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Chapter One
It was a chill gray day in Savannah, and there was a brisk breeze blowing in from the ocean. There were leaves on the ground in Forsyth Park and a few couples were wandering hand in hand, some women were chatting and smoking a last cigarette before they went back to work. And in Savannah High School, the hallways were deserted. The bell had rung at one o'clock, and the students were all in their classrooms. There was laughter coming from one room, and silence from several others. The squeak of chalk, the looks of bored despair on the faces of sophomores ill prepared for a surprise quiz in civics. The senior class was being talked to about College Boards they were going to take the following week, just before Thanksgiving. And as they listened, far away, in Dallas, gunfire erupted. A man in a motorcade catapulted into his wife's arms, his head exploding horrifyingly behind him. No one understood what had happened yet, and as the voice in Savannah droned on about the College Boards, Paxton Andrews tried to fight the sleepy waves of warm boredom. And all of a sudden in the still room, she felt as though she couldn't keep her eyes open a moment longer.
Mercifully, at one-fifty the bell rang, all doors opened and waves of high school students poured into the halls, freed from quizzes, lectures, French literature, and the pharaohs of Egypt. Everyone moved on to their next rooms, with an occasional stop at a locker for a change of books, a quick joke, a burst of laughter. And then suddenly, a scream. A long anguished wail, a sound that pierced the air like an arrow shot from a great distance. A thundering of footsteps, a rush toward a corner room normally used only by teachers, the television set flicked on, and hundreds of young worried faces pressing through the doorway, and people saying "No!" and shouting and calling and talking, and no one could hear what was being said on the television, as still others shouted at them to be quiet.
"Hush up, you guys! We can't hear what they're saying!"
"Is he hurt?. . . is he . . ." No one dared to say the words, and through the crowd again and again, the same words. . . "What's happening?. . . what happened?. . . President Kennedy's been shot. . . the President. . . I don't know. . . in Dallas. . . what happened? . . . President Kennedy. . . he isn't . . ." No one quite believing it at first. Everyone wanting to think it was a bad joke. "Did you hear that President Kennedy's been shot?" "Yeah. . . then what? What's the rest of the joke, man?" There was no rest of the joke. There was only frantic talking, and endless questions, and no answers.
There were confused images on the screen with replays of the motorcade breaking up and speeding away. Walter Cronkite was on the air, looking ashen. "The President has been seriously wounded." A murmur went through the Savannah crowd, and it seemed as though every student and teacher at Savannah High School were pressed into that one tiny room, and crowding in from the hallways.
"What'd he say?. . . what did he say?" a voice from the distance asked.
"He said the President is seriously wounded," a voice from the front started back to the others, and three freshmen girls started to cry, as Paxton stood somberly in a corner in the press of bodies around her, and watched them. There was suddenly an eerie stillness in the room, as though no one wanted to move, as though they were afraid to disturb some delicate balance in the air, as though even the tiniest motion might change the course his life would take. . . and Paxton found herself thinking back to another day, six years before, when she was only eleven. . . . Daddy's been hurt, Pax. . . . Her brother George had told her the news. Her mother had been at the hospital with her father. He liked to fly his own plane to go to meetings around the state, and he'd had to bring it down in a sudden thunderstorm near Atlanta.
"Is he?. . . will he be okay? . . ."
"I . . ." There had been a strange catch in George's voice, a terrible truth in his eyes that she had wanted to run and hide from. She had been eleven then, and George was twenty-five. They were fourteen years apart and several lifetimes. Paxton had been an "accident," her mother still whispered to friends, an accident that Carlton Andrews had never ceased to be grateful for, and which still seemed to startle Paxton's mother. Beatrice Andrews had been twenty-seven years old when their son George was born. It had taken her five years to get pregnant with him, and as far as she was concerned, her pregnancy was a nightmare. She was sick every day for nine months, and the delivery was a horror she knew she would always remember. George was born by cesarean section, finally, after forty-two hours of hard labor, and although he was a big beautiful ten-pound baby boy, Beatrice Andrews promised herself that she would never have another baby. It was an experience she wouldn't have repeated for anything, and she saw to it with great care that she wouldn't have to. Carlton was, as always, patient with her, and he was crazy about his boy. George was the kind of boy any father would have loved. He was a happy, easygoing, reasonably athletic boy, with a serious penchant for his studies which also pleased his mother. Theirs was a quiet, happy life. Carlton had a healthy law practice, Beatrice had an important role with the Historical Society, the Junior League, and the Daughters of the Civil War. Her life was fulfilled. And she played bridge every Tuesday. It was there that she felt the first twinge, that for the first time she felt suddenly violently nauseous. She assumed she had eaten something off at the League breakfast that day, and went home to lie down right after her bridge game. And three weeks later she knew. At the age of forty-one, with a fourteen-year-old son about to enter high school, and a husband who wasn't even gracious enough to hide his delight, she was pregnant. This pregnancy was easier for her than the first, but she didn't even seem to care. She was so outraged by the indignity of it, the embarrassment of being pregnant again when other women were thinking about grandchildren. She didn't want another baby, she had never wanted another child, and nothing her husband said seemed to appease her. Even the tiny, perfect, angelic-looking little blond baby girl they put in her arms when she awoke barely seemed to console her. All she could talk about for months was how foolish she felt, and she left the child constantly with the huge, purring black baby-nurse she had hired when she was pregnant. Elizabeth McQueen was her name, but everyone called her Queenie. And she wasn't really a nurse by trade. She had borne eleven children of her own, only seven of whom lived, and she was that rarest of rare gifts of the South, the old beloved black mammy. She was filled with love for everyone, but most especially for children and babies, and she loved Paxton with a passion and a warmth that no mother could have surpassed had she given birth to her, and certainly, Beatrice Andrews didn't. She remained uncomfortable around the little girl, and for reasons she herself couldn't really explain, she always kept her distance. The child always seemed to have sticky hands, or she wanted to touch the delicate bottles of perfume on Beatrice's table and she invariably spilled them, and somehow mother and child always seemed to make each other nervous. It was Queenie who comforted her when she cried, whose arms she ran to when she was hurt or afraid, Queenie who never left her, even for a moment.
There were no days off in Queenie's life. There was nowhere she really wanted to go on a day off, her children had their own lives now, and she couldn't imagine what would happen to Paxxie if she wasn't there to help her. Her father was always good to her, and he loved that child so, but her mother was a different story. As Paxton grew older, the difference between them grew, and by the time she was ten, Paxton had already guessed that they had almost nothing in common. It was difficult to believe that they were even related. To her mother, her clubs were everything, her women friends, her auxiliaries, her bridge days, and benefits for the Daughters of the Civil War, her life with those women were what she lived for. She almost seemed uninterested when her husband came home, and she listened politely to what he said at the dinner table at night, but even Paxton noticed that her mother seemed almost bored by her husband. And Carlton noticed it too. Although he would never have admitted it to anyone, he felt the same chill emanating from his wife as Paxton had for years. Beatrice Andrews was dutiful, loyal, organized, well-dressed, pleasant, polite, perfectly bred, and she had never felt a single emotion for anyone in her entire lifetime. She simply didn't have it in her. Queenie knew it, too, although she expressed it differently than Carlton would have, she'd long since said of her to her daughters that Beatrice Andrews's heart was colder and smaller than peach pits in winter. The closest she ever came to loving anyone was what she felt for her son, George. They had a kind of rapport that she had never been able to allow herself with Paxton. She admired him, respected him, and he had long since affected a kind of cool, aloof, clinical way of looking at things that eventually led him into medicine, and she was impressed by that too. She liked the fact that her son was a doctor. He was even brighter than his father, she secretly told her friends, in fact, he reminded her a great deal of her own father who had been on the Georgia Supreme Court, and she felt certain that one day George would do great things. But what would Paxton ever do? She would go to school and graduate, and eventually get married and have children. It hardly seemed an impressive path to Beatrice, and yet it was the one that she herself had followed. At her father's insistence, she had gone to Sweet Briar. And married Carlton two weeks after graduation. But in truth, although she enjoyed their company, and sought it out at every opportunity, she had no great respect for women. It was men who impressed her, who accomplished the great things. And there was no doubt in her mind that the pretty blond child who put her sticky little hands everywhere at every opportunity was certainly not destined for greatness.
Walter Cronkite's voice droned on, as Paxton and the others stared silently at the television screen at school. The few people who were still talking were doing so in whispers. And every few minutes, Cronkite was switching over to the reporters now standing in the lobby of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the President had been taken.
"We don't have any real answers for you yet," the face on the screen said, "all we know is that the President's condition is critical, but there haven't been any new bulletins in the last few minutes." With that, a teacher's hand reached out and switched the dial, just in time to hear Chet Huntley say almost exactly the same thing on another network. The students were looking at each other, with terror clearly etched on their faces. And again, Paxton could remember George coming to pick her up at school to tell her about their father. The accident, the plane coming down. . . and George's face as he told her. He had just finished medical school then, and he was waiting to start his residency at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He had managed to stay in the South for his entire education, although their father was a Harvard graduate and had encouraged him to go north. But Beatrice felt that it was important to stay close to their roots, and support the educational institutions of the South, and she frequently said so.
It was two o'clock, and Paxton stood breathlessly in the corner of the room trying to believe that he would be all right, fighting back tears, and not sure if she was crying for their President, or her father. Her father had died the day after his plane crashed, his injuries too great, his wife and son at his side, while Paxton waited at home with Queenie. At eleven, they thought she was too young to see him at the hospital, and he had never regained consciousness anyway. She had never seen him again. He was gone, with all his warmth and his love and his broad wisdom about the world, his fascination with people and history and things far, far from Savannah. He was a southern gentleman of the old school, and yet in some secret ways he didn't fit into the mold he had been born to, and it was that that 0 Paxton loved about him. That and everything else in fact, the way he hugged her tight when she ran to him, the way he sounded when they went for long walks and talked about things she wondered about, like the war, and Europe, and what it had been like to go to Harvard. She loved the way he sounded and the way he smelled, the spice of his after-shave would leave a fresh smell in the room after he'd walked through it. . . and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and the things he said about how proud he was of her. . . she felt as though she had died when they played "Amazing Grace" at his funeral, and Queenie sat in the back row and cried so loud, Paxton could hear her from where she sat between George and her mother.
Her life had never been the same again since her father died. It was as though he had taken a piece of her with him, the piece that used to smell wild flowers with him, and go to his office to visit him when he had to work on Saturday mornings, the piece that could talk to him as though she really understood the world, and ask him all kinds of questions. She had an uncanny sense about people, and she had once said to him that she didn't think her mother really loved her. It didn't really bother Paxton anymore. It just was. And she had Queenie and her father.
"I think. . . I think she needs someone like George. . . . He doesn't make her nervous, and he talks about the thi...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
It was a chill gray day in Savannah, and there was a brisk breeze blowing in from the ocean. There were leaves on the ground in Forsyth Park and a few couples were wandering hand in hand, some women were chatting and smoking a last cigarette before they went back to work. And in Savannah High School, the hallways were deserted. The bell had rung at one o'clock, and the students were all in their classrooms. There was laughter coming from one room, and silence from several others. The squeak of chalk, the looks of bored despair on the faces of sophomores ill prepared for a surprise quiz in civics. The senior class was being talked to about College Boards they were going to take the following week, just before Thanksgiving. And as they listened, far away, in Dallas, gunfire erupted. A man in a motorcade catapulted into his wife's arms, his head exploding horrifyingly behind him. No one understood what had happened yet, and as the voice in Savannah droned on about the College Boards, Paxton Andrews tried to fight the sleepy waves of warm boredom. And all of a sudden in the still room, she felt as though she couldn't keep her eyes open a moment longer.
Mercifully, at one-fifty the bell rang, all doors opened and waves of high school students poured into the halls, freed from quizzes, lectures, French literature, and the pharaohs of Egypt. Everyone moved on to their next rooms, with an occasional stop at a locker for a change of books, a quick joke, a burst of laughter. And then suddenly, a scream. A long anguished wail, a sound that pierced the air like an arrow shot from a great distance. A thundering of footsteps, a rush toward a corner room normally used only by teachers, the television set flicked on, and hundreds of young worried faces pressing through the doorway, and people saying "No!" and shouting and calling and talking, and no one could hear what was being said on the television, as still others shouted at them to be quiet.
"Hush up, you guys! We can't hear what they're saying!"
"Is he hurt?. . . is he . . ." No one dared to say the words, and through the crowd again and again, the same words. . . "What's happening?. . . what happened?. . . President Kennedy's been shot. . . the President. . . I don't know. . . in Dallas. . . what happened? . . . President Kennedy. . . he isn't . . ." No one quite believing it at first. Everyone wanting to think it was a bad joke. "Did you hear that President Kennedy's been shot?" "Yeah. . . then what? What's the rest of the joke, man?" There was no rest of the joke. There was only frantic talking, and endless questions, and no answers.
There were confused images on the screen with replays of the motorcade breaking up and speeding away. Walter Cronkite was on the air, looking ashen. "The President has been seriously wounded." A murmur went through the Savannah crowd, and it seemed as though every student and teacher at Savannah High School were pressed into that one tiny room, and crowding in from the hallways.
"What'd he say?. . . what did he say?" a voice from the distance asked.
"He said the President is seriously wounded," a voice from the front started back to the others, and three freshmen girls started to cry, as Paxton stood somberly in a corner in the press of bodies around her, and watched them. There was suddenly an eerie stillness in the room, as though no one wanted to move, as though they were afraid to disturb some delicate balance in the air, as though even the tiniest motion might change the course his life would take. . . and Paxton found herself thinking back to another day, six years before, when she was only eleven. . . . Daddy's been hurt, Pax. . . . Her brother George had told her the news. Her mother had been at the hospital with her father. He liked to fly his own plane to go to meetings around the state, and he'd had to bring it down in a sudden thunderstorm near Atlanta.
"Is he?. . . will he be okay? . . ."
"I . . ." There had been a strange catch in George's voice, a terrible truth in his eyes that she had wanted to run and hide from. She had been eleven then, and George was twenty-five. They were fourteen years apart and several lifetimes. Paxton had been an "accident," her mother still whispered to friends, an accident that Carlton Andrews had never ceased to be grateful for, and which still seemed to startle Paxton's mother. Beatrice Andrews had been twenty-seven years old when their son George was born. It had taken her five years to get pregnant with him, and as far as she was concerned, her pregnancy was a nightmare. She was sick every day for nine months, and the delivery was a horror she knew she would always remember. George was born by cesarean section, finally, after forty-two hours of hard labor, and although he was a big beautiful ten-pound baby boy, Beatrice Andrews promised herself that she would never have another baby. It was an experience she wouldn't have repeated for anything, and she saw to it with great care that she wouldn't have to. Carlton was, as always, patient with her, and he was crazy about his boy. George was the kind of boy any father would have loved. He was a happy, easygoing, reasonably athletic boy, with a serious penchant for his studies which also pleased his mother. Theirs was a quiet, happy life. Carlton had a healthy law practice, Beatrice had an important role with the Historical Society, the Junior League, and the Daughters of the Civil War. Her life was fulfilled. And she played bridge every Tuesday. It was there that she felt the first twinge, that for the first time she felt suddenly violently nauseous. She assumed she had eaten something off at the League breakfast that day, and went home to lie down right after her bridge game. And three weeks later she knew. At the age of forty-one, with a fourteen-year-old son about to enter high school, and a husband who wasn't even gracious enough to hide his delight, she was pregnant. This pregnancy was easier for her than the first, but she didn't even seem to care. She was so outraged by the indignity of it, the embarrassment of being pregnant again when other women were thinking about grandchildren. She didn't want another baby, she had never wanted another child, and nothing her husband said seemed to appease her. Even the tiny, perfect, angelic-looking little blond baby girl they put in her arms when she awoke barely seemed to console her. All she could talk about for months was how foolish she felt, and she left the child constantly with the huge, purring black baby-nurse she had hired when she was pregnant. Elizabeth McQueen was her name, but everyone called her Queenie. And she wasn't really a nurse by trade. She had borne eleven children of her own, only seven of whom lived, and she was that rarest of rare gifts of the South, the old beloved black mammy. She was filled with love for everyone, but most especially for children and babies, and she loved Paxton with a passion and a warmth that no mother could have surpassed had she given birth to her, and certainly, Beatrice Andrews didn't. She remained uncomfortable around the little girl, and for reasons she herself couldn't really explain, she always kept her distance. The child always seemed to have sticky hands, or she wanted to touch the delicate bottles of perfume on Beatrice's table and she invariably spilled them, and somehow mother and child always seemed to make each other nervous. It was Queenie who comforted her when she cried, whose arms she ran to when she was hurt or afraid, Queenie who never left her, even for a moment.
There were no days off in Queenie's life. There was nowhere she really wanted to go on a day off, her children had their own lives now, and she couldn't imagine what would happen to Paxxie if she wasn't there to help her. Her father was always good to her, and he loved that child so, but her mother was a different story. As Paxton grew older, the difference between them grew, and by the time she was ten, Paxton had already guessed that they had almost nothing in common. It was difficult to believe that they were even related. To her mother, her clubs were everything, her women friends, her auxiliaries, her bridge days, and benefits for the Daughters of the Civil War, her life with those women were what she lived for. She almost seemed uninterested when her husband came home, and she listened politely to what he said at the dinner table at night, but even Paxton noticed that her mother seemed almost bored by her husband. And Carlton noticed it too. Although he would never have admitted it to anyone, he felt the same chill emanating from his wife as Paxton had for years. Beatrice Andrews was dutiful, loyal, organized, well-dressed, pleasant, polite, perfectly bred, and she had never felt a single emotion for anyone in her entire lifetime. She simply didn't have it in her. Queenie knew it, too, although she expressed it differently than Carlton would have, she'd long since said of her to her daughters that Beatrice Andrews's heart was colder and smaller than peach pits in winter. The closest she ever came to loving anyone was what she felt for her son, George. They had a kind of rapport that she had never been able to allow herself with Paxton. She admired him, respected him, and he had long since affected a kind of cool, aloof, clinical way of looking at things that eventually led him into medicine, and she was impressed by that too. She liked the fact that her son was a doctor. He was even brighter than his father, she secretly told her friends, in fact, he reminded her a great deal of her own father who had been on the Georgia Supreme Court, and she felt certain that one day George would do great things. But what would Paxton ever do? She would go to school and graduate, and eventually get married and have children. It hardly seemed an impressive path to Beatrice, and yet it was the one that she herself had followed. At her father's insistence, she had gone to Sweet Briar. And married Carlton two weeks after graduation. But in truth, although she enjoyed their company, and sought it out at every opportunity, she had no great respect for women. It was men who impressed her, who accomplished the great things. And there was no doubt in her mind that the pretty blond child who put her sticky little hands everywhere at every opportunity was certainly not destined for greatness.
Walter Cronkite's voice droned on, as Paxton and the others stared silently at the television screen at school. The few people who were still talking were doing so in whispers. And every few minutes, Cronkite was switching over to the reporters now standing in the lobby of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the President had been taken.
"We don't have any real answers for you yet," the face on the screen said, "all we know is that the President's condition is critical, but there haven't been any new bulletins in the last few minutes." With that, a teacher's hand reached out and switched the dial, just in time to hear Chet Huntley say almost exactly the same thing on another network. The students were looking at each other, with terror clearly etched on their faces. And again, Paxton could remember George coming to pick her up at school to tell her about their father. The accident, the plane coming down. . . and George's face as he told her. He had just finished medical school then, and he was waiting to start his residency at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He had managed to stay in the South for his entire education, although their father was a Harvard graduate and had encouraged him to go north. But Beatrice felt that it was important to stay close to their roots, and support the educational institutions of the South, and she frequently said so.
It was two o'clock, and Paxton stood breathlessly in the corner of the room trying to believe that he would be all right, fighting back tears, and not sure if she was crying for their President, or her father. Her father had died the day after his plane crashed, his injuries too great, his wife and son at his side, while Paxton waited at home with Queenie. At eleven, they thought she was too young to see him at the hospital, and he had never regained consciousness anyway. She had never seen him again. He was gone, with all his warmth and his love and his broad wisdom about the world, his fascination with people and history and things far, far from Savannah. He was a southern gentleman of the old school, and yet in some secret ways he didn't fit into the mold he had been born to, and it was that that 0 Paxton loved about him. That and everything else in fact, the way he hugged her tight when she ran to him, the way he sounded when they went for long walks and talked about things she wondered about, like the war, and Europe, and what it had been like to go to Harvard. She loved the way he sounded and the way he smelled, the spice of his after-shave would leave a fresh smell in the room after he'd walked through it. . . and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and the things he said about how proud he was of her. . . she felt as though she had died when they played "Amazing Grace" at his funeral, and Queenie sat in the back row and cried so loud, Paxton could hear her from where she sat between George and her mother.
Her life had never been the same again since her father died. It was as though he had taken a piece of her with him, the piece that used to smell wild flowers with him, and go to his office to visit him when he had to work on Saturday mornings, the piece that could talk to him as though she really understood the world, and ask him all kinds of questions. She had an uncanny sense about people, and she had once said to him that she didn't think her mother really loved her. It didn't really bother Paxton anymore. It just was. And she had Queenie and her father.
"I think. . . I think she needs someone like George. . . . He doesn't make her nervous, and he talks about the thi...
As a journalist, Paxton Andrews would experience Vietnam firsthand. We follow her from high school in Savannah to college in Berkeley and then to work in Saigon.
For the soldiers she knew and met there, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the men in her life, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways hey could not escape or deny. Peter Wilson, fresh from law school, was a new recruit who would confont his fate in Da Nang. Ralph Johnson, a seasoned AP correspondent, had been in Saigon since the beginning. He knew Vietnam and the war inside out. Bill Quinn, captain of the Cu Chi tunnel rats, was on his fourth tour of duty and it seemed nothing could touch him. Sergeant Tony Campobello had come to Vietnam from the streets of New York to vent a rage that had followed him all the way to Saigon.
For seven years Paxton Andrews would write an acclaimed newspaper column from the front before finally returning to the States and then attending the Paris peace talks. But for her and the men who fought in Viet Nam, life would never be the same again.
For the soldiers she knew and met there, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the men in her life, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways hey could not escape or deny. Peter Wilson, fresh from law school, was a new recruit who would confont his fate in Da Nang. Ralph Johnson, a seasoned AP correspondent, had been in Saigon since the beginning. He knew Vietnam and the war inside out. Bill Quinn, captain of the Cu Chi tunnel rats, was on his fourth tour of duty and it seemed nothing could touch him. Sergeant Tony Campobello had come to Vietnam from the streets of New York to vent a rage that had followed him all the way to Saigon.
For seven years Paxton Andrews would write an acclaimed newspaper column from the front before finally returning to the States and then attending the Paris peace talks. But for her and the men who fought in Viet Nam, life would never be the same again.
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- ÉditeurBantam Press
- Date d'édition1990
- ISBN 10 0593015754
- ISBN 13 9780593015759
- ReliureRelié
- Nombre de pages408
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Message from Nam [Hardcover] Steel, Danielle
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ISBN 13 : 9780593015759
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