Early Warning

1978

IT WAS NINE. Henry was dressed and had eaten a bowl of oatmeal. It had been snowing for fifty-three hours. Henry knew because he remembered getting up in the dark two nights ago to take a piss (from the Old French, pissier, twelfth century, origin unknown), looking out the window, thinking that it was snowing again — what was that, the tenth storm since Thanksgiving? — looking at the clock, and going back to sleep. With the howling winds and the sad attempts at plowing, some drifts mounted to second-story windows, covered cars, blocked streets. He had tenaciously kept shoveling and sweeping his little walk — if he hadn’t, he would not be able to get out the door. It was fortunate in some ways that he had sold his car and not purchased another: he would have hated to see a new car simply buried in snow for four months on end. And having no car meant that he wouldn’t set out hopefully for, say, Milwaukee, only to be stranded, trapped, and frozen to death. On the other hand, if you walked everywhere, as Henry did, being frozen to death or blown away in these winds was also a hazard.

Rosanna had sometimes talked about the storm of ’36 or some such year — Henry would have been three; he remembered nothing — when they first sent Frank to Eloise in Chicago because there was no school in Denby. Frank had supposedly gone through a tunnel of snow and nearly died, and two women saved him by buying him a berth in the sleeping car. Maybe, in those days, two women were always saving Frank. That same year, snow outside his future room, the addition where Joe was sleeping alone, had been up to the eaves. After this winter, Henry thought he could go toe to toe with Rosanna; he was in the most prepared-for-snow city in the world, and there was nowhere to put it. All they needed now, Henry thought, would be a nice ice storm to seal them in permanently.

In ordinary circumstances, no one would have said of him that he was a farm kid, not even his parents, but he had a farm kid’s plenitude of provisions — bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, boxes of spaghetti, cans of tomatoes, a freezer full of chicken breasts and nicely trimmed steaks. He had wine, he had water, he had anchovies and several varieties of Italian cheeses; if he had to make himself pizza for a week, he could do it. He had a kerosene lamp; he had wood for the fireplace (he’d used about half of that, and he was careful to keep the flue clear — his colleague Nina had passed out several times, thinking that it was the dreary nature of her manuscript that was putting her to sleep, but it turned out to be her chimney leaking carbon monoxide into the living room).

He went into the front room and picked up The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context, which had just arrived from Oxford for his review. Jean de La Ceppède was right up his alley now. In the summer, Henry had visited Aix-en-Provence and decided that medieval France was unbelievably alluring, and why had he not lifted his youthful gaze from Caedmon and Cynewulf and looked farther south, where the weather was better and the literature and history more complex?

But not only had Henry’s academic interests shifted toward France, he was also lonely, had been lonely since Philip left, now two years ago. Philip was in New York, and there was no reasonable hope of seeing him until spring break, seven weeks away. And even if he saw him, Philip had moved on. When Henry stayed with him for four days in October, they had gone out to the bathhouses every night, and while Philip ran joyously from room to room, partner to partner, disappearing and coming back, Henry sat at the bar, sipping gin and tonics, frightened, glad of his graying hair, his utterly straight outfits — khakis, sweaters, blue shirts. Though he had appreciated the wildness and color of the scene, though he had been flirted with, he would have grabbed the bar and resisted being taken away from it with all his strength. Philip, irritated and a little offended, had said, as if he meant it, that that emblematic medieval experience Henry had had as a boy, an eyeless white horse exploding in a ditch full of paleolithic refuse, was the key to his whole Weltanschauung: human nature is inherently evil and is never to be trusted. Philip was much more of a Romantic.

Once in a while, he wished he could call Rosanna and pick a fight with her, as he had done so many times in the past. “Ma,” she had hated that, but when he called her “Mom,” she said, “What are you, twelve years old?” When he called her “Mother,” she said, “I am not a nun,” and so for a few months he referred to her, only in her hearing, as “Mother Superior,” always smiling when she pursed her lips. Ma! Ma! What did you call a finicky maternal figure? She might have liked “Rosanna,” but none of them had dared. He’d wept when he saw her in the open casket, neatly dressed in her gray dress, with the pink sweater she had knitted herself and some black pumps. They had fixed her hair anyhow, not in the bun she preferred, and Lois had said, seriously, “Maybe we should fold up all the sweaters she made herself and put them in there. I hate to see them go to the Salvation Army.” But it had seemed too strange to do such a thing, and so they had gone to the Salvation Army — they were too small for anyone in the family.

After the funeral, he had come home to the very apartment where she had died, and not thought very often about it. In spite of having picked her up and lifted her and held her hand, he found himself sometimes dialing her number because he hadn’t heard from her in a while and felt guilty, and then he would remember. Was this failure to have experienced her death because, in spite of the evidence, he just couldn’t believe it, or because she had never accepted that he was gay (though he had never told her, either, leaving that to Lillian or Claire, and it was unlikely that they ever had)? Maybe she knew what a homosexual was, if she dared to think about it, but sexuality of any kind was not something talked about. You wanted to know the facts of life, you went out and watched some sheep. Were there boys in the neighborhood who tried putting it to a sheep once in a while? My goodness, why are we talking about such a thing? Henry smiled, stopped reading. The windows were flakily white. In the distance, he heard a siren. It had a futile sound.

If he called Philip now, Philip would be short with him, or maybe brusque. Henry wondered if Basil, too, visited him, and made better use of his opportunities than Henry did. In England, it would not be snowing, or if it was it would be mounding silently on the Gothic windowsills of elegant cathedrals.

For fun, he had taken a test that sorted personality types, and he had given it, too — to Beowulf, to Sir Galahad, to Sir Lancelot and King Arthur. All of them — were they sick, sick, sick, or just a certain type? He had come up I N T J — introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging — no surprise, and he had no trouble finding synonyms — stuffed shirt, irrational, persnickety (which was a lovely example of onomatopoeia, a variation on “pernickety,” which was in turn a variation on the Scots word “pernicky,” origin unknown), snobbish — that he was sure his colleagues thought were equally applicable. But, he had to lament, irrational, persnickety, snobbish (sine nobilitate) stuffed shirts had needs and desires, too! It didn’t help that, over the years, he had suppressed his sense of humor. When the department had to designate someone to write a gassy, sober report for the administration, Henry was the one. As for being gay, well, he accepted Philip’s view that if you were gay you were gay, but he sometimes wondered, did careful come first or did homosexual come first? Those times he had been with women (and, in retrospect, perhaps he had not experienced Rosa as a woman, because of her confidence, the chip on her shoulder, the clothes, the flat chest, the air of sophistication), had been looking at marriage and children, it had seemed as though being gay would be permanent relief from chaos, and this had turned out to be true. Every romantic encounter nicely arranged and self-contained, like a meeting of spies on the street corner, so careful to avoid the notice of MI5 or the KGB — Henry had liked that part. Could you break out of the box of your I N T J, or were you stuck with it? Was it temperament or training, nature or nurture? Maybe it was a little late, at forty-five, to be asking this question. But if you spent forty-four years arranging things to your satisfaction (according to Rosanna, as soon as he could pick up a block, he made sure that it coordinated with the block next to it), then who was to tell you that satisfaction was maybe the deadliest feeling of all? He looked out the window and decided to call Rosa — but when he tried to get her number from Information, none could be found.

—

ANDY WAS in the bathroom, reading a copy of Vogue on the john. She didn’t know what she thought about the Madame Grès draped look. Maybe you would have to feel the fabric against your skin to really enjoy the dresses; otherwise, they were rather dull. The phone rang. She had had a phone installed in the bathroom so that she could soak in the tub and talk, but, like — who was that? — LBJ, she often quietly picked up when she was doing her business. Janet’s voice said, “Mom?”

Andy closed her magazine. She hadn’t heard from Janet in two months, since Christmas. She carefully said, “Hi, honey,” as if this call were no big deal.

“How are you?” said Janet.

“Fine.” Janet had told her four times since her escape from those people in San Francisco that she really did not care to be reminded of that crap (that crap that Eloise had detailed for Andy with indelible outrage), and so Andy did not dare say, “And how are you?”

“Where’s Dad?”

“I’m sure he’s at the office.”

“It’s after eight there.”

“Maybe he’s getting a bite to eat, then.”

There was a silence, during which Andy assumed Janet was choking back some sort of disapproval of their domestic arrangements. But after Nedra retired (and with a nice package, Andy had assured her AA group), no one was interested in cooking. Andy could make her own salad.

“What are Richie and Michael doing?”

“You know they had their twenty-fifth birthdays?”

“I sent them cards.”

“Did you? I hope they received them. Michael’s apartment is such a mess, no one in their right mind would go in there, and Richie seems to be staying most of the time with a girl he knows on the Upper East Side. She’s Jewish.”

“Mom!”

“What? She is. I met her parents. They’re Jewish, too.”

Andy could hear her report this remark to someone. She was getting to that stage that her father had gotten to, where everything he said got laughed at, but if that was the price of conversations with Janet, Andy was willing to pay it. She said, “Her uncle is a furrier. They gave me a hat. It looks good on me. Can you call me back, I have to—”

“Mom.”

Andy shifted her position and set the magazine on the floor. She knew she was about to receive some news, felt a moment of dread, but then she sensed what the news would be. As Janet said it, she mouthed the words, “I’m pregnant.”

Andy forced herself not to exclaim, “Oh dear.”

Janet said, “He’s wonderful!”

“You know it’s a boy?”

“No, Mom. Jared. Jared Nelson, my beloved. The father of the pregnancy.” She laughed. There was a laugh in the background.

There were many questions that Andy did not dare ask: Are you married? Did you meet him in San Francisco? Where’s he from? What does he do? Is he divorced (not a bad thing, in Andy’s estimation)? Does he get along with his parents? What’s his birth order? Does he drink? Does he speak any Scandinavian language fluently (“Nelson” was possibly a bad sign, though “Nilsson” would be worse)? Janet forestalled her by saying, “He’s the funniest person I ever met.”

Andy smiled.

“Mom?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’re happy.”

“I’m happy that Jared is the funniest person you ever met.”

“Are you happy I’m pregnant?”

Andy let her gaze wander over the pink bathroom tiles, take in a tiny cobweb, then her shoes, which she had kicked off, then the tub and the sink. She shifted position again, and stood up. According to AA, you were not allowed to lie. When was it, sometime recently, she had seen a picture of a sculpture installation — Dad, Mom, six-year-old daughter, one-year-old baby son. All were the same height, six feet tall, but proportioned realistically. The result was that the baby was enormous, the hugest and most dominant member of the family, and the six-year-old came second. Andy thought it was the truest depiction of family life she had ever laid eyes on; all they needed for profounder horror was expanded premature twins. Even so, she said, “Sweetheart, I am happy for you. And I am happy it’s you and not me.” This was to be their future as mother and daughter, then — the past unmentioned, a fresh start, equals in keeping their feelings to themselves. Quite Nordic, in its way.

Janet turned away from the phone and repeated this. The voice in the background laughed, and then Janet laughed. Andy let out the breath she was holding. Janet turned back to the phone and said, “Oh, I love you, Mom.”

She hadn’t said that in twenty years. But as if this declaration were routine, Andy said, “Sweetie. I have to get off. But call me tomorrow and tell me more.”

Janet said she would.

When she walked into the kitchen half an hour later, Frank was leaning into the open refrigerator. She said, “There’s some ravioli from Antonio’s in that cardboard box. It was good.”

Frank stood up and turned around. Before he could tell her anything at all about work, she said, “Janet is pregnant.”

Frank slammed the door of the refrigerator and said, “I didn’t know there was a boyfriend.”

“Neither did I.”

“Are they getting married?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Frank swallowed, and then swallowed again. Eloise’s report had frightened him, too, though he had said only, “Doesn’t surprise me.” Andy walked over to him, put her arms around him, and laid her head on his chest. She could hear his heart beating — loud booms. She’d always wondered how his arteries could take such a powerful current. He remained stiff for a few moments, and then he yielded, put his arms around her. This was the way, so long ago, forty years now, she had first come to love him. You had to get inside his shell to feel sorry for him; if you didn’t feel sorry for him, then you couldn’t experience love, but if you pressed yourself against him and felt the warm tension of his flesh, you always felt sorry for him, and tender, too, as lonely as he was. He might hate that, but if you were brave, you would feel it anyway. She felt it now.

—

PAUL HAD INVESTED “their” money from the farm in something called a Money Market Fund, at almost 9 percent, first for six months, then for another six months. He had longed for the money and been happy to get it, but he was preoccupied by it — he made sure that Gray and Brad, thirteen and ten, knew the difference between a Certificate of Deposit and a Treasury Bill, but Claire did not know the difference, and didn’t care. All she knew was that her original $240,000 was bubbling up, and the effervescence amounted to about twenty thousand a year. Paul insisted that the wisest thing to do was to let the interest compound, and he taught the boys the Rule of Seventy-two. Even Brad now knew that if you left your money in the bank at 10 percent interest per year, and then divided seventy-two by ten, the resulting figure was how long it would take for your money to double. If you had, say, $240,000, he said to Brad, by the time you were eighteen you would have $480,000, and by the time you were twenty-four or twenty-five, you would have almost a million, but you couldn’t touch it. It had to stay in the bank. The great thing was geometric compounding — at thirty, you would have two million; at thirty-seven, four million; etc. Brad could figure it out from there. And Brad did — if retirement age was sixty-five, then at retirement you would have more than sixty-four million dollars!

When Claire brought up the idea of inflation (that sixty-four million dollars wouldn’t be the same in fifty-some years as it was today, look at Germany before the war, or…), Paul said that they would save that for another time — best not to discourage him at this point.

As for Claire, for the first time in her life, she understood the old phrase “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” She thought of that measly little $240,000 (as compared with the future sixty-four million) and she wanted some of it. In fact, she wanted all of it. In fact, she saw it as the door that could open and let her out of Paul’s tight, neat, suffocating house. Now that her mother was dead, she had no one she would have to justify this to. All she had to do was make up her mind.

It was not the boys holding her back. Maybe if they had been girls she would have had a second thought (she imagined girls actually talking to her, letting her brush their hair, asking her questions, and taking advice, though she had never done any of these things with Rosanna), but boys, at least her boys, hardly seemed to notice their mothers. At a party, she had heard one woman laugh and say, “Oh, boys! You can be wonderful to them every day of their lives, and this is what they say: ‘Mom! I love Mom,’ and that’s all. They only think about Dad, no matter whether he was a saint or an asshole—‘My mom was great, but Dad! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ ” And it was true of Gray and Brad: their eyes followed Paul wherever he was. Yes, it was partly in fear, since he was demanding, but all three of them treated her more or less as if she weren’t really there, or, she might say, weren’t importantly there.

—

JANET OPENED her eyes and noticed two things — the window to her right, across the sleeping (and snoring) body of Jared, was pale but not light, and the apartment was enveloped in silence. Emily Inez (named after Emily Brontë and Jared’s mother) was still sleeping, and well she should be, given that Janet had nursed her twice already, once at ten and again at three. Since the apartment had only one bedroom, Jared had taken the doors off the spacious hall closet and fixed it up as a nursery, visible from the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room, but Janet knew they would have to move eventually. Janet didn’t mind waking up every four hours. Emily had such a strong personality that she had inserted herself quite efficiently into Janet and Jared’s easygoing existence, and organized everything around herself. Janet faithfully read Penelope Leach (sent to her by Debbie), and did as Emily told her.

She glanced at the clock: six-forty-five. The weather had been nice all fall, and she could tell as the window brightened that it would be another pleasant day; she could put Emily in the Snugli and walk across Burlington, take a stroll down Clinton and Dubuque, and maybe get all the way to the Hamburg Inn for an early lunch — Emily was sucking the pounds off Janet so quickly that she owed herself a cheeseburger, not to mention some French toast for breakfast. She kissed Jared on his bare shoulder (he wore only shorts to bed, nicely exposing his muscular but supple thirty-year-old chest, and wasn’t thirty the best age for a husband, especially if you yourself were twenty-eight? And he was a Gemini to her Libra, nothing better than that), eased out of bed, sneaked past Emily, who was sleeping with her mouth slightly open and her lips, which were divinely full, shaped into a sort of a kiss. She half closed the kitchen door and hefted the kettle — full. She turned on the gas, yawned, and decided that it was perfectly acceptable to go quietly down the hall steps in her pajamas, and even to open the front door and get the paper off the stoop. She set a cup and the instant coffee on the counter, and tiptoed once again past the sleeping baby, and then past the door to her room, and down. Six weeks after delivery, going down the steps was practically like flying compared with the last six weeks of her pregnancy, when the pains in her lower belly made her gasp. Tendons? Ligaments? Something in there was screaming in protest at carrying a thirty-five-pound load that it was not designed to handle. She glanced at the Harrisons’ closed door, then slowly turned the knob of the front entrance. The paper was lying there. She grabbed it, noticing as well the bare branches and the drift of brown leaves in the gutters — a melancholy sight. She clutched The Des Moines Register (they also got the Press-Citizen in the afternoon) and tiptoed back up in time for the first cry.

Penelope Leach said that you should answer the first cry — babies only cry for a reason, and to ignore them is to impress upon them the futility of communication — so she threw the paper onto the kitchen table and went to the cradle. After she picked up Emily, she eased over to the bedroom door and drew it shut, letting Jared know that he could keep sleeping if he wanted to. He didn’t have to be at work at the U of I computer lab until noon; Mondays, he was on until eight-thirty, advising lost and confused professors how to stack their punch cards and input data. It was a well-paid job, and Jared liked it — he said that every iota of computer competence he introduced into the brains of old men and women was a positive social good, a point in his favor in the mind of the Grand Intelligence that was the universe. Janet had quit her job at Things, Things, and Things when the steps in the shop got too taxing, but they were doing well enough on Jared’s salary. She would go back to school in the spring semester, at least at night. Debbie said that teaching fit right into having kids, even two kids, which she now had, so Janet thought she would do that: have two kids, live wherever Jared worked, teach French in high school. This made her think of Marla, who had written from Paris in the summer. She sat down at the kitchen table and, after putting Emily to the breast, flipped open the paper.

The front-page article did not say that they were all dead, only three to four hundred. The article did not say that American soldiers had raided the Guyana compound and mowed everyone down with machine guns, which was Janet’s instant thought as her eye raced down the page. When she read it more slowly, she saw that American soldiers were actually nowhere in the vicinity, that everyone was using the words “mass suicide,” and Janet’s next instant thought was, how did Reverend Jones persuade Lucas to kill himself? Such a thing was not possible. Emily pulled away, and Janet shifted her to the other breast. She read it again. Most of the article was about a congressman killed in Jonestown along with some other people, including a TV cameraman who had been shot while in the act of filming the shooting. The witness to this said he had seen the cameraman’s brains “blown out of his head.” Janet read that twice and then read the next part again, about the congressman visiting the camp the previous day, about some of the members wanting to leave with him and go back to California. Her body jerked, bumping Emily’s head on the edge of the kitchen table. She came to. Emily did not cry, but as Janet looked down at her face, her dark hair and her wide eyes, she felt herself fall into a well of guilt. She smoothed the small head; the baby was fine.

Janet stood up from her chair and walked down the narrow hallway, which was bright now (it had a skylight, the feature that had made Janet like this place in spite of its proximity to the railroad tracks). She made sure she had both arms under and around Emily — she was a big baby. She tried not to stagger, just to balance carefully on each foot as she made her way toward Jared. He would be very surprised to learn about the massacre, and even more surprised to learn that Janet had had anything to do with these people. She had told him a few things about her life in California — that she had a long-term boyfriend who was in a band, that she worked in a wonderful restaurant and learned to love authentic Italian food, that she lived in a communal arrangement. She let him tease her about being a hippie — he was from Rochester, Minnesota. It could be that she was the only person in Iowa who knew any of these people, or who had ever been inside the Peoples Temple. Cat. Jorge. Janet’s face was wet, and by the time Jared sat up in bed, she was standing over him coughing and choking with shock. Being Jared, he reached up, ever so tactfully, and took Emily out of her arms.

Jared said, “What’s the matter?” Janet intended to reply, but found she couldn’t say anything. She went over and collapsed on her side of the bed. Jared sat holding the baby in the bright morning light, staring down at her in alarm; then he said, “Are you okay? Did something hurt you? Did you fall down?” Janet shook her head. She closed her eyes for a moment, but she knew there was only one thing to do, so she got to her feet, went to the kitchen, and brought back the paper. She handed it to Jared, who was sitting up, holding Emily to his shoulder, and took Emily. She lay down, set Emily beside her, and put her to the right breast again. She pressed against Jared; his hand on her hip, he kept reading, then said, “Oh my God.”

Lying between the two of them, Janet felt safe enough finally to focus on Lucas. Until right now, she would have said that she had worked through her feelings about Lucas. First off, he had been incredibly attractive, so talented and joyous and good-looking. And, as Aunt Eloise had said, unself-conscious in a strange way. Anyone would be attracted to him, and lots of women and girls were. Second, telling Lucas what to do was the same as telling him what not to do — if he identified something as an order, he resisted. This perversity Janet found to be both daring and sexy. Third, their last year in the Temple had been fraught with conflict, and, she understood now, they both hated conflict. It was as though the Reverend had infused them with alien personalities, and to what end Janet still could not understand. All the things she knew about the Peoples Temple were contradictory — that people were happy and unhappy, that people loved one another and felt tormented by one another, that Jones was a preacher and an atheist, that he loved his followers and hated them. That they had been alive and were now dead. Aunt Eloise had said, in her cynical way, “Sounds like God to me,” and maybe, Janet thought, the Temple was just the world, concentrated and sped up so that you gave up understanding it and bowed your head in prayer. But Lucas. Was he dead?

Jared laid the paper on the floor. “Well, that’s a piece of news. Amazing. Lots more to come. I guess the CIA got Congressman Ryan after all.”

Janet said, “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you know, Ryan. Didn’t you ever see him? He was from San Fran. He authored the Hughes-Ryan Act. Ryan was after Jones for years, and finally made it so they had to report covert ops to Congress. Now they must have—”

“You sound so detached.” Jared had a thing about the CIA; another thing Janet had not ever told him was about her uncle Arthur.

“Well, I am detached. I mean, it’s shocking, but you had to see it coming. Jones was a nut.”

“I did see it coming,” said Janet, not quite knowing what she meant. She had told Jared only that she had gone to the Temple a couple of times — everyone did — and had known people who were really into it. Now she looked down at Emily, her savior. She had gotten pregnant the first time they went out, simply because she was too lazy to get up and find her diaphragm, simply because she hadn’t expected to end up with Jared Nelson, computer programmer, in her bed. They had gotten married when she was four months along. She had lucked out, or buyer’s delight had kicked in — he was right for her, good for her, after wandering in a dark wood, she found the path back to the village. In the village, the streets were clean and straight, gardens were planted, the villagers friendly. Little Red Riding Hood didn’t have to say where she had been — they fed her, gave her a job, and laughed about the Big Bad Wolf, what a monster he was, so self-involved and grandiose, just stay away from that guy. And then the bonus — Emily Inez Nelson, perfect baby.

Emily relaxed, fell away from the breast. Janet moved her a little, snapped her bra closed. Jared rubbed his hands over his face. “Looks like another nice day,” he said. Just this one, thought Janet, just this one nice day, and then maybe she would tell him more. But she wouldn’t think about that now.