Excerpt from Times Like These

Excerpt from "Veterans"

Some people forget; it can be a failing or a convenient knack, easily acquired.  Others remember right to the end, without discriminating as to what they can recall.  And there are those whose memory in later years is haunted by an early, careless wrongdoing—an indiscretion, folly, or even a crime.

Franklin Page remembered.  He remembered that he hadn’t stopped to think.  Before he realized what he was doing, or could imagine what it might lead to, he had committed the act that was to change his life as well as that of someone else.

His was a good deed, not a misdeed.  At the time of the incident he was fighting in a war.  And when the moment came, he figured that he could probably make it into the field, pick up the wounded man, and get back out again.  He never gave a thought to what might happen if he didn’t succeed.  He saw that it was possible and he started to move. 

His introduction to military life had been similarly unconsidered.  He hadn’t waited to be drafted.  He’d joined up, choosing armed combat as an alternative to suicide. 

Whether he’d run away from home, or had been kicked out, was a point on which his family would never have agreed with him.  He’d thought that they had made it clear: he wasn’t doing any of the things they expected of him and they didn’t want him around until he did.  He could go somewhere else till he pulled himself together. 

He went to the big city, where he fell in love with a pretty girl several steps above him, who had an ambition to be a ballerina.  Her parents liked him, but since their daughter was so young—as he was himself—there was no question of formal approval or disapproval; he looked and sounded right, and wore recognizably good clothes.  He appeared to be a boy from a stable background and therefore someone who could be trusted to take their daughter out to movies and meals and the kind of drinking that didn’t get out of hand.  It was understood from the beginning that the relationship wasn’t to be regarded as serious because it wouldn’t be subject to the rituals that applied in those days: he’d fallen in love at a time when people still got engaged.  Her mother and father wouldn’t have thought she’d be sleeping with him; sexual intercourse was reserved for a fiancé.  They would have assumed the probability of kissing, cuddling, and even heavy petting, but—naturally—what he and the girl wanted was everything that went with love—the full, physical and sexual encounter without which they couldn’t achieve the oneness they longed for.

The fact that his ardor and incompetence had combined to make the girl pregnant was something he didn’t know until a series of telephone calls involved him and, eventually, her mother.  The mother was the only other person the girl had told and she was also the first to be informed, which should have given him a clue about how matters would progress.

The girl was horrified.  He’d kept telling her, she said, that everything was all right and now it wasn’t any such thing.  Hadn’t she said to him that she wanted to be a great dancer?  And even if she hadn’t had any ambitions, who would want to have a child at the age of nineteen?  And to go through nine months and everything afterwards—to undergo all that and then give up a baby for adoption and think she could go on happily with the rest of her life—no: she’d have to get an abortion.  Of course she would.  If she didn’t, what was the rest of her life going to be like?  She’d be tied hand and foot for the whole of her twenties.  He didn’t even have a job; he was doing dishwashing and that kind of thing to put himself through college on a scholarship.  And he’d only just started.  He didn’t expect her parents to support them, did he?  Because they couldn’t.  And what about the child?  To grow up resented by a mother who never had time for you because she was busy trying to recapture her lost chances—that wouldn’t be so wonderful.  And ten or twelve years later, when it was the right time to have her family?  For the child that was a mistake—to have to look on and see everybody else being showered with love: that would be torture. 

She rattled off everything she had to say, without allowing him to get out a single word.  Then she collapsed.  She was nice; even on the verge of hysteria she wasn’t going to remind him that his grandfather had drunk himself to death and his aunt had gone crazy.  After a long pause she just said that this was good-bye.  And she hung up.

He called back.  He called back forty-three times.  Every time, her mother answered; she was polite but unyielding, as was to be expected of the mother of an only child. 

He talked about his love.  He said that he’d do anything.  He hadn’t meant to hurt anybody—he’d have done anything rather than that.  This couldn’t just be good-bye, no matter what they all decided.  He reasoned, he whined, he tried not to sound angry.  He cried.

When he realized that everything was over, he went out and got drunk.  And in the morning he joined up.

From Times Like These. Copyright 2005 by Rachel Ingalls. All rights reserved.