Dedicated to the gallant men and women of the Federal Civil Defense Administration and to those other true patriots, the volunteers, who are doing their best to save the sum of things.

MAPS

X-Day Minus Ninety

1

When the pioneers came across the plains to the place where the Little Bird River Bowed into the Abanakas, they halted. The tributary was clear and potable. In the muddy main stream, an island served them as a moated campground. It was called Swan Island owing to a shape which, it later proved, changed radically with the Hoods. They renamed the Abanakas the Green Prairie.

The Little Bird, as a town crept south along its banks, became Slossen’s Hun—thanks to a trapper who, in the early part of the nineteenth century, set his lines in the. headwaters of that creek.

The Abanakas, or Green Prairie, Bowed generally east through a flat and fertile land. But below Swan Island it made a wide turn toward the south and sank between low sandstone bluffs.

The water deepened there and a shingle beach served for a towpath. Above the bluffs, the river shallowed; they marked the most westerly local point to which barges could be drawn by mules in the seasons of deep water. This conjunction of navigability, good fresh water, game-filled woods and fertile prairie made an inevitable site for habitation.

Fort Abanakas, the first settlement, was often attacked by hard-riding Sioux. The Indian Trading Post was next—on the north bank, since it had a more gradual slope which made for easier unloading of the towboats. Farmers followed the trappers, and merchants came to deal with both. Long before a shot was fired at Fort Sumter, two sizable towns had come into being on the opposite banks. Their certain rivalry was soon redoubled. For when the territory was carved into states, the Green Prairie River became a boundary over a considerable stretch. Thus

“Green Prairie,” the southern town, and “River City” on the north bank, were loyal to different states though connected even then by bridges a few hundred feet long. The loyalty, and rivalry, grew after Sumter: River City’s state was free, Green Prairie’s, slave.

After the Civil War, lead and zinc were discovered beneath the prairie sod. In distant hills, at the century’s turn, a dam heaped up the river’s energy. Hydroelectric plants followed.

Oil was found in Bugle County and good coking coal in Tead. Smoke covered the prairies from then on. And the immigrants arrived.

They unpacked their carpetbags. They sold skills learned in the mills and mines of Europe. They created lichenlike slums, went to school, entered politics, became the gangsters of the twenties and some, the heroes of the Second World War.

By then the combined population of River City and Green Prairie approached a million.

Where the sullen, sweating mules had brought the barges to rest, where Sioux arrows had fired cottonwood logs in the fort, skyscrapers stood.

By then, there were families who could look back to four or five generations of unbroken residence in the region. Some of these “natives” were rich and powerful; some were poor; but most were ordinary people—prospering modestly, loving freedom, hating interference, intelligent by the lights of their society, fair citizens and superb neighbors. The Conner family in Green Prairie was such.

Their white frame house had been built in 1910, set back in a big lawn on Walnut Street in the “residential south section,” then a long trolley ride from the busy downtown district. The houses around were like the Conner house in atmosphere even though some were frame, some brick and some stucco. The people, too, were like the Conners: indistinguishable from millions in the nation, at first glance—yet, like the millions, on any second look more individualist than most other people of the earth. At the end of the Second War, during the great expansion, the Conners had thrived. But like all their fellow citizens, and more keenly than many, they shared the doubts and anxieties of the new age.

Its very voice influenced their lives, even their domestic lives, as the years chased each other swiftly, rewardingly, after the century’s mid-point. Green Prairie and River City were halves of a happy, urban world, separated by a river and a political boundary but united by bridges both actual and spiritual. Typically American, content, constructive, the Conners, too, were happy. And yet….

The sound came through the open windows of the dining room. Each of the five members of the Conner family was differently affected. Henry, the father, stopped all movement to listen.

The gravy spoon, which he had been about to plunge into his mashed potatoes, dripped midway between the bowl and his plate. His wife, Beth, looked out through the screened windows, frowning, as if she wished she had never heard a siren in her life.

Nora, who was eleven, exclaimed, “Brother! You can hear it this time, all right, all right!”

Ted Conner pushed back his chair, stood, started to go, and snatched a fresh roll, already buttered and spread with homemade jam, before his feet took the stairs with the noisy incoherence of a male high school student in a hurry.

Charles, the older son, smiled faintly. This was the first evening of his leave and the first time he’d worn home the proud silver bar of a first lieutenant. The dinner—especially the roast beef which had filled the kitchen with a hunger—begetting aroma all afternoon—was a celebration for him. Now the sound surging over the city would interfere with that homely ceremony. Charles’s smile expressed his regret. “Can I help?” he asked his father, who had risen.

“Guess not. This is a civilian party!” Henry Conner took the stairs in the wake of his younger son, but more deliberately.

“It’s a shame it had to be this evening,” Mrs. Conner said. “Still, Nora and you and I can at least eat.”

“Aren’t you in it?” Charles asked.

“I’m in the First Aid Group, yes. But we don’t have to answer this call.”

Nora, always ready to amplify any subject, her mobile mouth apparently unembarrassed by potatoes, said informatively, “This is just for air-raid-warden practice, and the rescue teams, and cops and firemen, and like that.”

“Nora! Don’t talk with your mouth full. And don’t say, ‘and like that!’ It’s bad grammar.”

Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, laughed a little.

It was good to be home, good to listen to the gentle reprimands that spelled home and were nothing like military correction. After dinner he would get out of uniform, enjoy the comfort of slacks and a sports coat. He would go next door and see if Lenore Bailey would like to take in a movie.

The siren gathered strength and volume. Its initial growl and its first crescendo had seemed far away; soon its slow rise and fall became pervasive and penetrating; when it slurred into each high warble, the human head was invaded not just by noise, but by what seemed a tangible substance. Nora reflected the fact. “This new one,” she yelled above it, “sure is a lulu!”

“They must have hung it on a tree in our back yard,” Charles replied loudly.

His mother shook her head. “It’s on the new TV tower, out on Sunset Parkway by the reservoir.”

Henry Conner came down the stairs two at a time. “Where the hell are my car keys, Beth?”

“Right on your dresser.”

“ I looked there—!”

“Behind Charles’s photograph.”

“Oh!” He bounded up the stairs, hurried back, opened the front door and yelled from the porch, “Ted, that moron, has left his jalopy in the drive! How many times do I have to…?”

“I’ll move it.” Charles pushed back his chair to go to the third floor, where his brother would be tuning in his ham radio as his part in the drill.

Beth stopped him. “Don’t bother. Your dad’s forgotten he’s sector warden, now. Ed McWade’s supposed to drive him.” She hurried out on the porch and repeated the fact to her husband.

“Just as well Ed is coming,” Mr. Conner said. “That monstrosity probably wouldn’t start.”

The automobile—without fenders, with a homemade engine hood—did not look operable. It had been repaired with wire and sticks and painted by hand in half a dozen different colors. These hues were superscribed with initials, emblems, symbols, slogans and wisecracks, so that it resembled a tourist attraction rather than a vehicle.

“Here comes Ed,” Mr. Conner cried, and raced down his driveway, waving. The effort caused his crimson arm band, on which the word “Warden” was stenciled in white, to slide off his unused arm. When he bent to retrieve it, his World War I helmet clattered on the sidewalk. At the same time, Mrs. Conner called, “You forgot your whistle!” and ran indoors to get it. The lieutenant hastened down the walk to help his father reassemble his gear.

At the dinner table, alone in the presence of a feast, Nora made a hasty survey and passed herself the jam. She piled an incredible amount on half a slice of bread, tossed her two braids clear for action, and contrived to crowd the mass into her mouth. She was still masticating when her mother and older brother, having dispatched the paterfamilias, returned to the table.

“Everything’s cold,” Mrs. Conner said ruefully.

“Far from it,” her son answered. “Best meal I’ve looked at in six months.” He sliced a square of thick and juicy beef. “Best I’ve ever tasted!”

Her rewarded look was warm, but it vanished as she noticed the diminished aspect of the jelly dish. “ Nora …!”

In the car as he sped down Walnut Street beside Ed, Henry Conner was thinking about the wild-strawberry jam and the roast beef, too. His companion had identical sentiments:

“Caught me,” he said, as he slowed to cross Lakeview Road, “just as we were sitting down to dinner.”

“Me, too. Guess they figured everybody would be doing the same. Ought to be a good turnout, on account of it.”

Ed slammed on the brakes in time to avoid the chemical engine of Hook and Ladder Company Number 17. It pounded across the intersection, its lights on in spite of the fact that the sun still shone, its clanging bell drowned by a whoop of the siren. “Something else to think about,” Henry yelled, letting his nerves down easy. “When those sirens are going, you can’t hear car horns or even fire-truck hells!”

Ed wiped a little diamond dust of sweat from his forehead. “Could have been closer, Hank.”

“Oh, sure.”

The sedan turned into South Hobson Street and slowed. The school was only four blocks distant and converging Civil Defense cars were piling up, even though volunteer “police” were blowing whistles urgently and urgently waving their arms, and even though Hobson Street was “one way” during this surprise drill. They could see, now, hundreds of cars parked and being parked in the playgrounds of the South High School. They could see the “wrecked” corner of the gymnasium where, later in the evening, the fire fighters and rescue squads would rehearse under conditions of simulated disaster, including real flames and chemical smoke. The very numbers of the congregating people stimulated them. That stimulus, added to a certain civic pride and the comparative verisimilitude of the occasion, helped Hank Conner and Ed McWade to forget they were middle-aged businessmen, middle-class householders, who for weary years had periodically and stubbornly pretended that their city in the middle of America was the target of an enemy air raid.

Before Ed parked the car, Henry leaped out and went to his post to assemble his block wardens. One of them, Jim Ellis, proprietor of the Maple Street Pharmacy, was incensed. “You know what, Hank? This is my druggist’s night off. I had to shut down the prescription department since I can’t be there to roll pills myself! Probably cost me twenty, twenty-five bucks. Maybe customers, even. People don’t like to come in a drugstore and not get a prescription filled on the dot. Next time we have one of these fool rehearsals—”

“You shouldn’t be here, anyway, Jim. How come?”

“I said that. I phoned headquarters when the letter about this new drill came. They told me whenever the sirens went to report here at the school—”

“Well, I’ll be responsible for that. You get your car and go back to the pharmacy. All the pharmacists in my area, by God, are going to stay in the stores. What zigzag chump ordered you here? In a real raid you’d be indispensable at the store.”

“That makes sense!”

Hank nodded and his easy voice rose to a pitch of command: “Sykes! Evans! Maretti!

Get Jim’s car cleared and see him around to Baker Avenue! Hold everything up till he’s out of the parking yard!”

A woman wearing a warden’s arm band rushed up from a knot of people gathered around a placard that said, “Station Forty-two.” She cried anxiously, “Mr. Collins! I left rolls in the oven!”

Henry drew a breath, expelled it. “How often do we have to go through the routine, Mrs.

Dace? You’re supposed to check all those things before you jump in a car and start for your post.

You’ll have to get a phone priority slip and tell your neighbors to turn off the gas—”

“It’s a coal range.”

“All right! To turn down the drafts and haul out the pans.” Hank began searching the school grounds for somebody connected with telephone priorities. He wondered with a kind of good-humored annoyance how in hell the citizens of Green Prairie would learn to save lives when they couldn’t remember to salvage biscuits.

In that segment of the attic which had long ago been converted into “the boys’ room,”

Ted Conner worked feverishly amidst a junklike jumble of wires, dimly glowing tubes, switches, dials, condensers, transformers and other paraphernalia with which gifted young men—specialists at the age of sixteen or so—are able to communicate with one another, often over distances of hundreds of miles. Ted Conner was a member in good standing of the American Radio Amateurs’ Society. He was also a volunteer member of Civil Defense, Communications Division.

To Ted, more than to any other person in the family (and partly because his function was the most realistic), the rise and fall of the siren spelled excitement. It was his instant duty to rush to his post, which meant his radio set. It was his assignment to get the set going and tune in headquarters. It was his additional assignment, every five minutes on the second, to listen for thirty seconds to his opposite number in Green Prairie’s “Sister City,” directly across the river.

Ted was going to be big like his grandfather Oakley, a blacksmith. He had his mother’s light-brown hair—as did Nora—and his father’s clear, blue eyes, as also did his sister. Only Chuck had the Oakley brown eyes; but Chuck hadn’t inherited the size, the big bones and the stature; Chuck was slender. Ted sat now with one leg hooked over the arm of a reconstructed swivel chair, his blue eyes shining, his usually clumsy hands turning the radio dials with delicacy. He was oblivious to everything in his environment: the pennants and banners on the wall; the stolen signs that said, “Danger,” and “Do Not Disturb,” and “Men”; the battered dresser and its slightly spotted mirror framed in snapshots-snapshots of girls in bathing suits and girls with ukuleles and a burning B-29.

He did not see any of it. Not the rafters over his head. Not the end-of-summer leaves on the treetops outside the window, where a setting sun cast ruddy light. Not the moraine of mixed garments which lay, contrary to familial orders, on his bed—not made up, contrary to the same rules. To Ted Conner, who was sixteen, a hideous danger now menaced Green Prairie and its sister metropolis, River City. To Ted, the theoretical enemy bombers were near. To him, brave men like his brother Chuck (though Chuck, actually, was a Ground Force officer) were even now climbing from near-by Hink Field into the stratosphere to engage atom-bomb-bearing planes that winged toward Green Prairie.

This stage setting was necessary to accompany the rest of the dream he had, every time there was a drill:

One enemy bomber was getting through. Man after man was trying for it and missing. Its bomb-bay doors were opening. The horrendous missile was falling. There was an earth-shaking explosion. Half of Green Prairie and even more of River City were blotted out. Now, Ted Conner was alone—alone at his post in the attic. His family had been evacuated. The place was a shambles and on fire. But there he sat, ice calm, sending and giving messages which were saving uncounted lives—to the last. They would put up a monument for him later—when they found his high school class ring, miraculously unmelted in the ashes of the Conner home.

His earphones spoke. “Headquarters. Condition Red! Condition Red! Stand by, all stations.”

Ted felt gooseflesh cascade down his back.

He stood by.

Headquarters had been saying that off and on for twenty minutes. And not much else.

Downstairs, Nora asked if she could have another piece of pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Mrs. Conner said, “Absolutely not.”

“Then I’ll go out and play till it’s dark.”

“You’ll do your homework, that’s what you’ll do! It’ll be dark in a quarter of an hour, anyhow.”

“Mother! It’s ridiculous to ask anybody to study during an air raid.”

“It is ridiculous,” her mother replied, “to think you can use a drill for an alibi. You go in the living room, Nora, and do your arithmetic.”

“I hate it!”

“Exactly. So—the sooner you do it “

Chuck grinned reminiscently and excused himself. He went through the kitchen to the back door. Queenie, the Conner tomcat, was meowing to be admitted. The lieutenant let him in, marveling briefly over the mistake in gender which had led to the original name and his young sister’s defense, which had permitted the misnomer to stick. “A cat,” Nora had said long ago, “can look at a queen. So, he’ll stay Queenie, even if he has got a man sex.”

He had stayed Queenie for five years though, Chuck thought fleetingly, and after a glance, the scars on the aging tom suggested he had overcompensated for what he must have considered a libel.

Dusk was gathering in the yard. On the high clouds there remained signs of where the sun had gone—purplish shadows, glints of orange. But the Olds was already hidden in the darkness of the open garage and the soldier could smell rather than see that his brother had recently mowed the lawn. He could see, however, that Ted hadn’t trimmed the grass along the privet hedge which separated the Conners’ yard from the Baileys’. Chuck reflected that in his boyhood he had been a precise trimmer and clipper. But then, he’d always wanted to be what he would be now, were it not for his uniform: an architect. And Ted was different: he wanted to be an inventor—at least right now. Inventors were probably not much interested in even lawns, while architects definitely were.

Chuck stood in the drive and looked uncertainly at the Bailey house. Time was when his family’s house and the residence next door had been quite similar—ordinary American homes—two-story-and-attic frame houses, white, with front porches and back porches, clapboard sides, scroll-work around the eaves, and big lawns. Both had been planted with spirea and forsythia, with tulips for spring, random crocuses, and, for fall, dahlias. Both had had vegetable gardens in the back and both had long ago lost barns and acquired garages.

But the Baileys had “modernized” their place in the years just after World War II. The sprangly shrubbery had been replaced by neat evergreens. The front porch had been carted away and the front façade remade with imitation adobe bricks and a picture window instead of the old comfortable curved bay. The vegetable garden had vanished entirely and in its place were a summerhouse and a barbecue pit where, wearing a chef’s hat and an apron with jokes printed on it, Beau Bailey, Lenore’s father, sometimes ruined good beefsteak while his guests drank martinis in the gloaming.

As a man with a degree in architecture (who had gone into uniform from the ROTC before he had professionally designed so much as a woodshed), Chuck now skirted the Bailey property, critically surveying the moderne effect and looking for any recent changes. The house didn’t seem right any more, he thought. Its proportions were wrong. There was nothing in Green Prairie to warrant the use of imitation adobe either. It might be “modernistic,” but it was suitable for the desert, not for a region where winter came in November and went away in May. All in all, Howard Bailey (who was called “Beau” even by the president of the bank where he worked as cashier) had spent a lot of money for his remodeling job, and failed to fool anybody. Such was Chuck’s professional opinion—and his human opinion was similar. Putting on “side” characterized not only Beau, but his wife.

Lenore was different.

At least, Chuck hoped she was different, still.

For Chuck could hardly recall a day in his life when he had not been in love with the Baileys’ only child. Propinquity might have explained that: there was no day when Chuck had not lived next door to Lenore. But propinquity was not needed to explain the attachment.

Lenore long ago had won a “Prettiest Grade School Girl” contest that had included River City as well as Green Prairie. At eighteen she had been May Princess at the South High School, which meant she was the most attractive girl in her senior class. And she had been voted the “Most Beautiful Coed” when she had graduated from State University.

Beauty, then, could have explained Chuck’s fealty—the simple fact that he had grown up next door to a girl who became one of the loveliest women in the city. But the matter of Lenore’s desirability involved more than the impelling forces set going by loveliness. She happened to be bright, and in addition she had been sweet and gracious, democratic and sincere.

Now, Chuck wasn’t so sure. Where Lenore was concerned, he’d had no lasting assurance anyhow.

They had always been “friends.” As “friends” they had enjoyed an intimacy of a particular sort. Chuck was sure, for example, that he was the first boy who had ever kissed Lenore; but it was not very impressive assurance. He had kissed her when they were both six years old. In fact, he had then carried a mixture of ardor and curiosity, which she had shared, considerably beyond mere kissing. The Baileys and the Conners were one day appalled to discover that their two six-year-olds were not merely kissing but that—in the elderberry thicket which had then existed in a then-vacant lot behind the Bailey premises—they were both stark naked, their small shoes, socks, overalls and underwear commingled in an untidy heap. Such findings perennially stun nearly all parents, and Lenore and Chuck had suffered the shocked, conventional punishments. But though Chuck recalled the episode with warmth and savor, his close amity with Lenore at six did little to bolster his confidence at twenty-four.

He hadn’t written her that he was coming home for his thirty days because, until the last moment at the base in Texas, he hadn’t been sure of the date on which his leave would begin.

He’d reached the house, by cab from the airport, just in time for dinner. He had wanted then to phone Lenore of his arrival. But he had felt it would slight his family, his mother especially, if he immediately sought out someone else. He had hoped all during the meal (which the siren had spoiled as a family reunion anyhow) that Lenore might step across for some reason or another and find him there. Maybe the Bailey phone would be out of order—or they’d need to borrow coffee-or something. He had known the hope was preposterous. He had also reflected during the meal (while he told his mother that life in the Air Force “wasn’t bad at all” and while he had watched with incredulity the amount of food Nora consumed) that in years past he had run over to the Bailey house freely, casually, while now he felt a definite constraint.

He still felt it as he walked along on the mowed grass between his driveway and the privet hedge, examining the Bailey house. There was a Buick parked at the curb—“a Buick,” his father often said, “trying to look like a Cadillac”—and a Ford in the back yard. That meant all three Baileys were probably at home: Beau, Netta and Lenore. But it didn’t mean Lenore had no date that evening or that Chuck, at twenty-four, could simply enter without even knocking as he’d done when he and Lenore had studied algebra together.

He had about decided to go back in the house and phone formally when a door opened and somebody came out. At first he couldn’t tell who the person was. Not Mrs. Bailey: too tall.

But it wasn’t Beau: no sign or his expanded waistline. It was somebody, he could see, in a kind of plastic jumper, yellow, with a hood that covered the head. The person was carrying a box with wires attached to it and a silvery gadget dangling from the wires. This figure turned toward the open door and called in a husky, pleasant voice, “Don’t wait up for me. I’ve got a date—after.”

It was Lenore’s voice. Chuck, completely bewildered, shouted, “Hey!”

The box with its attached gadgetry was set on the lawn. The voice now floated toward him. “Chuck! When did you get back?” Lenore ran toward him.

Had Charles Conner been more experienced in the behavior of women, had he even been of that temperament which is given to shrewd scrutiny of others, he would have noticed the impulsiveness with which the girl started toward him. It was emphasized by the fact that she remembered the outlandishness of her costume only later, when she had skirted a neat bed of tea roses, come up to him, held out both her hands and exclaimed, “What a wonderful surprise! Why didn’t you let me know?”

He was not such a person. He was a gentle and dreaming kind of young man, somewhat introverted, modest, in his opinion far from handsome. His head was long and narrow, his features somewhat ascetic; his hair had retreated a little way: he would soon be half-bald like his father; meantime, the effect was to make his forehead seem extraordinarily high. Lenore’s good looks invariably brought out his diffidence.

In addition, her regalia (astounding for any woman and all but unthinkable for Lenore) put him off. She was dressed as if she were going to crawl under the Buick and fix it-a chore of which she was capable; but it was not for that, he knew. He knew it if for no other reason than that neither her mother, whose social ambitions were limitless, nor her father, who had matching financial desires, would let their daughter play mechanic in the street.

It was only when they touched hands there in the gathering twilight, with a subconscious pulling—when they felt warmth and strength each in the other—that Chuck associated the girl’s costume and recent events. “Ye gods!” he cried, letting go of her, “a Geigerman!”

She nodded serenely, a little impishly. “Isn’t it becoming?” She pirouetted like a model.

“Yellow,” she went on, “is the fall color. The material is simply amazing. Not only weatherproof and mothproof, but fire-resistant too. Absolutely dustproof. No common chemicals can damage it. The hood”—she pulled it farther over her face and drew down a green, transparent visor which sealed her from view—” provides adequate protection from the elements, all the elements, including their radioactive isotopes!” She broke off, pulled down the hood, disclosed blue eyes, tumbling dark hair, raised, crimson lips. “Oh, Chuck! I’m so glad to see you! Kiss me.”

He tried to kiss her cheek and she made that impossible. She held the kiss, besides, for a long moment and when she settled on her heels she whispered, “Welcome home.”

He dissembled his feelings, pointed. “How come?”

“This?” she looked down at the radiation safety garment. “Spite.”

“Spite?”

“I’ll explain. I’ve got to take off in a sec—South High. Want to drive me there?”

“‘Whither…’ and so forth,” he answered.

She stared at him, shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe him real. “Come on, then. We’ll take my Ford.”

“Just a mo!” Chuck reverted to a bygone period. He ran back toward the open kitchen window and shouted, “Hey, Mom!”

Beth Conner’s voice floated back from above the dishpan. “Yes, Charles? No need to yell so.”

“I’m going to run Lenore down to the school.”

“All right.” Mrs. Conner wiped a copper-bottomed pan and hung it up with her set, one of her many small sources of pride and joy. It was just like Charles, though now a man grown, to let her know where he was going. Teddy had reached an age when he preferred never to say, or else forgot. And Nora had never known a time, never would know one, probably, when she considered her private destinations any affair of her mother.

Chuck carried the Geiger counter to the car, climbed in, and backed down the driveway.

He switched on the headlights and started slowly along Walnut Street. The girl beside him began to turn the knobs on the radiation counter. “Let’s see if you’re radioactive,” she said. She held up the wandlike detector and frowned down at the dials. “Nope. Just overheated.”

“Warm day—for September.”

“Since when wasn’t September warm?”

“How are things?” he asked.

“Just the same.” She shrugged one shoulder somewhere under the coverall. “But absolutely, painfully the same. Possibly a shade worse. Dad seems to be drinking a little too much, a little too often, if you know what I mean. And Mother keeps crowding me a little harder all the time.”

“Why don’t you go away?”

“Away like where?” she asked. “Didn’t we kick that around till it got lost, the last time you were home on leave?”

“I kept thinking about it—at the base.”

“I didn’t need to. The family didn’t let me study what I wanted. Couldn’t afford graduate courses. You know that. They hate the very thought that their darling daughter has a knack for science instead of a knack for rich men. So why should I go away, to New York even, and work at something I’d detest, myself? Being a secretary. Or a model. Phooie!”

“Anyhow,” he said, not happily, “you’ll make a damned good Geigerman.”

She ignored the hurt tone. “Won’t I? And doesn’t it burn mother to the core!”

“Does it?” He could understand her relish. Lenore’s parents frightened him, in a sense: they were able to influence Lenore.

“About six weeks ago the Civil Defense people called at our house,” she began. “They gave Mother and Dad a long spiel about how this state is high up on the national list in preparedness and how everybody in Greek Prairie who could, ought to be in the organization.

You can imagine the fascination Mom and Dad had for that! The defense people didn’t stay long; they could see that the senior Baileys were a dry hole as far as public spirit and atomic war are concerned. But they left some pamphlets. And I got reading them one evening when Mother was chewing me out for refusing to go to some beastly Junior League thing, and I saw in the pamphlet that Green Prairie badly needed people who could handle electronic equipment. So I phoned up to see if they’d take women. Well, there is one other woman Geigerman, a schoolteacher, a Mrs. Phollen. So I signed for it.”

“Great. And now instead of going to beastly Junior League parties, you’re out playing air raid—”

“To the infinite annoyance of my parents! And they really can’t say anything about it.

When they try to, I just hang my pretty head and tell them the Baileys have to do something…”

She broke off with an abrupt mood change familiar to him. “Oh, all right, Chuck. You always do see through me. I got into this absurd Civil Defense thing on one of my impulses, and now I’m plenty sore because it takes a night a week. We’ve been briefed and briefed and briefed; some of the people have been at it for years—and the whole business is simply fantastic anyhow! Tell me about life in the army.”

He relaxed a little. “That’s even duller. You know. I’m not in the glamour department of the Air Force. I’d be, even in the highly unlikely event of a war, at some base probably, far from peril—attached to a Colonel who was attached to a good dugout—keeping track of the lubrication stock for B-47’s.”

She said, “You do think there’s no chance of a war, don’t you?”

“Are you asking me as a person? Or as a military man? Because, as the latter, I’m supposed to say we can’t afford to drop Uncle Sam’s big guard.”

“As you, Chuck.”

“I think the Reds want peace—need it—and mean to have it. They’ve conceded about everything lately, except letting the free world come in and inspect them. But I’d trust sharks quicker. I’m kind of glad you’re in something.”

He swung into South Hobson Street. It was solid with cars. From time to time they moved up a few inches. In the distance, the playgrounds of South High, floodlighted now, were swarming with people, most of whom wore brassards and helmets. Whistles blew. Teams of various sorts formed and marched together toward a place where flames licked around a huge heap of broken boxes, barrels, old lumber. Hoses played. The thrumming of a fire-engine pump could be heard. A searchlight snapped on somewhere and threw so much light on the simulated burning wreckage that the flames became invisible and only the smoke showed.

Chuck fixed an eye, half-humorous, half-melancholy, on the scene. It was just a little like basic training, when you crawled along under live bullets from real machine guns and when you ran through actual poison gas, wearing a mask. But, he thought, it was nothing whatever like a real city after the detonation of a real bomb—even a high-explosive bomb. “Terrific,” he said.

Lenore raised her eyebrows. “Ridiculous, too?”

“Just what do you do?”

“We form,” she answered, “exactly one hour after the siren. I’m late, but everybody in my section will be because they can’t get their counters working right, or can’t find where they put them, or took them over to the lab for repair. Then we approach the ‘simulated radioactive site.’ Tonight, they told us, they will actually have a small chunk of radiating metal somewhere.

We’re supposed to probe around till we find it.”

He shook his head, inched the car up, braked again and watched as she opened the door.

“Carryon!” he said, saluting her with mock solemnity.

She laughed a little. “I’ve got myself in this, and a date later, when all I want to do is go down with you to our spot by the river and neck.”

“I’ll be home,” he answered, “any evening for the next thirty.”

“And as soon as Mother knows it,” she answered, grimly picking up her instrument, “she’ll raise heaven and earth to make it as nearly impossible as she can for me to see you at all.”

“Still—you being twenty-four—”

“But jobless and dependent.” She slammed the door. “I can’t fight them to the point where I’m really kicked out.”

He wanted to ask why she couldn’t. He wanted to say, as he had said before, that there were young women, lovely ones, who managed to live on a lieutenant’s pay. But he knew what would follow any such suggestion. It began with the reminder that, when he ceased being a lieutenant in one more year, he wouldn’t have an income at all. When he was settled in civilian life, it would at first be on the minute income of a draftsman in some small architectural office in River City or Green Prairie. “Barely enough,” Lenore had said once in a bitter moment, “to pay my dry-cleaning bills.”

“Do I call back?” he asked.

“I’ll get a ride. This monkeyshine won’t break up till around eleven. Then we go to somebody’s house for what the older veterans of Civil Defense call refreshments and jollification.”

“Ducky.” She swore and stalked down South Hobson Street, making better time than the traffic.

He parked her car beside her house and saw, through the picture window, Beau Bailey sitting in a deep chair with the evening paper, a highball, and the top button, of his trousers undone. Hurriedly he crossed the lawn to: his own yard.

Nora and Ted were studying.

“I thought,” Chuck said to his brother, “you were supposed to be at the switch. One of the minute men?”

“Oh, heck. I am! But they just repeated the same old baloney over and over and it got sickening.” His imagination, vivid when the “attack” had begun, was now a faded thing.

Mrs. Conner had come from the hall with her darning basket. She smiled at her straight, thin son and sat down with a murmur of relief. “Ted’s been very faithful, really, Charles. And it is tiresome. This is your father’s fourth year. I don’t see how on earth he keeps up his enthusiasm.

Ted said with scorn, “He’s enthusiastic about everything!” his voice cracked on the last word and he repeated it with dignity: “Everything. Besides, afterward they have beers and they bowl. Also it’s political. He’s getting to be such a big shot in this part of town, the next thing you know, he’ll he elected dogcatcher. Then he’ll be away from home every night, looking for old ladies’ lost poodles.” He yacked mightily at that sally.

His mother laughed a little too.

Charles picked up the evening paper and took his father’s chair under the green-shaded drop-lamp. He reflected somberly that it was odd how homesick one could get at an Air Force base in Texas and how soon the feeling evaporated when one actually got home.

Nostalgia for home had been changed by some unwanted trick to nostalgia for the past.

He was thinking about Lenore, in a wordless stream of pictures.

Lenore in the days when he’d been younger than Ted, when he’d been given his own first jalopy by his father and learned to take care of it; Lenore, fifteen, half-tomboy and half-woman, more fascinated by machinery than he, adept, helping him, summer afternoons, when they sprawled together in overalls in the drive, under the car with wrenches, tightening bolts and swapping kisses that tasted faintly of engine oil, Lenore, taking the high school chemistry prize in her junior year, the physics award the year after, a pretty kid with a man’s aptitude for the sciences, encouraged by the teachers, who said she’d “go a long way.”

The times, the times that went back as far as he could remember, when usually at her instigation, they “collected”—birds’ eggs, moths and butterflies, insects, stamps, coins, J and shells from the distant ocean that neither one had ever seen, then….

And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to….

Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary….

It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,” awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.

“I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.

His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”

“If you’d only…” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.

“If I’d only what?”

She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”

“Keep quiet!” Nora expostulated. “I’m studying!” She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.

Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title Sins in Seven Streets. A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.

Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”

“You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss Tootlin’ Tim.”

Tootlin’ Tim was apparently on the air, for a studio audience laughed and the Conner household was filled with the lunging, sepulchral explosion which represents the combined efforts of hundreds of persons, with nothing to do· and no sense of humor, to express what they regard as amusement.

The same sound from the same source—radio laughter—was surging through millions of Middle Western homes at the same instant. It is an utterly savage sound, mirthless and cruel, usually inspired by the sadisms which constitute most popular humor. It is a sound that would stun to silence the predatory night noises of the wildest jungle, a sound of madness, more frightful than screaming.

2

The same sound from the same TV program intermittently belched through the Bailey living room where Beau, the evening paper in his lap, now slept. He snored lightly and he stirred from time to time. But whenever the TV set gave forth its collective guffaw, its mechanical replica of the mechanical mirth of morons who opened their mouths and chortled every time the emcee made sucking motions with his hands (and who slammed their mouths shut when the same all-pimple showed them his palms), whenever this rock-slide cacophony struck his ears, Beau’s belly jiggled in cadence, his snoring ceased and a miniature replica of the audience noise escaped him.

Indeed, in many homes and public places, where people had no idea what program was on the air or what jest occasioned the brickbat risibility of the unseen audience, the mere sound elicted that response—a chuckle, cackle or snort. For they were so slavishly conditioned to this style of diversion, so inertly used to, the inanities which push-buttoned their sport, that the mere noise of other nitwits being tickled elicited the reflex. They laughed without knowing why, or even that they laughed. They laughed while drying dishes and emptying garbage and adding columns of figures and shaving and defecating and picking their noses and reading Sunday-school lessons and swallowing pork pies and custards and beer. They chortled.

Beau, among them, though asleep and patently troubled in his slumber, nonetheless snored and snickered, tittered, nickered, nasalized and woke up with a start because Netta had spoken to him-yelled, rather, since her first words had been overridden by a fresh, oblong block of guffaw, and she detested above all else to be outshouted. All Beau heard, or needed to hear, was “Telephone!”

He got out of his chair and buttoned the top of his fly as if the telephone were going to be able to see. Then, as if it had the additional power to do harm to him, he snatched up his highball and gulped it down protectively.

He picked up the instrument and cleared his throat. His tone was suddenly buoyant and friendly, “Howard Bailey speaking.”

“This is Jake.”

If Netta had been in the hall she would have seen that Beau’s face lost all its color. The whisky, too, went out of his brain. Nothing was left but a pallid and wobbling man’s body, frantic eyes—but the voice intact, for Beau knew his wife would be listening though she could not look. She always listened.

He said, after a pause, “Oh, yes. How are you?”

A businessman, Netta decided upstairs. Somebody of whom Beau was slightly afraid, which didn’t mean much, since he was somewhat afraid of everybody. She looked down bitterly at the bedroom floor as if she could see through it and watch her husband standing below. She would have liked to listen in on an upstairs phone but Beau, six months before, with a remarkable show of determination had had the second-floor extension removed. It was an “economy measure” he had said, but she had known his true motive: to prevent her from eavesdropping on his calls.

The voice that reached Beau was level, a little too level and, though not foreign, it used English in a fashion alien to Green Prairie—in a way which anyone familiar with American dialects would have identified as related to Chicago, to the South Side, to the period of 1920-1930. “Shallcot Rove ran fifth today, Mr. Bailey.”

“Yes, I know. Of course.”

“It puts the total up to five thousand, even.”

Beau gave a little laugh. “As much as that, eh? I wouldn’t worry. I expect the market will take a turn for the better—”

“No more ‘market,’ Mr. Bailey, until you pay up.”

“I’ll come down and have a conference in a day or two…” Beau could feel the sweat forming and he could hear Netta on the stairs.

“Yes,” the voice of Jake said flatly. “You come down to The Block tomorrow, to the horse room, Mr. Bailey. And I think you better bring the five thousand. If not all, then at least half. And half later—but soon. And no more bets. Frankly, I told the Bun not to take bets from you last week, till you paid. I was sore at the boys for doing it against orders. He is home sick now because I was so sore. I made him sick.”

Jake hung up.

So did Beau. He hung up fast and found, by listening to his wife’s tread, there was time to get back through the archway into the living room (sunken two steps since the remodeling) with the appearance of casualness. The wall then hid him long enough so that he was able to whip out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He contracted his abdomen in an effort to flush up a little blood, for he could see in the mirror wall around the fireplace that he was pale. He tipped the Scotch bottle over his highball glass, with his free hand—and when Netta came through the archway he was apparently imbibing the weak dregs of a drink, prior to pouring a fresh one.

Even she did not realize he had just gulped four fingers of straight liquor.

Netta was forty-eight and, though she had never had the coloring which made Lenore so peculiarly beautiful, she hall once possessed the same perfect features and the same unusual, slightly slanted shape of eye. Netta was a Hiver City girl, the daughter of a railroad brakeman who had seven other children. As a child, she had learned all I here is to know about the flea-bitten ways of life. Her world had been a mean street seen through second-hand lace curtains darned not to show. She had worked her way through normal school in near-by Lummus Center and taught second grade for two years. But she had never entertained an intention of making a career of teaching. Normal school had been her only feasible way of acquiring something resembling education. She had not even wanted real erudition—general or specific—merely its sufficient facsimile.

Netta was pretty as a young woman; she was also durable and indomitable. Her personality was identical with her ambition which had been formed, delineated and defined to the utmost detail by American advertising. It is true, as advertising exponents hold, that advertising is educational and brings to millions a numberless bounty of cultivated benefits. It is also true, although the advertising exponents dislike to be reminded of the fact, that while their art creates a demand, often where demand did not thitherto exist, this same demand, in the case of multitudes, is greater than the fiscal capacity for its satisfaction or the cultural control for its employment. A struggle for additional revenue to satisfy cravings both synthetic and inordinate ensues everywhere in the land. Among persons whose morals are weak, the struggle becomes, ipso facto, unscrupulous.

Had she been reared in a strict, Presbyterian family, Netta’s ethics would have been mighty indeed: she would have become a moral Midas. Unfortunately, her father, the brakeman, had been nominally a Methodist but actually merely an alcoholic. Her mother, though sporadically pious, by a kind of heritage from a backslid Baptist grandparent, was a woman of negligent libido with a chronic weakness for receiving and returning affection due, perhaps, to the small amount she ever received from or gave to her husband.

The result was that Netta’s brothers and sisters, all younger, were in some hidden doubt concerning their true and probably several sires. Such circumstances obtain widely among the impoverished; they obtain at least quite often amongst the well-born and the well-heeled, too, though here they are differently regarded. In such latter circles, drunkenness may be known as

“temperament” or “sensitivity” and loose sex manners in a mother may be designated as anything from “feminist pioneering” to what the country-club set does for fun. Poverty is deprived of such pretty tissues to put between human pretensions, and the almost universally rejected fact that people are, after all, animals.

So Netta passed through childhood and into her early teens with one determination: to have nice things someday. The method was always apparent: marriage. In the Sister Cities it was easy for Netta to meet young men with money: they came to the dance halls, the saloons, the places of even more flagrant disrepute. They even came cruising in River City, through the gaslit district, driving large cars and looking for precisely what Netta was at sixteen.

She learned much from them—though at seventeen she barely escaped marrying a drummer of forty who had what she thought of at the time as “money.” She learned gradually that her end could be achieved only if she had adequate formal schooling, which was why she trained as a teacher. Tuition was free. She had found out, by the time she got her degree, that the style of man she wanted—rich, of course, important, social, urbane and worldly—would also have to be (if he were to marry her) weak and vain and somewhat gullible.

She marked down Howard Bailey within ten minutes of their first meeting, at a picnic on the banks of the Green Prairie River in 1928. They were married—rather hastily and to the infinite puzzlement of Beau—and there Netta’s luck failed. In 1929 Beau’s father (who had owned an automobile agency in River City) shot himself to death, two weeks after the historic Black Friday, which wiped out other thousands of millionaires. Beau was left with nothing but his job in the Sloan Mercantile Trust Company. Curiously enough, Netta discovered that, though the self-evident thing to do was to get divorced and find a new spouse whose bonds and stocks had not been touched by the market collapse, she was by then attached to Beau in a way she could not fathom. His very weakness, his dependency, made her postpone repeatedly even talk of divorce.

Those were home-brew days, bathtub-gin days. Lenore was a result of the overpowering quality of such anodynes, in the waning epoch of prohibition and jazz.

Years passed. Beau, the handsomest senior in his high school (where the nickname had attached), started to shed, one by one, the attributes of male beauty. His dark hair silvered, lost its curl, began to vanish. His skin reddened and his face became puffy. He skirmished with reducing for years and gave up. His mustache and eyebrows turned gray and he was obliged at first to touch them up. Later, dye and a toupee restored a sort of ghostly caricature of the “handsome Dan” he had been. He had flat feet, which exaggerated the out-toeing, ducklike walk he developed as a fattening man with no more musculature than that of a youth whose only sport had been the Charleston. At the same time, he was still full of a kind of eager and boyish affection; a willing listener, he was also popular at parties for having the largest fund of dirty jokes of any man in the two juxtaposed states. In addition, Beau was extremely good at figures.

Had he not been lazy, he might have been a mathematical prodigy. Lenore’s scientific aptitude came that way.

Emmet Sloan, board chairman of the Sloan Mercantile Trust, a far-seer and expert conniver, the richest man in the Sister Cities, had been Beau’s boss. When Mr. Sloan died in 1935, “of Roosevelt,” they said, his widow, Minerva, became the head not only of the bank but of the sundry factories, newspapers, mines, railroads and other interests her late spouse had collected, created and purloined.

Minerva Sloan, a size forty-four daughter of one of River City’s oldest and best families, was even shrewder and tougher than her husband. She knew Beau Bailey’s weaknesses the first time she saw him. But he had always been amiable, sedulous and amusing: Minerva liked rough jokes. She saw to it that he rose steadily in the bank, for his mathematical skill was exploitable.

She saw to it that men were put where they could watch his more important acts. She realized that he was useful for his brain and also might (someday in a pinch, and owing to his feeble sense of ethos) be made even more useful as the patsy before an embarrassing investigating committee, or on the occasion of a shaky lawsuit.

It did not occur to her, however, that he was stupid enough, as cashier of her largest bank, to bet on horses. The idea had never crossed Netta’s mind, either. She had not questioned the occasional “bonuses” and “little bonanzas” he had fetched home recently. (For at first, Beau had been extremely lucky.) Netta was used to taking cash unquestioningly; it was only its dearth that aroused her to sharp attention….

As Lenore entered her teens, as the Baileys struggled up the complex social ladders of River City and Green Prairie, Netta saw that her luck had potentially taken a swing for the better, after many hard years which she regarded, not , without a sort of reason, as loyal and sacrificing.

Lenore was going to be beautiful. Soon she was beautiful. To Netta, who had herself parlayed prettiness into a marriage that provided some, if not all, of the products recommended by class advertising, beauty could be stage-managed so as to open the grand cornucopia.

Unfortunately, Lenore proved to be a person in her own right. She early developed an interest in the boy next door, the Conner kid, which Netta regarded as mawkish and entirely inappropriate. This youngster wanted, even as a mere boy, to become nothing more remunerative than an architect. In addition, Lenore had inherited her father’s mathematical ability and in high school became greatly interested in science, especially physics. Netta felt that perhaps the most difficult operation of her life had been the one by which she had managed to hinder her daughter from becoming a teacher, a professor, a laboratory worker or a technician. The struggle involved had become a kind of stalemate. Lenore had gone to college and come dutifully back home. She had not taken the job the du Ponts offered her and had in fact allowed her science to rust; but she had not married a rich man either—and she was twenty-four.

There was one rich man, especially, whose name adorned Netta’s mind year after year.

The fact that Lenore had once attracted and then rejected him was, quite possibly, the largest thorn in Netta’s thorny life. He was eminently eligible, extremely handsome, socially so impeccable that his in-laws would automatically be lifted to the top strata, and destined to be very rich; he was Minerva’s son, Kittridge Sloan.

If Beau’s family background was average, Netta’s had been far below the American norm; hence, in a real sense, she had improved herself far more than he. Furthermore, though both had skeletons in their private closets, though indeed Netta’s young womanhood (a closed book from the day she saw Beau) was the kind which reformers wrongly imagine leads invariably to a wretched end in some such place as Buenos Aires, the Baileys had attained a complete “respectability.” They found pleasure in that estate.

They were, according to their lights, good to their one child and they furnished her with what they truly believed to be a splendid home environment. They were worthy members of the River City Episcopal Church and rose early every Sunday morning, often in spite of painful hangovers, to drive across the Central Avenue Bridge to services. Netta taught a Sunday-school class and Beau, who had a fair tenor voice, led the hymns in Sunday school. Minerva Sloan was the Sunday-school superintendent. But even that fact, which explained why they traveled so far to attend church when there were many handier places of worship in Green Prairie, did not mean their faith was entirely opportunistic. They did believe in God, childishly, as the source of pleasures and gifts and undue punishments.

One afternoon a week Netta sewed with the colored women at the Mildred Tatum Infirmary. It was, to be sure, a Sloan charity. But Netta enjoyed that afternoon sincerely: she liked colored people and felt, in a sense, completely at home with them. Moreover, Beau not only led Sunday-school singing out he contributed generously to the River City Boys Club, which was not a Sloan charitable concern, and he gave a certain amount of time to that rather sad American enterprise of “leading” boys. Beau was also a member of the Elks, Kiwanis, and the Society of Green Prairie Giraffes. He served as the perennial treasurer of all three. He was also an active Republican and had been a leading and early Eisenhower protagonist, after finding—surreptitiously and owing to his acquaintance with the accounts—that Minerva had made a large contribution to the Eisenhower campaign fund. The measure of Beau’s stance in such matters was this: that if he had discovered Minerva was backing Stevenson, he too would have paid lip service to the Democratic Party, but without enthusiasm, and he would doubtless have voted for Ike secretly, denying it afterward.

The Baileys, in sum, were not intentionally evil people. Like many, they were engaged in striving toward that place in life where their hypocrisies, small dishonesties, speculations and shady deals would become “unnecessary.” To them, as to millions of other American families, not only “keeping up” but “getting ahead” have priority over conscience; honor is a luxury they conceive of as desirable, even ideal, but possible only to those lucky few who somehow have run all the gantlets, crossed all the goals, and bought all the nationally advertised essentials, including airplane trips abroad, summer homes, large annuities and permanent vaults.

Theirs were the vices of ambition, which has come to be identified with progress, thus obscuring its other name—greed.

They were superficially much like their neighbors, the Conners, and only underneath unlike in certain ways. Neither Henry nor Beth Conner was greatly afflicted by the desire for things. Henry was content to stay forever the head of the accounting department of the J. Morse Company, the second largest hardware store chain in the state; Beth was not particularly interested in clothes, in country-club living, in “society,” in concerts or plays or lectures (doings regularly patronized by the Baileys), or even in modernizing her house or relandscaping her yard.

“She seems,” Beau once said perplexedly, “to like kind of beat-up housewares and sprangly bushes outdoors and old duds.”

In money contributed and time devoted, the good works of the Conners far outweighed the somewhat opportunistic benevolences of the Baileys. Henry Conner belonged to even more organizations—charitable, fraternal or merely sportive. Henry, indeed, was known to thousands of his fellow citizens, and his warmth and down-to-earth wisdom endeared him to them all. His younger son’s joke about his election to the office of dogcatcher was warranted: if he had desired office, Henry could have been elected to any of dozens. For that very reason he had been appointed a sector warden. Beau Bailey, on the other hand, while known to hundreds of the most prosperous citizens of his region, was not known to thousands—save perhaps as a dimly recalled face at a teller’s window, in the days before he had a desk and his own office.

Yet it was Beau who regarded himself as “important” in the community, a figurehead and social pillar. Netta shared that belief. Both Beth and Henry Conner would have deemed silly the suggestion that their family was “important.”

Such, in outline, was the background of Netta Bailey, née Meddes; such therefore was the etiology of her emotion when she carne downstairs while her husband was on the telephone, occupied by nothing more than a marriage-long habit of anxious inquisitiveness and a very slight feeling, not that the phone call was of a serious nature but that her husband had been a little quieter, a little more obsequious than usual. She saw now that Beau was frantically afraid. His swift effort to dissemble went to no purpose: She said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”

“Beau. You can’t fool me.”

“I’m not trying to!”

Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.

“Okay,” she said steadily. “Who was it?”

“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a business call.”

“Your business, though. Not the bank’s.”

Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”

The question allowed her to pretend the reality of a mere assumption. “So it was personal. Beau! What have you been up to?”

“Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”

Netta sat down on the arm of the huge, flower-print-covered divan the decorator had chosen for them. “You can tell me now or you can argue awhile. Either way, Beau, I’ll find out from you.”

His voice suddenly filled the room, taut, shrill, surprising him even more than Netta. “None of your goddamned business!”

“It’s really bad trouble, isn’t it?”

“Who said it was trouble?” His face had puckered like the face of a baby trying to decide whether to produce a tantrum or a spell of pitiable tears.

“How much is it going to cost us?”

“Netta—stop jumping to such crazy conclusions!”

She could tell, to a decibel, a hairbreadth, when he was lying and when he was not. She went on implacably, “If you’ve just hocked something—or borrowed on the cars….”

“What have we got to hock that isn’t already hocked, including the cars?” He stared at her with momentary self-righteousness.

She said, “Then it is money?” Her arms were folded now on the back of the divan and her uncorseted body sagged between the two supports of rump and elbows.

“Quit hounding me.” He reached for the bottle.

“No more drink until you explain.”

He put the bottle down. Another man might have continued the defense for hours, even for days. Beau himself might have gone on fencing for a time, in spite of an inner awareness of inevitable capitulation, save for the fact that he was now far more afraid of another person than of Netta. It was the first time in his life such a thing had happened to him. He took a chair. He lighted a cigarette. He looked at his intent wife and said, “Okay. You brought it on yourself. This time we really are in a jam.”

“I brought it on myself! We are in a jam! Speak for yourself, bright boy!”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “just how bad a jam it is. If I hadn’t borrowed up to the full value on my insurance…!” He pointed his forefinger at his temple, cocked his thumb in a pantomime of shooting himself.

“How much money?” she asked again, unimpressed by his drama.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Netta moaned softly, sagged, slid from the arm of the divan onto the cushions. “Five—

thousand—dollars.” She murmured the words, wept them. “Even one thousand the way we’re fixed…!” Then she screamed, “How in God’s earth do you owe that?”

Tears filled Beau’s eyes. “All my life,” he recited, “I’ve done just one thing and one thing only, scrimped and sweat and slaved and hit the old ball, so you and Lenore could have a fine life. I have no pleasures of my own, no vices, no indulgences—”

She was looking at him, white-faced, oblivious to his stale stock of good providing.

“Those—‘bonuses,’ you called them! The ‘little windfalls,’ you said! The fur coat you got Lenore! The new deep-freeze you made a little killing just in time to pay for! All that?”

“A man,” he responded in a ghastly tone, “can get so devoted to his family he’ll stop at nothing for their sake—”

Netta said a word she had learned in her childhood environs, monosyllabic and succulent-sounding. It was one of the first words she had ever known. She sat up. “You’ve been gambling!”

“How do you know?”

“Horses!”

“And I did all right.” Her guess seemed to release him. “And if I had some real dough to lay on the line, I could get back what I’m down—!”

“Where? What bookie. Jake! That was Jake on the phone!”

Now, for the first time, Netta was more frightened than angry. “Beau, do you really owe Jake Tanetti five thousand dollars?”

“I didn’t think it was that much. I thought—around three. But he says five.”

“Then it’s five.” Netta sat silent for a moment, her chest heaving. Once or twice she looked speculatively at Beau. Finally she smiled at him wanly. “Come over here. Sit beside me.”

“Net, I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”

She beckoned. Heavily, he rose and cautiously approached. He seated himself as gingerly as if the divan had been an electric chair. But Netta didn’t swat him or even yell at him. She just took his hand and held it in her own and stared at it and finally said, softly, “Beau, my boy, you’ve done some dumb things in your day, but—this is really Grade-A trouble. I’m not sore. I’m sorry.”

She meant it. Meant the compassion she displayed, the calm. Intellectually Netta knew that the only way to manage Beau now would be with gentleness. Anything harsh might easily snap the thin threads of his remaining pride and cause him to do something still more rash. Not suicide. But—he might confess to Minerva Sloan and throw himself (and her and Lenore, as incidentals) on the mercy of the old woman. There was no such thing as mercy in Minerva, Netta knew; she’d had a good deal of experience in the absence of mercy. So there was reason for her to hold her tongue and to treat Beau with restraint.

But something much deeper also moved Netta, something she did not understand. It was pity. She realized that she had never pitied Beau before; she had always, in fact, felt slightly inferior to him because of her background. Now, however, she suddenly felt equal. His descent to this level, his victimization by the bookmaker, even his gambling per se, as his way of trying to clamber from his eternally sticky finances, touched Netta in a familiar spot. Her mother, father, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles had lived in this place, owing what they could not pay, guilty of merely taking a chance and losing, and faced in sudden consequence with the malignity of forces vastly mightier than themselves: rackets, unions, the law, the church, street gangs, hoods, noble powers that became suddenly evil and evil powers that were ceaselessly opposed to everybody, to life itself and letting live.

Netta came closer to loving Beau then than ever before.

“You’re the cashier of a big bank,” she said carefully, “so you can’t gamble. That means this business must not come out.”

“If I don’t pay Jake—”

“Sure. If you don’t—it will. That’s Jake.” She said it as if “Jake” were a force of nature, not a person. “So he has to get paid.”

“How?”

“That’s what we’ve got to figure. He’ll probably take something down….”

Beau brightened a little. “He said he would. Half now. Half later.”

“So, okay. All you need right off is two grand and a half.”

He shrugged. “Might as well be two million.”

“I’ve heard you say, Beau, you could lay your hands on fortunes, and nobody would be wiser for years.”

He pulled away from her. “The bank?”

“You said…?” she gestured casually.

“My God, Net! I said so, sure. Portfolios full of negotiable stuff that I check, sometimes.

You could slip out millions and borrow on it—cash it in—and nobody would know till somebody looked. Maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe longer. But that’s out!”