He nods. But he doesn’t know. He glances at Froelich, who watches his wife. He is in love with her. It must take a lot of love to run that household, those kids.
“Cuba’s just caught in the middle,” she says. “Under Batista, they were just America’s whore. Fidel’s the best thing that ever happened to that country.”
Jack can’t decide what is more startling: her use of the word “whore” or her use of the word “Fidel.” Not to mention “bullshit.”
“I like the Kennedys at home”—her voice deceptively young in the darkness—“they’re really getting it together with civil rights down there. But the right-wing press has been baying for Castro’s blood for months, so…. Are you guys hungry?”
Jack shakes his head. “No, I’m uh — thanks Karen.” They watch her go back in the house.
Jack shifts his eyes from the screen door, and spits out a speck of tobacco. “We can only hope Khrushchev dismantles those weapons. It’s like General MacArthur said, eh? Never fight a war you don’t intend to win.”
“Ach, win schmin, it’s all good for business, no?”
“It’s about more than that, Hank, and you know it.”
“What is it about, my friend?”
“It’s about democracy. It’s about the fact that you and I come from worlds apart and wind up standing here in your driveway, disagreeing about something that in some countries would get us flung in jail for even talking about. And that includes Cuba.”
Froelich draws on his pipe and releases the leathery aroma in a white stream. Jack sends a chain of smoke rings up to drift and distend in the October sky. The two of them look up at the spangled dome. It really is a remarkably clear night. A beautiful night on earth.
Froelich says, “You want ein Bier, Jack?”
“Ja, danke.”
“What the heck is this?”
Jack is in his basement, surveying a ramshackle of cardboard boxes that he had neatly collapsed and stacked after the move in August. They now form tunnels under blankets reinforced with every book from the bookshelves, as well as the bookshelves themselves. Heavy hardcover volumes secure the blanketed extremities — Winston Churchill’s memoirs, all six volumes, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, along with several years of carefully preserved National Geographic magazines, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Huron County phone book and God knows what else. Sleeping bags that had been laboriously rolled and stored for the winter now curtain an entrance arch fashioned from one end of the old metal baby crib. Jack reaches out and rescues part of today’s newspaper from the literary thatch-work as Mike’s head appears between the sleeping bags. His daughter emerges. “Hi Dad, want to come in?”
“Watcha got in there?” asks Jack.
“Rations,” she says, “and water.”
“What are you up to, Mike?”
Mike switches off the flashlight and crawls out. “Makin’ a shelter.”
“A bomb shelter,” says his daughter, delighted. It’s a game to her, and that’s as it should be.
“Up to bed now, sweetie.”
“We haven’t finished, Dad—”
“Up you go.”
As she disappears up the steps, Jack says to his son, “Are you trying to give your sister nightmares again?”
“No.” The boy turns red.
“What did I tell you at supper?”
“We’re on alert.”
“Well that’s not make-believe, it’s real. I told you that ’cause I figured you were mature enough to understand.”
“I’m mature,” he mumbles.
“Well then, what kind of game are you playing here, Mike?”
“It’s not a game, it’s how you do it, I saw it on TV.”
“You saw it on TV. Do you believe everything you see on TV?”
“No.”
Jack turns to go back upstairs. “Take all this nonsense apart now and put everything back the way you found it.”
“Dad—”
“On the double.”
“But—”
Jack stops and turns, pointing a finger. “You heard me, mister, I want this thing gone. Dismantled.”
He climbs into bed next to Mimi and tells her about Mike’s “bomb shelter.” Now that he’s describing it aloud, it’s actually kind of funny. She kisses him and says, “He’s like his father.”
The boy is just trying to do his bit. It’s hard sometimes to remember that he’s just a child. “Remind me tomorrow,” he says, “I want to take Mike over to the arena after school, pass the puck around.”
Mimi strokes his chest and rests her head against his shoulder. As he reaches to turn out the bedside light, she says, “Did you talk to Mr. March?”
“Mr. — ? No, I … got a little busy toward the end of the day, but she seems fine now, don’t you think?”
“I think so, yeah.”
The next words come easily. “I had to go into London. Meet with a guest lecturer for the officers’ school. Ran a bit late.”
“Mmm,” she says.
He closes his eyes.
“Jack. Are you sure it’s okay for Madeleine to play with the Froelich girl?”
“Colleen? Sure, why not?”
“I hope so, because I let her go over there today.”
That’s right, he was going to have a word with Mimi about that. Just as well she has come to it on her own. “Good,” he says.
He listens until he hears her breathing change, then carefully turns onto his side. The first lie. But how is it different from the others he has told her in the past few days? “It’s just sabre-rattling. Nothing to worry about.” They are not really lies. They are another way of saying, “I’ll look after you.” Another way of saying, “I love you.”
In the privacy of the darkness, the fleecy comfort of his sleeping family, Jack reflects on Oskar Fried alone in his furnished apartment. That is how we will win this war — how we will ensure that there is a world for our children to inherit. By getting as many Oskar Frieds as possible to come over to our side. And in a small but direct way, Jack is helping. He closes his eyes again and revises his expectations of Oskar Fried. Let the man cloister himself in his apartment if that’s what he wants. He isn’t here to make Jack McCarthy’s life more interesting. He is here to help win this cold war that is set to boil over.
But Jack’s eyes will not stay closed. His lids have that spring-loaded feeling. He gets up, goes quietly into the hallway and looks in on his daughter. She is asleep. Damp child’s brow, wrinkle of flannel PJs and grimy old Bugsy. My child is safe.
BIG WARS AND LITTLE WARS
A Russian quite recently said
’In color TV we’re ahead.
Your pictures confuse,
With all sorts of hues,
But ours are the best — they’re all red.
IT’S RAINING MILDLY after school the next day. Madeleine has just come from playing naked Barbie dolls with Lisa Ridelle. Auriel was at the dentist. It was entirely different being two rather than three. They sat, somewhat at a loss, on Lisa’s bedroom floor, looking through her mum’s movie magazines. Then, to Madeleine’s dismay, Lisa brought out her Barbie and Ken — she hadn’t even known Lisa possessed them — and undressed the dolls until they were both bare naked. She stuck a straight pin between Ken’s legs for his “thing” and made him lie down on top of Barbie. Madeleine said, “I just remembered, I have to go.” She felt an overpowering dread backing up from her stomach, like a sewer, as Lisa began to speculate with carefree horror on “the facts of life.” Madeleine hoped she’d left in time, before the smell came out of her and filled the Ridelles’ house.