The Pearl Diver (29 page)

My thoughts in a jumble, I drifted out of the building and back to Union Station. I placed a call to the Marine Corps Historical Center in the Navy Yard. I learned that they were going to close in an hour, but I was able to make an appointment for the following morning. As I drove home, I placed a second call to Andrea. I was beginning to forget that I’d survived for so long without a cell phone, and had once thought drivers who used them were supreme jerks. I was now one of them.

Andrea picked up on the third ring and said that she couldn’t talk long, as she was going out the door to start her dinner shift at Bento.

“It’ll just take a second,” I promised. “Did you talk to your father on the phone yet?”

“No, I haven’t. I got the message last night that he wouldn’t stay to meet me, and I guess I was too mad to call him today.”

“Well, I need some info from your father’s service record to take with me to the Marine Corps Historical Center. Unless, of course, you want to go yourself—I don’t mean to overstep.”

“Oh, no. It would be great if you went. The problem is, I don’t have the service record anymore, and the hell if that’s what I’ll
bring up with him if we ever do talk on the phone. As you told me last night, he was upset about us digging into things—”

“What happened to your copy of the service record? I thought it had just come in, and you kept it in a different place from the box of papers that was stolen.”

“I had them in my backpack, but remember how there was that break-in at my locker at work? The service record vanished along with my wallet. I didn’t mention it yesterday because I was more concerned about not having money.”

“I see,” I said. “But what a shame. If you still had the record, you could have told me the name of his platoon.”

“It was a long name, whatever he was with,” Andrea said. “There was a division and a battalion and then a company name. The letter
C
sticks in my mind.”

I was disappointed that she didn’t remember more. “Do you remember his military service number?”

“Sorry. It was too long. But he was in Vietnam from sixty-eight to seventy, I can tell you that. That was before they started using social security numbers, because I would have recognized that.”

So I’d go into the archives knowing a name, a set of dates, and the letter
C
. It wasn’t much, but it was the best that I could do.

It was odd being alone at night. I ate exactly what I wanted for dinner, which tonight was a vegetarian empanada I’d carried out from Julia’s, on Eighteenth Street. I drank a glass of wine, but that didn’t improve my mood. It didn’t feel like my apartment again, even though Norie was gone. The truth was that it had never really been my apartment. I decided I should do the right thing and take it back to its original masculine state. After I washed Norie’s sheets and towels and returned the guest room, more or less, to the way it had been, I got started in the bathroom. Every single female toiletry I could think of went inside an old wine carton. Where I was going to take it all I didn’t know, but it was mine.

The phone rang, and I jumped up to get it. It was Hugh on the other end, sounding surprised.

“You’re home.”

“You thought I should have moved out already?”

“No. It’s just that you’re usually out every night. I’m still in Boston, by the way. I was calling to check on your aunt, see what her plans are.”

“She flew out this morning,” I said.

“So soon! What brought about that rush?”

“She did. She wanted to go.” I deliberated telling him that she was going to see Sadako’s relatives, but decided against it.

“Back to normal, then,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Returning your apartment to its formerly tidy and masculine state,” I said. “Right now, I’m attacking the bathroom.”

“I don’t mind your bits and pieces,” Hugh said. “I like waking up with your bra dangling off the edge of my shaving mirror.”

“Hugh, I’m talking about…moving out. You do recall that you broke off our engagement, don’t you?”

“I have the ring in my handkerchief box. Every time I reach for one, I remember.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” I said. “I’ve already gotten the picture that you’d be happier without me. Anyway, I’ve hardly seen you in the last week or so.”

“Work’s been hell,” Hugh said. “And as far as the other things, well, I do recall taking a leave of absence to care for a woman who didn’t say more than two dozen words to me for almost a full week. Now that your aunt’s gone and we don’t have to walk on eggshells, perhaps we can make a bona fide attempt at discussion.”

“That sounds so businesslike, so legal,” I said. “I wonder what kind of words you used when you told Kendall about the baby.”

“I didn’t know that would upset you,” Hugh said. “If it did, I’m sorry. I told her because I think of her as family.”

“But she’s not part of your family,” I said pointedly. “Since we’re not getting married.”

“You know,” Hugh said, “I’ve heard that having children can
tear people apart. Whether you raise them or you lose them, they change who you are. I’m not the same, all right? And neither are you. Even though we never saw it or held it…” His voice trailed off, and I realized he was crying.

“Hugh.” Suddenly I felt terrible.

“We aren’t the same,” he said. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Lord knows we’ve had our problems over the years. We’ve broken up how many times?”

“I can’t count,” I said. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to start another fight. You still probably have work to do tonight, and there will be meetings tomorrow.”

“I’m coming home tomorrow,” he said. “After my morning meeting, I’m taking the shuttle straight back. I have to go to the office, but I will try to be home by six…that is, if you’ll be there.”

The archive closed at four. There would be no complication in getting home. I would even have time to make dinner. But what food do you cook for someone you’re breaking up with? I would have consulted with Jiro if I hadn’t been so unwelcome at the restaurant.

“I’ll be waiting,” I said to Hugh. “I promise.”

I woke up the next morning with less than an hour to get to the Navy Yard. The Marine who’d made the appointment for me over the phone the previous day had warned me that there was no parking there, so I hustled off to the Metro without breakfast.

It took forever riding to the Navy Yard on the Green Line, a line that ran from Prince Georges County, Maryland, into southeast Washington. The stretch I rode was all tunnel—no scenery, nothing to take my mind off the challenge that lay ahead of me. I had dates and a hint at a company name, but nothing solid. If Andrea hadn’t lost her father’s service record, I’d be set. But she had lost it, or it had been stolen, by the same person, probably, who didn’t want her to have her mother’s papers. I imagined this phantom person showing up at the Marine Corps Historical Center and
stealing the papers I needed just before I got to them—no. It would be impossible.

When I got out of the Metro station, I found a desolate neighborhood, not dangerous or dirty, just barely inhabited. And the Navy Yard was far from the Metro itself, at least half a mile. I followed a beautifully built old redbrick wall past several magnificent, closed entrances all the way to a gate for cars that was open at M Street and Sixth. I showed my California driver’s license to a sentry who politely told me that because I didn’t have any government identification, I would have to enter at Eleventh Street and O where there were police who would help me. Since when was a state driver’s license not government identification? I thought furiously as I trudged on for a mile and a half longer. A homeless man wandered up to me with a plastic gas can and a sob story about needing money for fuel.

“I saw you last week!” I grumbled. I could swear he’d been in Adams-Morgan, blocking my way when I needed to park. Even if it hadn’t been him, I’d heard the car-out-of-gas story almost a hundred times in urban America—whether San Francisco or Baltimore or Washington. Now I was wishing I’d come in Hugh’s car instead of taking public transportation because the rejected beggar trailed me all the way to Eleventh Street, as if his presence might wear me down. Finally, when I was close to the Eleventh Street entrance, which turned out to be practically underneath Interstate 295, he wandered off. The military police were clearly present, and he must not have wanted a possible tangle with them.

Once approved, and given a visitor sticker to wear, I was allowed into the Yard. It was a vast campus with real streets and traffic lights and a variety of buildings, old and new. Building 58, the Marine Corps Historical Center, was an old Marine barracks that had been painted chalk-white and had on its first floor a nice museum devoted to Marine history. The lone attendant sent me up to the third floor. Once upstairs, in a suite of offices hung with historic portraits of various Marine officers, I wound my way to the reference historian’s desk. The historian, a civilian in his thir
ties wearing a short-sleeved shirt, khakis, and wire-rimmed glasses, was on the phone. When he hung up, I told him I was the person who’d called for an appointment the day before. I gave him Robert Norton’s name, the time I thought he’d been in Vietnam, and said that the letter
C
might have had to do with his company or battalion.

He nodded. “C was a very large company; beyond that, he had to have been in a platoon, and then a squad. The easiest thing might be to pull the casualty card for him. That will have the detail of the company name, and you can research the unit diaries from there.”

“Casualty? Doesn’t that mean—dead?” I asked.

“Wounded, missing, or dead.” The man was looking at me strangely, as if he realized I was far removed from the typical researcher who came in.

“Well, he was wounded, he’s not dead.”

“If he’s not dead, why don’t you ask this former Marine the name of the company he was in?” the librarian asked in a reasonable tone.

I paused. “From what’s happened so far, I don’t think he’d tell me. And the situation is rather—urgent.”

“Well, then, I’m sorry, but it’ll be harder.”

“Does that mean I can’t get any information?” I shouldn’t have confessed about not being on good terms with Robert Norton. I’d made it clear that I was a person up to no good.

“No, of course you can get information. But looking through hundreds of pages of unit diaries—well, that will be more tedious and time consuming.”

“Hey, it’s only ten in the morning.” I smiled at him. “I need to consume time.”

So I sat down at a microfilm reader in the Marine Corps library, under a portrait of a stern-looking former Marine commander. Now I really wished I’d eaten, because looking at tiny type whizzing past usually gave me motion sickness. If only I had a dollar for every time I’d gotten sick in the libraries at Hopkins
and Berkeley, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about Marshall not paying me.

The unit diaries were made up of pages divided into blocks of text that identified men, their ranks and company affiliations, and any movements they made—whether it was joining a unit, leaving it for a while because of hospitalization or rest and relaxation, or serving time as a punishment. I read through a number of pages before discovering that each monthly report had a personnel roster. From that point, I moved more quickly, and I was triumphant when I finally saw Robert Norton’s name among a group of ten. Now, in addition to the division and battalion, I had his serial number and company. As I traced the unit diaries further into the year, I learned that he’d been wounded by sniper fire six months into his tour, after which time he’d been hospitalized for six weeks before being transferred to a different squad. This group he was with worked on land mines and building or bombing bridges. Half the team was gone after a year due to death or injury. But Norton was hanging on, and he was promoted to lance corporal. A lieutenant named Alan Martin was in charge. He certified each report and signed it, at the very end. About a year into his tenure, though, Martin’s name was gone from the reports, replaced by a Lieutenant Russell.

I remembered what Harp Snowden had said about lieutenants losing their lives in fragging incidents. The unit diaries made it clear that Martin had enforced some punishments for Marines who had gone absent from their posts or had been caught with drugs. Could that have been enough to have caused his death? And, I thought with a mixture of excitement and dread, was that Robert Norton’s big secret?

I needed more. I went back to the reference historian and asked him if a casualty card existed for Martin. It didn’t.

“I’m frustrated because I can’t find him,” I said. “There’s a new officer signing the reports starting in 1969.”

“Maybe he was transferred out. Keep going.” He looked at me carefully. “But you know, you look like you need something to eat. It’s one already.”

He gave me directions to a nearby canteen, where I went and drank a liter of orange juice and took the turkey off the submarine sandwich I’d bought. I sat there, in the midst of men in many different uniforms—Marines in their camouflage, naval officers in khaki polyester, and sailors in flared dungarees. I was wearing jeans, too—but the Yokohama Curry T-shirt I wore gave the truth away about me, that and my self-created vegetarian submarine sandwich.

Feeling stronger, I returned to the library and went back to my microfilm reader, where the light had been turned off but the tape had remained undisturbed. I went forward, and then I saw the notation: Martin had reported to battalion headquarters, along with five of the enlisted men serving under him. Another hour
with the reader revealed that after this visit, the lieutenant had been sent to Okinawa, along with Norton and another of the Marines, while the three other Marines who’d gone to battalion headquarters were split up to go to new companies in different parts of Vietnam.

I went back to the reference historian, who suggested I go to a different historian—the chief archivist, another civilian who bore more than a passing resemblance to him—the glasses, preppy dress, and a calm, interested manner in all the proceedings.

“Something happened with this squad that was serious enough for them all to go to battalion headquarters. A few of them lost rank. They all moved to different places, and the Marine whose career I’m tracking was sent on to Japan. I’m trying to find a written account of what happened.”

The archivist asked me a few more questions, then spoke. “We can look for a command chronology. This would be a written report that was filed by the officer daily, an accounting of everything that happened. You don’t know a particular day an incident happened, it sounds like, but you could examine some chronologies for the larger time frame.”

I settled down at a computer terminal this time, because the information was stored on a CD-ROM. The records that came up on the screen were scanned copies of original typed pages, and many of them were so faint as to be almost impossible to read.

But I was persistent, and the life of the squad was interesting enough to keep me spellbound. At the beginning, Martin wrote about the daily rituals of attempting to flush out Vietcong fighters in hiding. The Americans were fired upon, and predictably, fire was returned. Only rarely was the lieutenant able to report Vietcong who’d been killed. All too often, he was able to confirm his own men as dead. When the group’s corpsman was killed, morale was seriously shaken. Now Captain Martin was writing about men in the group who were frequently disobeying orders and were angry.

And then there was the shooting incident. On a hot, rainy night in June, the lieutenant dispatched a squad consisting of Private Becher
and Private Jones, Lance Corporal Norton, Corporal Davidson, and Sergeant Matthews to investigate the sound of voices. The men reported that they’d been fired upon, and had fired back in return. In the ensuing gun battle, an unknown number of Vietnamese nationals died. The next day, a reconnaissance of the dwelling revealed the presence of six dead adult and adolescent females, two teenage boys, and two babies, a boy and a girl.

Lieutenant Martin had written that he’d questioned the men separately about the incident and all had recounted the same story. In conclusion, he wrote, it was most likely that the Vietnamese civilians had been caught in the crossfire as the squad reacted with justified force to enemy attack. He and the men would travel to battalion headquarters the next week to discuss the situation with an investigating officer.

All shot and killed. If people were shooting in the dark, how could there be such a perfect kill rate? Wouldn’t some of them have escaped the shooting or been wounded rather than dead?

There was no record of court-martial for any of the named men. I couldn’t think of an obvious next step, so I returned to the reference section to check to see if there were casualty cards for any of them. Bingo. Private Jones had died in combat in 1971 and Corporal Davidson of natural causes in 1990. Thus, the surviving men who’d gone out were Robert Norton, Sergeant Cyrus Matthews, and Arnold Becher.

“I can’t believe all these men were summoned to the battalion headquarters after so many civilians were killed, yet nothing happened,” I said after the reference historian had given me the casualty report. “What’s that famous army incident they made a movie about, My Lai? Justice was served in that case.”

“Ma’am, even if there was no court-martial, there was probably an inquiry at battalion headquarters.”

I thought about Hugh and the intense privacy with which he guarded his clients. “Who is allowed access to the inquiry records?”

“Well, most of those records were declassified years ago. We can’t let people deal with the reel-to-reel tapes directly, because
they’re so fragile, so we’ve put everything on CD-ROM. The sound can be sketchy at times—just as the command chronology pages are sometimes illegible—but it’s there. Just ask the chief archivist for the time period that you want.”

Twenty minutes later I was walking out of the Navy Yard with a CD-ROM the staff told me was mine to keep. It would play on a personal computer, but not on a Walkman, they added, as if they’d deduced somehow or other—maybe from my jeans and Asics running shoes—that I was a Walkman kind of person.

The walk along M Street seemed faster, since I had so much to think about—and no conclusion about what it meant. I needed to talk to Robert Norton, but I doubted he’d tell me the truth. If he didn’t tell it to an investigator over thirty years ago, why would he tell me now? I imagined he could still implicate himself and face a court-martial. That is, if he’d knowingly killed innocents. I’m not good with babies, he’d said to me once. And I now wondered whether the reason that Andrea’s crying, as an infant, had disturbed him so much was because he was flashing back to the children killed in Vietnam. When I reached the Metro, its escalator was out of service. A repairman told me to take the elevator down. I did so, moving to the side to let in another person, for a minute, taking my mind off the words winding through my brain, just to make sure the person looked all right. I avoided elevators in secluded places, but today, I had no choice. As luck would have it, my fellow rider was a disheveled man with a heavy odor and tiny, reddened, angry-looking eyes.

Great, I thought, after I’d made the identification. It was gas-can bandit, the one who’d tried to get money from me in the morning. He had a cigarette clamped between his teeth. If he actually had gas in the can, he could blow us both up in the tiny elevator. Or he could get me, if he tossed the cigarette in the can and threw it grenade-style, the way I’d heard about from Harp Snowden.

The door opened before anything happened, and we were now downstairs in the Metro station. I shot another look at him but he had already moved on. He had thrown his cigarette on the
ground in front of the fare-card machine, into which he was carefully dropping coins for a fare card. Fortunately, I had paid for a round-trip fare when I’d bought my fare card that morning, so I was able to scoot through the turnstile gate ahead of him. A train was coming in, not toward Greenbelt, the direction I needed, but farther into Anacostia. A sign on the platform told me that the next train to Greenbelt was six minutes away. I saw the gas-can bandit coming down the stairs to the platform, so I took a quick step onto the train. He started to hurry, but the train doors closed when he was twenty feet away. His small, mad eyes lingered on me as the train began moving. His mouth moved, too. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but from his expression, I didn’t think it was a friendly good-bye.

I jumped off the train a few stops later to take the correct train back home. Of course, I had to worry about passing back through the Navy Yard station again, and running into my friend. So I stood in the compartment closest to the conductor, and kept a careful watch out the window as we drew into the Navy Yard platform. The crazy man was nowhere to be seen. Slowly my heartbeat returned to normal as I rode the rest of the way home.

My relaxed feelings ended an hour later, when I made it through the door of the apartment and realized I’d forgotten about making something for dinner. Hugh would be coming home and there would be nothing. He’d suggest going to a restaurant, and the last thing I could face was a candlelit table for two.

I wanted a simple, fast, no-frills meal to be at least under way before he got there. That way, the night wouldn’t be too long. We could get to the discussion and the resolution.

I opened the fridge and started searching its shelves desperately. Norie had left her box of cherry blossom tea, but there were no delicious Japanese leftovers, as I’d hoped—she must have thrown them away before she left. There was the half-bottle of sauvignon blanc from the previous night, and lots of condiments—coconut milk, peanut butter, soy sauce—plus frozen vegetables, which could make a Southeast Asian soup.

I had started rifling through the pantry for a box of rice noodles I knew I had when I heard the door open.

“Hello?”

“You’re back five minutes early,” I said, not bothering to hide my distress.

“I’m sorry to do this to you without warning, but…” The rest of what Hugh said vanished in the crumpling sound of paper.

I walked into the small entry hall to face up to the situation. Hugh was almost disheveled, his tie half off and his shirtsleeves rolled up and spotted with wetness. He was trying to unpack a paper grocery-shopping bag that was dripping water out of its bottom.

“Ice melts,” Hugh said. “You’d think someone who passed three A levels would remember that. But they’re still cold.”

“Never mind.” I was glad he at least had a grocery bag. I could see from its labeling that it was a store in Boston, not Washington.

I left Hugh to mop up the foyer with a bathroom towel and took the decomposing bag to the kitchen counter. There, buried in bags of ice, was a very long white paper package. I opened it and caught my breath. Two crustaceans, but freakishly long. They didn’t have claws like lobsters, and they had striping on their bodies that reminded me of tiger shrimp. Like shrimp, they had heads with beady eyes and long, trailing antennae.

“Is this a joke?” I said when Hugh came in.

“I don’t make jokes at forty dollars a pound. What’s wrong?” He looked stricken. “Are you off prawns now?”

“No, it’s just…are they really prawns? They seem too big.”

“These two are almost fifteen inches long. They come from the Atlantic Coast, off Nigeria. I know you believe in the sanctity of
terroir
and all that, but they seemed enticing. The fishmonger said they were best broiled or barbecued…” His voice trailed off.

“They won’t fit in the broiler,” I said, shaking my head. “And we can’t barbecue in April. We don’t even have a barbecue grill!”

“Why don’t we make one?” Hugh asked.

So we did. We took one of my old blue-and-white hibachi, set it
out on the fire escape, and filled it with coals that Hugh borrowed from the downstairs neighbors. While Hugh kept watch over the coals, I ran around the corner to the organic grocery to buy some field greens for a salad, and strawberries and cream for dessert.

When I returned, Hugh had already set the table in the dining room, poured wine, and melted butter with lemon. The prawns were grilling on the rack.

“I didn’t know you liked to grill,” I said.

“Oh, I think it’s in the male genetic code to want to build fires. Is there any more of this wine?”

“Yes, but it’s not chilled. Just take the glass you poured for me.” I didn’t want anything addling my brain. The discussion with Hugh still loomed ahead. After it was done, I planned to jump on the computer to read through the command chronologies I’d gotten on disc from the archives.

The prawns were luscious, rich beyond belief, and a perfect match with the butter. And one each really was enough, if you ate the salad.

I worked steadily at eating. It wasn’t until we’d gotten to the strawberries that Hugh spoke. “Is there a reason you’re avoiding it?”

“The wine? No, I had a little last night. But I can’t drink tonight if I’m going to run tomorrow.” I actually hadn’t thought about running, but it made sense. It was about time I got moving again.

“Actually, what I meant to ask is why you’re still avoiding me. Last night, after I talked to you on the phone, I thought everything might turn out all right, but since I’ve been home, it’s just been…the same.”

“Ah. So you thought this idea, making a special dinner, would change everything back to the way it was?” I paused. “It was a delicious meal, Hugh. Much better than even the Yin-Yang shrimp at Bento. Thank you.”

“There’s no point. Food—you can spend on it, slave over it, but in the end it all goes to waste.” Hugh pushed away his plate.

“I try to think about what happened to us,” I said. “Two months ago, we both had work. We were planning a wedding.
Then my aunt came and we weren’t alone anymore. We started pretending we weren’t cohabiting and, in a way, that led to it really being true that we weren’t.”

“The irony is that we weren’t alone two months ago. There were three of us.” He put his head in his hands.

“Oh, Hugh.” I closed my eyes. “Don’t. You know that if we had found out about it, we would have been in such a panic, the two of us pregnant and not married!”

“We would have married. We were on the verge, I thought.”

“And I suppose you think I would have stayed in the apartment and carried out the pregnancy just right, no jogging or heavy lifting and certainly not jumping out of car trunks.” My words came fast and hard.

“I wouldn’t have made rules. How could I ever possibly impose anything on you?”