Early Warning

Now there was a long silence, and Andy knew that Dr. Grossman believed her.

1960

HENRY DIDN’T THINK about Rosa much. Sometimes he identified her to himself as his “first love,” rather like Flora in Little Dorrit—the wrong girl, fortunately escaped, though she wasn’t silly, like Flora — she was argumentative, resentful, beautiful, and severe. And yet, when he got to the part in Eloise’s letter where Eloise said that Rosa had gotten married and seemed to be having a baby, he felt his mood darken. He read it over: “I don’t know if you met Elton Jackman when you were here. He is friends of friends. Anyway, Rosa has told me that she and Elton had decided to get married in a simple ceremony down in Big Sur (to which I was not invited, also not surprised) and they will now live down there with some friends until their baby is born (I guess it’s due in June).” Then she went on to write about some organizing she was doing in Oakland.

Henry had met Elton Jackman once — a small, wiry fellow whose real name, it was said, was O’Connell, and whose real game, it was said, was fencing stolen goods, though when the horses were running at Golden Gate, Bay Meadows, or Tanforan, he spent most of his time there. Jackman would take Rosa’s literary friends to the races and induce them to bet (and to fund his betting); he would give them a decent tip often enough so that they felt flush. Jackman, talkative and funny, was a bona-fide member of the Lumpenproletariat. Henry thought he was maybe forty-five or so by this time. He himself was twenty-seven, Rosa nearly twenty-six; when he broke up with Sandra, this seemed old, but now it seemed almost virginal. He had thought that failed romances were Rosa’s vocation, along with mourning the father she lost in the war. Obviously to everyone, including Rosa, these two activities were deeply and meaningfully intertwined, and getting knocked up by Eddie O’Connell could easily be the culmination of them.

There was a letter from Sandra, too, not in today’s mail, but in Friday’s, now four days old, which he hadn’t read, much less responded to. He sincerely hoped that Sandra was full of the same news — she was marrying an older man, she was pregnant, she was happy, she was defiant, she was thrilled beyond words to have escaped their hasty engagement, which Henry had attributed to the excitement of finding not one but two Roman coins in the same day on their dig in Colchester (“Camulodunon,” then “Camulodunum,” then, perhaps, “Camelot”?).

Henry went into his perfectly neat bedroom and opened his perfectly neat closet. Stacked on the shelf, perfectly folded, were three sweater vests in shades of brown — he called them “tobacco” (an Arawakian/Caribbean word apparently related to Arabic tabaq for “herbs,” describing in its very being the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish), “rust” (from the Old English root, rudu, for “redness,” and obviously related to “red,” but also to erythros, Greek, and rudhira, Sanskrit, and the only color with such broad provenance, and what did that mean?), and “shit,” the darkest one, from Old English scitan, to “shed,” “separate,” or “purge,” also the root for “science”). Henry chose the rust, and then a nice Harris-tweed jacket with a bluish green cast, and a navy blue scarf.

The idea that his class would be starting on Beowulf in two hours reminded him that he should drop a note to Professor McGalliard, that man of infinite patience who had taught him everything he knew — or, rather, everything that Henry had been capable of learning at the time, which right now didn’t seem like much — and who had recommended him for this position. Henry had a couple of chapters to go on his dissertation, but when the department had gone to McGalliard for advice right after Professor Atlee dropped dead of a heart attack in August, he had recommended Henry most highly, so here he was. Professor McGalliard had never married. Now that Henry was rid of Sandra, never marrying seemed like the purest option.

Henry put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, went out the door to his apartment, closed the door behind him, made sure it was locked, put on his rubbers, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went down the three steps to the outside door. Several kids had come home for lunch from the nearby elementary school, and were making snowballs in front of the apartment building next door. Henry waved to them. It was January. There had been four snowstorms before this, and all three of the boys knew that Henry had good aim, so they smiled, shouted hello, and kept their hands down.

Henry swore that he would open Sandra’s letter when he got home that evening.