Those three men and the nurse seemed somehow to represent the crowd that day, the diversity. I'd expected . . . I didn't even know, really. Disreputable-looking men with long hair and mustaches? Danny's lunatics? But there were all kinds of men and women protesting—in suit coats and ties, in workmen's clothes, in housedresses and bell-bottom slacks and skirts and pumps.
It was a long walk—seven miles—to the park.
We Wednesday Sisters walked at the fringes of the crowd, feeling more like the shopkeepers who observed from their doorways than like protesters. Maybe not Linda, but the rest of us. If made to declare one way or the other, Danny was probably right, I probably would have said that Nixon was doing the right thing, that peace through victory was the right path. Yes, I'd watched the footage and listened to Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid; I couldn't purge the awful photos from my head. But it wasn't as simple as it sometimes seems in retrospect. I believed—most Americans believed—that the spread of communism would mean loss of freedom and torture and death, and perhaps even nuclear war. We never imagined the communist world would just collapse as it did in the Soviet union years later. We thought the only way to preserve our lifestyle was to fight theirs. And we couldn't, truthfully, imagine that America might be wrong. We didn't like to imagine that what we were doing as a country could be imperialist or illegal or just plain immoral any more than we liked to imagine an America that could be defeated by a small country of small people we thought of as less intelligent and less compassionate and less worthy than we were. So we just didn't imagine it.
Even Linda, the most vocally antiwar of us, was watching more than protesting with the crowd that morning. “All the disabled veterans,” she said. “I never expected to see them here. I never thought about that.” And even as she was admitting that, a tall, blond man with his arm amputated at the elbow fell in alongside her, his stump exposed under the edge of his short-sleeved oxford shirt. “Nice to see a pretty girl like you out here with us,” he said.
Linda focused on his face—china-blue eyes, slightly crooked nose, freshly shaved chin—listening to him, trying to work up the nerve to touch him. Just a small touch at his shoulder. She veered away from him unconsciously, though, just enough to bump into Brett, who reached a hand out to steady her. Linda looked at Brett's gloved fingers on her elbow but didn't pull away. She turned back to the man, her face solicitous and yet not quite natural. “Did you lose your arm in the war?” she asked, making herself confront it. See, I can face this. I can do this now.
“This?” The man thrust the stub of arm toward her, maybe angry at her for seeing his arm rather than seeing the whole of him, maybe angry at what he'd been through, maybe angry at everything.
Linda swayed back from him again, staring at the stump, unable or unwilling to look away. She wanted to tell him that it wasn't him, really. It wasn't him or his arm she loathed. It was herself. She wanted to tell him it was impossible for her to look at him without thinking of her mother, that it was her own guilt that was the problem, the guilt of a nine-year-old who never did embrace her mother. But he was already heading back to rejoin his buddies, who looked toward us as they frowned at something he said.
Brett set her hand back on Linda's elbow, the lightest embrace, and Kath fell in on Linda's other side, where the man had been.
As we walked that morning, we had to squeeze into the crowd when the road narrowed or when we came to a car parked at the curb. We were walking alongside a group of doctors when I stumbled, and I was saved from plastering myself on the pavement by one of them. He and his doctor friends made me stop so they could check my ankle, though I assured them I was okay, I was forever tripping but I'd never once in my life broken or sprained a thing.
They were from Los Angeles, a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility, and one of them—a fellow with the same dark-rimmed glasses and slight build as my Danny—turned out to know people Jeff and Lee knew; he'd interned at Stanford.
Linda told him we were writers.
“Writers?” he said. “That's terrific. What have you written?”
He expected books, you could tell. Books he'd heard of, books on the bestseller list. When you say you're a writer, people always do.
Linda replied, cool as a morning breeze, that Brett had published an essay and she had a story coming out soon. I felt like an idiot even though I wasn't the one who'd proclaimed myself a writer; I hadn't published a thing. Then quiet Ally started asking them questions as if she were a reporter for The New York Times, I swear, as if she did not intend to go home until she understood everything that was happening here. Before I knew it, I was asking questions, too. It was so much easier to be a writer with these strangers than it was with any-one I knew, these men who had no preconceptions about me, who wouldn't think that I was just Frankie, the engineering school secretary who'd never been to college, who couldn't possibly have dreams.