Love, Dad

12

He called his attorney. His attorney said there was no need for alarm but that it might be wise to call the State Department in Washington to see if they might be able to help him in locating Lissie. The man he spoke to there was named Mr. Brothers. Mr. Brothers told him there was virtually nothing the State Department could do. Unless they knew his daughter’s address, there was no way their various consuls in Asia could even begin making inquiries. He suggested that Jamie contact him again the moment he knew where his daughter could be reached. Jamie thanked him, and then hung up. He had called the State Department because he’d wanted help in locating his daughter; he had just been told to call back after he’d located his daughter.

He was a stranger to the part of the world in which his daughter was traveling. He telephoned the India Government Tourist Office and asked for a map to supplement the one in his 1967 Rand McNally Atlas, and then bought a half-dozen more maps in the Doubleday near Fifty-seventh. Some of them proved worthless while others were so detailed and sophisticated that they listed currency rates, time changes, temperatures and rainfalls at various times of the year, and even unlighted tollgates one might expect to encounter at night. The roadmaps gave him a sense of security. The countries through which she had passed, the country in which she was now traveling (presumably) seemed more civilized than he’d imagined them to be; there were primary roads and secondary roads and even little back roads, just as there were in Connecticut.

Like an armchair general planning a fall campaign, Jamie spread his roadmaps on the long table in the barn and tried to second-guess Lissie’s route.

Had she entered India at Lahore, which seemed likely, and then continued on to Delhi and eastward to Calcutta? Or had she gone up to Nepal instead? It was supposed to be beautiful there in Nepal, maybe they went right out of Delhi into Nepal, looks like maybe, what can this be, maybe nine hundred miles to Katmandu, that’s where they may have headed, supposed to be terrific there in Katmandu, temples and everything, monks, whatever, would have taken them maybe, well, how many miles a day would they be averaging, oh, figure thirty miles an hour, maybe a bit more, but say thirty and play it safe. So figure two hundred, two hundred and fifty miles a day, no more than that, they’d have been in Katmandu — well, let’s say they spent at least a few days in Delhi, let’s say they left Delhi on the twenty-first, they’d be in Katmandu by, where’s the calendar, well, I don’t need a calendar, just divide nine hundred by two-fifty, that’s close to four days, they’d have been in Katmandu by the twenty-fourth of August.

He made this calculation on Sunday, August 30, sixteen days after Lissie had written her last letter home. At a dinner party that night, he learned that both Reynolds McGruder here in Rutledge, and Matthew Bridges in nearby Talmadge, had a month ago received telegrams from the Defense Department stating that their respective sons had been killed in action. Apparently both young men (their lieutenants’ letters to each family read like carbon copies of each other) had been engaged in dropping supplies to a beleaguered South Vietnamese rifle company when the Vietcong opened fire and blasted the hovering helicopter out of the sky. It seemed as though Charlie hadn’t heard that the Americans might be pulling out. Or perhaps Charlie had simply decided that dropping ammunition and food could be considered aiding and abetting the enemy. Either way, Roger Bridges (who would have been twenty-one this month) and David McGruder (whose twentieth birthday would have come in December) would never again or respectively play drums and lead guitar in the group they had formed two years ago.