A Place We Knew Well (9 page)

“ ‘Erbarme dich'?” It came out a shocked whisper.

He turned to face her, his own eyes wide with surprise. “I was listening to it this morning and got it stuck in my head. But…there aren't many people around here who would recognize it.”

“I…sang it, once,” she explained, slowly, “in a talent contest.”

“You? Sang ‘Erbarme dich'? But that song requires”—he was suddenly attentive, keen with curiosity—“a three-octave range.”

“Yes.” In the silence that followed, the air in the little room, which had felt close with oil and dust, seemed to open and expand.

He sat down. “And did you win? The contest, I mean. Some sort of prize?”

“Yes,” she said, masking a deep breath, considering how much more she might say. It was a nice story, which would have been nicer still if…“The prize was voice lessons in New York with Frank La Forge.”

“Frank La Forge?” He drew his hands together in a single appreciative clap. “How wonderful!”

“It might have been, if I'd gone.”

“You didn't?”

“Just didn't work out.” Sarah swallowed hard against the tremble in her throat. Spilt milk, she reminded herself firmly.

Beauchamp looked away. “I. Understand. Actually.” He straightened a piece of paper, aligning it with the edge of his desk. “I was accepted to Juilliard. But the war and my local draft board got in the way.”

A fragment of a poem, memorized decades ago, floated into Sarah's mind. Softly, she repeated it:
“From far, from eve and morning, and yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me, Blew hither: here am I.”

Beauchamp nodded, his eyes crinkling in a slow, sad smile. “A. E. Housman, the sad Shropshire lad of senior English. I don't think they teach him anymore.”

“But they should.”

“I completely agree, Mrs.—”

“Please, call me Sarah.”

“If you will call me Charles,” he said, reaching out to offer her his hand.

Sarah took it and shook it gratefully. She'd grown accustomed, over the last many years, to being
looked at
as Wes's wife, Charlotte's mother, and, more recently, Edith's underling. But it had been a long time, a very long time, since she'd felt
seen
as Sarah, a woman who could recognize a hummed aria when she heard it, quote an appropriate snatch of poetry, and, at one time, sing with a three-octave range.

“Heigh-ho,” Beauchamp said, looking past her to the open door. “Here's our Charlotte!”

A
T FOUR, WHEN
F
ATHER
O
'
M
EARA
dropped off Emilio for his afternoon shift, Avery was eager to get to the bank and assess the mood downtown. As soon as the teenager emerged from the back room in his green uniform, Avery told him, “She's all yours, son,” and was on his way.

The lobby of the State Bank was packed with a long, snaking line of locals withdrawing cash. Avery noticed the rise in the communal pulse, the rapid shifting of eyes and feet, the nervous jingling of pocket change, and the odd tendency to grab the cash envelope without comment and stalk directly out the door.

Teller Bea Dittman accepted his deposit with the comment, “Nice to see something
coming in
for a change.”

Outside, Avery's insurance agent, burly Ralph Kayhill, hailed him from the curb and waved him into his office next door.

“Guess you've heard.” Kayhill heaved himself into his chair.

“Heard what?” Avery asked, playing dumb for news.

“Near as I can tell all hell's about to break loose over Cuba.”

Avery bit back frustration. Kayhill was trolling for information. Same as he was.

“You know”—Kayhill leaned forward, chair creaking protest—“they've stepped up the Civil Defense drills at the schools, got the kids doing duck-and-cover twice a week now.”

“Didn't know that,” Avery said, wishing Charlotte had mentioned it, resenting a policy that promised schoolchildren ducking under their desk and covering their heads with their arms would keep them safe in case of an actual attack.

Kayhill opened his desk drawer, thumbed through a stack of envelopes. “Lot of schools, not ours, have been issuing the kids dog tags in case, well, you know, something happened while they were out in the open, marching on the field, say, or walking home from school.”

Avery stiffened. Where was Kayhill going with this?

“So, you know, parents could identify the bodies and all,” Kayhill continued, selecting a single envelope and holding it with both hands. “I know it's a grim prospect, Wes. But that's what insurance agents are for, to consider worst-case scenarios. I talked to the local principals, even went 'round the district office, but”—he furrowed his brow in aggravation—“no dice. So I decided, well, I hope you'll agree, that at the very least I want my clients to have the peace of mind that, under any circumstance, their children could be identified.”

At this, he opened the envelope and handed Avery a metal dog tag on an aluminum linked chain.

The sight of Charlotte's name stamped in tin, above her birth date and address and blood type, made Avery want to retch.

“And, of course,” Kayhill was continuing, “we have very reasonable rates on juvenile policies, especially…”

Clutching the tag in one hand, Avery shot his other hand out flat in front of Kayhill's face.
Stop right there,
it said.
Not another word.

Kayhill stopped.

Incensed—not just at Kayhill, but at all of this…
insanity!
—Avery got up, punched the fist holding Charlotte's dog tag into his pant pocket, and walked out.

Striding to the truck, still fuming over Kayhill's gall—“juvenile policies” be damned!—he railed against it being a Monday.

Any other day, Steve would be at the station and they could hash this out together. Steve could be caustic, his language colorful. But he prided himself on, and Avery counted on, his ability to “maintain an even keel.” What's Steve thinking about all this? Avery wondered, checking his watch. Is he still in New Smyrna with Lillian, or on his way home?

For a brief moment, Avery considered dropping by the VFW. It might be good, he thought, to belly up to the bar with other veterans and talk over the day's ominous developments. Maybe someone had been out to the base PX and had a real update. Then again, the VFW was often overrun by negative blowhards who argued, in almost every case, that we should “just go ahead and nuke the bastards” and be done with it.

As perhaps the only local who'd actually laid eyes on Hiroshima, Avery had no patience with Bomb-worshippers. Unlike them, he carried his own involvement with the deaths of all those Japanese civilians like a deadweight, a guilt-laden drag on an otherwise upright life. He had, suddenly, no taste for drinking with potential warmongers.

Instead, he drove home. The empty carport, no sign of Sarah's Buick, surprised him. But then he remembered Sarah's plan to take Charlotte shopping. He sat in the truck a moment, and rejected his initial idea to toss Kayhill's dog tags into the trash. Not about to risk either Sarah or Charlotte finding them, he stashed the tags in his leather bank pouch, locked it in the glove compartment, then, for good measure, locked the truck.

In the kitchen, prominently placed in the middle of the fridge, he saw the container of leftover tuna casserole, plus Sarah's note:
350 degrees for 20 minutes.

He put it in the oven, took his shower, then returned to the kitchen and ate his meal standing at the sink, watching the bland cloud-choked sunset.

As he was rinsing his plate, the phone on the wall next to the fridge rang. A young man's voice, a nervous cracking tenor, asked, “Is Charlotte home?”

“Not right now. Take a message?”

“Well, sure. Thanks. Could you tell her Todd Jenkins called? I'll call again later?”

“No problem,” Avery said and hung up.

Jenkins was the son of Mabel from church, who'd admired Charlotte's looks after the service yesterday. He was also a short, pimply-faced drag racer who chain-smoked Marlboros in an effort to look tough. Hot Toddy, Steve called him, having replaced the clutch in the boy's '50 Ford Crestliner twice in the past six months.

“No way, Ho-zay,” Avery announced to the empty kitchen.

Immediately the phone rang again. Now what?

“Hey, Cap.” It was Steve. “Heard the news?”

“President's announcement, y'mean? In”—Avery eyed the kitchen clock—“forty-two and a half minutes?”

“Yeah, well, I'm back. Just talked to Leo. Poor kid's pretty bent outta shape over what's goin' on. Thought I'd swing by the station, watch the speech with him.”

“Oh, Lord. Leo! Good idea.” Imagine being
here
while your family was stuck
there
in the crosshairs of all that firepower out at McCoy? And God knows how many other American bases, too. Avery shook off a small icy shiver.

“Talk atcha tomorrow,” Steve said, signing off.

At quarter till, Avery was in the living room, television on, listening to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley's run-up for President Kennedy's speech. Huntley in New York was his usual cool cucumber, but Brinkley, outside the White House in Washington, scowled concern. Though, Avery thought, it doesn't appear he knows any more than the rest of us.

At two till, Avery saw the Buick wheel past the front window into the carport, heard two car doors slamming and Sarah calling from the kitchen, “Has he started yet?”

“Not yet.”

Sarah and Charlotte burst into the room, arms full of shopping bags.

“It was all the talk at Colonial Plaza,” Sarah explained in a rush. “Stores up and down the mall setting up televisions in their windows. Baer TV had five color consoles in theirs!”

“Mom, shhhhh!” Charlotte dropped down on the sofa beside him. “Here he is.”

The first thing that struck Avery was the President's face. Normally handsome, debonair, smiling, John Kennedy's face was grim; his jaw hard, his eyes steely grave.

He began simply,
“Good evening, my fellow citizens,”
and pulled no punches:
“This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military build-up on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere….”

Avery's churning stomach suddenly stilled. He heard Charlotte's sharp intake of breath and felt Sarah's trembling fingertips press his shoulder. In his mind's eye, he saw the solemn transfer of the black film boxes on the flight line at McCoy, imagined the chain of custody from the photo developers and interpreters to the Joint Chiefs to the President's own hands. No doubt,
that
was why he'd returned to Washington.

Unmistakable evidence, Kennedy was saying, of the Soviets' urgent transformation of Cuba into a strategic Soviet base with large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction.

The words
“sudden mass destruction”
flooded him with an acute, seething anger. And Kennedy's listing of potential targets:
“Washington, DC, the Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Mexico City,”
felt like a body blow.

Clearly, Kennedy was angry, too—especially over Soviet foreign minister Gromyko's repeated assurances just last Thursday that there was no need for offensive weapons in Cuba and that the Soviet Union would never become involved in such a thing.

“False,”
Kennedy practically spat,
“a deliberate deception!”

The U-2s' cameras must have caught them red-handed. But what in the world do we do about it? Avery sat frozen, staring at the screen.

“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time.”

Ashes in our mouth, Avery thought. And remembered well that same taste on his tongue.

The President outlined his immediate course of action to effect the withdrawal and elimination of the missiles: a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba, continued and increased close surveillance, plus orders to the US armed forces to
“prepare for any eventualities.”

Kennedy warned the Soviets that any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would provoke
“a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
Finally, he called upon Khrushchev personally to
“halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace”
and to
“move the world back from the abyss of destruction.”

Sandwiched between his wife and daughter, Avery felt chilled to the marrow. On his left, Sarah trembled, twitchy with nerves. On his right, Charlotte had shrunk into stillness, like a field mouse sensing the dark overhead flight of a night owl.

The President's sign-off,
“Thank you and good night,”
left Avery wondering. Who in the country, or in the world, could possibly have a good night when the two superpowers were locked in a dangerous face-off, potentially on the brink of what scientists called MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction?

It was madness all right. He'd seen ample proof of it at Hiroshima seventeen years ago. But that bomb—Little Boy, they called it—was a mere fledgling compared with the hundred-times-more-powerful thermonuclear bombs perched atop missiles on both sides today. Bombs that, like hell's chickens, had come home to roost just ninety miles south of Florida's Key West. Less than five hundred miles—eight to ten minutes in missile time—from his living room.