The path we have chosen is full of hazards, he said. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which our patience and our will will be tested. He called upon Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles immediately. He said our goal was not peace at the expense of freedom, but peace and freedom. God willing, he said, that goal would be achieved.
He said Thank you and good night. And after a moment he was gone.
There was a soft swell of voices then in the place. From somewhere came a spectral wail or moan of grief or terror, and people turned in their chairs or on their stools to see who had made it. We had all been so afraid of this, for so long; we had been so sure it would happen, so sure it couldn’t.
“Bastards,” said Max softly. “Sonsa bitches.” Rodger put his hand over Max’s where it lay on the table.
“Gotta remember,” Jackie said. “They’ve been firing off those bombs for twenty years. So far the world’s still here. I mean this might mean war. But it don’t mean we’ll necessarily get hit.”
“Of course we will,” Saul said. “In the first exchange. Those missile silos to the west. That’s exactly where their missiles are aimed. The firestorm will reach at least as far as this. Easily,” he said. His small thick fingers circling his glass were still. “Easily.”
“So it’s the end,” Rodger said. “It is, after all.”
“It’s not the end, necessarily,” Jackie said; and he glanced at Kit, as though she should not hear these things, too young or vulnerable.
“Well if it ain’t the end,” Rodger said, “it’ll do till the real end comes along.”
“I have to go,” Kit whispered to Jackie, and she slid from the booth and went to the back and into the little toilet and the wooden stall with the scarred walls varnished a hundred times. Jim + Jean 4 Ever. Bobby I Love U. Jackie had told her how the scratchings in boys’ toilets were all about sex; these were always about love, eager hopeless love. She had thought of writing John Keats ½ + Easeful Death. In a heart cartouche, struck through by an arrow.
Death.
What she knew, all of a sudden and for sure, was that she wouldn’t hide. No matter what, she wouldn’t go down into the shelters they had made to put people in. The shame of that would be worse than the death they were going to inflict, it was like the shame she felt hiding under her desk in grade school, hands clasped over the tender back of her head, her butt in the air with all the others, while Sister watched. No never. She would stay up on the earth’s surface and wait.
She knew something else. She had wondered if, when death came near her, she would in her fear want a priest, if she would ask for forgiveness. And now death was near and she knew she wouldn’t: Death couldn’t change her back to what she had been, or the world either. I am myself alone. If she were sent down then into his hell, well fine: better to be there than to grovel, to beg or praise. Praise for this? No not for this.
She found herself weeping, though; she pulled off a length of rough paper from the roll and pressed it to her eyes and blew her nose. She didn’t want to die; she wanted the world not to die, or be so wounded it could never recover. She wanted to live.
That night, twenty-two American interceptor aircraft went aloft in case the Cuban government reacted to the President’s speech with an attack on Guantanamo or the arming of missiles or the liftoff of the Il-28 bombers. The Soviet ships in the Atlantic received orders from Moscow to ignore the blockade and continue on course to Cuban ports. Polaris nuclear submarines in port went out to sea. The President signed an order, National Security Memorandum 199, authorizing the loading of multistage nuclear weapons on aircraft under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. United States forces went from the worldwide state of alert that was code-named DEFCON III up to DEFCON II. DEFCON I meant war.
The next day on East North Street, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held what Saul called an emergency executive meeting to decide how to respond to the blockade of the island. The President had called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade, Saul said, and a blockade is an act of war, plain and simple, and it was obviously not going to be the last one either. The committee members spent the day calling other campus groups and trying to get a united front together to go into the streets in a mass public demonstration against the blockade. They couldn’t get a campus meeting place for a rally, not being a registered student group, but at last got an offer from a Unitarian church to hold their meeting there on the following evening. They got the Young People’s Socialist League to run off announcements on their mimeo machine and Jackie and the others went around in Jackie’s car tacking and taping them to lampposts and walls; they were mostly torn down as soon as they went up.
On television they showed people emptying the shelves of supermarkets, buying canned food and bottled water, and guns and ammo too. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they supported the President’s action. One in five said they believed it meant the beginning of World War Three. But mostly people went on doing what they had been doing; they got up and went to work and went to class and in class went on talking about Shakespeare and quadratic equations and the rise of the middle class. Kit wrote notes into her notebooks and walked across campus listening to the carillon at noon and went to the library. And always she felt the depth of the sky above her, maybe being severed right now by the missiles coming. There was no poetry or knowledge or wisdom that could master or face or even survive it, it was hopeless: Pushkin’s smile as useless against it as any other weapon, any at all.
The Unitarian church was bleak and homey at once, like a school cafeteria or a basement game room. There was no cross and no colored glass and the pews were square-backed and had worn velvet cushions to sit on. It was the first church that wasn’t a Catholic church Kit had ever been in; a little shadow of trespass was only one of the new feelings she felt sitting there. She watched the people come in and the minister in a blue button-down shirt and no tie set up a microphone and folding chairs for speakers in front of the altar.
Saul and Max and the YPSL guys registered the people who came in, got signatures from those who were willing to sign. There were people from ADA in ties or in dresses; there were two women from SANE who each wore the black button with a white figure on it that Jackie told her was the semaphore letters for N and D laid one over the other, and they stood for Nuclear Disarmament. Kit wondered how anyone would know this.
“So are you guys representing the Student Peace Union?” Max asked two boyish blonds, almost twins, in argyle sweaters.
“We’re not representing it,” one said. “We are it.”
In the end the church filled and the speakers one by one got up and tapped the mike and spoke. “Don’t say it’s too terrible to be used,” the SANE woman said. “Just because you wouldn’t use it. It’s not too terrible. It’s been used. We used it. Eisenhower threatened to drop one on the Chinese in Korea. Just a little one. He was going to lend one to the French in Indochina. Don’t tell me it’s inconceivable.”