Absolution: A Novel

by Alice McDermott

Genres: Historical Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

 

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Release date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 338

Sample

THERE WERE SO MANY COCKTAIL PARTIES in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon we called them garden parties, but they were cocktail parties nonetheless.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading, writing letters home—those fragile, pale blue airmail letters with their complex folds; evidence, I think now, of how exotic distance itself once seemed.

I’d do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging—wedding stationery with my still-new initials, real ink, and cunning turns of phrase, bits of French, exclamation marks galore. The fan moving overhead and the heat encroaching even through the slatted blinds of the shaded room, the spice of sandalwood from the joss stick on the dresser.

Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my afternoon nap, damp hair on my neck as I removed the shower cap, a haze of talcum. Still wrapped in the towel, I could feel the perspiration prick my skin. Face powder, rouge, lipstick. And then the high-waisted cotton underpants (I hope you’re laughing), the formidable cotton bra, the panty girdle with the shining diamond of brighter elastic at its center. The click of the garters. Stockings slipped over the hand and held up to the light, reinforced toe and heel and top.

We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run.

You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home.

Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I’d be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself.

And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful.

It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We’d only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed.

I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I’d taught kindergarten at a parish school in Harlem, but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband.

That was the word I used. It was, in fact, the word my own father had used, taking both my gloved hands in his as we waited for the wedding guests to file into our church in Yonkers. This was in the bride’s waiting room, a small chamber well off the vestibule. I recall a tiny stained-glass window, a kneeling bench (for last-minute prayer, I suppose), a box of tissues (for last-minute tears) on a shelf under an ornate mirror, and the two brocade chairs where we sat. The cool odor of old stone and the fresh flowers in my bouquet. My father took both my hands and held them together on the wide tulle skirt of my wedding dress, which even in the dim light of the tiny room was winking with seed pearls.

He said, “Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown.”

I said, “I will.”

* * *

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO POSED so prettily with her parents and her baby brother was you.

She was about seven or eight, in her Sunday best like the rest of us: a crisp yellow dress, nearly gold, with pleats at the bodice, scalloped collar and sleeves. She held a Barbie doll in the crook of her arm, like a scepter. It must have been the first Barbie doll I’d ever seen.

After the family was introduced—my husband knew the husband, had already met the wife as well—I leaned down to ask her about the doll, as you do with children. To tell the truth, I was happy to give her my attention, pretending to be a kindly adult.

I hadn’t yet lost the shyness that plagued me then; I had only managed to put it aside—to steady my hands before I extended them and to breathe deeply before I spoke. I wanted to be a helpmeet to my husband, and these gatherings, cocktail parties and garden parties and dinners with embassy people and military people and corporate people and advisors of all kinds, were, as my husband put it, how things got done in Saigon.

The little girl spoke softly, with the manners—she said, “Yes, ma’am”—that were taken for granted in children, in those days. Seen but not heard. Nearly whispering, she touched the doll’s little shoes—open-toed high heels—and the pretty floral dress she wore, explaining that the doll arrived wearing only a bathing suit, but that any number of outfits could be purchased: cocktail dresses, uniforms—nurse or stewardess—even a wedding gown that cost, and here she grew breathless with the astonishment of it, five dollars.

From the small purse on her arm she withdrew a tiny booklet, illustrated with all the outfits the doll might wear.

Two men had joined the adult conversation that was just above our heads, blocking me, or so I saw it, from their circle. I didn’t want to straighten up and turn away from the child—she was so earnest. Nor did I want to linger on the periphery of these grown-ups, waiting to be invited back in. So I took the little girl aside a bit, to a wicker settee just beyond the trellis of flowers. Together we turned the pages of the catalogue, and she told me which outfits she already owned and which she was “asking for.” Many of these she had already marked with a careful X.

There was an aunt in New York City, she explained. A businesswoman who was the regular source for these gifts. Who, in fact, the child told me, sometimes wore a tweed suit with a matching pillbox hat exactly like the one pictured in the catalogue, an outfit called “Career Girl.”

Well, it was all charming to me. I had grown up with broad-faced baby dolls that came with only a party dress or a coat and a bonnet, and my playtime consisted of pushing a doll carriage up and down the sidewalk, or holding to the doll’s rosebud mouth a plastic baby spoon of imaginary food. But here was a doll that did not require naps or airings or pretend feedings. A doll meant for a thousand different games: nurse, stewardess, plantation belle, sorority girl, night club singer in a sultry gown (“très chic,” I said to my little friend), bride.

The girl’s mother soon joined us, her plump baby boy in her arms.

Charlene was young and freckled, with thick strawberry blond hair that she wore pushed back with a small headband. Her nose was pert, her darting eyes a deep hazel. There was something both regal and feral about the way the straight line of her scalp met her tanned forehead. I recognized her type from my days at Marymount: she had the healthy, athletic, genetic—as I thought of it—confidence of one born to wealth. The first thing she asked me, in fact, was if I played tennis; she was looking for a partner. I did not.

Then she leaned across her daughter, holding out the baby, offering him to me.

“Would you mind taking him for a sec?” she asked, giving me no option, really. Had I not reached up, she seemed ready to let him roll to the ground. “I have got to go tinkle,” she whispered.

I’d noticed this before, among girls of her tribe: they knew an easy mark, a girl of lesser means who would be reflexively—genetically—disposed to do for her whatever she asked.

“I’d love to,” I said, and meant it. I took the baby from her, a big, warm bundle in his pale blue romper. He was now wide-eyed. She straightened up—“only a sec,” she said—and had no sooner gone into the house when his little mouth crumpled and he began to whimper. I lifted him to my chest, held him under my chin. I patted his back to soothe him. He quieted nicely.

We were hoping to start a family of our own—any month now, was how I’d come to think of it—and I felt a surge of confidence. I would be a marvelous mother.

Then the baby hiccuped once or twice, and I felt the warmth of his spit-up on my bare throat. A second later, just as I tried to ease him from my breast, he began to vomit, effortlessly, copiously, as babies do. I felt it running down my dress. That bland, wheaty odor of baby formula—no more awful, really, in that it was regurgitated. I felt it pool warmly in my bra.