The opposite problem is all the flying saucers idiots are seeing. The Air Force has lately been trying to train G.O.C. personnel not to jump to fanciful conclusions. They’ve requested that any airborne device that cannot be positively identified as an airplane of some kind—most of the “saucers” are surely Skyhook meteorological balloons, which look like disks when they’re overhead—should simply be designated an Unidentified Flying Object, or U.F.O. Good luck with that.
Schiller said it: Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Imogen logs in ten planes that evening. Chicago survives another shift. At eleven she signs the book, shelves the binoculars, goes downstairs. Sarge is still hanging around the office doing God knows what. Imogen doesn’t know if he has a bad home life, or no home life at all.
“Good night, Sarge. You staying?”
“Good night, Mrs. Fuller. Yes, I thought I’d go up myself for a couple of hours, since there’s no one else.”
“You’re like the little Dutch boy.”
“Excuse me?”
“Putting your finger in the dike.”
“Oh . . . Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”
Better than your thumb up your ass! “Well you have a good night, Sarge. It’s beautiful up there.”
She goes outside. She notices Sarge has recently tacked a Skywatch recruitment poster next to the front door, where it can be seen from the road. His hope just keeps on springing. A majority of the Ground Observer Corps are women, but of course the poster shows a man. Join Us in Skywatch! He’s pointing upward at a 45-degree angle, his straight arm looking like a— Ugh.
She walks through dark suburban streets toward the train station. They’re still building large tracts of this town, dozens of houses at a time. It’s all planned. It’s like the country never left off war production, just changed the product. She catches the 11:25 to Chicago. During the forty-five-minute ride she often reads, but tonight she writes a letter to her German pen pal, Hildegard. When Imogen was at Mount Holyoke, a woman at the Episcopal church in Westfield was organizing food and clothing shipments to Germany, where so much of the postwar population was suffering such deprivation. “Many of these people were also victims of Hitler,” this woman would say. Since Imogen was taking classes in German, she signed up to be a pen pal and also to contribute whatever goods she could afford.
Hildegard lives in a town in the eastern zone, where conditions are especially hard. She writes long letters about the bombed-out buildings, the food lines, the water shortages, her younger brothers, her ailing father, her depressed and listless mother. Her father is a pastor who opposed the Nazis and was interned during the war. Since marrying Vernon, Imogen has been able to send more goods, and Hildegard’s letters are extravagantly grateful. She recently sent Imogen a photograph of herself. She has been urging Imogen to visit her someday, which Imogen would love to do. Imogen has always wanted to travel abroad. She would especially love someday to see Norway. There was a book she liked when she was a teenager, about Norwegian children during the war sneaking their country’s gold reserves past Nazis by hiding it on sleds. She can’t remember the title, but it was a true story about bravery that for once involved as many girls as boys.
Ihr fotograph ist sehr schön, she writes. Ich möchte soviel gern, jedenzeit in der Zukunft Ihnen besuchen. Vielleicht kann ich das tun, wenn mein Mann sein Phd vollendet hat.
She gets off at 63rd Street, walks the five blocks to the parsonage where she and Vernon are renting a crappy apartment with a nosy sanctimonious parson’s wife for a landlady. (When they told her the fridge thermostat wasn’t working right, she came to check and got huffy when she saw the beer.) It’s half past midnight when she comes through the apartment door. All the lights are off and Vernon is asleep. Poor boy, he’s been telling her how much he misses her on Wednesday evenings. It’s very sweet of him, so she tries not to find it annoying.
1957
She slams the door on her way out, and of course Susan starts crying again.
How can he be like that? Yes, he works all week—but what does he think she’s doing all day every day with Susan—he knows how Susan is. He’s happy to let Imogen get up in the night while he sleeps like a log. He comes home, wants his dinner, eats cheese and crackers while she cooks—he’s getting chubby—and he’s a picky eater, he wants his food bland, meat and potatoes, doesn’t even tolerate lamb, says it’s too gamy, and after dinner, instead of engaging with his daughter he’s tinkering with the stove light, or tightening a belt on the washing machine. If she makes the smallest innocuous complaint—Why does it take so long for the water to get hot in the kitchen sink?—boom! he’s down in the crawlspace, mapping the configuration of the pipes and drawing a diagram and then going on about the plumber’s puzzling choices or unintended consequences or counterintuitive reasons. “I’ll bet I know why they did it that way . . .” he’ll say after an hour of cogitation, and he’s off in Discoveryland, while she’s waiting for the water to get hot so she can wash the dishes and Susan is in the next room fussing.
She plops Susan in the stroller—“Shush, now, come on, just shush up”—and heads up Dimmick Avenue in the Saturday sunshine. It’s beautiful weather and Susan’s been a hellion all week and all Imogen said was, could Vernon maybe take her to the beach or the carousel on the pier for a couple of hours, so she could have a break. I work
