“Say it.”
“Paul’s an ass.”
I laughed, more out of surprise than anything else.
“I know I shouldn’t say that.”
I leaned into him and touched my forehead to his. “I won’t tell.”
He took a deep breath and relaxed into me.
“Things have been a little better between us lately,” I admitted.
“You deserve more than a little better.”
That got me, probably because—on some level—I recognized that what he’d said was true.
113.
I WAS WALKING DOWNthe Via Giuseppe Garibaldi at the end of April when I passed an electronics store with a row of televisions in the window. All of them were tuned to Italy’s public broadcast station, RAI, and on the screen, I could make out the grainy images of throngs of people rushing the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
I hurried inside the store, where there were more televisions. “What’s going on?” I asked the clerk in Italian.
“It’s happening,” he said. Then, because he knew I was American, he added, “Your ambassador has already given the order to evacuate.”
I stood there, transfixed, as an announcer narrated the final days of the South Vietnamese government.When President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned early last week, American officials had hoped to negotiate a peaceful transition of power for Saigon, but it now seems certain that the city will fall to North Vietnamese forces.
The North Vietnamese had Saigon surrounded, and the ARVN’s numbers were so depleted that they couldn’t mount a defense, much less the offense it would take to regain control of the region. A thousand Americans and more than five thousand Vietnamese had been evacuated overnight, and many more people remained on the ground waiting for help.If and when it will come, no one knows.
The clerk and I watched tanks full of North Vietnamese soldiers roll toward the presidential palace. One man, who couldn’t have been much older than my brother, Lenny, had been when he was killed, waved a gun in the air, and I started to sob.
“Can I get you something?” the clerk asked, but I already knew what I needed, and it wasn’t something he could help me with.
I let myself out of the shop, scattering tear-soakedgraziesbehind me, then ran the quarter of a mile to Bar Sanna before remembering that it wasTuesday, and if I wanted to make an international call, I would need to go to Bar Shanghai instead.
It was seven o’clock in the morning in Charleston, and while I waited for the call to go through, I pictured my mother at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking her first Pall Mall of the day. When she answered, I could hear the radio in the background.
“Mama?”
“Eileen?” Her voice had that panicked edge all parents’ voices get when their kid calls late at night or early in the morning. “Is everything all right?”
“You been—” I was crying so hard, I couldn’t even get the whole sentence out.
“Baby?”
“You been—”
“Seriously, Eileen. You’re scaring me. You okay?”
“Yes,” I stuttered.
“Paul okay?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
You know how sometimes you’re crying about one thing, and then someone brings up something else, and it’s got nothing to do with the first thing you were crying about, but now it’s like you’ve got permission to cry about that, too? That’s how it was when my mother asked me about Paul. I was crying so hard, I was choking on my own snot, and my mom kept telling me to calm down, that I had to take a breath.
She started taking her own deep breaths on the other end of the phone. “See, this is how you do it,” she soothed. “In and out. In and out.”
