Bradford frowned. “You’re saying that NATO is of the same order?”
Robert felt a chill of uncertainty, with the older man’s eyes on him. He was merely a theoretician himself, but Bradford Lockridge had been there. Still, there was nothing to do at this point but go forward, so he said, “That’s the way it seems to me. NATO is a carefully planned and brilliant defense against Hitler and the German army of the early forties. Since if there were a Russian attack against the West it would bypass Europe entirely and strike first at the United States, NATO has never been anything but a beautiful window display to reassure the folks back home; to let them know if the Second World War ever comes back, we’re ready for it.”
Bradford smiled, but he said, “Is that merely a funny joke, or do you mean it?”
“I mean it,” Robert said. “At the beginning of the Cold War, the government knew it had to reassure the people that they were safe, so they—” But at that point he suddenly became aware again of who he was talking to, and faltered. “That is, the way it worked out—”
“That’s all right,” Bradford said gently. “That was before my administration.”
Robert gave him a grateful smile and said, “Thank you, sir. The point was, there was no defense against the Third World War, but the people were going to lose confidence in a government that didn’t promise to defend them, so what they were given was a perfectly adequate defense against the war we’d just won. The whole object of NATO, besides coordinating European military policy, was to give people the comfortable feeling that something was being done.”
Mrs. Canby, who until now hadn’t said a word throughout the meal, suddenly said, “Isn’t that awfully cynical, Mr. Pratt? The people I’ve met in government have tended to be more honest than that.”
Robert turned to her, both in surprise at hearing her speak up and in relief at the opportunity to get out from under Bradford Lockridge’s scrutiny for a few seconds. “I hope it isn’t cynical,” he said. “I don’t really believe that someone sat down in the White House or somewhere and cynically worked out this whole complex global con game to delude the masses. I believe the people generally were scared and worried, and their attitude communicated itself to the decision-makers—”
Bradford interposed, “Who were possibly themselves also scared and worried.”
“Of course,” Robert said, turning back to him for an instant. “People in government I’m sure have the same doubts and the same need for reassurance as people outside. More, even, because they know more about the near misses.” He turned back to Mrs. Canby, saying, “The people in charge did the best they could, but the problem was insoluble because there really isn’t any defense against the kind of weapons that now exist.” He turned to Bradford again, saying, “We aren’t too far from Pittsburgh, are we, sir?”
“About a hundred miles,” Bradford said. “Perhaps a little more.”
“Thank you.” To Mrs. Canby again he said, “Pittsburgh would be a prime target if an all-out war started. Hit Pittsburgh with one of today’s bombs, and everybody in this house would die, and no one would be able to live in this neighborhood for the next seven years.”
Howard said, “There are clean bombs.”
Robert said, “If someone were anxious enough to destroy the United States to launch a nuclear war, I really doubt they would use clean bombs. In fact, the dirtier the better. The people you don’t burn to death you radiate to death.”
Mrs. Canby said, “This is really terrible lunchtime conversation.”
“Exactly my point,” Robert told her. “You would rather believe that our World War Two defenses are adequate, because the alternative is to understand that there isn’t any defense at all.”
Elizabeth said, “But that doesn’t seem to matter, does it? You said a little while ago that there wouldn’t be any Third World War anyway.”
“I was too hasty when I said that,” Robert admitted. “Then I was reminded of Hitler.”
Howard said, “But a Hitler isn’t very likely at this point in history. Not in Russia, anyway. What Bradford said before about fiscal policy is what does it. Russia isn’t poor enough. You have to have an advanced industrial nation that happens to be very poor before you have a people who’ll produce a Hitler, and that just isn’t a description of today’s Russia.”
“I’ll tell you what it is a description of,” Robert said. “China.”
v
THEY WALKED IN THE garden, and Robert found himself thinking, She could be a good-looking woman if she tried.
There were only the two of them out here. Lunch had lasted well over an hour, mostly because of the conversation, and after it Bradford had excused himself, saying he really did have to spend some time with Howard and the galleys of his book. Sterling and Elizabeth had expressed a desire to spend some time with the little girl, Dinah, and that had left Robert with the girl’s mother, Mrs. Canby. Robert was prepared for the next hour or so to be extremely dull.
Mrs. Canby—she’d said he was to call her Evelyn, and he was trying to think of her that way—had suggested a tour of the house and its nearby grounds, and he’d agreed, mostly because it would have to be better than sitting with her in a room and trying to think of something to talk about. They’d done the house first, and it was surprisingly large and rambling, even more so than it had looked from outside. Robert didn’t say so, but the chief impression he got from the house was of age. The rooms looked comfortable and well-used, but somehow as though most of the usage was over and done with, as though the house had been empty for some time, though still cleaned and maintained. The nursery, a sun-bright toy-filled second floor room in which Elizabeth and Sterling were being an indulgent audience to a now-much-more-animated Dinah, was like an intrusion from some other house, almost from another era.
After the house, Mrs. Canby—Evelyn—took him around the outside, and here again the same impression persisted, of a place that had once been full of life and activity but which recently had declined to a merely neat museum.
Particularly the garden. The paths and beds had been laid out with obvious loving care, there were fresh plantings, new flowers, the spring beginnings of the lush beauty this spot would have by mid-summer, but somehow there was an aura of absence over it all, of meticulousness without warmth, and Robert wasn’t surprised when Evelyn told him the explanation:
“This was Dinah’s really. Not my Dinah, Bradford’s. My grandmother. She used to do most of this garden herself, she really loved it.” She stopped to look around at the neat spring plantings, the fat buds, the greenery, the first swatches of summer’s patchwork quilt of color. “Bradford has people to take care of it now,” she said. “For Dinah’s sake, not for his. He doesn’t particularly care about gardens and things like that.”
“I’m surprised he lives so far out in the country then.”
“Oh, he likes the orchards and the woods. He likes the feel of land around him. It’s a man kind of thing, you know.”
There was a tone of voice in that last remark oddly out of place in a young woman speaking of an old man, even if he was a relative. There’d been a time when he’d heard that kind of sound in Kit’s voice, when she was describing to some third party his football exploits or some feat of strength he might have done; a kind of delighted pride in the manifestations of masculinity in her man. Robert looked at her, thinking, Is that it? Does she have a crush on her grandfather?
It would be understandable, in a way; Bradford Lockridge was still an impressive man, with an impressive background, but there must be forty years between them. Did Lockridge understand why his granddaughter had buried herself here in the middle of nowhere with him, or had it all happened too gradually for any of the participants to notice?
They walked on, Evelyn pointing out items of interest, Robert making appropriate comments, and at a later stage he said, “Elizabeth told me your husband was killed in Asia. I’m sorry.”
They had left the garden by now, and had just entered th
e apple orchard, the short trees all elbows and stooping, like frozen contortionists in long swooping rows. Evelyn stopped and glanced back at him. “That was over a year ago,” she said. “Just before Christmas, the year before last.”
“If one time of the year is worse than another to lose someone you love, I suppose Christmas is the worst time of all,”
“I suppose so,” she said, almost indifferently. “I seem to lose them at all seasons.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Have you had enough of the great outdoors?”
“That depends,” he said, since he anticipated that indoors lay nothing but endless boredom. “What else is there to see out here?”
“Oh, God,” she said, and made a rueful smile that unexpectedly emphasized her good looks. “We have just about anything outdoorsy you could ask for, except a painted desert. There’s a branch of Conodoguinet Creek that runs through the property about a mile that way. Back up the road you came in there’s the stables. Off that way—”
“Stables? You have horses?”
“Didn’t you notice that on your way in? It was on your right, stables and exercise yards and all the rest of it.”
“I saw some buildings, but I didn’t pay any particular attention.”
“Do you ride?”
“Infrequently, but I like to.”
“What about your suit?”
Robert looked down at himself and said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s an old suit anyway.” He didn’t add that he had no new suits. He’d lacked much interest in clothing the last three years.
“I’ll change,” she offered, “and meet you around the other side of the house.”
“Done.”
She was faster than he’d expected, coming out in less than ten minutes, in tan jodhpurs and brown riding boots, a white blouse and a tan jacket. He’d spent the time strolling around the nearby area, looking at the cars in the eight-car garage to the left of the main house, poking his head into a storage shed full of motorized gardening equipment, trying to read a slightly tilting sundial in the grassy oval surrounded by the circular gravel drive. He looked up from the sundial—it seemed to be claiming it was ten o’clock, probably A.M. and certainly inaccurate—and saw her come out to the sunlight, cool and trim and impersonal, and he was instantly reminded of Kit in the last stages of their marriage. Except that this woman was a few years older than Kit had been. And where Kit had given an impression of a fire suppressed, Mrs. Evelyn Canby gave no impression of containing any fire at all.
She came over and said, “A delivery truck hit that once, don’t ask how. It hasn’t been too accurate since.”
“I noticed.”
“Come along,” she said. “I’ll show you our ghost town.”
Robert half-smiled, not sure if she was kidding or not.
“No, really,” she said. “I told you we had everything. Just wait and see.”
“I’m ready to be shown,” he said.
One thing they definitely had was an astonishing number of employees. He’d seen half a dozen servants at one time or another inside the house, and now when they reached the stables there were at least four more men working there, all of them looking to be at least in their fifties. Old family retainers, no doubt. There was something faintly feudal about the whole thing that made Robert uncomfortable.
But the stablemen were contemporary Americans, after all, without the good old-fashioned forelock-pulling manner. Robert might be a guest of the master of the house, but he had entered their domain and there was no ambivalence about who was in charge. Evelyn asked politely if they might have a pair of horses to ride, and the man she was talking to considered the question thoughtfully and decided that yes, it was possible. He then gave Robert a stern no-nonsense talk about how to treat the animal he would be loaned, and Robert found himself half-grinning and half-seriously promising to treat the horse like his own child. The man was reluctantly satisfied, and went away to select and saddle their mounts.
Evelyn was smiling at him sidelong. “One of these days,” she said, “he’s going to say no, no you can’t have a horse, go away, we’re all busy. God knows what I’ll do then.”
“Go away, I suppose,” Robert said. “I know I would.”
Soon after, two horses were led out, one a handsome chestnut and the other a plodding gray beast with a barrel body. Robert suspected at once that the gray was for him and was the most docile animal they had available, and he was right in both suspicions. As he mounted—the horse stood there like a stuffed mattress, like something left over from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade—he was suddenly put in mind of an old joke about an orange horse, and he glanced at Evelyn. But the joke was sexual in nature and the punch line was obscene, so he kept it to himself.
Riding was fun, even though the plug they’d given him could only with great difficulty be roused from its lethargy. It preferred to walk, if motion was absolutely necessary, but a fairly constant drumming of heels into its ribs could get it to shift gears up to a thump-thump trot.
Whether it was the fact of movement, or simply being away from the house, or the view of him bouncing along on the gray galumpher, he couldn’t tell, but whatever the cause Evelyn came much more to life while they rode. Her conversation was animated, and so were her expressions, and he began to revise his estimate of her age downward. He’d guessed her to be thirty when he’d first seen her, but now he thought she was probably much closer to twenty-five.
He had known that Lockridge’s estate was large, but he hadn’t realized just how various it was. They traveled through parklike forest, the ground flat and soft, and then over hilly broken land treacherous with boulders and thick with underbrush. They came to the creek Evelyn had mentioned and followed it up a dim moist ravine, then cantered up a treeless grassy hillside that cried out for a golf course. From the top of that hill, Evelyn told him, he could see most of Lockridge’s property. She pointed at landmarks defining the perimeter, and he nodded agreement but didn’t really yet have a clear idea of the estate in his head.
And she showed him the ghost town. It was in the woods again, and he might have ridden right on by it without seeing it, if she hadn’t pointed it out. “You’re on Main Street,” she called. “Hold up a minute.”
His horse was more than willing to hold up. He sat astride it and looked around and said, “Main Street?”
She had come up beside him and brought her own animal to a halt. “This used to be a town here,” she said. “A long long time ago. Too far back to be on any of the maps Bradford’s ever seen.” She pointed. “See the stone wall?”
And then he did. A few crumbling stones, a low wall no more than a foot high at any point, covered by creeper vines and years of rotted leaves. It ran about twenty feet in a straight line, then made a sharp left turn and faded away. “What was that?” he asked. “A farmer’s fence?”
“More likely a house,” she said. “That’s all that’s left around here, the foundations of some of the houses. And the cemetery over there. A few of the headstones aren’t entirely buried yet.”
Robert looked around in wonder. “You mean this was no fooling an honest to God community? Not just a farm, but a whole town?”
“A whole town,” she agreed. “A pretty big one, too, I think. I’ve come across foundations for maybe twenty houses, scattered all around here.”
Robert said, “This must go back to the Revolution, even before.”
“Probably.”
“What do you suppose did it? Indian attack?”
“Bradford says it was probably just evolution. There stopped being a need for a town here, so it died. There are hundreds of towns like this, you know, all over the Northeast.”
“That’s amazing.” Robert looked around at the trees, the underbrush, the low line of stones. Suddenly it all seemed very forlorn, very sad. “Do you suppose they had a mayor?” he asked.
To his surprise, she understood the statement beh
ind the question. “I feel that way sometimes, too,” she said. “I come here and I imagine the houses, and children running in and out of them, with everything seeming so sure and permanent. And the women keeping everything clean.”
“And now we don’t even know what name they had for the place,” he said. He gave her a doleful smile. “What a cheery treat you had for me.”
“I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized it would affect you that way. It does me sometimes, but most people just think it’s curious. Come on, there’s open meadow over this way.”
vi
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the stables, the man there said, “They phoned down from the house for you, Mrs. Canby. About twenty minutes ago.”
Robert was surprised at how white she got. She dismounted hurriedly, saying, “Did they say what was wrong?”
“No, just asked for you.”
“Excuse me,” she said over her shoulder to Robert. “I’ll have to phone and see.” She hurried away to the stable office.
Robert dismounted and the man came over to pat the gray horse on the side and say, “Well, what did you think of Beulah?”
“Oh, is this Beulah? Well, she’s pretty flighty, but I managed to keep her from running away with me.”
The man gave him an understanding grin and said, “Well, maybe next time we’ll give you something a little quieter.”
“I’d like to see that,” he said, “something a little quieter.”
The man nodded and went away, Beulah plodding fatalistically along behind him, and a minute later Evelyn came back out to the sunlight and said, “I think we should go back to the house.”
“Of course. Something wrong with the little girl?”
“What, Dinah?” Her surprise was genuine, and he was surprised himself to see that it hadn’t even occurred to her the call might be about her daughter. “No, it’s Bradford,” she said.
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