Mr. Lee said, “What gives, Pops? Can’t the lady watch TV in peace?”
The man said, “The meter’s running, Audrey. Please, come with me. We can talk. I have been looking for you these last five years. I have good news of John Birch.”
“You told me he was dead,” I said.
Mr. Lee said, “Scram. Beat it, Pops.” Now everyone was watching the scene in the street. The men who had been nearest the store were now in back, looking for an opening to see. Mr. Lee, sensing he was now the center of attention, continued to yell. I thanked Mr. Lee, apologized to the television audience, and got into the seat next to Mr. Welch. As we left Chinatown, the children in pajamas ran after us collecting the stray blossoms that fell from the jinriksha.
What else could I do? Another lead to track down. Such a gentleman who had given me candy, your name. I suppose that Mr. Welch, Robert, had thought I would be grateful for the truth. The truth was that the truth didn’t interest me as much as a convincing lie. Later, I found out that that was his mission, truth telling. Another truth not yours, John. He believed all he had to do was tell people the truth and they would act accordingly. Not that easy.
As we clopped around and around the monument circle he told me some more truth.
This is what the man said. He said he had made his fortune in candy and then sold the business to Nabisco. He said he spent his time and money studying the spread of Communism, that he kept a little score-card in his wallet. He knew the political positions of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah. He said he came across your name when you helped Doolittle, and that, as he pieced together your life in China, he turned up my name. My first name. Our affair. Our engagement. The mystery of your leaving. Now, as he looked for Communists, he also looked for me. He said he’d found, in your life and death, the ordeal of an age.
“What was he like, really?” This is what he asked.
I was eating the candied egg. I told him what he wanted to hear. A truth teller always has such simple notions of truth. I said, “A pious man. Deeply religious. His soldier’s shell temporarily assumed. A gentleman. A happy warrior. Cheerful. A tinkerer. A lover of children. All the things you would expect from a man descended from a Mayflower Pilgrim and related, through blood, to four U.S. presidents.”
I did not tell him about the rice paper, your calligraphy. The way you squatted against the wall of the hut. The bathtub.
He gave me his handkerchief to wipe the caramel from my hands. When I offered to give it back, he told me to keep it. We returned to my building and he walked me to the door.
He said, “Audrey, I must continue to see you. It is important to the Free World. You, who knew and loved John Birch, can understand what he and we should stand for.”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Robert took me to the 500 after we had spent the weekends in May at the time trials. We sat in the infield while the cars shot around the track. Before the race, he led a prayer for the war dead, cried when they played “On the Banks of the Wabash.” He took me to restaurants. He praised you over John’s Hot Stew. We went to Indian baseball games, to the state fair. The judge slapped the rump of a steer. He said, “A farmer, that’s all John ever wanted to be.”
Always at my desk, I would find some type of kiss. I could not concentrate on your file. All the women seemed to be weeping more than usual.
I smoked more cigarettes and bought Hershey bars from the stand in the lobby of the building. In all the public buildings, the Marion County Association for the Blind run the concession. They say they know by touch the denomination of the bill. They make change easily. They sit, their creamy eyes floating in their heads, surrounded by candy. No matter how quiet I am. “Yes, may I help you?”
I buy some gum and return to my place. I write letters to the floorwalker. I tell him I did steal some stamps. “I’ll never be able to see you again.” Also a letter to Mr. Lee, breaking it to him gently.
One night Robert took me to his room at the Fox Hotel. French windows led out to the balcony where he had set up a white telescope. Ten stories up you could see down to the spokes of the lighted streets as they radiated from their circles. The circles were phosphorescent craters. All along the mall, the government buildings were flooded with lights. Car lots on the south side were having sales. Surplus spotlight beams waved back and forth. I looked at the city and saw it for the first time. Robert, through his telescope, searched for Sputnik.
“There, there! That’s it!” He was so happy. “Look at it as it goes by.”
The stars are different in Indianapolis. I can see no dragons, no bears, no crabs. My eyes came back down to the red neon of the insurance companies on Meridian.
I am sitting here now in my usual place writing you another letter. I can’t say things right. I cannot wait any longer. And, now, I am here at the signature, the farewell. Who is the John of this Dear John letter? I imagine you somewhere at mail call. The names of the dead shouted out, packages passed along on fingertips. Envelopes thrown, arms reaching out. “Yo! Here! That’s me!”
What should I do? Robert will soon ask me to marry him. We will honeymoon in England, the better to study the evils of Socialism. He will read to me from newspapers over breakfast. We will talk about you as would a father and a sister. He will ask me to marry him as I walk out of this building for the last time having left a box of chocolates for the kind woman at the desk. I will wear white gloves and inspect the equipment on the lawn in front of the building. The gun barrels crisscross above our heads. The grass has grown up around the tires of the caissons and the tracks of the tanks.
Robert has shown me a picture of your funeral in Hsuchow. I have it here. I will send it to you. The Japanese probably wonder how they got into this. They want to go home now that the war is over. They look over Drummond’s shoulder at the casket. The Chinese, in their German-looking helmets, are drawn up in a row, bayonets fixed but sheathed. They go out of focus as they approach the camera. There are too many stripes on the flag. Is this hope? Is it just me? The one flaw that gives the deception away. The foliage looks flat, a painted flat. The whole thing staged, a postcard from a wax museum. Why was the picture taken? Can no one believe you are dead?
Why did you leave me, John? That is the heart of the matter. Robert showed me how to read the cowlick on the chocolate shells. All the assorted pieces before him, semisweet and milk, in the pleated paper cups. Each had its own dripping crest that told its center. A crown of thorns for coconut, a halo for cherries. That is what we all need. Our own braille, like phrenology, to tell us the difference between cordials and hard centers.
I am in Indianapolis. Robert is inviting some friends to come and talk about the world, about its future, about you. I will meet them. I will be as close as they come to you.
I am going through my file of letters to a dead man. One of the first things I learned were your last words, reported by Lt. Tung:
Wo pu neng tsou le. I cannot go on. I cannot go on. Yet I fear we cannot live without you.
THE GREEK LETTER IN THE RED
The skull over the door is stolen from the biology lab. There are red Christmas tree lights in the eye sockets. The triangle has something to do with champagne. They don’t tell me what. The TKE sign stays on all night. Sometimes, the boys from the other houses steal our light, and, sometimes, my boys steal theirs. They hide them in my suite. My suite fills up with Greek letters. I stack them against the wall with the light bulbs still warm. “You boys,” I say. In their plywood frames the bulbs are the size of grapefruit and look like a package that Harry and David, the fruit people, would send. My furniture is alphabetized. When a boy comes in to talk with me about how he misses home, he parks himself on the Tau by my dresser.