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41 THE COMING OF THE STORM
She took the keys to my Cadillac car,
Jumped in my kitty and drove her far.
— Bob Seger
The first of that winter's great northeast storms came to Libertyville on
Christmas Eve, beating its way across the upper third of the US, on a wide
and easily predictable storm track. The day began in bright thirty-degree
sunshine, but morning deejays were already cheerfully predicting doom and
gloom, urging those who had not finished their last-minute shopping to do so
by mid-afternoon. Those planning trips to the old homestead for an old-
fashioned Christmas were urged to rethink their plans if the trip could not be
made in four to six hours.
"If you don't want to be spending Christmas Day in the breakdown lane of I-
76 somewhere between Bedford and Carlisle, I'd leave early or not at all,"
the FM-104 jock advised his listening audience (a large part of which was
too stoned to even consider going anyplace), and then resumed the Christmas
Block Party with Springsteen's version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town".
By 11:00 A.M., when Dennis Guilder finally left Libertyville Community
Hospital (as per hospital regulations, he was not allowed on his crutches
until he was actually out of the building; until then he was pushed along in a
wheelchair by Elaine), the sky had begun to scum over with clouds and there
was an eerie fairy ring around the sun. Dennis crossed the parking lot
carefully on his crutches, his mother and father bookending him nervously in
spite of the fact that the lot had been scrupulously salted free of even the
slightest trace or snow and ice He paused by the family car, turning his face
up slightly into the freshening breeze. Being outside was like a resurrection.
He felt he could stand here for hours and not have enough of it.
By one o'clock that afternoon, the Cunningham family station wagon had
reached the outskirts of Ligonier, ninety miles east of Libertyville. The sky
had gone a smooth and pregnant slate-grey by this time, and the temperature
had dropped six degrees.
It had been Arnie's idea that they not cancel the traditional Christmas Eve
visit with Aunt Vicky and Uncle Steve, Regina's sister and her husband. The
two families had created a casual, loosely rotating ritual over the years, with
Vicky and Steve coming to their house some years, the Cunnhinghams going
over to Ligonier on others. This year's trip had been arranged in early
December. It had been cancelled after what Regina stubbornly called
"Arnie's trouble", but at the beginning of last week, Arnie had begun
restlessly agitating for the trip.
At last, after a long telephone conversation with her sister on Wednesday,
Regina gave in to Arnie's wish mostly because Vicky had seemed calm and
understanding and most of all not very curious about what had happened.
That was important to Regina—more important than she would perhaps ever
be able to say. It seemed to her that in the eight days since Arnie had been
arrested in New York, she had had to cope with a seemingly endless flood of
rancid curiosity masquerading as sympathy. Talking to Vicky on the
telephone, she had finally broken down and cried. It was the first and only
time since Arnie had been arrested in New York that she had allowed herself
that bitter luxury. Arnie had been in bed asleep. Michael, who was drinking
much too much and passing it off as "the spirit of the season", had gone down
to O'Malley's for a beer or two with Paul Strickland, another factory reject in
the game of faculty politics. It would probably end up being six beers, or
eight, or ten. And if she went upstairs to his study later on, she would find
him sitting bolt upright behind his desk, looking out into the dark, his eyes dry
but bloodshot. if she tried to speak with him, his conversation would be
horribly confused and centered too much in the past. She supposed her
husband might be having a very quiet mental breakdown. She would not
allow herself the same luxury (for so, in her own hurt and angry state, she
thought it), and every night her mind ticked and whirred with plans and
schemes until three or four o'clock, All these thoughts and schemes were
aimed at one end: "Getting us over this." The only two ways she would allow
her mind to approach what had happened were deliberately vague. She
thought about "Arnie's trouble" and "Getting us over this".
But, talking to Vicky on the phone a few days after her son's arrest, Regina's
iron control had wavered briefly. She cried on Vicky's shoulder long-
distance, and Vicky had been calmly comforting, making Regina hate herself
for all the cheap shots she had taken at Vicky over the years. Vicky, whose
only daughter had dropped out of junior college to get married and become a
housewife, whose only son had been content with a vocational-technical
school (none of that for
her
son! Regina had thought with a private
exultation); Vicky whose husband sold, of all hilarious things, life insurance.
And Vicky (hilariouser and hilariouser) sold Tupperware. But it was Vicky
she had been able to cry to, it had been Vicky to whom she had been able to
express at least part of her tortured sense of disappointment and terror and
hurt; yes, and the terrible
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