Honor and Duty (28 page)

“Going to bust an airplane?” I asked, charitably.

Edna drew in breath, her mouth open. I had learned in the last year how to face anger. I put on my inscrutable Plebe face, through which no emotion leaked and no pain was visible. I could endure Beast, march with a rifle, steel pot, and fifty pounds on my back up heartbreaking hills, recite MacArthur, sweat pennies, go without food, sleep, or rest, or raise a table-limits
pot on the fourth round for a pair of threes. I could stay up late and could somehow pass the first year of a college engineering curriculum while undergoing more discipline than the boys on Alcatraz.

She had gained weight, but her lean and cool aspect was unperturbed. She wore a simple navy dress, against which her brightly blond hair produced a two-tone rainbow of blue and gold.

“You look nice,” I said.

She closed her mouth. “Well, thank you. That is a handsome uniform. I am astonished; you look good in it.”

“Can I come in?”

She backed up. I entered and took off my garrison cap. The living room, the flowered couch, the ashtray, Dad’s large reading chair, where he absorbed the books of the world, the television—all looked the same, but smaller.

“I got the flowers you sent through your friend Duke.”

She stepped away and returned with a letter. It was from Luther “Duke” Troth, in New York City, to me. She had tried to reseal the envelope, but it opened easily the moment I touched it.

“They were lovely,” said Edna. “They’re dead now; had you returned earlier, you could have seen them.”

“I didn’t send them and he’s no friend.”

“Oh, do make up with him. He sent his picture, in uniform, which I kept. He’s quite—presentable—a lovely friend.” She smiled. “I think you should forgive him for his imagined wrongs.”

“Christine, this is Kai. How are you?” I was in the living room of my parents’ home, sitting back in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other, as if sitting in my own house and using the telephone to call a girl were normal events. This, I thought, was how John Glenn felt circling the earth.

Edna sat next to me, malignantly. I knew Christine’s number like the number stamped on the receiver of my rifle.

Christine’s voice. “Kai! Oh, Kai—hello, hello! Are you home? How
are
you?” Her voice was so sweet, so rich with
passion and my heart pounded as it flowed out of the phone into my ear. Edna’s glare became imposingly brilliant, for this was her very own weird problem child, that strange Chinese boy Kai Ting, talking with a girl on a telephone
in her house.
This should have hit my alarm bells and induced a stutter or a sudden recitation of preadolescent nonsense, or laughter, or polio. Only the buzz in my ear persisted. Somehow, Mr. Spillaney, the Man in the Red Sash, Mr. Arvin, Mr. Armentrot, Mr. O’Ware, Plebe math, Mr. Flauck, and the Spirit of the Bayonet had been more intimidating. I wanted to marvel at this accomplishment, and perhaps call the press, but all I could do was hear Christine’s voice, and rejoice.

“I’m great, Christine. It’s wonderful to hear your voice, to have your voice come out of this telephone. Can I see you?”

“Are you home for the summer?” she asked.

“I have a week,” I said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Oh, I’m busy,” she said. “Remember Kyle Bush?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Kai, let’s get together Tuesday; I don’t have a thing.”

That was four days from now. I could do a lot of running and weightlifting. “Okay. I’ll see you at breakfast at eight, for lunch, twelve noon, and for dinner, at five, on Tuesday.”

She laughed. “You want to see me three times?”

I laughed. “For starters.”

I stepped into my room. The four model airplanes hung from the ceiling, heavy with dust. I stepped to the window. The view of the backyard was the same, although the flowers, whose names I had never learned, seemed brighter and healthier. I put Marco Fideli’s etching of Beethoven and the storm on the shelf, then shook my head and put it back in my bag. It didn’t belong here.

Edna entered after I showered and was changing into civvies. “You are all sinew and muscle,” she said. “They truly didn’t feed you much, did they.” She put down a plate of Underwood devilled ham sandwiches and a glass of milk. “You’re a man now, and can have food in your room,” she said simply. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No. Thanks very much,” I said. “So we’re starting over.”

“We both missed you, more than you can believe,” she said.

I started to argue. I was confused, my resistance to her in jeopardy. I didn’t know what to do with her kindness. I looked again at the bed, where Silly Dilly had slept, and was comforted
by my old loathing of her, for what had happened to the cat. “Thanks for the sandwiches.”

I brushed my teeth and donned my dark blue Rogers Peet blazer with blue button-down shirt, narrow red-striped tie, and gray trousers. The phone rang and Edna said it was for me.

“Kai, Duke Troth.” Hollow echoes of long-distance calling.

I paused. “My mother liked the flowers.”

“Congrats on math. Hey, I was a
shit.
” He laughed. “Probably shouldn’t swear on leave. Plebe year, you know. Sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. A silence. He wanted something.

“Want some help with
contacts?
” I asked.

“Aw, hey, I don’t do that anymore. I’m apologizing to
everyone.
We’re upperclassmen now. No reason to shit on anyone. I owe you a cherry Coke at Doris Barth Hall at Camp Buckner. Hey, you’re all right. Let’s not crap on each other. What do you say?”

“Cool,” I said. “I don’t like having enemies.”

“Well, look, that’s great. See you at Buckner.”

I looked at my watch. I could make it. “Going to call Dad for lunch,” I said to Edna. It would’ve been better if I could’ve seen Tony first. Pinoy had said, “Little boys need Tony and Barney.” I was eighteen, a grown-up. I had to give up my things of childhood.

“That’d be wonderful, Kai,” she said.

17

San Francisco, June 12, 1965

He was working on a Saturday. I waited in the lobby.

He appeared, smiling, nodding, unchanged. He wore English regimental ties with neatly pressed suits and brilliantly shined shoes. He had shined them ever since Edna announced that a gentleman could be gauged by his shoes. My hand compressed in his powerful grip, and he glowed as he introduced me to his
co-workers. “My West Point cadet!” he exclaimed. I endured it manfully, but my discomfort from being his possession was a palpable, living thing that consumed my inconstant, shaky identity.

Dad’s job with Soboleski was new. I had never seen his office before. I realized that the disaster area composed of successive layers of sedimentary buildup, of squirreling, and a relentless refusal to discard anything, was his. I expected it to be neater. It looked like my desk after poker, or Tony Barraza’s desk before he swept it clean, or New York on a good day. It looked like my brain before a math writ.

Talk it slow. “How’s the job?” I asked. The words came out smoothly, as if I were a familiar friend. His office had a clear view of the City. I watched tiny cars twinkling in the late-morning sun as they crossed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.

“Good,” he said, lighting his pipe.

I had asked something, and he had responded to me.

“I like your desk,” I said. “Looks like mine.”

“You going to graduate?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Must,”
he said.

I nodded.

“Cannot
tell
you how much,
must.
” He twisted his blue, aquamarine Infantry School ring. The gold eagle and crossed rifles had been worn smooth in the twenty-three years since it was attached to his finger in Fort Benning. It had been the best weeks of his military career, going through the Infantry Officer Basic Course with American lieutenants. He had been a major in the Chinese infantry, and was the beau ideal of the class: he had been in combat and they hadn’t. The American officers had bought him drinks and meals and toasted the success of his army against Japan.

I stared at the old ring that made him more American than his citizenship papers. He had been a brother, honored by the Army he had loved so much. Nothing could compare to it. I broke my gaze.

“Many fail, right?” he asked.

“Yes, too many.” I thought of Stew Mersey, Joey Rensler, and Ravine Mankoff, of Alduss, Conoyer, Dirkette, and the others.

“They not so smart, not work so hard.”

“They worked hard. Some were a lot smarter, better, than me.”

There were clouds in the East Bay, where Christine went to college. I frowned with the view. With a start, I realized my middle sister, Megan, was over there. She was a schoolteacher in Berkeley. I wondered how she was. Suddenly, I wanted to see her. My heart began pounding; Edna forbade contact with her. How could I do that? But I’m an adult now. I can talk to my father. I could call her. Like I called Christine—in the open. I looked through the mass of debris on my father’s desk and saw his telephone.

“Come,” he said. “I take you to lunch, Blue Fox.”

I took a breath. “Dad—could we go to Kuo Wah? And I’ll pay.”

He frowned. “Kuo Wah. Pay—ridiculous! Don’t take pleasure!”

Andy Young, Kuo Wah’s proprietor, was a tall and dashing man who could have run for governor on the strength of his smile and the beauty of his wife and daughters.

“Hey,” he said, “how’s our general? Richard! Your best patron is here! How are you, Mr. Ting?” he said, bowing to my father.

Richard Loo, the refined waiter, had always served our family. Seeing him was like Noah seeing the dove and dry land.

“Mr. Ting, how are you, sir? Ah, young master,” he said to me. “You look wiser and very hungry! Come. Favorite table and dishes!”

“Doggone it, Richard,” I said, “I sure missed you.”

He smiled with all his teeth, laughing a little, looking down. “Yes, yes, young master. We miss you too.” He seated us in our usual booth near the kitchen, closest to the hottest dishes.

The luncheon was constantly interrupted as a variety of people I could not remember, or perhaps had never met, came to the table to greet the West Point cadet.

“Where your uniform?” asked a stockbroker from Hooker and Fay.

“I don’t have to wear it on leave, sir,” I said.

“Should wear it,” he grunted. “Show off uniform, for all of us. You only Chinese cadet from City!”

“Thank you, sir,” I said flatly, trying not to think of the duty he described. I had enough expectations.

As usual, I had foolishly presumed that when people are
near food, the only business at hand is eating. My father, like all table commandants, had a different agenda.

“What they say about Southern Lands, Viet-Nam, at West Point?”

I was enjoying the use of
kwaidz
, chopsticks, and the savoring of food. I liked eating at my own pace, without any semblance of Western manners and without the Fourth Class mess hall light being illuminated for my departure from an unmeal. Then it hit me: my father had asked me a real question. I swallowed.

“We get briefings, but we don’t know that much yet. I know basic infantry skills. This summer, we’ll learn advanced skills for Vietnam. Lots of patrolling, night patrols.”

“You know, China fight Viet-Nam. Never win.
Nam
is Cantonese for
nan
, ‘south.’ ” I nodded. “ 
‘An-nan’
mean ‘pacify south.’ Whole people, name for warlike natures. They
always
trouble! Han, T’ang, Sung, Yuan, and even Ming—all Chinese armies try rule An-nan, Champa, Viet-Nam. Viet kill all. Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, shock army, Golden Horde, Bannermen—Viet kill Chinese soldiers for thousand year! More hero than China. Dinh Bo Linh! Le Loi! Vo Nguyen Giap.”

I remembered hearing about the Chinese army’s thousand-year war in Champa, which they renamed An-nan. I didn’t want to think about it. Deep down, I was unhappy we had gone in. We were clearly going to win, but my father’s talk worried me. “There’s not going to be trouble over there, is there?” I asked.

“Already have trouble. To beat them, we must fight a thousand years. You stop eat. Don’t. Eat more.”

He was talking to me but wasn’t eating, watching me devour platefuls of food. Chinese food was the best. Besides tasting better than the best steak and having more complex tastes and sensory memories than the most sophisticated French sauce, it was spiritual sustenance, and wonderfully communal. What I ate was superior in taste, but it did not come from the extraordinary sacrifice of a French chef who had dedicated his life to perfecting a special dish. What I loved about Chinese food was its wondrous merging of the extraordinary with the common, the hard and the soft, the sour and the sweet, the pleasures of one with the pleasures of all. As I ate this food, I was joined in spirit with the great Black Haired people, who recognized in meals the celebration of life, and family, and community, a father talking to his son, hearing his questions. I served him, selecting
the cheek and eye of the fish, the most succulent black mushrooms, the darkest, most compact pieces of meat. Some of the delicacies, like sea slugs, were easy for me to surrender.