When She Came Home (6 page)

M
aryanne Byrne had seen it all before.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, shell shock, battle fatigue, nerves: the name changed with every war but the suffering did not. Going back to the Peloponnesian Wars, there wasn’t a wife or mother or girlfriend who didn’t know what it was.

The General had brought it home after his last tour in Vietnam. For months it had poisoned his days and torn up his nights. Eventually the symptoms moderated but he had been forever changed. Afterward it was as if a crack ran through Harlan Byrne’s personality. On one side he was the dreamboat she had fallen in love with, the father of her children, the man she trusted and admired. On the other he was unsure of himself, a moody and volatile stranger, rigid, unpredictably mean, and forbiddingly silent. For years after his return from Vietnam, she didn’t know from day to day, or sometimes hour to hour, which side of the crack he
would be standing on. He had refused to get help for what they were calling battle fatigue in those days. A trip to a psychologist at Balboa Hospital would have been noted in his service record. The book on Harlan Byrne would have gotten a black mark in permanent ink.

And now there was Frankie, home from the Middle East with the same brokenness.

Maryanne was as much dreading the General’s seventy-fifth birthday party as she was happy for it. If he was in a funk—as he might be on such a momentous occasion—he would try to make himself feel better by drinking too much; and if that happened, he would almost certainly take off on the nearest target, which would, inevitably, be Frankie. He could always find a way to get at her.

Maryanne had been perilously close to thirty when she met Lieutenant Colonel Harlan Byrne. At the end of the sixties it was just becoming an accepted thing to marry “late,” but it was a trend she never wanted to be part of. Too old to be caught up in the sixties rock ’n’ roll free-for-all, and not impressed by Germaine Greer or radical feminism, she had been on her own for eight years teaching sixth grade on Chicago’s south side and had her fill of liberation. A Norwegian girl from a family of Rockefeller Republicans, she yearned to be a wife and mother and set her heart on a strong man, a big house, and children; but after her twenty-eighth birthday, her confidence that all this would
happen began to fracture like an egg too long on the boil. She moved to San Diego. It was wartime and there were plenty of eligible men there.

For a smart, pretty girl, poised, athletic, and brimming with bright conversation, it had been like fishing in a well-stocked pond. Maryanne threw back the small fry until, at a dinner dance, she met Harlan, his ribbons, stars, and bars aglow with possibility. He had a brash boyish sweetness in those days. He was courageous and sure of himself, and he looked stunning in his Marine Corps uniform. Before she met him, if Maryanne had been asked how she felt about the war in Vietnam, she would have said that it was a waste of life and treasure. By the time she and Harlan were a couple and she had gone into debt for a wardrobe suitable for the girlfriend and then fiancée of a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, she could argue persuasively in support of the war as essential to American influence abroad and security at home. Dominos, etc.

They had been married less than a year when he went back to Vietnam, leaving her alone in military housing with baby Harry. If anyone thought making the world a safer, freer place was the way to get rich, they didn’t know anything about the Marine Corps. As a young married woman she had remodeled out-of-style clothes and economized on food and utilities long before it was the green thing to do. It had taken five years of going without before she had enough money in a special fund to afford the Mission-style table that extended to seat sixteen, the chairs, and matching
sideboard. Looking at it now as she set an extra place for dinner—her mother’s silver, her mother-in-law’s Wedgwood and Spode—she still felt proud of the self-discipline it had taken to bring the beautiful furnishings into their life. She came from thrifty stock. Her parents had saved and invested all their lives in anticipation of a time when they would need a chunk of money. They had happily paid for Harry’s years at Cathedral Boys’ School and Frankie’s at Arcadia and left their daughter a comfortable inheritance.

Some of which had helped Harry through med school. He would be at his father’s birthday party, of course. Maryanne looked forward to that. It was always a special occasion when she had her son on his own. Gaby, his French-Canadian wife, was on one of her extended fund-raising trips, soliciting money for the kids’ clinic. Despite her liberal politics, Harlan loved his daughter-in-law and, in his own begrudging way, he respected her and let her know it. Maryanne wondered how it felt to be Frankie, watching her father give Gaby the approval she had longed for since childhood.

Sergeant Major Bunny Bunson, USMC Retired, had called that morning and invited himself to the party. Luckily Maryanne had bought a large rib roast. Bunny was a gormandizer.

Bunny had been the General’s closest friend since their first tour. Maryanne had never liked him. Too opinionated and showy for her taste. A strutter. At almost seventy he was still a compulsive bodybuilder and wore his shirts
tucked in, military style, to emphasize his trim waist and broad shoulders. He shaved his head to hide the truth that his hair was white, and Maryanne suspected a cosmetic surgeon had firmed his jawline with a scalpel and needle and thread.

She first met Bunny when she’d been dating Harlan only a few weeks. In his terse, always correct way, he had just declared that he loved her. She remembered him telling her that she was the prettiest girl at the party, saying he was so proud his brass buttons might pop. It was 1969 and Maryanne had been told that she looked like Jean Shrimpton, the British model who was in all the style magazines, so she dressed the part in Carnaby Street mode. That night she wore an extremely short black dress with a white ruffled front like an old-fashioned men’s dress shirt and patent leather shoes that her roommate called “French hooker heels.” Her blond hair was shoulder length and ironed dead straight.

She and Harlan were talking with some other officers and their dates when Bunny swooped down upon them and enveloped her in a hug that was an inch too tight, a second too long. She didn’t like the amused, appraising look in his eyes when he pulled away.

He said, “So this is the one,” and nodded, grinning at Harlan. “Gol’ dang it, I wish I’d gotten there first!”

Maryanne remembered being insulted by the way he put his compliment, and thinking how grateful she was
that he had not
gotten there first
. Bunny Bunson might have soured her on the Marine Corps altogether.

But he was Harlan’s friend and over the years he had become a fixture in their lives. There had been girlfriends and two ex-wives, but none lasted long enough to make much of an impression on Maryanne. After retirement he bought a house on a lake in the Cascades and vanished for a while, saying he would fish and hunt until he thought of something better to do. She wasn’t exactly sure what had tempted him away from the slaughter of fish and deer, but she thought it was a consultant job of some kind with the corps or DOD. He rarely stayed in one place very long. He kept an apartment in DC and one in Oceanside. Once she’d asked Harlan what Bunny’s job was. His answer had been vague, and she wondered if her husband knew for sure.

Anyway, tonight he was in San Diego and like it or not, he was coming to dinner.

I
n Frankie’s memory, family parties all ran to a similar pattern.

They began, as her father’s birthday did, with the necessary social lubrication—martinis, whiskey sours, Manhattans, the lethal cocktails of her parents’ youth—served from a bar that took up half of one wall in the den, a room full of easy chairs, books, and memorabilia. In military circles, alcohol was the drug of choice; and while Frankie could not remember ever seeing her mother finish a drink, the General always had two of something, wine with dinner, and milk punch at bedtime.

On the evening of the party, one day after Frankie’s meeting at Arcadia School, Glory ran through her grandparents’ house like the healthiest, happiest, and best-adjusted kid in three counties, though only a few hours earlier, she had been reluctant to go to school and complained first of a stomachache and then a headache. For a moment Frankie had been tempted to send her across the
street to her grandmother for a mental health day, but the impulse passed quickly when she thought of explaining this to her mother and the General. She had not yet spoken to Glory about the incident at school, nor had Frankie told Rick anything about it. She dreaded both conversations and until she figured out how to begin and get through them, she convinced herself it was better not to try.

It was a thin excuse and all day she’d been fretting, feeling both dishonest and cowardly.

In the den her godfather was tending bar. Bunny grinned at her from across the room, his front teeth shining like a clean sink.

Frankie’s throat tightened.

She kissed her mother’s cheek and then the General’s and handed him an expensive bottle of champagne. “This is for you two later.”

“And I made
this
for you.” Bunny handed Frankie a sugar-crusted cocktail glass. “Sidecar. Your favorite, right?”

In college, yes, maybe. These days she preferred a shot of Johnnie Walker up, but she thanked Bunny, took the clown drink, and stepped back into the corner of the room behind a big wing chair. One sip of the cocktail and she set the glass on a bookshelf. After the week she’d had, she needed to be in close control of herself. Her brother arrived, apologized for being late, and launched into a story about the clinic’s latest problems with Mrs. Greenwoody and her Build a Better Ocean Beach committee.

Frankie listened, her attention barely engaged. She
wasn’t exactly hiding in the corner behind the chair, but she was safely out of the conversational line of fire. She turned her head as if she were following the conversation and occasionally nodded as if she were interested. Her focus drifted like a net cast between Iraq and San Diego, childhood and the present. When she was young and the upholstery was a serviceable blue-and-white striped cotton, the corner behind the chair had been a good hideout if the General was angry and looking for a target.

In the den the television was on and set to PBS, the
NewsHour
. Frankie’s mother preferred this channel, and the General tolerated it so long as she did not complain when he swore at the onscreen guests and commentators. At a family gathering the television was always on and, like an opinionated guest who knew the scoop from inside the beltway, it often determined the course of the conversation. That night Senator Susan Belasco was being interviewed. Over the murmur of conversation, Frankie heard the words
Global Sword and Saber Security Services… bodyguards for top officials… a secret army over there….

Her attention jerked away from the screen and dilated to a pinprick as she counted the points and lines in the wing chair’s plush beige herringbone.

“You okay, goddaughter?”

She wished Bunny would just call her Frankie or Francine like everyone else.

“Drink up. You look like you need to relax a little.”

And Bunny was a ridiculous name for a grown man.

“You think too much, goddaughter.”

What was he now? A mind reader?

Maryanne called them in to dinner.

For Frankie family gatherings were an ordeal of dancing around the General’s mood, dipping and pirouetting and trying to make herself agreeable. In contrast Harry always seemed to have a great time. The accident that crippled the General’s plans for his son’s military career had liberated Harry. These days he laughed and argued and was as outspoken as if the General’s approval meant not much to him, either way.

“Gaby sends her love.” Harry’s wife was not only a pediatrician but held an MBA from Boston University. It was she who managed the finances and did most of the fund-raising for the clinic. “She said to tell you that she wouldn’t have missed your birthday, but she’s got an amazing opportunity to talk to some really big donors in show business. She’s eating lobster and filet mignon tonight.”

“Love Gaby, hate lobster.” The General walked around the table, filling wineglasses with a heady cabernet. He put a drop in Glory’s water glass, tinting it pale pink. “Might as well eat a cockroach.”

“She’s seeing some television folks tomorrow morning. Did you know that shows like
American Idol
give grants to not-for-profits? They’re talking about funding mobile clinics so we wouldn’t be limited to Ocean Beach.”

“The BBOB would be glad to hear that.” Rick helped himself to a thick slice of rare prime rib from the platter.
He put a smaller piece on Glory’s plate. “The dreaded Veronica Greenwoody was in my office yesterday, trying to get me to sign one of their petitions.”

“Who’s Greenwoody?” Bunny asked.

“Local developer,” Harry said. “She lives out on Sunset Cliffs in a house full of cats and buckets of cash. She and the BBOB want the poor out of Ocean Beach so they can build McMansions and make a fortune.”

Rick did not disagree although he too was a real estate developer. He favored controlled growth, and despite having built a large home across the street from the General and Maryanne, most of his projects were modestly sized and styled residences.

Harry said, “Greenwoody’s been fighting us for three years but we haven’t moved and we’re not planning to.”

“I don’t think they actually begrudge care for the children,” Rick said. “I meet with them from to time, to stay on top of things, and they’re not monsters. Except her, of course.”

“She’s a Godzilla, right, Daddy?”

Everyone at the table laughed at Glory’s precocity.

Frankie took some meat, the smallest slice she could find on the platter. Salad was what she really wanted, but this was the General’s birthday and his favorite kind of meal: rare beef, potatoes, and peas.

“You’ve got to admit, Harry, this town could use a little cleanup.” Frankie felt Rick looking at her as he spoke and knew that he wanted her to say something supportive. “It’s
getting pretty hard to avoid the homeless. Frankie’s even got a friend who sleeps in her car.”