Thus Whedon Coles, a lean, lank, preoccupied man who was a Baptist deacon and had five daughters, was able to reveal to his fellow citizens that being “new lines superintendent of Sister Cities Consolidated Gas and Electric” meant he knew about what lay beneath the streets of Green Prairie and where the overhead wire mazes ran and what to do about a hundred hitherto bewildering household dilemmas involving leaks and short circuits. Thus it developed that Ed Pratt did not just paint houses; he was able to explain their construction. Joe Dennison could tell all about walls—brick, rock, cement—and what underlay everybody’s lawns and gardens. In the same way, Henry, who had come up through retail hardware to accounting, could show his community how to use all sorts of tools and small machines.
Civil Defense had been an interesting way to learn unknown things concerning a city, how it is put together, and what makes it run; it had been at the same time that humanly more valuable thing: an opportunity to demonstrate, private skills and special knowledge.
These people, angry, studying what steps to take to express their wrath and to revenge themselves upon the sudden “disloyalty” of the morning paper, were gradually interrupted, silenced, by a penetrating wail coming from somewhere in the house.
Beth Conner heard it first and hoped it would subside.
Henry heard it and went on for a moment: “… it’s my feeling that we shouldn’t appeal to Washington. Civil Defense, for better or for worse, is principally a state matter. We therefore ought to handle our problems at home. People always kicking about too much central government, I mean, hadn’t ought to yell for Federal help the minute anybody tramps on their toes….”
He stopped and smiled at his wife. “It’s Nora,” he said. “I guess you better go up.” He went on, “So I think we ought first to get hold of Coley Borden and ask him what in hell he’s doing. After all, there isn’t one of us here but knows and loves Coley Borden….”
Beth hurried up the stairs, following the steam-engine wail. She found Nora lying on the double bed, on her back, a braid in each hand.
For a moment, Beth nearly burst into laughter. She had liked the child’s long hair, but she had been on the verge of conceding to Nora’s demands that it be cut. Insistence that it not be had expressed mere sentiment on Beth’s part. But now, seeing the shaggy locks against the bedspread, hearing the agony in the voice, Beth lost her smile. She did not conceal it; a genuine, deep sympathy banished amusement. She picked up the girl bodily and hugged her. “Nora. You mustn’t cry. You’re just upset because it looks so funny at first. I’ll take you right straight over to Nellie’s. If she’s closed up, we’ll make her open the beauty parlor and we’ll have your hair fixed to look lovely!”
Hope and wonderment stirred in Nora. She checked her grief. “It’ll never look lovely!”
“Come along. My! Your dress is a mess. Never mind….”
Beth beckoned her husband to the front-hall door. “I’ve got to take Nora on an errand,” she said.
“Is she sick?”
“No. But—”
“Ye gods, Beth! This is an important meeting. And somebody has to serve the refreshments afterward.”
Beth shook her head. “Nora’s important, too! Lenore can serve. She knows where everything is, Henry. Tell her the refrigerator—and the plates are all stacked in the pantry. Oh, she’ll know…!”
5
Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, had always liked his mother’s sister and her family. Perhaps it was the kids he had particularly liked, for the father, Jim Williams, wasn’t actually much: an archetypal nobody, a draftsman, a little gray chap who would get lost in a crowd of two. And Beth’s sister Ruth, though she had been very blonde and very pretty at twenty, was careworn now. No wonder, with so small a salary and six kids.
Still he boarded the Central Avenue bus reluctantly. He’d been home for a week now, and he’d had only one real date with Lenore. The rest of the time she’d been busy—or had merely dropped in for an hour, or permitted him the same privilege. But there was a tension in the Bailey house he didn’t understand, though the Baileys had always been tense. And there was a kind of—distance—about Lenore: an attitude he’d never before seen in her. It made him feel with increased anxiety that growing up, entering the service, getting an architectural degree and a commission-doing the things men do—was steadily alienating him from the loyalties, affections and intimacies of his youth.
His mother had repeatedly reminded him he would have to pay a call on his aunt’s family while he was at home on leave. He had at first agreed gladly. But, now that he was on the way, he felt forlorn about the journey and the visit.
He caught the Central Avenue bus and sat on the back seat while it wormed its way north through the residential area, the business perimeter and the shops and tall buildings of the downtown section. He got out in front of the Olympic Theatre, already alight, with an early queue of moviegoers under its marquee. He walked to the terminal and caught a Ferndale bus.
It started across the river. On the way over, Charles observed how low the water was, September-shallow, with boulders showing and dry sandbanks. It forked around Swan Island to the west. Late bathers still dotted the waist-deep water. The Fun House was already bright for evening though roller-coaster cars caught the sun as they heaved up on the latticed curves and slowed before plunging. To his right, he saw the river going away east, the ruddy bluffs crossed by other bridges, the warehouses on the Green Prairie side and the disused, rotting docks below.
Across the way, slums whose colored people lived, and Italians, Greeks, Jews and Poles.
The lieutenant thought about the river a little, and perhaps only as men can think of rivers, remembering boyhood.
He remembered fishing in its muddy waters for suckers and catfish, and finally, one day, catching a big bass. He remembered camping with a scoutmaster, out where the airport was now.
The river then, and at that point, was gouged deeply into the level plains; there were miniature canyons where cottonwoods and willows grew, where deer lived, where tents could be pitched in summer and where in winter an ardent boy could trap a few muskrats, a skunk or two and maybe, once in a lifetime, an ermine or a mink. It was gone now; the mills had killed the fish and the airport was so close to the gorges (which once had been mysterious and remote-seeming) that nobody in his right mind would pitch a tent there. He reflected that no good places were left where boys on rafts could play Lewis and Clark, or Mark Twain steamboating. Subdivisions had replaced those primordial pockets on the river—or factories, or golf courses, or parallel highways, or airports. Something.
The bus plugged for half a mile, noisily, through a run-down section, competing with trolley cars, trucks, jalopies driven by Negroes and hordes of pedestrians. At last, turning on Willowgrove from Mechanic Street, it made better time and soon covered the distance between the slums and Ferndale, River City’s oldest suburb. Charles walked the short way to his aunt’s house.
He was sighted in the distance by twelve-year-old Marie. In a moment, four of the young Williamses came down the sidewalk under the catalpas, yelling, he thought affectionately, like Indians. (He found out presently, however, that they were yelling like inhabitants of Venus.) As the youngsters caught his hands and poured forth questions about his family, about the armed forces, about life on other planets as he walked toward the too-small frame house where they lived, Charles lost some of his feeling of forlornness.