Letter

You have never before received a letter from me, so you know this is bad news. I deliver it in the first paragraph to prevent you from jumping ahead to find it, then forgetting the da capo. Skipper is dead. So the Army tells us, but they have not rendered up a body to prove it, which leaves us you-know-where. He enlisted to avoid the draft and the inevitable infantry, thereby making of himself a prize catch for military intelligence. He was a natural linguist, and knew enough about the fundamentals of radio to instruct the instructors, I have no doubt. After his training was completed he disappeared into a fog of official secrecy, but we have been informed by someone I’ve blackmailed that he was assigned to the Army Security Agency in Vietnam, which emphatically does not exist, especially in foreign countries. A non-person in a non-outfit, posted to a non-war rapidly destroying a non-unified country, is now non-existent and presumed non-living. What madness!

TJ (who goes by Joe now) is in legal combat – we hope not mortal combat – with the government of the United States. He was briefly in Daniel Berrigan’s circle of anti-war activists, but that did not turn out well, perhaps because TJ has become an in-your-face, proselytizing atheist ideologically incapable of saying Father to anyone not his father, as well as a visceral antagonist of a polity so craven and morally depraved as to conscript its youth into pointless wars in distant lands for no reason beyond artfully manufactured fear and the enrichment of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so presciently warned us about. (My apologies for the run-on shriek. I’m a mother, not an actuary.)

Connie has married a loaf of Wonder Bread who teaches at a small college in a small town in a flat state, where it’s hundreds of miles through wheat fields to the nearest culture.

There you have it, Alvin, my inverted pyramid of lamentation and woe. Please bear with me, suffer my graphorrhea, logorrhea, demented incoherence. Be my sponge, as you were to our merry band a decade ago. Not spongia officinalis, brought up from the deep by beautiful Greek divers, but the new cellulose variety, willing to soak up absolutely anything, grief included. Soak up my hysteria and despair and turn it into Wonder Bread. Do it not for me, but for the mother of the children you loved and left. See? I can blackmail you, too.

Now to the fetid undergrowth—Maugham-Waugh territory.

We have not informed TJ of Skipper’s presumed death. Reflect on that a moment—we, who knew everything about each other, conspiring to keep from TJ the brutal fact that his brother is dead. TJ is at heart a pacifist, as we all are, but we fear that the shock would drive him to something truly suicidal, like burning Old Glory in the capital of a poor southern state. You once asked Connie whether TJ was an accident, reasoning from the ten-year gap between his age and that of Connie and Skipper. You were halfway there. He is doubly accidental. His biological father is a concert violinist whose name you would probably recognize.

I lead a double life, violinists aside. I am the slightly scatterbrained housewife who fussed over biscuits, soufflés, and camping trips, and picked up after a housefull of dearly beloved but more than slightly scatterbrained litterers. I am also a successful writer of “romance novels,” a profession, if one may call it that, which provides a modest supplement to our modest income from teaching at a small college (but one close to culture). I market my novels under a phony name through a cut-out in London, standard practice for American authors of my ilk. I do not do field work. I did once, and we love TJ all the more for it, but never again.

Sweet Alvin, we had serial hopes for you. We first hoped you would pal around with one or the other of our almost-adult children, we didn’t care which. In the event you did both, or tried to, keeping things on the whole Platonic, democratic, all very Methodist and proper, as is your style. But the epicene world of triangulation knows no armistice. Connie and Skipper were fiercely competitive, barely tolerated each other, and regularly stole each other’s boyfriends. Even Cocteau flinched at that. Our final and most romantic wish was for you to ensnare and tame the shooting star of Skipper’s wildness by building a loving non-Platonic home for him here on earth. This plan bloomed the moment you emerged from a small tent you shared with him through a starry autumn night. Your face told us everything, no translation needed. How did you get away from us?

Ten years later, the spotlight of our anxiety has shifted to TJ. After the initial awkwardness of mutual calibration, you and he got along quite well. The secret, which very few outsiders bothered to learn, was to talk to him as an adult, while fully engaging with his fantasies. (Our house must have tilted left, causing all the intellectualism and hyperactivity to drain into the boys’ bedrooms.) Try to imagine him now, our bouncing Mensan – not nine, but nineteen. He loved you, Alvin. Perhaps he still does. Aren’t you the least bit interested? Fascinated? Compassionate?

I must draw your attention to one further dimension of our agony. No body means no story, and no story means no restraint on morbid imagination. What if Skipper deserted and went over to the enemy? Is that best case or worst case? Or imagine TJ learns that Skipper is missing, and plunges into the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam in an entirely quixotic and deadly search for his lost brother.

In the end, my garrulous rambling comes down to this: Put that cellulose in your head to good use. Find my surviving son, pin him down, give him a bath, throttle the engine of his indignation, soak up the liquid fire of his political madness, save his life.   Save his life.

Oh, Alvin! What a dismal name your dismal family has encumbered you with. You have my undying sympathy.