Early Warning

1953

THE FUNERAL WAS a riot of floral exuberance — not just lilies, but daffodils and tulips and sprays of apple and pear blossom. Frank Langdon sat with his daughter, Janny, about six pews back on the right; his wife, Andy, and their month-old twins, of course, couldn’t come all the way to Iowa. Janny, two and a half, was behaving herself. Frank took his hand off her knee, and she stayed quiet. The broken sounds of tears being suppressed rose all around him. Frank’s sister Lillian, her husband, Arthur, and their four kids were two pews ahead on the left. Mama was sitting in the front pew, staring straight ahead. Granny Elizabeth was sitting next to her, alone now — Grandpa Wilmer had died in the summer; in the intervening nine months, Granny had traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. His mother liked to cluck knowingly and say, “She’s blossomed, hasn’t she?”

His brother Joe’s baby, the same age as his twins, looked like she weighed what they did together. Joe’s wife, Lois, and her sister, Minnie, passed the baby back and forth to keep her quiet. Frank stared at Minnie for a moment. He had known her his whole life, walked to school with her for years, known always that she was on his side. Maybe she loved him still. Frank cleared his throat. Annie, the child’s name was. Janny couldn’t get enough of her — she talked to her and stroked her head if she got a chance. Across the aisle from Minnie were Frank’s brother Henry, his communist aunt Eloise, and Eloise’s daughter, Rosa. His sister Claire — fourteen, nineteen years to the day younger than Frank himself — kept turning her head and looking at Rosa, and why not? The girl was at her peak at twenty, severe and slender, with the look of a French actress. She made Henry, who was only months older, look like a girl, Claire look like a sheep, Andy, even glamorous Andy, look like a frump. Rosa was much more alluring than his aunt Eloise had ever been. Frank looked away. It was his father’s funeral.

After the interment (where Janny wanted to walk from grave to grave, smelling the daffodils in full bloom; Frank didn’t stop her), Frank calculated that he’d kept that sad smile on his face for eight solid hours. He held his drink, Scotch and soda — supplied by Minnie, who was now assistant principal at the high school and lived here, apparently comfortably, with Lois and Joe. Frank watched the neighbors come and go. This house, much grander than the house they’d grown up in, was industriously clean. The famous dining room with the sliding French doors that had been the envy of farmers around Denby, Iowa, all through Frank’s childhood, still had flowered wallpaper and heavy moldings. While he was pondering the double-hung windows, Arthur Manning came up to him, as if they were merely brothers-in-law who just happened to see each other at a family funeral. Frank often wondered if his sister Lillian had any idea of what her husband talked to Frank about, or the uses he put him to.

Arthur held Tina against his shoulder. She was three months now, wiry and active, as if she planned to head out the door any moment. Arthur’s tweed jacket was festooned with a folded diaper. Arthur jiggled and comforted a baby the way a great athlete hit a ball, as if his adept grace and evident reproductive success were the easiest thing in the world. Tina burbled and muttered, wide awake and not crying. Frank admired this.

Arthur said, “How are Richie and Michael doing?”

“Coming along,” said Frank.

“What are they now?”

“A month. But they were four and a half weeks early, so let’s call them newborns.”

“Precocious, then,” said Arthur, with a straight face, and Frank smiled a real smile. He said, “It’s a good thing Mama hasn’t seen them. She might suggest putting them down.”

Arthur’s eyebrows lifted.

“Mama’s strict about babies. If you aren’t good-looking, you could be carrying something contagious.”

Arthur kissed Tina on the forehead.

“Don’t worry, Arthur,” said Frank. “Tina would pass.”

Arthur laughed. But Frank could see it — even at his father’s funeral, Mama doled out words and smiles like stock options. Annie and Lillian were the preferred stock; Timmy, Arthur’s oldest at six, the class-A common stock; Debbie, five, Dean and Janny, both two and a half, the class-B common stock — not much of a risk, but not much of a dividend, either. Tina, who could still turn out to be blond, could rise in value or decline. As for Frank himself, well, he had taken his company private, and Mama didn’t have much of an investment there at all — a peck on the cheek, a reassurance that everything was going to turn out fine. Frank lowered his voice: “Have you talked with Eloise?”

Arthur jiggled Tina again. His voice was low, too. “We clinked glasses, but we haven’t exchanged actual words.”

“Were you congratulating each other on the death of old Joe?” Stalin had been dead about two weeks.

“I think we were.”

“Did your organization have anything to do with it?”

“Not that I know of,” said Arthur, seriously. “Just dumb luck, I suspect. But we will take the credit if it is offered to us.” He shifted Tina to the other shoulder. “Maybe he doesn’t matter, though. There’s no sign that things have changed or that their ambitions have waned.”

Frank nodded, then said, “You know what we said in the war? Two Russkies die, four more pop up. Why would Stalin be different?”

“You know that, when Hitler and Stalin were playing footsie, Hitler promised him Iran, right?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He did. Now Mossadegh hates the Brits so much that he’s heading that way, too. However Iran goes, so go the rest of them.”

“Truman would have let them have it,” said Frank. “He let them have Eastern Europe. Maybe Ike has more balls.”

“Zorin is in Tehran now. He was in Prague in ’48. Coups are what he does.”

Frank half expected Arthur to ask him to do something, but he couldn’t imagine what that would be. Jim Upjohn, the savviest investor Frank knew, had recently put a lot of money into Getty, but Getty was based in Kuwait and Arabia — nothing in Iran. Arthur said, “I’m ready for bedtime. How about you?”

Frank said, “Always.”

But dinner was served. Once they were seated, Janny between himself and Minnie, who kept putting bits of food on her plate, Janny seemed to cheer up. She ate everything Minnie gave her, and asked for more of the canned corn. There was plenty, as always — beef stew, beans, rolls, the newest possible potatoes, an angel-food cake. When everyone had eaten their fill, Joe told a story — the kind people tell at family dinners after a funeral, about the person who died. “One time, Papa sat me on our horse Jake, and then led me to the apple tree and had me pick apples. I would hand them to him, and he would put them in an old feed sack.”

“Oh, that was the Arkansas Black,” said Rosanna. “So good. Only cropped every two years, though.”

“When Walter showed up to propose to you, Rosanna,” said Eloise, “I remember he wore the strangest hat.”

“It was a derby!” exclaimed Rosanna. “Very stylish.”

“I was looking out the window. I thought he was wearing a turban.”

“How did that look like a turban?” said Rosanna.

“I didn’t know! I’d never seen a turban, either.”

Everyone laughed.

Minnie said, “What about the rattlesnake?”

“What rattlesnake?” said Joe.

Frank suddenly remembered this.

Minnie said, “Frankie and I were picking pole beans. We were maybe seven. There was a snake under the bottom of the fence, a step from where we were. Walter must have been watching us, because, as soon as I screamed, this long, forked stick came down and pinned the snake’s head right to the ground. We ran away. I don’t know what Walter did with the snake.”

Frank said, “He cut off the head with a hoe. I remember him saying that the cut-off head could still bite.”

Debbie said, “What do you remember, Mommy?”

“Well,” said Lillian, “one time when I was working at the drugstore, I was at the counter late at night, adding up what I had sold for the day, and someone sat next to me, and kind of leaned into me, so I moved over without looking up from my figures, and he leaned into me a little more, so I moved over a little more, and he elbowed me in the side, so I whipped around to tell that guy to get away from me, and it was my papa, grinning like mad that he had played a trick on me. We laughed all the way home.”

Debbie nodded. Frank had never thought of Walter as playful.

Henry said, “When I was about nine, we came out the back door in the morning, and Papa said, ‘Look at that.’ He was pointing at something. Then he moved his finger in a curve and said, ‘See that sheen?’ and it was a huge spiderweb covered with dew. It must have been ten feet across, and perfect.”

Claire started crying. Rosanna said, “We could have lost him long ago.” She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her apron.

Everyone sat up.

She nodded. “Papa fell into the well. He was standing on the cover of it — the old well — and it broke away. He flung out his arms to the sides and caught himself. That well out by the barn — that’s a deep one. He climbed out and never said a word about it until a couple of years ago. He told me he hung there, trying to decide. I asked him, ‘Walter, what were you trying to decide?’ He said he was trying to decide how to get out, but I’m sure he was trying to decide whether to get out, because I’m telling you, back in the Depression, it seemed like either a slow death or a quick one were the only choices.” She shook her head. “So — I tell myself we had twenty extra years. That’s what I tell myself.”

The memory of his father that came to Frank was of having his pants pulled down and being beaten with the belt — no memory of pain, only of Walter looming over him, the muscles of his forearm twitching and bulging, the words matching the rhythm of the blows, Frank’s close-up view of the hairs on the back of Walter’s hand.

—

LOUIS MACINTOSH LOOKED LIKE about ten people that Frank knew — that was, he was not tall, not fat, not thin, not handsome, not ugly, not dark, not light. He was not surprised to see Frank and Arthur when they showed up at dusk at Stewart Air Force Base, so Frank wondered what MacIntosh’s handler had told him. They boarded the plane, a De Havilland Comet, a sleek-looking airplane (Frank considered himself somewhat of an amateur expert — he worked for Grumman, and he had been taking flying lessons for a year). A simple blue stripe was painted along the fuselage, but no other identification mark. There were ten seats to each side of the aisle, and an unmarked canvas bag sat on each seat, belted in. Frank’s and Louis’s seats were behind the bags; the toilet was behind their seats. Frank did not have a suitcase, nor did Louis. After Arthur left, someone closed up the plane and someone flew it, but Frank didn’t meet or even glimpse the crew. When they took off, Frank saw only the edge of a dreary sunset over the dark lumps of the Catskill Mountains to the west.

Unusually for him, Frank got no feel for MacIntosh, but maybe that was because Frank was better at picking up details at a distance. They both sat quietly, the narrow aisle between them. The canvas sacks of money were uniform — clasps turned and locked, tops folded over, the outline of the square corners within just barely visible. Whoever had packed up what Arthur had said was ten million dollars, Frank thought, was an orderly person. Louis dozed off.

They flew east. The Comet was a quiet plane. Frank was interested to note how they’d installed the engines — not under the wings, which was what he was used to, but within them. And the wings themselves reminded him of some sort of swooping bird — a barn swallow, maybe.

When Louis woke up, he shook his head and looked around, then shifted in his seat with a groan. After a moment, he stood and went into the toilet. As soon as Frank heard the door lock, he was on his feet. He felt all the pockets of Louis’s jacket, which was draped over the back of his seat, and all the pockets of his coat, which was folded into the open compartment above their heads. No wallet — that would be in Louis’s pants. No briefcase. He looked in the pocket of the seat in front of Louis, and he felt under Louis’s seat. Nothing. He sat down again as the lock turned in the door of the toilet, and stared out the window. Below them, the vast Atlantic, black under the moonless cascades of stars.

Frank had intended to beg off this time. Arthur’s earlier “assignments” for Frank had been convenient and interesting, and getting to know Jim Upjohn might have been the best thing that had ever happened to him — Jim Upjohn was not only a good friend and a great connection, he was also endlessly eccentric, and fascinating as only a wealthy man at the center of what Aunt Eloise always called “the ruling class” could be. This job — making a very long-distance delivery — had no evident purpose (at least, evident to Frank) and seriously interfered with his day-to-day routine. As usual, the only payoff was giving Arthur what he wanted, and getting Arthur’s gratitude in return, and once Arthur got your attention, he could be very compelling.

But Frank’s resistance had been momentary. All he had to do was think of spending yet another evening at home with Andy, Janny, and the twins (not yet six months old, but six months felt like an eternity, and twins seemed like quintuplets if you never thought, waking or sleeping, about anything besides feeding, diapers, bathing, burping, crying). Andy was always either tending to one of them or out on the back deck, smoking a cigarette. She had risen to the occasion, no two ways about it — the nurses they’d hired for two months had taught her to order her every moment and the twins’ every moment; the boys were thriving, but at the expense of all that was idle or easy. After much hemming and hawing, he and Andy had bought a house in the winter. It was an airy, modern split-level with plenty of windows, contemporary furniture, and wall-to-wall carpet. It felt as bleak in the summer and the spring as it had in January, when they moved in. Doing this job for Arthur felt like playing hooky — returning to his younger, sharper, brighter, and more restless self. If only Andy — the Andy of two years ago — could have come along.

When they stopped to refuel in Sardinia, he wanted to walk around, smell the air. What was her name, that girl, the love of his life? Joan, it was. Joan Fontaine, he had called her. A whore. But it was foolish to daydream about a woman who was lost; instead, he sat quietly and waited for Louis to make a move. When the door opened, Louis stood up and scuttled forward. It was, indeed, Mediterranean light here. Hard to believe that he hadn’t been to Italy or France since the war. It was as if he had no idea that Italy would have changed or recovered since he last reconnoitered this cratered city or that blown-up house, looking for Jerries. He had treated stories of postwar renewal in newspapers as unsubstantiated rumors without even realizing it. The airfield was barren, just a long stretch of concrete with a rudimentary tower at one end, not far from the fuel tanks.

Louis hunched down the steps. Frank went into the toilet and pissed without flushing — flushing would release onto the tarmac. He went back to his seat and ate half of his sandwich. When Louis returned, he brought a couple of Cokes. Frank took one.

Louis sat down and buckled his seat belt. Frank said, “This reminds me of the war.”

“You in the European theater?”

Frank said, “Africa first, then Italy.” Someone closed the hatch. Frank could hear the crew shouting something.

“Pacific for me. Midway. Philippines. Nimitz was a great man.”

“Not so many cats to herd,” said Frank. “At the time, I was a big fan of Devers, and I couldn’t figure out why Ike stopped us at Strasbourg, but now I understand a little more about outrunning your fuel supply.”

Louis nodded, then said, “I think you had the prima donnas with you. Montgomery was a fool.”

They sniffed simultaneously. The plane began taxiing down the runway, and Frank turned to stare at the beach and then the ocean, so much paler here. Louis said, “Can’t say I’m all that comfortable in this aircraft.”

Frank turned and looked at him. “Why not?”

“That BOAC Calcutta crash.”

“I didn’t hear about a Calcutta crash.”

“No? Last May sometime. Everyone killed — crew, passengers, everyone.”

Frank again glanced out the window at the engine.

Louis said, “Here’s the creepy part, you ask me. Witnesses say, when the plane went into the Indian Ocean, it was on fire”—Frank couldn’t help looking at him now—“and the wings were gone. Just say this: let’s hope we don’t encounter a hurricane.”

“Let’s hope that,” said Frank. They were quiet. And it was odd that they were using an English plane, given the antipathy the Iranians were supposed to feel toward the Brits. On the other hand, it was the fastest plane Frank had ever been in — twice as fast, if you included takeoff and landing, as a DC-6. Frank looked out the window past the wings this time, and imagined a hundred thousand hundred-dollar bills fluttering in the air.

—

THE SUN WAS GOING down again — Frank checked his watch. For him it was about nine or ten in the morning, but here, where the Mediterranean ended and Asia began, it was darkening and reddening toward nightfall.

He had dropped off, but it had been a restful if alert sort of doze that not only reminded him of his time in North Africa but made him remember what it felt like to be twenty-one rather than thirty-three. He undid his seat belt and stood up, allowing himself to yawn. He cocked his head to the side and slid toward the bathroom, opened the door, went in. He gave himself a bit of time, but not too long, and then he stood up, flushed, waited another moment. He unlocked the door. Louis was sitting just as he had been most of the trip, rereading his copy of The Saturday Evening Post. Frank saw at once that the angle of the folded top of the third bag forward on the right — Frank’s side — was slightly different. And the middle of the three clasps had not been twisted as tightly as before. The other clasps were unchanged. This was why Arthur had hired him — to notice things. Frank sat down again. Louis paid no attention to him. Frank had no idea what Louis’s self-defense skills were. Frank also had no idea how his own skills might have deteriorated since he was actually twenty-one and could grab some guy’s fist almost before the guy decided to pop him one.

The Comet landed in a different kind of dark from American dark — much deeper, no glow of nearby cities or streetlights or even headlights making their way from one empty spot to another. Wherever they landed — it was August 13 here, almost the 14th — Frank knew they were somewhere in Iran, but it was not a base or an oil field. It was a quiet place, dry-smelling. The door opened. Three men came up the stairs and began carrying away the sacks. When the man picked up the last two of the ten sacks, Louis stood up to follow him. Frank stood up to follow Louis. Louis had his jacket on, and when he came to the top of the stairs, he slipped into his coat, but that didn’t stop Frank from noting the rectangular outline just barely discernible against Louis’s chest.

At the bottom of the stairs, Louis broke into an easy trot. The three men with bags were dim in the dark, almost out of sight. Frank was on Louis in a moment, grabbing his wrist and pinning it high and tight behind his back. Louis grunted. Frank said, “I can break your arm, Louis, easy as pie.” Louis twisted, and Frank lifted the arm even higher. Louis bent over, and Frank reached around with his left hand and slipped it inside Louis’s coat and jacket. He felt the stiff rectangle and pulled it out. There was only one. He stepped away from Louis and flipped through the packet. Louis stumbled forward, caught himself, but didn’t do anything other than press and rub his right shoulder with his left hand. He said, “You dislocated it.”

“Want me to put it back in?”

“What the fuck do you care, Freeman? It’s not your dough.”

Frank smiled. Arthur had rebaptized him yet again.

A car pulled up — something nondescript and old, but heavy. The driver got out and opened the trunk, and the ten bags of money were piled in it. The trunk was closed. The driver then opened the back door on the passenger’s side, and Louis got in. The driver closed the door. The driver had a beard. He didn’t say anything. The three men who had transferred the bags came over and stood rather close to Frank — as close, say, as New Yorkers would stand, closer than Iowans would stand. He felt mildly uncomfortable. After about two minutes, the passenger door of the car opened again, and Louis got out. The man to Frank’s left gestured for him to get in. Frank got in. The door closed with a thud.

The fellow in the car was wearing a U.S. Army uniform, two stars on his collar. He held out his hand, and Frank shook it. “Mr. Freeman. Thanks for your help. Arthur speaks highly of you, and, my Lord, we couldn’t do a thing or take a step without Arthur. If this shebang goes over, we have Arthur to thank, once again.” He cleared his throat. “Looking iffy at this point, I must say. Why this had to come to a head in August is a mystery to me. Must be the hidden hand of the Soviet menace. You got anything to report?”

Frank shook his head.

The man stared at him, the hardness of his gaze belying his casual tone. But how long had Frank been telling lies? As long as he could talk. Finally, Frank said, “Routine operation, sir.”

The man nodded. His jacket strained over the pistol in his armpit. Frank waited for him to hold out his hand for the packet of bills, but he didn’t. He rubbed his forehead, as if he had a headache. He said, “Well, then. MacIntosh is staying with me here. I believe you are going back via Majorca. To Cuba? I can’t remember. I had some food put on the plane. Good luck to you.”

The man knocked on the ceiling of the car, and the passenger door opened. When Frank got out, he was alone beside the plane. Louis and the three men had been taken away, and now the big car drove off, too. It was dead quiet. Even the air was still. The only movement was the flight of two huge birds, probably some kind of vulture — they landed maybe thirty yards away and picked over a carcass for a minute, then lumbered into the air again. Frank had seen vultures before, but as he watched, something about the air and the light entered him and terrified him. The crew of the plane could easily shoot him and leave him here; he would be bones in a day or two. But that wasn’t it, exactly. He looked upward, at the endless stars across the flat sky, and recognized nothing — not the Milky Way or the Big Dipper or even, for a moment, that dishlike sliver that was the moon. For thirty-three years he had thought that the unknown was a friendly thing. Now that idea vanished in a millisecond. He swallowed hard, then ran his hand down the side of his trousers and felt the packet of money in his pocket. His assignment. It was reassuring.

By the time they landed at Stewart, his watch had run down. Arthur was there, as if he had never left, at the bottom of the stairs.

“Nice plane,” said Frank.

“Something borrowed,” said Arthur. Frank took Arthur’s right hand and slapped the packet of hundred-dollar bills into it. Arthur barely glanced at them, just put them in his pocket. He said, “You met McClure?”

“Two-star general?”

Arthur nodded. “Tell me everything he said.”

“Well, he thanked me for coming, and—”

“No, I mean his exact words.”

Frank repeated all of what the general had said to him, understanding at once that this was why Arthur had sent him — his eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to the government, he had no idea and knew Arthur wouldn’t tell him. Nevertheless, he did ask, “What’s the money for?”

Arthur said, “Popular uprising.” Frank thought he saw the ghost of a smile, but only that.

Arthur dropped him outside the split-level just at dawn. He picked up the newspaper, eased in through the lower entrance, then went up to the kitchen. All was quiet for once. On page two, the paper announced that Mossadegh had won the election in Iran. There was no mention of unrest, but as he watched the coup unfold — Mossadegh was out by the end of the week — Frank couldn’t stop thinking of that human cipher Louis MacIntosh, who was exactly the sort of person Frank would never have entrusted with buying a gallon of milk at the grocery store.

—

WHEN HE GOT BACK to Iowa City for the fall semester, Henry Langdon went to a place on Iowa Avenue that sold old things and looked and looked until he found a wooden box with a lock (and a key) for storing his letters from his cousin Rosa (at Berkeley) and carbon copies of his own to her. His were typed, but hers were handwritten. The question of typing had posed a real dilemma — you wanted your personal papers to be handwritten, because they were more, well, personal that way, and also because future literary scholars (the career Henry was preparing himself for) would be able to get a better sense of your personality and character from your handwriting than they would from typing. But it was almost impossible to make a good carbon copy by hand, and it was easy with the typewriter. The box was cheap but roomy. In it, he placed the letters as they had been written — his, hers, his, hers — then, on top of them, that Indian-head gold dollar his father had given him, eleven years ago now. The date on the dollar was 1888. Looking at the dollar, Henry wondered if his joy at being back in Iowa City was some kind of betrayal, especially since here he didn’t think of his father or the farm more than once or twice a day. (“And a good thing, for heaven’s sake,” his mother would say.) He thought of “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” he thought of the Venerable Bede, he thought of Defoe, he thought of Rosa Rosa Rosa.

He hadn’t seen Rosa since his father’s funeral in the spring, but they wrote twice a week. He hadn’t counted on Rosa’s visiting Denby (meaning “village of the Danes”—it gave him a bona-fide sense of pleasure to know that), or on himself traveling from Iowa to California, so he couldn’t say that he was disappointed, exactly, not to have seen her.

The tone of her letters was satirical but good-natured, always affectionate. She now referred to her mother, his aunt Eloise, as “Heloise,” never “Mom,” and “Heloise’s” adventures were a source of amusement—“Tuesday, Heloise ran out of gas on the Bay Bridge, and lo and behold, she had left her purse on the kitchen table, so she waited in traffic with a piece of paper in her hand (‘OUT OF GAS PLEASE HELP’) and who should stop to pick her up but Gary Snyder, who is a poet, maybe our age. He was riding a motorcycle, and Heloise got on the back and rode to the gas station! She told me he was darling. I am guessing she is going to fix me up with him any day now.”

Henry’s own letters left something to be desired, he thought. They were detailed and earnest, and quite often he found himself going on too long about things that excited him, like how the system of Roman roads in England dictated subsequent linguistic boundaries, even a thousand years after the end of the Roman Empire (another difficulty with carbon copies — no erasing). But she wrote faithfully; her letters were as long as his and as frequent, and though she often talked about meeting various guys at coffee shops or poetry readings (everything free — no Hollywood trash movies), she never mentioned any name in more than two letters.

Henry knew that Rosa knew that Henry loved her. He signed his letters, “Love, Henry.” She signed her letters, “Yours, Rosa.” For six weeks, he dreaded Thanksgiving, when she and Aunt Eloise would be coming to the farm and he would have to see her.

On the Wednesday he left for Denby, he spent the whole morning deciding what clothes to take, aware all the while of his roommate’s bag beside the door, full of dirty undershorts heading back to Dubuque for their once-a-semester laundering.

Rosa was wearing what she always did — black shoes, black pants, black sweater — though her dark hair was cut in a different style, shorter than Henry’s now, showing the nape of her neck. Her neck was long — he hadn’t noticed that before. Or the mole on her cheekbone, or that her fingernails were bitten, or that her eyes were brown. They had exchanged 160 letters, counting both hers and his, and he might not have recognized her on the street. She hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks, and he stood stiffly. I’m such an Iowan, he thought miserably.

Thanksgiving Day itself was like the funeral had been — everyone on their best behavior, sitting at the dining-room table for a long time, and lots of talk about his father. Papa was in every room, every sentence, every holiday dish. In an odd way, he was in everyone’s face, even the faces of those who had never been said to look like him. Every face except Rosa’s. Maybe that was why Henry kept staring at her.

Henry hadn’t expected to hold Rosa’s hand, or to sit next to her; he’d imagined a conversation about Waiting for Godot, which Rosa was reading, or Paradise Lost, which Henry was reading. That hadn’t happened by Friday morning, which was maybe why Henry was still lolling in bed when Aunt Eloise came over from Granny Mary’s by herself for breakfast. Since his supremely orderly, book-filled room was off the kitchen, he could hear them quite well. Almost the first thing his mom said was “How does she expect to find a husband, dressed like that? And with that hair. Look at it, it is so short.” His aunt Eloise was seven years younger than his mother, but it could have been twenty, given Rosanna’s bossy tone. Henry covered his mouth with his hand so as not to make any noise.

Aunt Eloise said, “Come on, Rosanna. She’s twenty. I’m not worried. And anyway, you know who Audrey Hepburn is, don’t you? That look is all the rage.”

“I’d had Frank by the time I was twenty.”

“Look how that turned out.” Eloise coughed. Henry knew she was joking, and could imagine his mother waving her hand. “Anyway, I was almost twenty-five when I met Julius. You don’t take the first one who comes along anymore.” Point to Eloise, thought Henry.

Now there was a silence, and Henry eased himself upward on his bed to hear better. Eloise went on. “In a big city, you have to…well, you can, pick and choose.”

“You picked and chose Julius?” Point to Rosanna. Henry bit his lip. He didn’t remember his uncle Julius very well, except as having that delightful English accent and imposing, articulate English manner. Henry would have picked him, too, he thought. But Julius had died in the war, early, in the failed invasion of Dieppe, when Henry wasn’t quite ten.

“I did,” said Eloise. “If you want to know, yes, I pursued Julius, not the other way around. You thought Julius was strange, but I thought he was elegant. From the first time I saw him.”

Their voices were still good-natured, or at least level.

“Well,” said Rosanna, after a moment, “he was argumentative.”

“I know that,” said Eloise. “But, then, that was what I was used to — growing up with Mama and Papa, and living here.”

Point to Eloise, thought Henry.

A chair got pushed back, and then, a moment later, the spigot turned on, so it was his mother who’d gone to the sink. Henry picked up his book, and then Eloise said, “Ma knew I had another friend. I’m surprised she never told you.”

The sound of the water stopped. Rosanna said, “No, she didn’t. What happened to him?”

And Eloise said, “He went back to his wife.”

Henry thought he might really have to wander into the kitchen just to see the looks on their faces.

“Did Ma know about that?”

“She knew everything. She gave me advice.”

After a moment, Rosanna said, “What in the world was Ma’s advice?”

“Did I know where to find some Queen Anne’s lace? And did I know the difference between that and poison hemlock?”

“Everyone knows the difference who was raised on a farm.”

Now there was a silence, and Henry thought about the fact that maybe he did not know the difference. Finally, Rosanna said, “Did you ever have to act on Ma’s advice?”

Eloise said nothing; maybe she shook her head, or nodded, but her answer was not for Henry to know.

In the end, Henry had to settle for mostly admiring Rosa from afar. Every so often she gave him a look or a smile. She laughed when he laughed, and teased him once or twice. To Eloise, she said, “Don’t you like Henry’s sweater? It’s so classic.” She called him “Cousin Henry” a few times, as a joke, and then it turned out she was reading a book of that name, by Anthony Trollope, so they did have one tête-à-tête, though the only Trollope Henry had read was Orley Farm, extra-credit for his Victorian-literature class. The best thing was that, the day after he got back to Iowa City, there was a letter in his mailbox, postmarked Denby, from Rosa. She wrote, “Dear Henry, I’m sitting at the dining-room table, here at Uncle Joe’s. Baby crying. You think I am doing calculus problems but really, I’m watching you. You are reading something with gold lettering on the spine. Every so often you look at Heloise. I wonder what you’re thinking….” It went on for three pages, and it was signed, “Love, Rosa.”