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.