Early Warning

1955

ON A QUITE SNOWY DAY (for D.C.) at the end of February, Lillian Manning found Lucy Roberts, only four, sitting on the couch in the playroom at seven-thirty in the morning, waiting for the cartoons to begin. Lillian felt the little woolly feet of Lucy’s sleeper; they were cold and wet. She found some of Deanie’s PJs in the laundry (Dean and Arthur had gone to Dean’s third skating lesson), then called Betsey Roberts, who was sound asleep and hadn’t realized that the front door to her house was unlocked and wide open. Fortunately, the Robertses lived across the street and down one: not much harm done. Betsey said Lucy could stay, so Lillian gave her a couple of pancakes and some orange slices. While Timmy and Debbie were eating their cereal, the knocks on the front door began. By the time Bugs Bunny came on, there were twelve children cross-legged on the floor staring up at the TV. They sat quietly for Roy Rogers and Sky King; then some of the girls went up to Debbie’s room, taking Tina with them, and a couple of the boys went out to the backyard with Timmy to slide down the “ski slope” Arthur had made.

Lillian carried Lucy home in her dried-out sleeper. Betsey seemed a little embarrassed — Lucy, she said, was such an active child, and she talked about Debbie every day — where was Debbie, was Debbie coming, what was the name of Debbie’s teddy bear? Lillian and Betsey laughed together.

When she got home, one of the boys had a scrape on his elbow. Lillian washed it off and put some mercurochrome on it, and though Lillian could see tears frozen on his cheeks, he dashed out to play some more. They were standing on their sleds now, teetering at the top of the tiny slope, and then raising their hands and yelling as they slid down. Five inches of snow — no more — but Arthur had sprayed it with water and let it freeze overnight. Lillian watched out the window while she did the dishes. Arthur had installed a Dishmaster on the spigot of the kitchen sink; the water ran through a hose to a brush with a button on it — when you wanted to scrub, you pushed the button for suds, and when you wanted to rinse, you stopped pressing the button.

Dishes done, Lillian went to the bottom of the stairs and listened. All was quiet. Maybe they were dressing up, which was fine with Lillian, who threw all of her old heels and slips and blouses and skirts into Debbie’s dress-up box. She decided to check on Tina, though really she was checking to see if the girls were fighting yet.

Tina was lying on her back at the top of the stairs, her blanket in her hand and her thumb in her mouth, sleeping. Lillian opened the gate without a squeak and gently picked up the toddler. Tina awoke only long enough to snuggle against Lillian while she carried her into her crib. It was one-thirty-five. She would sleep until three, Lillian guessed. Tina had such thick hair now, it was down past her shoulders and dark, like Arthur’s. In fact, she looked so much like Arthur, and had so many of his mannerisms, it was almost uncanny to watch her. Arthur hardly ever disapproved of anything, but when Timmy did intentionally hit a tennis ball into the front picture window just to see if it would bounce (“It wasn’t a baseball! I thought the tennis ball would, I really did!”), Arthur’s eyebrows made a V-shape over his nose, and the corners of his mouth turned down. Tina made the same face when she saw green beans on the tray of her high chair.

The four girls were playing nicely — Debbie in charge, as usual. Lillian watched them from the doorway, smiling when anyone looked at her. Debbie was a strict child, but fair. Once, Lillian had pointed out that maybe her friends, unlike Timmy, did not know the rules to some game and were not actually flouting them; Debbie was amazed. When Lillian then suggested that if Debbie knew more than other children it was her job to be patient and teach them, Debbie understood immediately. She was a good girl. No one in this room reminded Lillian of herself or of Jane, her first friend. These girls had always been in neighborhoods populous with children who were not cousins. Mama had pitied the children Lillian knew, and why not? During Lillian’s Depression childhood, there had been plenty of kids in rags or in shoes with flapping soles — Jane’s parents ordered the family shoes out of a catalogue once a year, and when the children grew out of them, they wore them anyway. Children had disappeared — the farm was lost, said Papa. Lillian had hated those words, imagining that a farm could be lost in the woods, like Hansel and Gretel. Now Margie Widger marched her third piece up the last tunnel into the Sorry! home base (which looked rather like a bomb shelter for the four members of the Yellow family), then glanced at Lillian. Lillian said, “When you girls are hungry, I’ve got peanut butter, salami, and chicken-rice soup.”

But there was no peanut butter — Timmy and the boys had found it and eaten it, digging it out with carrot sticks and celery. While she was cleaning their mess up, Arthur came in with Dean. Dean was larger and stronger than Timmy had been at the same age, though not as daring, so Arthur had decided Dean would start at four and soon be playing hockey for, as Arthur always called them, “Les Canadiens.” Arthur had not actually been to Montreal, but he also declared that Dean would begin his French classes in the summer. He called him Doyen and sang to him in French—“Alouette,” “La Vie en rose.” Arthur now also went about asking people if he himself didn’t look very much like Yves Montand, but younger.

Lillian said, “How did he do?”

Arthur said, “How did you do, Doyenny, mon fils?”

Dean looked up at Arthur and said, very carefully, “Tray bun, papaaah.”

Arthur grinned, then came over and hugged Lillian and said, “You are such an exceptional broodmare, ma chère.” He kissed her on both sides of her neck while Deanie stared. Lillian extricated herself and said, “You must be hungry, Dean.”

Dean said, “Is there ham?”

“Jambon!” said Arthur.

Lillian said, “Please go out back and check the boys for broken bones and missing teeth.”

“They’ve been having that much fun, huh?” He went out the back door. Dean went to the table and climbed into his chair. Lillian knew what that broodmare remark meant — he was in the mood for another. Bob and Bev D’Onofrio, at the end of the street, were about to produce number eight, and the Porters, three streets away, had a child in every grade at the elementary school. Lillian knew more about how babies were made now, and at a certain time of the month, she did a little more late-night sewing or pretended every so often to have fallen into a deep, deep sleep. Four was enough, she thought. If he got really importunate, she would give Arthur a puppy — he was a big fan of Rin Tin Tin.

Lillian put Dean’s plate in front of him, then sat there, chin in hand, smiling, as he ate. He was methodical but thorough — she put her hand out and stopped him when he picked up the plate to lick it. She asked, “Did you skate well?”

“I let go of Daddy’s hands two times.”

“Good boy!”

“I was strong.”

“I know you are. Do you like it?”

Deanie nodded. Then he said, “Je swiss un bun garsson.”

Lillian said, “Oui!”

“Can I watch something?”

“You can go see what’s on.”

He got down from his chair and went into the playroom. Lillian took his plate to the sink. Outside, there were six boys now. Arthur formed them into two teams. The team to his left had to pat their stomachs with their right hands and rub their heads with their left hands. The team on the right had to pat their heads with their right hands and rub their stomachs with their left hands. It took about one minute to get everyone laughing and falling in the snow. Lillian laughed, too.

—

AFTER LESS THAN a semester at Berkeley, Henry decided that he hated the place. He did not want to believe that he was so shallow it bothered him that his clothes were slightly off, though how he experienced it was that everyone else’s clothes were slightly off — too aggressively casual, or dirty, or black, black, black. But perhaps they wore black because it was so cold all the time? Colder than Iowa — clammy, moldy, creeping into your joints, and the sunlight just for color. The landscape irritated him, too: up, down; up, down. The sky was very closed in, almost trapped. He kept his eyes on his feet.

The teachers and his fellow students always smiled after he told them where he’d done his undergraduate work. Henry knew what they were thinking: wasn’t it a relief to be here, in Berkeley, the promised land? He even had one teacher who spoke more slowly and clearly to him than to the other students — Professor Pradet, a man who had never heard of “Iowa.” And when he did well in Old English, that teacher always gave him extra praise, as if he were consistently exceeding expectations. In that class, two students had come from Harvard and one from Stanford; the only public-university graduate was from UCLA. In his Chaucer seminar, there was another outcast, Pat Clayton from Ohio State. But Pat wore the same clothes every day, was about to become a father, and talked only about rents, food prices, and the scarcity of jobs in medieval lit. Henry had nothing in common with him, either.

It didn’t help that, before Christmas, Rosa embarked upon a highly volatile romance with an older man (well, he was almost thirty to her twenty-two), named Neal Cassady, who was very handsome but also the sort of person whose life was a performance — or, you might say, a mess, Henry thought. Aunt Eloise disapproved, too, which may or may not have egged Rosa on. Henry said a small thing (“I see what you see in him, but what do you see in him?”) in an almost sincerely inquisitive tone of voice. Rosa slammed down the phone and didn’t speak to him for a month. Then Cassady went back to his wife, and Rosa called Henry to insist that Neal Cassady was nothing like her father, and if Heloise said one more Freudian word, Rosa would wring her neck. When Henry said, “That’s very Greek of you” (he was thinking of Electra, Orestes, etc.), she suddenly laughed, and then started crying and asked if he would go away for the weekend with her, because she couldn’t “stand it anymore.” He made himself pause as if hesitating before saying yes.

He thought he accepted that he and Rosa were not going to advance their own relationship past the epistolary stage. He had accepted that they were cousins, that there was scandal awaiting them if they went any further, and he had decided to see it as his particular fate that he should fall hopelessly in love with his cousin (but there was plenty of precedent in Romance literature for forbidden love, and maybe it was the least inconvenient kind). Once he moved from Iowa to California to be in the same city as Rosa, and had even moved to Rosa’s neighborhood, off Shattuck, he was forced to admit that she was hot-tempered, selfish, and not terribly neat. But he loved her even more, and could not sincerely turn down a chance to be with her. She said she would pick him up in twenty minutes.

Rosa was driving Eloise’s car, a gray Deux Chevaux that normally she laughed at. Henry had expected Rosa to look rumpled and distraught, but she looked normal. She leaned over to give him a peck on the cheek and peeled away from the curb, then zipped to Telegraph Avenue. When they turned south on Route 27, he remembered to ask where they were going. She said, “Carmel.” Henry perked up. Maybe his hatred of Berkeley was specific. California was as big as France, and, everyone said, as various. It was his own fault that he had not even gotten on a bus or a train and gone somewhere.

And, sure enough, soon he observed that the lie of the land south of the Peninsula was different from San Francisco, and the weather was warmer, too, brighter and drier. Beyond that, though, he could take no interest in the local language, history, geology, or products — he only had eyes for Rosa. The more normal she seemed (Did she usually smoke three cigarettes in an hour, or was he only noticing that now? Was she looking thinner? When he said something about Francis Drake repairing his ships in California, was she making a face?), the more he focused only on her. They walked Carmel Beach, a flat, golden expanse at the foot of a pleasant, clean town that was much more Spanish-looking than San Francisco; he stared so deeply into her face that he fell into a hole some child or dog had dug in the sand, and went to his knees. Rosa laughed for the first time in hours as she held out her hand to him. Maybe he was good for something, then, he thought.

She had money. They ate sole caught nearby for supper and went to a movie in downtown Monterey. Henry watched Rosa’s profile as she gazed at the screen. She seemed to follow the plot, but Henry only noticed that it was about Grace Kelly somewhere in South America.

The rooms at the hotel Rosa found in Carmel were small, fake adobe. Without commenting or seeming to notice that this was unusual, Rosa put on her pajamas and got into bed with Henry. She was so businesslike and quick that he hardly got a look at her breasts, her thighs, her derriere, but he tried to think that this was his dream come true. She pressed herself into his arms and fell asleep. But it was like nothing — worse than that, uncomfortable. Even though he felt the breeze from the open window on his forehead, he couldn’t disentangle himself from Rosa to get up and close it. It was strange to feel her breath on his neck, strange to sense the weight of her head pressing his arm into the unforgiving mattress, strange to feel her knee push between his legs, strange to take in her scent (she hadn’t bathed before getting into bed), a combination of salt and sweat and the detergent her pajamas had been laundered in. She slept like a rock — an unconscious weight tilting the bed, so that finally he had to ease backward, toward the wall, and contain and balance himself there all night, until Rosa woke up, sat up, and said that she had just been dreaming of waffles. After breakfast, Rosa said that she thought they should drive down the coast, but Henry said that he had an exam the next day and absolutely had to get back to school, to the library, and to something (he kept this part to himself) that he understood.

He did not look at her on the drive home, only out the window, and he decided that maybe California was as interesting in its way as everyone said it was.

—

LATELY, Joe Langdon kept wishing that he had a photograph of his father when Walter was thirty-three, the age Joe was now. What he would look at was not the hairline or the wrinkles, but the belly. When had Joe’s come on? He could not remember. His mother said he was getting to look more like Walter every year, but she was talking about worry lines between his eyebrows. She said, “Well, you had to be a farmer, didn’t you?” And he always said, “You could have married more commercial bloodlines,” and that shut her up for a day or two. He knew she knew he was referring to the Crests, who had the grocery store in town. Dan Crest was rumored to have had a crush on Rosanna, which was why he gave her more for her eggs and butter all through the Depression than he gave anyone else. Maybe the farming came from the Vogels — his grandmother Langdon cared so little about farming now that she had plowed under her rosebushes in case she got the money to go to Europe all of a sudden. His mother’s brothers, alive and dead, were as wedded to the land as Joe was, so who was Rosanna to talk?

He might pat his belly with regret, but when he stepped into the kitchen after kicking off his boots on the back porch, the Parkerhouse rolls cooling on the table looked damn good, buttery little half-circles, crispy on the bottom and the top. You didn’t have to put another dab of butter on them. He shouted, “Lois?” But there was no answer, so he went through to the living room and looked out the window. Lois had set Annie’s playpen on the porch, in the middle of a patch of sunlight. Poppy, the six-month-old spaniel puppy, was in there with Annie, sort of flopped on the toddler’s legs, with her head back and her tongue hanging out. Annie was stroking Poppy on the chest with both her hands — nicely, as Joe had taught her. Annie seemed to be a real dog-lover — if there was a dog in the room, she wanted to be with it.

Lois got good cream from the Whiteheads, who had several Jerseys. She thought chickens were disgusting, but eggs were divine, and she didn’t waste her egg whites on angel-food cake — she preferred meringues and soufflés. As for the yolks, well, nothing like a smooth hollandaise or some vanilla ice cream. When Rosanna came over on her birthday, and Lois served chocolate mousse with whipped cream instead of angel-food cake, Rosanna didn’t say a disapproving word, ate every last bite. Lois’s Joy of Cooking had already fallen to pieces; Minnie had bought her Betty Crocker, which Lois read after dinner as if it were a novel. Then Minnie brought home a copy of a magazine for gourmets, which were people who liked to eat, and Lois pondered these recipes, whispering words to herself—“mortadella,” “tagliatelle,” “scaloppini.” She made one recipe, noodles with a fancy sauce. They had all the ingredients (beef, pork, veal, bacon, onion, carrots, celery), except for something called a truffle, which Minnie maintained was like a mushroom. At the end, she stirred in some Jersey cream. It was good.

Now Joe saw her looking up into the butternut trees, though they wouldn’t blossom for another month. Her mother had baked with butternuts all the time, and so, last fall, she had done it herself, and Joe had to admit that the cookies were delicious. Rosanna wouldn’t taste one; she had said, “Is there poison ivy in the salad, then?”

Lois saw him and called out, “Did you see my rolls? I think they turned out fine.”

To go with the Parkerhouse rolls, she had warmed up the pot roast from the night before with the last of the spinach. There was less than a cup of peas — the first of the season — but they were sweet, light, and delicious. For dessert (how could Lois serve a meal without dessert?), there were some shortbread cookies. Joe took only one of those. Annie ate happily — a serving of pot roast, a spoonful of peas, half a roll, half a cookie, a cup of milk. Like Lois, she was lean and tall. Lois herself ate only a roll, a bite of pot roast, and some peas.

Joe said, “Are you feeling okay, Lo?”

Lois shrugged, then said, “Okay enough. Just not hungry.” She reached over and wiped Annie’s mouth. Then she said, “I have something to tell you.” She said it in her normal way, calmly and straightforwardly.

Joe waited.

Annie wiggled, and said, “Down!”

“Down, please!” said Lois.

“Please!” said Annie.

Joe stood up and removed the tray of the high chair and set Annie on her feet. She ran into the living room. Lois said, “I’m pregnant.”

Joe sat down again, and pushed away his plate. Then he said, “How long?”

“Couple months.”

“So…due in November?”

“Mid-November.”

Joe nodded, got up from his chair, and carried his plate into the kitchen, where he set it on the drainboard. He went out the back door. The weather was warming up — a nice breeze from the west was fluttering through the daffodils and the apple blossoms. He stepped into his boots. He thought about putting his jacket back on, but decided he wasn’t going to be needing it. Two more days of warm weather and he could plant the long field north of the house that had been in beans last year. Corn this year. Not seed corn, but field corn. Mid-November. Well, that was a good time. All the fall work would be done by then. Annie would be almost three. Joe had heard that three years was a good space between two kids. Close enough to be friends (eventually), but far enough apart not to be in each other’s business every minute of the day. On balance, the news was good. Joe pushed his cap back and headed for the barn, trying not to be too happy, trying to remember a farmer’s first principle, that many things could go wrong, to focus on the fact that there were a few things that he could stand to fix on the planter — little things, nothing major. But he skipped a few strides, just because he couldn’t contain himself.

—

THIS YEAR, Frances Upjohn had talked Andy into spending August on Long Island — the Upjohns had a big place on Gin Lane in Southampton — but Andy had refused to be a guest for thirty-one days, so, because they were late getting started, all they could find was a house in Sag Harbor, and nowhere near the beach, which was fine, said Andy, because she hated the beach. It was a dark place, facing north, with beat-up summer-house furniture. Frank came Friday nights, went home Sunday nights; today he was looking after the boys while Andy and Janny went shopping.

Frank sat about halfway up the stairs, nursing a beer, watching them. They had eaten lunch, and now they were watching TV, Richie rolled up in his blanket and Michael sitting cross-legged. Neither was quite as far along as their cousins Timmy and Deanie had been at their age — Frank had to admit that Timmy was a phenomenon in some ways, the son Frank would never have. When Timmy was two and a half, which was what Richie and Michael were now, he had liked to get up on the back of the couch and walk along, pretending he was on a tightrope, his hands above his head. Richie and Michael ran around, but Richie sometimes stumbled and fell for no reason, and Michael had a sort of rolling gait — nothing efficient. Andy told him he was too critical of them, but he liked them better than he liked Janny, who was stiff and remote, the spit and image of his father right down to the tip of her rather large nose. She had started kindergarten early, though, and could now read “at fourth-grade level,” and that would serve her well. He could send her off to Rosemary Hall for high school, then Radcliffe, and then her equally boring uncle Henry could find her something to do.

No, it was true, Frank thought. You didn’t have to be a farmer or the son of a farmer to know that breeding was always a gamble. He and Andy should have begotten a race of gods and goddesses. He finished his beer and called down to the boys, “Wanta have a contest?” Richie, with rounded, placid eyes, looked up the stairs.

Frank moved a couple of armchairs, then pushed most of the dining-room chairs against the wall. He took one of them and set it in the middle of the kitchen. The boys were still lolling. He turned off the TV — it was one he hadn’t seen before coming to this house, a portable GE with a clock. He took each of the boys by the hand and stood them up. Richie knew better than to cry when Frank took his blanket away from him and tossed it toward the stairs.

Frank said, “Okay, fellas, here’s the course. You start here, at the bookcase, and then you run to the green chair — that’s the green chair — turn right — this way”—he demonstrated right—“and then run straight into the kitchen and go around the chair, and come back to this spot.” With his toe, he pointed out the threshold between the dining room and the living room. He said, “Let’s try it.”

Still grasping the boys, he led Michael and half dragged Richie over to the bookcase. Then he trotted them (slowly) toward the center of the room, turned right at the green chair, and trotted them (even more slowly) through the dining room into the kitchen. Michael stumbled as they went around that chair, but regained his feet right away. Frank exclaimed, “Come on, boys! This is the home stretch! Put on some speed!” He dropped their hands, and they half ran across the “finish line.”

“Okay!” said Frank. “That was the warm-up!”

He walked them back to the base of the bookcase and stood them about a foot apart, both facing ahead. Now he whispered in Michael’s ear, “Keep your feet — you can beat him easy! Got me?” He backed away, made eye contact, and stared at Michael until Michael nodded. Then he whispered in Richie’s ear, “If he stumbles, Rich, you just keep going. Slow and steady wins the race. You listening?” Richie nodded.

Frank stepped back and held out his arm, then he said, “Ready? Set? Go!” He dropped his arm, and the two boys took off. Richie understood the course better than Michael — he did make the right turn and head into the dining room while Michael was still wondering what to do — but then Michael spun around and overtook him at the chair in the kitchen, and, in fact, poked him in the side with his elbow, causing Richie to stumble. When they got to the finish line, they were about a step apart, Michael in the lead. Frank stood in the middle of the living room, scowling and shaking his head. He said, “What a pair of slowpokes! This race is going to have three heats. That was number one. Go back to the start.” He pointed to the bookcase.

He sent them off again. This time, Michael had learned something — he turned at the proper spot and headed for the kitchen with Richie on his heels. But Richie had learned something, too, and when they came to the chair, he turned his hip and popped Michael, sending him sprawling. He crossed the threshold by himself, grinning, and said, “I won! I won!”

“You did!” said Frank. “You won! Can you beat him again?”

Richie nodded emphatically.

Frank said, “Okay, then. You each had one win. Richard, you go stand by the bookcase and wait.”

He went into the kitchen, where Michael was sitting on the floor, his face hot and flushed. Frank squatted down and said, “Michael? You mad?”

Michael nodded.

“Are you really, really mad?”

Michael nodded again.

Frank said, “Okay, then, you go beat him. You are faster, and you can do it. You got that?”

Michael nodded and clambered to his feet. When he arrived at the bookcase, he stuck his tongue out at Richie, who responded in kind. Frank said, “Save it, boys. Just run fast!” Then, “Ready? Set? Go!” This time, the squabbling commenced almost immediately — Michael bounced Richie into the green chair, but Richie kept his feet, followed Michael, and grabbed his shirt. Frank said nothing. Michael smacked Richie on the arm and then pushed him, but they both kept running through the dining room and into the kitchen. At the kitchen chair, Richie did a smart thing — he pushed the chair a couple of inches, so that Michael had to duck to one side to avoid it. In the meantime, Richie, having shortened his own course, was two steps into the dining room while Michael was still going around the chair. But Michael was faster, and when he caught up to Richie, he reached out and grabbed his hair and pulled him down. Frank barked out a single laugh. He had to give Richie credit, though — instead of crying, he crawled forward as fast as he could and grabbed Michael’s pant leg and brought him down. Then he crawled over the finish line first. Frank now laughed out loud, and both boys turned and stared up at him. Frank said, “I guess Richie wins. Richie wins by a neck.” Richie started laughing, too, but Michael’s face began to crumple, so Frank said, “What’s the prize, boys? What does the winner get?” Both boys looked at him. He said, “The winner gets tickled!” He fell upon Richie and played his fingers over the tiny ribs until Richie was squirming away and laughing. After a moment, Frank stood them up. He wiped tears off Richie’s face with the tail of his shirt — he didn’t want Andy to see those — and then he got a Kleenex and wiped both their noses. “You boys tough?”

Both boys nodded.

“Are you really tough?”

They nodded again.

“All right!”

But they were still angry at one another; when they went back to watching TV, Frank had to sit them on cushions a couple of feet apart so they wouldn’t continue the argument. By the time Janny walked in, and then Andy, they were quiet enough. Andy said, “Whew! It’s nice and shady in here. We could have stayed home, it’s so hot. You guys have a nice afternoon?”

“We did,” said Frank. The boys nodded; undoubtedly, “nice” was not the word to describe the particular pleasures of their time together. But “nice” was not for boys, Frank thought. “Educational,” “stimulating,” “active.” Right out of Dr. Spock, Frank was sure.