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 centred 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 embarrassment of it, of knowing that people were talking and that people who had for years wanted to see her take a fall were now satisfied. It was Vicky, maybe it had always been Vicky, and Regina decided that if there was to be a Christmas at all for them this miserable year, it would be at Vicky and Steve’s ordinary suburban ranchhouse in the amusingly middle-class suburb of Ligonier, where most people still owned American cars and called a trip to McDonald’s “eating out”.

Mike, of course, simply went along with her decision; she would have expected no more and brooked no less.

For Regina Cunningham the three days following the news that Arnie was “in trouble” had been an exercise in pure cold control, a hard lunge for survival. Her survival, the family’s survival, Arnie’s survival—he might not believe that, but Regina found she hadn’t the time to care. Mike’s pain had never entered her equations; the thought that they could comfort each other had never even crossed her mind as a speculation. She had calmly put the cover on her sewing machine after Mike came downstairs and gave her the news. She did that, and then she had gone to the phone and had gotten to work. The tears she would later shed while talking to her sister had then been a thousand years away. She had brushed past Michael as if he were a piece of furniture, and he had trailed uncertainly after her as he had done all of their married life.

She called Tom Sprague, their lawyer, who, hearing that their problem was criminal, hastily referred her to a colleague, Jim Warberg. She called Warberg and got an answering service that would not reveal Warberg’s home number. She sat by the phone for a moment, drumming her fingers lightly against her lips, and then called Sprague again. He hadn’t wanted to give her Warberg’s home telephone number, but in the end he gave in. When Regina finally let him go, Sprague sounded dazed, almost shell-shocked. Regina in full spate often caused such a reaction.

She called Warberg, who said he absolutely couldn’t take! the case. Regina had lowered her bulldozer blade again. Warberg ended up not only taking the case but agreeing to go immediately to Albany, where Arnie was being held, to see what could be done. Warberg, speaking in the weak, amazed voice of a man who has been filled full of Novocain and then run over by a tractor, protested that he knew a perfectly good man in Albany who could get the lay of the land. Regina was adamant. Warberg went by private plane and reported back four hours later.

Arnie, he said, was being held on an open charge. He would be extradited to Pennsylvania the following day. Pennsylvania and New York had coordinated the bust along with three Federal agencies: the Federal Drug Control Task Force, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The main target was not Arnie, who was small beans, but Will Darnell—Darnell, and whomever Darnell was doing business with. Those guys, Warberg said, with their suspected ties to organized crime and disorganized drug smuggling in the new South, were the big beans.

“Holding someone on an open charge is illegal,” Regina had snapped immediately, drawing on a deep backlog of TV crime-show fare.

Warberg, not exactly overjoyed to be where he was when he had planned on spending a quiet evening at home reading a book, rejoined crisply, “I’d be down on my knees thanking God that’s what they’re doing, They caught him with a trunkload of unstamped cigarettes, and if I push them on it, they’ll be more than happy to charge him, Mrs Cunningham. I advise you and your husband to get over here to Albany. Quickly.”

“I thought you said he was going to be extradited tomorrow—”

“Oh, yes, that’s all been arranged. If we’ve got to play hardball with these guys, we ought to be glad the game’s going to be played on our home court. Extradition isn’t the problem here.”

“What is?”

“These people want to play knock-over-the-dominoes. They want to knock your son over onto Will Darnell. Arnold is not talking. I want you two to get over here and persuade him that it’s in his best interest to talk.”

“Is it?” she had asked hesitantly.

“Hell, yes!” Warberg’s voice crackled back. “These guys don’t want to put your son in jail. He’s a minor from a good family with no previous criminal record, not even a school record of disciplinary problems. He can get out of this without even facing a judge. But he’s got to talk.”

So they had gone to Albany, and Regina had been taken down a short, narrow hallway faced in white tile, lit with high-intensity bulbs sunken into small wells in the ceiling and covered with wire mesh. The place had smelled vaguely of Lysol and urine, and she kept trying to convince herself that her son was being held here, her son, but achieving that conviction was a hard go. It didn’t seem possible that it could be true. The possibility that it was all a hallucination seemed much more likely.

Seeing Arnie had stripped away that possibility in a hurry. The protective jacket of shock was likewise stripped away, and she felt a cold, consuming fear. It was at this moment that she had first seized on the idea of “Getting us over this”, the way a drowning person will seize a life preserver. It was Arnie, it was her son, not in a jail cell (that was the only thing she had been spared, but she was grateful for even small favours) but in a small square room whose only furnishings were two chairs and a table scarred with cigarette burns.