Dragon Lady

Fading, my pagan-summer-in-Catalina- Island's umber complexion, the deep kiss on skin of so much glad day, whitening like the pages of Faulkner and Yeats I scrutinized, sophomore grind further from Avalon than 26 miles. November second, nineteen sixty-three, I was driving on Wilshire Boulevard, admiring not only the chic new shops in Beverly Hills, the Jaguar dealership, the bistros with French names, but my twenty-year-old face in the rear-view mirror. I'm guessing that the radio played the year's hit song, "Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer," already nostalgic for the romance of August, not the preacher's dream of being free at last but chaste horseplay with cabin boys, fellow proletariat at an overpriced hotel, sweaty scrimmages, water jousts, wrestling Bobby Levin's younger body into taunting surrender. Lawrence of Catalina, Bobby called me, after the year's big movie, while we sunbathed near White Cove. The music stopped. And then a bulletin not many Top 40 listeners would heed: A coup in Vietnam. Diem dead. Nhu dead. Madame Nhu would hold a press conference, very soon, in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I bluffed my way into the VIP room, exotic as some Cold War outpost or posh screening room at the Director's Guild. The fourth estate pointed cameras, joked about the Dragon Lady, awaiting her mad speech. Madame Nhu was famous for savage remarks. First Lady of a foundering state, she loathed the Buddhist monks who torched themselves: "Let them burn," she said, "I will be glad to supply the gasoline, and we shall clap our hands." Named Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring, she spoke no Vietnamese, only that French patois shared by the colonized upper class. Beautiful and cruel, more Lilith than Eve, she doubled as serpent in the Orientalist press. She was beyond my comprehension, I with no insight into politics, no experience of grief. She entered the room, close to me, so close I could touch the color of moonlight she wore. She said, "Now President Kennedy has all the power he wants. But will he be able to hold power? Power will be dangerous for him too, more than he knows." So few people there, why should she not stare at me, so much younger than the rest? Her gaze eclipsed the light of August, her voice dubbed over Bobby's blithe chatter pricking the mind like Catalina warbler cries and our teasing farewells after Labor Day. "I can predict to you," she fixed me in the front row, "that the story of Vietnam is only at its beginning." And so the Fifties ended, though none of us note-takers wrote this down. None saw how this stock femme fatale spun out the Sixties' thread before our eyes. She donned her dark glasses, left the hotel; I lingered, stunned, in the afterglow of glamour, musing on her fierce incitement to war. She departed the short memory of the West except one day, three weeks later, when she stepped from her Roman villa, now in black, and spoke no sympathy for Jacqueline, her Catholic twin. The days got shorter. Los Angeles knows nothing of winter's harrowing; still, nothing was ever the same. Innocence, wrote Graham Greene, in his novel of Vietnam, should wear a bell, like a leper, to warn of its approach. Do I agree? Surely, America had earned a respite, a time for blamelessness, a right to say no when Madame Nhu conscripted not just ourselves to spread fire in her land. "I believe," she said, "that all the devils of Hell are against us." Too innocent to resist, too arrogant in our postwar fortune, we devils signed her pact in blood. Put the blame on Mame. Call her Medusa, this bit player, this contra-leper who vanished ten years before the fall of Saigon. Call her the evil muse of anti-communism, visiting in spirit two Presidents, their armies, all who misconstrued her prophecy in Beverly Hills: "What is done against Vietnam will be felt in America, too." Felt in our politics, I supposed she meant, felt as a wound...