Tomorrow! (3 page)

He tried to kiss her cheek and she made that impossible. She held the kiss, besides, for a long moment and when she settled on her heels she whispered, “Welcome home.”

He dissembled his feelings, pointed. “How come?”

“This?” she looked down at the radiation safety garment. “Spite.”

“Spite?”

“I’ll explain. I’ve got to take off in a sec—South High. Want to drive me there?”

“‘Whither . . .’ and so forth,” he answered.

She stared at him, shook her head as if she couldn’t quite believe him real. “Come on, then. We’ll take my Ford.”

“Just a mo!” Chuck reverted to a bygone period. He ran back toward the open kitchen window and shouted, “Hey, Mom!”

Beth Conner’s voice floated back from above the dishpan. “Yes, Charles? No need to yell so.”

“I’m going to run Lenore down to the school.”

“All right.” Mrs. Conner wiped a copper-bottomed pan and hung it up with her set, one of her many small sources of pride and joy. It was just like Charles, though now a man grown, to let her know where he was going. Teddy had reached an age when he preferred never to say, or else forgot. And Nora had never known a time, never would know one, probably, when she considered her private destinations any affair of her mother.

Chuck carried the Geiger counter to the car, climbed in, and backed down the driveway.

He switched on the headlights and started slowly along Walnut Street. The girl beside him began to turn the knobs on the radiation counter. “Let’s see if you’re radioactive,” she said. She held up the wandlike detector and frowned down at the dials. “Nope. Just overheated.”

“Warm day—for September.”

“Since
when
wasn’t September warm?”

“How are things?” he asked.

“Just the same.” She shrugged one shoulder somewhere under the coverall. “But absolutely, painfully the same. Possibly a shade worse. Dad seems to be drinking a little too much, a little too often, if you know what I mean. And Mother keeps crowding me a little harder all the time.”

“Why don’t you go away?”

“Away like where?” she asked. “Didn’t we kick that around till it got lost, the last time you were home on leave?”

“I kept thinking about it—at the base.”

“I didn’t need to. The family didn’t let me study what I wanted. Couldn’t afford graduate courses. You know that. They hate the very thought that their darling daughter has a knack for science instead of a knack for rich men. So why should I go away, to New York even, and work at something I’d detest, myself? Being a secretary. Or a model. Phooie!”

“Anyhow,” he said, not happily, “you’ll make a damned good Geigerman.”

She ignored the hurt tone. “Won’t I? And doesn’t it burn mother to the core!”

“Does it?” He could understand her relish. Lenore’s parents frightened him, in a sense: they were able to influence Lenore.

“About six weeks ago the Civil Defense people called at our house,” she began. “They gave Mother and Dad a long spiel about how this state is high up on the national list in preparedness and how everybody in Greek Prairie who could, ought to be in the organization.

You can imagine the fascination Mom and Dad had for
that!
The defense people didn’t stay long; they could see that the senior Baileys were a dry hole as far as public spirit and atomic war are concerned. But they left some pamphlets. And I got reading them one evening when Mother was chewing me out for refusing to go to some beastly Junior League thing, and I saw in the pamphlet that Green Prairie badly needed people who could handle electronic equipment. So I phoned up to see if they’d take women. Well, there
is
one other woman Geigerman, a schoolteacher, a Mrs. Phollen. So I signed for it.”

“Great.
And now instead of going to beastly Junior League parties, you’re out playing air raid—”

“To the infinite annoyance of my parents! And they really can’t say anything about it.

When they try to, I just hang my pretty head and tell them the Baileys have to do something . . .”

She broke off with an abrupt mood change familiar to him. “Oh, all right, Chuck. You always do see through me. I got into this absurd Civil Defense thing on one of my impulses, and now I’m plenty sore because it takes a night a week. We’ve been briefed and briefed and briefed; some of the people have been at it for years—and the whole business is simply fantastic anyhow! Tell me about life in the army.”

He relaxed a little. “That’s even duller.
You
know. I’m not in the glamour department of the Air Force. I’d be, even in the highly unlikely event of a war, at some base probably, far from peril—attached to a Colonel who was attached to a good dugout—keeping track of the lubrication stock for B-47’s.”

She said, “You do think there’s no chance of a war, don’t you?”

“Are you asking me as a person? Or as a military man? Because, as the latter, I’m supposed to say we can’t afford to drop Uncle Sam’s big guard.”

“As
you,
Chuck.”

“I think the Reds want peace—need it—and mean to have it. They’ve conceded about everything lately, except letting the free world come in and inspect them. But I’d trust sharks quicker. I’m kind of glad you’re in something.”

He swung into South Hobson Street. It was solid with cars. From time to time they moved up a few inches. In the distance, the playgrounds of South High, floodlighted now, were swarming with people, most of whom wore brassards and helmets. Whistles blew. Teams of various sorts formed and marched together toward a place where flames licked around a huge heap of broken boxes, barrels, old lumber. Hoses played. The thrumming of a fire-engine pump could be heard. A searchlight snapped on somewhere and threw so much light on the simulated burning wreckage that the flames became invisible and only the smoke showed.

Chuck fixed an eye, half-humorous, half-melancholy, on the scene. It was just a little like basic training, when you crawled along under live bullets from real machine guns and when you ran through actual poison gas, wearing a mask. But, he thought, it was nothing whatever like a real city after the detonation of a real bomb—even a high-explosive bomb. “Terrific,” he said.

Lenore raised her eyebrows. “Ridiculous, too?”

“Just what do you do?”

“We form,” she answered, “exactly one hour after the siren. I’m late, but everybody in my section will be because they can’t get their counters working right, or can’t find where they put them, or took them over to the lab for repair. Then we approach the ‘simulated radioactive site.’ Tonight, they told us, they will actually have a small chunk of radiating metal somewhere.

We’re supposed to probe around till we find it.”

He shook his head, inched the car up, braked again and watched as she opened the door.

“Carryon!” he said, saluting her with mock solemnity.

She laughed a little. “I’ve got myself in this, and a date later, when all I want to do is go down with you to our spot by the river and neck.”

“I’ll be home,” he answered, “any evening for the next thirty.”

“And as soon as Mother knows it,” she answered, grimly picking up her instrument,

“she’ll raise heaven and earth to make it as nearly impossible as she can for me to see you at all.”

“Still—you being twenty-four—”

“But jobless and dependent.” She slammed the door. “I can’t fight them to the point where I’m really kicked out.”

He wanted to ask why she couldn’t. He wanted to say, as he had said before, that there were young women, lovely ones, who managed to live on a lieutenant’s pay. But he knew what would follow any such suggestion. It began with the reminder that, when he ceased being a lieutenant in one more year, he wouldn’t have an income at all. When he was settled in civilian life, it would at first be on the minute income of a draftsman in some small architectural office in River City or Green Prairie. “Barely enough,” Lenore had said once in a bitter moment, “to pay my dry-cleaning bills.”

“Do I call back?” he asked.

“I’ll get a ride. This monkeyshine won’t break up till around eleven. Then we go to somebody’s house for what the older veterans of Civil Defense call refreshments and jollification.”

“Ducky.” She swore and stalked down South Hobson Street, making better time than the traffic.

He parked her car beside her house and saw, through the picture window, Beau Bailey sitting in a deep chair with the evening paper, a highball, and the top button, of his trousers undone. Hurriedly he crossed the lawn to: his own yard.

Nora and Ted were studying.

“I thought,” Chuck said to his brother, “you were supposed to be at the switch. One of the minute men?”

“Oh, heck. I am! But they just repeated the same old baloney over and over and it got sickening.” His imagination, vivid when the “attack” had begun, was now a faded thing.

Mrs. Conner had come from the hall with her darning basket. She smiled at her straight, thin son and sat down with a murmur of relief. “Ted’s been very faithful, really, Charles. And it
is
tiresome. This is your father’s fourth year. I don’t see how on earth he keeps up his enthusiasm.

Ted said with scorn, “He’s enthusiastic about
everything!”
his voice cracked on the last word and he repeated it with dignity:
“Everything.
Besides, afterward they have beers and they bowl. Also it’s political. He’s getting to be such a big shot in this part of town, the next thing you know, he’ll he elected dogcatcher. Then he’ll be away from home every night, looking for old ladies’ lost poodles.” He yacked mightily at that sally.

His mother laughed a little too.

Charles picked up the evening paper and took his father’s chair under the green-shaded drop-lamp. He reflected somberly that it was odd how homesick one could get at an Air Force base in Texas and how soon the feeling evaporated when one actually got home.

Nostalgia for home had been changed by some unwanted trick to nostalgia for the past.

He was thinking about Lenore, in a wordless stream of pictures.

Lenore in the days when he’d been younger than Ted, when he’d been given his own first jalopy by his father and learned to take care of it; Lenore, fifteen, half-tomboy and half-woman, more fascinated by machinery than he, adept, helping him, summer afternoons, when they sprawled together in overalls in the drive, under the car with wrenches, tightening bolts and swapping kisses that tasted faintly of engine oil, Lenore, taking the high school chemistry prize in her junior year, the physics award the year after, a pretty kid with a man’s aptitude for the sciences, encouraged by the teachers, who said she’d “go a long way.”

The times, the times that went back as far as he could remember, when usually at her instigation, they “collected”—birds’ eggs, moths and butterflies, insects, stamps, coins, J and shells from the distant ocean that neither one had ever seen, then. . . .

And—Lenore when she’d won the first beauty contest—slender but mature-bodied, proud but vaguely ashamed, walking a runway at the Swan Island Amusement Park Beach, head high, breasts high, her dark, almost black hair perfectly curled down her back between tan shoulder blades, her blue eyes straight ahead, her smile too fixed—winning the cup and beginning to move away from him, not meaning or wanting to. . . .

Her college years. She knew a little about the trouble with herself, by then; nobody, no intent professor or research graduate, expected to look up from some glass maze and see a dream girl working at the bench opposite; nobody could quite believe glamour and brains could live together. And her family: a mother openly outraged that she’d birthed a brainy daughter, publicly maintaining that beauty, by which she meant a body, was a woman’s one useful asset and brains were the certain road to inconspicuous poverty; Beau, the indulgent father, scared of his wife, happily awed by his child-scared and awed first by his own mother—indulging Lenore when he could but never making any assertion of family values, never leading, always either following Netta or pursuing Lenore like a nervous secretary. . . .

It was a dilemma all right, and Chuck was accustomed to it. He didn’t exactly blame Lenore for reaching no decision, for drifting along, a lovely college girl, “back at home,”

awaiting events, like myriads of other girls. Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was really lacking in initiative like her dad. Maybe she shared, deep beneath the intelligent mind, the realism and pert but warm aliveness that appeared to be her whole self, some taint of her mother’s infinite cupidity; perhaps she had caught some contagion from her mother’s striving to escape an inferior background. Maybe Lenore wasn’t the woman the girl had been. But maybe she was.

“I think she still loves you,” Chuck’s mother murmured across her sewing.

His brown eyes gleamed. ‘Wish I thought so.”

“If you’d only . . .” Beth Conner broke off. No use telling Charles to take any “bull by the horns,” any ‘‘bit in his teeth”; it wasn’t his way. He went at life, even when everything he valued was involved, slowly, quietly, in his steady fashion.

“If I’d only
what
?”

She bit a thread. “Lenore hasn’t changed a particle—so far,” she said. “But she’s getting worried about herself. Restless.”

“Keep
quiet!”
Nora expostulated. “I’m
studying!”
She sank her teeth into an apple, glued her eyes to a geography.

Concealed behind its brown covers was a paper-backed novel with a near-naked, huge-bosomed young woman printed on its sleek exterior and the title
Sins in Seven Streets.
A period of perhaps five minutes passed while Nora “studied,” Ted completed a math problem and Mrs.

Conner read. Charles turned the pages of the paper unseeingly, his mind steadfast on Lenore. But even he was startled when the alarm went off.

“What’s
that?”
he exclaimed. Mrs. Conner glanced swiftly at her two younger children, Nora first. Then she said drily, “What is it, Ted?”

“You’ll see.” Pride was commingled with misgiving in his tone. The room was suddenly flooded with hollow-sounding din as the TV set switched itself on. “Invention,” Ted explained modestly. “So we wouldn’t miss
Tootlin’ Tim.”