She found herself weeping, though; she pulled off a length of rough paper from the roll and pressed it to her eyes and blew her nose. She didn’t want to die; she wanted the world not to die, or be so wounded it could never recover. She wanted to live.

That night, twenty-two American interceptor aircraft went aloft in case the Cuban government reacted to the President’s speech with an attack on Guantanamo or the arming of missiles or the liftoff of the Il-28 bombers. The Soviet ships in the Atlantic received orders from Moscow to ignore the blockade and continue on course to Cuban ports. Polaris nuclear submarines in port went out to sea. The President signed an order, National Security Memorandum 199, authorizing the loading of multistage nuclear weapons on aircraft under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. United States forces went from the worldwide state of alert that was code-named DEFCON III up to DEFCON II. DEFCON I meant war.

The next day on East North Street, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held what Saul called an emergency executive meeting to decide how to respond to the blockade of the island. The President had called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade, Saul said, and a blockade is an act of war, plain and simple, and it was obviously not going to be the last one either. The committee members spent the day calling other campus groups and trying to get a united front together to go into the streets in a mass public demonstration against the blockade. They couldn’t get a campus meeting place for a rally, not being a registered student group, but at last got an offer from a Unitarian church to hold their meeting there on the following evening. They got the Young People’s Socialist League to run off announcements on their mimeo machine and Jackie and the others went around in Jackie’s car tacking and taping them to lampposts and walls; they were mostly torn down as soon as they went up.

On television they showed people emptying the shelves of supermarkets, buying canned food and bottled water, and guns and ammo too. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they supported the President’s action. One in five said they believed it meant the beginning of World War Three. But mostly people went on doing what they had been doing; they got up and went to work and went to class and in class went on talking about Shakespeare and quadratic equations and the rise of the middle class. Kit wrote notes into her notebooks and walked across campus listening to the carillon at noon and went to the library. And always she felt the depth of the sky above her, maybe being severed right now by the missiles coming. There was no poetry or knowledge or wisdom that could master or face or even survive it, it was hopeless: Pushkin’s smile as useless against it as any other weapon, any at all.

The Unitarian church was bleak and homey at once, like a school cafeteria or a basement game room. There was no cross and no colored glass and the pews were square-backed and had worn velvet cushions to sit on. It was the first church that wasn’t a Catholic church Kit had ever been in; a little shadow of trespass was only one of the new feelings she felt sitting there. She watched the people come in and the minister in a blue button-down shirt and no tie set up a microphone and folding chairs for speakers in front of the altar.

Saul and Max and the YPSL guys registered the people who came in, got signatures from those who were willing to sign. There were people from ADA in ties or in dresses; there were two women from SANE who each wore the black button with a white figure on it that Jackie told her was the semaphore letters for N and D laid one over the other, and they stood for Nuclear Disarmament. Kit wondered how anyone would know this.

“So are you guys representing the Student Peace Union?” Max asked two boyish blonds, almost twins, in argyle sweaters.

“We’re not representing it,” one said. “We are it.”

In the end the church filled and the speakers one by one got up and tapped the mike and spoke. “Don’t say it’s too terrible to be used,” the SANE woman said. “Just because you wouldn’t use it. It’s not too terrible. It’s been used. We used it. Eisenhower threatened to drop one on the Chinese in Korea. Just a little one. He was going to lend one to the French in Indochina. Don’t tell me it’s inconceivable.”

“These missiles are a danger to this country,” the ADA man in tweed jacket and striped tie said. “But after all they are equivalent to our own missiles in bases in England and Turkey. There has to be a general summit-level discussion on the reduction of these forces around the world. Sudden precipitate action…”

But Max had stood up in the audience, his long S shape, and started to speak. “Well those weapons may not represent a new danger to us,” he said, “but we sure are a danger to Cuba. And this government would prefer Cuba to be defenseless. The Russians are lending a hand to the little kid who’s just about to get beat up…”

There were shouts of No, no and protests; Max slid his big hands into his pockets and went on. “Kennedy says we’ve got no plans to invade Cuba at the present time. At the present time. Well, swell. Must make them feel confident down there.” More protests, but Max didn’t raise his voice. “Kennedy’s risking the end of civilization to get another whack in at Castro. Do we go along? Sixty-four-dollar question.”

Splits and oppositions appeared among the groups, an ill will spreading that Kit could only partly perceive. It was like a family argument where what someone said reminded others of everything that person always said or shouted, so that people began responding angrily at the first words, as though they knew what had to be coming. Saul took over the mike and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee proposed a rationale for a march on Saturday, coordinated with the protest marches the national committee was sponsoring in Washington and at the UN. The theme of the march would be Hands Off Cuba. There was real shouting then, and some people walked out.

“Listen,” Jackie said to Kit, leaning close. “I don’t think you should get involved with this.”

“I am,” Kit said. “I’m here.”

“I don’t think you should participate in this thing tomorrow. It’s not anything that’s going to do you any good.”

“What do you mean? Any good?”

He looked away, at Saul going through a list and asking for volunteers, at the darkened windows, and at his hands. “I just think you ought not to,” he said softly. “I can’t even promise you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m not safe.”

“Kit,” Jackie said, but still he didn’t look at her. “For once. Listen and believe me.”

9.

The next night, as if he knew just where she’d be—though in fact he could not have known—Falin stood in the lamplight outside the music building when Kit came out with Fran and her friends.

Kit had insisted that Fran let her come along with her to the rehearsal. Fran’s pickup quintet was doing the Trout, but only the first two movements, and not perfect, Fran warned her. Kit could not have borne solitude, though it had always been so easy. She sat on a hard chair while they went through it twice, stopping to work on small moments like craftsmen on a jewel, five oddly assorted, even funny-looking people beautiful in their attention, transformed into what seemed to Kit almost a holy unity. The music filled her as though with water, as though she swam, a trout released, too small to keep: escaped.