“And do we live near a banyan tree, she wants to know. It's a tree that's sacred in India, Jim says, that represents eternal life because its branches never stop expanding. I keep threatening to plant one even though they grow four times as big as your average Palo Alto yard because, listen to this: it's a wish-fulfilling tree. I'm supposed to—I think this is the way it works—I'm supposed to gather my girlfriends and tie a thread around its bark when the moon is full, and that will keep Jim safe or make me pregnant or both, something like that!”
“Have her send us a branch, honey,” Kath said. “It'd be mighty fun to dance a midnight Indian jig!”
“Heavens, no!” Ally said, mock horror on her face. “You can't cut so much as a leaf from a banyan tree. It's sacred!” Which had us all laughing that day, though later I wondered why it was any funnier than what went on in my church, people kneeling and crossing themselves in front of manmade altars that women weren't even supposed to stand behind. I wanted to ask Ally what she and Jim did religion-wise; I couldn't see back then how a marriage of two different faiths—even two Christian faiths—could work. Though it turns out Jim is Hindu and Ally is Christian and that just doesn't bother them. They feel they're fundamentally the same even if they do pray to different gods.
“I wouldn't laugh if Jim didn't laugh first,” Ally said that morning. “But he's sure the minute we have a grandson for them, his parents will be fine. Which is sort of what I hope about my parents, that a grandson will bring them around. My sister says that's all my father talks about with her: When is she going to give him a grandson?”
We all agreed that surely a grandchild would bring everyone around, though Linda, at least, wasn't all that sure. She told us later, after Ally left to take Carrie home, that when her brother's old girlfriend had married a black man, her parents sat shiva for her just as if she had died.
WE WEREN'T GOING to join the peace march in San Francisco that November, mind you, we were just going to watch, to see what it was all about. As I told Danny, “How can I be a writer if I don't experience the world?”
“You're writing a mystery, Frankie,” he said. “One set in Renaissance Italy. And it won't be the world you'll experience, it'll be thousands of irresponsible lunatics bent on causing trouble, shouting for peace as if they could possibly know more about Vietnam than the president does.” And when I started talking about the demonstrators lining up coffins outside the Capitol and all those Vietnamese civilians massacred at My Lai, he said, “You don't think we should pull out of Vietnam any more than I do, Frankie. And what if the crowd starts rioting and people are arrested? What if it turns out like the Democratic convention, with people getting killed? What would Maggie and Davy do if anything happened to you?
“If you want to go to a peace march,” he said, “I hear there's going to be one right here in downtown Palo Alto.” And it seemed impossible to explain the difference: that Palo Alto peace marches rarely drew more than a few hundred people, whereas this San Francisco march might draw a hundred thousand or more.
He wasn't the only husband unhappy about our going. Only Jim and Jeff didn't object. Jim thought Ally should stand up for what she believed in—but then, they were childless, they didn't have the same concerns. And Jeff? When Danny tried to enlist his opposition, Jeff said, “I could object from my rooftop, Danny, but Linda is Linda. She'll do what she wants.” Which left me wondering why she hadn't gone to the University of Iowa graduate program, why she'd married Jeff and moved to Baltimore instead. It made me think of the way she'd sent her story out again and again—but without telling us. Linda did what she wanted and said what she wanted, but there was more to her than that.
The morning of the rally I slipped out of bed early, and dressed quietly, and walked down to Ally's house in the wet darkness. I sat under my umbrella on the damp bottom step of her front porch, watching the sky over the old mansion lighten to a dull cloud gray. What did I really think about the war? I wondered as I sat there. Not Danny, but me. I read the newspapers. I watched the news. What did I think?
Despite the wet chill of the morning, by the time we arrived in San Francisco some two hundred thousand people had gathered at the waterfront, filling the streets and beginning to make their way toward Golden Gate Park. Three men who seemed to belong together only in their size—all big men, though the first wore a suit and tie, the second long hair and lamb-chop sideburns, the third a decorated service uniform—led the way with a large banner that read veterans for peace. There was one woman with them, a nurse in a clean white uniform who walked with a slight limp—a war wound, it dawned on me only later; she, too, was a veteran.