The Age of Reason. Marian Birch
in Canada once when she was about ten. Surely, if it were the Rapture, it made perfect sense that well-behaved Edith would be taken up by God, and she, prodigal Kitt, would be left behind to wallow in her sins. Next, or almost simultaneously, as if her mind were showing two movies on adjacent movie screens, she thought of Nuclear Armageddon. The Russians had the bomb, the Chinese threatened to use it in Korea, and no one knew for sure if they really had it or were bluffing. Ike after all was a general who had authorized atomic tests in the desert, and Edith had to do drills at school and hide under her desk, of all the stupid things. If their appeal was denied, the Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted the following week, and that could make the Red world angry. But the bruised purple and yellow sky—no blinding light of atomic fission—brought her mind finally, in a matter of infinitely slow milliseconds, to tornado. The radio had predicted thunderstorms for that afternoon, though it had been so mild earlier that she had put the forecast out of her mind.
Should she continue to huddle fearfully in the big fireplace, or should she go outside to look for Edith? A quick glance out the window told her that she wouldn’t get far with the second option. Which would be more unbearable, she asked herself, getting killed or badly injured by flying debris as she tried to find and save her daughter, or living with the horrible shame and guilt of being safe in shelter while Edith endured . . . well, God only knew what? It took only a moment to reach the conclusion that the second option was by far the more intolerable one. Teeth chattering, legs trembling, she forced herself to stand, and leaning on the shabby wooden ladderback chairs for support, she pulled herself along the walls and made her way into the new kitchen and to the sliding glass door on the north side of the room, which, for incomprehensible reasons, had not shattered. And then a new silence fell like the blade of a guillotine, suddenly and absolutely. The wind, the storm had passed. Kitt opened the sliding door and ran out, shouting, “Edith, Edith, where are you, it’s me!” Calling, stumbling, twisting an ankle, she crossed the meadow and scoured the hundred-square-yard stretch of beechwoods north of the house, and finally found her firstborn huddled silently in a hollow under an uprooted maple tree, wide-eyed, half-naked, staring at her dolls. An old mullioned window with its six tiny panes of glass intact stood on its rim only a few feet away.
***
Edith sat on the table in the Fensterheims’ kitchen stripped to her Lollipop underpants again. When she and Kitt picked him up at the college, Arthur had yelled at Kitt.
“What kind of a mother do you think you are, anyway? You didn’t take her to the doctor?”
Kitt had slid across the Buick’s front seat as Arthur took the wheel.
“She’s perfectly fine, Arthur. Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I suppose you’re a doctor, you can tell if she has a concussion or something else inside that doesn’t show? Jesus!” Arthur had stomped his foot on the gas and the tires had squealed as they left the campus heading south. Edith didn’t know why he said “Jesus” or “God damn” when he didn’t like how things were going, since he’d often told her that Jesus and God are frauds made up to distract poor people from how rich people rob and cheat them. She’d expected him to take her to the hospital right there in Durham, but instead he had driven all the way to Whitby. After dropping Kitt off at Granny’s to get Marcus—“And try not to let him get run over!”—he had driven half a mile up the road to bring Edith to the Fensterheims.
It was after six, so Dr. Lenny was home from his square brick doctor’s office near the Whitby Green. So was his wife, June, who was also his nurse, as well as their two children, Adam and Ruthie. Edith squirmed uncomfortably inside because she was on the table in front of everybody, wearing nothing but underpants, but nine-year-old Adam acted like he didn’t even notice she was there as he worked on a jigsaw puzzle across the table. Ruthie, who was her first-grade classmate, stood feet wide apart and arms crossed over her stupid frilly taffeta dress, watching. At least school was out for the summer so Ruthie wouldn’t be able to tell everybody in their class until fall.
Dr. Lenny pressed the cold metal disk of his stethoscope under Edith’s shoulder blades and told her to take some deep breaths. Then over his shoulder he told June, “Turn on the radio for me, will you? Don’t want to miss the news. Hear if Ike’s granted the Rosenbergs a reprieve,” while, with his large hairy fingers, he poked along each rib and down her spine.
“The power’s still out, hon.” June opened the fridge. “Tornado, remember?” She grabbed two cans of beer.
As Dr. Lenny shone his tiny doctor flashlight into her eyes, Arthur pronounced,
“Forget about it, Lenny. Ethel and Julie are as good as dead already. Since they’re innocent of everything except being Communists, they have nothing to trade for their lives except betraying the comrades. She look okay to you?’ He ruffled Edith’s hair. “Now you can tell all your pals you know how to fly! Won’t they be jealous, huh?” He felt proud that his little girl was so tough even a tornado couldn’t hurt her, although she was only a girl and a good two inches shorter than sturdy Ruthie. “That’s my pipsqueak,” he said, accepting a can of beer from June. He gave Edith a playful punch on the arm.
***
For a few days, life on Buck Hill Road centered on the big tornado and its aftermath. Arthur retrieved and reinstalled the old window that had blown out of the garret behind Edith. Although her heart was beating fast with the expectation of another tornado, she was holding the extra screws while he screwed the hinges back into the window frame. As he looked around at the tiny attic, almost completely filled by the old wooden bed, and at Edith’s toys, clothes, and blankets still strewn all around, he declared that Edith should move downstairs.
“It’s no good you being upstairs away from everybody. There’s only one way out of here if there’s a fire or something. You should be sleeping on the same floor as the rest of us.”
That very weekend, he and Pop built her what they called a “studio bed” out of knotty pine. She helped them carry the boards up the narrow stairs to her new room on the second floor, a room that had been Arthur’s study. He said he didn’t really need a study since he had a nice office at the college, and he could put some of his books in Kitt’s study. They sawed and hammered while listening to the radio. It was Saturday; the day before, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison.
Arthur took the nails out of his mouth to tell Pop, “They had to kill them before sunset on Friday because that’s when the Jewish Sabbath starts.”
“But I thought they were Communists, so how can they be Jewish? Communists don’t have religion, right?” Edith asked, but nobody answered her.
Arthur put down his hammer and picked up the paper. He read aloud, over the radio, which was playing “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window”instead of the news.
Executioner Joseph Francel sent the electrical charges through their bodies. Julius, the weaker, went first. He died with a grotesque smile on his lips. A wisp of smoke curled toward the ceiling as the current charged through Mrs. Rosenberg. It took three shocks of 2,000 volts each to electrocute Mr. Rosenberg. Four jolts swept through Mrs. Rosenberg and still she was not dead. A fifth was ordered.
“It’s a damned shame to kill a woman like that,” Pop muttered. “These are bad times we’re living in.”
“Where do their little boys live now? Do they know that their mother and father were electrocuted?” Edith asked. She tried to imagine what being electrocuted would feel like. Was it like being burnt? She’d burnt her hand once picking up a pot on the stove.
Arthur too was picturing the electric chair in his mind and trying to imagine what the Red martyrs had felt. He thought about the way his whole body vibrated when he used his chainsaw. What if that feeling were multiplied by a hundred or a thousand? Pop started to whistle softly along to Patti Page, fitting the corners of the new bed together carefully.
“I would’ve gone down to DC to picket the White House yesterday, but my Contemporary Issues class had its final exam,” said Arthur. He noticed that Edith was looking dubious as her new bed took shape.
“It’ll