gracewillow (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gracewillow) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} tww_fanfiction,@ 2008-04-03 18:42:00 |
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Fic: Marching Orders (1/4) by gracewillow NC-17
Title: Marching Orders (1/4)
Author:gracewillow
Rating: NC-17 for innuendo and squicks
Word Count: 5,479
Characters: Leo, Jenny, Jed, Abbey, Sam (briefly)
Pairings: Leo/Jenny, Jed/Abbey
Spoilers: Season 1; squick alerts: alcoholism, drug addiction, PTSD, suicide
Summary: Leo comes home from Vietnam and finds the adjustment not as easy as he's expecting... though not all bad.
A/N: “Marching Orders” is the first story in my series of stories called Behind Blue Eyes. If y’all like this one, I’ll be posting the others eventually. This one is about Leo’s background, a key point for the rest of BBE. Here are my notes about it.
Re: Leo’s hometown, the series gives mixed messages—sometimes Boston, sometimes Chicago, and because I live where I live, and know the town, I chose Boston. I invented some details about Leo’s and Jenny’s respective upbringings.
Re: the chronology, I had to do some juggling to make certain things fit: length of time Leo has known the Bartlets (see “Bartlet for America”), apparent ages of Leo and the Bartlets, Liz Bartlet’s age, and Leo’s time in Vietnam (that one I had to kind of make up). Sam’s age I just plain dropped by a couple of years, as you’ll see in the second story (patience, patience) but there are reasons for that.
Re: Leo’s sisters: we know nothing about Elizabeth except that she exists (there’s a throwaway line about her in one single episode), and nothing about the respective ages of Leo, Elizabeth and Josephine (who also only appears in one episode), so I chose those details to suit the story.
I’d love to have comments, but please, no flaming. This is my first post. Be gentle with me.
Many thanks to my beta,indigo_inferno.
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Chapter 1.
The bellow shattered the heavenly quiet of early morning in the canteen at Bien Hoa military airport.
“McGarry! Front and center!”
Leo Thomas McGarry, 22 years old and nearing the end of his third year in Vietnam, wished the Colonel hadn’t shouted quite so loudly. He’d already taken two aspirin and he was on his second cup of coffee, but these sovereign remedies had barely taken hold, and his regular morning hangover amplified even the smallest noise to an exquisitely painful degree. And now Colonel Adamley wanted him. He got up, hoping the Colonel didn’t notice him wincing at the clatter of his chair, and made his way to the door.
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to come with me, Captain? We’re going to sit down and chat for a minute.”
“Yes, sir.”
Only as he was crossing the compound in the wake of his commanding officer did it occur to Leo that normally the Colonel would have sent his aide to fetch him. Was something going on that Leo didn’t know about? A transfer? Discipline for some unknown mistake? Or, please God not, bad news from home? As they went into the small and poorly ventilated cement hut that served Adamley for an office, the adrenaline rush was starting to wash out the alcohol-induced headache. Well, at least fear’s good for something, Leo told himself as he came to a stop at the Colonel’s desk.
“Have a seat,” Adamley said as he plopped himself down in his desk chair. “Have some coffee, son,” and he pushed a cup across the desk at Leo, who, not knowing what else to do, sipped in stupid silence. “I have some news for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now don’t look like that. Everybody at home’s fine. It’s good news. For you, anyway. Me, I’m losing my best pilot.”
Out the back window of the hut Leo could see rank upon rank of the fighter planes belonging to the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing. One of them was his. South, beyond the planes, was the skyline of Saigon, such as it was. But losing? So it was a transfer…
“Your enlistment’s up, son. You’re going home.”
“What?” Leo said blankly, leaving off the “sir” for the first time since induction day.
The Colonel looked amused. “You lose track of time somewhere? You signed up for four years. Time’s up. Here’s your orders. You’re on the seven-thirty flight out. Thirty-six hours and you’ll be stateside.”
“Sir, is this—is this for real?”
“It’s for real, son. Go get packed and say your goodbyes. This isn’t a flight you’re going to want to miss.”
“No, sir,” Leo said, standing up and trying hard not to shake. He would never know whether it worked or not—or so he thought, never expecting to see Adamley again and have the chance to ask the question. And he more or less didn’t care. His headache was completely gone. Too bad this is only a one-time cure… “Thank you very much, sir.”
“We’ll be missing you, son. Send us some good news from home.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.” But it was December, 1969, and the people who were making the news back home were not supportive of the troops fighting this war. Leo tucked his travel orders inside his jacket and shook the Colonel’s offered hand, then gave him one last salute. He’d have to hustle now—not to get to the transport area, which was only on the other side of the base, but to say those goodbyes. Soon enough the other pilots would be fueling their planes, loading the bombs, and climbing aboard for the day’s mission, whatever that might be.
He walked to the barracks at a seemly pace but with his heart racing. His friend Clew Mallory looked up. “Where ya been, Catman? Breakfast’s been over for hours.”
Breakfast had been over for all of fifteen minutes, but things ran on a tight schedule around here, and some of the pilots were already suiting up.
“Colonel wanted me for a mission, Clueless,” Leo said. You didn’t waltz in exulting about your discharge papers to guys who were going up fighting in less than two hours. Even if your heart was singing about it.
“Yeah?” Mallory said.
“Yeah. Move it, you’re sitting on my trunk.”
“You’re taking your trunk in a Thunderchief?” Wes “Jackal” Jarvis said doubtfully.
“No. Air Force transport to Manila.”
“Home leave?” Mallory said, getting off the trunk, one of many that served as chairs and tables in the sparsely furnished barracks.
Leo said, “Sort of,” and flipped the trunk open. He started moving his neatly folded uniforms into it from his locker. When he was done with his clothes he started in on his personal items—pictures from home, letters, all the accumulated clutter and paraphernalia of a year’s training and three years’ active duty. By then guys were looking at each other, and then at him, and then at Mallory, who was his wingman and (in complete contradiction to his callsign-nickname) the smartest man in the barracks and its de facto leader. So it fell to “Clueless” Mallory to ask, “Catman—just how long is this leave you’re getting?”
“Kinda long,” Leo acknowledged, looking around his bunk for anything he might have missed. Things he might want on the flight—series of flights—he started putting into a smaller duffel bag.
“How long?” Mallory persisted, with every man in the barracks paying attention.
“Well,” Leo said, leaving the duffel bag alone for a moment, and turning around to sit on his bunk and face the other men, “it’s pretty long.”
Mallory said evenly, “Not medical.”
“No. That thing with the hard landing was months ago. I mean, the doc said I might walk a little funny sometimes—he said he couldn’t do anything about it, it being my tailbone and all—but apart from that, I’m healthier than you are, Clueless. For damn sure I can still drink you under the table.”
The barracks broke up in a wave of laughter. Leo could do that, and regularly did. But Mallory was still on the trail. “How long, Catman?”
“Pretty long, Clueless. It…” This was harder than he’d expected. “It looks like I got my discharge papers, guys.”
Mallory’s eyes widened and his jaw tightened, and he looked away for a moment, swallowing. When he looked back at Leo, his eyes were wet. “Aw, shit, Leo,” he said. “Who the hell’m I supposed to fly with now? Old Dinky over there?”
“Dinky doesn’t fly,” Mike Rothman declared from the corner bunk. “He just takes a puff of that stuff he smokes, spreads out his arms, and hoo-wee, he’s up in the air all by himself. Don’t need no airplane.”
Dinky, who was of course the largest man in the barracks, smiled genially. “Hey, guys, I keep offering…”
“Clew, man, I’m sorry,” Leo said, using his wingman’s right name for once. “I hate to leave you guys like this. I wish I could take you with me.”
“And pigs fly through the skies right alongside us,” Mallory sighed. “No, Catman, I know you wish you could bring us home in your trunk, but there’s no way you’re sorry you’re going home, so don’t give me that shit.”
“Yeah. Well.” Leo looked around at the 19 other men in C barracks, all of whom had their own thoughts of home, family, and loved ones versus the mission they would be up and flying in an hour and a half.
He finished packing, shook hands with the guys, found the other people he wanted to say goodbye to, and brought his trunk and duffel bag to the transportation garage with Mallory’s help. “You don’t need to hang out here, Clueless,” Leo said. “I got half an hour to go.”
“I got time,” the other man said. “Listen—Leo—there’s something I need to ask you. In case something happens to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“Okay, but listen, just in case, will ya? You know I don’t have much family. My dad’s dead, my mother remarried, then she died, so it’s just my stepfather and my little sister. I don’t care much for my stepfather. I mean, he’s not a bad guy. Just we never really got along. Plus I was too old to need much more fathering. But Sarah’s only ten. And if I do something stupid—no, listen, okay? Something happens to me, I want you to look in on her sometimes. You’ll be in Boston, they’re just up north from you. Would you do that?”
“Do it without anything stupid happening to you, you asshole. You know that. But nothing’s going to goddamn happen to you.”
“Leo, just promise me. Okay? All she’ll have is her father. And you’ll have known me, you’ll have known something about what might have happened. I just want you to talk to her. Would you?”
“Okay,” Leo said quietly. It was what you did, if you could. “I promise.”
They sat on the bench outside the garage, speaking in fits and starts. In a way it was a relief when an Army corporal drove up in a green Army Jeep and said, “Major McGarry?”
“Uh—” Leo said, confused. “I’m Captain McGarry…”
“I got orders for a major by that name.”
Mallory started laughing. “Check your orders, Catman. What do you want to bet there’s a promotion hidden in there that the Colonel stuck in for a surprise? Go on, take a look.”
Leo took the papers from his jacket and checked, and just as Mallory had predicted, there it was: an order promoting him one rank, with a note in Adamley’s handwriting clipped to the typewritten sheet.
December 10, 1969
Saigon, South Vietnam
Major McGarry,
It’s been a pleasure having such a fine pilot and officer serve under me. I’m sorry to be losing you, but I cannot in good conscience ask you to re-up. The present unpopularity at home of the Vietnam conflict can’t hurt me; I’m a career man, there will be other posts for me to serve in, and people will think what they want to think about the fact that I served here. You, however, came into the service under different circumstances, and you are at the stage of your life where you should be getting an education, going to work, starting a family, not getting old and crotchety like me. So go home and enjoy your life, son.
“Old, ha,” Leo muttered. The Colonel would never be old. Your C.O. would never be old.
The note continued:
Please note that the promotion is backdated three months, and that I had the company clerk include a chit for the back pay. Consider it a wedding gift in advance. Please also find attached my own oak leaves. Consider that a present to that nice girl of yours and a mark of my
Deepest respect,
Col. Alan Adamley, USAF
“Sir, you coming?” the corporal inquired. “I mean, if you’re the major and all.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Leo said. Shrugging, the corporal hefted Leo’s trunk and duffel bag into the back of the jeep, leaving Leo with nothing to do but say goodbye to the man he had fought side-by-side with for three long years.
“Aw, shit,” Mallory said. “You write to me, Leo, you hear me?”
“And you,” Leo said. “You have the address? Boston?”
“Yeah.”
“Sir?” the Army driver said. “We gotta get moving.”
Leo gave in and let emotion guide him into a rare embrace. Mallory hugged him hard, quickly, man-to-man, with a rough buffet on the back, and stepped back. “Catch you on the upswing,” he said, turned around and walked away.
Only as the transport plane rumbled along the runway and clawed its clumsy way towards the skies did Leo understand that he was leaving Saigon. Only as it turned and banked southwards over the city and the civilian airport at Tan Son Nhut did he understand that he was at last leaving Vietnam. But the greatest realization of all came only when the plane was far out over the South China Sea, on the way to the Philippines, and he opened his packet of orders again to find his new insignia and pin them on his collar. His eyes fell on Adamley’s note, and something about it was nudging at the back of his mind, but it took three passes to find the thing he needed, and even then it was a moment before he actually figured it out.
December 10th, he thought. Okay, so it’s three days after Pearl Harbor Day. So why is that bugging me?
Then it finally hit.
Going home.
To be discharged.
In December.
God Almighty, but I could be home for Christmas.
Several months later Leo received a letter—two—one from Adamley, but he had already heard from Jackal Jarvis, telling him that Clew Mallory’s plane had been shot up by a Viet Cong gunner over the Plain of Reeds and gone down in flames. They had recovered Mallory’s body a day later.
And he did meet Adamley again, a long time later, under circumstances he could not have dreamed of as he left Bien Hoa—in his own White House office, debating the merits of an international war crimes court. But from Leo’s point of view, these two events lay in the future. All he knew at this moment was unbearable anticipation. The plane had its landing gear down—he had felt the movement through the skin of the airplane, first a rumbling vibration (much deeper than that of a Thunderchief), then a firm ka-chunk—and in that much time he would be back in Boston, home, his parents and sisters waiting for him at the terminal…
He had called them from San Francisco three days earlier. The Air Force transport had trundled down onto the base’s main runway at precisely eighteen hundred hours, Pacific Standard Time, December 10th, 1969—thanks to the international dateline, the same day he’d left Bien Hoa. Twenty minutes later Leo had been in the base commander’s office. A blessedly compassionate and efficient red-tape machine had had him processed out in the space of two days. On December 12th he received his honorable discharge, his last two weeks’ pay (plus the back pay as major, and all of it in genuine U.S. dollars, not military scrip), a handshake from the base commander, and a bundle of tickets for the first commercial airplanes he’d flown on in four years. Well, three years, really. He’d had one long weekend in Boston just before they sent him over to Vietnam, and he’d flown commercial for that. But he figured he was off Air Force planes for good now.
And so San Francisco to Chicago, Chicago to Pittsburgh (with an overnight there; but too tired from traveling, from three years of combat, from everything, to even dream of going into town to find some fun, he spent it just sleeping in the airport motel), Pittsburgh to LaGuardia in New York, and now, finally, New York to Boston.
The wheels thumped down onto the runway, he closed his eyes in gratitude, and to his surprise tears rolled out from under the lids. Home. My God. I never thought I’d be this grateful to see anything. Ever. But I’m home.
He fiercely wiped the tears off before he left the plane; he was not facing his family looking like a crybaby. He’d had a seat near the back of the plane, but urgency overtook courtesy when he reached the jetway. He started hurrying past the other debarking passengers, apologizing breathlessly when his swinging duffel bag brushed against them. Halfway up the slanted floor he started running.
Home. My home turf. My own country. The San Francisco base hadn’t seemed real, had only seemed like another military base (which, of course, it was). He hadn’t left it even for a moment’s time to stretch his legs. He had only wanted to stick close to the people who were processing his discharge papers.
He reached the end of the jetway and slowed down, taking a deep breath before he walked more decorously into the terminal proper. He looked around and—
There they are.
In the split second before they saw him he processed their appearances. Dad, a few more gray hairs. Josie, not too different. Was that really little Lizzie, four years later?
…and my mother.
She saw him first and threw herself into his arms, laughing, crying, kissing him fiercely. Dad came at him from the other side, and the girls wormed in where there was room, even Josie who didn’t like him much. Leo bit his lip, trying not to cry, but then he smelled his mother’s shampoo. It wasn’t perfume. She only wore that when she and Dad went out for the evening (when Dad took his wife out instead of one of his girlfriends). It was her shampoo. That was what undid his resolution not to cry. Mom baffled him—sometimes outright angered him—with her subservience to his alcoholic father, but he loved her, and he was young, and he’d been away at war for three years, afraid for his life every time he lifted his plane into the sky. He started crying in his family’s embrace, and it lasted a long, long time.
They stood there, all five of them, until he was capable of walking on his own rather than, say, falling to his knees—not to kiss the ground, but simply because his knees weren’t working. Lizzie stole his cap for the walk down to baggage claim and snuggled close under his arm. When they got outside with his trunk and Dad had gone to get the car, she asked him why he was shivering.
“Because it’s December, you dink, and I just spent three years in a jungle. This bomber jacket isn’t as warm as it looks.” It didn’t go with his dress uniform, either, but it was the warmest thing he owned, and he wasn’t about to wear his flight suit just to stay warm; he had wanted to look his best to come home in.
“Oh, dear,” Mom said. “Lizzie, let him have your coat. You’re closest in size. I didn’t go through all that worrying just to lose your brother to pneumonia. Leo, they didn’t give you a coat?”
“Well, they were about to discharge me. And I wasn’t about to complain. I really didn’t want anything to get in the way.”
When they got into the car—the familiar American Motors Rebel station wagon—they bundled Leo up in the old brown blanket from the back over Lizzie’s coat (she was wearing the bomber jacket now) and he felt warmer, especially with his sisters on either side of him; Lizzie snuggled up under his arm again. Still, Mom worried, and when they got home, she said, “Girls, you help your father with Leo’s things. I’m taking him to the kitchen and make him some coffee.”
The old frame house in the back streets of Cambridge had barely changed. One new chair in the dining room—okay, the old one had been particularly rickety. And it looked like they’d finally replastered the spot in the half-bath where the upstairs tub had leaked that time… Leo washed his hands, took his uniform cap back from Lizzie and hung it up, and joined Mom in the kitchen.
“I don’t know how you like it these days,” she said as the coffee dripped slowly through the big percolator. “Your Dad’s taken to drinking it black again. The girls and I both use milk. But I remembered you used to like cream, so I got some.”
“Mom, whatever you have, that’s fine. I can’t remember the last time I had milk or cream that came in liquid form. What we got over there was that awful powdered stuff. So I mostly drank my coffee black. What we wouldn’t have done for real, live cream…”
“Sugar?”
“No, there wasn’t any trouble getting that. Vietnam is a big sugarcane producer.” Then Leo saw his mother’s confused expression. “Oh. Sorry. No, I guess I don’t really feel like sugar, but where are you keeping the scotch these days?”
“In the living room. There’s a couple of bottles. Get the open one. Your father’s going to want some too.”
It was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a work week, but his father’s employer was a retired Army colonel himself, from the Korea years, and on hearing that Evan McGarry’s son was being mustered out, he’d granted him “as much time as you need, Ev, and bring the boy by to say hello.” Leo went through the front hall, walked past the double doors to the dining room, and turned left into the living room—he could have gone directly through the dining room, but then he would have had to skirt around the table, and when you did that you always clonked your other knee on the dish cupboard. Comfortable furniture, faded rugs, liquor cabinet. Sure enough, here was the scotch—one open bottle, with two spares hiding behind it. A standard supply for Dad… No. He didn’t want to think about that. Not when he’d just come home. He took the open bottle back to the kitchen just as the girls and Dad arrived, and Mom poured five cups of coffee. Leo and Dad both added generous dollops of the alcohol to theirs. So did Josie.
“Josie,” Mom said sternly.
“Hey, Mom,” Leo’s older sister said. “I’m old enough now, remember? I’m in graduate school. I turned twenty-one like ages ago.”
“Okay. But don’t say ‘like.’” Mom turned a forbidding eye on her younger daughter, who had a hopeful expression on her face. “Lizzie, don’t even think about it.”
Leo poured cream into his cup, stirred some sugar in (forgetting that he had said he didn’t want any), and lifted the concoction to his lips. Pure heaven.
After two cups of coffee, he realized he was hungry. This produced some grilled-cheese sandwiches, only it was real cheese from the market and bread from a for-god’s-sake bakery. This helped him feel considerably more solid, more sure of really being where he was. And warmer. Mom said, “Your clothes are still in your room, Leo. I aired everything out and washed it, you’ve got tons of sweaters and things, and there’s fresh sheets and blankets on the bed. Why don’t you go on up, maybe you’d like to wash up and have a nap? I got some nice steaks, but we can have dinner any time.”
“Okay, Mom.” He was tired. There was another round of hugs and kisses, then he climbed the stairs. In his old room he automatically started to unlock the trunk to reach for clean underwear to sleep in after he washed up. Then he thought A) I’d need long underwear to sleep in to be warm enough, here, B) they don’t issue long johns in goddamn Vietnam, and C) I’m too tired to even turn on a tap, much less locate and successfully use a washcloth and soap. Instead he poked around in his old dresser and found a pair of flannel pajamas. They were faded, but when he’d taken off and carefully hung up his uniform jacket, shirt and trousers, and pulled the pajamas on, they by God still fit. He crawled into bed—clean sheets! Cotton sheets! A real, live mattress! On top of a box spring!—pulled the heavy wool blankets up to his chin, and fell asleep in nothing flat.
Dinner that night got a late start, as Leo had slept till nearly seven and then wanted not so much a quick, practical wash-up as a long, hot bath. Afterwards the McGarrys sat around the living room, passing bottles of wine and scotch (this time Mom had given up and let Lizzie have some) and just talking. Quiet music on the radio, telephone calls to the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and cousins, all kept brief, partly because Leo’s immediate family was jealous of his time, partly because Leo was disoriented with the enormous change in his circumstances. Less than a week ago he’d been dropping bombs on Southeast Asians. Now he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Maybe not in the most privileged part of Cambridge, maybe not in striking distance of Harvard and Radcliffe and MIT, but what did that matter? He was full of real food, not military rations, and it was good real food. And he was hearing about Dad’s job, Mom’s faithful women’s group at church, Josie’s upcoming finals at her master’s in education program, Lizzie’s exploits in high school—she was a senior now?—and pretty soon he could—
“Oh, shit,” he said, realized he’d said it out loud, and mumbled, “Sorry, Mom. Service’ll do that to a guy.”
His mother looked taken aback, not so much by the swearing, he thought, as by the realization in her turn that yes, her boy wasn’t so much a boy anymore, but “a guy” who was in the service—was now an veteran. Dad said, “What’s wrong, Leo?”
“Um—nothing, I guess. Just a little later than I thought it was.” He’d only reset his watch when he’d looked at it during dinner and realized it was still proclaiming the time at Bien Hoa. But the realization that he’d lost track of the time, that it was past ten-thirty, jarred him badly. “Would you excuse me for a moment, please?”
He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of scotch from the bottle they’d left by the sink when they were making coffee. Damn his stupidity. Tomorrow was a workday. That meant nearly twenty-four hours before—
“Leo?” Dad had followed him in. “You’re going to want to put that glass down.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause it’s not going to sound good if you call her when you’re half in the bag.”
Leo started.
“Come on,” Dad said. “I’m not stupid. I know you want to talk to her. I know you want to let her know you’re home—you think I didn’t feel the same when I came home from Germany? Hell, I wanted to call your mother first, never mind my parents.”
Ordinarily Leo would rather have died than take advice about his love life from his father. Tonight was different.
“Easy for you to say,” Leo told him. “You two were actually engaged. Me, I had to be cowardly enough to say no when she asked me because it wasn’t fair to ask her to wait.”
“She kept writing, didn’t she?” Dad asked him softly.
Leo looked at the glass and thought about it, head down.
“It’s not too late to call?”
“Son, you just got home from the war.”
“But it’s almost quarter to eleven,” Leo tried, as a feeble last defense.
Dad picked up the telephone and put it firmly in Leo’s hand. “Call.”
Leo chewed his lip, leveled his shoulders, put the glass down and dialed Jenny’s number. She’d graduated from college in June and moved into an apartment in Philadelphia with some other girls. He’d kept writing back, while she was at Bryn Mawr and then once she got a teaching job in Philly. But he’d been too chicken to call, all those long years, afraid he wouldn’t recognize her voice, afraid she was only writing out of friendship…
“Yeah, what?” said a cheerful female voice. Female, but definitely not hers. One of her roommates. Well, that settled the recognition question, at least in the negative. At least in one case of the negative, anyway…
He was nervous enough to be extremely polite.
“Miss, I’m sorry to be calling so late, but it’s important. I’m looking for Jenny O’Brian. Is she available?”
“Um—not exactly. It is sort of late. I mean, you sound cute and all, but can this wait till tomorrow?”
Could it? Tears sprang to Leo’s eyes. Maybe… But Dad was still standing there, and Leo drew a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, but no, it can’t. Can you please put her on the phone? My name is Leo McGarry, I’m calling from Boston, and I need to talk to her.”
Dad smiled, gave him a thumbs-up, and left the kitchen. The roommate said, “Can I tell her what this is about?”
“Tell her it’s Leo. Please. Tell her I’m at home, tell her I just got here—I really am sorry to call so late, but it’s—”
“Hold it.” The voice on the other end of the line suddenly became more alert. “Did you say Leo?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Boston?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t move a muscle, buster.” The receiver dropped onto a hard floor, a chair squeaked, a door opened and there was a conversation that he couldn’t quite make out. Then a rather cross voice, with accompanying footsteps: “… not funny, Caitlin,” and the receiver was snatched up.
“Who is this?” Jenny said.
Which answered the recognition question. In the positive. For a moment Leo couldn’t breathe.
“Hello?”
He struggled to find speech. “Jenny, it’s me. Leo.”
A pause. “I told Caitlin that wasn’t funny. Who are you, really?”
Oh, God, she didn’t recognize his voice… “Listen to me, Jenny. It really is me. Honest to God.”
“Leo,” she said after a moment.
“Yes.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “It’s really you.”
“Yes.”
She started to cry. “Don’t tease me. Where are you? Are you hurt? You’re calling from a hospital?”
“No. I’m home. With Mom and Dad. In Cambridge. My enlistment’s up. I’m discharged. Not wounded, not anything. Just home.”
“You’re discharged?” She sniffled and tried (and failed) to blow her nose. “You’re already processed out?”
“Yes. Honorable discharge, and I made major—Jenny, I’m home. You hear me? I’m home.”
“You’re home. You’re safe. Oh, Leo.”
“I’m home, I’m safe, and—hang on.” He glared at his little sister, who was peeking into the kitchen and giggling. “Lizzie, if you don’t get out of here I’m going to smack you one, I swear I am.”
She merrily stuck her tongue out at him and vanished. Leo sighed and said to Jenny, “Sorry. That was Lizzie eavesdropping.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“No. But she interrupted my flow. I was going to say, the only thing wrong is that I’m not standing face to face with you.”
“Leo—” she said, suddenly apprehensive. “This isn’t a home leave between tours, is it? I mean, are you going back?”
God, he hadn’t even thought that she might think that. And he thought of Adamley’s note. “No. Absolutely not. Not injured, not re-upping, not going anywhere… unless it involves seeing you.” And he thought of another piece of the Colonel’s note, and made bold to say, “I love you, Jenny.”
“Oh, Leo.” She sniffled and blew her nose again, doing it better this time. “I love you, too. Will you marry me? Please say yes this time. I don’t want anyone else to get her hooks in you.”
His knees turned weak again, as they had at the airport, but this time he just plain slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. It was what he’d wanted and hadn’t dared to hope for.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m saying yes. I will.”
“Good. Can you come down to Philadelphia? The kids get out of school in—no, that’s not fair on your parents, and I’ll be home in a week anyway. Can you wait that long?”
“I waited three years,” he said hoarsely. Three years since they sent him, inevitably, to Vietnam. Apparently she had waited too. “I guess seven more days isn’t going to be too bad.” Had she really? “Jenny… baby… damn it, now I’m crying. Twice in one day.”
“Men should cry more often,” she said. “It’s good for the soul.”
“This is what they teach you at Bryn Mawr?”
“Since it’s true, who cares where it comes from? Oh, Leo, how do we get through this week?”
“I don’t know.” He wiped his eyes. “When can I call you?”
“I get home from work at four-thirty. I go to bed at ten-thirty, but any time between…”
“So, apart from the mess it would make of Mom and Dad’s phone bill, I could spend, lemme see, six hours on the phone with you every day?”
“And six times seven is forty-two… very good…” She was laughing. “Sorry. My kids are doing the times tables right now. Except we can’t talk right now. I do have to work tomorrow. But you sleep well, Leo. And I truly will sleep better now, knowing you’re home and safe and well.”
Leo went to sleep that night wondering how much diamonds cost.
Title: Marching Orders (1/4)
Author:
gracewillowRating: NC-17 for innuendo and squicks
Word Count: 5,479
Characters: Leo, Jenny, Jed, Abbey, Sam (briefly)
Pairings: Leo/Jenny, Jed/Abbey
Spoilers: Season 1; squick alerts: alcoholism, drug addiction, PTSD, suicide
Summary: Leo comes home from Vietnam and finds the adjustment not as easy as he's expecting... though not all bad.
A/N: “Marching Orders” is the first story in my series of stories called Behind Blue Eyes. If y’all like this one, I’ll be posting the others eventually. This one is about Leo’s background, a key point for the rest of BBE. Here are my notes about it.
Re: Leo’s hometown, the series gives mixed messages—sometimes Boston, sometimes Chicago, and because I live where I live, and know the town, I chose Boston. I invented some details about Leo’s and Jenny’s respective upbringings.
Re: the chronology, I had to do some juggling to make certain things fit: length of time Leo has known the Bartlets (see “Bartlet for America”), apparent ages of Leo and the Bartlets, Liz Bartlet’s age, and Leo’s time in Vietnam (that one I had to kind of make up). Sam’s age I just plain dropped by a couple of years, as you’ll see in the second story (patience, patience) but there are reasons for that.
Re: Leo’s sisters: we know nothing about Elizabeth except that she exists (there’s a throwaway line about her in one single episode), and nothing about the respective ages of Leo, Elizabeth and Josephine (who also only appears in one episode), so I chose those details to suit the story.
I’d love to have comments, but please, no flaming. This is my first post. Be gentle with me.
Many thanks to my beta,
indigo_inferno.-----
Chapter 1.
The bellow shattered the heavenly quiet of early morning in the canteen at Bien Hoa military airport.
“McGarry! Front and center!”
Leo Thomas McGarry, 22 years old and nearing the end of his third year in Vietnam, wished the Colonel hadn’t shouted quite so loudly. He’d already taken two aspirin and he was on his second cup of coffee, but these sovereign remedies had barely taken hold, and his regular morning hangover amplified even the smallest noise to an exquisitely painful degree. And now Colonel Adamley wanted him. He got up, hoping the Colonel didn’t notice him wincing at the clatter of his chair, and made his way to the door.
“Yes, sir.”
“You want to come with me, Captain? We’re going to sit down and chat for a minute.”
“Yes, sir.”
Only as he was crossing the compound in the wake of his commanding officer did it occur to Leo that normally the Colonel would have sent his aide to fetch him. Was something going on that Leo didn’t know about? A transfer? Discipline for some unknown mistake? Or, please God not, bad news from home? As they went into the small and poorly ventilated cement hut that served Adamley for an office, the adrenaline rush was starting to wash out the alcohol-induced headache. Well, at least fear’s good for something, Leo told himself as he came to a stop at the Colonel’s desk.
“Have a seat,” Adamley said as he plopped himself down in his desk chair. “Have some coffee, son,” and he pushed a cup across the desk at Leo, who, not knowing what else to do, sipped in stupid silence. “I have some news for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now don’t look like that. Everybody at home’s fine. It’s good news. For you, anyway. Me, I’m losing my best pilot.”
Out the back window of the hut Leo could see rank upon rank of the fighter planes belonging to the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing. One of them was his. South, beyond the planes, was the skyline of Saigon, such as it was. But losing? So it was a transfer…
“Your enlistment’s up, son. You’re going home.”
“What?” Leo said blankly, leaving off the “sir” for the first time since induction day.
The Colonel looked amused. “You lose track of time somewhere? You signed up for four years. Time’s up. Here’s your orders. You’re on the seven-thirty flight out. Thirty-six hours and you’ll be stateside.”
“Sir, is this—is this for real?”
“It’s for real, son. Go get packed and say your goodbyes. This isn’t a flight you’re going to want to miss.”
“No, sir,” Leo said, standing up and trying hard not to shake. He would never know whether it worked or not—or so he thought, never expecting to see Adamley again and have the chance to ask the question. And he more or less didn’t care. His headache was completely gone. Too bad this is only a one-time cure… “Thank you very much, sir.”
“We’ll be missing you, son. Send us some good news from home.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.” But it was December, 1969, and the people who were making the news back home were not supportive of the troops fighting this war. Leo tucked his travel orders inside his jacket and shook the Colonel’s offered hand, then gave him one last salute. He’d have to hustle now—not to get to the transport area, which was only on the other side of the base, but to say those goodbyes. Soon enough the other pilots would be fueling their planes, loading the bombs, and climbing aboard for the day’s mission, whatever that might be.
He walked to the barracks at a seemly pace but with his heart racing. His friend Clew Mallory looked up. “Where ya been, Catman? Breakfast’s been over for hours.”
Breakfast had been over for all of fifteen minutes, but things ran on a tight schedule around here, and some of the pilots were already suiting up.
“Colonel wanted me for a mission, Clueless,” Leo said. You didn’t waltz in exulting about your discharge papers to guys who were going up fighting in less than two hours. Even if your heart was singing about it.
“Yeah?” Mallory said.
“Yeah. Move it, you’re sitting on my trunk.”
“You’re taking your trunk in a Thunderchief?” Wes “Jackal” Jarvis said doubtfully.
“No. Air Force transport to Manila.”
“Home leave?” Mallory said, getting off the trunk, one of many that served as chairs and tables in the sparsely furnished barracks.
Leo said, “Sort of,” and flipped the trunk open. He started moving his neatly folded uniforms into it from his locker. When he was done with his clothes he started in on his personal items—pictures from home, letters, all the accumulated clutter and paraphernalia of a year’s training and three years’ active duty. By then guys were looking at each other, and then at him, and then at Mallory, who was his wingman and (in complete contradiction to his callsign-nickname) the smartest man in the barracks and its de facto leader. So it fell to “Clueless” Mallory to ask, “Catman—just how long is this leave you’re getting?”
“Kinda long,” Leo acknowledged, looking around his bunk for anything he might have missed. Things he might want on the flight—series of flights—he started putting into a smaller duffel bag.
“How long?” Mallory persisted, with every man in the barracks paying attention.
“Well,” Leo said, leaving the duffel bag alone for a moment, and turning around to sit on his bunk and face the other men, “it’s pretty long.”
Mallory said evenly, “Not medical.”
“No. That thing with the hard landing was months ago. I mean, the doc said I might walk a little funny sometimes—he said he couldn’t do anything about it, it being my tailbone and all—but apart from that, I’m healthier than you are, Clueless. For damn sure I can still drink you under the table.”
The barracks broke up in a wave of laughter. Leo could do that, and regularly did. But Mallory was still on the trail. “How long, Catman?”
“Pretty long, Clueless. It…” This was harder than he’d expected. “It looks like I got my discharge papers, guys.”
Mallory’s eyes widened and his jaw tightened, and he looked away for a moment, swallowing. When he looked back at Leo, his eyes were wet. “Aw, shit, Leo,” he said. “Who the hell’m I supposed to fly with now? Old Dinky over there?”
“Dinky doesn’t fly,” Mike Rothman declared from the corner bunk. “He just takes a puff of that stuff he smokes, spreads out his arms, and hoo-wee, he’s up in the air all by himself. Don’t need no airplane.”
Dinky, who was of course the largest man in the barracks, smiled genially. “Hey, guys, I keep offering…”
“Clew, man, I’m sorry,” Leo said, using his wingman’s right name for once. “I hate to leave you guys like this. I wish I could take you with me.”
“And pigs fly through the skies right alongside us,” Mallory sighed. “No, Catman, I know you wish you could bring us home in your trunk, but there’s no way you’re sorry you’re going home, so don’t give me that shit.”
“Yeah. Well.” Leo looked around at the 19 other men in C barracks, all of whom had their own thoughts of home, family, and loved ones versus the mission they would be up and flying in an hour and a half.
He finished packing, shook hands with the guys, found the other people he wanted to say goodbye to, and brought his trunk and duffel bag to the transportation garage with Mallory’s help. “You don’t need to hang out here, Clueless,” Leo said. “I got half an hour to go.”
“I got time,” the other man said. “Listen—Leo—there’s something I need to ask you. In case something happens to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“Okay, but listen, just in case, will ya? You know I don’t have much family. My dad’s dead, my mother remarried, then she died, so it’s just my stepfather and my little sister. I don’t care much for my stepfather. I mean, he’s not a bad guy. Just we never really got along. Plus I was too old to need much more fathering. But Sarah’s only ten. And if I do something stupid—no, listen, okay? Something happens to me, I want you to look in on her sometimes. You’ll be in Boston, they’re just up north from you. Would you do that?”
“Do it without anything stupid happening to you, you asshole. You know that. But nothing’s going to goddamn happen to you.”
“Leo, just promise me. Okay? All she’ll have is her father. And you’ll have known me, you’ll have known something about what might have happened. I just want you to talk to her. Would you?”
“Okay,” Leo said quietly. It was what you did, if you could. “I promise.”
They sat on the bench outside the garage, speaking in fits and starts. In a way it was a relief when an Army corporal drove up in a green Army Jeep and said, “Major McGarry?”
“Uh—” Leo said, confused. “I’m Captain McGarry…”
“I got orders for a major by that name.”
Mallory started laughing. “Check your orders, Catman. What do you want to bet there’s a promotion hidden in there that the Colonel stuck in for a surprise? Go on, take a look.”
Leo took the papers from his jacket and checked, and just as Mallory had predicted, there it was: an order promoting him one rank, with a note in Adamley’s handwriting clipped to the typewritten sheet.
December 10, 1969
Saigon, South Vietnam
Major McGarry,
It’s been a pleasure having such a fine pilot and officer serve under me. I’m sorry to be losing you, but I cannot in good conscience ask you to re-up. The present unpopularity at home of the Vietnam conflict can’t hurt me; I’m a career man, there will be other posts for me to serve in, and people will think what they want to think about the fact that I served here. You, however, came into the service under different circumstances, and you are at the stage of your life where you should be getting an education, going to work, starting a family, not getting old and crotchety like me. So go home and enjoy your life, son.
“Old, ha,” Leo muttered. The Colonel would never be old. Your C.O. would never be old.
The note continued:
Please note that the promotion is backdated three months, and that I had the company clerk include a chit for the back pay. Consider it a wedding gift in advance. Please also find attached my own oak leaves. Consider that a present to that nice girl of yours and a mark of my
Deepest respect,
Col. Alan Adamley, USAF
“Sir, you coming?” the corporal inquired. “I mean, if you’re the major and all.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Leo said. Shrugging, the corporal hefted Leo’s trunk and duffel bag into the back of the jeep, leaving Leo with nothing to do but say goodbye to the man he had fought side-by-side with for three long years.
“Aw, shit,” Mallory said. “You write to me, Leo, you hear me?”
“And you,” Leo said. “You have the address? Boston?”
“Yeah.”
“Sir?” the Army driver said. “We gotta get moving.”
Leo gave in and let emotion guide him into a rare embrace. Mallory hugged him hard, quickly, man-to-man, with a rough buffet on the back, and stepped back. “Catch you on the upswing,” he said, turned around and walked away.
Only as the transport plane rumbled along the runway and clawed its clumsy way towards the skies did Leo understand that he was leaving Saigon. Only as it turned and banked southwards over the city and the civilian airport at Tan Son Nhut did he understand that he was at last leaving Vietnam. But the greatest realization of all came only when the plane was far out over the South China Sea, on the way to the Philippines, and he opened his packet of orders again to find his new insignia and pin them on his collar. His eyes fell on Adamley’s note, and something about it was nudging at the back of his mind, but it took three passes to find the thing he needed, and even then it was a moment before he actually figured it out.
December 10th, he thought. Okay, so it’s three days after Pearl Harbor Day. So why is that bugging me?
Then it finally hit.
Going home.
To be discharged.
In December.
God Almighty, but I could be home for Christmas.
Several months later Leo received a letter—two—one from Adamley, but he had already heard from Jackal Jarvis, telling him that Clew Mallory’s plane had been shot up by a Viet Cong gunner over the Plain of Reeds and gone down in flames. They had recovered Mallory’s body a day later.
And he did meet Adamley again, a long time later, under circumstances he could not have dreamed of as he left Bien Hoa—in his own White House office, debating the merits of an international war crimes court. But from Leo’s point of view, these two events lay in the future. All he knew at this moment was unbearable anticipation. The plane had its landing gear down—he had felt the movement through the skin of the airplane, first a rumbling vibration (much deeper than that of a Thunderchief), then a firm ka-chunk—and in that much time he would be back in Boston, home, his parents and sisters waiting for him at the terminal…
He had called them from San Francisco three days earlier. The Air Force transport had trundled down onto the base’s main runway at precisely eighteen hundred hours, Pacific Standard Time, December 10th, 1969—thanks to the international dateline, the same day he’d left Bien Hoa. Twenty minutes later Leo had been in the base commander’s office. A blessedly compassionate and efficient red-tape machine had had him processed out in the space of two days. On December 12th he received his honorable discharge, his last two weeks’ pay (plus the back pay as major, and all of it in genuine U.S. dollars, not military scrip), a handshake from the base commander, and a bundle of tickets for the first commercial airplanes he’d flown on in four years. Well, three years, really. He’d had one long weekend in Boston just before they sent him over to Vietnam, and he’d flown commercial for that. But he figured he was off Air Force planes for good now.
And so San Francisco to Chicago, Chicago to Pittsburgh (with an overnight there; but too tired from traveling, from three years of combat, from everything, to even dream of going into town to find some fun, he spent it just sleeping in the airport motel), Pittsburgh to LaGuardia in New York, and now, finally, New York to Boston.
The wheels thumped down onto the runway, he closed his eyes in gratitude, and to his surprise tears rolled out from under the lids. Home. My God. I never thought I’d be this grateful to see anything. Ever. But I’m home.
He fiercely wiped the tears off before he left the plane; he was not facing his family looking like a crybaby. He’d had a seat near the back of the plane, but urgency overtook courtesy when he reached the jetway. He started hurrying past the other debarking passengers, apologizing breathlessly when his swinging duffel bag brushed against them. Halfway up the slanted floor he started running.
Home. My home turf. My own country. The San Francisco base hadn’t seemed real, had only seemed like another military base (which, of course, it was). He hadn’t left it even for a moment’s time to stretch his legs. He had only wanted to stick close to the people who were processing his discharge papers.
He reached the end of the jetway and slowed down, taking a deep breath before he walked more decorously into the terminal proper. He looked around and—
There they are.
In the split second before they saw him he processed their appearances. Dad, a few more gray hairs. Josie, not too different. Was that really little Lizzie, four years later?
…and my mother.
She saw him first and threw herself into his arms, laughing, crying, kissing him fiercely. Dad came at him from the other side, and the girls wormed in where there was room, even Josie who didn’t like him much. Leo bit his lip, trying not to cry, but then he smelled his mother’s shampoo. It wasn’t perfume. She only wore that when she and Dad went out for the evening (when Dad took his wife out instead of one of his girlfriends). It was her shampoo. That was what undid his resolution not to cry. Mom baffled him—sometimes outright angered him—with her subservience to his alcoholic father, but he loved her, and he was young, and he’d been away at war for three years, afraid for his life every time he lifted his plane into the sky. He started crying in his family’s embrace, and it lasted a long, long time.
They stood there, all five of them, until he was capable of walking on his own rather than, say, falling to his knees—not to kiss the ground, but simply because his knees weren’t working. Lizzie stole his cap for the walk down to baggage claim and snuggled close under his arm. When they got outside with his trunk and Dad had gone to get the car, she asked him why he was shivering.
“Because it’s December, you dink, and I just spent three years in a jungle. This bomber jacket isn’t as warm as it looks.” It didn’t go with his dress uniform, either, but it was the warmest thing he owned, and he wasn’t about to wear his flight suit just to stay warm; he had wanted to look his best to come home in.
“Oh, dear,” Mom said. “Lizzie, let him have your coat. You’re closest in size. I didn’t go through all that worrying just to lose your brother to pneumonia. Leo, they didn’t give you a coat?”
“Well, they were about to discharge me. And I wasn’t about to complain. I really didn’t want anything to get in the way.”
When they got into the car—the familiar American Motors Rebel station wagon—they bundled Leo up in the old brown blanket from the back over Lizzie’s coat (she was wearing the bomber jacket now) and he felt warmer, especially with his sisters on either side of him; Lizzie snuggled up under his arm again. Still, Mom worried, and when they got home, she said, “Girls, you help your father with Leo’s things. I’m taking him to the kitchen and make him some coffee.”
The old frame house in the back streets of Cambridge had barely changed. One new chair in the dining room—okay, the old one had been particularly rickety. And it looked like they’d finally replastered the spot in the half-bath where the upstairs tub had leaked that time… Leo washed his hands, took his uniform cap back from Lizzie and hung it up, and joined Mom in the kitchen.
“I don’t know how you like it these days,” she said as the coffee dripped slowly through the big percolator. “Your Dad’s taken to drinking it black again. The girls and I both use milk. But I remembered you used to like cream, so I got some.”
“Mom, whatever you have, that’s fine. I can’t remember the last time I had milk or cream that came in liquid form. What we got over there was that awful powdered stuff. So I mostly drank my coffee black. What we wouldn’t have done for real, live cream…”
“Sugar?”
“No, there wasn’t any trouble getting that. Vietnam is a big sugarcane producer.” Then Leo saw his mother’s confused expression. “Oh. Sorry. No, I guess I don’t really feel like sugar, but where are you keeping the scotch these days?”
“In the living room. There’s a couple of bottles. Get the open one. Your father’s going to want some too.”
It was the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a work week, but his father’s employer was a retired Army colonel himself, from the Korea years, and on hearing that Evan McGarry’s son was being mustered out, he’d granted him “as much time as you need, Ev, and bring the boy by to say hello.” Leo went through the front hall, walked past the double doors to the dining room, and turned left into the living room—he could have gone directly through the dining room, but then he would have had to skirt around the table, and when you did that you always clonked your other knee on the dish cupboard. Comfortable furniture, faded rugs, liquor cabinet. Sure enough, here was the scotch—one open bottle, with two spares hiding behind it. A standard supply for Dad… No. He didn’t want to think about that. Not when he’d just come home. He took the open bottle back to the kitchen just as the girls and Dad arrived, and Mom poured five cups of coffee. Leo and Dad both added generous dollops of the alcohol to theirs. So did Josie.
“Josie,” Mom said sternly.
“Hey, Mom,” Leo’s older sister said. “I’m old enough now, remember? I’m in graduate school. I turned twenty-one like ages ago.”
“Okay. But don’t say ‘like.’” Mom turned a forbidding eye on her younger daughter, who had a hopeful expression on her face. “Lizzie, don’t even think about it.”
Leo poured cream into his cup, stirred some sugar in (forgetting that he had said he didn’t want any), and lifted the concoction to his lips. Pure heaven.
After two cups of coffee, he realized he was hungry. This produced some grilled-cheese sandwiches, only it was real cheese from the market and bread from a for-god’s-sake bakery. This helped him feel considerably more solid, more sure of really being where he was. And warmer. Mom said, “Your clothes are still in your room, Leo. I aired everything out and washed it, you’ve got tons of sweaters and things, and there’s fresh sheets and blankets on the bed. Why don’t you go on up, maybe you’d like to wash up and have a nap? I got some nice steaks, but we can have dinner any time.”
“Okay, Mom.” He was tired. There was another round of hugs and kisses, then he climbed the stairs. In his old room he automatically started to unlock the trunk to reach for clean underwear to sleep in after he washed up. Then he thought A) I’d need long underwear to sleep in to be warm enough, here, B) they don’t issue long johns in goddamn Vietnam, and C) I’m too tired to even turn on a tap, much less locate and successfully use a washcloth and soap. Instead he poked around in his old dresser and found a pair of flannel pajamas. They were faded, but when he’d taken off and carefully hung up his uniform jacket, shirt and trousers, and pulled the pajamas on, they by God still fit. He crawled into bed—clean sheets! Cotton sheets! A real, live mattress! On top of a box spring!—pulled the heavy wool blankets up to his chin, and fell asleep in nothing flat.
Dinner that night got a late start, as Leo had slept till nearly seven and then wanted not so much a quick, practical wash-up as a long, hot bath. Afterwards the McGarrys sat around the living room, passing bottles of wine and scotch (this time Mom had given up and let Lizzie have some) and just talking. Quiet music on the radio, telephone calls to the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and cousins, all kept brief, partly because Leo’s immediate family was jealous of his time, partly because Leo was disoriented with the enormous change in his circumstances. Less than a week ago he’d been dropping bombs on Southeast Asians. Now he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Maybe not in the most privileged part of Cambridge, maybe not in striking distance of Harvard and Radcliffe and MIT, but what did that matter? He was full of real food, not military rations, and it was good real food. And he was hearing about Dad’s job, Mom’s faithful women’s group at church, Josie’s upcoming finals at her master’s in education program, Lizzie’s exploits in high school—she was a senior now?—and pretty soon he could—
“Oh, shit,” he said, realized he’d said it out loud, and mumbled, “Sorry, Mom. Service’ll do that to a guy.”
His mother looked taken aback, not so much by the swearing, he thought, as by the realization in her turn that yes, her boy wasn’t so much a boy anymore, but “a guy” who was in the service—was now an veteran. Dad said, “What’s wrong, Leo?”
“Um—nothing, I guess. Just a little later than I thought it was.” He’d only reset his watch when he’d looked at it during dinner and realized it was still proclaiming the time at Bien Hoa. But the realization that he’d lost track of the time, that it was past ten-thirty, jarred him badly. “Would you excuse me for a moment, please?”
He went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of scotch from the bottle they’d left by the sink when they were making coffee. Damn his stupidity. Tomorrow was a workday. That meant nearly twenty-four hours before—
“Leo?” Dad had followed him in. “You’re going to want to put that glass down.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause it’s not going to sound good if you call her when you’re half in the bag.”
Leo started.
“Come on,” Dad said. “I’m not stupid. I know you want to talk to her. I know you want to let her know you’re home—you think I didn’t feel the same when I came home from Germany? Hell, I wanted to call your mother first, never mind my parents.”
Ordinarily Leo would rather have died than take advice about his love life from his father. Tonight was different.
“Easy for you to say,” Leo told him. “You two were actually engaged. Me, I had to be cowardly enough to say no when she asked me because it wasn’t fair to ask her to wait.”
“She kept writing, didn’t she?” Dad asked him softly.
Leo looked at the glass and thought about it, head down.
“It’s not too late to call?”
“Son, you just got home from the war.”
“But it’s almost quarter to eleven,” Leo tried, as a feeble last defense.
Dad picked up the telephone and put it firmly in Leo’s hand. “Call.”
Leo chewed his lip, leveled his shoulders, put the glass down and dialed Jenny’s number. She’d graduated from college in June and moved into an apartment in Philadelphia with some other girls. He’d kept writing back, while she was at Bryn Mawr and then once she got a teaching job in Philly. But he’d been too chicken to call, all those long years, afraid he wouldn’t recognize her voice, afraid she was only writing out of friendship…
“Yeah, what?” said a cheerful female voice. Female, but definitely not hers. One of her roommates. Well, that settled the recognition question, at least in the negative. At least in one case of the negative, anyway…
He was nervous enough to be extremely polite.
“Miss, I’m sorry to be calling so late, but it’s important. I’m looking for Jenny O’Brian. Is she available?”
“Um—not exactly. It is sort of late. I mean, you sound cute and all, but can this wait till tomorrow?”
Could it? Tears sprang to Leo’s eyes. Maybe… But Dad was still standing there, and Leo drew a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, but no, it can’t. Can you please put her on the phone? My name is Leo McGarry, I’m calling from Boston, and I need to talk to her.”
Dad smiled, gave him a thumbs-up, and left the kitchen. The roommate said, “Can I tell her what this is about?”
“Tell her it’s Leo. Please. Tell her I’m at home, tell her I just got here—I really am sorry to call so late, but it’s—”
“Hold it.” The voice on the other end of the line suddenly became more alert. “Did you say Leo?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Boston?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t move a muscle, buster.” The receiver dropped onto a hard floor, a chair squeaked, a door opened and there was a conversation that he couldn’t quite make out. Then a rather cross voice, with accompanying footsteps: “… not funny, Caitlin,” and the receiver was snatched up.
“Who is this?” Jenny said.
Which answered the recognition question. In the positive. For a moment Leo couldn’t breathe.
“Hello?”
He struggled to find speech. “Jenny, it’s me. Leo.”
A pause. “I told Caitlin that wasn’t funny. Who are you, really?”
Oh, God, she didn’t recognize his voice… “Listen to me, Jenny. It really is me. Honest to God.”
“Leo,” she said after a moment.
“Yes.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “It’s really you.”
“Yes.”
She started to cry. “Don’t tease me. Where are you? Are you hurt? You’re calling from a hospital?”
“No. I’m home. With Mom and Dad. In Cambridge. My enlistment’s up. I’m discharged. Not wounded, not anything. Just home.”
“You’re discharged?” She sniffled and tried (and failed) to blow her nose. “You’re already processed out?”
“Yes. Honorable discharge, and I made major—Jenny, I’m home. You hear me? I’m home.”
“You’re home. You’re safe. Oh, Leo.”
“I’m home, I’m safe, and—hang on.” He glared at his little sister, who was peeking into the kitchen and giggling. “Lizzie, if you don’t get out of here I’m going to smack you one, I swear I am.”
She merrily stuck her tongue out at him and vanished. Leo sighed and said to Jenny, “Sorry. That was Lizzie eavesdropping.”
“That’s nothing new.”
“No. But she interrupted my flow. I was going to say, the only thing wrong is that I’m not standing face to face with you.”
“Leo—” she said, suddenly apprehensive. “This isn’t a home leave between tours, is it? I mean, are you going back?”
God, he hadn’t even thought that she might think that. And he thought of Adamley’s note. “No. Absolutely not. Not injured, not re-upping, not going anywhere… unless it involves seeing you.” And he thought of another piece of the Colonel’s note, and made bold to say, “I love you, Jenny.”
“Oh, Leo.” She sniffled and blew her nose again, doing it better this time. “I love you, too. Will you marry me? Please say yes this time. I don’t want anyone else to get her hooks in you.”
His knees turned weak again, as they had at the airport, but this time he just plain slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. It was what he’d wanted and hadn’t dared to hope for.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m saying yes. I will.”
“Good. Can you come down to Philadelphia? The kids get out of school in—no, that’s not fair on your parents, and I’ll be home in a week anyway. Can you wait that long?”
“I waited three years,” he said hoarsely. Three years since they sent him, inevitably, to Vietnam. Apparently she had waited too. “I guess seven more days isn’t going to be too bad.” Had she really? “Jenny… baby… damn it, now I’m crying. Twice in one day.”
“Men should cry more often,” she said. “It’s good for the soul.”
“This is what they teach you at Bryn Mawr?”
“Since it’s true, who cares where it comes from? Oh, Leo, how do we get through this week?”
“I don’t know.” He wiped his eyes. “When can I call you?”
“I get home from work at four-thirty. I go to bed at ten-thirty, but any time between…”
“So, apart from the mess it would make of Mom and Dad’s phone bill, I could spend, lemme see, six hours on the phone with you every day?”
“And six times seven is forty-two… very good…” She was laughing. “Sorry. My kids are doing the times tables right now. Except we can’t talk right now. I do have to work tomorrow. But you sleep well, Leo. And I truly will sleep better now, knowing you’re home and safe and well.”
Leo went to sleep that night wondering how much diamonds cost.
