CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Crossroads
SDI
In March 1985, Anthony had news that was too big for the telephone. Tatiana asked if she should make some blinchiki—and he didn’t say no! He flew home for the weekend, made sure Pasha was not on call, made sure Harry could fly up from MIT in Boston, and in the evening, when all was quiet and the lights were dimmed in the white kitchen, when they were all gathered and collected in their weathered jeans and jerseys, they sat down at the granite island, the five of them: Tatiana, Alexander, Anthony, Pasha, and Harry. Jane was away in Cabo San Lucas. Tatiana warmed up her blinchiki, and brought out bread and olive oil, wine and cheese, and tomatoes; they sat on high stools and ate, all except her, because when she was anxious she couldn’t keep still, and so she paced and pretended she was tending the troops.
On one of her passes, Alexander took her arm, leaned to her from the stool and whispered, “Sit down. Can’t you see? Until you calm down, he won’t tell us what’s going on.”
“Really, Mom,” said Anthony, “I’m not going to war again. Please sit. I have news. Good news and bad news.”
She sat. “Give me the bad news first,” she said.
A smiling Anthony handed her and Alexander a release from the office of the Press Secretary of the White House. “As in many times in life,” he said, “this is both.”
FORMER SPECIAL FORCES CAPTAIN NOMINATED BY PRESIDENT REAGAN TO BE THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF.
“The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff!” Tatiana and Alexander exclaimed. For a moment they didn’t speak; Tatiana’s jaw fell open. “How is that bad news?”
Anthony smiled. “Keep reading.”
General Anthony Alexander Barrington, a career officer in the U.S. Army has been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve as Chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States. If confirmed, Gen. Barrington will become the youngest Chairman ever to serve a U.S. President.
Gen. Barrington has had a long and illustrious career in the U.S. Army. A West Point graduate, he served four distinguished tours in Vietnam and was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese in 1969, resulting in serious battle wounds including the loss of his left arm. His heroic actions during a well-documented intrepid escape led to his subsequent Congressional Medal and have contributed to his meteoric rise in the post-Vietnam era.
Anthony Barrington was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and was commander of Fort Bragg in North Carolina, then commander of a Mountain Division in Fort Drum, New York, and three years ago was moved to the Pentagon where he was promoted to general to chair the United States Special Operations Command. He has also been the honorary chairman of the POW/MIA Committee, at the forefront of multinational efforts to find and return all the missing coalition soldiers from Southeast Asia.
Ronald Reagan, in announcing his nomination, said, “General Barrington fought for a truly noble cause for which he nearly gave his life. The war he fought in Vietnam has not been lost; it did not begin in Vietnam, it has not ended in Vietnam. The war continues. I have said this before and I will say it again, unless we take serious measures, it will be five minutes to midnight for the United States. Gen. Barrington understands this. He has been fully engaged in the ongoing fight for freedom, and I for one am very pleased to have a man like him in my column. I also appreciate and am grateful to have his stalwart advocacy for an operational strategic defense system that I believe will be instrumental in our endeavors to bring peace to the world. Like myself, Gen. Barrington does not believe that holding people hostage to the threat of a nuclear nightmare is a civilized way to live. I cannot think of a more qualified man to be the principal military advisor to this President, to the Secretary of Defense and to the National Security Council.”
The good crystal and Cristal was brought out. Tatiana knew Alexander was saving the champagne for their anniversary, but he opened the bottle gladly tonight, as they clinked and drank and congratulated their son and brother. Tatiana’s feeling for Anthony was unaffected by such things as pride in his new achievements. No accomplishment of his added or detracted from the unsplittable irreducible atom of what she felt since the moment she leaned over her wounded husband in that Morozovo hospital made so distant by time, and said: “Shura, we’re going to have a baby. In America.” Anthony was conceived in the ashes and under the stars, on doomed frozen soil and yet in hopeful fire. Nothing Anthony did with his life could stop Tatiana from believing that there was nothing Anthony could not do with his life. But looking at Alexander’s face, Tatiana smiled with pleasure, for Alexander was unconscionably and embarrassingly proud of his firstborn son.
Anthony himself, however, was only ostensibly pleased by the proffered chairmanship, muttering that of course he was honored to serve the President in any capacity, and yes, it was on the surface a tremendous achievement, and yes the responsibilities would be astonishing…but he was muted in his enthusiasm. Looking conflicted, he sat at the head of the wide multiangular island; Alexander and Tatiana sat across from each other so they could fully see each other’s faces. Harry was next to Alexander; Pasha was next to Tatiana.
“So where’s the bad news, Ant?” Pasha asked.
Anthony sighed. He said that next week would begin the closed Armed Services Joint Session hearings into his confirmation. He thought the hearings would present big problems for him and would cast clouds of doubt on the success of his nomination.
“You guys are not paying attention,” he said. “Did you read the press release? The part where the President is lauding my support of SDI? Operational Strategic Defense system, ho ho, ho.” He coughed. “Do you not see the one small problem?”
“You don’t know what SDI is?” said Harry.
“Shut up.” Anthony cleared his throat. “I think SDI is a big bunch of flaming bullshit.”
They laughed and said, “Ah.” They expressed surprise. Since the beginning of the eighties they had talked at length about the failing nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviets, but had not talked about the space shield.
“See my problem?” said Anthony. “The press and many people in Congress despise and criticize the President’s ridiculous idea, while the President is grateful I’m on his side. But in my heart of hearts I agree with the people who mock his plan. Quite a pickle, no?” He smiled. “And once I get inside that room, as Dad well knows, it’ll be very hard for me to hide my true feelings. I’m firmly with the President on every other policy on his agenda. But they’ll ask me two sua sponte questions about SDI and they’ll know where my abundance of the heart lies. Right, Dad?”
“Anthony, refuse to answer sua sponte questions, that’s all,” said Alexander. “But what the hell is wrong with you? Have you not been following what’s been going on with the Soviets? Have you not been reading any of my reports?”
Alexander was still pulling at least five days a month in Army Intelligence. The homebuilding business was running so smoothly, with managers and foremen and accountants and two architects and Tatiana overseeing the bookkeeping that Alexander was able to devote quite a bit of time to the nuclear question since the ABM treaty of 1972.
“Of course I’ve been reading them,” said Anthony. “But can I help it that I think SDI is a joke?”
Harry was shaking his tousled, strawberry-blond head. “Anthony, Anthony, Anthony.”
“Harry, honestly,” said Anthony. “Now is so not the time for me to listen to your crazy theories about impulse accelerators and rotary motors of zero curvature. I need to know in the next seven days if I can or should hide my heart on this issue.”
“Ant,” said Harry, “rotary motors is what it’s all about. If you knew about them, you wouldn’t have to hide anything. So if you don’t want the job, just thank the President and refuse the job.”
“That’s just it—I do want the job!” Anthony exclaimed. “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? I do want the f*cking job—excuse me, Mom, sorry. I just don’t want to defend this Star Wars crap. Nuclear disarmament, absolutely; conventional weapons reductions, yes; containing the Soviets everywhere they have their little grapple hooks in, bring it on, I’m your man. But Star Wars? No, thanks.”
“Anthony,” said Tatiana, “next time you get an urge to agree with the journalists, take a short trip to Vietnam.”
“Mom, you’re right,” said Anthony. “Vietnam is extremely clarifying. Out of balance and unreconciled to the universe.” He smiled. “But that’s exactly my problem with Star Wars. We should be dealing with Vietnam—and El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and Angola—not playing with laser guns in space. I can’t hide my skepticism. The President is going to withdraw his nomination as soon as he sees what a fraud I am, and I will have disgraced myself and my family.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself, Ant,” said Pasha, always conciliatory.
“You’re not being hard enough on yourself, Ant,” said Harry, never conciliatory. “You will disgrace your family if you don’t wrap your head around the possibilities of a nuclear deterrent that does not involve the Soviets developing new ICBMs and nuclear subs.”
“Ant,” said Pasha, “in this one instance, and only this one, I might listen to Harry. He knows nothing else but this.”
“Pasha, I treasure your vote of confidence,” said Harry, “but a defense system must be developed—”
Alexander put his hand on Harry’s forearm. “Son, excuse me. You’re missing the point.”
“I’m not missing the point,” said Harry. “That point is all the difference.”
“Yes, it is,” agreed Alexander, “but for completely different reasons than you think.”
“Well, wait, Dad,” said Harry, not raising his voice. Tatiana smiled. Confrontational with everyone—except his father. Harry did not argue with Alexander. Nonetheless…he had a quiet but vociferous opinion on the space shield. “In the beginning of his first term,” said Harry, “the President wanted to know if a system could be developed that would locate and destroy the Soviet nuclear weapons as they left their silos. He was told it could be, and would be.”
“It’s the most far-fetched thing I’ve ever heard,” said Anthony.
“What’s far-fetched?” asked Harry. “What about a dropped bomb exploding two sub-critical atomic masses in a microsecond and converting one gram of harmless mass into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of deadly energy? That’s not far-fetched to you? You have been nominated to the highest military position in the United States and you have decided to draw your line not at titanium-armored vehicles that will stop a round fired point blank traveling 3000 feet per second, but at SDI’s multi-megawatt space nuclear power program with its open-cycle reactor concepts and terminal ballistics? Dad is right, what the hell is wrong with you? Frankly, I don’t think we should be judging SDI by your belief system. You still can’t believe the Spruce Goose flew!” Harry laughed.
“Oh, Harry, give me a break!” Anthony exclaimed. “Just look outside your box for a second. A computer network runs a series of detection systems that controls lasers and hypervelocity guns in space?”
“Yes!”
Now Anthony laughed. “A computer detects hostile missiles going off thousands of miles away and then space lasers intercept and destroy the missiles in flight? A computer? I can’t get my tax refund from last year because the computers keep going on the blink every five minutes!”
“Go ahead, yuck it up,” said Harry, completely unintimidated, “but the computers will detect enemy nuclear missiles and then superconducting quench guns will attack them from space and destroy them.”
“Ant, listen to Harry-boy,” said Pasha. “He knows his quench guns.”
“Forget it,” said Anthony. “Billions of dollars spent, billions of man hours invested, on an unsustainable, insupportable, nonsensical defense system, and all the computer has to be is in restart mode and the whole thing is moot. And this is exactly where the committee will catch me and yank me out of the water with a hook in my throat. Hence my conflict. You know,” he went on, “originally when I said I supported the President with respect to SDI, I meant, I agree with the President that the Soviets have been recalcitrant in negotiations and overweeningly militaristic, hell-bent only on the concept of mutually assured destruction and nothing else. I agreed wholeheartedly that something needed to be done. Just not this.” Anthony nodded as Tatiana poured him another glass of champagne. “Thanks, Mom. I know very well what our President has been going through. I know it pisses him off that the Soviets hide their military expenditures in pseudo-civilian manufacturing. I know he hates their vast superiority in conventional weapons and nuclear weapons, which they continue to build up without incurring international wrath. I just think that this is the wrong thing to invest our resources in.”
“I read in the paper,” said Pasha, “that the Soviets spend three to four times more on their conventional forces than we spend on ours. Is that true?”
Anthony glanced at Alexander and shook his head. “Don’t read the paper, Pasha, read one of Dad’s reports. The Soviets are spending much more than that. Every single steel plant and factory in the Soviet Union produces guns and ammunition and bombs and tanks. And we know this not just because we have inside information from our mother, the Kirov factory Soviet bombmaker.” He smiled lightly at his mother. “They make them in Kirov and then sell them to their little Vietnams the world over. Dad, do you know what was the NVA’s second weapon of choice behind the Kalashnikov? Your 1941 Soviet-made Shpagin submachine gun.”
Alexander whistled.
“That’s some serious economies of scale,” said Tatiana, ironically impressed.
“Indeed, Mom. And furthermore, Dad estimated last year that the Soviets spent 60 percent of their GNP on defense and not their stated 14 percent. While we spend 6 percent.”
“Ant, look,” said Harry, “their GNP is a hundredth of ours. They have to spend more to keep apace. But stop deluding yourself with conventional weapons expenditures. Shpagins, Kalashnikovs, Studebakers left over in the Soviet Union from Lend-Lease that are now being peddled to Angola and Vietnam. It’s just small fry. It’s the nuclear threat that worries the President most of all. Every time the Soviets say they’re going to think about arms reduction, they go and build a new nuclear sub. Our last negotiation in the sixties gave us ICBMs. The ABM treaty in the seventies increased both our arsenals by twenty percent. That’s what keeps the President up at night. He wants to prevent nuclear war, in which—in the best case scenario—a hundred and fifty million Americans will die. And he is right when he says that mankind has never invented a weapon that they did not use sooner or later. That’s his fear and his argument for SDI—that in 1925 the world got together and banned the use of poison gas. But we still kept our gas masks.”
Pasha nodded, looking quite favorably across the island at his younger brother. “Personally that alone is enough for me to weather the doubts regarding SDI.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you should’ve been nominated instead of me,” said Anthony. “In the meantime, while Harry mocks me, I’m going to have to sit in front of those men and defend something I can’t, despite his particle physics bombardment.”
During most of this Tatiana and Alexander refrained from speaking. While their sons squabbled, they listened, sat, drank their champagne, considered each other. Reaching across for Tatiana’s flute, Alexander poured her what was left of the champagne and got up from the island.
“Dad, where are you going?” said Anthony. “We’re not close to done.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Alexander, and left anyway.
Tatiana turned to Anthony. “Ant,” she said, “you know how you can tell what your father thinks of your nomination? Because he went to get another bottle of Cristal.” She nodded. “He really believes. Now, do you want to smoke? You can smoke in the kitchen, it’s fine. I’ve put the filter on.”
Anthony gratefully lit a cigarette. He’d become quite proficient at functioning one-armed, including lighting his own cigarettes. “Why are you and Dad so quiet? You don’t agree with me?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. “Let Dad come back,” she said softly. “He’ll talk to you.”
They sat quietly until Alexander returned, popped the cork and poured everyone another glass of the best champagne ever made. They raised their flutes, and Alexander said, “Anthony, this one I drink to you. All our chosen roads, your mother’s and mine, and yours, have led you here to where you now stand. I want you to stand tall, and say with no hesitation, Thank you, Mr. President, it will be my honor and privilege to serve you. And so we will drink to the clarity of your purpose, which seems to be so sorely missing.”
Anthony put his glass undrunk on the island. “My clarity of purpose is missing?” he said, bristling.
“Oh, yes,” said Alexander, himself less abrupt, but no less direct. He drank fully. “In this it is.”
“Dad! I’ve been working with the President on ratifying SALT II for the last three years!”
“Well, then, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on with SALT II in the last six months,” Alexander said calmly.
“Are you kidding me?” said Anthony, slightly lowering his voice.
“You absolutely have not. There have been twenty nuclear disarmament talks with Soviet Union since 1946—twenty, Ant! And to the one, they were all ended by the Soviets, who refused to make a single concession, a single even cosmetic reduction in their nuclear arsenal. The only thing we agreed on even in the lauded ABM is that we wouldn’t make any more defensive missiles to protect our East Coast from their offensive missiles!
“That’s right, but because of our efforts, SALT II has a very good chance of being signed!” said Anthony.
“Being signed is not arms reduction,” interjected Harry. “But whatever. One of the reasons SALT II has a good chance of being signed is because this President approved the deployment of the MX missile and the installation of the Pershings in Europe to bring the Soviet Union to the negotiating table by telling them in no uncertain terms that their arms build-up was not going to fly with him. Four wars this century was all this President was going to go for.”
“The MX and the Pershing were instrumental, Harry,” said Alexander. “They brought the Soviets to the table. But the SDI is what’s making them stand on this table on their heads.”
“Oh, what does SDI have to do with SALT?” Anthony exclaimed, struggling to keep his voice low.
“This is what I mean by completely missing the point!” returned Alexander, not keeping his low at all. He put his glass down and turned to his son. “Don’t you get it? SDI is everything! And it’s not about what Harry thinks about SDI, or what you think and your journalist supporters think about SDI, or even what our President thinks about SDI. It’s only about one thing—what do the Soviets think about SDI?”
“Who the f*ck cares? Sorry, Mom.” Anthony barely apologized—as if she needed it, having lived with a soldier for 44 years.
“Anthony.” This was Tatiana and her voice was mild, and Anthony took a breath, and took a drink and, shaking his frustrated head, turned his face to his mother. “Don’t get defensive. You’re not listening to your dad. Listen. He is saying it doesn’t matter if you think SDI can’t work—no, Harry, let me finish,” she said across the island to her son, who was already opening his mouth in protest. “I know you think it can. I’m saying that for Anthony’s purposes, it doesn’t matter if it can. The only thing that matters,” said Tatiana, “is whether the Soviets think it can.” She gazed at Alexander across the island. “Shura, tell me, do the Soviets think it can work?”
“F*ckin’a they think it can work,” said Alexander, slapping the island with the palm of his hand. “The Soviets have panicked so thoroughly, it would be funny if it weren’t so shocking. Ant, the Soviet Union has bent over to accommodate the United States with regard to SALT II. Just in our preliminary discussions, they have agreed to dismantle a whole range of their atomic weapons, which as you know they have not agreed to do in forty years. They have agreed to move their ICBMs out of Europe! I mean, that’s f*cking astonishing,” said Alexander, not apologizing to anyone for anything. “They’ve agreed to almost all of our other demands with respect to reducing their nuclear arms. And do you know what they want in return?” Alexander paused and stared intently at his son. “All they want in return is that we do not pursue SDI.” Alexander laughed. “I mean, come on! I have never heard of a louder bell ringing for supporting anything.”
Tatiana laughed, too.
“Yes, Dad,” said Harry, “but just one small addendum—”
“Yes, son, I know, I know,” said Alexander, putting his paternal, affectionate arm around Harry. “Our resident nuclear physicist thinks it will work. That’s great. It doesn’t matter. The Soviets think it will work, and that’s all that matters.”
Anthony sat quietly. He smoked. He finished his drink. Alexander poured him another. He looked at Pasha, at Harry, who mouthed to him, It will work, rolled his eyes, and said in a thoughtful voice, “I’m hearing something from you here that I’m not quite sure I’m understanding.” He looked at Alexander. “Tell me this. SDI is slated to be a defense system, right, but this is the part I don’t get: how is development of our nuclear defense system supposed to promote their nuclear disarmament? How is SDI going to help spur the Soviets to want to disarm? I would think it’d be just the opposite. They’ll just be developing new weapons that can penetrate the shield, no?”
Alexander was very quiet. Tatiana was very quiet. They looked only at each other. Then it was Tatiana who spoke. “No. They’ll just be trying to build their own SDI, Ant.”
“Excuse me?”
“Son,” said Alexander, “do you know why the Soviets are so frantic? Because they think we are not building a defense system but an offense system. That we’re hiding behind words like disarmament, and SALT, and treaties, and accommodation, just as they hide behind their civilian steel plants while using those plants to produce a hundred thousand tanks to invade Afghanistan. They think that we’re going to hide behind the shield of SDI and nuke them back to the stone age as soon as it’s operational. This is why they want us to abandon working on it. If they didn’t think it could be successful, they wouldn’t care how much money we poured into it. But they sense our imminent superiority of nuclear weapons systems that their pride and sense of self-preservation simply cannot allow—the same way that at the end of World War Two they killed an additional million of their men to get to the enriched uranium factories around Berlin just days before the Americans did, and then engaged in feverish espionage to develop their atomic program.” Alexander narrowed his eyes at Anthony. “And you know I know something about that, having been at the forefront of those million men, pushing my penal battalion into Germany.”
Alexander poured everyone the rest of the champagne. “The Soviets have asked our President to stop, and he said no. SDI will continue. In their panic, the Soviets are at this very minute figuring out a way to plunge every resource they have into creating an SDI of their own.” He spoke slowly and very deliberately. Tatiana knew he wanted Anthony to understand fully what he was saying. “But how do you think the Soviets will manage this? Where are they going to find the money for SDI?”
“Where are they going to find the money for SDI?” Anthony repeated incredulously.
“Yes, ask your mathematically-minded mother, Ant. What is her opinion? We’d like to know.” Alexander smiled at Tatiana. “Tell your son, Tatia—to achieve perceived offensive nuclear parity with the United States, will the Soviets risk bankrupting their country, or will they do the prudent thing and not pursue crazy scientific notions, but instead believe our President—who has pledged that once he develops the technology, he will share it—disarm their missile heads and save their country?”
Tatiana smiled and said nothing. “Your father is just presenting all sides, Ant, all actions, reactions, weights, counterweights, measures, countermeasures, points, counterpoints. He is balancing the scales for you. It is your choice entirely what you do.”
Anthony groaned, his father laughed, his brothers laughed.
“Tatiana,” said Alexander, “don’t be coy. Don’t tell him the choice is his. Answer my question. Help your son.”
“I think, and I could be completely wrong,” said Tatiana—her palms down on her granite island that her husband built for her so they could sit around it and discuss matters of their life, large and small, like this—“that the Soviets will bankrupt their country to develop their own SDI.”
In disbelief, Anthony shook his head. For a minute or two he didn’t speak. “Look, you’re my mother,” he said at last, “and I—forgive me if I remain skeptical. You can’t tell me that the Soviet Union, one of the richest-resourced industrial countries won’t have the money for a little research and development! They have plenty of money. And if this is important to them, they’ll come up with the money, the way they came up with it for the atomic bomb during Dad’s time. They didn’t go bankrupt then. They’ll just do what they have to; they always had, they always will. They’ll rearrange their priorities, they’ll divert their resources, as all countries do—including our own—to pursue their agenda.”
“Ant, son, they can and they absolutely will do just that.” Tatiana looked at Alexander. “But you know, perestroika, glasnost, solidarnost, they all cost money. And I’m not saying they don’t have the money.” Tatiana paused. “I’m saying they’re going to have a hard time coming up with it.” She paused again and then said, “They’ll have to divert their resources.”
Anthony was quiet himself. “What are you two are telling me?” he asked. “Just so we’re straight here. Are you telling me to stake my career and reputation on the belief that the Soviets will break their country to develop their own SDI?” He stared at his mother.
“We’re just laying it out in front of you, Ant,” said Tatiana.
Anthony, looking exasperated with his mother, turned to his father. “Dad, I’m going to be the principal military advisor to the President of the United States. He is going to need my head to be on straight if I’m going to counsel him to relentlessly develop SDI. You know how I feel about it. Do you think it’s viable for the Soviets to pursue their own? And if they do, is Mom right? Will it matter in the long run?”
“Those are very good questions, son,” said Alexander. “I’ll try not to be as oblique as your mother. She really has been beating around the bush too long. Tania, you must learn to be more direct so your children and husband can understand you.” He grinned at her, and turned his face to Anthony. “Let’s see,” Alexander said. “Yes, I think the Soviets will pursue developing this unfeasible system. Harry, please!” he exclaimed. “What I meant was, this feasible, workable, fabulous system. Is it viable for them to do it? Viable? That I don’t know. Probably not. They’re already stretched to the limits in the war in Afghanistan they’ve been fruitlessly fighting for six years. Not just stretched to the limits, but they’ve been borrowing from World Bank to pay for their little war. They owe more money to the World Bank than 172 other countries. There are only 175 countries in the world.”
Everyone laughed.
“On top of the Afghani war,” Alexander continued cheerfully, taking a drink of champagne and lighting his cigarette, “they are heavily subsidizing all their Eastern satellites—East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria. Plus they are funding a standing army of millions of Soviet men across the breadth and width of Eastern Europe. They’re paying for the Czech wall and its guards, they’re paying for the Berlin Wall and its guards. They’re paying for the guards around Lech Walesa’s prison cell, for the guards to keep the Poles out of churches. Is it viable for them to divert their resources from this, Ant? Away from the Berlin Wall and into SDI?” Alexander shrugged and smiled. “Perhaps it is. Perhaps that’s where they should divert their resources from. If they can’t defend it, the wall is coming down, Walesa is free, and the Catholics attend Mass in Krakow. The Soviets are having a very hard time keeping Christ away from Polish Communists. But they are also funding every new rebellion in Africa and South America, and subsidizing Cuba and Vietnam. And insurgencies in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada. Creating chaos throughout the world doesn’t come cheap, you know.” Alexander’s eyes were glazed over Tatiana, as if he were remembering something, perhaps about chaos in the universe where all was one, where all was all right, and all was reconciled—and then he went on. “In 1979,” he said, “the Soviets paid for the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and to help them repel the Chinese invasion. The same year they overextended themselves into invading Afghanistan. They continue to fund and supply the Vietnamese Army, one of the largest standing armies in the world. Why do they do it? And what does Vietnam still need an army like that for? Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, they’re all one.” Now he smiled at Tatiana. “The Soviet Union produces nothing of value except gold and oil, and with the Gulag machine disassembling, labor, cheap as it is, is no longer free. The criminal prisoners alone are not enough to prop up the command economy of the Soviet state. So Anthony Barrington, my son, your third question is, you want to know if I think—with their hands already so deep in every pot—the Soviets should spend hundreds of billions of rubles they don’t have on the stupidest thing you have ever heard of?” Alexander laughed. “But of course, I say. They must!”
CODA
“Farewell, queen,” said he, “henceforward and for ever, till age and death, the common lot of mankind, lay their hands upon you. I now take my leave; be happy in this house with your children, your people, and with king Alcinous.”
HOMER, The Odyssey
One
Many years passed since the seagulls in Stockholm, Sweden, and the hospital in Morozovo and the hut in Lazarevo; and many more still since the granite parapets in the finite twilight of the Northern sun.
It was Thanksgiving 1999.
While two turkeys were peaceably hiding in two ovens, the house was a zoo. Five opinionated women were in the kitchen, five loud cooks to spoil the broth. One was making mashed potatoes, one was making green bean casserole, one was cooking sweet potatoes. The loudest of all was adjusting her nursing bra, making milk, and the quietest of all was making bacon leek stuffing and yams with rum and a brown sugar glaze. Seven preadolescent and teenage girls were flung over the kitchen table gabbing about music and makeup, toys and boys. Next to them was a small infant seat and in it a small infant. The young girls were impatiently waiting for their grandmother to finish the leek stuffing and make the preacher cookies she’d been promising.
Across the long, sunny gallery, in the den, five mature professional men were cursing at an inanimate rectangular object on which the Cowboys were being carved up by the Dolphins. A toddler sat on his grandfather’s lap with his grandfather’s large hands over his ears.
Four boys were running in a pack around the house, at the moment playing ping pong polo. Three boys and one gangly twenty-year-old were playing basketball outside. Music piped through the speakers. The house was so loud that when the doorbell rang no one heard.
It’s the end of November, and outside is 72 degrees. They’re all going in the heated pool after dinner.
The freshly repainted walls are covered in memories. The beds are made. The fresh flowers are in vases. The mirrors have no streaks, the hardwoods are polished. The California golden poppy, orange fiddle-neck and desert lavender bloom winter wild across the hills and by human design in their bedroom garden.
The dining room is banquet hall sized—because the one who built it had been thinking generationally. It has space for two long wooden tables pushed together. The tables are clothed in gold and scarlet and are set in crystal and china for twenty-six people: four grown children, three of their spouses, fifteen of their children, and two guests.
One mother.
One father.
At the head of the room, above where he sits, a small plaque reads, “He brought me to his banqueting table and his banner over me was love.” Under the plaque stands the gangly basketball player, a stranger to this house, staring at the walls and the photographs.
In her madhouse of a kitchen, Tatiana’s sea-foam eyes shine in her round face as she shows her granddaughters how to make preacher cookies. “All right,” she says. “Preacher cookies. Watch and learn. Half a cup of butter. Two cups of sugar. Half a cup of milk. Boil, boil boil.” Her soft flaxen hair comes down below the nape of her neck. Her makeup is light. She has gained weight in her breasts and her hips but remains trim, and as if to prove it, wears a form-fitting, short-sleeve, jersey-knit, periwinkle dress. Her shoulders and the bridge of her nose are dusted with freckles. Her face is smooth, her skin plump and filled out. She swims every day, dives still, rides trail horses in Carefree, walks through the desert, plants flowers, lifts her smaller grandchildren in her arms. She has aged well.
“When it boils,” Tatiana says, “you add three cups of quick oats, a cup of powdered unsweetened cocoa, and then, at your discretion, either half a cup of coconut, half a cup of walnuts, or half a cup of peanut butter.”
Here ten different voices give their ten opinions. Tatiana sighs theatrically and puts in half a cup of coconut. “Your grandfather likes it with coconut, so that’s how I make it. When you’re in your own house, you can make it how you like.” She stirs until the oatmeal is cooked, for about a mushy minute, maybe longer, and then takes it off the stove, and immediately spoons out glops of fudgy cookies onto foil. “They’ll be ready in an hour,” she says. Really, she might as well be speaking Russian because the older girls, the younger girls, the teenage girls, and even their chuckling dressed-up mothers all take a ball, hot on napkins, and pop them ah-ah-ahhing in their mouths.
There is frightening noise from the crystal-clad dining room. Tatiana is sheepishly told that Tristan and Travis, Harry’s 10-year-old twins, are playing football with their two older brothers who should know better. No one wants to mention that the football they’re playing around her banqueting china is not touch but tackle.
Rachel and Rebecca, Anthony’s 19-year-old girls, both sophomores at Harvard, are gossiping loudly at the table with chocolatey red mouths. Rebecca has brought a boyfriend for Thanksgiving—a first for her, a first for the family—and is now giving her younger, open-mouthed cousins the loud, G-rated low-down on him, in full hearing of Tatiana, as if hoping Grammy will hear and approve. Rebecca’s boyfriend finally appears in the kitchen after playing basketball and touring the house, and is introduced simply as Washington. He is tall, lanky-awkward, long-haired, laconic and unshaven for the holidays. When he speaks, Tatiana, with a small disapproving frown, notices a ball of silver flash on his tongue.
“Grammy, Washington is a math major!” Rebecca effuses, hanging on to Washington. “Aren’t you impressed? Grammy loves math majors, don’t you, Grammy? And Washington is brilliant!”
Tatiana smiles politely at Washington, who tries to look brilliant and nonchalant. He pastes a return smile for Tatiana, analyzes her face intently, looking for something, excuses himself after ten seconds and goes to get a drink without asking Rebecca if she wants one.
Rebecca, twinkling like a comet, says in a low voice, “Grammy, I think he is my first real love. Though truthfully, when you’re this young, can you even tell?” She glances longingly after Washington.
“No, honey,” Tatiana says to Rebecca. “You can’t tell anything about love when you’re young.”
“Grammy, you’re being ironic with me, and I simply won’t stand for it,” Rebecca rejoins, her chocolate lips puckering on Tatiana’s face. “I’m going to write a book about you and then you’ll be sorry.”
“I give them till Christmas,” Tatiana says quietly to Anthony, who has just walked in, heading straight for the preacher cookies.
“That long?” he says, swallowing the gooey ball.
A small dark delicate-looking boy trails behind him. “Dad,” he says, “can I go to Grandpa’s shed? We were making a chess board last time I was here. He said I could finish it.”
“Don’t ask me, Tomboy,” says Anthony. “Ask Grandpa. Though you might want to wait till half-time to ask him anything.” With his hand on his son’s shoulder, he turns to his mother. “Mom, are you still collecting blood for Red Cross?”
“Who wants to know?” Tatiana smiles. “As President of the Phoenix Chapter, I think I must. We have a blood drive next week. Why, you want to donate a pint?”
“Why just a pint?” Anthony says. “Take the whole armful.” And he grins back.
Pushing her small brother out of the way, Rebecca steps up to her father, taking him by his one arm, which he disengages from her, trying to take another cookie. She grabs him again and says petulantly to Tatiana, “Grammy, ask Daddy what he thinks of Washington. Ask him.”
“Becky, honey, your father is standing right here. I give you permission to ask him yourself.”
“He won’t tell me!”
“What does that tell you?” Anthony says. “Let go. I have to go back for the disembowelment of the Cowboys. Tom, you coming?”
“That kid Washington plays pretty decent basketball,” says ten-year-old Tommy. “If that’s worth anything.”
“Dad,” says Rachel, coming up to his left side and poking him in the rib, “why don’t you tell Grammy what I just heard Grandpa shouting at the TV in full hearing of the two-year-old.” The model-tall girls, identically made up, identically attired, identical, stunning, flank their father, their identically affectionate gazes on him.
Anthony winks at Tommy. “We won’t tell her, will we, bud?” He stares at his daughters. “Will you two let go of me? Tom, where’s your brother? Uncle Harry wants him to watch Samson until Grandpa calms down.”
“Grandpa was standing in front of the TV,” whispers Rachel with a big grin but in a low voice so the young ones won’t hear, “and yelling at his team, ‘Hey, girls! Why don’t you Cowboy the f*ck up?’”
“Shhhhh!” exclaims Tatiana. “Rachel Barrington!”
“What? He’s your husband!”
Shaking her head, Tatiana takes Tommy by the hand and the last two preacher cookies on a napkin and walks from the kitchen, through the long wide gallery with plants and pictures and floor-to-ceiling windows, to the family room, where she stands behind the couch and leans over a white head.
“Shura,” she says quietly, her hand with the preacher balls extended, “be good. Don’t teach the toddlers all you know just yet.”
Alexander, without taking his eyes away from the TV, reaches over, takes one of the cookies, pops it into his mouth, leans his head slightly to her, and says in his rasping baritone, “I was good. I covered his ears. And if you saw the defensive line—God, when’s half-time? I need a cigarette.”
Tommy loiters by the side of the couch. “Grandpa, what about my chess board? Can we go finish it?”
“What a good idea, Tomboy,” says Alexander. “Let’s go right now.” Standing up, he turns to Tatiana. Though his hair is white, and thinner, it is not gone from his head. Tatiana cuts it herself every month with her electric clippers. There are many physical things that age has not taken from Alexander: his height; his straight posture; his hands—with the iron handshake, still like a vise, and with softness still like feathers; hands that still work in his shed, whittle chess pieces, trim bushes, hold reins and children, shoot basketballs, touch his wife. His arms that do the frontstroke in the pool and support his weight in bed; his lucid eyes, still twinkling peace under his black-gray eyebrows, his caramel eyes—that suddenly narrow.
“Hey!” he shouts at two boys rolling in from the dining room. “Yes, you, Tristan, Travis—secure that! How many times do I have to tell you? Not one more time, you hear me? No horseplay in the house on holidays. Take the life-threatening games outside.”
Before Pasha even has a chance to get up from the couch and glare at his sons, they instantly and silently and in an orderly fashion hightail it outside. Alexander smiles at Tatiana, and Tommy reaches for his hand. “Just for a minute, though, bud,” says Alexander. “I’ve got a houseful today. But you’re staying the week; I promise, we’ll finish the set, okay?”
“Okay, Grandpa.”
“How has your brother been treating you?”
“Terrible.”
“Ignore him. He’s in a bad mood.”
“He’s been in a bad mood since the day he was born.”
During merciful half-time, Alexander gathers with his sons on the patio: him and Anthony and Harry—who has supposedly quit—for a long smoke, Pasha for a cold beer.
Alexander’s sons are tall. Harry, the slimmest and tallest, is taller even than his father, a fact for which he jokingly blames his mother for allowing him to nurse until he was two and a half. (“You’re depending on a two-year-old to wean himself? Grown-ups can’t wean themselves!” Alexander had said to Tatiana.) Harry and Pasha are blond. Anthony’s pepper is slowly salting.
Pasha now likes to call himself Charles Gordon Barrington. His wife, Mary, always so proper, calls him, “Chaaarles.” As soon as she turns her back, his brothers mutely imitate her. “Chaaaarles,” they mouth. To his family he will always be Pasha, except to Jane, who, to tease him, calls him Chaaarles now, too. Not exactly like the sainted warrior of Khartoum; at 41, Charles Gordon Barrington is the U.S. Army chief surgeon at the Hayden Veterans Medical Center right on Indian School Road in Phoenix. His mother comes to have lunch with him once a week. His father continues to persist in his lifelong aversion to hospitals, so father and son play golf instead. Since Alexander left the hospital back in March of 1970, just in time to receive his Congressional Medal, he has never been back. Whatever ailments befall him, he’s got his own nurse, right around the clock, and a son who anxiously observes his condition twice a week from holes one through eighteen. The son looks for signs of heart disease, emphysema, old age. Alexander is eighty. He figures any time now, Pasha might see the last. But not while the son demands golf twice a week, and makes Alexander walk the eighteen holes. Every few months, Alexander gets to play golf with two of his three sons.
Anthony doesn’t play golf.
Pasha was the last of the four kids to marry, gallivanting intemperately through his twenties, and finally falling for another doctor when he was thirty and in residency; in 1988 they settled into an overworked life, and together they, organized, temperate, efficient, had twins in 1990—a girl, Maria, whom they call Mia, and a boy, Charles Gordon—and were done, and their family was ordered and quiet, and they each worked sixty hours a week. They now live in Paradise Valley, in a house Barrington Custom Homes built for them, and they come over on Sundays to spend the day. Except Mary is pregnant again at 41, inexplicably, and they don’t know how to tell anyone. It is so unlike them not to plan. Pasha advises Mary not to go anywhere near his mother if she doesn’t want the whole family to find out.
Harry Barrington, 39, is a U.S. Army nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional defense specialist. As Harry likes to point out, “I’m not a weapons specialist. I’m the weapons specialist.” After getting his doctorate in nuclear physics from MIT in 1985, he has been working for the Department of Defense at Yuma Proving Ground. His career was made at the end of the eighties when he had been experimentally designing a long tube that was 19 feet long and only 14 inches in diameter. His brothers called it, “just a souped up punji stick.” Suddenly Iraq invaded Kuwait and Harry and his team of scientists had to work around the clock, and in record time designed a guided bomb unit that in its final form weighed nearly 5000 pounds and was fitted with over 600 pounds of explosive.
Alexander said, “Harry, my son, if the bomb weighs 5000 pounds, does it even need to explode?” Apparently, yes it did. It needed to penetrate concrete Iraqi command centers deep underground before it detonated. It was called a bunker buster. It was such a rush job that the initial bunker busters were constructed out of the army’s old artillery material.
Harry married a tiny girl named Amy in 1985, when he was 25, and his generous wife gave him one boy after another, after another. They had Harry Jr. in 1986, Jake in 1987 and then the twins Tristan and Travis in 1989. In one final last ditch attempt for a girl, they produced Samson in 1997, who is enough boy for four. Now all five sons trail like puppies after Harry and he teaches them what he knows. The rest of the family loudly fears for the fate of the world. They drive up from Yuma once a month to spend the weekend at the house. Amy and Mary are good friends.
Jane had the opposite problem from Harry. In 1983, barely twenty, just finished with her registered nurse credentials, she married a boy she had known since birth—a fine man named Shannon Clay Jr., Shannon and long-gone Amanda’s oldest son, who runs Barrington Custom Homes for both families now that Alexander and Shannon are semi-retired. In 1985, Jane and Shannon Jr. had a girl, Alexandra, another girl, Nadia, in 1986, another girl, Victoria, in 1989, and yet another girl, Veronica, in 1990. The 1980s were baby boom years for the Barringtons—especially 1989, when six of the sixteen next-gens were born just as the Berlin Wall was coming down. That Harry had five sons is somehow cosmic, but that Jane, the tomboy of the family, in an ironic twist of fate had four daughters—Sasha, Nadia, Vicky and Nicky—when what she and Shannon both desperately wanted was just one little boy, is cosmically unfair. Harry advised them to learn from him and quit at four, because five was so unmanageable as to be comical. He said five was like war. “That’s only because your fifth one is named Samson,” Alexander said to Harry. “Teaches you right to call your son that.” But Jane—afraid not only of another girl but of her mother’s latent twin gene, which so far passed her by—heeded Harry’s procreational advice up until the end of the millennium. Now her newborn son has five mothers, like cooks. He sleeps in the noisy kitchen, adored but unnamed—like a monarch. They’re tortured over his name. Shannon wants his own, and Jane wants her father’s.
Janie and Shannon live just downhill on Jomax in a spectacular pueblo house. Janie is always over.
Anthony, despite great pressures in Washington, tries to coordinate his own visits with Harry’s from Yuma, so that at least a few times a year, their mother and father can have what they love best—all their children in one noisy house.
Anthony, who is 56, is currently a deputy advisor for the National Security Council. He has served three presidential administrations beginning with Ronald Reagan’s. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union has gone quiet, as have all the rebellions it was stirring in Africa, across the breadth of South America, and in Southeast Asia—as if once the Gorgon Medusa’s head was severed, all the serpents on it shuddered and died. Now Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam remain some of the poorest countries on earth. And though Alexander has finally resigned his commission—deeming his work finished after the fall of the Soviet Union—as far as Anthony is concerned, the world remains unfixed. Old troubles are brewing on top of new troubles in the Middle East. And new troubles are brewing on top of old troubles in North Korea. There is some intel indication that the North Koreans are not sticking to their end of the agreements against nuclear weapons development. While dealing with them, Anthony has continued to wage his thirty-year-old battle to locate the 1300 still missing soldiers in Vietnam. In the same vein, he has just returned from Russia, where he met with government officials from Moscow and St. Petersburg to see if they could fix more firmly on the fate of 91 American servicemen missing in Russia since the end of the Second World War.
Over the years he has steadfastly refused a prosthetic; a functional device was impossible with his degree of injury and one for purely cosmetic reasons was insulting. He continued to feel the burning, stinging pain for years and still feels the electrical nerve impulses in his phantom limb whenever he is stressed.
He feels the electrical nerve impulses constantly.
And while there are some things he cannot do (golf, play his six-string, carve turkey), for the most part he manages just fine, and the people who know him stopped noticing the missing arm in the seventies. The people who don’t know him, if they’re in the service, don’t ask, because Anthony is a general, and no one asks a general anything unless they’re invited to, and Anthony does not invite them to. Civilians sometimes ask. In stores, on the street, during Alexander’s VE-Day parades, they’ll say to Anthony, “Hey man, what happened to you?” And he replies, “Vietnam.” They whistle, shake their heads; usually, “Vietnam” is enough. Sometimes they want more. “Did you get shot?”
And then he tells them. “No,” says Anthony. “I was a POW, and the NVA cut off my arm piece by piece starting with my fingers because I kept killing the guards that were torturing me.”
And after that, there is not even a single follow-up breath.
In 1979, Anthony married an Indonesian woman named Ingrid, who was Janie’s twelfth-grade music teacher. Janie introduced her 36-year-old brother to the 24-year-old piano-playing Ingrid at a winter concert. Janie had talked him way up—where he fought, how many tours he had, how many medals he got, how many times he got wounded. She even mentioned in oh-so-casual passing that her brother had only one arm and liked to sing. Ingrid was exotic, musically gifted, and impressed. Anthony married her four months later, and his girls, Rachel and Rebecca, were born in 1980. To their protégé mother’s great disappointment—though they are both at Harvard—Rachel is immersed in Russian studies and Rebecca in English. They are raven-haired Eurasian beauties, combining their father’s height with the vivid Italian-Russian-Indonesian markings from their parents. Few who meet them can see beyond the drama of their looks. In their freshman year, they made a calendar to raise money for the families of the Vietnam MIA/POW. The R-rated calendar was called “The Ivy Girls” and was the number-one-selling calendar in Cambridge. They said their father was too old to see it. This year, back by popular demand, they had to put out a new edition. That is how Washington first laid eyes on Rebecca: he bought the calendar.
In 1985, after two miscarriages, Ingrid finally gave Anthony a son, Anthony Alexander Barrington III. One more miscarriage followed before another son, Tommy, was born in 1989.
Of Anthony’s four children, it is ironically Anthony Jr. who has his mother’s gift for music and his father’s voice; ironic because Anthony Jr. would rather be boiled in oil than touch an ivory or let a lyric note pass his lips. He used to play and sing when he was younger, even played guitar; but no more.
After he came back from Vietnam, and they buried Tom Richter in Arlington, Anthony lived with Vikki. She stopped working, stopped flying around the world; she traveled with him, stayed with him. Since Vikki was a troublemaker, her favorite thing to tell people in response to their slightly nosy, perked-up question, “And how long have you two known each other?” was, “Oh, we’ve been together—on and off—since the day he was born.” And to an even more impertinent, slightly suggestive allusion to the absence of his limb, she would say, “Don’t you worry, the man is still a quadruped.”
They were together until 1977 when she got breast cancer at the age of 54 and died. Anthony was with her until the end. One of the last things Vikki said to him was, “Antman, because of you, comé un fiume tu, adesso lo so—questro é amoré. Ti amo, Anthony. Ti amo. Quale vita dolce ho trascorso con te.”
Vikki never knew her father, and her mother had been lost to her since childhood. She had been raised by Travis and Isabella, her Italian grandparents—who after a Tristan and Isolde inauspicious beginning were married for over seventy years, and were now long gone. Since in death, Vikki had nowhere to go, she was brought to Phoenix and cremated, her ashes scattered over Tatiana and Alexander’s saguaro desert land, and a garden of colt-like ocotillos, red around a yellow sole mio palo verde, planted in her name, ex animo, ad lucem.