Early Warning

1967

THEY WERE NAKED on his fold-out couch. The treatment room was warm enough (he turned up the heat to eighty) so that they required no covers, even though the windows were uncurtained and the weather outside was frigid. Andy remained positioned as he had instructed her, on her back, her arms above her head, her hands beneath her neck, her knees bent, and her feet flat on the mattress. Dr. Smith was sitting up. His body was much hairier than Frank’s — the first time, she had stared. The hair was gray over his shoulders and got darker over his chest. His very thick pubic hair was black. Andy said, “You told me you worked with shell-shocked soldiers in the war. Did you notice a connection?”

“Between…” said Dr. Smith.

“Between, I don’t know, between being a little wild and being a casualty? Frank came home without a mark on him, and he was over there the whole time — North Africa, Italy, Germany. He didn’t even get a hangnail.”

“He was—”

“He was a sniper. Why didn’t you serve, again?”

“I did serve, though not in a combat capacity. I had asthma. However, psychiatric work was service.” Now that his treatment plan had proceeded to greater intimacy, Dr. Smith sometimes offered little nuggets of personal information. Andy knew that they were supposed to help her see him as more human — a man with an inner life and a history, vulnerable and worthy of compassion. His mother, for example, had been an exceptionally cold woman, heavyset and determined; one of his earliest memories was of helping her unlace her corset. But this old fact was not dramatic. Though it had been frightening at the time to see her flesh billow forth, with therapy he now pondered all of his memories with equal disinterest, which was not lack of interest, but a state of emotional remove. What was there to learn from these episodes? If he had persisted in endowing them with the emotions that they aroused at the time, then he could learn nothing from them. Such was his goal for her, too. “You keep coming back to this topic, Mrs. Langdon. The young man was killed months ago.”

“Janet wrote me about it again. I guess she told one of the girls at her school that she would rather it was her who died, and the girl told one of the teachers.”

“Are you worried?”

“I’m not worried that she’s going to do anything, but…”

Now he stood up and went to his mat, where he assumed his cross-legged position. He had made it absolutely clear that he did not love her — love was neither his purpose nor his aim (he was, after all, a married man), and if she were to fall in love with him (impossible, Andy thought), then it would be his job to deflect and analyze those feelings as a variety of transference. For now it was sufficient that she almost always had an orgasm, and, with increasing frequency, they had simultaneous orgasms. Simultaneous orgasms were a learned behavior, just like any other. So, indeed, was love.

“But what?”

“But I think her reaction is extreme. I’ve always thought she was rather remote.”

“We see in others what we feel in ourselves, Mrs. Langdon. When you’ve tapped your own passions, perhaps you will understand your daughter’s.”

He waited for a moment, then said, “Now, in series of tens, I want you to tighten your pubococcygeus muscle.” He began to count, and Andy, still lying on her back, did her best, though he went a little fast for her. He counted three sets, and then said, “You may rest.” Next he had her straighten and bend her left leg ten times, then her right leg, then her left leg, then her right leg again. He said, “Turn over.” She turned over. He said, “Now tighten your gluteals.” He counted to ten three times. This was easy for her — she had been improving her posture since she was ten years old and first heard the word “posture.” When he finished counting, she sat up. “I don’t know what to say to comfort her. If I say nothing, she says I don’t care, and if I say something, whatever it is, she says I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He was still cross-legged, still hairy, still self-possessed. He said, “What have you said?”

“My sister-in-law and her husband let those children run wild. It seems to me that, if they had exerted a little control, he might have had more direction, and this wouldn’t have happened. I guess that was exactly the wrong thing to say to Janet. I mean, I actually criticized her aunt Lillian and uncle Arthur, which is not to be done.” Andy knew she sounded a little incensed.

“I thought you were a believer in fate, Mrs. Langdon.”

“Yes, but—” Andy fell silent, momentarily startled. And it was true: a year ago, she would have viewed such a thing quite differently. Even as recently as September, she had told Janet that Tim’s death was meant to be. Now, five months deeper into her treatment, she couldn’t help seeing cause and effect, paths not taken, things that could have turned out in another way.

Dr. Smith looked at his watch, then rose to his feet without his hands touching the floor. It was this act that held her whenever she wavered in her dedication to her treatment. He went to his book and said, “We can take up this topic again.”

Andy sat up and reached for her clothes and her handbag. She said, “Friday.” He gazed at her expectantly while she put on her brassiere and underpants. She rummaged her bag for her checkbook. He handed her a pen. She wrote him a check for five hundred dollars. About this, as about everything else, he was very strict. He often said, “It may have seemed to you when you were a child that your father was a kind man, but his kindness, so called, had no direction, did it? And so, as a woman, you are untrained and adrift.” As she handed him the check, Andy couldn’t help agreeing.

—

DEBBIE’S ROOMMATE WENT STEADY, and her best friend dated three guys at Amherst in a round-robin arrangement, but Debbie maintained that she had set her sights on real intellectual achievement: she was not going to graduate school at Harvard, she was headed for Oxford. Uncle Henry said this was possible. Debbie knew that if she had gone to U.Va. or even UMass, her late nights at the library could have turned into dates with boys also spending time in the library, but if you were at a Seven Sisters, at Mount Holyoke, this was not the case.

So now she was at a mixer, standing in the corner, dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin, because every boy reminded her of Tim — not because they looked like Tim, but because they filled spaces that her brother should have filled. One gawky kid after another walked across the dance floor, dribbling his beer, his Adam’s apple poking out, and his mouth half open. Always, Debbie had known that Tim was better-looking than she was, because the eyes of strangers slid past her and rested on him. Always, she had known that he got away with murder and so she had to do everything right. Always, she had been petty and irritable. Well, now she had taken Psychology 101, and Family Dynamics, and Elementary Freudian Theory, and she had identified herself as the wicked stepsister whose foot was too big for the glass slipper no matter what size the glass slipper was. In other words, she was a realist, surrounded by fantasists.

One of the gawky boys, this one at least six four, came to a halt in front of her and said, “You dance?”

“I have danced,” said Debbie.

“I danced, I have danced, I had danced, I might have danced, I could have danced, I should have danced.”

“English major,” said Debbie.

“Might you dance in the near future?” said the boy.

Debbie stepped away from the wall. The song was “Ruby Tuesday.” Debbie moved around, and the kid moved around near her, but not too near her. The song changed to “Georgy Girl,” which Debbie didn’t like, so she stood still for a moment, then backed away. Unfortunately, he followed her.

After ten the same evening, Debbie was still talking to this guy, whose name was David (not Dave) Kissell, a junior at Wesleyan. He already knew her entire name, Debbie Manning, and he also knew that her brother Tim had been killed in Vietnam, something only her best friend and her roommate knew. David Kissell’s eyebrows had not risen. He had not backed away from her in either horror or disapproval, and when the tears came, he had supplied her with a clean paper napkin and a fresh beer. He said, easy as you please, “Come with me to the march. Someone in my dorm has a car. Three of us are going, and you can come along.” Debbie said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” And then they went back into the dining hall and danced to “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” and David said he was from Long Island and had seen Vanilla Fudge live. When he walked her back to her dorm in time for midnight curfew, he kissed her not on the lips but on the forehead.

He met her at the corner where her ride to Middletown dropped her off. She saw the three other girls stare at him for a moment and then dismiss him — he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and his hair was below his collar (though clean — he smelled good). He took her little bag, and they walked to a pizza parlor. There were two guys he knew there, about halfway through a sausage pizza with mushrooms. Debbie sat down. She had the shortest hair at the table, and the most boring color, plain brown. The guy across from her was wearing a long wool army-surplus coat with a belt, even though it was April, and he had a carefully trimmed mustache. He was clearly the leader. David introduced her to him first — Jeff MacDonald.

They went back to Jeff’s room, and pretty soon the boys were passing her a slender cigarettelike object which she knew was a joint. She took it, but when she sat staring at it, David gently removed it from her fingers and passed it to Jeff, who nodded thoughtfully and took another “hit.” He had a nice stereo, and they were listening to the Electric Prunes.

The plan was to leave for New York by six, so she slept in David’s single bed with him, which, in spite of years of slumber parties, she could not say she was used to. But he was nice, and anyway, he took a sleeping pill.

Jeff MacDonald knew somebody on East Seventy-third Street, so they left the Falcon there and walked to the park. Even by 9:00 a.m., Manhattan was so busy that Debbie had to grab David’s hand so as not to lose him. When they got to the Seventy-ninth Street entrance, a small sign directed them to gather with other students, but it looked to Debbie as though everyone was milling around together. The official signs were large and white — Debbie thought the one that read “Children were not born to burn!” was more effective than “Stop the Bombing!” Other signs were homemade: a pair of twins had two signs, “Hey Hay LBJ How” and “Many kids U KILL 2DAY?” They marched shoulder to shoulder through the crowd, deadly sober and carefully holding the signs so that they could be read together. There were families, too — couples with babies in carriages, old ladies, even some men in old army uniforms from the war. Just before eleven, she and David followed Jeff to the rocks near the bottom of the Sheep Meadow. There Jeff climbed on a rock and burned his draft card with a lighter, while she, David, and the other boy, Nathan, formed part of the human chain protecting the small group of draft-card burners. Debbie looked over her shoulder to see if they were going to be rammed by police, but she could see no police, only more protesters lining up behind her, shouting, as the cards burned. When his card was a blackened ash falling into a can, Jeff raised both his arms in a salute, and everyone shouted “Hell, no! We won’t go! Hell, no! We won’t go!” Then everyone got organized and headed downtown.

On Park Avenue right before Forty-eighth Street, Jeff MacDonald got an egg right on the forehead. The egg broke and splattered over his glasses, and David almost laughed but didn’t. Debbie ducked — another egg hit the ground in front of her feet. Then they all started looking up and hurrying a little bit, but there was no panic. Jeff just put his glasses in his pocket and kept shouting. They passed three guys with short hair, holding a sign that read “Hang the potesters!” “Protesters,” Debbie wanted to stop and point out, was spelled with an “r.” But the march pressed forward, so she just raised her fist and gave them the finger.

Debbie didn’t start crying until Phil Ochs started singing. Debbie was not a screamer. She had one Beatles album, and she liked to listen to the acoustic Bob Dylan. Her sole pop-music memory was from three years ago, her freshman year, at a Peter, Paul and Mary concert, when she had gone up afterward to get an autograph from Paul. She was six people back in the line; it was late; she yawned, and Paul saw her. He looked right at her and sang, “On a Desert Island.” But Phil Ochs was handsome and graceful, and he had a rich voice, even in this crowd. And when he looked out at them and sang “Is there anybody here who’d like to wrap a flag around an early grave?” she decided that he was singing to her, for Tim, and she burst out — wa-wa-wa — very embarrassing, so upsetting that David Kissell put his arms around her. And he followed that with “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” She heard David whisper the words “Her brother was killed,” and then there were a few tentative pats on her shoulder. Would Tim have come to this march? Debbie had no idea. But maybe his ghost would, knowing what it knew now.

—

JANET, TOO, was at the march. The week before, she had gotten a letter from Aunt Eloise. Aunt Eloise was interesting to Janet, if only because every time her name came up Dad laughed and Mom said, “Oh, Frank,” then laughed, too. They thought Aunt Eloise was an embarrassment, but she wrote more faithfully than either Dad or Mom.

Dear Janet—

Thanks for your letter! I’m always happy to read anything you have to say, and no, I am not at all tired of you talking about your cousin Tim or telling me how much you miss him! You should miss him. I consider him a murder victim, not murdered by the Viet Cong, but by Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the imperialist pigs who are perpetrating an illegal war that they will never win. I know that you don’t hear such things at THE MADEIRA SCHOOL, but you are old enough to know the truth. When I was your age, I was walking around the farmhouse, staring out the windows, and wondering what was out there. Now I know, and I can’t say that it has made me happy, but it has made me strong. There have been many things that we have not been able to do anything about, but the Vietnam War is something that we can do something about. There is going to be a march in New York on April 15, a Saturday (here in San Fran, too). You should think about how you might get to that march. I don’t know the rules at your school. But there is never anything wrong with breaking rules, and in fact, you should practice as soon as you can. You are a good girl, which is a convenient cover story for you. No one expects you to misbehave, so, at least for a while, you can judiciously misbehave (not sex and drugs, if you know what I am getting at and I hope you do not).

Then there was stuff about Rosa and her daughter, Lacey.

By midnight that night, Janet had forged a brief note from her mother: “Back from Florida the other day. See your Dad is still in Palm Springs. Guess the hotel is a mess, and he needs to stay for at least another week. By the way, Nedra is very ill, and she asked to see you. A Surprise. Don’t know what is going to happen, but you should come home this weekend, Love, Mom.” She’d stuck it in the envelope from an earlier letter, careful to tear off the postmark in a ragged way, as if she had ripped open the letter. When she took it to Miss Green, her housemother, the next day, she saw instantly what Aunt Eloise had been getting at. Miss Green barely glanced at the letter, just gave Janet a big smile and said, “Of course. Do you have train fare?” And, yes, she did.

The most adventurous part of Janet’s trip to New York was something she would not be telling Aunt Eloise: that she spent Friday night on a bench in Penn Station. She did fall asleep, but only for an hour or so, with her purse between her chest and the back of the bench and her arms through its handles. She was awake by the time the crowds began to trickle through the building, and when she saw two girls in pigtails walking with two guys in army-surplus jackets, with long hair, she followed them as they headed uptown.

When the protesters began to head out of Central Park to Fifty-ninth Street, Janet was toward the front. She didn’t dare speak to anyone, but she smiled several times and got smiles back. When they passed in front of the Plaza Hotel, where her mom had taken her for tea a couple of times, Janet looked east down Fifty-ninth Street; it hadn’t occurred to her until right then that there were lots of people she knew who might see her, even if everyone in her family was out of town. The barriers were jammed with old people gaping. The only shouting was coming from the protesters, who were screaming “End the war! Stop the bombing!” Janet screamed that, too. Aunt Lillian had said that Tim was killed by a grenade — a piece of shrapnel had entered the back of his head, and he died right away — and that was all Janet needed to know. She screamed until she was hoarse, thinking of Tim pitching balls to her when she was eight, and of herself striking out over and over until, finally, he tossed it right at the sweet spot where her bat was headed, and her bat hit it.

At some point, Janet realized that the tall white man and the shorter black man that she was right behind were Dr. Spock and Dr. King. There was a way in which Janet had not quite believed that Dr. Spock existed, like Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima, but here he was, smiling and laughing, even when they passed a sign that read “Traitors!” And then she looked back. Because there was a little dip in the road, she saw the most thrilling sight she had ever seen, which was miles of people extending as far as it was possible to extend, into the buildings, into the clouds. They marched toward the East River, to the UN. The last time she was here was a field trip in sixth grade. She found herself a spot.

Janet was sure that Tim’s ghost was right there with her, practically touchable, a figure in the crowd, maybe standing behind the Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s placard. Tim had written her only one postcard from Vietnam, postmarked Nha Trang, and all it said on the back was “Hey, kiddo! Everything is fine here! Send me some more Hershey bars! Love you, Tim. xxx.” Aunt Lillian had let her read his last letter after she asked three times. Both she and Aunt Lillian knew that she would cry for days afterward, but that was good, according to her mom. As Phil Ochs sang “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Janet closed her eyes and mouthed the words, and imagined that it was Tim singing. Just as he had sung all those songs with the Colts.

—

THE APARTMENT WHERE Henry was staying for a long weekend, at Eighty-fourth Street and Broadway, had one window that faced east, and maybe Henry and Basil Skipworth heard the noise of shouting wafting on the breeze from the park, and maybe they didn’t. As the crow might fly, they were only a mile or so from where the protesters were gathering. They had talked about joining the march but had indulged themselves in not doing so. Thinking of Tim, Henry felt a little guilty. But when he came to New York, he’d somehow not put two and two together about the protest; he had been thinking of this weekend as a break from everything about Tim that was putting his mother and Claire and Paul and Lillian — and himself, for that matter — at loggerheads. Basil taught German at Yale. Even though he often said “my dear boy,” he was two years younger than Henry and about six times more sophisticated, if by that you meant that he read Balzac in French and Boccaccio in Italian as well as Goethe in German (and Kafka, too). On the other hand, he had only the most rudimentary grasp of the etymology of “foot” (fot, föt, pes (Latin), pod (Greek), pada (Sanskrit), — ped (Indo-European), much less that of “penis,” which meant “tail” in Latin and was almost unchanged from earlier forms. Basil, who had gone to Cambridge, was much more sophisticated than Henry in many ways, but, they both knew, not nearly as good-looking. He had started subtly pursuing Henry at the Modern Language Association meeting in December. Henry had allowed capture in March, intrigued by Basil’s courage, since he himself had never been bold enough to push any pursuit to its logical end. They were using an apartment belonging to some friend of Basil’s, who was back in England for a month.

Basil was completely up to date on sodomy laws: In England, still illegal, penalty, no longer death, but imprisonment, as for Oscar Wilde. Wilde, according to Basil, had been convicted under the same law that made the age of consent for females twelve; “however, my dear boy, for us, no consent is possible. I guess it is a sign of progress that, as of a hundred years ago, a man could be jailed for fucking a girl who wasn’t quite ten yet, but the wheel of progress moveth exceeding slow.” Nor could they meet in Connecticut, where homosexuality meant prison if the judge felt like it. Illinois — didn’t Henry know this? — was the most progressive. As for New York, well, buggery was only a misdemeanor, and with all of these draft dodgers in town, the police had their hands full.

“Buggery,” “balls-up,” “bollocks,” “git,” “ponce,” “poofter,” “rodger,” “wanker,” “stiffy,” “todger,” “stonker.” Listening to the words Basil enunciated in his layered accent (West Country underneath Received Pronunciation — he almost always pronounced his “r”s, for example, and sometimes joked around, saying, “Where ye be goin’ to?”), Henry got used to them as if they were jokes, as if what Basil was showing him wasn’t a little scary (“Oh, my dear boy, we’ve not got to that part yet”). Henry knew that Basil sometimes put on the West Country pretty thick just for him, because that was where the purest Anglo-Saxon still resided. Basil laughed at him for caring about such elementary linguistic motes and crumbs, compared with Death in Venice, or at least Doktor Faustus, which had universal appeal. Henry’s standard riposte was, had Doktor Faustus, finished only twenty years ago, really stood the test of time? He was willing to admit that Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus had features of interest that might prove lasting, but…

And then they started laughing. Basil said, “My God, you are a stuffy fellow, for all that length of leg.”

Henry was naked. The windows of the bedroom looked south, onto a tiny little square of green surrounded by cats and flowerpots. The apartment was on the third floor, and there were blinds; Basil had drawn them but not closed them. Henry supposed that north-facing windows across the alley had a view of their misdemeanors. They had kissed. They had stroked. Basil had warmed some baby oil and started at his shoulders, then moved farther down, lingering over Henry’s arse, admiring the fact that Henry’s body hair was fine and blond. Henry had rubbed Basil down, also, lingering a little around his shoulder blades before descending to the arse (hairy, not like any girl Henry had known). Until now that was all they had done, besides sleep side by side, though Henry wore shorts and a shirt and Basil wore pajamas (a word that was, indeed, related to “penis”). Basil had buggered and been buggered by, but he was patient. When Henry visited in March, Basil had walked around the apartment naked, sometimes with an erection, and he had done nothing with it except touch it from time to time, letting Henry get used to it. Watching him, without saying anything, Henry had imagined Jacob Palmer doing the same thing. Jacob had finished his doctorate at Wisconsin — highly motivated by the cold, he said — and was now married to one of his fellow graduate students, a Yeats scholar from St. Paul. They had a six-month-old baby boy. Jacob had gotten a good job at UCLA.

They were going slowly. Maybe Henry should be embarrassed, at his age, but they both knew that Henry had offered himself up for an education, and that Basil was perfectly agreeable to the terms, whatever they were.

The question was whether to walk over to Amsterdam and up a couple of blocks to Barney Greengrass, or down Broadway a few blocks to Zabar’s, and the answer was — did you want the best bagel or did you want the best lox? Henry let Basil decide, and it was always Barney Greengrass, where they were even ruder than at Zabar’s. (“My dear boy, manners are the key. If he ejaculates, ‘Whaddaya havin’, bud?’ then the bagels will be just a little chewier and the lox just a little loxier.”) As they walked up the street, Henry thought, they revealed nothing about misdemeanors they might have committed or be about to commit. Basil changed his posture slightly, slouching his hips and straightening his shoulders. He could feel himself do the same thing. Did they know each other? Only slightly — colleagues who happened to meet and were catching a bite.

At Barney Greengrass, there was a lot of talk about the protesters, crazy hippies, what was wrong with those people, wasn’t LBJ doing the best he could, these kids didn’t know from trouble if they thought the draft was trouble. Henry and Basil exchanged a glance, even though Henry hadn’t yet told Basil about Tim, or, indeed, anything at all about his family. Onion bagel, toasted, cooled, easy on the cream cheese, no capers, a little onion. Black coffee, two sugars. They took their plates to a table by the window.

—

CLAIRE DREADED the hot weather and the muggy noise she would have to endure at the state fair, but since Paul had informed her that irritability was a classic symptom of pregnancy, she didn’t say a word. Paul might not be pregnant himself, but when, on his thirty-eighth birthday, he burned the manuscripts of his partly written plays in the backyard, he had done in his mood for the rest of the summer. It didn’t matter that his practice was booming so that he’d had to take on a new partner. He considered his new partner merely the best of a bad bunch — Cornell University undergraduate and Wake Forest Medical School. He was great with kids, but Paul didn’t like him. Martin Sadler, his name was. He thought going to the doctor should be fun for a kid, or at least not terrifying.

Dr. Sadler was friendly. When he asked if he could tag along, Claire said yes, and began to think going to the fair might not be so bad after all in spite of the belly. He was there when they pulled into their parking spot. Paul snapped, “Well, I’m still not in favor of closing the office on a Friday,” but then, because it was cool and the weather looked like it was going to be unusually pleasant, he said, “But we did pick a nice day.”

Joe and Lois arrived in the pickup with Annie and Jesse; Minnie followed, with Rosanna, who was carrying Lois’s competition pie on her lap. Claire thought her mother looked terrible. She had not seemed to take the news of Tim’s death very hard: How many chickens did they think she had killed in her day? What did they think it was like, finding her own husband, ten years younger than she was now, curled up under that damned Osage-orange tree? Death was a fact, and no one knew that better than an old lady on a farm. Why discuss it? But today she looked as if she had given up on her hair in the middle of putting it up, as if she had given up on her sweater in the middle of buttoning it, as if she had dabbed two spots of lipstick on her lips and given up on that. Claire kissed her and asked her how she was.

“Just getting old. Gout in my toe. My hip. What all.” She tossed her hand dismissively in the air. “The question is, how are you?” Claire suspected her mother thought she was too far along to show herself in public. She said, “I feel terrific, actually.” Dr. Sadler walked right up to them, held out his hand to Rosanna, and said, “I understand you’re Claire’s mom. I’m Martin Sadler. I’m pleased to meet you.” His smile was as big as could be. Rosanna put her hand on his arm and asked him if he was engaged or dating anyone.

Paul strapped Gray carefully into his expensive Maclaren baby stroller, tied his hat onto his head, then pulled his socks up and his overalls down. If one ray of sunshine got on the child’s skin, Paul would take him inside. Paul refused absolutely to have a dog, and even though Claire was always saying that a boy needed a dog, it was she herself who needed the dog. But Paul’s favorite words were “I don’t think so.”

Annie had changed overnight — breasts (suddenly large ones), though not much of a waist. Jesse wore exactly what Joe wore, right down to the ill-fitting white shirt and the too-short khakis and the flattop. And he stayed right in Joe’s shadow. When Dr. Sadler asked him what grade he was in, Jesse looked up at Joe before he answered. Lois, as always, looked as if she was minding her own business. She opened the door and received the pie before Minnie turned off the engine.

Claire’s hand went to her own hair. She had sprouted thirty gray ones, all at the cowlick on the left side of her hairline, right up front for everyone to see. She was twenty-eight years old! It was very unjust, she thought. Paul ran the stroller right over her toes.

Lois said, “I’m going to check in to the Machine Shed. I’ll meet you at the crafts,” so they followed Rosanna into the hall. Purple cable knit with long sleeves, regular Aran patterned vest, Fair Isle, hand-knitted Iowa Hawkeyes football jersey, including the number and the player’s name, “Murphy.” After the knitwear, they wandered past the canned goods to the piles of fleece, then tomatoes, longest green bean, biggest onion, heaviest ear of sweet corn. Claire had a little exchange of hard stares with Paul about taking Gray among the livestock, but Claire won — Paul picked him up, and Claire folded the stroller and carried it. It was important not to stand up straight, not to ask for help, and not to pat your belly. There were breeds of hogs here that she would not have recognized without a sign — Old Spots, Mulefoot, Tamworth (these were red) — and cows (Red Poll, Randal Lineback, Belted Galloway). She liked the horses, which were mostly draft and ponies. Paul actually got interested in the chickens. Rosanna took hold of the sleeve of Dr. Sadler’s jacket. “Goodness, we had those Chanticleers. Good birds. Smart. I always heard of those Dominiques, never saw one before. Who was that who had a whole flock of those red Russian Orloffs? Claire, do you remember? Those could stay out in any weather, but they weren’t good layers. Chickens got us through the Depression. And cream!” Dr. Sadler continued to nod. Goats, sheep. Joe lingered at the sheep, his hand affectionately on Jesse’s shoulder, pointing out the Southdowns, like the one he had brought to the fair — oh goodness, was it thirty-three years ago now? Emily, that ewe’s name was. And then he met a girl named Emily, too.

The Southdowns were the prettiest, Claire thought. When Jesse asked for one, Joe said, “We’ll see.” Which was better than “I don’t think so.” Claire knew she was grumpy.

They came out onto the midway, and she felt a breeze. It was almost noon, quite pleasant — not even eighty, she would bet. Paul said, “We could have chickens. The backyard is big enough.” Quite typical of Paul to reject a dog out of hand, but get suddenly enthusiastic about chickens. Dr. Sadler and Rosanna were at the corn-dog stand. Claire waddled away from Paul and joined them there. Dr. Sadler gave her a comfortable smile. She said, “You know the recipe for grilled corn?”

“I shudder to think,” said Dr. Sadler.

“Twelve ears of corn, a cup of melted butter, salt.”

Paul made her cook with margarine.

Rosanna held out her hand, and Dr. Sadler put the corn dog into it. Claire was beginning to feel a little jealous.

Paul insisted that they go to the replica of the first church ever built in Iowa. “Catholic!” exclaimed Rosanna. “Built in Dubuque.” She turned to Dr. Sadler. “Were you raised a Catholic, by any chance?”

Dr. Sadler shook his head, and Claire felt her ears get bigger, but he didn’t say anything except “Nice woodworking.”

The pies, set out neatly on the display table, were judged at four. Claire thought Lois’s did look delicious, but she came in second. After the judging, she went up to the judges and smiled and shook their hands and thanked them for judging. Claire thought that Lois was always excessively polite. You never knew what she was really thinking.

And so they forgot about Tim for eight hours, and Rosanna was, indeed, perked up. As for Claire, she was so exhausted she let Paul put Gray to bed, which he did with better grace than he had all summer. She was lying on her side, and she could feel the baby moving around; she imagined her (him) doing backflips. After Gray was down, Paul came into their room and sat on the edge of the bed, took Claire’s hand, and pushed her bangs gently out of her face. He said, “That was a good idea, enjoying plant, animal, and human variety for a day. Let’s do that every year.” He was patting her hand, and she fell asleep right there, deep as a well and twice as dark — who used to say that?