Early Warning

1975

Dear Jesse—

I think I told you about a kid I knew in the army — he was from Oklahoma, but I met him at Fort Leonard Wood, which is down in the Ozarks. Now, I was a pretty good shot, but this kid was a phenom. I had a sergeant there at Fort Leonard Wood, and he was such a perfect and complete sort of sergeant that I don’t remember his name. Anyway, he’d heard about snipers in the marines. He wanted to toughen Lyman and me up, so one day, he took us down to a river that ran through a remote part of the base, and he got us to strip down, carry our weapons into the river, and look out for game in the trees or on the banks. We were supposed to go along for an hour — he would meet us downstream and see what we got. The key was to move as quietly as possible. Lyman thought he was going to shoot himself some catfish, maybe, and he did get a beaver, and I got a raccoon on the shore. Lyman, who was very observant, then pointed out that there was a cottonmouth swimming right along with us, about ten feet away. Now, I’d seen a cottonmouth or two, and they usually ran maybe three feet, but this one was nearly five feet long and as big around as your arm — an old fellow and wily. I thought I would shoot it, but Lyman wanted to watch it, so we slowed down and kept our eyes open. Pretty soon, the snake crossed our path and slithered up on the right-hand shore, where it did something I never saw a snake do before, it slithered over to the carcass of a deer and began to eat it. We didn’t kill the snake, in the end — while we were watching the snake feed, Lyman noticed a bobcat peer out at the snake and the deer from behind a tree. We stood in the water and waited, and after a few moments, the bobcat eased out, his teeth bared and his hackles raised. I’m guessing he thought he could scare the snake away from what might have been his kill. But as soon as it emerged and slid two steps toward the deer, Lyman pulled the trigger and shot the bobcat. The snake coiled up quick and started looking around and opening his mouth — that’s why it’s called a cottonmouth, it’s got white inside its mouth. Lyman, I know, could have shot it in the head. But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t let me. I guess he sympathized with it, and respected it for getting so big and old. Lyman was the soldier who stepped on a mine in Italy — it took us four hours to carry him down the mountain. He lost his leg in the end, but he came home, which many others did not.

Got to go,

Uncle Frank

—

IN THE SPRING, almost six months after the funeral, Lillian drove from McLean to Denby to clean out the house. She could see concern flicker across their features as she said to Arthur, and then to Debbie (who was four months’ pregnant), that she didn’t want any company — such a long trip, was it safe, where would she stop — but she shook her head decisively. She had already written Minnie, Lois, and Claire, using the words “Don’t touch anything,” and they had not, though Claire wrote back, “It is such a black hole of stuff, are you sure?”

“Don’t touch anything.”

But it was a way of preserving the house for a few months, because Joe and Frank were clear: the house had to come down. Two of the basement walls were bowing inward, and the TV room was separating from the main structure. The stairs had never been up to code — like climbing a ladder, how Walter, or Rosanna at her age, had…

“Don’t touch anything.”

So they didn’t touch anything, and though it was dusk and a long way from South Bend, where she had spent the previous night, Lillian drove into the old driveway and parked. She had forgotten the house would be dark; Joe had, of course, shut off the electricity. She was a little struck by its air of being a solid object. Joe had made sure that nothing happened to it. Wasn’t that a frightening thing from her childhood in the Depression — abandoned houses with the windows smashed, and then the birds got in and built nests, and the wasps and bees. But Joe would never allow anything like that.

She opened her car door and put her foot in a rut in the driveway. Running along the east end of the house was the bed of daffodils, now finished, and among them the first green spears of tulip leaves thrusting upward. Back in Virginia, they were already through tulips, and even the irises were tall, though they hadn’t blossomed. Magnolias. Her mother had never gotten a magnolia tree to grow here. She got out of the car and closed the door and waited in the silence for a few more seconds, though what she was waiting for, she had no idea.

Henry said only that Rosanna seemed more than fine when she arrived in Chicago: talkative, and pleased with herself. Went in to take a rest, which was certainly understandable — it was a long drive — and then he had heard something but he didn’t know what. At the funeral, everyone had agreed, what a good death, you had to go sometime, she had retained her faculties to the end, and she had eaten whatever she pleased whenever she pleased. In short, life was doing what you wanted to do in the way you wanted to do it, and may she rest in peace. Even this new Pastor Campbell, supposedly quite strict, had stood there at the pulpit and talked about Rosanna’s showing evidence of God’s grace in her generosity of spirit. Then they laid her next to Walter, and soon they would tear down the house, fill in the foundation, plow the field, and plant the beans; there was a completeness to it that Lillian knew her mother would have considered right and just. No one, not even the dead person herself, minded this death as much as Lillian did. She went up the stairs and opened the door (when had it ever been locked?).

Lillian’s eyes adjusted, and she saw how Rosanna had left the room, the afghan folded over the back of the sofa, the September issue of McCall’s on the side table, the TV Guide on top of it, dated the week of September 30. Beside the sofa, Rosanna’s basket of yarn, half-skeins and balled-up remnants in pinks and blues on the top. Thrust among them was a pattern book open to a pineapple-lace pattern. Lillian couldn’t knit a twenty-stitch row without dropping five stitches, but Debbie had already knitted the baby two hats, a pair of booties, and a blanket. And her husband, Hugh, the only handy intellectual Lillian had ever seen, was building a cradle based on a model from Amish country. Hugh’s specialty was the history of Dutch Reformed settlement in America, which was why, Lillian thought, he could build and think at the same time. But he was systematic and literal-minded, and though he loved Debbie very much, Lillian had hoped her daughter would end up with someone handsomer and more romantic, someone, in fact, more like Arthur. Tina had a boyfriend, too — another art student, who specialized in giant paintings of galaxies, where each dot of paint represented a star. Tina had explained to Lillian that impossibility was the sign of art. She herself was doing collages of torn food packaging made to look like animals.

The darkness wasn’t dark anymore. Lillian sat down in the rocking chair and gazed around the room. She suddenly remembered Rosanna sitting in this very chair, also at twilight, softly singing the song that Lillian knew from her earliest days was “her” song—“God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall.” “He paints the lily of the field, / Perfumes each lily bell; / If He so loves the little flow’rs, / I know He loves me well.” In those days, Rosanna had had a light, tuneful voice, and Lillian had asked for it over and over, as children do. Now she hummed it, and realized that she had lived an unusual life for only one reason, and that reason was that she’d known true love from the day she was born. Then she handed herself off, as if by instinct, to Arthur, passing through town, and he had also loved her truly and faithfully.

Looking around the room, though, tired and sad that this space was doomed, she understood that Rosanna’s love had required a sacrificial victim, and that had been Mary Elizabeth. No one knew how Mary Elizabeth had come to fall backward and hit her head on the corner of the egg crate. Rosanna said that there had been a simultaneous flash of lightning and clap of thunder — Mary Elizabeth, who was dancing about, was startled, slipped, and fell. Andy, though, had said years ago, in that questioning way she had, that Frank took the blame — he’d been arguing with Joe about something and scuffing his feet on the rag rug; when it shifted, Mary Elizabeth fell backward. Not daring to ask Frank, Lillian had once asked Joe, who said he didn’t think that Frank, at five and a half, would have been able to move the rug — it had been a heavy thing. All he remembered was that, when Rosanna and Walter talked about it to the boys, Rosanna had said that it was the hand of God taking his beloved child to himself, and Walter had nodded in agreement. Joe didn’t know what Walter might have said when the boys were older. What had Mary Elizabeth been like? Joe shook his head. He barely remembered her — he was only three and a half when she died.

The ghost of a little girl, Lillian thought, even a toddler, would be completely formed and full of individuality. She would have a way of reaching upward and opening and closing her fist when she wanted something. She would have a rhyme that she asked for again and again — this little piggy went to market — and she would smile and nod when you pronounced it. She would have a characteristic way of balancing herself on her little feet, a precipitous style of walking so that every step was a dare accepted. She would plop down on her little bottom and throw her arms in the air, laughing. She would drag her rag-rabbit around by the ear, and chew meditatively on one of his feet, no matter how often her mother took it gently out of her mouth and said, “No, dirty.” The ghost of a little girl would stand by her baby sister’s cradle and stare at her, never touching her, but wondering about her, about how she came to be, whom she belonged to. The ghost of a little girl would not necessarily be wise — she might spend her ghostly existence lost in confusion.

Lillian knew that there was no ghost of Mary Elizabeth, but now that she had conceived of her, she closed her eyes and invited her to come closer, step by step. She opened her hand that was resting on the arm of the chair, and she invited the child to take it. Then she said, “Thank you.”

It was Jesse who found her. He was home for the weekend, walking back from tracking a flock of turkeys. He was carrying a rifle, but he hadn’t fired it — he just wanted to practice getting close to them. He saw the car in the driveway, and the front door ajar. Lillian must have dozed off; she woke up when he said, “Hello?” He was a tall, graceful boy, slender but broad-shouldered. She said, “Jesse, it’s me, don’t shoot!” and then they laughed. She only thought of Mary Elizabeth again when they were going down the steps. But it was true, she felt calmer, and much more ready to listen to Lois, Joe, and Minnie divvy up the contents of the house. “Are you sure you don’t want some of the furniture?” Lois said, “There isn’t much of interest. The dishes are so plain. I can put them in the shop. Min, you should ask Henry if you can take his books to the school library. There are some nice ones there.” And so on. But, really, Lillian only wanted the yarn remnants for Debbie, the afghan for herself, and the shelf of old books in her pink bedroom for the new baby.

—

ALREADY BEFORE NOON, it was so hot that you had to tiptoe across the concrete to get to the edge of their swimming pool or you would burn your feet. Claire had put a shirt on Gray even though she had slathered him twice with the sunscreen Paul insisted the boys use. A mist seemed to hang in the air, and the pool wasn’t refreshing. Claire took a sip of her Coke. Paul kept glancing at Gray playing with the float in the shallow end. He was a good swimmer, though — they had taken both boys to the Y from the age of five, and Gray, ten, had been on a swim team there all the previous winter. Brad was inside. Claire was thinking she would make sandwiches for lunch from the leftover baked chicken. Paul was sitting up on the chaise longue, watching Gray. He said, “That land is worth twenty-five hundred dollars per acre, which is over two million bucks.”

“What does that mean to me?” said Claire, pushing her sunglasses up on her nose and consciously pulling her chin downward so as not to inflame Paul further. She had been half an hour late to pick up Gray and Brad at day camp the previous Tuesday, and, not reaching Claire at home, the school had called Paul’s office. He and she had shown up just at the same time, and it didn’t help that, upon seeing both of them, Brad burst into tears.

“Some of that is yours. Joe can get a loan and buy you out. The banks are crazy to lend these days. A hundred grand — I could put it in the stock market.” He rattled his glass and ate a piece of ice.

“They’re crazy to lend? Rusty Burke told me that getting their loan was horrible. Anyway, interest rates are seven and a half percent. Why would I ask Joe to pay five hundred dollars a month or more so that you can play the stock market? Five hundred dollars is more than our mortgage payment.” Minnie had told her on Monday that Joe, Frank, and Gary, the last Vogel cousin interested in farming, were already tiptoeing around this issue of who owned what and what would be done with it; Claire did not want to get involved. However, every time Paul thought of that two million bucks, he decided not to investigate where she had been at four o’clock Tuesday afternoon, and why, when he saw her, her hair was uncombed. In fact, she had overslept her nap, but she was too annoyed with him to confess.

He adjusted his hat so that his bald spot was covered, then pressed his finger into the skin of his forearm, checking for sunburn. Claire had to wonder why they had built the swimming pool to begin with. He said, “At the very least, if there is value, it’s important to diversify the investment, so as not to lose it all if the market plunges.”

“The market? The market for what?”

“Farmland has gone up thirty percent each of the last two years. That’s a bubble. Bubbles pop.”

She sat up, set her feet on the concrete, then leaned toward Paul and put her face right up to his, which she knew he hated. She said, “Paul, it’s not yours.”

He pulled back, but he said, “It’s ours. It’s the boys’. Do you think an Ivy League education is cheap? We have to start saving now. There’s no telling what those tuitions are going to be in eight years.”

Claire lay back again. Gray had abandoned the float, and was now bouncing up and down on the end of the diving board — another danger. If Paul had had girls, Claire often thought, he would not have had to make men out of them. She said, “There’s no telling whether they can get in at this point.”

“They can get in,” said Paul, evidently aghast that his sons’ own mother had so little faith in their intellect.

Claire placed her palms together, bent her legs, and put her hands between her knees, telling herself: Say nothing. Say nothing. That Paul made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year in his practice, and that his father, who was seventy-eight, would certainly leave him a nice portfolio, must remain unsaid. That his parents’ six-bedroom English Tudor in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was worth $150,000 must remain unsaid (though Paul had said this very thing a few weeks earlier). Their own house, with pool and three-car garage, was worth eighty. She adopted a wheedling tone: “Come on, sweetie. You didn’t use to be so interested in money. You knew you weren’t marrying into the landed gentry.”

Paul smiled, but then he said, “I hadn’t met your brother then.”

“Joe is a farmer, not landed gentry.”

“I mean Frank.”

“Frank has plenty of money.” Claire meant that he didn’t need any more, but she saw immediately that what Paul meant was that Frank was to be simultaneously mistrusted and emulated. She sighed. She had come to think that there was a golden mean for money. Around that mean, which Claire estimated to be about five thousand a month, you worried less than if you had too little, and less than if you had too much. There was space in your inner life for other interests.

She was thinking of this because of Eliot. Eliot was older than Paul — fifty-five, he said — and balder, too — his well-shaped pate had a neatly trimmed pepper-and-salt fringe. He talked more than Paul, but he never talked about money, never talked about his children or his ex-wife, never talked about what people should or could be doing that they were not at present doing (one of Paul’s favorite topics). He did not talk about hippies or weather. He talked about books. His favorite phrase was “Did you ever read,” as in “Did you ever read Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’?”; “Did you ever read ‘The Rocking Horse Winner,’ that’s by Lawrence?”; “Say, did you ever read ‘Bitter-Sweet’?” And then, “ ‘Ah, my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like.’ ”

She’d known Eliot now for six weeks, since she’d met him at the car wash on Hickman. He’d been carrying a book then, too, reading while waiting for his car to emerge. She’d gotten his attention by saying she’d read that book—The Golden Bowl—though of course she never had. It was by her bed now, however, along with two of his favorites, The Good Soldier and The Plague. Just last night, Paul had said, “Why are you reading those books?”

“They’re supposed to be good.”

“Who says?”

She almost told him.

Now he got up and went over to the thermometer. “Ninety-seven in the shade. Gray should come in. I’m going to close down the house. We need to relax and cool off for half an hour before ingesting any food.”

She was not going to sleep with Eliot — he was much too old and reminded her of teachers she’d had at North Usherton High. Besides, Dr. Sadler had to remain solitary and pristine in his position as her great love. He would be thirty-six now, and according to Paul was married. Another thing to be grateful for — that he had vanished at the apex of his beauty. But she would keep her date for coffee with Eliot tomorrow at ten. She would have the last chapters of The Golden Bowl finished, too, and they would discuss them intelligently, just as if they were in London, or at least in New York City, and not in Des Moines.

Claire picked up her towel. Paul said, “It’s all very well to be sentimental about your family and about the farm, but you have to be realistic, too. You understand that, don’t you?” And then he stepped closer. “Don’t you?” She nodded, the way she always did.

—

TO SAVE ON heating oil, Janet and Marla had closed the door of her room and wrapped themselves in blankets. Marla was in the chair, Janet on the bed. They were reading The Madwoman of Chaillot, their third session, and they were nearing the end of the first act. Two of Marla’s plays had been put on, the best one, a one-act called Cedar Rose Park, by the Berkeley Rep. She went to the Temple with Janet every Sunday, but she complained about it and swore she was going to write a play about Reverend Jones called Loudmouth.

Though she didn’t like the Giraudoux play very much, Marla always wanted to finish. She read, “Dans les trois cent cinquante. Nous n’enverrons qu’aux chefs.” Her pronunciation had gotten better, but it wasn’t perfect, so Janet repeated the line slightly more fluently, then waited while Marla pondered it for a moment before translating it as “In the three hundred and fifty. We will not send the heads.” This was correct as far as Janet was concerned, so she nodded and Marla read the next line, “Qui va les distribuer? Surtout pas le sourd-muet! On lui rend en moyenne quatre-vingt-dix-neuf enveloppes sur cent!” Marla was now twenty-four, and seriously worried that she was getting too old to make her way in France. She was to turn twenty-five at the end of March, so she planned to leave by the first of February, to take advantage of the two months of her remaining youth when she arrived in Paris. She had gotten her passport; her savings amounted to $1,498.76. She planned to put aside another two hundred in the two months before she left, and with luck, she would find a wealthy Frenchman to take her on when she got there. This aspect of the whole thing Janet could not help her with, but she had no doubt that the willing Frenchman would present himself — Marla was as careful of her appearance as any Frenchwoman Janet had ever seen, and much more friendly. She corrected Marla’s translation, and Marla went on to the next line. One thing they had done in the summer was to translate Cedar Rose Park into French — not writing it down, but saying it aloud. Marla was proud; she did not want to be less than perfect from the moment of her arrival.

The door opened, and Lucas slipped into the room. Marla kept reading, but Janet made a smooch and waved him over to the bed. Then she did what she could never resist doing, which was to press herself into Lucas as tightly as she could. His skin tonight was chilly enough to make her shiver. When Marla finished reading, Janet said, “You are cold, baby.” He kissed her, kicked off his shoes, pulled one edge of the blanket around himself, and said, “Keep going. I like to hear it.”

Marla read, “Vous, Fabrice, vous me reconduisez. Si, si, vous allez venir. Vous êtes encore tous pâle. J’ai de la vieille chartreuse. J’en bois un verre tous les ans, et l’année dernière j’ai oublié. Vous le boirez.” Janet corrected her pronunciation of boirez. Her translation was excellent. Janet nodded. Lucas took the book out of her hand, stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “Makes no sense to me.” He gave the book back to her.

Marla said, “Really, Lucas, you should act. You look good, you don’t give a shit about performing in front of an audience, and you’ve got style.”

Lucas shrugged.

“Start now. You’re perfect. Pisses me off, you wasting your talents while the rest of us work our asses flat.”

Lucas laughed. “Show me when that happens.”

Marla read the next line. Cat and Marla disagreed about how Janet should handle Lucas.

Marla said he had stage presence, which was rare in a drummer, too bad he had to sit at the back, because the lead singer ought to have a bag over his head, he was so ugly. Lucas was way out ahead of all of them, but he didn’t have a lick of ambition, “and that seems fine to you now, but give it ten years,” she often said.

Cat, who had given up all her acting ambitions and was going to community college in marketing, had a list as long as your arm of musicians who thought they were going to hit the jackpot, and of course never did. She thought Janet should get Lucas to go for his GED and then learn something like accounting or library science. She said, “He smiles, white people aren’t afraid of him — he should make the best of what he’s got.”

Janet turned the page. Almost the end of the first act. Lucas leaned against her while they kept reading, correcting, translating. By the time they were finished, Janet thought he was asleep, but Marla wasn’t going to allow that. She tossed down her book and jumped out of her blanket. She went over to the bookcase, stared for a moment, then chose a volume. She dropped it in Lucas’s lap, and he sat up a little bit. She said, “Let’s try it.”

“Let’s try what?”

“Let’s try you taking a little advice.”

Janet did not think that Lucas was looking for someone to tell him what to do. She could see it when he was watching Reverend Jones — when Reverend Jones was saying something he agreed with, his face looked receptive, and when Reverend Jones was saying something he disagreed with, his face looked blank. He was like a radio that could receive only what it wanted to receive. His face went blank now. Janet took a little breath and held it in.

Marla leaned toward him, took the book, and opened it to a page. It was the first page of Miss Julie, from a book of one-act plays Janet had studied in college. She said to Janet, “You be Miss Julie, I’ll be Kristin, and Lucas can be Jean.” Then she read the stage directions in a clear voice and handed the book to Lucas. Lucas stared at it and handed it back. Since she had her hand on his arm, Janet could feel it go tense. “Oh, come on,” said Marla. “It’s my favorite game. Just a page. Or two.”

There was a feeling Janet hated — the feeling of looking back and forth between two people who did not agree. She glanced at Marla, who was smiling, and then down at the blanket, which she smoothed over her knee. The room no longer seemed cold.

Lucas cleared his throat. As far as Janet knew, Lucas didn’t have a temper, but she was beginning to get nervous, as if he did have a temper. Marla, however, was never intimidated. She said, “Just say the first line, ‘Miss Julie’s crazy again tonight; absolutely crazy.’ ”

He said the line in a natural way.

Marla took the book and said, “ ‘Oh, so you’re back, are you?’ ” She made it sound a little teasing, as if she was glad to see him and would be more glad in a minute or two. She again handed Lucas the book.

Lucas stared at the far wall for a space, then said, “I’m not into this. I hate plays.”

“Why is that?” said Marla.

“People keep talking and talking, and if they don’t start yelling eventually, the audience falls asleep. I can only take so much talking.”

Janet realized that this was true.

Marla was not to be deterred by mere theory. She said, “Just read the speech.” The two of them stared at one another for a long moment, Marla looking more and more like a teacher — a French teacher, stylish and haughty, but a teacher nonetheless. And then she shifted, actress that she was — a smile burst out that was both saucy and cheerful, and she said, “You could do me a favor, Mr. Jordan, just this once.”

Lucas’s gaze went back to the page. After a minute of silence, he looked back at Marla and said the speech, shaping it, giving it warmth. Then he put down the book, took Janet’s hand, and set Janet’s hand on top of the book. He held it there. Marla said, “My Lord, you are stubborn. But I thought you’d be good, and you are. Just because I’m telling you what to do doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”

Yes, it does, thought Janet.

Lucas smiled his brilliant and charismatic smile. No wonder Marla wanted him to act — if he was in your play, audiences would come back for more and more and more.

There was a long silence, during which Marla sat down again and picked up the French play. She said another line, Janet corrected her, and she said it again. Lucas leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. With her hand still on the book underneath his, Janet and Marla finished The Madwoman of Chaillot. As soon as they had read the last line, Marla stood up, leaned toward Lucas, and said, “I’m going to write a play just for you. A one-act.”

Lucas opened his eyes and smiled, then said, “No dialogue, though.”

“You think I can’t do that?”

“We’ll see,” said Lucas.

Marla zipped out the door and down the hall as if she was going to get started that very night.

In the eighteen months they had been seeing each other, Janet had been careful of boundaries, as her mother would have said, not because Lucas was touchy, but because she was always careful of boundaries. As a result, though, she knew nothing about his boundaries. She, perhaps, didn’t have any, at least where he was concerned. He was three years younger than she was, but six inches taller, five years less educated, but 50 percent better-looking, 20 percent less self-confident, but twice as talented, half as well traveled but half again more experienced. Really, they were equal in no way, and her support of the civil-rights movement told her nothing about how to manage herself or him. She looked at her watch. It was after ten. Usually, they stayed up until midnight, but she said, “It’s cold. You want to go to bed?”

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Do I think that a person who can recite lines from a play after a single reading is stupid? Or who can do a drum solo that is actually worth listening to without having smoked six joints is stupid?”

He laughed, but then said, “They did use to put that dunce cap on my head. Sit me in the corner.”

“What were you doing that was bad?”

“My own thing. Looking out the window and thinking of songs. Refusing to pay attention. When the teacher called on me, I’d pretend not to hear her.”

“My cousin Tim really would have liked you.”

Lucas stripped down to his shorts and got under the covers. Janet finished straightening the room, then pulled down the two shades and got in with him. He took her in his arms, and that was enough.