Heartwood (5 page)

“Mom and Dad, don’t worry about us,” she said. “Robby and I will both get jobs. We won’t need any help.”

And no matter how hard her parents protested for the rest of the evening, and in the coming days, she was adamant. After all, she was helping Robby save face—she was sure Nana would have done the same thing for her husband.

–—

If she had expected Robby to be grateful to her for giving up the financial assistance that, frankly, she’d been counting on, she was wrong. He didn’t say a word about those two terrible nights until they were safely back on their campus and in bed in his room at the dorm. He stared up at the ceiling, not touching her.

“So now you know,” he said. “My dad drinks, not all the time, but too much. I’ve never been sure if that was why all his businesses failed or if he started drinking because he was a failure.”

“It doesn’t matter, it has nothing to do with you,” she said fiercely.

It seemed to be what he needed to hear, because he put his arm around her. But he was still troubled. “Try not to judge my mom, okay?”

“It seemed to me that she was the one doing the judging.”

He sighed. “You don’t know what her life has been like.”

“She seems to think it was ideal. Or, at least, she was ideal.”

“No. She knows better. That’s why she … oh, you’ll never understand.” He pulled his arm out from under her and stared at the ceiling again.

“Try me,” she said more gently.

“You had it all when you were growing up. A home full of culture and class … and your mother had the same kind of life before you. You’ve told me her father treated her like a queen. No one felt that way about Mom. My Uncle Donald was good-looking and smart—and he was the boy. She was just the girl. I know she brags too much. It makes me cringe when she tries to find a way to quote my Aunt Margaret’s brother because she wants everyone to know she’s related to someone who went to Yale. It’s so damn sad!

“Your father is proud of your mother for getting her doctorate. I can see it whenever he talks about the work she does. My father would never be proud of anything my mother did. I’ve never seen him be tender or gentle with her. Not once. I’ve never heard him thank her for all the years she spent at that lousy job supporting us while he was screwing up business after business, until my Uncle Donald finally took pity on her and gave her an allowance. And now my father resents her for that.

“When I was younger, I used to wonder why the hell they ever got married. Now I don’t care, I just know that I want to make life better for her.”

He said it so earnestly. Laura propped herself up on one elbow. “What do you mean? You can’t do that—for anyone.”

“All I have to do is be a success. That’s all she needs.” His eyes were shining in the half light now. “She used to read to me when I was a kid, Laura. She’d come home from working all day, clean the house, make dinner, put me to bed, and then she’d read to me—not kid stories, books like
Ivanhoe
and
A Tale of Two Cities
. Sometimes she’d be so tired she’d nod off in the middle of a sentence, and I’m not sure she even liked what she was reading—she picked those books because my Aunt Margaret said they were intellectual.

“Mom bought the collected Shakespeare and one summer we tried to plow through it.” He laughed softly into the darkness. “She’s probably the only person in the world who ever tried to read
Timon of Athens
for the fun of it.” He stopped chuckling. “And she did get something out of all those words. She loved stories about honor and nobility. That’s why she likes it that I’m going to be an archaeologist. She read somewhere that archaeology is the occupation of aristocrats. To her, that means I’m like Ivanhoe.” He turned to Laura. “She meant it when she said I was the apple of her eye. I’m the reason she gets out of bed every morning.”

Cruel, selfish woman, to put such a burden on him! “That’s a big load to be carrying.”

“Oh she’s never said that, she wouldn’t.”

Not in so many words
, Laura thought.
But she’s let you know all the same that you are supposed to make it up to her for every disappointment, every unhappiness she’s had. And that is so unfair!

Robby stroked her face. “Hey, stop looking so tragic! I’m not some driven Mama’s boy. If I worked a little harder at a math problem when I was a kid, or if I studied a little harder for an exam because I didn’t want to fail her, where’s the harm?”

He did have a point. And she didn’t want to argue. “There isn’t any, I guess.”

“I’ll admit, I’d like to be famous. I’d like to discover a new dig site that’s named after me and write bestselling books. But if all I ever do is add to the store of human knowledge, that’ll be okay too. It’ll be an honorable way to spend my life.”

When Robby talked this way, he could quell every doubt. Especially when he was lying in bed next to her with his body pressed against hers and his fingers playing idly with her hair. “You and Ivanhoe,” she breathed.

“Exactly,” he whispered as he kissed her. And then they didn’t say anything more as they came together in the way that had always banished all thoughts except those of bliss for both of them.

Finally, when they lay next to each other spent and out of breath, Robby whispered, “Laura, we’re going to have a great life! You’ll see. I’m going to make you so happy.”

At that moment she hadn’t doubted it. And if, later, as he slept and she thought back over what he’d said, she did have a doubt or two, she told herself she was being foolish. Robby had a first-class mind—their professors all said so—so of course he was ambitious. And if his mother had nurtured that ambition, there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Most people who achieved greatness had at least one parent who had pushed them.

It wasn’t until years later that she realized that perhaps her first instinct had been right.

L
aura might have developed doubts about her marriage over the years, but in the months before her wedding she didn’t have time for doubts—or even for thinking. During the turbulent winter that spanned the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, while the Vietnam War was still raging, things were moving fast for most young people, and Robby and Laura were no exception. As with everyone else their age, their main topic of conversation was the sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of all the young men—the draft lottery.

For the rest of her life, Laura would remember December 1, 1969, when she and Robby and most of the students on their college campus sat glued to the television watching as strangers they’d never met dipped into a big glass bowl and pulled out the little blue plastic capsules that would decide Robby’s fate and that of every American male aged eighteen to twenty-six. Each of the capsules contained a birth date, one for every day of the
year, and a boy’s number on the draft list was based on how early or late in the drawing the capsule containing his birthday was picked. Early meant a low number, late meant a high one. A low number meant you would be going to fight in the war you probably didn’t believe in anymore, if you ever had; a high number meant you could go on living your life.

All over the campus as the drawing continued on that day, spontaneous groans and cheers went up in every dorm. After the drawing was done, the lucky boys with high numbers tried to hide their relief so they wouldn’t be rubbing salt in the wounds of those less fortunate. Many of those with low numbers cried openly in the hallways and the student lounges as hopes and dreams were replaced by fear and anger. Boys with numbers in the middle huddled in anxious groups and tried to calculate the odds of being called up or escaping. Girls like Laura held their boyfriends in their arms and searched for comforting words. By nighttime it seemed as if everyone knew what everyone else’s number was, and most people were trying to get drunk or high as fast as they could. It didn’t matter if they were celebrating or mourning.

Robby didn’t cry or get drunk, he laid down on his bed, and stared at the ceiling with the closed-off look that Laura had come to dread almost as much as the draft itself. His number was in the first third of the drawing. This meant he probably wouldn’t be drafted that spring, so he’d be able to graduate and he and Laura could get married. But Laura estimated that he’d be called up sometime during the summer. Unless they could find a way out.

“There must be something,” she cried. “Didn’t you tell me your father knows some people who are high up in Veterans Affairs? Couldn’t he pull some strings?” There was no sound from
the bed. “Robby, you have some time. If your dad talks to his friends right now …”

Robby turned and sat up. “My dad pull strings so I can be a draft dodger?” he sneered. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“A draft dodger? What are
you
talking about? You don’t support this war …”

“Draft dodger is what my father will call it. The McAllister men go to war, Laura. They don’t ask questions, they don’t wonder if their country is right, they just fight. Get my dad to tell you sometime about how he saved his buddy on Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy. It was his finest hour. If you want to know the truth, he hasn’t done anything better since.”

“But that was different. That war was justified.”

“It doesn’t matter. ‘America, love it or leave it.’ That’s what my father says.”

“But when he stops and thinks about what we’re really doing over there—”

“You don’t understand!” he shouted. “Your parents think. My father doesn’t.”

“My father supported the war at first.”

“But eventually he saw the light! Mine never will. He’s never read the kind of books that make people question themselves or the things they believe. He’s never traveled and tried to understand a different culture, or studied a religion other than the one he grew up with. He doesn’t live near a big city with different people and ideas that aren’t exactly like his own. He doesn’t think, Laura.”

“What about your mother?”

“When she hears about my number, she’ll be scared to death.
She won’t care about patriotism or any of that crap, she’ll beg Uncle Donald to fix it, which he can’t do.”

“But your father could.”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because he won’t. Because Uncle Sam will make a man of me. I’ll go into the army and get rid of all those crazy notions about making mud pies in the desert.”

Laura finally accepted reality; even if Robby’s father could have helped, he wouldn’t. And there certainly wasn’t anything Iris and Theo could do except worry about their daughter and the young man they were so fond of. It didn’t help matters any that the war that was probably going to take Robby away had nearly torn their own family apart and because of it their son Steve was still estranged from them. Laura did her best not to talk about Vietnam in front of them.

But it seemed to her as if that was all her contemporaries
were
talking about. In every dorm, coffeehouse, or hamburger joint where the college kids congregated, no matter how the conversation started, eventually it would turn to Vietnam and the draft. Or, more specifically, avoiding the draft. There were few supporters of the military on Laura’s politically liberal campus, where most of the students and faculty had been taking part in protest marches long before the televised images of young Americans coming home in body bags, and Vietnamese children burned by American napalm, finally turned the rest of the country against the war. In 1968 their school had firmly supported the peace candidate Eugene McCarthy. Robby and Laura, and everyone they knew, attended rallies wearing black armbands for the slaughtered Vietnamese and bracelets for American soldiers missing in action. But before the advent of
the lottery, those protests had been intellectual exercises engaged in for abstract beliefs. The new policy brought the war and fear of dying onto their lovely campus and into their protected dorm rooms.

Suddenly Robby had a new circle of friends; all of them boys who had low- or middle-range draft numbers and would probably be inducted by the end of the year. Before the lottery had gone into effect, most of these boys had planned to wait out the war safely tucked away in graduate school, or in jobs deemed vital to the national interest. But the government had declared most of those deferments unfair and ended them. Now the boys gathered in Robby’s dorm room every night to rant and rave about the old bastards who had started this mess. And to spend hours trying to figure out how to get out of it.

Robby was always the one who brought up the subject of leaving the country or going to jail. “It’s the only honorable way,” he said over and over again. And Laura would remember the night when he’d told her that he’d wanted to be Ivanhoe when he was a kid.

Sometimes Robby talked about Laura’s brother Steve, who was now deeply into the underground movement. Steve was doing it the right way, Robby declared. Laura was torn when Robby started saying things like that. She was proud of Steve’s courage, but she knew what her brother was doing was illegal and dangerous, and although he had never hurt anyone, members of his movement had, and that was as wrong as the war itself. And Steve had caused such pain and suffering at home. No, she didn’t want Robby to follow in Steve’s footsteps.