so Mark simply patted him on the shoulder, provoking a visible shudder. And then he climbed into the passenger seat of the Datsun, and the dirtier of his two friends, who was driving, started up the engine, and because the car had no reverse gear, he had to circle over the lawn, damaging the border grass, which made Ernest wince. “Goodbye!” Daphne called as the Datsun veered out of the driveway, and then at that instant she realized that she had forgotten to give Mark the cookies. “Wait, wait!” she cried, running after the car, which had turned the curve, and was out of view. Daphne burst into tears, and Nancy said, “Now what good is crying going to do anyone?” and stomped into the house, leaving the rest of us to stare at the space where moments before Mark had stood, and who knew if he would ever again stand there? Dusk was falling. We all trooped inside after Nancy for coffee and the forgotten cookies—everyone except Ben, who had retreated to the barbecue pit, where he remained until well after dark with a flashlight, writing a poem.
Some years later, Ernest told me that in his professional opinion Ben was doomed from the start, because insofar as Nancy was concerned, he could never hope to live up to his brother. And it is true that from the July day Mark drove off to Canada, his handsome face, by virtue of its enforced removal, suddenly seemed to be everywhere in that house. From the kitchen countertop next to the television, and Nancy’ bedside table, and the mantel in the dining room, versions of Mark smiled out at us, a constant reminder that he was not where he should have been. Mark had always been an easier child than either of his siblings: wholesomely athletic, even-tempered, a favorite of all his teachers. At Wellspring he had majored in political science, and would have graduated cum laude had the disaster of the draft lottery not interrupted his otherwise effortless ascent. But it had, and now he was living in the most tenuous of exiles, a fugitive who would be jailed if he even dared to come back to his mother’ house for Thanksgiving. As if to craft for himself an identity more in keeping with his new outlaw status, he grew his hair long; sent back snapshots of himself, scrawny and bearded, that made Nancy weep with pride. “He looks almost holy,” she’d tell me. “Like Saint Francis, or Saint Blaise.” For Nancy, draft dodging amounted to a kind of martyrdom.
Today, when the saga of the draft dodgers is talked about at all, it is usually as a sort of sidebar to the greater drama that was Vietnam itself. In 1969, though, the fate of these young men troubled the American conscience at least as much as that of the soldiers who were starting to return from the war maimed or dead or with pregnant Vietnamese wives in tow. And nowhere was this more the case than on Florizona Avenue: After all, of the twenty-four houses on that street, three had sent sons to Canada, whereas none had sent sons to Vietnam. Their affluence protected Nancy and her neighbors, allowing them the luxury of worrying about children who were safe and well-fed in row houses in Vancouver or Toronto instead of bleeding on the fields of battle. At least this was how I saw it. I never dared voice this opinion to Nancy, who would have considered it treasonous, and thrown me out of the house.
Ernest, by contrast, understood, and to some degree shared, my skepticism. Although he distrusted Richard Nixon, and loathed Kissinger, he had also inherited from his immigrant father a patriotic belief in America as a land of possibility whose principles it was a citizen’ duty to defend, and therefore he could do no more than tolerate Mark’ flight to Canada. At heart he was a deeply conformist man, his Freudianism of an old-fashioned and narrow variety that inclined him to regard all types of atypical behavior as pathologies for which it was the physician’ duty to seek a therapy. And what was more nonconformist than a son who had not only broken with his country but broken the law? Or a wife who stormed out of dinner parties whenever the host happened to say something with which she was in political disagreement? For in the wake of Mark’ departure, Nancy had taken up the mantle of his radicalism,