Chapter 113
I WAS WALKING DOWN the 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-soaked grazies behind me, then ran the quarter of a mile to Bar Sanna before remembering that it was Tuesday, 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.”
I thought about how expensive this call was going to be, how I didn’t have the money to pay five thousand lire a minute for breathing lessons, but then I decided I didn’t care.
“Are you following what’s happening in Saigon?” I asked when I could speak in complete sentences.
“I am,” she said, and I thought I could hear the burn of her cigarette. A long, deep inhale.
“Did you see the footage? The tanks rolling in?”
“It’s just awful.”
“And all those people trying to get out?”
“Yes,” she said.
I was quiet for a moment. Long enough that she worried we’d been disconnected. “You still there?”
“I’m here,” I said. I was desperately trying to figure out how to put everything I was thinking and feeling into words, and finally, I just said it. “Lenny dying over there was supposed to mean something.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“And now it’s, like, what was the point?”
She didn’t argue with me. In fact, I thought I could hear her crying on the other end of the line.
“You know what the worst part is?” I asked.
“What?”
“I can’t even tell if the communists are the bad guys anymore.”
“Eileen,” said my mother in the same scandalized tone she’d use if I swore in front of her.
“It’s true,” I said. “I know we were told that the world was going to implode if Vietnam fell to the communists, but I’m sitting on this island where a third of the population voted communist in the last election, and the people here, they don’t seem much different than people anywhere.”
“Is it really a third?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My Italian teacher’s definitely a member of the party. And I’m pretty sure my landlord is. And maybe my hairdresser.”
“Do you ever feel unsafe?” my mother asked me.
“No,” I said. “I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I feel fine all the time. Everyone’s been great. If anything, I worry we’re the ones who are making things unsafe.”
“How so?”
I told her about the Chartridge and how, after the grounding, everyone in the command had tried to keep the lid on it.
“The people on the island had no idea?” my mother asked.
“Right, but it could have really affected them, you know? I mean, it might already have affected them.” And then, because I had apparently decided I was going to spend every single centesimo I had, I told her about the babies who’d been born without skulls.
“Jesus, Eileen,” said my mother. “That’s terrible.”
“I know.”
“What does Paul say?”
“He thinks I need a hobby,” I said.
“Are things okay between you two?” my mother asked.
I was tempted to tell her about Teo, but I didn’t want her to think less of me. “We’re fine.”
“Your letters make it sound like you’re on one long honeymoon.”
My letters were lies, but I couldn’t tell her that. “I think I just wish Paul would acknowledge that there’s real risk with these subs. And that it’s not unpatriotic to want to understand what that risk means for regular people.”
She was quiet for a minute. “You sound unhappy.”
I choked out a laugh. “I am, a little.”
“Do you want to come home?”
Embedded in that question were other questions. Had I married Paul prematurely? Did I want to leave him? And in doing so, was I willing to give up the life I’d built in La Maddalena?
“No,” I said finally. “I want to stay. I just want…”
My voice had trailed off. It’s so telling, isn’t it? That I couldn’t even finish the sentence?