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.”
No
w 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.
1959
RUTH BAXTER WON Claire over the first day of secretarial school when she said, “You’re from Usherton? Aren’t you lucky! I had to come from Buffalo Center,” and without even pausing to think, Claire exclaimed, “Oh, you poor thing!” Ruth had a plan for every hour of every day. She was twenty now. She would dress perfectly, cultivating verve and style, until she was well out of the secretarial pool, and then she would cast about among the younger men in the lower reaches of management, and attain herself an ambitious husband exactly five years older than she was. By the time she was twenty-eight, she would have a house in West Des Moines, two children, a dog, and a charge account at Younkers. The ultimate goal was a membership in the Wakonda Country Club. If she and the future husband had to be transferred (sometimes that happened), Kansas City was preferable, St. Louis acceptable. The first step, getting a job, was easy as pie—they both ended up at Midwest Assurance.
Ruth, Claire had to admit, was even plainer than she was, or, rather, she had begun with fewer evident assets, though she didn’t have to wear glasses. But once she had shaved and plucked and dyed and girdled and curled and sprayed, once she had modified her accent to make it less Minnesotan and more unidentifiable, once she had taught herself to react to everything any boss said as if it were electrifying, she seemed to be on her way, so Claire duly plucked and painted and cultivated. She also took Ruth to her optometrist and had her choose Claire’s new frames: “cat eyes,” black with gold along the upper curve. Claire’s manner was not as arch and vivacious as Ruth’s—she could not manage that—but by thinking of Henry and Rosa, she could manage some good-natured irony and a few amused observations.
The first reason for turning down the proposal she had from Wayne Gifford, who was twenty-seven and worked in Claims, was not, oddly enough, that she didn’t especially like him; it was that she didn’t want to tell Ruth that she had attained their common goal first. But the second reason, that she didn’t especially like him, was good enough, too. For years she had thought that her main goal in choosing a spouse was that he not remind her of Frank, Joe, or Henry, that he remind her of her father, but not be a farmer. Wayne did not remind her of Frank, Joe, Henry, or her father—he was not good-looking, not nice, not smart, and he didn’t seem to enjoy her company all that much. While she was ridding herself of Wayne, the fellow Ruth had her eye on, Ed Gersh, introduced her to Paul Darnell.
Paul Darnell was more than thirty, and he was a doctor. He had just opened an ear, nose, and throat practice. He was scowling, abrupt, and from Philadelphia. He hated Des Moines, hated Iowa, hated humidity, hated the Midwest, didn’t much like being a doctor, and was vocally glad that ears, noses, and throats only rarely led to sudden death (influenza and scarlet fever he sent to the hospital, and throat cancer he sent to the oncologist). He planned to treat ear infections by day and pursue the passion that his father, also a doctor, had forbidden, by night—playwriting. He thought Claire was not at all plain. Her eyes were diamond-shaped; he took her glasses off and gazed at them. Her hands were slim and graceful. She had great ankles, and a twenty-two-inch waist, and she was funny. On their third date (for dinner, then The Big Country) he said, “I am perfect for you,” and thereafter proceeded as if she had said yes to an official proposal. He did not remind her of anyone she had ever met. Ruth said he was “a catch.”
Paul told her that, in the quiet backwaters of Des Moines, he could write in peace and comfort for ten years, then explode onto the New York scene (though not Broadway—never Broadway, which was far too corrupt to produce anything really meaningful). He talked in a way no one else she had known talked—he ranted, argued, joked, and gave her compliments. He responded to each of her facial expressions as if she had said something. Claire thought that if he just wrote down half of what he said while he was saying it, he would have a play.
Ruth’s idea was that you could tell your intended was getting closer and closer to proposing each time he added a regular date to
his schedule. She had gotten Howie Schlegel, and now Ed, from Friday, to Saturday, all the way up to Sunday. Howie had dropped out after about three months, not ready for the pressure. Ed seemed to be holding up, though his family were not already members of the Wakonda Country Club, but over there in Davenport, where they were from, his father and his uncle did play plenty of golf on the public course.
Claire did not want to be spending her Sunday afternoons, or even every Friday evening, with anyone, so she and Paul suited one another, since he liked to have a lot of time to himself, but also to call her at the last minute and ask her out. He did everything abruptly. All of this Claire kept to herself. When Rosanna asked her whether she had any special “beaux,” she said she did not, and Rosanna just put her hands on her hips and got a look that said that she had expected this all along. But Rosanna had been married at nineteen and a mother at twenty, and Lillian was just the same, and even though Granny Elizabeth had been very cruel that day on the beach, well, in the end, was she any crueler than Ruth, who was always suggesting hairstyles and lipsticks? As long as Paul was sure they were going to get married, then Claire’s job was to make best use of her present freedom. No, Paul was not a farmer, and did not remind her of her father, but he was attentive, and her goal was attained: since he was not like Frank, Joe, or Henry, she would not be like Andy, Lillian, or Lois.
—
ONE DAY TOWARD the middle of May, Jim Upjohn called Frank at the office and told him to come after work to the Plaza. There was a man he wanted Frank to meet. Andy was in Iowa, visiting her parents, and Nedra was staying through the weekend, so Frank had been planning a rendezvous at the Grand Canyon with a girl named “Ionia” (really Effie, though Effie didn’t know that Frank had looked through her purse when she went to clean up the last time), but Jim pressed him, and so he went.
The man was an oddball, in the sense that he was wearing a very expensive suit, certainly made for him, but he was so impossible to fit that he looked terrible anyway. When he went to shake Frank’s hand, his hand enveloped Frank’s in a horny clamp even though he was six inches shorter. His hair marched around his red, shiny head in patches, and there was a quality of scaliness to his bald parts. His eyes were bright and suspicious. Jim said, “Dave, I want you to meet Frank Langdon. He might be the man you’re looking for.”