We Were Beautiful Once (37 page)

Lindquist's eyes moved to the wall clock and agreed, “Yes, Counsel, we have run over our usual break.”

Trent and Anna stood up at the same time. She looked at him leaving the witness stand to stretch his legs. She saw him look toward the back of the courtroom where she was sitting and recalibrated the image she'd carried for thirty years. Although now he had the full grown body of a fifty-seven-year-old, he still resembled the boy she had known. She asked Julie, “Do you think he recognizes me? He's looking over here again. I don't think he... ”

Instead of answering Anna, Julie asked, “Why do you think that Jack and Trent never picked up on their friendship after they came home?”

Anna never told her sister-in-law that William was Trent's son, and naïvely she did not think that Jack told her either. “I don't know, guess some things don't last.” Anna knew their separation was not a simple one, not of boys growing into men, men going to war, diverting lives due to career choices or geography. No, they separated because their lives were so intertwined. The plain fact was that they had a friendship, which was inseparable in college, and then afterward, based on mutual self-interest—parasitic perhaps—winding around one another, growing like tangled banyan trees in a hairy contemptuous swamp over the course of many years, too complicated even for close friends to understand or untwist. She could not see what had played out in Camp 13, but she saw the fleeting guilt in Trent's eyes for his transgressions before he joined the Army in that instant when their eyes met and he hesitated and quickly turned away.  She found it hard to believe that he was the man to whom she gave the sweetness of her youth, but she never regretted it either.  After all, as she often thought, without Trent, Will would never have been born.  

 

 

T
HE SUMMER OF '68 FOLLOWING HIGH SCHOOL graduation, Trent's other son, William O'Conner ventured to California partly to spread his wings and partly to join in one war protest or another—there were hundreds to choose from. Before leaving, he told Jack “Most of these kids being drafted are victims of the power elites who prey on boys, poor kids, most with no way forward.” He and the many young men and women like him were not bystanders: they stood against war and the establishment. They searched for an answer to why America was in Vietnam or why blacks were burning down ghettos. Many ended up finding a new direction, a new despair, or a new drug: marijuana, cocaine, heroin or LSD. William tired of the California scene, returning in September '69 to attend St. Johns University. But the following year, he quit—partly because he could not afford it and partly because his grades were dismal. He returned to Bridgeport. By the following January, he had yet to enroll in college again. In early March, he received a draft notice ordering him to report for a physical on April 26. He immediately tried to enroll in college and reapply for a deferment.

Jack was working for HH when Will told him about the draft notice. Trent was spending most of his time at the bank. Jack rarely, if ever, ran into him. He made two attempts to have Trent, an influential member of the draft board, help with the deferment. His old friend and boss did not return the calls. Finally, Jack went to the bank in late March and asked him to pull some strings; after all, he was Chairman of the local draft board. Trent was polite to his old college buddy, war buddy and senior employee of one of his major investments. And although they never spoke about it, there was the paternity connection. They parted on a hearty handshake, and Jack thought that he had succeeded in postponing Will's military service. When Jack learned that William's deferment did not materialize, he tried calling Trent, and discovered to his grim disappointment that Trent was in India selling helicopter parts—in all likelihood returning too late to do anything to divert the army's intention to induct Will.
 

***

When Jack could not reach Trent, he went to Father Ryan in hopes that he had some advice. After explaining his situation, Ryan did not think he could be of much help, explaining that he had received one or two calls a month about the draft, and after a few attempts at exerting a subtle ecclesiastical influence on a particular member of the draft board, the bishop told him to keep his nose out of things that weren't God's business. Jack sat, head bowed, ready to accept the inevitable.

“Vietnam, Father, Vietnam.  What in hell is it?”

Ryan kept his feelings in check rather than make Jack feel worse than he did. He did not answer.  

“Father, it's odd that soldiers hate war, what it stands for, more than anyone—unless they're insane. But they also justify what they've done when it's over.”

“Yes, and many of those—especially when they get old—will tell you service during war was their greatest achievement. There's this need to justify why we've been put on this earth.”

The men sat quietly. “What should I do, then, just accept Will's situation?”

“Jack, Will knows a little about mechanics.  Send him down to the Army recruiter. I know the guy.  I'll call. Let's see if they won't take him. Send him where he'll be out of harm's way.”

***

Will was trained at Fort Wolters in Texas to fly helicopters. By the time he had graduated from flight school, he had gained a reputation for knowing about helicopter mechanics, owed in no small measure to working summer's at Hamilton Helicopters. Instead of being shipped to Vietnam, he was sent on a temporary duty assignment to Japan where he worked with Fuji Heavy Industries outside of Tokyo.  They were developing modifications to the Huey UH1-J, a derivation of the craft he had learned to fly.  Six months after arriving in Japan, he received orders for Vietnam.

In 1970, Warrant Officer William O'Conner went to Vietnam to fly helicopters, while Anna and Jack watched the war, like the rest of America, through the nightly news projected on the TV.

 

 

 

IN THEIR UNIVERSE, A TWENTY-FIVE watt bulb in the middle of the room supplied illumination when the lights dimmed on the tiny Christmas tree lamps that shone through the cellophane windows of little cardboard houses. The Lionel train ran in a continuous circle. All was well in the manufactured town Jack and Will had assembled in the basement. Upstairs, the doorbell rang.

Anna answered and an army chaplain asked, “Mrs. O'Conner?”

“Yes?”

“I am here from the Army and regret—”

Anna screamed.

But, the truth, having been suddenly coiled, irrevocably wound into every fiber of her existence and could not be unwound, by Man, Nature or God. Jack, hearing her shrieks, ran upstairs from the cellar.  When the chaplain left, the parents remained clutched until their mind, spirits and bodies deflated. They talked, sobbed, bawled how they would make it through the night, how they would live on.  How they would tell their daughter Mona that Will was dead.

Sometime after the second hour, Jack went back to the cellar. The train was still circling. He remembered the hours that turned into days that turned into years. Will and he laid track. They built neighborhoods. They made platforms of plywood to satisfy their passion for railroading. They built trestles from tiny balsam beams—a quarter inch wide and three inches long—piece by piece, each a truss in the trestle engineered for the locomotive to make its way up the grade. Plaster sidewalks a quarter-inch high curbed streets dotted with cardboard houses. The leaded inhabitants living affluent lives raising children—posed in a solitary positions.  A rubber brontosaurus and a plastic dragon Will had placed in the town square and left there by Jack so he would never forget Will's sense of fantasy—or as a reminder that dinosaurs and dragons might stave off enemies that could disturb the sanctuary of Toyland. Here, even the appearance of movement was an illusion; the locomotive's headlight cast on a wall never went anywhere, except in Jack and Will's imagination. Yes, here life was static. What the man and boy could not control in life, they controlled in the miniaturized train towns sprawled across the basement. This would be the land Jack would fashion.  If he were God.

At a friend's house for the night, Mona would be told when she returned in the morning. Having called Mary, Charlie and Julie, Anna went to bed. Jack consumed half a fifth of J&B by 10 p.m. About 11 p.m. he felt the urge to tell Trent.  Drunk as he was, he drove north to Fairview, heading for the mansion—a place he had not seen since the night the Hamiltons threw the farewell.

The hills and valleys were now grey images on the eastern side of the Ford as it climbed the final quarter mile of the long hill, past a vacant roadside stand that led to the drive at the foot of the mansion's front steps. The moon was high in a sky filled with cirrus clouds. It called to mind his youthful memory of the yellow color that had bathed the Hamilton estate the night he said goodbye to Tracy. He parked in the same place he parked twenty years earlier. He walked to the front entrance. Jack heard music and remembered the sounds of twenty years ago. A butler greeted him.

“Yes, may I help you?”

The butler took Jack's measure. Eyes bloodshot. A drunken man in a worn out flannel shirt struggling to keep his balance.

“Tell Trent Jack O'Conner's here to see him.”

“Sir, he is not available right now.”

“Tell him that Jack's here,” he repeated. “He'll wanna see me.”

“Wait here.”

Trent appeared at the front door.

“Jack, what the hell you doing here?”

“Will is dead!”

Jack could see a flicker of doubt cross Trent's face, but it was gone in an instant—the perfect host was back. “What! Oh God, Jack...  I am sorry, so sorry. What happened, for Christ's sake? Come in, let's go to the library.”

It wasn't what Jack wanted, how he had thought it out in his mind, but he could not think it all out anymore. He followed Trent into house. Musicians surrounded a piano, people mingled with drinks in their hands. His eyes glanced beyond the players.  On the veranda, guests were caught up in small talk. Maids in white housedresses circulated. Things were as he'd pictured it so many times since that last night so long ago.

In the library, a Doberman stood next to an easy chair. “He's okay, long as I'm here,” Trent said as he poured two drinks. Coolly, he asked, “How's Anna taking it?”

“Anna?” The thought inflamed Jack, “For Christ's sake, man, your son just died.”

“Look, Jack, you're upset,” Trent said, “Nothing's going to bring the boy back.”

“The boy!  The boy? His name's William, William. That's his name...  Trent...  remember? William. One of the dozens you left in your wake—like Anna, like Dawn, Roger...  me.”

Trent cocked his head. “You keeping score, Jack?”

“Yeah, I've kept score.  I've kept score goddamn it.”

“Who the hell is Roger, or Dawn?”

“Trent, you killed them, don't you remember? You killed 'em, and...  you can't even remember their names. Goddamn—can't even remember their names.”

“You're talking crazy, Jack. I never left anyone in any wake, and certainly not you, for Christ's sake. You'd still be in Manchuria, buried, if it wasn't for me. Or behind some press on a factory floor, if I didn't prop you up all these years!”

“Fuck you, Trent!” Jack screamed.  “You, my great benefactor, my great savior.”

“Jack, calm down or you'll have to leave. I have some important people out there.”

The room went silent. The vacuum of non-response was filled by the muffled sounds of the music and the din of cocktail conversation behind the oak door.

Jack put his face in his hands and began to sob. “No, nothing's going to bring him back. I know. But you could've kept him from going in the first place.”

“Me? Me, Jack...  I had no control.”

Jack looked up at Trent now standing by the bar. “You've always been in control, you were on the
fucking
draft board
,” Jack howled.

Jack's face was beet red, the wild-eyed look of a man about to explode. Trent reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a leather wallet. He opened it and reached for a pen on the bar. “Jack, I have to get back outside, but let me help you and Anna out—there'll be expenses.”  

Jack sneered. “You bastard, you goddamn bastard. You always have a way of skating free. But, you're not free on this one. You're not free. I don't want your fucking money, you hear me? You're not free,” he yelled, in full rage as he catapulted from his chair, hitting Trent square in the chest.  Knocking him against the bar, knocking two stools to the floor. “Keep your motherfuckin' checkbook.” The doberman stood up, but stayed put.

The library door opened.  Jack spotted Tracy dressed in a sequined crinoline cocktail dress, walking quickly, Grecian-like, toward the central foyer. He had not seen her since the night before they had left for the Army. She stopped at the doorway, half hiding behind a man in a black dinner jacket. With fire in his eyes, Jack gazed at her and figured she did not recognize him. Then she turned her lips pretentiously in the way she had twenty years earlier, and his heart jumped. She reached into her purse for her glasses, but he was already heading for the front door. He turned to take a final look as the crowd drew closer, and he saw Tracy putting her glasses back in her purse.

***

Six-months after Will's death, Jack lay in a hospital bed, staring at a flaking wall. His eyes shifted to a fan wobbling off-center over his head. An ebony brown orderly, with snow white hair, stood a few feet away and asked in a Jamaican accent, “Heh mon, you comfortable?”

“Yeah, but where the hell am I?”

“VA hospital.”

“VA? What the hell am I doin' here?”

The orderly walked toward a door with a small wire mesh window. “Doc will be in, in a few minutes.”