“Something to show me?”
“Come along.”
She went with him, retracing her route as far as the second floor, where he turned toward the back library. As they walked down the hall she said, “Howard’s here, he just arrived.”
“Yes, I saw his car from the ridge.” But he didn’t seem very interested in Howard right now.
They went on into the library, and Bradford carefully closed the door before unwrapping the wrinkled brown paper from around his package and taking out the contents, two flat pamphletlike things with dark-green pebbled covers. United States passports.
He was grinning like a boy. “They finally came,” he whispered, opened one to glance inside, and handed it to her. “Here you are, this one’s yours.”
Yes, it was. It was exactly like her own passport in almost every way, the differences few but crucial. Like the name: Ann Thornton, it said. And the occupation: journalist. And on the page listing those parts of the world where American citizens were currently forbidden to travel, an official-looking stamped permission appeared, giving her the right to travel in and to Communist China. The People’s Republic of China, it said.
“You’ll have to sign it,” Bradford said. “With that name, of course. Here, I’ve got a pen over here.”
She went over to the desk, carrying the passport, sat down, took the pen, wrote Ann Thornton. She kept thinking, The People’s Republic of China, and it suddenly seemed as though she really were going there, a conveyor belt of some kind had just been activated and she was sliding slowly but inevitably forward, and nothing was going to stop it after all, not the family, not anything, and at the far end was spread The People’s Republic of China, and darkness, and a future she couldn’t imagine.
Bradford said, “Like to see mine?” His boyish pleasure still showed in his smiling face as he extended his new passport toward her.
“Yes, thank you.”
The Chinese had them unrelated. Marshall Allan was to be Bradford’s new name, and he too was now a journalist. And he too had the rubber-stamp permission to travel to The People’s Republic.
“It won’t be long now,” Bradford said.
“No, it won’t.”
“You’ll have to make up your mind about Dinah very soon.”
“I will, I promise.” Then she looked at the passport again and said, “But can I take her? A journalist traveling with a little girl, would that look all right?”
“I don’t see why not. It would be unusual, I suppose, but no one will pay us that much attention. We’ll simply be a pair of journalists on an assignment, and you’re taking the opportunity to show your daughter a bit of the world. If you decide to bring her along.”
She said, “Well, I have till Tuesday anyway.”
“Tuesday? Why till then?”
“That’s when Joe’s coming to give you the check-up” She looked up at him with sudden frightened suspicion. “We aren’t going before Tuesday, are we?”
He grinned, teasing her. “That would be something, wouldn’t it? Duck out on Joe before he even got his stethoscope stuck in his ears.”
“But we won’t do that, will me?”
“No, dear,” he said, and in an odd gesture reached out and patted her head. “Don’t worry, we won’t run out on Joe. I’ll have him put your mind at rest before we go anywhere.”
iv
“Evelyn! Hey, Evelyn!”
She struggled upward from deep deep sleep, her head muffled in pillow and darkness and almost palpable layers of slumber, swathing her head like soft black cotton. Someone was joggling her shoulder, annoyingly, causing her discomfort, dragging her up from sleep. And calling her name.
She’d been dreaming of wooden stairs, with wooden railings, up the clapboard side of a building. Like a building in an old western town, but endlessly high, and the outside stairs going up and up along the side of the gray clapboard building. No windows. Stairs going up, old wooden stairs, and the sky far above, and nothing below. Not a frightening dream, but like a dream of duty.
She didn’t know her eyes were open until she noticed the slightly paler black rectangle of the window, and then at once Robert re-entered her memory, and she recognized the voice, she recognized the presence of the man beside her in the bed, shaking her shoulder, and she sat up, abruptly awake, saying, “What’s the matter?” Thinking, Bradford’s gone, he left without me.
Robert said, “We fell asleep.”
The statement made no sense. She knew she’d been asleep, why talk about it? The point was Bradford, had he gotten away or had somebody stopped him? She sat there in the dark trying to assemble words into a coherent question, and her eye was caught by a moving green circle in the darkness. When she understood that it was the luminous dial of Robert’s watch she was seeing, her fright and confusion fell away like seed husks and she said, “Oh. I’m supposed to be home.”
“It’s after three o’clock,” he said. “I’m going to turn the light on now. You ready?”
She put a hand over her eyes. Ready.
The bedside lamp he switched on was very small, giving off a minimum of illumination, but at first it hurt her eyes anyway. She squinted in what seemed like a glare, looking at the seedy room they had now twice made home, and beside her Robert was pushing the covers off, was getting to his feet, was padding naked across the room to pull down the window shades.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said, blinking, gradually getting used to light and to being awake. But she did know how it had happened; she had wanted the uncomplicated pleasure of going to sleep here, of acting as though there was nothing terrible waiting for her anywhere.
This afternoon Howard had arrived at the estate, and then Bradford had come back from his walk with the false passports, and she had spent the rest of the afternoon and the dinner hour in a state of nervousness and near-hysteria. Those passports, with the real faces and the empty-sounding names and the glib smoothness of the rubber-stamped lies, had lifted her awareness of the situation to a new level, frightening her to the point where rational thought was almost impossible. A short conversation with Howard had helped somewhat, calming her enough so that she could make her departure from the house quiet and unsuspicious, but it had been Robert who had really restored her to herself. And, in a long telephone call, Uncle Joe. Until at last she and Robert had come back to this bed, and switched out the troubles of the world around them, and now it was three in the morning.
Robert said, “Do you want coffee? Instant.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, and got out of bed, and padded off to the bathroom.
A shallow alcove off his main room contained what the landlady called a kitchenette, being a sink, a narrow oven, a two-burner stove and a low freezerless refrigerator. When she returned now from the bathroom he was just coming from that alcove with two cups of coffee. She took hers, thanked him, sipped at it, and in silence they both dressed.
He was ready first, and said, “What will you tell him, if he’s still up?”
“He won’t be,” she said. “But if he asks tomorrow, I’ll tell him I had a blow-out. I’ll tell him I went to a movie in Hagerstown and had a blow-out coming back.” She put on her second shoe, and stood. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “He really doesn’t pay that much attention these days. To details.”
“I suppose that’s a part of it,” he said. “The effect of the stroke, I mean.”
“That’s awful, isn’t it? Taking advantage of his illness.”