Tomorrow!

by Philip Wylie

  “That’s really not up to your usual acid rejoinder, dear.”

  “No.” She gazed at him, not happily. “Look, Kit. I was one more of the college girls back then who thought you were a young female’s dream, answered prayer—all that.”

  “But I am!” His bright smile gleamed, his amused laugh sounded.

  “Oh, sure. E very young girl’s—”

  “Just a sign of broad taste.” He chortled. “And the curse of wealth. Let me ask you something.”

  “All right.”

  “Is your health good?”

  “Why? Of course it is.”

  “Grandparents long-lived? Have many children?”

  “Just what?”

  He grinned. “Tell me.”

  “One had five and Dad’s family has four and they’re all living. Why?”

  He leaned back, blew smoke. “Mother is getting very insistent these days. You know. The family line must be continued. I must find somebody steady, intelligent, healthy, good family, sound stock—you’d really fit the whole catalogue.”

  “Did she say anything about the girl being willing?”

  “Nope. Mother rarely does. Just that she be found by me. The presumption is that the rest can be managed. By her, I suppose, if not by me.” He sighed ever so slightly and Nora thought it was not an especially interesting change of mood from his mirth. “Seeing you this P.M. at the handkerchief counter did more than bring back memories, Lenore. It brought to mind Mother’s bill of particulars.”

  “You didn’t have to pick up a display umbrella and open it over me and kiss me, in front of all those shoppers and clerks!”

  Upon hearing that news, Nora peered at Kit with the first sign of any reaction save disdain.

  “Ah, but I did!” he said. “Only kiss I ever got with no fear of reprisal. You didn’t dare—

  in the store.”

  “Not true.” He took her hand. “That’s what I mean, Lenore. Remember?”

  “I remember our last date. I wished I had a Colt automatic.”

  “I’ll send you one, and then phone you for a new date.”

  Lenore nodded. “I really have to go.” She looked across toward the Conner house where cars were parked.

  “What do you do in Civil Defense?”

  “Radiation safety.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You know. Monitoring. Seeing if it’s safe to go in places.”

  “That’s my girl!” Kit Sloan was amused again. “Checking with instruments, for safety!

  All right. I’ll take a chance. Phone you tomorrow.”

  She thought about it and nodded. They got up.

  Kit grabbed her and gave her a long and large kiss. Nora edged up a little higher on her knees to evaluate it. You could tell, she felt, that Lenore wasn’t particularly keen about the kiss.

  But it went on for so long that Lenore seemed to weaken a little. People do, Nora had observed.

  Anyhow, Lenore sagged and when he let her go she just looked at him with a very odd expression and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He said, “See you!” and ran away. . .

  . Then his car started. Lenore just sat down.

  By and large, Nora had nothing against the beautiful girl next door. In fact, Nora thought, she was one of the best types of grown-up people. She paid some attention to others. She could tell when a person was discouraged or being put upon and, if she wasn’t busy (the curse of maturity), she would do something about it. Buy you a sundae, maybe, or even take you to the movies. Right now, for instance, Lenore was on Nora’s side against Nora’s mother on the matter of braids. Lenore argued, sensibly, that braids were a bother to kids and hair would grow back when you wanted it. On the other hand, this business in the summerhouse, Nora felt, was definitely on the two-timing side. Lenore was Charles Conner’s girl and always had been and they would be married someday and, in Nora’s opinion, Lenore was about as good as her brother could be expected to do—though she had occasionally wondered why neither Charles nor Ted ever expressed any interest in exotic types. Nora thought if she were a man she would probably marry either a Polynesian or a gypsy, and there was some idea in her mind of adding Latin-American women, in general, to the list.

  Letting herself be kissed limp by this Kit-Whoever was not Fair in Love. But Nora thought it might be Exotic. The man had a handsome-stranger look, though she had apparently known him for umpteen years. Nora felt she herself would like, someday, the type who put open umbrellas over you in stores and began osculation without caring about onlookers. She didn’t believe Charles would do a thing like that.

  All in all, she decided to reserve judgment. A woman, she thought, who was soon going to settle down and marry her brother certainly had a right to a few harmless flirtations. Without them, according to Nora’s information from books, taken with her observation of her older brother, a handsome woman like Lenore would probably soon tum into a desiccated shrew with dishpan hands. But such things, Nora realized, shouldn’t go too far.

  She wondered what would happen if they did, and it was quite an exciting thing to wonder about.

  She was sitting in the grass, merely wondering, when Lenore lighted another cigarette and drifted away into the house. Nora kept trying to visualize the extremities involved in going

  “too far”—trying to associate the imaginary behavior of Lenore with the rather nebulously described activities of the ladies in Sin on Seven Streets, until Queenie made his pounce at the bird, and missed.

  The bird merely gave a little squeak and flew away.

  Queenie sat down and groomed his tail, glancing once at Nora with the look of a cat who was fooling anyhow and merely enjoyed scaring hell out of birds. Nora went home. She stopped at the dining-room doors, but they were drawn together. She listened to voices. “Henry, you’re the leader here! I say we need help from Washington and you ought to phone.”

  “I say, let’s start a campaign to boycott all advertisers in the Transcript. We’ve given years, here, to this organization. It’s intended to save Green Prairie in case of an emergency. We cannot allow a newspaper to ridicule us, censure, blame. . . !”

  Newspapers, Nora thought loftily, going away, do what they please.

  She went upstairs slowly. Music drifted from Ted’s radio in the attic. The day, all of it, had blanked from Nora’s mind, save for one thing: her braids. She felt she was a neglected child and would have to take care of herself. She went to her mother’s sewing basket, found the big shears, and cut off both braids, hastily lest she change her mind.

  They did not cut easily. She had to hack them off, one strand at a time. When she finished—when she held in her two hands the light-brown pigtails, still beribboned at the ends, tinged here and there with a slightly greenish cast from their contact with grubby hands—an expression of purest delight set Nora’s light-blue eyes dancing. Site had done it. They were done for. She had done it by herself, because it was her hair and it was unbearable, and nobody else but herself cared particularly what happened to her. She ran skipping to see the effect in the long mirror in her mother’s room.

  And when she saw, she was devastated. In her mind’s eye, she had overlooked the present phase—the ragged, wrong-length hacked locks that were not a recognizable bob of any kind but merely the plain evidence of devastation. A long, low wail escaped Nora and rose to a penetrating wail of dismay.

  Downstairs, Henry sat with some thirty men and women, block wardens, section heads, neighbors, old friends, most of them his own age, many of them people with whom he’d gone through grammar and high school in Green Prairie. They were angry, intent people, who felt themselves grossly abused and made ridiculous before their own community. Now, as they talked, they valiantly uttered what they had thitherto felt only a little, or fractionally, or not at all: that their work in Civil Defense was of critical importance because of its purpose.

  Most of the men were employed in good positions, like Henry Conner; most of the women were hous
ewives. But Ed Pratt, sitting in a kitchen chair (hastily transported for the meeting by Ted) with his hat still on the back of his head and a toothpick in his teeth, was a house painter. Joe Dennison, his broad backside propped on the window sill and his blue shirt open, owned and ran a bulldozer, contracting privately for its use. Ed and Joe were joint heads of the section’s demolition squad.

  To nearly all these people, to nearly all other Civil Defense volunteers, the destruction of Green Prairie had not actually been thinkable. Good will, community spirit, conformity and a readiness to serve were far more responsible for their efforts than any acceptance of the reality of the booklets sent by the Federal Civil Defense Administration from Washington. Their special organization had long since became a proper enterprise in their town—just as it was an enterprise to scorn, in River City.

  There was one further factor which abetted their association: a private pride in private occupations. Until Civil Defense had been established, each lived in a partial vacuum about the occupation of others. Now, rather surprisingly, everyone had learned much concerning the special skills of the community.

  Thus Whedon Coles, a lean, lank, preoccupied man who was a Baptist deacon and had five daughters, was able to reveal to his fellow citizens that being “new lines superintendent of Sister Cities Consolidated Gas and Electric” meant he knew about what lay beneath the streets of Green Prairie and where the overhead wire mazes ran and what to do about a hundred hitherto bewildering household dilemmas involving leaks and short circuits. Thus it developed that Ed Pratt did not just paint houses; he was able to explain their construction. Joe Dennison could tell all about walls—brick, rock, cement—and what underlay everybody’s lawns and gardens. In the same way, Henry, who had come up through retail hardware to accounting, could show his community how to use all sorts of tools and small machines.

  Civil Defense had been an interesting way to learn unknown things concerning a city, how it is put together, and what makes it run; it had been at the same time that humanly more valuable thing: an opportunity to demonstrate, private skills and special knowledge.

  These people, angry, studying what steps to take to express their wrath and to revenge themselves upon the sudden “disloyalty” of the morning paper, were gradually interrupted, silenced, by a penetrating wail coming from somewhere in the house.

  Beth Conner heard it first and hoped it would subside.

  Henry heard it and went on for a moment: “. . . it’s my feeling that we shouldn’t appeal to Washington. Civil Defense, for better or for worse, is principally a state matter. We therefore ought to handle our problems at home. People always kicking about too much central government, I mean, hadn’t ought to yell for Federal help the minute anybody tramps on their toes. . . .”

  He stopped and smiled at his wife. “It’s Nora,” he said. “I guess you better go up.” He went on, “So I think we ought first to get hold of Coley Borden and ask him what in hell he’s doing. After all, there isn’t one of us here but knows and loves Coley Borden. . . .”

  Beth hurried up the stairs, following the steam-engine wail. She found Nora lying on the double bed, on her back, a braid in each hand.

  For a moment, Beth nearly burst into laughter. She had liked the child’s long hair, but she had been on the verge of conceding to Nora’s demands that it be cut. Insistence that it not be had expressed mere sentiment on Beth’s part. But now, seeing the shaggy locks against the bedspread, hearing the agony in the voice, Beth lost her smile. She did not conceal it; a genuine, deep sympathy banished amusement. She picked up the girl bodily and hugged her. “Nora. You mustn’t cry. You’re just upset because it looks so funny at first. I’ll take you right straight over to Nellie’s. If she’s closed up, we’ll make her open the beauty parlor and we’ll have your hair fixed to look lovely!”

  Hope and wonderment stirred in Nora. She checked her grief. “It’ll never look lovely!”

  “Come along. My! Your dress is a mess. Never mind. . . .”

  Beth beckoned her husband to the front-hall door. “I’ve got to take Nora on an errand,” she said.

  “Is she sick?”

  “No. But—”

  “Ye gods, Beth! This is an important meeting. And somebody has to serve the refreshments afterward.”

  Beth shook her head. “Nora’s important, too! Lenore can serve. She knows where everything is, Henry. Tell her the refrigerator—and the plates are all stacked in the pantry. Oh, she’ll know. . . !”

  5

  Charles Conner, Lieutenant Conner, had always liked his mother’s sister and her family. Perhaps it was the kids he had particularly liked, for the father, Jim Williams, wasn’t actually much: an archetypal nobody, a draftsman, a little gray chap who would get lost in a crowd of two. And Beth’s sister Ruth, though she had been very blonde and very pretty at twenty, was careworn now. No wonder, with so small a salary and six kids.

  Still he boarded the Central Avenue bus reluctantly. He’d been home for a week now, and he’d had only one real date with Lenore. The rest of the time she’d been busy—or had merely dropped in for an hour, or permitted him the same privilege. But there was a tension in the Bailey house he didn’t understand, though the Baileys had always been tense. And there was a kind of—distance—about Lenore: an attitude he’d never before seen in her. It made him feel with increased anxiety that growing up, entering the service, getting an architectural degree and a commission-doing the things men do—was steadily alienating him from the loyalties, affections and intimacies of his youth.

  His mother had repeatedly reminded him he would have to pay a call on his aunt’s family while he was at home on leave. He had at first agreed gladly. But, now that he was on the way, he felt forlorn about the journey and the visit.

  He caught the Central Avenue bus and sat on the back seat while it wormed its way north through the residential area, the business perimeter and the shops and tall buildings of the downtown section. He got out in front of the Olympic Theatre, already alight, with an early queue of moviegoers under its marquee. He walked to the terminal and caught a Ferndale bus.

  It started across the river. On the way over, Charles observed how low the water was, September-shallow, with boulders showing and dry sandbanks. It forked around Swan Island to the west. Late bathers still dotted the waist-deep water. The Fun House was already bright for evening though roller-coaster cars caught the sun as they heaved up on the latticed curves and slowed before plunging. To his right, he saw the river going away east, the ruddy bluffs crossed by other bridges, the warehouses on the Green Prairie side and the disused, rotting docks below.

  Across the way, slums whose colored people lived, and Italians, Greeks, Jews and Poles.

  The lieutenant thought about the river a little, and perhaps only as men can think of rivers, remembering boyhood.

  He remembered fishing in its muddy waters for suckers and catfish, and finally, one day, catching a big bass. He remembered camping with a scoutmaster, out where the airport was now.

  The river then, and at that point, was gouged deeply into the level plains; there were miniature canyons where cottonwoods and willows grew, where deer lived, where tents could be pitched in summer and where in winter an ardent boy could trap a few muskrats, a skunk or two and maybe, once in a lifetime, an ermine or a mink. It was gone now; the mills had killed the fish and the airport was so close to the gorges (which once had been mysterious and remote-seeming) that nobody in his right mind would pitch a tent there. He reflected that no good places were left where boys on rafts could play Lewis and Clark, or Mark Twain steamboating. Subdivisions had replaced those primordial pockets on the river—or factories, or golf courses, or parallel highways, or airports. Something.

  The bus plugged for half a mile, noisily, through a run-down section, competing with trolley cars, trucks, jalopies driven by Negroes and hordes of pedestrians. At last, turning on Willowgrove from Mechanic Street, it made better time and soon covered the distance between the slu
ms and Ferndale, River City’s oldest suburb. Charles walked the short way to his aunt’s house.

  He was sighted in the distance by twelve-year-old Marie. In a moment, four of the young Williamses came down the sidewalk under the catalpas, yelling, he thought affectionately, like Indians. (He found out presently, however, that they were yelling like inhabitants of Venus.) As the youngsters caught his hands and poured forth questions about his family, about the armed forces, about life on other planets as he walked toward the too-small frame house where they lived, Charles lost some of his feeling of forlornness.

  He loved kids. He had liked being one, through all the wonderful epochs of childhood from the day of his first sled to the day his father had given him a fly-casting rod and thence to the magical evening when his dad had said, “Well, Chuck, looks like the ducks might be coming in around dawn tomorrow. Sam Phelps has that sprained ankle, and if you look in the broom closet, you may discover something resembling a brand-new, sixteen-gauge, over-and-under. . .

  .”