Dear Digby (7 page)

I tried to retort but found that my lips and tongue seemed sealed together by a powerful mortar. I spit some blood on the grass.

“I think it’s broken,” I said, or
thought
I said, pointing to my nose.

The girl looked mystified. “Come ag’in?”

I wrestled my bruised tongue once more into speaking position.

“B’oken. My noth. My
noth!”
I shouted, losing patience, jabbing my finger at my proboscis.

The girl smiled beatifically and nodded, adjusting her white armband with the red cross, preparing to move off through the crowd, or what remained of it.

“Ah’m up heah from Alabama with a blues group. Ah’m jus’ tryin’ to he’p out.”

She floated off, and I sat up, looked out over Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowd had been effectively dispersed, except for a few bloody hangers-on, like me, a few last-worders. Twenty minutes or so before, ten thousand people with banners reading:
OUT OF VIETNAM NOW, STOP THE BOMBINGS, HO, HO, HO CHI MINH: VIET CONG’S GOING TO WIN,
and
WITHDRAW DICK
had been milling in front of the White House, chanting, snake-dancing, smoking dope, waving their placards.

We had all come down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to protest a brunch meeting that sat President Nixon down with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some of the Vietnam Hawk generals, including Westmoreland. They were planning more bombings, as everyone knew; the meeting was obviously not a high-level strategy discussion—
those
were never witnessed—but their arrogance in coming together in such an upfront manner, with such public disregard of the nation’s mood about recent war developments, had triggered this spontaneous demonstration in front of the White House—and as far as possible, or accessible, the White House lawn.

I had been in the vanguard of the Lawn Streakers—Rennie Meyer, my boyfriend (long since vanished), and several other friends and I had all joined hands, singing “Give Peace a Chance,” waving Cong flags, and waltzed onto the grounds. All of the friends had disappeared, driven off in the front-line fire.

Holding a tissue gingerly to my nose, I searched for a familiar face. And suddenly, in the most unlikely of all places, I saw one. I can’t remember the words that began flowing out of my mouth, but I began to cry out—and I began to run faster than I had ever run before in my life, through the impossible heat and the leftover gas, in the direction of the White House gates.

The generals, having finished their meeting with Nixon, had decided to board their limousines at the east gate, where they would also answer one or two fast questions from the press, then hop into their stretch Caddies. They apparently wanted to appear Calm and Steadfast for the media, in the midst of the morning’s massacre.

As I ran toward them, they completed their cheery “No Comments” to the TV cameras, shook hands all around, began slithering into their shiny black hearses. I recognized Westmoreland, a couple of Joint Chiefs, but the first face I’d recognized was the one I was headed for.

No one saw me, no one tried to stop me, which was astounding, considering my physical appearance. The cops were scattered, everyone was intent on the circle of cameras and lights.

As I got within earshot, I began to shriek over my bloody lisp.
“Colonel Digby!”
I screamed. “Hey, I
should say General Digby
—I heard it on the news yesterday,
General,
General Digby?”

He whirled around and faced me—I was within three feet of him—and gasped. I must have looked like a ghoul from a basement horror flick: blood had coagulated,
crusted
on my face, hair, T-shirt, teeth. There was so much dried blood in my throat I was having trouble getting words out.

“How do you like the way I look, Dad? This is what happens to people who want peace in this country! How do you like it, Dad?
How do you like it
—take a good look!”

I pushed in closer. His face was still handsome under his white hair, a
shocked
handsome face. He put up a hand as if to protect himself.

“Willis,” he said. “What …”

Suddenly more leather hands were on my back; this time I could feel they Meant Business. He seemed about to protest, but then I bent, coughed, shook off the hands, stood up, and spit blood in his face.

“Killer,” I screamed as they dragged me off. “Killer!”

After his telephone call, which came the next day, I left the doctor’s office and stopped by my apartment to change before going to see him.

Consequently, I, Willis Jane Digby, am the only United States citizen who has ever walked into the offices of the Pentagon wearing bell-bottom jeans, no bra, a T-shirt reading
FUCK THE WAR
on both sides, a huge
LEGALIZE MARIJUANA
button, pink heart-shaped aviator glasses over my taped nose, a Janis Joplin hairdo, a necklace made of roach clips, and a fettuccine of bandages.

The guard who accompanied me to General D’s office remained poker-faced, but I could feel his sidelong glances every now and again.

“Care for a cigarette?” I asked him—my jaw ached tremendously but somehow moving it helped.

He shook his head. “No,
ma’am.”

We entered General Digby’s temporary office. He would be shipping out in three days, they’d said on the news. I did not know the specifics of his commission.

We had not spoken in three years. Since I had gotten so involved with antiwar politics on campus, I found it impossible to communicate anything to him other than the shame I felt at his holding a position of such significance in this war. For his part, he remained fairly withdrawn; he offered little in the way of explanations.

I had come to see him today, when he called me, before he left for Vietnam, because I thought he might try to explain. As passionately as I believed that there was no explanation or forgiveness—a part of me wanted to hear my father (the way he had when I was a little girl) deliver a few choice words that clarified everything. Or maybe I just wanted another chance to say more about my own anger. Or maybe, I thought as I saw him standing up behind his desk—thin, tall, and powerful in his uniform—maybe I just wanted to see
him.

To say good-bye.

We stood facing each other.

“That’s an interesting outfit,” he said. “You look like the antiwar celebrity you’ve become. I saw you spitting on me on all three channels on the six o’clock
and
the eleven o’clock news.”

“Yeah, I’m a real star. Too bad I had to get my nose broken and my jaw slightly realigned in order to do it.”

“Sit down, Willis.”

I noticed a slight unsteadiness. Had he been sipping a bit?

“Yes, yes, I’ve had a drink,” he answered, as if I’d asked the question out loud. “Would you like something? Scotch? Mixed drink? Wine?”

“No, thanks. Still hitting the sauce, huh?” I rearranged my button so that a
FUCK THE WAR
emblem caught a shaft of cool white light from his desk.

“Willis,” he said, pouring a straight Scotch, “I admire you for putting yourself on the line like this, for getting your head bashed in because you care so much about protesting this war. However, you don’t know shinola about what I’m trying to do—and while I would never expect you to admire me, I would ask that you reserve judgment of me.”

Much to my horror, I found myself starting to cry, losing a breath as the tears stung the swollen flesh around my nose. “Wait a minute … waaaait a minute …
shinola.
Is
that
the stuff you guys use to shine your boots with?
Shinola.
Is that the stuff that burns the skin off little kids’ faces—or eats up the grass and the trees? Yeah, I know that stuff. This is the Shinola War, isn’t it?”

He laughed and took a drink and looked away. “You’re proud of that mouth, aren’t you?” he said.

He turned around suddenly and faced me, terrifying and quiet.

“Contrary to what you believe, there
is
an organized program of withdrawal. I’m going over there to assist that movement
out.
However, it’s going to take time; patience—a virtue that you’ve never cultivated—is required.”

“How can you sit there and lie like that?” I stood up, accidentally nudging my jaw and winced. “You know as well as I do that all we have to do to end this war is to
get out.”

“Willis, wake up. There’s an entire population of Vietnamese who are now dependent on us. What’s going to happen to those people if we turn tail and pull out? Anything good, do you think? Mass executions, petty dictators are just the—”

“I’m going now. I don’t know what I came here for, but it certainly wasn’t to hear a lecture on the U.S. global conscience. That’s what started this whole thing.”

“Willis,” he said more insistently, “you do what you believe. I’m doing the same thing. How the hell can I help what you think of me? But I’m doing the only thing we
can
do over there. I wouldn’t mind if you got that straight.”

“Good-bye, General.” I started to walk out and then something made me stop and turn around. He had his head bowed, his hand over his eyes.

I found myself walking toward him. I paused at the edge of his desk.

“The gun just went off that night,” I said. I started to cry. “We were rolling around on the floor and then the gun went off … and Matthew Kallam was dead.”

I was crying harder now. “It wasn’t my fault. The gun just went off.
Why
did you leave me in that tent? Why?”

He kept looking down. “I raised you to be fearless, Willis—and you are, I think.” He looked up at me. “You are. But being a woman and fearless”—he shook his head, troubled, and took a drink—“men will back away from you for that. I wasn’t wrong to make you strong, was I? I was wrong not to tell you that men fear fearless women. How about a little mercy, Willis, how about a little mercy?”

I stood still, shaking. The room was perfectly silent. I reached over the desk and touched his cuff. “Good-bye, Father.”

He touched my hand.

Six weeks later he was dead of a heart attack in Da Nang. They flew the body back, and at the funeral, after the rifle salute, when they took the flag from the casket, as it lowered, and folded it and placed it in my mother’s hands, I wept with the others. And I stayed by the grave a long time, weeping.

For my father.

For my country.

For me, fearless Willis Digby. His son.

M
INNIE W-W-G BUZZED
me on the intercom. “Someone here to see you at the front desk, Digby.”

“Well, who is it?” I buzzed back testily. Ever since Minnie had settled her hyphenation problems, she’d been fabulously inefficient on the job—leafing through
Vogue,
sucking on low-fat yogurt pops, endlessly doing her nails.

“Ummmmmmm—jussasec, I’ll check.”

I was a bit cautious about whom I “saw” in Reception. Since I’d begun answering the more imaginative letters, I’d gotten a few visitors. One was a guy who insisted on meeting me because (he said) he’d had my handwriting analyzed and had been told by the graphologist that I was “multi-orgasmic,” and he wanted to date me. Also, Dino Pedrelli had stopped by a few times, asking for me. I did
not
want to powwow with that gentleman either.

“Well?” I buzzed again.

Minnie fumbled back on. “She says her name is Moose. No, no.
Moss, Iris Moss.”

“Just a second, I’ll get right back to you.”

Now
what? Jesus, what if she had a gun, or worse? The possibilities of how Iris Moss might stock a personal arsenal were paralyzing to consider. What if she wanted to blow up SIS? I mean, she
did
think that I was entering her sleep under false pretenses. She was obviously here on a
mission.
I looked over at Holly’s office. She was just coming out, brushing her hair out of her eyes, deep in conversation with Marge Taggart. She looked up and waved. I had told her we needed to talk to these crazy women—I had defended their right to be weird, or worse. I
had
to go out and face Iris Moss.

I approached Minnie’s Reception platform (which had a bulletproof bubble she could raise and lower at will)—I wondered momentarily if I could get her to activate it and then let me address Iris on the microphone. I heard animated conversation.

“… and then I realized that liquid protein is
not
the answer and is so much less satisfying in terms of food image than even, say, cottage cheese and celery—or yogurt and bran. I mean, those are
boring
foods, but liquid protein is
unconscious
food, the kind of food you’d eat if you were a
chair.”

Before Iris spoke, I looked at Minnie. Then I remembered—she’d decided to switch from glasses to contact lenses. She was on a big prewedding physical “make-over” kick—and just that morning she’d had drops put in her eyes at the ophthalmologist’s office for the contact lens test. She was, for all practical visual purposes (like seeing the nose in front of her face)
blind.
She was working the switchboard by rote.

“Yes, yes: I know what you mean. At the hos—where I live, we seem to end up with a lot of starchy foods. I’ve gotten very strict about the way I eat. …” A high, oddly fluted voice, with a pronounced speech impediment, she swallowed her “P’s” and “R’s”; she said “stalchy”, “stlict”). “I usually cut all the gristle off my pork chop, and I pick all the raisins out of everything: carrot salad, bran flakes, even ham sauce.”

“Raisins are fattening?”

“Oh, I have no idea about that. I just don’t like the way they
look.
If you think about it, they’re very disgusting looking; they look like something that
died,
they
are
something that died—they look like the testicles of a chipmunk who’s been stiff for a few days.”

I could hear Minnie shifting in her seat at this observation. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I see your point.”

There was a silence. Mercifully, the phones all began to ring at once. Lights flashed. Minnie went to work.

“SIS magazine … Hold the line please.”

“SIS magazine … Same to you, buddy.”