It was never clear who initiated the Youth Club picket. Forced to guess, Brad Congreve would have picked the thick-set Burmeister girl, Shelda—the one who wore bottle-glass lenses and quoted Gandhi during Sunday Discussion. It was exactly the sort of febrile notion Shelda would have taken into her head.
She was certainly one of the twelve young people who had set up a picket line around the Civic Gardens, carrying stick-and-cardboard signs with such legends as
and
This time there was no pastoral guidance and no approving crowd of strangers. This wasn’t fun or familiar. This was patently dangerous. Pedestrians who saw the picket line stared a moment, then turned away.
When the soldiers came, Shelda and her eleven compatriots filed submissively into the back of a dung-green transport truck. In best Gandhian fashion, they were willing to be arrested. Calmly, they appealed to the consciences of the soldiers. The soldiers, grim as stones, said nothing at all.
The trouble with being close to a man, Evelyn Woodward thought, is that you find out his secrets.
From hints and silences, from phone calls half-overheard and words half-pronounced and documents glimpsed as they crossed his desk, she had learned one of Symeon Demarch’s secrets—a secret too terrible to contain and impossible to share.
It was a secret about what was going to happen to Two Rivers. No. Worse than that. Let’s not be coy, Evelyn thought. It was a secret about the
It was a secret about an atomic bomb. No one called it that; but she had discerned words like
Now, with Symeon away and the house empty and all this snow coming so relentlessly from a woolen sky, the secret was an awkward weight inside her. It was like having a terminal disease: no matter how hard she tried not to think about it, her thoughts came circling back.
Her only consolation was that Symeon had not originated the idea and even seemed to despise it. He hadn’t argued when he talked to his superiors, but she heard the unhappiness in his voice. And when he told her she would be safe, he seemed to mean it. He would take her away. He might not live with her; he had a wife and child in the capital; but he would find a place for her out of harm’s way. Maybe she would go on being his mistress.
But that left everybody else. Her neighbors, she thought, Dex Graham, the grocer, the schoolkids—
There was plenty of food, and she dealt with the cold by burying herself in sweaters and blankets and lighting the propane stove Symeon had left. But she couldn’t keep out the dark, and in the dark her thoughts were loudest. Sleep didn’t help. One night she dreamed she was Hester Prynne from
She was gratified when, at the end of that unendurable week, the electricity came back. She woke up to a wave of new heat. The blankets were superfluous. The
The morning after
Dressing in these things was like putting on a discarded skin. Old clothes have old memories inside. Briefly, she wondered what Dex was doing now. But Dex had moved out when the lieutenant came (Evelyn had chosen to stay in the house); Dex had been threatened by the Proctors; worst of all, Dex was going to die in the bomb blast (damn that hideous, unstoppable thought).
She walked along Beacon past Commercial until she reached the woody corner of Powell Creek Park, which was quite far enough: her cheeks were ruddy and her feet were cold.
The exercise helped to empty her mind. Evelyn hummed to herself from deep in her throat. There was not much traffic on the streets and it was better that way. She decided to go home by way of City Hall, a walk she had always enjoyed in winter when the skating rink was open. She didn’t skate but she used to like seeing the people glide in looping curves, like beings from a better world, light as angels.
Of course the skating rink was closed. The Civic Gardens looked barren, too. City Hall itself was stony gray, and there was something odd about the lampposts lining the avenue.
When she saw the dead children she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The bodies were stiff inside frozen clothing; they moved in the wind, but not like anything human. The ropes had been thrown over the angle brackets of the streetlights and knotted in timeless fashion around the children’s necks. The children’s hands had been tied behind their backs and their faces were hidden under shapeless hemp sacks.
Evelyn came closer without really meaning to, shocked beyond reason. The shock was purely physical, like putting your finger in a wall socket. She felt it in her arms and legs.
She stopped and stood for a long time looking at the dead children hanging from the lampposts outside City Hall. A delicate snow began to float down from the sky. The flakes of snow were large and perfect and they landed on the humped, frozen clothing of the dead children until the dead children were clothed all in white, a perfect unsullied purity.
A patrol car passed on the snowy street. Evelyn turned to look at the soldier who was driving, but he was hidden in the shadow of the car and had turned his head away: away from Evelyn, or away from what Evelyn had seen.
She walked without a destination and after a bleak passage found herself peering up through veils of snow to the window of Dex Graham’s apartment. His light was on. The window was a yellow punctuation in the snow- scabbed brick wall. She went inside, walked up the stairs, knocked on his door.
Dex opened the door and looked at her with unconcealed surprise. Maybe he had been expecting someone else. That was natural, after so much time apart. But, seeing him, she was overwhelmed with memories that seemed terribly immediate: of his voice, his touch, his smell. There was that catalog of intimate knowledge still between them. She wasn’t entitled to it but couldn’t put if away.
He said, “Evelyn? Evelyn, what is it—are you all right?”
“I have to tell you a secret,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
