Their first apartment was a three-room flat in a tenement on East 73rd Street, a street teeming with children during the summer, swarming with traffic that headed west from the East River Drive exit, noisy and smelly and wretchedly hot. Christie had never been able to stand heat, she ran from the sun the way albinos do, always seeking the comforting shade of an umbrella or a tree, her white skin turning lobster red if she were exposed for as long as five minutes. The apartment was an inferno, and the secondhand fan he bought on Canal Street did little to dispel the fetid air. He would come home from work each day to find her limp and haggard on the bed, her eyes silently accusing, and he would remember his mother's mute disapproval of Zachary, the cutting edge of her smile. He later wondered if their marriage did not really suffocate forever in those first terrible months in that grubby apartment. But at the time, he was too involved in coping with the profession he had chosen, hurling himself against an indifferent city swarming with talented young lawyers like himself, expecting Christie to cheer his efforts, applaud his small triumphs, urge him on to greater heights. She did this unfailingly until, almost a year to the day after her marriage, she became pregnant. Then, frightened by the changes in her body and the impending responsibility of motherhood, wishing for the Shippan house and the easy life she once had known, she turned to Jonah — childishly perhaps, unrealistically perhaps — wanting him to take care of her, wanting him to tell her everything would be all right, that there was nothing to worry about, that this was all a part of it, all a vital part of it. And he might have provided her with the assurance she desperately needed and sought, had not a very important change taken place in his own life at exactly the same time.
Raymond Gauthier was a bald-headed New Yorker of French descent who had lost his right eye in Italy, and who wore a black patch over the empty socket. He resembled a motion picture pirate, with powerful shoulders and chest, pepper-and-salt hair curling over the open collar of his shirt, the dangling arms of a gorilla, thick thighs and enormous hands. Jonah always visualized him with a belaying pin in his fist, following Burt Lancaster over the side of a burning Spanish vessel. His wife was a Brooklyn girl named Helen, whom he openly and frankly described as an ex-junkie who had married and later divorced a saxophone player. Jonah surmised that Raymond was kidding about this, at least about the junkie part, but he nonetheless watched Helen very carefully, and every time the poor girl scratched at an itch, he assumed she was overdue for her next fix. Helen had dark black curly hair which she wore cut very close to her head. She had slightly bucked teeth, and her eyes were green and faintly Oriental; sometimes when Jonah looked straight into them, he could believe she had once been an addict. He was tempted on several occasions to ask her about it directly, but then of course he knew it was just another of Raymond's jokes.
Raymond had been practicing law in New York since 1951, and felt it was time he took a partner, an idea Jonah clutched at immediately; Raymond had a going practice, Jonah was still chasing ambulances. Neither of them knew that the treason case would come their way so soon, or that it would catapult their newly formed partnership into that rarefied upper atmosphere of the legal profession, where clients were abundant and fees were outrageous, and fame was suddenly upon them like a sunburst. They knew only that they liked each other, and respected each other, and could possibly put their separate talents to fruitful use in a partnership. The treason case was still six months away. The plot itself was at that very moment, in fact, taking definite shape and form in a Jersey City basement, the plans being drawn, the bombs manufactured; the execution and subsequent capture were still in the offing. But the formation of the partnership meant that he and Christie could move instantly from their shabby East 73rd Street town-house (Mr. and Mrs. Jonah Willow of New York and Shippan Point) into a better apartment on Central Park West, large and airy, and not terribly expensive because the neighborhood was supposedly succumbing to the Puerto Rican influx.
The new apartment did little to lift Christie's spirits. She had begun to show in her second month, and she now tried to conceal the pregnancy as though she were the victim of a back-alley rape. She incessently blamed Jonah for what she called his "animal impetuosity," and one night delivered a five-minute kitchen diatribe on "the primitive and unreliable birth control methods available to American women." She then developed a theory relating her pregnancy to Jonah's work, claiming he was always too busy to do anything but make love, and further claiming they had used sex that summer as a substitute for other forms of entertainment ("What!" Jonah said) which would not have been necessary if he'd taken her to dinner or the theater every now and then ("What!" he said again). Besides, she said, this new partnership of his was all craparoo, and he knew it, the same as everything else in this stupid world, "craparoo" being one of Mrs. Dunseath's more choice expressions, passed on to her daughter the way some families pass on the Limoges or the Sheffield plate, an expression Jonah hated, and one which Christie used with increasing frequency to describe almost anything.
Stalin's succession by Malenkov that year was craparoo, as was Salk's development of a trial polio vaccine. Hillary's and Tenzing's conquest of Everest was likewise craparoo, and even the first test explosion of a hydrogen bomb by the Soviet Union was so classified by Christie. The exchange of ideas in those last few months of 1953 became virtually impossible. Coupled with Christie's craparoo concept was an almost biblical attitude that found voice in her second most favored expression, undoubtedly inherited from the water commissioner himself: This too shall pass. Why bother wondering whether Dag Hammarskjold would make a good secretary general of the UN? His term would only last five years anyway. Why concern oneself with Senator McCarthy's belief that a Communist Party cell was in operation at the Lynn, Massachusetts, plant of General Electric? Wouldn't this eventually blow over? The theory applied to everything, all human endeavor fell before it and was trampled: the latest world event, the newest novel, the most recent motion picture, the goddamn Pillsbury bakeoff. All was either trivial at worst or transient at best, and who really gave a damn?
I really give a damn, Jonah thought, and began wondering whether or not anything at all mattered to Christie. Well, she's pregnant, he thought, she's going through a difficult time, she's only twenty-five years old, been married a year and a little more, this is difficult for her. She's really a very sensitive and vulnerable person, it's easy to see how things in this neurotic world of ours can confuse her and force her to build defenses against involvement, she's only exhibiting the symptoms of our times, she's a sweet confused kid, and I've got to help her. But where do you start when someone doesn't even realize that "craparoo" is as phony as whatever it purports to define? Crap is crap, and shit is shit, and craparoo is neither, no matter what Mrs. Albert Dunseath astride her Arabian stallion may believe or have caused her daughter to believe. So where do you begin, and what do you say?