Tomorrow! Page 9

  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—”

  “It’s the school,” Jim said.

  “It is not merely the school,” Ruth said heatedly. “It’s scientific information.”

  Charles grinned, yet frowned a little, too. “I don’t get it.”

  “She always goes to the P.T.A.” Jim yawned a little in spite of himself. He covered up by taking a sip of elderberry wine.

  Ruth appealed to her soldier-nephew. “I can show you the facts, in the Bulletin! Every time they run off a series of atomic tests anywhere, the kids of the United States show a marked rise of nervousness, of nightmares, of delinquency. The Rorschach Tests prove it!” she shuffled in a stack of papers, schoolbooks, bills, checkbooks, women’s magazines on the top of a radiator.

  The heap made a bulge in the lace curtains.

  “I suppose kids do,” Charles agreed. “They react to things. Nevertheless, we have to run the weapons tests, don’t we?”

  “Why?” Ruth turned, hot-eyed, from her search. Papers and magazines cascaded to the floor. She reminded Chuck of his mother when his mother was on the verge of administering

  “righteous” punishment. “Why do they have to go on forever scaring the daylights out of people?

  You tell me why!”

  “Just to try to keep ahead of the Reds,” he answered.

  “I thought we were making peace with the Reds!”

  “We’ve been ‘about to’ ever since I was in high school and maybe before that, for all I can remember.”

  “Peace, peace, peace!” she said heatedly. “Why don’t we accept this last offer? The one they made in August?”

  “We’re trying to, Mother.” Jim was obviously endeavoring to divert his wife. “The United Nations is trying.”

  “Maybe they’re right,” she said. “Maybe our people—the military men and the big steel manufacturers—don’t really want peace.”

  “It isn’t that, Aunt Ruth.” Charles tried to be lucid.

  “Every time, every single time, we’ve thought we were on the verge of an understanding with the Kremlin—whammo! They broke loose somewhere else. Stop them there—get a deal set—and bingo! They hit in China again. Burma, the Balkans—”

  “So what? Are those people worth dying for? Worth trillions of dollars? Worth making permanent nervous wrecks of all the children in America and a lot of grownups, besides, like your father?”

  Charles considered the idea of his father as a “nervous wreck”; it was such an unfamiliar thought that it fascinated him. He chuckled. “I know how you feel, Aunt Ruth. After all, it’s why I have to spend time in service. But look. There’s one thing the Soviets have never offered—

  offered and meant it. That’s to let the world come in and inspect them and make sure they aren’t stockpiling mass-destruction weapons. Right?”

  “They’ve offered, time and again, to inspect themselves! I don’t see why, for the sake of ending all this crazy strain, we can’t try having just that much confidence in them.”

  “You’ve shown a marked lack of confidence in the American citizens who have turned out to be Communists.”

  “That’s different!”

  “Why?”

  “When an American citizen goes Communist, it shows that person is a moral leper and utterly untrustworthy, through and through.”

  “But the Kremlin, with the same beliefs, can be trusted?”

  Charles had felt a twinge of anger at his aunt and met it with vehemence.

  “Oh, hell, let’s not argue,” Jim said unhappily. “Have some more wine, Chuck.”

  “What would you feel,” Ruth asked, ignoring her husband, “if you were a whole government, and another government flatly refused to take your treaty oath and your word?”

  “The Soviet Government,” Charles replied, “goes on the principle that its own word is no damned good whatsoever. That’s why we can’t trust their mere promise to disarm. That’s why we have to test A-bombs and keep up a draft army and remain powerful, until and unless Russia permits the world to see for itself that it is doing what it has promised to do. There’s no other way! Our Government would have found it long ago if there had been.”

  “You’re wrong!” Ruth was shaking with anger.

  Marie came in the front door and stood in the hall, holding the hand of six-year-old Don.

  She looked very mature for not-yet-fourteen—and very pretty.

  “See here,” Charles said, trying to restore the tone of good will, “suppose we do accept world peace under Soviet terms? Okay. We disarm. We destroy all our atomic weapons, as per the terms. We cut our army and air force and navy down to the bone. Do we feel better? That’s what you say you want, Aunt Ruth. But suppose you got it? Would you then quit worrying?

  Would you the
n feel safe, knowing the Soviets had made a big promise, and knowing, at the same time, you didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were really doing behind an Iron Curtain that would still be down?” Charles shrugged. “I think you’d find yourself, in exactly no time at all, so terribly much more worried about A-bombs, you would really be a nervous wreck.

  And you’d have a right good reason for being afraid, too. Because then you’d know the Russians could fly over us any time, and we couldn’t even hit back!”

  At the doorway, Don began to whine. “Stop talking about atomic bombs.”

  “Why?” Charles asked calmly. The little boy’s face twisted. “It scares me. I don’t want to hear about it. I hate talking about cities blowing up.”

  “You see?” Ruth said. She said it as if every point she had brought up had been proven beyond further debate. Her job was the protection of her children. Whatever assailed them was evil and wrong; worry over world conditions and the dreadful advances of science upset the young; ergo: the world should be altered. Ruth obviously could not reason beyond that—to the theoretical possibilities, to the absolute need of protecting her young from something fantastically worse than nervousness.

  This narrowness, this ingrained sense that River City would always be there because it had always been there, the emotional identification with the immediate here and the refusal even to look at the hard and horrible face of tomorrow yonder, annoyed Charles more than such things usually did. He did not realize that his private irritability was colored by the private disappointment in his leave. He would even have denied stoutly that his visit to his favorite relatives had been a second-choice manner of spending the evening.

  He took up the challenge again. “I don’t see, Aunt Ruth. What I see— all I see—is the one fact we must never lose sight of! So long as even the potential threat of A-bombs on America exists, nothing we can do in the way of arming ourselves, of testing weapons, of civil defense, is too much. I think little Don here is jittery because you’ve made him jittery. I think—”

  Jim said, firmly, “Cut it, son! Mother’s mad.”

  She was “mad.” She controlled her temper long enough however, to order the wide-eyed, very blonde Marie to take her towheaded brother upstairs and put him in bed. Then she whirled on her nephew. “I know you’re a soldier. That’s no excuse for your coming to a quiet, peaceable, domestic scene and scaring hell out of mere children!”

  “Somebody ought to be scared,” he answered.

  “You should be! People like you! People like your crazy father! Yes. People like my sister, stringing along with that everlasting playacting about sudden death! A fine way to bring up a whole generation, watching grown men and women make like they are dead and dying. I tell you, Charles Conner. . . .”

  “. . . and I tell you, Aunt Ruth, you ought to go get those ancient newspapers out, where they announced Russia had exploded an H-bomb, and sit on your broad backside and reflect what that means to your kids—”

  “‘Bout time,” Jim Williams said, mildly still, “for you to be running along, isn’t it, Chuck?”

  He went.

  He had walked a mile down Willowgrove Avenue before his vexation abated. Then he laughed a little. Most people took it the way Ruth did. They were frantic inside. Themselves and trying, somehow, to fight off the feeling, simply because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, nerve themselves to look squarely at the cause. Hysterical, that was the word. Hysteria was the thing that knocked out the brain when it refused to face fact and pretended something unreal was true instead. Ruth had got plenty mad and plenty active and mighty effective in the bargain—two years ago when she discovered the fourth-grade teacher once had belonged to a subversive organization. That teacher hadn’t lasted three days.

  The trouble was, she couldn’t carry her fear of Communism into the realm of war. War wasn’t her department. She felt it wasn’t any civilian’s department. Most civilians couldn’t imagine that war might suddenly become their whole concern. Not American civilians: Europeans, maybe. So Ruth was living in a dream world, trying to compel the real world to match her dream, where there could be no civilian war. Trying to make a special peace—for her kids, she thought, but actually to assuage her own deep guilt for turning away from the big picture of a nation, her nation, in trouble.

  Twelve blocks of walking took Charles well into River City. He decided he might as well walk the rest of the distance. It was only nine fifteen. He cut over to James Street and up the steep bank around the reservoir. The moon had come up, a harvest-sized moon, and the water in the reservoir was so clear he could see the brick-lined bottom—as well as pop and beer bottles, cartons, Kleenexes and picnic residue people had tossed in, despite the signs all along the fence saying, “You Drink It, Keep It Clean—River City Water Supply.”

  The reservoir was in an old section of town, one much like the Pearson Square section to the west. Along one side were large mansions which had long ago been divided into small apartments and the one-room niches of boarding-houses. On the side opposite, the north, old familics who had kept their money and refused to move still maintained their mansions and grounds, mansions behind iron gates and brick walls, with apple trees and grape arbors in back, mansions where often the only relict would be one old lady, with aging memories and trunks full of vintage clothes, albums full of dated photographs.

  To the west, the sky line of River City sharp and high, picket-thick, glittered against the aurora of the Amusement Park beyond on Swan Island. South were the lights of River City’s colored town—the streaming radiance of Mechanic Street—and beyond, the darkling shadows of Water Street, the river itself, and the less-visible thrust of Green Prairie’s business district.

  He went around the reservoir and down to Mechanic Street, taking pleasure from the full-throated aliveness there—markets still open—kids still wide awake and playing on the street-fat colored women talking from window to tenement window in voices like velvet-radios shooting band music over the nocturnal streetscape-fruits, vegetables, hucksters, hock shops, saloons—a pretty, thin girl who walked toward him and enquired huskily, “Busy, good looking?”

  He followed Mechanic Street. Its last four blocks led across back alleys and alongside commercial buildings that stepped up to Market’s tall structures. Here, trucks and cars went individually and people, too, hurrying alone under the spitting arc lights on errands connected with belated shipping orders, or other, less legitimate errands. For here, in small, brick-fronted buildings that once had been homes, the nefarious part of River City’s life was conducted.

  Charles knew Pol Taylor’s place was somewhere here—and here was Jake’s.

  It was here he saw Beau Bailey.

  Chuck Conner did not know the precise location of Jake’s, any more than he knew which of the many grimed brick houses contained Pol Taylor’s high-class bordello. He knew only that some businessmen of the Sister Cities referred to this area as “The Block” and that it contained numerous centers of diversion frowned on by churches and right-thinking people. He saw Beau because Beau stumbled down three steps to the sidewalk, nearly fell—a man in conspicuous trouble.

  Charles hurried. Beau, looking wildly up and down the street, rushed away, not recognizing Charles. He went totteringly, and the younger man stopped. Several things had become plain to him in that instant. Beau’s eye was cut and bleeding and his nose was bloody.

  But he had not been looking for help. His face, in the arc light, had been tormented by fear; he had been furtive. The chance that the man he noted, in the shadows, but near enough to recognize him, would be somebody able to identify him did not even enter Beau’s head: most people he knew didn’t frequent The Block. Beau rushed on, lurching a little, toward Market Street, and Charles decided he had better not follow: Beau had probably been in a fight; the less said about which, the better.

  When Charles reached the river he walked across the bridge slowly. But he was not thinking, this time, of his boyhood. He was thinking of
a young woman whose father got in fights in River City hellholes. He was wondering if such a girl, after all, would make a mother for half a dozen kids like his nieces and nephews. Then he began wondering if their mother was any better for them than Lenore would be. Lenore, after all, was a realist. Even a Geigerman.

  And not guiltily scared of any weapons—Russian, male, human or animal. A not-scarable girl.

  He caught an Edgeplains bus, which meant he’d have to let himself out while a red light somewhere up toward Walnut Street stopped it. The company franchise didn’t allow conductors to drop passengers short of Windmere Parkway, except in rush hour—which showed, he thought, nodding into a half-sleep, that everybody was nuts.

  He came over Walnut Street and saw a Jaguar parked in front of the Bailey house. He slowed to admire the red-leather upholstery, the complex controls panel. He wondered whose it was and saw the monogram: KLS.

  Kit Sloan.

  When Charles entered his house and his mother called, “You’re back pretty early!” he concealed an emptiness. “Yeah. Got in a bicker with Ruth about the world situation. Jim politely threw me out. Remind me to phone and make up in the morning.”