The Tu-tone DeSoto

By D H. Robbins

The Tu-Tone DeSoto

By D.H. Robbins

The Tu-tone DeSoto centers on the lives of eight Hanson, Iowa high school teens during the Kennedy administration and Cold War years of the early 1960s. They are living in conflict with the mind-sets of their parents through a generation gap destined to become an incendiary turning point

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Robbins
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781733072281

D H. Robbins

David (D.H.) Robbins has been actively writing fiction for nearly 30 years. His first novel is a family saga centered around the 1960s, "The Tu-tone DeSoto" (2014), introduces eight teenagers growing up in Iowa during the veiled turbulence underlying The Kennedy Years (1960-63). His second novel, "Chamelea" (2017), is set in New York City in 1963-64. His third, "The Weight of Indifference" (2019), takes place in San Francisco and Vietnam during the counterculture years (1965-68). His fourth Novel, "Boxing with Hemingway" (2022), is set in Paris, Hollywood, and Vienna during the mid-1920s. His fifth novel, "2028" (2022), is an account of an America during the demise of democracy under an Autocratic regime.He has also created and produces a five-part lecture series, "The 1960's-Revisiting a Crucial Decade." Robbins has taught learning module design and has recently taught a fiction-writing course/workshop. He now facilitates a casual monthly online writers' group. Robbins was born in Darien, Connecticut, and currently lives in Simsbury, Connecticut where he lives with his wife, Kate, and Gypsy, his Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

Book preview

1960-61

Hanson, Iowa

Prologue

November 8, 1989

One night of sleep is all Maxie needs, but lately her thoughts have been nagging her into wakefulness. She can’t help thinking about Connie. On nights like this, she would rather stay awake than face the darkness that stole away the bittersweet years of her adolescence. She crushes out her partially smoked cigarette in an undersized saucer serving as a bedside ashtray. The little dish brims over with equally half-smoked cigarettes, whose spent, moistened scents sting her eyes through the aged aroma of the humidity permeating the guest room.

She absently fingers the slick, crumpled, red and white cigarette pack. As she ponders taking another, she burrows under the thick comforter on the bed, pulls it toward her, and listens to the nocturnal sounds from the recesses of the neighborhood in which she grew up to know so well. She hears the midnight barking of the Jurgen’s golden retriever who replaced the fox terrier who had replaced the spaniel that had once lived to a very old age. Then she hears the gritty, metallically impressive grind and squeal of a souped-up muscle car pealing out from gravel to asphalt a few houses further down the street. It’s always been the same, she realizes to herself, kids and cars.

The smooth cadence of Michael’s snoring cycles though the bedroom wall across the room as Heather sleeps soundly in her room across the hall. Her daughter seems obliviously casual about being seventeen. This makes Maxie jealous. She hated being seventeen. Her memories of being a teen coalesce from recollections fraught with the same kind of helplessness of the impending doom of a twister.

There are so many things about Heather that remind Maxie of Connie. She remembers the innocence of the love she and Connie felt as friends, until it all went so suddenly and terribly wrong twenty-six years ago. She understands that secrets are a rite between teenage friends, but the weight of Connie’s secrets had become too much for her to bear. She only hopes that her daughter’s confidences are not as burdensome as were those of Connie. But then again, Maxie knows she’s not not the mother from hell that Connie’s mother was.

She tries to remember some of those little philosophical morsels that she had learned at Heritage College–ample little ingredients for those metaphysical recipes meant to clarify the cryptic cake of life. I think, therefore I am, Descartes had concluded. So what? She thinks. Then what? She wonders if Descartes had an answer for those who think too much for their own good. All this thinking is really stupid. Shut up! she scolds herself. Michael sometimes tells her not to think at all. He’s right, of course. Therein maybe lies the truth between being and blending. She forgets about Descartes and decides to try to count sheep instead.

I think, therefore I am, she reminds herself and imagines sitting in Julie’s aqua and dark blue 1956 DeSoto Firedome listening to Frankie Avalon singing Venus from somewhere in outer space.

Why did you do what you did, Connie? she wonders. I could have helped you! It didn’t have to end like it did. I wouldn’t have let it. She feels a tear lightly tickle her cheek as she finally drifts off to sleep.

One —

A SolidShake!

and Trippple-burger

September 26, 1960

Connie grips the two aluminum tubes of the porch swing’s arm and imagines them as the twin barrels of her father’s shotgun. Through the open front door and windows behind her, she had heard the predictable slow muffled crash coming from the kitchen. Her mother, drunk again, has fallen from her chair to the floor. Connie tightens her grip on the gritty tubes as desperately as her sixteen-year-old grasp would allow. 

God dammit, Jake! she hears her mother rasp, "When’re you ever gonna fix this goddamned chair?" It was as if she was blaming her drunkenness on the chair.

From inside the house, the wood frame of the over-used living room couch creaks annoyingly as her father quietly and routinely rises to attend to his drunken wife. "I’m coming, Vera, dammit, her father groans as he makes his way toward the kitchen. Just hold your horses!"

Coalescing into the warm light of the porch where Connie sits is the soft pale glow from the 17-inch Dumont console television where her father had been watching it in the living room. Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy debate one another for the United States presidency as Howard K. Smith moderates.

She concentrates on listening to the distant voices from the TV. Uh, I believe that Vice President Nixon is only paying lip service to the increase of the minimum wage to a dollah an houah, Kennedy has gone on in his distinct Massachusetts accent. Connie knows that Massachusetts is a place she will never see. She feels doomed to be trapped in an ordinary life here in Hanson, Iowa–at least once she is freed from the dysfunctions of her parents.

It has been getting worse between her them. Her father’s attentions had been directed toward his deteriorating wife and have freed Connie from her fear of his threatening desires toward her as she has grown into adolescence. The cold comfort of her father’s ignoring her has left her gratefully invisible to him. But she knows it’s only a matter of time, as she has seen the wanton glances he has leveled at her from within the darkness of his libido. She feels as helpless as prey for a hidden tiger ready to spring when she’s around him

Feeling only a little safer now that her father distanced himself in the kitchen, Connie relaxes her grip on the dry naked tubes of the chair arm. She picks up her glass of orangeade from the chipped paint metal end table and vacantly sips as she directs her gaze down the street toward the homes where more normal families live.

A row of two-story Craftsman and Victorian houses are hunched neatly together behind their outsized front porches. Each side of the street is lined with an irregular row of thick-trunked elms and the few junipers for which the street is named. Dim illumination from the streetlights filters through the breeze-rustled foliage and plays among the shadows of this unusually warm late September evening. The barking of the Jurgen’s spaniel puppy from a few houses away sets off a chain reaction of itinerant canine replies down the block. A light gust spirals the wind sculpture suspended from the arch at the far end of the porch into a lazy twirl. The feeble yellow glow from the porch light flows unevenly the over rotating sculpture’s planes.

She then hears the sharp rasp of badly shifted gears. The dull luminance of car headlights irradiates that of the streetlights dappling through the trees. She stands up as the aqua and dark blue 1956 De Soto Firedome rounds the corner from Brentwood Street onto Juniper and then stops at the curb in front of her house. The giggling of the driver and her younger passenger are nearly drowned out by the volume of the car radio.

Sixteen-year-old Maxie arches her lithe four-foot-nine body out of the car window. She is wearing an oversized red and black-checked flannel shirt that emphasizes her small physique. A shaggy bob of light brown hair flounces briskly around her lean, broad-featured, thinly freckled face. Her wide blue eyes accentuate an impish expression as she sings along loudly and badly over the voice of Frankie Avalon singing Venus.

Connie puts her orangeade on the porch railing. She steals out toward Maxie and the car’s driver, Maxie’s eighteen-year-old sister, Julie. Connie cringes as she paces down the front walk. Shh! she scolds through a shiver. "Keep it down, Max! You’re gonna wake the whole neighborhood. Shh!"

Knock it off, little sister, says Julie from behind the wheel as she lowers the radio’s volume and leans across Maxie toward the open window where Connie has leaned down. We’re meeting Beau Harper down at The Pit Stop. Are you up for some fun, Connie?

Connie casts a worried glimpse back at her house.

Come on, Maxie urges. "Really, it’ll be fun."

She silently mulls over her decision as her mother’s voice rises incoherently over that of her father’s from inside the house. The two girls in the car haven’t seemed to have heard Connie’s parents, and she wonders if she alone had been conditioned to her mother’s shrieks, as her mother may have been to her own cries from the crib 16 years ago.

"Beau might bring some bee-er," Julie entices confidently.

Maxie smirks and twiddles her low-hanging bangs as Connie gazes back at them. The mild glow from the streetlight behind Julie causes a dim corona to form behind her shoulder-length, silky blonde hair. Maxie, you and I shouldn’t drink, Connie begins.

"And I came along to make sure the two of you don’t," Julie assures them.

Another crash sounds from the house. "No, Jake, you bastard! I won’t!" her mother screams angrily at her husband. The sound of a northbound freight rumbling toward Council Bluffs from a quarter mile away filters through her mother’s drunken resistance.

"We aren’t waitin’ all night, girl!" Maxie tells Connie as she opens the car door.

I probably should check with, she begins as she hears: "Screw you, Jake! Just screw you! The screw you" sounds as if it were tucked into one slurred syllable with a little dip between the words.

She hears the rickety kitchen screen door slam as her mother retreats to the rusty glider out in the dirt patch of the backyard. The glider is Vera’s summer hideaway, as is the attic where she often hibernates to drink in the winter. Connie imagines her mother grasping her beer can as if it is the only thing left for her to hold on to.

She smiles mirthlessly down at the ground. I’m going out, she whispers hoarsely toward the house. I’ll be home before midnight. As if to hide the ugly but familiar incident happening behind the dirty white clapboard exterior of her home, Connie’s rueful smile turns puckish as she scrambles into the front seat next to Maxie.

_____________________________

The Pit Stop, known for its Solid-Shake! and its Trippple-Burger with secret sauce, is on Center Boulevard, three blocks down from the Rexall Drug Store on Durant Street, which cuts through the middle of Hanson, Iowa; one of the last whistle stops before Council Bluffs. With a history built on corn and the railroad connecting east to west, Hanson is surrounded by grain elevators and stitched throughout with railroad tracks. In view of the Pit Stop’s parking lot, the Missouri River undulates listlessly under the three-quarter moon in the darkening sky.

A block away, the 9:13 p.m. local diesel train hisses before it whines up to full throttle. The clank of its cars being pulled into motion intermingles with groan of its hoarse, woebegone whistle. It is bound for Burlington Station in Omaha, a trip all of them have taken many times. It serves as a reminder of one they haven’t taken in a long time.

Mmm, Maxie mumbles as she sips through the straw of her Solid-Shake! and then looks at Julie. They’re opening this new shopping center out on Dodge next Saturday.

"We certainly can’t miss that," Connie murmurs facetiously as she offers a weary smile over her Trippple-Burger.

Julie notices Connie’s light sarcasm and cocks her head at her. You okay, Connie? I mean, really. You okay?

Yeah, she answers uncertainly. Yeah, sure.

You seem a little, I don’t know, off-center, tonight.

"She’s fine, Maxie assures her sister. Can we get some more fries?"

Julie reaches behind Maxie, touches Connie’s shoulder and feels its recoil. If you ever want to talk about it, she confides.

Shut up, Julie! Don’t touch me! Connie wants to cry. Instead, she dryly whispers, I’m okay. The angular planes of Julie’s long features and the little swell of her eyelids are pronounced by the feeble red, green and yellow neon glows from the Pit Stop sign. Connie smiles warmly to counter Julie’s look of concern.

A new top-40 hit, "(My love is higher than a) Mission Bell" sung by Donnie Brooks, trips out over KOIL-AM from Omaha. Its tone trips about the white and turquoise vinyl environment of the car, seeming to accent the light, ubiquitous scents of vinyl, plastic and French fries.

Well, Jewel! Beau Harper gloats confidently as he suddenly appears and leans through her window. A pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes shows above the rolled-up sleeve of his white T-shirt. He displays a missing incisor in his crooked smile. He turns his wide-open, icy blue gaze toward Maxie. Hey, brat, he says.

Hey, yerself, Beau, Maxie pouts.

He rests his bony forearms on the ledge of Julie’s window to put himself at ease. There is a crude tattoo of the Li’l Devil cartoon character with Born for Trouble inked beneath it within the light glaze of freckles on his right bicep. He nods toward Connie. "Who’s she?"

That’s Connie, Julie says. This’s Beau Harper, she tells Connie. Haven’t you met?

No, he answers smoothly and extends a hand that takes hers in his oddly feather-like grasp. Connie smiles faintly as she pulls her hand away and stares down at her half-eaten Trippple-Burger. Beau’s self-assured simper falls to a look of mild rejection.

D’jeu bring a little, like, dividend with you, Beau? Julie asks.

His hand slides to one of Julie’s knees hidden in the shadow beneath the dash and he inches it upward. "Now, what dividend might that be, Jewel?" he teases.

When Beau’s hand has reached a point beyond where it might cause trouble, she clamps her knees together and lifts his hand up between her thumb and forefinger. He gets the point and helps her pat her skirt into place. The beer you promised, she tells him.

He raises his gaze from her lap, and he looks at the two fifteen-year-old girls, then back at Julie. Unh-hunh, yeah, he grunts as he sweeps a shock of his thick blond hair from his sunburned forehead. He stands up and opens the door. Come on, Jewel, we gotta talk private.

Beau, she whines in complaint.

Come on, Jewel, out of the car.

He leans down and smirks at the other two. Maxie sends back a bemused glance and blows a little puff of breath up toward her bangs as she does when she’s perplexed. Connie flashes Beau an indolent look as Julie swings her tall frame out of the car. Julie has grown up gracefully in advance of her year-younger sister. There is an effervescence in her light-blue eyes, clear-skinned features and defiant smile. It is a confident look Maxie rarely sees when Julie is around her parents. "Oh, Beau," Julie scoffs.

"Jew-el, he mocks, and then glances at the two girls. We won’t be long, kids."

Maxie rifles her bangs with another puff. "What a dwink!" she comments after her sister and her boyfriend have retreated into the drive-in’s diner. 

Connie sighs. They’re all dwinks. All boys are dwinks.

"Well, some of them."

Max, Connie says suddenly snapping out of her depression and bristling into confidence. D’you think Julie and that guy, you know, have, well, you know—?

Maxie shudders and grits her teeth. The bridge of her nose crinkles in distaste. "Pee-ewww! Jeepers, Connie, do y’think she—with him?"

I asked you.

I wouldn’t kn—, Maxie begins to reply. "Oooh! I love this! She turns up the volume on the The Everly Brothers singing Cathy’s Clown."

You think they wrote that for Kathy Boland? Connie asks. You know, the one who sits in the fourth row in Mr. Oster’s class?

"You mean her?" Maxie says sourly.

Yeah, well, John Wiler’s going crazy over her.

Kathy’s got no figure, Maxie mutters as she indolently checks on her own unexceptional development.

Hah! You’re not in her gym class, Max, Connie replies with a toss of her head. A warm neon glow swells across her face. A stray strand of her thick dark-brown hair glitters against her cheek, and she brings her hand up to brush it away. Maxie notices how Connie’s usually soft hands now appear peculiarly old in this moody half-light.

"Hey, kids! Julie says as she bangs on the car window frame to get their attention. Maxie rolls down the half-opened window. Listen, Penny, can you cover for me tonight?"

"What?"

Tell Mom and Dad I’m, uh, staying over at Hannah’s or something.

"Ju-leee, Maxie whines incredulously. What about the car? How’re we gonna get home?"

You can drive it, hon. You’ve done it before.

I don’t even have my lisc—

You have a permit, Julie interrupts. Come on. You can do it.

This, Connie says enthusiastically, "I have got to see."

Come on, Julie, for iced cake, stop ticking me off. You know I can’t drive at night! I’m not allow—

No, Penelope, Julie insists as she furrows her brow. You’re ticking me off. You’ve driven this car during the day. This is the same thing, only darker.

"Thanks a heap, Julie," Maxie grumbles.

Connie leans into the conversation. "Can I drive?" she asks breathlessly through a mischievous smile.

"No! Julie barks at her. Then to Maxie: Penelope, this is important."

Maxie looks over her sister’s shoulder at Beau standing in the dim light. He leans confidently against the hood of his blue and yellow-primed 6-year-old Ford Crestline. Maxie is overcome by a wave of hatred for him as her angry, knitted-browed look turns to one of confusion and dismay. She puffs up at her bangs again. "Julie, are you and Beau gonna go off and do it, or something?"

Julie looks back over her shoulder. Beau brings an oil-smudged finger to his lips to shush her and to preserve their secret. She looks back at Maxie and bites her lower lip. No, she insists with conviction. Look. Mom and Dad aren’t even gonna to ask about me, okay?

Connie detects the kind of choke in Julie’s tone reserved for children who are neglected by their parents.

"Ju-leee?" Maxie pleads in a whisper.

Her sister stands away and all Maxie sees in the curved frame of the car window is Julie’s slender-fingered, polished-nailed hand waving her away. I’ll be home right after midnight, Penny. I promise. Leave the den window open. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? The thing for the lights is to the left of the thing near the cigarette lighter. Pull it and they’ll turn on. She walks away.

Shit! Maxie mutters in a sharp whisper.

Shh! Max! Connie scolds her and then speculates, Let her go. She needs to, you know— She looks over at Beau. Whatever. Then half to herself, she says, I wish I had Julie’s kind of—

"Stupidity?" Maxie answers as she watches them get into his car. He then pops open a bottle of beer and hands it to Julie. The Crestliner’s engine rumbles viciously as Beau turns on the ignition. The tires chirp on the pavement and the car lurches through the neon and florescent patches toward the darkness in the opposite direction of Julie and Maxie’s home.

Maxie pulls her horn-rimmed glasses from the pocket of her flannel shirt. She slips them on to inspect the immense, glittering white, aqua-padded dashboard with the big and little circular dial faces and instruments as she tries to remember what switch does what. She glances to the left of the steering wheel at the protruding square push-button shift console on the dashboard.

Connie quietly collects the wrappers and wax cups from their meal and takes them to a nearby wire trashcan. She looks into the dirty, crushed waxed-paper cups and crumpled wrappers as she thinks about Kathy Boland. She wonders if John Wiler is also thinking about Kathy tonight, then wonders if Kathy would even care. Kathy and John are strangers to one another, as Connie feels like a stranger to everyone else except Maxie. Her thoughts eventually lead back to her disgust with her parents—particularly her father.

She rarely dares to venture into the lingering kind of hope that so often leads her only to despair. Tonight, though, she’s found reassurance and hope in Julie’s defiance.

Two—

Yakety-yak

Once Maxie gets her driver’s license in early December, Julie’s clandestine outings with boys become easier, as the two sisters leave the house together. Once at the Pit Stop, Julie gets out of the De Soto then into Beau’s or Larry Wood’s car. This leaves Maxie and Connie to cruise the Hanson strip on their own. Maxie assumes her parents must think it’s wonderful that she and Julie are spending so much time together at night, keeping one another safe from hoodlums and other dangers of darkness.

George and Emily Maxwell manage to keep a close eye on Maxie as Julie takes advantage of her parents’ seeming lack of concern. At times they glance out from their bedroom window after 10:30 p.m. and feel reassured that if the car is in the driveway, the girls must be home and upstairs studying. It’s only when Julie is involved in a minor midnight accident while riding in Larry’s Buick in Council Bluffs that they start demanding answers.

"Who is he?" George demands over the kitchen table after dinner, once Maxie had been sent away to do her homework to be spared the dressing-down of her sister.

Julie feels the memory of the car wreck register as a dull ache in her neck. No one, she pouts, as she strains to look down at her lap.

Emily wipes her hands on her terry cloth apron and then snaps on a pair of yellow rubber gloves to wash the dishes. Julie! she scolds from where she stands at the sink. Listen to your father.

"He hasn’t told me anyth—"

"Don’t get smart with me, little lady! George replies tersely. He scratches the back of his brush-cut head. Jeeze, why do you even spend time with boys like th–?"

"You don’t even know them!" she blurts out.

Don’t interrupt your father, Emily warns as she turns on the faucets. A scraping sound follows the groaning and knocking of the pipes before the water flows.

A cold January blast cuts through the loose windowpanes behind Julie and sends a warm shiver up her spine that temporarily soothes the pain of the accident, but the tension of the moment strains her breathing. The discomfort serves as a scant reminder of the asthma she had six years before. The constancy of the asthma somehow disappeared when she contracted the rheumatic fever that had laid her up for four months. It was then that she first sensed her parents’ alienation from her. George and Emily had always been healthy and have not been able to abide Julie’s physical weaknesses. Maxie never gets sick, and this is the one resentment her Julie holds against her. She focuses her gaze on the crumbs from the chicken potpie crust on the stained Formica tabletop. The kitchen smells as old as the 1930s—as old as them. I wasn’t interrupt—

Yes, you were! George interrupts. Jeezus.

Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, George, Emily admonishes him as a mother might to a child.

"You don’t show one ounce of respect for your parents, Julie. Not one, George carps. Are you even listening to me?"

Julie remains still and quiet as she directs her eyes down in silent reflection.

Where have we failed you—? No, her father corrects himself, "why have you failed us, Julie? His chair scrapes against the black-and-gold-flaked linoleum as he rises. He grips the edge of the table and leans toward her as she hunches her shoulders in preparation for another lecture. Take Reverend Barragan’s daughter, Regina. She is such a good teenager. She’s about your age. No. Penny’s age. Do you know she isn’t even going to date anyone until she gets to college? Here she is, cute as a button, an above-average student who’s probably trying to get better grades. His tone has softened as Julie quietly simpers over the rumor going around school concerning Regina’s sexual preference. She even sometimes works on weekends."

An absolute flower, Emily echoes.

Why can’t you be more like Reverend Barragan’s daughter?

Why aren’t you more like Reverend Barragan? Julie mutters facetiously at her lap.

"What? What did you say?"

Stung by Julie’s response, Emily looks up from the sink. "I can’t believe the impertinence of this child! she says to her husband. Penny would never act this way. And Penny gets straight B’s on her report card. Even an A or two from time to time."

Penny’ll do us proud, Emmie, George assures her. Much more so than— He waves his hand in Julie’s direction. You know? I can’t believe it either—how we’ve produced two daughters so very different from one another. Jeeze, I wish I’d never bought that damn car for you last year, Julie.

We got the De Soto for Penny, too, George, Emily reminds him.

Well, it’s been nothing but trouble. Damn car’s a blank check for her to go out and do these damn fool things. All that speeding around our streets, listening to that cruddy jitterbug music on the car radio. Driving around town sounding like a goddamned circus calliope, George grumbles. Damned car.

They call it rock ’n’ roll in this century, Julie weakly informs him.

Julie’s thoughts have momentarily taken her away from the conversation about the De Soto George bought for his daughters a year ago so that Julie wouldn’t drive his prized 1958 Sunliner convertible. I’m sorry I was sick, she responds in a choke, trying not to let her parents see her weakness. She bites her lower lip in defense.

"What?" Emily gasps.

"Just what do you mean by that, young lady?" George asks threateningly.

Nothing, Julie relents quietly as she raises her gaze to them. Tears have dampened her cheeks. "Could you two do me a real big favor, this time? she says tightly. Could you just carry on this conversation between yourselves without forcing me to hear it again?"

Julie? Emily says tersely. "You are rude. Here your father is trying to help you and all you do is criticize him."

He’s not helping, she replies scornfully. "He’s comparing me to Penny and Regina Barragan. Well, I’m not either one of them. I’m Julie, God-dammit!" she sobs.

Julie! Emily gasps.

"You can learn from those two girls, you little snit! George snaps. You are grounded as of now until I tell you different. And don’t make any more of those God-damned phone calls."

George! Emily gasps.

Fine! Julie snaps as she pounds the table.

"Don’t you wave your temper in my face, little girl! George warns her, and if any of them boys calls this house, I’ll tell ’em you’re not even home, that I’ve sent you off to reform school, the army, or something."

"Fine! Fine! Fine. FINE! Julie gasps. A final pound on the table topples an empty milk glass. I don’t give a damn anymore about what you say!"

"Jeeze, George moans calmly. Keep me away from this girl. She’s a mean one!" He straightens himself, arches his back and walks to the refrigerator to get a cold beer.

Julie looks down at her clenched, reddened fist and then at the Formica tabletop with its pattern of yellow mother-of-pearl. She traces the ribbed stainless-steel edge of the table with her index finger. The crimson polish on the nail is chipped at the tip. She hears a quick sizzle of pent-up beer escaping from the bottle her father has opened. "I have a mind, you know," she laments with a tone fallen deep into sadness.

"Three Cs, a D, and an incomplete don’t exactly convince me of that, daughter, George affirms through a sip of beer as he makes his way out to watch The Ed Sullivan Show. I’ll call you when Señor Wences comes on, Emmie."

Emily says nothing in response to her husband’s invitation to watch the Señor’s hand puppets, as she methodically continues her chore. One dish scrapes against another dish in a regular cadence through the silence as Julie sits trying to listen to anything but that. She had been deserted many years before by those who could have loved her though it might have been inconvenient for them. She slips undetected to her room to finish her pouting; alone and forgotten.

_____________________________

Scant sunlight sifts through a sliver of azure sky beneath dense, slim layers of clouds above the open cornfield outside Reverend Thomas Barragan’s living room window. A gust of wind whisks a puff of last night’s snow against it.

"I’m not having a good light here at all. I can’t see in this light, the frail, elderly poet proclaims dryly from the television image where he stands behind the podium. Robert Frost’s voice seems much smaller than the power of the words of his poem, Dedication," which he had written for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Lyndon Johnson, the vice president-elect, removes his hat and shields the old man’s eyes from the glare off the lightness of the type on the pages as he tries to read on.

The rasp of his voice is buffeted in the competing wind, which is amplified through the microphone as he reads his poem. He has to stop reading because the intense winter sun reflects too brightly off the wind rustled pages. Instead, he recites another poem, The Gift Outright.

Regina Barragan sits in the comfort of the overstuffed living room couch as she watches the inauguration on television. A thick, wavy length of rusty-hued hair hangs to below her shoulders. She is a naturally pretty girl—a skirt and sweater type, bundled in an oversized beige angora sweater. Maybe they should have sunglasses or something, she remarks. She’s recovering from the flu and her feathery timbre is tinged by a husky edge. They’re all squinting.

Reverend Thomas Barragan glances impartially up at the hazy black and white televised image. Then he notices a pulsing of light reflected off the wall caused by the sun glinting through some wind-rustled tree branches outside the front window. He smiles passively, then looks back at his notes. God’s light, Regina, he replies dryly from the absorption in his Sunday message, shining down on history, he adds with a tinge of sarcasm.

Regina had always considered that her father’s tendency toward detachment came with his profession. But something other than his wife’s accidental drowning over 8 years before has aged him beyond his 43 years. Lately he has taken on the sunken appearance of apathy. His close-cropped hair is prematurely gray, and his eyes have dimmed beneath the soft shadow of his high brow.

Regina also feels aged because of the dual duty she feels she must play as daughter and quasi-saint in the shadow of the sullen Reverend. Is that what your sermon’s going to be about, Dad? President Kennedy? She clears her throat. I mean, are you putting a line about God’s light shining down on history in your sermon?

He glimpses up at her with his pen poised above the writing tablet. Certainly not, he finally quips. My God has little to do with the politics of worldly things. Those are man’s doings and God’s children must pay the consequences of their choices, including those of their chosen leaders.

Regina’s mouth twitches into a sullen smile and she shakes her head. She realizes he is in another one of his crotchety moods again. Normally he is more reclusive during his sermon constructions. It’s unusual for him to be writing in the living room, especially over the distraction of television. Customarily he writes behind the locked door of the bedroom he once shared with Jillian, his wife. Regina believes that’s where he crafts his Sunday homily, as he’d been spending a growing portion of his day there. She finds it odd at times when she passes the locked door and she senses an eerily discomforting silence behind it. She occasionally, smells the fragrance of lavender, her mother’s favorite fragrance. She dismisses this as the incense of Jillian’s memory her father uses to concentrate on his work.

She combs another length of hair away from the right side of her face. Regina’s delicate, long-fingered hands are those of an artist, though they are never used that way. She has been more ruled by life’s proven formulas, but life’s predictability has begun to bore her. She would now rather accept the planned mysterious spontaneity of God’s will, coupled with that of her own.

She stares back at the television where Cardinal Richard Cushing is swearing in President-elect Kennedy. Firemen and secret servicemen scamper about to find the source of some smoke in the area. It is from an overheated amplifier and is quickly contained.

"So help me, God!" Kennedy booms with his New England inflection at the end of his oath of office.

So, help me, God, Regina beseeches in a silent prayer.

_____________________________

The new President comes across as a grainy image on George’s big Motorola television in the cabinet of the knotty pine den. In his inaugural speech, Kennedy has talked about the heirs of the American Revolution going forth as the torch has been passed to a new and hopeful generation of young Americans, who have been tempered by the strength of past generations.

"Aw, hell, George grumbles low as he raises himself from the colonial-style couch across the darkened room. He walks to the television to adjust the slow rolling of the picture. One of this guy is enough, he mutters as he thumps the side of the set’s metal mahogany grained cabinet. I don’t need four of ‘em rollin’ up and down my screen."

Another harder pound on the cabinet causes the rolling to stop, also causing one of the doors normally used to conceal the television to swing closed.

Oh, George, Emily complains as George blocks her view. "Now I can’t see Jackie."

The new president goes on to proclaim that America will pay the price to assure liberty for all nations, even those that wish us ill.

"Who writes this guy’s sappy speeches? Uncle Miltie?" George quips as the TV image stabilizes. He swings the cabinet door back open and returns to his recliner chair.

Where do you think Jackie buys her clothes? Emily says about the President’s wife. You think they sell those coats and matching pillbox hats at Brandeis?

"No, Emmie," George emphatically warns her.

President Kennedy continues to proclaim that we will help to relieve the misery of those humbly scrounging out an existence in the huts and hamlets of the third world; that we will help them to help themselves, because it is the right thing to do. He says that to help the poor is and should be the responsibility of any free society.

A cold wind swirls through the President’s hair, but he seems oblivious to it as his gloveless hands gesticulate his points.

I’ve heard, George relates, "that he wants to send our boys into the jungles to dig ditches for Commie natives, rather than to fight ‘em–even though they’re Reds. I think he just wants us to be a nation of softies on Communism. With all the Castro stuff going on down in Cuba. Jeeze! Khrushchev could end up ninety goddamn miles from Miami, and he wants our fighting forces to help a couple of African nigra farmers raise fuckin’ sheep!"

"George! Emily gasps. Not in front of the children."

What children? George wonders as he peers at the television. His anger with the new President’s proposals has cornered him in a place far away from the secure company of his family as he imagines the imminent Soviet invasion of Hanson, Iowa.

I’m right here, Dad, Julie grumbles indifferently from the shadow in which she sits.

The picture starts to roll again. Aw, Jeeze! he complains as he gets up and crosses the room to pound on the television again.

_____________________________

The President talks about helping to free Latin America from its oppression and poverty. He promises to employ the United Nations to induce the instruments of war to succumb to those of peace. He also hopes that science will invoke its peaceful achievements over the terrors of its possibilities in producing instruments of war.

This comment may have been a reaction to departing President Eisenhower’s speech of a few days