Caesar Bloody Caesar

Caesar Bloody Caesar

Josephine Quinn NY Review of Books

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War

edited and translated from the Latin by Kurt A. Raaflaub

Pantheon, 793 pp., $50.00

When Julius Caesar was thirty-one years old in 69 BCE, so the story goes, and serving as a junior Roman magistrate in Spain, he once stood lamenting before a statue of Alexander the Great because he had achieved so little at an age by which Alexander had already conquered the world.

He had good reason for concern. Although his recent election as a quaestor—one of the officials responsible for finances—had given him a lifetime seat in the Senate, Roman politics were more of a funnel than a ladder: twenty quaestors who had been elected at thirty years old could compete nine years later for eight praetorships, and then, three years after that, for just two annual consulships. To rise, you needed political friends, name recognition, and, in order to buy elections, a great deal of money.

Caesar was already admired as an orator, but he was best known for his debts, and he was good at making enemies, especially among the powerful conservatives in the Senate. Furthermore, while he had ably fulfilled the standard military duties of a young Roman nobleman, he had attracted attention only for his first assignment overseas at the age of about twenty: a trip to Bithynia in northern Anatolia, where he had become friendly—many said extremely friendly—with its king, Nicomedes. Whether or not the rumors were true, this was the first hint of a lifelong tendency to test the bounds of Rome’s unwritten moral and legal codes.

What he realized over the next decade was that two very good friends could make up for a lot of enemies if one was Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and the other its finest general, Gnaeus Pompey—nicknamed, no doubt to Caesar’s annoyance, “the Great.” This clique—which has gone down in history as the overly official-sounding “First Triumvirate,” but was called at the time the “three-headed monster”—got Caesar elected consul for 59 BCE. It also got Pompey a new wife in Caesar’s daughter Julia, apparently a love match despite the thirty-three-year age gap.

In office, Caesar proposed a radical program that included land distribution for the poor and Pompey’s veterans, as well as financial concessions for state contractors under Crassus’s protection. When the Senate rejected it, he took his laws directly to the people, and his co-consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus was chased from the Forum at knifepoint when he attempted to veto them. This was a step too far: Bibulus retaliated by retiring to his house for the rest of the year, claiming that he was watching the sky for omens, without which state business could not be conducted. As a result all Caesar’s legislation as consul was, strictly speaking, illegal, putting him under serious threat of prosecution when he became a private citizen again.

He and his friends ensured that wouldn’t happen for some time by securing him an unprecedented five-year military command over three Roman provinces to the north of Italy, including Transalpine Gaul (modern Provence), and later having it extended to the ten years required before he could stand for a second consulship, which would give him the chance to put his earlier legislation and subsequent actions on a firmer legal basis. He further enraged his opponents by turning this assignment into the greatest land grab ever accomplished by a Roman general, bringing all the rest of Gaul under his personal power: still not at the level of Alexander’s achievements, but a worthy rival to Pompey’s.

Caesar himself recorded the first seven years of the Gallic War in seven books of Commentaries; these are included in a new and highly readable translation of Caesar’s work in the Landmark series, along with his memoir of the first two years of the subsequent Civil War and four additional books written by his officers to fill out the account of his campaigns. These are the first Latin texts to receive the sumptuous Landmark treatment already enjoyed by Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Arrian, and it suits them very well, with copious maps, diagrams, illustrations, footnotes, and appendices to help the reader keep track of the people, places, and siege machines involved, as well as another forty-three background essays available online, written by a lively mixture of old hands and Young Turks.

“Gaul, if you take all of it into account, is divided into three regions” is Caesar’s opening line in the Gallic War, and in the first three books he brings these in turn under Roman control: first central France north of the existing Roman province, then the “Belgians” in the north, then the peoples of the Atlantic coast. He makes brief sorties after that across the Rhine and the Channel, while resistance to occupation builds up in Gaul itself. This comes together in early 52 in the general rebellion Caesar describes in Book 7, which culminates in his defeat of the Gallic leader Vercingetorix at Alesia in modern Burgundy. At this point Caesar brings his account of these wars to a close on a suitable note of triumph; in reality, he remained in Gaul for another two years putting down further rebellions, campaigns that were later written up by his legate Hirtius in an eighth book.

Cicero praised Caesar’s Commentaries—the first example we have of Latin historical prose—as “naked, straightforward, and graceful, stripped of rhetorical ornament as of clothing.” Too long and too good a read to be Caesar’s official reports to the Senate, these must have been written for wider public consumption, presumably with an eye to the consular elections of 49: Caesar constantly emphasizes that he is acting on behalf of the Roman state, and that the Roman people are making huge territorial gains in Gaul. He writes with considerable style and attention to narrative, with exciting battles and detailed descriptions of encampments, bridge construction, and ship-building, and with an emphasis on the speed and scale of operations: the word “quickly” occurs sixty-two times, and “big” more than two hundred.

We naturally hear little of Caesar the man as opposed to the calm, decisive, and brilliant general. We must turn to his later biographers for accounts of the trimming, shaving, and plucking, the fringed and belted senatorial tunic, the comb-over he adopted to hide his baldness (and his relief when the Senate voted to give him the honor of wearing a laurel wreath at all times), the mosaic flooring he carried on campaigns to furnish his tent, his “falling sickness” (probably epilepsy), or his notorious aversion to alcohol. And we hear nothing of the vast personal profits that Caesar made in Gaul—enough to pay off his accumulated electoral debts, reward his officers and men, and fund a series of vanity building projects in the heart of Rome that kept the absent general at the center of attention during the 50s. His contemporaries were certainly aware of what was happening: the poet Catullus, writing in Rome, says that one of Caesar’s corrupt officers “has all the riches that used to belong to remotest Britain and Hairy Gaul.”

The Gallic War does paint a revealing picture of Roman imperialism. Conquest beyond provincial bounds was not Caesar’s brief, nor did he refer it to the Senate for authorization; instead he raised legions on his own initiative, and in the first instance with his own money, though his successes embarrassed the Senate into taking over the financing of his additional legions after two years. Of course, he presents his campaigns as fundamentally defensive, a long series of interventions against individual communities motivated by the immediate dangers they posed to his Roman province in the south or to Roman allies in free Gaul. Surrender then brought these communities into permanent subjection, as well as making them “allies” that Caesar had to protect from threats further away. At the same time other neighbors would see which way the wind was blowing, line up to congratulate Caesar on his success, and capitulate before their own conquest. None of this was new to Roman strategy, but the process is laid out here with striking clarity.

It is also a deeply disturbing text. The mortality rate is staggering, as ten legions of highly trained and battle-hardened Roman soldiers methodically work their way through the states of Gaul, targeting entire peoples for destruction. After defeating the Belgian Nervii, Caesar reports that both the people and their name “were reduced almost to annihilation”: survivors tell him that of 60,000 men of fighting age, only five hundred remain. Nor was this absent-minded genocide: when Caesar prepares a campaign against the Eburones in northeastern Gaul, he boasts of his intention “to destroy their stirps ac nomen [stock and name].”

Death was not the only way to destroy a people. When the Atuatuci launched a surprise attack on Caesar’s besieging army after negotiating a surrender, 53,000 of them were sold as slaves in a single lot, and the recently identified site of their city, the Iron Age fortification of Thuin, tells its own tale: a few hoards of gold that must have been hidden in the panic and then missed by Caesar’s solders; piles of sling bullets; and then nothing at all for two hundred years. Nonetheless Caesar presents himself throughout as a man of unusual clemency, and when he has the hands of all the fighting men cut off after the surrender of Uxellodunum, Hirtius reassures us that “Caesar was aware that his merciful disposition was known to everyone, and he did not need to be afraid that if he acted more harshly than usual, it would be ascribed to his cruel character.”

Altogether, later sources plausibly claim, Caesar fought more than four million Gauls, killed one million, and took as many prisoners—most of whom would have been sold into slavery. The Germans too suffered terrible losses, including one episode when Caesar imprisoned a delegation of German migrants who came to negotiate a truce, stormed their camp, killed the men who resisted, and then sent his cavalry to run down and slaughter the women and children as they fled. Those who were not caught drowned in the Rhine. Other sources tell us that 400,000 people died. Was that the culture then? Not everyone’s, it seems, or not exactly: although the Senate voted sacrifices of thanksgiving on news of the victory, Cato the Younger and other senators proposed that Caesar be extradited to the Germans, not for the massacre itself, but for breaking a truce.

With an election on the horizon, Caesar had good reason to be alert to his readers’ sensibilities, and he makes no attempt to disguise or play down the bloodshed. What was attractive to Romans about mass murder in their name? One conclusion a reader could draw from the The Landmark Julius Caesar is that that they saw the “Hairy Gauls” as distant from or less human than themselves, perhaps even as an appropriate target. When Caesar notes, for example, that if Orgetorix had been convicted of attempting to usurp the monarchy of the Helvetii, “his punishment would inevitably have been to be burned alive,” a footnote suggests that this “helps to characterize the Helvetii as savage barbarians.” This is, however, questionable: the same punishment was prescribed in Rome for crimes against the state, and less than fifty years before, Gauls and Greeks had been buried alive in the Roman cattle market just for good luck.

More generally, Caesar does not dehumanize the Gauls; in fact he presents their individual causes and their desire for liberty as rational, even sympathetic. In 52 the chief magistrate of the Aedui, Convictolitavus, asks his countrymen, “Why should the Aedui come to Caesar and make him the arbitrator concerning their own laws within their own justice system, any more than the Romans came to the Aedui?” Caesar calls these Aedui “brothers and kinsmen” to Rome, and he describes these and other Gauls in terms that would have made sense to a Roman reader: they have social systems based on patronage, taxes, and slavery, the same problems of bribery, corruption, and debt as Romans have, and a similar set of gods. Like Rome, their states are governed by aristocratic senates, they have an equestrian class, they make political decisions by formal laws and decrees, and their leaders make marriage alliances to seal political arrangements. (Again, this is not always obvious in the Landmark edition: when Caesar mentions the “senate” of the Remi, the translation corrects this to “council,” explaining that this is “to avoid false associations”—associations that Caesar himself seems to encourage.) The truth is that he didn’t need to justify slaughter and slavery: in Rome, as in Gaul, human rights were nonexistent, life was cheap, and its worth was often reckoned in a brutally utilitarian fashion.

In the end, Caesar took Rome by force rather than persuasion. By the late 50s Roman political institutions were falling apart, as famine and rioting culminated in the torching of the Senate house by protesters. Caesar’s personal relationship with Pompey began to break down with the death of Julia in 54, and Crassus died in a disastrous campaign against the Parthians in 53. Complex negotiations to allow Caesar to stand for election to the consulship of 48 without returning to Rome, which would have caused him to lose his immunity from prosecution, failed. The conservative faction would not permit a compromise, rammed a resolution through the Senate to have Caesar declared an enemy of the state, and persuaded an apparently reluctant Pompey to defend it. When Caesar eventually returned to Italy in January 49 for the first time in nearly nine years, it was to face a civil war.

In his own account of these events Caesar entirely ignores what later seemed the pivotal moment: the crossing of the Rubicon, a river so minor that we still don’t know its location. In his telling he simply leads his men from Ravenna to Rimini. Perhaps he was right to play down the significance of marching into Italy under arms, since he continued to sue for a diplomatic solution. The threat of a military coup had in any case become a relatively familiar tactic in the previous generation, and those that had succeeded had been temporary. It was only in retrospect, knowing what Caesar and Rome became, that this decision appeared a point of no return.

Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg

Julius Caesar; painting by Peter Paul Rubens, 1619

Caesar’s three books of Civil War cover the first two years of campaigning. He defeats Pompey’s generals in Italy and Spain, returns to Rome to supervise his own election as consul, and then follows Pompey east across the Adriatic, eventually chasing him down to Pharsalus in Thessaly. There he defeats his old friend’s far greater numbers with a brilliant display, though he says it himself, of generalship and improvisation.

Self-justification is again a major theme. Caesar presents the civil war as a dissensio, or personal disagreement, and he emphasizes his clemency toward defeated Roman citizens, as well as his constant (and strictly extraconstitutional) attempts to negotiate directly with Pompey. At the same time, he insists that his actions had the support of his own Roman troops and of the towns of Italy, and that they were taken on behalf of the Roman people against a small senatorial faction. Reports of atrocities dry up too, unless they are committed by Pompey’s side.

Caesar seems to have left this work unfinished, and it lacks the polish and tight plotting of his Gallic War. It also peters out: instead of ending with his great victory at Pharsalus, or with the subsequent flight and squalid death of Pompey in Pelusium at the hands of henchmen of the royal household (who delivered his head and signet ring to a horrified Caesar a few days later), Caesar gets bogged down in an Egyptian civil war between four royal siblings over their deceased father’s kingdom.

Another author, perhaps Hirtius again, continued this tale. In Egypt Caesar battled with surprising difficulty two eunuchs, a thirteen-year-old boy, and a girl of perhaps fifteen. He eventually delivered the throne to the twenty-one-year-old Cleopatra and her twelve-year-old brother, whom she married according to Egyptian tradition and, it is generally believed, killed with poison. The author spares his readers such details, as well as the notorious story of Cleopatra winning Caesar’s support by having herself delivered to him through enemy lines in a sack, or what other writers assure us was a considerable delay in his campaigning owing to a cruise they took together on the Nile. Instead, we rejoin him on the Black Sea, where Pharnaces of Pontus was exploiting the general chaos to expand his territory at the expense of Rome’s local allies; Caesar conducted a five-day lightning campaign that he later celebrated with the slogan Veni, vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered.

The last two books tackle Caesar’s final campaigns against the remaining Pompeians in Africa and Spain. They are written by lower-level participants, anonymous even in antiquity, but still with considerable literary ambition. They also offer a rare insight into Roman warfare from the soldier’s perspective, and into Caesar’s methods for training soldiers: we’re told of an elephant who remains remarkably docile even when the cavalry use him for target practice. Both authors idolize their general, defending his actions with even greater tenacity than he does himself, but we also get details Caesar would surely never have advertised, including massacres of other Roman citizens, more hand amputations, and a bizarre account of a temporary camp built in Spain out of the bodies and weapons of defeated Pompeians, topped by the heads of the enemy stuck on sword points.

Caesar defeated his last opponents in Spain in 45. By then he was consul for the fourth time and had the previous year been awarded a ten-year dictatorship to rule the state—a perfectly constitutional position in times of crisis, although the term of office was normally limited to six months. Nothing in Caesar’s own account, or in his actions up to this point, suggests that his aim was to overthrow the Republic, to institute a monarchical system, or to found a dynasty. Instead, he simply insisted on maintaining his own extraordinary political authority and personal immunity, within the fuzzy structure of Rome’s existing institutions.

It was a popular strategy. Under Caesar’s supervision the chaos of recent senatorial government receded. He restored the infrastructure of Roman social and economic life through a program of rent control, debt relief, public works, and settlement abroad for veterans and the poor. He also restored much of the political status quo, filling the gaps left by the deaths of many senators, priests, and magistrates, and he restored time itself by replacing the existing 355-day calendar, which was constantly falling behind the seasons, with a 365-day one with a regular leap year, a system that has worked almost perfectly ever since.

Once again, however, he pushed his fellow politicians too far. It is one thing to accept dictatorship at a time of national emergency, while your own position, dignity, and career prospects still remain more or less intact, but Caesar’s rule was looking more and more permanent: in February 44 he was made dictator for life, and he had recently become the first living person to have his head depicted on a coin minted in Rome. He had also welcomed divine honors, something that had long been an acceptable practice for Roman generals abroad but was traditionally avoided among supposedly equal citizens. The final straw, according to later historians, was that when the Senate approached him as a body, he refused to rise. He was assassinated by a large group of his fellow senators on the Ides of March of that year, in a new Senate house Pompey had built, kicking off another round of civil war. The room in which he was murdered was closed up, and it later became a communal toilet.

His writing too slipped into obscurity for centuries, not least because for over a millennium it was ascribed to other authors. Since the Renaissance, however, Caesar’s simple, direct Latin and his limited vocabulary have made the Gallic War a popular school text. Although it lost some of its attraction in the mid-twentieth century, as career positions in colonial territories become scarce, and the embrace of Caesar by fascist politicians—Mussolini called him “the greatest figure after Christ”—became hard to ignore, it is now back in US classrooms as a central text in the Advanced Placement curriculum. This brutal tale of conquest, enslavement, and genocide might seem a bold, even brilliant choice for classroom discussion, but the reality of the Latin lesson may best be captured by the young Nigel Molesworth’s inimitable English in Down with Skool!, Geoffrey Willans’s immortal rendering of English schoolboy life in the 1950s:

They sa: “The gauls—galli—subject—go on molesworth oppugnant—what does oppugnant mean—they are atacking fossas. Ditches. What did you say molesworth? Why on earth attack a ditch? Keep your mind on the sentence. The gauls are attacking the ditches. What? I am quite unable to inform you molesworth for what purpose the Gauls wished to attack the ditches. The latin is correct. That sufices.

We proceed…. What is that? molesworth for the last time your opinion that it is soppy to atack a ditch does not interest me…. Likewise the question of whether there was buckets of blud is immaterial.*

The Right to Murder

The Right to Murder

Gaby Wood London Review of Books

• In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
  NYRB, 224 pp, $14.95, August 2017, ISBN 978 1 68137 147 4
• In a Lonely Place directed by Nicholas Ray
  Criterion Collection, £14.99

What does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it was both poisonous and immortal.

The book on which the film is based – a noir novel written in 1947 by Dorothy B. Hughes – is told from the point of view of a serial strangler named Dixon Steele. We know from the outset that he is guilty; what we don’t know is whether he’ll be caught, and, if he is, how many women he will have killed in the meantime. Hughes, one of very few female crime writers in the noir canon, made it clear that she intended to sidestep the whodunnit in favour of character, and here her focus is on the ways in which women might be seen by a man who ritually kills them. They are viewed through Dix Steele’s eyes as ‘cheats, liars, whores’, and presented by Hughes as perceptive and tough. Though the crimes are technically solved by an astute male detective, the women are on to Dix first.

Hughes had been writing novels throughout the 1940s, and regularly wrote about crime fiction. She lived in Santa Fe, but did a brief stint in Hollywood in 1944, when she worked as an assistant to Hitchcock on the set of Spellbound. There she met Ingrid Bergman, and as a result when In a Lonely Place was published, Bergman’s friend Humphrey Bogart bought the rights for his own fledgling production company.

The action essentially takes place in the mind of the character Bogart saw as a part for him to play. Hughes’s novel, her best known, was an early and influential example of the ‘psyche of a serial killer’ form. (The idea is that a murderer can never escape what he’s done – he’s ‘caught there in that lonely place’, as one character puts it. ‘He has to live with himself.’) Although it’s usually said that the film retains nothing of the book beyond its title, its setting and the names of its characters, in this fundamental respect – the concern with Steele’s habits of thought – they are related. In Bogart’s rendition, the possibilities of the plot were sprung open. Steele was no longer a guilty man – just a man who looked guilty, or looked like he felt guilty.

In one of the best seduction scenes in cinema, an interrogation becomes a flirtation: third-person, no eye contact, refracted through the cops’ questions. The setting is the office of Captain Lochner in Beverly Hills police station. The language is the language of evidence. Dix Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter, has been called in over the murder of Mildred Atkinson, a girl he was with the previous evening. We’ve already seen Bogart-as-Dix take little interest in Mildred, whose job was to tell him the plot of a terrible novel he’d bleakly agreed to adapt, and here he takes no interest in her murder either. Lochner sees Dix’s indifference as incriminating – his response to the news, the policeman says, is ‘just petulance. A couple of feeble jokes.’ Dix doesn’t let up. ‘I grant you, the jokes could have been better, but I don’t see why the rest should worry you.’

Enter his alibi: Laurel Gray, a neighbour who saw him come home with Atkinson. At the threshold of the captain’s office she raises an eyebrow, just slightly, and over the next few moments it becomes clear that, for the purposes of irascible romance, Dix and she are the same person: unintimidated, less than ingratiating, sarcastic. She sits down, peers into a near-empty cup of coffee, looks up. Words are unnecessary: she’s nobody’s suspect; men have no manners.

‘Miss Gray, do you know this gentleman?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ever see him before?’

‘Yes, a few times.’

‘Where?’

‘At the patio apartments. We both live there.’

‘Do you know who he is?’

Her back is to Bogart. He has one foot up on the leather sofa, arm resting nonchalantly on his knee. Though he’s sitting behind her, the depth of field is at a maximum, so that they are in almost equal focus. The implication of the framing is clear: throughout this scene, though they say nothing to each other directly, the dialogue is between them.

‘Yes,’ Grahame replies. ‘When I moved in a few days ago, he was pointed out to me by the manager. She was very proud of having a celebrity for a tenant.’

Her arched brows are doing their subtle work. The irony is meant for the man behind her.

‘Did you see Mr Steele last night?’

‘Yes, as I came home I saw him go into his apartment with a girl.’

‘That girl was Mildred Atkinson. She was murdered between one and two o’clock this morning.’

Grahame turns to face Bogart for the first time. She moves slowly, without shock. But vulnerability, and something like affront, enter her eyes. He returns her gaze plainly. She turns back. ‘Murdered?’ she says.

The ending is in this beginning. She registers that he may be a killer. Does she believe in his innocence? Not necessarily. Can she handle him? Perhaps. Or can she not handle him – and does that make him her kind of guy? She continues to respond, undaunted.

‘Were you interested in Mr Steele because he’s a celebrity?’

‘No, not at all.’ Her gaze is impassive. ‘I noticed him because he looked interesting. I like his face.’

Steele smiles. Gray is dismissed. She leaves without looking at him again.

The film is built on Bogart’s face: its crumpled anger, its tombstone teeth, everything registered on his forehead when he lights a cigarette: defeat, bewilderment, sorrow at the predictability of everything. (‘Keep it in the shadows, Gloria,’ Bogart advised Grahame on set, ‘Let the camera come to you.’) Ray credited himself with ‘taking the gun out of Bogart’s hand’ – meaning he steered him away from the gangster roles he’d always played and brought him into the territory of complex characters. We know from Bogart’s face that Dix has murdered his own life, and we are beginning to understand that he is a serial killer. He starts brawls in bars, he breaks his lovers’ noses, he has fistfights with producers. Later in the film he smashes his agent’s glasses and almost kills a motorist in a random fit of rage. Whether or not he has strangled Mildred Atkinson, he’s capable of killing someone, and that, ultimately, is the knowledge on which the romance must rest. Can he be trusted? The engine of the film is fear: not the fear triggered by a murder, though that is the model it offers, but the fear of more intimate, ongoing forms of harm, and of the ways in which people might invite it.

In Hughes’s book, Dix’s misogyny derives from a paradise lost. The novel is an intentionally restricted response to the colossal trauma of the Second World War. Dix is an emasculated war hero, a man at a loss, without an income, masquerading as a novelist and living off hand-outs from his uncle – who suggests, when Dix says he needs medical attention, that he visit the ‘veterans’ hospital’. As the crime writer Megan Abbott writes in the afterword to this edition of In a Lonely Place, ‘Hughes understood implicitly how such trauma connects to gender and a dangerously beset masculinity – and how it can explode into sexual violence.’

‘The war years were the first happy years he’d ever known,’ Hughes writes of Dix. Laurel is ‘the only right thing he’d had since he took off his uniform’. We discover that Dix initially uses the war as his cover: ‘There’d been so much killing, one more wasn’t news.’ And Hughes gives him an alter ego in the form of an old wartime pal: Brub Nicolai, a fellow ex-soldier who has become a policeman with the LAPD. If Dix’s mind is the book’s subject, his mind games take up a large part of it. Brub is hunting down the killer, who he doesn’t realise is in fact his friend. Remembering the war, Brub tells Dix:

I don’t like killing. I saw too much of it, same as you did. I hated it then, the callous way we’d sit around and map out our plans to kill people. People who didn’t want to die any more than we wanted to die. And we’d come back afterwards and talk it over, check over how many we’d got that night. As if we’d been killing ants, not men.

It’s clear that each of these men stands for a fork in the postwar path: one becomes a cop, a man in search of an antidote; the other becomes a killer, exchanging the work they began together for a solo career.

In the film, the war is referred to but only to imply a certain old-boy loyalty – Dix, we’re told, was Brub’s commanding officer – yet early on, Dix is mocked by movie people in a bar because he hasn’t ‘written a hit since before the war’. There’s something missing: what the war did to Dix. Years of authorised killing are elided, but they’re there, like a residue left by Hughes’s desire in her novel to understand what happened to the men.

In order for us to see what the film is up to, it’s essential for the murder victim to be irrelevant. If the audience cares too much about Mildred, we’ll fall for the idea that we’re watching a whodunnit, and fail to see the point of the broken romance. The film manages this by giving Mildred a metaphorical as well as a literal role: she is the agent of cliché. ‘I think it’ll make a dreamy picture, Mr Steele,’ she says of the trashy novel she’s been asked to describe, hours before her death: ‘what I call an epic.’ To judge from Bogart’s expression, her belief in banality might be motive enough.

Cliché isn’t Ray’s own mode, it’s the main signal of weariness in the mind of the hero, and so contributes to the film’s caustic tone overall. In a Lonely Place sets you up to see the world through Dix’s eyes – and achieves something more than sympathy: an instant affinity with his ennui. When Dix has dinner with Brub and his wife, Sylvia, he entertains them by envisaging the murder scene. ‘Tell you what’s wrong with you and Lochner,’ he says to Brub: ‘You don’t see enough whodunnits. We solve every murder in under two hours.’ He gets them to re-enact what he thinks might have happened, and Sylvia becomes frightened. When Dix has left, she turns to her husband and says, appreciatively: ‘I’m glad you’re not a genius.’ But she has misidentified Dix’s problem. It isn’t that he’s brilliant but that he’s bored. He’s been working in Hollywood so long that he’s heard every story there is, and he doesn’t think life is any more generous with surprises.

In the corridor of the police station, Dix is introduced to Henry Kesler, the suave banker who’d been dating the dead girl. ‘They trying to pin this thing on you too?’ Dix asks, as cheerfully as his laconic nature will allow. ‘Matter of fact, you’re a much more logical candidate than I am. You were in love with her. You could have been jealous. If I were Captain Lochner I could build up a pretty good case against you.’ He extends his hand, and smiles. ‘Glad to have met you.’ Kesler shakes Dix’s hand. ‘What an imagination,’ Kesler says, uncomfortably. ‘That’s from writing movies.’

In other words: one of the possible plots shuffling through Dix’s head is bound to be right. This sets the film apart from the book in two ways: it makes the movie, emphatically, a movie about the movies; and it makes the plot even more inconsequential. The film’s purpose must lie elsewhere.

‘We solve every murder in under two hours’: something else is happening here. Speed is integral to the story: the whirlwind love affair, the swift disintegration of Dix’s mind. ‘I don’t like to be rushed,’ Laurel tells Dix the day they meet. The line is echoed at the end, when Dix asks her to marry him and she replies that they needn’t rush into anything. ‘Who said anything about rushing into anything?’ he counters. ‘I thought maybe if you give me an answer, say in the next ten seconds, I’d go right out and buy a ring.’ When Dix refers to the fact that screenwriters can solve murders faster than policemen can, he is giving movie time – speeded-up time, flash-forward time – as the measure of the story within the film. Things – murder investigations, romances – that would otherwise take months or years are accelerated. After a violent row, Dix murmurs a few lines he wants to put into the script he’s writing: ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.’ The phrase is later repeated, melancholically, as if its main significance were the rhythm. But listen again and it’s all about hurry. What is the hurry? This: redemption isn’t something that happens at the end – it’s a constant emergency. The film’s atmosphere of anxiety, and Dix’s own coerciveness, can be traced along these lines: time itself must be subject to his violent control.

*

Nicholas Ray met Gloria Grahame when he cast her in A Woman’s Secret, shot early in 1948. Maureen O’Hara was the star; Grahame, a 24-year-old RKO contract player who had just been nominated for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim.

When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The couple had already made four films together –To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo – but Bogart had since left Warner Brothers, and Jack Warner, who still had Bacall under contract, wouldn’t release her. Ray, meanwhile, was on loan to Columbia, and couldn’t cast his own wife either, because she was still at RKO, which was run by Howard Hughes. (The Rays and the Bogarts were friendly; their baby boys had been born a few months apart.) Harry Cohn, Columbia’s bullying boss, began to get impatient over the filmmakers’ seeming inability to cast the female lead. ‘I hear you’re having a problem with the leading lady,’ Cohn is supposed to have said to Ray. ‘I don’t have a problem,’ Ray said. ‘I just don’t want Ginger Rogers.’ (He meant the real Ginger Rogers, who was on offer, though it might as well be a catch-all term for the opposite of a femme fatale.)

‘Who do you want?’

‘Gloria Grahame.’

‘You’re married to her, huh?’

‘What the hell does that have to do with it? She’s right for the part.’

After some gangsterish shenanigans involving Cohn and Hughes meeting at a filling station in the middle of the night, Grahame got the job.

As it happened, their being married had quite a lot to do with it. It was widely reported that Grahame’s contract contained a ‘Mr and Mrs’ clause, which allowed her husband to ‘direct, control, advise, instruct, and even command my actions during the hours of 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., every day except Sunday, during the filming’. She was forbidden to ‘nag, cajole, tease, or in any other feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him’. She agreed that ‘in every conceivable situation his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail.’ Even so, Ray moved out of their home. He told the producers he was having trouble with the third act and wanted to work through the night; they built him an apartment out of two dressing rooms.

It was true that he had trouble with the third act – or, specifically, the final scene. At first he shot it as written. Then he devised an alternative. As the film spirals to its conclusion, Gray attempts to get away from Dix. ‘I’m scared of him. I don’t trust him. I’m not even sure he didn’t kill Mildred Atkinson,’ she tells Dix’s agent. She agrees to marry him but as soon as he’s left her apartment she buys a ticket to fly east. She hands the screenplay Dix has finally finished (and which she has typed) to the agent, in the hope that its success will take his mind off the fact that she is missing. But he senses her withdrawal, goes to her apartment and notices she’s not wearing the engagement ring he’s just bought her. Her phone rings. He picks up. It’s the travel agent, calling to say there’s a seat on an earlier flight to New York. ‘You run away from me the first chance you get!’ he growls, clutching her throat. ‘Don’t act like this, Dix! I can’t live with a maniac,’ she protests, before he pushes her onto the bed and starts to strangle her.

In version one, Dix finishes the job. The next morning Laurel is dead and he is arrested while sitting at his typewriter adding the final lines to a screenplay we might imagine is the basis for the movie we’re watching, or something like it. After he’d shot the scene, Ray thought better of killing off his wife. ‘Shit,’ he later remembered thinking, ‘I can’t do it, I just can’t do it! Romances don’t have to end that way. Marriages don’t have to end that way, they don’t have to end in violence. Let the audience make up its own mind.’

In version two, the ending used in the final film, the strangling is interrupted by another phone call. This time it’s the police. Kesler has confessed, and Captain Lochner apologises to Dix for the strain he’s suffered and asks to say sorry to Gray. Moving slowly and groggily, beleaguered by his own violence, Dix leaves the receiver for Laurel. ‘Man wants to apologise to you,’ he croaks. He means Lochner, but also, perhaps, himself. The scene becomes a bookend to the original seduction in the police station. Again, Laurel speaks to the detective but directs her words at Dix. ‘Mr Steele’s absolutely in the clear,’ the police captain tells her, and she replies, rubbing her throat and staring at Dix, who is standing on the threshold about to leave: ‘Yesterday, this would have meant so much to us. Now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.’

What difference does knowing there were two endings make? Well, to begin with, it may seem surprising that the resolution in which Bogart is revealed to be the killer was the original, accepted one – except that everyone knew that from the book. As it happens, Production Code officials were against his being portrayed as a psychopath, and would only agree to the star playing a murderer if his character was seen to have been provoked. Bogart’s co-producer, Robert Lord, brokered the agreement: Bogart wouldn’t play a serial killer. He’d be a suspect, but someone else would be found guilty of those murders. However, he would crack under the pressure of suspicion and end up murdering his girlfriend. So in one interpretation of the jettisoned ending, Bogart and Grahame play a perfect couple caught in the jaws of the system. Superficially, this is a more brutal result, but it’s also a conventional one. The unconventionality of the eventual ending used – its painful nuance and drastic suspension – makes it more sinister.

Kesler’s confession, with its confirmation of Dix’s innocence, isn’t just an alternative ending. An ‘alternative’ would suggest that one thing mattered more than another. This shows that nothing matters, because the plot is not the point. The point is danger – and corrosion – in human relations. Kesler did it, but so what? – we knew Mildred was a MacGuffin. Meanwhile, the invisible yet palpably simmering thing has boiled over: Dix has lost control; any semblance of trust has vanished. This, masked all along by a detective story, rises to the surface in the final scene, as if a wound or a scar had been revealed rather than a murder solved.

The last-minute amendment, partly written by Ray and partly improvised by the actors, is what turns the film into a masterpiece. It’s the scene that shows you were living in the wrong story, the scene that makes film noir evaporate. The solution to the crime can’t resolve the romance. What good is a confession when all is lost?

*

Ray would go on to say of his marriage to Grahame: ‘I didn’t like her very much. I was infatuated with her, but I didn’t like her very much.’ As if in homage to Ray’s dislike, his biographer Patrick McGilligan refers to Grahame several times as a ‘sexy blonde actress’, and writes that ‘many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac.’ It wasn’t just those who knew her. In Peter Turner’s succinct, sad memoir, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (recently made into a film with an uncanny Annette Bening in the lead), Grahame is a washed-up Hollywood star about to die of cancer – but hers is a complicated decrepitude. Hair matted, make-up mouldering, asking to be ‘burped’ like a baby, she is even so billed in British repertory theatres as ‘the girl who can’t say no’.

McGilligan reports that Ray hired a private detective to follow her, because he suspected that, among other things, she was ‘bedding one of the elephant trainers she’d met on the set of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth’. The elephants are pretty good (and the DeMille reference helpfully evokes not just one lover but an entire crowd scene), yet there’s an even better story, as unreliable as the rest. Ray complained, McGilligan says, that whenever they passed through New York, Grahame would force him to escort her to private sex shows. In their hotel room after one such occasion, she allegedly ‘pulled a gun out of her handbag’ – McGilligan here – ‘and ordered him to fuck or die’. There is a brilliance to this flipped episode – the noir heroine picking up the gun where Bogart had left it and using it to insist on sex. ‘Fuck or die’ sounds more like a manifesto than a demand.

The private eye was unnecessary. A year after In a Lonely Place was released, Ray found Grahame in bed with his 13-year-old son, Tony. The couple divorced in 1952 –the year Grahame won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, in which she played the ditzy wife of another Hollywood screenwriter. (Ray was three years away from making Rebel without a Cause.) ‘My husband hit me twice,’ Grahame told the judge. ‘Once at a party without provocation, once at our home when I locked my bedroom door.’ A producer who knew Ray well said of his complicated appeal to women: ‘The chance to save him from his own destructive urges proved an irresistible attraction, of which Nick took full advantage and for which he rarely forgave them.’

Eight years and an interim husband later, Grahame married her former stepson Tony Ray, had two children with him, and stayed with him until 1974, longer than she had or would with anyone else.

DREAMS OF A TECHNOCRAT

DREAMS OF A TECHNOCRAT

by Ashutosh Jogalekar 3 Quarks Daily

Examining the ideas and beliefs of William Perry in the nuclear age.

Technocrats have had a mixed record in guiding major policies of the United States government. Perhaps the most famous technocrat of the postwar years was Robert McNamara, the longest serving secretary of defense who worked for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Before joining Kennedy’s cabinet McNamara was the president of Ford Motor Company, the first person from outside the Ford family to occupy that position. Before coming to Ford, McNamara had done statistical analysis of the bombing campaign over Japan during the Second World War. Working under the famously ruthless General Curtis LeMay, McNamara worked out the most efficient ways to destroy the maximum amount of Japanese war infrastructure. On March 9, 1945, this kind of analysis contributed to the virtual destruction of Tokyo through bombing and the deaths of a hundred thousand civilians in a firestorm. While McNamara later expressed some regrets about large-scale destruction of cities, he generally subscribed to LeMay’s philosophy. LeMay’s philosophy was simple: once a war has started, you need to end it as soon as possible, and if this involves killing large numbers of civilians, so be it.

The Second World War was a transformational conflict in terms of applying the techniques of statistics and engineering to war problems. In many ways the war belonged to technocrats like McNamara and Vannevar Bush who was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. The success that these technocrats achieved through inventions like radar, the atomic bomb and the development of the computer were self-evident, so it was not surprising that scientists became a highly sought after voice in the corridors of power after the war. Some like Richard Feynman wanted nothing to do with weapons research after the war ended. Others like Robert Oppenheimer embraced this power. Unfortunately Oppenheimer’s naiveté combined with the beginnings of the Cold War generated paranoia and resulted in a disgraceful public hearing that stripped him of his security clearance.

After McNamara was appointed to the position by Kennedy, he began a tight restructuring of the defense forces by adopting the same kinds of statistical research techniques that he had used at Ford. Some of these techniques go by the name of operations research. McNamara’s policies led to cost reduction and consolidation of weapons systems. He brought a much more scientific approach to thinking about defense problems. One of his important successes was to change official US nuclear posture from the massive retaliation adopted by the Eisenhower administration to a strategy of more proportionate response adopted by the Kennedy administration. At this point in time McNamara was playing the role of the good technocrat. Then Kennedy was assassinated and the Vietnam War started. Lyndon Johnson put pressure on McNamara and his other advisors to expand American military presence in Vietnam.

To obey Johnson’s wishes, McNamara used the same techniques as he had before, but this time to increase the number of American troops and firepower in a remote country halfway around the world. Just like he had during the Second World War, he organized a series of bombing campaigns that laid waste not just to North Vietnamese military installations but to their dams and rice fields. Just like it had during the previous war, the bombing killed a large number of civilians without having a measurable impact on the morale or determination of Ho Chi Minh’s troops. The lessons of the Second World War should have told McNamara that bombing by itself couldn’t end a war. The man who had studied moral philosophy at Berkeley before he got ensnared by the trappings of power failed to realize that you cannot win over a nation through technology and military action. You can only do that by winning over the hearts and minds of its citizens and understanding their culture and history. Not just McNamara but most of Kennedy and Johnson’s other advisors also failed to understand this. They had reached the limits of technocratic problem solving.

William Perry seems to have avoided many of the problems that beset technocrats like McNamara. Perry was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton. His memoir is titled “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink”. As the memoir makes clear, this journey is one the entire world shares. The book is essentially a brisk and personal ride through the journey but there is little historical detail that puts some of the stories in context; for this readers would have to look at some of the references cited at the back. Perry came from a bonafide technical background. After serving at the end of the war and seeing the destruction in Tokyo and Okinawa, he returned to college and obtained bachelors and graduate degrees in mathematics. He then took the then unusual step of going to California, at a time when Silicon Valley did not exist and the transistor had just been invented. Perry joined an electronics company called Sylvania whose products started getting traction with the defense department. By this time the Cold War was in full swing, and the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations wanted to harness the full potential of science and technology in the fight against communism. To provide advice to the government, Eisenhower set up a president’s science advisory committee (PSAC) which included accomplished scientists like Hans Bethe and George Kistiakowsky, both of whom had held senior positions in the Manhattan project.

One of the most important uses of technology was in reconnaissance of enemy planes and missiles. Perry’s company developed some of the first sensors for detecting radar signatures of Soviet ICBM’s and their transmitters. He also contributed to some of the first communication satellites and played an important role in deciphering the images of medium range nuclear missiles installed in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perry understood well the great contribution technology could make not just to offense but also to defense. He recognized early that electronic technology was moving from analog to digital with the invention of the integrated chip and decided to start his own company to exploit its potential. His new company built sophisticated systems for detecting enemy weapons. It was successful and ultimately employed more than a thousand people, making Perry a wealthy man. It was while heading this company that Perry was invited to serve in the administration of Jimmy Carter in the position of undersecretary of defense for research and development. He had to make a significant personal financial sacrifice in divesting himself of the shares of his and other companies in order to be eligible for government service.

Perry’s background was ideal for this position, and it was in this capacity that he made what I think was his greatest contribution. At this point in history, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States. They could achieve parity by building missiles called MIRVs which could house multiple nuclear warheads on one missile and target them independently against multiple cities. The introduction of MIRVs was not banned by the ABM treaty which Nixon had signed in the early 70s. Because of MIRV’s the Soviets could now field many more nuclear weapons than they could before. The US already possessed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, most of them at hair trigger alert. Perry wisely recognized that the response to the Soviet buildup was not a blind increase in the US nuclear arsenal. Instead it was an increase not in nuclear but in conventional forces. Over the next few years Perry saw the development of some of the most important conventional weapons systems in the armamentarium. This included the Blackbird stealth fighter which had a very small radar signature as well as smart sensors and smart bombs which could target enemy installations with pinpoint accuracy. These weapons were very useful in the first Iraq War, fought two decades later. Today Perry’s contribution remains enduring. The strength of the US military’s conventional weapons is vast and this fact remains one of the best arguments for drastically reducing America’s nuclear weapons.

When Ronald Reagan became president he adopted a much tougher stance against the Soviets. His famous ‘Evil Empire’ speech cast the Soviet Union in a fundamentally irreconcilable light while his ‘Star Wars’ speech promised the American people a system of ballistic missile defense against Soviet ICBMs. Both these announcements were deeply flawed. The Evil Empire speech was flawed from a political standpoint. The Star Wars speech was flawed from a technical standpoint. On the political side, the Soviets would only construe Reagan’s stand as an excuse to build more offensive weapons. On the technical side, it had been shown comprehensively that any defense system would be cheaply overwhelmed using decoys and countermeasures, and it would take only a fraction of the launched missiles to get through to cause terrible destruction. Standing on the outside Perry could not do much, but because of his years of experience in both weapons development and talking to leaders and scientists from other countries, he initiated what he called ‘Track 2 diplomacy’, that is diplomacy outside official channels. He established good relationships with Soviet and Chinese generals and politicians and made many trips to these two and other nations. Like others before and after him, Perry understood that some of the most important geopolitical problem solving happens at the personal level. This fact was especially driven home when Perry spent a lot of his time as secretary of defense advocating for better living conditions for American troops.

In his second term Reagan completely reversed his stand and sought reconciliation with the Soviets. This change was driven partly by his own thinking about the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war and largely by the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev. As Freeman Dyson has pointed out, it's worth noting that the largest arms reductions in history were carried out by supposedly hawkish right-wing Republicans. Reagan and George H W Bush and Gorbachev dismantled an entire class of nuclear weapons. Before that, Republican president Richard Nixon had unilaterally got rid of chemical and biological weapons. Republican presidents can do this when Democratic presidents cannot because they cannot be easily accused of being doves by their own party. I believe that even in the future it is Republicans rather than Democrats who stand the best chance of getting rid of nuclear weapons. Because people like William Perry have strengthened the conventional military forces of the US so well, the country can now afford to not need nuclear weapons for deterrence.

When Bill Clinton became president Perry again stepped into the limelight. The Soviet Union was collapsing and it suddenly presented a problem of very serious magnitude. The former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan suddenly found themselves with thousands of nuclear weapons without centralized Soviet authority. Many of these weapons were unsecured and loose, and rogue terrorists or states could have easily obtained access to them. Two American senators from opposing parties, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, proposed a plan through which the US could help the Soviets dismantle their weapons and buy the nuclear material from them. Nunn and Lugar worked with Perry and weapons expert Ash Carter to secure this material from thousands of warheads, blending it down from weapons-grade to reactor-grade. In return the US destroyed several of its own missile silos and weapons. In one of the most poignant facts of history, a sizable fraction of US electricity today comes from uranium and plutonium from Russian nuclear bombs which had been targeted on New York, Washington DC and San Francisco. The Nunn-Lugar program of denuclearizing Russia is one of the greatest and most important bipartisan triumphs in American history. It has undoubtedly made the world a safer place, and Nunn and Lugar perhaps along with Perry and his Russian counterparts surely deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

When Perry became secretary of defense under Clinton, much of his time was occupied with North Korea, an issue that continues to confront the world today. North Korea has been fighting an extended war with the United States and South Korea since the 1950s ever since the Korean War ended only in a truce. In the 90s the North Koreans announced that they would start reprocessing plutonium from their nuclear reactors. This would be the first step toward quickly building a plutonium bomb. Both South Korea and the US had serious concerns about this. Perry engaged in a series of diplomatic talks, some involving former president Jimmy Carter, at the end of which the North Koreans decided to forgo reprocessing in return for fuel to help their impoverished country. Perry’s accounts of North Korea contains amusing facts, such as the New York Philharmonic organizing a concert in Pyongyang and Perry entertaining a top North Korean general in Silicon Valley. Today the problem of North Korea seems serious, but it’s worth remembering that someone like Kim Jong Un who relishes such total control over his people would be reluctant to lose that control willingly by initiating a nuclear war in which his country would be completely destroyed.

The greatest problem, however, was Russia and today many of Perry’s thoughts and actions from the nineties about Russia sound prescient. After the Cold War ended, for some time US-Russia relations were at an all time high. The main bone of contention was NATO. Many former Soviet-controlled countries like Poland and Ukraine wanted to join NATO to enjoy the same security that other NATO members had. Perry was in favor of letting these countries join NATO, but he wisely understood that too rapid an assimilation of too many nations into NATO would make Russia uneasy and start seeing the US as a threat again. He proposed asking these nations to join NATO along a leisurely timeline. Against his opinion Clinton provided immediate support for NATO membership for these countries. A few years later, after George W Bush became president, partly because of US actions and partly because of Russia’s, Perry’s fears turned out to be true. The US withdrew from the ABM treaty because they wanted to put ballistic missile defense in Eastern Europe, ostensibly against Iranian ICBMs. Notwithstanding the technical flaws still inherent in missile defense, the Russians unsurprisingly questioned why the US needed this defense against a country which was still years away from building ICBMs and construed it as a bulwark against Russia. The Russians therefore started working on their own missile defense and a MIRV missile as well as new tactical nuclear weapons themselves. Unlike high-yield strategic weapons which can wipe out cities, low-yield tactical weapons ironically increase the probability of nuclear war since they can be used locally on battlefields. When Obama became president of the United States and Medvedev became president of Russia, there was a small window of hope for reduction of nuclear weapons on both sides, but the election of Putin and Trump has dimmed the chances of reaching an agreement in the near future. North Korea has also gone nuclear by conducting a nuclear test in 2006.

Perry’s greatest concern throughout his career has been to reduce the risk of nuclear war. He thinks that nuclear war is quite low on the list of public concerns, and this is a strange fact indeed. Even a small nuclear bomb used in a major city would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and severe social and economic disruption. It would be a catastrophe unlike any we have faced until now and would make 9/11 look like child’s play. With so many countries having nuclear weapons, even the small risk of a rogue terrorist stealing a weapon is greatly amplified by the horrific consequences. If nuclear weapons are such a serious problem, why are they largely absent from the public consciousness?

It seems that nuclear weapons don’t enter the public consciousness because of a confluence of factors. Firstly, most of us take deterrence for granted. We think that as long as most countries have nuclear weapons, mutually assured destruction and rationality would keep us safe. But this is little more than a false sense of security; mutually assured destruction is not a rational strategy, it is simply an unfortunate reality that emerged from our collective actions. We are very lucky that no nuclear attack has taken place after Nagasaki, but there have been scores of nuclear accidents that almost led to bombs being exploded, some near American cities. The book “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser describes dozens of such frightening accidents. Just a few years ago there was an incident in which American military planes flew from North Dakota to Louisiana without realizing that there were nuclear bombs onboard. In addition, even during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came very close to nuclear war, and a slight misunderstanding could have triggered a nuclear launch: in fact it is now widely acknowledged that dumb luck played as big a role in the crisis not escalating as any rational action. There are also false alarms, one of which Perry recollects: an accidental playing of a training exercise tape led a general to the erroneous conclusion that two hundred nuclear tipped missiles were heading from the Soviet Union toward the US. Fortunately it was discovered that this was a false alarm in seconds, but if it had not, according to protocol American ICBMs would have been launched against Russia within minutes, and the Russians would have retaliated massively. The problem with nuclear weapons is that the window of prevention is very small, and therefore accidents are quite likely. The reason the American public does not fear nuclear weapons as much as it should is because it sees that the red line has never been crossed and it believes that the line will never be crossed, but it does not see how close we already came to crossing it.

Secondly, the media is much more concerned with reporting on the latest political or celebrity scandal and important but much less precipitous problems like climate change rather than on nuclear weapons. Of the two major problems confronting humanity – nuclear war and climate change – I believe nuclear war is the more urgent. The impacts of climate change are mixed, longer term and more unpredictable. The impacts of nuclear war are unambiguously bad, immediate and more predictable. Unfortunately climate change especially has been an obsession with both the media and the public in spite of its uncertainties, whereas the certain consequences of a nuclear attack have been ignored by both. The supposed dangers of climate change have been widely publicized by self-proclaimed prophets like Al Gore, but there are no such prophets publicizing the dangers of nuclear weapons. For one reason or another, both the public and the media consider nuclear weapons to be a low priority because no nuclear accident has happened during the last fifty years, but they keep on ignoring the very high costs of even a low risk attack. If nuclear weapons received the kind of massive publicity that global warming has received, there is no doubt that they too would loom large on everyone’s mind.

Changing attitudes is hard, although Perry certainly has tried. Nuclear weapons were born of science, but their solution is not technical. With his colleagues Sam Nunn, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger and Sidney Drell, Perry started an initiative whose goal is the reduction of nuclear weapons through both official and unofficial diplomacy. All four of these people have had deep experience with both nuclear weapons and diplomacy. Encouraging economic and trade relationships between traditional rivals like India and Pakistan for instance would be a key strategy in reducing the risk of nuclear conflict between such nations: one reason why an actual war between the US and China is highly unlikely is because both countries depend heavily on each other for economic benefits. The key objective in caging the nuclear genie is to remind nations of their common security and the fact that individual lives are precious on all sides. During the Cold War, it was only when the US and the Soviet Union recognized that even a “win” for one country in a nuclear war would involve large-scale destruction of both countries did they finally realize how important it was to cooperate.

Finally, Perry has made it his life’s goal to educate young people about these dangers, both through his classes at Stanford University as well as through his website. The future is in these young people’s hands, and as much of the world including Russia seems to be reverting to the old ways of thinking, it’s young people whose minds are unspoiled by preconceived notions who give us our best chance of ridding the world of the nuclear menace.

NO MORE MAYBE

NO MORE MAYBE

By Gish Jen The New Yorker

Since my mother-in-law came to visit America she is quite busy. First, she has to eat many blueberries. Because in China they are expensive! While here they are comparatively cheap. Then she has to breathe the clean air. My husband, Wuji, and I have lived here for five years, so we are used to the air. But my mother-in-law has to take many fast walks. Breathing, breathing. Trying to clean out her lungs, she says, trying to get all the healthy oxygen inside her. She also has to look at the sky.

“So blue!” she says during the daytime. “I have not seen such a blue since I was a child.”

At nighttime, she says, “Look at the stars. Look! Look!”

She has to post pictures of the stars on WeChat for her friends. And she has to take some English-language classes. Because these classes are expensive in China! she says. Here they are free.

She thinks this is very strange.

“Why are they free?” she asks. She says, “America is a capitalist country. What about so-called ‘market force’?” “Market force” sticks out of her Chinese like a rock in a path. “And what about so-called ‘invisible hands’?” she goes on, and there it is—another rock.

“ ‘Invisible hand,’ ” my father-in-law says. Because he is the professor in the family, and the one who knows everything.

And, in fact, my mother-in-law only just learned about the invisible hand two days ago. Even yesterday she called Adam Smith “Alan Smith.” But, in China, she was a volleyball coach. She has a lot of self-confidence. She talks with her chin in the air. Even though she is retired, she uses only the top half of her bifocals. It is as if she is still watching some game, looking for weakness on the other side of the net. And, sure enough, look: already she has found something fake about America. America calls itself capitalist, but no one should be fooled. It is China that is capitalist.

“You know what free classes are?” she says. “Free classes are socialism!”

If my father-in-law likes to make points, my mother-in-law likes to score points.

Now my father-in-law hides his face in his rice bowl. Only his chopsticks move. It is as if he is trying to scratch a small, small message inside the bowl. One line. Two lines. Still scratching. We think maybe he cannot explain the free English lessons, either. Or maybe he just needs time to prepare his explanation. He was an outstanding thinker when he was young. But since he retired he has crazy, wild hair, like that conductor Seiji Ozawa, and his thinking is crazy wild, too.

We talk to help him. Try to make him comfortable, try to smooth things over.

“America is very strange,” I say.

“It is not socialism,” Wuji says. “It is capitalism with American characteristics.”

“It is politically correct capitalism,” I say.

Because this is what we know how to do. We know how to say something true enough to hide a bigger truth. We know how to hide people’s weakness. How to protect them.

Of course, when he was young my father-in-law also protected people. Every day there was a new kind of craziness. Every day a new kind of corruption. He had a lot to manage. Still, no matter how bad the situation got he protected us and a lot of other people besides. It was a big talent he had, a real strength. We all remember it and appreciate what he did. But now that he is older he sometimes scatters seed for the chickens, as they say. He stirs things up instead of calming things down. Maybe this is what couples do when they do not have sex. That is what Wuji says.

I think Wuji is full of such theories because I am too pregnant for sex.

Now my father-in-law’s chopsticks stop scratching. He lowers his bowl.

“Maybe the government watches to see who comes to the English lessons,” he says. “Maybe that is why they are free.”

“That is crazy!” my mother-in-law says. “Watching everyone is a lot of work. Do you think Americans will do that kind of work? Only Chinese will do it. Americans are too lazy.”

“Maybe it is a trap,” my father-in-law says.

“What is there to trap?” my mother-in-law says. “Who wants to know that I’m taking English lessons? No one. I am nobody. No one is interested.”

“Everyone knows the government here spies on people, just like in China,” my father-in-law says. “Look at that movie ‘Snowden.’ They spy here, too. They do.”

He reaches slowly for some steamed fish from the dish in the middle of the table. My mother-in-law takes her glasses off, as if the score is tied and she is ready to fight the other coach. So now poor Wuji has to say something. He is kind of like the ump.

“Yes, they spy in the U.S.,” he says. “But it is not just like China. Here there are many more laws to protect the common citizen.”

Wuji is careful because even an ump must know how to handle my father-in-law. He must first agree with his father, and only afterward disagree.

Still, my father-in-law argues. “Every government is the same,” he says. “What if that person is so-called ‘illegal immigrant,’ right? You go to the free English classes. Then what? Then they catch you.”

And suddenly we think, even if the classes were not originally a trap, maybe they are a trap now. We think maybe my father-in-law is still smart. We think maybe we should listen to him.

After all, even though we are here legally, we see all the stories on the Internet. People are being stopped! People on buses. People even in hospitals. We carry our visas everywhere, and keep a list of places we should not go. Texas. New Hampshire. Alabama. Also, we do not talk too much to outside people. Of course, we do not talk too much to them anyway, because this is a city. People do not talk here; they honk. Honk, honk, honk! You are in my way! If they talk, they are yelling. What the fuck are you doing? Don’t you speak English? But these days we talk even less. In fact, we are almost starting to think maybe my mother-in-law should not go to that English-language class, when she says, “If you think you can stop me from studying English, you can’t! This is America! You can’t!”

Her eyes glare so hard at my father-in-law that he ducks back into his rice bowl. Not as though he is backing down—more as though he has thought of something else and has some more scratching to do.

So that is score one point for my mother-in-law.

Actually, for my mother-in-law English has no use. But she has always wished she could speak English like my father-in-law, who was a literature professor. It was just her bad luck that she took the college-entrance exam in 1977—the first time you could take it after the Cultural Revolution. She is still talking about how fierce the competition was. Two generations, both had to take the examination together, she says. All the teachers and all the students, sitting side by side. She says today she would probably get a top score and go to a top college, like my father-in-law. Because he was smart but also just lucky that he did so well. And he agrees. Some people did well who were not so smart, he says, and some people did not do well, though they were very smart. He agrees that today my mother-in-law would probably be outstanding, especially since, if you don’t like your score, you can try again. So she would probably try eight, nine, ten times! Until she succeeded.

She is not like Wuji or me, who were not outstanding but did not work so hard, either. We went to third-tier colleges and wished we had scored higher, of course, but did not care so much. Wuji says maybe this was because there was some money in his father’s family, and even I knew ever since high school that Wuji and I would get married. So both of us knew we would have to work hard but would not have to work crazy hard just to live. Also, his parents are kind of like a fire generation. After a fire generation, it is only natural to have a water generation.

And, actually, my mother-in-law could relax a little, too. But she was always crazy worried when she was growing up, and now she is a person who studies even when it has no use. She says that, now that my father-in-law’s English is declining, if she studies maybe they can meet like two roads. Maybe if her English goes up while his goes down they can meet at an intersection.

“And then what?” I ask.

“Then I will wave and say, ‘Hi,’ ” she says, with a wink. “Then I will say, ‘How are you, Professor? I can speak English, too.’ ”

Of course, it is completely absurd. But it is also sad. I feel sorry for my mother-in-law. It is as if she was born inside a box, so she can never really stand up straight. My mother always says I pity people I should not pity, and she is probably right. She says I am too soft. Because, after all, my mother cannot really stand up straight, either, and at least my mother-in-law has plenty to eat. My mother does not have plenty to eat. Still, when my father-in-law looks up from his rice, ready to fight again, I quickly say, “The baby is kicking!”

He laughs a little then, as if to say, “You Chinese girls are so obvious.” And, “Why does everyone have to manage me?” But he lets go, too. He does not say anything and he does not fight with my mother-in-law. Because the baby is why they came. They came because Wuji and I are having a baby, and because they could afford to come. They are not like my mother, who has been on her own since my father died and can only Skype. And, of course, no one wants to upset the baby—and if I am upset he will be upset. That is how Chinese people think. One thing always affects something else. So for now we have peace. I reach down and tell the baby, “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h.” He kicks hard on one side, a real boy. Everyone is so happy I am having a boy. And, on the other side, there is his round head. It is soft-hard, like a volleyball.

The English teacher recommends an English-language app. My father-in-law tells my mother-in-law, “Do not install it!” Though she can only say a few words so far, already he has had enough of her learning English to compete with him. But while she is out walking he picks up her phone and there it is. A little orange square on the screen.

“Did you help her?” my father-in-law asks me.

I nod, because in fact he already knows the answer. My mother-in-law cannot upload, download anything, after all. And Wuji would not dare defy his father to help. But I nod very gently, with both hands on top of my belly.

“No one can stop her, anyway,” he says then. Meaning, “At least you answered honestly and did not insult my intelligence.”

I nod again. “She will never stop,” I say.

“That is true,” he says. And he looks happy just to have this little conversation. To have someone agree with him, the way everyone used to.

Often, I drive my mother-in-law to the beautiful library, with the glass walls and the café. There are all kinds of people there, including black people and a lot of people you cannot say what color they are. You can only say they like books. My mother-in-law does not mind the people. Every day she finds a DVD to check out so she can practice her English some more after class. And then I pick her up so she can cook for me.

Actually, I help a lot when she cooks for me. Especially, I help with the shopping and the chopping. But she does the planning and the cooking, because my baby will be born in two months now, and she wants me to eat all kinds of special food. On the outside, my mother-in-law is a modern sportswoman. But inside she is a traditional type. So I take American prenatal vitamins and calcium and DHA, of course. But also she feeds me steamed egg porridge with rice, and millet porridge. I have a glass of milk, red dates, fruit, and nuts every day. Tofu and bean sprouts every other day. And a lot of soups: pork-rib soup with lotus seeds or Chinese yam. Hen soup with mushrooms and more red dates. Soybean-and-pork-trotter soup. Even swallow’s-nest soup, which is very expensive. Because I am in my seventh month and my body has heated up, and because my mother-in-law has an app that says it’s O.K., I am allowed to have some cooling foods I could not have before. For example, some of her blueberries with a little ice cream. In China, there are pregnant women who eat a lot of blueberries. They think it will make their baby’s eyes shiny and round. But my mother-in-law says that is illogical thinking. She will let me have only a few.

Very important, too, everyone wants me to rest. “Take it easy,” they all say. “Go slow, go slow.” They say, “Rest, rest.” But how can anyone rest when my mother-in-law is cooking and learning English?

My father-in-law is not as busy as my mother-in-law. But he feels he has to keep up with her. Of course, he used to be very active, too. Wuji says his father used to have so many ideas he had to put a piece of paper next to his bed at night in order to write them all down. Only then could he go back to sleep. And now he still puts a piece of paper next to his bed. But in the morning it is almost always blank. If he writes something, he says he cannot read it. The writing is unclear. When he watches my mother-in-law’s DVDs, too, he nods as if he still understands everything. But then he complains. Why does she have to bring so many DVDs home? And why a new one every night, each one with faster speaking than the last? Another day, he complains she is so active she walks her legs even in her sleep.

“As if she is going somewhere!” he says.

Still, to keep up with her my father-in-law moves things around. For example, he does not think the feng-shui of our apartment is very good. So he moves a bookcase to the entrance of the apartment. The bookcase is not that tall, only chest-high. But still it is a help, he says. A small wall inside the front door, to help block evil spirits from coming in. Then he sees that our bookshelves are not well organized. So, one by one, he takes the books and puts them in the correct order. Now we cannot find anything and have to walk around the bookcase to go out.

He wants to clean everything, too.

“No need, no need!” we say. “Everything is clean already!”

But still he cleans the fridge. Then he cleans the stove. Then he cleans the microwave. Next he fixes the bicycles. He oils Wuji’s bike chain. He repairs my bike basket. Actually, there was nothing wrong with my bike basket. Now it is pushed so far to the back, I cannot clip my light on it. But no one can ask him to put it back to where it was or he will say, “Don’t tell me what to do.” We have to do it quietly, by ourselves.

We are glad when he is all done.

One night in bed, Wuji says, “I told them they can stay as long as they like.”

“How could you promise without talking to me?” I say. “Is that respectful communication? Is that how a husband ought to behave? Does no one consider my feelings? Does my opinion not count at all?”

Before I was pregnant, I did not talk this way. But it is as if my belly is pressing down on my nerves. The bigger my belly, the more I say. Of course, Wuji is sorry. But do I remember? he asks. I agreed before we got married that his parents could come live with us when they got old. Also, he agreed that my mother could come. Remember? Because we are both only children. Our parents are our responsibility. Yes, he should still have told me he was going to raise the topic. But he didn’t have an opportunity, he says. Because he was trying to calm his parents down.

“Again,” I say.

“Yes, again,” he says. “That is my life’s real job. And now I have to calm you down, too. My poor pregnant wife.”

He puts his hands on my moving belly. The baby kicks him and he laughs. “Hey! So strong!” And then I say I understand. Because I feel sorry for him, that he has so many people to calm down. My mother says I do not realize I will end up a servant to everyone. “Soft and capable, the worst combination,” she says. “You will serve everyone, and no one will serve you.” Is that true? Maybe it is a mistake to tell Wuji he is right. Maybe it is a mistake to admit my pregnancy is making me talk crazy. Maybe it is a mistake to say I do not want to make trouble for him. But still I say, “Poor Wuji.” Maybe because, inside, I think, This is the best way for my child.

“At least, if they move here we can buy a bigger place,” he says. “There is that advantage to living in the United States. There is room here. It’s not like China.”

“That is true,” I say. “There is that advantage.”

“Plus, you know, even if we all buy a place together they might not move in right away,” Wuji says. “Maybe they won’t, right? We don’t know.”

“Maybe not,” I agree. “You’re right. We don’t know.”

“And maybe they won’t really like it here, anyway,” Wuji says. “Maybe they’ll miss China and want to go back. Or maybe they’ll go back and forth. A lot of people do that. Go back and forth.”

“You’re right,” I say. “A lot of people do do that. Maybe they will, too.”

“Plus, maybe my father will be fine. We don’t know, right? Maybe my mother will be able to handle him herself.”

“Maybe he will,” I say. “And maybe she will indeed be able to handle him by herself. It’s hard to say. You’re right.”

In China, I had a clothes store. Not a very big store—in fact, quite a small store. Still, my friends would make clothes and I would sell them, and we always made a little money. Because I figured everything out so well, my friends said. Because I made everything so smooth. Though, actually, their designs were outstanding, too. Then Wuji went to the U.S. for his doctorate, and I went with him. Now my store is like a beautiful picture I once saw, a long, long time ago, on Taobao. At first, my friends said they would send me clothes and I could sell them here. So I could still have a store.

“I’m not sure. Maybe the Americans will not like the clothes,” I said at first.

Then, later, I said, “I think the Americans maybe do not like them.”

And now I say, “The Americans just do not like our clothes.”

No more maybe, in other words. Because that is just what happens. One day it is maybe, and then you just know.

My father-in-law says maybe he will wash Wuji’s car.

Of course, he knows that Wuji bought a silver-colored car. Also, he has been in Wuji’s silver car several times. Once, he tested the air-conditioning. Once, he told Wuji he was surprised there was no screen to show you how far away you are from the car behind you. Because all the children of his friends who had cars had that kind of screen, he said. Very useful. Of course, he understands that, in terms of technology, the United States is often quite backward. He knows that in the United States many people still use cash, for example. Still, he said, he was surprised.

Wuji agreed then that the United States was backward. But his car had no screen, he said, because his car was a used car.

“Ah,” his father said.

“My car is an old model. Too old to have that kind of screen,” Wuji said.

“Ah,” his father said again. Then he said, “It is because you are only a lecturer. It is because you are not a professor.”

“Yes,” Wuji said. “A lecturer’s salary is quite low.”

He was calm, because in fact he already knew what his father thought. Also, in his heart he would like to be a professor, too.

Still, my mother-in-law said, “Wuji is just as successful as the other sons! He got his Ph.D. in America! And at least he is not a volleyball coach, right?”

“Wuji jumps like an elephant,” my father-in-law said. “He is so slow he has to wave the flies away; he cannot swat them. I do not think he could have become a volleyball coach.”

If Wuji was not the ump in the family, maybe he would feel bad. But, instead, he calmly said, “I am not a coach and I am not a professor. I cannot jump and, truly, I am slow. But I am going to be a father.”

And my father-in-law agreed then that Wuji had accomplished at least one important thing. Because a child born in America is a U.S. citizen. And a U.S. citizen can do anything!

“He is a success!” my mother-in-law said.

My father-in-law nodded.

But now, somehow, when my father-in-law cleans the car, and we go out to the parking lot to inspect it, Wuji’s car does not look all clean and shiny.

“Beautiful!” we say, though we can see that it is not only just as old as before but still quite dirty.

Then my mother-in-law whispers, “Look!”

And that is when we see that the silver car across from Wuji’s car is all clean. Should we point out that Wuji’s car is a Nissan, and that car is a Toyota?

Not even my mother-in-law will try to score that point.

For two days we say nothing. I knit some baby clothes. I water some plants. I help cook. I eat. My mother-in-law has found a special oatmeal place near our house and is interested in the grain, which is milled very fine. It is not like regular oatmeal, she says. It is more like millet. She serves it to me with soy sauce and sesame oil.

“Good for the baby,” she says.

Meanwhile, the shiny car does not move. Every time we go out, it is still there in the parking lot. Clean.

The third day, my father-in-law washes Wuji’s car.

We go outside again. We stand on the cracked asphalt.

“Beautiful!” we say. As if we did not say that the other day.

My father-in-law makes a kind of flower blossom with his lips. Then suddenly his eyes light up and he says, “Is there another silver car I can clean tomorrow?”

We laugh. We laugh because it is funny. We laugh because we are relieved. And we laugh because we want to cry. Because there he is—the man he was before his hair got so long. The man who made jokes and did not argue all day with his wife.

So what to do now about the first clean car? Should we write a note and put it on the windshield? And, if we do, what should the note say?

“It should say, ‘We are so sorry we cleaned the wrong car, but we are from China,’ ” my father-in-law suggests. “It should say, ‘We older people especially only know a few brands of cars. For example, BMW.’ ”

We laugh.

My father-in-law says, “Or else we can write, ‘Those Japanese cars, you know, they all look the same.’ ”

We laugh again.

But Wuji thinks it would be a mistake to write anything.

“You are right, we can write a note,” he says. “That is one approach. But American people don’t like people to touch their things. If they find a dent or a scratch or anything wrong, they will complain. If they can, they will even sue you. So I recommend we not write anything.”

Everyone is quiet. Will my father-in-law feel Wuji is telling him what to do?

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says.

In the end, though, he follows Wuji’s recommendation and does not write anything.

The next day, the doorbell rings. Outside, there is a short black man with a cardboard box. We cannot see him too well because of the bookcase and also the screen door. But we can see that, actually, he is not really black. Actually, he is a rust color, kind of like a fall chrysanthemum. He is wearing bluejeans and a T-shirt, and he is very similar in size to my father-in-law, except for his shoulders and his arms. My father-in-law is quite thin. This man’s muscles bulge out. He is wearing a gold earring, too, kind of like the Buddha, only just one earring, instead of two.

“Hi, my name is Jeff,” he says through the screen. “I heard you cleaned my car.”

He looks friendly. Still, my father-in-law stands between the bookcase and the door as if this Jeff is an evil spirit the bookcase might not be strong enough to keep out. My father-in-law is holding hard on to the apartment doorknob as if to brace himself. He does not open the screen door.

“We did not clean anything,” he says in English. He speaks slowly and clearly.

Jeff raises his eyebrows so high, three deep creases appear on his forehead. The rolls of skin between them look like dragons.

“But our neighbors said they saw you out with a bucket and a sponge,” he says. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Out of all this, my mother-in-law only gets the “thank you.” But, as she has been practicing in English class, she cries, “You’re welcome!”—spiking the words like a volleyball across the room.

Does Jeff feel encouraged by her words? Anyway, he starts again.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” he repeats. “I brought you a present.”

We think maybe my father-in-law needs more time to prepare. But we cannot help him. And sure enough, he says, slowly but clearly, “Is that really your car?”

Maybe he is just surprised. A black man with a newer car than Wuji’s. And who knows? Maybe this black man has a screen to show him what is behind the car when he is backing up.

But Jeff thinks something else.

“Did I steal it? Is that what you mean?” Jeff says.

“If you find something wrong, we did not do it,” my father-in-law says.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Jeff says.

“We did not wash your car,” my father-in-law says. His hand is still holding on to the doorknob. “You have no proof.”

“Is that so?” Jeff gives my father-in-law a funny look. Then finally he says, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to leave this cake here anyway.”

He opens the screen door.

“Stop!” my father-in-law says.

But one foot is already inside. Jeff holds the screen door still with his shoulder. Then he opens the lid of the cake box. He props the box on his knee as he writes quickly in the icing with his finger. Then he closes the box and licks his fingertip.

“Here,” he says. He hands the box to my father-in-law.

My father-in-law does not accept it.

“Take it,” Jeff says.

My father-in-law does not move.

“I said take it,” Jeff says again.

“Take it,” Wuji says from behind the bookcase, in Chinese.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” my father-in-law says. But he takes the box.

Jeff leaves, muttering something we cannot hear.

We lock the knob and the bolt, then put the chain on, too.

Later, at dinner, we can see that although the cake originally said “thank you!” on it in fancy blue letters, on top of that is now something else.

“ ‘Fucking As,’ ” my father-in-law says. “ ‘Fucking As.’ ” He frowns.

“I think it means, ‘Fucking Asians,’ ” Wuji says.

My father-in-law still looks confused.

“The blacks do not like us,” Wuji explains. “Because we are too smart.”

“Also, we do not spend money like crazy,” my mother-in-law says.

“They are afraid China is going to surpass America,” I say.

“ ‘Fucking Asians,’ ” my father-in-law says. Then suddenly he says, “I saw that there were two cars. But I thought Wuji’s car must be the new car.”

He says, “I was confused.”

He says, “A lot of English I do not understand anymore.”

This should be my mother-in-law’s happiest moment. Finally, she and my father-in-law have met at an intersection. This is the moment she can wave and say, “Hi! How are you, Professor? I can speak English, too!” But, instead, she is looking down through the bottom of her bifocals. She is batting back tears.

No one moves. Only the baby is turning over and over, as if he is in a washing machine.

“We should give the cake back,” Wuji says after a while.

“We should serve the cake into that man’s windshield!” my mother-in-law says. She holds her hands as if she is ready to toss the cake into the air and punch it.

“Good idea,” Wuji says.

On the way out of the apartment, he carries the cake up high, as if he is in a parade.

“Make sure you hit the Toyota!” my father-in-law jokes in English. “Make sure you don’t hit the Nissan!”

Everyone laughs.

But Jeff’s car is not there. So, when we come back in, we still have the cake.

“Maybe we should scrape off the frosting and see how it looks,” I say.

“Good idea,” Wuji says.

We scrape off the words and, sure enough, the cake looks better. My mother-in-law says, “We should have it with blueberries!” And, in the end, even I get three berries.

Then we turn on the DVD player. The DVD today is “The Sound of Music.”

My father-in-law nods, getting ready to explain everything. He has seen this movie before and knows the story. He is prepared. Of course, in fact we have all seen it. We all know about the children and Maria, and about the brave father who manages the situation so well.

Still, I say, “ ‘The Sound of Music!’ ” as if it is something new.

My father-in-law smiles.

Am I being too obvious? Am I insulting his intelligence?

“You will be a good mother,” he says. “You will manage things very well for your child.” He stops. “And then one day your child will have to manage you.”

And now it is my turn to cry. I cry because he is right. I cry because I am sorry. And I cry because there he is, one more time, under the crazy, wild hair. The professor who knows everything. The professor we will all miss. ♦︎