Summer of '69(125)
We drank champagne as we prepared dinner, Magee imagines telling her mother.
The champagne has also eased Magee’s nerves about meeting Exalta. Once Exalta has been relieved of her coat and handed her cocktail—a gin and tonic served in a highball glass with an artful twist of lime—Magee is ushered forward to be presented to her.
My nonny, Tiger had said before he left, can be intimidating.
But the woman Magee meets is tiny in stature with a silver bobbed haircut held back from her face by a black velvet headband. She wears a soft red turtleneck sweater and pearl earrings. Her eyes widen as she takes stock of Magee.
“Aren’t you lovely?” Exalta says, reaching for Magee’s hand. “And you’re wearing Penn’s class ring. How divine that it fits.”
It doesn’t fit; Magee has wound tape around the back, but she won’t show Exalta that. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says.
Exalta turns to Bill. “Isn’t she just beautiful?”
What interests Magee at that point isn’t Bill’s response (he benignly agrees, although really, what else could he do?) but the glowing expression on Exalta’s face as she looks at Bill. Magee recognizes that she and Exalta are members of the same tribe. They are women in love.
They all sit down to eat. The turkey is golden brown, fragrant, and steaming in the center of the table, just like in a Norman Rockwell painting. David is at the head of the table with Exalta at the other end. Magee is in the middle, between Kirby and the empty chair, and on the other side of the empty chair is Jessie. This is Magee’s spot. She is becoming part of this story. Pennington Nichols met Exalta at a debutante ball in 1917, just after he returned from fighting in World War I. Fifty-two years later, Magee Johnson went for driving lessons because her mother decided it was worth the thirty-dollar fee to have Magee help her drive the boys around. Magee stepped out of the Walden Pond Driving Academy office and there, leaning against the car at the curb, was her instructor.
He’d stuck out his hand with a devilish grin. Devilish, he informed her later, because after twelve weeks of working as an instructor at this school, he had finally been assigned a pretty girl his age.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Tiger.”
She had noticed his eye right away—feline, wild, mesmerizing.
David rises to offer words of thanks and then lifts his glass. Magee raises her glass, filled with a delicious red wine. The only thing that could make this moment more perfect, she thinks, would be for Tiger to walk in right now, dressed in his combat fatigues, his expression weary but grateful.
However, things like that happen only in the movies and in novels.
But incredibly…
Just as all the adult members of the Levin-Foley and Whalen clans raise their glasses and say, “Cheers!,” and as baby Genevieve utters a happy cry from her wind-up swing, the front door of the house opens. They all turn. Magee’s heart hovers; it’s a hummingbird, wings beating so fast they can’t be seen.
Kate jumps to her feet.
Tiger!
But there’s no one standing at the door.
It’s just the wind blowing in off the water.
Fortunate Son (Reprise)
Sergeant Richard “Tiger” Foley is eighty-seven hundred miles away from Nantucket at Landing Zone George, southeast of Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. To surprise the troops, the U.S. Army has flown in turkeys, mashed potatoes, and Marmite cans filled with gravy. It’s not perfect—there are no candied yams, no acorn squash or pickled okra, no soft snowflake rolls, no ziti for the soldiers who grew up with Italian grandmothers, and they’re all served cranberry juice instead of cranberry sauce—but it still feels festive.
Major Freeland—aptly named—stands to say grace, and the men all bow their heads.
“Lord, we offer thanks for the meal we are about to receive. We pray that You will keep us safe on the battlefield and that You will instill in us courage, strength, forbearance, resolve, patience, and trust in our fellow soldiers so that we may continue our efforts to bring peace to this war-torn country.” He pauses long enough that Tiger looks up. The major, he can see, is struggling. “We ask You to hold in the palm of Your hand the brave men we have lost…”
Puppy, Tiger thinks. Frog. So many others. What must their families’ Thanksgivings be like today? Then he thinks of Luck, the little Vietnamese boy he carried out of the smoldering village. The life he saved.
“…and let them know we miss them and will carry on in their honor and on behalf of all the good citizens of the United States of America. In Your name we pray. Amen.”
Magee, Tiger thinks. Blair, Kirby, Messie, David, Exalta, Angus, the twins Tiger has yet to meet…and his mother.
His mother, Kate, loves him more than all those other people put together. Because…well, because she’s his mother.
Some folks are born made to wave the flag. And he is one. Other soldiers at this table may be wishing they were safe in their homes with their families, but Tiger knows that, right now, he’s where he’s supposed to be. And he will see his family again soon enough. Of this, he is certain.
“Amen,” he says.
Author’s Note
I’m frequently asked where I get the ideas for my books. Much of the time, I don’t have a satisfying answer for this beyond “ideas come to me in the night.” But the novel you’ve just read had a very specific genesis.