Early Warning (32 page)

ANDY LOOKED AROUND
the table. Twenty-four people, all smiling. She had been here twenty times now, and she had never once stood up and said, “Hi, I'm Andy, and I am an alcoholic.” She had the book, and she had read most of it. She left it on the coffee table, and sometimes she saw that Frank or Nedra had opened it, or at least moved it. Already this evening, Bob had stood up and related how he went off the wagon on Thanksgiving, and fell down in the kitchen and hit his head. Roman had related how he was supposed to go to his mother's
house, and he knew there would be liquor there. So Roman had turned it over to his Higher Power and tried to forget about it. When he went out to get into his car Thursday, his battery was dead, and at the very moment he was wondering which restaurant, his neighbor two doors down came out onto his porch and asked him what he was doing, because there were only the four of them, and so Roman contributed the pecan pie he'd been planning to take to his mother's, and it turned out that the neighbor needed new kitchen counters and had the money to pay, and wanted this new surface that was coming out called Corian, God knew what that was, but expensive, so Roman was smiling. And then Mary said that she had gotten through Thanksgiving fine, but yesterday, the 29th, was the fifth anniversary of the death of her daughter from falling out of the window of their old apartment on Ninety-first Street, and even though they now lived in the Village, she had had to go up there and stand on the very spot where her daughter landed, she had had to, but she didn't drink anything, though she came close. A shocking story, but you were not supposed to make drama, which was maybe why Andy never said a word.

Before coming, she practiced saying, “I am fifty years old and, however pointless your life is, mine is more pointless,” but comparisons were not allowed. Maybe “I am said to exist, but I doubt it”? When she had said that to Dr. Smith, whom she hadn't seen now in ten weeks, he told her she was acting “grandiose.” As far as she could tell, you were supposed to talk about specific incidents—“I lay in bed yesterday morning, after my sons left, on my back, staring at the ceiling, and thought of nothing”? Not even a drink. “Last week, I overheard a woman say she had stopped drinking, no problem, but then she was up in the middle of the night making popcorn, and so she gave up corn, and it was killing her.” Maybe the others, she thought, should know this? Next to her, Jean stood up and said, “Hi, I'm Jean, and I am an alcoholic. I just want to thank my sponsor, Mary here, for answering the phone at two-thirty-five a.m. Sunday morning. I was upset, and she talked to me for fifteen minutes, and then I went to sleep. Mary, you are a saint and a half; I am very grateful.” Everyone smiled and nodded. Andy stared across the table at Mary, who did have a very kind face, and Mary made eye contact, and then, almost without even thinking about it, Andy stood up and introduced herself,
and what she said was “I haven't had a drink since the Kent State massacre, which I think is when I started to wake up from a twenty-year walking coma, and I absolutely do not know why or what is going on. But I do know that my son disappeared in July for six days, and then he returned, and even though I do not believe in God or magic or anything, really, I am deathly afraid to touch the bottles, even to throw them away.” She fell silent. The others looked at her, and Bob said, “Any reason is good enough, as long as it works.”

W
HEN FRANK SUGGESTED
that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different—maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.

Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement—from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe,
being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly—keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.

In the meantime, since they had come in the winter, they were surrounded by French people, not tourists, and though Janet's French was good, and people smiled at her and were helpful, Frank was a little nettled by Janet's loud voice, Richie's and Michael's exaggerated movements, Andy's endless observations. It was this last that was a revelation—Andy had always kept her thoughts to herself, except when she had been drinking, and she only drank at home. But now that she wasn't drinking, she talked all the time—what an elegant building, is that really Napoleon, I thought he was short, oh, there were more Napoleons than the one, look at those horse statues on that pillar. The French didn't stare at her, the kids didn't seem to care (though Janet answered a lot of her questions), but it drove Frank crazy. The thing he couldn't stop noticing was the way her mouth worked. All around him, Parisians hardly moved their lips, and their words issued forth in a liquid stream. Andy's mouth was like the mouth of a puppet flapping, revealing the empty cavern within. For ten days, he felt as though his glance was shifting between her mouth and momentary glimpses of Lydia disappearing around corners, up steps, and over bridges. By that time, too, all five of them were expressing the opinion that two weeks was too long—you could only go to the Galeries Lafayette so many times, only appreciate so many paintings of the long, pale body of Jesus, his eyes closed, being taken down from the cross, or of a short man in a fancy outfit sitting on a small, bouncy horse. Janet thought they could have spent the second week in Nice; Frank wondered why he had forgotten about Rome; the boys wished they had gone skiing; and Andy wondered when she would ever get to Madrid.

The evening of the tenth day, Janet talked them into going over to the Rive Gauche and trying her favorite Vietnamese restaurant, a cheap place where she and some of her fellow students went every couple of weeks. Richie and Michael hated the food, Andy hated the
toilette
, which was a hole in the ground in a room with the lightbulb
burned out. Frank thought that Janet used her chopsticks in a superior way after showing off about the menu. Then she wanted to take the Métro rather than a taxi, and Richie and Michael thought they would use the map and walk—either down the Quai d'Orsay and across the Pont de l'Alma, or over the Pont Neuf and then down the street where the tumbrels had rolled, taking the condemned to the guillotine. Janet said, “That would be the only thing you two know about Paris,” and Andy said, “Isn't it a little dangerous?,” as if the two of them could not take on any muggers in the city of Paris. Look at them—they even looked threatening. So they ended up walking, freezing to death. Back at the hotel, Frank went to bed, and got up a couple of hours later, and there was Janet in the living room of the suite, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over a book. When he came in, she glanced up and then turned her whole body away.

“That's nice,” he said.

“Don't take it personally, all right?” But she sounded irritated that he had even walked into a room he was paying three hundred a night for.

“I think I will,” he said.

“Fine, be my guest.” She lifted her book slightly. It was a Proust, in French,
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, which he thought was both shocking and pretentious. He must have harrumphed, because she looked up and scowled, and he reflected that she had always preferred Lillian and Arthur. In their family, she was a boarder who deigned to be supported in luxury, but she gave back nothing except a sort of I-told-you-so perfection of academic performance that was showing off rather than pleasing. He said, “What's eating you?”

“Well, since you ask, I can't stand how you elbow Mom out of the way every time you are walking along. It's very rude. Men here actually have manners.”

“Oh, do they?” said Frank. “I didn't notice.”

“No,” said Janet, “you didn't.” She slammed her book shut. “But they notice you. I watch their heads turn.”

“Your mother has been talking a lot.”

“So what? She's interested. Not all disdainful, like you, or just completely heedless, like Michael and Richie, though I admit Richie looks around every so often.”

Frank said, “When did you turn into such a little bitch?”

Janet's face registered shock, and it was true that Frank had never called her a name before—he mostly left the discipline to Nedra and maintained his distance. But she was not intimidated. She said, “About the time I realized that you spend every single minute of your working day stoking the war machine and trying to figure out how to slaughter Vietnamese peasants more quickly and efficiently.” Her mouth snapped shut, but then she had another thought, and said, “And profitably.”

“Thank you, Joan Baez, for your input.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

Frank said, “We don't call it the defense industry for no reason, you know. You get to sit around day after day, whining about how you don't like this and you don't like that, and you're safe to do it. Do you think that the Vietnamese don't want to defend themselves? You think they want to be communists and a client state of the Red Chinese? You think Ho Chi Minh is a nice, liberal person who is going to say to those who fought him, ‘Oh, honey, so sorry we didn't agree, just go home and plant some rice'? This is what happens when one group of people wants to conquer the other—they move in, they slaughter the chieftains of the village, or whatever they're called, and they put the young boys into the army. I won't say what they do to the girls. Then they go on to the next village to do it again. That's how human beings operate. Right here in France, they've done it more than once, in spite of the crème Chantilly”—he pronounced this quite nicely—“and the haute couture. Maybe because of it.”

“That's not our business,” said Janet. “Anyway, they were chased out of Vietnam, and it wasn't our business to take over from them.”

“So, I take it, you would drive past a family being lined up and shot, and just step on the gas because it isn't your business?” He thought he had her.

But she said, “When did you ever stop to help anyone? Remember that couple by the side of the Turnpike outside of Newark ten years ago? She looked eight months pregnant, and he was struggling with the tire. Remember that?”

Frank must have looked blank. She said, “I don't think you even noticed. I did. Mom did, but you just stepped on the gas.”

“Your mother noticed?”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she pointed, and you just shook her off.”

Frank stared at her. She was not a pretty girl, but she was worth looking at—what the French called
jolie laide
, in fact. How much credit could he take that she had developed character? But he said, “I don't believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am more observant than both of you.”

“I'm not saying that you didn't see them.”

Frank walked over to the bar, opened it, and took out a beer. The door to the corridor was to the left, and he had his robe and slippers on. He could walk out and put this argument to an end right now. But he snapped the lid off the beer and turned around. He said, “Who got me started in my career? Who set me up reading documents seized from the Germans after the war? Who taught me how things work? Do you know?” She opened her mouth, but he interrupted her. “Your divine uncle Arthur, that's who. What do you think Mr. Perfect Love thinks of imperialism? Of breaking a few eggs for the omelette? Of putting a few peasants through the meat grinder if the sausage belongs to us?”

Her scowl was deep and furious, and about twenty years old—the same scowl she had produced as a baby. He stepped up to her and grabbed her hands. When she tried to pull them away, he opened them out flat and said, “You look, Miss Priss. You take a look at his hands when you visit next, and you take a whiff, because there's plenty of blood on them.”

She jerked away from his grasp and said, “Why would I believe you? I've known you were an asshole my whole life.”

But her face was white. And what that meant was that she would never trust her instincts again, and if she encountered love, she wouldn't know it. And then he thought, Well, why should she be any different from anyone else?

—

WHEN THEY HAD TORN DOWN
Rolf's house years ago—seven, to be exact—Rosanna had not objected or said a word about her brother besides “Well, he took after the Vogels, but the rest of us were Augsbergers to the core” (Austrian rather than Prussian). Joe put off telling
her that he and John had sold the property until she began to press him about what he was going to plant in that field—and why would she care? He always planted either soybeans or corn these days. But one Saturday in March, he took Jesse over to her place for lunch, and she said, “Jesse, you know how your grandpa and I knew that your father was going to be a great farmer?”

Jesse shook his head.

“When he was sixteen years old, he grew his own hybrid seed, and the next year he planted it, and he got, oh, I think ten bushels per acre more than your grandfather. Well, your grandfather was fit to be tied.” She turned to Joe. “You don't experiment much anymore.”

“They do that at the ag stations, Ma.”

“You could try something with Rolf's old field. Just anything. Perk you up.”

Did he need perking up? He took a sip of his coffee, looked at her, and honestly, in front of his son, he said, “I sold that place.”

“You sold Rolf's farm? My grandfather's farm that's been in the family since Opa came to America?”

“John and I sold it. Mama, between us, we were working over eleven hundred acres. John—”

“John has not taken good care of himself. Only fifty-six, and his rheumatism is so bad he can hardly walk! If he'd started taking chamomile tea twice a day with a tablespoon of honey and a tablespoon of cider vinegar, he would be fine.”

“That may be true…”

“You should be, too. You're old enough. It would do you no harm.”

“We got a good price, and we put it into the new harvester.”

“How much did you get?”

Joe glanced pointedly at Jesse, and Rosanna said, “He's fifteen. He's old enough to know.”