Joe Bright’s thoughts returned to Billie Holiday, as they usually did when he was waiting for his father. A retired trauma surgeon, Samuel Bright was an enormous fan of Lady Day’s singing, especially the recordings—“Such soulful longing”, Samuel often said while listening to them—that she had made with the pianist Oscar Peterson. Now, so many years removed from Joe’s time as a Navy corpsman with the Marines, he recalled the day that he and his father had talked about Billie, just before Joe had left San Francisco for Vietnam. He had been nineteen, a big fan of Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix, about whose amazing talents he had never been able to convince his father
Hendrix was a lot of noise for Samuel Bright. “A pretty boy in all that orange and red get-up, all those feathers and make-up”. He also couldn’t play the guitar, as far as Samuel was concerned. Marvin Gaye was clearly a gifted singer, but his attitude toward his audience, the over-confidence, the sex, the in-your-face brazen demand to accept everything that Gaye was shoving at you…that made Samuel think that Gaye was more exhibitionist than artist. Samuel believed that popular music itself had been derailed by guys like these, by Miles Davis too and even The Beatles. “Too many gimmicks,” he had complained. “No soul. Too much bother about sales. Too much formula.”
Billie Holiday, on the other hand, merely had to make a gesture with one of her beautiful be-ringed hands, to look to the side the way she did so often, as though no one else were in the room and she had caught herself in mid-thought, in a passing dream, or a painful effort at a smile…and then all she had to do was sing the words. ”Gay roué and gay divorcée/who lunch at The Ritz,/will tell you that it’s…/divine!” She sang from regret. A ruse, The Divine yet filled The Ritz, a palace devoted to fun and loss. Billie Holiday was the muse who made you feel that fun in your own ruptured heart.
“She recorded it in 1952, with Oscar,” Samuel had told his son. “Her voice was failing. It wanders off key sometimes, weakens here and there. But you can tell how much the song is giving her. You know, she sings ‘It’s good to live it again’ there in the end. She means it, even though she’s faltering so badly.”
That day in 1967, on a bench overlooking Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, Samuel had given Joe two eight-track tapes filled with Billie Holiday’s music. Dressed as always in a dark three-piece suit, a white dress shirt and dark tie, his hair just beginning to gray that year, his eyeglasses serving to make his face appear opaque and ordered, Samuel took his son’s right hand into both of his. “Listen to this while you’re over there, Joey. Please. Think about San Francisco. Think about your mother and me. Just listen to this stuff now and then.”
Months before, Samuel had pleaded with Joe not to go into the Navy. “Finish college. Go to medical school. The world doesn’t need another piece of cannon fodder. It does need another doctor.”
But Joe had gone to Vietnam and been wounded at Khe Sanh in 1968.
There had been no medical school after he had recovered, a painful realization for his father, who could not understand why such a talented kid as Joey would want to waste his time with words. “What do you think, you’re a Hemingway?”
Joe often thought about that moment, too, when he and his father had been seated on this very same bench two years later. Stow Lake appeared motionless in the uncustomary hot San Francisco weather, one of the three or four days a year in that city in which the heat holds to your skin as though bandaged to it. Indeed, Joe’s legs were heavily bandaged that day, his recovery from the burns progressing reasonably enough, although, as Samuel told him, “that skin below your knees, it’s so bad that it’ll always be like cowhide, Joey. But cowhide that breaks open if you bang it against a low table or something. It’ll itch. It’ll hurt”
And so it had, and so it did now as he listened to more of Billie Holiday on his iPhone.
Holding the eight-tracks in his hands before Joe left for Vietnam, his father had described to him the one Billie Holiday concert he had attended, on March 27, 1948 at Carnegie Hall in New York. Samuel was twenty-seven that year, doing his surgery residency at the Mount Sinai hospital. He had no time for anything, with a new baby about to arrive…Joey himself. But Samuel made time for this concert.
“Your mother and I were up in the first balcony. First row. And there were so many people…black people, white people… Not an empty seat in the place. Looking down on the main floor, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such…splendor in an audience. Gorgeous women, black and white, dressed beautifully. Tuxes. Money. The love they had for her.”
Samuel looked to his hands.
“You never heard a voice like that, Joey. She did more than thirty tunes that night, and every one of them—every one—took your breath.”
Three months after his deployment, lying against a red mud embankment on Hill 881, smoke rising from his legs, his helmet rolling down the slime and mud beside him, everything about Joe was mottled red and black with mud except where his right shoulder bled. A bright carmine gleaming. The piece of shrapnel that had loosed the helmet from his head had been diverted into the shoulder itself. Joe fell into a pain-ridden swoon, in which, through all the noise of the explosions and sear and automatic rifle fire, broken slivers of music ran through his mind, just here and there, gone in the terrifying pain, a sigh of remorse, death demanding that it be heard. Oscar Peterson’s recollected piano so sweet in the roar. Billie Holiday singing for Joe despite the fact that his legs were on fire and he was dying.
“Come on, Joey.” Someone huddled down next to him, still under fire, his voice barely controlled, all anger and panic. “We’re gettin’ you out.” Joe didn’t know who it was, even though he recognized the voice. They dragged him by his shoulders out of the kill zone. He figured he was dead. Black smoke rose from the tattered shreds of his pants legs. His own skin…he didn’t know what was happening with his own skin.
Joe glimpsed his father approaching, a ninety-year-old now, but still one who enjoyed his exercise. He loved this particular path around Stow Lake, the undulant turns in it, and the trees seeming to bow down over the surface of the lake itself. This bench… Joe mused that it had to be a bench very like this one that Billie had sung about. ”Lovers that bless the dark/On benches in Central Park/Greet autumn in New York.”
He could not remember now whether that too went through his mind as, screaming, held down by others, still under fire, he awaited the med-evac. He should have died.
“It’s good to live it again,” she sang.
Joe stood up, a cane in each hand. Walking still caused him considerable difficulty, and his father occasionally kidded him for that. “Well, you’re sixty-three years old, Joey. What do you expect?” Samuel was a widower with an apartment in The Marina, overlooking the garden and pond of the Palace of Fine Arts. He walked far more comfortably than his son did, and still dressed with natty, businesslike style. A suit and a necktie, always. Dr. Samuel Bright, Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Stanford University Medical Center.
Joe suspected that someone being told about such an exchange would accuse Samuel of heartlessness toward his son. But that was not so. As soon as Joe had arrived at the Brooke Army Burn Center in Texas, Samuel flew there. The physicians explained that Joe had suffered full thickness burns in his lower legs, and that there had not been the facilities in the field to flay the skin, to enable blood circulation. The musculature had quickly deteriorated.
“You’ve got to do that within a few hours, Doctor Bright,” one of the physicians told him. Joe was lying in a bed, his father seated next to it. Samuel placed a hand on Joe’s chest, to comfort him, as the doctor continued. “And out there, Joe, where you were…I don’t have to tell you about that fire fight you were in. A bad one. Very bad. They just couldn’t get you out in time.”
Joe had awakened every morning in the burn center to light coming in his window. But it was hardly an awakening. His sleep was not actually sleep. Rather, it was a kind of floating wonder steeped in flame. He could not move, his legs being wrapped in whatever they wrapped them in, and stabilized. “They’ll heal,” his father told him. “But you’re not going to have anything like the mobility you did have. And you’ll have pain.”
His father took as much time as he could away from his practice, to be with Joe. Joe had always marveled at how Samuel described some of the cases he had in his surgery practice. He could describe the most gruesome details of a patient’s situation as though he were arranging milk and orange juice in a refrigerator. Joe had often thought that his father had no emotions when it came to his work. A shoulder splattered by a close-range shotgun blast was simply a disorganized object that Samuel was attempting to put together again, despite the fact that if he didn’t, the patient could well die. His descriptions for Joe never included anything about his feelings for having to view so much torn apart carnage.
But at the burn center, listening to Samuel’s advice about Joe’s own misfortune, Joe sensed the underpinning, unexpected as it may sound, of anguished distress. He had always loved his father, despite Samuel’s seeming distance, not knowing quite why he cared for him so. He realized now that his father’s feelings had indeed not been hidden from him. A run-of-the-mill patient chewed up by a severe knifing would not feel them because Doctor Bright had built the barrier into his demeanor. He needed to save this person’s life, and the distance allowed the surgeon to do things right. But for Joe, at the burn center, his father had actually shown clear, invasive pain as he had watched his own son suffer the results of death’s not having taken him.
And here at Stow Lake, now, Joe saw once again what his father had successfully hidden from others. From that first moment in Texas, Samuel’s commiserative pain was real and demonstrable to Joe, and Joe realized that that was because he and his father shared not just some DNA connection, but a mixing of souls as well. The passage of their pain back and forth was a silent acknowledgment of it for both men. Samuel’s emotions were palpable and deep, like Joe’s wounds.
These many years later, Samuel still helped Joe wash and hydrate the skin on his legs when he came to visit. They went for weekly walks around Stow Lake. Samuel kept up on the latest for the long-term treatment of such severe wounds. He admired his son’s writing and the fact that his novels had done so much to explain the heartfulness of the wounded in war. Joe’s first novel had described the death of a Hill 881 corpsman, his thoughts falling to dreams as he lay next to two dead men, both of whom he had thought he could save. Mendoza and Sink had been the two characters’ names in the book, the same as the two Marines that Joe was lying next to when they all were hit by the incendiary. Joe’s fourth novel, about the last moment in the life, in Vietnam in 1954, of the combat photographer Robert Capa, had made him minorly famous for a while. Throughout the novel, before he stepped on the landmine, Capa’s damaging, electrified second thoughts about his life revealed themselves. In the novel, his death did little to relieve his suffering.
The book’s fame diminished, and Joe wrote another one, also famous, and then another.
“Hello, Dad.” Joe took Samuel’s hand in his. Samuel was wearing a Mayser Piero panama that he had owned for years. It was brushed, blocked, in beautiful shape.
“Hello, Joey. How you feeling?” His father looked down at the canes.
“The same. Fine.”
“Pain?”
“Sure. But, so what?”
They turned up the path toward the coffee stand at the boat rental shack on the lake, where they stopped for Joe to rest. Arriving at the coffee stand, Samuel told his son that he was buying, and while they stood in line waiting, he turned to Joe to continue the conversation they had been having.
“That’s the reason I call it ‘Johnson’s Folly.’” Samuel took a billfold from his jacket pocket and brought out a twenty. “You know, president on the day you were wounded. But you could call it Kennedy’s. Eisenhower’s. It doesn’t matter.” He returned the billfold to its pocket. “I think in my heart that those wounds—yours and those of all the other guys—are insulting reminders to the wounded themselves of how little they mattered.”
He took the two cups of coffee into his hands, and both men turned toward an empty metal table with chairs and a view of the lake. Samuel placed the coffees on the table, along with two paper napkins and two plastic-wrapped slices of banana bread. Their usual. He put his hand on the small of Joe’s back, caressing it as he took the canes from his son and then helped him sit down.
“They were doing the best they could, Dad.”
“Maybe. They did abandon that hill a month or two after you took it.” Samuel eased down into his own chair and sipped from his coffee. “Without a word why.”
Joe unwrapped one of the pieces of banana bread, tore it into two pieces, and offered one to his father. His books had allowed the rages that overwhelmed him, and his hatred for what had happened on 881, to be channeled into much-savored creativity and a sort of battered peace. He was grateful to have discovered what the writing could do to calm him. He felt that, in many ways, he was still alive because of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know they did.”
—
A soft wind floated from the west…from the ocean…and hurried across Stow Lake. The surface wavered. The water darkened, cold blue to black where the air stirred it. Joe opened the top button of his shirt, to allow the breeze and, as he turned to look across the lake, he saw a young woman and an older man walking along the path toward the boathouse. Both Asians, they seemed as different from each other as one could imagine. The woman was in her early thirties, Joe guessed, very slim and small, dressed in black slacks and a short black cotton jacket. She was wearing sunglasses and just now securing a handbag to her right shoulder. She appeared fresh, pleased, and physically delicate. Looking toward the boat house, she pointed the building out to her companion.
The man was dressed in a suit and tie. He was taller than the woman, although not much. The formality of his clothing made him seem professorial, a quiet assurance that was enhanced by the fact of his walking with a cane. He moved slowly and looked ahead at the pathway as though it were an uphill passage, even though the pathway itself bordered the lake and was therefore flat. His walking was labored. Even this slow stroll was an effort. He was beset with elderly-seeming worry. When his companion pointed out the boat house, he nodded, acknowledging her speaking to him. But clearly, he had to concentrate on his balance.
“Ah, here’s someone I’ve wanted you to meet,” Samuel said. “A student of a friend of mine.”
“A physician?”
“Yes. Now she is. Emergency room surgery. The same as me, and a real pro.” Samuel stood and touched Joe’s right shoulder. “Shirley Phạm’s her name.” He stepped toward the path to greet the couple. “And her grandfather.” Samuel waved. “Phạm Cuong”
Joe stood up as the couple approached their table. He leaned on his canes.
There was a quarter hour’s small talk. Shirley’s medical training in New York City. Her residency at Stanford. Cuong had been a translator at the United Nations: Vietnamese, French, and English. His wife had died a few years ago, and he still lived in New York City. He was visiting his granddaughter just now, with whom it was quite evident he was close.
But Joe sensed that Shirley and Samuel wished to leave the two men alone for a time.
“I know you don’t know it, Joe,” Shirley said. “But you have things to talk about.” She stood and kissed her grandfather on the cheek. “Ông nội.”
“I love you, Shirley,” Cuong whispered. He took her right hand a moment with his left, and let it go. “Thank you.” His own right hand was a black prosthesis, in the shape of a hand, coming from the sleeve of his suit coat where it rested on the table. So smoothly manufactured, it looked like sculpture, only sculpture without heart, fashioned for utility alone, and emotionally remote. It did not move.
Samuel and Shirley left the boathouse and, before they set out on the walkway around the lake, he pointed out the rental boats to her. Joe noticed how Shirley glanced over her shoulder as she listened to Samuel’s talk. There was worry in the glance.
“Shirley asked me to tell you that I was born in 1945.” Cuong sat back and grinned. It was the first instance of liveliness Joe had seen from him. “The Japanese left, and I arrived.” He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning grey hair. “Some months before the French came back to Vietnam. My father had worked for the French colonial government before the Second War. He had lived in France…studied there. We spoke as much French at home as we spoke Vietnamese.”
“French,” Joe said.
“Fluently.”
“And he went back to work for them.”
“Yes.”
“What about your English?”
Cuong fingered the buttons of his jacket with his left hand, studying them. He did not respond immediately, as though he were searching the words…maybe the story itself. “After the American war, in 1980, I was able to go to England. They wanted me to keep an eye on what was happening in Europe.” He sipped from his tea. “How the Europeans felt about us.” The silence wavered. “The English…. Very good teachers.”
“How long were you there?”
“Five years.”
“And the American war? Yourself, I mean.”
Cuong swallowed. After a long silence, he swallowed once more. “Yes. I fought in the war, also.”
Joe glanced at the prosthesis.
“The same as you. Shirley told me about you. Your father had described for her your time there.”
“ARVN?” Joe’s reference was to the army of South Vietnam.
Cuong looked to the side. “No, I…I….” He sipped from his tea. “I was Viet Cong.”
Joe swallowed. He waited, not able in the moment to respond.
“Khe Sanh,” Cuong said. He leaned forward and gathered his hands on the table. He studied the cup of tea. “Your Hill 881.” He looked up. “Your father had told Shirley about your…your experience there.
“Where I…” Joe spread his hands wide and looked down at his legs.
“Yes. And then she told your father about me.” Cuong held his right arm out on the table. “That’s where I lost this.”
Joe examined the prosthesis. Cuong nodded and touched his cane. “And my right leg.”
“What happened?”
“Part of the leg. I was running. Crazy. They told me later I was shouting out for my hand. ‘Where’s my hand?’ And one of your M-16s…. It….” He gestured toward his leg.
Joe assented. “I understand.”
“They were incredible, those M-16s.” Cuong tightened his lips. “Better than our Type-56 rifles. Chinese. Not as good as American.”
“And the others with you? They survived?’”
“We were all running.”
“They survived?”
“No.”
Joe’s lips tightened. “Eventually they….?”
Cuong shook his head. “No. Not ‘eventually.’” He looked out onto the lake. “Apparently…more or less…instantaneously.”
“You don’t remember.”
“No. They told me after they got me out of there.”
“How did they get you out?”
“One of our people carried me. On her back.”
Joe waited for more. But for the moment, there was not more. Both men sat quietly. Neither was ill-at-ease. Neither was beset by nerves. For Joe, silence was simply the most respectful manner of expression, given the moment.
“I’ve read your book about Robert Capa,” Cuong said.
Surprise jolted Joe’s quiet.
“The French, of course, did not understand the situation,” Cuong said. “They thought we would welcome them back, after the Japanese.” He smiled. “And when we did not, they punished us.”
“But you punished the French, eventually.”
“Yes, despite the help they got from your Mr. Eisenhower.”
Joe let out a breath. “He didn’t understand the situation, either.”
Cuong now nodded. He caressed the head of his cane.
Joe continued. “I suppose he felt that, because he had saved France itself—”
Cuong exhaled, a moment of almost silent laughter. “They were as ineffectual at Normandy as they were at Dien Bien Phu,” he said.
“What about the French Resistance, though?”
Cuong swallowed, looking to the side. “Yes. The Resistance. They did to the Nazis what we did to the French. So…yes.”
The idea was so large, and so unrelated to Hill 881, that Joe remained silent.
“I believe Robert Capa was the only European in our country who understood the situation there,” Cuong said. “And I think you show that in your book.”
“How?”
“His anger at The French. His eastern European…the socialism. His being a Jew. He thought of the French as fascists defending a corrupt failure.” Cuong fell into a kind of flowing disappointment. “Vichy in Vietnam. Imagine thinking that arming the fortress at Dien Bien Phu had anything to do with the history of French civilization.” He took in a breath. “You would think the people who fueled the Renaissance would know better.”
“And what can we count on, Cuong, you and I? What is there that we can…can….”
“The two of us?”
“Yes.”
Cuong remained silent…a long moment. “The flames.”
Joe took in a breath.
“The fire.” Cuong’s utterance, like the memory of the flames themselves, caused in Joe a momentary seizure of terror, as his memories had done so frequently. He contemplated the killing zone on 881, with its white, exploded phosphorous engulfing the bodies next to him, and shuddered with the realization, once more, as so often since that very moment, that his own musculature had itself been charred and in effect left behind in that hole, while his heart and mind had gone on.
“How do you think about the flames?” Joe said.
Cuong did not respond. He turned the paper cup, now only half filled with tea, about with his left hand. “I remember so little.” He looked out to the pathway and, as Joe had, observed his granddaughter conversing with Samuel. “The flames are what I remember.” He looked down, his left hand still caressing the paper cup. “The phosphorous. The napalm. And, like you, I thought afterwards about what it all meant, for good and bad. Your President Johnson. Your General Westmoreland. My Chairman Ho. My General Giap. All that. Book after book. But what remains in my heart is the fire, Joe.” He swallowed and sat back, lifting his eyes toward Joe’s. His mouth tightened. He sighed, looking away. “The moment, after your M-16s, when I was crawling from those flames.”
Joe saw that Samuel and Shirley had turned and were coming back to the boathouse.
“The terrible choking,” Joe said.
That the two physicians had so much expertise in their field, and yet appeared so much like a tableau of the 20th and the 21st centuries chatting together, decades apart, youth and age, east and west, fresh learning versus weathered knowledge….
Cuong grimaced, looking away. “Yes. How it burned your lungs.”
“Killed my friends,” Joe said. But this lake, this air, here, now…. he thought. We can breathe here.
“And mine,” Cuong said.
—
“You know, the wounded went on and strove for life, Joe.” Samuel sat down, unbuttoning his suit coat as Shirley and Cuong walked the path toward their car. “Like you and Shirley’s grandfather. For yourselves and…the others. For their memory.” Neither Joe nor Cuong had enjoyed revisiting the war. But they had planned to meet again.
Samuel removed the panama and placed it on the table. “And I know your work helped bring you back.” He moved the second piece of banana bread, still resting on the table in its wrap, back and forth before him. “I know that. Once you started writing, I knew that your studying…” He looked up and seemed startled to find his son so attentive to what he was saying. “…to be a doctor wouldn’t have—”
“I have thought about that, you know.”
“I hope so. It would have made me happy.”
“I know, but—"
“Wait, though, Joey.” Samuel studied the banana bread once more. “I think you’re alive because you wrote about what happened.”
“I do too.”
“Yeah, you lived it again, Joe.” Samuel reached across the table and placed his hands over Joe’s folded hands. “And it kept you—”
“Going.”
“Yes. Your heart. That’s what your books mean to me, Joey. It’s your heart.” He smiled. “It’s the same for Shirley and Pham Cuong.”
“How?”
“He’s the reason she went to medical school.” Samuel looked up. A kind of gathering together, an assertion of understanding, had entered his speech…a moment…a revealing…. “She understands his wounds.”
_____
© Copyright 2021. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
“Stow Lake” is a story from my recent collection titled San Francisco, which is available everywhere.
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