Early Warning (8 page)

He did eat them all. They were cold and delicious. He ate them
standing by the kitchen counter, and with the strawberries, he did a thing slightly frowned upon, at least by his mother—he dipped each one into the sugar bowl before sucking it off the stem. Then he scraped and rinsed the plates, washed his hands, and went back out. He had at least four more hours, he thought, but he didn't mind cultivating. It was precise work; he liked seeing the weeds uprooted and covered by the soil, but the rows of corn plants still standing—small, neat sown seams.

Sometime later, he saw Lois waving to him. He finished his row, made his turn, tried to ignore her. He hated turning the tractor off and on unless he had to. She went inside. He continued his task, but he watched, promising himself that if she came out and waved again, he would go see what she wanted. She didn't come out. Joe finished the field, once in a while glancing toward the house. Nothing.

On the porch, Joe heard Minnie say, “Do we call the sheriff?”

Through the screen, Joe said, “What about?”

Minnie's face turned toward him, blanched but blank. She said, “My father is at the bottom of the basement stairs.”

Joe didn't understand at first, then, when he registered how pale and how angry Minnie looked, it finally clicked. “Is he dead?”

Lois said, “He's really cold. As though he's been down there a long time. I saw him when I opened the door to go down for ajar of peaches. What was that, an hour ago.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.

Joe peered down the stairwell. There wasn't much light, but he could see the old man staring upward, his neck twisted to the right and backward. His hands were above his head, as if he had been reaching for something on his way down. He was wearing a dirty shirt with long sleeves, and overalls.

Sheriff Dee arrived just then with his deputy. After they spent maybe fifteen minutes in the cellar, they sat everyone at the kitchen table for the questions, which Sheriff Dee asked as if he were reading them from a piece of paper, though he wasn't. Lois bounced Jesse on her knee. Minnie looked half upset, half angry, but Lois looked blank. The deputy, Carson, wrote everything down. Joe told about the back door being ajar when he came in the first time. Lois told about noticing a car by the side of the road when she went into town, but she didn't recognize it, it was partly in the ditch, there was no one
in it—she'd thought maybe someone had run out of gas. They never used the front door, but, no, neither of the doors was locked. No one locked their doors around here. And what had they all been doing today? Rosanna had been at her house with Annie, Minnie had been at school, Joe had been out cultivating the corn, Lois had been away for about four hours, taking Jesse for a checkup, then shopping, mailing some letters, visiting with Dave Crest at the store, and browsing at the Denby library. Witnesses? Joe didn't say anything at first; then: “I guess my only witness is the cultivated field.”

The deputy nodded, but Sheriff Dee remained serious and still.

Rosanna said that, yes, Roland Frederick had appeared—when was that?—two years ago now, came and went, said he was working in Omaha, seemed like he'd been drinking steadily for eight years, hardly coherent, but, no, he hadn't seemed threatening, exactly, and he'd gone away as quickly as he came. She had told Minnie about it. Joe's head snapped toward Minnie; then, under the table, he took Lois's hand.

Minnie said, “I thought I mentioned it to you, Lois.” She cleared her throat.

Once they had been “questioned,” Joe and Minnie sat there while Sheriff Dee and Deputy Carson—oh, Seth, his name was, Rodney's kid—walked around the house, looking at this and that, going out on both of the porches, then coming in, staring at the floor, checking doorknobs. They went back down into the cellar, but this time only stayed for under five minutes. It was now after six. Sheriff Dee went to the phone and called the undertaker. Lois asked if they were free to go over to Rosanna's for the rest of the evening, and that's where Minnie, Lois, Jesse, Rosanna, and Annie did go, taking Poppy along. But Joe stayed, sitting quietly at the table, making sure that Nat sat next to his leg while the undertaker and his two assistants carried the shrouded corpse up the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the front door. Nat growled once or twice, but he knew better than to bark. Joe gazed at him, wondering what he knew—he would not have been in the house, but he might have seen something. Joe felt ashamed and somehow suspected, though he didn't know why or of what. Maybe because he really was an interloper in the Frederick house? Maybe because at last the farm was his?

—

DR. KATZ SAID
, “How about dreams?”

Andy was lying on his couch, though it was more like a daybed. He was behind her. This was her thirty-second appointment. She had started in the summer, after reading about how H-bombs had potential as usable conventional weapons. She realized that she could not get the word “fallout” out of her mind—it was planted in there like a black pea that sometimes sprouted and sometimes did not—but Dr. Katz didn't seem interested or impressed by her worries. He said he wanted something “deeper.” She was up to five days a week now, as of September 1, when they both returned from their August vacations. It had been fifteen dollars a session, but since she was seeing him every morning, like a regular job, he was doing it for $12.50. Frank didn't mind. This year he stood to earn fifty thousand dollars at Grumman, and that did not include their investments in what they called their “Uncle Jens Fund,” named after that strange great-great-uncle of hers who had left all his money to be divided up among his descendants, but only after those who were living when he was still alive had themselves died—a grouchy, Nordic legacy that Andy hadn't yet mentioned to Dr. Katz. She said, “Not much. Well, one sticks in my mind.”

It was part of her job to offer the dream. She lay there for a minute or two, allowing the silence to build around her, then said, “Two mornings ago. I'd sort of forgot it, but it's coming back to me.”

She closed her eyes and continued. “There were hills, but no trees. I am on a hillside, and a river is running below me, fast and frothy. I am supposed to go down there. I'm a little afraid. I also know that I'm a very beautiful girl—say, fifteen. But I'm not me. I have silky blond hair to below my waist. I'm sitting on the hillside, twisting my hair between my hands.”

Actually, the dream was not a dream, but a story she had read. Andy, as far as she knew, didn't have any dreams. But Dr. Katz seemed to like the dream stories she told him, and to find them revealing.

She went on, “I've been married twice already. So maybe I'm not fifteen. But it seems like both those things are true. The main thing is the feel of the grass on the hillside—rough and full of burrs.”

“Hmm,” said Dr. Katz.

“Then a man comes up to me, and I know that this is my new husband, and I really like him best.” She paused, then said, “He smiles more than the others did. He's not Frank. Anyway, we walk along the hillside, which is steep, and then, all of a sudden, he has a bow in his hand, and he's shooting arrows at some people. And his bowstring breaks, and he asks me for some of my hair. I say no.”

“Explain, please,” said Dr. Katz.

“I can't explain. I just say no. So he stands there with the broken bowstring, and then he is shot through the neck, and I woke up. I guess I looked over at Frank, and he was lying on his back, but he was fine. So I lay there for a few minutes, and then went back to sleep.” In fact, Frank was not next to her. But, then, she hadn't had the dream, either.

Dr. Katz said, “Do you feel that you withheld something from your husband, and it killed him?”

“Well,” said Andy, “he was outnumbered.”

“Is that what you feel, that he was outnumbered?”

“Why would he think that he could use hair as a bowstring? It makes no sense.”

“Did you feel that in the dream, that his idea was a foolish one?”

“I felt nothing. I just said no.”

“Did you feel in mortal danger?”

“No.”

Andy was beginning to regret that she had told this story. Finally, she said, “People die in my dreams all the time.” From, she thought, fallout. Dr. Katz said, “Yes, they do,” which surprised her. She said, “But it seems like, in the dream, I always know that it's a dream, and that the person is not really dying, or that the person is not really a person. One or the other.”

“You do not grieve for them.”

Andy said, “No.” A question offered itself: was she a heartless person? When Lillian told her over the phone the night before that the son of a friend of hers, nine years old, also named Michael, had been hit by a car crossing the road by the house, killed instantly, Lillian wept in sympathy, but Andy felt cold, stared at the ash of her cigarette, had nothing to say. Was she the most heartless client he
had? But you weren't supposed to ask questions, you were supposed to arrive at answers.

There was an extra-long silence. Andy thought of being honest and telling him that she had related a story, not a dream. But then he would ask her what the difference was, and she would have to say that she didn't know.

W
HEN DID LILLIAN HAVE TIME
to read the papers, or to watch the news on TV? And yet things filtered through—Hungary in November, the Suez crisis at the same time, both of them crushing. Even so, though Arthur came home a little late, he did come home in the usual way, full of fun and with a big appetite, two helpings of everything, though you couldn't tell that to look at him. He didn't lose his sex drive until February, which Lillian thought, secretly, was a bit of a relief. Then, one night, she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she got back to bed, in the moonlight the tears were glistening on his cheeks and his eyes were wide open, even though he was lying still and not saying a word. It was like getting in bed with a stranger. She said, “Arthur?”

He rolled onto his side, his back to her, and she slipped under the covers. She put her hand on his head and scratched, just very lightly, and it put her right to sleep. Sometime after that, he slipped his arms around her sleeping body and woke her up, sobbing on her shoulder. He hadn't been like this for years, not since Timmy was born alive and healthy. Even when his father died, his eyes had remained dry and his back straight.

She did what she did with Debbie and Deanie, just let him sob, patting him lightly on the leg. She could see the phosphorescent hands of the clock glowing from where she lay—a quarter after three, marching
on to a quarter to four. Finally, he heaved a big sigh, pulled his one arm from underneath her, and sat up. She said, “You okay?”

He wiped his face with the corner of the sheet and sighed again. He said, “Well, if this room is bugged, I'm probably out of a job.”

“Is this room bugged?”

“I've checked. I don't think so.”

Lillian said, “You're kidding me.”

“I hope I am.”

He stood up and went down the hall to the bathroom. She heard him open and close doors—peeping in on the boys and the girls. Then he sat down in the armchair and said, “Did we say Dean could sleep on the floor?”

“For now.”

“Okay. I just wanted to make sure Timmy is not imposing some cruel and unusual punishment.”

“No, Deanie's agitating for a tent. He wants me to tack one side of his blanket to the wall.”

Arthur said, “Please tell me that we've been married less than a hundred years.”

“We've been married eleven years and three months.”

Arthur let his head drop onto the back of the chair and inhaled deeply. Lillian was sure right then that he had found another woman—someone who had no children, or whose figure was holding up better. She, who had once worn a 4, now wore an 8. What had ever made her think that such a dashing man as Arthur would be satisfied with her? Georgetown was a hotbed of infidelity—the women who didn't talk about it all the time were those who sleeping with their friends' husbands, and so you could always tell who had just commenced an affair.

He said, “I don't know how I'm going to take it anymore, and now—”

“Now what, Arthur?”

He leaned forward and put his face in his hands, and mumbled something. Lillian realized that he was not talking about their marriage. She knelt down in front of him, took his hands away from his face, and said quietly, “Say that again, Arthur.”

“Eighty percent of our budget goes for absolute crap.”

She waited.

“I hate Frank Wisner. I hate every stupid idea that he ever had, starting with parachuting blockheads into Poland at the end of the war. Direct action! Sabotage! Subversion! His operations are the definition of ‘half cocked'! And I like Ike. I do like Ike! But thirty thousand got killed in Budapest, just mowed down, and it was because Ike wouldn't lift a finger, and the Russians just rolled over them. Wisner hated Nagy, he'd once been a commiebastard—that's how he talks—there is no redemption for commiebastards. We had two guys translating from the Hungarian—two, just two—but everything they translated indicated that Nagy was going to go our way, and everything we broadcasted said, ‘Go, go, go, we're right behind you,' but they didn't actually look around, because if they had they would have seen us running the other direction, because Ike has some other plan, God knows what it is.”

“The Hungarians knew it was risky, Arthur….”

He took her hands and peered into her face. He said, “You know what I do every day, Lillian? I exaggerate the Soviet threat. I say they have a hundred new bombers when they only have ten. I say that there are twenty divisions when there are ten divisions. I say that they are thirty percent closer to thermonuclear-tipped ICBMs than they are.”

“Why do you do that, darling?”

“Because maybe the Soviets are lying and our sources are wrong and we have to be on the safe side, and eighty percent of the budget that goes to doing crap is taken away from finding out crap. Because I've become a jerk. Because that's what they want to hear. I do feel like I've been doing this for a hundred years and that I can't do it anymore.”

“Then quit,” said Lillian. You have four children and a mortgage. But she didn't say this.

“Who takes over from me when I quit? Some kid from Yale who looks at the figures and stretches them even further. Some kid from Yale who can't wait to be sent to El Salvador or Vietnam and is only wiping his shoes on the doormat of analysis.”

“But you've been thinking like this for a while, Arthur. What's bothering you right now?”

“We didn't know! We didn't know a thing about either the Hungarians
or the Suez attack before they happened. Were you surprised when you read that in the paper?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“I was just as surprised as you, Lillian. I nearly fell down the steps. I picked up the paper out on the front porch, and I opened it and I read the headline, and I grabbed the railing, and it was a good thing I did, because I had reeled backward and a moment later I lost my balance.”

“That's six steps,” said Lillian.

“It would have been a mess,” said Arthur.

“Did you get in trouble for not knowing?”

“No! I had my excuses all lined up, and no one said a word. They don't care! The White House doesn't know what we know or when we know it, and Dulles and Wisner just cover up, because, if people started wondering what we know, then they would start wondering why we do crap, and our funding would be in danger, and we can't have that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the charitable way of looking at it is that we might actually need it for something worthwhile in the future.”

“But why were you crying? I mean, tonight rather than last night or last November?” She ran the tip of her finger along the angle of his cheekbone, an angle that she loved in him, in Timmy, in Dean, in Tina, and then she touched her fingertip to her lips.

He said, “We're already on to the next mess.”

Lillian said, “What is that?”

“Deposing Sukarno. Wisner swears he's a closetcommie. The Indonesian ambassador says Sukarno loves Ike like a father. What am I going to do?”

Lillian said, “I don't know.”

It was now almost five. The alarm was set for seven. They got back under the covers, and Lillian pressed herself into Arthur's arms. He held her at first loosely and then tightly. What would her mother say? Lillian thought. When Rosanna was thirty, Mary Elizabeth had already died, and then, not much later, Henry was born right there in the downstairs bedroom, in a howling wind, with Joe looking on. Probably, her mother would have considered worries like Arthur's
abstract and even unimportant. Lillian could not tell Arthur what to do. But she knew there had been a shift, as slow but as inexorable as the movement of an hour hand—the cocoon she had made herself in this house was beginning to crack, and something quite different from the caterpillar inside it was about to emerge. Her mother would toss her hand, roll her eyes, and say that you had to grow up sometime. She would also probably say that such a thing was never good.

—

JIM UPJOHN HAD
a theory about women: there were those younger and prettier than your wife, but cut from the same cloth—say, they had gone to Vassar, as your wife had, if only for a year. Alex Rubino had a theory, too: you found women who were as unlike your wife as they could possibly be, and made sure that these women never crossed your path again. For a long time, Frank laughed at both of these theories, because he kept expecting the return of a certain tide—that rush of feeling for Andy that he had felt just before and after they were married, before the twins siphoned every mote of energy in their own direction. But the twins were just kids now, not enormous representations of obligation and fatigue, and Andy had made up her mind that something about her own childhood was lingering around her, a shroud, a ghost, a bearskin rug. She, of course, wasn't the only woman they knew in psychotherapy—Frances Upjohn was quite fond of her Jungian. Both Frank and Jim thought that therapy was a luxury women could afford because they didn't have much to regret; without mentioning it, they both knew they were talking about the war, and the only way you were supposed to talk about the war was as an adventure. They let the subject drop.

When Frank got picked up in the Waldorf, he was sitting at the bar, nursing a gin and tonic. He was wasting time, not going home, because the twins, then a year old, were a riot of screaming and upset. When she passed him, murmuring, “That looks good. Buy me one?” he didn't even realize she was a whore. What a hick, he thought. Once a hick, always a hick. She was a nice-looking girl, dark, slender, wearing a pair of shoes Andy would have admired. But he wasn't a guest in the hotel, and so didn't have a room. After an hour, they left the Waldorf, and he kissed her by the front door, before she went uptown
and he headed for Penn Station and home. Why had he kissed her? Because she opened his eyes. Of course, he paid her, too.

He tried it a month or so later at the Waldorf, taking a room for the night, then watching the girls work the bar. That time, the girl had been slightly younger—maybe twenty-five, and blonde, from Los Angeles, she said, looking for a job on Broadway. But she, too, wore shoes that Andy would have admired, and she carried an expensive handbag. He gave her a twenty, told the man at the desk he was called away. The next hotel he tried was the Plaza—the wrong direction. Farther south, he thought, would suit him better. The Roosevelt seemed perfect—you could walk from there to Grand Central, and the ambience was not quite as stuffy as at the Waldorf. It was winter by then; the first girl he found had a nice Sandra Dee hairdo, headband and all, and her coat was from Macy's, not Bergdorf's. She talked with a little whine in her voice, like the wife in a movie he'd seen,
The Killing.
The second girl was from the South somewhere, and maybe this had been her first time, because when he took her up to the room, she walked around, touching things like the windowsills and the wallpaper.

The third time, he paid for his room at the Roosevelt (twenty-eight bucks), then left because he was too bored to stay. The Mansfield, a little farther south, looked right, but he decided to try the West Side. The Algonquin amused him for a month or two—the rooms were not terribly expensive, and the girls more experienced, as if they had tried out for the Plaza and the Waldorf but hadn't made the cut. Four girls there—Leslie, Peachy, Zandra (really?), and Honey. He was ready for someplace new.

He got as far south as the Chelsea Hotel, and he liked that—there were girls coming out of every door and leaning out of every window. But he didn't fit there, with his clean suit, nice shoes, and carefully cut hair. Better to observe the Chelsea Hotel from a distance. Three blocks away, he happened upon a ramshackle, narrow building on West Twentieth Street that faced north. The bar was called the Grand Canyon, and it had two entrances and a large window looking out onto the street. He walked through twice, looked around, greeted the desk clerk in a friendly way and reserved a room, then returned to the Grand Canyon. Three people sitting at the bar. The
tables empty. Frank sat by the window. Because it was late May, the light was fairly bright. None of the regulars wanted to sit in the glare.