After the divorce her precious ‘career’ had become everything and her whole pre-October War life, a life almost totally bereft of family and real friends. She had become old before her time cultivating stern professorial dowdiness, careful never to risk personal involvements.
These days she only wore her uniform when she was in Philadelphia; or on a military base, things worked better if she behaved and looked like a civilian.
In the beginning she had honestly believed that what she was doing made a difference, that in some way the Air Force was actually trying to ‘care’ for its countless irreparably ‘damaged’ survivors. The funny thing was that she still believed that Curtis LeMay genuinely cared; but whether his ‘concern’ was motivated by compassion for ‘his boys’ or by a simple desire to minimize the contagion within his remaining Bombardment Groups was a moot point.
Caroline Konstantis got out of the car and stretched the tension out of her shoulders. She smoothed down her calf-length cotton dress, enjoyed the feel of her hair falling freely, touching her mainly bare shoulders in a distinctly unmilitary fashion, and luxuriated in the warmth of the sun on her arms. Before the war she would have regarded today’s ‘frock’ as a party dress that revealed far, far too much of her less than prime flesh, and the positively wanton suggestion of shallow cleavage, quite scandalous. However, that was then and this was now. Her figure had always been trim, skinny in her younger days, a little fuller in her middle years. The last eighteen months ‘on the road’ had rescued her from a sedentary desk and classroom-based lifestyle that had been sucking the vitality out of her frame. It was years since she had seen enough sun to develop a healthy tan; years since she had felt remotely at one with herself. The World had gone to Hell, the country was falling apart around her but she had accidentally re-found herself. Or at least that was what she pretended.
Notwithstanding her qualms — something mid-way between teenage ‘prom nerves’ and the existential angst that often assails one in middle age when contemplating a thing that is patently foolish — she felt alive.
The sad thing was that she had almost forgotten what that was like.
That morning’s edition of the Lost Angeles Times reported that ‘Chicago Is Burning!’ on the front page above a story about the British Embassy in Philadelphia having been damaged by a car bomb, and on the inside cover that the man the East Coast newspapers called the ‘Pied Piper of Greenwich Village’ was playing at the ‘gala reopening’ of a club called ‘The Troubadour’ on Santa Monica Boulevard that night. The continuing melodrama of the trial of a dirty cop called Reggie O’Connell’ had taken up three whole pages further into the paper. There were pictures of a buxom blond, the cop’s wife who had turned State’s evidence, and another of a rangy, handsome, unkempt man in his twenties; the musician Sam Brenckmann — a man whose single ‘Brothers Across the Water’ had been playing in most of the diners and bars she had ducked into in the last two or three months — whom it seemed was, coincidentally, a co-owner of The Troubadour and one of Reggie O’Connell’s most high profile victims.
Everywhere else outside California the papers were full of news of shootings, crackdowns by the police, vile accusations against the political classes in general and the person of the President in particular; but here in California there was still plenty of ‘normal news’.
The Los Angeles Times was full of it; orange growers in ‘the Valley’ were worrying about the likelihood of a drought on account of the exceptionally dry winter, the State Governor Pat Brown had tabled re-drafted plans to bridge San Diego Bay and for new road building plans in the Bay Area. In downtown San Francisco the Adjutant General of the West Coast Confederation National Guard, Major General Colin Powell Dempsey, was taking the salute at a parade honoring the men who had fallen ‘pacifying the gangs of the Sierras’.
Here in California there was still a sense of civil society, of order and something vaguely like ‘normality’ on the streets of Berkeley and elsewhere which struck her every time she crossed the state line or stepped off an aircraft at LA or San Francisco. Granted, law and order even here was a fragile thing and there were a lot of places in the state where she would fear to drive or walk as a woman alone; but mainly, she still knew that she was safe most places, especially in the Bay Area and down south in Los Angeles.
The small, utilitarian bungalow hurriedly thrown up in the World War II boom years seemed exactly as it had before. The yard was a little neglected and the grass out front an inch or two overlong.
The dwellings in this part of town were constructed to a pattern; one or two bedrooms, a living room, bathroom and small kitchen, the main rooms separated by a narrow hallway. Damaged slates on the roof had been repaired since her last visit a month ago and a battered Chevy pickup sat on the concrete pan beside the end wall. The TV aerial on the gable of the building was silvery new and the drapes on the front room windows were drawn against the heat of the summer sun.
There were three wooden steps up to the small porch.
The door was freshly painted, matt white like the exterior walls of the property to reflect the heat of the California sun outward. Caroline stood at the top of the steps, turned and took in her surrounds one more time. The war workers had moved on years ago and students had moved in. Across the road at intervals of fifty yards the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority had posted signs; many of the houses on that side of the street were condemned, under notice of demolition to allow work to start on the new tramways planned to link Berkeley and the whole eastern Bay Area. The October War had put a hold on all that and it was only recently that Governor Brown had begun resurrecting California’s ambitious pre-war infrastructure plans.
Her hand moved to the newly fitted circular bell button wired into the right hand frame of the door at shoulder level. Up close she could still detect the tang of fresh pain work. The place had been virtually falling down three months ago. The last time she had been in the Bay Area the best part of four weeks ago the outside walls were flaking, and the insides the building had been a tangle of wiring and lifted floor boards, the power turned off most of the time. The last month had seemed like forever and as her finger hesitated over the bell push she was suddenly tingling with anticipation, and fear.
She was who she was, fifty-one years old and he was… who he was, young enough to be her son; her son’s age in fact, give or take a few months and the way she was feeling now, in this moment, in the heat of this moment seemed just plain wrong.
It was one thing to rationalize her current psychological-emotional condition as some kind of delayed ‘war psychosis’ — God in Heaven she had seen enough different manifestations of that in the last year to fill a dozen research papers — but another entirely to extricate herself from its grip. Even, that was, if she was remotely motivated to so do, which she was not!