by Hugh Hood
Supposing that they had survived the initial blast, as seemed to be the case; there was still the fallout to consider. The likelihood, he thought (he was beginning to be able to think) was that they were already being eaten up by radiation and would soon die of monstrous cancers, or plain, simple leukemia, or rottenness of the cortex. It was miraculous that they had lived through the first shock; they could hardly hope that their luck would hold through the later dangers. He thought that the baby might not have been infected so far, shielded as she was, as he began to wonder how she might be helped to evade death from radiation in the next few days. Let her live a week, he thought, and she may go on living into the next generation, if there is one.
Nothing would be the same in the next generation; there would be few people and fewer laws, the national boundaries would have perished — there would be a new world to invent. Somehow the child must be preserved for that, even if their own lives were to be forfeited immediately. He felt perfectly healthy so far, untouched by any creeping sickness as he lay there, forcing himself and the lives beneath him deeper into their burrow. He began to make plans; there was nothing else for him to do just then.
The noise of the winds had become regular now and the green glow had subsided; the earth was still and they were still together and in the same place, in their cellar, in their home. He thought of his books, his chequebook, his phonograph records, his wife’s household appliances. They were gone, of course, which didn’t matter. What mattered was that the way they had lived was gone, the whole texture of their habits. The city would be totally uninhabitable. If they were to survive longer, they must get out of the city at once. They would have to decide immediately when they should try to leave the city, and they must keep themselves alive until that time.
“What time is it?” gasped his wife from below him in a tone pitched in almost her normal voice. He was relieved to hear her speak in the commonplace, familiar tone; he had been afraid that hysteria and shock would destroy their personalities all at once. So far they had held together. Later on, when the loss of their whole world sank in, when they appreciated the full extent of their losses, they would run the risk of insanity or, at least, extreme neurotic disturbance. But right now they could converse, calculate, and wait for the threat of madness to appear days, or years, later.
He looked at his watch. “Eight-thirty,” he said. Everything had ended in three-and-a-half hours. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said, “I don’t feel any pain and the baby’s fine. She’s warm and she doesn’t seem frightened.”
He tried to move his legs and was relieved to see that they answered the nervous impulse. He lifted his head fearfully and twisted it around to see behind him. His legs were buried under a pile of loose brick and rubble which grew smaller toward his thighs; his torso was quite uncovered. “I’m all right,” he said, beginning to work his legs free; they were undoubtedly badly bruised, but they didn’t seem to be crushed or broken; at the worst he might have torn muscles or a bad sprain. He had to be very careful, he reasoned, as he worked at his legs. He might dislodge something and bring the remnant of the house down around them. Very, very slowly he lifted his torso by doing a push-up with his arms. His wife slid out from underneath, pushing the baby in front of her. When she was free she laid the child gently to one side, whispering to her and promising her food. She crawled around to her husband’s side and began to push the bricks off his legs.
“Be careful,” he whispered. “Take them as they come. Don’t be in too much of a hurry.”
She nodded, picking out the bricks gingerly, but as fast as she could. Soon he was able to roll over on his back and sit up. By a quarter to ten he was free and they took time to eat and drink. The three of them sat together in a cramped, narrow space under the cellar beams, perhaps six feet high and six or seven feet square. They were getting air from somewhere although it might be deadly air, and there was no smell of gas. He had been afraid that they might be suffocated in their shelter.
“Do you suppose the food’s contaminated?” she asked.
“What if it is?” he said. “So are we, just as much as the food. There’s nothing to do but risk it. Only be careful what you give the baby.”
“How can I tell?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Say a prayer and trust in God.” He found the flashlight, which had rolled into a corner, and tried it. It worked very well.
“What are we going to do? We can’t stay here.”
“I don’t even know for sure that we can get out,” he said, “but we’ll try. There should be a window just above us that leads to a crawl-space under the patio. That’s one of the reasons why I told you to come here. In any case we’d be wise to stay here for a few hours until the very worst of the fallout is down.”
“What’ll we do when we get out?”
“Try to get out of town. Get our outer clothes off, get them all off for that matter, and scrub ourselves with water. Maybe we can get to the river.”
“Why don’t you try the window right now so we can tell whether we can get out?”
“I will as soon as I’ve finished eating and had a rest. My legs are very sore.”
He could hear her voice soften. “Take your time,” she said.
When he felt rested, he stood up. He could almost stand erect and with the flashlight was able to find the window quickly. It was level with his face. He piled loose bricks against the wall below it and climbed up on them until the window was level with his chest. Knocking out the screen with the butt of the flashlight, he put his head through and then flashed the light around; there were no obstructions that he could see, and he couldn’t smell anything noxious. The patio, being a flat, level space, had evidently been swept clean by the blast without being flattened. They could crawl out of the cellar under the patio, he realized, and then kick a hole in the lath and stucco which skirted it.
He stepped down from the pile of brick and told his wife that they would be able to get out whenever they wished, that the crawl space was clear.
“What time is it?”
“Half-past twelve.”
“Should we try it now?”
“I think so,” he said. “At first I thought we ought to stay here for a day or two, but now I think we ought to try and get out from under the fallout. We may have to walk a couple of hundred miles.”
“We can do it,” she said and he felt glad. She had always been able to look unpleasant issues in the face.
He helped her through the cellar window and handed up the baby, who clucked and chuckled when he spoke to her. He pushed the carton of food and the bucket of water after them. Then he climbed up and they inched forward under the patio.
“I hear a motor,” said his wife suddenly.
He listened and heard it too.
“Looking for survivors,” he said eagerly. “Probably the Army or Civil Defense. Come on.”
He swung himself around on his hips and back and kicked out with both feet at the lath and stucco. Three or four kicks did it. His wife went first, inching the baby through the hole. He crawled after her into the daylight; it looked like any other day except that the city was leveled. The sky and the light were the same; everything else was gone. They sat up, muddy, scratched, nervously exhausted, in a ruined flower bed. Not fifty feet away stood an olive-drab truck, the motor running loudly. Men shouted to them.
“Come on, you!” shouted the men in the truck. “Get going!” They stood and ran raggedly to the cab, she holding the child and he their remaining food and water. In the cab was a canvas-sheeted, goggled driver, peering at them through huge eyes. “Get in the back,” he ordered. “We’ve got to get out right away. Too hot.” They climbed into the truck and it began to move instantly.
“Army Survival Unit,” said a goggled and hooded man in the back of the truck. “Throw away that food and water; it’s dan
gerous. Get your outer clothing off quick. Throw it out!” They obeyed him without thinking, stripping off their loose outer clothes and dropping them out of the truck.
“You’re the only ones we’ve found in a hundred city blocks,” said the soldier. “Did you know the war’s over? There’s a truce.”
“Who won?”
“Over in half an hour,” he said, “and nobody won.”
“What are you going to do with us?”
“Drop you at a check-out point forty miles from here. Give you the scrub-down treatment, wash off the fallout. Medical check for radiation sickness. Clean clothes. Then we send you on your way to a refugee station.”
“How many died?”
“Everybody in the area. Almost no exceptions. You’re a statistic, that’s what you are. Must have been a fluke of the blast.”
“Will we live?”
“Sure you will. You’re living now, aren’t you?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Sure you’ll live! Maybe not too long. But everybody else is dead! And you’ll be taken care of.” He fell silent.
They looked at each other, determined to live as long as they could. The wife cuddled the child close against her thin silk blouse. For a long time they jolted along over rocks and broken pavement without speaking. When the pavement smoothed out the husband knew that they must be out of the disaster area. In a few more minutes they were out of immediate danger; they had reached the checkout point. It was a quarter to three in the afternoon.
“Out you get,” said the soldier. “We’ve got to go back.” They climbed out of the truck and he handed down the baby. “You’re all right now,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Goodbye,” they said.
The truck turned about and drove away and they turned silently, hand in hand, and walked toward the medical tents. They were the seventh, eighth, and ninth living persons to be brought there after the sirens.
He Just Adores Her!
Right after that chilling fall of snow the week before Christmas, some young ladies from Miss Harker’s School arranged a funny little reunion at The Cow Barn on Route 4 outside Farmington, nothing formally sanctioned by Miss Harker herself, she having been dead these many years, just a small party for a dozen baby graduates in their earliest twenties, who still wanted to see one another. The occasion was casual, even vulgar, a corner of the public dining room with three tables under a dim light, indifferent food and bad cocktails and an insane waiter, but as Betsy Warren remarked they had gotten it up themselves without interference from the older generation — no teachers, no parents, and no husbands or suitors either — and they were happy, perhaps unknowingly, to be thoroughly vulgar in public; they laughed merrily and sang songs and it was a gay evening.
Elizabeth Lovelace led the singing, standing with a corner of the table sticking into her neat and lovely stomach, gently waving her cocktail glass, slopping little waves of gin against the rim and never spilling a drop. She had played that way as a child, with her bowl of oatmeal and a big spoon. In the dark light of the dining room with her eyes fixed intently on the liquid in her glass, her gentle pipe of a singing voice spinning out a Tom Lehrer number, she looked, as children do, so extraordinarily happy and good that staid older diners gazed at her and whispered their pleasure.
At Miss Harker’s, Elizabeth had been the object of many friendly small jokes because of her figure, which was exactly a model size, a perfect eight. Sometimes, even after her marriage, the girls referred to her in those terms, laughing as they paid her the sisterly compliment.
“And this is Elizabeth Lovelace, Harry. She’s a perfect eight.”
And Harry would stare at her rapturously, and jokingly exclaim: “Loveless?”
She always laughed at that. “It’s spelled L-o-v-e-l-a-c-e,” and the boy would laugh with her, and then she’d say proudly, “Mrs. Lawrence Lovelace. Larry’s brother was quarterback of the Harvard freshmen this year, until he broke his arm.” And the boy’s face would fall slightly as he turned away.
At the little reunion Elizabeth was wearing the latest consequence of her figure, a dark pink wool afternoon dress from Scaasi which her mother had wangled for her. It had been made for the famous (the notorious) Lenny Faber to wear at a private showing, and had never been sold. Because only someone with Liz’s figure might wear the dress, her mother had snatched it out of the workroom for her birthday, for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.
She therefore looked, and knew she looked, physically better than anyone else in the room, which was usual, but she also looked better clothed, which was unusual because she and Larry had no money, and neither did her mother who was on a fixed alimony payment from the estate, nor her non-earning bum of a father, nor Larry’s parents. Mr. Lovelace was an associate professor of sociology at Wesleyan and earned the appropriate salary.
She and Larry were constantly in an equivocal position; they had probably gotten married two or three years too early. Neither of them had completed a degree. Elizabeth had had one year at Sarah Lawrence and poor Larry had had to go to Syracuse for a variety of interesting reasons, mostly connected with a two-year artistic trip to Mexico, which he had unwisely taken at seventeen. Now they were a year married, with expensive inclinations and small means of gratifying them. It was therefore with a sense of triumph, even joy, that Elizabeth stood up before her friends and led them in song. She knew perfectly well that they sometimes felt sorry for her and discussed her unfortunate circumstances; but nobody at the party looked like her.
It was wonderful how the dress supported her and gave her confidence; it had a lovely smooth-finished weave and fell in a fluid line. She had taken a chance and worn no girdle, and the effect was perfect, one of understated opulence, so she laughed and joked and sang and had a marvellous time. She drank six cocktails made of gin and something else, she wasn’t sure what, an action which was very far outside her normal range of behaviour. When it was time to leave she stood beside her car for twenty minutes before she felt confident enough to drive.
Her car was a monstrous old convertible with holes in the top which she kept around because it was essential to her job. She was selling memberships in a home-freezer-and-food plan for a Hartford company and sometimes had to drive a couple of hundred miles in a single day. She earned between three and four thousand a year, most of which she had put into her decor. She had fixed up that old apartment until it was stunning and unrecognizable in its transformation. Now she was composing a portfolio of arty angle-shots which she would send around, perhaps to Lord and Taylor in West Hartford, perhaps to some of the smaller, newer, New York decorators, to see if she could arrange an apprenticeship. She felt that she had ideas of her own which would in time be valuable.
When her head stopped expanding and contracting in the cold night air, she climbed carefully into the car, started the engine and waited for it to warm up; she grew cold and approximately sober sitting there. All at once she shivered violently and she began to think that she might get chilled, sitting in the cold, so she worked her way out of the parking lot, climbed the hill up Route 4, going out of Farmington, and headed home into the darkness. The car’s large engine soon began to heat the interior. It grew warm and warmer still, and she felt less chilled and feverish and more comfortable. She stared fixedly along the highway into the darkness, alternately buoyed up and excited, and then cooled and depressed, by the evening. Halfway home, the highway narrowed between the snowbanks and slid into a long avenue of trees, hardly lighted, and she felt herself to be burrowing comfortably into a long serpentine tunnel. She let herself slide and nod and it grew very quiet in the car, and then the road widened shockingly and the lights came back and she was home to Hartford, sitting up with a start. Though she often let herself drowse at the wheel, she had never so far had an accident. She slammed the car’s nose into a snowbank that served as her parking space and scuttled into the building. In five
minutes she was sound asleep in her slip, in their enormous bed that almost filled the small bedroom. On the back of the closet door, swinging gently to and fro on the hanger, her lovely dress whispered to her. The rustling, and the “ting … ting … ting” of the hanger, were the last sounds she recognized.
The drug house for which Larry travelled handled two major lines, a headache tablet and an ointment for hemorrhoids, and the name of the second item never sullied Elizabeth’s lips, she refused to admit its existence, always referring to the company by its imposing name. Fairbanks Laboratories paid Larry seventy-five hundred a year to cover a southern New England sub-territory, providing him with a car and regular sales assistance from the home office. They had told him not to bother making calls during the week before Christmas; by that time druggists were cutting inventory to meet the January slump. He took the week off reluctantly because the enforced vacation would cut sharply into his December earnings. When he got a chance to clerk in a bookstore during the rush, he grabbed it and picked up an unforeseen hundred bucks.
He found that he much preferred the retail book trade to travelling in hemorrhoids, and the owner of the store told him that he was the quickest and most adaptable assistant he’d ever had. At the end of the week he told Larry that he’d be glad to take him on full time, but that he couldn’t pay an adequate salary. The best that the bookstore could manage during the regular season was eighty-five a week, with the prospect of small raises if the business flourished.
Naturally Larry couldn’t take a job like that; he’d lose his car and about thirty-five hundred a year, and Elizabeth wouldn’t hear of it. As things were, she said, they were barely keeping their heads above water on the ten thousand they made between them. How could they possibly manage on that much less? He had to concede that she was perfectly right — there was nothing to be done about it. But he enjoyed the work so much! He could have handled the ordering and billing, and the windows, and freed the owner to cultivate personal contacts in the local market.
