Chapter 43: The Family

WITHOUT REALLY TELLING Xian what I was doing, I led her to the guest room. Oh, I slept with her. We made love. I made sure she had everything she needed in the bathroom. But I felt that the huge double-double bed in the master bedroom would be intimidating with just the two of us. I really wanted our first night in that bed to be with all my wives. I hoped I wasn’t dreaming.

I woke in the morning to the ringing of the phone at four o’clock.

“You’re there! Oh, I’m so glad you are home,” Anna shouted. “Oh, I love you and I miss you and I can’t wait to be in your arms. And that goes for six of us!”

“Six?”

“Didn’t you get the message that Adrienne is with us, too? We’re all just getting ready to board our flight to Detroit. We couldn’t get a non-stop to Toronto. We’ll be arriving at 1:20 Detroit time.”

“Okay, got it. We’ll meet you there. We can fit everyone in the Suburban.”

“We?”

“Yes. I have a dependent I signed for in Saigon. She is with me.”

“So, there will be eight of us? Okay. We can all fit. We shipped most things. Did they arrive?”

“I’m not sure. I just got in last night and didn’t check thoroughly to see if Melinda received anything. I’ll check, but it’s only four in the morning here.”

“Oops! I’ll let you get another couple of hours of sleep before you have to leave for Detroit.”

“I love you, Anna.”

“That goes for all six of us here, Nate. We love you like crazy!”

“I’m so glad. I miss you.”

“They’ve called us to board. Gotta go now, love.”

“See you soon.”

I’d spoken to at least one of my wives. I’d have them all in my arms in a matter of hours. Was I a coward not to have told them I was married? I didn’t think so. I simply thought it would be better to be face to face and not on a rushed international phone call.

Going back to sleep was a non-starter. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table. Thinking.

I woke Xian at eight. We had a three-hour-plus drive to get to the airport. Of course, I wanted to be there early for their 1:20 flight. But first, I fed her and went to the studio again to check for boxes. In fact, one corner of the studio was stacked with boxes from Oman. That was good. Our things had arrived.

Xian and I returned by the route we had driven the previous evening, and were at the airport by noon. I rented an airport trolley to wait for their luggage and then Xian and I headed for customs.

And waited.

Yes, the plane landed on-time at 1:22, but then it was ten minutes to the gate and longer yet to get the jetway attached. Then people had to go through border control and clear their luggage through customs. It was faster for my family as they all showed black US passports and were waved through.

And then I saw them.

Toni, of course, came running to me and I caught the little girl up in my arms and swung her around before the rest of the family caught up. My family! My family was home. I kissed each of my wives and Adrienne. I had Toni in one arm and Alex in the other. And I was crying so hard I couldn’t see them. I had my family in my arms.

“I never ever want to be parted from you again,” I sobbed. “Never!”

“I’ll drink to that!” Toni exclaimed.

“As we all will, sweetie. Introduce us, Nate,” Ronda said.

“My wives, this is Xian,” I said, pulling Xian forward.

“You can call me China if it is easier,” she quickly said.

Ronda smiled at her and quickly hugged the girl.

“Unless you prefer us to call you China, I assure you we can all learn to pronounce your name. It’s Sh-yen?”

“Yes. Thank you ... um ... Ronda.”

“You are adorable! We have to hear all the story,” Anna said, hugging Xian.

“Um...” Xian was cut off by Patricia’s hug and then Adrienne’s. They were impressed that she knew everyone’s name.

“Family, let’s move aside so we aren’t blocking the exit,” I said. “There’s something very important I need to tell you.”

We moved aside and other tearful reunions filled the gap we vacated.

“What is it, Nate? You sound really serious,” Anna said.

“I am. Xian is not just my dependent. She’s my wife.”

There was a collective gasp.

“What?” Patricia practically screamed. “Wife?”

“Sweetheart, please listen. We were trying to get as many people as possible out of Vietnam before the collapse. The way we managed it was to create an affidavit of support, indicating that there was a sponsor who would be responsible for their transportation, integration into society, and livelihood. Xian had been my assistant all month and would have been imprisoned or possibly even executed if she’d been left behind. So, I signed an affidavit of support to bring her along.”

“And married her?” Patricia insisted.

“No. That was not the intent. When we got to the ship, we continued to work as fast as we could to get more people out. We got over a hundred thousand people evacuated.”

“Not by marrying them,” Patricia insisted.

“No. Honey, please. We had to appear before the ambassador. He said the affidavit of support was only for immediate relatives and we couldn’t use it for an assistant. Then he asked if I’d support her and asked her if she agreed, then said he pronounced us man and wife and had us sign the certificate.”

“And you just signed it?” Patricia demanded.

“Yes. He told us there was no other way he would approve her immigration. What was I supposed to do? Leave her?” I asked.

I was addressing everything to Patricia because it was obvious, she was the most struck by what I’d done. We’d had a child together. I adopted her first child. I was pleading with her. She shook her head a little and Anna stepped in.

“So, is this like a marriage of convenience and once she’s settled, you get a divorce?”

“It could have been, I suppose.”

“Have you slept with...?” Ronda started, then snorted. “Why am I asking? Of course you have. How could you not? I’d have slept with her.”

“Please, Mrs. Wives. Please, Miss Mistress,” Xian said. “Nate could have left me in Saigon. He could have refused the marriage forced on us by the ambassador. He could have rejected me from his bed. He could have left me in Chicago. It would have broken my heart, but I would have understood. I knew about all of you and I promised I would never allow our relationship to come between you and him. If it has, you can leave me here in Detroit and ... and...”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said. “This is a shock to us, but we aren’t throwing anyone away. Right, Patricia?”

Patricia nodded and cast her eyes down.

“We all need to get our crap in the car and go home,” Ronda said. “We have emotions boiling to the surface that none of us are prepared to deal with. We simply need to breathe and rejoice in being back together.”

“I agree,” Adrienne said, surprising us all. She hadn’t said anything since she arrived. “I think everyone should remember that if anyone needs to be punished for what has happened, it is not the innocent. It is me.”

“Oh, my sweet Fifi. In this you are innocent. I will bear my own punishment.”

“Daddy,” Toni said, with her fingers in my hair, as we turned to roll the trolley toward the parking lot. “Why your hair a different color?”

“What, honey? What do you mean?”

“It’s all white.”

“Oh, my God!” Patricia exclaimed. “Oh, Nate, I’m so sorry I snapped. It must have been terrible! Your temples are all gray! I was so wrapped up in my own feelings that I didn’t even notice.”

“I guess I haven’t really looked in a mirror,” I said. “Does Daddy look old, honey?”

“Pretty, Daddy. Dance?”

With my two daughters in my arms, I spun and jogged and two-stepped all the way to the car. Toni and Alex kept petting the tears away from my face. My arms ached with holding the two girls, but I wouldn’t let them go.

I don’t know how we figured out how to divide things up. I know the luggage got stowed in the back, I rode in the last seat with the little girls. Ronda took charge of Xian and rode with her in the second seat. Fifi drove with Patricia and Anna beside her.

I guess it was a way to keep my wives from pummeling me with questions while we were in the confines of the car for four hours. We stopped for dinner in London. Anna and Patricia wrapped arms around me as Ronda held Xian’s hand. Our dear pet, Aunt Addi, took care of the children.

“I can feel your ribs. You’ve lost weight, too,” Patricia said. “Nate, it’s like you’ve been gone years. Are you the same husband we know and love?”

“I hope so, precious. You still mean more to me than the world. I’ve been so lost without you. I’m never going back on the road again. I quit the State Department. Turned in my passport, camera, badge, and everything.”

“Will you be okay, love?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know, Anna. Being okay means having and loving my family. Being with you. Have I destroyed what we had? If so, I’ll never be okay. I couldn’t find you. I called the embassy. I sent a telex to the office. No one knew where you were. Robert and Joanne went to the house and found it empty. I was desperate. And they were bombing the airport. We could feel each impact, even when we were in the air and all huddled together, praying we’d make it out alive. People were falling. I tried to help people. I just wanted to get everyone out. I just wanted to come home.”

“We’ll adjust,” Patricia said. She was crying on one side of me and Anna on the other side. “We just need a little time to get back together.”

“I love you so much. I love you,” I repeated.

Somehow, we managed to pull ourselves together enough to eat and not make a spectacle of ourselves. Positions changed when we left for the last leg home. Fifi sat with the girls playing a French word game. Anna drove. I sat in the middle with Ronda next to me. Patricia sat in the second seat with Xian.

“All we managed to take on the helicopter with us was what we were wearing and the stupid embassy passport camera,” I said just loudly enough for Anna and Ronda to hear me. “A woman ... the ambassador’s secretary ... fell a few feet from the helicopter. I gave Xian the trolley with the equipment so I could pick up the secretary. The poor girl couldn’t handle everything and she ditched our suitcase so she could pull the trolley on. Then Bruce almost didn’t make it and I had to pull him into the helicopter before the ramp was closed on him.”

“It sounds heroic,” Ronda said.

“It was desperate,” I answered. “It was all we could do.”

“I panicked,” Anna said. “When we found out Ronda was sick, I grabbed her crew and ordered them to take us to London. I didn’t trust anyone in Muscat. All we could get was a nurse who said she thought it was meningitis and gave her aspirin. I should have at least coordinated things better. Not having a phone in the house ... I just carried her to the airplane and sat with her head in my lap the whole way. I kept thinking that at least in London, I could speak the same language and understand what the doctors were telling me. I was so afraid I’d lost her.”

“You took care of me, sweetheart. You got me the help I needed. I can’t thank you enough,” Ronda said. “Poor Patricia. We abandoned her. Left her with the kids in a foreign country with no phone and no transportation. It was brilliant that she thought of Adrienne. I’m not sure Adrienne even used an airplane getting to Oman. She might have beamed across. She was there so fast and brought Patricia and the girls to us in London.”

“By the time they got there, I managed to reach Jane and Peter. As soon as Ronda was out of the hospital and the rest of the family was there, they took us all to Plympford and just babied all of us until Ronda regained her strength. Of course, with Peter and Derek and James all there, the girls were in heaven.”

“I couldn’t figure out why no one from the office had contacted me,” Ronda picked up. “The news from Vietnam was totally disastrous. The pictures. I finally got through to Josie and she said she’d received a telex that you were safe on board a ship. So, we told her we’d head for Stratford and she should have you go there as soon as you could arrange a flight.”

“I didn’t get any of those messages until I walked into the office Thursday morning. By then, I was so frantic I wasn’t thinking straight. Mr. Martin didn’t come in until three, so Josie told me to go get a haircut and we bought some clothes. Funny I never noticed the gray.”

“You’re very distinguished-looking,” Anna said, lifting a hand from the steering wheel to pet the side of my head.

“But way too thin. Did you eat at all while you were there?”

“I confess, I don’t remember a single meal. The cantina was really just a glorified snack bar. They served some kind of egg with rice and hot dog chunks for breakfast, I remember. Xian would bring me a sandwich for lunch or dinner. It wasn’t bad at first. We had time to sit by the pool at night and drink a beer. But after the first weekend, the pace picked up because the ambassador was sick, so I started going into the office in the middle of the night to validate passports and get them back to the agents.”

“How’d you manage to validate passports?” Ronda asked. “Steal the embassy seal?”

“The last thing Mr. Martin did before we left Manila was give me a State Department seal and tell me the Secretary of State wanted to get as many people as possible out of Vietnam. I didn’t tell anyone I had it and probably misused it grossly, but it came in handy. We printed around a hundred thousand Affidavits of Support and I applied the seal to every one of them. My hand and arm are still so weak I was worried about picking up the girls. I’ll probably have Popeye forearms.”

“A hundred thousand?” Anna asked. “How many people evacuated? All we saw or heard about was people being picked up off the roof of some hotel.”

“We started with three or four thousand babies,” I said. “They called it Operation Babylift and we got out all the orphans and mixed-race babies we could find. But then we got word that American citizens could bring their spouses and immediate families. I think Immigration and Customs was thinking children. But the immediate family in Vietnam includes in-laws and even cousins. The downside was that we couldn’t get all of them visas. We couldn’t even process the applications that fast. So, they got affidavits that basically said their sponsor would support them, provide for them, and furnish their transportation.”

“And that’s what you signed for Xian?” Ronda said.

“Yeah. If I had put down that she was my daughter rather than that she was my assistant, I doubt there would have been any questions asked. A nun claimed a thousand children as hers and they all got out.”

“The number, Nate. How many people got out?”

“By the twenty-fourth, we shipped out 27,000, give or take. In the next six days, another 30,000. 7,500 were lifted out in Operation Frequent Winds during the last eighteen hours. When we got out to the ships, we took on 60,000 more refugees who came in every kind of boat they could find.”

“A hundred ... a hundred and twenty thousand?” Ronda exclaimed loudly enough that everyone in the car looked up. “That’s insane! I can’t imagine even seeing that many applications in a month.”

“Once we were on ship, we continued to produce visas until we ran out of materials. And the shipboard printshop printed another fifty thousand or so affidavits. When we reached Manila, our supplies were replenished and we were joined by the crews we trained at the embassy there. I turned over my equipment and functioned solely in validating the visas. Xian helped by being able to cross check what was written in Vietnamese. We didn’t get to leave Manila until Wednesday night, then flew home via Tokyo. Got in Thursday morning and went straight to the office.”

“It’s a miracle we all managed to find each other again,” Anna said. “We should count each relationship in this car as a part of God’s gift to us.”

I’m surprised we managed to get to bed that night at all. It was awkward. Adrienne called the hotel and I took her over there. I kissed that girl long and hard when we got to her room, but it didn’t go any further than that. She gave me a gentle push toward the door.

“You need to be with your family. I will be here when you’ve worked things out.”

“You can’t even imagine what you mean to me,” I said. “To all of us. Thank you for coming to Patricia’s rescue.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said. She kissed me again and I went back home.

I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I got back home, but the four wives were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. The girls were fast asleep in their room and I popped in to give them a little kiss on the head. There were times the past couple of weeks when I didn’t know if I’d ever see them again and I wiped tears out of my eyes again.

I felt arms wrap around my waist and Patricia hugged me tightly.

“I was mad at you long before you brought Xian home,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t believe that you’d gone off to Vietnam where Tony ... I was so afraid I would lose you, too.”

“I had to, Patricia. I just didn’t have any choice. If I thought I could have saved people and refused ... I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”

“You wouldn’t have been you. The you we love so much and prayed for every single day. Toni taught Alex to pray for Daddy before they went to bed at night. They prayed for you again tonight. And thanked God for bringing you home. I thanked God, too.”

“Mr. Martin once said that he didn’t think I was afraid to die. That part didn’t bother me. But the thought that I might never see you and the girls again haunted me the entire time I was gone.”

“When you told us you brought a dependent, we all thought you’d adopted another child. Seeing a beautiful young woman beside you at the airport was such a shock. And then you said she was your wife.” Tears were streaming from Patricia’s eyes as she hugged herself to my chest. “I always thought ... It was silly ... But I always imagined that one day we’d find a way that I could be your wife. That it wouldn’t just be shared custody of our children, but that we would be a regular family.”

“But...”

“Don’t ask me how. I always thought Ronda and Anna would still be with us and we’d all be married together. I didn’t think it would be such a shock to see another woman—any other woman—married to you. I didn’t think that slip of paper meant that much to me, but I still cherish the certificate your mom signed when she married Tony and me. I should have known.”

“Patricia, do you doubt that I love you as much as I always have?” I asked.

“Oh, Nate, I don’t doubt that you love me far more than you always have. I just have so much to understand. To put my head around. Come, my love. I’m not the only one who needs to have you near.”

Xian had started to go to the guest room, but Anna and Ronda stopped her.

“Xian, I understand if being with us makes you uncomfortable because you still hardly know us,” Anna said. “But we are all wives and we all want to be with our husband. If it is too hard to see any one of us with the man you married, one of us will come with you. But we would like you to come to our family bed. Be one of us.”