Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

And because a single act of courage can incite similar acts, Benny shouted to the retreating man, “Do what you can before it’s too late for Rita Mya! She’s been held by the monsters for fifteen years in Insein Prison!”

A few days later, by some universal principle by which misfortunes strike more often in aggregate than in isolation, they received a letter from Johnny’s young American wife. It had been tampered with, the letter — its seal broken, its carefully inked script pooling in fingerprint-sized spots, as if the government meddler had just washed his hands before sifting through the thin pages, or as if that meddler had wiped away his own spontaneously elicited tears. It was enough, these heartaches in aggregate, to make one wonder what it was all for. You strive, you strive to do right, to make something of your life, to find a way to make peace with others, with yourself, and then you drop dead. Or else the ones you are trying to make peace with vanish or are felled.

After reading the letter through several times, Benny took it upstairs and knocked on Khin’s door. She called for him to enter — or, rather, she called to the person who she must have thought would be Hta Hta to come in. When he hesitantly opened the door and leaned his head inside the yellowing room, its curtains only partially drawn, she appeared to be as surprised to see him as he was shocked by the state in which he found her — laid out stiffly on the bed, her hands positioned over her startlingly narrow chest, her color off in the afternoon light filtering through the window.

“Has something happened?” she said, spotting the letter in his hand.

She seemed to struggle to sit up and flinched with some pain — in her abdomen, he observed.

“Are you sick?” he ventured.

“Tell me what it says.”

She set herself against the headboard with worried expectancy, and he sat in the chair opposite the bed, guilt passing over his heart. Since the first Miss Burma pageant — when from his seat in those stands he’d glimpsed what Louisa might radiantly have stood for — his anger toward Khin had raged as never before. Raged because of Khin’s part in what had been made of their daughter. At some level, he’d even blamed her for the disappearing act that Louisa had felt compelled to stage with Lynton, though he took no satisfaction in the particular suffering that act must have caused Khin. And he’d come — perhaps solipsistically, he realized — to view what Khin had done to launch Louisa into celebrity, and what she’d done much earlier with Saw Lay and Lynton, as part of her personal (if ultimately unsuccessful) revolution against him, against her unhappiness with him. But seeing her now, seemingly trapped in the bed, trapped in her body, he glimpsed how terribly partial that view of her had been. The truth was she’d never been trapped. He was the prisoner. All along, she could have moved on with her life, walked out on him. Yet she had chosen to stay. And he was so suddenly moved by her loyalty that for a moment he couldn’t speak. What was astonishing, he thought, wasn’t that their union had been meant to be; very possibly they could have built equally meaningful lives with others. What was astonishing, rather, was that this loyalty existed in spite of their not having been meant to be together. What was astonishing was that leap , unique to every less-than-perfect marriage.

“Whatever it says, Benny, please tell me,” she urged him, and he saw that she was bracing herself against the headboard.

He coughed into his fist and opened the letter. “It’s from Nancy”—Nancy being Johnny’s plain, bespectacled twenty-year-old wife, whose blurry photograph they had received soon after the young couple’s precipitate marriage nearly two years earlier. “She is very reassuring,” he added — a lie. “She promises that nothing has changed as far as her devotion to Johnny goes.” Another lie — this one told by Nancy, who no doubt had been struggling to believe the lie herself. Again his eyes took in the smudged contours of the girl’s careful handwriting, pressed into the thin pages between his fingers. “It seems our boy has suffered a nervous episode. He was studying for oral examinations, and at the same time managing the money of friends and several faculty members. How his instructors could have allowed themselves to put a student in such a position is unimaginable—”

“But he is alive?”

When he glanced up, Khin was staring at him with desperation. He couldn’t do it: he couldn’t subject her to one more heartache. What he wanted was to shelter her from heartbreak for the rest of her life.

“Yes, my darling,” he assured her, rather than telling her of Johnny’s rise and fall while playing the stock market, rather than describing how one night Johnny hadn’t come home, and Nancy had driven around the cold Michigan campus, finally locating him near midnight, crouched in the snow, without clothes, and defecating. “He is alive.” Alive in a mental institution, he did not elaborate.

Now she exhaled, her body seeming to release itself of something more than breath, so that suddenly he felt frightened of losing that breath’s ongoingness. And he was filled with tender pity for her. It must have been very difficult for her, he admitted to himself, that their daughter had found freedom with a man who had once freed Khin herself — from heartache, from aloneness, from captivity by loyalty to him.

Not a week passed before Hta Hta woke him at midnight, a lamp in her hand, saying a white man was waiting for him downstairs. In the bafflement of his half-wakefulness, Benny fumbled with his trousers and pressed down his hair. Yet he was somehow unsurprised to find Hatchet in the semidarkness of the living room, peering at a photograph of Louisa pretending at serenity under the weight of her Miss Burma crown.

“I imagine you bribed the thugs at the bottom of my driveway,” Benny said to him.

Hatchet turned — not in surprise, exactly, but with obvious anxiousness. And with dismay. Yes, from the way he took Benny in, it was evident that time — ten years of time since they’d last met! — hadn’t been any kinder to Benny than it had been to the poor chap. The slope of Hatchet’s enlarged belly, the cant of his neck (even with his head thrown back just so) — each feature of his appearance spoke of his having been defeated by gravity, by the work Burma had made of him, or the work he’d made of Burma. Only the absence of his old pustules now dignified him. So he was finally past his adolescence. Finally past it, and already an old man.

“One of them,” the American said now, though Benny had forgotten his own question by then. “The rest were sleeping on the job.”

“Will you have something?” Benny said, heading for the bar, where one of the bottles from a stash Lynton had previously brought stood nearly emptied. Benny had gone to bed having had too much, and he had told himself he would be more moderate come morning, and here it was, around midnight, and he could hardly steady his hands enough to divide the dregs of the bottle into the tumblers he hadn’t bothered to wash.

Hatchet gripped the glass that Benny thrust at him, staring at its amber contents with a hangdog look. He seemed to be gathering up his courage finally to reveal his own human dependency on something — on liquor, on intimacy.

He touched the glass to his lips, but a moment later drew the glass back down.

“For God’s sake,” Benny said, “what is it?”

“I guess I don’t drink,” the man said, blushing to the jawline. “I’ve never really developed the taste.” The way he confessed it: it was as if the deficiency of that taste betrayed some greater deficiency of spirit.