Stern nodded when the voice trailed into silence. “One man did it, though. I’m sure of Elliot’s story.”
“Sabotage.” Miles seemed not to have listened to the comment. “Funny how nearly everybody, even then, was under a compulsion to believe what was happening must be the result of Communist action. And even when the USSR began to suffer identical or similar calamities. The Red mania did a lot of damage to our own work. Gave people a whipping boy—and so, a rationalization for that endless notion they could eat their cake, have it, feed it to their kids, and the kids would still have it too.”
Stern smiled. “Human, though.”
The other looked up quickly, his eyes blazing and blue again. “What we used to call human.”
“Right.” Stern accepted the rebuke with a sigh.
The “Valentine’s Day thing,” Miles had said.
Miles’s sister Nora was and had for a good while been Mrs. Willard Page Gulliver. His father was then recovering from his first heart attack at the new Harkness Pavilion on the Hudson, that February night, the thirteenth. Miles had long since forgiven his father, if that is the way to say it, for Miles’s youth-long shame. He had come to understand the old man and admire him for all that was admirable in the man—not the sum of him, but a large part. When I dropped in on my father-in-law I found Miles there. Old Jason was out of his oxygen tent and able to get around his rooms a little.
The door to the suite was half open and as I came along the hospital corridor I heard them laughing. Laughing in a certain way, one that indicated they were busy with, and enjoying, their still new relationship—going over the old hurts and misunderstandings with the happy aim of increasing its intensity and, so, clarifying the old pain to solidify the new regard.
Before I rapped on the door I heard Jason say in his light tenor voice with its numberless modulations that gave his meanings special patterns but patterns the listener, granted some acuity, could clearly discern, “You mean, Miles”—this pattern made of wonder and a more usual ingredient, curiosity—“you felt duty-bound to tell Will about Nora and yourself before they were engaged?”
Miles must have nodded because I heard no sound from him and his father continued as if there had been a signal.
“Strange. Ever since you told me, I’ve been baffled.”
“Rare thing for you, Dad.”
They both chortled briefly.
“Here was I”—the psychiatrist sounded reflective and also still puzzled—“taking the stand I did, aware, too late, how it affected your mother—and completely unaware that my own son and daughter—acting on my apparent advice, call it speculation—Lord!”
“I don’t think we did. That she did when she first—well—or I, then or later. It does happen, you know. And did, before you wrote your first book. Before books existed.”
Jason gave a title with questioning warmth. “The Oedipal Myth and the Human Reality. Lot of errors in it. Some truth. Did your sister want you to tell him? Ask you to?”
“No.”
“You did it for your own sake?”
“The sake of the three of us,” Miles murmured. “Or so I believed, then.”
“A terrible risk—”
“See what you mean. Did, even then. It could have busted them up. And Nora wouldn’t have told him. Not, anyhow, till some exactly right time came, later, years later, maybe.”
“Maybe she already had.”
Faintly, I heard Miles take in a breath. “Maybe,” he said after a pause, “you’re right, at that.”
Jason chuckled. “So, now, I know how Will took it. Which is what I wanted to know, it appears.”
“To hell with all you probing, cheating psychiatrists!” Miles was laughing as he spoke.
“Was I right?” the older man asked after a time. “Am I?”
Miles snorted. “So, add us to your computer punch cards. For us, sure. I think. It cost something—secrecy. Maybe that’s why I eventually brought it up. To shake off some lingering sense of the need to keep it hidden.”
I was about to tiptoe away and make another, louder approach. Eavesdropping isn’t my commonest or even frequent vice. But I’d done it! Stood there listening to them discuss my wife, their daughter, sister. One more, slow, easy yet considered speech held me in spite of my shame. It was Smythe’s.
“I think I better break a confidence, son. You wouldn’t like it any other way. When Nora told me she was in love with Will and wanted to marry him if, as she expected, Will was near to the asking point, she also told me she was doubtful about what she wanted to do if he did—say a tremendous ‘yes’ or a gentle ‘no.’” The older man sniffed—a nervous habit of his later years—not a sniff of superiority but one used for punctuation in a tense moment. “When I asked what her reservation was, she told me.”
“Oh.” Miles thought that over. “Good for Nora!” A quiet ten seconds passed and Miles chuckled again. “The offspring of psychiatrists must all be busybodies, confiders, tellers of needless truths, I guess. The home conditioning.” Both men chuckled.
Then I knocked, and was told to come in, which I did, but before I took off my coat I said, “I’ve been standing outside listening to you two somber oafs exchange guilty knowledge about my wife. I trust candor will haunt you both.”
That fixed up my prickling conscience.
What, exactly, they were discussing may be inferred. If not, no matter. I had married into a tabu-freaking family. And they were people of shatterproof will.
“How’s it out?”
Miles asked that. I said, “Wild.” For the three previous days it had been very cold. Now the blizzard which had been foretold by the weather people was building up as expected.
“Didn’t have Les drive you up, I see.” Smythe was looking at my coat to show how he knew. It was damp with brilliant drops on its collar of synthetic fur. “Les” was the Smythe chauffeur.
“No. Came on the Whistle.”
“Did it?” Smythe asked and both were interested.
“When it got to cruise speed, yes. And how!”
I described my ride from the station at Fifty-ninth and Central Park in the recently opened Whistle. Essentially, it used a tube bored beneath the maze under Manhattan, through solid rock, mainly, and sheathed, where the rock wasn’t solid. “Trains” were air-propelled through the tunnel, air-cushioned so as to touch nothing. The trains were like segments of one long car, jointed to allow for easy curves and level-changes. Each train seated a thousand persons. There were three stops in Manhattan, a dozen more, to date, in the branches that went on to Westchester and out to Connecticut. The trains cruised at seven hundred miles an hour at this time and were expected to reach their design speed of a thousand by summer.
Cheap electro-cabs operated in fleets from the stations, and people either used them or walked, unless they had a license to drive a gasoline-powered vehicle in the region or, of course, owned one of the new electron-battery cars. Many already did though they were still expensive.
“Fun?” Miles asked.
“A little surprising. And they better do something about the squeal. It’s deafening, almost—would be injurious, if you traveled the Whistle regularly, I’d think.”
“I’ll send Arthur back and try it with you. Okay?” Miles said. “Haven’t had time.”
Soon we left Jason and walked away. It was getting on toward time for dinner and Nora and I were to be at the Smythe apartment for cocktails and dinner. When we stepped from the hospital, wind and snow came “like BB shot in a supersonic wind.” Miles said, “Wow! Maybe I shouldn’t have phoned Arthur to go on along!”
Even those words, yelled, were ragged and hard to interpret. I nodded, and we bucked into the white, loud craziness. It would have been a hard walk had not Miles spotted an empty electro-cab and roared, as few others can.
The driver heard it or, perhaps, like most, glancing a second time to make sure the man was as big as he’d thought, he saw the open mouth and my waving arm. We had a slow ride in
heavy traffic that skidded and sluiced into the storm. The dome of the uptown entrance of the Whistle appeared abruptly—and unbelievably near, since it was brilliantly lighted. Soon we were on the elevator, brushing each other.
In a car that halted where we were placed, according to marked squares on the platform, Miles began to talk cheerfully about his father’s recovery. Then the Whistle rose and Miles covered his ears, grinning. We reached speed and began slowing in a minute or two.
There weren’t any cabs at Fifth and Fifty-ninth or in the blocks we pounded through, beyond there. When we reached Park Avenue at Sixtieth the wind was shoveling north to south at hurricane speed. Snow came down as if Antarctica was being dumped. Wind made the building corners and irregularities scream, moan and bellow. Our eyes stung and we couldn’t see anything across Park except, now and then, in some wind-carved cave in the avalanche, a glimmer of lights. Once we realized that we’d lost track of the cross streets and had to wait for a chance to be able to read the sign right over our heads. After we did so, we started counting.
I knew that we were going to be frostbitten if we didn’t get out of there soon—if, as seemed likely, we were held up by a stoppage of traffic. We counted off cross streets and had reached the middle of our last block when the lights went out.
We didn’t realize that for a while. It seemed to us only that some of the lights in the apartment houses at our left had been switched off. But the next block looked dark and by then changes were taking place. We were still on the west side of Park when southbound vehicles turned on high beam and made a dazzling confusion of what little could be seen at all. Both rivers of machinery started braking, and cars around us began to skid. There were several collisions. From near and far came crashes and glass shattering. Then the horns began.
It was Miles who first recognized the truth and bellowed it into my ear. “Power failure.”
I nodded and went with him.
There were people on Park Avenue in cars with splintered windshields. At some intersections the drifts of snow were already so high we went around. People passed us, bumped into us, muttered and vanished. The temperature was falling swiftly. We watched several people, including two or three drivers of the big rigs, leave their stalled vehicles and flounder to the sidewalk. Ordinarily, Miles and I are both given to lending a hand to strangers in difficulty and once or twice I made a spontaneous quarter turn with that aim. Miles did too. Neither of us did more.
Why we didn’t help is understandable, though I doubt either of us figured it out then. We had made three quarters of our own trip. We wanted to check on our families. And there were so many “problems” on every hand that it wouldn’t have meant much if we had stopped to help a few people. Nothing we could do that they couldn’t, plainly.
At last we made it, climbing over engine hoods and forward battery covers of vehicles to cross Park and tramping through drifts to the apartment house marquee where a doorman should have been standing and was not. A head-high pile of snow, part shoveled, the rest drifted, indicated that the apartment crew had been trying. But the snow was a foot deep where they’d quit. We got inside.
“Hello, Bill.”
“Mr.—” and the doorman stopped there.
The lobby, or “rotonde” as it was called in that building, was a big one with marble, gilt, lemon and black upholstery and mirrors in about equal amounts. I saw myself and realized why the doorman had balked. Like Miles’s, my eyebrows were white and thick, there were ice crystals on my face where a beard had gathered them one by one on the growth since a morning shave and my hat was heavy with icy snow so that its brim hung partly over my head, all around.
We began defrosting as the doorman recognized us.
“Almost gave you a bum’s rush,” he said in a slightly overhearty tone. “Had to throw about two hundred strangers out, so far. Everybody wants in—in, any place. Lot of our own people haven’t showed up, too. Lord knows where they got settled, or stuck.”
“Big area—power cut?” Miles asked him.
“Big? It’s the biggest in history. New England, part of Canada, west to middle of Ohio, and down past Washington, D.C.”
“Jesus.”
Bill assisted us in beating, rubbing and brushing off the now melting snow and ice. The size of a dark puddle on the floor and its extent on the carpet showed that this operation had been standard for some period of time.
We went to the elevators when we were free of the stuff, leaving Bill to mop at the water and slush we’d contributed. I rang. Bill had to charge the main doors and do verbal, then some physical, battle with three boys of about twelve who wore jackets and looked to be getting waxy cheeks. Miles rushed back and ordered him to let them in.
I heard a few sentences from the radio in the rotonde:
“. . . the same procedure as a Condition Red. Again. Attention, all air raid wardens, auxiliary police, National Guard members. Report for duty at stations assigned for Red Alert. If not feasible, assist authorized personnel wherever encountered. This is a major emergency.”
The elevator hushed down and the door opened. On the way to the high Smythe floor it hit me. “How come?”
Miles was distracted from some concentrated effort of mind. “How come what?” Then he grinned. “Took it for granted, didn’t I? The building has auxiliary power for the elevators and central heating, air conditioning. Not anything else, though.”
“Oh.”
He had that scowl back again but it went away swiftly.
“Corddy,” he laughed. “Remember?”
I repeated what I’d perfectly heard. Then I did remember. A long time ago and a pompous sociology teacher who had given us a sermon about another blackout—as faulted and groundless as all sermons are, or nearly all.
The Smythes were living in a tower penthouse now, near the pair of duplexes they’d called home and offices when I met Miles. Horicon, the butler, was old but very able still and unwilling to retire, for which all were grateful. He greeted us as if nothing had happened and then Nora was running to me, in my arms, and saying after a kiss, “I’m so relieved.”
She kissed Miles’s cheek and added, “Twice relieved.”
We went on to the drawing room. Both Pat and Zillah, Pat’s daughter by a former husband, were in the front room. A fire muttered on the hearth, and drinks were being made by Zill, who’d heard us come in. Pat was displayed by a chaise beside the fire, and I was struck as always by the fact that she had not let time manage things. Rather, the skill of her plastic surgeon, and her own determined efforts to supplement that skill, had succeeded so well that it took bright daylight and a close scrutiny to see her years.
Zill, of course, had the advantage of twenty years. But the same skills and arts kept her looking twenty—after two husbands, two babies, one war in which she’d served as a Red Cross something, two divorces and probably a hundred lovers. She looked as ready for the hundred and first, as eager and as relatively unselective as she’d been in 1965 when I first beheld the golden witch.
Pat greeted us. “Hello, darlings.”
Zill said, “The world has almost ended, again.”
Miles sipped the drink Zill handed him, and then took a call on the building phone.
The doorman asked for aid in the lobby—three car smash victims had come in and the situation on the door was tight. Miles turned down my offer of aid and asked Zillah to go with him. With that I learned more about the blonde engine of sex. In the Desert War she’d driven an ambulance—after completing a course on the care of battle casualties. News to me; but people were always learning more about Zill, and that more in various areas.
When they’d gone I turned on the radio, and soon we knew that New York was in bad shape. The radio announcer was good; cool, quick and lucid. These days, too, the new disaster policy was in effect. As much information as possible was broadcast. For a while, and after certain prior disasters, the authorities had tried the opposite method, keeping most of the worst news secret. It
merely increased fears and led to more extensive panic. Not knowing is worse than knowing . . . the worst.
After the great Harlem Fire that nearly sent Manhattan into firestorm and total destruction, politicians came to their senses and switched the orders. Trying to keep that blaze secret had stampeded tens of thousands, since it was visible for a hundred miles. These people fled and made bloody shambles in the streets, in tunnels and on the bridges.
Now we were given the truth:
“. . . warehouse on fire at West and Franklin. Do not attempt rescue. Get as far from warehouse as time permits. Dangerous chemicals in storage there. Will explode. Noxious gases already issuing from site. Acids will flow. Keep clear. Do not approach for any reason. Evacuate all dwellings within ten-block area. Repeat. . .
“Third Avenue not yet open! This route must be cleared. No regard for vehicular property to be taken. Persons still in vehicles will leave them as bulldozers are in use to clear lanes. When you leave your car or truck see that your neighbors are out of their vehicles.”
Next came a staccato series of commands which were largely “clear” and, if abbreviated, only for speed. These went out to trained groups, ordering them, by number and name, to special emergency areas.
A hospital’s stand-by generators had gone out and a team of electricians was urgently needed. Hundreds of thousands of persons were trapped in elevators in high buildings, of course, and almost as many in the reconstructed but conventional subway lines. As the pressure blowers of the Whistle failed, one train lost way beyond an injection point but a second, behind it, crashed at full speed. The fact was known, not the consequences, easily envisaged.
One of the reports from people in a high-rise building was especially shocking. This was the recently completed and fully occupied Regent Towers on Fifth Avenue some distance from the Smythes’ building. Its elevators, banks of them, were, of course, stopped where the blackout affected them—many between floors. It was a cooperative edifice and its tenants were still squabbling over the cost of a stand-by power plant. Few of the tenants had left the luxury apartment. The lobby was packed with refugees from the blizzard. Servants and service people had stayed in, waiting for a lull. But recently departing persons told of a gas leak and of gas permeating the structure.
End of the Dream Page 6
