When the twenty minutes were up Dennis Siroca squirted his mouth with Binaca, smoothed back his hair, buttoned his leather jacket and put the Volkswagen in gear to descend to his grandmother's house.
When Meredith Bradison heard her grandson's VW turning into the driveway she was making up the bed she and her husband shared in the large, light room that overlooked the road. She peered through the louvered shades to make sure, then tugged the corners of the coverlet approximately straight and left it. It was good enough. It had been made once already that day, anyway, by the mornings-only maid, and still showed traces of order. She took time to run a brush through her hair, studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror for a moment and then shrugged and went down to admit her grandson.
Meredith Bradison was sixty-six years old, her husband sixty-five, and they still made love with a frequency about two-point-five times the twenty-five-year-old normal, in the afternoons when the maid was out of the house, in hotel rooms between her convention sessions or his politicking, in the back of their camper, parked beside a lake or in a national forest, wherever. When the grandchildren began to be old enough to come for visits, any of the five sets of grandchildren, it cramped their style very little. The grandchildren learned that when Grandma said she was going to catch forty winks with Grandpa in the middle of the day, the kids were not invited. At night for a tuck-in story, yes. In the morning, when they woke up early and climbed in with the old folks, sure. But not always. And the way Emily or Dennis or Junior or Merry could tell the difference was by whether or not the door was locked.
There were times when the way Meredith felt about her husband embarrassed her, or at least made her wonder why her contributions to conversations with her contemporaries were so unlike theirs. Those times rarely lasted more than a minute. The rest of the time she knew a good thing when she had it, and she had Sam Houston Bradison. When they got married, him still in his junior year at Stanford and herself a dropout he was encouraging to return to school, it hadn't looked all that promising. Her mother wouldn't even come west from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, for the wedding. But it worked out pretty well, at that.
Sam Houston Bradison had been mentioned as a dark- horse candidate for governor more than once. One time he had even made his run for Congress. But he was before his time. That was in the Franklin D. Roosevelt years, when he was a young man, when California was profoundly New Deal when it wasn't Ham and Eggs or Thirty Dollars Every Thursday. Or worse. On the Republican ticket Sam got creamed. After he got his doctorate he stuck to teaching political science instead of practicing it. At least, openly. But the inner circles of the California Republican Party were open to him at all times. He was an academic, and the husband of a woman who was becoming a famous scientist, and the bearer of a proud name. He spent weekends with John Wayne on the actor's converted landing- craft yacht. He was one of the strongest supporters of Dick Nixon, and bled with him in the hotel room in 1962 as the bad news about the governorship race was coming in, just before the "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more" outburst. Later, Ronald Reagan phoned him at least every other week to ask his opinion before doing as he pleased. It was queer of Professor Bradison that he had never supported the war in Vietnam and, even in the 1950s, spoke out against academic blacklists. But what would you expect of a professor?
In any event and whatever the cause, Meredith was there with him. After the New Deal fervor that had brought her out to join a boy-friend in the CCC and, briefly, share the life of the migrant workers John Steinbeck was writing about, she cleaved to Sam Houston Bradison as to a rock. She made her decision early. Birthing five children was a full-time job. Adding a scientific career on top of that made a double load. She handled both easily and well, but add in her forty-five-year love affair with her husband, and there simply were not hours enough for getting involved in politics, or women's groups, or even in shopping, cooking or fashion. Meredith Bradison was widely known as the worst cook west of Texas, and she cheerfully identified herself as a frump. It didn't matter whether her clothes were color-matched or her hair coiffed. At sixty-six she still had a graceful, slim, boy's body, and whatever she wore she improved.
She stood at the open door, waiting for her grandson. "What's holding you up now, Dennis? Brushing your teeth so I won't smell beer on your breath?"
Dennis looked up, startled. Actually he had been making sure the stash that had been in the glove compartment was now securely out of sight under the floor mat, but she was close enough to what he had been doing earlier to disconcert him. "You just missed your grandfather," she said, tilting her cheek to be kissed. "He has a late independent-study group tonight. My God, it's nice to see you!"
Dennis put his arms around his grandmother without squeezing, as though she were a porcelain shepherdess, and let her lead him into the living room. He noticed the bowls of Fritos and salted peanuts on the coffee table and his eyes widened. "Am I interrupting something?" he asked.
"No, dear. I have some people coming over in half an hour or so, but you're welcome to stay. I know you're interested in the subject, since you're in that bunch that was at the ASF meeting."
Dennis shrugged politely; he had half expected to see his grandmother there herself, was not surprised that one of her friends had recognized him and passed the word on. "That's the only way I knew you were back in California," she went on, sitting down across from him to study him better. "Is Zee with you?"
"No, Gram. She's got a business deal in P.R."
Meredith sighed. "She's always got a business deal," she said. "I guess that's one of the reasons I liked her so much. You're not eating enough, Dennis." She had nine grandchildren, but he was the one who worried her the most. To Meredith's knowledge he had been arrested five times (the actual count was nine). The only conviction she knew of was for shoplifting, but it was Meredith's opinion that he had been guilty as hell of all of them, and probably a lot more. Not out of evil. Not even out of any need. Dennis was just willful, and had been ever since he had run off to join Reverend Moon—and been ejected unceremoniously when they discovered he was only twelve years old at the time. Her daughter, Amy, had simply given up. When Dennis returned to his family, it was his grandparents he returned to. Sam Bradison yelled at him, half an hour at a time. For a marvel, the boy listened. But he did not change. Meredith didn't yell. She took him out to McDonald's and filled him full of cheeseburgers and shakes, and slipped him pocket money.
When he was little she had given him cookies and milk. The cookies came out of a supermarket box; it was the best meal that any of the grandchildren usually could expect at grandmother's house. Now that he was one of those curious people with placards and beards, her resources seemed inadequate. He didn't want anything to eat, although he accepted a can of beer and a handful of Fritos out of politeness. "Gram?"
She straightened up from the floor of the closet, where she was looking for the attachment to the vacuum-cleaner hose. "Yes, dear?"