And… Eleanor, always full of life, had been celibate for six years.
You can’t warn someone who’s tumbled into love. Neither Kate nor I tried. We attended the wedding and reception and offered our best wishes. Mostly I was conscious of Jack. The boy had grown haggard; he moved and talked like a robot.
In his new home, he rarely got a chance to see us. Afterward he would not go into detail about the months which followed. Nor shall I. But consider: Where Eleanor was a dropout from the Episcopal Church, and Jack a born agnostic, Birkelund was a Bible-believing Lutheran. Where Eleanor enjoyed gourmet cooking and Jack the eating, Birkelund and his sons wanted meat and potatoes. Tom spent his typical evening first with a book, later talking with her. If Birkelund wasn’t doing the accounts, he was glued to the radio or, presently, the television screen. Tom had made a political liberal of her. Birkelund was an ardent and active American Legionnaire — he never missed a convention, and if you draw the obvious inference, you’re right — who became an outspoken supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
And on and on. I don’t mean that she was disillusioned overnight. I’m sure Birkelund tried to please her, and gradually dropped the effort only because it was failing. The fact that she was soon pregnant must have forged a bond between them which lasted a while. (She told me, however, I being the family doctor, that in the later stages his nightly attentions became distasteful but he wouldn’t stop. I called him in for a Dutch uncle lecture and he made a sulky compromise.)
For Jack the situation was hell from the word go. His step-brothers, duplicates of their father, resented his invasion. Junior, whose current interests were hunting and girls, called him a sissy because he didn’t like to kill and a queer because he never dated. Harold found the numberless ways to torment him which a small boy can use on a bigger one whose fists may not defend.
More withdrawn than ever, he endured. I wondered how.
In the fall of 1950, Ingeborg was born. Birkelund named her after an aunt because his mother happened to be called Olga. He expressed disappointment that she was a girl, but threw a large and drunken party anyway, at which he repeatedly declared, amidst general laughter, his intention of trying for a son the minute the doctor allowed.
The doctor and his wife had been invited, but discovered a prior commitment. Thus I didn’t see, I heard how Jack walked out on the celebration and how indignant Birkelund was. Long afterward, Jack told: “He cornered me in the barn when the last guest had left who wasn’t asleep on the floor, and said he was going to beat the shit out of me. I told him if he tried, I’d kill him. I meant that. He saw it, and went off growling. From then on, we spoke no more than we couldn’t avoid. I did my chores, my share of work come harvest or whatever, and when I’d eaten dinner I went to my room.”
And elsewhere.
The balance held till early December. What tipped it doesn’t matter-something was bound to-but was, in fact, Eleanor’s asking Jack if he’d given thought to the college he would like to attend, and Birkelund shouting, “He can damn well get the lead out and go serve his country like I did and take his GI if they haven’t cashiered him,” and a quarrel which sent her upstairs fleeing and in tears.
Next day Jack was not there.
He returned at the end of January, would say no word about where he had been or what he had done, and stated that he would leave for good if his stepfather took the affair to the juvenile authorities as threatened. I’m certain he dominated that scene, and won himself the right to be left in peace. Both his appearance and his demeanor were shockingly changed.
Again the household knew a shaky equilibrium. But six weeks later, upon a Sunday when Jack had gone for his usual long walk after returning from church, he forgot to lock the door to his room. Little Harold noticed, entered, and rummaged through the desk. His find, which he promptly brought to his father, blew apart the whole miserable works.
Snow fell, a slow thick whiteness filling the windows. What daylight seeped through was silver-gray. Outdoors the air felt almost warm-and how utterly silent.
Eleanor sat on our living-room couch and wept. “Bob, you’ve got to talk to him, you, you, you’ve got to help him… again.
What happened when he ran away? What did he do?”
Kate laid arms around her and drew the weary head down to her own shoulder. “Nothing wrong, my dear,” she murmured. “Oh, be very sure. Always remember, Jack is Tom’s son.”
I paced the rug, in the dull twilight against which we had turned on no lights. “Let’s spell out the facts,” I said, speaking bolder than I felt. “Jack had this mimeographed pamphlet that Sven describes as Communist propaganda. Sven wants to call the sheriff, the district attorney, anybody who can force Jack to tell who he fell in with while he was gone. You slipped out to the shed, drove off in the pickup, met the boy on the road, and brought him here.”
“Y-y-yes. Bob, I can’t stay. Ingeborg’s at home… Sven will call me an, an unnatural mother—”
“I might have a few words to say about privacy,” I answered, “not to mention freedom of speech, press, and opinion.” After a pause: “Uh, you told me you snatched the pamphlet?”
“I—” Eleanor drew back from Kate’s embrace. Through tears and hiccoughs, a strength spoke that I remembered: “No use for him to call copper if the evidence is gone.”
“May I see it?” I asked.
She hesitated. “It’s… a prank, Bob. Nothing s-s-significant. Jack’s waiting—”
—in my office, by request, while we conferred. He had shown me a self-possession which chilled this winter day.
“He and I will have a talk,” I said, “while Kate gets some coffee, and I expect some food, into you. But I’ve got to have something to talk about.”
She gulped, nodded, fumbled in her purse, and handed me several sheets stapled together. I settled into my favorite armchair, left shank on right knee, a good head of steam in my pipe, and read the document.
I read it twice. And thrice. I quite forgot the women.
Here it is. You won’t find any riddles.
But hark back. The date was the eleventh of March, in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty-one.
Harry S. Truman was President of the United States, having defeated Thomas E. Dewey for election, plus a former Vice President who would later have the manhood to admit that his party had been a glove on the hand of Moscow. This was the capital of a Soviet Union which my adored FDR had assured me was a town-meeting democracy, our gallant ally in a holy war to bring perpetual peace. Eastern Europe and China were down the gullet. Citizens in the news included Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Somehow, to my friends and myself, they did not make Joseph McCarthy less of an abomination. But under the UN flag, American young men were dying in battle — five and a half years after our V-days! — and their killers were North Korean and Chinese. Less than two years ago, the first Russian atomic bombs had roared. NATO, hardly older, was a piece of string in the path of hundreds of divisions. Most of us, in an emotional paralysis which let us continue our daily lives, expected World War III to break out at any instant.
I could not altogether blame Sven Birkelund for jumping to conclusions.
But as I read, and read, my puzzlement deepened.
Whoever wrote this thing knew Communist language — I’d been through some books on that subject — but was emphatically not a Communist himself. What, then, was he?
Hark back, I say. Try to understand your world of 1951.
Apart from a few extremists, America had never thought to question her own rightness, let alone her right to exist. We knew we had problems, but assumed we could solve them, given time and good will, and eventually everybody of every race, color, and creed would live side by side in the suburbs and sing folk songs together. Brown vs. Board of Education was years in the future; student riots happened in foreign countries, while ours worried about student apathy; Indochina was a place where the French were experiencing vaguely noticed difficulties.