Innocent Sailors and Enemy Aliens page 2

I whispered to Jason, "Do you think he's a robber?"

Now, Jason, who was plumper than I and shorter, was also considerably more sophisticated, so that he tended to put himself in charge of our activities, and he said with familiar scorn, "Does he look like a robber?"

I had to grant that he didn't. The man was tall and dark haired, wearing a blue cord summer suit with a red tie and white shirt. He was probably thirty, though I'd have just said he was grown-up rather than old, like my parents. I said, "Then what's he doing in Mrs. Farr's back yard?" Which was where he'd advanced to by this time, but not deep into it; he'd turned and was heading toward the back door.

Jason said, "I have to think about this a minute."

This was usually a sign for me to be quiet and wait for Jason to come up with what was usually a startling idea. The one he produced this time, still whispering, was, "I think he's going to visit Mrs. Farr."

"Visit Mrs. Farr?" The idea seemed really strange to me. Mrs. Farr was a tall woman with long blonde hair and two children under four years old. She had a kind of distance about her, the kind where she never seemed really to acknowledge your existence, even when she said hello, though she wasn't unpleasant about it. Her husband, known to us, of course, only as Mr. Farr, was actually shorter than her, and bald headed where he wasn't gray, and he had a large belly. Mrs. Farr always seemed to have the same distance with her husband when I saw them together. So the notion of Mrs. Farr having a visitor didn't seem to fit with her character; why would she want to have a visitor, I wondered if she was so far away all the time. And anyway, as I whispered to Jason, "Why doesn't he use the front door?"

Jason, also whispering, said, "I think Mrs. Farr is having an affair."

"What's that?" I said.

At that moment the back door of Mrs. Farr's house opened and I found out what an affair was. Mrs. Farr appeared in the doorway, and suddenly, as far as I was concerned, the two of them, the blonde haired, now not at all distant seeming woman and the tall man with the dark hair and the blue cord summer suit, were in one another's arms, kissing and handling one another. At the time I had a pretty fuzzy idea of what sex was, but I knew perfectly well that wives weren't supposed to be doing that kind of thing with people who weren't their husbands. I had no idea at all of how desperate the two of them had to be to take the chance of doing that kind of thing in her own house, or being so indiscreet as to be unable to wait till the door was closed. Anyway, Clipper must not have liked the idea of two people tangling up like that—she always became agitated the few time Jason and I got physically active enough to wrestle—because it was at that moment she stood up and began to bark.

To me it was pretty comical the way Mrs. Farr and the man jumped apart, like something you'd see on a TV sit-com. Mrs. Farr actually staggered, and the man was, even from our distance, wide-eyed. Nor were they any better when Jason, whose sophistication didn't always extend to practicalities, yelled at Clipper to be quiet, and the two of them spotted us on the roof. Mrs. Farr put her hand to her chest above her bumps, as I thought of them, and the other hand over her mouth; the man took a step forward, as if he was going to come over to us, and then a step back, as though he was going to run away. As I say, it was pretty comical to me, until I laughed, and my laugh sounded unexpectedly grisly to me—like I'd laughed when someone teased a slow kid in class and he broke into tears just as I started to think it was funny.

There was a moment when we were all poised there, Jason and Clipper and I on the garage roof; Mrs. Farr and the Man in the Blue Cord Suit on the other side of the yard; and I wondered if we were all going to stay there forever, but then the man in the suit turned his head for a minute and said something to Mrs. Farr, and came across the yard, very casually, one hand in his pocket, until he was close enough to talk without yelling, though he had to crank his head back up to keep his eyes on us. "Hi, guys," he said, "What'cha doing up there?"

He had a friendly enough face, not the kind that an eight or nine year old would automatically distrust, nothing immediately or apparently unpleasant about it; on the other hand, it was friendly the way a teacher's face was friendly, with a certain distance implicit and a certain sense of, not quite manipulation, so much as purpose which was its own. Jason said, "Nothing," in that assertive way of his which really made it sound as though he were saying, None of your business. I shrugged. I was feeling a little embarrassed myself by this time, and a little trapped and overburdened already; all I'd been doing was playing, and suddenly this 'sail sighted' situation had come about. Clipper, between Jason and me, also felt tense, as if she were ready to start barking again.

The man waited a minute, and then, when neither of us spoke again, said, "Do you live here, or do you just use this roof to play on?" His voice was very mellow and smooth, I thought, like a TV announcer selling watches.

I felt he was accusing us of trespassing, so I said, "This is Jason's house," and Jason glared at me as if I'd just given away the location of the buried treasure or showed the alien how to use the disintegrator gun. Apparently Jason had another of those secret plans or ideas of how we should behave that I never suspected until he let me know I'd violated them. However, the man said, "Oh. Then you must know Emmy, huh?—Mrs. Farr." Whom I could see beyond the man near her back door, her arms folded across her chest watching him.

Jason said, "Of course, we know Mrs. Farr," almost as scornfully as he would have said it to me had I been silly enough to state the obvious in that way.

I could see that the man didn't like that very much, and in addition he didn't seem very comfortable there with his head pushed back, because he put his hand behind his neck and cranked his head around in a circle a couple of times. But when he tilted back up at us, he was smiling. It was a beautiful smile, friendly and open and warm and kind; it was nothing like his teacher's face at all; it just sent out beams of good heartedness and confidence and liking you and loving the world at large. I'd never seen anything like in my life; it was as if I'd discovered some pirate's buried treasure, thrown open the iron chest and seen piles of bright gold shining out at me, and I knew at that minute that whatever the man and Mrs. Farr had been doing, it was all right. I was even about to say so to Jason, who was observing the man and the smile with much the same expression as always. Clipper, however, felt less tense. Then the man said, "Yeah, but I bet you don't know who I am."

I shook my head—really, that smile had dumbfounded me—and Jason said, "Who are you?"

The man's smile was now reduced to a somewhat paler glow, and he said, that very smooth voice very low as though he were telling us something that not only shouldn't be heard by anyone else, but was probably the most important thing we'd ever heard in our lives, "I'm Mrs. Farr's brother, and today is the first time we've seen one another in years and years and years. But there's a real problem. You see, I'm a secret agent and no-one's supposed to know where I am, but since I was around here, I couldn't resist stopping in to see my sister, but if anyone else, even her husband, were ever to find out that I was in the area, it could compromise my mission and threaten the safety of our country. So it's very important that you don't ever tell anyone that you saw me here today. Can I count on you guys?" And he turned up that smile again.

It was just the kind of story I would have wanted to believe, especially in conjunction with that smile, and I would have wanted to tell the smile how much it could count on me and how my lips were sealed and how the Russians (in 1949, the enemy of course had to be the Russians, although in 1950 it would be the North Koreans and the Chinese) could do anything to me, and they'd never find out that he'd been there. And I might have believed it, simply reinterpreting their embrace, had not Mrs. Farr by this time advanced half-way across the yard, and had I been up there alone without my friend Jason Berger. But I didn't, because Mrs. Farr had advanced half-way across the yard and her face didn't have the distant nobility about it that a sister's should have when her brother was a secret agent and his mission might be messed up if it were revealed; and anyway, Jason said, "Oh, that's not true. You're not a secret agent. You're having an affair."

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