“He’s not dead,” Kit said. “He isn’t. I know it.”
“Well then why, where,” Fran said. “I mean come on.”
The doctor came down the row of beds to where Kit lay. The infirmary was old and small and strangely smelly, the iron beds in an open row. Only one other was occupied, a boy who seemed to be weeping, weeping, face into his pillow.
“How’s the throat?” the doctor asked.
“Okay,” Kit said. “I guess.”
“Doesn’t hurt to swallow?”
“It never did. It just hurt.”
The doctor put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “The tests are back. You have mononucleosis. You know what that is?”
“The kissing disease,” Kit said. “Mono.”
“Well you get it from more than kissing. I mean you can get it in more ways than one. It’s just an infectious disease.” He bent over her and with warm dry hands felt the underside of her chin, the sides of her throat. “The pain comes from swollen lymph nodes that are producing the white blood cells to fight it off. There’s a number of nodes right along here. They don’t usually get as swollen as yours, though.”
“Is that why she fainted?” Fran asked.
The doctor shrugged, a little shrug, as though he knew no more than anybody. It hadn’t been he who had been here when the University police car brought her; only nurses and a student receptionist. She couldn’t make them leave her alone, they made her answer questions and show her ID card and then undress and put on a cotton robe, they took blood, they put her into a narrow bed and drew the curtains around it. Sleep, they said, but she said she wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, and she started to tremble again as she had before she fell down in the Castle, as though shaking to pieces. She tried to get out of the bed and a nurse held her with a strong hand and another brought a paper cup with a red pill in it, a capsule like a little shiny gout of blood. It was the same pill that the nuns had made her take the first night at Our Lady, when she had not stopped arguing, not stopped shaking. It was like a little death; she knew it, and she took it.
While she slept motionless and dreamless in the University infirmary a message began to be transmitted by cable from General Secretary Khrushchev to the President of the United States. It was broadcast publicly over Moscow Radio at the same time. The weapons which you describe as “offensive” are in fact grim weapons, the message said. Both you and I understand what kind of weapons they are. It went on to say that in order to give encouragement to all those who long for peace, and to calm the American people, who, I am certain, want peace as much as the people of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government had decided to dismantle the weapons that the United States objected to. They would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. The only condition placed on the offer was that the United States give its solemn pledge not to invade Cuba.
In the Atlantic the Soviet ship Grozny stopped and was reported to be standing still. It was afternoon in Moscow, morning in Washington when the message had been assembled and translated. The generals and the Secretaries of State and Defense gathered to study it. The admirals and generals urged caution and the Air Force Chief of Staff demanded that Cuba be invaded anyway, everything was in readiness: but the President overruled them. He ordered that no air reconnaissance missions be flown that day.
An aide to the President said later: Everyone knew who were the hawks and who were the doves, but today was the doves’ day.
Kit and Fran went out into the Sunday sun. The world was still before them, as it had been the day before and the day before that, which seemed like a kind of miracle: that there should be students walking in groups and in pairs, and at noon the ringing of the University’s famous carillon. Fran groaned and held her ears as they walked.
The strangest idea, Kit wanted to say to her. Fran I have the strangest idea, I can’t even say it. But not even that much could she say.
What she thought was that maybe he was supposed to disappear. Maybe it was supposed to look as though he had died, but he hadn’t, he had gone on. She knew this was possible, that people who were in danger could be made to disappear, or seem to have died, when really they’d been helped to escape, helped to safety. But how could that be? There was no escape; he had already escaped. There was no place left that was safe.
Jackie would be able to tell her, tell her that she was nuts, to calm down. Or maybe not. He had gone too, without a word.
At nightfall a telegram was delivered to her, that had made its way to the campus and to her tower and her room. It was in a yellow envelope with a cellophane window. She took it from the proctor who had signed for it, an object she had never held in her hands before.
“Open it,” Fran said.
It was just as in the movies, a paper with typed lines of capital letters stuck on and the dots between phrases that meant stop. It was from George and Marion; the picture of Kit in the front row of the demonstrators must have appeared in their paper too.
THREE QUOTES COME TO MIND ONE MY COUNTRY MAY SHE ALWAYS BE RIGHT BUT RIGHT OR WRONG MY COUNTRY TWO I DISAGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY BUT I WILL DEFEND TO THE DEATH YOUR RIGHT TO SAY IT THREE IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY LOVE MOM DAD
She slept most of the day and night. In the morning she found in her mailbox a postcard, mailed on Friday, a picture of the carillon on campus. The message said only I’m sorry. Will write later and explain.
It was from Jackie. He hadn’t signed it but she knew.
The short answer is, he’s gone. That’s what Saul had said to her when she asked. The short answer. She felt a kind of warning tremor begin deep within her. She thought of the kitchen at East North Street, when Saul and Fred were pretending that Fred was an FBI agent. A joke. But there had to be one, they said: wherever two or three are gathered together in my name. And when she had agreed to spy on Falin, Jackie had been there, outside the dean’s office, appearing by chance but not by chance. And she had told him everything after that, everything she learned.
She crushed the card into her pocket. The tremor within her had risen to a kind of roar like the roar she felt in her head and breast when she awoke from shocking dreams. She set out across campus. The morning was white with cold.
The dean of students was just arriving at her door as Kit reached it too. She tried to avoid Kit, pretending not to have seen her coming up the steps behind her, but Kit called out to her. “Excuse me. Wait.”
“Well?” the dean said.
“I have a question,” she said.
For a moment the dean said nothing. Breath came from her red mouth. Then she let Kit through the door and went to the office, Kit following. The secretary’s desk was empty, her typewriter shrouded and her lamp off.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you,” the dean said. She sought amid a huge bunch of keys for one that would open her own office door. “Just like you, I’m waiting for news. I’m afraid though that we’ll have to prepare ourselves for the worst.”
“I was wondering,” Kit said, coming into her office behind her uninvited, “if you could find Milton Bluhdorn. He might know something. I think he might know something.”
The dean at her desk looked at her as though trying to choose among several responses; Kit could see them come and pass in her features despite her masklike makeup.
“Well I would have no way of contacting him,” she said at length. “And why…What is it you think he would know?”