Early Warning (7 page)

Both boys nodded.

“Are you really tough?”

They nodded again.

“All right!”

But they were still angry at one another; when they went back to watching TV, Frank had to sit them on cushions a couple of feet apart so they wouldn't continue the argument. By the time Janny walked in, and then Andy, they were quiet enough. Andy said, “Whew! It's nice and shady in here. We could have stayed home, it's so hot. You guys have a nice afternoon?”

“We did,” said Frank. The boys nodded; undoubtedly, “nice” was not the word to describe the particular pleasures of their time together. But “nice” was not for boys, Frank thought. “Educational,” “stimulating,” “active.” Right out of Dr. Spock, Frank was sure.

G
RANNY ELIZABETH WAS BOUND
and determined to go visit Henry in California (and Eloise, too—ever since Eloise had lived with Rosanna and Walter back in the old days, helping with Frank and Joe, Granny Elizabeth had had a special fondness for her), and so Claire found herself on New Year's Day, her seventeenth birthday, helping Granny down the steps at the station in Oakland or Berkeley or somewhere damp, dark, and chilly. Granny had on her furs—a set of four minks with heads and tails, biting each other around her neck. The thing was ten years out of style, but she was enormously proud of it—“It's the dog she never got to have,” said Joe. Claire, carrying both the suitcases, had to hurry to keep up with her grandmother as she clicked down the platform toward the waiting room. “California!” she exclaimed. “You know, Claire, in a day or two, I will stand on these eighty-year-old feet and stare out over the Pacific Ocean, and that is a thing no Chick or Cheek has ever seen before! Stuck in the mud as always, just like hornbeams on the riverbank, looking at the lucky creatures drifting by! There he is!”

The Chicks and the Cheeks were Granny's ancestors back in England. Secretly, Claire always thought maybe the names were a joke, that they were really “Smiths” and “Johnsons.”

Henry was laughing as he took the bags from Claire. Then Eloise
was hugging her, and Rosa kissing her, and Henry was saying, “How was your trip, Granny?”

“Not long enough by half,” she said, “but I hear this is as far as you can go.”

The next morning, Henry showed up at Eloise's. As soon as they finished their coffee, they piled into Eloise's car, and Henry exclaimed, “Westward ho!” Two hours later, they were standing in the brilliant sunshine, at a place called Drakes Bay. The weather was not hot but, compared with Oakland, almost heavenly.

Claire kept her eye on Rosa, who slipped off her shoes and socks and set them beside an oddly shaped rock—they would pass it going back to the car. They were the only people on the beach. Rosa was five months younger than Henry, almost twenty-three, but years more mature. “Ah, the beach!” exclaimed Granny, with joy. But to Claire it was a stark, strange thing: flat, cool sand running under flat, cold water, the brilliance of the clouds and the sea and the sun almost too much to look at. Granny Elizabeth stood up straight, her arms thrown in the air. Henry touched something in the sand with his toe and bent down. It was a shell—concave, pearly on the inside, and rough gray on the outside. Claire said, “What's that?”

“Only an oyster shell. But you know how they know that Francis Drake stopped here? Shards of broken porcelain from vessels he would have been carrying on the ship. By the time he got here, he had one ship, the
Golden Hind.
He started out with five. These cliffs here”—he swept his arm around, and Claire noticed the tall, pale cliffs looming over the grayish-yellow sand—“reminded him of Dover, England, where there are also cliffs, so he called this ‘Nova Albion,' which basically means ‘New England,' and claimed all this coast for Queen Elizabeth.”

“Was that before the Pilgrims?” said Claire.

“Forty-one years before.” Henry scraped his toe through the sand again.

Since moving into Henry's old room at home, Claire had looked through some of his books. She couldn't believe how boring they were. She thought it was really too bad that Henry should be so good-looking—he was twenty-three and looked like a blond James Dean, except he didn't—James Dean walked around like he had a plan,
and Henry walked around like he was going to the library, which he was.

He did everything Rosa said. Rosa had her nose in the air, Claire thought, and when she smiled, it was only to laugh at you, or even less than that—she smiled to herself because it wasn't worth it to notice you. Right now, she was walking ahead of all of them, her hands in her pockets, sometimes shaking her head to make her hair blow, and then gazing out to sea as if she saw something that she was going to go write a poem about. Aunt Eloise might look a mess, but she was nice. How did her daughter turn out not to be? Claire wondered.

Granny Elizabeth came up beside Claire and took her hand. “Claire, honey,” she said, “I do think this is the most beautiful place that I have ever seen. You are a sweetheart for bringing your granny all the way out here.”

Claire said, “It was fun. It is fun, I mean.”

“Albion means ‘white,' you know. I don't know why that means England, too,” said Granny Elizabeth. And then she sat down in the sand and burst into tears.

Claire stopped dead and squatted down. After a moment, she put her hand on Granny's knee and pulled the hem of her blue crepe dress down a little. Granny's crying sounded to Claire like something falling—dishes out of the cupboard, or ice down a frozen slope. Claire didn't like crying at all; she hadn't cried since the day her father died under the Osage-orange hedge.

“You know what I did when I was your age, Clary?” said Granny Elizabeth. “I played the piano. We had this old-style parlor piano, not even eighty-eight keys, but I played it every day. I played it for your grandpa, and I thought he liked it, and then, when we were married for about six months, he said it was irritating. He didn't ask me to, but I did stop, because I didn't want him to hear me, even through the window.” Then she cried again, and said, “Oh, Wilmer!” Claire knew that there was more to the story—her father's two brothers, men she'd never met, had died young, which was strange to think of. Claire took Granny Elizabeth's hand.

“Walter was such a good little boy. I thought the worst day of my life was the day your father went away to the army in 1917, even worse than when little Lester died. I was only nineteen when that happened.”
She fell silent. “Then, of course, Howard went in the influenza after the war.” She pulled her handkerchief out of her sleeve and blotted her eyes, then said, “Oh me. How many times did I wish that it had been me to go? I had that flu, too.” Claire dreaded what might start now—Granny Elizabeth had outlived all of her children, and if they were to talk about that, and then get on to Claire's own feelings about the death of her father, she didn't know if she could stand it. She felt Granny's hand tighten around hers. But then Eloise noticed them. A look of alarm suffused Eloise's face as her lips formed the words “Henry! Rosa!” The other two turned around abruptly.

Granny Elizabeth saw them coming, and she leaned in toward Claire, speaking right in her ear. She said nothing about her father after all, only something that Claire would never forget: “The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I'm being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.”

Eloise hurried up and knelt down. “Are you all right? Did you fall? Beaches are so treacherous.”

“Oh no, Eloise, dear. I didn't fall. I'm fine. I just had a weak moment. Weak in the brain. Oh my. Why is it that beautiful places give you sad thoughts?” Claire held out her hand. Eloise took Granny Elizabeth's elbow and said, “Do you want to go back? I'm sure you must be tired.” Henry stepped forward and offered Granny Elizabeth his arm. After everyone helped her up, they continued down the beach, Rosa first, Eloise right behind her, Henry, Claire, and Granny Elizabeth behind them.

—

CLAIRE KNEW
she was a quiet girl. Supposedly, she didn't say “Mama” until she was nearly two. “It wasn't that she couldn't,” said Rosanna, “it was that she didn't care to.”

But what, thought Claire, was the use of talking when no one was listening? You could see it right here in Eloise's apartment. Some people talked all the time—Eloise and Granny Elizabeth. Henry yakked, but in spurts—Sir Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve children, he fought the Spanish Armada, and on and on. Rosa said little, but whenever Rosa said something (“We should put some mushrooms in
it”), the others fell silent, smiled, and nodded. Henry was in love with her and watched her every move. Eloise didn't notice, because she did the same thing. Rosa was a perfect example of an only child, thought Claire—she behaved herself, but it was because she was always on the stage and the lights were always up.

In the five days they spent in Berkeley, Rosa didn't introduce them to a single girl. Plenty of boys came over—they were kind of stinky and not good-looking, and they wore messy clothes. Everyone smoked and sat around, talking and talking. They watched out to see if you were listening, but they didn't say anything right to you, they just went on and on about being and nothingness while thinking that they were talking about something. In the end, pigs were more interesting. If Claire had been asked her opinion, she would have described how pigs look for their favorite foods in the slop, how they push the orange rinds to one side and eat the potato skins first, then come back to the orange rinds and nibble them, and she had even seen a pig eat a lemon rind and wrinkle its nose. Also, pigs had friends, and they grouped together; quite often, they liked the pigs who looked more or less like they themselves did. There were a couple of pigs in every litter whom the other pigs stayed away from. Claire had plenty to say, but not anything that anyone wanted to hear.

Eloise took them to see the Golden Gate Bridge, which they drove over one way, and then they turned around and drove back over it the other way. They went to Chinatown in San Francisco. Granny Elizabeth wanted to buy a doll, and she had the money, but Eloise insisted on bargaining for it, and then, when the price got down to two dollars, Granny Elizabeth walked right up to the woman and paid her four dollars anyway. The night before they went home, they had dinner in a restaurant where, in her show-offy way, Rosa ate only vegetables. They had ice cream for dessert. Henry told a story about his adviser, who had divorced his wife because she kept mispronouncing the word “album.” She could not stop herself from saying “alblum.” Henry said, “He corrected her, but she was really stubborn.”

“Why don't you go digging in Mexico or somewhere?” said Rosa. “New Mexico. There's plenty of interesting archeological stuff there.”

“There is.” Henry's voice was sharp. “But I didn't start with that culture. I started with Indo-European, and it's too late to change now.” His lips snapped shut, and Aunt Eloise looked from him to
Rosa. Rosa shrugged. It was a careful shrug—she knew Henry was looking at her, and she wanted him to understand that, whatever he did, she, Rosa didn't care.

“How many languages do you speak, Henry?” said Granny Elizabeth, oblivious.

“English. German. I can read French and Italian. If you can read Italian, you can work out Spanish. I can read Latin, Middle English, Old English. There aren't many texts, but I can make it through the Gothic version of the Bible. I'm taking Greek this semester.” Henry's voice rose.

Rosa turned her head slowly, toward him, and then away from him, across the room. Aunt Eloise took another sip of her wine. Claire saw then that she and Rosa did have something in common, and that it was keeping secrets. Claire's secrets might be about the family life of pigs, but Rosa's were more interesting, and maybe sadder than that.

Granny Elizabeth wiped her mouth and said, “Well, I am sorry to go home! And the penny jar is empty, upside down, drained dry, but this trip was worth it!”

“What's next?” said Henry. “You should go to England, Gran.” He dragged his gaze away from Rosa.

“I think Hawaii!” said Granny Elizabeth.

—

WHEN JOE CAME IN
from cultivating the field that ran behind the house, the first thing he did was splash water on his face at the outdoor sink. Then he kicked off his boots. It was hot and he was thirsty, and although later he remembered that the door was ajar, at the time he just closed it behind him. He was hungry. He shouted for Lois, but there was no answer, and then he glanced out the kitchen window and saw that the car was gone. Minnie, of course, was at the high school, administering something or other—even in the summer she was gone most of the day. He opened the refrigerator. The plate of leftover ribs, right next to a dish a strawberries, had a little note—“Took Jesse to his six-month checkup. Annie is with your mother. Eat them all, Lois.”