Early Warning (12 page)

Jim sat on any number of boards of directors, including Pan Am and Douglas Aircraft—he had taken Frank on the maiden run of the DC-8 a year ago May, and Frank had been impressed. He knew that Jim loved the DC-8, and suspected that he was behind Pan Am's big order of those planes when everyone else assumed they were going to go with Boeing. Now he was up to something, but when had Frank ever not gone along with Jim Upjohn? It was like that first time he had taken Frank for a ride in his—what was that?—a Fairchild something—an
Argus. You could see through the roof of the plane. It had been a revelation.

All of a sudden, Dave Courtland balked. He bucked, he reared, he backed away. He said, “I've had it for today. I'm going up to my room and having supper, then turning in for the night.”

Jim Upjohn was as smooth as could be. He said, “Good idea, Dave. They serve quite a good filet here; you should try it.”

Dave Courtland was already gone, leaving Jim to pay for the drinks. All Jim said was “That man's got forty million bucks, and those boys are siphoning it out of his pocket.”

Frank said, “You ever siphon gas?”

Jim Upjohn shook his head.

Frank said, “Well, it tastes like hell, and it gives you a hell of a headache.”

“Something Hal and Risky Friskie truly deserve.”

Frank said, “I don't understand what you want from me, though.”

“We'll see. My idea at this point, though, is: Dave hires you to replace himself as COO. You walk around beside him, you sit down next to him, you stand a little off to the side, and you say not a single word, and those little boys will be shitting their pants.”

“I have a job,” said Frank.

“Oil pays very well,” said Jim.

They parted at the door, and Frank headed into the park.

—

FIRST, ROSANNA SAID
what she always said: “How's the weather?”

Lillian had long since learned that her mother wanted to know in detail and could not be put off, so she said, “Not bad. Warmish—maybe in the high forties. Sunny.”

Rosanna said, “Well, that cold snap here is over, but it's still below zero every night. You know it got down to fifteen below. In November. I am not looking forward to actual winter.”

“Brr,” said Lillian.

Rosanna said, “How did those boys behave themselves?”

“They were fine,” said Lillian. Frank, Andy, and their three kids had flown down Wednesday for Thanksgiving and left that morning. Rosanna waited. Lillian said, “Really, they had one fight with each other. They were fine with Tina. She had some toy—oh, the Mr.
Potato Head—and Michael asked her for it very nicely. That doesn't mean that he's as nice with his brother, Richie….”

“I never saw anyone for taking what the other child had just to get it like Frankie was. Whatever Joe had, Frankie swiped it, and then, as soon as Joe was out of the room, he lost interest and dropped it. Didn't matter what it was. It could be a piece of lint.”

“They argued over pieces of lint?” Lillian was always amazed at what Rosanna said they had played with during the Depression.

“You know what I mean,” said Rosanna.

“Janny stuck to Timmy like glue, so they went bike riding, and the twins couldn't get enough of Dean. There was one hair-pulling incident, and then Dean got them to run around the yard with him, trying to keep the paddleball going. They were laughing.” Lillian waited for Rosanna to ask about Andy's drinking. She had her reply all ready—“Hardly anything, Arthur was the one who…”—but Rosanna said, “Well, good for Dean. Those little boys always strike me as deadly serious.”

Now it was Lillian's turn to cluck. “Well, Janny is serious, too. It's just their temperament. I mean…” Lillian hesitated, then went on: “When have you seen Andy laugh out loud? She smiles, and she chuckles once in a blue moon, but I've never seen even Arthur get a real laugh out of her.”

Rosanna said, “Dear me.”

Lillian decided to change the subject. “Did you have anyone besides Claire?” They both knew what that meant.

“He's a doctor. Ears, noses.” Rosanna said this rather dismissively.

Lillian smiled, but said, “Was she wearing a ring?”

“No ring,” said Rosanna.

“How did they act?”

“Like good friends.”

“No hand holding?”

“In front of me?”

“You can tell if there has been hand holding in the last minute or two.”

“Didn't see any of that. He talked mostly to Joe and Lois, as a matter of fact.”

“What about?”

“Crop prices with Joe, and ear infections with Lois.”

“How is Henry?”

Rosanna clucked again. Lillian waited. Rosanna said, “I thought Henry was going to bring home this girl, what was her name, Sandra. But he said that was all over.”

“Really?” said Lillian. “He seemed to like her.”

“Did he bring her there?”

“He was going to, but she got the flu or something. She sent along a tin of cookies with him. In the spring sometime. I did think they were serious. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Manchester.” Then she said, helpfully, “In England. I thought she was kind of his dream girl. Her last name is Boulstridge. He said it was very rare.”

“He would know,” said Rosanna. “But you never saw her.”

“I saw a picture of them. She was cute. He had a picture when he visited.”

Rosanna clucked, then said, “Same thing happened with that other girl, the Canadian girl. He talked all about her for months and months, said she couldn't wait to come visit, and then she was gone with the wind.”

“He's picky,” said Lillian.

“Where does that get you?” said Rosanna. “He's too good-looking. He's smart, he's got himself a good job at Northwestern, teaching crazy old languages; he goes to Europe every summer and has a ball digging up old junk, if you can believe that.” Lillian could almost see her mother's eyes rolling. Then, “How is Arthur?” Rosanna spoke suddenly and sharply, in order, Lillian thought, to take her by surprise and trap her into saying some revealing word. But all words were revealing—“fine,” “better,” “okay,” “not bad,” “the same,” “eating well,” “sleeping sometimes,” “roaming the house and the yard,” “sitting in the car without doing anything.” Losing his mind. When they were having just one drink before dinner (beer for Lillian and Frank, martini for Andy and Arthur), Arthur had asked Andy what she thought of psychoanalysis, and when she answered that she enjoyed it, that, yes, it was worth the money (she and her analyst, Dr. Grossman, were learning a lot of things), he had stared at her almost, Lillian thought, in pain. She said, “Arthur is working hard.”

“I never met anyone like Arthur,” said Rosanna.

“There is no one like Arthur,” said Lillian.

There was a pause; then Lillian said, “Did you make the gravy?”

“Always do,” said Rosanna.

“I made mine just like you make yours,” said Lillian. “When dinner was over and we were all just so full, Arthur took the gravy boat and poured the last few tablespoons right into his mouth. Then he licked his lips and rubbed his stomach. I thought Debbie was going to disinherit herself, but the other kids were laughing.”

“Oh yes, your Arthur is one of a kind,” said Rosanna.

—

DR. GROSSMAN
'
S OFFICE
was farther up Riverside Drive, at Seventy-eighth Street. It was easy to get to, there was plenty of parking, and Andy could imagine herself and Dr. Grossman as friends rather than doctor and patient. It wasn't just that Dr. Grossman was a woman, it was that she seemed to have a naturally sunny disposition, and also that she was nicely dressed—not only expensively, but with thought as well as taste. It was sort of a perverse victory, Andy thought, that Dr. Katz had fired her, or, rather, kicked her up the ladder to someone more expensive, and less accommodating. Dr. Grossman didn't let her get away with telling stories as dreams, or lying silently on the couch for more than a minute or two. Sometimes Dr. Grossman even argued with her. Now Andy felt that she was truly brave, forging ahead as Dr. Grossman uttered one skeptical noise after another.

“Considering what has happened to Eunice since, I don't feel terribly bitter, and I know she was, we were, very young.” Dr. Grossman did not rise to this bait, so Andy went on. “She set out to seduce Frank—I knew that at the time, because she told me she wanted to. You know how girls are. Some of them, like me, just go around a bit underwater, and everything comes so slowly. So, oh, I guess it was the summer, six months after our friend Lawrence died, that Eunice just came out with it in a letter. She was going to lose her virginity anyway—it was as inevitable as the war—she didn't believe for a moment that Roosevelt would leave the English in the lurch—so why not lose it to someone like Frank Langdon, the best-looking guy you'd ever seen? It was such a small thing compared to, say, the collapse of France. I mean, she wrote that.” Andy fell silent; Dr. Grossman cleared her throat. Andy added, “Small compared to other things, too.” It was true that seeing Dr. Katz and then Dr. Grossman every day, the only Jewish people she had ever known, really, made
her think of the concentration camps, then atom bombs—she could hardly remember the war itself through the smokescreen of hydrogen and atom bombs. And there was no remembering with Frank. He never said a word about what he had done or not done. “Of course, at that time, I didn't know that she had already lost her virginity years before, and not in a very nice way, to an uncle, I believe, though he was fairly close in age—I think she was fourteen and he was seventeen.” Dr. Grossman made a low noise, maybe disbelieving, maybe disapproving, but, as far as Andy knew, this tale of Eunice's was as true as any other. “Of course, I didn't tell Frank what she wrote. I never talked about sex to Frank, and to be honest, he seemed a little shy about that sort of thing.” She paused for a long time and waited for Dr. Grossman to prompt her, but Dr. Grossman said nothing, just uncrossed and recrossed her legs.

“When school started up again and Eunice returned from vacation, I saw that she meant it. Her eyes were all over Frank. The three of us weren't together very often, because why would we be? The person that linked us was gone.”

“Please tell me again how he died?” said Dr. Grossman.

“Infected tooth,” said Andy. “Utterly needless.” She cleared her throat. The sun poured in the window, and Andy could easily sense the Hudson River below in the quality of the light. “However, in the Union or walking across campus, if I was with either of them and the other one appeared, no one had to tell me a thing. It was like magnets. It hurt my feelings at first, but then it didn't. Whatever was going on between them just squeezed some other things out of him that I actually preferred—‘I love you,' stuff about his family, his brother Joe. Joe is a wonderful person. The sense of sin did it. You know, that is the one time in my life with Frank that I ever saw him be sorry for anything, anything at all. His usual attitude is very fatalistic. If Michael hits Richie and blackens his eye, or Janny gets bullied at school, then it was just what was meant to be. I mean, when I showed him that article in the
Times
that said that the Russians have a hundred missile bases, and said what would we do if…, well, he said, ‘Just sit right here.' ”

“So—go on with your story.”

“Frank thought it was a dead secret, but Eunice gave me the blow-by-blow. How he kissed her, where he touched her, which item
of clothing he took off first, how one time he ripped her stocking. Believe me, I was not envious. Sometimes I thought she was crazy, and she was doing it not with Frank but with someone she thought was Frank or she was telling me was Frank, but wasn't really. I mean, Frank was nicer to me every single day, and rougher with Eunice, apparently. It was like I had to choose—there were two of him, or there were two of her, or it just wasn't my business. Like I say, I was so young.”

“Have you seen this kind of split personality since in him?”

Of course the answer was yes. Or no. Andy thought about Frank, the Frank she had sat with at dinner the night before, silent for a while, then irritable with Janny, then laughing at the boys, then seeming to enjoy his au-gratin potatoes (Nedra's were indeed delicious), then telling her a joke, then asking her what a dress she bought for one of Jim Upjohn's cocktail parties had cost ($230), scowling only for a moment, then laughing. She said, “I would say that my sense of what is in a personality has gotten larger since then. His or anyone else's.”

Dr. Grossman said, “Hmm.” That was a sign of approval.

Andy said, “Anyway, he ran off to the war. That's how he put it back together again. It was Eunice who suffered.”

“And how did your friend suffer?”

“Well, the fellow she married beat her senseless more than once.”

“Do you mean that literally?”

Andy said, “Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Andy said, “I feel nothing about that.”

Now there was a long silence, and Andy knew that Dr. Grossman believed her.

H
ENRY DIDN
'
T THINK
about Rosa much. Sometimes he identified her to himself as his “first love,” rather like Flora in
Little Dorrit
—the wrong girl, fortunately escaped, though she wasn't silly, like Flora—she was argumentative, resentful, beautiful, and severe. And yet, when he got to the part in Eloise's letter where Eloise said that Rosa had gotten married and seemed to be having a baby, he felt his mood darken. He read it over: “I don't know if you met Elton Jackman when you were here. He is friends of friends. Anyway, Rosa has told me that she and Elton had decided to get married in a simple ceremony down in Big Sur (to which I was not invited, also not surprised) and they will now live down there with some friends until their baby is born (I guess it's due in June).” Then she went on to write about some organizing she was doing in Oakland.

Henry had met Elton Jackman once—a small, wiry fellow whose real name, it was said, was O'Connell, and whose real game, it was said, was fencing stolen goods, though when the horses were running at Golden Gate, Bay Meadows, or Tanforan, he spent most of his time there. Jackman would take Rosa's literary friends to the races and induce them to bet (and to fund his betting); he would give them a decent tip often enough so that they felt flush. Jackman, talkative and funny, was a bona-fide member of the Lumpenproletariat. Henry thought he was maybe forty-five or so by this time. He
himself was twenty-seven, Rosa nearly twenty-six; when he broke up with Sandra, this seemed old, but now it seemed almost virginal. He had thought that failed romances were Rosa's vocation, along with mourning the father she lost in the war. Obviously to everyone, including Rosa, these two activities were deeply and meaningfully intertwined, and getting knocked up by Eddie O'Connell could easily be the culmination of them.

There was a letter from Sandra, too, not in today's mail, but in Friday's, now four days old, which he hadn't read, much less responded to. He sincerely hoped that Sandra was full of the same news—she was marrying an older man, she was pregnant, she was happy, she was defiant, she was thrilled beyond words to have escaped their hasty engagement, which Henry had attributed to the excitement of finding not one but two Roman coins in the same day on their dig in Colchester (“Camulodunon,” then “Camulodunum,” then, perhaps, “Camelot”?).

Henry went into his perfectly neat bedroom and opened his perfectly neat closet. Stacked on the shelf, perfectly folded, were three sweater vests in shades of brown—he called them “tobacco” (an Arawakian/Caribbean word apparently related to Arabic
tabaq
for “herbs,” describing in its very being the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish), “rust” (from the Old English root,
rudu
, for “redness,” and obviously related to “red,” but also to
erythros
, Greek, and
rudhira
, Sanskrit, and the only color with such broad provenance, and what did that mean?), and “shit,” the darkest one, from Old English
scitan
, to “shed,” “separate,” or “purge,” also the root for “science”). Henry chose the rust, and then a nice Harris-tweed jacket with a bluish green cast, and a navy blue scarf.

The idea that his class would be starting on
Beowulf
in two hours reminded him that he should drop a note to Professor McGalliard, that man of infinite patience who had taught him everything he knew—or, rather, everything that Henry had been capable of learning at the time, which right now didn't seem like much—and who had recommended him for this position. Henry had a couple of chapters to go on his dissertation, but when the department had gone to McGalliard for advice right after Professor Atlee dropped dead of a heart attack in August, he had recommended Henry most highly, so here he was. Professor McGalliard had never married. Now that
Henry was rid of Sandra, never marrying seemed like the purest option.

Henry put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, went out the door to his apartment, closed the door behind him, made sure it was locked, put on his rubbers, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went down the three steps to the outside door. Several kids had come home for lunch from the nearby elementary school, and were making snowballs in front of the apartment building next door. Henry waved to them. It was January. There had been four snowstorms before this, and all three of the boys knew that Henry had good aim, so they smiled, shouted hello, and kept their hands down.

Henry swore that he would open Sandra's letter when he got home that evening.

He had five students. Whether they would get through all thirty-two hundred lines of
Beowulf
by May, Henry had no idea—that was sixteen weeks. Two hundred lines a week might be a lot. But anything was better than nothing. They looked at him expectantly, and so he opened a large book to a marked page and pushed it to the center of the seminar table. He said, “See that mound? I wish the picture were in color. It's a beautiful grassy green. It is Eadgils Mound, in Uppsala, in Sweden. When it was excavated in 1874, it contained a corpse lying on a bearskin, with his sword and other precious possessions, indicating that he was a king. He seems to have died in the middle of the sixth century. When you are translating this poem, I want you to think of it as not only a monster tale, but also a historical record. This poem is considered to be about Eadgils, the king in the grave.” The students' heads went up and down.

Class lasted two hours. They got twenty-five lines translated—from
“Hwaet! We Gardena”
to
“man geptheon”
(“What! We learn of the Danes of the Spear…” to “a man shall thrive”). It did not make much sense, but the students seemed to enjoy the puzzle. That's what Henry said at the end of the class: “Think of the poem as a puzzle, not only a translation, but a jigsaw puzzle that will only become a meaningful picture when you've put all the pieces together. That means we have to be patient.”

He ate his supper at a café near the campus, then trotted all the way home, which took a single invigorating hour. Once home, he put
off reading Sandra's letter by working on his last chapter, a consideration of “The Battle of Maldon” and the monk Byrhtferth.

Finally, he picked up Sandra's letter, slit it open, and got into bed with it. He was so sleepy that he hoped he wouldn't really understand a thing that she wrote. The letter was surprisingly short. It read, “Dear Henry, I have only one thing to say. I no longer think that our engagement failed because you are American and I am English. I know I said that, and it made sense at the time, as Americans are known for their enthusiasm which then falters as novelty and amusement give way to commitment and familiarity. My sister told me about a fellow she went for at University who treated her as you treated me—always kind and more and more distant. He came up queer as a nine bob note. You might think about it. Yours truly, Sandra Boulstridge.”

The interesting thing to Henry was that he wasn't offended. But he also decided to complete his dissertation before thinking any more about it.

—

HER MOTHER AND FATHER
could not afford to buy her a horse. No plan or scheme that Debbie had managed to come up with (including sending Uncle Frank and Aunt Andy a letter, asking very respectfully for a loan of a thousand dollars, to be paid back in ten years, at 5 percent interest) had worked. But now that Debbie had met Fiona Cannon, who was a year ahead of her at school, she didn't care about a horse of her own. Fiona had two horses—or, rather, a horse (Prince) and a pony (Rufus)—and riding with Fiona was far more fun than any camp or lesson she had ever experienced. She rode Rufus, who was a pinto and very low to the ground. She had fallen off Rufus dozens of times—she was expected to fall off Rufus. She was also expected to watch Fiona, who rode Prince. Debbie knew the expression “He rode rings around her,” but she had no idea that it was so much fun to have rings ridden around her.

Fiona lived three stops farther on the school bus. She was an only child, and she kept Rufus and Prince at home, but home was not a fancy place with a stable and a riding ring—home was a two-story house with a wraparound porch down by the road, and a big fenced
field that dipped, ran up the hillside, and ended at the trees. Rufus and Prince lived together in the field, and all of Fiona's equipment and tack was stored in the garage. Fiona's mom was a teacher at the high school, and her dad had a diner in town that served breakfast and lunch but not dinner. Debbie had been there; she liked the waffles.

When Fiona invited her—not every day, but lots of days—Timmy was supposed to tell Mom that she was going to Fiona's, and most times he did. They dropped their books inside the house, changed clothes (she was just a little shorter and thinner than Fiona), and went out back, where Fiona stood at the gate with a bucket of oats and a lead rope, smacking the chain of the lead rope against the bucket and shouting, “Come in, come in!” And then the best thing happened—Prince and Rufus came galloping down the hill, exactly as if they were happy to see them, Fiona of course, but also Debbie, it seemed. While Prince ate from the bucket, Debbie fed a couple of handfuls to Rufus. Then they brushed them and picked their hooves.

Debbie stood Rufus up next to the fence and clambered on bareback. He was slick beneath her, so she entwined the fingers of one hand in his mane and gripped the lead rope with the other. Fiona eased onto Prince, and sat there, limber and relaxed, until Debbie felt secure; then Fiona clapped her legs against Prince's sides and headed diagonally up the hill in a big walk. Rufus jogged a little to keep up. Prince was a beautiful horse, a Thoroughbred who had raced at Pimlico. He was a chestnut (Debbie mouthed the word “chestnut”) with a blaze and two white feet.

As far as Debbie could tell, Fiona could do anything on a horse. It was not only jumping and fox hunting—in Virginia, lots of people did that. Fiona loved riding bareback, and she could do some things that you only saw in movies, like slide to one side and show her face under Prince's neck at a canter, and then pull herself upright again. She could also ride backward, jump off at a trot and a canter, and get Prince to turn, stop, and back up without any bridle or halter at all, just voice commands and the weight of her body.

Debbie wasn't sure what Fiona saw in her—they weren't special friends at school. Debbie was in a group of seventh-graders who took Latin instead of French and thought serving on the Student Council was important. Most of them didn't know who Fiona was, but in the fall, at the bus stand, Fiona had overheard Debbie say to one girl that
she was going to have a set of riding lessons, and then she had started talking to her that afternoon. The next day, she had invited Debbie to meet Rufus and Prince, which was, of course, fine with Mom, who thought that Debbie did not need to copy her homework over twice just to make sure every word was perfect.

The horses ambled along nicely, until the dip was below them and the hillside stretched damp and green before them. All along the fence to their left, the dogwoods were blooming against the darker background of the not-yet-leafy trees, and there were a few bluebells. In the fall, they had picked blackberries at the top of the hill, right from the backs of their horses, while the horses ate grass. Now they walked along the fence about halfway up the slope; then Fiona said, “Stop a minute and watch this.” Debbie pulled on Rufus's lead rope, and Rufus halted. Fiona trotted on up the hillside for another ten or fifteen feet and turned Prince, still trotting; as he trotted down the slope, she squatted on his bare back, and then stood up. After a few strides, she dropped the lead rope and jumped into the air, bending her knees. He trotted out from under her. She landed on her feet. Debbie clapped, and Fiona gave a little bow. She pulled a piece of carrot out of her pocket and called, “Prince! Come in!” Prince looped a lazy circle and took some bites of grass, but after thinking about it for a moment, he came up the hill and received his carrot. Rufus wanted a piece, too. When Fiona had given him a tiny bit, she said, “I started doing that over the weekend. I want to try it at a canter.”