4 comments/ 2277 views/ 4 favorites The Savage Innocent 2015 By: Adrian Leverkuhn He was something of an enigma, when we were younger. When we first met. Maybe because he wasn't the typical kid next door. Maybe, too, because as soon as you met Dalton Rand you knew there was something about him worth knowing, something almost bigger than life. I say that because there seemed to me to be an inextricable connection between the Dalton Rand I knew --and by that I mean the year I spent in school with him -- and the spirit of those times. He was alive in ways I never knew existed, preternaturally attuned to people, and people's connection to him. I often think of charged particles adrift in the cosmos, repelling, attracting, colliding, and when two extremely dissimilar particles collide there exists, if only for the brief span of it's existence -- something like a momentary lapse of reason. The laws of the universe break down, and out of the collision something peculiar emerges. A union so singular, so insular in it's inception that it's impossible not to get pulled into it's orbit. Curiosity works that way too, I guess. It's difficult for me to think about those days, quite painful in fact. I think it's difficult to reconcile the man I think he became with the way he was then. I say this because even before he met my sister Madeleine, he seemed destined to play an outsized role in both our lives. But I have to pause here, pause to see him as he was then in my mind's eye, because with the passage of so much time I don't see those days as clearly as I once did. For me, somewhere in time he slipped into the darker realms of mythos. He belongs to the sixties, you see, and in one shattering moment he became an essential part of our mythology. He belonged to us because, in the brief spark of his youth, he came to embody everything that was righteous and strong and pure in us, and how that just wasn't enough. So, where was I? Oh yes, bigger than life. I have to think he knew he was too, even then. He thought he knew where he was going in life, and understood some people would try to tag along for part of the ride. Anyway, I think this one fact of life, more than any other I'm going to try to pass on, defined the course of events that year. Without this one simple fact to ground you, that Rand was even then a true force of nature who pulled you into his orbit, everything else about this story will seem faintly ridiculous, even a cumbersome delusion of sorts. You'll have missed the point, I guess you might say, and that would be too bad. +++++ I met Rand in August, 1969, just before my freshman year of high school began, and our experiences growing up couldn't have been more different. I think kids just growing up in the late 60s were already growing allergic to Strawberry Fields, Lucy in the Sky with all those Diamonds, and all the other psychedelia that was in full bloom by the mid-sixties. We were too young to have been terminally shaped by the so-called counter-culture, and so lacked the full-blown rebelliousness of our older brothers and sisters. Like so many of us, Rand was not yet full of the rebelliousness that would soon define those precious, terrible moment of our lives. But even in the eyes of a bell-bottomed, round-eye romantic like myself, the first time I saw him I could tell there was something outrageous, possibly even titanic about the guy. I think he was, in a phrase that has passed in and out of vogue over the past two hundred years, a World Historical Figure just waiting for his moment. When I first laid eyes on him, Dalton Rand was the square-jawed fighter pilot-to-be who all but proclaimed the Age of Aquarius was going to come crashing down all over our fevered little heads. Perhaps the central irony of this story is that we, Rand and I, had just been deposited onto the well-manicured grounds of a distinguished military academy in north-central Indiana. Vast manicured lawns rolled between ordered rows of cedars to a small lake, the grounds presided over by a huge granite cathedral, the whole place surrounded by football fields and parade grounds. The campus was a grand and glorious prison, and by the late sixties the whole place was drowning in it's contradictions. That first day? Well, that day was as hard and real as life had ever been for the two of us, and quite possibly because the school was dedicated to creating young men ready for military service. But time has a way of creating subtle ironies in our lives, and it's those little incongruities that keep our lives interesting, I think. For instance, Rand's hair was long and blond; mine short and red. He looked carved from purest white marble, rather like Michelangelo's David; perhaps I could most charitably be described as a very pale string bean, with hideously long legs. He seemed to regard his sudden appearance at the school as an anomaly of cosmic significance, yet while I was a little confused about what life here might hold, I was sure whatever happened would be less traumatic than life at home. We both arrived on the same chartered bus from O'Hare; that old stainless steel bullet dropped us off on a sweltering Saturday morning in mid-August, 1969; Rand's black-stenciled olive drab foot-locker matched mine in all details save a few scratches and dents, while his jeans and white polo shirt were somewhat at odds with this universe. There were 43 of us on that bus, and I think, looking back on it all, we must have all looked rather alike -- except for Rand. If you are the cynical type, you might have said our group looked rather patrician. Gray flannel slacks, white button down Oxfords, red and blue regimental ties...you know the score, I'm sure. We probably looked like clueless stacks of Wonder-Bread. As it happened, Rand and myself were assigned to room 21, a second floor corner room that looked down on a little stone and hedge-lined quad. Statues and cannon defined the view out our windows, images of history and sacrifice. My first impression of the view was that it was pretty nice -- for a prison. Even one of the cannon was aimed squarely at our windows, and the placement seemed to reinforce the sense of involuntary confinement I felt. I fondly remembered looking at the school's glossy catalogue the winter before, at the ordered rows of scowling cadets and a fierce looking fullback charging behind pulling guards, and wanting passionately, furiously, to belong to this place. As is so often the case, you've got to be careful what you wish for. Clio is a deadly muse, is she not? I turned from my prison window and opened my footlocker, looked down at the proscribed number of white boxer shorts labeled just so, at the white sheets my grandmother had laundered and folded not a day before, and I felt the first stabs of anomie. Then I looked at Rand. He was lying on his bed face up, staring intently at the ceiling. He didn't look lost there, far from it. No, it looked as if he was pondering the very limits of the universe, the nature of existence. And I noticed them then. The shoes on his feet. Wingtips. Heavy, black wingtips on his feet, just like my father's. And probably, I thought, just like his father's. A polo shirt, jeans, and big, fat wingtips? His jaw was clenched, his left fist balled tightly in a knot, the thumbnail digging into the skin on the side of his finger. Believe it or not that was the first time I noticed how clear-eyed he was, how full of manifest purpose he seemed. I remember placing folded white t-shirts and rolled-up black socks into a drawer while regarding him as one might a smoldering volcano across a narrow strait. Krakatoa comes to mind. We had been told to get our belongings unpacked and squared-away, yet Rand remained as fixed in place as a new specimen on a lepidopterists' examining-table. Pinned flat, so to speak. Anyway, I wasn't exactly surprised when, half an hour later a short, blunt instrument by the name of Lt E. G. Crist pounded on our door and came blustering into our lives. He looked at Rand's unpacked footlocker and stared at my roommate with a sort of wild-eyed disbelief stammering across his face. "What the FUCK are YOU doing, Cheesedick!" Crist, E. G. yelled as he took in the sight of our pinned butterfly. The inert mass that was Dalton Rand barely stirred, the clear grey eyes barely came back to us for a moment, and he looked benignly at Crist, E. G. for a moment before looking back at the ceiling. "I was thinking about your mother," Rand said, and Crist, E. G. began to tremble and fume. "What did you say?" Crist, E. G. screamed. "I was thinking about your mother, and the last time I fucked her up the ass," he said clearly, and Crist, E. G. seemed like a kettle too long on the boil. He frothed and fumed and leaned over, got in Rand's face and started to yell when the volcano blew. Yes, that volcano. Krakatoa. Rand was off the bed and airborne in an instant and took Crist, E. G. by the neck and the balls and pinned to the far wall, his own face now just inches from the shocked kids, the butterfly now a cobra, malevolent fury coiled in the air around his hissing smile. And then Rand was smiling, and he pulled back from the strike, let the poor kid slide down to the floor. Eddie Crist had just met Dalton Rand -- and his world had been turned upside down. Hell, who knows, maybe it never would never be the same. But then again, so had mine, and I guess you could say mine never would be, too. +++++ We had, the forty or so who'd arrived on the bus that afternoon, reported to campus two weeks early for football. The school was not, therefore, really in session, not yet operating at full military power. Only a few staff were around, and only a few of the teachers who would define the perimeters of our existence over the next year were anywhere to be seen. We hadn't been issued uniforms yet, didn't form up in front of the dorms every morning, yet all things being equal, life wasn't quite what it had been the day before, either. Still, there was a residual informality lingering over the campus, a casual give or take that would soon, and inevitably, give way to the barked orders and clipped cadences of military school. But within this casual informality, word of Crist's encounter with Rand had spread like a particularly vile sexually transmitted disease. We ambled slowly to breakfast early that first Sunday morning, met the coaches then walked with them to the locker room an hour later and were issued our gear. We were the new kids, Rand and I and the forty others we'd traveled with on the bus were told, and we were the unknowns, the untested. We were, we were told, being relegated to tackling dummy status the first few days of practice, and somehow I felt a little tainted simply being Rand's roommate. Guilt by association, I suppose, because it was soon apparent our coaches didn't know what to make of Rand. They looked at him, felt the pyroclastic fury in his eyes, and I think they must have assumed I fit into that same classification. Anyway, I got the impression they were a little unsure of themselves around Rand. Not quite afraid, but they sure as Hell weren't going to turn their backs on him, either. After this first orientation was over, we had the rest of the day off, so Rand and I and a few of the other freshmen took off and explored the farther reaches of the campus -- and beyond. When we got back to the dorm, we all showered and Rand finally got around to unpacking, then we made it to dinner, and found Crist and a few of his upperclassmen buddies watching our every move. Crist, E. G. was a short, stocky kid who grew up on a dairy farm north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it looked like one day he might even be muscular, yet for some reason he considered himself linebacker material. He wore the number 66, like his hero Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers. Everything about the kid screamed 'insecurity', from the way he looked at himself in the mirror when he popped zits to the way he strutted around the practice field. I think all our coaches thought he was a prick; I know all of us freshmen thought he was. Anyway, that first Monday practice, late in the afternoon, Rand was lined up opposite Crist in the tackling pit. They faced one another as rookie versus veteran, buck private against first lieutenant, Crist all snarling and chest beating, his beady-eyes red with full-blown fury, and when the coach's whistle pierced the air Rand lowered his head and drove his helmet right through Crist's gut. I remember looking down at the writhing numbers boiling on the sand and thinking the kid sure didn't look like Ray Nitschke anymore. It turned out there wasn't a thing Rand couldn't do better than anyone else on the team, and in due course he started throwing the ball with one of the coaches. Let me just say this: Rand could throw a football. Point of fact, he could drive nails with a football at twenty yards, and rifle the thing through a swinging tire hanging from a tree thirty yards away, time after time. He had, you see, grown up playing ball with kids on military bases in Germany. Much older kids. All this put our coaches in a bit of a fix. The presumed quarterback that year, Tucker Harriman, had been so-ordained last year. Not by talent alone, mind you, but by dent of his father's having helmed the team through an almost mythical 8-0 season in 1936. And the truth be told, Tucker wasn't a bad quarterback, in fact, he was considered better than any other kid in our league. But the simple fact of the matter was this: Tucker was not even close to being half as good as Rand. Tucker was, however, a senior; Rand was, like myself, a freshman. After watching Rand run some plays, everyone, and I mean everyone knew Rand was a far better QB, but facts are facts: the deck was stacked against Rand. Still, Harriman knew he was the Big Man and strutted around the field like the stud he thought he was. At the end of our second week of practice, we scrimmaged against the local high school's varsity squad. The game was a cross-town rivalry always enjoyed by the townies because they got to kick our asses all over the field. The local kids were, you see, almost all farmer's kids. Big, mid-Western farmer's kids. They usually wiped our much smaller school's team right off the field within the first few minutes of the game. The word going around town was that their entire offensive line had harnessed up and plowed fields all summer long just to get ready for this season-opener, and the guys on our defensive line were a little weirded-out by this kind of talk. Anyway. we took to the field late that afternoon; August was about to give up the ghost and harvest time was coming, and there were a few big storms brewing off to the southwest. Their offensive linemen cast a mighty shadow, no doubt about it, and at the end of the first quarter the score was 23 to zip. Our coaches looked despondent, our defensive line looked ready for a trip to the local ER. So, the game now safely out of reach, our coach decided to preserve what little was left of Harriman's dignity and sent Rand in to face the lions in the den. Coach also sent in a list of plays he wanted Rand to call. I was sent in too, at wide receiver. The first play on Rand's crib sheet was a running play, a fullback plunge between center and left guard; true to form Rand called passing play, a wide right fly pattern and sent me long. Let's just cut to the chase here and be done with it; Rand's first pass from scrimmage was completed to me for a touchdown and Coach benched Rand. Harriman went back in and threw another interception on our next possession, then he stomped off the field blaming the offensive line for failing to protect him. Still, our Coach blistered Rand in front of the bench, told him he wasn't a team player; Rand made a germane if impertinent comment about how well the team was doing and everyone thought poor Coach was going to blow one of the veins in his forehead. Harriman continued playing; Rand and I warmed the bench. Mid-way through the fourth quarter, the score now a comfortable 55-7, Coach decided to send in Rand and I -- and all the rest of the freshmen into the game. Mind you, the locals were still playing their varsity squad so when we, the scrawny horde, took to the field we could feel a palpable blood-lust radiating from the sidelines and stands across the field. It was really quite heartening in a way, a weird sort of Norman Rockwell moment. Their coach was salivating, while our coach dutifully sent in another fullback plunge. Yeah, right. That was going to accomplish a lot. Rand characteristically broke the huddle and sent me and another receiver wide right again; coach was red-faced and howling like a stuck pig. The guys on the defensive line could smell red meat; they knew Rand was going to fire long again. I was about ten yards from coach and could see the veins on his forehead bulging while I listened to the count. On the snap I went long then cut hard across field; Rand was running a quarterback draw, and had already cut up-field on the far side of the field. He was hauling the mail, and had cleared all but the deep safety by the time I made it across to his side of the field. I just managed to block their safety, a tall rangy-legged kid about a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than myself, and Rand zipped into the end-zone untouched. I'll never forget the look on Coach's face while we trotted back to the sideline: the lips on his weathered face were tightly pursed and his brown eyes hidden within a distant squinting gaze, while his arms were crossed over his chest and his feet were planted about a yard apart. He looked like he'd just eaten his first raw oyster, and while completely prepared to hate the experience -- he had instead rather enjoyed everything about it. So, it wasn't surprise I saw on his face when we walked past; he instead kept his eyes dead ahead, and to me it looked like he was reevaluating the very meaning of existence. The whole game was like that, too; that last touchdown just brought a touch of clarity to the proceedings. I mention this evening in passing, however, and only to reinforce the idea once again that Rand had that kind of impact on everyone around him. Tucker Harriman started the first game of the regular season, by the way. +++++ The next day all the remaining cadets arrived, the upperclassmen as well as all the faculty. We were sent to the Quartermaster's building for uniforms and on to the nurse's office for flu shots and hernia checks (turn your head, cough), then across campus to the barber shop for a shiny new set of white-walls. Rand was called to the Commandant's office later that afternoon and, I suppose, someone read him the riot act. Gross insubordination would not be tolerated, they said, at least as he relayed the incident to me later, and that had been the sole topic of conversation. I could see reflections of their red capes waving in front of his eyes as he spoke, and the way he must've dug his hooves in. That said, we could all see the contours of a colossal battle shaping up after that day. Rand was in his habitual horizontal mode as he spoke, and had resumed staring at the ceiling. Having read The Catcher in The Rye not long before, I hope you can understand the queasy feeling I had in my gut while I listened to Rand talk. He was becoming more than a little disconcerting to me. I say this because I think I was then, and maybe was right up to the day our world collapsed, the only person on earth who saw through his game, and saw it for what it truly was. +++++ And I suppose First Lieutenant Edwin G. Crist must have been informed of Rand's little chat in the Commandant's office, because not an hour later he came thundering down the hall, banging on doors, yelling there would be a room inspection before dinner "and everyone better be ready -- or else." Rand of course took off his clothes and threw them on the floor, grabbed a towel and walked off to the showers. The Savage Innocent 2015 I suppose it's a flaw of mine but I went about straightening my things because I was, all-in-all, taking this whole military thing quite seriously. I shined my shoes, polished the brass insignia that would adorn my uniform, laid out my things just-so, just as proscribed in the Cadet's Manual of Conduct. I think I heard Rand laugh under his breath when he came back from his shower. He put his things away and dressed for dinner just as Crist arrived on the floor. I was surprised, in a way, by what happened next -- but maybe I shouldn't have been. Rand stood at attention, eyes dead ahead, shoulders square, fingers just so -- as Crist strode into our room. He looked over my stuff and complimented me, then walked briskly from the room; I could just make out the faintest traces of a smile on Rand's face when we walked downstairs to form-up on the quad outside the dorm. We were, you see, from that day forward marched in formation to the Dining Hall, where we confronted legions of pimply-faced Napoleon-wannabes who were intent on making our first year on campus a living Hell. I'd have to say that, with much shouting and consternation, they managed to do just that. There were retired military personnel at every cadet table, and our table was headed by a very stern-faced Marine, a Sergeant Major who, we were told, taught Military Science to first year cadets. We heard this man had fought in Europe and Korea, and had gone to Vietnam but was seriously wounded and came home after just a few months. I looked at the guy, Tom Shipman was his name by the way, and had no doubt in my mind he could lead a battalion to retake Hue right after dinner. His belly was flat, his arms looked like sunburned-flesh over taut steel cable, and his eyes remained in a perpetual squint, like he was taking aim down the barrel of an M-16. He was a United States Marine through and through, and that night was the first time I think Rand had ever been impressed by another human being. I think the feeling was mutual, too. Later that night, while we sat at our desks and melted Kiwi to do our shoes, the two of us talked a little about what we'd been through those past few weeks. In his usual circumspect way, Rand seemed to digest every emotion and question before opening his mouth, but several things became clear as we talked. He missed his father, hated his mother, and really, really hated being "incarcerated in this hell-hole." We hadn't talked too much before, at least not about this kind of stuff, so I was a little surprised by what came next. "So, just why are you here?" I asked. "I assume you mean you didn't want to come?" He looked at me like I was some kind of pathogenic fungus under a microscope: "Hell no, I didn't. Don't tell me you did?" he asked incredulously. "Yeah, I did." "No shit?" He continued his examination, now wide-eyed in disbelief. "I cannot tell a lie, Rand. No shit." "Fuck." "Aptly put. Why are you here?" "I didn't have a choice." "Really?" It was my turn to act the smart-ass -- so I jumped in head first. "What do you mean?" "Really. My dad works for the State Department; we've lived in Europe most of my life." He looked away for a moment, parsing words and emotions, looking for just the right combination, I suspect. "That sounds kind of neat," I volleyed back into his court and ran to catch his next shot. "My mom and dad fight all the time. I mean all the time. Until last year, anyway." I didn't know what to say. "Oh?" I think I finally said. His eyes were burning a hole in the desk. "What happened last year?" "My brother was killed. Vietnam." "Oh. Sorry." "He was a pilot. In the Navy." "Yeah?" I looked at him hard now; his eyes were red and fixed on the shoe polish sitting on the desk in front of him. Jaw rigid, muscles under the skin on the side of his face walked with him through the rigid dimensions of his anger -- a tiger pacing it's cage. "Yeah. Shot down," he said, his teeth clenched. "SAM." "Sam?" I said, his meaning lost. "Surface to air missile. S-A-M, Sam." "Oh." "Yeah. 'Oh.' Sometimes I imagine that's exactly what he said, you know, when he realized what was happening." "What happened to your father?" "He stopped drinking." "Oh." "I think he stopped breathing, too, at least for a few months. Then he and mom really started in on each other. I didn't see him much after that, and he sent me packing to D.C., then enrolled me in this place a few weeks ago." "What about your mom?" I said as a shiver rolled through me. "Jack Daniels," he said those two words so quietly I almost couldn't feel the hurt, and yet I understood. We had that much in common already, I reckon. +++++ I seem to remember going to class occasionally, but what stands out most now was football practice, and those first few games when poor Tucker Harriman got pounded into the ground. I almost felt sorry for the kid; he floundered around the field like someone who had stopped believing in himself, but I swear, sometimes it looked like he had forgotten how to breathe. The games we played in early September were in-league, meaning the opposing teams were from other mid-Western military schools like our own, so not as daunting as that local high school, but pretty solid competition even so. It didn't make a hell of a lot of difference. Harriman just couldn't handle the load, but even after two terrible games, the coach just didn't have the stones to bench him. Then something characteristically weird happened, but then again, everything about that year was weird. Weird could've been Rand's middle name. So, it all started with Rand and Harriman talking during practice, but it was plain to see Rand was coaching him, helping the kid find himself again. They stayed late after practice and threw the ball and talked, then Rand convinced me and a couple of the other receivers to hang around and we ran patterns while the sun set every afternoon. The coaches watched, I guess, and covered for us; anyway, we turned up late for dinner more than once and no one blistered our tails. Pretty soon Harriman was completing passes again, even sounded a little more sure of himself. When we were loading up for our next game, he seemed alright with his place in our little world. It was an away game, down in Lexington, Missouri, and on the bus ride down Coach announced that Rand would be starting at quarterback. Harriman slid down in his seat and Rand's jaw clenched. We suited up and took to the field; Coach called a fullback blast after the kick-off and Rand audibled a right slant out and threw an easy interception; the cornerback pranced into the end zone and spiked the ball. Next possession - same routine, only this time I knew Rand was deliberately tossing the ball high for an easy pick-off. Coach fumed and called Harriman over, told him to get ready to go in on the next possession and you could see the kid inflate like a Firestone. He was probably the only guy out there, God bless him, who didn't know what the fuck was going on. Rand huddled with Harriman by the bench and I could hear him working on Harriman, stoking the fires, building him up, and sure enough the kid went in and tossed a right fair post pattern to rocket named Perry and we had seven points on the board. Harriman was alright after that, and had a great year. I didn't know what to think about Rand after that. Hell, no one did. Kind of funny, though, when you think about it, because all those soldiers were there to teach us leadership, but the biggest lesson we learned that year came from a fifteen year kid who had grown up in Switzerland. +++++ The school had a decent reputation for being a total bear academically, and after the first few weeks no one doubted that in the least. Even Rand was impressed. His parents were what you might call intellectuals. They met at Georgetown and both had continued on to Boston; Colin Rand to the Fletcher School and Ruth Carlson to Harvard Law. The Rand kids had, as I've mentioned, grown up in Europe, Zurich for the most part, and Dalton was fluent in Latin, German and French by the time he was nine. Italian came easy after that, so did Spanish. His mother was a reluctant, if very learned teacher with a ton and a half of time on her hands, so suffice to say academics came easily to Rand. Too, I think today most people would say people like the Rands come from the deep end of the gene pool, and they would be right on-the-mark. It's just a simple fact of life that sometimes gets lost in all the noise out there, but some people are just smarter than others. While I didn't consider myself a slouch academically, after mid-terms I found myself hovering just above the jaws of academic probation. When my grandfather received notice of that interesting bit of news, I was promptly informed there would be no problem re-enrolling at the local high school come January. The problem for me was, well, my less than stellar aptitude for algebra. Rand was in Calculus and I was in Algebra I; Rand was taking Honors Physics (doing celestial mechanics, for Christ's sake) and I was struggling to get through Physical Science. He soon handed me a new nick-name: Moron. It hurt. If anyone else had called me a moron I would have flattened them; coming from Rand it was an evisceration. And I felt like I had let him down. And to this day I still don't know why. +++++ Parent's Weekend rolled around in late October, and my mother came at the anointed time -- no surprise there. What did surprise me was that my sister Madeleine came with her. And here I need to digress a little, for our story now takes a sudden, sharp turn to the left. I was kid number two, and probably an afterthought at that. Madeleine was the apple of everyone's eye, doted on by one and all, the chosen one. I say this not out of jealousy; indeed, I took it all in stride because I pretty much felt the same way about her. I loved her, just like everyone loved her; Hell, she was lovable. And everyone it seems, especially my father, loved her unconditionally. Unbeknownst to me, my father had a little something more than an infatuation going on with Madeleine, and while she was more a friend to me than a sister, she was leading a double life that had been tearing her apart for years. I didn't know it then, but Dad's infatuation was tearing our family apart. Madeleine? She was protective and nurturing, all a little brother could ask for. Another salient feature? She was known far and wide as the embodiment of feminine perfection, and by junior high, her first year as a cheerleader, she was the most popular girl on campus, and the boys came calling. For a while I think she probably believed some of the cheerleader hype, but the reality she lived with was far more sinister. Double lives, double binds, splitting right down the middle, Madeleine's reality finally fused with father's infatuation one rainy night in the backseat of his Lincoln. She had just started her junior year, and the details get pretty sketchy at that point. Rumors ran high and wide, while life at home went to Hell. Though I had no clue, the summer I shipped off to Indiana marked the second year of her stay at a mental hospital in the hills overlooking Palo Alto, California. I was told she had "gone away to a special school" or some such nonsense the year before, and buckets of like drivel greeted her absence that summer. My mother was by then deep into her love affair with Jack Daniels, she had been for quite some time, so it was a bit of a surprise when Mom showed up without Dad, and that she wasn't drunk. Anyway, Madeleine's presence was the stunner, as I hadn't seen her in a year. Sorry, one last digression now. As I've mentioned, Madeleine had just about every girl I ever knew beat hands down in the looks department. She had Grace Kelly eyes and wavy strawberry blond hair that people stopped to stare at, and she couldn't do a damn thing about it. She was just gorgeous, movie star gorgeous. Why or how someone with so much going for her ended up so shy and unsure of herself was a mystery to me. I used to ask myself that question all the time when I was a kid. I think about that now and start to bleed inside all over again. Anyway. My mother was no slouch in the looks department herself; that end of the gene pool was pretty deep on her side of the family. She'd been on her way to a starring role in a minor Paramount production when she ran into my dad; he'd charmed her right out of the life she'd dreamed of and still had no idea what had happened. Dad was reputedly a damn fine lawyer, so one has to assume he knew how to lie pretty well. So anyway, along came Mom and Madeleine, and there I was on the parade ground in my dress blues -- probably looking like something out of a Mickey Rooney movie. As predictably self-conscious as I was, every pair of eyes in the Cadet Corp was riveted on Madeleine. She was, as she always was, radiant, blindingly so, and I heard Rand mutter under his breath something about the blond on the second row. "That's my sister, Dickhead," I said to him, cheerfully. "Can't be," he whispered, undaunted. "Nothing as ugly as you could be related to that." I smiled, for truth be told I was proud Madeleine was my sister, and seeing her now after so long only made that pride run deep. Rand's affirmation just made the joy more immediate. And besides, I was happy. Happy enough to not notice my father wasn't in the stands. +++++ Parent's Weekend is also Homecoming Weekend, so of course we had a big football game on the schedule for Saturday. And naturally, as the game was against a bitter rival there were lots of alumni around. It was late October by that weekend, and the air was already crisp and clear when we took to the field Saturday at noon, the scene framed by turning leaves at their furious best. Butterflies the size of barn owls fluttered in my gut, yet behind all the game day jitters were thoughts about dinner the night before. Those of us whose parents had come for the weekend were given leave from our normal duties, and so we could venture off-campus for dinner Friday night. I was allowed one guest, so of course Rand came along -- as there was no way his parents were coming. There is a nice inn not far from school, and Mom had secured reservations for the weekend well in advance; their dining room was reputed to be first rate, if a little on the pricey side; even so she had reserved a table both nights. Mom appeared sober when Rand and I arrived, and if her sobriety held the night promised to be, if not interesting, then certainly one to remember. Mom came down in a luxurious cloud of Chanel No 5, and while it seemed Jack Daniels had taken leave for the evening, my skin still crawled. We walked into dining room and Madeleine said it was all kind of cute, "kind of English country cottage meets West Point," and we laughed at that. With the twenty or so tables all occupied with cadets and their parents, the atmosphere was more than a little strained, but all very, very polite. The menu, it turned out, was in French -- which launched the evening down the most hysterically pretentious roads possible. Madeleine was in rare form when Rand read the menu to our table, she was entranced, impressed, attentive, her eyes batting semaphores of lust. Yet I don't think I was the only one to notice that something in her eyes seemed a little off balance, maybe a little clouded over. And Rand may have taken his eyes off Madeleine when I introduced him to my mother, but frankly, I doubt it. No, when I introduced Madeleine he bowed, took her hand and kissed it. Madeleine blushed, a first for her in my experience, and he rushed around to get her chair and seat her. The dining room was overflowing with unctuous chatter, and Rand noticed a retired four-star general sitting two tables away, which put a damper on our table's chit-chat. I guess I would be remiss if I didn't say that both Rand and I were all too aware we were being watched and graded by people who could and would make our lives a living hell if we made a scene, or embarrassed the school in any way. I doubt a plebe-year West Pointer could have done better that night. Anyway, Rand read the menu and interpreted items, made suggestions, championed the proper way to hold escargot, and when Madeleine made noises about needing the powder room, Rand fired out of his chair so smartly he nearly knocked the thing over. He stood and watched her walk from the table, and I knew right then and there he was in love with her. Hell, who could blame him? We'd been locked away without so much as a Playboy magazine for ten weeks; we were all ready to explode on contact. During all this, my mother might have been amused by Rand's smitten appearance but for the lingering malaise that seemed to hover somewhere just under her Chanel. She seemed distracted, indeed, almost worried, and I was suddenly ill-at-ease. "I hear there's a dance after the game tomorrow," my mother said soon after Madeleine returned. "Rand, perhaps you'd be so kind? Would you take Madeleine under your wing and take her to the dance for me? There are some things I need to discuss with Todd, and as we're leaving early Sunday, I'm afraid I'll need to borrow him during that time." She blinked her soft eyes and smiled easily at him. "Would you be a dear and do that for me?" "It would be my honor," Rand said; Madeleine and I tried our best not to laugh, but mother let slip and we all burst out laughing. It was, after all, getting hard to ignore the look in Madeleine's eyes too. When we got back to the dorm later that night, Rand had mail waiting. He ripped open the letter from his mother while I undressed and hung up my uniform. I heard a sharp intake of breath and paper crumbling, turned in time to see Rand thunder from the room. I left the paper on the floor, looked at its malevolent form while I waited to find out what had happened. He came back a while later; he was red-faced, his jaw clenched, the muscles in his face working frantically. All the classic Rand-signs that the shit had well and truly hit the fan. "What gives?" I said while he ripped his shirt off and threw it on the floor. "My mom. She's fucking divorcing dad. Says she's getting married in Florida, during Christmas break." He flopped down on the bed, resumed that faraway stare. "Merry fucking Christmas!" "Cripes," I managed to say, but I was nevertheless speechless. Divorce in those days was still something of an oddity, and with an uncertain frame of reference I just couldn't fathom what the words really meant to him, or me. Still, I could see the cold reality of those words playing out on Rand's face, and whatever was going on in there -- it wasn't pretty. +++++ It still wasn't pretty Saturday morning while we suited up in the locker room; the pre-game butterflies were fluttering, but something vile and unsettling was crawling around Rand's gut, and I wasn't sure he was going to make it through the day. I was pretty certain he'd gotten up in the middle of the night to throw up, and I don't think either of us slept after that. Nevertheless, he was steady during pre-game warm-ups and brightened considerably when he saw Madeleine and my mother take their seats in the stands just above the home-team bench. A stiff, cold breeze was coming out of the north when we kicked off; the kid returning the ball stumbled and got hammered, fumbled the ball on their thirty yard line. Harriman took the offense out on the field and called the first play of the game, lined up for the snap and fell back to pass. The defense blitzed everything they had and it was a miracle Tucker managed to hold on to the ball under the wave of maroon jerseys that crashed over him. He didn't stand up when the pile cleared and remained resolutely still while the huddle formed. Finally a referee blew his whistle and the team doc ran out on the field; he worked for a moment and Harriman stood and wobbled a few steps before going down for good, looking just like a sack of coal as he fell. A stretcher was summoned and Coach turned to Rand. They talked for a moment and Rand looked at me and smiled; the backfield coach popped me on the helmet and told me to 'get out on the field, Meathead' -- and I trotted out beside Rand and got in the huddle. The Savage Innocent 2015 He looked at me again while he sized me up. "23 wide right, slant right, on two." He winked at me while he repeated the play. "You ready, slick?" he said while we clapped and broke the huddle. "Betcha," I managed to croak before running up to the line. On the snap. I bolted straight downfield and faked left, then shot for the sideline and the far corner of the end zone. I knew I had their cornerback beat; all I had to worry about was their safety. As I looked over my left shoulder I caught sight of the ball; it was right there, rifling straight at my face. I jumped and turned at the same time; the ball drilled into my chest like a missile -- which was a good thing because the force of the throw knocked me into the end zone and out of the defensive safety's otherwise well-placed sights. I tumbled into the end zone, ball still in hand, and landed on my back. Stars in my eyes, I marveled at the very idea of being alive on such a glorious afternoon; I lay there stunned and happy and listened to the crowd go wild. All in all, it was quite a feeling. Rand was standing over me moments later looking down, concern clear in his eyes. "You all right, Moron?" "Fine, Cheesedick. Help me up." He smiled at me and everything was right with our little world. The rest of the game was a little anti-climactic. The kids from Wisconsin put up a pretty good fight, but they had never scouted Rand; in effect they never knew what hit 'em and went down not in flames -- more like cooling embers. It was a lopsided score and there's no need to humiliate them again, so let's just leave it at that. +++++ The gym was transformed for the dance into a yawning arabesque; vast billowing streamers of crepe paper hung from girders and pulsing waves of light -- amethyst and vermillion clouds, really, or so they seemed -- left frenzied shadows from wall to wall. Music I'd never heard before -- King Crimson's '21st Century Schizoid Man', if memory serves -- washed over a solid writhing mass of crew-cut cadets and hip-chicks in flowing Antebellum gowns. I knew enough about the world to understand the scene had slipped from mere irony to something like a skit from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in: I was watching our country's future military leaders mingle in a landscape straight out of a painting by Dali -- or Hieronymus Bosch. Everything was just so weird, all of it. And then there was my fragile sister, hanging on my arm as we walked into those pulsing waves of light. Oh, how excited she was! But I never saw the knife-edge she walked on in her long grey twilight, could not understand she was trying -- once again and as she always had -- to protect me from the monsters that lay waiting just ahead. I couldn't know it then, but she was still trying to keep me me from seeing into the shadows that had always defined life in our parent's house, and to protect me, she had been prepared to sacrifice herself. But Rand was waiting for her now, and I'd never seen such seriousness of purpose in anyone's eyes before. With news of his parent's divorce still fresh in his mind, just when he'd had his entire world torn out from under his feet, here he was, ready to create new worlds out of the stuff of shadows. He reached for her hand and she his, yet she remained fixed to my arm -- and in that sundered moment the three of us were fused -- perhaps for all time -- then she turned as if to kiss my cheek but leaned closer still and whispered in my ear: "Be careful, Todd." "You too, Kiddo," I replied uneasily. She squeezed my arm and held my eyes a moment, then the circuit was broken and she slipped away from me for the last time and waltzed away to the funeral march of the Black Queen and the summoning of the Fire Witch, then she disappeared gracefully into The Court of the Crimson King. +++++ Mother was waiting for me, as I imagined she had her entire life, in the parking lot; we drove quietly to the inn and took the very same table. She was older now, and though she wore the cares of her world easily, the pain she had come to share hung in the air between us. Even so, all the radiant beauty that shone so brightly in Madeleine eyes could easily be traced to the soft glowing orbs and fine lips that sat across the table from me now. She had, she seemed to say, great truths to tell that night, yet she had never known how to speak even the easiest truth. She found it less troublesome, in my experience anyway, to run and hide with her bottles, or fall into a deep sleep for days at a time. Truth must have come calling though, and somehow she'd managed to listen. I, of course, had no idea what was coming. No idea what the divergent nature of her truth was, the cosmic truth she had so recently come to terms with. She ordered tea but I could see the doubt in her eyes, doubt that shook her to the core of her soul. We ordered dinner in silence, the air between us grew charged with dread and she looked away from the table constantly. It was as if looking she was looking for someone or something to carry her away from the truth. Maybe protect her from the truth. Did she want me to be her protector? After all she'd done? When at last I couldn't stand it any more, I looked at her, held her in my eyes. "Is it Dad?" I finally said. She looked down at her hands crossed in her lap, then up at me. "We're getting a divorce," she said quietly and looked quite startled when I laughed. "What's wrong with you!" she said as she wiped away tears. "My God! It's contagious!" I gasped between great gut-wrenching roars. I could see Mother's sidelong glances, could feel the questions in her eyes -- and her embarrassment through the candlelight, and I caught myself just as the ragged edge of the blade at my neck drew near. "Todd!" she whispered angrily. "Get a hold of yourself!" Her words were like a slap on the face, the bark of a drill sergeant; I sat upright, shoulders square, eyes straight ahead, my mouth a dead line of moral rectitude. "Stop it!" she hissed. "You're making a fool out of both of us!" "Is everything alright, Ma'am?" I heard that familiar voice and turned to see Sergeant-Major Shipman standing beside the table. His hand was on my right shoulder, the firm pressure reassuring, not quite painful. He was looking at my mother, and his hand kept me from standing. "Yes, yes," she said at length. "We, we just have difficult ground to cover this evening." She had turned her eyes with full effect on Shipman -- and was waiting to gauge her success -- but it never came. Then he turned to me, his eyes stern and fair and full of compassion. "Hold it down, Corporal," Shipman said firmly as he looked into my eyes. "Get control of yourself now, or come with me." "Yes, Sergeant-Major!" I said quietly. He walked back to a table across the room, took his seat beside a staggeringly gorgeous Japanese lady. I groaned: "Oh, no." Mother laughed easily now; she'd easily won at least a partial victory. "Will you get in much trouble?" "That's a fair guess, Mom. Yeah, you could say that." "I'm sorry, Todd. Really. For everything." "Forget it, Mom. Okay? My fault." We looked at one another, took the measure of our resolve to kill one another yet again. "What did you mean when you said 'contagious'?" she asked, her eyes almost happy now. I told her about Rand and his parents and about the death of his brother and soon her eyes drifted far away while she listened to echoes of other sadnesses from other nights. "He seems like a very sweet boy," she said finally. "Sweet? Rand?" "Don't you think he's nice?" "I don't think either of those words come to mind, Mother. No, not at all, really." "Oh? What word would you choose?" "Clarity," I said quietly, my eyes locked on hers. "Or maybe purity." "Purity?" She looked up at me, the question burning in her eyes. "Why do you say that?" "I don't think he's ever lied once in his life, Mother." She nodded, turned away. "That you know of, anyway." She said those words with quiet desperation lingering over her head; they were almost an abdication, if not part of a larger quest for absolution. "No, I think you're missing the point, Ma'am. I don't think he lies. Ever." "Ma'am? Todd? You called me...have I lost even that now? Have I lost you, too?" In the splintered silence that grew between us I wanted to get up and leave, to leave and run far away from her, and I think she sensed the impulse within that fragile moment and she reached out for me one last time. At least I think that was what she tried to do. But you see, I was ready for her... "Mom, is there really anything we need to talk about now? I'm not sure I'm up to it anymore." That wasn't really true, and I knew it. I wanted to lash out at her, I wanted to hurt her, because she had ruined everything. She always had. In that she had been most consistent. "I'm sorry, Todd, but we have a lot of ground to cover tonight. And not just about the divorce." I looked at her; her lips were trembling now, no longer the soft, inviting weapon she had wielded so effectively, for so long. There were no chance diversions in the offing, only the vast plains of truth she had turned her back on all our lives, and now I had just backed her up against the last wall there was between us. And I was ready to tear that down, too. No matter the cost. +++++ I don't know how long we talked. Well into the night, anyway. We talked of things I had never known, the terrors down the hall Madeleine had always shielded me from. Of Dad and his unusual tastes, his love of all things Madeleine; of how my mother had denied it all, run from the truth that suffocated our lives, how she'd wrapped it in bright paper and put a Christmas bow on it year after year -- until the lie had become so practiced it came as naturally as breathing. Then father had gotten my sister pregnant and everything started to unravel -- bit by nasty bit. Catalogues from military schools started coming in the mail; Madeleine disappeared in the middle of her junior year -- early admission to a very special college my mother told me. Father was soon away on business trips all the time, mother spending long afternoons at a doctor's office every Monday and Friday. Then Jack had come calling, and Mom was ready for him. She soon became a bottle a night gal. And I had missed it all, never had a clue what was going on with Madeleine and Dad. Now I looked back on those nights and felt like I was falling backwards into a well. So I listened that night in a little downstairs den while my mother bared her soul. There was a small fireplace glowing, and a big bay window in the room looked out over a vast English garden. The leaded glass window was made of dense, diamond-shaped panes, and just outside, framed by dark pine branches, an early winter's snow had just started falling. Snow fell as her words fell on me; heavy white flakes on sagging branches, just as her black words fell on my soul. In time the trees began sagging under the weight of so much snow, too much too soon, and I wondered when the branches would snap and fall. It was all very nice, I thought, because here I was, listening to the truth of my world, and everything was dissolving under the most beautiful circumstance possible. So, we were both up against our last wall, as it turned out. Here at a crossroads, here in time for the facts of our lives to bleed away, here in her lying eyes, and now she looked to me for understanding. Perhaps even acceptance. How, Mother? I just don't understand how? And in the face of her multiple betrayals, I felt nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I had nothing to give her, as it turned out, nothing for her but an almost catatonic abeyance. In this, her moment of need, I turned away and left her to the silence of embers and falling snow. In time she stood to leave, utterly defeated and at a loss to explain how all this could have come to pass in the withered shadow of dying love, and she disappeared up a small winding staircase. I would not see her again for many years, but I never despised her more than I did that night. Shipman came in as she left and took her seat. I guess he had been in on it from the beginning. He didn't say a word, didn't even look my way. When I think about that night now, maybe he was ashamed of me, disgusted with my lack of humanity, but I doubt it. Somewhere along the line he must have made his peace with the world; spoiled rich kids probably didn't upset him very much anymore. Anyway, we talked a little then he dropped me outside my dorm sometime after midnight; Rand was waiting up for me, his eyes all burning and red. I walked listlessly about our room and got ready for bed by the tenuous light of a tiny desk lamp, and I guess Rand must have taken it all in while trying to take the measure of what had come to pass in my long night. "How did you and Madeleine get along?" I asked him -- finally, tentatively. I had nowhere else to go, you see. "I think I shall never love another soul but hers," he replied gently, poetically, if a little theatrically. I nodded my head. "Good." "She told me." I heard his voice breaking and I turned to look at him. He was, I think, trying pretty hard not to cry. "What? What did she tell you?" "Everything, I guess." Silence came for us and held us quietly for a while. "Good." "Good?" "Yeah, good. I don't want to live with this shit staining my life for one more goddamn minute, and I'm pretty sure I'll ever be able to talk about it ever again. So, yeah. Good." "Do you think it would be stupid of me to, well, to want to marry her someday?" "Stupid? No, Rand, I don't think that's stupid. I think maybe it's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard in my life." He was looking at me now, his eyes clear and bright and full of majestic truth, then he just barely nodded his head and smiled. "You ready to turn off the light yet?" he said. I walked over to the desk and flipped the little switch, my mind still burning brightly. Oh! How I longed to die just then. +++++ Rand didn't go to Florida for his mother's Christmas wedding, or to Zurich to be with his father; he flew home with me to my grandparent's place on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The warmth of California in December held us and nurtured our souls while we walked the hills and wharves of North Beach; we made it across to Berkeley to gawk at the freaks and hippies, took the cable car to Haight-Ashbury where we drank coffee and listened to beat poets and Jim Morison and Janis Joplin, and a couple of days before Christmas my grandfather drove us down to Palo Alto, to pick up Madeleine at the hospital. No one mentioned parents of any sort that day; we were too busy walking on eggshells. Yet it was clear from the moment Rand and Madeleine saw each other this second time that something very powerful had passed between the two of them at that dance. Rand was, of course, then just fifteen; Madeleine was eighteen, I think, but was going to turn nineteen on Christmas Eve, and I guess those numbers were rolling around in my grandparent's heads when we went out to dinner that night. Still, I guess they'd seen everything in their long lives. We walked to a place just down the hill from their house, to place called The Shadows, an old Bohemian-German hangout known for great German food -- and a bar on the third floor with a view of the Bay that was simply nonpareil. Though only fifteen, I had a dark-rum Collins and was in love with life by the time our salads arrived. Grandmother insisted we order the roast duck with bing cherries, red cabbage and spätzle, and she was spot on. My grandparents were, I might add in the vernacular of the day, pretty cool cats. Gramps was an architect, a pretty big deal too; I never knew what my grandmother did, other than read and futz around with cameras, but she was an active soul, skiing and hiking all the time, and always taking pictures. The next afternoon they took us down to the marina and out on the bay for a beautiful sail on Gramp's wooden schooner, the Antigone. Rand had never been on the water and was instantly taken with the whole thing; after that he and Madeleine grew closer still and Gramps just let 'em go. Madeline and I had been surrounded by so much deceit, and for so long, that our grandparents seemed like a breath of fresh air, and Madeleine soon seemed to revive under my grandmother's loving openness. And don't get me wrong here, I don't think Rand and Madeleine were fooling around. I did see some furtive hand holding going on, but I really don't think they did much more than kiss once or twice before we were dropped off at SFO for the flight back to Chicago. While I guess there's no point standing in the way of the inevitable, I thought Rand was nurturing Madeleine as much as he was trying to protect her. And I think my grandparents thought all those goo-goo eyes were fun to watch. Our family had over the years exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve, and Rand was anxious because he didn't have an appropriate gift on hand. He took my grandmother by the arm the day before -- most bright and early, I seem to recall -- and off they went. He came back from Tiffany's with a little robin's-egg-blue sack in hand and a smug look on his face, and that was that. We went out and got The Tree early on Christmas Eve morning, the morning after his trip to Tiffany's, and we spent the afternoon hoisting our Christmas Tree up three flights of stairs and into an ancient cast iron stand. Then it was up to the attic, hauling boxes of ornaments down to The Tree and soon we were hanging lights and ornaments 'til dinner was ready. Granny worked her usual magic in the kitchen, the house grew more festive by the minute, and by the time dinner was over I had the sneaking suspicion Rand was in love with my grandmother too. The woman knew how to cook, but more importantly, how to make a house feel like a home. I guess it felt like we were the only three kids in the world who'd never felt that way before, but those were special moments in my life. I'd opted for a very original gift for Madeleine and the grandparents; triangular pennants of the most precious Chinese felt -- with my school's name emblazoned in diminishing letters -- and rest assured I felt pretty smarmy when Gramps gave me a new pair of skis, maroon Rossignol Strato 102s. In fact, skis were had by one and all -- with the intent of heading out before sunrise on Christmas morning and making it to Squaw Valley in time to claim first tracks down the Palisades. That was the intent, I believe, before Rand handed his little blue sack to Madeleine. I guess I had expected an ID bracelet or some such nonsense; in no way -- not even in the wildest flights of my imagination -- would I have considered it possible for my high school roommate to give my sister an engagement ring, but that's exactly what the son-of-a-bitch did. He called it a friendship ring and proclaimed that Granma had been instrumental in his choice; Gramps and I had, in effect, been clubbed over the head like baby seals and now sat quietly on the sidelines looking over the proceedings like a couple of pre-frontally lobotomized orangutans. Simpering in our drool, perhaps, would be a good way to describe Gramps and me. Anyway, to dwell on our bewildered reaction would be to gloss over the most salient feature of the evening. Notably, my dear sister's reaction. And again, I think now, looking back on such things from the vantage of forty years on, that I expected Madeleine to laugh in his face or at the very least blush politely while she stood and helped clear away the mounds of wrapping paper that surrounded her like vast peace offerings, but no, no, that's not what happened. No, not at all. Far from it. No, it was more like Rhett and Scarlett, or maybe Fred and Ginger would take us a little closer to the point of contact. They were like two lovers circling each other on a grand dance floor; they were each lost in the other's eyes, two hearts yearning for union in something more vast than the oneness of becoming. They were refuges fleeing the night, but like a first kiss, all this might have been a foregone conclusion if only I'd been able to see the world as it really was. Madeleine was as much in love as he; the rest of us simply had no clue because we truly had no idea what was really going on. Well, Granma might have, but grandmother's always do, I guess. The Savage Innocent 2015 So no, it was left to me to pick up the discarded wrapping paper and carry it down three flights to the curbside bins. Rand and Madeleine sat on the terrace that looked out over San Francisco Bay; and there they sat, hand in hand, on the threshold of a dream -- as the setting sun slipped behind the Golden Gate. There was a Moody Blues album playing in the living room, setting the mood that defined the coming days. One song, Watching and Waiting, seemed to sum up the feelings I had as I watched them. Whenever I hear that song I think of them sitting in silhouette, framed by an amber-purple sky, watching them as they looked after greater truths waiting for them out there on the far side of the sky. +++++ Winters in Indiana aren't for the faint of heart. The word bleak comes to mind, but singularly fails to convey the utter desolation and ruin one feels. Unless, of course, you have to stand at parade rest for an hour each and every morning on warped sheets of ice waiting for your room to be inspected, waiting before you march off to breakfast, counting cadence all the way. Not to say the experience doesn't have its fine points -- I'm sure there are and were many -- but let me say in all politeness that if there were, it was all lost on me. Christmas had come and gone, the return flight to Chicago a memory, and in the frozen aftermath I witnessed a strange metamorphosis: a peculiar sense of responsibility had come calling for Dalton Rand -- and found him ready and waiting to shoulder the burden. He'd given Madeleine not a ring, but THE ring. All of a sudden, life was taking on a whole new complexion, and I could tell his new world had been textured in none too subtle shades of 'serious' and 'purpose'. He went from being a sort of care-free fifteen-year old version of the Nietzschean übermench to acting just like any other stressed out, fingernail biting American teenager. I guess the biggest thing to hit him about this whole situation? Madeleine was two thousand miles away, he missed her terribly -- in the painful way teenagers miss their 'one true loves' -- and it suddenly became apparent he'd lost his edge. He was growing dull, distracted, and wholly dissatisfied with his lot in life. Having grown up in Europe, America came up on him hard and fast, like a freight train roaring through the night. I think anyone in his situation would have found the experience overwhelming, maybe even a little disorienting, but Rand wasn't just anyone. He was an observer, true enough, but he was more than anything else a man of action -- even at fifteen. The rebelliousness that seized America's youth when Richard Nixon turned his attention on Laos and Cambodia seemed pointless to Rand; he had bigger fish to fry. When we read about student protests in Time and Newsweek, he said they were little more than the runny-nosed bleatings of just so many spoiled sheep. As a matter of fact, I think he longed to strap on an airplane and bomb North Vietnam, because, if I'm right, after so many years in Europe he longed more than anything else to simply be an American. But perhaps, and just for a while, I don't think Rand really understood the hidden depths of America, of what being an American truly means. The very inclusiveness of the word implies an infinite variety of shades of grey, yet such a vast profusion of ideology was lost in the absolute blacks and whites of the Cold War. The academic Weltanschauung we found ourselves in, trapped in, you might say, precluded dissent, but some of us were bound to break our way out of this cocoon sooner than others, and therein lies our tale. I hope you'll pardon me now, as another long digression is in order. I need to tell you a little more about Tom Shipman and his world, about a frozen lake in Korea, about orange-robed monks and a Japanese lady, because without understanding Shipman's story, I'm not sure what happens next will make a whole lot of sense. +++++ The Korean Conflict remains a footnote in America's long Cold-War policy of containment, and a small footnote at that. Sandwiched between WWII and Vietnam, the Korean War was a relatively modest affair, by Cold War standards, anyway. Soviet expansion, first in Eastern Europe, then in the Middle East and SouthEast Asia was the great concern of the day, and for many who fought in WWII it seemed as if the United States had entered a protracted period of never ending war. Still, Korea was a Big Deal. Russia, China and the United States squared off for the first time in Korea. The 'duck and cover' nuclear drills that shaped so many lives in the 60s can be traced back to Korea. Even so, few people today care about, and many more don't even know there was a war during the first three years of the 1950s. And fewer still know anything about the two week battle around Chosin Reservoir. My guess is that few people know that the Japanese Army 'liberated' the Korean peninsula from China, in 1895, mind you. Japan then annexed Korea -- and the Korean people were subject to a most brutal existence, for decades. When Japanese imperial ambitions spread to mainland China (and to her vast natural resources) during the Great Depression, Korea was stripped bare by Japan, her men enslaved, her women forced to provide "comfort" to the men of the Emperor's armies. Of course everyone knows all Asia was torn asunder by WWII, and that the British and Dutch, who had defined Asia's entry into the Industrial Age, lost their empires in the aftermath. By the time World War II ended, contours of a vast new conflict were taking shape, and let's simplify matters by defining this conflict as a struggle between two competing economic philosophies. Let's further simplify things with a football analogy: the United States and her NATO allies represented the Capitalist Team, while Russia, China and a whole bunch of professors at Brown and the University of California at Berkeley represented the Communist Team. After WWII, there were many smaller countries around the world that toyed with the idea of converting from capitalism to communism, and the Capitalist Team simply didn't want this to happen. Russia seemed to be behind many of these countries' nascent ambitions, too, and so the game was afoot. During the immediate post-war period, the Korean peninsula -- like Germany and Vietnam and Greenwich Village in New York City -- was partitioned; communists took control of the north while capitalists took control of those lands south of the 38th parallel. All these partitioned countries, bastard creations at best, seemed doomed to fail from the start, and Vietnam collapsed into civil war soon after partition, the two Germanys became a battleground of competing ideas until the Wall came down in '89, leading to reunification. The war over the partitioning of Korea ended, however, in a stalemate, and a cult of personality remains in charge of the north to this day. About Greenwich Village? Hell, all I can say is the last time I ventured in that embattled, war torn country, most of the chicks I saw there had dicks, and no one spoke English. Enough said. Anyway, lets keep in mind that the major communist entities of that era, Russia and China, seemed intent on exporting their economic revolution to Western Europe and the Americas. A group of patrician Ivy Leaguers, known collectively as The Wise Men, counseled haberdasher-turned-president Harry Truman that the best way to confront communist expansion was to push back wherever and whenever they tried to expand into new territory; this policy was known as Containment and became, after a document called NSC-68 was enshrined in the pantheon of America's own imperial ambition, official U.S. policy. Containment was resisted by conservatives in Washington; many wanted to exploit America's strategic superiority and bomb the Soviet Union off the map. These conservatives wrested control of vast segments of America's industrial capacity and dedicated these tremendous resources to expanding America's capacity to wage war all around the world. The nascent spiritual leader of these uber-Capitalists, by the way, was a slight Soviet emigre, a woman by the name of Ayn Rand; their Bible a ponderous tome mirthfully titled 'Atlas Shrugged'. It's well worth a read, by the way, if only because it should be considered a founding document of the conservative movement in America, and indeed, elsewhere. I will not dwell further on Ayn Rand's relationship to this story. It's simply not relevant, because not all Rands, it seems, are created equal. In mid-summer of 1950, North Korea's communist forces, backed with weapons from Russia and China, pushed, and pushed hard into South Korea; the first armed test of the Policy of Containment was underway. American and United Nations forces pushed back against the North Koreans. North Korean troops were initially repulsed, pushed back all the way to the Yalu River and the Chinese border, then winter's first snows fell. This first communist advance appeared contained, and indeed it was, at least until the full weight of a Chinese Army counter-attack hit American and U.N. forces. This first thunderous, world altering collision between two massive ideologies occurred around a frozen lake in North Korea. The Japanese had, decades before, named this lake 'Chosin'. There's little need to dwell on the obvious, but wars change the people who fight in them. We've seen in own our lifetimes how very unpredictable these changes can be, often violently so. The fact of the matter is this: I could never have come to terms with what happened to Rand and I in the spring of 1970 without coming to terms with the changes war brought to Tom Shipman's life. And, well, you might never come to understand the nature of the beast that was Tom Shipman, and that would be a shame. +++++ He lived on campus, in one of the modest bungalows that lined the perimeter of a tree-lined drill field. Shipman lived in this bungalow with his wife. She was, I think I mentioned once before, a Japanese woman, and I first saw her when I had dinner with my mother at the inn. Her name was Tetsuko, which translates, roughly, to Lady of Steel. Students rarely saw her on campus, which, in hindsight, was a probably a very good thing. She was a stunning, utterly exotic looking woman, and young men lost in floods of testosterone are best left to wander in the comfort of less tangible dreams. Willowy and fragile looking from a distance, I believe now she had been named with no small amount of prescience. Though she wasn't yet fifty years old the night I first saw her, she looked half that age. At least you might have thought so -- but for the blinding purity of her white hair. She was always dressed in deepest black, too, which only served to accentuate the striking contrast of her hair. And I say black clothing, but never a penitential black, never a shiny, reflective black; no, she always wore the black of limitless space. When I first saw her face, it felt as if I was looking at an island of stark serenity -- framed by infinite space. As a result of her startling appearance, she seemed as distant and remote as a faraway planet in the most remote arms of our galaxy. And I was given to understand that at one time she had been a Buddhist nun. Shipman met her during a brief interlude when he was stationed in southern Japan after World War II. At twenty years of age, Shipman arrived in the Pacific theatre just in time for the initial invasion of Okinawa, on 1 April 1945; he was there for 49 days, assigned as a combat corpsman with the 1st Marine Division. War changes people, and I think those assigned to medical duties bear the brunt of that change. Of importance here, Iwo Jima, then Okinawa, witnessed the first large scale deployment of napalm for close air support, with the seasoned pilots from the original VMSB-235 carrying out the majority of these missions. While Marine aviation is generally focused on providing close air support to ground troops, in April, 1945, nobody really understood the temperamental nature of napalm. The first sorties using napalm were directed at Japanese troops who were using deep caves in the sides of steep mountains to keep out of sight. Pilots and troops alike found that conventional bombs were proving inadequate, the Japanese simply retreated to the depths of their caves until the Dauntlesses and Corsairs disappeared, then they'd reappear, man their guns, and repulse the next wave of Marines. Napalm changed that equation. The pilots dropped napalm near the entrances to these caves, and when the napalm blossomed -- all the oxygen was sucked out of the caves. No one inside, of course, survived. Unfortunately for those outside the caves, most notably Marines positioned nearby waiting to assault the Japanese, when napalm detonated it tended to spray over a very large area, and often this spray landed within Marine positions, injuring hundreds of men at a time. Tom Shipman spent almost all his time on Okinawa tending to men severely burned by napalm. By June, 1945 Shipman went to Korea, where his unit fought scattered remnants of Japanese forces still holding out in the mountains, and more napalm was used, more Marines burned. He remained in Korea until mid-August 1945. Until just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the global lexicon of horror. After the surrender, elements of the 1st Marine Division were garrisoned in Japan, as part of the primary occupation force. Shipman was among those tasked to help render medical assistance at a Japanese Naval hospital near what remained of Hiroshima, and it was in Hiroshima that Shipman met a US Navy Captain by the name of John Crossfield. Crossfield was preparing the initial BDA, or Bomb Damage Assessment, for the War Department. He and his team were measuring radiation levels in and around the city, and one day ran across a convent in the mountains north of the city. The convent had been turned into a sort of hospital, but the nuns he found had neither the expertise nor the supplies to take care of so many seriously ill people. Crossfield decided to gather a team of Corpsmen to help the nuns, and with supplies to treat burns and malnutrition, he took a large convoy back to the convent. When Crossfield asked around the base, looking for personnel who might have experience treating burns, Shipman's name came up time and time again. Crossfield found Shipman working at a field hospital in the center of the city, told him about the convent and his plans to help the nuns. Shipman was in that first convoy, and stayed with the nuns for months. Forgive me if I keep repeating this, but War Changes People, yet sometimes it is the people met in war that changes us the most. Tetsuko Shibata had always been a serious student. She was a serious student in a land, and in a time, where studious women were still considered something of an oddity. But war changes societies, just as it changes people, and war changed social constructs and expectations in Japan, just as war changed America. Tetsuko wanted to study medicine when she finished university, but found herself, in June,1945, working as a nurse at a naval hospital in Hiroshima; she was in fact a well regarded surgical scrub nurse. One day in August she was going to visit her grandmother, who lived in a monastery in the mountains north of the city, when she saw a lone silver aircraft flying over the city. The explosion she observed, even from ten miles away, knocked her off her feet; she witnessed the deaths of sixty thousand people and turned inward on herself. I never learned the how or the why of these things, but she was soon working at her grandmother's convent in the mountains north of the city, taking care of the sick and the dying. And a strange thing happened. Her jet black hair turned purest white within days of the bomb's detonation over Hiroshima. No one fully understood the effects of radiation in those days, but people seemed to be affected proportionately to their distance from Ground Zero. Some people very close to Ground Zero saw their hair fall out, these people were also seriously burned and were soon bleeding from their mouths and rectums. These people died quickly, and Tetsuko found herself, more often than not, working with these victims. She worked tirelessly, without rest or supplies, until the helplessness of her situation became overwhelming. But there was no end to the sickness and death. There was no turning away. No quitting. One day American soldiers appeared, and she hated them. She wanted to find a sword and hack their heads off, she wanted to hold their severed heads high and spit in their callous faces, yet she saw her true self in that moment, fell into a poverty she found hard to shake. Then she fell back to the Shinto teachings that had defined her childhood. She turned to the seven million spirits that define life, turned to sacred spirits in the rocks and the trees, turned to an acceptance of the world and her place in it. Days later she saw a column of American trucks coming up the battered road toward the monastery, and she met John Crossfield and Tom Shipman later that day. They were among those bringing supplies to the convent, then she learned that Shipman was one of a handful of corpsmen assigned to help the nuns. He was the enemy, she told herself as she struggled to accept the man and his talents, yet he came to care for the living and the dying in the weeks ahead. He did not see the world in terms victors and vanquished. He saw sickness and death as his enemy, and he had come to the mountain prepared to fight. I don't know the details. Shipman never got a chance to tell us the whole story, but I can guess what happened. Somehow they fell in love, and they married a few years later. They didn't have children, and I thought perhaps that was a result of all the radiation they worked around. Maybe that's why they chose to live at a school; that Tetsuko married a U.S. Marine and came to live on the campus of an American military school is an irony I'll leave you to ponder. When I think of Tetsuko even now, think of all she lost in this life, my feelings still get in the way. But life goes on, in the most unexpected ways. +++++ I always believed Shipman would have made a great physician, apparently John Crossfield did too. Instead, Shipman chose to remain in the Marines, to carry a carbine with his medical supplies. Again, this was just part of the undercurrent of irony running through Shipman's life, and something I feel inadequate to discuss. Anyway, sometime in late 1950, Shipman found himself temporarily attached to the 7th RCT31, a 3,000 man composite Regimental Combat Team, and one of several American divisions in the area around Chosin. He arrived at the lake just before heavy snow and ice cut off all lines of supply to the south, and more importantly, just as hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed into North Korea. Command elements from Chosin to Washington, D.C. saw the vast new threat emerging, ordered the various Marine and Army groups to dig-in along the hills that flanked the eastern shore of the reservoir. Battle was joined, with the American force vastly outnumbered. Sometime during the second day of the initial Chinese attack, the 7th RTC31 was cut-off from the main body of American forces; they had in fact been cut-off by an entire division of Chinese regulars. Unbeknownst to Shipman and his comrades, still another Chinese division was gathering in the twilight to help mount an all out effort to destroy the splintered 7th. In effect, there were now 36,000 Chinese regulars moving in to take out 3,000 American Marines. Sometime during the long night that followed, when the snow was so deep it was impossible to walk without falling into deep drifts, Shipman stopped being a corpsman and became an infantryman. He was among a handful of survivors rescued three days later, and the record shows Tom Shipman killed over three hundred men during just one assault that first night. He told our class the number was probably twice that, and he looked at us for a long while, letting the enormity of the number sink in. The Savage Innocent 2015 Wars change people. You can see it in the eyes of the people who've been there, and we could see these events unfolding as we watched Shipman's eyes. Snow, pure and white, smells of gunpowder and blood, lakes of blood dotted with islands of empty brass cartridges, bodies stacked in protective revetments, hour after hour of close combat, one man killing hundreds, perhaps thousands over the course of sleepless days and nights. Anyway, Shipman returned to Japan with severe frostbite in January, 1951. He converted to Buddhism a few weeks after his discharge from the hospital, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor later that spring. +++++ One fine winter day early in 1970, a most interesting notice was posted outside the dining hall; it stated that flying lessons would be optionally available to students with high enough grade point averages beginning March 1st. Rand was, of course, a straight A+ student; I had managed to right myself and the magic number was just-within-reach. So, provided my mid-term scores showed modest improvement, I aimed high, so to speak. I was going to follow Rand come Hell or high water, wherever that might lead, and we were going to fly. Before long, the two of us were traipsing through knee-deep snow to the library whenever we had free time, off to dream our way through flying magazines. Rand started looking at recruiting posters for college ROTC programs about that time, then at admissions guidelines for Annapolis and Colorado Springs. He wanted to fly forever, he said. Hell, so did I. He wrote to his dad, I to my grandparents, to secure the necessary funds for lessons, and when March came round we were among the first dozen to begin flight training. It was just ground school -- the academic nuts and bolts of theory and regulations -- those first few weeks, and was limited to Saturday mornings at that, but it was heaven. Plus, we got out of Saturday morning drill, and that alone was worth the price of admission. We started flying -- for real -- in mid-April, when all traces of winter's snow and ice were dead and gone, and that was more than a little bit like heaven. I bring this up not to entertain with tales of inverted flight or buzzing startled cattle on crazy Saturday afternoons -- as entertaining as such stories might be. No, I bring up flying and the dreams of teenage boys to paint a picture of where we thought life was taking us. We had the flying bug really bad, and, as we were roommates, we had it full time. Yes, I know, there were really three of us in that room. Rand and myself, of course, but Madeleine was there too, always with us in that corner room. Because her letters came daily, and their presence hung in the air apparent to anyone who waltzed unawares into our toasty little cave. And we couldn't have escaped her presence even had we wanted to. She was so much a part of our lives that winter, so much the instigator of all that lay ahead. Rand wrote to her every day, too, sometimes several letters a day, but theirs was a secret 'wartime' correspondence. I think the letters that passed less frequently -- but no less importantly -- between Madeleine and myself were focused less on our family's wars than on a possible peace and reconciliation. I wonder today if there could have been a middle ground between the three of us, some soft, common ground that my father's shadow didn't dominate, but that just wasn't the case. Father's shadow was everywhere. Madeleine was fighting for her life, any life out from under his grasping shadow, as it turned out. She lived inside a very dark, very protected landscape, and often the only way out of the darkness came from something I knew nothing about. I heard it referred to as ECT. Electro-Convulsive Therapy, or shock therapy. I had no idea what it was, but I could feel the ebb and flow of it's current in her words. I could see the coming of darkness in her handwriting, the first faint glimmer of a new dawn in the words she chose, then the suffocating rush of her next fall. I came to understand the depths of my father's treachery, the crushing weight of her despair through our letters, but my mother's role remained a mystery. Some nights, those dark nights after her letters came, I dreamt about the lookouts perched high above the foredeck of the Titanic on that last night, as the ship steamed into darkness. In my dreams, I watched the lives of seven men unfold; the seven who rotated through that posting night after night. I wondered why fate chose just those two men up there in the cold and the darkness that night. The stars overhead must have been lighting the way ahead, and though their breath must've been frosty and tired, in my dream I watch and wonder why they fail to see that single, solitary iceberg looming on the surface of that still, black sea -- until it is all but impossible to avoid such an uncertain fate. +++++ Madeleine began taking classes at UC Berkeley that winter. Part time, of course, just a few afternoons a week, but the improvement we saw in her letters was startling. Her doctors apparently saw the change as well. Following our return to Indiana after Christmas, she was still a very fragile girl, yet she had a tenacious, though still perilously weak hold on life. The tectonic shifts of the 60s were still very much alive in early 1970, however, as War and Rebellion were still tearing our world apart; now I think of those times as alive with focused fury, yet the actors on that stage often appeared indifferently malicious. I wonder what it all must have felt like to Madeleine. Strange and new, perhaps? Or like echoes, dark and malignant clouds full of unwelcome memory. Ever since Ronald Reagan's election in 1967 as governor of the state, and his subsequent appointment of Edwin Meese to crack down on college protesters, the epicenter of those tectonic shifts emanated from the campus of The University of California at Berkeley. It's hard to look at the campus today and remember just how different that world really was. Head-shops and record stores lined the streets around campus, girls wrapped in patchouli-scented batik drifted past day-glow images of Hendrix and wilting psychedelic peace signs. Everywhere you looked, storefront windows were full of 'the sixties' -- because that peculiar zeitgeist had been packaged and branded and was being shoved down our collective throats by 1970. "Radicals" driving red Alpha Romeos were everywhere in Berkeley -- and Mrs Robinson was still coo-coo-ca-chooing in the air, too. National Guardsmen came to campus as unrest took root, rocks were thrown, campus buildings occupied, and eventually, guns fired. Riots, protests, rebellion...all part of the sixties and all part of the same grand convulsion, and it was all centered on the campus of UC Berkeley. Destiny, History, Fate -- choose your weapon, gentlemen, and take aim, because all this was happening around a fragile young woman, still just a girl really, in so many ways. A girl named Madeleine. She was taking classes there, learning the contours of class warfare, soaking up the righteous indignation offered at coffeehouses round the clock, listening to Dylan and Zeppelin, focusing all the dissipating energy of her father's warped lust into a singular outpouring of rage -- directed at all our fathers. We, Rand and myself, went back The City for spring break. Madeleine was already at the house on Nob Hill, living there on weekends, trying to come to terms with the world, all while living under my grandmother's watchful gaze. Our father had simply disappeared -- he was nowhere, yet still he was everywhere. Inescapable, omnipresent, gone. Mexico we heard one day, Brazil the next. Who knows, I said. Who the fuck cares, said my sister. Berkeley was changing her. Berkeley was her War. And now she was different in so many ways from the girl we'd sailed and skied with back in December. She didn't smile -- she boiled over and spilled onto the floor, then drifted back to the tortured shadowlands of her inner landscapes. Rand sat with her almost all the time, held her, tried to help her make sense of her changing moods. He held her hand, looked at that ring on her finger, and that grounded them both to some distant hope. For a while, anyway. Our week spent, Rand and I flew back to Chicago, just made our bus for the ride back to school, but we rode across our own thawing landscape in silence, caught up in a grievous turmoil. If Madeleine was our common ground, we had just caught a sharp, brief glimpse into the maw of a magmatic fissure. Madeleine had just brought the war home. Home, to Rand and I. And war changes people. +++++ On a Friday afternoon in the first week of May, Tom Shipman came to our room, and he asked Rand to accompany him to the Commandant's Office. Time stopped in our little room, and Rand left without so much as a prayer on his lips. He came back to our room an hour later; he was pale with grief, shaking with rage. He slowly, quietly, put a folded yellow telegram into his desk, shut the drawer with a grinding finality that left me breathless. The telegram was not from Madeleine, but was instead from his father, who was still in Zurich. The man related, perhaps with the last vestiges of his own humanity, that his ex-wife, Rand's mother, had committed suicide earlier that day. There were no tears in Dalton Rand's eyes that afternoon, only quiet understanding. He didn't want dinner that night and Shipman intervened, allowed both of us to skip evening formation. He came by after diner to check on us, or so he seemed to say, but he asked us to come with him, go out for a walk. And we did. We walked across campus, walked across broad, tree-lined drill fields to a modest bungalow, and once there, we stepped into another world. We stepped into Tetsuko Shipman's world, and for two kids sentenced to life without chance of parole at a military school in north central Indiana, life would never be the same. +++++ Robert Frost once wrote of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and as some come to understand in the fullness of time, there are indeed people who opt for roads less traveled. I can understand that choice now, in the autumn of my life. The chance of solitude. The certainty of everlasting peace not so many years ahead. Not a care in the world -- save the opportunity to look back on the roads we chose to take along the way. That night, that night in the Shipman cottage, stands out to me now as the first divergent path of my life. The living room, the only room in the house, really, large enough to hold four people, was awash with incense. Tetsuko was on the floor, sitting on a large pillow, her back to the door. She had a large koto in hand and was playing softly, singing about the wind, and a bird -- caged in a tree. The bird was trapped, caught by the spirit of the tree, a tree who only wanted to listen to birdsong and who had no idea his true nature was evil. I remember Rand standing there, transfixed, understanding nothing, then understanding everything, caught between life and death, between being and becoming. Perhaps the wind brought her back to us...the little gust that always slips just past an opening door, and she turned, looked at us, then stood and put her instrument away as we took off our shoes. She bowed to Tom and Rand, then to me, and asked us to come inside, to be seated, then she disappeared to make tea. Shipman, Tom, that is, took a pillow and left the one small sofa in the room to Rand and myself. Tetsuko returned with tea, hot jasmine tea, and poured for us, then set out a few cookies on an exquisite wooden stand. I thought perhaps Tom Shipman had brought us to talk about Rand and his mother, but he turned to me, looked sympathetically my way. "How are you doing, Todd? Kind of a lot to take in, isn't it?" "Yessir," I remember saying, standing deep inside the safety of military ritual. "I guess I'm okay." "How's your sister doing? Madeleine, isn't it?" I looked at Rand, who of course was looking at me. "I don't know, sir. She was acting pretty weird last month. Real angry, but kind of at the world." "Is she still in that hospital?" "Yessir," I said, flinching inwardly. "But only part time now. She's taking classes at Berkeley this term." "Berkeley," Shipman said, surprised. "You mean U C Berkeley?" "Yessir." "What's she doing there, for heaven's sake. That's the eye of the hurricane." "Sir?" Rand and I said in unison. "Berkeley is the center of the anti-war movement," he said quietly, now clearly concerned. "That campus is overrun with chaos, and it's not the kind of place I'd want my kid -- not if she was trying to move beyond emotional troubles of some sort..." He took his cup in hand, sipped tea reflectively. "What happened to her, Todd. To Madeleine, I mean. Your mother wouldn't tell me." I looked away. "No, she wouldn't." Imitating Shipman, I took some tea, It was bitter, unsatisfying, somehow soothing. "So? Tell me about Madeleine?" "I don't know where to..." "She was raped," Rand said, interrupting me, saving me from hearing my father leave the house one more time, "by her father, starting almost ten years ago. Several times a week. Their mother would pick a fight with him, push him out of the house. He'd take Madeleine when he left, he'd take her with him in his car. To a place called Half Moon Bay. They have a little summer cottage out there. He'd take her there, fuck her all night, then make her cook breakfast for them both before he drove her back into the city, back to school." I was looking away, my eyes trembling, trying to keep my world together just a little longer. Rand told them what he knew, which was, as it turned out, a whole helluva lot more than I knew. He told them about her aborted pregnancy, about two suicide attempts I knew nothing about, her collapse in school -- which was how school officials learned all about my father's secret life, and that led to his own desperate flight from the country. I learned how she ended up in Palo Alto, too. She tried to kill herself a third time, but this time at a downtown hotel. She'd checked into a room, was preparing to jump when someone knocked on the door. A maid, turn-down service. This woman figured out what was happening, or what was about to happen, and talked her back from the edge, called my grandfather. Gramps got her to a friend, a psychiatrist he'd designed a house for, and grandfather took over her care from there. I tried to talk about it, talk about our life at home, but that part of my life has always been a barren landscape, a land of sharp, broken shards of dreams. While I listened I tried to run to that silent place, to that place where I'd held my own deepest terror in check all my life. An hour passed, then a second, and still we talked. Then Shipman asked me about my mother. "I haven't talked to her since October," he said. "How is she?" I shook my head. "I don't know. We haven't heard from her in a while." Shipman seemed taken aback by this. "What? What do you mean...?" "I don't know where she is, sir. I assume the grandparents do, but I don't." "You haven't talked..." "No, sir, not since Homecoming." "October, then. Why? Is something...?" Tetsuko had been silent most of the evening, a patient, hawk-eyed observer. She turned to me then, just in silence, and finally asked me the one question I had been dreading all my life. "Todd? Rand said your mother would pick a fight with your father. That she ran him off. What happened then? What did your mother do?" I guess by my reaction everything was fairly obvious to them. "Todd? What happened?" Rand asked. I think I was trembling, I think I felt her hand on mine, but I don't really remember much after that. My story came out in gasps, between emotional convulsions, but all was revealed that night -- under the patient guidance of a nurse turned nun, and a Marine who had once killed six hundred people in one night... ...and this is what I remembered: my mother, always drunk before we got home from school; my mother, as she tore into my father as soon as he got home. She ripped him apart nightly, and yes, I remembered how he ran away. I remembered the yelling, the slamming doors, the cries and whispers from Madeleine's room, then I would hear his car roaring down the driveway, speeding away into the night, and then I would lie there in the dark, waiting, because the worst part of the night was about to begin. Again. I could hear her, down there in the kitchen, pouring another glass of courage. Then she's coming up the stairs, coming for me, and I pull the covers up over my head, try to hide. The door to my room opens, sudden light betrays me every time, for there is nowhere to hide now, nowhere to run. There never is. Then I can smell her, smell the bourbon under her breath, smell her Chanel as she pulls down the sheets of my bed and as she pulls me from my hiding place. I remember the smell of her above all else -- perhaps because my eyes were always closed so tightly; the smell intense as she started to lick my ear, then as she worked her way down I would curl up in a tiny ball, wish the night away as she pried my body apart. And when she was finished with me, when her hot wetness was everywhere, the beatings began. Tetsuko was holding me, cradling me, really. Wiping our tears away, she held on to me for hours, weeks, years, until some measure of trust returned to me. I saw Rand then; he was standing by the table at the Inn, looking down at my mother, wanting desperately, more than anything else in the world, to take that bitch and kill her. +++++ Richard Nixon announced to the nation on the night of April 30th, 1970, that American forces had entered Cambodia; for all intents and purposes, America entered her second civil war over the next few days. The conflict was a short, violent one, and a deadly conflict as well, yet for the most part, violence was confined to colleges and universities around the country. Oddly enough, the first skirmishes of this war had happened a year before, in May 1969, and of course, this happened at UC Berkeley. The conflict simmered for a year, simmered while the country tried to come to terms with Bobby Kennedy's murder, then Martin Luther King's murder, Richard Nixon's coronation, race riots in cities all across the country. There was nowhere to hide from the convulsions: at the grocery store, on the cover of Life Magazine, bloody protesters greeted you at the check-out line; at the local hamburger joint, the owner refused to let kids with long hair enter his establishment; at the Olympics in Mexico City, athletes raised fists in solidarity with African-Americans suffering torrid oppression in American cities, and found themselves expelled from the games. Television programs focused on the evils of drug use, on the evil deeds of hippies and all the other Easy Riders seeking to tear down the American Dream -- and make everyone live on Satan worshiping communes in northern California. The first bodies to fall in America's Second Civil War did so a little after noon on the 4th day of May, 1970, three days after I came unglued in the Shipman bungalow. This first battle occurred in the sleepy college town of Kent, Ohio, when National Guardsmen confronted students gathered at Kent State University to protest Nixon's just announced Cambodian invasion. Students had gathered to talk about the CIA funding this expansion of the war through drug-trafficking, about the My Lai Massacre, about the use of chemical agents in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and to talk about the steady flow of aircraft returning to America, aircraft full of the dead and dying. Troops that afternoon in Ohio watched passively, but then ordered the protesters to disperse: the students refused and History took note, she started watching very closely now. Someone, somewhere made a wrong move and destiny took over. Shots were fired. Thirteen fell, four died on the scene.