On a sunny afternoon, just before June became July, during a Midwestern heat wave, a young man pushed a hand mower back and forth over a Walnut Street lawn in the city of Green Prairie.
He looked to be twenty-two or -three years old though, actually, Ted Conner was not yet nineteen. He had grown big, like his Oakley grandsire, the blacksmith, bigger than his father, a good deal bigger than his older brother. In addition, there was something about his face (besides the scar on the forehead) which suggested more years than the teens. He limped, too. It was noticeable when he walked over to a shady spot behind the ferns and picked up a glass jug of water. His right leg was slightly shorter than his left.
He took a bandanna handkerchief from the belt that held up his shorts; he wiped his mouth, then his brow. After that he returned to work. But before he started the mower’s clattering monody he looked at the house for a moment.
Two and a half years had passed, since the Bomb.
But only the attic windows were boarded up. Glass was still rationed-along with a hundred other things—but householders had enough, now, to take care of two floors per family.
It was the necessary new construction, as much as replacement, which had caused the shortage to last so long.
The Conner house needed paint. Every house did, these days. But paint was short, also, though not rationed. They hadn’t bothered yet to try to get the house back exactly on its foundations. Men had come, that first winter, with powerful jacks and pushed the frame building as near to its proper position as they could. Joe Dennison had helped with his bulldozer. And Ed Pratt had followed with bricks and cement, bringing out “temporary” foundations to support overhanging sills and to close in the basement. A power pole, sawed on a diagonal at the top, leaned across the drive from a concrete base on the ground to the eaves, a brace against winter wind.
Have to paint that pole, Ted thought; wouldn’t want it to rot. He moved again, drowning out the cicadas in the trees with a not dissimilar sound.
His father had boarded up all the windows that first winter, when there was no window glass and when he had been in the hospital. At the Country Club, that was—with many other people. He was among the lucky. Plenty of them hadn’t left that place alive. They’d died of about everything you could think of, injuries and burns, shock and even of radiation, like that Catholic priest and the Baptist minister. So many people…!
For a moment, the fear of those days returned to him. No one had been sure of anything.
Everything was short—food, blankets, bandages, medicine. Nobody knew whether the war was over or not; they knew only that the Soviet planes didn’t come back. Mobs were ravaging the countryside; for weeks it seemed the armed forces couldn’t stop them, couldn’t restore order, couldn’t prevent the looting and the murdering and everything else. Everybody was scared, scared the bombers might return, scared the mobs might come back to the cities or to what was left of cities.
That time passed.
Peace came. Then, for more weeks, the burying. It was still going on when he could sit up in bed and look out the window. They made a new cemetery of the Green Prairie Country Club golf course, the last nine holes. Digging and blasting all through February and March, burying people, or whatever they found that had been a person. Later that spring, in common with other bombed cities, they designed their Cenotaph and it stood now above the graves-a monument to the ninety-some thousand known dead of Green Prairie. There was one in River City, also-for a hundred and twenty thousand. At what had been the ball park.
Ted mowed down the edge of the sidewalk.
It must have been—when?—around June, around this time, two years back, that they’d stopped all the mobs. What a job! Still a job! Some of the towns and villages that city dwellers had overrun were almost as bad off, afterward, as the bombed areas. Nobody knew, exactly, how many people had been killed by the crazed fugitives or how many people had been killed in self-defense and killed by the soldiers and the police. The total was thought to be more than a million.
More than two million people had been hurt that way, besides, and as many more driven mad.
But things were getting better everywhere, and fast, now.
When he finished the edge of the walk, he went around the house, limping a little, for a bushel basket. His mother had set one out on the back porch. Before he picked it up, however, he stood on the porch, looking north.
Nora had been right: you could just see the top of the new Farm Industries Building that was being erected near the devastated area—Green Prairie’s fourth huge postwar structure. It wasn’t going to be a skyscraper, just an immense, horizontal building, with parking zones around it. Not that there were too many cars to park, as yet, Ted thought; or that there was much gasoline to run them.
The bushel basket, when he picked it up, seemed odd. It wasn’t made the regular way and it didn’t appear to be the right size. He saw faded stencil marks and read: Produit de France. The good old Frogs! he thought. In the “Aftertime,” they’d kicked through—the French and, of course, the English, the Italians and Belgians and Dutch and the Latin-Americans and about everybody else except the Russians—who almost didn’t exist—and the satellite countries.
With America bathed in blood, martyred, crucified, a flood of aid began. In that first dreadful winter, unreckoned millions of Ted’s fellow citizens were saved by European bounty.
He even recalled foreign labels on some of the medicine bottles at his bedside, when he’d been smashed up.
Now, the basket was another example. Everybody in U.S.A. owed something tangible to lots of people abroad. He chuckled a little, thinking what hell that had raised with the old “isolationists.”
Then he went around in front of the dilapidated house, raked up a green mound of fresh-cut grass and carried it, in the French hamper, to the chicken yard. The Conners now had more than sixty chickens and five pigs. Henry was even angling for a cow; some of the Crystal Lake people had offered grazing room on their estates.
His mother came down the street, walking slowly because of the heat and because of her mood. But when she saw the mowed grass, saw her tall, broad-shouldered son mopping his sweaty light-brown hair, she moved faster and she smiled.
Ted knew where she had been. He didn’t ask any questions—just said, “Hello! Been expecting you. Haven’t we got company coming for supper?”
“A lot of people! The lawn looks lovely, Ted!”
“It would—if we had a matching house.”
She laughed. Her eyes moved to the even more tatterdemalion house in which the Baileys had lived. “I think our place looks fine! Call it quaint.” Her tone changed. “I believe Ruth is getting better, Ted! The doctors over at the Home think so, too!”
“No fooling!”
She nodded. “I’ll bring you some iced coffee.”
“Dandy!”
He was in the back yard when she brought coffee. He went indoors and washed before sitting down with her on the kitchen steps.
“You know,” she said slowly to her son, “Ruth’s never been able to say—what did happen.”
“I know.”
“She’s told! The doctors a few days ago. And me just now!”
The young man gazed over the sun-yellowed green of the lawn to the cool blue-green of its shady places. “Bad, hunh?”
“Too awful to think about…!”
He drank the cold coffee, tinkled ice, refilled the glass from a pitcher. His mother’s weekly visits to her sister, in the asylum they referred to as the “Home,” invariably depressed her. Today, however, she seemed in a different frame of mind: hopeful, but frightened. Ted knew-most people in these days knew-a great deal about such attitudes. “Better tell me,” he said.
“Right now. And get it over with.”
His mother glanced at him lovingly and nodded to herself. “I—I guess it isn’t really any different from—thousands of stories like it. Only, when it’s your own sister…! Your own nieces and nephews…!”
“Sure,” he said.
She Sighed and her eyes looked far away. “They got the warning on the radio,” she finally began, “the red signal. They started for the cellar, but it had a foot of water in it. Jim, the fool, decided not to take cover. The windows blew in on them, including new storm windows, she said. It—killed the baby, Irma—but…” She halted.
Ted murmured, “But what?”
“You see—Ruth was holding the baby and the baby’s body saved her face. It ripped up Jim’s face and chest. They—just decamped—ran away—like so many people. Ruth in the lead—
the others following-holding a rope. Some teenage boys, in a car, saw them—saw young Marie, that is. The boys stopped and talked. They soon got out and took Marie, and nobody’s heard any more about her. She was only a little older than Nora.”
Beth hesitated. Tears welled in her eyes.
“And then?”
She averted her face, but reached for his hand. Her voice continued evenly. “Ruth got them to the ball park. People were pouring into it. Ruth thought it was probably some kind of shelter or aid station. I suppose everybody on the outside got that idea. Inside, it was dreadful—packed. Jim had to lie down—he’d bled so badly, all that way. And—she’d— dropped the baby somewhere. It was dead. Anyhow, brands kept falling from the sky and finally the bleachers caught fire so badly no one could put them out. That was when people stampeded. Besides, there was a rumor going around that Russian planes would drop germ bombs on every large crowd.
They did, too—where they found crowds! That whole mass of hurt grownups and kids started for the exits at once. Ruth rolled Jim under some steel seats—he was nearly unconscious—and she tried to save the youngsters.”
“ Save them?”
“Yes. From the mob. It was like a river of people, she said, like trying to protect them from a rising flood. And the kids were hysterical, sure they’d be burned to death, trying to get out. Don broke away with Tom, finally, and got separated from Ruth. Trampled. And a man actually yanked Sarah away from Ruth—because they were in his path—and hurled her to the ground. That was what happened.” She wept soundlessly.
“You mean—they all…?”
“Most of the children in that ball park were trampled to death. It’s—inhuman, isn’t it?
But that’s what people do. Ruth lost the youngsters then and there. But, somehow, the crowd carried her out of the park without killing her. She was nearly suffocated by the pressure. Her feet didn’t touch the ground for minutes at a time. She had ribs broken. But she was pushed and driven through a gate. When she could, she went back. She found Jim again and he was unconscious. So she stayed there. She thinks she was there—with thousands of others—for two days. Some of our people finally got to her and brought her out—and she doesn’t remember much, after that, for a long time. You see, Jim had gone into a fever the day after, and died of it, or loss of blood, of untreated infection—shock—all that. Her family was wiped out before her eyes—and she lived—and it’s no wonder she—lost her reason!”
Ted turned his mother around and forced her head onto his shoulder. She wept quietly there and he held her. Because she was weeping, he felt relieved. If she hadn’t cried, he would have worried. It was almost always the ones who didn’t weep, didn’t show emotion, didn’t speak, who were liable to crack up later. Pretty much everybody knew that.
He knew, also, that she would soon do just about what she did.
She pulled herself away, blew her nose on a clean handkerchief with holes in it, and said,
“Imagine a tough old character like me! But I just couldn’t break up, in front of Ruth.
I had to take it evenly. Ted! I really hope, now, she’ll recover!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he answered. “Not a bit. She could come home here.”
“Do you think Henry would mind, if I tried having her here when the doctors say it’s possible?”
Ted looked into his glass, empty again. “Sometimes, I think the old man doesn’t mind anything this side of hell. He’s got more guts than grizzly bears.”
Mrs. Conner sniffled in a manner reminiscent of the younger Nora. “I know. And I’m glad I cried this out in front of you, Ted. Because now, I can tell him straight, without a whimper—if you promise not to tell on me, for being feeble-headed?”
He winked at her. She bustled to her feet. “Here it is nearly four o’clock and I’ve got twenty-odd guests to feed!”
“Ye gods! I thought it was just us and the Laceys.”
“I asked both families that have moved in the Bailey place.” She glanced across.
“They’re new, and they don’t know a soul in this part of town. I thought we’d get them acquainted. Their names are Brown and Frazetti.”
“I know. Already met the Frazetti kids. Twins.” She nodded. “What about the Brown girl? Have you seen her?”
“Didn’t know there was one.”
“She’s sixteen,” his mother smiled. “Blue eyes and the prettiest red hair I ever saw. If you aren’t in love with her by nine o’clock tonight, I’ll lose a bet.”
“Phooie,” he said.
“Wait till you see her! Name’s Rachel.” Ted looked, also, at the neighboring house. For a year and a half after X-day, it had been occupied by people billeted by town authorities. Then it had been roughly remodeled inside as a double house and occupied by two families. After one winter, they had moved again. The present occupants had arrived recently.
“I wonder what happened to Beau,” he said.
She stopped in the screen door, holding the coffee pitcher and the glasses. “I doubt if we ever find out now!” She thought of her visit with her sister. “Though you can’t tell, can you?”
“Nope.”
It was the way it was in those days.
Lenore’s mother had been sent to Florida and she was still there, undergoing plastic surgery. But Lenore’s father had vanished.
Weeks had passed, months, and now two years and a half—with no word. The bureau set up by the Federal Government to trace people hadn’t located him. Or any sign of him. Netta knew only that he’d been in the cellar when the Bomb burst. After that, he walked into the silences. He was one of the anonymous dead. Or one of the unidentified mad. Or one of the unfound bodies. Or someone who had a new name and a new life somewhere else—because he’d come to unable to remember, ever again, who he was, where he lived, what his name had been—or because he had wanted to forget.
Nora came home on her bike.
Since he had been thinking about the already-remote “Aftertime,” Ted saw Nora in a new light. She was fourteen now and trying to behave like eighteen. Occasionally, for minutes at a time, the effort was fairly convincing. She’d changed in two years and half. She was hardly a kid now. There was something very precise and well-cut about her profile which (wonder of wonders, he thought) had an almost sweet look. Her nose didn’t turn up so much. Her hair, light like his, was not lank like his any more; it was wavy, like their mother’s. And her clear blue eyes were getting slanty—exactly, he thought, as Nora would prefer it: slanty-eyed women got the dangerous men, she claimed.
At this instant, however, she behaved on the kid side. “Mom!” she yelled through the kitchen screen, “Mr. Nesbit didn’t have enough hamburger to make fifty patties. I got sixty hot dogs instead.”
“That’ll be fine, dear. And don’t bellow.”
She yodeled briefly, put away her bike, came around the house and approached her brother who was clipping edges. She then assumed her pseudo maturity. “Good afternoon, beast.”
“Greetings, afreet. How’s things?”
“Ted. Will you give me an answer to a serious inquiry?”
“Sure. Any old answer. What’s your problem?”
“I’m not kidding. Do you think it’s inevitably, in any case, a mistake for a fourteen-year-old girl to be engaged?” He concealed his grin by great attention to the grass. “Is she deeply in love?”
“Very,” said Nora in a deeply-in-love tone.
“Well”—he rose on his knees, thought somberly—His the boy able to support her?”
“He will be someday. He’s extremely intellectual. He intends to become an anthropologist.”
“Be all right,” he said, nodding in self-agreement. “That is, if the girl’s going to have a child.”
“Oh! You meanie! You evil thing!”
“If they’re going to have a child,” he asserted in an offended tone, “I really think they owe it to the little stranger to marry.”
“There are times,” Nora said, “when you ought to be afraid the earth would open and swallow you up! I’m talking about the sacred kind of love, not the profane kind!”
“They’re so interchangeable,” Ted mummured. “You start out on the profane tack—and lo!—you’re full of nice sentiments, just when you could do without them. And vice versa.”
“ You!” she said. ‘What do you know about it?” Idly, she raked up grass with her fingers and threw it on him. “A girl in my class,” she said, “is leaving school this summer to take a job. I don’t think it’s sensible for a girl to abandon her education—”
“Maybe she’s a moron.”
“She’s merely an orphan,” Nora replied. “I wish school didn’t last all summer, now. I bet I have to go clear through high school, this way. Just because so many schools got wrecked. I wish I could go to Europe on a student tour. Do you think Dad would ever let me?”
“Dad might, in a few more years. But would your fiancé?”
“Scum!” she said. “What’s Queenie doing?”
“I dunno. I haven’t asked him. Every pretty female in the block, doubtless.”
“I mean—over by the Baileys’—by the old summerhouse?”
Ted peered through the hedge and across the sunlit lawns. “Search me!” The cat was staring in the gazebo, through the lattice, standing on his hind legs. “A peeping Tom cat, I guess.”
“What a lowlife,” she murmured fastidiously—and she went away, to see what Queenie was doing. She came back in less than a minute, running. “Ted! Ted! Oh, Mom! Ted, you were right! The Crandons’ angora is having kittens in there! His kittens, Queenie’s, I bet!”
“ Sans doute,” he replied and rose, limping more than usual, as he followed her. Even Mrs. Conner came out and looked. There were three kittens on a forgotten pillow—three, thus far. The Crandons’ angora looked proud; Queenie looked appropriately suspicious, pleased, defiant and generally paternal.
“How dreamy!” Nora kept saying. “How perfectly dreamy!”
“Profane love,” her brother suggested, with a wise nod of the head.
“It is not! Cats don’t….”
“What on earth,” Mrs. Conner asked, “are you two fighting about?”
“Nora’s life interest of the moment,” Ted said, beating her to the reply, leaving his sister open-mouthed. “Something people for years have been calling sex.”
Beth chuckled. “You better get dressed. Your father will be along soon. And you still have to bathe, Ted.”
Henry Conner signed his mail, said good night to his secretary and went down two Rights of stairs to the ground floor of the West Side store of J. Morse and Company. The main building and the warehouses had, of course, vanished with the Bomb. They were using the West Side branch for business offices now and would go on doing so until the new Morse Building was finished. At present, it was a set of blueprints, the work of Charles Conner. Under the Emergency Building Code, they wouldn’t even lay the cornerstone for nearly another year.
He walked along the sales aisles, en joying, as always, the sights and smells of a hardware store-glitter of chrome, glass and steel-geometrical array of hand tools, garden tools, ornaments, plumbing fixtures, the splashes of color in the kitchenware section, the aroma of tar and rope and metal and machine oil.
The Oldsmobile was parked behind the store, near the loading area. It gave him an almost sentimental feeling: it would he good for quite a few more years. The old buggy had taken quite a beating, though. He looked in the trunk, to check, and drove away in the hot sunshine, aware that its hotness was diminishing, that there was a breeze. He was scheduled to pick up Charles first, then Pad Towson and Berry Black, then Lenore. Next week the car pool would be Towson’s lot.
Charles wasn’t waiting at their meeting place.
Henry was glad. He parked the Olds and got out. He looked for a while at the building where his elder son worked. The Green Prairie Professional Building had been the first one erected according to the new plan and the first one to invade the “total destruction” area. It wasn’t high, not a skyscraper, only four stories. But it was as tremendous as the Pentagon—that—was, in Washington-that-used-to-be. It was something like a ranch house, but blocks long, with many “L’s” and “courtyards” between them, with gardens, patios, glassed-in restaurants, even a skating rink in the courtyards.
Someday Green Prairie and River City would have a hundred such buildings all around the circle of ruins, and inside it, and here and there out to the suburbs besides.
“Semidecentralized,” they called it, and “horizontal expansion.” It replaced the vertical growth of the skyscraper age which had let fumed air, heat and darkness and slums accumulate in its canyons.
These buildings took more room, but as architects like Charles had argued—why not?
There was plenty of room for them in the prairies. They left plenty of room, too, room for broad streets with underpasses at intersections, room for vast parking areas, room for gardens, for parks, for picnic grounds right in the center of the city, room for swimming pools and dance floors and everything else that added to life’s enjoyment.
It had not been so difficult as many had expected to “sell” the once-crowded city dwellers on the new pattern for living. Most people had detested many aspects of urban living. And even those who clung to old ideas habitually were shaken in their conservatism. For nobody who had lived in a bombed city wanted to spend another hour, if he or she could help it, in such a deathtrap. To be sure, there was no menace, any longer, of bombs. But the memory that haunted millions slowly pervaded the whole population. Hence the new, “wide-open” cities satisfied unconscious fears, even in people who otherwise would have clung to the traditional-style city: to the narrow streets, the picket-fence skyline, the congestion, suffocation, gloom and noise.
Indeed, by this time, unhit cities were considered “obsolete.” Those that had been bombed provided people with a surge of exhilaration, for the bombing had proved an ultimate blessing by furnishing a brand-new chance to build a world brand-new—and infinitely better.
So Henry gazed at the structure where his son worked. Then he faced around, walked to a fence, and drank in the scene opposite.
The rough circularity of the destroyed area could be perceived from where he stood, though a man in the middle of that desolation could see the circle more plainly. Such a man could pivot three hundred and sixty degrees: everywhere the earth would sweep away, bare and comparatively Hat, to standing buildings (or ruins) approximately equidistant from his position.
Now, looking across from one edge, Henry drew a big breath and expelled it with force.
He never could get it through his head that something his living room could easily contain had removed the familiar cityscape, left it as nude as this. And all in a night, consuming in hours what had taken men generations to put there.
Now, in summer, weeds were growing out there. The red-brown nothing was relieved by sprawls of green. And the arid circle was bisected by the river. Its blue water could be seen, darker where the afternoon breeze ruffed it. On Swan Island, there was a tangled mound, a pimple on the earthen face, where the tracks of the roller coaster had been vaporized, leaving, nevertheless, sundry heaps and embankments that had supported other rides and contained the chute-the-chutes pond. That earth had not been boiled away, or wholly Battened.
Near the perimeters, in the river, he could see the rusting, rectilinear tops of collapsed bridges. These hadn’t been pulled clear yet, hadn’t been sent back to the smelters. And everywhere, making a din, sending up dust, machines worked. Like men on Mars, they lumbered in this desert, disinterring and reburying, with mammoth indifference to all meaning. If one watched a particular dozer or earth-mover, one would see the substance of archaeology, the potsherds of recent twentieth-century Americans. A refrigerator would be turned up, or a bathtub, or a kitchen stove or, perhaps, stone foundations, a brick wall. These would be pushed into shallows, crushed Hat, covered again—to make a firm base for the coming metropolis.
It had been going on for a long time.
The fumbling engines had labored there in winter, scarring the snowfalls, making dark tracks and darker scars in the white circle. They had sloshed there during the past spring when heavy rains had turned the area into a land of small lakes and of uncharted streams that backed up, overflowed and ran on until they finally found the route to the river and added their colored muds. Someday the engines would finish. Paving machines would follow, planting machine—the masons, carpenters, roofers, electricians, plumber—all of them.
Someday, where he looked at dusty nothing, a new city would rise.
By and by, no one would remain even to miss the old one.
When all the mourners had died, Henry thought.
Then the Bomb would be no catastrophe at all, but pure benefit. “End of an era,” they would say. “Good thing, too,” they’d add. “Can’t imagine how they stood those old cities,” they’d assert. “Barbaric.” “Positively medieval.”
It seemed incredible to Henry, for a moment. But he was a shrewd if humble student of his fellow man, so he knew it to be true. Nobody rued a billion buried Egyptians or sorrowed for gone Romans. A few marveled or rejoiced at what they, in their crushed past, had contributed to the present; but not one grieved over the cruelty of time’s heel. Even Pompeii was viewed as an excitement. Henry could not recall one touring neighbor who had brought home from its ashes a sense of melancholy. So it would be here. So it should be.
He felt Chuck’s hand on his shoulder. “A penny,” Chuck said. He didn’t wait for the thought he’d bargained for. “Great day, Dad! Old Minerva Sloan finally accepted our drawings-mine, that is—for the new bank building! May mean a partnership! But, brother! Is that crippled old dame a sourball!”
Henry said, “Peachy!” He held his hand out, gravely.
They walked together to the car.
Henry carried his thought along one more step. Everywhere catastrophe had struck, something other than rank weeds grew in the ash, the crumpled walls: opportunity. Opportunity for young men like his son who were able to dream and able to put the dreams on paper so other men could turn them into substance.
They picked up Pad Towson and Berry Black and, finally, Lenore. The men were just two businessmen coming home from work, tired, looking forward to whatever home meant: a hot soak in a tub, slippers, a highball, a meal.
But Lenore was different. Excited. Privately excited, for she slipped into the front seat between Charles and his father-in-law and silently took her husband’s hand, keeping her eyes on him.
They delivered their passengers before she began to tell; talking to Charles but permitting Henry to hear. “I’ve got news. ”
“I can see that!” Charles smiled and kept back his own “news.”
“Good news. I think it is.”
Henry sensed the tenseness in his son’s voice. “Are you going to tell it?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Henry heard his own faint breath-catch. He slowed down, jostled, as Chuck wrapped his arms around her. “I thought…” Chuck broke off.
After they had kissed, she said, “So did I! So did Dr. Mandy, at first! I got so much radiation! Now we know different! I’m not sterile.”
Charles whispered, “That’s just too wonderful to believe.”
She said, matter-of-factly, being Lenore, “It’s actually only seventy-five per cent wonderful.”
“Which is enough miracle for these days!” Henry butted in, perplexedly. “I don’t get…?” He checked himself. “Oh,” he said.
Lenore turned to him then, and took his arm too, hugged him also. “About a quarter of the babies, Dr. Mandy said, are born dead—or not in their right minds—if their mothers were rayed.”
Chuck murmured, with the extra poignancy of the still-new husband, “That’s a terrible thing to face, I know! But Lenore, dear …!”
She said, “Not too terrible. Just means I might have to have four, for every three we keep.
So what? Can’t you imagine how I feel, to know I can have them? And does this country need babies now!”
Henry let go of the wheel with his right hand. He reached out, touched her dark hair, moved his hand under it, found her neck, squeezed it lightly and went back to driving. He didn’t say anything more than the touch said. But she looked toward him fondly as she snuggled against Charles. It would be, she felt, the finest thing on earth to have a father like Charles. But, certainly, it would be almost as fine to have such a grandfather as Henry Conner would make a boy—or a girl.
At the house, they could see smoke from the fire in the barbecue pit, and the assembled next-door neighbors, along with the Laceys and their children. Two strangers besides.
Henry went around and opened the car trunk. Al had put the keg in at five. It was wet with its own coldness. A whole keg of beer, and a bung-starter with it—beside the tire tools.
“Gimme a hand,” he called.
But Chuck was already streaking through the hedge. ‘What do you think?” he called.
“Lenore’s going to have a baby! I’m going to be the father of a child!”
Mrs. Conner’s eyes blurred with happiness.
Nora Conner’s did not. “That’s nothing!” she said.
“Queenie’s just been the father-of five.”
Henry came up. “Somebody help me with the beer….”
Beth reached out, caught his sleeve and whispered, “A couple of professors here, Henry.
They’re making a survey of the region to find out why things went so badly in River City and so well, comparatively, over here. I hope you don’t mind. I asked them to stay for supper.”
Henry looked across the lawn and again spotted the men. “Hell,” he said. “Time we quit talking about it! Only difference was, some of us tried to swap freedom for security; the rest of us went on fighting for freedom, as usual.”
“Tell them that,” Beth said. “They’ll never find a better answer, no matter how smart they are, or how long they ask.”
Henry’s eyes moved, stopped again. “Who’s that redhead Ted’s mawking at?”
“Lives next door,” Beth replied. “She’s mighty sweet.”
Henry stared at the girl a moment longer. Then his twinkling affectionate gaze traveled on to the Bailey house. “Kind of where we came in, isn’t it, Mother?”
“People don’t change very much or very fast,” she smiled. Henry nodded and walked over to meet the professors and his new neighbors. The sun went down and left the lawn in gilded light. Queenie yawned—and touched his mouth delicately.