Crossroads

The brittle rubber of the Fury’s wipers shuddered on the windshield. Russ wanted to ask a clarifying question, to confirm that seeing meant what it seemed to, but he didn’t trust his voice. A day that had begun well was now conclusively terrible. As stupid as he’d been about Perry, he’d been even stupider about Frances. It had never occurred to him that another man might already have swooped in on her. Last summer, she’d been widowed for barely a year.

She leaned back into her corner of the front seat. “It was one of those things that seemed too good to be true because it was. One of my old girlfriends set us up on a date, and it just immediately felt right—we clicked right away. Philip’s a surgeon, and he’d been in the service. He’d served on one of the same bases Bobby had, so we had that in common, and heart surgery is like the medical equivalent of being a fighter pilot—not for the faint of heart. Philip’s got a gorgeous apartment in one of the high-rises on the lake, just north of the Loop, with an incredible view. As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘Okay, sign me up!’ In hindsight, it was way too early for me to be thinking that way, but I just wanted everything to be right again. I wanted there to be four of us, not three.”

Russ tried to imagine the scenario in which Frances had been in the heart surgeon’s apartment and not had intimate relations with him.

“I wanted Larry and Amy to meet him,” she said. “I thought we could all have lunch and go to the Field Museum. I kept pushing until finally one night he tells me, in the spirit of full disclosure, that there’s something I should know. Apparently, the entire time I’ve known him, he’s been seeing someone else. A nurse, of course. Younger than me, of course. So that’s where my head was when I came to see you. I really was missing Bobby, but not for the right reasons. I’d kind of had my heart broken.”

The black exhaust of a dump truck in front of Russ was soiling the snow before it even reached the ground. “I see,” he said.

“But here’s something else I didn’t tell you. Things hadn’t actually been so wonderful with me and Bobby. I was only twenty-one when we got married. He was my brother’s best friend, he was piloting planes that broke the sound barrier, he was awesomely good-looking, and I was the girl who got to marry him. He was gone a lot, but I didn’t mind that—I was an officer’s wife, which had its privileges. He was stationed at Edwards when the kids were born, and I would have followed him anywhere—it wasn’t me who made him quit the air force. But he wanted the kids to grow up in one place, in one school district, and the pay was a lot better with General Dynamics. And then as soon as we were there in Texas he decided he’d made a mistake. He missed the military, and I could tell he blamed me, even though it wasn’t my fault. Year after year, I watched him get more angry. Everyone knew he was a stud, and it wasn’t like I was giving him an argument, but he kept making me pass these loyalty tests. If I laughed too hard at something a neighbor said, it meant I was flirting with him, and Bobby wouldn’t let it go until I admitted that the neighbor was less of a man than he was. If I watched the news and made some comment about the war not going well, he’d start interrogating me. Didn’t I agree that America was the most powerful country on earth? With the best economic system? Weren’t we morally obliged to keep the Communists from expanding their blah-blah-blah? He honestly believed the reason so many troops were getting killed was that the protesters at home were undermining their morale. I was getting boys killed, by having doubts about the war. And Larry, he wanted to be an astronaut, but he wasn’t exceptional at sports, wasn’t a straight-A student, and Bobby was constantly yelling at him. ‘Do you think you get to be an astronaut by not sliding hard into second base? Do you think John Glenn ever got a B on an algebra test?’ Larry was just a dreamy kid who was interested in space, and he was so proud of Bobby, so desperate to please him, his disapproval was a torture. Have you ever seen the cockpit of an F-111?”

Russ should have been glad that she was opening up to him, but all he could hear was that she commanded the attention of test pilots and heart surgeons. He was an associate minister with a wife, four kids, and no money. What had he been thinking?

“It’s incredible,” she said. “The amount of instruments they have. They give you the sense that you’re utterly in control, and that’s the way Bobby was with us. We needed his approval, and he controlled us by making it conditional. Larry had to be a star athlete, and I couldn’t have a little fun talking to a neighbor. For me, the most terrible thing about the crash was imagining him losing control of the aircraft. He must have felt so furious.”

The sky was darkening, the traffic slow. How many millions of dollars did an F-111 cost? How could a nation that called itself Christian spend billions of dollars on weapons of death? The instrument panel of Russ’s Fury consisted of a speedometer and three gauges, one of them broken. The car urgently needed new brakes and new snow tires, but Marion had asked for two hundred dollars for Christmas shopping. The sum had struck him as excessive, but he’d been mindful of how little else he’d given her lately, mindful of the four hours alone with Frances that he’d contrived to give himself for Christmas. He’d imagined that the four hours would fly by all too quickly. Now he wondered how he could survive another minute of hearing about the kind of man she loved. There was a hard, sour knot in his throat.