Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Looking around the room, though, tired and sad that this space was doomed, she understood that Rosanna’s love had required a sacrificial victim, and that had been Mary Elizabeth. No one knew how Mary Elizabeth had come to fall backward and hit her head on the corner of the egg crate. Rosanna said that there had been a simultaneous flash of lightning and clap of thunder — Mary Elizabeth, who was dancing about, was startled, slipped, and fell. Andy, though, had said years ago, in that questioning way she had, that Frank took the blame — he’d been arguing with Joe about something and scuffing his feet on the rag rug; when it shifted, Mary Elizabeth fell backward. Not daring to ask Frank, Lillian had once asked Joe, who said he didn’t think that Frank, at five and a half, would have been able to move the rug — it had been a heavy thing. All he remembered was that, when Rosanna and Walter talked about it to the boys, Rosanna had said that it was the hand of God taking his beloved child to himself, and Walter had nodded in agreement. Joe didn’t know what Walter might have said when the boys were older. What had Mary Elizabeth been like? Joe shook his head. He barely remembered her — he was only three and a half when she died.

The ghost of a little girl, Lillian thought, even a toddler, would be completely formed and full of individuality. She would have a way of reaching upward and opening and closing her fist when she wanted something. She would have a rhyme that she asked for again and again — this little piggy went to market — and she would smile and nod when you pronounced it. She would have a characteristic way of balancing herself on her little feet, a precipitous style of walking so that every step was a dare accepted. She would plop down on her little bottom and throw her arms in the air, laughing. She would drag her rag-rabbit around by the ear, and chew meditatively on one of his feet, no matter how often her mother took it gently out of her mouth and said, “No, dirty.” The ghost of a little girl would stand by her baby sister’s cradle and stare at her, never touching her, but wondering about her, about how she came to be, whom she belonged to. The ghost of a little girl would not necessarily be wise — she might spend her ghostly existence lost in confusion.

Lillian knew that there was no ghost of Mary Elizabeth, but now that she had conceived of her, she closed her eyes and invited her to come closer, step by step. She opened her hand that was resting on the arm of the chair, and she invited the child to take it. Then she said, “Thank you.”

It was Jesse who found her. He was home for the weekend, walking back from tracking a flock of turkeys. He was carrying a rifle, but he hadn’t fired it — he just wanted to practice getting close to them. He saw the car in the driveway, and the front door ajar. Lillian must have dozed off; she woke up when he said, “Hello?” He was a tall, graceful boy, slender but broad-shouldered. She said, “Jesse, it’s me, don’t shoot!” and then they laughed. She only thought of Mary Elizabeth again when they were going down the steps. But it was true, she felt calmer, and much more ready to listen to Lois, Joe, and Minnie divvy up the contents of the house. “Are you sure you don’t want some of the furniture?” Lois said, “There isn’t much of interest. The dishes are so plain. I can put them in the shop. Min, you should ask Henry if you can take his books to the school library. There are some nice ones there.” And so on. But, really, Lillian only wanted the yarn remnants for Debbie, the afghan for herself, and the shelf of old books in her pink bedroom for the new baby.

—

ALREADY BEFORE NOON, it was so hot that you had to tiptoe across the concrete to get to the edge of their swimming pool or you would burn your feet. Claire had put a shirt on Gray even though she had slathered him twice with the sunscreen Paul insisted the boys use. A mist seemed to hang in the air, and the pool wasn’t refreshing. Claire took a sip of her Coke. Paul kept glancing at Gray playing with the float in the shallow end. He was a good swimmer, though — they had taken both boys to the Y from the age of five, and Gray, ten, had been on a swim team there all the previous winter. Brad was inside. Claire was thinking she would make sandwiches for lunch from the leftover baked chicken. Paul was sitting up on the chaise longue, watching Gray. He said, “That land is worth twenty-five hundred dollars per acre, which is over two million bucks.”

“What does that mean to me?” said Claire, pushing her sunglasses up on her nose and consciously pulling her chin downward so as not to inflame Paul further. She had been half an hour late to pick up Gray and Brad at day camp the previous Tuesday, and, not reaching Claire at home, the school had called Paul’s office. He and she had shown up just at the same time, and it didn’t help that, upon seeing both of them, Brad burst into tears.

“Some of that is yours. Joe can get a loan and buy you out. The banks are crazy to lend these days. A hundred grand — I could put it in the stock market.” He rattled his glass and ate a piece of ice.

“They’re crazy to lend? Rusty Burke told me that getting their loan was horrible. Anyway, interest rates are seven and a half percent. Why would I ask Joe to pay five hundred dollars a month or more so that you can play the stock market? Five hundred dollars is more than our mortgage payment.” Minnie had told her on Monday that Joe, Frank, and Gary, the last Vogel cousin interested in farming, were already tiptoeing around this issue of who owned what and what would be done with it; Claire did not want to get involved. However, every time Paul thought of that two million bucks, he decided not to investigate where she had been at four o’clock Tuesday afternoon, and why, when he saw her, her hair was uncombed. In fact, she had overslept her nap, but she was too annoyed with him to confess.

He adjusted his hat so that his bald spot was covered, then pressed his finger into the skin of his forearm, checking for sunburn. Claire had to wonder why they had built the swimming pool to begin with. He said, “At the very least, if there is value, it’s important to diversify the investment, so as not to lose it all if the market plunges.”

“The market? The market for what?”

“Farmland has gone up thirty percent each of the last two years. That’s a bubble. Bubbles pop.”

She sat up, set her feet on the concrete, then leaned toward Paul and put her face right up to his, which she knew he hated. She said, “Paul, it’s not yours.”

He pulled back, but he said, “It’s ours. It’s the boys’. Do you think an Ivy League education is cheap? We have to start saving now. There’s no telling what those tuitions are going to be in eight years.”

Claire lay back again. Gray had abandoned the float, and was now bouncing up and down on the end of the diving board — another danger. If Paul had had girls, Claire often thought, he would not have had to make men out of them. She said, “There’s no telling whether they can get in at this point.”

“They can get in,” said Paul, evidently aghast that his sons’ own mother had so little faith in their intellect.

Claire placed her palms together, bent her legs, and put her hands between her knees, telling herself: Say nothing. Say nothing. That Paul made more than a hundred thousand dollars a year in his practice, and that his father, who was seventy-eight, would certainly leave him a nice portfolio, must remain unsaid. That his parents’ six-bedroom English Tudor in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, was worth $150,000 must remain unsaid (though Paul had said this very thing a few weeks earlier). Their own house, with pool and three-car garage, was worth eighty. She adopted a wheedling tone: “Come on, sweetie. You didn’t use to be so interested in money. You knew you weren’t marrying into the landed gentry.”