Early Warning (21 page)

The road was one of the most beautiful Lillian knew of, much more romantic and rolling than any road in Iowa. As Arthur invariably pointed out when they went for a drive, the Land Ordinance of 1785 was way too late for Virginia, and so it was not laid out in a grid, but according to chance and convenience. This meant that Lillian drove through this town and that town, around this curve and over that hill, in the shadow of mountains, past farms and fences and thick stands of trees. Horses and cows grazed in green pastures and there weren't many houses. Once she was past Culpeper, the few she saw looked like ones she knew back home—the plantations seemed to have been hidden away. Lillian liked the sweep of it, and the names of towns like Haymarket and Ruckersville.

When Bundy got back from Vietnam (and Arthur had almost gone with him, only kept home at the last minute by a bout of the flu), Bundy was a different man. The sight of the bodies at Pleiku had literally changed his appearance—whereas before he had been sharp but a tad removed, as if always calculating, when he got back he was sure of one thing—the Viet Cong had to be repaid. Sure, he phrased this in terms of strategy—yes, it could be done, a harder push, more bombs, take off the brakes and apply the gas, if they feel our resolve they will back off—but really his blood had boiled, his wrath had burned. At first, Arthur laughed and said, “Well, if they'd let me belt him in a nice straitjacket for a few days, just take him to a suite at the Hay-Adams and give him a shower ten times a day, I might have saved him.” But then Bundy had convinced Arthur, and the spring had been calm with conviction—the bombing was unfortunate, but necessary; it would soon be over; sometimes a wound had to be cauterized. The calm had been pleasant. Arthur had been more his old, pre-JFK self, bringing home flowers and lingerie, eating, going to Dean's baseball games, not only admiring Tina's paintings but discussing them with her. JFK had driven everyone crazy—he said this,
then he said that, and never the twain should meet, but that was over, had been over for a year and a half. Thinking of JFK made her think of Mary Meyer, gunned down by the canal. (Had she really been his mistress? These days, the rumor mill was strangely silent.) Lillian shook that thought out of her mind and made herself pay attention to the scenery.

She drove through Gordonsville, and soon after that turned off 29 and onto Ivy Road, gazing over the fields to her right in hopes that she would see Tim. Two F's! The lowest grade he had ever gotten before (though there had been several of them) was a C. She did a careful U-turn and headed toward the center of town, to find a Coke and maybe a sandwich.

Straight A's were such a habit with Debbie that Arthur considered them almost a character flaw. When she brought home her report cards, Arthur would lower his brows and growl, “How much extra credit did you do, missy?” Debbie's job was to grin and say, “Hardly any, Daddy!” He didn't mind 800s on her SAT Aptitude tests, but 800s on the Achievements were a sign of a misspent youth. Tim had scored in the low 600s on his SATs, and when those scores came in the same week he crumpled the bumper of the Comet, Arthur was a little relieved. A boy had to be a boy had to be a boy.

But he didn't have to flunk out of college. Lillian parked in a space in front of a drugstore and went in. The soda fountain was all the way in the back, and the girl working there was blond. Lillian perched on a stool and put her elbows on the counter, vowing not to tell the girl that she had worked a soda counter once herself. The few college students perched on the other stools did not remind her of the ones she'd seen protesting the war at the Capitol in April. Eloise had called her from California and said she had to go to the protest—with a hat and dark glasses so no one would recognize her, so that her picture would not cross Arthur's desk. So she did. Eloise had participated in the Oakland protest in February, bringing along Rosa, the baby, and even the strange gambler husband, who was otherwise “apolitical” according to Rosa. Lillian didn't believe there were twenty-five thousand protesters, as Eloise insisted from her vantage point in Berkeley—maybe half that number. But the D.C. protest had been exhilarating. If Arthur, Debbie, Dean, or Tina suspected she had gone, none of them had said a word.

The sandwich was good. She ate it slowly, because once she was done, had eaten every crumb, had drunk her soda, had wiped her mouth and gone into the ladies' room to comb her hair, she would have to find Tim and figure that boy out.

She had been to his room twice before, and knew the number—215. She knocked on the door, at first lightly, and then more sharply. There was a groan, a pause, then Tim's voice, irritable, “Who
is
it?”

Lillian said, “It's me.” She looked at her watch. It was a quarter after one.

“What!”

A little louder. “It's me. It's your mother.”

Then, “Oh jeez!” Footsteps. Then the door opened. Tim was leaning on it. He was dressed in a white undershirt and dirty jeans. He stared at her and said, “Oh God.” He left the door open and went over and fell on the bed. Lillian followed him.

She said, “Are you hung over?”

“Oh God.”

The evidence was under the bed—empty beer bottles.

“You didn't tell me you were coming.” He groaned again.

“It was a last-minute thing, and I thought you'd be at work, so how would I reach you?” She looked around, glad to see at least some evidence of a party in the general mess—records lying around, a girl's shoe, two glasses and two plates, a sweater she didn't recognize that maybe someone left behind. She said, “Did you have a party?”

“In a way.”

Lillian opened her bag and pulled out the letter. When she handed it to him, he glanced at it and said, “I know that.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Take the courses over.”

“You aren't worried?”

He shook his head, then groaned.

“Are you okay? Is everything okay?” He looked like himself, tall and supple, unshaven, his hair a ragged mess, but handsome anyway. She realized that this was a question he could not answer, at least to her. If everything was not okay, then had she and Arthur failed? If everything was okay, would her concern push Tim into everything's not being okay? And maybe everything that she was seeing
now was just the way Tim had been for years, on his own, doing what he wanted, and letting them think that everything was okay. Lillian began to feel dizzy. She said, “You want lunch or something?”

“Can't eat.”

“Tell me this is a hangover.”

“This is a hangover.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“Stop asking, Mom.”

She stopped asking. She got up and walked around the room, picking up this shirt and that sweater, folding them, setting them on the dresser. Tim rolled over onto his stomach. She stood regarding him for a minute or two, and then walked out. By the time she got to the car, she was too dizzy to drive, so she sat in the front seat of the Mustang for a long time, and only pulled away when a man in a uniform peered at her through the window. She drove back, as she had thought she would, seeing nothing but Tim in her mind, sacked out and empty in his messy room, and got home before Arthur did. When he came in, he barely said a word. She fed Dean and Tina hamburgers and baked potatoes; Debbie was going out for the evening, and Lillian was too sad to eat. Arthur stayed in his office.

—

IT WAS TRUE
that Dave Courtland had a nose for oil—even if he didn't know what he was smelling, he couldn't stay away from it. He had bought the one field that Fremont had been developing carefully now for eight years, six of those with Frank's and Jim Upjohn's help. But he had bought another field, too, three years before that, and only on a whim. They hadn't developed it, because a geologist had said, “Well, cattle might do well on it.” Dave didn't know why he'd bought it. But now the geologists found oil there, too, and plenty of it, light crude.

Jim Upjohn said that what he and Frank had to do with Dave was shake their heads in a thoughtfully negative way, as if there were simply too many things undecided about the whole Venezuelan venture. Sun was if possible even more avid than Getty for what they'd found in the new field, because of their numerous grades of gasoline. The Sun rep wooed Frank by taking him to the Tabac Club, on the Upper West Side. They went in, stripped down in the locker room,
and then discussed Dave's oil field while lying on tables being hosed with hot water, strapped with fibrous whips, hosed again; then they were off to the steam room. The guy never stopped asking questions. The Humble Oil rep only took him to lunch. Jim Upjohn thought that if Frank played this properly, Dave Courtland could walk away with three or four times what he had put into Fremont. Sun had it right: hundred-octane gasoline? If you were driving a Ford Thunderbolt, quarter-mile in eleven and three-quarters seconds, that's what you needed. And the stock market was inexplicably shooting upward—Frank had to laugh when he read the article in the
Times
on his way to work: “The market has proved once again that it can behave just as mysteriously as a woman.” (Of course he pictured Lydia, but he thought of Andy, too.) “Everybody tries to figure out what it is going to do, but, heeding some inexplicable inner logic, it goes right ahead and pulls a surprise.” The Dow, which had bottomed out at around 840 in May, had hit 942.65 on Monday. Now it was Wednesday, and it had retreated a hair, to just over 940, and nineteen million shares traded. No one had ever seen such a thing before. He read on. “ ‘Columbus would have been amazed,' one broker declared yesterday.” Frank said, “Hey, Tony, looks like we're rich.”

“Maybe so, boss,” said Tony.

Frank continued reading the article, and decided to take some of Uncle Jens's money out of color TVs and Pan Am and put it back into steel and utilities. The article said that the solider stocks were going to follow the glamour stocks upward, and Frank believed that to be the case. Then he read that LBJ's gallbladder operation was considered a thing of beauty.

At the office, there were four calls from Jim Upjohn already. Jim wasn't impatient—he never was—he just told Frank exactly what to do. Call Hal first, and get him out of bed. Jim had seen him at a party the night before, at the Public Library, and he was so blitzed he couldn't find his shoes—“Or his feet,” said Jim Upjohn. “He needs to get up early and ponder his sins.” Then call Friskie. Friskie would have been up all night. Friskie read four newspapers, which affected his mood, always for the worse. The stock market was higher than it had ever been? Well, then, it could only fall. “He'll want to sell before ten a.m.,” said Jim Upjohn. Jim himself, with the backing of the board, would be phoning Dave. Frank should call a meeting in
the head office, and do a lot of frowning and worrying, and then, within a day or two, Jim said, “Everyone will be dragged, kicking and screaming, feet first, into nirvana.”

“What's that?” said Frank.

“A version of heaven on earth where money is no object.”

Frank was looking at a nice severance package and yet another mysterious new job. Jim Upjohn said it was in weapons manufacture. Weapons were booming now. Frank felt a little nostalgia for his life at Iowa State, that job he'd had for three years, those fruitless attempts to make gunpowder out of cornstalks. He expected to enjoy weapons, and he did truly wonder what all those weapons manufacturers had learned from the trove of German papers and patents he had spent two years after the war sorting and translating. Perhaps weapons had always been his destiny.

Frank went into his private bathroom and looked in the mirror. He was forty-five. He looked a little like Grandpa Otto, though taller, thinner, and colder. He kept his hair short, and because he was graying, there was no distinct contrast between his hairline and his hair; anyway, he knew how to buy a hat and how to wear one. His jawline had sharpened, and his cheekbones, too. All he had left were the blue eyes. Lydia, whose own eyes were brown, often stared at them as if they amazed her. Frank straightened his tie.

The deal, so long in the making, was done by Friday, and Frank was out of his office by five. He felt a little startled by the speed of it. All he carried out was his briefcase, and that was nearly empty. The Sun people told him to leave his files and his secretary. His secretary, happy to still have a job, promised to send his other things home in a box—a picture of Andy and the kids, a raincoat, an umbrella. That was all.

Frank got in a taxi and went straight to the Belvedere Hotel. He hadn't seen Lydia in a month. Of course, he hadn't called her or warned her. They did not communicate in that way. Once in a while, they left messages for one another at the Belvedere, but what Frank really counted on was walking into the bar there and seeing her across the room. They had gone a month before—most recently when Olivier took her to France in August. One of the pleasures of their romance, for Frank, was treating these unexpected separations as if they were disappearances, replays of that first disappearance followed
by the exhilarating, predestined reunion. She was not at the Belvedere, and there was no message. The bartender offered, without being asked, that he hadn't seen her in two, three weeks.

Frank hailed another cab and went to 158 Front Street, her apartment building. When he got out, he looked up immediately; he knew which windows were hers, though he had never been inside. The windows were dark, and they stayed that way all evening. Frank didn't head home until ten, and didn't get home until after eleven. He had no driver anymore—he had to make his own way. It didn't escape his notice that his own windows were dark, too. Not even the front-porch light was on.

He made his way in through the garage. Nedra's door was closed; the kitchen was dark; the family room and the living room were dark. Richie's door was cracked—Frank closed it. Michael's door was closed. Janny's door was open because she was away at school. Andy's hall door was closed. He went into his own room. The connecting door to Andy's room was also closed. This was the way rich people lived, and Frank liked it. Jim Upjohn told him that he and Frances both had their own suites—his modern and hers more Art Nouveau.