Early Warning (43 page)

It was Cat who led her home in the rain, took off her soaking clothes, helped her dry her hair, put her to bed, and kissed her good night, and though she cried for a while, she was so exhausted that she did fall asleep. Now she was wiped out, almost hungover in a way;
she knew she ought to get up and go to work, but she could not make herself do it.

—

THE PROBLEM
Eloise had when Jorge came by and told her how enemies of the Temple were bent on destroying it was that she believed him. Jorge was twenty-two; he never thought of the Kennedy assassinations, except as ghost stories. Nor, when she asked him, did he know what the CIA did, only what Jones said it did, which was to infiltrate peaceful organizations like his and destroy them from within. Eloise knew that was true, especially if that organization openly—you might say defiantly—professed socialist principles, which Jones did. When Jones said that J. Edgar Hoover had once called him personally and threatened to destroy or kill him, his wife, and his “rainbow children,” and told him that he had a dossier on him full of crimes “you and I know you didn't commit, but that I can prove you did,” that was the first time Jorge had heard of Hoover, and he believed the reverend, who had been good to him, like a strict but loving father, and allowed him to work as an orderly in the Temple medical clinic. People came in pain and left in joy, because at last they had found treatment, but also love; Jorge was convinced that the latter was more effective than the former. Eloise remembered what Frank had said about that young woman—Judy was her name—that Hoover hated because she knew he was gathering every molecule of shit he could on everyone he knew in order to maintain his hold over them, and how unusual was that? Not at all, in Eloise's experience.

Jorge insisted that there was nothing at all wrong with Cat, Janet, Lucas, and Jorge himself going to Guyana—the piece of property there was beautiful, rather like Marin County, fertile and well watered. The medical clinic was already up and running, and it was no less healthy than family farms in the Midwest had once been.

“That's not a good recommendation to an old farm girl,” said Eloise, but Jorge said, “I would rather work in my own communal field than a field owned by United Fruit.”

Eloise said that she hadn't known that United Fruit owned fields in the United States. Jorge scowled but pressed on. All they needed was some money for transportation. Janet had let it out that the family farm had been sold somehow, or split up, and there was money.
Just a few hundred dollars was all they needed. No one, not Lucas or Janet, knew he had come over to ask.

“Cat?” said Eloise.

Jorge didn't answer, just smiled and said, “We know that, deep down, you are in sympathy with socialism and with our experiment. You gave Marla money.”

Eloise, who was sitting on the sunporch in her favorite rocker, pushing herself back and forth with her toe, said, “Who told you that?”

“Marla is unhappy in Paris. She might join us.”

Marla's last letter had been full of news about how she had been taken up by a group of feminists who adored the self-referential profundities of her inscriptions. They wanted to do a street play on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Boulevard Saint-Germain, not even translating the plays into French, but acting them out as a reflection of the pedestrians going by, especially, since summer was at hand, of American tourists. Her funds were holding out fairly well, but she was getting tired of hummus and baba ghanouj. Eloise said, “I can't imagine such a thing.”

Jorge, who was sitting on the couch, drinking the chamomile tea Eloise had given him, said, “Well, she didn't write to me, but Reverend Jones has the letter.”

Eloise said, “If Reverend Jones wants my money, then he'll have to come and ask for it, because I learned long ago never to discuss finances with anyone but the boss.”

She expected Jorge to laugh at this, but he shook his head very seriously. He said, “Now that Rupert Murdoch is financing his assassination and the destruction of the Temple, he dare not go anywhere. His life is in too much danger.”

“Who is Rupert Murdoch?” said Eloise.

“He's like that Hearst man.”

“William Randolph Hearst?”

“Something like that,” said Jorge. “Anyway, Rupert Murdoch had one of our members killed last fall, as a warning, and now he has bigger plans, which means that our members are only safe in Guyana. We thought we were safe in California, but that isn't the case. The coming Nazi takeover will happen everywhere, and when it does, people like me and Lucas will be sent to camps. It happens
every thirty years or so. We think, for Janet's and Lucas's safety, you should—”

Eloise found herself rocking rather furiously, and made it a point to stop.

“We've already applied for our passports and visas, though Janet's passport is still valid.”

Eloise said, coolly, “What don't you know about her?” She thought, Or me, for that matter.

“Janet has been pretty open about her feelings and thoughts.”

“And her assets?”

Jorge smiled.

Eloise thought, I used to like this kid. She said, “When are you planning to go?”

“We understand that the visas will come in early August, so we ought to buy the tickets pretty soon.” He looked her right in the eye. “Four tickets—Janet, Lucas, Cat, me.”

“How much are the tickets?”

“Three fifty apiece. One-way.”

Eloise pretended to think for a moment by gazing out the window, but what she really did was note the two men walking down her street; they had been walking the other direction a few minutes before. She said, “You want a check?” She thought that seven hundred dollars, for Janet's and Lucas's tickets, was not too high a price to pay to get Cat and Jorge out of the country. She said, “What about Lena?”

“The reverend is taking care of her. He likes to have her with him.”

Eloise thought, I'll bet he does. Then she thought that Lenin may have been a pig but he was not a religious, lecherous pig.

She said, “Let me find my checkbook.” Then she said, “Do you know those two guys who keep walking back and forth in front of my house?”

Jorge glanced out the window. He said, “That's Zeb and Vic.”

“What are they doing?”

Jorge said, “We are all in danger. It's better to travel in groups.”

Eloise, who had lived in Oakland for years without a second thought, had a second thought.

—

CAT KEPT URGING
Janet to up her tithe, especially since “we don't have the reverend's golden tongue to help us raise funds anymore, at least for now.” She acted as though Reverend Jones's flight to Guyana and the article in
New West
magazine meant nothing—of course Reverend Jones had made enemies, and those enemies were glad to talk. Cat kept going to the Temple, kept chatting about whom she saw there and what they did. And then, right on schedule, on August 16, she disappeared from her room. When Lucas called the house where Jorge was living, he got no answer. He went over to the house, in the Mission District. It was empty, the back door unlocked. Janet kept taking out her ticket and putting it away again. When she looked at the destinations—Georgetown, Guyana; change at JFK, New York—the very words made her nervous, but she didn't know which affected her more.

Lucas was at first happy. He came over three days in a row, but then it was Friday, he had to play, and he didn't invite her to come watch. After he, too, disappeared—this was the part that she thought she should have noticed—she had watched him onstage so many times, smiling and waving his sticks, leaning into the drums and staring intently as the beat got faster and more complicated, then, when the song ended, throwing his arms in the air and grinning. Would she ever see that again? Not if he had gone to Guyana. Maybe he had changed his ticket, taken a later flight, used this opportunity to leave her behind because he saw that she was a bourgeois materialist after all. It was a mystery. But she pulled herself together. She went to work, she said that she would take the manager's job at the branch her restaurant was opening on Fulton Street, she said that she would move across the bay, find a room in the Castro, or, because she would be making a little more money, maybe a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe communal living was not for her. Maybe she needed some boundaries, and boundaries started with a locked door. Nor did she hear from Marla. Jorge had told her that Marla had gone to the agricultural paradise after all, had decided that Paris was corrupt and shallow, had turned over a new leaf. So they were all there; they had all left her behind.

She did not run out the back of the restaurant when she saw Aunt Eloise in her section. After being prodded by the maître d', she went over and set the menu in front of her aunt and said, “Would you like to hear today's specials?”

Aunt Eloise looked up at her. “I really did wonder whether you had gone.”

“I didn't.”

“Thank God! I read the article. I was appalled.”

Janet was about to say that the article was all lies and everyone was out to get Reverend Jones, but she said, “I was, too.” Then, “You should try the risotto. It's rice cooked in broth with mushrooms, garlic, and Parmesan.”

“I know what it is.”

Eloise stared at the menu as if she couldn't help herself, then said, “What about Lucas?”

“He went.”

Janet sat down in the chair beside Eloise at the table and put her head in her hands. Her hair fell in a dirty curtain around her, and that made her all the sadder, somehow. Aunt Eloise gently pushed it back, looked her in the eye, took her hand. Then she whispered, “Honey, do you want to leave here and go back home?”

Janet nodded.

—

THERE WERE
no kids Minnie had ever seen who had been improved by adult influence, and she thought this in spite of all the conferences over the years in which she had said, “Perhaps if you took Billy in hand,” or “Perhaps if you helped Janie attend more closely to her homework…” Janet, she thought, would have said her parents wrecked her, but Minnie thought she was a strange combination of daring and alert, strong and brittle, overprepared, too smart for her own good, and never ready. Minnie liked her. You could run down the list of what Frank and Andy and Lillian and Arthur and Tim and this mysterious boy Lucas had done to her, and you could imagine how these cruelties (whether intentional or not) had affected her, but she was the same girl she had always been.

When she got to Iowa (she still would not go all the way to New York), she slept one twelve-hour night, and then she was up, her hair
washed and combed, her bed made, her bag unpacked, and her clothes put away. Minnie was a week away from starting school, so she sat in the kitchen while Janet fixed herself a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast, which she ate neatly. She washed up after herself, and then sat down across the table from Minnie. She looked haggard and grief-stricken, but she said, “I should do something.”

“Why don't you take some courses?”

“Where?”

“ISU. Iowa. Drake.”

“I never applied to graduate school.”

“You can still take some courses. Night courses, if you want. Ames and Iowa City are pretty quiet, at least compared to—”

Janet smiled. “That would be a change.”

“Do you want to talk about—”

Janet shook her head, and Minnie wondered which thing she didn't want to talk about—what happened after she got to San Francisco, or what drove her to San Francisco in the first place. But that was neither here nor there. Janet was sitting in front of her, as ready as anyone Minnie had ever seen to take advice. Minnie said, “I always say, choose the place, not the school. Then you'll be happier.”

“I would choose Iowa City.”

“Me, too,” said Minnie.

So they did it step by step. The girl would not take a penny from Frank, referred to his wealth as “blood money,” but she was willing to take a loan from Minnie of $250.00. This was when she admitted to Minnie that she had given all her savings to the Peoples Temple at the last minute, after everyone she knew was gone, as a kind of desperate gesture. “How much did you have?” said Minnie.

“Eleven hundred dollars. I had a good job. I was making fifty bucks a night in tips.”

Minnie asked no more questions, just helped her find a small apartment on Gilbert Street, within walking distance of downtown, and a part-time job at Things, Things, and Things, which was an expensive but cheerful shop on Clinton. She helped her buy a bed and a chest and a lamp and some bedding and a chair. She went with her to the registrar's office, and, yes, there were quite a few courses she could take. She chose an advanced French-conversation class and a class in art history. Minnie paid the fees, which were small, since she would
only be getting adult-ed credit. Then she left her there, sitting on her bed, on a very warm, humid, sunny afternoon, with a sad look on her face, and as she drove back to Denby, Minnie wondered if she had diverted Janet to a less self-destructive path, or if she had just supplied her with the setting for more of the same.

I
T WAS NINE.
Henry was dressed and had eaten a bowl of oatmeal. It had been snowing for fifty-three hours. Henry knew because he remembered getting up in the dark two nights ago to take a piss (from the Old French,
pissier
, twelfth century, origin unknown), looking out the window, thinking that it was snowing again—what was that, the tenth storm since Thanksgiving?—looking at the clock, and going back to sleep. With the howling winds and the sad attempts at plowing, some drifts mounted to second-story windows, covered cars, blocked streets. He had tenaciously kept shoveling and sweeping his little walk—if he hadn't, he would not be able to get out the door. It was fortunate in some ways that he had sold his car and not purchased another: he would have hated to see a new car simply buried in snow for four months on end. And having no car meant that he wouldn't set out hopefully for, say, Milwaukee, only to be stranded, trapped, and frozen to death. On the other hand, if you walked everywhere, as Henry did, being frozen to death or blown away in these winds was also a hazard.

Rosanna had sometimes talked about the storm of '36 or some such year—Henry would have been three; he remembered nothing—when they first sent Frank to Eloise in Chicago because there was no school in Denby. Frank had supposedly gone through a tunnel of snow and nearly died, and two women saved him by buying him a berth in
the sleeping car. Maybe, in those days, two women were always saving Frank. That same year, snow outside his future room, the addition where Joe was sleeping alone, had been up to the eaves. After this winter, Henry thought he could go toe to toe with Rosanna; he was in the most prepared-for-snow city in the world, and there was nowhere to put it. All they needed now, Henry thought, would be a nice ice storm to seal them in permanently.

In ordinary circumstances, no one would have said of him that he was a farm kid, not even his parents, but he had a farm kid's plenitude of provisions—bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, boxes of spaghetti, cans of tomatoes, a freezer full of chicken breasts and nicely trimmed steaks. He had wine, he had water, he had anchovies and several varieties of Italian cheeses; if he had to make himself pizza for a week, he could do it. He had a kerosene lamp; he had wood for the fireplace (he'd used about half of that, and he was careful to keep the flue clear—his colleague Nina had passed out several times, thinking that it was the dreary nature of her manuscript that was putting her to sleep, but it turned out to be her chimney leaking carbon monoxide into the living room).

He went into the front room and picked up
The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context
, which had just arrived from Oxford for his review. Jean de La Ceppède was right up his alley now. In the summer, Henry had visited Aix-en-Provence and decided that medieval France was unbelievably alluring, and why had he not lifted his youthful gaze from Caedmon and Cynewulf and looked farther south, where the weather was better and the literature and history more complex?

But not only had Henry's academic interests shifted toward France, he was also lonely, had been lonely since Philip left, now two years ago. Philip was in New York, and there was no reasonable hope of seeing him until spring break, seven weeks away. And even if he saw him, Philip had moved on. When Henry stayed with him for four days in October, they had gone out to the bathhouses every night, and while Philip ran joyously from room to room, partner to partner, disappearing and coming back, Henry sat at the bar, sipping gin and tonics, frightened, glad of his graying hair, his utterly straight outfits—khakis, sweaters, blue shirts. Though he had appreciated the
wildness and color of the scene, though he had been flirted with, he would have grabbed the bar and resisted being taken away from it with all his strength. Philip, irritated and a little offended, had said, as if he meant it, that that emblematic medieval experience Henry had had as a boy, an eyeless white horse exploding in a ditch full of paleolithic refuse, was the key to his whole Weltanschauung: human nature is inherently evil and is never to be trusted. Philip was much more of a Romantic.

Once in a while, he wished he could call Rosanna and pick a fight with her, as he had done so many times in the past. “Ma,” she had hated that, but when he called her “Mom,” she said, “What are you, twelve years old?” When he called her “Mother,” she said, “I am not a nun,” and so for a few months he referred to her, only in her hearing, as “Mother Superior,” always smiling when she pursed her lips. Ma! Ma! What did you call a finicky maternal figure? She might have liked “Rosanna,” but none of them had dared. He'd wept when he saw her in the open casket, neatly dressed in her gray dress, with the pink sweater she had knitted herself and some black pumps. They had fixed her hair anyhow, not in the bun she preferred, and Lois had said, seriously, “Maybe we should fold up all the sweaters she made herself and put them in there. I hate to see them go to the Salvation Army.” But it had seemed too strange to do such a thing, and so they had gone to the Salvation Army—they were too small for anyone in the family.

After the funeral, he had come home to the very apartment where she had died, and not thought very often about it. In spite of having picked her up and lifted her and held her hand, he found himself sometimes dialing her number because he hadn't heard from her in a while and felt guilty, and then he would remember. Was this failure to have experienced her death because, in spite of the evidence, he just couldn't believe it, or because she had never accepted that he was gay (though he had never told her, either, leaving that to Lillian or Claire, and it was unlikely that they ever had)? Maybe she knew what a homosexual was, if she dared to think about it, but sexuality of any kind was not something talked about. You wanted to know the facts of life, you went out and watched some sheep. Were there boys in the neighborhood who tried putting it to a sheep once in a while?
My goodness, why are we talking about such a thing? Henry smiled, stopped reading. The windows were flakily white. In the distance, he heard a siren. It had a futile sound.

If he called Philip now, Philip would be short with him, or maybe brusque. Henry wondered if Basil, too, visited him, and made better use of his opportunities than Henry did. In England, it would not be snowing, or if it was it would be mounding silently on the Gothic windowsills of elegant cathedrals.

For fun, he had taken a test that sorted personality types, and he had given it, too—to Beowulf, to Sir Galahad, to Sir Lancelot and King Arthur. All of them—were they sick, sick, sick, or just a certain type? He had come up I N T J—introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging—no surprise, and he had no trouble finding synonyms—stuffed shirt, irrational, persnickety (which was a lovely example of onomatopoeia, a variation on “pernickety,” which was in turn a variation on the Scots word “pernicky,” origin unknown), snobbish—that he was sure his colleagues thought were equally applicable. But, he had to lament, irrational, persnickety, snobbish (
sine nobilitate
) stuffed shirts had needs and desires, too! It didn't help that, over the years, he had suppressed his sense of humor. When the department had to designate someone to write a gassy, sober report for the administration, Henry was the one. As for being gay, well, he accepted Philip's view that if you were gay you were gay, but he sometimes wondered, did careful come first or did homosexual come first? Those times he had been with women (and, in retrospect, perhaps he had not experienced Rosa as a woman, because of her confidence, the chip on her shoulder, the clothes, the flat chest, the air of sophistication), had been looking at marriage and children, it had seemed as though being gay would be permanent relief from chaos, and this had turned out to be true. Every romantic encounter nicely arranged and self-contained, like a meeting of spies on the street corner, so careful to avoid the notice of MI5 or the KGB—Henry had liked that part. Could you break out of the box of your I N T J, or were you stuck with it? Was it temperament or training, nature or nurture? Maybe it was a little late, at forty-five, to be asking this question. But if you spent forty-four years arranging things to your satisfaction (according to Rosanna, as soon as he could pick up a block, he made sure that it coordinated with the block next to it), then who was to tell you that satisfaction
was maybe the deadliest feeling of all? He looked out the window and decided to call Rosa—but when he tried to get her number from Information, none could be found.

—

ANDY WAS
in the bathroom, reading a copy of
Vogue
on the john. She didn't know what she thought about the Madame Grès draped look. Maybe you would have to feel the fabric against your skin to really enjoy the dresses; otherwise, they were rather dull. The phone rang. She had had a phone installed in the bathroom so that she could soak in the tub and talk, but, like—who was that?—LBJ, she often quietly picked up when she was doing her business. Janet's voice said, “Mom?”

Andy closed her magazine. She hadn't heard from Janet in two months, since Christmas. She carefully said, “Hi, honey,” as if this call were no big deal.

“How are you?” said Janet.

“Fine.” Janet had told her four times since her escape from those people in San Francisco that she really did not care to be reminded of that crap (that crap that Eloise had detailed for Andy with indelible outrage), and so Andy did not dare say, “And how are you?”

“Where's Dad?”

“I'm sure he's at the office.”

“It's after eight there.”

“Maybe he's getting a bite to eat, then.”

There was a silence, during which Andy assumed Janet was choking back some sort of disapproval of their domestic arrangements. But after Nedra retired (and with a nice package, Andy had assured her AA group), no one was interested in cooking. Andy could make her own salad.

“What are Richie and Michael doing?”

“You know they had their twenty-fifth birthdays?”

“I sent them cards.”

“Did you? I hope they received them. Michael's apartment is such a mess, no one in their right mind would go in there, and Richie seems to be staying most of the time with a girl he knows on the Upper East Side. She's Jewish.”

“Mom!”

“What? She is. I met her parents. They're Jewish, too.”

Andy could hear her report this remark to someone. She was getting to that stage that her father had gotten to, where everything he said got laughed at, but if that was the price of conversations with Janet, Andy was willing to pay it. She said, “Her uncle is a furrier. They gave me a hat. It looks good on me. Can you call me back, I have to—”

“Mom.”

Andy shifted her position and set the magazine on the floor. She knew she was about to receive some news, felt a moment of dread, but then she sensed what the news would be. As Janet said it, she mouthed the words, “I'm pregnant.”

Andy forced herself not to exclaim, “Oh dear.”

Janet said, “He's wonderful!”

“You know it's a boy?”

“No, Mom. Jared. Jared Nelson, my beloved. The father of the pregnancy.” She laughed. There was a laugh in the background.

There were many questions that Andy did not dare ask: Are you married? Did you meet him in San Francisco? Where's he from? What does he do? Is he divorced (not a bad thing, in Andy's estimation)? Does he get along with his parents? What's his birth order? Does he drink? Does he speak any Scandinavian language fluently (“Nelson” was possibly a bad sign, though “Nilsson” would be worse)? Janet forestalled her by saying, “He's the funniest person I ever met.”

Andy smiled.

“Mom?”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Say you're happy.”

“I'm happy that Jared is the funniest person you ever met.”

“Are you happy I'm pregnant?”