had ever before been in Avondale.
Mother told him to come ahead. Those were her exact words, delivered in the flat tones of someone who had never lost a fight: “Come ahead, if you want to.”
• • •
Mother and I had not yet begun to speculate seriously about what the radioactive mantelpiece might have done to our health, nor had we been encouraged to do so. Nor would we ever be encouraged to do so. Ulm, the director of civil defense and car-wash tycoon, had been getting advice on our case over the telephone from somebody at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., to the effect that the most important thing was that nobody panic. In order to prevent panic, the workmen who had torn out our fireplace, wearing protective clothing provided by Ulm, had been sworn to secrecy—in the name of patriotism, of national security.
The cover story, provided by Washington, D.C., and spread throughout Avondale while Mother and I were staying at the new Holiday Inn, was that our house had been riddled by termites, and that the protective clothing was necessary, since the workmen had killed the insects with cyanide.
Insects.
So we did not panic. Good citizens don’t. We waited calmly for Fred T. Barry. I was at the picture window, peering out at the street between slats of the Venetian blinds. Mother was reclining in the Barcalounger my brother Felix had given her three Christmases ago. She was vibrating almost imperceptibly, and a reassuring drone came from underneath her. She had the massage motor turned on low.
Mother said that she didn’t feel any different, now that she knew she had been exposed to radioactivity. “Do you feel any different?” she asked.
“No,” I said. This sort of conversation is going to become increasingly common, I think, as radioactive materials get spread around the world.
“If we were in such great danger,” she said, “you’d think we would have noticed something. There would have been dead bugs on the mantelpiece, don’t you think—or the plants would have gotten funny spots or something?”
Meanwhile, little tumors were blooming in her head.
“I’m so sorry they told the neighbors we had termites,” she said. “I wish they could have thought of something else. It’s like telling everybody we had leprosy.”
It turned out that she had had a traumatic experience with termites in childhood, which she had never mentioned to me. She had suppressed the memory all those years, but now she told me, full of horror, of walking into the music room of her father’s mansion, which she had believed to be so indestructible when she was a little girl, and seeing what looked like foam, boiling out the floor and a baseboard near the grand piano, and out of the legs and the keyboard of the piano itself.
“There were billions and billions of bugs with shiny wings, acting for all the world like a liquid,” she said. “I ran and got Father. He couldn’t believe his eyes, either. Nobody had played the piano for years. If somebody had played it, maybe it would have driven the bugs out of there. Father gave a piano leg a little kick, and it crumpled like it was made out of cardboard. The piano fell down.”
• • •
This was clearly one of the most memorable events of her whole life, and I had never heard of it before.
If she had died in childhood, she would have remembered life as the place you went, in case you wanted to see bugs eat a grand piano.
• • •
So Fred T. Barry arrived in his limousine. He was so old now, and Mother was so old now, and they had had this long fight about whether modern art was any good or not. I let him in, and Mother received him while lying on the Barcalounger.
“I have come to surrender, Mrs. Waltz,” he said. “You should be very proud of yourself. I have lost all interest in the arts center. It can be turned into a chicken coop, for all I care. I am leaving Midland City forever.”
“I am sure you had the best intentions, Mr. Barry,” she said. “I never doubted that. But the next time you try to give somebody a wonderful present, make sure they want it first. Don’t try to stuff it down their throats.”
He sold his company to the RAMJAC Corporation for a gazoolian bucks. A firm that acquires American farmland for Arabs bought his farm. As far as I know, no Arab has ever come