Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Eloise, who was sitting on the sunporch in her favorite rocker, pushing herself back and forth with her toe, said, “Who told you that?”

“Marla is unhappy in Paris. She might join us.”

Marla’s last letter had been full of news about how she had been taken up by a group of feminists who adored the self-referential profundities of her inscriptions. They wanted to do a street play on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Boulevard Saint-Germain, not even translating the plays into French, but acting them out as a reflection of the pedestrians going by, especially, since summer was at hand, of American tourists. Her funds were holding out fairly well, but she was getting tired of hummus and baba ghanouj. Eloise said, “I can’t imagine such a thing.”

Jorge, who was sitting on the couch, drinking the chamomile tea Eloise had given him, said, “Well, she didn’t write to me, but Reverend Jones has the letter.”

Eloise said, “If Reverend Jones wants my money, then he’ll have to come and ask for it, because I learned long ago never to discuss finances with anyone but the boss.”

She expected Jorge to laugh at this, but he shook his head very seriously. He said, “Now that Rupert Murdoch is financing his assassination and the destruction of the Temple, he dare not go anywhere. His life is in too much danger.”

“Who is Rupert Murdoch?” said Eloise.

“He’s like that Hearst man.”

“William Randolph Hearst?”

“Something like that,” said Jorge. “Anyway, Rupert Murdoch had one of our members killed last fall, as a warning, and now he has bigger plans, which means that our members are only safe in Guyana. We thought we were safe in California, but that isn’t the case. The coming Nazi takeover will happen everywhere, and when it does, people like me and Lucas will be sent to camps. It happens every thirty years or so. We think, for Janet’s and Lucas’s safety, you should—”

Eloise found herself rocking rather furiously, and made it a point to stop.

“We’ve already applied for our passports and visas, though Janet’s passport is still valid.”

Eloise said, coolly, “What don’t you know about her?” She thought, Or me, for that matter.

“Janet has been pretty open about her feelings and thoughts.”

“And her assets?”

Jorge smiled.

Eloise thought, I used to like this kid. She said, “When are you planning to go?”

“We understand that the visas will come in early August, so we ought to buy the tickets pretty soon.” He looked her right in the eye. “Four tickets — Janet, Lucas, Cat, me.”

“How much are the tickets?”

“Three fifty apiece. One-way.”

Eloise pretended to think for a moment by gazing out the window, but what she really did was note the two men walking down her street; they had been walking the other direction a few minutes before. She said, “You want a check?” She thought that seven hundred dollars, for Janet’s and Lucas’s tickets, was not too high a price to pay to get Cat and Jorge out of the country. She said, “What about Lena?”

“The reverend is taking care of her. He likes to have her with him.”

Eloise thought, I’ll bet he does. Then she thought that Lenin may have been a pig but he was not a religious, lecherous pig.

She said, “Let me find my checkbook.” Then she said, “Do you know those two guys who keep walking back and forth in front of my house?”

Jorge glanced out the window. He said, “That’s Zeb and Vic.”

“What are they doing?”

Jorge said, “We are all in danger. It’s better to travel in groups.”

Eloise, who had lived in Oakland for years without a second thought, had a second thought.

—

CAT KEPT URGING Janet to up her tithe, especially since “we don’t have the reverend’s golden tongue to help us raise funds anymore, at least for now.” She acted as though Reverend Jones’s flight to Guyana and the article in New West magazine meant nothing — of course Reverend Jones had made enemies, and those enemies were glad to talk. Cat kept going to the Temple, kept chatting about whom she saw there and what they did. And then, right on schedule, on August 16, she disappeared from her room. When Lucas called the house where Jorge was living, he got no answer. He went over to the house, in the Mission District. It was empty, the back door unlocked. Janet kept taking out her ticket and putting it away again. When she looked at the destinations — Georgetown, Guyana; change at JFK, New York — the very words made her nervous, but she didn’t know which affected her more.

Lucas was at first happy. He came over three days in a row, but then it was Friday, he had to play, and he didn’t invite her to come watch. After he, too, disappeared — this was the part that she thought she should have noticed — she had watched him onstage so many times, smiling and waving his sticks, leaning into the drums and staring intently as the beat got faster and more complicated, then, when the song ended, throwing his arms in the air and grinning. Would she ever see that again? Not if he had gone to Guyana. Maybe he had changed his ticket, taken a later flight, used this opportunity to leave her behind because he saw that she was a bourgeois materialist after all. It was a mystery. But she pulled herself together. She went to work, she said that she would take the manager’s job at the branch her restaurant was opening on Fulton Street, she said that she would move across the bay, find a room in the Castro, or, because she would be making a little more money, maybe a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe communal living was not for her. Maybe she needed some boundaries, and boundaries started with a locked door. Nor did she hear from Marla. Jorge had told her that Marla had gone to the agricultural paradise after all, had decided that Paris was corrupt and shallow, had turned over a new leaf. So they were all there; they had all left her behind.

She did not run out the back of the restaurant when she saw Aunt Eloise in her section. After being prodded by the maître d’, she went over and set the menu in front of her aunt and said, “Would you like to hear today’s specials?”

Aunt Eloise looked up at her. “I really did wonder whether you had gone.”

“I didn’t.”

“Thank God! I read the article. I was appalled.”

Janet was about to say that the article was all lies and everyone was out to get Reverend Jones, but she said, “I was, too.” Then, “You should try the risotto. It’s rice cooked in broth with mushrooms, garlic, and Parmesan.”

“I know what it is.”

Eloise stared at the menu as if she couldn’t help herself, then said, “What about Lucas?”

“He went.”

Janet sat down in the chair beside Eloise at the table and put her head in her hands. Her hair fell in a dirty curtain around her, and that made her all the sadder, somehow. Aunt Eloise gently pushed it back, looked her in the eye, took her hand. Then she whispered, “Honey, do you want to leave here and go back home?”

Janet nodded.

—

THERE WERE no kids Minnie had ever seen who had been improved by adult influence, and she thought this in spite of all the conferences over the years in which she had said, “Perhaps if you took Billy in hand,” or “Perhaps if you helped Janie attend more closely to her homework…” Janet, she thought, would have said her parents wrecked her, but Minnie thought she was a strange combination of daring and alert, strong and brittle, overprepared, too smart for her own good, and never ready. Minnie liked her. You could run down the list of what Frank and Andy and Lillian and Arthur and Tim and this mysterious boy Lucas had done to her, and you could imagine how these cruelties (whether intentional or not) had affected her, but she was the same girl she had always been.