Some Luck (55 page)

Setting Andy off, he had once thought, was nearly impossible. Was there anyone as agreeable and accepting as Andy? They had never had an argument, and Frank liked it that way—Mama, not slow to tell Papa what to do, had given Frank a distaste for domestic noise. So maybe, startled at Andy’s tirade, he squeezed Janet a little too hard, but there she was, screaming, too.

“Hey!” barked Frank, and Andy whipped around in her chair. She said, “He was right!”

“Who was right?”

“MacArthur was right! We should have gone into China right then and done in those Chinese communists, and Truman fired him, and now we’re all going to have to pay, because Stalin is going to give them the bomb!”

Frank didn’t completely disagree with this assessment—no one did—so he only said, “But that was April or something—”

“And he got away with it! I thought they would impeach him, but they chickened out, and now …”

“Now what?”

She reached for the baby—Frank paused for a moment before he handed her over, but decided it was safer in the end to do it—and took her in her arms. Janet’s crying subsided.

Frank stroked Andy’s hair. Everything was quiet for a moment. There was a Tide commercial, and the music started for
You Bet Your Life
. Andy turned the TV off. Janet struggled to get down, so Andy put her on the floor, and she crawled to her toy box. Andy got up and came over, sat in Frank’s lap, put her head against his shoulder. She said, “I’m sorry. I snapped. But you know what? Every day, I sit in this duplex, and all I think about is bombs.”

“You do?”

“I do.” Andy sat up. She said, “Don’t you? Every single thing we
do is on the surface. Every single thing we do is just a pretense that we all aren’t going to be blown to bits by the Russians.”

“We aren’t going to be blown to bits by the Russians, Andy.”

“Yes, we are.” She said this with icy certainty.

“They don’t have a delivery system. They have a bomb or two, but—”

She scowled and said, “We don’t know what they have, but they know what we have.”

“We know what they have.”

Janet came crawling back and reached toward him. Frank gave her his hand, and she pulled herself up.

Andy did an odd thing—she picked up her skirt and ran the edge between her thumbs and forefingers, back and forth—then said, “Why did we bomb Nagasaki?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank.

“Does Arthur know?”

“He might, but he’s never mentioned working on anything to do with the Manhattan Project.” Frank knew Andy had read the John Hersey book about Hiroshima. It was on the bookshelf across the room. He avoided looking at it so that her gaze would not follow his.

“Was it showing Stalin something he needed to know?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank.

Andy put her face on his shoulder again, and after a while said, “You’ll tell me when they can blow us up, right?”

“Right.” Then he said, “Honey, maybe this is an effect of listening to the news too often. It’s just a show, like any other show.”

Andy nodded.

After Janet went down and they were reading, though, the argument resumed. Andy looked up from her issue of
Vogue
and said, in a surprisingly bitter tone, “Everyone in the State Department is just busy as bees making sure the commies know all about us.”

His mistake was saying, “Us?” He had picked up the morning paper, but in fact was remembering that night in Strasbourg when they discovered that the Jerries had vanished.

“Yes, us!”

He turned and looked at her. Alight with indignation, she was beautiful. He said, “I don’t think the commies care about you and me. Arthur and Lillian, maybe, but not—”

“What about Judy?”

“Judy?” He put down the paper. But of course he knew whom she meant.

“You knew her! She knows you! You work at Grumman! Don’t you think she’s keeping track of you?”

“Well, I would be flattered, but—” That was his second mistake.

She leapt off the couch. “You would be flattered!”

“Anyway, she doesn’t know who I am. She never knew who I was. She thought I was Francis Burnett from Dayton, Ohio. Baby, I’ve covered my tracks.” After making this flat joke of the thing, he reached for her hand, tried to pull her back to the couch and kiss her.

Andy said, “Did you love her?”

“No, Andy. I did not.” She stayed over by the arm of the couch.

“Did she know that?”

“Know that I didn’t love her? Yes. I saw her once a month. It was a very cool relationship.”

“Did you tell her that you loved her?”

“No.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the usual things—that she was nice, that she was fun, that she was special, that she looked good tonight, that I liked her outfit, had she changed her hairdo, had she lost weight, had she been to the dentist, had she, I don’t know. I never said ‘I,’ I always said ‘you.’ ”

“That’s the way you treated me in college.”

“Is it? But I told you I loved you.”

“Once.”

“More than once.” But Frank felt his heart start to beat more quickly, the way he always did when they approached the memory of Eunice. He said, “Anyway, I was a jerk in college. We’ve agreed on that. You, Andy, are the person I love. You are my wife. How Frankie felt about Hildy nine years ago has nothing to do with how I feel about you now. Nothing.” She stared at him, and he held her gaze. Inch by inch, she eased toward him on the couch, and then they kissed, and he led her to the bedroom. There, he helped her unbutton her shirtwaist dress, and then take off the pearls and the girdle and the bra and the hose and the panties. He helped her slip her silk nightgown over her head, and then he kissed her good night. When
she was breathing steadily and deeply, he turned out the lights, and regarded the moon through the window to the right of the bed. A half-moon. A good moon for hunting rabbits.

Everyone he knew was afraid of the Russians. Arthur and Lillian muttered about the Russians all the time. At work, there was this constant sense of being prodded to stay ahead of the Russians, because the Russians, if they got rockets and long-range bombers, would have no scruples about using them, and even if regular Russians did have scruples, Stalin did not. The standard view at work was what Arthur had said months ago, that unless Stalin understood his every waking and sleeping moment that he himself would be blown up within an hour of sending out the first A-bomb, blown up for sure and without fail, then Stalin would not hesitate to send out that bomb. Was that not the lesson of everything Stalin had done since the death of Lenin and the exile of Trotsky? Frank’s own experience in the war confirmed this. Who were the French and the Brits and even the Americans afraid of? The Germans. Who were Germans afraid of? The Russians. Why were they afraid of the Russians? Because the Russians were afraid of Stalin, and so would do anything. But Frank was sure that Stalin did understand what he was supposed to understand.

Frank still had his shirt on, though he had taken off his khakis. Now he eased off the bed and slipped them on again. His loafers were at the bottom of the steps. He opened the front door and went out into the darkness, closing the door while feeling his key in his pocket. Maybe it was ten, but their residential neighborhood was quiet. Frank headed down the block, toward the park. Since the birth of Janet, he had stopped taking as many walks, but he still went out on hot nights, like this one, looking for a breeze or something. He wondered whether anyone else they knew would call what they’d had tonight a fight. He didn’t know. No blows, of course, no yelling back and forth (he heard the next-door neighbors but one do that fairly often), no thrown objects. (One family story had Granny Elizabeth throwing the coffeepot at Grandpa Wilmer once, when she finally got fed up with his overseeing her every move in the kitchen. Coffee grounds stuck to the wall for months, a reminder to him to watch his step.) Frank unclenched his teeth, and then unclenched them again.

The air was thick with humidity and the smell of cut grass. Every
house he passed had geraniums in pots and tiger lilies in rows and children’s toys scattered in the yards. The streetlights made the night a little stark and bleached out. The park, he thought, would be gloomier and more reassuring. He took some deep breaths. He was shaking, maybe not with anger. There was no reason to be shaking with anger. She was afraid of the Russians, she had heard about Judy, probably from Lillian, and anyway, Judy was free again—Hoover was as much of a screw-up in the end as Fredendall, Clark, and Eisenhower, wasn’t he? Frank unclenched his fists. Here was how he felt, walking in his quiet neighborhood in Floral Park, New York, now the most average of men—he felt more frightened than he had ever felt before in his life. There had been a fear he’d known in the army, even after he was used to the explosions: a sudden nearby boom would make his balls jump, and seem to shoot an electric charge right up his spine. This was not like that. This was vaster and higher, the same feeling he’d had in dreams, but now he was awake—he had been walking down the road, and the road had turned into a tree limb across an abyss, and he was out in the middle, surrounded only by air. His scalp prickled. But he hadn’t felt this fear in months, and now it was as if Andy had shot it into him like a bullet. Or had he shot it into her? Maybe, he thought, that was what love was. He opened his step and headed for the high school.

When he got home, Andy and Janet were both sound asleep—of course, he had not been afraid of their waking up, the very thing he should have been afraid of. It was after midnight, and cooling a little bit. He closed Janet’s window and got into bed beside Andy. The walking had tired him out, so that, when she got up at dawn and left the room, he didn’t stir. At breakfast, she apologized—she only now realized, cleaning the kitchen, that she’d had too much to drink, she wasn’t even going to say how many, but—she put her arms around him—never again. How stupid of her—it was so dumb to put gin in your lemonade, it disguised the flavor, she’d just poured it in without thinking, and, Frank agreed, that was that.

ON WARM DAYS
, Claire liked to go over to Minnie and Lois’s house and lie on the floor of the upstairs hallway, right on the wooden floor, and stay cool that way. She always took a book—right now, she
was reading one she got from the library about a girl named Trixie Belden. She was to the part where the two friends, Trixie and the rich girl, Honey, find the redheaded boy sleeping. It rather pleased Claire that she was lying quietly in the only house around them that could even remotely be called a mansion. The windows were closed on the west side, and the shades were drawn, but sunshine skated through the south-facing windows and spread over the red-gold boards of the floor around her. This hall was her favorite place in the world, not only because it was cool, but also because the color of the doors and the doorways and the set of drawers across from her was so deep and comforting. She liked the book, but she turned it on its face, took off her glasses and set them across the spine, then closed her eyes.

She dreamt of the book, of course. Trixie and Honey were in a small room by themselves. They looked a little like Mary Ann Adams and Lydia Keitel at school. The Claire in the dream was looking down at them, and they were trying to get something out of the corner of the small room, a kitten or a chicken or a picket—Claire couldn’t understand the word. As she looked down at them, the room got smaller, and Mary Ann (Trixie) started to cry, and then she said, “I made lunch for you.”

When Claire woke up, her hip was stiff—she had started sleeping on her back, but had turned onto her side, and the floor was hard. She yawned and sat up. The voice said, “With cupcakes.” The voice was Lois’s, and Claire got up on her knees and pushed her hair out of her face. The voice was coming from the dining room, which was to the right at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase, which was not carpeted, was funneling it up to her. She yawned again. Then Joey’s voice said, “You are sweet.” Claire closed her mouth and opened her ears.

Mama had said to Papa the night before that Joe had better get going, because she had seen Dave Crest making up to Lois at the market the day before. Dave had a crew cut, and wore nice clothes, and worked around the market like he owned the place, “Which he does,” said Papa.

“Well, Dan owns the place, but Dave is an only son,” said Mama. “He walks down the aisles like he’s seen too many John Garfield movies. Can’t you say something?” said Mama.

But they all knew that Papa wouldn’t say anything.

“I do love pea soup,” said Joe.

“This is fresh pea soup, and cold. Because it’s a hot day. And I made cornbread and some chicken from last night.”

And then Claire heard the sound of a kiss, a small kiss, but definitely a kiss. At this very moment, there was a flurry and a scratching on the stairs, and here came Nat, wagging his tail. Claire grabbed his nose before he could bark, and started petting him. He flopped into her lap and rolled over. She pushed the book and the glasses across the floor so he wouldn’t roll on them.

Two chairs scraped, and then scraped again. Joe said, “Oh, this is good.”

“These are the last of the peas.”

“They were good this year.”

“The lettuce topped out early, though.”

Silence while they ate. Thinking of those cupcakes, Claire had made up her mind to do something noisy and then trot down the stairs when Lois said, “Let’s get married.”

Joe said, “You and me?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Oh, Lois …” His voice tapered off.

“It’s a good idea.”

“Lois, you’re twenty-one years old and I’m twenty-nine, that’s such a …”

“Eight years is not a big difference.”

They must have gone back to eating, because after a moment Joe said, “The cornbread is really good.”

“Do you like the chicken?”

“Of course.”

“I rolled it in the breadcrumbs twice.”

“It’s crispy.”

Lois’s tone of voice hadn’t changed during this whole conversation. She had proposed, and Joe was going to say no, and Lois just kept on talking. It was not at all like, say,
Little Women
. Lois said, “I know you’re in love with Minnie. I don’t care.”