“The angels of the nations,” George said blankly.
“They should have been keeping us from harm, and maybe that was what they thought they were doing, each in its own way. But the power they had together, the power put in our own hands, was too much, and in the end they…they let it go. Mutual assured destruction.”
“But,” George said.
“But no, of course it didn’t happen,” Kit said, and she rose up and went to the window, as though to release her thought or her soul that way. “It didn’t, it should have but it didn’t. Because the lesser angel of one nation interceded. On our behalf. He made an offer; he offered himself.”
“The lesser angel,” George said. “The lesser angel.”
She turned to her father, and his face wasn’t sarcastic or mocking but only intent and listening; and she thought, How do I dare to tell this, how do I dare imagine it to be so, imagine believing it?
“The lesser angel,” she said. “Every nation has one: an angel who is all that the greater angel isn’t. Who can weep if the nation’s angel can’t, or laugh if it never does; who is small and weak and powerless, like us. Except this once. Because the lesser angel could say: Take this as a sop to your anger. And it worked: for just a minute they were distracted, the two big ones, and thought about this, took time to consider it—and they accepted. They took what the lesser angel offered. And in that time the big moment went by. The agreement was reached. The ships stopped. The bombers went home.”
“And what was it that was offered?” George asked. “Something mighty nice.”
“It didn’t have to be much. It wasn’t much. It was only the thing most precious to him. What would destroy him to lose. His soul.”
“They have souls?”
“His self. His life.” A sheaf of papers, yellow American copy paper, the rough uneven lines of Russian words typed on the Undervud. “They couldn’t refuse that.”
“They couldn’t.”
“They couldn’t. They can’t. It’s how they are.”
He was regarding her with that smile of complicity or amazement with which he had looked on her for decades, for all her life, though it had been a long time since she’d seen it. Love and wonder was what it meant, she knew now: love for her, wonder at her.
But it was true. The disaster we were all implicated in—all of us who should have known better and spoken out, all of us who were foolish and blind and didn’t do what we should have done, and who knew it too, and still did nothing, only waited in what we convinced ourselves was helplessness for it to happen, almost as though it had already happened—well it didn’t happen. The final logic of this century, this century that believed in logic and history and necessity, the final spasm so long and well prepared: it didn’t happen, and now seemed likely never to happen. You couldn’t tell, of course, and there were plenty of other things that could and did happen—she thought of Ben—but not that one, the worst one. And there ought to be someone to thank, someone to whom to be grateful.
“Well I don’t know,” her father said. “It doesn’t seem like enough. Their big angel lost, you know: it was a major defeat.” He indicated the row of wooden leaders with his thumb. “Khrushchev did the right thing, but we basically de-pantsed him, cost him his job, which in retrospect was maybe not as smart as we thought. So I mean—wouldn’t there have to be something additional paid in return? Something—what’s the word here, something more exacted? In return for their backing down?”
“Exacted?” she asked. “What, exacted? What kind of thing?” It mattered not at all to George if what they talked of here was real or true; he knew how to make a train of thought come out right whether its terms were ones and zeroes or gods and angels. A kind of poet without poetry: maybe, finally, she had got her talent from him.
“Well,” he said. He swirled the ice in his drink, all water now. “For instance. You know what happened a year later. They always connect that with Cuba too. Somehow.”
“What happened a year later?” Kit said, and remembered even as she asked. “Oh God,” she whispered. “1963.”
“Yeah,” said George. “Right.”
She felt stabbed, as though the story or myth she had articulated had caused it to happen, had right now got him shot through the head in Dallas: the sacrificial goat, the tragos of our tragedy. “Oh my God.”
“Fair Play for Cuba,” George said. “Free Cuba Committee. Castro, anti-Castro. Something somewhere somehow.”
It’s not so, she thought, and she took hold of a chair’s back, feeling she might keel over with strangeness: it’s not so, it’s only as though. It wasn’t truth but the economy of metaphor, everything in balance, this side of the mirror with Alice’s side, only reversed: Jacqueline cradling his poor head in her bloodstained lap, just a man dying. And yet also, far beyond where we could see, the Gray Gods licking up the same blood from the same bowl. Satisfied: appeased.
“You remember where you were when you heard?” George asked, not so much because he wanted to know, it seemed, as to change the subject, or its tendency. “You know they say everybody does. Like Pearl Harbor.”
“Yes,” Kit said. “Sure. I remember.” On the straight road north from the University toward that city in whose suburbs she had once lived with George and Marion and Ben. Yes. That day.
There was a little rain and the blacktop was velvety in the soft light. Kit was driving, Fran beside her searching on the radio for something besides Top 40 or preachers. It was so far only a brief sentence, interrupting the broadcast: the motorcade fired on in Dallas, the President hit.
“It’s probably really nothing,” Kit said. “You know how they get, about every little thing.”
“He’s dead,” Fran said with simple certainty. “He’s dead.”
They listened, waiting for more, going north. Kit had driven back to school that fall in George and Marion’s old Buick station wagon, they had at last got something newer. She had kept it, though she wasn’t twenty-one and had to park it at a garage off campus. Fran had a friend—her best friend, she said—who was singing in the chorus of a road-show company of Camelot that was appearing in that city. Fran longed to see her, it seemed so close; and Kit had said okay, let’s cut and go.
More news, worse. The rain got a little steadier, then seemed to pass.
They went past the junction where a secondary road turned off toward the town where Falin’s car had gone off the bridge; after a time they crossed on a wide causeway the same river, grown great. A river to cross.
The river of Jordan is muddy and cold
It chills the body
But not the soul
Kit thought of those lines, and at last began to weep. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh poor man.”
All my trials
Soon be over
It was a Joan Baez song, one of the terrible bleak songs she cried out so piercingly, at once wounding and healing. Fran had brought the records back from New York and they listened to them over and over, sometimes when drunk hugging the Webcor like a friend and pressing an ear right to the speaker grille. She longed to hear it now.
Hush little baby don’t you cry