Early Warning

Paul put his arm around her, and they lay back on the twin bed. The next morning, Paul asked for a room with a double bed, and as it happened, someone was checking out that very day, and the owner of the bed-and-breakfast would move their things. That day, Henry had to work, and so they went back to York Minster, bought a nice simple guidebook with large pictures and short explanations, and enjoyed their morning very much. The best part of the day, besides “tea,” was the hour she spent in a small bookstore, uneven floors on three levels, books piled everywhere willy-nilly. On the shelves marked “Local Interest, Yorkshire,” she saw Wuthering Heights, which she had been supposed to read in ninth grade and had never even started. She bought it for a half-crown.

Henry took them to supper in an Indian restaurant with eight of the other diggers, all of whom were about her age or younger, enrolled in colleges and graduate schools in the United States and England. Four of the boys had beards, which Claire thought was interesting. One couple lived in a tent not far from the dig. That day, Henry had let them take a shower in his room, because they had spent the last three days digging up the tanning pit to see if there was anything in there. The girl gaily related how the boy had had to hold her by the ankles for the last bits, as she scraped the bottom of the pit with her trowel. “Up and down, in and out, and stinking to high heaven.”

Henry turned to her. “In the Middle Ages, they tanned leather with manure.”

The boy said, “It was pointless to bathe, since we had to do the whole thing. So we just slept outside the tent. Thank goodness, it hasn’t rained.”

Claire looked them up and down. They seemed clean enough now. One of the boys was a Negro man. He was about Claire’s age, and had gone to school in New York. His name was Jacob Palmer. He didn’t seem to realize that he was the only Negro in the restaurant. He chatted and laughed at Henry’s jokes just as the others did. Claire noticed that she glanced at him more often than Paul did, but Paul was from Philadelphia, not Des Moines. Claire was in favor of civil rights. She’d thought it was shocking when that church was bombed in Alabama the year before, but everyone forgot about that when Kennedy was assassinated. Then those three boys, just about her age, were murdered in Mississippi, and their bodies were discovered four days before she and Paul left for England — eight or nine days ago now. She hadn’t heard any news about them since coming here, but looking at Jacob Palmer in this sea of white people made her think of them. However, it was easy to be in favor of civil rights when she spent all day sitting in Paul’s office, listening to his patients (or their mothers, actually, since many of his patients were children with ear infections) babble on about whether now, since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, they were going to let Negroes into the Wakonda Country Club. And why not? thought Claire, who had been there twice. There were plenty of Negroes there already — caddies, waiters, groundskeepers. Jacob Palmer talked just like the other students — about the excavations, the grid, the sherds, the artifacts.

That night, she began reading Wuthering Heights. She didn’t put the book down for two hours — Paul was sound asleep. Heathcliff was said to be dark-haired, but when she read about him, the face in her mind was Frank’s, not Joe’s. Two days later, when Henry took them to a town called Otley for just a little walk, and not into very steep countryside, that was where she imagined everything in the book to take place. It was a shocking book, but when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and started over.

—

AFTER HE DELIVERED his trunk and his suitcase and met his two roommates, Tim drove back to McLean. He did not drive Wednesday to his house, where they were expecting him for a last lunch before Lillian took him back to school and left him there; he drove Tuesday, late, to Fiona’s, and parked on the road up beside the horse pasture. It was nearly midnight. The weather had been hot and humid, and there were flies and midges everywhere. Fiona was leaving for Missouri in two days, for a college that was known, from what Tim had heard, solely for its horse-riding program. Rocky, who had been some kind of champion for 1963, had been sent ahead. Debbie had earned enough money working for a summer day camp to take over Prince’s expenses for the school year. The only one who got nothing in all of this, as far as he could tell, was himself.