Early Warning

“Considering what has happened to Eunice since, I don’t feel terribly bitter, and I know she was, we were, very young.” Dr. Grossman did not rise to this bait, so Andy went on. “She set out to seduce Frank — I knew that at the time, because she told me she wanted to. You know how girls are. Some of them, like me, just go around a bit underwater, and everything comes so slowly. So, oh, I guess it was the summer, six months after our friend Lawrence died, that Eunice just came out with it in a letter. She was going to lose her virginity anyway — it was as inevitable as the war — she didn’t believe for a moment that Roosevelt would leave the English in the lurch — so why not lose it to someone like Frank Langdon, the best-looking guy you’d ever seen? It was such a small thing compared to, say, the collapse of France. I mean, she wrote that.” Andy fell silent; Dr. Grossman cleared her throat. Andy added, “Small compared to other things, too.” It was true that seeing Dr. Katz and then Dr. Grossman every day, the only Jewish people she had ever known, really, made her think of the concentration camps, then atom bombs — she could hardly remember the war itself through the smokescreen of hydrogen and atom bombs. And there was no remembering with Frank. He never said a word about what he had done or not done. “Of course, at that time, I didn’t know that she had already lost her virginity years before, and not in a very nice way, to an uncle, I believe, though he was fairly close in age — I think she was fourteen and he was seventeen.” Dr. Grossman made a low noise, maybe disbelieving, maybe disapproving, but, as far as Andy knew, this tale of Eunice’s was as true as any other. “Of course, I didn’t tell Frank what she wrote. I never talked about sex to Frank, and to be honest, he seemed a little shy about that sort of thing.” She paused for a long time and waited for Dr. Grossman to prompt her, but Dr. Grossman said nothing, just uncrossed and recrossed her legs.

“When school started up again and Eunice returned from vacation, I saw that she meant it. Her eyes were all over Frank. The three of us weren’t together very often, because why would we be? The person that linked us was gone.”

“Please tell me again how he died?” said Dr. Grossman.

“Infected tooth,” said Andy. “Utterly needless.” She cleared her throat. The sun poured in the window, and Andy could easily sense the Hudson River below in the quality of the light. “However, in the Union or walking across campus, if I was with either of them and the other one appeared, no one had to tell me a thing. It was like magnets. It hurt my feelings at first, but then it didn’t. Whatever was going on between them just squeezed some other things out of him that I actually preferred—‘I love you,’ stuff about his family, his brother Joe. Joe is a wonderful person. The sense of sin did it. You know, that is the one time in my life with Frank that I ever saw him be sorry for anything, anything at all. His usual attitude is very fatalistic. If Michael hits Richie and blackens his eye, or Janny gets bullied at school, then it was just what was meant to be. I mean, when I showed him that article in the Times that said that the Russians have a hundred missile bases, and said what would we do if…, well, he said, ‘Just sit right here.’ ”

“So — go on with your story.”

“Frank thought it was a dead secret, but Eunice gave me the blow-by-blow. How he kissed her, where he touched her, which item of clothing he took off first, how one time he ripped her stocking. Believe me, I was not envious. Sometimes I thought she was crazy, and she was doing it not with Frank but with someone she thought was Frank or she was telling me was Frank, but wasn’t really. I mean, Frank was nicer to me every single day, and rougher with Eunice, apparently. It was like I had to choose — there were two of him, or there were two of her, or it just wasn’t my business. Like I say, I was so young.”

“Have you seen this kind of split personality since in him?”

Of course the answer was yes. Or no. Andy thought about Frank, the Frank she had sat with at dinner the night before, silent for a while, then irritable with Janny, then laughing at the boys, then seeming to enjoy his au-gratin potatoes (Nedra’s were indeed delicious), then telling her a joke, then asking her what a dress she bought for one of Jim Upjohn’s cocktail parties had cost ($230), scowling only for a moment, then laughing. She said, “I would say that my sense of what is in a personality has gotten larger since then. His or anyone else’s.”

Dr. Grossman said, “Hmm.” That was a sign of approval.

Andy said, “Anyway, he ran off to the war. That’s how he put it back together again. It was Eunice who suffered.”

“And how did your friend suffer?”

“Well, the fellow she married beat her senseless more than once.”

“Do you mean that literally?”

Andy said, “Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Andy said, “I feel nothing about that.”