Part One

1975

The staccato tapping of the keys on Melanie Ames’ portable Smith-Corona was echoed by the monsoon rains beating relentlessly on the tin roof of Mr. Bao’s tea house across the alley from Mel’s open window.  Sweat dribbled down her neck below her cropped, dark brown hair as the ceiling fan cranked ineffectually above her, shoving the moist overheated air from one side of the cramped one-room flat to the other.  Mel reached for another Marlboro from the pack in the breast pocket of her loose-fitting shirt.  Close up, in the yellow pool of the light cast by the lamp on the table, one could see the slender wrists emerging from the sleeves of the shirt, the delicate bone structure of her face.  But from a distance, as she moved in and out of the shadows in a disintegrating Saigon, the casual observer might not notice that she was a woman.  It was one of the ways she protected herself.  She defined it as making herself invisible, something she had learned as a young girl living abroad with her father on diplomatic missions.  People tended not to notice or realize she was there because they didn’t expect her to be.  And thinking she was not there, they often said or did things she was not meant to hear or see.

She now used that talent in her profession as a journalist.  People trusted her: bar girls in the noisy clubs that lined the teeming alleys of the city; shopkeepers; Navy lieutenants who ran river operations in the Delta; South Vietnamese army officers who talked to her over a beer and a cigarette.

Above the night voices of the rain and the ancient fan she heard the far-off reverberation of an explosion, then another.  Despite the South Vietnamese government’s insistence that it could defend Saigon, the word trickling through the city like the overrun sewers in the monsoon was that, as in Yeats’ poem, the center would not hold.

Mel knew it was time to go.  But after three years of writing about it, Vietnam was under her skin.  Her pulse beat to the singsong rhythm of its language.  And she knew she still had one more story to write in the mounting panic and confusion of impending loss.

Her journalism professor at Columbia had described it as fire in the belly.  If you didn’t have it, the burning desire to get the story no matter what the cost, you’d never make it in the news business.  And Mel knew she had it.

As she hit the return on the typewriter and rolled out the thin sheet of paper with her latest story, she heard tapping on her door.

“Missy!  Telephone call for you.”

It was late, and there were few people left in Saigon close enough to her to call her here.  She followed Mrs. Bao down the narrow stairs to the phone in the teahouse.

“Melly, this is Anh.  I call because I have no one else to turn to.  Please, I need your help.”

Anh was a bar girl Mel had first met when she arrived in Saigon three years before.  Where Mel had camouflaged her femininity to work and survive in Saigon, Anh had flaunted hers to the same end.  Both had paid a price, and in that had found some common ground to ease the loneliness of life in a war zone, cut off from family.  But Anh had dropped out of sight, and Mel hadn’t seen her for over a year.

Her distress on the phone was palpable.  She was insistent, a rising note of desperation in her voice that Mel had never heard before.  Anh, the one with the veneer of bravado, the silken note of teasing promise, was voicing the despair whispered all over the city.

“I have to see you.  Tonight.  Can’t talk on the phone.”

Anh was working and Mel reluctantly agreed to meet her at the bar.  She threw on a poncho and hurried the few blocks in the rain to meet her friend.

When she arrived she bought a drink for each of them to appease Anh’s boss and Anh sat with her at a battered, sticky table.  The place, once swarming with American servicemen and throbbing with Motown music, was nearly deserted.

Anh reached into her purse and pushed a photograph across the table to Mel.  She looked at it, a smiling image of Anh in traditional Vietnamese dress (not the miniskirt and halter top that was her working outfit).  In her arms was a baby.

“Who?” Mel asked.

“My daughter, Tien.”

Mel knew that she and Anh had secrets, pieces of their lives they hadn’t shared with one another.  But this piece stunned her.  Anh, at nineteen, was like a kid sister to twenty-three-year-old Mel.  How could she not know Anh had a daughter?

“Where is she?”

“In the St. Agnes Orphanage on the outskirts of the city.  I – I cannot care for her.  Every month I send money.  I thought, when I first left her there, it would be only until the end of the war.  But now, I think there will be no end for me.  That is why I am turning to you.

“I am thinking, if I can get her out of Vietnam to America, you can find her a family who would care for her.  She is half American.  She will have no life here.”

“Does her father know about her?”

Anh shook her head.  “He died before she was born.”

“I don’t know what I can do, Anh.”

“You are smart, Melly.  You have power – your boss in America, your father.  Help me.  I beg you.  There is nothing I am asking for myself.  Only for Tien.  Please!”

Anh clutched Mel’s hand, and in her touch Mel felt a force that she knew would stop at nothing to save her daughter.  Mel had already witnessed that force in her friend.

Anh had once saved Mel’s life.  The first year she was in Saigon, Mel had made mistakes, not knowing whom to trust, where it was safe for a woman to walk alone.  She’d been grabbed, dragged into an alley.  Anh had seen her attacker, followed them, and put the knife she always carried against the attacker’s throat, spewing a string of expletives and threats.  The boy let go of Mel and ran.

“What did you say to him?” Mel had asked her later, when Anh took her to her bar for a drink.

“I told him my pimp would cut his balls off.”

It was after that experience that Mel cut her hair and took to wearing baggy clothes.

Mel knew she could not refuse to help.

“Take me tomorrow to St. Agnes.  I’ll see what I can do.”