Early Warning (15 page)

Lillian felt tears come to her eyes.

“When my father got back from the war, he was disappointed in his bride. He had grown up, and she had not. But, of course, that was then, and he made the best of it, and in due course, another child was born, little Arthur. I looked just like a Manning, and my father was deeply relieved. He was a military man. His specialty was equipment. He was proud of everything he knew about equipment, whether it was a machine or a horse. He could deploy a flock of pigeons, fix an engine. He was just like me—he despaired of the glamour boys who always had to run out ahead of the supply line because they were too impatient to wait. But he liked the army, the order of it, and he was a great patriot. Just like me.”

“Just like you, Arthur.”

“One day, my mother put me down for my nap. I was two and a half, and a good sleeper. She rocked me, held me, carried me to my bed, and then she covered me and told me to have a nice long sleep, that we would have cake for dinner. I remember every word.”

Lillian felt her heart start pounding.

“Then she went into her room and got the belt of her dressing gown and she tied it to the bottom of a fat newel post, and then she hanged herself. When my father came home for his dinner, he saw her there. I was screaming from my room.”

Lillian started shaking.

“My father never hid any of this from me. He told me what I asked to hear, and he told it honestly. The woman he found to take care of me was a kind and loving woman, and when he sent me to boarding school, he sent me to a pleasant place with lots of animals and playing fields, and he made sure I was big enough and strong enough to defend myself, which I was. He never said an unloving word about my mother, but he would look hard into my eyes, Lil, and what he was looking for was that weakness, that failure of spirit. That fatal inability to take it, whatever it is.”

Lillian said, “You can take it, Arthur.” She was sure of this—he looked intent and perplexed, not broken, or breaking. But he said, “Wisner couldn't.”

“You hated Frank Wisner.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because he was wrong and foolish all the time?” Then she said, “There is no one like you, Arthur. You make Frankie look dull and Henry look stupid and Timmy look shy. You make Joe look weak. I cannot live without you.”

And they both knew what that meant.

—

BY THE SUMMER
before ninth grade, Debbie had become a pretty good rider, and she was too big for the pony, which was fine, because Fiona had a new horse, another old racehorse but more elegant than Prince, a bay with a star named Rocky (racing name Roquefort, with French bloodlines). Fiona loved him. He was a jumper; though he could not be hunted, he could jump six feet, and had done so. Oddly enough, he wasn't bad on the trail—his problem was not spookiness, said Fiona, it was bossiness. He would go on the trail with Prince if he could go first. That was fine with Prince.

Fiona didn't scare Debbie anymore—she was used to Fiona. Everyone at school thought Debbie was lucky to be friends with her.

In the hot weather, they rode trails every day. The first time they stole a watermelon, Debbie was nervous. But it was easy. They walked Rocky and Prince along a trail that ran along the far edge of a sandy watermelon patch that was hidden from the house and barn by both a line of trees and a stand of weeds. Fiona stared at the watermelons as they walked slowly past, and when she saw a ripe one, she slid off Rocky, handed the reins to Debbie, and skittered over to it, bright and oblong in the sun. Then she stood up, looked around, hoisted it (it was heavy), and dropped it. It burst open in a glory of reddish pink. Because she was Fiona, she offered pieces to the horses first, and Debbie saw that they knew what they were getting. Rocky stuck his nose into the wet sweetness and sort of slurped it up, licking and chewing at the same time. Fiona said, “We have to remember to wash their bits.” Prince had his turn, and then Fiona ran over and got pieces for Debbie and herself. After they were finished, Fiona took a dollar out of her pocket and secured it under the broken melon.

The second time, Debbie and Fiona were talking about a show Fiona had entered and didn't notice the horses' ears flicking. They
took the exact same path to the melons, and Fiona jumped off Rocky and handed his reins to Debbie. Debbie was looking into the woods, not toward the farmhouse, because she was just a little afraid of having a deer jump out and spook Prince. Fiona broke the watermelon and brought some over, then went back for more. It was then that they heard the shout, and about a moment after that that they heard the other thing, the shot. Debbie had never heard a shot before, that she knew of. But the horses threw their heads, Fiona dropped the pieces of melon, and she jumped onto Rocky as fast as Debbie had ever seen her. They took off down the trail that ran past the edge of the melon field, Rocky in the lead, Prince right behind him, and there was another shot. Fiona, who was bending over Rocky's neck, yelled, “Ouch!” and her hand came around and touched her behind. Then Prince shied to one side and almost lost Debbie, but she stayed on. They galloped. Debbie did not see a trail; she had to keep her head low and let Prince figure it out, because she had no idea where they were going.

They ended up near the top of the hill behind the farm, and when they came out into a little clearing, Debbie could see the farmer. He had his shotgun over his arm. The horses were breathing hard—the run up the hill had taken the wind out of them. Fiona dismounted and ran her hand over her behind and then over her right arm. There were marks—tiny red dots. She licked them. She said, “That's salt. He fills the shells with rock salt and shoots them.”

“He's done that before?”

“He shot me twice last year, but he didn't hit me.” She ran her hand over her behind again. “It stung. Did it go through my breeches?”

“No. There aren't any holes.”

“Okay. Well, I guess we'll stay away from him for a while.”

“Maybe Prince got hit. He spooked.”

But there was no blood on Prince. Once again, when they got back to Fiona's, a half-hour ride from the top of the hill, and the horses were cool and calm, Fiona kept her adventures to herself. It was summer, so her mom was home, sewing in the dining room. She said, “Oh, hello, girls. Beautiful day—not too hot, for once. You having a good day?”

And Fiona kissed her on the cheek, easy as you please, and said, “Not much going on.”

“Oh, that's the good old summertime.” When Friday came, and Debbie had her slumber party with her other friends, the good girls, she had to admit that she found them a little numerous and irritating.

—

SHE WAS AHEAD
of him, walking down Maiden Lane, almost to Front Street. Frank recognized her from the back, just the way her hips shifted from side to side. He sped up, and came up to her right at the corner, and they stood there, waiting on the traffic. He pretended not to look at her; he was adept at that. She was wearing a black wool coat, nicely cut, cheap. Of course, her face was much older—she would have been almost the same age as Frank in '44, so in her early twenties. That would make her at least thirty-eight or so. Frank gave her a little smile, somewhere between friendly-on-a-deserted-street and would-you-like-to-get-a-drink. She glanced at him and looked away. Of course, she didn't recognize him—he was no longer a GI, his hair had darkened, he was wearing a very expensive suit and custom-made shoes. He dropped back and let her go ahead. He slowed his steps and watched her, and the farther she got away from him the more certain he was that he was right—it was she, “Joan Fontaine,” the love of his life, the prostitute (but so unprofessional) that he had spent—what?—four, five hours with on Corsica after the Italian campaign. He watched her walk toward the entrance of a pleasant-looking red brick building on the corner. When she had closed the door behind herself, he walked that way and passed the door. He did not stop, but he noted the address: 158 Front Street, between Maiden and Fletcher.

He kept walking up Front until he found the subway station at Fulton Street, and went home. Once he got there, he was in such a good mood that he sat with Janny for half an hour, listening about the Halloween party at school (Mary Kemp had real wings—well, not real, but see-through—and Doug Lester came as Satan and the teacher sent him home). Richie and Michael had gone out dressed as a pirate and a cowboy. They were now fighting over the sword and the gun.

Frank had a long history of knowing exactly what he was doing. He looked at a thing, there was a click, and he was right. All he had to do was act on that thing. It hadn't started in the war, but he had
noticed it in the war—he always knew before he fired his weapon whether he was going to get a kill or not. The other snipers in his squad had talked a little about the same feeling. Lyman Hill, the best of them, thought it was a predatory instinct—not the instinct of a wolf, but that of a hawk or an owl, a sightline followed by a swoop. Frank pictured the woman again in his mind. He tried to imagine what she had been doing in the last seventeen years that had brought her to this street corner in New York City. He couldn't imagine it, but he knew that he would find out.

S
TEVE SLOAN DECIDED
that he was going to learn to play the guitar, and Stanley Sloan went along with this—he chose bass. Tim didn't know anything about music except that he liked everything but Ricky Nelson. The Sloan boys had been up to Philly and gone to
American Bandstand.
Tim liked the Marvelettes, and who did not like “The Duke of Earl”? But he had never thought about actually making music.

Steve Sloan never saw anything that he didn't think he could do, and anyway, his uncle on his mother's side was a piano player in various musical establishments up and down the Jersey Shore. He bopped around the halls at school muttering “Stand by Me” under his breath, just, Tim knew, to be showing off. But the girls smiled fondly as he walked by. Tim had been trying to cultivate a more reserved demeanor, interesting but distant. It wasn't working. So he chose rhythm guitar.

When he asked his mom for a guitar, she looked at him and said, “Oh, that would be fun. Your uncle Frank had a lovely voice as a boy, and, of course, Granny Elizabeth quite enjoyed playing the piano.” She walked away, humming. This was not quite the response he was looking for. At least, Mrs. Sloan would throw up her hands and say, “Not again! I wish you boys would quit bothering me!”

They played in the Sloan brothers' room. Steve said that they
would learn three chords—that was all you needed at first—then they would work on rhythm, and in the meantime, they would find a drummer of some sort, but he had to be steady. It didn't matter if he was their friend; in fact, it was better if he wasn't. He would be their employee.

In the years he had known Steve and Stanley, they had gotten in a fair amount of trouble. Steve had started Tim smoking, Steve was the one who had the beers, and the one who didn't mind driving without a license if it had to be done; that time they hitchhiked to Norfolk had been his idea (Mom and Dad had never even heard about that one). His way had always been, I'm doing this, and you can come along if you want. But now he stood over Tim and Stanley, showing them the chords, how to place the fingers of the left hand and how to strum with the right, and he counted and stopped them and started them and counted again. He wasn't terribly patient, especially with Stanley, but at the end of two and a half weeks, they could play “Tom Dooley,” which only had two chords, D and G, and “This Train,” which carried no gamblers, no crap shooters or midnight ramblers. Steve and Stanley's mom taught them “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which she said was about slaves heading north to freedom before the Civil War—the Drinking Gourd was the Big Dipper, which pointed to the North Star. Steve sang the lyrics, and Stanley sang the harmony. Tim sang “hey hey hey,” or “woo woo,” and sometimes came in on the refrain. About three-quarters of the time, they finished together.

Steve now began looking for a “gig,” which was a chance to play together in public, and Tim sincerely hoped that he would fail in this attempt. Over the next two weeks, they added “Frankie and Johnnie” and “Good Night, Irene” to their “repertoire.” But three girls came up to him on three consecutive days and said, “Hey, Tim. I hear you guys have a band,” and all he had to do was kind of cock his head and shrug and say, “Just getting started, really.” Then he would lean back against the wall and rest his right foot behind his left foot and act as if he had all the time in the world, and the girls would giggle and smile and hug their books to their chests and look up at him, and this made him realize that he was getting pretty tall.

—

“
WELL, THEY AREN
'
T
my nightmares,” said Andy, “but I think they're interesting and important, and since she's screaming almost every night, maybe we should talk about them.”

“Maybe we should,” said Dr. Grossman.

Andy sat up. She and Dr. Grossman exchanged a glance that indicated to Andy that their usual relationship was taking a little break, and they gave each other that feminine once-over—hair, necklace, stockings, shoes. Then Andy said, “Last night, it was pretty obvious. I mean, no hidden meanings here. It was a boom and a mushroom cloud.”

“Janny is how old now?”

“Eleven. She'll be twelve in the fall.”

“How do you think she knows about these things?”

“How would she not?” said Andy. “My neighbor two doors down is building a bomb shelter behind his house, down below the kitchen. The workmen have been there for two weeks, putting in the angled air pipes. Their little girl—her name is Melissa—told Janny last week that if she happened to be spending the night when the bomb came she could go into the shelter, but if she was at our house they wouldn't let her in. Or us, either. Now Janny wants to build a bomb shelter.”

“What do you think about that?” said Dr. Grossman.

“About building a bomb shelter?”

“No, about what the child said to her.”

“It sounds fair,” said Andy. Then she sighed. “If we have the news on, she puts her fingers in her ears, and she really presses them hard so she can't hear. Sometimes she goes into the kitchen and I can hear her humming all through the news to drown it out.”

“Have you and your husband tried to explain to her—”

“What is there to explain?” said Andy. “Frank would never build a bomb shelter.”

Dr. Grossman fell silent.

Andy imagined Dr. Grossman sitting, quietly reading intellectual books in German—not only Freud, but
The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Dr. Grossman and Mr. Grossman would be sitting in matching armchairs, and somehow their reading or their experience had taught them to accept what must be accepted, rather than to fear it. Normally, Dr. Grossman's office, neat and tastefully decorated, was calming. But today the very light said, “No hope.” Andy didn't terribly
mind if the failure of hope was hers—she was used to that—but she did mind if the failure of hope was Dr. Grossman's. She felt herself become a little angry.

She flashed out,
“Nordmennene vise seg Ã¥ være rett allikevel, ikke sant?”

“Excuse me?” said Dr. Grossman.

“Admit it!”

“Admit what?”

“There is no salvation.”

“I never said that there was,” said Dr. Grossman.

There was another long silence, and then Andy said, “Is there something I can do for her?” For me?

“I have a colleague,” said Dr. Grossman. “She might benefit from seeing him.”

But as she left the office, Andy thought, it was nature over nurture, wasn't it? Ragnarök or nuclear exchange, what was the difference? How appropriate that the DEW Line (the “Distant Early Warning Line”—Andy mouthed the words) ran across Greenland, Iceland, and no doubt Norway. What was his name again—Loki—the one bound to the rocks with chains and ropes made of the entrails of his own son. Loki, the god of the moving earth, of crevasses opening up and caverns collapsing, was the one who had always frightened her, not Surt, the fiery one. When she was Janny's age, any trembling, even of the branch her swing was anchored to, had put her in a fright. In the last ten years, she had considered and put away her fears—thermonuclear, fallout, Mutually Assured Destruction—one by one. Now they were back, and Janny seemed to sense them. The thing not to tell Janny was that there would be just two survivors, a couple named Líf and Lífþrasir, say Adam and Eve. But not Janny, not Richie, not Michael. Not Andy, not Frank.

—

FRANK DID NOT HAUNT
Front Street and Maiden Lane; he circled it, wending here and there, his eye always peeled. He had the time—he'd given up the whoring and the flying and practically everything else. He told Andy that he had taken up golf, and was planning to join a country club but hadn't decided which one, so he was visiting all of them. He even bought a set of clubs and kept them in the trunk of his Chrysler. But he didn't drive the Chrysler any where near
the Knickerbocker. He zipped over the GW Bridge, down the West Side Highway, then left on Canal Street. Then he parked in a lot near Chinatown, and started walking. Sometimes he walked first toward the river and then south (southwest—his inner compass was still accurate). Other times, he walked down Pearl Street or Gold Street, scanning the passing women.

He saw her twice in the first week in March. Both times, she was wearing the black coat. He followed her at a distance, taking note not only of where she went and which buildings she frequented, but also of whom she spoke to, whether any men walked along with her or picked her up (they did not), and whom she greeted. The first afternoon, he followed her for an hour and never got closer than half a block. The second time, she went into that same brick building after thirty-seven minutes. He needed a plan.

Events at the office interfered for a while. Friskie got drunk and slapped the Sulzberger cousin in the street outside the Waldorf after a dance—it got into the papers; the girl broke the engagement; Dave Courtland said high time, she was a Jew; and Frank had to fly down to Galveston and talk not only to Dave, but to the wife, Anna. It took seventeen days to work out a reconciliation, and the Sulzberger parents were not happy, but, on the other hand, they had not heard the “Jew” comment, and Friskie was a very, very handsome young man. Then the head of the Venezuela office, Jesús De La Garza, came for a visit, and he was in New York for seven days and out in Southampton for a long weekend. After he left, Jim Upjohn told Frank, he tacked a note to the door of the room Jesús stayed in that read, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the going of the Lord.”

The gift was that Frank was sitting at a table in the White Horse Tavern, and he saw her through the window. She passed the outside tables, came in, sat down nearby, and pulled out a copy of
The Atlantic Monthly.
Her coat was a slender trench, two years out of style. When she pushed her scarf back, he saw she had short, thick hair now, dark with scattered gray streaks, but neatly cut. She was fuller in the bust than she'd been during the war, and had just the beginnings of a belly, though she was neatly girdled. As she read, two wrinkles formed between her eyebrows, and her mouth thinned a bit, though her lips were still fuller than most women's. She ordered a sherry and kept reading. He squinted: it was an article entitled “Anyone Can Play the
Harmonica.” This was true, in Frank's experience, so he was surprised that there would be an article about it.

She must have sensed him looking over her shoulder, because she glanced in his direction and gave him one of those little smiles. He said, “Do I know you?”

“I don't think so.” Her accent was very good, just an underlying melody of the Mediterranean.

Then he said, “May I know you?”

This time she laughed, and it was the same laugh he remembered, merry and deep, the laugh of a woman with plenty of experience.

“I come from a long line of harmonica players.”

“Is that possible?” said the woman.

Right then, Frank knew that his fate depended upon pretending that he had never met her before, to collude in the idea that he believed she was from Queens or Rome or wherever she wanted to be from. What people had done to survive the war was their own business, was it not? He smiled, knowing that his smile was still hypnotic if he really meant it. “My brother is a farmer in Iowa who makes harmonicas by hand, from roots and branches.”

She did laugh. She did.

They chatted for an hour, exchanging only names—hers was Lydia Forêt—but nothing about occupations or background. Button by button, she removed her coat. He took it from her and hung it on the coat rack. She was wearing a navy-blue sheath with a slender red belt. Frank took off his own jacket and loosened his tie. They discussed whether the humidity had gotten worse and the likelihood of a storm. Others were talking about Carol Burnett, who had won an Emmy the night before, so they did, too. “She's funny,” said Frank. The woman said, “She'll do anything. I like that.” Then she reddened a little and said, “For a laugh, I mean. I saw her do a show a few years ago somewhere around here, I think.” Frank said that he had seen Nichols and May on Broadway the previous year. The woman said that she had a ticket for
My Fair Lady
, and she was looking forward to seeing it. Frank said that he knew some people who had gone to the opening night of that. There was a pause in the conversation, and Frank said, “So—can anyone play the harmonica?”