Early Warning

Arthur nodded. “Tell me everything he said.”

“Well, he thanked me for coming, and—”

“No, I mean his exact words.”

Frank repeated all of what the general had said to him, understanding at once that this was why Arthur had sent him — his eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to the government, he had no idea and knew Arthur wouldn’t tell him. Nevertheless, he did ask, “What’s the money for?”

Arthur said, “Popular uprising.” Frank thought he saw the ghost of a smile, but only that.

Arthur dropped him outside the split-level just at dawn. He picked up the newspaper, eased in through the lower entrance, then went up to the kitchen. All was quiet for once. On page two, the paper announced that Mossadegh had won the election in Iran. There was no mention of unrest, but as he watched the coup unfold — Mossadegh was out by the end of the week — Frank couldn’t stop thinking of that human cipher Louis MacIntosh, who was exactly the sort of person Frank would never have entrusted with buying a gallon of milk at the grocery store.

—

WHEN HE GOT BACK to Iowa City for the fall semester, Henry Langdon went to a place on Iowa Avenue that sold old things and looked and looked until he found a wooden box with a lock (and a key) for storing his letters from his cousin Rosa (at Berkeley) and carbon copies of his own to her. His were typed, but hers were handwritten. The question of typing had posed a real dilemma — you wanted your personal papers to be handwritten, because they were more, well, personal that way, and also because future literary scholars (the career Henry was preparing himself for) would be able to get a better sense of your personality and character from your handwriting than they would from typing. But it was almost impossible to make a good carbon copy by hand, and it was easy with the typewriter. The box was cheap but roomy. In it, he placed the letters as they had been written — his, hers, his, hers — then, on top of them, that Indian-head gold dollar his father had given him, eleven years ago now. The date on the dollar was 1888. Looking at the dollar, Henry wondered if his joy at being back in Iowa City was some kind of betrayal, especially since here he didn’t think of his father or the farm more than once or twice a day. (“And a good thing, for heaven’s sake,” his mother would say.) He thought of “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” he thought of the Venerable Bede, he thought of Defoe, he thought of Rosa Rosa Rosa.

He hadn’t seen Rosa since his father’s funeral in the spring, but they wrote twice a week. He hadn’t counted on Rosa’s visiting Denby (meaning “village of the Danes”—it gave him a bona-fide sense of pleasure to know that), or on himself traveling from Iowa to California, so he couldn’t say that he was disappointed, exactly, not to have seen her.

The tone of her letters was satirical but good-natured, always affectionate. She now referred to her mother, his aunt Eloise, as “Heloise,” never “Mom,” and “Heloise’s” adventures were a source of amusement—“Tuesday, Heloise ran out of gas on the Bay Bridge, and lo and behold, she had left her purse on the kitchen table, so she waited in traffic with a piece of paper in her hand (‘OUT OF GAS PLEASE HELP’) and who should stop to pick her up but Gary Snyder, who is a poet, maybe our age. He was riding a motorcycle, and Heloise got on the back and rode to the gas station! She told me he was darling. I am guessing she is going to fix me up with him any day now.”

Henry’s own letters left something to be desired, he thought. They were detailed and earnest, and quite often he found himself going on too long about things that excited him, like how the system of Roman roads in England dictated subsequent linguistic boundaries, even a thousand years after the end of the Roman Empire (another difficulty with carbon copies — no erasing). But she wrote faithfully; her letters were as long as his and as frequent, and though she often talked about meeting various guys at coffee shops or poetry readings (everything free — no Hollywood trash movies), she never mentioned any name in more than two letters.

Henry knew that Rosa knew that Henry loved her. He signed his letters, “Love, Henry.” She signed her letters, “Yours, Rosa.” For six weeks, he dreaded Thanksgiving, when she and Aunt Eloise would be coming to the farm and he would have to see her.

On the Wednesday he left for Denby, he spent the whole morning deciding what clothes to take, aware all the while of his roommate’s bag beside the door, full of dirty undershorts heading back to Dubuque for their once-a-semester laundering.