http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/us/01charles.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
In Chekhov’s 1892 short story “The Grasshopper” an ambitious young society woman marries a quiet doctor nine years her senior. Though tall and broad-shouldered, Dr. Osip Dymov seems small and insignificant in the glittering company of his wife’s artistic and literary friends: he looks “as though he had on somebody else’s coat.” At their wedding the young woman, Olga Ivanovna, dashes from friend to friend, urging, “Look at him; isn’t it true that there is something in him?,” as if she wanted to explain “why she was marrying a simple, very ordinary, and in no way remarkable man.”
Dana Canedy with her fiancé, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King.
A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN
A Story of Love and Honor
By Dana Canedy
Illustrated. 279 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.95.
Dana Canedy’s powerful memoir, “A Journal for Jordan,” begins by sounding similar notes. She has climbed from working-class roots, the daughter of an African-American military family at Fort Knox, into journalism’s highest echelons: reporter for The New York Times and part of thePulitzer Prize-winning team that created the 2001 series “How Race Is Lived in America.” She dates the managing editor of The Boston Globe and vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, enjoying lobster, single-malt Scotch and evenings of Scrabble.
But that relationship fades, and in its aftermath Ms. Canedy visits home. In her parents’ living room in Radcliff, Ky., she encounters First Sgt. Charles Monroe King. A tall, handsome and heavily decorated soldier eight years her senior, he had served in Operation Desert Storm, Kuwait and Guantánamo Bay.
“I wondered how a man blessed with so much beauty could possibly be bashful,” Ms. Canedy writes. But she also finds him stiff, old-fashioned and provincial. Sergeant King is not a voracious reader of books and newspapers; he makes grammatical errors; in a 45 miles-per-hour zone, he drives 45 m.p.h.
After Ms. Canedy returns to Manhattan, Sergeant King pursues her by phone. “I was instantly conscious of how little interest I had in dating a soldier,” she writes. “My ideal man,” she says, “looked like Charles but wore a suit to work and carried The Wall Street Journal under his arm.”
“He’s not exactly my type,” she tells a girlfriend. “I mean, what if I have to introduce him to the executive editor at a Times event? He mispronounces words and doesn’t keep up with the news.”
Chekhov’s Olga gets her comeuppance, like a character in an O. Henry story: her obsession with the imagined talents of her fellow social climbers eclipses her recognition of her husband’s true brilliance. As Dr. Dymov dies of diphtheria contracted from a patient, attending doctors snarl at Olga: “What a loss for science! Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an extraordinary man! ... Merciful God, ... we shall never look on his like again.”
I wish Chekhov had pushed deeper to explain that Olga grieves not for her husband, but for the lost status his eminence would have given her.
Like the fictional Dr. Dymov, the real-life Charles King is of quiet excellence. He is full of decency and honor. He is trusted and beloved by the men he leads, and to the last, he will never betray their trust. He offers Ms. Canedy respectful, full-hearted adoration. She accepts his courtship, but still frets that he is beneath her.
“I wondered if Charles could truly be happy married to a willful woman who earned considerably more than he did,” she writes.
There is subtle parsing here of crosscurrents of race and class: both Ms. Canedy and Sergeant King have climbed beyond the sphere of their parents’ achievements and of their modest neighborhoods, but Ms. Canedy has scaled higher. Dare she turn around now and reach back for this man? The writer is hard on herself, letting the best light fall on Sergeant King.
But, unlike Olga’s tale, Ms. Canedy’s narrative becomes a love story. Sergeant King’s goodness wins her heart. “Even though I still found it irritating when he mispronounced a word, I had grown to love his mind.” Not all great love stories are ignited by the lightning bolt of love at first glance; this humbler I’m-going-to-talk-myself-into-this-good-man version is believable and real.
They hope to marry, but now time is short. George W. Bush is elected; the twin towers fall; the White House purveys false assertions of weapons of mass destruction; Iraq is invaded; Sergeant King is called up. The two cling to each other whenever he can find time away from training his troops. The couple conceive a baby, then Sergeant King leaves for Iraq. In his duffel bag he carries one of Ms. Canedy’s last gifts to him, a new-father’s journal.
Sergeant King will leave Iraq only once, for two weeks, to meet his 5-month-old son, Jordan. He does not speak of the war. Instead the new parents nestle with their jolly boy and try not to count off the days. Sergeant King writes in his journal every night, committing a lifetime of wisdom to its pages, in case he fails to return to raise Jordan. The father’s journal forms the backbone of this memoir. (It was also the subject of a Times article by Ms. Canedy in 2007, “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By.”)
On his last visit Sergeant King presents Ms. Canedy with a painting he has made: a self-portrait of a man with angel’s wings, kneeling before God. She shoves it back at him in a panic. They say goodbye, then each stands alone and sobs — Ms. Canedy in her apartment, Sergeant King (she learns later) in the lobby. On Oct. 14, 2006, Sgt. Charles King is killed when an improvised explosive device rips through his Humvee.
There are no politics here, no accusations against the Bush White House. Ms. Canedy, having fallen in love with a career soldier, respects his sense of duty too much to rail against his orders. But “A Journal for Jordan” is impossible to read without a sense of bitter knowledge that this principled man fell at the behest of leaders less guided by honor. That is no trick O. Henry ending. It is a denouement full of suffering, worthy of Chekhov.
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