She was indeed a witch, if cleverness with stubborn household servants was any test. He watched from the kitchen doorway. Catherine sat at the table. Mrs. Hazelton opened a low door that revealed the refrigerator’s innards. Then she squatted before it, reaching in to twist something and pull something else. Presently a buzzing indicated that the machinery was working again. She beckoned to Catherine. Squatting, they examined the refrigerator together. Why had she chosen Catherine to instruct? he wondered. Wasn’t he the officer here? Both women rose — the graceful younger one in a dotted dress and the angular older one in her dead husband’s garments — and they turned toward each other, then toward him. For a moment they loomed larger than life: Grave Acceptance and her grim sister Defiance. Then they became two people again: sweet Cathy and the backyard widow, whose eyes, blue as a gas flame, flickered at him.
AUGUST BEGAN. His pain decreased. He wasn’t deceived, but he took advantage of the situation. One night they hired a babysitter and saw a movie. Another night they went out to dinner. Catherine’s charm almost distracted him. How lucky he had been in her, and in their children, and in his work — and yet how willingly he would trade the pleasures of this particular life for life itself. He would hide in a cave, he would skulk in an alley, he would harness himself to a plow — anything to remain alive.
On August 6 the bar radio shouted out the news of Hiroshima. Many of the patrons applauded. People stood rounds of drinks for one another. Mrs. Hazelton turned from her companions and stared at Richard. Her palms lay flat against her thighs, as if they were lashed there.
On August 9 the destruction of Nagasaki was announced. Mrs. Hazelton was not present. Richard left early. At home he found Catherine knitting by the radio. She turned her large eyes toward him. “This is terrible,” she said.
“All wars are terrible.” He lowered himself to the floor near her feet. “The bombs may end the war and save lives. Killing to cure, darling.” They listened together to the radio’s ceaseless gloat.
In the coming days the town began to swell with civilians and servicemen asking one another for news from Japan. The day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Richard and the girls could hardly make their way through the sidewalk crowds on Main Street. A woman they didn’t know, wearing a ruffled turquoise sundress, bent over the stroller and emotionally kissed his youngest daughter, all so fast that the child merely stared instead of crying.
Catherine reported that the beach was packed. A noisy blimp hovered over the water on August 11, enchanting some children and terrifying others. Eventually it moved slowly westward and out of sight. Meanwhile a new concessionaire had appeared, a vendor of cotton candy, which he swirled out of a vat. The girls had never seen such stuff before. When they came home their cheeks were laced with fine pink lines, like the faces of alcoholics.
On August 13 the bar was so full that Richard could find no stool. It was better anyway to drink standing. His pain had sharpened again. The underweight elderly couple shared their booth with strangers. The bartender was very busy. His son was working, too … a wiry young teenager whose presence behind the counter was buoyantly illegal.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 14 Richard felt restless. After his family left for the beach he walked to Main Street. The bar was open, and all the regulars were there. The bartender and his son had attached tan and peach crepe paper streamers to the center of the ceiling. Then they had twisted the streamers and tacked their ends high on the walls. The carnival effect was spoiled by the lingerie hues. “All the red, white, and blue ones were sold,” the bartender explained. Some of the streamers had become dislodged and hung down like flypaper. The place grew more and more packed. Seven or eight people crowded into each booth. The lively women had already installed themselves in the back of the room. They had acquired some men — a couple of officers and a fellow with a dog collar. Mrs. Hazelton was not among the party.
The air was stifling. Richard took his glass to the doorway, but the frequent comings and goings jostled him, so he went onto the street with his drink — another illegality. A sailor was openly fondling a woman’s breasts. Three of his companions were sharing a bottle on a bench. They were committing this breach right in front of the public library, diagonally across the street from Richard. On the third floor of the Woolworth building — the only building in town even to have a third floor — figures bobbed about at the windows, throwing confetti. The card shop was full of boisterous customers. The tobacco shop, the drugstore …
Someone, somewhere, set off a firecracker, then a string of them. Meanwhile the noise in the bar behind him had become a steady roar. “Victory!” he heard. “Defeat!” he heard. “Surrender!” Laughter thickened. Church bells began to ring — from the Episcopalians at one end of town and from the Congregationalists at the other. Automobiles blared their horns, though there were no automobiles moving on the street, since the street was filling with people — all sizes and ages of people, all shades of clothing and hair; people singing, shouting, hugging, crying, dancing alone and in pairs and in threes and in groups. Someone was playing an accordion. Someone was blowing a trumpet. An army truck poked its nose into the street from a side road, backed up, disappeared. Then a squad of soldiers arrived, not to contain the revelry but to join it, for this was the end of the war, and everyone was part of the glory. A small boy all by himself wandered crying into Richard’s view and then was snatched up by someone, presumably his mother. Were the police opening the jails? Was that the meaning of the latest siren? He leaned against the window of the bar and noticed that he still held his half-full glass. He undid one of the lower buttons of his shirt and poured the beer into his garments. It spread onto his stomach. Some of it dripped below his loose waistband and cooled his abdomen, failing to quench the fire within, but diminishing it a little bit, for a little while. He threw the glass into a trash barrel.
From the grocery on the other side of the street came shouts and cheers. From the barbershop, from the dentist’s office. Someone was running along the library path, past the three sailors on the bench — but there were twenty people on the bench by now, there were thirty! She raced slantwise toward him, crossing the street without seeing its inebriates. Her hair streamed backward like a figurehead’s.
He saw that she was not laughing, not crying, not shouting, not delirious with delight. She was raging. Her fury was finally unleashed. He caught her as she tried to run past. She gasped, tensed, raised her fists. Then she recognized him, and threw herself moaning into his embrace. They stood like tens of thousands of celebrants across their mad nation, locked in victory. He felt his dying staunched by her wrath, her passionate unsubmissiveness. It was as if she were a savage new drug, untried, unproven: a last desperate chance. She arched her back and gazed at him for a moment, the blue flames of her eyes seeming to lick his forehead, his nose, his chin, his forehead again — though perhaps she was merely avoiding looking anywhere else, down at his soggy trousers, for instance, whose wetness she could surely feel through her own. Then she turned her head rapidly from side to side, making her hair shake with the force of the refusal. He released her. She flew into their bar. He slogged toward home, drenched but not defeated, not yet defeated, not yet.