“Exacted?” she asked. “What, exacted? What kind of thing?” It mattered not at all to George if what they talked of here was real or true; he knew how to make a train of thought come out right whether its terms were ones and zeroes or gods and angels. A kind of poet without poetry: maybe, finally, she had got her talent from him.

“Well,” he said. He swirled the ice in his drink, all water now. “For instance. You know what happened a year later. They always connect that with Cuba too. Somehow.”

“What happened a year later?” Kit said, and remembered even as she asked. “Oh God,” she whispered. “1963.”

“Yeah,” said George. “Right.”

She felt stabbed, as though the story or myth she had articulated had caused it to happen, had right now got him shot through the head in Dallas: the sacrificial goat, the tragos of our tragedy. “Oh my God.”

“Fair Play for Cuba,” George said. “Free Cuba Committee. Castro, anti-Castro. Something somewhere somehow.”

It’s not so, she thought, and she took hold of a chair’s back, feeling she might keel over with strangeness: it’s not so, it’s only as though. It wasn’t truth but the economy of metaphor, everything in balance, this side of the mirror with Alice’s side, only reversed: Jacqueline cradling his poor head in her bloodstained lap, just a man dying. And yet also, far beyond where we could see, the Gray Gods licking up the same blood from the same bowl. Satisfied: appeased.

“You remember where you were when you heard?” George asked, not so much because he wanted to know, it seemed, as to change the subject, or its tendency. “You know they say everybody does. Like Pearl Harbor.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “Sure. I remember.” On the straight road north from the University toward that city in whose suburbs she had once lived with George and Marion and Ben. Yes. That day.

There was a little rain and the blacktop was velvety in the soft light. Kit was driving, Fran beside her searching on the radio for something besides Top 40 or preachers. It was so far only a brief sentence, interrupting the broadcast: the motorcade fired on in Dallas, the President hit.

“It’s probably really nothing,” Kit said. “You know how they get, about every little thing.”

“He’s dead,” Fran said with simple certainty. “He’s dead.”

They listened, waiting for more, going north. Kit had driven back to school that fall in George and Marion’s old Buick station wagon, they had at last got something newer. She had kept it, though she wasn’t twenty-one and had to park it at a garage off campus. Fran had a friend—her best friend, she said—who was singing in the chorus of a road-show company of Camelot that was appearing in that city. Fran longed to see her, it seemed so close; and Kit had said okay, let’s cut and go.

More news, worse. The rain got a little steadier, then seemed to pass.

They went past the junction where a secondary road turned off toward the town where Falin’s car had gone off the bridge; after a time they crossed on a wide causeway the same river, grown great. A river to cross.

The river of Jordan is muddy and cold

It chills the body

But not the soul

Kit thought of those lines, and at last began to weep. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh poor man.”

All my trials

Soon be over

It was a Joan Baez song, one of the terrible bleak songs she cried out so piercingly, at once wounding and healing. Fran had brought the records back from New York and they listened to them over and over, sometimes when drunk hugging the Webcor like a friend and pressing an ear right to the speaker grille. She longed to hear it now.

Hush little baby don’t you cry

You know your mama

Was born to die

He was pronounced dead as evening came quickly on, the darkest time of the year. They passed the city limits, the streets numbered neatly in the hundreds but really just straight roads through the brown cornfields where the crows were arising: you could watch them make for the naked willow grove.

How could this be given to them, how could it, had they deserved it by not knowing that it could be? The farmhouses and garages and flat-roofed split-levels were turning on their lights sadder than darkness.

They came into the city. Kit had laughed, telling Fran she would show her the sights, the high school from which she’d graduated, the church where she was confirmed, the house where she was deflowered. But she found she remembered nothing, it was all black streets and the lights of cars and stores, like everywhere.

They found a phone booth and Fran called the theater where the play was, Camelot for God’s sake, and after a couple of dimes reached the hotel and her friend. Kit watched from the car as Fran talked, her head lowered and unsmiling, and she almost wept again.

“She can’t come out,” Fran told her, returning. “Nobody can leave the hotel tonight. Not chorus people anyway. It’s a rule.”

They sat in the Buick watching the streetlight change.

“I’ve got to make a call too,” Kit said.

She found the number in the phone book after studying all the Eggerts and trying to remember the car dealer’s name. Carl. What would he sell now that there weren’t going to be any Studebakers? A woman answered after a couple of rings.

“Hi,” Kit said. “Is Burke there?”

There was a little pause; it seemed filled with tears too. “Burke doesn’t live here anymore,” the voice said, hurt or maybe cautious.

“Oh. Well. I’m, I knew him in high school, and well I was passing through.”

“No. He’s got a place of his own now. Over there on Sunset. With Mary Jo and the baby.”

“Oh.”

“They don’t have a phone yet.”

“Oh.”

“So.”

“Okay. Okay, thanks.”

“Well you’re very welcome,” the voice said, brightening strangely at the last.

“Okay,” Fran said when Kit came back. “Okay, I need a drink.”

Nowhere in that state in that year could Kit or Fran drink, but they stopped at a liquor store whose bright sign was reflected upside down in the wet pavement, and Fran turned up the collar of her raincoat and lit a Camel. She went in and in a moment came back, cigarette in the corner of her big mouth and her hands in her pockets.

“No luck,” Kit guessed.

Fran pulled out a flat clear bottle: a pint of vodka. “First thing I saw,” she said. “It helps if you grab something quick.” She uncapped it, drank, shuddered in disgust, gave it to Kit.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Kit said.

“Well. I think I like her a lot more than she likes me. You know.”

“I know.”

“Who was that you called?”

“A guy. The first guy I, you know, made love with.”

“Oh yes?”

Kit thought: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

There was nothing to do then but go back along the way they came, and they did that, driving south between fields black and limitless on either side, now and then passing the bottle. All along the road the bars and restaurants were closed, or had filled their changeable signs with new messages:

NO MUSIC TONITE         GOD BLESS HIM

“What should we do?” Kit asked desperately. “There should be something we should do now. We can’t just go on, just living, can we?”

Fran shook her head, she didn’t know.

“Should we join the Peace Corps?” Kit cried. “Is that it? Is that what we’re supposed to think of?” She had taken his hand once, she had, and he had said something to her—yes, he had said Falin’s name to her. He had said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had spoken of it in a poem, a poem she had burned with the rest.