Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

By then, Netta understood. She understood and was calm. “You simply haven’t time for it,” she said. “I didn’t think you could be so flighty! If your new frock wasn’t ready, you’ll have to wear your indigo. It looks well on you. Your hair needs more fixing. You’ll have plenty of time to get to the Ritz-Hadley— plenty! You can even lie down for an hour, if you’re tired. You look a bit fagged!”

“Mother. I’m going to the school!”

“My dear, Kit would be furious.”

“Call a cab for me,” Lenore said. “If you can’t get one here in twenty minutes, see if a neighbor would drive me over. Anybody.”

“See here, Lenore. I’ve been patient about this Civil Defense business for long enough. I know you did it just to annoy me, anyhow. But you are not going to cut an important party and break a date with Kit, just because some fool rehearsal has been ordered. Get that perfectly straight.”

“Get this perfectly straight,” Lenore answered. “It’s an alert. Official. I was summoned.

As soon as I can change, I’m going. If you try to stop me, I’ll—I’d even call the police!” She went.

Netta Bailey thought that over; her hands shook as she raised her highball, swallowed deeply. She knew that when Lenore was in that mood, nobody could do anything with her. She went to the phone. She called the Sloane house. Neither Minerva nor Kit was there. She told the butler that Lenore had come home with a sick headache and gone to bed quite ill, but nothing serious. The butler said he would “inform” Minerva and Kit. Netta then phoned Thelma Emerson and told her the same thing. It would never do to let Kit, or people like the Emersons, think that a mere girl-scout duty like Civil Defense had caused Lenore to break a date, to miss a social event.

As an afterthought, Netta called a cab company. She was told there would be a long wait.

So she tried the Davises. Jimmie said he’d knock off shoveling the yard under the clothes line, gladly, to drive Lenore anywhere she wanted to go.

Lenore came downstairs, dressed in her bulky yellow decontamination suit, carrying her radiation counter. Netta regarded her with bitterness, but silently. She was silent because she didn’t trust herself to say anything. She was afraid of a quarrel now: things had gone too far, too well. She had no way of guessing that things had also gone—from her viewpoint—to smithereens. She stonily eyed the beautiful young woman’s head, strange above the cumbersome garment.

Jimmie Davis’s feet pounded four times to make the steps, to cross the porch. Freckle-faced, wearing heavy gloves, a wool cap, a sweater under his jacket, high school personified, he reached to ring the bell. Lenore opened the door hastily. He said, seeing her, “ What the …?”

“Civil Defense stuff,” she replied. “Take me over to the South High, Jimmie, will you? And thanks a million!”

He was gallant: “Who wouldn’t leave off shoveling his mother’s drying yard to take the world’s top beauty for a tour?”

Lenore laughed at him and turned to Netta. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

Netta grunted.

It didn’t have the appearance of a parting.

Conscious of the slick chick at his side, proud of his driving skill, Jimmie Davis made time. It had started to snow; it was slippery; but he made time, anyhow.

“You’re very good,” Lenore said. It was all she said the whole way. For Jimmie, it was sufficient.

He didn’t notice anything special as they stopped at the curb near the school. “Big turnout!” he said. No more.

She nodded, waved her thanks.

But she had noticed.

The parking yard was filled. People were going swiftly through the school doors. Various teams and squads were assembling. Things were being done without any special haste, it appeared. But it was all so quiet.

As she walked along the wire fence around the play yard, she observed the quiet.

Nobody yelled neighborly greetings to new arrivals.

Nobody blew a car horn for the hell of it.

Nobody was telling a boisterous joke to a knot of male volunteers.

Everybody was Sunday-solemn. She also saw, as she swung through the gate and started for the gymnasium doors, where the radiation people had their station, that everyone was pale.

So she knew, before anybody told her anything, it was it.

And like them, she turned pale.

Minerva Sloan found that morning, and to her vast annoyance, four names on the lost leaf of her Christmas list which could not be ignored. That meant, in spite of the Saturday crowd, which would also be a last-minute crowd, she would have to go into the middle of the melee again and make four purchases. The items would be mailed, and they would probably be delivered late, but the postmark would show her correct intentions.

It was Willis, her venerable chauffeur, who bore the brunt of the hardship, of course, driving in tortuous traffic, finding a place to double-park (no police disturbed Minerva’s car) and waiting in the tedious cold. Minerva decided, since she was obliged to go out, that she would shop in Green Prairie rather than River City. It was farther, but she could stop in at the bank and save herself another trip on the following Tuesday.

Her errands, to her annoyance, took double the time she had generously allowed. The clerks were tired and rude, the gifts in the shops had been mauled, and traffic moved not at all, for long periods. She put off the bank expedition until afternoon and had Willis edge through Front Street (where the big tractor trucks backed up at warehouses made the way a zigzag, but where the very adroitness of their drivers kept some motion in the long lines of vehicles).

Thence, by other streets, she went to Wickley Heights Boulevard where two policemen and a gaudy doorman kept things moving along the elegant, curved façade of the Ritz-Hadley.

Even that usually serene hostelry was crowded. Minerva had intended to refresh herself in the Aztec Room, a euphemism for the bar. It was jammed. A hundred kids, minors, college students home on vacation, were dancing to an abominably loud jazz band. Dancing and illegally drinking, too.

Minerva backed out of the hot room and had her cocktails on the Palm Terrace, a wide hallway which looked out, through twenty-foot-high glass windows, on the landscaped hotel lawns, the eight-lane parkway, the river—and the slums on the opposite shore. Georges, the headwaiter in the Empire Room, brought a menu to the Terrace. Minerva ordered. She was notified when the meal was ready and dined sedately at an east-facing window, a window hung with wine-colored draperies that gave a view of the putting grounds, the winterempty swimming pool and the Broadmere beyond.

She was considerably mollified by the time she returned, wrapped in her silver-blue mink cloak, to the outside canopy. The tall, mannerly doorman summoned her car. She was still amiably aglow, still pleasantly aburp, when she entered the bank, let in by Bill Maine who rattled nervous bolts when he saw her car.

The moment she entered, she knew things were wrong, very wrong. Too many clerks were rushing about; and they were rushing too hurriedly; besides, they were carrying too many things. She caught sight of Beau Bailey, looking white, trotting in the nether distance. She bawled, “Beau!”

He turned and hurried up. She stared at him as he drew near. The man, she thought, is mortally frightened.

“What the devil is the to-do about?”

Beau trotted even faster to close the gap. “Minerva! Get home immediately! Condition Yellow—been in effect for hours! Don’t you know ?”

“Know what? What on earth arc you talking about?”