Early Warning

1962

STEVE SLOAN DECIDED that he was going to learn to play the guitar, and Stanley Sloan went along with this — he chose bass. Tim didn’t know anything about music except that he liked everything but Ricky Nelson. The Sloan boys had been up to Philly and gone to American Bandstand. Tim liked the Marvelettes, and who did not like “The Duke of Earl”? But he had never thought about actually making music.

Steve Sloan never saw anything that he didn’t think he could do, and anyway, his uncle on his mother’s side was a piano player in various musical establishments up and down the Jersey Shore. He bopped around the halls at school muttering “Stand by Me” under his breath, just, Tim knew, to be showing off. But the girls smiled fondly as he walked by. Tim had been trying to cultivate a more reserved demeanor, interesting but distant. It wasn’t working. So he chose rhythm guitar.

When he asked his mom for a guitar, she looked at him and said, “Oh, that would be fun. Your uncle Frank had a lovely voice as a boy, and, of course, Granny Elizabeth quite enjoyed playing the piano.” She walked away, humming. This was not quite the response he was looking for. At least, Mrs. Sloan would throw up her hands and say, “Not again! I wish you boys would quit bothering me!”

They played in the Sloan brothers’ room. Steve said that they would learn three chords — that was all you needed at first — then they would work on rhythm, and in the meantime, they would find a drummer of some sort, but he had to be steady. It didn’t matter if he was their friend; in fact, it was better if he wasn’t. He would be their employee.

In the years he had known Steve and Stanley, they had gotten in a fair amount of trouble. Steve had started Tim smoking, Steve was the one who had the beers, and the one who didn’t mind driving without a license if it had to be done; that time they hitchhiked to Norfolk had been his idea (Mom and Dad had never even heard about that one). His way had always been, I’m doing this, and you can come along if you want. But now he stood over Tim and Stanley, showing them the chords, how to place the fingers of the left hand and how to strum with the right, and he counted and stopped them and started them and counted again. He wasn’t terribly patient, especially with Stanley, but at the end of two and a half weeks, they could play “Tom Dooley,” which only had two chords, D and G, and “This Train,” which carried no gamblers, no crap shooters or midnight ramblers. Steve and Stanley’s mom taught them “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which she said was about slaves heading north to freedom before the Civil War — the Drinking Gourd was the Big Dipper, which pointed to the North Star. Steve sang the lyrics, and Stanley sang the harmony. Tim sang “hey hey hey,” or “woo woo,” and sometimes came in on the refrain. About three-quarters of the time, they finished together.

Steve now began looking for a “gig,” which was a chance to play together in public, and Tim sincerely hoped that he would fail in this attempt. Over the next two weeks, they added “Frankie and Johnnie” and “Good Night, Irene” to their “repertoire.” But three girls came up to him on three consecutive days and said, “Hey, Tim. I hear you guys have a band,” and all he had to do was kind of cock his head and shrug and say, “Just getting started, really.” Then he would lean back against the wall and rest his right foot behind his left foot and act as if he had all the time in the world, and the girls would giggle and smile and hug their books to their chests and look up at him, and this made him realize that he was getting pretty tall.

—

“WELL, THEY AREN’T my nightmares,” said Andy, “but I think they’re interesting and important, and since she’s screaming almost every night, maybe we should talk about them.”

“Maybe we should,” said Dr. Grossman.

Andy sat up. She and Dr. Grossman exchanged a glance that indicated to Andy that their usual relationship was taking a little break, and they gave each other that feminine once-over — hair, necklace, stockings, shoes. Then Andy said, “Last night, it was pretty obvious. I mean, no hidden meanings here. It was a boom and a mushroom cloud.”

“Janny is how old now?”

“Eleven. She’ll be twelve in the fall.”

“How do you think she knows about these things?”

“How would she not?” said Andy. “My neighbor two doors down is building a bomb shelter behind his house, down below the kitchen. The workmen have been there for two weeks, putting in the angled air pipes. Their little girl — her name is Melissa — told Janny last week that if she happened to be spending the night when the bomb came she could go into the shelter, but if she was at our house they wouldn’t let her in. Or us, either. Now Janny wants to build a bomb shelter.”

“What do you think about that?” said Dr. Grossman.

“About building a bomb shelter?”

“No, about what the child said to her.”

“It sounds fair,” said Andy. Then she sighed. “If we have the news on, she puts her fingers in her ears, and she really presses them hard so she can’t hear. Sometimes she goes into the kitchen and I can hear her humming all through the news to drown it out.”

“Have you and your husband tried to explain to her—”

“What is there to explain?” said Andy. “Frank would never build a bomb shelter.”

Dr. Grossman fell silent.

Andy imagined Dr. Grossman sitting, quietly reading intellectual books in German — not only Freud, but The Sorrows of Young Werther. Dr. Grossman and Mr. Grossman would be sitting in matching armchairs, and somehow their reading or their experience had taught them to accept what must be accepted, rather than to fear it. Normally, Dr. Grossman’s office, neat and tastefully decorated, was calming. But today the very light said, “No hope.” Andy didn’t terribly mind if the failure of hope was hers — she was used to that — but she did mind if the failure of hope was Dr. Grossman’s. She felt herself become a little angry.

She flashed out, “Nordmennene vise seg å være rett allikevel, ikke sant?”

“Excuse me?” said Dr. Grossman.

“Admit it!”

“Admit what?”

“There is no salvation.”

“I never said that there was,” said Dr. Grossman.

There was another long silence, and then Andy said, “Is there something I can do for her?” For me?

“I have a colleague,” said Dr. Grossman. “She might benefit from seeing him.”

But as she left the office, Andy thought, it was nature over nurture, wasn’t it? Ragnarök or nuclear exchange, what was the difference? How appropriate that the DEW Line (the “Distant Early Warning Line”—Andy mouthed the words) ran across Greenland, Iceland, and no doubt Norway. What was his name again — Loki — the one bound to the rocks with chains and ropes made of the entrails of his own son. Loki, the god of the moving earth, of crevasses opening up and caverns collapsing, was the one who had always frightened her, not Surt, the fiery one. When she was Janny’s age, any trembling, even of the branch her swing was anchored to, had put her in a fright. In the last ten years, she had considered and put away her fears — thermonuclear, fallout, Mutually Assured Destruction — one by one. Now they were back, and Janny seemed to sense them. The thing not to tell Janny was that there would be just two survivors, a couple named Líf and Lífþrasir, say Adam and Eve. But not Janny, not Richie, not Michael. Not Andy, not Frank.

—

FRANK DID NOT HAUNT Front Street and Maiden Lane; he circled it, wending here and there, his eye always peeled. He had the time — he’d given up the whoring and the flying and practically everything else. He told Andy that he had taken up golf, and was planning to join a country club but hadn’t decided which one, so he was visiting all of them. He even bought a set of clubs and kept them in the trunk of his Chrysler. But he didn’t drive the Chrysler any where near the Knickerbocker. He zipped over the GW Bridge, down the West Side Highway, then left on Canal Street. Then he parked in a lot near Chinatown, and started walking. Sometimes he walked first toward the river and then south (southwest — his inner compass was still accurate). Other times, he walked down Pearl Street or Gold Street, scanning the passing women.

He saw her twice in the first week in March. Both times, she was wearing the black coat. He followed her at a distance, taking note not only of where she went and which buildings she frequented, but also of whom she spoke to, whether any men walked along with her or picked her up (they did not), and whom she greeted. The first afternoon, he followed her for an hour and never got closer than half a block. The second time, she went into that same brick building after thirty-seven minutes. He needed a plan.

Events at the office interfered for a while. Friskie got drunk and slapped the Sulzberger cousin in the street outside the Waldorf after a dance — it got into the papers; the girl broke the engagement; Dave Courtland said high time, she was a Jew; and Frank had to fly down to Galveston and talk not only to Dave, but to the wife, Anna. It took seventeen days to work out a reconciliation, and the Sulzberger parents were not happy, but, on the other hand, they had not heard the “Jew” comment, and Friskie was a very, very handsome young man. Then the head of the Venezuela office, Jesús De La Garza, came for a visit, and he was in New York for seven days and out in Southampton for a long weekend. After he left, Jim Upjohn told Frank, he tacked a note to the door of the room Jesús stayed in that read, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the going of the Lord.”

The gift was that Frank was sitting at a table in the White Horse Tavern, and he saw her through the window. She passed the outside tables, came in, sat down nearby, and pulled out a copy of The Atlantic Monthly. Her coat was a slender trench, two years out of style. When she pushed her scarf back, he saw she had short, thick hair now, dark with scattered gray streaks, but neatly cut. She was fuller in the bust than she’d been during the war, and had just the beginnings of a belly, though she was neatly girdled. As she read, two wrinkles formed between her eyebrows, and her mouth thinned a bit, though her lips were still fuller than most women’s. She ordered a sherry and kept reading. He squinted: it was an article entitled “Anyone Can Play the Harmonica.” This was true, in Frank’s experience, so he was surprised that there would be an article about it.

She must have sensed him looking over her shoulder, because she glanced in his direction and gave him one of those little smiles. He said, “Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.” Her accent was very good, just an underlying melody of the Mediterranean.

Then he said, “May I know you?”

This time she laughed, and it was the same laugh he remembered, merry and deep, the laugh of a woman with plenty of experience.

“I come from a long line of harmonica players.”

“Is that possible?” said the woman.

Right then, Frank knew that his fate depended upon pretending that he had never met her before, to collude in the idea that he believed she was from Queens or Rome or wherever she wanted to be from. What people had done to survive the war was their own business, was it not? He smiled, knowing that his smile was still hypnotic if he really meant it. “My brother is a farmer in Iowa who makes harmonicas by hand, from roots and branches.”

She did laugh. She did.

They chatted for an hour, exchanging only names — hers was Lydia Forêt — but nothing about occupations or background. Button by button, she removed her coat. He took it from her and hung it on the coat rack. She was wearing a navy-blue sheath with a slender red belt. Frank took off his own jacket and loosened his tie. They discussed whether the humidity had gotten worse and the likelihood of a storm. Others were talking about Carol Burnett, who had won an Emmy the night before, so they did, too. “She’s funny,” said Frank. The woman said, “She’ll do anything. I like that.” Then she reddened a little and said, “For a laugh, I mean. I saw her do a show a few years ago somewhere around here, I think.” Frank said that he had seen Nichols and May on Broadway the previous year. The woman said that she had a ticket for My Fair Lady, and she was looking forward to seeing it. Frank said that he knew some people who had gone to the opening night of that. There was a pause in the conversation, and Frank said, “So — can anyone play the harmonica?”

“I guess this gentleman did.” She glanced at the page. “Herbert Kupferberg. In between watching Tannhäuser and Mozart, he taught himself to play ‘Taps.’ ” She glanced at her wristwatch and moved her feet. Frank stood up and fetched her coat. Then she stood, and he held it for her. He said, “I would like to talk with you again.”

She smiled. It was that same smile from eighteen years ago, sunny, retreating. She said, “Perhaps we shall run into each other.” She shook his hand, then turned and walked briskly through the White Horse Tavern door and click-click down Hudson Street. When she turned her head to look at something, Frank felt ravished and limp.

—

RUTH BAXTER’S CONSIDERED OPINION was that an autumn wedding was more unusual and therefore smarter than a June wedding or even a Christmas wedding, though you had more freedom with a Christmas wedding in choosing the colors of the bridesmaids’ dresses; but if, as Claire insisted, there were only going to be three bridal attendants (you could not say “bridesmaids,” because Lillian was not a “maid”), and four junior bridesmaids (Debbie, Janny, Tina, and Annie), then the color problem was easily solved — autumnal yellows and golds, with a touch of red here and there to go with autumn flowers (“Not the brightest of the year, but very classy,” said Ruth). Ruth’s own marital plans remained unclear, but Claire had become firmer in her identity as the future wife of Dr. Paul Darnell. For one thing, she had gotten fairly adept at her secretarial job, and it seemed silly for Paul to employ his current secretary when Claire could do the work for free; for another, she was almost twenty-four. Even if she got pregnant right away, she would be almost twenty-five when the baby was born, which meant that it might be rather difficult to regain her current figure afterward.

She went in and out of Paul’s house, installing her cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen, even cleaning the frozen remains of unidentifiable leftovers out of his freezer for when they got back from their Point Clear, Alabama, honeymoon. She spent a morning clearing shelves in his garage, and then went to his bedroom — she just stood in the doorway and looked around, knowing that, in a few weeks, folding, washing, and hanging up all of these articles of clothing that were so redolent of Dr. Paul Darnell would be her job.

She loved him. Her mother was proud of the way she had come around to that — not by means of romance or being swept off her feet, but by means of patience and friendship. After Claire made it clear that she was going to marry Paul, Rosanna said, “Well, he is a diamond in the rough, a very good man deep down, and the children will smooth off the edges.” These days, Rosanna recalled Walter as the opinionated one, the hard-to-please one; though neither Claire nor anyone else remembered the two of them in this way, Claire thought it reassuring that Paul reminded Rosanna of her father. The wedding was set for October 14. Minnie and Lois were putting together the reception, to be held at Joe and Lois’s house, and Annie was training Jesse to carry the rings on a pillow.

Around the first of October, the crying started. Claire and Ruth went to a movie called I Thank a Fool, expecting that Susan Hayward was going to be good, but the movie was irritating and confusing, not sad. Nevertheless, at the point when the villain broke through the fence he was leaning against and fell over the cliff, Claire felt herself seize up, and then there were tears off and on all the way back to the apartment she and Ruth were sharing. They made popcorn, and she forgot about it. In the morning, more tears came when she ran her stocking, and then tears again when, after lunch break, her boss told her that she had to retype a letter she had given him, because she had misspelled “receipt” three times. Two days later, she froze in that weird way again and cried over a chicken sandwich in the commissary, and the day after that, Paul called her late at night, and when he hung up without saying, “I love you,” she cried again, even though he had called her “honey” three times and “sweetheart” once.

Crying was a little time-consuming when you were going to the florist and the bakery and calling the justice of the peace on the phone about last-minute arrangements and reading Lois’s list of what she was making (finger sandwiches with tiny shrimp and rémoulade sauce, Swedish meatballs, sliced apples smeared with blue cheese from Kalona). She cried on the phone with Rosanna while they were talking about where the Darnells were going to stay the weekend; Rosanna was suspicious and reluctant to drop the subject of why she was crying.

Ruth thought the crying was charming and appropriate — she was getting married! She would be with Paul for the rest of her life! That could be fifty or sixty or seventy years, and much sadder if it were not that long than if it was! Obviously, it was sad to leave Ruth herself behind, but Ruth had hope, because there were three men she knew now, and one had gone to Grinnell.

After five days of the crying, she decided that it was just another thing to organize, so she equipped herself with plenty of Kleenex and continued about her business. October 14 barreled toward her; soon enough, Lillian and Arthur and Tim and Debbie and Dean and Tina and Frank and Andy and Janny and Richie and Michael and that woman Nedra, who had to come along, and Henry (no girlfriend) were wandering in and out of Rosanna’s house and Joe and Lois’s house, and there were two boys from the high school, too, whom Minnie had hired to hand around trays, put out chairs, and empty ashtrays. Eloise couldn’t come, but she’d sent a set of dessert plates with seashells painted around the rim that were Claire’s favorite present, and reminded her of that New Year’s trip to California with Granny Elizabeth, who had died this past spring (and the only thing sad about her passing, at almost ninety, was that she had never made it to Hawaii). Claire thought Granny Elizabeth would have said that she had done a good job — just what she herself advised, waiting this long, and choosing Paul.

Debbie got the younger girls dressed, and when they stood up in a row to have their picture taken, Claire thought that the way their velvet dresses shaded in color from green to gold made a beautiful effect. Lillian, Ruth, and Paul’s sister, Irene, looked nice, too, and Lillian, of course, made much of Claire’s own dress — how lovely it looked on Claire; the one thing she, Lillian, would never have in this lifetime was a wedding; of course, the war had made everything different, but what a luxury, and Claire had done such a good job planning all of this — Lillian just kept talking, in spite of the hairpins between her lips, as she buttoned all of the buttons down Claire’s back, and secured her bun and pulled out the curls on either side of her forehead so that they framed her face for when Paul would lift the veil and kiss her. Lillian had never understood the idea of a morning wedding — late-afternoon weddings, like this one, gave you such a warm, cozy feeling.

Joe gave her away. He looked very handsome — Lois had basted some alterations into his rented tux, and he had gotten a good haircut. When they were standing in the vestibule, watching the girls follow Jesse (who did succeed in balancing the rings on the pillow all the way down), he put his hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and said that he was very proud of her, and then he squared up and off they went, and tears leapt into her eyes when Paul turned and watched her come, smiling happily. Then he grabbed her hand when she got there, as if he might have missed her at the last moment, and so, when it came time to say, “I do,” she said it a little loudly. On the way back up the aisle, she saw that her new in-laws were smiling at her as if they meant it, even Dr. Evan. Then Arthur had to leave, rush back to Washington all of a sudden, but Lillian said that was the Kennedys for you — they always wanted everything right now, no matter how unimportant it was. “If people only knew what they are really like. Shocking.” But then she made a lip-zipping gesture and rolled her eyes.

Lois managed the reception perfectly — the whole house was lit with candles, and there were plates of food everywhere, all of it delicious. And when Claire stood on the landing of Lois and Joe’s staircase, and tossed her bouquet, Debbie made sure to catch it. Moments later, they were off in Paul’s cream-colored Oldsmobile, Dr. and Mrs. Paul Darnell, 1209 Ashworth Road, West Des Moines, Iowa.