Sparta (3 page)

Next to the Farrells stood a young blond mother with two small children, and behind her an older man. They all held pale blue balloons inscribed
WELCOME TOMMY
. White ribbons hung from the balloons. The mother wore a short-sleeved pink sweater, and a balloon was tied to each of her wrists. She held a small boy against her chest. She kept rising onto her toes, craning to see, then sinking back onto her heels, unbalanced by her son. The balloons followed her movements languidly. The little girl clasped her mother's thighs, staring resentfully upward. A balloon was tied to the center of her plastic headband. Behind them stood a grizzled, stocky man wearing aviator sunglasses, legs spread, arms tightly folded, a balloon tethered to one buried hand.

The bus doors hissed open. The families held back, anticipatory. When the first Marine stepped down, everyone began to cheer. As the line of them appeared, there were claps and calls, names were shouted out. “Hey, Durell!” “Yo,
Jimmy
!” Mothers waved and called; children screamed joyfully, whether or not they saw Daddy; wives began weeping; fathers beamed and whistled.

The blond mother suddenly set down her son. “Tommy!” she called. She raised her hands, clapping, the balloons bobbing around her face. She gave a high-pitched laugh, then started to cry. She called again, “Tommy!” Her voice broke.

“Mom,”
the little girl said accusingly, unable to see.

The grizzled man cupped his mouth and called, “Hey, Tom!” The balloon floated jerkily over his head.

The Farrells watched silently, scanning the faces of the men stepping down from the bus. Marshall pushed his hair off his forehead, but at once it fell back.

It was the end of the day, and the California sky was darkening to a transparent violet. To the west, the palm trees were turning a deep red-black against the liquid glow. Over the crest of the hill, to the east, the sky was still blue, but it was becoming deeper and dimmer. Once everyone was off the bus, the staff sergeant gave the order and the men began to march, three abreast. There were two platoons of infantry grunts, all in clean desert camouflage uniforms, blurred brown and tan. They marched in unison, heads high, arms swinging. His platoon was Dingo Three; Conrad marched alongside. As an officer, he did what his men did, but apart. In the mess hall, officers always ate last. You put your men first.

The ceremony would be small, there were only two infantry platoons returning, about ninety men. If it had been a whole company coming back, two hundred or more, there'd have been a big ceremony, food and bands. But this would be brief. The big blow-up toys were about all there was, and they were aimed at kids. Most of Conrad's Marines didn't have kids, they were too young. Most of them were not even twenty-one—though they were no longer kids.

As the platoons marched along, children ran daringly out in front of them, then raced back to their families. Wives waved, babies began to cry, fathers called through cupped hands. The Marines kept their eyes front. When you marched, you separated yourself from everything else. You didn't make eye contact with the crowd, even if it was made up of your own families. You were part of your unit, not part of the people watching. This was how they'd been trained.

The walls of the purple castle were made of netting. Inside, kids bounced relentlessly on the trampoline floor. The compressors, inflating the castle, made an industrial roar. Beside the castle stood the bear, with staring eyes and manic grin. It seemed to be female, its bottom half a huge brown skirt with a white apron as the doorway. A little boy in desert cammies stood outside it, a miniature Marine. He was holding his hands over his ears, his mouth open. A little girl, her face painted in cat whiskers, came out the door and stood beside him. She saw the marching Marines and lifted her hand in a wave. Over the loudspeaker a brassy march struggled against the thundering bass of the compressors, which were winning.

The platoons reached the edge of the parade deck and drew up before a balding and stern-faced colonel. He stood frowning and erect, chin high, shoulders back. Beyond him, the long packed clouds of evening were drawing across the lower edge of the sky.

The Marines stood before him at attention, heads high, eyes straight ahead, arms stiff at their sides. The blue dome of the sky was darkening, becoming deep and endless as the stain of night spread smoothly down its sides. Suddenly the arc lights went on, illuminating the field with a dry white glare. The sky overhead became dark, and all at once it was night. The Marines were irradiated, surrounded by darkness. In the sudden illumination they became mysterious—their mottled uniforms, their smooth, close-cropped heads, their fixed stare. They carried something of the place they'd come from, the life they'd lived there, something of those who had not returned. The field, and the waiting men, illuminated by the lights, seemed clouded by that invisible awareness. Darkness lay beyond them, and the vast nighttime sky lay overhead, the landscape turning shadowy across the continent as the sun dropped away from their side of the earth.

Lydia leaned toward Marshall and whispered, “Have we missed him?”

“We must have,” Marshall said. “He must be here.”

“But how could we?” Lydia murmured. “We've been watching. Where is he?”

They scanned the rows, and Lydia felt a sudden fear: that he was not here after all, that he had been somehow lost. It was irrational—they knew he was here—but familiar. Fear had become part of her consciousness.

*   *   *

Lydia had not grown up in this world. The military had been entirely alien to her. There was no long family connection to it, no swords, no photographs, no war stories. Her father's only connection to it (two quiet years on a naval air station in Tennessee, long before she was born) was rarely mentioned. It played no part in her family history.

She had grown up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the military was shadowed by disgrace. As a child she'd seen her parents watching the evening news night after night, their faces grave. They sat before the TV, drinks in their hands, listening in silence to the serious voice of the newscaster. One night her father listened to a general as he blustered and stalled, challenged by hostile questions.

Her father shook his head, swirling the ice cubes in his glass. “The country will never recover from this.”

Lydia, who was eight, was alarmed. For years afterward she expected something to happen, dire consequences. It was the military, she understood that. The military was in disgrace. The Vietnam War had been a scandalous mistake, everyone knew it. The advisers had lied to the press, the White House had lied to Congress, the generals had lied to everyone. The military had manufactured evidence, the troops had massacred civilians. The whole thing was a national shame.

Lydia grew up believing that the military had been permanently dishonored by this. Never again would the public trust it so deeply. The lesson had been a terrible one, harsh and costly, but the nation had learned it. This was how history worked, the way nations formed attitudes and policies. This was the school of experience: never again would America allow such a thing to happen—to undertake war so secretively, so recklessly, so duplicitously.

By the time Lydia was a teenager, the draft had ended, and no one she knew enlisted. That whole world receded into vague obscurity for her. The military seemed huge and surreal, like a factory out of Kafka, grinding on endlessly, groaning and rumbling as it produced a vast, dangerous, and incomprehensible product. It was outside the rest of the community, unrelated to civilians or peacetime. Lydia had seldom thought of the military until the spring of Conrad's junior year at Williams, 2001, when he came home to tell them about his plans.

The Farrells lived in the small town of Katonah, in northern Westchester, in an old farmhouse on a hill that slanted down to a dirt road. The house was set on wide, sloping lawns and shaded by huge rough-barked sugar maples; the fields were bounded by lichened stone walls. Across the lawn from the house was a red two-story barn, with an enormous hayloft above and big box stalls below: it had been converted from a dairy to a horse barn before the Farrells bought it. Behind the house, meadows rose up over the crest of the hill. Beyond them, on the other side, the land sloped down and gave way to woods. The original farm contained several hundred acres, though the Farrells owned only six. They'd bought it during a dip in the market in the late 1970s. After that, prices soared, and they'd never have been able to afford it.

The house was white clapboard, with three stories and five bedrooms, comfortable but not grand. On a beam in the attic was the signature of the carpenter:
Richard Inglesby, 1856.
For a hundred and fifty years people had lived their particular lives in those rooms, within those same plaster walls. Prosperous farmers, to judge from the house and its grace notes—high ceilings, elegant moldings, three bay windows, and a back stairs for the help. For all those years people had gotten out of bed each morning in those rooms. They'd set their weight on the slanting wide-board floors. On bone-cold winter mornings they went down the creaking back staircase, put on coats and boots, and went out to the barn to feed the animals. On hot summer nights they slept with the windows open onto the dark lawns, the murmuring sugar maples. During thunderstorms they looked out through the pouring rain toward the barn, revealed in terrifying precision by the flashes. Babies had been born in these rooms, the mother twisting and sweating, holding on to the iron bedstead behind her head, a doctor leaning over her. People had become ill in these quiet rooms. They had died here, their breathing stilled. Someone had watched, her gaze locked on a yellowish face, unable to turn away. All these people, cooking and sleeping and having children and getting ill, having parties and arguments, being confused and happy and grief-stricken, were part of the history of the house. Someone had decided to modernize and put in gas, and they'd had to cut the mysterious pipeline in the wall in order to add the window in the breakfast room. Someone later had put in electricity, plumbing; someone had paved the driveway. The Farrells changed little. They respected the modest nineteenth-century presence of the house. They'd preserved its integrity, protected it from change. They felt responsible for it.

The Farrell children had grown up there, Conrad, Jenny, and Oliver. Marshall commuted, taking the train every day to New York, where he taught law at NYU. When the children were grown-up enough, Lydia had slowly gotten her M.S.W. When the children were older, she set up a family therapy practice in New York, and she began commuting, too. The trip took over an hour on the train, and it was tiring. By the time you reached Valhalla, it seemed endless. But at the end of the trip you stepped out of your car in your own driveway, drew a breath of sweet country air, heard the soft calls of the mourning doves in the lilacs.

That Saturday morning, the weekend Conrad came home from Williams, Lydia and Marshall sat at breakfast, reading the
Times
and waiting for the children to straggle down the back stairs. Conrad and Jenny, twenty-one and eighteen, were usually the last; Oliver, fourteen, was usually first.

Marshall and Lydia sat in the little breakfast room off the kitchen, overlooking the garden. The paper was spread messily across the table, Classifieds and Real Estate already discarded on the floor. On the windowsill stood a jug of spring flowers: bleeding hearts and Jacob's ladder. Beyond the jug lay the brindle cat, Murphy, her eyes shut, her white paws tucked neatly under her chest, feigning disinterest in their food. Lydia was deep in the crossword, Marshall pored over the op-ed.

They heard movement upstairs, and then they heard someone descending. They saw bare feet, legs in loose gray sweatpants, someone jolting down the back steps. Lydia expected Ollie, gangly and loose-jointed, his face shimmering pink with hormones, his mouth complicated with braces. But the steps were light and controlled, the feet tidy. After the gray sweatpants she saw a faded T-shirt that declared in orange letters,
WILLIAMS TRACK
. Conrad.

“Good morning,” Lydia said. “You're up early.” She moved the newspapers to make room for him. “Want me to make something to eat?”

“No, I'm good.” Conrad went past them and fixed himself a bowl of cereal. He brought it back to the table and sat down across from his parents.

“Good morning,” Marshall said, raising only his head. His torso was cantilevered over the paper. He was poised, ready to dive back into it.

Conrad took a spoonful of cereal, then leaned back and folded his arms across
WILLIAMS TRACK
. “I wanted to tell you something,” he said. “I have an announcement to make.” He seemed awkward and self-conscious.

They waited, Lydia holding her coffee mug, Marshall poised over the paper. Neither was alarmed. Conrad was their eldest child, an achiever, responsible and conscientious. He trusted the world and had faith in the way it worked. He was always on the honor roll, always captain of the team. He completed the task before him; he moved beautifully through life.

Why would they be alarmed? What he was facing was his future. They'd had many talks about it. Conrad was majoring in classics, and he was drawn to everything in the ancient world: literature, history, art. He'd talked about going on to study archaeology or history; he'd talked about becoming a classics professor himself. He'd talked about law school and following his father's path.

Lydia was proud of his wide interests. She was proud that he'd moved into regions that were unknown to her, mastering knowledge that would never be hers. This was one of the delights of being a parent, wasn't it? Watching your children stride steadily past, outstripping you, knowing that they were carrying on the life of the family—whatever it was, the essence, genes, some kind of tribal presence—into another region, one that was distant, rich, remote. Astrophysics, intellectual property, ancient Greece: places where her mind would never go would be explored by her children.