Alive and Dead in Indiana

DEAR JOHN

I am living in Indianapolis now. Like me, it has no reason for being here. The people of the state simply wanted their capital in the middle of Indiana, paced off the distance, and brought an apprentice of L’Enfant out from Washington, D.C., to make all the same mistakes in this city’s plans. Streets, named after states, radiate from circles where monumental statuary bases are waiting for statues, waiting for someone to become famous enough to become a statue. Everywhere you look in this city you see these flat-topped pyramids, empty niches in building facades, friezes without faces, metopes without bas-relief. The circles here, too, were planned for defense purposes as if someone would wish to take a thing that was never meant to be. The theory was that batteries positioned in the circles could command three hundred and sixty degrees of the neighborhood. The airplane makes this all silly, of course. But, on the other hand, it is only from the air that you can see the plan, gain any perspective on the order here. Instead, the circles cause traffic jams, rotaries coursing with cars at all hours (late-model plum-colored Chevrolets, it seems, are everywhere), all looking for numbered streets. There are quadrant designations too — NW, SE. It is very much like an army camp, except there are no white rocks. There are boulders on people’s lawns. Blank bronze plaques are bolted on the sides of the boulders. In the summer, you can watch the husbands trim the grass by crawling on all fours around the boulders using those hand clippers. The boulders came all the way from Canada, their sides worn smooth for the plaques by the glaciers that carried them down here.

I came here looking for you. You’re not dead yet, officially. Still listed as missing in action on the Lung-hai Railroad en route to Hsuchow, China, 25 August 1945. I can’t go back there now and look for you myself. What were you doing in Anhwei Province? Another airfield in the middle of nowhere? I thought when you left Changsha for the last time you were on your way to Shantung Province to organize the North. I can’t remember what you said to me.

The woman at the American Legion headquarters here is very kind and helpful. She tells me that I mustn’t worry, that GIs are marching home all the time. Some have knocks on the head and have lost their memories. Pockets of Japanese resistance are still being turned up on nameless atolls a dozen years after the surrender. There are prisoner exchanges all the time. Priests stumbling out of the jungle. I have pretty much given up hope, though. I go on out of habit. I think you can keep someone alive. I keep. I still write often to your sister Betty on the farm in Macon. I tell her about her brother in China. She tells me about growing up with you in Georgia. The farm, she writes, has now been all planted with trees, just as you wanted it to be. Elm (though there is a new disease here in the States that is killing them), tulip, white pine, and, of course, birches that do not grow well since they are not native to the South. Your father still preaches. Your mother still plays the organ for him. Things would not be that different if you came back now.

I sit in the study room at the American Legion with the other women — widows mostly, though some are old girl friends like me. We all have our files, the accordion type, filled with letters from comrades, maps, commendations, canceled orders. We wait for records to become declassified, for belongings or effects or last remains to appear from the warehouse searches in Kansas City. The older women wear hats with veils. The cross-hatch of the netting makes their faces look made up out of dots like newspaper photos. They remove just the one white glove, the one from their writing hand. The other glove is specked with the crumbs from their erasures. When a regular gives up her place by the window, someone new comes to take it and stays until, a few weeks or years later, her work too is done.

In front of the American Legion Headquarters building, a mall begins, and from there it stretches four blocks along Meridian and Pennsylvania to the Post Office. There are plazas and parks. There is a hundred-foot obelisk of black Berwick granite. Around the base is a varicolored electric-lighted water fountain. There is a cenotaph, gold Roman eagles and all. Halfway down the mall is the War Memorial, a replica one-third the size of the mausoleum erected by Artemisia. There is even a light on the plateau of the stepped roof that represents the eternal flame. Scaffolds, like the ones window-washers use, hang high up along the west wall of the building. Workmen are still carving the names of the Korean dead. Watching them, I hear the sound of hammer and chisel long after I see the blow. All of the buildings around the mall are made from limestone in that New Deal style. The U’s are carved as Vs. There is, on the part of the mall that begins in front of the Legion building, a vast vehicle park and ordnance dump the Legion supervises and maintains. Rows of 37mm antitank guns, howitzers (all spiked, the breechblocks gone), files of quad.50 mounts and Bofors guns. There are a few old Shermans and Grants, even a Stuart, destined for a park somewhere or maybe to be cemented in a town square. The Legion distributes the surplus to the local posts, to be set up on stoops and front lawns next to lighted flagpoles. The guns will be trained on the part of Main Street that is most menacing. Every city will have one. They can’t all be hammered into plowshares. I can imagine a crew of drunken legionnaires scrambling from a stag, manning this fieldpiece, pretending they are walking shells toward the grain elevators. In purple fatigue caps sagging with medals, these men will crank the elevation wheel because that is the only thing that is left working, and then they’ll lob a few shells toward home, the wife, the kids.

After a day of looking for you, I walk along the rows of weapons, and if the wind is right, I hear the whistle coming from the vents of the air-cooled barrels. I smoke a cigarette, watch them carve the names. It is all drab and battleship gray. Everything that is loose has been stolen. There are chalk marks on the shields and fenders. Stars glow on the armor.

I live in Chinatown here. It is on the near south side in the shadow of the Lilly pill plants. To get there, I walk around the monument circle at Market Street and cross the Crossroads of America at Washington and Meridian. Under the railroad overpass. By John’s Hot Stew. I don’t know why I am writing this as if you will come looking for me.

Chinatown here is the type of thing you would expect. Chop suey joints above laundries or laundries above chop suey joints. Banners hang above the street. The smells of soy and dry-roasted peanuts. Taiwanese mainly. Many from the fall of the Tachen Islands. Quemoy is being shelled again. There are animated arguments at the walls where the language dailies are posted. Children dribble basketballs along the sidewalk. Wearing scarlet, they weave around their fathers. The public phones are in pagodas. The shelter signs are in Chinese.

It is not really like Changsha, though there is a jinriksha. Most people here wear black sneakers. They miss China. I can pretend I am still there — bow to the men in sleeveless shirts and gray pants in my building, share silk thread with their wives, who sew all day. I can imagine when I leave in the morning, I am on my way to the Yale-in-China Hospital again. Taste tea in a coffee cup. And I wait for you. At night in bed, I hear a train slam into the station. It is the Japanese shelling.

There is a man here who says he remembers you when you preached in Chekiang Province. He is still a Christian and insists I go to church with him, an A.M.E. in the next ward. He says he was told you joined the AVG, that all China has heard of you. He tells me your Chinese is perfect. He would not be surprised if you were still alive and preaching to many converts. Mao himself would not be able to tell you were American. I think the man says what he thinks I want to hear; he brings me fried bananas and takes me uptown on the bus to the cathedral to play Bingo.

There is one bathroom on my floor in my building. I like to sit there, steaming in the tub. I can smell the starch from the street. Do you remember the P-40 shot down over Lingchuan when we lived there? It crashed, pilotless, down the road. I remember when the Chinese peasants, hundreds of them it seemed to me, carried the cracked-up plane up the road to our house. The smaller parts, they held them above their heads. It looked as if it was coming apart as it moved. It was like the dragons at New Year’s. “Here is your plane,” they shouted, dropping it near the porch. We were the only Americans they knew of. You thanked them in your perfect Chinese. Sly General Wang took the aluminum from the fuselage and had his smith make the bathtub. Remember the bathtub? All we had before was the Yangtze Kiang. The way I washed your back like an Asian wife. Why did you leave with Drummond without saying anything? You wrote to Betty trying to explain. She has shown me the letters. And you wrote to your parents. In Lingchuan, in Changsha, when we made love, you whispered to me in Chinese. In Chinese. I didn’t know Chinese. I don’t know it. The geese flying backwards. The Eastern menagerie. And I would have gone with you to the West, to Turkestan if you had wanted. Converted the Jews. It is a place for a woman. “Look, I have a mission.” Now, I have a mission, John. I had one then and they are the same. You, John. Did you, in doing your duty (and was it duty to God or to country that allowed you to leave me?), confuse your two missions? A missionary is always the best warrior. I remember the Jesuits saying mass along the road in camouflage, the host made of spinach flour. I remember the almond eyes of that Flying Tiger. I kept them above our bed after you left. I would stare back at them as they bore down on me and try to imagine its smile.

I asked for you at HQ. I waited for your letters every day at the Yale Hospital. I rode my bike back home past the quilted soldiers who eyed me along the road as they unwrapped their puttees at night, just as they had wrapped them as I went to work in the morning. Your letters never came. I always left forwarding addresses. Mailed a packet of letters to your family. I tried to write the letter that would free me. I could live with the secrets of the war you shared with me. I could have lived with you and your God and your other women. I watched you for hours as you studied the code books. A mission makes us the thing we pursue. We are what we study. I am becoming you, John. Losing me. Losing us. Losing the very reason I went looking in the first place. The way you lost yourself in a China you believed could be converted into Georgia. Why did you leave me? Was it that you could no longer understand English? Had you only the taste for the cheapest red rice?

You don’t know about television. Imagine one of your radios but this one sends pictures along with the words. After my bath, if the night is warm, I go down to the appliance store and watch the televisions in the window. No one in Chinatown can afford one yet. So, people come out and they watch with me. The men wear straw hats and bob up and down to see over shoulders. The women sit on the curb or lean against the few cars and listen to the man who translates the words which come from the small speaker tucked up under the awning with the sparrows’ nests. There are twenty sets on tiers all tuned to the same picture. You can watch people making sure that all the pictures are doing the same thing at the same time. You can see their heads jerk from screen to screen. I go there to watch them watch. During the day, the screens are turned off, and no one stops on the sidewalk. The televisions are watching us. “Take one home,” the appliance man tells me as I pass his door. “It will keep you company.” He says I will never be lonely. “Come back tonight. They will all be turned on tonight.”

Then I go back to the American Legion and search for you. In my file is a new commendation from Chennault. I answer mail. Write letters. Make notes in the margins of radio traffic logs.

I do not know how many letters this makes to you. For a while after the Arbor Day I spent in Georgia, I would send them to your sister there. She would write back as you. She had practiced your hand from the letters she had from you during the war, tracing them as she grew up the way other children trace animals or flowers out of encyclopedias. We both went a long way toward believing. She cut short her hair and nails, carved our initials, yours and mine, into one of the trees. She had her picture taken by the tree while she wore your old work clothes. But the closer she got to you, the more I missed the things that she was not. Maybe I am cursed with too much memory. Maybe I write these letters as a way of forgetting. I watch the nicotine stains on my fingernails grow out as the nail grows out, and I think to myself that by the time the yellow splotches reach the tip, I will be over this. They do and I am not and I smoke more and my nails are stained. Perhaps I will clip them and send them off with this letter.

Of course, there are other men. Mr. Lee, who brings me the fried bananas and the fortune cookies without fortunes he buys half-priced at the bakery thrift shop. There’s him. He clips articles for me from the National Geographic. He takes me to movies at the Circle Theatre. There is the floorwalker at L. S. Ayres, who began by suspecting me as I wandered around the mezzanine near the stamp corner. But I was innocent, and he led me to the perfume counter where he spotted my arms with samples. What could they say to me? “He is dead and gone.” They are too polite for that. To them, I am a story they could tell their grandchildren. “I knew a woman once.”

Recently, I met another man.

At my table at the Legion, I found a box of chocolate-covered cherries. I thought someone had forgotten them from the day before, and I tried to turn them in to the woman at the desk. She said no, they were for me. “A Mr. Welch left them for you himself.” Welch’s was the brand name on the box.

That night as I watched television, he appeared in the jinriksha, bedecked with flowers. “Audrey, my dear, come for a ride with me.”

The men watching television looked to see him too, a tall man in a linen suit and Panama. “I am Robert Welch,” he said. “It was I who left the bonbons for you.” The women in the gutter clucked. “Come here,” he said, “I have things to tell you about your Captain Birch.” Such a nice smile. He held out a candied egg. “For you.”

The men had turned back to the television in the window. The women leaned together. “I have irrefutable proof that John Birch was killed by Communists in nineteen forty-five.”

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.