Jane Smiley - Early Warning

She stood at the door with the Realtor, nodding. The Realtor’s instinct was that the place would show beautifully. She held both of Lillian’s hands between hers and moved them up and down. Then the Realtor turned her head and said, “Oh, I think you have a visitor. Well, Mrs. Manning, I really look forward to this! How are you, sir?” And she clickety-clacked down the walk and got into her Lincoln. The man nodded to the Realtor and hurried up the walk, hunched over but smiling. Lillian’s gaze flicked to his car — only a Ford, a Country Squire. And then Lillian was shaking his hand, and he was saying, “Mrs. Manning! We haven’t met before, but your name is always on Arthur’s lips. I gather you are a font of wisdom!” And Lillian said, “Would you like to come in, Mr. Bundy? I’m afraid Arthur isn’t here at the moment.”

He said, “Thank you, I would like to chat with you for a moment or two. I won’t take much of your time.” He did have that gaze that sought hers out. While he was shaking her right hand, his left hand went to her elbow and then to the small of her back, and she was given to understand that she would do whatever he asked.

They went into the living room, and he sat on the pinkish sofa, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, and his shoulders hunched. He said, “Now, Mrs. Manning — but I think of you as Lillian. May I call you Lillian?”

Lillian nodded.

“I just heard of Arthur’s plans this morning, at breakfast, and I jumped in my wife’s car because it was right outside the door with her keys in it. That’s how worried I am about Arthur.”

Lillian said, “I think Arthur will be fine once he’s got a different job.”

He smiled. “Ah. Maybe. What I’m worried about is Arthur abandoning me. Every day, I say to the President, ‘Mr. President, Arthur Manning says this, or Arthur Manning says that,’ and if I can’t say that to the President, I don’t know what I will say.”

Lillian felt herself staring. Then she said, “I don’t think Arthur realizes he has such influence. He’s never even met the President.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it? The President is very, very good at ignoring everyone in the room. It’s the ones outside of the room that make him nervous.” He smiled. Lillian realized that she was supposed to smile also, and did.

“What does Arthur say?”

“Arthur is very cautious,” said Mr. Bundy. “And I have to say, when we got the news of Ap Bac, it impressed me, and it impressed the President, that Arthur wasn’t in the least surprised.” Arthur had told Lillian about Ap Bac — a battle in a village in South Vietnam where the Viet Cong had made the South Vietnamese and the American reinforcements look like fools. Bundy shook his head. “Terrible rout, that was, and about as far from Saigon as from here to Baltimore — less even.” He wrung his hands and shook his head.

Lillian said, “I didn’t hear about that.” It was the job of all the wives never to hear about anything.

“January 2, and that was part of the problem. The South Vietnamese forces had to wait for the Americans to sober up after New Year’s, so they let the enemy get the jump on them.”

“They knew you were coming.”

“They baked us quite a cake.” He didn’t smile.

“Well, sir, I suppose, since you bring it up,” said Lillian, “that’s Arthur’s problem. No one is surprised at any given action except our side.”

“Yes! That is so true! A perennial frustration. Perennial!”

Lillian said, “I think Arthur has made up his mind.”

“Oh, he has. Indeed, he has. I know that. But have you made up your mind?”

“Excuse me?” said Lillian.

He stood up and went over to the window. “What a wonderful place this is, ideal for children, adolescents. A very welcoming and comfortable place. Lovely landscape. Nothing like this even exists around Bethpage.”

“You know we’re going to Bethpage?”

He smiled. Of course he did.

“Arthur is a figure around here! Respected for his conscience and his wit, not to mention his belief in our country. Arthur is irreplaceable, and I shudder at the thought of doing without him.”

He came back to the sofa and sat down again, but this time he leaned forward and took Lillian’s hands in his own. “Lillian. Do you know what my job is?”

Lillian shook her head.

He said, “I am the national security adviser. My job is to apply the brakes. I recognize as well as anyone that the road leads downhill, a steep hill. There are plenty of people that I see and talk to every day who want to step on the gas and drive the car straight over the cliff. There are a few who want to turn off the road and stop. They don’t have a chance, no matter what the President truly thinks — and, between you and me, even I don’t know what the President truly thinks. But I can apply the brakes, with Arthur’s help. I can and I do, and I will.”

He was hypnotic, the way he cocked his head and caught her eye, and then nodded ever so slightly until she was nodding with him. And then the brilliant smile — the smile that told her that she agreed with him, Arthur was essential, they couldn’t do without Arthur.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she wasn’t sure that Arthur could take the pressure any longer, but she didn’t say it, because she knew, as soon as she thought it, that to say it, or even imply it, would be the greatest betrayal of all, would be a kind of catalyst. Instead, she said, “I think Arthur will certainly appreciate your desire, sir.”

“Please don’t call me ‘sir,’ ” he said. “Makes me feel about eighty. I know he’s kept quiet about this in order to avoid having me plead with him.”

“Arthur is a secretive person anyway,” said Lillian.

He knew he had won. He glanced at his watch, and stood up from the pinkish sofa.

At the door, he took both her hands, just the way the Realtor had done, and shook them up and down. He said, “You must do what’s best.”

She knew what that was.

Arthur, of course, knew that he had been there. After the kids left the dinner table, he said, “Persuasive, isn’t he?”

“He is, Arthur. But I am not going to try to persuade you. He thought I would, but I won’t.”

“I have been at this for seventeen years — twenty if you count the war, Lil.”

“I know.”

“The Grumman people Frank knows have interviewed me three times.”

“I know.”

“There’s a fortune to be made there.”

“Is there?”

Arthur didn’t say anything, but, yes, there was. “However.”

Lillian turned her fork over on her plate.

“I can’t say I liked my prospective new colleagues terribly much. Very serious, serious people.”

“Aren’t your present colleagues very serious people?”

“They have been whittled and honed and pared and polished. At the bottom they have a few qualities left.”

“Which ones?” said Lillian.

“Wit. Dread. Hope. Not always in that order.”

“I don’t really like the new house.”

Arthur said, “Shall we do the easy thing, then?”

And once again that day, Lillian just nodded.

—

JOE AND HIS UNCLE JOHN kept arguing about what to plant, how much to plant, whether to leave some acreage fallow. Joe had seen a picture of stored corn reserves in a Time magazine, and the picture spooked him — hills and billows of grain just sitting there. The article said there were something like a billion bushels in storage, and no market — maybe no future market until 1980, not for seventeen years. Joe remembered the old saying “The best place to store corn is hogs, and the second best is whiskey.” His dad had made use of the first option, though not the second. However, Joe didn’t have hogs anymore — they were too much work for one man with no one to help him. Yes, the government had bought the surplus corn in the winter; a few of those billion bushels no doubt had belonged to Joe Langdon and John Vogel. John had no doubt that the government would pay for it again this year, store it again, and come up with something to do with it — rocket fuel, maybe. In the fall, the Canadians had sold almost seven million tons of wheat to the Russians — a first, as far as anyone knew, but secret deals happened all the time, didn’t they? Wheat wasn’t corn, however, and Joe hadn’t paid too much attention, though everyone sitting in the Denby café had been pretty hot under the collar, half of them wondering why the Canadians would feed the enemy (“Well, the Cuban missiles weren’t pointed at Montreal, were they?” said Bobby Dugan. “Every man for himself, and why not?”), the other half wondering how the American government had been so stupid as not to get in on the deal (“Food is food; if they’re starving, we’re no better than Stalin was, not to sell it to them”). At least the government was consistent, thought Joe. It would be a sign of craziness to feed them with one hand and blow them up with the other.