Lillian said, “Oh. Were you awake?”
Arthur nodded.
“Now I feel silly.”
Arthur lay down next to her and arranged his arm for her to roll up against him. Just when she was relaxing, he whispered deep in her ear, “It isn’t good.”
She waited.
“We’ve been bombing and bombing and bombing the Indonesians, pretending that the bombers are Indonesian rebel bombers. But they are our bombers. If there’s a fucking commie anywhere out there, I will shit in my own hat. The whole operation has been such a failure that we are about to switch sides, and congratulate Sukarno on suppressing the commies. It’s our planes he’s shot down.”
Lillian didn’t move.
Arthur was silent for a long moment, then said, “It’s Finn and I who have to rewrite the reports headed to the White House. Lots of civilian deaths.”
Then he said, “And the reports about Frank Wisner. Everyone in Indonesia says that he’s crazy as a bedbug.” Arthur’s tone hardened. He moved away from her, said, “I wish I could say I feel any pity or compassion. It was just that today we were all whispering about Wisner, and when I was sitting in my office, thinking about him, my heart started pounding, and I was just so angry I could have burst into tears. Believe me, I was not thinking, Oh, you poor guy — I was thinking, Why go crazy now, why not years ago?”
She said, “Faye Purvis got her husband to admit he was in love with his secretary that way.”
And now Arthur really laughed.
She didn’t suggest that he quit his job.
—
TIM KNEW Janny loved him best. Uncle Frank had flown her down for a visit on his new plane, and then taken all of them up for a ride. There were only four seats, so Tim sat in the copilot’s seat, and Mom and Dad sat behind him. Dad kept saying, “Lil! Take your hands down! It’s beautiful!” Tim liked it, but he got a little sick, so he didn’t like it as much as he told Uncle Frank he did. The best part was flying over their own house, a long L with a gray roof, set flat into the rectangle that was their “property,” the oval of the swimming pool tucked into the L. He hadn’t realized they had so many trees.
After Uncle Frank left, Janny stayed for six weeks, and went to day camp with Debbie and Deanie. Tim roamed the neighborhood with the Sloan brothers.
Janny had five matching outfits, a different one for every day of camp. Mom said, “That makes it easy,” because they were always waiting for Debbie to decide what she was going to wear. One day she wore a ballet outfit. Tim thought she was a birdbrain.
Janny asked Tim questions: Did he have a baseball bat? Did he have a ball? Would he teach her to hit the ball? Would he throw the ball twenty-five times? How deep was the deep end of their pool? Did he ever dive into it? Did he know how to do a jackknife? How about a cannonball? Can you show me a can opener? Tim showed her how to hit the ball, pitched the ball not twenty-five but thirty-two times, tried a jackknife, demonstrated a cannonball and a can opener (on this one he really rocked back and made a big splash). Janny watched him intently, her hair plastered to her tiny head and her swimming suit drooping on her skinny body. She was only eight. When he did something funny, she laughed and laughed.
She also played with Debbie, of course, endless games of War, Slapjack, and Crazy Eights, and she even played with Deanie — Old Maid and pickup sticks. Debbie’s friends came over, and they played blindman’s bluff, hide and seek, and spud (Tim and the Sloan boys were allowed to join this game if they didn’t aim the ball straight at the girls). Since it was summer, Mom and Dad let them stay up until ten-thirty or eleven every night.
Every morning, Janny came into his room before he was awake, sat on his bed, and asked him what he was going to do that day. He told her — build a fort with the Sloan boys, bike into town, swing on the rope that hung over Wilkins Creek (which was way wider than Harkaway Creek), build a glider, solve a murder mystery, jump off the roof of the house into the pool when Mom wasn’t looking. At the end of the day, she sat on his bed and he told her what he had done: the glider sailed for twenty miles, the water from his jump had splashed all the way into the living room. None of it was true — he had just biked around, and the fort was four hay bales and an old tarp. But she didn’t care one way or the other. She said she never, ever, ever wanted to go home. She hated Uncle Frank, Aunt Andy, Richie, Michael, and Nedra, the housekeeper, all equally. Mom stroked her head and said, “Everyone feels that way once in a while, sweetie,” but Tim was twelve and had never felt that way. And then, two days before Uncle Frank was to come pick her up, she really did cry and cry and beg Mom to adopt her and keep her — she would always be good, every day, and help around the house. She got straight A’s and was reading at ninth-grade level — the last book she read was Jo’s Boys—and Mom had to keep patting her but shaking her head and saying, “No, Janny, we can’t do that. Frank and Andy love you and miss you. We were lucky to get you this long.”
Everyone was in bed, and quiet, and Tim was almost asleep, when Janny tiptoed into his room in her pajamas and lay down on his bed. Tim didn’t say anything; in fact, he let out a tentative little snore, to see if she would believe it, and she did believe it — she shook his shoulder to wake him up. He said, “Huh?”
Janny said, “Are you going to miss me?”
Tim said yes. Whether he meant this, he had no idea.
Janny said, “Can I sleep here? It’s hot, and I don’t need covers.”
Tim moved over toward the wall. Janny moved a little bit, too, away from the edge of the bed, so that she wouldn’t fall. He said, “When is Uncle Frank getting here?” He was hoping for another ride in the plane. Steve Sloan said that if you stared at something still, like the horizon, you wouldn’t get sick.
“He told Aunt Lillian on the phone. I don’t remember.”
Now she took a deep breath, but she didn’t cry. Tim thought that was sadder in a way. Then she said, “Maybe you could come visit me. In Southampton. We could go to the beach.”
“Maybe,” said Tim. Then, “But I would have to bring Debbie. She would never let me go there without her.”
They didn’t say any more. She fell asleep on her back, and Tim lay awake for a little while, looking at the ceiling, and then looking at her face two times. Was she pretty? Tim didn’t know. He fell asleep. Someone, Mom or Dad, came in before he woke up and carried her out. They had pancakes and applesauce for breakfast. When they took her to the little airport, Uncle Frank didn’t offer to take them for another ride. Janny did run up to Uncle Frank, and did hug him, and he did pick her up and kiss her on the cheek. And every so often after she left, Tim missed her. He decided that she was pretty, but he didn’t say anything about that to Steve or Stanley.
—
ANDY PUT HER HAND over her eyes. It was interesting that the story was as familiar to her as an old sweater — admittedly a Norwegian sweater — because it was a farmer’s story. She couldn’t remember where she’d read it. Two brothers, Kristjan and his brother Erik, and the mad wife, in this case Signy. Kristjan would have been thirty-five, and Signy would have been no more than twenty. Kristjan and Signy were married three years before they had a child — maybe there were a couple of miscarriages — but then a girl was born alive, and Signy insisted on giving her an American name, Fanny. Fanny was much doted upon, and Signy was very careful of her, but her care didn’t matter in the end, because Fanny sickened anyway, and died on her first birthday. This event took place in the spring, and shortly afterward, Kristjan and Erik had to go away overnight to buy a team of horses they needed for spring plowing. When they got back, Signy had gone mad.