Thea and I are determined that this will be the year we finally make the trip to Greece. Leander and the girls are all still living at home, but Maggie is in her senior year of high school and we trust her, for the most part, to take care of Tessa and Leander for the week Thea and I would be away.
Mama and Papa have been asking us every year if we are going to see them before they die. Neither one of them is in poor health, so I recognize question as simply their way of instilling guilt or urgency, or both, into the situation. Of course, they desperately want to see the children as well, but they understand that we cannot possibly afford to fly all of us to Greece for a week, and my parents are in no position to help.
After a few rough years, the Atheneum is doing well enough that Thea and I no longer worry about meeting payroll and paying the bills – thanks in large part to Sheboygan’s very devoted, very dependable Greek community. Thea had been working five hours a day, five days a week, until last year, when we agreed that all three kids were of the age and sufficiently responsible that she could finally resume full-time work. We pay our servers and kitchen staff well and have made some overdue repairs to the roof and the plumbing – and last year we even managed to expand the dining area to accommodate six more tables. As for the menu, it has changed only slightly from the days when Papa was running the kitchen. In the fall of 1961, at the suggestion of a very loyal Italian customer, we tried adding several pasta dishes to the menu. But the change did not sit well with our regular customers, and we returned to what Maggie calls, dismissively, Greek purity. When we talk, once or twice a week, my parents always ask what is new at the restaurant, and I usually give them a full accounting. But I did not tell them about our Italian experiment. Papa still talks about Italy as if Mussolini and the fascists are massing at the border, and I did not want to be the cause of a second and possibly fatal stroke.
Papa was able to spend nine years living within a half-mile of his mother in Farsala, seeing her every day, which made her very happy. She died in her sleep at the age of 93. Her funeral, Mama reported, was attended by most of the town, including six women who were older than Mrs. Pappas, and one who claimed to be 101.
People here live long lives because they don’t worry about little things, Mama said at the time. At least some people.
I have picked up little hints leading me to think that Mama feuds with some of the ladies in Farsala. The casual remark about some people meant nothing to me, but I suspect it was offered with someone specific in mind.
Thea and I lived through a world war, but I honestly do not believe that there has ever been a time as chaotic and worrisome and polarizing as the times we are living in today. Last year, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed and Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Maggie was only 17, but she has become political in a way Thea and I never were. She cried when Kennedy died, and she cried even harder at King’s death. Both men, I discovered later, were heroes to her. Heroes of a kind I never had at her age. I did have Charles Lindbergh, but only for a brief time. Now, Maggie is part of a group at her high school that some adults in town have labeled The Agitators, organizing marches and demonstrations and sit-ins against Nixon and the war in Vietnam. Thea says that she is proud of Maggie for standing up for her beliefs, even if we do not altogether share those beliefs. I want to feel the same pride. But my brother died in an Army uniform fighting for my country, fighting for a free world, and it sickens me to see how soldiers returning from Vietnam are so reviled.
One Sunday night, watching the news, I make the mistake of blurting out something along those lines.
But they’re not fighting for our country, Dad, and they’re not fighting for a free world. Maggie has fire in her eyes and I know that I have instigated something. It’s just the opposite, in fact. The North Vietnamese are fighting for their freedom. Vietnam is their country, and we’re destroying it.
It angers me to hear my daughter speak this way about the North Vietnamese, whose army is killing American soldiers. Thea has instructed me to count to ten before replying to anything Maggie says about politics. It is good advice, but it is not always easy. These are young American men who believe they are serving their country and doing the right thing, I say finally.* I had managed to reach six on the ten-count. If you need to be angry, be angry at the politicians who decided that we should be in this war.
But I am, Dad! I was angry at Johnson and now I’m angry at Nixon. They’re the war criminals. But I can also be angry at the soldiers who are obeying the orders. Weren’t you angry at the German and Japanese armies who were killing Americans because they were following orders from the politicians in their countries?
Thea has been quietly observing the argument, but she recognizes a landmine when she sees it. Maggie, honey. We respect your opinions about the war. And we’re proud to have raised a passionate young woman with strong beliefs. But please, let’s not equate American soldiers with the Nazis. Your father and I lived through the Second World War. We both lost brothers in the war. Two wonderful young men who would have been wonderful uncles to you and Tessa and Leander. I know you don’t mean to be hurtful, and I know how strongly you feel about Vietnam, but please think before you speak about Nazis.
Thea has a way of respectfully chastising our children without provoking or prolonging an argument. I do not have this ability.
Maggie looks completely stricken, but she needs to have the last word, and I need to give it to her. You know, Dad, she says, tentatively. If I were a boy, I’d be getting ready to register for the draft. I just hope the war is over when Leander turns eighteen.
I am not sure how our eldest child became so politically headstrong, but the transformation came earlier than I had expected, and much too soon. Maggie was just sixteen when she and several of her friends organized a walk-out at their school to protest against Dow Chemical – in solidarity, she explained, with the student protesters in Madison. Solidarity is a word that is much in currency with young people, and it makes me cringe. I am only forty-three, but sometimes I feel much older.
I am especially troubled by Maggie’s determination to attend college in Madison after she graduates from high school. I have tried to persuade her to live at home and take classes at the local UW-Green Bay campus, for at least a year. But my urgings only seem to solidify Maggie’s resolve – and Thea chooses, as she had never done before, to not take sides in the debate. So Maggie applies and is accepted to UW-Madison, and when she leaves home in August she will be relocating to one of the country’s foremost centers of political wrath.
Leaving Maggie in charge of her sister and brother while Thea and I are in Greece for a week seems suddenly like a bad idea. Tessa worships her older sister, and Leander drifts with the prevailing wind, so it is entirely possible that we will return to a houseful of radicals agitating against the status quo. But we have our tickets, and my parents have spent months making preparations. Aside from trips to Door County and a few long weekends in Chicago, Thea and I have not taken a real vacation since my parents handed the restaurant over twelve years ago. In the end, the prospect of disappointing Thea and my parents overcomes my concerns over the political indoctrination of my younger children, which Thea assures me are baseless. So we close the Atheneum for a week and, on the first Sunday in June, Maggie drives us south to Chicago and wishes us safe travels.
Mama and Papa, along with a young man named Cassius, meet us at the airport in Athens. Cassius and his parents, we are told, are neighbors of my parents back in Farsala. Since my parents no longer drive, and own no car, he has been enlisted to taxi us around for the week.
I have been to Ontario with Mama and Papa and Nicholas, but Canada and Wisconsin are basically indistinguishable, so this is essentially the first time I have been in a foreign country.
But your parents were born in Greece, Cassius points out, so this is not really a foreign country, is it? Cassius’ English is excellent, although I do not quite understand his argument.
The road to Farsala is long. Once we are clear of Athens, the traffic thins and the drive becomes relatively pleasant. Papa is sitting in the front with Cassius, Mama is in the back between Thea and me. She and Cassius chat away, pointing out landmarks and explaining the indecipherable road signs. I understand, I think, where the phrase It’s all Greek to me came from. Papa falls asleep at one point, snoring lightly. Cassius lowers his voice to a whisper.
The landscape around Farsala consists of low-lying hills that remind me, in a way, of western Wisconsin. The houses all appear to be white, with red tiled roofs – like most of the houses in the towns we have passed through. Mama and Papa live in a small white house on a road that climbs up one of the modest hills on the edge of town. Cassius helps Thea and me with our bags, and then he departs for his own house just across the road.
We spend most of that first day being greeted by neighbors who drop by with cakes and cookies, loaves of fresh bread and covered dishes. The visits seem almost pre-arranged, one neighbor arriving just as one is leaving, staying until the next one appears. I can see that my parents are fatigued by all the company – Papa especially, but Mama is flagging as well. We talk by phone, across the miles, on a semi-regular schedule. But this is the first time I have actually seen my parents in twelve years, and they have aged more than I expected. Papa shows no lingering signs of the stroke, but he gets out of his chair with difficulty and moves very slowly around the house. Mama still speaks with authority and carries on energetically, but she has lost weight and looks a little too pale, a little too undernourished.
The guest room is furnished with two twin beds, separated by an oak bedstand. Thea and I are used to snuggling up together as we fall asleep, so the arrangement is not to our liking. But for six nights, Thea allows, we can manage.
Your folks seem good, Thea whispers from the other side of the room.
Pretty good. I forget sometimes that Mama is seventy and Papa just turned seventy-one. Although in Greece, I suppose they would say that’s still young.
The house is profoundly quiet. Back home, there seems to be background noise all the time: cars driving past the house, planes flying overhead, sirens in the distance, parents shouting at their children, children shouting at one another, dogs barking, a neighbor playing music or watching television with the volume turned up too high. Mama and Papa have neighbors, but it seems as if everyone quiets at the same respectable hour.
I’m glad we came, Thea says. Even if we sit around the house and don’t do much of anything, it’s good that we’re here. I wish we could have brought the kids.
I had managed to put Maggie and Tessa and Leander out of my mind. Now, I am reminded that Maggie is back home organizing her re-education camp for her younger siblings. That is, of course, the darkest scenario my mind can conjure, and I am fairly sure that the reality is nothing like it. Thea would laugh if I described the scene out loud. But it will be difficult to fully enjoy this vacation, realizing that I have no way of knowing what is happening back in Sheboygan, and no way of controlling it even if I did know.
Thea comments on how quickly the days pass. But for me, they pass almost glacially. Cassius arrives at the same time every morning, ready to drive us around Farsala and show us the sights. Farsala has woefully few see-able sights. On our first full day, we see the house where Mama was born and raised and, just a stone’s throw away, the house where Papa grew up and where his mother lived until her death at age 93. We see the town square where my parents first became acquainted, as infants, wheeled here in their baby carriages by their mothers. We visit the cemetery where two sets of my grandparents are buried, along with dozens of other relatives dating back more than 200 years. In fact, everything in Farsala seems to be almost hermetically preserved, as if time here passes and is measured differently from time in the world beyond. We see the schoolhouse where Mama and Papa studied together, and the small pond nearby where Mama learned to ice skate. Cassius also drives us several miles out of town to the alleged spot where Julius Caesar defeated Pompey in 48 BC.
Cassius and his parents come to the house for supper on our third day in Farsala. Papa apparently had his fill of cooking in the kitchen of the Atheneum, and now Mama prepares all the meals. The menus are simple: tomato salad with cucumbers and black olives and feta, bread from the local bakery, egg and lemon soup, spinach pie, chicken and potatoes. Somehow, the food has more flavor than the same foods Thea and I eat at home. I think maybe it is that the ingredients are fresh every day from the market, or that I am back in my parents’ home, or, perhaps, that we are in Greece.
Cassius’ parents are close to Thea’s and my age, but I find it easier talking to Cassius. He shovels food into his mouth rather like an American teenager, entertaining us with stories about his hunting excursions into the mountains and his summer trip across the Adriatic to Italy. Cassius’ mother has brought a walnut cake for dessert, and Cassius consumes his piece with the same reckless gusto as everything else that was placed in front of him.
Thea, I know, finds Cassius delightful. I wish we could take him home with us, she tells me that night. He’s not much older than Maggie. Can you imagine the two of them…
Maggie, I think. Maggie.
As the end of our week in Greece approaches, I think about the possibility that this may be the last time I will see my parents. Conceivably, they may both live another twenty or twenty-five years, into their nineties – as did my grandmother Pappas. But they will never be flying back to the United States, I am certain. And with Maggie getting ready to start college, and Tessa and Leander not far behind, I cannot imagine Thea and me once again closing the restaurant for such an indulgent adventure.
When I mention this to Thea, she does not disagree. So if there’s something you want to say to your parents, she says, you should do it before we leave.
As often as I talk to Mama and Papa by phone, I can think of nothing unsaid between us. Nothing important. Except the St. Louis letter. That was my secret for a long time, and then the secret was Thea’s and mine: the St. Louis letter, the second letter from Los Angeles, and the packet of letters that Hawk sent, believing that he was helping me close a chapter in my life. But that chapter has never been closed, nothing else about Nicholas’ death has ever come to light, and I tell Thea that I see nothing to be gained by sharing any of this with my parents.
Unless there was some way to tell them…something, Thea muses.
Like what?
We decide, finally, to tell Mama and Papa that I received a letter from one of the young men who served with Nicholas, telling me that he was loved and that he served with honor. It may strike them as odd that I had not mentioned the letter on our phone calls, and that I apparently received it almost twenty-five years after the war ended. Thea and I rehearse what we speculate will be the dialogue, although Mama especially has always been too cagy to anticipate.
For our final dinner together, Papa asks if I want to make spanikopeta with him in the kitchen. Until now, Mama has done all the cooking, but Papa apparently wants to demonstrate that he has not lost his skills. So Mama and Thea sit in the living room, talking and drinking red wine, while Papa and I navigate around each other in the small kitchen, chopping spinach and onions, crumbling feta cheese, cracking eggs, crushing garlic, layering phyllo dough into the baking dish, brushing the layers with olive oil, assembling it all. Papa does not move with the same speed and dexterity as when he ran the kitchen at the Atheneum, but his hands seem to operate almost by memory, with never a lapse. As he works, he keeps an eye on me. At the restaurant, I found this irritating – as if I had never managed to earn his absolute trust. Now, Papa’s scrutiny is somehow reassuring.
At the table, Thea makes a toast, thanking my parents for having us. Mama says the prayer, and we begin eating. This is my signal.
I meant to tell you, the last time we talked. I got a letter from one of the soldiers who served with Nicholas in Okinawa. I’m not sure how he found me, or why he waited so long to write, but he wanted me to know that Nicholas always acted with honor and that he was loved and respected by everyone he served with.
Mama and Papa stop eating at exactly the same instant. Papa’s look is more puzzled than anything – as if the memory of Nicholas had dropped out of his head at some point and is now attempting to slot itself back into place.
That’s strange, says Mama. Doesn’t it seem strange that someone would send you a letter, after all this time?
I suppose something must have happened in his life that made him remember Nicholas, Thea says. And he wanted to get it off his chest. I guess that’s how the mind works sometimes.
That is a better reply than anything I was prepared to say, and it seems to satisfy Mama.
But Papa wants more, now that I have stirred up a memory. What else did he say? About your brother?
Nothing, really, I say. They became friends, I guess. He just wanted me to know that Nicholas was a good soldier and a good person with a sense of honor.
A sense of honor, Papa repeats. What’s the boy’s name? Did you write back to him?
I begin to say something, find myself stuttering. I…I don’t remember his exact name. He didn’t include his address, so I guess he didn’t want to be…like, pen pals. He just wanted me to know…about Nicholas.
You should try to find him and write back to him. If you know the boy’s name. Maybe he was with Nicholas at the end. Maybe he knows how he died. Haven’t you wondered?
This was, I realize, a huge mistake. Thea should have tried to talk me out of it instead of rehearsing the conversation with me. Papa is becoming agitated, and Mama does not look particularly serene, as I had imagined. Of course I was not the only one who wondered about how Nicholas died. The letter from St. Louis may have raised alarms in my mind, but the exact circumstances of my brother’s death were never shared with the family, so naturally Mama and Papa had years and years to invent all kinds of scenarios in their minds, as did I. And now I have given them hope that someone, somewhere, can give us answers.
I’ll try to find him, I say weakly. It may not be possible, but I’ll try. And if I find out anything…
Thea and I avoid eye contact for the rest of the meal. I had enjoyed working alongside Papa in the kitchen, but I am having trouble enjoying the food.
Maggie does not want us to drive her to Madison. A high school classmate of hers was also accepted to UW and has offered to drive. But I am insistent, and Thea persuades our daughter to allow her father this one kindness.
The drive is not long – about two hours. Maggie, I know, wishes that the distance between parents and school was greater, but Madison is where she wants to be, so there is nothing she can say about it. Tessa and Leander have said their goodbyes. Tessa will miss Maggie, but Thea thinks this will be an opportunity for Tessa to blossom, out of her older sister’s shadow. And she will finally have a room of her own. Leander will miss Maggie too, although I am sure that he will quickly overcome any separation anxieties.
Maggie will be rooming with another young woman in Lowell Hall. She has not met her new roommate yet, and she knows nothing about her, aside from a name: Molly Urbana. But she accepts this as part of the great adventure of college. Maggie’s room is vacant when we arrive with her things. So, for now, Thea and I will not get to meet Molly Urbana. Maggie tosses her bags onto one of the beds and hurries us back to the car. At the curb, we hug. After sharing in Maggie’s excitement for weeks, it seems that Thea now does not want to let her daughter go. But they finally separate, and Thea and I start back to Sheboygan. Thea allows that she feels unexpectedly hollow, somehow. It is an odd term, but I feel the same.
Maggie has agreed to call home every Sunday evening. For the first six weeks, she phones as arranged, precisely on schedule. She talks to Thea and me for several minutes, then to Tessa for several minutes more. Maggie and Tessa have asked for privacy, so Thea and I retreat to our bedroom until Tessa knocks and tells us the call has ended. Maggie will sometimes ask to talk to Leander, and they will talk for less than a minute. Sometimes, Maggie will not ask for her brother.
I am aware, of course, that the news we get from Maggie is, to use a familiar term, heavily redacted. The anti-war protests on campus in Madison are getting national attention. It is inconceivable to me that Maggie is not somewhere in the center of it all.
After my parents moved back to Greece, Thea and I stopped attending Sunday mass. Father Gregory checked in on us several times – wondering, I suppose, if someone in the house was sick. The reality was that I no longer felt inspired in church, as I had when Nicholas and I were acolytes, inhaling incense and the smell of freshly laundered cassocks and surpluses. Thea had never felt much of a spiritual spark in church, so she offered no resistance. A few years later, I heard that Father Gregory had been transferred to a church in Chicago, which I presume was a promotion of sorts. Now when we talk to Maggie, across the miles, I do sometimes ask myself if we did our children a disservice by eliminating all regular religious exposure, if Maggie in particular would have benefitted from more spiritual discipline. Probably not.
October 15. When Thea and I arrive home after the dinner shift at the Atheneum, Tessa meets us at the door with the news that she spotted Maggie on television. I am aware that this is an important day for young people in America. Someone has declared it National Moratorium Day, which means that millions of college students across the country have been walking out of their classes to attend rallies and marches and sit-ins and demonstrations to end the war in Vietnam. In Madison, the day began with a rally on UW’s Library Mall. Despite a cold, steady rain, about three-thousand students showed up. Maggie was there, no doubt, but it was later in the day when Tessa spotted her on the news, picketing with several dozen other students in front of the Army Math Research Center.
Thea and I turn on the television in time to watch the late news. Tessa sits with us, talking excitedly about seeing her sister.
They’re protesting the war, but they’re also angry at the university, Tessa tells us.
I ask her why the students are angry at their own university – which has, it seems to me, gone out of their way to appease even the most radical of the bunch.
They didn’t even cancel classes for the day, Dad. They knew that half of the students and probably half the professors were going to be out, but they said no one was excused from attending class anyway.
Well, Tessa, it’s a university. Their business is educating students. You wouldn’t expect them to do anything else, would you?
Tessa and Thea exchange a look, as if they are sharing a thought. It was a rhetorical question, but I think that Tessa at least is contemplating an answer.
The late news is filled with stories from Madison – speeches, marches, interviews, confrontations. But we do not see Maggie’s face. The program ends with live coverage of a crowd surging down one of Madison’s main arteries, carrying candles and umbrellas, on their way to a memorial service for the Wisconsin servicemen who have died in the war. Perhaps it is the rain, or perhaps the day’s passion has simply spent itself, but everyone appears somber and, surprisingly, civil.
Look at them, Thea says, almost reverently. Maggie is in there, somewhere.
When we talk, Papa never fails to remind me of my promise to track down the person who wrote the letter extolling Nicholas. I see that this has become an obsession for my parents, especially for Papa, and I realize that I am entirely responsible for this. I remind him that my promise was to try. But the distinction is lost on my father, and since there has been no trying on my part since Thea and I returned from Greece, there is not much point in arguing.
I do make one attempt to learn not about the author of the St. Louis Letter, but about the three men who wrote the redacted letters that Sargeant Hawkins shared with me, all those years ago. My attempt consists of a phone call to Fort McCoy, where I learn that Hawk retired eight years ago. So there seems to be no way of getting to the truth of Nicholas’ death in Okinawa almost twenty-five years ago. When I tell Papa that I have reached a dead end, there is a long silence on the line. If there was a small flame of hope in his heart, I have just snuffed it out. After that, on our calls, he does not mention Nicholas again.
Maggie’s grades at UW are good enough to earn her another year of classes, although not as good as Thea and I had expected. We know that her energies at Madison are not invested in academics. We had hoped that she would spend the summer of 1970 in Sheboygan, maybe waitressing at the Atheneum. But in May, she informs us that she has taken a job in the campus bookstore and will be staying with a friend off-campus.
On the phone, Maggie has developed a way of politely dissembling with Thea and me. Most of our information comes from gently prying it out of Tessa after the call. Tessa is loathe to violate any vows of privacy which her sister has imposed on her, but Thea can usually extract some key details about Maggie’s life in Madison, promising that secrets will remain secret. It is by way of Tessa that we learn that Maggie’s new off-campus roommate is her boyfriend, a young man from Illinois who goes by the name of Pluto.
Pluto, like the Disney dog? I ask.
That’s not his real name, Dad.
Well, I would hope not. What is Pluto’s story, exactly?
Pluto’s story, Tessa tells us, is that he is a fourth-year student, a History major, and a staff writer for the student paper, The Daily Cardinal. He and Maggie met, predictably, at an anti-war rally, and they have been dating for about three months. I find it strange that Maggie has not mentioned Pluto on our now-irregular weekly phone calls, but Thea points out to me that certain things are shared between parents and children, and certain things are not shared, and this should come as no surprise.
In May, on one of our calls, Thea asks if Pluto will be graduating this year. The question – which I had not expected, but which I recognize as calculated – is posed very casually, as if Maggie has told us all about the relationship, and her mother is simply dropping his name into a natural conversation. Maggie is silent for a long moment, and then she tells us that, yes, Pluto is graduating in June and will also be working on campus during the summer. Against all my impulses, I say nothing. Thea has warned me that we are at a crossroads with our eldest child, and that argument and antagonism will do nothing but drive Maggie further away. I am not quite sure whether Thea has just betrayed Tessa, but our conversation with Maggie seems to end on a cordial note, so I am obliged to trust that my wife knew what she was doing.
Did you and your sister have a nice talk? Thea is standing at the open bedroom doorway, addressing Tessa. If there are to be any recriminations from the phone call, we would hear about it now.
Pretty nice, Tessa says. I wish Maggie was coming home for the summer. I told her that maybe I could come and visit her. Maybe stay for a few days.
That would be nice, Thea says. Let’s see if we can figure it out.
In June, Tessa completes her junior year of high school. The Pappas family had also planned to celebrate Leander’s advancement, but freshman year was such a struggle, the school advises that he will have to repeat nearly all of his classes. Socially, in the move from intermediate to high school, our son lost two close friends and made two new friends. So, at least in that respect, he did not retreat. It is academically, intellectually, where Leander is a lost soul – which is pretty much the story of his life to this point, in contrast to his sisters. Thea maintains high aspirations for all three of our children, but when I look at Leander I see myself, and the best I can hope for is that my son finds a good woman and raises respectable children and settles onto a career path that will sustain them all. Seeing him prepare to repeat his first year of high school, and Tessa prepare to begin her last, I cannot help thinking about my own adolescent years with Nicholas, about how quickly time passes, and about how this house which was once so overcrowded with Pappases will soon (although Leander has just postponed it a year) have so much empty space, so much quiet.
We put Tessa and Leander to work at the Atheneum. Leander works with me in the kitchen, washing dishes and helping with a few basic cooking chores, as I did when Papa was running the kitchen. Tessa works in the dining room with Thea, waiting on tables and greeting customers. She has Thea’s natural social skills and – although parents are supposed to want nothing more than for their children to be happy in life – I secretly hope that she finds that happiness here, and that the Atheneum remains a family business.
In July, Maggie returns for a brief visit. Two days later, she and Tessa leave for Madison. The arrangement is that they will be back home in two weeks. I am more than slightly conflicted about this trip, but I voice my reservations only to Thea.
Tessa’s seventeen, Thea reminds me. She’s a good person with a strong constitution. You need to have faith that her values are not going to change in two weeks.
But I am not reassured.
In late August, Madison once again makes national news, this time in the most horrific way. The anti-war protests take a sudden and very dark turn, with the bombing of Sterling Hall on the UW campus early on a Monday morning. Sterling Hall is the home of the Army Math Research Center – the same facility, it startles me to recall, which Maggie picketed last fall, during the Moratorium Day demonstrations that received so much television coverage. The bomb was apparently intended to destroy the center, which it apparently failed to do. But it did inflict great damage to several floors of Sterling Hall, and it killed a young Physics Department researcher who had nothing to do with Army research.
Thea and I call Maggie that night to ask what she knows about the bombing.
Why would I know anything about the bombing? Maggie’s retort is quick and sharp.
We just mean because you’re right there, Thea says, and we’re here in Sheboygan. We thought you might have heard news that we haven’t heard.
I don’t know any more than what I’ve heard on the news. Same as you.
There is a tone in Maggie’s voice that makes me suspicious. I certainly do not believe that she would be involved in any kind of violence. My daughter has become such a fervent opponent of war and proponent of peace, I cannot imagine her doing anything more political than carrying picket signs and chanting slogans about Nixon. There are kids who want to fix the system and kids who want to wreck it, idealists and anarchists, and I have always seen Maggie as the former. But as little as she has told us about her boyfriend, it is not inconceivable to me that Pluto had some involvement in the Sterling Hall bombing.
For months, no one associated with the bombing is arrested. The four main suspects were quickly identified, and there have been sightings of all four in Canada and upstate New York. But it seems that there is an underground network that is keeping them safely hidden from the police and the FBI. I have not heard or read Pluto’s name in any of the stories about the bombing. But of course Pluto is not his real name, so I remain suspicious that he may have played some role either in planning the bombing or in arranging escape for the accused bombers.
I don’t know why you think that, Thea tells me when I share my thoughts. Maggie hasn’t said anything to suggest that he’s done anything more than protesting and demonstrating, which is what a lot of young people are doing.
But that’s just it, I say. She hasn’t told us anything at all about him. It’s like she’s trying to keep him completely under wraps.
Thea simply shakes her head. I feel as if my wife and I are diverging on things that have never been important to us. More than this, I am beginning to feel outnumbered and isolated in my own family.
Thea and I later learn, from Tessa, that Pluto moved to Canada to avoid serving in the military. If Maggie is crushed by his departure, and their breakup, she says nothing about it to us. Life seems to more or less find a precarious balance.
Tessa has always tried to please everyone, so she is painfully conflicted when the time comes to submit her college applications. Maggie wants Tessa to join her in Madison. I am lobbying for her to attend classes at the UW-Green Bay Sheboygan campus, and to live at home. Thea tells Tessa to simply follow her heart. In the end, Tessa decides to attend UW-Milwaukee. It is a compromise that pleases no one, but Thea reminds me that this is the nature of compromise and that we need to stand behind our daughter’s choices.
Having two daughters away in college is stressful on our finances. Maggie, fortunately, has kept her parttime job at the campus bookstore and has moved into an apartment with three other young women, so she is proudly paying her own room and board. And business at the Atheneum has been steady, so Thea and I are able to make ends meet.
Early in her second semester, Tessa announces that she has her first real boyfriend – a young Irishman named Robert Corrigan who is studying business. I know that Mama and Papa would have hoped for someone with at least a drop of Greek blood, but I am relieved that Tessa’s boyfriend does not bear the name of a Disney character, and that he is enrolled in a very traditional, very capitalist discipline. There is, of course, antiwar sentiment on campus in Milwaukee, but the city is nothing like Madison, and Tessa is nothing like her sister.
On a bitterly cold day in February 1972, Karlton Armstrong is captured in Toronto, a year and a half after supposedly leading his gang of four in the bombing of Sterling Hall. His three compatriots – including Karlton’s younger brother – have been sighted all over Canada and the northern American states, but they remain well hidden. Armstrong’s capture is not a topic of conversation in our calls with Maggie.
Both of our daughters navigate their way through college. Maggie’s grades improve slightly in her third and fourth years, and while her politics do not change at all, she stays out of trouble. In the spring of 1973, she graduates and takes a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Chicago called The Daily Defender. I have never heard of it, but Tessa tells us that the paper is one of the leading Black-owned and Black-operated newspapers in the country, and that her sister will be one of its few white employees. Tessa seems proud of this. It seems like a strange career path for Maggie, but I am at least grateful that she will have a job and that she will no longer be living in Madison. And she is twenty-one, almost twenty-two, so Maggie is well beyond my influence.
Leander is meanwhile beginning his fifth and final year of high school. He has expressed no interest in college, and neither Thea nor I have tried to push him in that direction. He has become a dependable assistant in the kitchen of the Atheneum, and I would not be disappointed if he chooses to continue working there after high school.
It surprises me to discover, too late to do anything about it, that Leander has been in regular contact with Maggie. He informs Thea and me on a Sunday evening in March, three months before his scheduled graduation. We have continued to keep the Atheneum closed on Sundays – against the urging of some of our customers, who are concerned about competition from several newly opened seven-days-a-week restaurants – so that our shrinking family can continue to enjoy a day at home and a supper together. Tonight, Leander advises that our Sheboygan family unit will soon be contracting further.
I wanted you guys to know that I’m joining VISTA after high school. Leander says this between bites of beef stew, as casually as if he is informing us that he is spending the weekend with his friends in Door County.
Thea looks as startled as I am. Neither one of us says anything for a time. My first thought is that this is one of Leander’s jokes. All I know about VISTA is that it is a government program that sends out volunteers to do some kind of community service. Leander has not once mentioned VISTA, and he is the last of our children I would imagine doing charity work.
Finally, Thea finds her voice. What do you mean? VISTA?
I’ve been talking to Maggie about it. And before you say anything, this is completely my decision. She asked if I wanted to move down to Chicago, but I don’t want to live in a big city and what she’s doing doesn’t interest me.
So you decided on the VISTA? I ask. You just came up with that idea on your own?
Leander puts his fork down and glares at me. Does it surprise you that I would have ideas of my own?
I didn’t mean it like that. It just seems like this is coming out of the blue.
Not out-of-the-blue. Just because I haven’t been talking about it with you and mom doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. And I have been talking about it with Maggie. It wasn’t her idea, but she thinks it’s something I should do. And so do I.
VISTA. Over the next several weeks, Thea and I try to educate ourselves about it. The program is apparently an offshoot of the Peace Corps, but focused on communities in America rather than villages in Africa. But VISTA and the Peace Corps attract the same kind of idealistic young person who wants to change the world – exactly the kind of person Leander is not. Or maybe I should say the kind of person I do not know him to be. It depresses me to realize that, as they age, each of my children has, in a sense, evolved into strangers of one kind or another. The relationship I have with Tessa has not fundamentally changed. We understand each other and communicate in the same way. But Tessa’s life is increasingly in Milwaukee, with Robert Corrigan and other friends we do not know, and Thea and I see less of her every month.
I offer to bring Leander in as a fulltime cook at the Atheneum after graduation, but he has made his decision. In June, he is formally accepted as a VISTA volunteer and is sent to work on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation on the North and South Dakota border. He is vague about what exactly he will be doing, but for the first time that I can remember there seems to be a spark of energy in him as he packs his bags.
The next day, Thea and I return home from work to an empty house.