Christmas Eve after George and Marion went to bed, Kit and Ben sat up; Kit insisted they watch an inane Christmas movie they’d seen together as kids. The only lights were the TV and the gray-green tree; already it looked a little tawdry and leftover, on the way out. On the sofa’s broad arm were the two books Kit had given Ben, printed by the Peter Pauper Press: The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Pascal’s Pensées.
“A matched pair,” she said. “Small, so you can carry them.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding earnestly, maybe too earnestly. The Baudelaire had harsh, black woodcuts, dark women, demon lovers. It was for him, but even more it was from her: something of her, a part of her life for him to carry. The Pascal, though, was just for him, for his faith and his clear-eyed austerity: it scared Kit, but she thought Ben would respond. “So nicely wrapped too.”
Kit had got a Christmas-season job at a department store downtown; they’d taught her to wrap, tie bows, skills she’d never lose.
“So Merry Christmas,” she said; and because it was allowed, on this night of this year surely, she hugged him, laid her cheek against his rough one and held him a long time: feeling a hot dreamlike relief in his touch, a completeness, even as she felt him shrink and begin to extricate himself. Merry Christmas they said on the screen, the bishop’s wife, the suave angel who had come from heaven to help them, the happy people. Merry Christmas, while the big flakes of snow fell on the black-and-white town and the overcoats and fedoras and pheasant-feather hats.
“So tell me,” he said. “What’s the plan? What are you going to do next year?”
“I don’t know yet.” She spread her skirt flat with her hands, far from him again; shy to be questioned, her imaginary futures brought forth. “I’ve sent away for some college catalogs. I could get a scholarship maybe. Mom wants me to apply to Vassar.”
“Good school.”
“Oh my God,” Kit said. “All girls? I don’t think so. I don’t really like girls that much.”
“No?”
“No. You know that.”
“Just boys?”
“Well no, I mean…Oh you. You know. Ben: you know.”
He wouldn’t talk about his own plans for when he got out, whether he’d use the GI Bill to go to school or if he’d get a job or what; he deflected his family’s inquiries with jokes, maybe he’d be a cop, the army was good training for police work, a lot of guys he knew. Or janitorial work too. Then Christmas night, as they sat in the kitchen eating cold turkey and pie, he told them what he had decided: he was going to reenlist when his hitch was done. Re-up he said: he’d learned a new language, and used it shyly but willfully, as though abandoning his old one in its favor.
“What?” Kit whispered in horror, before her parents could speak. “What?”
“I’ve been offered Special Forces,” he said. “It’s a program. Languages, and politics, and counterinsurgency.” He spoke to Kit, until her face made him look away. “How to help ordinary people: what they call nation-building. You serve in lots of places.”
“But for how long?” Kit asked, hearing the rising edge in her voice. “For how long this time?”
“Same again,” Ben said smiling. “Just the training takes a year.”
“But you’ve done what you were supposed to do,” Kit said. She could feel her parents looking not at him but at her, at her weird intensity of feeling, her fear if that’s what it was, the thing come to life in her stomach. “Your part or whatever. Why do you have to do more?”
“I don’t have to. I mean it’s not a law. I feel like I have to.”
“You don’t.”
“I do. And I did. I mean I’ve accepted. I’m telling you now. I’ve reupped.”
She had stood now, napkin gripped in her hand. “Well why did you do that?” she said. She hated it that George and Marion could see her ask it, see her come out of herself to ask it in a voice full of tears. “Why did you go and do that? I thought you were coming home.”
“Special Forces,” George said. “They have the different uniforms, is that right? The green berets.”
“That’s right,” Ben said. “Green Berets is what they’re called. A special uniform.”
“A special uniform!” Kit cried. “A special uniform, that is so great! Well gee no wonder!”
“Kit,” Ben said.
“You said you’d come home,” she said. Marion put her hand on Kit’s arm but Kit shook it off as though not recognizing what it was. “You told me.”
He shook his head, looking down at his folded hands and smiling. It was a look she knew. And Kit turned away, threw down the napkin, and went out.
Ben found her in the garage, wrapped in her winter dress coat, smoking a cigarette.
“When’d you start that?” he asked her.
“A while ago.”
“What about…”
“They don’t know.”
“Well you ought to cut it out.”
“All right,” she said. She tossed the butt to the oily concrete and ground it out. In the corner of the garage into which she stared was his bike, covered in a tarp. “I hate you,” she said.
“Kit.” He sat beside her. “What did you think. What did you want from me.”
As soon as he spoke she saw clearly what she had thought, that he would come home and that everything would be as it had been, which was impossible. Nothing is ever as it was, it is always as it is, and then as it will be.
“It happens,” he said. “People grow up and move on. They have things they want to do. Have to do.”
“What,” she said. “You mean your war.”
“Not mine.”
She waited, not looking at him still but poised to counter whatever he might say. For a while he didn’t speak further, as though what he thought was gathered within him but hadn’t ever been wholly said, and needed a moment to turn into words; and when he spoke it was as carefully as if the words might be the wrong ones, or words the wrong medium. “I do think there’s a war on,” he said. “I do think I have to fight it. I think everybody has to. I think Dad is fighting it in his way. Maybe you’ll find your way. This is my way.” He clasped his hands between his knees and studied them. “I haven’t shot anybody and I probably never will. The whole idea is to do what it takes so that you don’t have to shoot. But it’s still a war, and you can be on God’s side or not: there’s no other way to say it.”
She still wouldn’t look at him, but she could see the light of the bare bulb overhead caught in the red stone of his high school ring.
“You know,” he said. “When I was wondering what I should do, what I could personally do, and they pitched this program to me—I thought: Okay, I can do this; or I can join the priesthood.”
Now she looked at him, and he smiled at her amazement. “The priesthood, yeah. Yup. I’ve thought about it. A lot. I decided I can’t do it, though. I’d have a problem with the vows.”
“You would? You?”
“Well. Not with poverty, or obedience.”
She laughed, feeling a sudden awful vertigo, a doom opening beneath her that she had known about all along and hadn’t wanted to see: why she was losing him. It wasn’t war or Cold War or the army, he would go away from her no matter what, into whatever life he could flee to. He had asked her what did you want from me in that way, meaning that what she wanted was impossible, and it was, and she knew why. She shook her head, hands pressed to her eyes as though to keep from looking down so far: laughing, laughing and then crying, crying at last.
“Sis,” he said. “Sis.”
What she had thought, what she had wanted. He had stepped back from the edge of an abyss, that’s what he had done; and she was the abyss. He put his arm over her shaking shoulders and in heedless defiance she turned into his embrace and wrapped her arms around him and pressed her wet cheek and mouth against his cheek.