Early Warning

1958

WHEN HIS DAD and his mom were going back and forth all winter about whether to move out of D.C. and if so where to go, Tim was against it. He had a group of friends, and he was the boss of those six guys, who ran with him on the playground and roamed with him in the neighborhood. Three streets in any direction, there were stores, parks, playgrounds, anything you wanted. But it was also true that, if he was going to get rid of Dean and all his crap, then they needed a bigger house. Somehow, no one was in favor of Tim’s preferred plan, putting Dean and his stuff in the cellar, or his alternate plan, taking over the cellar himself. You got out of the cellar by going up a few steps and pushing open a metal door, and there you were in the side yard. That was a possibility until he and Brad Widger laid some boards around the floor of the cellar and then ran a line of DuPont Cement along the boards to a cherry bomb inside a tin can (he had poked a hole in the side of the can for the fuse to stick out of). When the bomb exploded, the bang was pretty loud. Debbie, who was reading on the couch, said that she was lifted into the air, and Mom almost fainted, because she knew that Tim and Brad were in the cellar, and she thought the furnace had exploded. The tin can had gone up the stairs, bounced against the door, and unraveled along its seams. Mr. Widger whipped Brad with his belt, and Dad had made Tim clean the walls of the cellar with a scrub brush.

All of a sudden they found the perfect place — open house on Sunday, purchase agreement on Monday, then moving in two weeks later, March 1. It was expensive — forty thousand dollars (though Mom and Dad didn’t know that he leafed through the papers on Dad’s desk one day and discovered that). He also knew, from listening to them whispering in the kitchen, that Colonel Grandfather Manning Sir had left just about that amount in his will. The new house was on five acres, all on one floor, and had six doors to the outside, any of which Tim could get out of anytime, day or night, that he cared to.

He remained grumpy. There were only twenty kids in his new sixth-grade class, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, the junior high was small, too — forty kids in that class. He felt stuck in the middle of nowhere. Until he met the Sloans.

Steve and Stanley were the oldest of eight. Steve was three months older than Tim, and Stanley was ten months younger. The Sloans knew the entire area like the back of their hand (or hands). Their dad was an electrician. Electricity was interesting, and by smiling at Mr. Sloan and paying attention, Tim got himself taken along when the Sloan boys had to work Saturdays, which was fine with everyone at home — Dad thought he was learning something practical, Mom thought he was making new friends, Debbie thought he was not pestering her, Dean thought he was not tormenting him, and who knew what Tina thought; she was always staring at him with her thumb in her mouth, even when it was painted red with iodine.

The Sloan boys were not exactly troublemakers, but that was because the Sloan parents’ definition of trouble was a narrow one. Roaming far and wide, catching a fish or two, stealing strawberries or raspberries, swimming in the creek, swinging on branches back and forth across the creek — none of these activities were considered troublemaking. If there was a surplus of something, you could have some even if it didn’t quite belong to you.

On their bikes, it took Tim, Steve, and Stanley about fifteen minutes to get to the new development, a string of one-acre lots where some contractors were building big houses. The house and the barn were way up a hill behind these lots; Steve said the people in that house sold the land because they were old and running out of money. All the lots fronted on Quantock Road, formerly dirt, now paved. A street went up the hill between the fifth lot and the sixth lot. This was a new street, called “Harkaway Street.” There was a pond up by the old house, and a little creek ran from it down Harkaway Street and into a big pipe, carrying the water past Quantock Road, where it went back into the regular creek bed and down the valley. The pipe was fun to play in. Steve said that if you were in the pipe and there was a sudden flash flood, it would carry you out of the pipe in less than ten seconds, so it would be fun and not dangerous. Stanley said that this had never actually happened.

The other interesting thing about Harkaway Street was that big kids in cars parked there with their girlfriends and made out — sometimes, according to Steve, all night.

It was a Friday, after supper, not even very dark. Tim had eaten and then eased out the back door and found Steve and Stanley, who were on their own because their parents had taken all the other kids to see Old Yeller. Steve and Stanley had noticed a Thunderbird up there, facing into the valley, top down, lights off. Tim didn’t know what they were going to do, but Steve and Stanley did. They rode their bikes past Harkaway Road to where the house was almost finished being built on the eighth lot. They left their bikes behind the house, then walked back to the corner of Quantock and Harkaway, went down the bank, and into the pipe. The pipe was dark, but Steve had a flashlight. They followed the pipe almost to the end, and when they got to the iron ladder built into the pipe, Stanley climbed it. He was so far above them that Tim couldn’t see his feet, but Steve then climbed up three rungs. He braced himself against the rungs; way at the top, Tim could see a sliver of light where Stanley had pushed open the manhole cover.

Now there was a flash of a match when Steve lit a cherry bomb, which he passed carefully to Stanley, who tossed it or rolled it under the Thunderbird. Then he let down the manhole cover and he and Steve climbed down the ladder. Tim heard the bang of the cherry bomb going off. Then there was a faint scream, and after a few minutes, the Thunderbird roared away. Steve, Stanley, and Tim could not stop laughing. “We did it at midnight a few weeks ago,” said Steve. “Those guys were really surprised.”

“Why doesn’t it blow the car up?” said Tim.

Steve said, “Just doesn’t. A blockbuster might. We got a couple of those, but we just use cherry bombs for this, because they roll.”

When he sneaked back in the house later, his dad was in the kitchen. He spun around when Tim came in from the back, and said, “What are you doing? I thought you were in your room!”

Tim said, “I was getting a Coke in the garage,” and Dad said, “So where is it?” and Tim realized that he should actually have a Coke in his hand if that was his excuse, but he said, “I changed my mind.”

Dad stared at him, but let it pass.

Then Debbie came into the kitchen and said, “He was out on his bike. He’s been out on his bike for an hour.”

Dad said, “Were you lying to me?”

And Tim said, “No, because you didn’t ask me if I was out on my bike, you asked me what I was doing.”

And then Dad did the thing he always did, which was to laugh, and Debbie said, “He goes out on his bike at night a lot.”

And Dad said, “Maybe that’s my business rather than yours, young lady.”

Debbie set her bowl, which had greasy unpopped popcorn kernels in the bottom, in the kitchen sink, then turned on the water, elaborately washed and dried it, and wiped down the sink. Tim knew she was doing this to him, showing off. She often informed Mom that things were out of control, and Mom always said, “Goodness, you are just like your grandmother, right down to the ground.”

Tim said, “Hey, Dad. Did you hear the one about the two morons who were building a house?”

His dad smiled.

Tim said, “So — the one moron, he would take a nail out of his pocket and look at it, then sometimes he would nail it to the house, and sometimes he would throw it away. So the other moron says, ‘Hey, you moron! Why are you throwing away all those nails?’

“ ‘Because, you moron, they point the wrong direction!’

“And the second moron starts laughing and laughing, and says, ‘What a moron you are! The ones that point the wrong direction go on the other side of the house!’ ”

His dad laughed and ruffled his hair. They walked toward the TV room, and his dad said, “Stay in at night, Tim, okay?”

But Tim knew that he didn’t really mean it.

—

LILLIAN FELT THAT she had the place pretty well organized. What had it taken, two months? The living room, which was off limits for the kids, had beige wall-to-wall, pale-green armchairs, a pinkish sofa, and their Chinese prints from the old house. The family room had sturdy rattan furniture, and sort of an oceanic air — it faced right onto the swimming pool; since it was May and hot, the sliding glass door was always open, and towels and face masks and snorkels dribbled in, along with trails of pool water. Tina had spent three months — from the first day they knew they would be moving here — learning to swim at the Y. Lillian had been so nervous that she checked the gates to the pool area twenty times a day, but now Tina was swimming — well, dog-paddling — all the way across the width of the pool, and Lillian was no longer waking up nightly (in their own pale-gold bedroom with pale-olive drapes) listening for tiny splashes.

The new kitchen was big; Lillian bought a range and a new refrigerator. There were two windows in the kitchen that looked out onto the pool, so she could cook, talk on the phone, wash up, and still see everything. She had given up on supervising Timmy — he was out of the house and gone before breakfast. Debbie had a sixth sense of what trouble he was into and always reported, so she let herself rely on that. Deanie, for all his size and hockey ability, was just as happy reading a book (so like Arthur!) — she didn’t worry about him. And Tina was a cautious child; the kindergarten teacher reported that she watched the other children and did what they did, which was not surprising in a fourth-born.

If there was someone to be worried about, Lillian knew that it wasn’t herself — she was as pleased with the new house and the new neighborhood as she had thought she would be the first time they went through the place. But the new house was closer to Arthur’s office, and no matter how secretive he had been at first about the address, colleagues from the office had begun to stop by for a drink on their way home and keep on talking about business. Five acres in the country and a child-free overstuffed living room were perfect for quietly deploring this and that subversion, coup, mistake, and then falling silent if anyone (like Lillian herself) came into the room.

There were five of them, most of the time — Arthur, Larry, Burt, Jack, and Finn. They entered through the front door and went to the liquor cabinet and helped themselves. Lillian, who was the one who stocked the liquor cabinet, noted they they liked Grant’s Stand Fast the best, though the levels of the Gilbey’s and the Noilly Prat steadily diminished also. Arthur’s business was full of partiers; for one thing, most of them knew each other from Yale or St. Paul’s. Lillian had been to her share of parties, given her share of parties, and she got along with the Vassar girls well enough (though, while she was navigating this world, the ups and downs of North Usherton High School were never far from her mind). But these get-togethers were not parties. All through Spring Training they talked about baseball, and Arthur pretended to be a Braves fan, but when they were talking about the office, there were a lot of long faces and meditative sips. Lillian came to understand that the days they gathered in her living room were bad days. Arthur told her almost nothing about why they were bad days.

Arthur got everyone out by seven, and he was good about sitting at the dinner table and asking the kids what they had been doing all day, but on the bad days, he just pushed his food around on his plate, even if it was sirloin steak, his favorite. Then, after he had joked with Timmy, listened to Debbie tell him everything she had done (by the minute, it seemed), spoken some French with Dean, and asked Tina about words that started with “b” or “t” or “n,” he would get up, veer ever closer to his office, then, finally, close himself in there while she did the dishes and watched TV and put the kids to bed. He reserved his one hour’s worth of high spirits for the dinner table.

She went to a kaffeeklatsch on Thursdays, after dropping Tina at her three-day-per-week nursery school — seven women who lived in the area and who were friendly and sociable. Lillian said nothing about Arthur, but what they said about their own husbands made her ears burn: everything from how hairy they were to how one of them picked his teeth at the dinner table and then threw the toothpick over his shoulder for the wife to find. Black eyes were discussed, and grabbed wrists, and yelling in front of the children. The three women who seemed happily married preened a bit. They complained about opportunities they had missed to work for a newspaper, or sing on Broadway (Really? thought Lillian — Rosanna would have called this woman “about as attractive as a shoe, if you ask me”). One of them swore that Ann Landers said that if you walked by your husband’s trousers hanging over a chair, and you bumped into them and his wallet fell out, then you could pick it up and remove necessary funds if you had to. Another woman said that her husband never stooped to pick up his change — he just left it on the floor of the closet. Ten or twelve dollars a week, it came to.

The day after Arthur had seemed especially blue, one woman said that she suspected her husband of stepping out on her, because he “had to work late” three Fridays in a row. She plied him with drink until he passed out on the couch, prodded him into bed, and then, when he was sound asleep and comfortable, stroked his forehead and whispered questions into his ear. He had come up with several endearments, and a name, “Liza,” and then she had whispered over and over, “Liza who, Liza who?” Liza Rakoff! Lo and behold, there was a secretary at his office, Elizabeth Rakoff, and when confronted, he admitted that he had taken her out and was attracted to her, but he swore he hadn’t gone to bed with her. He was in the doghouse now.

Four evenings later, on an especially troubling Monday, all the sad-sack men gathered, the Gilbey’s and the Grant’s were drained dry, and Arthur said so little over his pork chops that night at supper that Debbie afterward asked her, very seriously, if Daddy was all right. Lillian made Arthur a hot toddy, which she took to his office door around bedtime.

Arthur was sitting at his bare desk, glowering out the window. His office was on the opposite side from the pool, and his nice large window looked over a long slope to the woods. It was so dark that the only thing visible in the glass was Arthur’s own reflection.

She said, “I brought you something soothing.”

“Your voice is soothing.”

“Drink up. Come to bed.” She led him down the hall. He drank in a preoccupied way and fell asleep while she was doing her face in the bathroom.

Normally, Arthur did the last check of the night. Lillian did the best she could — she covered Tina, turned out Dean’s light, told Timmy he had to get up early, and smoothed Debbie’s always unruly hair. She made sure the garage was closed, locked the pool gates and the six doors. She wished for a nice big watchdog, turned out the porch lights, and walked down the dark hall to her bedroom. Arthur hadn’t moved.

She knelt on her side of the bed and leaned over him. His breathing was even, steady. After hesitating, she whispered, “What’s wrong, Arthur? What’s wrong, darling?” She felt like a fool. “What happened?”

Arthur groaned and shook his head. Lillian sat very still and watched his eyelids, but they didn’t open. He got quiet, and she tried again. “Just tell me, Arthur. I need to know. I won’t tell.” Her voice was almost inaudible, even to herself. “Just tell me a little little bit.” Arthur turned on his side and put the pillow over his head. Lillian waited, listening to an owl hoot in the distance, and then another call — a fox, she thought, which made her think of Frank. The house creaked. She sighed and eased under the covers.

The next thing she heard was “Wisssszzzzzner.”

She opened her eyes. Arthur was kneeling above her, scratching under his arm, and smiling. When he saw she was awake, he said, “A little birdie was whispering in my ear.”

Lillian said, “Oh. Were you awake?”

Arthur nodded.

“Now I feel silly.”

Arthur lay down next to her and arranged his arm for her to roll up against him. Just when she was relaxing, he whispered deep in her ear, “It isn’t good.”

She waited.

“We’ve been bombing and bombing and bombing the Indonesians, pretending that the bombers are Indonesian rebel bombers. But they are our bombers. If there’s a fucking commie anywhere out there, I will shit in my own hat. The whole operation has been such a failure that we are about to switch sides, and congratulate Sukarno on suppressing the commies. It’s our planes he’s shot down.”

Lillian didn’t move.

Arthur was silent for a long moment, then said, “It’s Finn and I who have to rewrite the reports headed to the White House. Lots of civilian deaths.”

Then he said, “And the reports about Frank Wisner. Everyone in Indonesia says that he’s crazy as a bedbug.” Arthur’s tone hardened. He moved away from her, said, “I wish I could say I feel any pity or compassion. It was just that today we were all whispering about Wisner, and when I was sitting in my office, thinking about him, my heart started pounding, and I was just so angry I could have burst into tears. Believe me, I was not thinking, Oh, you poor guy — I was thinking, Why go crazy now, why not years ago?”

She said, “Faye Purvis got her husband to admit he was in love with his secretary that way.”

And now Arthur really laughed.

She didn’t suggest that he quit his job.

—

TIM KNEW Janny loved him best. Uncle Frank had flown her down for a visit on his new plane, and then taken all of them up for a ride. There were only four seats, so Tim sat in the copilot’s seat, and Mom and Dad sat behind him. Dad kept saying, “Lil! Take your hands down! It’s beautiful!” Tim liked it, but he got a little sick, so he didn’t like it as much as he told Uncle Frank he did. The best part was flying over their own house, a long L with a gray roof, set flat into the rectangle that was their “property,” the oval of the swimming pool tucked into the L. He hadn’t realized they had so many trees.

After Uncle Frank left, Janny stayed for six weeks, and went to day camp with Debbie and Deanie. Tim roamed the neighborhood with the Sloan brothers.

Janny had five matching outfits, a different one for every day of camp. Mom said, “That makes it easy,” because they were always waiting for Debbie to decide what she was going to wear. One day she wore a ballet outfit. Tim thought she was a birdbrain.

Janny asked Tim questions: Did he have a baseball bat? Did he have a ball? Would he teach her to hit the ball? Would he throw the ball twenty-five times? How deep was the deep end of their pool? Did he ever dive into it? Did he know how to do a jackknife? How about a cannonball? Can you show me a can opener? Tim showed her how to hit the ball, pitched the ball not twenty-five but thirty-two times, tried a jackknife, demonstrated a cannonball and a can opener (on this one he really rocked back and made a big splash). Janny watched him intently, her hair plastered to her tiny head and her swimming suit drooping on her skinny body. She was only eight. When he did something funny, she laughed and laughed.

She also played with Debbie, of course, endless games of War, Slapjack, and Crazy Eights, and she even played with Deanie — Old Maid and pickup sticks. Debbie’s friends came over, and they played blindman’s bluff, hide and seek, and spud (Tim and the Sloan boys were allowed to join this game if they didn’t aim the ball straight at the girls). Since it was summer, Mom and Dad let them stay up until ten-thirty or eleven every night.

Every morning, Janny came into his room before he was awake, sat on his bed, and asked him what he was going to do that day. He told her — build a fort with the Sloan boys, bike into town, swing on the rope that hung over Wilkins Creek (which was way wider than Harkaway Creek), build a glider, solve a murder mystery, jump off the roof of the house into the pool when Mom wasn’t looking. At the end of the day, she sat on his bed and he told her what he had done: the glider sailed for twenty miles, the water from his jump had splashed all the way into the living room. None of it was true — he had just biked around, and the fort was four hay bales and an old tarp. But she didn’t care one way or the other. She said she never, ever, ever wanted to go home. She hated Uncle Frank, Aunt Andy, Richie, Michael, and Nedra, the housekeeper, all equally. Mom stroked her head and said, “Everyone feels that way once in a while, sweetie,” but Tim was twelve and had never felt that way. And then, two days before Uncle Frank was to come pick her up, she really did cry and cry and beg Mom to adopt her and keep her — she would always be good, every day, and help around the house. She got straight A’s and was reading at ninth-grade level — the last book she read was Jo’s Boys—and Mom had to keep patting her but shaking her head and saying, “No, Janny, we can’t do that. Frank and Andy love you and miss you. We were lucky to get you this long.”

Everyone was in bed, and quiet, and Tim was almost asleep, when Janny tiptoed into his room in her pajamas and lay down on his bed. Tim didn’t say anything; in fact, he let out a tentative little snore, to see if she would believe it, and she did believe it — she shook his shoulder to wake him up. He said, “Huh?”

Janny said, “Are you going to miss me?”

Tim said yes. Whether he meant this, he had no idea.

Janny said, “Can I sleep here? It’s hot, and I don’t need covers.”

Tim moved over toward the wall. Janny moved a little bit, too, away from the edge of the bed, so that she wouldn’t fall. He said, “When is Uncle Frank getting here?” He was hoping for another ride in the plane. Steve Sloan said that if you stared at something still, like the horizon, you wouldn’t get sick.

“He told Aunt Lillian on the phone. I don’t remember.”

Now she took a deep breath, but she didn’t cry. Tim thought that was sadder in a way. Then she said, “Maybe you could come visit me. In Southampton. We could go to the beach.”

“Maybe,” said Tim. Then, “But I would have to bring Debbie. She would never let me go there without her.”

They didn’t say any more. She fell asleep on her back, and Tim lay awake for a little while, looking at the ceiling, and then looking at her face two times. Was she pretty? Tim didn’t know. He fell asleep. Someone, Mom or Dad, came in before he woke up and carried her out. They had pancakes and applesauce for breakfast. When they took her to the little airport, Uncle Frank didn’t offer to take them for another ride. Janny did run up to Uncle Frank, and did hug him, and he did pick her up and kiss her on the cheek. And every so often after she left, Tim missed her. He decided that she was pretty, but he didn’t say anything about that to Steve or Stanley.

—

ANDY PUT HER HAND over her eyes. It was interesting that the story was as familiar to her as an old sweater — admittedly a Norwegian sweater — because it was a farmer’s story. She couldn’t remember where she’d read it. Two brothers, Kristjan and his brother Erik, and the mad wife, in this case Signy. Kristjan would have been thirty-five, and Signy would have been no more than twenty. Kristjan and Signy were married three years before they had a child — maybe there were a couple of miscarriages — but then a girl was born alive, and Signy insisted on giving her an American name, Fanny. Fanny was much doted upon, and Signy was very careful of her, but her care didn’t matter in the end, because Fanny sickened anyway, and died on her first birthday. This event took place in the spring, and shortly afterward, Kristjan and Erik had to go away overnight to buy a team of horses they needed for spring plowing. When they got back, Signy had gone mad.

“What did that mean?” said Dr. Katz.

“She looked for the child, who had been buried in the graveyard, all over the farm. She ripped open her featherbed and pulled all of the feathers out, looking there. She thought she might be in the wood box, or in some trunk or other. Wrapped in a blanket. Whenever she saw a pile of something, or something rolled up, she imagined that the child was in there, trying to get out. She was always whipping around to look behind herself. Finally, she took to wandering the farm with a spade in her hand, digging here and there. It was a fulltime job.”

Andy wondered if she would have the same reaction if Janny or Michael or Richie died, and if so, whether it would prove to her that she truly loved that child.

“The death of a child often leads to some form of hysteria,” said Dr. Katz.

Andy cleared her throat. “Kristjan and Erik kept her in the barn for the rest of her life, in a stall, next to the horses. They had gone to the asylum, which wasn’t far away — Mendota, I think — and they didn’t like the idea that all those people would see Signy and talk about her, so they took care of her as if she were one of the animals. I think she lived about five years after the baby.”

Dr. Katz said, “And yet?”

Andy said, “And yet?”

“I mean, this story sticks in your mind. You say you think about it frequently, and yet you tell it with great equanimity. I am, if I might say so, struck by your tone.”

“My tone?”

“Yes.”

For the first time ever, Dr. Katz leaned around and caught her gaze. He said, “To me, this story seems to be one of great injustice. But you seem not to delve into the feeling of it.”

Andy said, “But what about the time Uncle Freddy, who was the second child of the oldest brother, went out in the evening to bring in the cows, and fell into the pond, and it was so cold that he couldn’t make it back to the house before he froze to death? He was fourteen. They found him before bedtime, but only because his mother happened to look out the window and ask why there was a cow in the front yard.”

But Dr. Katz only sighed again. Andy wondered what she could come up with that would move him, actually move him, and then, maybe, make her feel something, anything.