They treated Kit like visiting royalty, taking her out to dinners and movies and even on trips to points of historic interest, as though unwilling to stay in the house. When they were home George made them play Scrabble or casino; or he put LPs on his new stereo system, an engineer’s dream all in separate parts—a glowing amplifier, four speakers, the massy turntable on its weighted base. George slipped the records from their paper jackets as though they were delicacies, turning them skillfully by their edges with his long white fingers. And got his wife up out of her chair to dance.
Kit and Ben had always found this music their father loved hilarious, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berrigan; it seemed to be played by cartoon animals, the singers to be kidding. But it had that jingle-jangle sweetness that made George take his wife’s hand and pull her to her feet.
“See, you don’t have to go to college to be rich and have a big life,” George said, squiring Marion around the room. “Look at these guys. Most of them didn’t finish high school. Hell, grade school.” Each of his phrases was marked by a turn. Marion’s eyes were closed, her neat little feet seeming to be propelled by his. Kit wondered what that felt like, to be certain and swift and surefooted because your man was. She could almost hear their hearts beat together, like it said in these songs: to beat as one. They’d always been like that, she thought, George and Marion; opposites matching, fitting together the way only opposites can, like the two magnetic Scotties that click together, the black one and the white one. The best of friends. How much could that make up for? They couldn’t get over Ben, no more than she could: but maybe if they could always have these moments, these moments when they couldn’t tell one from the other, then maybe they wouldn’t need her so badly.
Meanwhile her letter had come from the Language Institute; Marion handed it to her incuriously along with other mail from the University. Kit made sure the offer was what she hoped it would be, and as they waited for dinner at George’s favorite long low steakhouse on the highway she told them what she was going to do.
“Russian?” her mother said, as though it were basket weaving, or sexology. “Why on earth.”
She told them about the Institute’s summer program, the scholarship money she’d been awarded, the intensive study. She’d be able to catch up, she said; with these hours and some more hard work she’d be able to graduate with her class, her true class, the Class of 1965. Still they looked at her, fingers on the stems of their drinks.
“It’s a government program,” George said.
“No. It’s just the University.”
“Believe me,” said George. “It’s DoD money, honey. Just like mine.”
It was the first time Kit had ever heard him say what his money was. She worked out what DoD must mean. “Okay,” she said. “So?”
“Well what would you do with it?” Marion asked. “I mean.”
“Okay,” Kit said. “I talked to this person, she’s taking this same course. She said that the National Security Administration…”
“Agency,” said George. “The National Security Agency.”
“Agency. They need people with Russian. And the CIA. Lots of government places. Government bodies.”
“Well,” said Marion.
“You know I’ve always been good at languages,” said Kit. A silence fell again. Kit decided not to say that on her own application she too had expressed interest in the CIA; it had seemed the right response, to win their favor. Marion’s brows were knitted (it was this face of Marion’s that would always illustrate that funny phrase for Kit), and George studied her acceptance letter as though for hidden watermarks. It must have been (Kit only thought this later on) like a Catholic family who’ve been told their daughter has decided to be a nun: hard to find grounds for objection. And maybe because they thought that what she was doing was somehow a tribute to Ben, to his impulse to service, or to George, they couldn’t fight her for long. For once, like Ben, she had thought of everything. It was the first time she’d ever made and executed such a plan, and it would be a very long time till she did so again.
Marion asked her to clean out her room before she went back, and to throw out all she could; in the apartment where they would be living there would be no attic, no basement where the archives of years could be stored. So she went through her things, judging quickly and harshly, pulling out her high school notebooks, prizes, pictures of girls she would never see again with rash and unfelt protestations of eternal friendship written over them, and throwing them toward the wastebasket in a kind of rage: knowing already where this was leading.
Three black folders in the left-hand drawer; a composition book with marbled cover; some loose sheets of blue-lined school paper and pages torn from spiral notebooks. Her handwriting changing as she grew older, her preferred ink color too. Drafts with more crossed out than left alone; final copies typed on onionskin. She could hold it all in one hand easily. Almost none of it had ever been seen, except by her.
There would be times, when she was much older, that she would wish she could go back to that evening and take it all out of her hands, the hands of that child, and make it safe, whatever it contained, however unworthy to be saved: times in which it seemed to her that she had nothing, nothing but her self to care for. But she couldn’t go back, and it was all carried to the wire incinerator near the garage, and thrown in to be burned up with waste and old newspapers, with Time and Life.
She came back through the kitchen, where Marion was wrapping and packing glassware with the grim efficiency of long practice, and sat at the end of the plaid couch where George was watching TV. She didn’t feel cleansed, or shriven; not naked, or unburdened, or as though she had suffered a wound self-inflicted; not anything. She felt nothing. But for a long time she watched the gray figures come and go on the screen without actually perceiving them.
“Here’s your pal,” George said.
President Kennedy was speaking. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if the bombs begin to fall would be a failure of responsibility.
There were scenes of people passing city doorways that were stamped with a special hex sign; in the basements down below were piles of dry food, containers of water, medicines. It looked hopeless and sad.
“Look at this guy,” George said. A man stood in a tubular space like a sewer pipe or a submarine, his private shelter; it had cost him fifteen hundred dollars to build, and he had stocked it with bottled beer, a rifle, and a 1939 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nuclear war would set the world back a generation, he said, and these books would tell him how to live, back then.
They were there, she could see their brown backs in their case behind him.
She could do that too. All she needed.
“So you think they’re going to drop it?” George asked her.
“No,” Kit said. “It would be too stupid. Just too stupid.”
“Uh-huh.” He crossed his arms, grinning as though her answer was the one he expected. “Well, I hope to God you’re right.”
“You don’t think I am.”
“I think it’s about fifty-fifty.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that.”
Kit had once had bomb dreams: she knew no one who grew up in those days who didn’t have them, dreams of mysterious and total desolation, or the oncoming of disaster like a huge wind or wave rising without warning, at which you woke. Rarely the event itself, which maybe even dreams could not imagine: only just after, or just before.