Early Warning (58 page)

“He doesn't want to miss the cranberry harvest, he says, but I—”

“What cranberry harvest?” said Loretta as she sat Binky upright in her lap and hooked the cup of her nursing bra. Frank had to admire the shameless way she nursed Binky wherever she was and whenever Binky crossed her eyes in dissatisfaction. It made for a quiet babyhood. Andy held out her arms, and Loretta gave Binky to her, then went back to eating her own food, which she herself had cooked—veal scaloppini, good. Frank said, “East of Philadelphia. Near Chatsworth. He's got three thousand acres down there, and the cranberry harvest started a week or so ago.”

Loretta's face blossomed into a look both delighted and approving. She said, “Three thousand acres?”

“He's talked about buying a farm for twenty-five years. Horses, plums in France, poppies in France, a vineyard in Sonoma, even wheat there for a while. But he ended up with cranberries.”

“Not scenic,” said Andy. “Frances says that he won't go to Paris at all anymore. And apparently, it's very hard to find escorts to take her to parties. You can't go without an escort. She's furious.”

“She can find an escort,” said Frank. “But she's used to standing beside the lightbulb and having the moths flutter around her. He doesn't want to be that anymore.”

“Will you take me?” Frank realized that Loretta was speaking to him, and talking about New Jersey, not Paris.

Oddly enough, he said yes.

They started early the next morning. Enough milk for two bottles had to be pumped, and the little bag with the pump and the cooler and another bottle had to be taken along for when Loretta began lactating on the road. Dalla had to be instructed about Chance's and Tia's activities, although she supervised these activities herself every single day. Even so, Loretta ushered Frank out of the house as Michael was sitting at the kitchen table in his robe, taking his first sip of coffee. Andy was still asleep in her room. Frank liked it. It felt strangely surreptitious.

They got into the Mercedes. Loretta said, “This is comfortable. I've never ridden in a Mercedes before.”

She was always full of surprises.

Frank said, “What do your parents drive?”

“My dad drives a Chevy truck, and my mom drives an El Camino.”

Frank burst out laughing.

“My dad swears that his headstone is going to read, ‘Here lies Raymond Perroni, who drove twenty-five Chevy pickups into the ground, 1938 to whenever.' He doesn't want it to include anything insignificant.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, she says she's going to be cremated. There's an altar at the house…. I guess we'll put her between the Catrina she bought in Oaxaca and Hickock's left front hoof, which she had plated in silver after he colicked and died.”

Frank said, “Catrina?”

“Oh, that's a Mexican statue. It's a ceramic skeleton of a woman, all dressed up. Mom's is wearing this red picture hat with yellow flowers sculpted over the crown.” She stared out the window. They were approaching the Garden State Parkway. She adjusted her breasts and
kicked her feet. It was interesting to Frank how he enjoyed Loretta, Ivy, and Jesse so much more than his own children. Being around his own children was like having sand in his underwear that could not be gotten rid of—the timbre of Janet's voice, the knowledge of Michael's empty brutishness, the sight of Richie's temperature rising and falling in perennial reaction to Michael's slightest move. Such thoughts didn't come up with other people's children; you appreciated them for themselves. Loretta was a one-of-a-kind eccentric who did not seem to know how rare she was; ambitious Ivy was sharp and amusing company; and Jesse was the son he could not have had because he was not his brother. And he didn't at all mind his son-in-law, Jared, who was reserved in his Minnesota way, but knew all there was to know about 1's and 0's and how to string them out until they magically spiraled into some sort of electronic DNA. Janet had talked Jared out of North Carolina and into Silicon Valley, just because, Frank knew, she couldn't stand Frank's presence in their lives, but money was getting more and more disembodied every day, and Jared was no more averse to it than any red-blooded American. Frank drove steadily. The traffic was sparse; the Mercedes had a kind of feral quickness; they were already passing Elizabeth.

Frank said, “Chance is very good-tempered.”

“And so he always gets his way. You can deflect him or forbid him or put him to bed, but as long as that idea is in his mind, he keeps at it. This summer, he decided that there was a treasure under one of the flagstones by the driveway. He went into my father's shop and found a big nail, and started scraping out the cement around that flagstone. Every time anyone saw him, they'd say, ‘That's enough,' and Chancie would nod and put his nail in his pocket and walk away, and then he'd be back. It took him two weeks. He even figured out how to lever it up with a table knife. There was nothing under there. He didn't care. He just had to know.”

“I was like that,” said Frank. But, he realized, what he meant was, he'd just had to break it, whatever it was—not see what something was, but feel it fall apart. “Some kids are curious.”

“Well, I wore a pair of underpants on my head for a year, because I thought they made a very nice hat. But Chancie isn't opinionated, he's dedicated. Tia doesn't talk much yet. I see her staring at Chancie,
making up her mind to do everything exactly opposite to the way he does it.”

She went on. They were past Perth Amboy now, not far from Sea Bright. It was too bad, Frank thought, that listening to people talk about their kids was so boring, because there were lessons to be learned. One of them, in this case, was that Loretta was an observant and thoughtful young woman, with a measure of self-knowledge. If so, Frank thought, she was surely aware of Lynne Rochelle, whom, according to Richie, Michael had installed in her own loft in SoHo over the summer. Why Michael wanted two wives, Frank could not imagine. Richie said that it was for their explosive potential—Loretta was the nitro and Lynne was the glycerin.

Frank glanced at Loretta. She was looking out the window at the passing forest. Three children in three years had done no favors to either her figure or her face. She looked forty to Michael's thirty-three. But she also looked like being a wife and a mother was her avowed destiny, and Michael could take it or leave it. If that was the case, then Michael's strategy was maybe the only one.

When they got back to Jim's double-wide after exploring the cranberry bogs, Loretta took her bag from the Mercedes and asked where the bathroom was. Frank and Jim went into the kitchen. The sink was full of coffee cups and soup bowls; the trash bin was piled with Campbell's cans on top of plastic bread bags. Not the diet Frank would have thought Jim Upjohn preferred—or had even experienced, since his ancestors had been obscenely wealthy unto the fourth generation at least. What was he, seventy-one? Five years older than Frank? Over the years, Jim Upjohn had remained far more innocent than Frank had, far more innocent than anyone Frank knew, a nice boy who might cut your head off, but always gently, gracefully, with regret, a rare breed these days. Now he went to a kitchen cabinet and took out some peanuts. He said, “Come on, watch this.” Frank followed him onto the back porch of the double-wide. Jim Upjohn trotted down the steps and over to one of the taller cedars, where he slipped out of his loafers and set them side by side at the base of the tree. Then he whistled and called out, “Ronnie! Nancy!” He squatted down and sprinkled peanuts in the heel of each loafer, stood up, and backed away. There was chirping, and within moments, two squirreis,
their tails fat and furry, their coats thick, scampered down the tree. Each took a different loafer, as though they knew just what they were doing. They sat upright on their tails, picking up peanuts and putting them in their mouths, all the time expressing various opinions. When the peanuts were gone, they paused a moment, almost bidding adieu before scampering back up the tree. Jim Upjohn said to Frank, “It's surprising how little they cost.” He was twinkling.

But then he spun around and said, “Miracle you came, Frankie, because I need a favor. Involves you firing up that plane of yours and heading into the sunset.”

“Everyone agrees that I'm semi-retired and have too much time on my hands, so I am at your service.”

“I know.”

“How do you know? I haven't talked to you in four months, and you don't have a phone.”

“You don't think the complaints go only one direction between Paris and Englewood Cliffs, do you?”

“Andy doesn't complain.”

“She remarks upon.”

This would be true, thought Frank.

“Anyway, I want you to go to Aspen and meet someone. There's a conference there. I was supposed to go and help take over the world, but I can't stand the odor anymore, so I stayed home.”

“Do you go anywhere?”

“To the beach over at Barnegat. There's a fellow supposed to be in Aspen, Prechter. He's got a theory about how the market works, and I want you to talk to him about it.”

“What is his theory?”

“Well, basically, it's a mathematical version of Yes, uh-oh, well-maybe, or-maybe-not, okay-one-more-time. Large-scale, small-scale, middle-scale. He resurrected it, he's not taking credit for it.”

“What do you care? Look at this place. You have it all.”

Jim didn't disagree. He said, “I don't have a theory. I would like to have a theory.”

The ultimate luxury, thought Frank.

Jim said, “Anyway, you like to fly your plane, you like to get out of the house.”

Frank didn't say yes, he didn't say no, but he knew he would do it.

Loretta was charmed by the bogs, the floating cranberries, the mysteriousness of the landscape. She wanted to stay as late as she could, even though she also wanted to get back to Binky. In the end, they watched the men use long booms to push the brilliant berries into one corner, a ground of shining red in the sparkling sunlight. Then, as they left, Jim Upjohn stopped them, ran back in the house, and came out with a pot containing a flowering plant, an upright lavender blossom shading downward to white. “Arethusa,” he said. “An orchid.” Loretta balanced it on her lap all the way home.

Binky was screaming when they walked in the door, Chance was arguing with Dalla, and Andy was bouncing Tia on her knee. Loretta straightened her shoulders with a military air and handed the orchid to Frank, then said, “You were nice. Thank you.”

Frank knew that she hadn't thought such a thing was possible before today.

—

PRECHTER DID INDEED
have a theory, and it was interesting enough. When Frank floated the name “James Upjohn” in the air around them, Prechter turned toward it like a sunflower toward the sun. Prechter seemed to be rich, but that was not the point—the point was to be right. Frank apologetically recorded their conversation for “Mr. Upjohn, who can't make it because of the press of business,” but there was no need to apologize: Prechter waxed all the more emphatic and eloquent at the thought of explaining himself to such a deity. Frank said that Mr. Upjohn would be getting in touch, he was sure. Or he was unsure. Prechter had that look when they shook hands goodbye of being stretched on a rack of longing, his goal within sight but out of reach.

Otherwise, Frank nodded to a few men he recognized, ate lunch, eavesdropped, did his best to breathe and not fall asleep. One man was sure that the Dow would hit 2,000 by Christmas (Frank had heard that one before). Another man had heard Maggie Thatcher supported apartheid in South Africa, to which the man across the table from him replied, “Well, you know, the old dear is sending help to Pol Pot, though she would deny it unequivocally.”

“She's not the only one,” said someone else. Because of the time change, Frank fell asleep in his room at eight-thirty and was up by
four. At dawn, he left the Jerome and turned left. Aspen reminded him oddly of Iowa—maybe it was the wide streets and short buildings—he half expected to see a grain elevator over his shoulder. Even this early, the sunlight was getting ready to be brilliant. It was September 24th, wasn't it? Lillian would have been sixty today. He reminded himself to call Arthur when he got back to the hotel. He stared at his reflection for a moment in the window of a café that was already open, saw kids—hikers, it looked like—lined up at the counter, pointing to the menu overhead, or else sitting in their boots, equipment piled beside them, their hands arced around large yellow cups. When a girl passed him, grabbed the door, opened it, and entered, Frank could smell vanilla, chocolate, and butter. His reflection looked metallic, as if his skin were flaking away to reveal the tin man beneath. He had lost ten pounds in the last year, though his doctor said he was in perfect health. The weight loss seemed to enlarge his hands in an unpleasant way. He looked at them and put them behind his back. When he looked through the window again, his eyes had adjusted. Looking through the window was like looking through binoculars, and what he saw, across the room, standing, kissing a girlfriend on her red hair, and then going for another cup of coffee, was himself.

He shaded his eyes, leaned forward. The kid was in his early twenties, blond, broad-shouldered, over six feet. He had teeth, and he showed them—his smile for the waitress was merry, triangular, almost heart-shaped. His eyes were no doubt blue, though Frank couldn't tell that from where he was. The real resemblance was in his walk as he went back to his table, the shape of his hips, the tilt of his torso, and, oddly, the shape of his head. Frank could see his uncle Rolf, but cheerful rather than dogged. Frank turned away and went back across the street. He stood quietly, telling himself that he was getting some air, whatever air there was to get, but really, he was waiting, and when the kid and the redheaded girlfriend exited the café and headed down the block, Frank, on his side of the street, followed them. Lydia, his long-vanished mistress, must have produced a child. Perhaps that was why she had vanished. She had vanished in '65, which could be right for the age of this kid, but he'd thought she was his own age, so she'd have given birth in her mid-to-late forties. Possible? Not possible? Frank wasn't sure, but he found himself, as he
watched them from the other side of the street, doing a thing that he always did, gauging the value of the girlfriend. This one was bulky but strong, carrying a backpack; her legs in her shorts were postlike and sturdy. Her hair was piled on her head. It fell out of its clip once, and flopped forward. She coiled it up without thinking about it, still talking. She was good enough, in her way.