Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  --who was killed in Italy, August 6, 1943.

  2

  A DOCTOR cannot endure having made his inevitable grisly blun­ders unless he recalls enough rescues to offset them. I count Jack Havig among those who redeemed me. Yet I helped less as a physician than as a man.

  My special knowledge did let me see that, beneath a tight-held face, the boy was seriously disturbed. Outside the eastern states, gasoline was not rationed in 1942. I arranged for a col­league to take over my practice, and when school closed, Bill and I went on a trip. . . and we took Jack along.

  In Minnesota’s Arrowhead we rented a canoe and entered that wilderness of lakes, bogs, and splendid timber which reaches on into Canada. For an entire month we were myself, my thirteen-year-old son, and my all but adopted son whom I believed to be nine years of age.

  It’s rain and mosquito country; paddling against a headwind is stiff work; so is portaging; to make camp required more effort than if we’d had today’s ingenious gear and freeze-dried rations. Jack needed those obstacles, that nightly exhaustion. After fewer days than might have been awaited, the land could begin to heal him.

  Hushed sunrises, light gold in the uppermost leaves and ashiver across broad waters; birdsong, rustle of wind, scent of evergreen; a squirrel coaxed to take food from a hand; the soar­ing departure of deer; blueberries in a bright warm opening of forest, till a bear arrived and we most respectfully turned the place over to him; moose, gigantic and unafraid, watching us glide by; sunsets which shone through the translucent wings of bats; dusk, fire and stories and Bill’s young wonderings about things, which showed Jack better than I could have told him how big a world lies beyond our sorrows; a sleeping bag, and stars uncountable.

  It was the foundation of a cure.

  Back home again, I made a mistake. “I hope you’re over this notion about your father, Jack. There’s no such thing as fore­knowing the future.” He whitened, whirled, and ran from me. I needed weeks to regain his confidence.

  His trust, at any rate. He confided nothing to me except the thoughts, hopes, problems of an ordinary boy. I spoke no fur­ther of his obsession, nor did he. But as much as time and circumstance allowed, I tried to be a little of what he so desper­ately lacked, his father.

  We could take no more long excursions while the war lasted. However, we had country roads to tramp, Morgan Woods to roam and picnic in, the river for fishing and swim­ming, Lake Winnego and my small sailboat not far off. He could come around to my garage workshop and make a bird feeder for himself or a broom rack for his mother. We could talk.

  I do believe he won to a measure of calm about Tom’s death by the time it happened. Everybody assumed his premonition was coincidental.

  Eleanor had already taken a job in the library, plus giving quite a few hours per week to the hospital. Widowhood struck her hard. She rallied gamely, but for a long while was subdued and unsocial. Kate and I tried to get her out, but she declined invitations more often than not.

  When at last she began to leave her shell, it was mostly in the company of others than her old circle. I couldn’t keep from remarking: “You know, Ellie, I’m damn glad to see you back in circulation. Still--forgive me--your new friends are kind of a surprise.”

  She reddened and looked away. “True,” she said low.

  “Perfectly good people, of course. But, uh, not what you’d call intellectual types, are they?”

  “N-no. . . . All right.” She straightened in her chair. “Bob, let’s be frank. I don’t want to leave here, if only because of what you are to Jack. Nor do I want to be buried alive, the way I was that first couple of years. Tom influenced me; I don’t really have an academic turn of mind like his. And . . . you who we went with. . . you’re all married.”

  I abandoned as useless my intention in raising the matter--to tell her how alien her son was to those practical-minded, loud-laughing men who squired her around, how deeply he was coming to detest them.

  He was twelve when the nuclear thunderbolts slew two cities and man’s last innocence. Though the astonishing growth rate I had noted in him earlier had slowed down to average since 1942, its effects remained to make him precocious. That rein­forced the extreme solitariness which had set in. No longer was Pete Dunbar, or any schoolmate, more than a casual associate. Politely but unshakably, Jack refused everything extracurricu­lar. He did his lessons, and did them well, but his free time was his and nobody else’s: his to read enormously, with emphasis on history books; to take miles-long hikes by himself; to draw pictures or to shape things with the tools I’d helped him collect.

  I don’t mean he was morbid. Lonely boys are not uncom­mon, and generally become reasonably sociable adults. Jack was fond of the Amos ‘n’ Andy program, for instance, though he preferred Fred Allen; and he had a dry wit of his own. I re­member various of his cartoons he showed me, one in particu­lar suggested by a copy of The Outsider and Others which I lent him. In a dark, dank forest were two human figures. The first, cowering and pointing, was unmistakably H. P. Love­craft. His companion was a tweedy woman who snapped: “Of course they’re pallid and mushroomlike, Howard. They are mushrooms.”

  While he no longer depended on me, we saw a good bit of each other; and the age difference between him and Bill was less important now, so that they two sometimes went together for a walk or a swim or a boat ride-even, in 1948, a return to northern Minnesota with Jim and Stuart.

  Soon after he came back from this, my second son asked me: “Dad, what’s a good book on, uh, philosophy?”

  “Eh?” I laid down my newspaper. “Philosophy, at thirteen?”

  “Why not?” Kate said across her embroidery. “In Athens he’d have started younger.”

  “Well, m-m, philosophy’s a mighty wide field, Jim,” I stalled. “What’s your immediate question?”

  “Oh,” he mumbled, “free will and time and all that jazz. Jack Havig and Bill talked a lot about it on our trip.”

  I learned that Bill, being in college, had begun by posing as an authority, but soon found himself entangled in problems--was the history of the universe written before its beginning? if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future . . . or the past?--which it didn’t seem a high school kid could have pondered as thor­oughly as Jack had done.

  When I asked my protégé what he wanted for Christmas, he answered: “Something I can understand that explains rel­ativity.”

  In 1949, Eleanor remarried. Her choice was catastrophic.

  Sven Birkelund meant well. His parents had brought him from Norway when he was three; he was now forty, a success­ful farmer in possession of a large estate and fine house ten miles outside town, a combat veteran, and a recent widower who had two boys to raise: Sven, Jr., sixteen, and Harold, nine. Huge, red-haired, gusty, he blazed forth maleness--ad­mitted Kate to me, though she couldn’t stand him--and he was not unlettered either; he subscribed to magazines (Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Country Gentleman), read an oc­casional book, like travel, and was a shrewd businessman.

  And . . . Eleanor, always full of life, had been celibate for six years.

  You can’t warn someone who’s tumbled into love. Neither Kate nor I tried. We attended the wedding and reception and offered our best wishes. Mostly I was conscious of Jack. The boy had grown haggard; he moved and talked like a robot.

  In his new home, he rarely got a chance to see us. After­ward he would not go into detail about the months which fol­lowed. Nor shall I. But consider: Where Eleanor was a dropout from the Episcopal Church, and Jack a born agnostic, Birke­lund was a Bible-believing Lutheran. Where Eleanor enjoyed gourmet cooking and Jack the eating, Birkelund and his sons wanted meat and potatoes. Tom spent his typical evening first with a book, later talking with her. If Birkelund wasn’t doing the accounts, he was glued to the radio or, presently, the tele­vision screen. Tom had made a political liberal of her. Birke­lund was an ardent and active American Legionnaire--he never missed a
convention, and if you draw the obvious inference, you’re right--who became an outspoken supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  And on and on. I don’t mean that she was disillusioned over­night. I’m sure Birkelund tried to please her, and gradually dropped the effort only because it was failing. The fact that she was soon pregnant must have forged a bond between them which lasted a while. (She told me, however, I being the family doctor, that in the later stages his nightly attentions became dis­tasteful but he wouldn’t stop. I called him in for a Dutch uncle lecture and he made a sulky compromise.)

  For Jack the situation was hell from the word go. His step-brothers, duplicates of their father, resented his invasion. Jun­ior, whose current interests were hunting and girls, called him a sissy because he didn’t like to kill and a queer because he never dated. Harold found the numberless ways to torment him which a small boy can use on a bigger one whose fists may not defend.

  More withdrawn than ever, he endured. I wondered how.

  In the fall of 1950, Ingeborg was born. Birkelund named her after an aunt because his mother happened to be called Olga. He expressed disappointment that she was a girl, but threw a large and drunken party anyway, at which he repeatedly de­clared, amidst general laughter, his intention of trying for a son the minute the doctor allowed.

  The doctor and his wife had been invited, but discovered a prior commitment. Thus I didn’t see, I heard how Jack walked out on the celebration and how indignant Birkelund was. Long afterward, Jack told: “He cornered me in the barn when the last guest had left who wasn’t asleep on the floor, and said he was going to beat the shit out of me. I told him if he tried, I’d kill him. I meant that. He saw it, and went off growling. From then on, we spoke no more than we couldn’t avoid. I did my chores, my share of work come harvest or whatever, and when I’d eaten dinner I went to my room.”

  And elsewhere.

  The balance held till early December. What tipped it doesn’t matter-something was bound to-but was, in fact, Eleanor’s asking Jack if he’d given thought to the college he would like to attend, and Birkelund shouting, “He can damn well get the lead out and go serve his country like I did and take his GI if they haven’t cashiered him,” and a quarrel which sent her up­stairs fleeing and in tears.

  Next day Jack was not there.

  He returned at the end of January, would say no word about where he had been or what he had done, and stated that he would leave for good if his stepfather took the affair to the juvenile authorities as threatened. I’m certain he dominated that scene, and won himself the right to be left in peace. Both his appearance and his demeanor were shockingly changed.

  Again the household knew a shaky equilibrium. But six weeks later, upon a Sunday when Jack had gone for his usual long walk after returning from church, he forgot to lock the door to his room. Little Harold noticed, entered, and rum­maged through the desk. His find, which he promptly brought to his father, blew apart the whole miserable works.

  Snow fell, a slow thick whiteness filling the windows. What daylight seeped through was silver-gray. Outdoors the air felt almost warm-and how utterly silent.

  Eleanor sat on our living-room couch and wept. “Bob, you’ve got to talk to him, you, you, you’ve got to help him . . . again.

  What happened when he ran away? What did he do?”

  Kate laid arms around her and drew the weary head down to her own shoulder. “Nothing wrong, my dear,” she mur­mured. “Oh, be very sure. Always remember, Jack is Tom’s son.”

  I paced the rug, in the dull twilight against which we had turned on no lights. “Let’s spell out the facts,” I said, speaking bolder than I felt. “Jack had this mimeographed pamphlet that Sven describes as Communist propaganda. Sven wants to call the sheriff, the district attorney, anybody who can force Jack to tell who he fell in with while he was gone. You slipped out to the shed, drove off in the pickup, met the boy on the road, and brought him here.”

  “Y-y-yes. Bob, I can’t stay. Ingeborg’s at home. . . . Sven will call me an, an unnatural mother--”

  “I might have a few words to say about privacy,” I answered, “not to mention freedom of speech, press, and opinion.” After a pause: “Uh, you told me you snatched the pamphlet?”

  “I--” Eleanor drew back from Kate’s embrace. Through tears and hiccoughs, a strength spoke that I remembered: “No use for him to call copper if the evidence is gone.”

  “May I see it?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “It’s . . . a prank, Bob. Nothing s-s-signifi­cant. Jack’s waiting--”

  --in my office, by request, while we conferred. He had shown me a self-possession which chilled this winter day.

  “He and I will have a talk,” I said, “while Kate gets some coffee, and I expect some food, into you. But I’ve got to have something to talk about.”

  She gulped, nodded, fumbled in her purse, and handed me several sheets stapled together. I settled into my favorite arm­chair, left shank on right knee, a good head of steam in my pipe, and read the document.

  I read it twice. And thrice. I quite forgot the women.

  Here it is. You won’t find any riddles.

  But hark back. The date was the eleventh of March, in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty-one.

  Harry S. Truman was President of the United States, having defeated Thomas E. Dewey for election, plus a former Vice President who would later have the manhood to admit that his party had been a glove on the hand of Moscow. This was the capital of a Soviet Union which my adored FDR had assured me was a town-meeting democracy, our gallant ally in a holy war to bring perpetual peace. Eastern Europe and China were down the gullet. Citizens in the news included Alger Hiss, Owen Lattimore, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Somehow, to my friends and myself, they did not make Joseph McCarthy less of an abomination. But under the UN flag, American young men were dying in battle--five and a half years after our V-days!--and their killers were North Korean and Chinese. Less than two years ago, the first Russian atomic bombs had roared. NATO, hardly older, was a piece of string in the path of hundreds of divisions. Most of us, in an emotional paralysis which let us continue our daily lives, expected World War III to break out at any instant.

  I could not altogether blame Sven Birkelund for jumping to conclusions.

  But as I read, and read, my puzzlement deepened.

  Whoever wrote this thing knew Communist language--I’d been through some books on that subject--but was emphati­cally not a Communist himself. What, then, was he?

  Hark back, I say. Try to understand your world of 1951.

  Apart from a few extremists, America had never thought to question her own rightness, let alone her right to exist. We knew we had problems, but assumed we could solve them, given time and good will, and eventually everybody of every race, color, and creed would live side by side in the suburbs and sing folk songs together. Brown vs. Board of Education was years in the future; student riots happened in foreign countries, while ours worried about student apathy; Indochina was a place where the French were experiencing vaguely noticed difficulties.

  Television was hustling in, and we discussed its possible ef­fects. Nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles were on their way, but nobody imagined they could be used for anything ex­cept the crudest exchange of destructions. Overpopulation was in the news but would soon be forgotten. Penicillin and DDT were unqualified friends to man. Conservation meant preserv­ing certain areas in their natural states and, if you were sophis­ticated about such matters, contour plowing on hillsides. Smog was in Los Angeles and occasionally London. The ocean, im­mortal mother of all, would forever receive and cleanse our wastes. Space flight was for the next century, when an eccentric millionaire might finance a project. Computers were few, large, expensive, and covered with blinking lights. If you followed the science news, you knew a little about transistors, and per­haps looked forward to seeing cheap, pocket-sized radios in the hands of Americans; they could mak
e no difference to a peasant in India or Africa. All contraceptives were essentially mechanical. The gene was a locus on the chromosome. Unless he blasted himself back to the Stone Age, man was committed to the machine.

  Put yourself in 1951, if you can, if you dare, and read as I did that jape on the first page of which appeared the notice “Copyright © 1970 by John F. Havig.”

  3

  WITHIT’S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY

  Activist: A person employing tactics in the cause of liberation which, when used by a fascist, are known as McCarthyism and repression.

  Aggression: Any foreign policy advocated by a fascist.

  Black: Of whole or partial sub-Saharan African descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Brown, Red, White, or Yellow. This word replaces the former “Negro,” which today is considered in­sulting since it means “Black.”

  Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other noncombatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf. missile.

  Brown: Of Mexican descent; from the skin color, which ranges from brown to ivory. Not to be confused with Black, Red, White, or Yellow.

  Brutality: Any action taken by a policeman. Cf. pig.

  Chauvinism: Belief of any Western White man that there is anything to be said for his country, civilization, race, sex, or self. Chauvinist: Any such man; hence, by extension, a fascist of any nationality, race, or sex.

  Colonialist: Anyone who believes that any European- or North American-descended person has any right to remain in any territory outside Europe or North America where his an­cestors happened to settle, unless these were Russian. Cf. native.