“Lenny Bruce!”
“Bob Hope!”
“Dick Gregory!”
“Bob Hope!”
“Mort Shah!”
“Bob Hope! Bob Hope! Bob Hope!” Shirley was a true believer.
“Conservation! Industrial waste! Pollution!” agitated Llona.
“Pioneers! Property rights! Science and technology!”
“All we are saying is give peace a chance. . . .”
“God bless America, land that I. . .”
“Bogie! James Dean! W. C. Fields!” Llona’s earnest effort at communication.
“Ronnie! John Wayne! George Murphy!” Rejection.
“Eugene McCarthy!”
“Spiro forever! Long may he wave!”
“Any Kennedy!” Llona flaunted desperately.
“Okay. Any Kennedy.”
“Okay?” Surprise.
“A strong leader. Like Wallace.” Shirley explained.
“Wrong reason!”
“So what?”
“So what?” Whoa! Llona bit her tongue. So what indeed? A point of contact had been arrived at. It was tenuous, but it was there. If persuasion was the aim, then there was no point in attacking even the haziest area of agreement. No, this was a seed to be tended tenderly and some day—who knew?—a flower might bloom!
When she told Archer about it that night, she didn’t put it in quite such poetic terms. “I think I reached her for an instant,” Llona explained. “I think she can be reached and I think people like her have to be reached if the peace movement is ever going to get anywhere.”
“I wish I had your kind of faith in people.” Archer was skeptical.
“Anyway, I think we have to try. So I asked her over with her husband. I thought that in a social situation perhaps —“
“Wait a minute! You asked them over? When?”
“Tonight. But it’s only Shirley. Her husband’s out of town on business.”
“Oh, hell! You mean she's coming over here tonight? Damn it, Llona, I don’t want to spend the evening with some square Bircher type, biting my tongue and watching her busting her girdle with indignation -and going all red in the double chin because I don’t think Strom Thurmond’s the epitome of the American ideal.”
“Shirley’s not like that. You’ll see.”
Archer saw. Shirley Simpell was not at all what he’d expected. He’d envisioned some overweight matron with a horse-face and the zeal of a Barbara Frietchie on the stump. Instead of which he found himself sitting opposite this chick who was “cute as a button” with the face of a cherub .
Llona left them alone while she went to fix some coffee. Archer looked at Shirley with a fatherly eye and denied the impulse to pat her fanny. “You‘re the first hawk I’ve ever really had a chance to talk to," he told her frankly. “And you’re not at all like what I expected.”
“Oh? What did you expect?” Shirley winked her dimples.
“Oh, you know. A DAR type.”
“But I am a member of the DAR.”
“Groovy.” Archer couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I think it’s ginger-peachy m self.”
“You think it’s what?”
“Ginger-peachy. Swell. You know, hunky-dory.”
“Hunky-dory? Like a Jim Crow boat, hey?”
“I don’t know what you mean. But I do know you're making fun of me.”
“I’m sorry. I was only teasing. I apologize.”
“Okee-doke.”
“Are you interested in semantics?” Archer tried a different tack.
“Gee whillikers, I don’t know. What do you mean?"
“Well.” Archer explained “like sometimes I think the real problem between hawks and doves is they’re not talking the same language. Semantics, you know. If that could be straightened out, then maybe everything else could. I mean, like that’s where it’s really at.”
“I never did understand what that’s supposed to mean, Shirley confessed. “I guess I’m just not hep.”
“Hip.” Archer corrected her.
“Holy cow! What difference does it make?
“About thirty years.”
“How are you two getting along?” Llona reentered with the coffee.
“We are trying to set up channels of communication,” Archer told her.
There was a long, awkward silence.
“Knock-knock,” Shirley broke it.
“Huh?” Llona and Archer looked at each other.
“Knock-knock.”
“Oh.” It dawned on Llona first. “Who’s there?”
“Albie.”
“Albie who?”
“Albie glad when you're dead, you rascal you.”
A sudden surge of self-pity welled up in Llona. “Excuse me.” Unable to control her tears, she bolted from the room.
“Was it something I said?” Shirley was genuinely concerned.
“I don’t think so. She's been acting funny lately. Over-emotional, if you know what I mean. I don't know why.”
“Oh. Well, I really should be going anyway. May I use your telephone to call a cab? It’s such a pain when my husband’s away on one of his trips with the car.”
“I’ll drive you home,” Archer offered.
“That’s not necessary.”
“I insist.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Archer told Llona he was driving Shirley home and they left. It seemed to Llona that he was gone a long time. A very long time. She commented on it when he finally did return.
“We sat in the car outside her house a little while, talking,” he explained. “You know, Llona, you were right before. I think the effort should be made to reach the hawks, and I think some of them can be reached.”
“Do you think you reached Shirley?”
“Well, I made a beginning. And I’m not giving up on her.”
“If you can move just one other person, it’s worth the effort,” Llona agreed.
It wasn't until a few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, that Llona learned just how determined an effort Archer was willing to make. He’d gone off to play golf, and she went up to the roof to sunbathe. As had become her custom, she took a pair of powerful binoculars up there with her.
The binoculars were part of the campaign she and Archer were waging against the Air Force. Every time she sunbathed on the roof, training planes would buzz the house. So she made a point of keeping track of the times and the planes and filing weekly complaints claiming invasion of privacy with both military and civilian authorities. The binoculars were used to read the identification numbers on the planes.
Today, however-—perhaps because it was Sunday -—there was virtually no air traffic. After baking for about an hour, Llona became bored. Her mind turned to her fateful prognosis and that depressed her. Rather than dwell on it, she picked up the binoculars and idly scanned the countryside.
“What do you know?” she exclaimed to herself aloud. She hadn't realized before that from the top of her roof she had such a clear view of the golf course lying to the south of the airbase. On a whim, she focused the binoculars on the first tee and then followed along to the second, third, and fourth holes, trying to spot Archer.
She found him in the rough between the fourth and fifth holes. The undergrowth was fairly tangled and high there, and it wasn’t until a moment later that Llona spotted his companion coming around a clump of bushes. It was Shirley Simpell.
Llona was mildly surprised—no more. When Archer went off to play golf, he usually didn’t make any date in advance. Often he joined up with whoever happened to be around for a twosome. Llona simply assumed that he’d met Shirley there by chance.
She continued watching them through the field glasses. They seemed a lot more intent on whatever they were talking about than they did on playing golf. But that didn’t bother Llona. She was proud of her husband for neglecting the sport he so enjoyed in order to make the conversational effort to sway Shirley from her hawkish notions. At least that’s what she assumed they must be discussing so earnestly.
It was just after the sixth hole that Llona began to doubt her assumption. They were in the rough again and Shirley had evidently lost her ball. It was a heavily wooded area and they didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to find it. They seemed much more intent on whatever they were saying to each other. When they sat down in a little grassy gully shielded from the rest of the area by trees, Llona’s doubt turned to awful suspicion.