Jane Smiley - Early Warning

But it was no use — Claire cried and cried. She wrote to Henry, did he remember that coin, but of course he did. It was an Indian-head gold dollar, he replied in a letter back. He wrote that he kept it with the Marcus Aurelius coin he’d found loose in a muck pit in Winchester. Once again, she opened out the tiny handkerchief. The very thin linen was four inches by four inches, and the crocheted border looked as if it had been made out of sewing thread in a pattern of leaves, like elm leaves. She smoothed them under her finger. That very afternoon, she took it to a picture framer to preserve.

Paul did not like the fact that their bed-and-breakfast had twin beds with footboards. He was too tall for footboards — he had to sleep on his back with his legs spread and his feet to either side of the footboard, or else on his side, curled up, and one time he stretched out and bumped his head on the headboard. And then, for breakfast, they served the toast cold, in a rack, unbuttered, and when you buttered it, it fell apart. Henry showed them around; Paul could not help correcting him — surely York Minster was York Cathedral? Were those really kings in the choir screen (though Claire could see that they had crowns on)? Was that window really about the War of the Roses? Had Henry ever read Richard III ? Henry was polite every moment.

The third night, sitting across from her in his pajamas, on the other twin bed, Paul said, “I sound like an ass, don’t I?”

“I don’t think Henry is ever wrong about this sort of thing.”

Paul said, “He’s been very decent.”

“He likes you.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

She sat down next to him. The bed dipped almost to the floor. She said, “I can’t imagine why not.”

“I know I can be a jerk.”

“You don’t try to be a jerk. The jerkiness just pops out once in a while.”

Paul put his arm around her, and they lay back on the twin bed. The next morning, Paul asked for a room with a double bed, and as it happened, someone was checking out that very day, and the owner of the bed-and-breakfast would move their things. That day, Henry had to work, and so they went back to York Minster, bought a nice simple guidebook with large pictures and short explanations, and enjoyed their morning very much. The best part of the day, besides “tea,” was the hour she spent in a small bookstore, uneven floors on three levels, books piled everywhere willy-nilly. On the shelves marked “Local Interest, Yorkshire,” she saw Wuthering Heights , which she had been supposed to read in ninth grade and had never even started. She bought it for a half-crown.

Henry took them to supper in an Indian restaurant with eight of the other diggers, all of whom were about her age or younger, enrolled in colleges and graduate schools in the United States and England. Four of the boys had beards, which Claire thought was interesting. One couple lived in a tent not far from the dig. That day, Henry had let them take a shower in his room, because they had spent the last three days digging up the tanning pit to see if there was anything in there. The girl gaily related how the boy had had to hold her by the ankles for the last bits, as she scraped the bottom of the pit with her trowel. “Up and down, in and out, and stinking to high heaven.”

Henry turned to her. “In the Middle Ages, they tanned leather with manure.”

The boy said, “It was pointless to bathe, since we had to do the whole thing. So we just slept outside the tent. Thank goodness, it hasn’t rained.”

Claire looked them up and down. They seemed clean enough now. One of the boys was a Negro man. He was about Claire’s age, and had gone to school in New York. His name was Jacob Palmer. He didn’t seem to realize that he was the only Negro in the restaurant. He chatted and laughed at Henry’s jokes just as the others did. Claire noticed that she glanced at him more often than Paul did, but Paul was from Philadelphia, not Des Moines. Claire was in favor of civil rights. She’d thought it was shocking when that church was bombed in Alabama the year before, but everyone forgot about that when Kennedy was assassinated. Then those three boys, just about her age, were murdered in Mississippi, and their bodies were discovered four days before she and Paul left for England — eight or nine days ago now. She hadn’t heard any news about them since coming here, but looking at Jacob Palmer in this sea of white people made her think of them. However, it was easy to be in favor of civil rights when she spent all day sitting in Paul’s office, listening to his patients (or their mothers, actually, since many of his patients were children with ear infections) babble on about whether now, since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, they were going to let Negroes into the Wakonda Country Club. And why not? thought Claire, who had been there twice. There were plenty of Negroes there already — caddies, waiters, groundskeepers. Jacob Palmer talked just like the other students — about the excavations, the grid, the sherds, the artifacts.

That night, she began reading Wuthering Heights. She didn’t put the book down for two hours — Paul was sound asleep. Heathcliff was said to be dark-haired, but when she read about him, the face in her mind was Frank’s, not Joe’s. Two days later, when Henry took them to a town called Otley for just a little walk, and not into very steep countryside, that was where she imagined everything in the book to take place. It was a shocking book, but when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and started over.

—

AFTER HE DELIVERED his trunk and his suitcase and met his two roommates, Tim drove back to McLean. He did not drive Wednesday to his house, where they were expecting him for a last lunch before Lillian took him back to school and left him there; he drove Tuesday, late, to Fiona’s, and parked on the road up beside the horse pasture. It was nearly midnight. The weather had been hot and humid, and there were flies and midges everywhere. Fiona was leaving for Missouri in two days, for a college that was known, from what Tim had heard, solely for its horse-riding program. Rocky, who had been some kind of champion for 1963, had been sent ahead. Debbie had earned enough money working for a summer day camp to take over Prince’s expenses for the school year. The only one who got nothing in all of this, as far as he could tell, was himself.

Tim jumped the little ditch and crossed the Cannons’ yard to his tree. He chinned himself on the lowest branch, then caught his foot on a little knob maybe four feet off the ground, and swung onto the branch. Then he stood up, stepped onto the next branch and the one above that. From there, he jumped lightly to the roof of the back porch, squatted down, and duck-walked to Fiona’s window. The other window looking over the roof of the porch was a bathroom, so the curtains were usually closed. Only once, sometime in May, had the curtain been flung wide, and a face, the face of Mr. Cannon, stared out over the roof. But Tim had frozen outside the triangle of light, and the curtain closed again. Fiona remembered that particular night as their most romantic. The window was up and the screen unlatched. When he put his hand on the sill, Fiona said, “Who’s there?” in a soft, trilling voice. Tim said, “I don’t know,” also in a soft voice. This exchange made them laugh. He pulled the screen out and slid through the opening, then turned and secured the screen in the window frame. The light of the full moon, which had been obscured by the thick foliage of the tree, shone on the bare floor of her room and the end of her bed. He saw that she was totally naked. He said, “Hot, huh?”

She laughed again.

Tim began to take off his clothes.