled with weapons, and the carbine was about as low grade as weapons came. He himself had been in another realm, calm except for the twitch in his leg. And all that time the headman had not moved, seemed lost in reverie or grief. In this, Harry seemed to be the odd man out. His tour of duty in the war zone had one year to go and he supposed that, in good time, his heart would harden. A hard heart was evidence of maturity, a hard-won stoic ideal. The ability to put yourself at a remove was better still in the chore of getting on from day to day. Women were not immune, though their lack of immunity took a different form. Visiting one of the army hospitals one day with the ambassador, Harry watched a nurse lose her temper and scream at a patient, a middle-aged civilian caught in crossfire somewhere. A friend had smuggled him a can of beer and he was drinking it without bothering to conceal the can. He had a distant look in his eyes, the look of the convalescent alone in an unfamiliar situation, and as a civilian he was entitled to write his own rules. His head was bandaged and his back wrapped in a heavy poultice. All around him were badly wounded American soldiers, many of them unconscious, several of them amputees. The nurse was very pretty and looked scarcely older than a schoolgirl, except for her mouth, twisted in a snarl. Who do you think you are? she screamed. You asshole. You moron. There are sick people here. You will not drink beer in my ward! The startled civilian was unable to reply. His eyes welled with tears and he looked away as the nurse seized the beer can and threw it into a hamper before running from the room.

  They motored on, Harry gazing at the humpbacked moon as he continued to fix Village Number Five in his mind’s eye. He wanted very badly to remember it whole, the burned-out clinic, the old man, and the dying woman. He tried without success to remember the village’s actual name. Much later he learned that it had been evacuated, as if it were contaminated or cursed.

  PART I

  One

  THE next morning, Sunday, Harry went to Mass at the church near the harbor, Église St.-Sylvestre, the one with the yellow wood walls and ungainly spire, cane chairs in the nave, and Christ on his cross behind the altar. The church was built in the late nineteenth century, a spiritual souvenir of the colonial power. There were many Roman Catholics among the well-to-do element of the capital. Missionaries in the countryside had also been energetic, though the soul of the nation was said to be Buddhist. Buddhism took many forms in the countries where it was practiced, and in this one the salient feature was intransigence, a failure to get on the team. Street demonstrations were common. Monks were known to set themselves alight in support of the demonstrations, confounding officials of the Military Assistance Command and the American embassy. Something perverse about it, this failure to help out. A newspaper photograph of a monk burning in the street was not at all helpful, and they knew it wasn’t helpful. But all that was remote from the formal atmosphere of Église St.-Sylvestre. The single spark of color in the church was the stained-glass window in the east wall of the nave, a recent gift from wealthy Connecticut families who wished to show solidarity in the struggle against communism. One of their number was an important publisher and he solicited funds from friends in the neighborhood. Finely etched in the glass was a fragment of poetry from the hand of Cardinal Newman, a puzzling choice in the circumstances but the publisher insisted. Harry knew two of the Connecticut families, friends of his parents who often came to lunch at their place in the hill country near Salisbury. Harry’s father was asked to join the window subscription but declined, sending a check instead to the Boy Scouts. Harry Sanders Sr. did not approve of the war, being an isolationist Republican of the old school. He always asked himself, What would Bob Taft have done? Surely Bob Taft would never have gone to war in a country so remote, so without promise, a country that would remain on the periphery of things for generations, probably centuries.

  Harry was an infrequent communicant at Église St.-Sylvestre. Now he sat alone in the rear and did not participate in the singing of hymns or the recitation of prayers. He did not choose to receive communion that day. He was remembering the village, the headman and the dead woman, the sour odor of smoke in the air, the desolation of it. He said a private prayer for their safekeeping and also a thought for God, neither careless nor distracted, at least where Harry’s life was concerned. He did believe that it was selfish to asks for God’s aid except in the most trying circumstances.

  The priest was voluble, his sermon lasting the better part of an hour. He pleaded for an end to the insurgency. He asked God’s blessing in that undertaking. God was not indifferent to the suffering of the people, and neither was He indifferent to the many sins of the communist enemy, communism a heathen ideology ill suited to their ancient land, the soil of their ancestors. The communists wished only the death of God, His eradication. But God would never yield. God would aid the good people in their virtuous efforts to vanquish the heathen. God’s spirit was with the ordeal of the good people. We have suffered much, he said, and we must bear much more. We will bear whatever we are given to bear because our faith is mighty and our cause is just. We must remember that God walks with us on our long twilight journey. Two rows ahead, an American army colonel in dress uniform bent his head in prayer.

  The congregation stirred, restive as time passed. The priest was small of stature and, for those in the front seats, invisible behind the high altar. He spoke in a reedy voice, his tiny hands outstretched. Harry wondered how many in the church sympathized with the revolution. No more than half, he reckoned; probably less. Perhaps about the same number as adulterers in his family’s church in Connecticut, where the priest was worldly and not particular about the sins he absolved. Murder and blasphemy would be exceptions. Murder or blasphemy in that church would be similar to Marxism in this one. The priest’s voice faded and was lost altogether as Harry reprised Connecticut and then the events of the day before, motoring back to base, the helmsman mindful of navigation. He had steered the vessel in the middle of the river, and a good thing, too, for a mile downstream they took fire from the mangroves to starboard. The shooters were not marksmen, the bullets falling far astern. When they rounded a bend all was quiet once again. The sergeant fetched three cans of beer from the cooler and handed them around, a reward for their unsuccessful afternoon. Harry sipped beer as night came on, back now in his family’s summer place near Salisbury. There was always a crowd for Sunday lunch, spirited conversation, gossip mostly of Washington with detours to horseracing and real estate. Sometimes the local congresswoman
and her doctor husband dropped by, everyone pleased to have them at Sunday lunch. Mrs. Finch, as politician and horseplayer, always had something to add. She was a great raconteur. His father maintained that she was the only woman he had ever met who knew how to tell a story, beginning, middle, and end. She was also an accomplished mimic. Her specialties were Connecticut squires and tidewater Virginians and also the president and the speaker of the House, everyone laughing, and at the end of the story the doctor husband exclaiming again and again, Isn’t she wonderful? Whereupon the congresswoman smiled and patted his wrist, there, there. The bourgeois life, Harry thought, often a battle in the trenches but never on Sundays, a fine meal served on a three-part Regency table that seated sixteen, Chippendale chairs, a low vase of flowers dead center, decanters of Bordeaux that never ran dry. A wide window looking out on a disheveled English garden, hollyhocks and gladioli, here and there a rosebush. His mother thought the table much too grand for a country house but his father insisted. It had been in the family for a hundred years. Why, the young Winston Churchill had sat at it, drinking everything in sight and reminiscing about the Boer War, rum show. A Marsden Hartley landscape on one wall, an Alfred Munnings stallion on the wall opposite, a wee Homer next to that. Kilim rugs on the floor, not so out of place as you might think. A martini or two before the meal and a walk in the fields after it, a stroll accompanied by the Labrador retrievers, Pat and Dick. There were firearms, too, in case anyone wanted to shoot a pheasant. More Washington, more horseracing and real estate, and an agreement to get together again soon, in Connecticut or the city. Harry was attracted to this life, its iron routine and American naturalness. He could have done with more conversation concerning the world, foreign affairs, but the world was far away on Sunday afternoons. He wondered then if the girl he had been seeing would take to Sunday lunch in Connecticut. She was German, her name Sieglinde Hechler, a technician from the hospital ship docked these past months in the harbor on the river. He had no idea; the life of the squires was an acquired taste. It took some getting used to. Sieglinde was game but it took more than gameness. Gameness took you only so far around the Regency table and its revolving decanters.

  Connecticut. He remembered how in late-afternoon darkness gathered in the corners of the high ceiling and over the yellow hills curling west toward the Hudson and, beyond the Hudson, all of the American interior. The dying sun gave the landscape a golden glow, even the lichen-topped tumbledown stone wall with the dogs’ graves behind it, four generations of Labrador retrievers. Prime time was mid-October, the air so crisp you could break it in your fingers. Everyone turned to look out the big windows at the autumn light show. Conversation softened and became intimate, as if a stranger might be nearby and listening in. Soon enough the westering sun was forgotten, an object on the edge of their vision. They were indoor people, most comfortable at a crowded table; indoor air, indoor vistas. The Candlesses, old Mr. Wilson who did something in the energy sector, the widow Born who looked after diamonds at one of the Fifth Avenue shops, the brothers Green who ran a private concern on Wall Street, Congresswoman Finch and her doctor—all content. Harry’s father once remarked that he preferred Marsden Hartley’s landscape to the one in front of his eyes out the window, a thought his mother found baffling. Look at the way it catches the light, his father said. As it happened, the old man preferred his own horse to Alfred Munnings’s horse, but that seemed to matter less.

  That afternoon two years past: Someone asked Harry about the war, the true situation, where things were and how they might develop. Harry was silent a moment, wondering where to begin and, once begun, where to go. Wasn’t it all a matter of stamina? the doctor asked. Yes, Harry said, that was true enough and should give us pause. He commenced with what diplomats called an appreciation of the situation, meaning the long view, the macro-estimate of the state of security upcountry and down, which provinces were secure and which were not; well, most of them were not. The degrees of difference were important. Harry talked about the war until the expressions around the table grew slack and then impatient. Old Jimmy Candless at the end of the table poured a glass of wine and stared into it as if it were a fortuneteller’s crystal ball. He had been an airborne brigadier general in the war in Europe, a war of easily described measurements. The boats landed at Omaha and Utah and Sword, and the troops drove east to Berlin. That was essentially it, although his old army comrades—now very senior generals—said that was not essentially it in this war. It was hard to grasp. It was a damned enigma. It—well, it was a kind of riddle.

  Harry explained that the war could be grasped only in its many details, and the details continued to accumulate until the congresswoman intervened to tell a story about her encounter, years back, with General Marshall, the general ill at ease in her presence even though she was the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Perhaps his discomfort was for that very reason. At any event, she let him off the hook. He so obviously preferred the company of men. His great probity and sincerity, his military courtesy, made him sympathetic. When he offered her a cigarette, she took it, and as he lit it she leaned forward, touched his hand to steady the match, and winked. A blush ensued. Everyone at the table laughed, and the doctor most of all. One story followed another and Harry’s war was discreetly put to one side. He did not blame them for their inattention, his awkward sentences summoning a house of cards built on quicksand, one fact after another and so many of them counterfeit. He felt he had let them down—his father was gazing at the Marsden Hartley and his mother had begun to collect the plates—but the war fit no known precedent or pattern in American history with the possible exception of the Revolutionary War. It was sui generis and unspeakably tedious unless you were engaged with it day by day. When you were there, the war was your entire life, as seductive as the sun now disappearing over the western hills, their outlines becoming indistinct. Coffee arrived and his father stepped to the sideboard to organize the cognac. Everyone except the doctor lit cigarettes, the smoke rising and hanging in the still air of the dining room. His father once said that Marsden Hartley reminded him of Vuillard, the one drawn to the outdoors and the other drawn to the in. Vuillard, the master of enclosed spaces, bedrooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms. Meticulous Vuillard, nothing beneath his notice, no piece of bric-a-brac or vase of flowers or the oval mirror on the wall. Sunday lunch in Connecticut ended in a drawn-out sigh, everyone rising slowly from the Regency table stifling yawns, tipsy.

  The priest wound down at last, exhausted by his oration and perhaps by the demands of his faith, concluding with a toss of his head and a long fingernail pointing at the stained-glass window—it was known by the American community as the Connecticut Window—so the congregation could read for itself Cardinal Newman’s prophetic words:

  The night is dark, and I am far from home.

  Lead Thou me on!

  Harry was first out the door, emerging into the naked street, the familiar restaurant close at hand. Only a few of its sidewalk tables were occupied. He stood irresolute, wondering if a drink in the shade would help the afternoon along. The day was very warm and the heat came at him in a rush. He felt sweat gather on his forehead, the curse of the tropics; and then he remembered lunch. A colleague was giving lunch at his villa nearby, an open house in honor of an important guest from Washington, in-country for a look-around with a confidential report to the Secretary later, Eyes Only. It was necessary that the civilians get to him before the generals did, damned generals with their bogus coherence. Bogus charts, bogus bar graphs, with a young lieutenant fresh from Princeton to supply commentary. A military briefing was an art form that hovered somewhere between German Expressionism and the Innocenti of the Italian Renaissance. By contrast, the civilians drew cartoons. Tell our guest about your clinic, Harry. What gives? But Harry thought better of the open house and decided to go home, have a bite of lunch, read something. He could take a book to the silk-string hammock under the spreading ficus tree, a pitcher of iced tea at his side. Someth
ing on the phonograph. But then he felt a hand on his arm and turned to find Sieglinde, the technician from the hospital ship. He did not expect to see her. She had hinted she was going away, perhaps for good and perhaps not for good. But he was awfully happy to see her now. The street was crowded and he could hear the last rumbles of the organ inside the church. Sieglinde’s hair was wet and he supposed she had gone for a swim at the Sportif. She was dressed plainly in a short skirt and white blouse, espadrilles on her feet. She said nothing for a moment, only looked at him with a slight smile.

  You, he said.

  Me, she answered.

  They had known each other only a week, the beginning of something. Two nights before, she had come to his villa for dinner and stayed on, still asleep when the alarm sounded at five a.m. He had explained about the clinic at Village Number Five and the installations at the other villages, a day’s chore. She did not hear the alarm and slept on peacefully as if the bed were her own. He had carefully pulled the sheet over her and slipped away after a soft kiss, the sergeant’s jeep already idling in the driveway.

  Sieglinde took his hand and smiled, remarking on his sweaty brow and evident weariness. She said he did not look well. Was everything all right? What happened at the clinic? Harry said that everything was fine and he would explain about the clinic later. She said she had errands to run but after the errands she was free for dinner. We can go out or I can come to you. She said, I’ll cook. I’m a good cook. I’ll cook you schnitzel if I can find veal.

  Come to the villa, Harry said.