'Yes, yes,' chuckled the woman. 'Tell me, Mr. Baedecker, does that sound like something a person would make up on the spur of the moment? Or say at such a time? Of course not. It sounds like just what it is, a poorly written drama.' Baedecker started to speak, looked at Dave, and closed his mouth.
'David, how is dear Diane?' asked Miz Callahan.
'Just fine,' said Dave. 'I was with her when they did the sonogram.'
'Amniocentesis as well?' asked the old woman.
'No, just the sonogram.'
'That was wise,' said Miz Callahan. 'Diane's young enough, there's no reason to run the one percent risk of miscarriage if the procedure is not necessary. When is the due date again?'
'The doctor says January seven,' said Dave. 'Di thinks it'll be later. I'm voting for a little earlier.'
'First baby probably later if anything,' said Miz Callahan.
Baedecker cleared his throat. 'Ah, what were you saying about magnetic lines of force?' Miz Callahan patted her dog and rose to walk slowly and carefully to the table. She glanced at the sky, looked down at her charts, nodded as if satisfied, and returned to her seat. 'Yes, electromagnetic lines, actually,' she said. 'I never understood it all, but after Mr. Callahan first made contact, he wrote it all down. You may look at it someday if you wish. At any rate, Mr. Callahan confirmed that they were correct and that this would be the best spot in the United States . . . in North America, really . . . so we moved. Mr. Callahan passed on in 1964, but since they don't speak to me directly the way they did to him, I have to rely on his early calculations. Wouldn't you agree?'
'I guess so,' said Baedecker.
'Mr. Callahan was undoubtedly correct about the place,' continued the woman, 'but was never quite sure about the time. They simply would not commit themselves to a date. I've seen them fly over hundreds of times, but they have yet to come all the way down. Well, I have to tell you, they had best get on with it. I am not getting any younger, and some days it is all I can do to drag these old bones up the stairs. Tonight will not be a good night for watching because the full moon will be rising soon and . . . oh, my, look!' Baedecker followed the shadowy line of her arm to a point near the zenith where a satellite or an extremely high-flying aircraft glowed briefly for several seconds as it tracked from west to east. The three of them watched its progress until it disappeared against the background of stars, and then they sat in the comfortable darkness and silence for several minutes.
'More lemonade, anyone?' Dave said at last.
After Baedecker's mother died of a stroke in the fall of 1956, his father moved from their Chicago house to their 'log cabin' in Arkansas. Baedecker's parents had won the land in a Herald Tribune contest and had been working on the house for almost five years, spending summers there when possible, sometimes traveling down for Christmas. Baedecker's father had retired from the Marine Corps in 1952, the same year his son had begun flying F-86 Sabres in Korea, and had held a part-time sales job with Wilson's Sporting Goods ever since. They had planned on retiring to Arkansas in June of 1957. Instead, Baedecker's father had gone there alone in November of 1956.
Baedecker had strong memories of two trips there: the first in October of 1957, two months before his father's death from lung cancer, and the second, with Scott, during the hot Watergate summer of 1974.
Scott was ten that year, but he had already entered the growth spurt that would not end until he was six feet one, two inches taller than his father. Scott had let his red hair grow that year so that it was touching his shoulders. Baedecker disliked it — he thought it made the thin boy look effeminate — and he disliked even more the nervous tic his son had developed in constantly flipping the hair out of his face, but Baedecker did not think it important enough to make an issue of.
The drive from Houston had been hot and uneventful. It had been the first summer of Joan's dissatisfaction, or so Baedecker later thought of it, and he was glad to be away for a few weeks. Joan had decided to stay in Houston because of commitments she had made to various women's clubs. Baedecker had left NASA a month earlier and would begin his new job with a St. Louis–based aerospace firm in September. It was his first vacation in more than ten years.
Scott was not pleased. During the first few days of work around the cabin — clearing the underbrush, repairing damaged windows, replacing shingles, and generally shoring up the exterior of a cabin that had been empty for years — Scott had been quiet and obviously sulking. Baedecker had brought a transistor radio along, and the news was filled with urgent speculation on Nixon's impeachment or imminent resignation. Joan had been absorbed in the Watergate story since the televised hearings had begun over a year earlier. At first she resented them because network coverage interfered with her favorite soap operas, but soon she was looking forward to them, watching the evening's replay on PBS, and talking to Baedecker of little else. To Baedecker, on the verge of ending a flying career he had been in since he was eighteen, Nixon's final agonies were graceless and embarrassing, evidence of an unraveling society that Baedecker already viewed with some sadness.
The log cabin was actually a two-story log home quite out of fashion with the stone-and-brick ranch houses and A-frames appearing in developments around the new reservoir. The cabin sat on a hill amidst three acres of forest and meadow. Down a long stretch of hill there was a narrow lake frontage and a short dock Baedecker's father had built the summer Eisenhower was reelected. Baedecker's parents had been working on finishing the second-floor rooms and adding a rear deck, but when he moved there after his wife's death, Baedecker's father left the work unfinished.
Baedecker and Scott tore down the rotting remnants of the deck on the August day that Richard Nixon announced his resignation. Baedecker remembered sitting in front of the cabin that Thursday evening, eating hamburgers he and Scott had grilled, and listening to the last, lame expressions of self-pity and defiance from the departing president. Nixon ended with the phrase, 'To have served in this office is to have felt a personal kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer: May God's grace be with you in all the days ahead.' Immediately, Scott said, 'Just get it over with, you lying shit. We won't miss you.'
'Scott!' barked Baedecker. 'Until noon tomorrow, that man is President of the United States. You will not speak that way.' The boy had opened his mouth to respond, but two decades of Marine Corps–instilled authority had gone into Baedecker's command, and Scott was able only to throw down his plate and run away, his face reddening. Baedecker had sat alone in the last vestiges of the Arkansas twilight, watching his son's white shirt receding down the hill toward the dock. Baedecker knew that Scott's sulking would deepen for their few remaining days together. He also knew that Scott's statement, while phrased somewhat differently, adequately expressed Baedecker's own feelings about Nixon's departure. Baedecker had looked at the cabin and remembered the first time he had seen it — the first time he had been in Arkansas — driving straight through from Yuma, Arizona, in his new Thunderbird, being reminded of New England as he passed through small towns with names like Choctaw and Leslie, Yellville and Salesville, and half expecting to see the ocean rather than the long lake where his parents had won their property.
His father's appearance had shaken him; although sixty-four years old, Baedecker's father had always appeared at least a decade younger. Now his hair had remained jet-black, but gray stubble mottled his cheeks, and his neck had gone loose and lined since Baedecker had seen him in Illinois eight months earlier. Baedecker realized that in twenty-four years he had never seen his father unshaven before.