Early Warning

“Then quit,” said Lillian. You have four children and a mortgage. But she didn’t say this.

“Who takes over from me when I quit? Some kid from Yale who looks at the figures and stretches them even further. Some kid from Yale who can’t wait to be sent to El Salvador or Vietnam and is only wiping his shoes on the doormat of analysis.”

“But you’ve been thinking like this for a while, Arthur. What’s bothering you right now?”

“We didn’t know! We didn’t know a thing about either the Hungarians or the Suez attack before they happened. Were you surprised when you read that in the paper?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“I was just as surprised as you, Lillian. I nearly fell down the steps. I picked up the paper out on the front porch, and I opened it and I read the headline, and I grabbed the railing, and it was a good thing I did, because I had reeled backward and a moment later I lost my balance.”

“That’s six steps,” said Lillian.

“It would have been a mess,” said Arthur.

“Did you get in trouble for not knowing?”

“No! I had my excuses all lined up, and no one said a word. They don’t care! The White House doesn’t know what we know or when we know it, and Dulles and Wisner just cover up, because, if people started wondering what we know, then they would start wondering why we do crap, and our funding would be in danger, and we can’t have that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the charitable way of looking at it is that we might actually need it for something worthwhile in the future.”

“But why were you crying? I mean, tonight rather than last night or last November?” She ran the tip of her finger along the angle of his cheekbone, an angle that she loved in him, in Timmy, in Dean, in Tina, and then she touched her fingertip to her lips.

He said, “We’re already on to the next mess.”

Lillian said, “What is that?”

“Deposing Sukarno. Wisner swears he’s a closetcommie. The Indonesian ambassador says Sukarno loves Ike like a father. What am I going to do?”

Lillian said, “I don’t know.”

It was now almost five. The alarm was set for seven. They got back under the covers, and Lillian pressed herself into Arthur’s arms. He held her at first loosely and then tightly. What would her mother say? Lillian thought. When Rosanna was thirty, Mary Elizabeth had already died, and then, not much later, Henry was born right there in the downstairs bedroom, in a howling wind, with Joe looking on. Probably, her mother would have considered worries like Arthur’s abstract and even unimportant. Lillian could not tell Arthur what to do. But she knew there had been a shift, as slow but as inexorable as the movement of an hour hand — the cocoon she had made herself in this house was beginning to crack, and something quite different from the caterpillar inside it was about to emerge. Her mother would toss her hand, roll her eyes, and say that you had to grow up sometime. She would also probably say that such a thing was never good.

—

JIM UPJOHN HAD a theory about women: there were those younger and prettier than your wife, but cut from the same cloth — say, they had gone to Vassar, as your wife had, if only for a year. Alex Rubino had a theory, too: you found women who were as unlike your wife as they could possibly be, and made sure that these women never crossed your path again. For a long time, Frank laughed at both of these theories, because he kept expecting the return of a certain tide — that rush of feeling for Andy that he had felt just before and after they were married, before the twins siphoned every mote of energy in their own direction. But the twins were just kids now, not enormous representations of obligation and fatigue, and Andy had made up her mind that something about her own childhood was lingering around her, a shroud, a ghost, a bearskin rug. She, of course, wasn’t the only woman they knew in psychotherapy — Frances Upjohn was quite fond of her Jungian. Both Frank and Jim thought that therapy was a luxury women could afford because they didn’t have much to regret; without mentioning it, they both knew they were talking about the war, and the only way you were supposed to talk about the war was as an adventure. They let the subject drop.

When Frank got picked up in the Waldorf, he was sitting at the bar, nursing a gin and tonic. He was wasting time, not going home, because the twins, then a year old, were a riot of screaming and upset. When she passed him, murmuring, “That looks good. Buy me one?” he didn’t even realize she was a whore. What a hick, he thought. Once a hick, always a hick. She was a nice-looking girl, dark, slender, wearing a pair of shoes Andy would have admired. But he wasn’t a guest in the hotel, and so didn’t have a room. After an hour, they left the Waldorf, and he kissed her by the front door, before she went uptown and he headed for Penn Station and home. Why had he kissed her? Because she opened his eyes. Of course, he paid her, too.