Benno stopped turning the dial when he heard whistling and drumming, the opening instrumentals for “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.” He nestled back into my chest. Within a minute, his eyes were welling up as the soldiers were trapped on a hillside. He moaned.
“Change the station,” said Rhonda.
“No!” shouted Benno. “The best part’s coming. The sergeant needs a volunteer to ride out.” Tears streamed down his face as he sang along.
“God help us,” I mouthed to Rhonda.
“Babe, is this a good cry or a bad cry?” I whispered to Benno.
“G-good,” he stuttered.
“Okay.” I wrapped my arms around him and let him do his thing.
Benno loved to feel sad, as long as it wasn’t a get-a-shot-at-the-doctor kind of sad. He loved, in fact, to feel. Anything. Everything. But this kind of emotion, happy-sad, as he called it, was his favorite flavor. Tonight I would indulge him. We wouldn’t see each other for two weeks.
Rhonda took one last drag of her cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. She was no stranger to this kind of melodrama. The song ended and Benno turned around, fastened himself to my chest like a monkey, and buried his head in my armpit.
I stroked his back until he stopped trembling. He looked up at me with a tear-streaked face.
“Better?” I asked.
He nodded and ran his finger across the faint blond down on my upper lip. He made a chirping sound. My mustache reminded him of a baby chick, he’d once told me. I told him you should never refer to a lady’s down as a mustache.
I’d given Benno my mother’s maiden name—Bennett. I loved the clean, bellish sound of it. She’d flown out for his birth; my father had not. At that point he and I had been estranged for more than two years, and my choice to have a son “out of wedlock” was not going to remedy that situation.
My mother, Miriam, had been campaigning for Benno to come east for a visit for months. I’d said no originally. The thought of shipping Benno across the country to my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, land of whale belts, Vanderbilt mansions, and men in pink Bermuda shorts, was unthinkable.
“Please,” she said. “He needs to know where he comes from.”
“He comes from San Francisco.”
“He barely knows me.”
“You visit three times a year.”
“That’s not nearly enough.”
She upped the ante. She promised to pay for everything. The airfare, the escort who would accompany him on the plane. Finally I relented.
I’d met Nelson King, Benno’s father, in a bar a week before he shipped out to Vietnam.
“You’re not from here” was the first thing he said to me.
I’d been in San Francisco a little over a year at that point and thought I was doing a pretty good job of passing as a native. I’d worked hard to shed my New England accent. I’d traded in my preppy clothes for Haight-Ashbury garb. The night we met, I was wearing a midriff-baring crocheted halter top with white bell-bottom pants.
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“You hold yourself differently than everybody else.”
“What do you mean? Hold myself how?”
He shrugged. “Stiffer. More erect.”
I puffed out my cheeks in irritation. He was an undeniably good-looking man. Pillowy raspberry lips. Luminous topaz skin. He could be anything. Persian. Egyptian. Spanish. Later I’d learn his mother was black, his father Puerto Rican.
“That wasn’t an insult,” he said. “That was a compliment. You hold yourself like somebody who knows their worth.”
I was nineteen, in between waitressing jobs, and desperately searching for an identity. That he saw this glimmer of pride in me was a tiny miracle. We spent every day together until he shipped out. It wasn’t love, but it might have blossomed into that if we’d had more time together.
After he’d left, I’d written him a few letters. He’d written back to me as well, echoing my light tone, but then we’d trailed off. Three months later, when I’d found out I was pregnant, I’d written to him again, but didn’t get a reply. Soon after, I discovered his name on a fatal casualty list in the San Francisco Examiner.
Although his death was tragic and shocking, the cavalier nature of our relationship and that it had resulted in an unexpected pregnancy was just as jarring. We’d essentially had a fling, a last hurrah that had allowed for a sort of supercharged intimacy between us. A quick stripping down of emotions that I imagined was not unlike the relationship he might have had with his fellow soldiers. The details of our lives didn’t matter and so we’d exchanged very little of them. We’d just let the moment carry us—to bars, to restaurants, and to bed.
In an instant, the dozens of possible futures I’d entertained for myself receded and the one future I’d never considered rolled in.
I was pregnant, unmarried, and alone.
“What do I call the man?” asked Benno as Rhonda pulled into the airport parking garage.
“What man?”
“The man who lives with Grandma.”
“The man who lives with Grandma will be away when you visit,” I said.
The man who lived with Grandma, a.k.a. my father, George Lysander, would be spending the last two weeks of August at his cabin in New Hampshire, as he’d done for the last forty-something years. My mother had timed Benno’s visit accordingly.
“I met him before,” said Benno.
“You were only two, Benno. Do you really remember meeting him?”
“I remember,” he insisted.
My father had been in San Francisco for the Association of Independent Schools’ annual conference (he was dean of admissions at St. Paul’s School in Newport). He’d arranged to stop by our apartment for dinner: it would be the first time he’d met his grandson.
“For you,” he’d said to Benno, handing him a loaf of sourdough bread.
Benno peeked out from behind me, his thumb in his mouth.
“Say thank you to your grandfather,” I prompted him.
“He doesn’t have to thank me,” said my father.
“Yuck crunchy bread,” said Benno.
I watched my father taking Benno in. His tea-colored skin. His glittering, light brown eyes.
“I don’t like it either,” my father said. “How about we have your mother cut off the crusts?”
Benno nodded.
“We can make bread balls.”
It was an offering to me. Bread balls were something my father and I did together when I was a little girl. Plucked the white part of the bread out of the loaf and rolled tiny little balls that we dipped in butter and salt and then popped into our mouths. It drove my mother crazy.
That was all it took. Benno adored my father. He climbed into his lap after dinner and made him read The Snowy Day three times. I washed the dishes and fought back tears of relief and resentment. Why had it taken him so long to come around?
But he hadn’t—not really. When Benno was standing in front of him in the same room, he came around. But when he was three thousand miles away from us, back home in Newport, the distance grew again. His contact with Benno dwindled to a once-a-year birthday card. The incongruity