Act of Deceit

Chapter 47

D onnally considered making a U-turn and heading back to the Burbank Airport for a return flight to San Francisco when he saw his father’s porcelain white Bentley parked in the circular driveway of the Hollywood estate. But a wave from Julia arriving for her evening shift drew him in. It had been a call from her about his mother’s weakening condition that had brought him there.

Julia looked at him with a cocked head and raised eyebrows as if to say she knew what he had been thinking.

He parked behind his father’s car, then followed her up the front steps into the marble-floored foyer.

“Your father told me yesterday that he wanted to speak with you when you arrived.” Julia pointed toward the stairway leading to the screening room. “He’s probably down there.”

It had been twenty years since his father had summoned him downstairs. He’d gone then because his mother was already in there, an object of both of their affection. Now, he suspected, she would be the subject.

Even back then, when his father was merely famous and long before he was referred to as the Legendary Don Harlan, the screening room seemed to Donnally like a shrine his father had created to worship himself: Oscars and Golden Globes and Directors Guild awards lined up on shelves like religious icons. Low lighting like a chapel that forced visitors to lower their voices to a whisper when they entered, as though they had arrived in the presence of a divine mystery.

“Was it an invitation?” Donnally asked Julia.

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

D on Harlan looked back from where he sat in the first of the four rows of the theater as Donnally entered. The soft lights glowing from above had never made him seem more Hollywood, more statuesque, more artificial than he did at that moment.

At the same time, the room seemed hollow. The shelves were mostly bare. Donnally wondered whether the awards that had now sanctified him as a legend had outgrown the space and he’d moved the Church of Don Harlan to larger quarters.

In one motion he waved Donnally over and pointed at the seat next to him.

“I thought you were doing a reshoot in Vietnam,” Donnally said in full voice as he sat down.

“Belize.”

“Belize?”

“It was a jungle scene and Americans can’t distinguish one from another.” His father grinned. “So I’ve been shooting in Latin America.”

“Your investors will be pleased.”

“Not with this one. It’s not what they thought they were buying.” He pressed a button on the console before him, and the lights went down. “Let me show you a little.”

“I’d really just like to check on Mother and then try to make the last flight back,” Donnally said, leaning forward in the deep seat to rise. “I’m kind of in the middle of something up there.”

“Humor your old man for a few minutes.”

Donnally let an exhale be his answer and settled back.

Moments later he felt a surge of anger as he watched a fade-in to the pseudo-documentary beginning. He pushed himself to his feet and jabbed his finger at the grainy black and white image of the 1968 Saigon press briefing in which Captain Donald Harlan had blamed the North Vietnamese for the murder of the Buddhist monks.

“I don’t have time for this bullshit.”

His father answered, not from next to him, but from the screen. A voice-over:

The following is a story none of us had the courage to tell when it would’ve made a difference. None of the names have been changed to protect the guilty. None of the places have been changed to conceal the evidence… May God have mercy on our souls.

Donnally felt his body slump. He reached for the armrests and lowered himself back down into the seat.

H is father had slipped out sometime during the ninety-minute film. Donnally found him sitting alone at the kitchen table.

“What happened?” Donnally asked.

Donnally heard his voice, but his mind and heart were still filled with the final image on the screen, a frozen shot of the actor who had played his brother, his body lying in the grass outside the Vietnamese village where he had been killed.

“I realized that it was time to stop hiding behind the art,” his father said, “and just tell the truth.”

“That’s not what I ever expected to hear from you. Even Janie has been trying to convince me that one was the means to the other.”

His father’s face reddened. Donnally knew why. It was his asking Janie to play the part of a prostitute.

“Sorry about that,” his father said. “I keep playing the provocateur even when I don’t want to anymore.”

Donnally leaned back against the edge of the granite-topped island, wondering whether Janie had been right, that his father had been moving toward this moment and that Donnally hadn’t been able to see it.

But the change, whether in himself or in his father or in both of them, was too sudden and he wasn’t prepared for that kind of conversation, so he focused on the film itself.

“I think that’s the first Vietnam War movie ever made about the Vietnamese,” Donnally said.

“I thought it was time to raise the question of who we were fighting, why we were fighting them, and who we became while we were doing it. Understanding those things might have kept us out of Iraq.”

Donnally felt his body tense, but he tried not to show it. The question for him wasn’t about Vietnam or Iraq, it was about who his father was when he’d lied to the world and deceived his own son into sacrificing himself for a cause that his father knew, even back then, could only be defended through lies.

“It looks to me,” Donnally said, “like your answer was that we were fighting a fantasy of our own construction.”

His father nodded, then leaned forward in his chair and folded his forearms on the table. He looked down at his hands for a long moment, and then back up at Donnally.

“I watched Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima about a dozen times until I figured out why no one ever made a film like that about the Vietnamese peasants we were fighting. And the reason was guilt: It’s easier to tell a story from the point of view of an enemy who attacks you than of someone you’ve wronged. That’s when it hit me why all of my other war films were about us, and not about them.”

His father took in a deep breath.

“And that’s why I always made American soldiers and veterans out to be psychotic or psychically wounded or berserk supermen.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “What else can they be when no one wants to admit that the people we wanted to save were also our enemies, and that they didn’t want to be saved, at least by us.”

His father paused and bit his lower lip. Finally he said, “It started out as idealism, but somehow it got corrupted-or we corrupted it-and we blinded ourselves to what we were doing.” He sighed. “Finally, our lies became more real to us than the truth.”

Donnally gazed at his father, seeing lines in his face and darkness under his eyes he’d never noticed before. He realized that his father had always appeared in his mind fixed at age fifty, prematurely gray and well-tanned. In fact, he’d become a pale old man with yellowing hair.

Donnally pointed at an aged-brown envelope on the table. “What’s that?”

“It’s the letter your mother and I received from Donnie’s commanding officer after he died.”

His father picked it up and handed it to Donnally.

“I’ve read it once a month for the last forty years.”

Donnally’s hands shook when he reached the section describing his brother’s final firefight. The euphemism “he engaged the enemy on all sides” gouged into him, reopening the wound.

He pointed at the paragraph and looked up at his father.

“They made him into a hero when what happened was that he was ambushed,” his father said, “set up by villagers anguished by the napalming of their children and the torching of their homes. It took me all of these years to let myself understand what really happened. And when I did, I realized why you became a cop. It’s the same reason you were unwilling to let Charles Brown plead no contest to a manslaughter.”

“You’ve been following that?”

“Every step. And it proved to me that you’ve always had the courage that I never had: to refuse to accommodate yourself to a convenient fiction.”

His father stretched his arms out on the table, his palms open, turned upward, a gesture that seemed to Donnally to be a surrender to an elemental, existential exhaustion.

“I realized in making this movie that, in the end, my art has been basically juvenile, even when it claimed to be in the service of truth. I should’ve been more like you. Fuck the allegory and just say what is.”

His father fell silent, his breathing labored, then he said, “I know this doesn’t make up for everything… for me, for the way I’ve been…” He shrugged. “For the way I am.”

Donnally didn’t respond. They both knew what he was saying was true and that he wasn’t expecting forgiveness.

His father glanced toward the floors above and said, “Maybe you should go sit with your mother for a while.”