Correspondents Read online

  And she spotted the old ladies, the taytahs and sittus and the tantes, hunched over in their chairs and clucking together, their hair rigidly set, their giant black patent-leather purses upended from their laps by adoring grandchildren who climbed all over them. They reminded Rita of her own late sittu, the formidable Marguerite Daou Khoury, who in the 1970s and ’80s held court at the mahrajan in grand fashion, loudly discoursing on whether Irish or Italian men made better husbands for Lebanese women or correcting the other sittus on the proper way to roll a stuffed grape leaf.

  They were winding their way through tables, Rita scanning faces left and right that all felt vaguely familiar yet were mostly unplaceable, until the face she sought came into focus. Her Irish mother, Mary Jo Khoury (née Coughlin), unsmiling, her white, crinkly skin like phyllo dough, with her sensible auburn wash-and-wear hairdo, poking judgmentally at a plate of hummus with a bit of pita bread.

  “Look at Ma,” Rita whispered to Ally as they approached the table. “Still looking at the food like it’s alien even though she’s been eating it half her life.”

  Ally laughed. “So true! You know that after all these years, she still thinks the whole thing is a little bit Ali Baba magic carpet.”

  “Ha!” said Rita. “But I’m still happy to see the crabby old gal.”

  And also: Hadn’t she heard that cousin Bobby would be here? Where was he?

  “Hiiiii!” She beamed toward the table, forcing sunshine out of herself. Dutifully, she went to her mother first. “Don’t get up,” Rita said, embracing her and pecking her cheek. “Ma,” she pulled Jonah forward, “this is the guy I’ve been talking about.”

  Jonah thrust forth a hand. “It’s very nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Khoury.”

  Mary Jo grabbed his arm, pulled him down toward her, and planted a dry, dutiful kiss on his cheek. “Don’t make me feel old,” she said. “Just call me Mary Jo. It’s nice to finally meet you, too. I’ve gotten an earful about you.”

  “A good earful, I hope.”

  Mary Jo cocked her head at her younger daughter. “She’s crazy about you. You must be smart. She doesn’t have any patience with dummies.”

  Rita shaded her face with her brow and shook her head. “Ma, you are mortifying me already.”

  But her mother waved her off. “Why are you so late? We thought you’d be here an hour ago.” She delivered this in her Merrimack Valley accent, nasal and underwhelmed. “I didn’t know it took so long to get up here from Connecticut.”

  “We left early, but we got hungry and stopped for breakfast in Worcester,” Rita said.

  Her mother shook her head. “You probably don’t have any appetite now for all the nice things here.”

  “Believe me,” said Jonah, “I have an appetite.”

  Rita pulled her mother’s paper plate of hummus and tabooleh close, tearing off a piece of bread for Jonah. “Why isn’t Dad here yet?” she asked.

  “He’s in surgeries until four,” Ally supplied.

  Rita turned to Jonah. “Story of our childhood,” she groaned.

  “Hey!” Mary Jo pointed an indignant finger her way. “You think he put you through Harvard on peanuts?”

  But Rita just snatched more pita from her mother’s plate and passed it to Jonah. “You’ve always loved that peanuts line, Ma. Anyway, listen. I thought you said you were bringing Bobby today.”

  At this, everyone laughed, including Mary Jo. “Oh, your cousin’s here, don’t worry,” she said. “Go take a look on the dance floor.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Go see.”

  Rita wove her way through a few tables to get closer to the dance floor in the center, where a large circle of people were stepping in unison a few paces to the right, then, with a kick, bobbing upward a moment before moving on. And there, with his high-tech prosthetic leg with a Nike at the end of it, his arm on the shoulder of the man to his left, his Red Sox cap askew on his head, was Bobby, his face aglow with joy, stepping and kicking along with the rest.

  Rita gasped, delighted. “Oh, Bobby!” she cried, to no one in particular. But an older woman to her right heard her.

  “You know him?” she asked Rita.

  Rita, still smiling and shaking her head, her eyes fixed on Bobby, grateful that her first sight of him in so long had been a happy one, said, “It’s my baby cousin.”

  “God bless him,” the woman said.

  Rita laughed. “That’s for sure.”

  When the song ended, everyone clapped, and several of the dancers, especially the children, crowded around Bobby to hug and kiss him and take pictures with him. Rita laughed out loud again. She hung back off the dance floor and waited until Bobby, his fans dispersed, spotted her and walked toward her, with a far more fluid gait now than when she’d last seen him, when he was still acclimating himself to the prosthesis.

  She held open her arms. “The star of the mahrajan is an Irishman!” she said, as they hugged.

  “Look who’s here!” he said. “Lovely Rita, meetah maid.” He’d been calling her that since he first heard that song when he was six years old. Bobby was one of the only ones in the family who made no effort whatever to suppress his Boston accent. It had been a mark of regional pride among him and the other Massholes when he was in Iraq.

  “Look at you,”she said. “You look great!”And,truly,he did. He was part of a network of Iraq and Afghanistan vets from north of Boston and southern New Hampshire who met informally throughout the week at various gyms and worked out together before hitting Denny’s or Apple-bee’s, and the intact original parts of his body were impressively built up.

  And the face: How could Rita not love that face, the ginger crew cut and facial scruff, the shit-eating grin, the watery blue eyes that were like her mother’s and her uncle Terry’s but full of delight and trouble instead of sourness and doom? The little cousin she’d proudly and proprietarily taken to the amusement park in summer at Salisbury Beach for the Tuesday night half-price-entry special, the cousin who made her feel so mature when she’d pull her own money out of her pocketbook to buy him ride tickets and fried dough, and the cousin who inflated her ego when, upon her attempts to explain some complex matter of politics or science, he would say, “You’re wicked smaht, Rita. You’re probably gonna go to Hahvahd, ahn’cha?”

  But now, as they grinned at each other, he said, “Naw. You look great. You look even bettah than when I see you on the nightly news using your fancy policy talk.”

  Only Bobby could drop such bullshit on her, make her shriek with laughter. “Shut up!” she laughed. “I wanna push you but I can’t anymore.”

  “Yeah, you can. Go ahead, push me. Right in the chest.”

  “No!”

  “Go ahead. You think I’m not strong? I’m still a fuckin’ barrel chest.”

  “No, Bobby, I am not shoving you!”

  “Who’s shoving who here?”

  Rita turned. It was Jonah, slipping his hand around her waist. For a nanosecond, Rita was annoyed that Jonah had crashed their cousinly mini-reunion so quickly, before catching herself.

  “Jonah, this is my cousin Bobby, who I told you about,” she said. “And Bobby, this is my boyfriend, Jonah.”

  Jonah and Bobby shook hands. Bobby beamed. “Nice-ta-meech-ya.”

  “Likewise. Rita’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Yeah, well,” Bobby said, still grinning. “She probably told you what a little wiseass I was to her growing up and then how pissed at me she was when I told her I was signing up.”

  “I wasn’t pissed at you,” she corrected. “I was worried because I was already in Iraq and it was already becoming a nightmare, and then my mother tells me that you are voluntarily signing up to be a part of it. She turned to Jonah. “And then he e-mails me to tell me they’re sending him to Ramadi when it’s become the center of the insurgency.”

  “Cuz, I had to come over to find you, ’cause I missed you!”

  Rita released a short, bitter laugh. “Well, I’d been sent away with my tail between my legs long before you finally got there.”

  “At least ya still got two legs.”

  “Whoa!” Jonah interjected. “I feel like I’m watching a Laurel and Hardy routine here.”

  Rita laughed and put an arm around him. “We’ve been putting on this show for many years, haven’t we, cuz?”

  “Well, look,” said Jonah. “You’re both here and alive and together today. That’s the amazing thing.”

  Throughout the exchange, Bobby’s grin never left his face. “Back with more fuckin’ Arabs!” he crowed, gesturing around him. “I just can’t get enough.”

  Rita cracked up with him. “You are the worst!” she said. She turned to Jonah. “He has no boundaries. Zero. He is the human embodiment of political incorrectness.”

  The three walked off the dance floor back toward the family table, Jonah slightly ahead. Lightly, Rita guided Bobby by the elbow. “Be serious and tell me how you are,” she said.

  But he turned to her with the same bullshit smile. “I’m fuckin’ awesome!” he said. “How are you?”

  “Stop it! Seriously. How’s your head?”

  “It’s still sitting on my neck.”

  “Stop it. You still get together with the vets?”

  “Three times a week.”

  “That’s good. You still seeing—um—” Rita faltered,forgetting the name of Bobby’s last girlfriend.

  “Cheryl the amputee addict?”

  Rita just rolled her eyes, exhausted already from trying to make Bobby cut the jokes. He’d privately nicknamed his last girlfriend that because he’d been the second amputee vet she’d dated in four years.

  “Yes, that’s who I mean,” Rita said.

  “Naw. That ended back in the winter.”

  “What happened?”

  He shook his head, to suggest he was at a loss. “I just wasn’t feeling that anymore.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well as long as you’re doing okay.”

  “I told you I’m doin’ fuckin’ awesome.”

  “Okay! Good.”

  “How are you doin’?” Bobby pointed up ahead, to where Jonah was settling in at the family table. “What’s goin’ on here? You gonna get married?”

  Rita snorted derisively. “No, I’m not going to get married. What would anyone ever get married for?”

  “You been with him, what, a year now?”

  “Nearly. He’s a great guy.”

  “First a Palestinian, now a Jew. You just can’t get away from the neighborhood.”

  “Please,” she scoffed. “Jonah’s never even been to Israel.”

  Bobby was uncharacteristically silent for a moment. “We gotta get him on the dance floor today and check out his moves,” he then said.

  Rita beamed. “You’re right, we totally do!” She was glad the conversation had lightened. She turned to him. “I love that after all these years you still love coming to this thing. That makes me so happy.”

  “I love me some dabke,” he said, inserting a giant guttural noise, as if hacking up phlegm, where the hard k went, and they both cracked up.

  “Honorary Arab,” she told him, as they rejoined the others at the table.

  But no sooner had they sat than the synthesizer keyboardist, positioned with the drummers in the corner of the dance floor, directly beneath large Lebanese and American flags hung side by side, struck up notes to a brisk four-four beat. Nearly every adult under the large tent turned again toward the dance floor, eyes aglow with recognition and anticipation, hands brought together in rhythmic clapping. “Yalla!” called several of the older men. The musicians smiled broadly, having elicited from the crowd the response they clearly sought.

  Rita and Ally turned toward one another, laughing. “The time has come!” Ally said.

  “It always does!”

  Jonah put a hand on Rita’s arm. “What time?”

  “This is the song to end all songs,” Rita explained. “It’s called ‘Nassam Alayna Al Hawa.’ It was sung by Fairouz, who is the ultimate diva of Lebanon and is worshipped by every Lebanese person on the planet, and it’s all about missing the homeland, and whenever it’s played all the old folks will start crying. Just look around you.”

  Sure enough, old ladies were dabbing tears from their eyes, clutching one another’s arms as their heads bobbed to the beat.

  And now the gentleman playing the synthesizer said into his microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, a beloved classic of our mahrajan, Ramona Bistany and her daughter, Nicole.”

  From around a screen erected behind the musicians, out stepped Ramona Bistany—now likely in her early seventies and looking about half a foot shorter than Rita remembered her but every bit the diva still, nimbus of bottle-blond hair intact, face preternaturally smooth and plumped, in a peach-colored shirred chiffon dress and heeled sandals, smiling broadly and lightly clapping to the beat with the microphone in her hand, her long nails—painted peach to match her dress— carefully splayed. And alongside her was her daughter, Nicole, whom Rita remembered from church merely as a husky tomboy in button-down flannel shirts and Dickies. Now here she was alongside her mother, her own microphone in hand, her dark hair in a crew cut, in khakis with rolled cuffs and a polo shirt.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan!” called Ramona, lacing her left arm around her daughter, who laced her right arm, in turn, around her mother’s still tiny waist. “Welcome to the mahrajan!”

  Rita, Ally, and Bobby all traded wide grins. “Looks like Nicole raided the boy’s department at Filene’s Basement,” Bobby cracked.

  “So I guess the whole tomboy thing wasn’t a phase,” Rita said to her sister. “Even having the world’s most glamorous mother can’t make you put on a dress if you don’t want to.”

  Ramona Bistany then warbled out the first lines of the song, which, during the fifteen years of civil war in Lebanon, and even after, became the anthem of the Lebanese diaspora, sung everywhere by Lebanese who’d fled and nursed romantic memories of a halcyon prewar land. Then, holding Nicole’s hand, she turned to her daughter expectantly, and Nicole sang the second line of the song in her not-bad tenor. Back and forth they went like this, all eyes on them, wet ones from the elders, everyone clapping to the beat.

  Rita, smiling, shook her head. “So tribal,” she remarked.

  Ally shoved her gently. “You know you love it. Who’s the only one here who learned Arabic?”

  Jonah, perhaps feeling protective, put an arm around her. “Her Arabic blows my mind.”

  “It’s so rusty,” Rita allowed, “now that I don’t use it every day.”

  “She’s a very smart girl,” chimed in Mary Jo. “Always has been.”

  Rita turned in surprised delight to her mother. “Did I just get a compliment from you, Ma? Do my ears deceive me?”

  Her mother rolled her eyes. “Don’t make me out to be some kinda Mommie Dearest,” she snapped, making Rita and Ally collapse in laughter.

  Ramona Bistany strode to the edge of the dance floor, began pulling people from their folding chairs. “Yalla!” she called into her microphone. “Hayaa linarquas! Time for dabke.” Bit by bit, people rose, joined hands, made their way onto the dance floor. Wives tugged husbands, children tugged sittus and jiddes, until an ever-lengthening line began inching its way sideways, then curling to draw an arc past the musicians.

  Charlie threw himself into Mary Jo’s lap. “Come on, Nana, dance dubee with us, please, pleeeeez?”

  “Look at those beseeching eyes, Ma,” Rita gibed.

  Mary Jo slowly stood. “How does your father manage to get out of this and not me?” she asked, of no one in particular. But she had an arm around her grandson as she said it.

  Everyone cheered Mary Jo’s acquiescence. “That’s it, Ma!” Ally cried. “Keepin’ it real at the mahrajan.”

  As a family, they threaded their way through the tables, joined hands, and attached themselves to the end of the line as it snaked its way around the dance floor. Ramona and Nicole Bistany sang together above the clamor. Rita had lived in Beirut long enough to know what the lyrics meant: “My heart is scared of growing up estranged. / And my home wouldn’t recognize me. / Take me home, take me home.”

  Rita’s right hand was enlaced in Jonah’s, her left in Bobby’s. To the right and then ever so slightly back to the left, everyone stepped, stepped, kicked, and stomped, repeating this sequence in endless cycles. Ramona and Nicole Bistany joined the end of the line as they continued to sing, linked by a silk handkerchief that each clutched in one hand.

  Rita laughed, smiled first at Jonah, then at Bobby, who was keeping up with the steps flawlessly. She watched her mother between her nephew and niece, all traces of being put-upon lost, her face in a wide-open expression of pleasure.

  Much later Rita wondered whether it was her instincts from Iraq, that adrenaline-induced hyper-attentiveness to one’s surroundings so typical of veterans and others who’ve lived in a war zone, that made her notice, well before anyone else seemed to, the man walking toward the dancers at a strangely swift clip from the parking lot, bent slightly forward, in his hands a dark object that Rita at first could not decipher. Even as she continued to dance, her eyes remained fixed on him as he came closer toward them. Then she identified the object in his hand, and her heart was stabbed with terror.

  PART ONE

  THE OLD WORLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE COUGHLINS AND THE KHOURYS

  (1912–)

  In Lawton, the mills dominated everything. You could hardly believe that the city was part of the tranquil Merrimack Valley of northeastern Massachusetts, its lush, rolling green hills cleaved in two by a broad and gently winding river once lined with Pennacook Indians spearing fish, then with sparsely settled Yankee farmers of modest ambition. But by 1912, the year of the great strike that drew the world’s attention, the mills along the riverbanks had grown so large and long that if you beheld the city from very high above you would have seen a swath of green violated by massive, miles-long blocks of brown brick spiked with dirty black towers and, in the instance of the Ayer Mill, a forbidding clock tower with a mansard roof that flared and then peaked like a medieval executioner’s hood.