Early Warning

Frank said, “We don’t call it the defense industry for no reason, you know. You get to sit around day after day, whining about how you don’t like this and you don’t like that, and you’re safe to do it. Do you think that the Vietnamese don’t want to defend themselves? You think they want to be communists and a client state of the Red Chinese? You think Ho Chi Minh is a nice, liberal person who is going to say to those who fought him, ‘Oh, honey, so sorry we didn’t agree, just go home and plant some rice’? This is what happens when one group of people wants to conquer the other — they move in, they slaughter the chieftains of the village, or whatever they’re called, and they put the young boys into the army. I won’t say what they do to the girls. Then they go on to the next village to do it again. That’s how human beings operate. Right here in France, they’ve done it more than once, in spite of the crème Chantilly”—he pronounced this quite nicely—“and the haute couture. Maybe because of it.”

“That’s not our business,” said Janet. “Anyway, they were chased out of Vietnam, and it wasn’t our business to take over from them.”

“So, I take it, you would drive past a family being lined up and shot, and just step on the gas because it isn’t your business?” He thought he had her.

But she said, “When did you ever stop to help anyone? Remember that couple by the side of the Turnpike outside of Newark ten years ago? She looked eight months pregnant, and he was struggling with the tire. Remember that?”

Frank must have looked blank. She said, “I don’t think you even noticed. I did. Mom did, but you just stepped on the gas.”

“Your mother noticed?”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she pointed, and you just shook her off.”

Frank stared at her. She was not a pretty girl, but she was worth looking at — what the French called jolie laide, in fact. How much credit could he take that she had developed character? But he said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am more observant than both of you.”

“I’m not saying that you didn’t see them.”

Frank walked over to the bar, opened it, and took out a beer. The door to the corridor was to the left, and he had his robe and slippers on. He could walk out and put this argument to an end right now. But he snapped the lid off the beer and turned around. He said, “Who got me started in my career? Who set me up reading documents seized from the Germans after the war? Who taught me how things work? Do you know?” She opened her mouth, but he interrupted her. “Your divine uncle Arthur, that’s who. What do you think Mr. Perfect Love thinks of imperialism? Of breaking a few eggs for the omelette? Of putting a few peasants through the meat grinder if the sausage belongs to us?”

Her scowl was deep and furious, and about twenty years old — the same scowl she had produced as a baby. He stepped up to her and grabbed her hands. When she tried to pull them away, he opened them out flat and said, “You look, Miss Priss. You take a look at his hands when you visit next, and you take a whiff, because there’s plenty of blood on them.”

She jerked away from his grasp and said, “Why would I believe you? I’ve known you were an asshole my whole life.”

But her face was white. And what that meant was that she would never trust her instincts again, and if she encountered love, she wouldn’t know it. And then he thought, Well, why should she be any different from anyone else?

—

WHEN THEY HAD TORN DOWN Rolf’s house years ago — seven, to be exact — Rosanna had not objected or said a word about her brother besides “Well, he took after the Vogels, but the rest of us were Augsbergers to the core” (Austrian rather than Prussian). Joe put off telling her that he and John had sold the property until she began to press him about what he was going to plant in that field — and why would she care? He always planted either soybeans or corn these days. But one Saturday in March, he took Jesse over to her place for lunch, and she said, “Jesse, you know how your grandpa and I knew that your father was going to be a great farmer?”

Jesse shook his head.

“When he was sixteen years old, he grew his own hybrid seed, and the next year he planted it, and he got, oh, I think ten bushels per acre more than your grandfather. Well, your grandfather was fit to be tied.” She turned to Joe. “You don’t experiment much anymore.”

“They do that at the ag stations, Ma.”

“You could try something with Rolf’s old field. Just anything. Perk you up.”

Did he need perking up? He took a sip of his coffee, looked at her, and honestly, in front of his son, he said, “I sold that place.”

“You sold Rolf’s farm? My grandfather’s farm that’s been in the family since Opa came to America?”

“John and I sold it. Mama, between us, we were working over eleven hundred acres. John—”