'No. The book is a subsidiary of the man.'
He left the statement unremarked. 'Well, I'm sure Lucy did mention a publicity tour, but I can't remember when or how. I'm sorry, Judith. I think I must be very tired. Not keeping track of things. It's been hard these last few weeks, writing with Lucy and treating patients on my usual schedule. I'm a bit short on sleep.'
'You've got the whole summer to rest up in,' she said brightly. 'Atticus will gear itself to publish in the autumn, just before mass exodus begins and just as mass depression sets in. That's the logical moment to release this book. The people will be ready for it. Ripe.'
'Yes… Mmmm… Thanks for the words of wisdom, Judith, I like to be filled in. And it sounds as if I'd better rest up all summer.'
Clearly he was torn; avid to make personal contact with vast numbers of the populace, yet apprehensive about the vehicle he would be riding and the antics of his chauffeur, Judith Carriol. God, but it was going to be hard dealing with him! Out of touch with so much of the outside world because he didn't watch television and he didn't listen to the radio and he only read the New York Times and the Washington Post and good or professional books. Yet at one and the same time, he was more aware of what ailed the populace than any of the possible sources of information he might have pursued.
Under her eyelids she watched him closely. There was something new and odd about him, and it gnawed at the roots of her certainty. A fragility? A fading? Was his self eroding? Garbage! she assured herself. Imagination. Quite a logical combination of her own insecurity and his strenuous spring of writing and working. He was not a frail man, he was a sensitive one. He did not lack strength, he lacked egocentric toughness. And above all he was a man capable of rising to the occasion when he felt he was needed, capable under those circumstances of giving everything he had and more besides.
In the end she stayed to dinner, aware (and mildly amused by it) that the younger women of Joshua Christian's household did not regard her so suspiciously this evening as they had on the day she had first met them. Whatever Mary and Martha and Miriam had sensed in her and her relationship with their beloved brother apparently was no longer felt to be a threat. What had they sensed? What had everyone sensed that she had not? Or he had not, for that matter? How odd, when their contacts with each other had in actual fact been devoid of personal complications. Dr Carriol left for her helicopter and Washington with the conundrum unanswered.
'So Judith finished filling in the picture for me of what is going to happen after the book is released,' Dr Christian said to his family that night in the living room.
'Well, I presume you'll be asked to do some kind of publicity tour?' asked Andrew, who had made it his business to become better informed about the mechanics of publishing since his brother's venture into literature. He had also taken to watching a few television programmes and switching on the radio in his office when he had no patients and no really concentrated work to do.
'Yes. Which pleases me in one way and is likely to be an embarrassment in others. I've given all of you so much extra work to do this spring, and now it seems I'll have to take more time off in the autumn.'
'No sweat,' said Andrew, smiling.
Mama was very happy. Dearest Joshua was back in the bosom of his family after a two-month mental absence. How nice to see him sitting placidly sipping his cognac along with his coffee, instead of jumping up from the table with his last mouthful of food still unswallowed. She didn't even feel an urge to sting him into a diatribe.
'Do you think you'd like me to come along with you?' asked Mary, yearning to go with him. So many years in this little moribund city of Holloman when there was so much to see outside it! Behind her passivity and her knowledge that she was neither so bright as Joshua nor so beautiful as Mama nor so necessary as James and Andrew and Miriam and Martha, a restless and bitter and frustrated spirit champed; alone among the Christians, Mary had an urge to travel, to see new places, experience new things. But being by nature a passive one, she couldn't come out and say what she wanted. She just lived her sterile life waiting for someone in her family to see it without being told; what she couldn't understand was that her very neutrality and passivity made her invisible to all the rest, that she hid her longings too well, and so no one ever dreamed they existed.
Dr Christian smiled at her, shook his head emphatically. 'No, of course I don't! I'll be fine on my own.'
Mary said no more, nor let her feelings show.
'Will you be gone long?' asked the Mouse, looking down at her feet.
For her, so small and sweet and grey, he always had a special tenderness; so he gave her that wonderful special smile as he said gently, 'I don't imagine so, dear Mouse. One or two weeks should do it'
Her eyes had lifted to drink in this benediction, eyes huge and wistful, teary-bright.
Andrew got to his feet immediately, yawning. 'I'm tired! I think I'll go to bed, if you'll excuse me.'
James and Miriam rose too, glad someone else had suggested bed. Theirs was a good marriage, chiefly because it had brought an unexpected joy in its wake: wrapped in its sanctity they had discovered the deliciousness of skin against skin, body against body. And summer was their time, when they would sport in their bed for hours untrammelled by nightclothes and bedclothes. Perhaps intellectually Miriam preferred Joshua to James, but certainly in no other way imaginable.
'Lazy!' said Joshua, getting to his feet. 'I'm going for a walk. Anyone else feel like it?'
Mama jumped up at once and rushed off to find some comfortable shoes, while the Mouse said in her shy little voice that she really ought to go with Andrew.
'Nonsense!' said Joshua. 'Come with us. Mary?'
'No thanks. I'll clear up the kitchen.'
For several seconds longer Martha dithered, her eyes travelling between Joshua and Mary, dismayed, apprehensive. 'I won't come, Joshua,' she said in the end. 'I'll give Mary a hand and then I'd better go to bed.'
Mary looked at Martha a little grimly, then stretched out her hand and yanked the youngest member of the Christian family from her chair. It was not a gracious gesture, but as Mary's strong fingers closed over her own, Martha as always felt that hand plucking her from a sea of doubt and carrying her to safety.
'Thank you,' she said as they reached the haven of the kitchen. 'I never do know how to get out of difficult situations. And I'm sure Mama will want Joshua to herself.'
'You're dead right,' said Mary. She lifted her hand again, this time to tuck back behind one ear an erring strand of fine dun hair. So like a mouse's coat! 'My poor little Mouse,' she said. 'But cheer up. You're not the only one who's trapped.'
Mama and Joshua paced steadily through the still and tranquil night, arms linked, a feat he managed in spite of the difference in their heights by cuddling his mother's shoulder rather than her elbow.
'I'm glad Lucy's gone and you're free of the book,' was her opening gambit.
'So am I, by God!' he said with great feeling.
'Are you happy, Joshua?'
When anyone else asked him that question he fenced, but Mama and he had been joint heads of the family for nearly thirty years, and on his side the bond between them was a mature one.
'Yes and no,' he said. 'I can see so many possibilities opening up, opportunities I really do welcome. That makes me happy. And yet I can also see problems. I'm a bit afraid, I suppose. Therefore I'm unhappy.'
It will work itself out.'
'Nothing surer!'
'It's what you've always wanted to do. Oh, not write a book and become a famous man! I mean get yourself into a position where you can help a great many people. Judith is an amazing woman, you know. I would never have thought of a book, not knowing your difficulties with the written word.'
'Nor would I.' He guided her across Route 78 and into the park. Enormous moths bumbled around the infrequent lights, the leafy trees sighed in a faint breeze, some unknown flower's perfume trailed elusively around the nostrils, and everywhere the inhabita
nts of Holloman walked the short summer night of the short summer. 'You know, Mama,' he went on, 'I think that's what frightens me most of all. This afternoon I found myself thinking of Judith as the genie of my own personal Aladdin's lamp. I wish, and out she pops with all the answers.'
'No! How could that be? It was chance, Joshua. If you hadn't gone to Hartford to sit in on that Marcus trial, you and she would never have met. But you did go to Hartford, and you did meet her. She's terribly important, isn't she?'
'Oh, yes.'
'Well, there you are! She sees and knows so much we couldn't, living here in Holloman as we do. And she must know all the right people.' 'Indeed she does.' 'So doesn't it make sense?'
'It should. But it doesn't. There's something, Mama! I voice a wish, and she makes it come true.'
'Then next time you see her, if that's before I do, would you ask her to grant me just one wish?'
He stopped beneath a light to look down at her. 'You? What do you want you can't have?'
Her beautiful face laughed up at him, more beautiful because it laughed. 'I want you and Judith.'
'No good, Mama,' he said, starting to walk again. 'I respect her. Sometimes I even like her. But I couldn't love her. You see, she doesn't need love.'
'I don't agree with you at all,' said Mama stoutly. 'Some people hide their feelings very well. She's like that. I don't know why. All I do know is that she's the right woman for you.'
'Oh, look, Mama! A concert on the lake!' And he began to walk faster down the hill towards the ornamental lake, where four musicians on a moored pontoon were playing Mozart.
Mama gave up. There was no competing with Mozart.
7
Summer swelled up on its own hot air, lush and oh so languorous, more ephemeral in these days when people were perpetually aware of its brevity and mortality, but no less hot, hot, hot; how could a place so arctically cold in winter be so tropically hot and humid in summer? But ice ages aside, that was a question Americans of the northern states had been asking themselves ever since the seventeenth century. The only real difference between a summer of the second millennium and one of the third millennium was its duration, shorter now by about four weeks.
In the evacuee cities of the north and midwest, summer had to be ignored while those who had made the arduous trek up from the south during the first days of April toiled to make up for their enforced winter idleness. And following an annual pattern apparent for some years now, the spring of 2032 saw fewer people than ever before return north, while more people than ever before relocated permanently in some
Band A or Band B town south of the Mason-Dixon line, or west and south of the Canadian-Arkansas River.
When relocation had begun over twenty years earlier, no one who still had a job in the north wanted permanent relocation; but that state of affairs was now reversed, the list of applicants for permanent relocation grew ever longer, while a harassed government fell ever further behind in the number of permanent places it could offer potential relocatees. Of course there were many who spurned federal assistance in relocating, just sold what they could in the north and bought afresh in the south. But because property in the north and midwest was fetching next to nothing, there were many indeed who could not relocate permanently until they received official help. Probably about the same number of new fortunes were made as old ones were lost; builders, housing developers and land speculators waxed fat while small northern businessmen and professionals waned lean. The warmest of the southern states fought desperate battles to curb the growth of trailer parks and shantytowns, dinning their woes in Washington's left ear while the skeletal remains of the northernmost states dinned their woes in Washington's right ear. All of which made the one-child family a crucial factor in the struggle to equilibrate. Oddly enough, many more people were prepared to defy the government in order to stay in the south all year round than defied the one-child family edict.
Excluding the area that once had housed the black and Hispanic communities, things came to life in Holloman after April Fool's Day. There were still more unoccupied houses by far than tenanted ones, but every block saw one or two dwellings with winter boards taken down and drapes flying proud as flags out of open windows. The streets had pedestrians, more of the suburban shopping malls opened, the frequency and number of buses increased, the few industries not permanently removed kept up production seven days a week. Winter grime was scrubbed and blown off everything, dilapidation lessened, the cinemas went back into business, so did a number of restaurants and diners and bars and ice cream stands. The roadways suddenly littered a modest number of solar-battery-powered electric carts that ambled quiet as the grave and slow as a snail on pleasurable errands. Those in a hurry or going to and from work or school caught buses and trolley cars, those going to the market or the park or the doctor crept there and back by electric cart. And a lot walked, of choice. Mentally the people might have been depressed and apathetic, but physically they had never been fitter.
However, by the end of September what little euphoria had trembled in the summer air above Holloman was dwindling away again. Two months before relocation would be completed, yet already the warmth was gone from the sun. Two months in which to pack away things not wanted down south and wind up affairs and start the telephoning and queueing to see how and when the winter exodus would be conducted. While the glorious Indian summer that now came in September instead of in October worked its hot-day cold-night witchery on the trees and they turned red, yellow, orange, copper, amber, purple, Holloman thought only of how cold the nights were getting and shut out the pageant of the autumn by boarding up its windows and doors. A dumb enduring hideously patient sadness came down with the first fog, and people began to tell each other how glad they would be to quit the place, preferably for good. Who wanted or needed this circus living, forever packing up and moving on? Who wanted living at all? The suicide rate commenced its soaring annual escalation, the acute psychiatric units at Chubb-Holloman Hospital and Holloman Catholic Hospital filled to overflowing, and the Christian Clinic was obliged to turn patients away.
The most cheering news to come out of Washington was that from the year 2033 onward, relocation of a temporary nature would be more realistic in terms of the weather; six months only in the north, from the beginning of May to the end of October, and six months in the south instead of four. Not that everyone arrived on the same day, anyway; such a massive movement of people took several weeks, though it was done with extreme efficiency given the conservation of oil, coal and wood, and with a minimum of red tape. No country in the world could do so much so quickly as the United States of America in the frame of mind to do. But this was far from cheering news to people like Mayor d'Este of Detroit; he read it correctly as the beginning of the end of winter relocation, and therefore as the death knell of the northern and midwestern cities. Places on the west coast like Vancouver and Seattle and Portland would last longer, being warmer, but eventually they too would perish. Those who insisted upon remaining in the doomed cities all through the depths of winter after winter relocation was phased out altogether (the estimate given for this was another ten years) would not be forcibly removed, any more than women who insisted upon defying the one-child family were forcibly aborted, or sterilized. Simply, they would receive no aid, no tax benefits, and no welfare.
'I don't want to go south!' cried Mama when the family gathered in the living room to discuss this bolt from the Washington blue.
'Nor do I,' said Dr Christian soberly. He sighed. 'But Mama, we will have to. It's inevitable. Chubb has set itself a target for relocation, starting next year and finishing by 2040. Margaret Kelly phoned me today to tell me. She's pregnant, incidentally.'
Andrew shrugged. 'Well, if Chubb goes, it's the end of Holloman for sure. Where?'
Dr Christian laughed silently. 'Certainly not to any of those brash late entrants into the Union! They've purchased land outside Charleston, quite a swag of it.'
'Well, we've got a while y
et to think about where we'll go,' said James. 'Oh, Josh! Somehow when things happen you adjust, and once you've adjusted there's a sense of well-being again. You can tell yourself it's a false sense until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't cushion the shock when the next upheaval comes, does it?'
'No.'
'What provoked this decision?' asked Miriam.
'I imagine the birthrate and the population have fallen more rapidly than anyone expected,' said Dr Christian. 'Or — who knows? Maybe my friend Dr Chasen and his computer have figured that now's the time to cut our losses with a vengeance. The whole phenomenon of relocation, if you'll permit me to call it a phenomenon, has had to be played by ear right along. It's never happened before, unless you can include the mass migrations of peoples out of central Asia. But the last of those occurred over a thousand years ago. One thing for sure. This isn't an irresponsible decision. So I guess we move.'
'Our beautiful clinic!' said Miriam.
Mama was weeping. 'I don't want to go, I don't want to go! Oh, please, Joshua, can't we stay? We're not poor, we can survive!'
He plucked a handkerchief from his pocket, passed it to James, who passed it to Andrew, who leaned over and took his mother's face in one hand and dried it with the other.
'Mama,' Dr Christian said patiently, 'we elected to stay in Holloman because we felt it was those who didn't go south who would need us the most, and the people who relocated for the winter only too. But now we have to go south, because I imagine it will worsen there during the first few years of this new phase. We go where we're needed, that's the real reason why our clinic exists.'
Mama shrank and shivered. 'It's going to be some shanty city in Texas, isn't it?'
'I don't know yet. Perhaps this publicity tour in November will give me the answer, if they send me to enough places. It's a good time to start looking, anyway.'
Andrew put a kiss on each of Mama's eyelids, and smiled into her face with her own smile. 'Come on, Mama, no more tears and chin up!'
A Creed for the Third Millennium Page 19