Early Warning

1968

THEIR CHRISTMAS HAD BEEN bittersweet. Debbie invited her boyfriend, an awkward kid but kind. He helped with the dishes, and he noticed things like rug corners turned up or stove burners left on. Lillian liked him. Tina had taken a class in printmaking and made their Christmas cards. After years of encouraging her because that’s what a mother was supposed to do, Lillian had loved the cards Tina made, two sheep, a goat, and three chickens peering through a door into a shed, and the Star of Bethlehem shining above them. Dean brought home an early admission to Dartmouth, which everyone imagined to be surrounded by acres of smooth ice. Arthur seemed energetic and almost happy, and maybe only Lillian noticed that his hair was nearly all gray now. They hung Tim’s favorite ornaments on the tree and drank to him at the table, and told a few of the funnier stories, just so the boyfriend would know that they had handled their loss.

Yes, when McNamara had turned in his resignation, Arthur was irritated watching it on the news, muttering, “Frank Wisner shot himself. What’s stopping you, Mr. Secretary?” then retreated to his office as he had so many times before. This was the first thing Lillian thought of when she found Arthur under the bed.

He was canny about it. Dean took swimming practice before school, and Tina liked to go in with him and study in the library, so Lillian was up by six, making breakfast. She ironed Tina’s blouse and found Dean a pair of socks, did the dishes, had a second cup of coffee. She thought Arthur had left — he said he was going to sneak out of the house early and not to worry about him. She even went in and out of the bedroom once, noticing only that the bed was made. When she was putting away her robe, she saw a wrinkle in the lower hem of the bedspread. First she touched the wrinkle; then she felt his shoe. There was no blood; he had no wounds, but he was out cold, and she knew he had done it at last. She threw the bedspread onto the floor and called an ambulance.

He was wearing trousers, a pressed shirt, a jacket, socks, and loafers. The ambulance people had to pull him out feet-first, which mussed his hair. One guy took the note out of Arthur’s fist and handed it to her. She unfolded it. It read, “Don’t call the office unless I’m dead.”

She said, “Is he—?” shaking her head and starting to cry. As they rolled him onto the stretcher, the medic said, “Not yet.” She didn’t call the office. She got into the back of the ambulance with him, and stared at him as they careened toward the hospital, maybe a twenty-minute trip. Every so often, the medic took his pulse and listened to his heart and nodded. Lillian herself kept her hand on his chest. His breathing was shallow, but he kept breathing. It was cold. The landscape was white and the sky was gray, and she knew that he had planned it and had intended to succeed. The unhappy ending, as far as Arthur Manning was concerned, was life.

When the doctor came to her in the waiting room, she was shivering in spite of still having her coat on, and she shook the whole time he talked. It was Seconal, was your husband suffering from insomnia, did he have a prescription for barbiturates, was he showing strange signs of drowsiness or disorientation, could he have fallen down and rolled under the bed. Lillian said, “Didn’t they tell you about the note?”

“No. No note.” He licked his lips and said, “Has Mr. Manning been treated for depression, or manic-depressive illness? Has he shown—”

“Our son was killed in Vietnam.”

The doctor for the first time looked into her eyes, said, “I am sorry. May I ask—”

“Almost a year and a half ago.”

“Has your husband shown signs…”

It went on.

He was to stay in the hospital for three days, for observation. Lillian said, “May I see him?”

“It’s going to take a couple of hours for him to wake up. I guess he’ll be surprised to find himself here.”

“Very disappointed.”

“Oh, maybe not. Second thoughts—”

Lillian shook her head.

It wasn’t until she was home to get the car that she threw the bedspread back onto the bed and saw the other note, the one written in a neat hand folded into Tina’s Christmas card. It read:

Dear Lily Pons—

I am doing a bad thing to you, my darling. I know even more clearly than you do that this is the ultimate betrayal, and the only way on earth that I could or would betray you is exactly this way. But you know I’ve been waiting for the chance. You know I’ve been putting my affairs in order — not my financial affairs, but my domestic affairs. I have been waiting for each of you to recover somehow from Tim’s death, and now we have reached the crossroads where everyone has a path to the future. I saw all the paths at Christmas. Even Debbie is in good hands. You are the only one. Why can’t I take you with me? I ask myself that. And I ask myself that again, feeling you beside me in the night, feeling your hand in mine, hearing you breathe. But I can’t do it, nor can I stay. Why is that? Because I literally and truly see no future. Blank. Empty. Nothing. At last. And I am glad of it. You are perfect. I love you.

Arthur

The first thing he asked her when she saw him in his room, and he was groggy when he asked it, was whether she had told anyone at the office. She said no, and it was true — she had not told anyone at the office. Who had she told? Minnie. She had to talk to someone; she had called the farthest-away person that she could think of, in her office at the high school, and cried to her for ten minutes. Minnie might or might not tell Rosanna, but Minnie did want to tell Joe — Joe wouldn’t say anything. Arthur swallowed several times, closed his eyes, and patted her hand as best he could. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess we’ll soon find out once and for all.”

“What?” said Lillian.

“Whether the phone is tapped.”

It was.

Wilbur and Finn appeared after dinner. They took Lillian into the living room, turned on the lights, and offered her a drink from her own liquor cabinet. No, not even one sip of the Rémy Martin. Wilbur poured himself a Scotch and soda. Finn, a shot of crème de menthe over ice. Sheppard Pratt was where he would be going, up in Towson; men like Arthur had walked its halls for years; nervous breakdowns were part of the job, Arthur knew that. Arthur had always taken everything very seriously. That had its good and bad aspects. Electroshock was of course a possibility.

She told the children he was in the hospital with pneumonia. He would be fine; but, no, they couldn’t go see him, it was too dangerous. She should have said something else, but Arthur hadn’t told her what to say. The two doctors met her as soon as she arrived at Sheppard Pratt the next morning: Dr. Rockford, who was tall and impatient, and Dr. Kristal, who was younger, shorter, and more charming. What had Arthur been doing and saying for the last few months, for the last year, whatever stood out in her mind? Dr. Rockford sat to her left and Dr. Kristal sat to her right. Dr. Rockford would ask a question: Has Mr. Manning shown signs of depression? And then Dr. Kristal would translate it: Did he seem to have a disrupted sleep pattern? Was he eating sufficiently and with enjoyment? Had his drinking habits changed? In half an hour they had elicited most of what she remembered about Arthur staring out the window of his office, about Arthur wandering the house, about Arthur pushing his food around his plate. Yes, he did drink a little, still, but he’d stopped drinking as much as he had been.

Then it was on to his history — the death of his first wife and child in childbirth, his proposal to Lillian not a year after that, the immediate pregnancy, his “manic” (Dr. Rockford’s word) reaction to fatherhood, his “excessive sexual importunities” (Dr. Kristal). His habits of secrecy. “He has to keep secrets,” said Lillian. “That’s part of his job.” They both nodded. Finally, feeling that she had been led step by step into this but not knowing any way out, she told the story of his mother, the death of the older sister in the flu epidemic, the hanging. Dr. Kristal wrote industriously on his clipboard, and Dr. Rockford nodded as if he had expected as much. Lillian at once had the sensation that there was nothing about her marriage or Arthur that was at all unusual or admirable. Everything she cherished was, if not a symptom of pathology, then an item of utter triviality. She fell silent.

Well, they would keep him up there for a few months. The staff was highly competent and extremely effective; she would be amazed at the change; best she not visit very often, if at all; a whole new scene, a whole, in some sense, reassessment of oneself, of life itself; in many cases, the effects were amazing, even when the condition was chronic, as it seemed to be in this case. Utter privacy worked wonders, no television or newspapers, concentration on the here and now.

Then they took her to Arthur’s room. He had been given something. When he took Lillian’s hand, he did so from deep inside a pharmaceutical distance. Dr. Rockford explained what would be done, in no way asking permission or seeking agreement. Arthur stared at the ceiling, and Lillian signed the papers that Dr. Kristal set before her. When she had finished and handed back the pen, he whispered in her ear, “Just wait! He’ll be a new man! These things are always hard!” She kissed Arthur on the lips. As she drove home, she wondered if he would ever forgive her.

—

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Charlie to make out the thing on his chest in the mirror. It was a piece of paper with writing on it, which read:

It was pinned to his shirt with two large safety pins. He could not go outside without this piece of paper. Every day, Mommy knelt down beside him several times and said, “Stay with me, Charlie. You know what that means. Right beside me. And if I call your name, I expect you to answer.” Charlie nodded and said yes, that he would stay with Mommy, that he would answer to the sound of his name, that he would not ever run away again so that the police had to be called and find him after dark and bring him home. The police were tall and wore blue and did not like looking for lost children.

Nursery school was at the gray church on the corner, and it was a long walk, but by the time Charlie got there each morning, his legs weren’t jiggling and jumping anymore, the way they did at breakfast. For the first part of nursery school, where they sat in a circle on the red rug and Miss Ellery read a story, Charlie could be quiet and not move if they had walked, though not if they drove. Mommy put his hand right into Miss Ellery’s hand and said, “Goodbye, Charlie. Be a cooperative boy.” Charlie nodded and put his finger on the paper. “That’s your sign,” said Miss Ellery. Charlie Wickett. “You’re a lucky boy to have a sign, so don’t touch it, okay?”

The book today was about a fox who wore sox. On the cover, the fox was bright red. Charlie sat quietly and stared at the book, sometimes at the red fox and sometimes at the SOX and the FOX. He wondered if they could be XOS and XOF, and touched his sign. It wasn’t until Miss Ellery came to ticks and tocks that Charlie stood up and started running around the red rug — first one way, as fast as he could go, and then the other way. Miss Ellery didn’t say anything. She kept reading. Charlie was careful not to step on anyone’s fingers or to fall over anyone. The room was very bright when he was running, and the colors swam around him.

Miss Ellery put the book down and said; “Charlie, do you think you can sit down and listen?”

Charlie came to a halt and stared at Miss Ellery; then he sat down for one more page. When he stood up again, Miss Plesch came into the room and took his hand. They went outside to the playground, and Charlie ran around the swings and the jungle gym. When he was tired and sat down, Miss Plesch said, “A.”

Charlie said, “Antenna. B.”

“Banana. C.”

“Corvette. D.”

Miss Plesch grinned. She said, “Dog. E.”

Charlie was stumped, so he jumped up and ran the other way around the swing set, then said, “Ethyl. F.”

“Flower. G.”

“Gas. H.”

Now the door opened and the other kids came running into the playground. The girls went one way, and the boys — Davie, Herbie, Barry, and Petey — came toward Charlie. Charlie put his hand on Miss Plesch’s knee and said, “Herbie.”

“Very good,” said Miss Plesch. Charlie took off, and Herbie and Barry ran after him. They ran and ran. It was a sunny day. When Mommy picked him up for lunch, Miss Ellery said, “He knows every car word.”

“His first sentence was ‘Dere go a Muttang.’ He was almost two. Before that we never heard him say a word.”

“Sometimes adopted children are a little late talking. That is my experience. But they catch up.” She bent down and said, “Charlie, do you still have your sign?”

Charlie touched his sign with his finger.

They walked home the long way, down Greeley. When he got home, he sat quietly and ate his peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich. Mommy said he was a good boy.

—

FRANK WAS SUPPOSED TO be in Palm Springs, looking at the renovations Rubino had authorized at the hotel, but he had stayed late in Malibu, at Hughes, so he was driving along Wilshire, past the Ambassador Hotel, about nine. The traffic was a nightmare, and Frank could feel his temper rising, but then he remembered Jim Upjohn’s stories about going to the Cocoanut Grove there in the forties, with Howard Hughes. Hughes was on his mind even though he, Frank, would never meet him (wasn’t the guy holed up in Las Vegas somewhere now?). He turned off Wilshire onto Mariposa, drove up two blocks, and walked back. The hotel was seething with people, and almost as soon as he walked through the door, Frank felt himself get edgy. As a man with nothing to lose, Frank was almost never edgy. What offended him was not the crowd, but some acoustic quality of the hotel lobby. The chaos was not of a uniform loudness and incomprehensibility — words popped out of the noise and impressed themselves upon his consciousness: “red,” “fountain,” “hola,” “I said,” “Nixon,” “Pittsburgh.” He went into the bar, but he got the same feeling there — he could not hear the man standing next to him saying to the bartender, “Gimme a highball,” but he could hear an unknown female voice saying very clearly, “Don’t touch that.” The word that rose on the din was “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.”

Frank didn’t care who won the nomination or the election. Kennedy was of interest to him as a young man still, a man the age of Lillian, a man who had lost many things and had plenty to lose. Bobby Kennedy had been transforming before his eyes lately — getting younger and younger, even as Frank and everyone he knew was getting older and older. Maybe that’s why Arthur’s colleagues hated him. Look at his recent pictures: he had never been as handsome, as tousled, as brilliant. Every so often, when an old picture popped up of Bobby and JFK, JFK looked exhausted in comparison.

Jim Upjohn liked Bobby Kennedy, both politically and personally. Jim had come around since JFK’s assassination, mostly because he thought Johnson was a Texas roughneck and Eugene McCarthy was wheels within wheels. Within wheels. He said that RFK might be too short to win the election, but he kept urging Frank to contribute — it would be good moral experience for Frank, such a tightwad. The thing Frank didn’t like about Kennedy was that he didn’t seem to be able to keep his feelings to himself, no matter what he actually said. When he worked for Joe McCarthy, when he went after Hoffa, when he walked beside his brother Jack, you could see him almost trembling with intention that was eating him alive. Several times over the years, Arthur and Frank had talked about Bobby the way you did about strange younger men, and not only because the Kennedys also lived in McLean and seemed to follow the Arthur Manning laissez-faire child-rearing program (once, Arthur heard through the grapevine that the daughter Kathleen had hired her own nanny when she was walking down the beach in Hyannis Port, and Ethel had interviewed her through the door while she, Ethel, was going to the bathroom). Arthur’s co-workers hated Kennedy, said that he made their skin crawl, that they recoiled from him as from anything small and poisonous.

In the crowded lobby, Frank felt edgy. His eye could not help going to the anomalous figures in the busy roomscape — a man here and a man across the room who were utterly still and utterly observant, who seemed unhappy amidst the rising zest of the crowd. They wore suits as if they were used to wearing suits; they were Frank’s age, and they knew too much to be swept up in the enthusiasm around them. Their eyes flickered sideways before they turned their heads, as if they were waiting for something. The crowd, by contrast, was moving in a kind of coordinated exuberance, heads tossed backward, mouths wide open in talk or in smiles, arms lifted, bodies lifted. Just the sort of crowd that thought it knew what was coming. Frank shivered and moved away from the bar. Probably, he thought, he would always be that kid he’d been in college, living in a tent beside the river, shooting rabbits to make a little money, that kid he’d been in the army, comfortable on a quiet morning, focusing his telescopic sight on a figure in the distance, watching it come to a halt, waiting for the quarry to stretch a little bit and yawn. That was when Frank had liked best to make a kill, at that moment of confidence and comfort. It was a mercy killing, in a way, and he’d done it carefully, so that a single shot finished the deed. The sniper units were trained never to fire a second time, never to give away their position, so Frank had made sure that no second shots were needed. He hadn’t thought about that in years.

Now Bobby appeared, surrounded by larger men — Frank recognized Rafer Johnson — and headed toward the podium. Frank’s edginess peaked in a kind of uncomfortable tingle. He finished his beer and turned away. Outside of the hotel, Wilshire was pretty empty. Even the whores were there, trying to get a glimpse of the next president. Frank found the car and drove around for an hour or two, still a man with nothing to lose, but newly aware of what he had lost — not only Lydia, but Andy, Janet, Eunice, Lawrence (who would have loved Bobby Kennedy).

It was at least three when he got to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had stayed for the last three nights and always did stay. The desk clerk was distracted; Frank didn’t understand why until he got to his room and turned on the TV. He sat on the corner of the bed in his shorts, watching the black-and-white panic. Was he the only person in America who was not surprised at the assassination of Bobby Kennedy — or, rather, surprised only that the shooter was that kid, who looked as dumbfounded and harmless as a fawn in the headlights?

—

WHEN SHE GOT HOME from Mount Holyoke in June, Debbie saw that her real summer job was organizing her mother and, once he got home, watching her dad, who was finishing up five months at Sheppard Pratt. She had to press her mother, even bully her, into naming his diagnosis — well, depression, yes, pretty severe, and, well, paranoia, too, though that was not something her mother had noticed, or maybe it was not something that her father had expressed. Apparently, there were people who seemed perfectly normal on the surface, and then you read their diaries or their letters and it was one long description after another of plots and plans. There had been shock treatments. Debbie quailed and didn’t ask how many. Lillian at last told Debbie about the suicide attempt, and then she told her about her grandmother, and then she told her about the first wife, during the war, and Debbie cried, but all of this was so new and strange that her grief was more or less like crying when a book was sad. She wrote about it to David.

When he got home, though, her father seemed fine enough. He wasn’t ready to go back to work, so he bought and read something called The Gourmet Cookbook, which was about five hundred pages long, and he went to the nursery for plants and bushes, which he and Mom discussed as if they were new puppies, and he oversaw the crew that came to trim some of the trees. At the bottom of the property, he broadcast some wildflower seeds that he got at a natural-history museum. He washed both cars. Debbie found herself counting jokes. If he made five jokes in a day or fewer, he wasn’t feeling very good, and if he made up to ten, he was okay, but if he made more than ten, he was acting “manic,” which was cause for worry. He didn’t watch the news or read the paper. Debbie wondered if he was the only person in the world who did not know about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Her father would have been the perfect person to talk to about these events, but she couldn’t find a way. Her mother never said a word.

To David, who was caddying for the summer at a golf course in Middletown, she wrote, “It’s like a tomb around here. That’s the saddest thing. When we were kids, no one had as much fun as we did. We had the first television, we had the sandbox, and both a swing set and a rope hanging from a tree limb. We had more bikes than kids, because if my dad saw a bike for sale cheap, he would buy it in case some neighborhood kid didn’t have one. We had so many balls, neighborhood dogs would come over to play even when their kids didn’t. Dean keeps telling me to leave Dad alone and stop staring at him, that that’s what makes you paranoid!”

She thought she was handling everything pretty well, until she took a weekend and went up to Middletown Friday night, with a return ticket for Sunday afternoon. Mom had been willing to make her a reservation at a hotel. She said, “You’re almost twenty-one. When I was your age, Timmy was a year old and you were on the way. What you do is your business. I am not going to ask you how serious you are about him, or anything. Which is not something your grandmother said to me. Which is why I ran off with your father without telling her a word about it.” She smiled, but she still looked worn out. Debbie wasn’t in fact sure how serious she was about David, since he was more comforting than exciting, but she was eager to go.

David hugged her like he was really glad to see her, and he looked tanned and fit from working at the golf course. He’d had to cut his hair, but it was growing out.

The argument was not with David, but with Jeff MacDonald, whose job was at an “underground newspaper,” a bunch of typed articles that they dittoed, stapled together, and handed out on street corners. The argument started when David admitted that he had hit some balls at a driving range earlier in the week. Jeff said, not joking, but in that teachery way he had, “I told you you weren’t reliable, and anyway, have you given me twenty-five percent of your tips?”

David scowled, and Debbie said, “Why is he giving you twenty-five percent of his tips?”

“The ruling class has to fund its own overthrow.”

“Are you talking about the ruling-class players on a public course, like old Italian guys and people who work in factories?”

David said, “Deb—”

She went back to picking the olives off her pizza. In the nine months or so that she and David had been dating, Debbie had gotten used to Jeff MacDonald and didn’t take him very seriously anymore. But she did not want to overthrow the ruling class; she wanted to end the war in Vietnam.

The three boys continued to talk about tips. Nathan, who was waiting tables at a diner on Main Street, was making twenty-eight dollars a week plus forty in tips. His share of the rent was fifty dollars. David was making fifty a week plus caddying, which could be another fifty, but could also be another ten, and that didn’t take rainy days into consideration. Jeff, of course, was not putting in his share of the rent, because the paper was too radical to have a large paying audience, but they had handed out fifty copies last week and fifty-three this week. Jeff and the editor had debated about whether they should carry advertising — there was a head shop on Pearl Street that would pay for an ad, and that guy knew a tarot-card reader.

Debbie stifled a smile. Jeff saw it, because he said, irritably, “So I guess your old man was taken out by his fellow spooks.”

As soon as he said this, she knew David had told her secret. She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff. “You do. But I don’t think you should take it personally. There are more important things in the struggle than the fate of individuals.”

“I’m surprised you think that,” said Debbie, “when the most important thing to you always seems to be that you have the last word.”

“If I consider my analysis to be more correct, then I have to make sure it’s understood.”

“You have an analysis of my father’s…illness when you aren’t a psychiatrist and you haven’t met him and you’ve never even talked to me about it?”

“I don’t have to know particular individuals in order to understand that the ruling class will do anything to retain control of the means of production and of the organs of indoctrination.”

“Yeah,” said Debbie, “Like 1984.”

“Mistakes have been made.” He shrugged. “Look what they did to Bobby Kennedy. I’m not saying I liked Bobby Kennedy. He remained pretty reactionary, but that’s the key. He got just a little out of line and they shot him.”

Nathan said, “They haven’t shot Eugene McCarthy.”

“He has no charisma and no chance,” said Jeff. “They know that. You know there’s five hundred thousand American soldiers in Vietnam? Why do you think they’re there? Culling! We have a big generation. Once everyone is drafted, they cull us. What do you think friendly fire is? When we’ve been trained to toe the line, then they’ll bring everyone home and put them to work, and you’ll never hear a peep out of our generation again. JFK was the first warning shot, MLK the second, and RFK the third.”

“That was in your paper,” said David.

“Yes, it was.”

“You’re ‘Kropotkin’?” said David.

Debbie laughed out loud, but it was an angry laugh. Jeff looked right at her. She said, “Everyone in the world knows that communism doesn’t work. Even my aunt Eloise knows that.”

“Peter Kropotkin was an anarchist.”

“Party of one,” said Debbie.

Jeff pushed his glasses up his nose. David was staring at his half-eaten slice of pizza. Debbie expected Jeff to start in about Tim somehow. Her fingers were trembling. But Jeff said, in his most superior voice, “What happens after the third warning shot? Well, the revolution begins, and it’s about to. Clearly, you think that everyone was upset when Martin Luther King was put out of his misery by a CIA hit man. Don’t you recognize crocodile tears when you see them? Ask Eldridge. Whites hated him, even though King didn’t really realize that until the very last moment, and blacks with any sense had come to hate him, too, because he didn’t understand whites. He thought, if black people were just good boys and girls, then the folks up at the big house would let them grow up. Bobby Seale and Eldridge know better. They’re glad he’s dead. And, for the same reason, I’m glad RFK is dead. Everybody has to die eventually. But if you are standing in the way, if people think you’re going to change everything but really you aren’t, you can’t, and you don’t even want to, because your idea is that if poor people need houses they just need to suck up to big business even harder than they already do, then better to die sooner rather than later.” He pushed his glasses up again and looked around the restaurant. His voice had risen. Now he lowered it. He said, “That’s what I think.”

Debbie said, “That is just a bunch of bullshit.”

“You ask your dad the spook. You ask him what is really going on. Go ahead, I dare you.”

Debbie said, “Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you’re the boss. You ask me why you wear that jacket or give away that piece of crap on the street, even though you know that when people take it they just throw it in the next trash can, or why you wear those glasses right out of Doctor Zhivago? You just want to get laid, like every guy. My brother, Dean, thinks playing hockey is going to get him laid. You think pretending you are some Russian is going to get you laid — big fucking difference.” She tossed her head. “You wouldn’t mind running General Motors. You hate big business just because you’re not the boss. If, by some magic trick, you got to be the president of…of…of Dow, you’d do it, and you would be happy to make napalm, too, because if you don’t care about one person getting killed, then you don’t care about any person getting killed. You’re just a heartless asshole.”

David had already stood up, and now he said, “I think we should leave.”

“I’m not leaving with him,” said Debbie.

“We don’t have to,” said David. He took her hand, and pulled her toward the door. Outside, it was hot and very sunny. When they had gotten about halfway down the block, David said, “I guess his dad is in the Teamsters Union in Pittsburgh. They’ve always been pretty militant. And his grandfather knew Big Bill Haywood.”

“He doesn’t—”

“I mean, it’s not like he speaks to his dad. I don’t think they’ve spoken since Jeff was fifteen or something. He doesn’t agree with his dad, and he always says, ‘If you work in the factory, even if you are in a union, then you are still agreeing that the factory should exist.’ ”

“Well, the factory should exist. Is your mom going to make your clothes, and are your sisters going to dip candles and carry buckets of water up from the river?”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“I told you not to tell.”

“It slipped out. Are you mad at me?”

“I don’t know.”

They came to a cemetery. In Middletown, it seemed, you were always coming to a cemetery. She said, “Let’s look at the gravestones, and I’ll figure it out.”

Afterward, she said she wasn’t mad, and they did go to a movie, and he did stay in her room that night, and the next day he put her on the train. His first letter came Wednesday. She wrote right back, and neither of them even mentioned the fight, but she said yes to a date with a guy who went to Vanderbilt, and when the riots broke out in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, she assumed that the revolution had begun.

—

RICHIE WAS IN Alpha Barracks and Michael was in Gamma Barracks. The one other set of twins, John and Clay Simpson, were in Delta Barracks. Everyone, including the Simpson twins, thought Richie and Michael got along great, though their jokes and tricks sometimes went too far. That was why Richie was in the major’s office right now, waiting for the major to come back with his file — Richie had pointed one of the old Springfield rifles right at Michael’s head and pulled the trigger; everyone knew the firing pins had been removed. Michael even laughed. And he had pushed Michael off the high dive at the swimming pool. Michael had spread his arms and legs and shouted “Yahoo!” as he was going down.

They were “getting out of hand” once again.

Out the window, it was starting to sleet. That was all they ever had here, sleet. No real snow. The door opened, and the major came in. The major was pretty short — last year, Richie had been about his height, but this year, he had grown six inches (Michael had grown seven), and even without his cap on, he was way taller than the major. He looked down.

The major said, “Corporal Langdon.”

Everyone in his class was a corporal. Then you got to be a sergeant junior year, and an officer senior year. Richie saluted. “Yes, sir.”

The major started shaking his head. “I’ve been watching you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You may not know this, but I was at the swimming pool the other day, and I happened to witness you pushing your brother off the diving board.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He made the best of it, but you took him by surprise, and, Corporal Langdon, I don’t think you were joking.”

“I was, sir. He knew I was right there. He was ready for me. It may have looked like I surprised him, but that’s because he made a big deal of it. He was—”

“Are you contradicting the evidence of my own eyes, boy?”

“Yes, sir.” Richie said this snappily, his eyes straight ahead and his chin up.

“Finish what you were saying, then.”

“He was going to push me off. He knew it, I knew it. I was just quicker. For once.”

“You two like the rough stuff, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would you feel if one of you got hurt?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know?”

“We’ve never gotten hurt.” In the sense that someone had to go to the doctor, Richie thought.

“Well, think about it.”

“I will, sir.”

“No, think about it now.”

Richie thought about it, staring out at the sleet, which was making the windows of the major’s office look wet and cloudy. He often imagined Michael getting hurt. For instance, maybe the major would say that one of them would have to leave the school. This would be Michael, and on the day he was supposed to leave, Richie would take him somewhere and stab him to death. He said, “That would be bad, sir. I know that.”

“Boys can be heedless.”

Richie contemplated the roof of the building across the way. The roof was metal, and steep. If he and Michael were on the roof, Michael might look the other direction, just for a moment, and Richie could give him a push. It was three stories, and Michael would hit the pavement. He imagined that, headfirst.

“I have to punish you, Corporal Langdon. The rules say that, whether your behavior is intentional or out of carelessness, the suitable punishment will bring home to you the gravity of your actions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am not breaking you back to private, but I am warning you that that is a possibility.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tomorrow, and for each of the next three days, you will run six laps around the drill field, carrying your weapon and your pack.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At the completion of the six laps, you will do twenty-five push-ups. You will perform these exercises while the others are drilling, as an example to your fellow cadets.”

“Yes, sir.” Then this would lead to shouts and laughing back in the barracks. Michael always said, “Shit, you run like a girl!” Richie pressed his lips together.

“If that doesn’t do you some good, Corporal, I don’t know what will. But I have faith in you.” The major reached up and patted Richie on the shoulder. Richie guessed this was supposed to be a fatherly gesture. He stared straight ahead and practiced what he always practiced, which was being a blank brick wall and never letting on.

“All right, Corporal Langdon, that’ll do. You are dismissed.”

“Yes, sir.” Richie saluted again.