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.
1979
LILLIAN WENT TO the window in the living room, the one that looked out over the driveway, and watched Arthur. He was standing with a shovel in his hand just where the driveway curved down to the road. His back was to the house, and she couldn’t tell whether he was resting, or whether he had stopped shoveling. The house was utterly silent—she had turned off the TV after watching The Edge of Night, a show that Arthur thought was ridiculous but that Lillian watched because Rosanna had, every day. It was getting dark, and Lillian squinted. Finally, she went to the hall closet, got her coat, wrapped it around herself, and opened the front door. By the time she got to Arthur, he was shoveling again, and Lillian thought he looked all right. She said, “Okay. You want pork chops for dinner? We have some.”
Arthur turned and looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Pork chops are fine.” His tone meant that he would pick at them.
“Or I could make spaghetti with clam sauce. You liked that.” She shivered. Arthur took the two sides of her coat and crossed them more tightly, then turned up her collar. As he did so, he looked brighter. He kissed her. He said, “I did like that spaghetti. I’m almost finished here. What time is it?” He no longer wore a watch.
“A little after five.”
“Do you feel something?”
“What?”
“Do you feel our estate here, Belly Acres, rising up at every corner to enfold and suffocate us?”
“There is a lot of upkeep,” said Lillian, keeping her voice low, neutral. “You should”—but she had suggested that Arthur hire someone to help him before, and he had refused, so she said—“at least find a service to plow the driveway.”
“The thin end of the wedge,” said Arthur. “Ten years ago, I would have shoveled four inches of snow off this driveway in an hour, running and singing the whole time, and now I had to stop every few minutes and catch my breath.”
Lillian shivered again, though it wasn’t very cold, and said, “Maybe you should actually see a doctor.”
Arthur shook his head, as she knew he would. He hadn’t seen a doctor in years. I’ve had enough of that, he always said.
“What if I, your wife, want you to see a doctor?”
“You’re out of luck.” Then he turned her toward the house, putting his right arm over her shoulders and carrying the snow shovel in his left hand. They tromped up the driveway. He said, “I do feel sixty today, though. Every minute of it. When Colonel Manning was sixty, he walked thirty miles a day, keeping a list of wildflowers and birds that he saw on his march.”
“How old was he when I met him?”
“Sixty-six.”
“He had a twinkle in his eye.”
“Somehow,” said Arthur, “he did. Must have been a trick of the light.”
“You have a twinkle in your eye.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
While she was cooking dinner (green beans, too, with browned butter and almonds), they did their daily worrying about Debbie, Dean, and Tina, a prophylactic. Lillian talked to Debbie every day. Debbie told her about Carlie, Kevvie, Hugh, and the dogs. At the moment, the only thing wrong was that one dog had ear mites. Lillian and Arthur agreed that this was not worth worrying about. Dean had broken his wrist in a game of pickup basketball with eight guys who were taller than he was—he had gone for a rebound and hit his hand on the rim of the basket (pretty impressive), and would be in a cast for four more weeks. Lillian said, “How many broken bones is that over the years now?”
Arthur thought for a minute and said, “Eight, if you count the ribs as two.”
“Maybe this will teach him a lesson.”
“What lesson, though?”
“That he isn’t seventeen anymore?”
“I was hoping Linda was going to teach him that lesson.”
“So was she,” said Lillian.
Now for Tina. Tina had taken up the blowtorch. She lived in Seattle. She had sent a picture of herself, in her entire protective outfit, blowtorch in her right hand, hair gathered in a neat ponytail, gloves, helmet, standing in front of a slab of glass maybe an inch or more thick, three feet by four feet. She burned beautiful patterns in the glass, sometimes in the shape of animals or plants, but more often in astronomical designs—the solar system, the moons of Jupiter, six galaxies rotating in the distance. Her boyfriend, who still mad
e his own cosmological paintings, then lit these so that the light came in from the edges somehow and illuminated the heavenly bodies. She’d shipped Lillian and Arthur a piece for their thirty-third wedding anniversary called Virginia Cowslips. In the note, she had written, “Hope you don’t find this too sentimental. I was in a funny mood.” Lillian did not find the image of her daughter bent over a blowtorch at all sentimental, but the piece was very pretty, and Lillian had put it on the dresser in their bedroom. Lillian said, “No news is good news for Tina.”
“No news is normal for Tina.”
“She’ll tell us if she gets pregnant. Even Janet told Andy when she got pregnant.”
They paused to worry about Janet for a moment. Andy had come back from Iowa City oohing and aahing as if she had never seen a baby before; to Lillian, Emily’s pictures looked like those of a normal baby and, indeed, of a Langdon baby, but, having somehow looked past her own babies, Andy was stunned by the new one.
Lillian said, “We could worry about Michael.” Michael had wrecked the car he shared with Richie—DWI, girl in the hospital for a week with a broken pelvis, and Michael himself, not wearing a seat belt, ramming his knee into the key in the ignition and painfully damaging the joint.
“Why bother?” said Arthur. “Worrying about Michael would be an existential exercise.”