Early Warning (20 page)

Then, because he moved, because she moved, Tim ejaculated. His back arched, his entire lower body shook and throbbed, and his mouth opened. At the very moment that he felt the usual scintillating thrill run into his brain, her hand, a large hand, covered his mouth. He opened his eyes and put his own hand on top of hers. As best he could, he stilled all movement. She said, “I'm fine, Daddy. I must have fallen asleep reading my book.”

“Your door is locked.”

His muscles seemed to vibrate, but he wasn't moving.

“Oh, I did that by mistake. I'll unlock it in the morning.” She yawned loudly. “I'm just so tired. Night-night.”

“Night-night, honey. Just as long as you're okay.”

“I'm fine, Daddy.”

Tim realized that he hadn't pulled out.

Now they were absolutely still, listening to the retreating footsteps—three, four, then up the stairs. Tim felt a belated urge to flee, but she had him pinned. Her strawberry-blond hair was in her face, and she was looking down at him with, it must be said, an adoring look in her eyes.

They slept until dawn. Tim woke up when he felt her move beside him. It was the first time he had ever spent the night with her. She looked good even in the early light, even as she whispered, “It's after six-thirty. When I go down to breakfast, you need to leave.”

He nodded.

She dressed methodically. She made a fat ponytail and wound a rubber band around it. She kissed him on the forehead, then on the lips. She went out the door; he waited until all footsteps had quieted, and slipped out the window, down the tree, across the ditch, and up the road, without looking back. If someone saw him, he figured he would hear about it soon enough.

—

AT THE MADEIRA SCHOOL
, not four miles from Aunt Lillian and Uncle Arthur's (though she could only go there once in a while), Janny informed the other girls that her name was Janet, and after that, she felt older, smarter, and prettier. It didn't matter that Tim was gone to the university and Debbie was busy with her last push before college applications, or that Aunt Lillian herself seemed a little distracted. Whenever Janet got leave, there was so much going on—all of Dean's friends splashing in the pool; Tina at the easel in her room, or wandering around talking to herself (when Janet asked her what she was talking about, she said she was telling a story); Aunt Lillian cooking enough for ten, adding plates for friends until someone had to sit at the counter, with Uncle Arthur's colleagues in and out (once, she opened the door of the hall bathroom, and a man in a hat was sitting on the toilet; when she gasped, he smiled and said, “Peekaboo”)—that she felt wonderful for days, just knowing she loved them and they loved her. Since she could not imagine anything better than being related to the Mannings, she was not intimidated at all by this fancy boarding school or the other girls she met.

She took English, French, geometry, biology, and ancient history. Whereas her roommate, Cecelia, groaned every time she hefted a textbook, Janet set hers on the left side of her desk and worked through all her lessons one by one, the minutes ticking by, and in every single one counting out her pleasure that she had left her father, mother, and two numbskull brothers behind. She was not the smartest girl in any of her classes, but she was the most methodical, the most grateful. Likewise on the hockey field: if a girl on the other team was dribbling toward the goal, or passing to another girl, Janet never took her eye off the ball—she was so effective that the goalie got bored and started yawning. By October, the teachers would not call on her anymore. Was she ambitious? Did she want to get to Radcliffe, or even Vassar? Not at all. If you took a string and a pin and poked the pin into Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where her parents and the twins were, the farthest college from the pin that was still in the United States was the University of Hawaii, which was fine with Janet.

She was friendly to everyone, even to Cecelia, whose heart had been set on Chatham Hall, where her best friend had gone. Cecelia was making herself disagreeable so that they would send her home; she refused to bathe or wash her hair. When Janet told this story at Aunt Lillian's, everyone laughed and said bring her over and we'll throw her in the pool. And, Janet knew, Cecelia would enjoy every minute of it. Madeira, like every high school, was fraught with cliques and gossip, but Janet didn't care. She did not dread being ignored; she did not dread being talked about; she did not dread having the wrong hair or braces; she did not dread breaking the rules and being punished, though this was unlikely. The only thing she dreaded was Christmas vacation at home.

She began her campaign at Halloween. As she wrapped Tina's head in her mummy costume (careful to leave openings for her nose and eyes), she said, “What day does your Christmas vacation start, honey?” Tina went to public school.

Tina had insisted that Janet wrap her mouth. She mumbled, “We onry hab a wik.”

“Really? We have three.”

“Luggy dug! You shud tay her.”

“Well,” said Janet. “Ask your mom. We can do lots of things together. I'll take you Christmas shopping.”

The next thing was to write a note to her mom. It began, “Dear Mom and Daddy, I am doing really well, I got an A on the geometry test and I have to write a report about cells for biology. It isn't due till next week, but it is almost done. If I turn it in early, I will get 10% extra credit. Guess what? My roommate, Cecelia, is going to take a trip with her family at Christmas. They are going to”—Florida? Too close. Paris? Mom would like that but Dad wouldn't. Australia? Perfect, except that Richie and Michael might blow up the plane before they got there. Caracas? Texas? Her parents went there all the time. She thought of something—“Disneyland. I guess she and her brothers have been there three times, and they love to go back. There is so much to do that”—she thought again—“they can barely keep their eyes open for dinner. Her dad just drops the kids off, and then he and her mom go do things in Hollywood.” She read it over. It was perfect. She signed, “Love, Janny,” with a little heart next to the “y,” sealed it up, and sent it.

Her mom was good about corresponding. She wrote back, “Darling, Thanks for your letter. So glad you are doing well. And enjoying yourself. Know you are being a good girl, as always. Wish the same could be said for you-know-who. Back to the principal's office yesterday. Nothing very bad, though. Knew it was a mistake to put them in the same class, but now Richie is being put into the other class. Think the teacher, who is a man, can handle Michael if he is the only one. Exhausting! Saw Dr. N. the other day. He asked after you. Said you are happy and not worried. You aren't worried, are you? Can't help feeling sad for the North Vietnamese, but do think that the Vietnam War, and even bombing North Vietnam, makes it LESS likely that there would be nuclear war rather than MORE likely. So DON'T WORRY. Daddy is fine, and says to say love to you. Love, Mom.” Nothing about Disneyland.

Janet then wrote a note to Aunt Lillian, on a special note card with flowers, telling her that lots of the girls from far away, like her, were staying through Thanksgiving. Aunt Lillian wrote back, “Janny, I was hoping you would invite yourself! Hope you have time to help Debbie and Tina with the pies. Dean and Uncle Arthur are planning to do something very strange with the turkey, so the pies will be important.” When she wrote to say that she was staying for Thanksgiving, and that Aunt Lillian had asked if she could, her mom wrote back, “Maybe we will fly down and join you,” but then the weather was bad. They were not missed, at least by Janet. The turkey turned out to be delicious—Uncle Arthur and Dean took turns basting it with a mixture of apple cider, butter, and whiskey, every half-hour, so it took an extra-long time to cook, but they played charades. The pies were also good, apple and pecan, her favorite of Lillian's many and always delicious pies.

The day after Thanksgiving, she tried the Disneyland gambit again, by postcard, to Richie: “Hi, Richie! Guess where my roommate is going for Christmas! Disneyland! She says that Tomorrowland is really great!” To Michael, she wrote, “Dear Michael, Get Nedra to tell Mom to take us to Disneyland! You would love Frontierland.”

A few days later, she thought she had done it: “Dear Janny, Must say, the constant whining about Disneyland is driving me crazy. Though hear it is a nice place. Daddy should visit his friends out there in Los Angeles and take us along. Christmas is not a favorite holiday!
Everyone in the world should spend it traveling, the way they do in France.” However, no plans were made, and Christmas vacation approached.

Janet managed to get Cecelia up for classes, but not much else. Sometimes she went for days with the same clothes on, rolled in her bedclothes, her mattress showing. Janet tried to set a good example by making her own bed very carefully—hospital corners, the way Nedra had shown her—everything smooth and fresh, desk neat, closet straight. Cecelia didn't take the hint. Janet woke up in the night and heard soft noises, but they were so soft that she couldn't tell if it was crying or not.

On December 10, she received her train ticket, leaving December 17, returning January 10. She put it under her mattress and turned over in her mind the idea of saying that it had never arrived, or that she had lost it, but school would be closed, so someone, probably Aunt Lillian, would just buy her another ticket. On the night of December 16, after the Christmas pageant and party, she cried once, and then gave up. The next morning, she left Cecelia still bundled in her bed and went in a taxi with the two other girls who were taking the train. When she came back in January, her roommate was Martha, who was in advanced math classes. She never saw Cecelia again.

A
NDY SAID
, “Well, don't you think it's mysterious?” It was three months since the murder; Lillian was still upset, and Arthur seemed beside himself. “I've never seen Arthur so…so…I don't know.”

“Who was murdered again?” said Dr. Smith.

“A friend of theirs, named Mary Meyer. She was shot in the head and in the heart, walking down the towpath in Georgetown in the middle of the day.”

“Have you ever met this woman?”

“I don't think so, but it horrified me. I had nightmares about it, and we had to come home two days early.” Andy was lying on the mat, staring at the ceiling. She didn't often avail herself of the mat, but Dr. Smith's facial expressions could be unpleasant. His bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes until they seemed to disappear. Sometimes he tapped the lead of his pencil on his teeth while she talked, which she found so distracting that she fell silent. What really horrified her was a thing that she was not comfortable telling: that Lillian and Arthur seemed to be falling apart. The injustice of this disturbed her. She said, “May I change the subject?”

“There is only one subject.”

“I went to Bendel's to get a dress for a cocktail party at the Upjohns' next week. Frank said it had to be Dior or Chanel, but I
hated the Chanel, and the Dior looked very girlish to me, though brown. Brown is so dull. It was two o'clock in the afternoon.”

He coughed as if losing patience.

“Anyway, as I came into the vestibule, but before I opened the outside door, I saw Frank pass with a woman on his arm—rather a plain thing, I must say. I stopped in my tracks. I knew it was Frank—he was wearing his gray Brooks Brothers overcoat that I picked up at the cleaners' the day before. And he was smiling. I registered that right away.”

“You didn't recognize the woman?”

“Never saw her before.”

“Did you go out into the street?”

“I did. I watched them, and when they turned the corner, I followed them down Fifty-seventh Street.”

“Can you tell me their exact demeanor and posture?”

Andy's hip began to hurt, so she crossed her ankles. Dr. Smith would be taking note of this, she knew. She said, “She looked upright and self-contained. Her elbows were at her sides, and her head was straight. Her shoulders were straight.”

“And your husband?”

“First he was holding her elbow, and then he put his arm across her shoulders.”

“Was he leaning toward her?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Smith wrote busily, then sniffed.

Andy said, “She didn't look like a prostitute.”

“Is there any reason that she should look like a prostitute?”

Andy crossed her ankles the other way. “This young man where he works, one of the sons, he asked me at a party last summer, when we were staying in Southampton, if I knew that Frank frequented prostitutes downtown.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

“You haven't mentioned this to me before, Andy. Were you telling the truth?”

“I didn't
know
it.”

It hadn't been as difficult as she'd thought it would be to tell about seeing them, the couple, Frank and the woman he loved. She said,
“I did go to Bonwit's and buy a dress. Navy-blue shantung, with a matching coat. It was last season, but on sale.”

“So the sight of your husband and another woman who was rather dowdily attired motivated you in some way?”

Andy nodded.

“Let me ask you this. Which of your physical assets do you feel that this new outfit makes the most of?”

Andy lifted her chin, almost unconsciously, then put her hand on her neck. Dr. Smith said, “Your neck. Your chin.”

“My waist. My legs and ankles. I'll put my hair up, of course.”

“So—you plan to accentuate your slenderness, your paleness in contrast to the dark color of the dress, your, let me say, androgynous qualities, as if to say to all, once again, that sexuality isn't your business? And so your husband falling in love, if that is what it is, with a dowdy but, let's say, womanly rival makes perfect sense.”

Andy said, “I suppose it does, from his point of view.” She said this in a reasonable tone of voice, and was just about to say something else when Dr. Smith was right there, nose to nose with her, and apparently in a rage. Andy recoiled. Dr. Smith exclaimed, “Andrea Langdon, are you so flat and small that you have no reaction to this? Is there nothing inside you, no mote of emotion or resistance? No ego? No identity? No being? You come here to me, three days a week, faithfully. As far as I can discern, you are a wraith, floating through your own life not only with no affect, but with no response. I ask you if you drink, you say yes. I ask you if you ever get drunk, you say yes. I ask you if you embarrass yourself when you get drunk, and you say no, you just doze off or go sit in a corner. Sometimes you say you laugh at nothing. That's the extent of your transgression.”

“I thought I was supposed to behave myself if I had too much. Frank says—”

“Your husband is cheating on you! He loves another woman! He's been to prostitutes! But your voice trembles only when you describe the murder of a stranger.”

“She was JFK's mistress! At least that's the rumor!” Andy coughed, thinking of how many times Dr. Grossman had explained the concept of displacement to her. She leveled her voice, then said, “I don't think she loves him. She wasn't leaning toward him in any way. Her body language said that she was—”

“Are you using my own terms to show me up?” Now Dr. Smith seemed really angry. Andy slid to the right, and put her left hand lightly on his arm, to prevent his moving toward her again. He said, “I am yelling at you! I am berating you! How does that make you feel?”

“I think you must be having a bad day.”

“You think this has nothing to do with you?”

Andy stared at Dr. Smith, and decided that he must have been a headstrong child, which was possibly why he had become a psychiatrist. Then she said, “Ragnarök.”

“What is that, please?” He sounded both surprised and contemptuous.

“The end of the world, in Norsk.”

“Gotterdämmerung. The Apocalypse?”

She nodded.

He said, “Please describe this to me.”

Andy closed her eyes, remembering. It was still very clear. “First, I thought, the dogs would begin to howl, and then the wolves in the forests would gather in town, Decorah, where I grew up, and join them. The howling would get so loud that you could not hear, no matter how hard you listened, that the snakes were slithering out of the river. We lived on Winneshiek, which was just south of the river. Anyway, the snakes were big as pythons, but they were cottonmouths, more poisonous than rattlesnakes, and they would slither through the front door and up the stairs, and first they would go into my parents' room and smother them and bite them all over, but you couldn't hear my parents' screams because of the howling. Then the snakes would wait in the hall for me to open my door. I could stay in my room for days, but eventually they would slither around me and bite me. They would be as cold as ice. Then the house would burn down.” This was a true memory, from when she was about seven.

“What would cause the house to burn down?”

“I don't know.” Andy shivered.

Dr. Smith stared at her, then said, “Perhaps we are getting somewhere.”

—

WHEN CLAIRE WOKE UP
from what seemed to her to be a childbirth-induced state of catatonia, Gray was three months old, and it was the
first of May. Forsythia was done, dogwood was done, daffodils were done, and she saw that she no longer had an excuse for not visiting Rosanna, something that ordinarily she hated to do. She woke up in a bad mood, even though the sun was shining and Paul was jolly and Gray could not have been cuter, and after she kissed Paul goodbye and he wished her a safe trip, she laid Gray carefully in his car basket, bought by Paul from someone he knew in Europe, and made sure he was properly strapped. The hour that it took them to head up the 330 was far too short, and then there was Rosanna—looking out the window, standing on the porch, her arms open wide. Claire felt her teeth grinding, but only for a moment. She held out the baby.

“Oh, what a peachy peach!” exclaimed Rosanna, but she hardly said a word to Claire. On the other hand, Claire could walk around the yard with Gray in her arms (and him only in a sweater) and smell the apple blossoms and the grass and the chamomile that she trod upon as she made her way. Yes, now Rosanna was peering at her through the kitchen window, supposedly making lunch, though really cataloguing what Claire was doing wrong, but Claire didn't care. It was so evident, looking at Gray, that she was doing everything right. She pulled down an apple branch and inhaled the fragrance of the blossoms. Gray's smile was the thing about him that was not like Paul—it was big and so merry that sometimes Claire wondered what Paul might have been like if he'd had a father who let him get dirty once in a while.

Rosanna had heated up frozen chicken potpies, and Claire did not say a thing about it as she stuck her fork into the crust with her left hand—Gray was cradled in her right arm, staring and making little noises.

Rosanna held out a spoon. Gray waved his hand. Rosanna said, “The only toy Frank ever had was a spoon.”

“Oh, Mama! And the only toy you ever had was a mud pie.”

“No, I had lots of toys, because your granny Mary loved to crochet puppets and tie rags into dolls. Both your grandmothers were much more fun than I was. But I was too busy looking for black widows in the dresser drawers and starvation in the cupboard.”

“Lillian is like Granny Mary.”

“She certainly is,” said Rosanna. “I spoiled her rotten, and learned a lesson.”

“What?” said Claire.

Rosanna patted Gray on the head. She said, “You can't spoil a good one.”

“Are there any bad ones?”

“You don't find that out until later,” Rosanna said.

Claire knew she was talking about Frank.

Once she had broken through the crust and eaten most of that, the potpie was pretty bad, Claire thought. The pieces of chicken and carrot were tiny and flavorless, and the peas were strange, too. Suddenly, almost surprising herself, Claire said, “Lillian told me that Elizabeth—”

“Mary Elizabeth.”

“Mary Elizabeth was struck by lightning.”

“Oh goodness!” said Rosanna, setting down her fork with a ding on the plate. “Does she think that? Heavens, no. Lightning did strike. But she fell. Maybe the thunder startled her. It was bang-bang, like that, the lightning so close. The back of her head hit the corner of an egg crate. She died without a mark on her.” Rosanna shook her head. “I'm amazed to this day I can say any of that aloud. What is today?”

“May 1.”

“You know, she was born forty-one years ago. January 28. And she was no trouble, just like this one.”

But Claire didn't want there to be any resemblance between that ill-fated child and this one, destined for greatness. Rosanna offered Gray the spoon again, and this time he curled his fist around it. Rosanna said, “I think that's advanced.”

“Of course it is!” Claire laughed.

It was the ice cream that was good—it had been made by Lois, who was going through an ice-cream phase. It was peppermint, sweet and sharp. They ate it while Claire nursed Gray, and then Rosanna quietly washed the dishes (including the aluminum pie holders, for some reason). Then she went into the living room and turned her show on low. Sitting in the kitchen, gently rocking back and forth in her chair, feeling Gray draw the milk out of her and the ache subsiding, Claire thought that maybe, maybe she would forgive Rosanna, but she couldn't remember what for.

—

LILLIAN TOOK
the Mustang. Tim didn't know she was coming, but she knew where he lived, and she could wait for him if she had to. She left a note for Arthur in the middle of his desk, where he might see it if he was not too distracted, and as she drove away—got farther and farther from the note—she began to feel freer and less anxious. She would have expected it to be different—closer to Tim, more worried. But there it was—farther from Arthur, less worried.