Tomorrow! (10 page)

Newspapers, Nora thought loftily, going away, do what they please.

She went upstairs slowly. Music drifted from Ted’s radio in the attic. The day, all of it, had blanked from Nora’s mind, save for one thing: her braids. She felt she was a neglected child and would have to take care of herself. She went to her mother’s sewing basket, found the big shears, and cut off both braids, hastily lest she change her mind.

They did not cut easily. She had to hack them off, one strand at a time. When she finished—when she held in her two hands the light-brown pigtails, still beribboned at the ends, tinged here and there with a slightly greenish cast from their contact with grubby hands—an expression of purest delight set Nora’s light-blue eyes dancing.
Site had done it. They were done
for.
She had done it by herself, because it was her hair and it was unbearable, and nobody else but herself cared particularly
what
happened to her. She ran skipping to see the effect in the long mirror in her mother’s room.

And when she saw, she was devastated. In her mind’s eye, she had overlooked the present phase—the ragged, wrong-length hacked locks that were not a recognizable bob of any kind but merely the plain evidence of devastation. A long, low wail escaped Nora and rose to a penetrating wail of dismay.

Downstairs, Henry sat with some thirty men and women, block wardens, section heads, neighbors, old friends, most of them his own age, many of them people with whom he’d gone through grammar and high school in Green Prairie. They were angry, intent people, who felt themselves grossly abused and made ridiculous before their own community. Now, as they talked, they valiantly uttered what they had thitherto felt only a little, or fractionally, or not at all: that their work in Civil Defense was of critical importance because of its purpose.

Most of the men were employed in good positions, like Henry Conner; most of the women were housewives. But Ed Pratt, sitting in a kitchen chair (hastily transported for the meeting by Ted) with his hat still on the back of his head and a toothpick in his teeth, was a house painter. Joe Dennison, his broad backside propped on the window sill and his blue shirt open, owned and ran a bulldozer, contracting privately for its use. Ed and Joe were joint heads of the section’s demolition squad.

To nearly all these people, to nearly all other Civil Defense volunteers, the destruction of Green Prairie had not actually been thinkable. Good will, community spirit, conformity and a readiness to serve were far more responsible for their efforts than any acceptance of the reality of the booklets sent by the Federal Civil Defense Administration from Washington. Their special organization had long since became a proper enterprise in their town—just as it was an enterprise to scorn, in River City.

There was one further factor which abetted their association: a private pride in private occupations. Until Civil Defense had been established, each lived in a partial vacuum about the occupation of others. Now, rather surprisingly, everyone had learned much concerning the special skills of the community.

Thus Whedon Coles, a lean, lank, preoccupied man who was a Baptist deacon and had five daughters, was able to reveal to his fellow citizens that being “new lines superintendent of Sister Cities Consolidated Gas and Electric” meant he knew about what lay beneath the streets of Green Prairie and where the overhead wire mazes ran and what to do about a hundred hitherto bewildering household dilemmas involving leaks and short circuits. Thus it developed that Ed Pratt did not just
paint
houses; he was able to explain their construction. Joe Dennison could tell all about walls—brick, rock, cement—and what underlay everybody’s lawns and gardens. In the same way, Henry, who had come up through retail hardware to accounting, could show his community how to use all sorts of tools and small machines.

Civil Defense had been an interesting way to learn unknown things concerning a city, how it is put together, and what makes it run; it had been at the same time that humanly more valuable thing: an opportunity to demonstrate, private skills and special knowledge.

These people, angry, studying what steps to take to express their wrath and to revenge themselves upon the sudden “disloyalty” of the morning paper, were gradually interrupted, silenced, by a penetrating wail coming from somewhere in the house.

Beth Conner heard it first and hoped it would subside.

Henry heard it and went on for a moment: “. . . it’s my feeling that we shouldn’t appeal to Washington. Civil Defense, for better or for worse, is principally a state matter. We therefore ought to handle our problems at home. People always kicking about too much central government, I mean, hadn’t ought to yell for Federal help the minute anybody tramps on their toes. . . .”

He stopped and smiled at his wife. “It’s Nora,” he said. “I guess you better go up.” He went on, “So I think we ought first to get hold of Coley Borden and ask him what in hell he’s doing. After all, there isn’t one of us here but knows and loves Coley Borden. . . .”

Beth hurried up the stairs, following the steam-engine wail. She found Nora lying on the double bed, on her back, a braid in each hand.

For a moment, Beth nearly burst into laughter. She had liked the child’s long hair, but she had been on the verge of conceding to Nora’s demands that it be cut. Insistence that it not be had expressed mere sentiment on Beth’s part. But now, seeing the shaggy locks against the bedspread, hearing the agony in the voice, Beth lost her smile. She did not conceal it; a genuine, deep sympathy banished amusement. She picked up the girl bodily and hugged her. “Nora. You mustn’t cry. You’re just upset because it looks so funny at first. I’ll take you right straight over to Nellie’s. If she’s closed up, we’ll make her open the beauty parlor and we’ll have your hair fixed to look
lovely
!”

Hope and wonderment stirred in Nora. She checked her grief. “It’ll
never
look lovely!”

“Come along. My! Your dress is a mess. Never mind. . . .”

Beth beckoned her husband to the front-hall door. “I’ve got to take Nora on an errand,” she said.

“Is she sick?”

“No. But—”

“Ye gods, Beth! This is an important meeting. And somebody has to serve the refreshments afterward.”

Beth shook her head. “Nora’s important, too! Lenore can serve. She knows where everything is, Henry. Tell her the refrigerator—and the plates are all stacked in the pantry. Oh,
she’ll know
. . . !”

Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, had always liked his mother’s sister and her family. Perhaps it was the kids he had particularly liked, for the father, Jim Williams, wasn’t actually much: an archetypal nobody, a draftsman, a little gray chap who would get lost in a crowd of two. And Beth’s sister Ruth, though she had been very blonde and very pretty at twenty, was careworn now. No wonder, with so small a salary and six kids.

Still he boarded the Central Avenue bus reluctantly. He’d been home for a week now, and he’d had only one real date with Lenore. The rest of the time she’d been busy—or had merely dropped in for an hour, or permitted him the same privilege. But there was a tension in the Bailey house he didn’t understand, though the Baileys had always been tense. And there was a kind of—distance—about Lenore: an attitude he’d never before seen in her. It made him feel with increased anxiety that growing up, entering the service, getting an architectural degree and a commission-doing the things men do—was steadily alienating him from the loyalties, affections and intimacies of his youth.

His mother had repeatedly reminded him he would have to pay a call on his aunt’s family while he was at home on leave. He had at first agreed gladly. But, now that he was on the way, he felt forlorn about the journey and the visit.

He caught the Central Avenue bus and sat on the back seat while it wormed its way north through the residential area, the business perimeter and the shops and tall buildings of the downtown section. He got out in front of the Olympic Theatre, already alight, with an early queue of moviegoers under its marquee. He walked to the terminal and caught a Ferndale bus.

It started across the river. On the way over, Charles observed how low the water was, September-shallow, with boulders showing and dry sandbanks. It forked around Swan Island to the west. Late bathers still dotted the waist-deep water. The Fun House was already bright for evening though roller-coaster cars caught the sun as they heaved up on the latticed curves and slowed before plunging. To his right, he saw the river going away east, the ruddy bluffs crossed by other bridges, the warehouses on the Green Prairie side and the disused, rotting docks below.

Across the way, slums whose colored people lived, and Italians, Greeks, Jews and Poles.

The lieutenant thought about the river a little, and perhaps only as men can think of rivers, remembering boyhood.

He remembered fishing in its muddy waters for suckers and catfish, and finally, one day, catching a big bass. He remembered camping with a scoutmaster, out where the airport was now.

The river then, and at that point, was gouged deeply into the level plains; there were miniature canyons where cottonwoods and willows grew, where deer lived, where tents could be pitched in summer and where in winter an ardent boy could trap a few muskrats, a skunk or two and maybe, once in a lifetime, an ermine or a mink. It was gone now; the mills had killed the fish and the airport was so close to the gorges (which once had been mysterious and remote-seeming) that nobody in his right mind would pitch a tent there. He reflected that no good places were left where boys on rafts could play Lewis and Clark, or Mark Twain steamboating. Subdivisions had replaced those primordial pockets on the river—or factories, or golf courses, or parallel highways, or airports. Something.

The bus plugged for half a mile, noisily, through a run-down section, competing with trolley cars, trucks, jalopies driven by Negroes and hordes of pedestrians. At last, turning on Willowgrove from Mechanic Street, it made better time and soon covered the distance between the slums and Ferndale, River City’s oldest suburb. Charles walked the short way to his aunt’s house.

He was sighted in the distance by twelve-year-old Marie. In a moment, four of the young Williamses came down the sidewalk under the catalpas, yelling, he thought affectionately, like Indians. (He found out presently, however, that they were yelling like inhabitants of Venus.) As the youngsters caught his hands and poured forth questions about his family, about the armed forces, about life on other planets as he walked toward the too-small frame house where they lived, Charles lost some of his feeling of forlornness.

He loved kids. He had liked being one, through all the wonderful epochs of childhood from the day of his first sled to the day his father had given him a fly-casting rod and thence to the magical evening when his dad had said, “Well, Chuck, looks like the ducks might be coming in around dawn tomorrow. Sam Phelps has that sprained ankle, and if you look in the broom closet, you may discover something resembling a brand-new, sixteen-gauge, over-and-under. . .

.”

What in the hell, Chuck thought, turning into the Williams’s walk, was life all for—if not this: kids to pass on kinship to?

When dinner was over, the plenteous dinner his aunt provided, in part from the big vegetable garden in the empty lot behind the house, they “relaxed in the parlor.” He had played with Irma, the new baby, blonder than the others, he’d said, practically silver-haired. He had thrilled the youngsters and their parents with an eyewitness account of the take-off of a guided missile. He’d shown Don the right way to hold his bow and arrow—and shot a hole through a diaper on the clothesline, accidentally. He’d arbitrated a quarrel between Marie and Tom and admired Sarah’s kindergarten art work.

Now, with a tumbler of elderberry wine, he sat with Ruth and Jim. Fireflies winked above the lawn and sounds of play told where the older kids were. The young ones already slept. It was peaceful.

His aunt and uncle asked, diffidently, about service. Did he hate it? Was it really rugged?

Jim, who had been deferred in the Second War because of his family, seemed to hide under the question a mixture of guilt and romantic expectation.

“It’s just dull,” Charles said. “Lord, the kids are growing! Marie’s really a young woman!”

Jim hitched a suspender and rubbed his Adam’s apple. “That’s what she tells us daily,”

he laughed. “She’s a year and a half older than Nora.”

“Nora,” said Charles, “is getting the same idea. She cut her own hair the other day. . . .”

They laughed at the story.

“We haven’t seen much of Beth and Henry.” Ruth sounded apologetic. “Time was when Ferndale seemed practically next door to Walnut Street. But now”—she sighed—“by the time I get the kids organized, or a few hours of an afternoon, it seems a million miles off.”

“I know,” Chuck nodded. “Took me an hour and a quarter to get over here.”

“Mercy!”

“Both cities,” Jim said, speaking with professional assurance, “were horse-and-buggy designed. I read the other day in my drafting magazine that cities are strangling themselves.

Green Prairie and River City
sure
are!” Jim suddenly realized that, although his nephew was the younger man, he had a degree in architecture. “What do
you
think?” he asked, yielding his moment of pontification.

“You’d believe so, if you could hear Dad and his wardens talk! They jammed up Green Prairie, but good, last week.”

Ruth said, “I wish Hank Conner would get out of that thing!”

Charles lit a cigarette. “Why? He loves it. Dad’s a kind of natural leader of folks.”

“Think of the effect on Nora, though—and Ted—”

“
What
effect?”

Jim put in anxiously, “You see, Chuck, we’re not allowed to mention atom bombs or anything having to do with them in this household.”

“It’s emotionally destructive,” Ruth Williams said emphatically.

Charles realized his aunt was serious. A stiffness had come into her comfortable, plump body. He laughed. “You mean harmful to the kids? I don’t know. They were having a war on Venus when I arrived. The carnage was fabulous, they told me. I don’t believe hearing a few useful facts about what to do in case of enemy aggression—”