Early Warning

Frank glanced at Loretta. She was looking out the window at the passing forest. Three children in three years had done no favors to either her figure or her face. She looked forty to Michael’s thirty-three. But she also looked like being a wife and a mother was her avowed destiny, and Michael could take it or leave it. If that was the case, then Michael’s strategy was maybe the only one.

When they got back to Jim’s double-wide after exploring the cranberry bogs, Loretta took her bag from the Mercedes and asked where the bathroom was. Frank and Jim went into the kitchen. The sink was full of coffee cups and soup bowls; the trash bin was piled with Campbell’s cans on top of plastic bread bags. Not the diet Frank would have thought Jim Upjohn preferred — or had even experienced, since his ancestors had been obscenely wealthy unto the fourth generation at least. What was he, seventy-one? Five years older than Frank? Over the years, Jim Upjohn had remained far more innocent than Frank had, far more innocent than anyone Frank knew, a nice boy who might cut your head off, but always gently, gracefully, with regret, a rare breed these days. Now he went to a kitchen cabinet and took out some peanuts. He said, “Come on, watch this.” Frank followed him onto the back porch of the double-wide. Jim Upjohn trotted down the steps and over to one of the taller cedars, where he slipped out of his loafers and set them side by side at the base of the tree. Then he whistled and called out, “Ronnie! Nancy!” He squatted down and sprinkled peanuts in the heel of each loafer, stood up, and backed away. There was chirping, and within moments, two squirreis, their tails fat and furry, their coats thick, scampered down the tree. Each took a different loafer, as though they knew just what they were doing. They sat upright on their tails, picking up peanuts and putting them in their mouths, all the time expressing various opinions. When the peanuts were gone, they paused a moment, almost bidding adieu before scampering back up the tree. Jim Upjohn said to Frank, “It’s surprising how little they cost.” He was twinkling.

But then he spun around and said, “Miracle you came, Frankie, because I need a favor. Involves you firing up that plane of yours and heading into the sunset.”

“Everyone agrees that I’m semi-retired and have too much time on my hands, so I am at your service.”

“I know.”

“How do you know? I haven’t talked to you in four months, and you don’t have a phone.”

“You don’t think the complaints go only one direction between Paris and Englewood Cliffs, do you?”

“Andy doesn’t complain.”

“She remarks upon.”

This would be true, thought Frank.

“Anyway, I want you to go to Aspen and meet someone. There’s a conference there. I was supposed to go and help take over the world, but I can’t stand the odor anymore, so I stayed home.”

“Do you go anywhere?”

“To the beach over at Barnegat. There’s a fellow supposed to be in Aspen, Prechter. He’s got a theory about how the market works, and I want you to talk to him about it.”

“What is his theory?”

“Well, basically, it’s a mathematical version of Yes, uh-oh, well-maybe, or-maybe-not, okay-one-more-time. Large-scale, small-scale, middle-scale. He resurrected it, he’s not taking credit for it.”

“What do you care? Look at this place. You have it all.”

Jim didn’t disagree. He said, “I don’t have a theory. I would like to have a theory.”

The ultimate luxury, thought Frank.

Jim said, “Anyway, you like to fly your plane, you like to get out of the house.”

Frank didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no, but he knew he would do it.

Loretta was charmed by the bogs, the floating cranberries, the mysteriousness of the landscape. She wanted to stay as late as she could, even though she also wanted to get back to Binky. In the end, they watched the men use long booms to push the brilliant berries into one corner, a ground of shining red in the sparkling sunlight. Then, as they left, Jim Upjohn stopped them, ran back in the house, and came out with a pot containing a flowering plant, an upright lavender blossom shading downward to white. “Arethusa,” he said. “An orchid.” Loretta balanced it on her lap all the way home.

Binky was screaming when they walked in the door, Chance was arguing with Dalla, and Andy was bouncing Tia on her knee. Loretta straightened her shoulders with a military air and handed the orchid to Frank, then said, “You were nice. Thank you.”

Frank knew that she hadn’t thought such a thing was possible before today.

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