The Refugees(15)

I backed away, while my mother threw her hands in the air, saying, “Khong, khong, khong!” My father had appeared, halfway between the kitchen and the front door, and the man fixed his aim on him, saying, “Get down, mister.” My father got onto his knees, raising his hands high. “No shoot,” my father said in English, his voice faint. “No shoot, please.”

I had never seen my father on his knees outside church, and I had never seen my mother tremble and shake with fear. Pity overwhelmed me; I knew this was neither the first nor the last time someone would humiliate them like this. As if aware of my thoughts, the man pointed the gun at me wordlessly, and I got down on my knees, too. Only my mother did not sink to her knees, her back against the wall and her face, freshly peeled of makeup, very white. Her breasts undulated behind her nightgown, like the heads of twin eels, as she kept saying no. The man was still aiming his gun at me as he said, “What’s her problem, kid?”

When my mother screamed, the sound froze everyone except her. She pushed past the man, nudging the gun aside with her hand and bumping him with her shoulder as she ran outside. He stumbled against the bookshelf by the door, knocking over the glass vase full of coins. Falling to the ground, it shattered, spraying pennies, nickels, and dimes all over, the coins mixed with shards of glass. “Jesus Christ!” the man said. When he turned toward the door, my father leaped up and hurled himself against the man’s back, shoving him across the threshold and then slamming the door shut. Outside, the gun went off with a short, sharp little pop, the bullet ricocheting off the sidewalk and lodging itself in the wall next to the mailbox, where a policeman would dig it out a few hours later.

On Sunday morning before we left for church, my mother used a dab of Brylcreem and a black Ace comb to slick my hair and part it down the middle. I was horrified at the way I looked, like Alfalfa from Little Rascals, but I didn’t protest, just as I hadn’t said anything to her after the police brought my mother back home from a neighbor’s house. “I saved our lives, you coward!” she yelled at my father, who smiled weakly at the police sergeant taking down our report while we sat at the dining table. To me, as she yanked my ear, she said, “What did I say about opening the door to strangers? How come you never listen to me?” When the police sergeant asked me to translate, I rubbed my ear and said, “She’s just scared, officer.”

The police never caught the man, and, after a while, there was no more reason to mention him. Even so, I thought about him every now and again, especially on Sunday mornings during mass when I rose from kneeling. It was then that I remembered how I had gotten off my knees to see my mother dashing by the living room window, barefoot on the sidewalk before all the people in their cars, hands raised high in the air and wearing only her nightgown in the twilight, shouting something I could not hear. She had saved us, and wasn’t salvation always the message from our priest, Father Dinh? According to my mother, he was already middle-aged when he led his flock, including my parents, from the north of Vietnam to the south in 1954, after the Communists had kicked out the French and seized the northern half of the country. Fantastically, Father Dinh still had more hair than my father, a tuft of white thread that shone under the light illuminating the stained glass windows. His voice trembled when he said, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and I could not help dozing in the hard-backed pew while he sermonized, remembering Emmy Tsuchida’s nipple and looking forward only to the end of mass.

It was in the crowd jostling for the exit that Mrs. Hoa touched my mother’s elbow one Sunday, a few weeks after the break-in. “Didn’t you enjoy the father’s sermon?” Mrs. Hoa said. Her eyes were curiously flat, as if painted onto her face. My mother’s back stiffened, and she barely turned her head to say, “I liked it very much.”

“I haven’t heard from you yet about your donation, dear. Next week, perhaps? I’ll come by.” Mrs. Hoa was dressed formally, in an ao dai of midnight velvet embroidered with a golden lotus over the breast. It must have been unbearably hot in summer weather, but no perspiration showed on her temples. “Meanwhile, here’s something to read.”

She produced a sheet of paper from her purse, the same fake alligator skin one with the silver clasp I’d seen last week, and offered it to me. The mimeograph was in Vietnamese, which I could not read, but the blurry photograph said it all, gaunt men standing at attention in rank and file under fronds of palm trees, wearing exactly the tiger-stripe fatigues I’d imagined.

“What a handsome boy.” Mrs. Hoa’s tone was unconvincing. She wore the same white high heels I’d seen before. “And you said your daughter’s in college?”

“On the East Coast.”

“Harvard? Yale?” Those were the only two East Coast schools the Vietnamese knew. My mother, who could not pronounce Bryn Mawr, said, “Another one.”

“What’s she studying? Law? Medicine?”

My mother looked down in shame when she said, “Philosophy.” She had scolded my sister Loan during her Christmas vacation, telling her she was wasting her education. My father had agreed, saying, “Everyone needs a doctor or a lawyer, but who needs a philosopher? We can get advice for free from the priest.”

Mrs. Hoa smiled once more and said, “Excellent!” After she was gone, I handed the mimeograph to my mother, who shoved it into her purse. In the parking lot, crammed with cars and people, my mother pinched my father and said, “I’m following Mrs. Hoa. You and Long run the market by yourselves for a few hours.”