“Perhaps,” he said. He looked older, the stubble dark in the deep furrows by his mouth.
“Are you,” she asked then, just a whisper, “are you in some kind of danger?”
“No,” he said. “No new danger, no.”
“Because,” she said. “If you are in danger. I know there’s nothing at all I could do. But I’d do anything I could.”
“My dear,” he said, “my dear love. You have done already. More than I can say. I cannot ask you more. I will not.”
“You can. Anything.”
He said nothing, only went on hearing and seeing the world, and her; she could almost feel it all as he did, see herself as he did: almost but not quite.
Not at all maybe.
She picked up her crumpled poncho. “I have to go,” she said.
He lifted a hand to stop her. Then from the small pile of papers before him he withdrew, one after another, her translations, the first drafts in pencil and the typed versions, themselves marked over. He squared them up and held them out to her.
“They’re yours,” she said, shocked. “They were for you.” But he only went on holding them until she came and took them.
“I want you to keep them,” he said. “Will be safer with you.”
She took them, and he opened his hands to her like a question; and unthinking, still holding the poncho in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other, she embraced him. He held her a long time, kissed her cheek and her cool brow, her mouth, her tears. She knew—she knew by now—that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must: and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.
6.
“Mad,” said George.
There was a toylike breakfast nook in the new apartment, where George and Kit sat; George buttered toast, for himself and for her too, as he had done when she was little. “M-a-d, mad. It’s the new concept. Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD.”
As usual Kit was uncertain how to understand what he said, whether he was teasing her or letting her in on a secret she’d better listen to. She only stared, and shook her head a little in incomprehension.
“Simple,” George said. “It means that if either side initiates an attack, the other side guarantees it will respond in kind and in toto. You make it certain that the response will come even if your command and control centers are knocked out and your leaders are dead and even most of your people are dead. You make it a standing order that can’t be countermanded: if they let fly, we let fly, automatically.”
“So if they…so if we bomb them, they have to bomb us back, even though that means the end of everything and there’s no winning?”
“That’s the concept,” George said. “I mean you can see the logic.”
“So that’s why we can’t protect ourselves?” That was where the talk had begun, why with computers or something we couldn’t know about attacks and prevent them.
“Right. It upsets the balance, queers the deal. If we, or they, started to build defenses against ICBM attacks, which is theoretically possible, and the other side got wind of it, they might feel they had to attack; because once your defense system is in place you can send off your missiles and destroy their country—you’ve got the capacity—without them being able to destroy you back.”
“Oh my God.”
He nodded, pleased, and held out his hands as though between them he held the perfect and irrefutable logic of it. “It’s like two guys standing up to their knees in kerosene, aiming flare guns at each other. No matter who fires first, they both go.”
“But they’re just people. We’re just people. What if somebody gets angry, or goes insane, or…”
George’s eyebrows rose and he nodded as though in sympathy with humankind in its dilemma. “Have to be careful,” he said. “Any little thing.”
“Is this now? They have this plan now?”
“Well,” George said. “If I know about it, probably it is now. Yes.”
“So it would be the end. They’ve made it so they can’t even help it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
MAD. It was like the game of chess in Alice: a game of unbreakable rules played by people who were all crazy.
“Dad,” she said. She looked down at the little yellow napkin she held, folded it, crushed it, smoothed it. “Do you think. I mean would it be possible. That what we were told about Ben isn’t true?”
“Isn’t true, hon?”
“I heard,” Kit said, and her throat was tight, “I heard that some Americans are fighting in Vietnam, or well Indochina in places, against the Communists. And we don’t want anybody to know. So, if a soldier there, you know, if he…” She moved her hand in the air to represent what she couldn’t say, and George nodded. “Then what they do is carry him someplace else, and pretend it was an accident.”
He didn’t answer, and didn’t look astonished; he only knit his fingers together as though he were going to crack his knuckles, and looked at her, and waited.
“And well do you think, I mean did you ever hear of this, or…”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Oh,” she said. “People on campus.”
“Not, say, in the New York Times.”
“No.”
He folded his hands now as though in prayer, and touched them to his lips, and looked away, or within. Kit felt helpless shame; shame for hurting him, helpless because she had to ask.
“Well,” he said. “Suppose it was so. That there was fighting going on, that those governments over there were getting our help. I hear the rumors too. The other side’s saying it. So. Naturally we would want to deny it. Like we just said, Kit. Any little thing.”
“Could you find out? I mean about Ben?”
“Well what would it matter? In a way. He’d still, it would still be the same.”
“But what if it’s so.”
He shook his head slowly. “They wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got their reasons. Anyway surely it’s not so. Surely. I mean people imagine a lot of things now, because there is so much that can’t be told. People get paranoid.”
She said nothing, folded the little rag of yellow again.
“What good would it do you, Kit? To know?”
“Because,” she said. “Then I’d know what world I live in.”
The door to the apartment opened then, and Marion came in; George ducked his head with a glance at Kit that she understood.
She was in a bathing suit with a flouncy skirt and mules, a flowered robe over her shoulders. “That pool is the best part,” she said. “Mm.” She had the mail in her hand, and distributed it. “Who’s this from?” she said, handing Kit one.
It was a long envelope addressed with care in pale ink, the name and address lines set out in steps down the envelope as she too had been taught to do and never did any more. A funny sweet warmth filled her that she hadn’t felt before but recognized immediately: a letter from my love. It felt as heavy as gold.
“One of my teachers,” she said, blushing or glowing for sure, she could feel it. “From last year.”
“Hm,” said Marion wisely, though without meaning anything by it; Kit knew the look. There were two sheets in the envelope. One had a few lines of verse, typed on the Undervud; the other was a sheet of typing paper written on in his strange hand, edge to edge, waste nothing.