FOURTEEN. Back to the World
Helen refused to attend the memorial service for Darrow in New York City. She considered it a hijacking of his wishes and would not be party to it. She would not be party either to her moniker of other woman. Gary and the others thought her callous not to go, to represent his colleagues in Vietnam. No. They expected her to be a good sport, to let the past stay in the past, but it was not within her to do it.
She flew from Tokyo to San Francisco, and felt a childish excitement as she looked down through the clouds, the idea of home suddenly real after such a long absence. Home would fix things. On the plane to Los Angeles, the last leg, she sat with soldiers still in uniform who had processed out of Travis and were going home. Could it be as easy as walking off a plane to leave the war behind?
Her mother, Charlotte, met her at the gate with a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. She saw her own face in her mother’s, softer and more fragile now. How she had missed that smell of Joy perfume. She pushed away the guilt she felt, her mother resigned to the whole selfish tribe she had raised. As they hugged, Helen watched the returning soldiers heckled by a small group of antiwar protesters. A stringy brunette wearing tattered jeans and a suede halter top stood in front of the soldiers, blocking their way. Her long brown hair was tangled, a feather dangling from a braided strand of it. With barely a glance, one of the soldiers shot his arm out to shove her aside.
The girl’s eyes widened until the whites were visible, and she yelled, “Who do you think you are touching me?” But the soldiers ignored her and moved off.
“Let’s leave,” Helen said.
“You’re so thin,” her mother said. “I hardly recognized you.”
Helen put her arm around her mother’s thickened waist as they walked by the brunette. She slowed and stared at the girl, who returned a flat, dreamy gaze. A look with no contradiction, not the smallest doubt. “Think peace,” the girl offered, then turned to drink from a soda can.
Helen stopped, transfixed. Her mother tugged at her arm.
The girl looked back now, flushed. “What?”
“That’s real brave… what you’re doing here.”
“I want to leave,” Charlotte said.
“Gee, thanks,” the brunette said with a nervous giggle and turned to the two men she was with.
“You’re really making a statement… standing in an air-conditioned airport.”
“Look,” the girl started. “My boyfriend was drafted. Were you there?” “Yes.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “That’s so cool. Did you see them bayonet babies?”
Helen shook with a rage she didn’t know was inside of her. Charlotte dragged her down the walkway.
“What was the point of it?” the girl yelled, gaining confidence at their retreat.
Helen stopped, unable to think. No one had ever asked her the question before.
When they reached the house, Helen first went around to the back and stood staring at the view she had grown up with-ocean waves breaking on the rocks down below. Then she walked from room to room, marveling how big and clean everything looked. Nothing had changed since she’d left except for herself. It was hard to imagine what had burned in her to leave this place and go halfway around the world. She wanted to return to what she had been before she left, but better, smarter, more content.
“Come and look,” her mother said, and showed her the pile of magazines and newspapers with her photos. “This just came.” She held the magazine with the NVA boy soldier on the cover. Inside was an editorial announcing Darrow’s death with the picture Linh had shot of him in the Special Forces camp. “So horrible, so sad.”
Helen said nothing. If she told about her relationship with Darrow, it would boil down to the elements of a dime-store romance. How she had wanted to bring Darrow here, to meet her mother and see where she grew up.
“Please put them away for now.”
Her mom fidgeted with her hands, shy in front of her daughter. “What was it like there?”
“Scary and depressing. Alive. Parts were wonderful.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
No answer.
“I’m just so glad you’re back. I’m proud. People say things about Vietnam behind my back. But my brave girl went.”
Helen stared at the floor. “That means a lot to me.”
“I invited some of our friends over,” she said. “Everyone is so anxious to see that you’re in one piece.”
“Not just yet.”
Charlotte stopped in the middle of the room. “This part of life is important, too.” She bit her lip. “All of you acted like the war was the only real thing that mattered.”
Helen hugged her, then stretched out on the couch.
“Take your shoes off the sofa. Don’t be a lazy bones. Come see your room. I haven’t changed a thing.” The comforting assurance one gave an invalid, when everyone knew that nothing at all stayed unchanged. Her room still had the white-painted twin bed, the flocked coverlet with pastel flowers sewn on. The walls papered with the pictures of Indochina she had collected as a teenager-broad swaths of the monsoon across the plains, long sun-drenched valleys, two figures wearing woven conical hats sitting in a fishing boat in the watery distance. Unreal and movieish; had this bit of fakery really started her on her way to Vietnam? How impossibly naive she had been.
Helen laughed, and her mother’s face looked hopeful, but the laugh continued too long, became raucous and then bitter, and her mother’s face fell as she escaped from the room.
Beneath the pictures was the box of Darrow’s personal things from the Cholon apartment. Helen avoided the box for days, and then broke down one afternoon, tearing it open, savoring the faint, sweet- rotten smell of Saigon inside. As strange and unsanitary as a full-grown Cholon rat. She loved it now in direct proportion to how she hated it then. Helen sat by the box, transported back to her crooked apartment, the Buddha door, the creaky stairs, the faded lamp. She closed her eyes and dreamed she could hear the street noise outside, longing for that life in this silence and hum of air-conditioning.
The magazine had taken care of his official things in the hotel, but Darrow’s wife made a request for all his personal belongings. “Do what ever you want,” Gary said. Helen would have ignored the wife, but the idea of the boy made her pause. As a young girl, she had studied in detail everything that related to her father for some clue to herself.
She made her slow way through file after file of prints and negatives. Any combat photographer as far forward as Darrow ended up with huge numbers of unprintable photos-material so gruesome that no magazine would publish it. But the photographer had to take them, nonjudgmental until he returned to the darkroom. Looking through his whole oeuvre, she saw that he had gone from a mediocre photographer in his early days in the Congo and Middle East to what some called a genius. Something had come together for him by the time he arrived in Vietnam, and the place itself had spoken to him. An astonishing achievement bought at an astonishing price. Helen kept the gruesome photos back, selecting the ones surrounding his published spreads. He had been notorious for taking many rolls for each intended shot, and these showed his artistic method at work. A child should know that about his father.
She came across the photos done at Angkor, stunned by their loveliness. So unlike anything he had done before. A photo of Linh among a group of Cambodian workers. Although he was smiling, he looked too young for the pain in his eyes. Helen also kept out all the shots of herself. She included his cameras, his equipment,
