Coming Home From Vietnam

---

---

He was stunned when Ginny didn’t meet him at the airport. Her letters had tapered off in the last year. They were chatty and light, but with no intimacy. Could have been from his sister, or a next-door neighbor.

“You need a ride, soldier?” Tony had finally left the terminal and was standing out front without any idea what direction to go in when the taxi pulled up.

“Sunnyside. Queens Boulevard and 36th Street.”

When Ginny didn’t show he’d called her mother, who sounded surprised to hear from him. But she said she couldn’t tell him where Ginny was. So he was going to Theresa’s house. Ginny and Theresa were the closest sisters he knew. If anyone could tell him where to find Ginny, it would be Theresa.

He checked the time. 10:30. Late to visit a family with small kids. But he had a feeling that if he didn’t go in person nobody was going to tell him anything about Ginny.

By the time the cab fought its way through the jams on the Van Wyck and the Grand Central it was almost 11:30. Nobody answered the bell, but he kept ringing.

“Theresa, it’s Tony. Tony Alberino."

He thought she said “Shit” but he couldn’t be sure because her voice was muffled on the speaker.

“Give me a minute Tony, I’m not dressed.”

She buzzed him in and he took his time walking up the three flights.

The door opened as he reached it. She must have been looking through the peephole. Theresa resembled Ginny enough that he had to catch his breath. They were beautiful girls. Classic Irish beauties. Red hair, freckled skin, blue eyes like crystals.

She kissed him. They had all hung out together. She eventually paired off with Greg Williams and Ginny ended up with Tony. They all knew what the rest of their lives were going to be like. Until Vietnam. Greg had a touch of scoliosis so he was 4-F. But Tony opted for Officer’s Training School when they gave him the choice. Because the pay was better and it would look good on his resume after he got out. But that meant three years and Ginny wasn’t happy.

Her letters were full of loneliness and longing in the beginning. She had lost her mooring, she wrote him. It had been Ginny and Tony for so long. Who was Ginny without Tony?

It would always be Ginny and Tony, he wrote back. It didn’t matter where they were. They were in each other’s heads and that couldn’t change.

---

---

But it did. Not for him. Vietnam didn’t offer him any alternatives to Ginny. Things were so bad there that they made him remember all the more vividly what he had left behind. It changed for Ginny, though. At eighteen three years was a lifetime. And she was beautiful.

“You know why I’m here, Theresa. I’m looking for Ginny. I talked to your mother but I couldn’t find out anything. What’s going on? Ginny knew I was flying in tonight. I’ve got to know what the deal is.”

Theresa looked at him with Ginny’s eyes. “She should have told you. I said that to her. You have a right to know. But she was afraid if something happened to you over there that it would be the last thing you knew and she couldn’t do that to you.”

She took a long breath and looked away. “She’s married. Six months ago. Met someone at work. College guy. It happened really fast. She was so lonely and he just came around at the right time.”

“I need to know where she is. What is her address, her phone number. I’ve got to talk to her. She owes me that much.”

“I don’t know, Tony. I don’t think it’s a good idea. Wait till you’re back a while and you’re used to being out of the army. It’s not going to do you or her any good.”

“How do you know what’s going to do me good? All that time I spent thinking about her face, her voice. I held onto the idea of us. In one night you tell me that doesn’t exist. I got a right to see her. To hear it from her. I was faithful to her. I earned the right.”

The part about being faithful wasn’t exactly true. But he didn’t count the hookers, which was the only relief, besides weed, that he could find when he was over there.

Theresa gave him the phone number, because he wouldn’t leave without it. But she made him swear that he would wait till the next day. And he really meant to.

His old watering hole was open. Could have been the night before he left, the place was so unchanged. Even some of the same old people.

The reception was warm, in a bleary kind of way. Everyone, including the bartender, was watered up by that time. Most people who had a life were home by midnight. The rest had no reason to stop drinking.

Tony closed the place down, the way he had so many times before he got serious with Ginny. His apartment was a short taxi ride away. But he didn’t want to go there.

He stopped at a pay phone and found the coin slot jammed with bubble gum. The one next to it gave a clear dial tone when he put his money in.

It didn’t ring very long. Theresa must have called Ginny and warned her he had her number.

“Tony?”

“What’d you do Ginny? What’d you go and do? Where am I supposed to go now? What about us? What about everything we planned?”

“Tony, it just happened. I’m sorry. I tried. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what was going to happen to you. I’m sorry, I meant to wait. You’ve got to forgive me Tony. You’ve got to forgive me or I can’t stand it.”

He hung up the phone. That was his Ginny. He could forgive Ginny anything. But he couldn’t handle this.

He left the phone booth and headed down the street toward his empty apartment. All that time in Vietnam he had learned how to live with danger and not be afraid. Suddenly, for the first time since he was a child, there on the safe sidewalks of Sunnyside, he feared the dark.