He tried to go on smiling. “I’ve been on a slow boat from Lisbon for a whole lot of days. I was in New York for less than two hours. And last night and this morning on a train. You tell me.”
His father laughed. When he laughed, Jimmie could see he had aged considerably.
“Hannah doesn’t mean the situation today. Everybody knows that. She wants the personal experience angle, Jimmie. Especially the bombings. Your letters weren’t very frequent or very satisfying. Censorship, no doubt. But Hannah has a passion for bombing stories. Reads everything she can lay her hands on.”
“I think,” said his mother, “the British are positively thrilling. We’re all ears, Jimmie!”
He shrugged and shook his head, as if to himself. “I was working in a laboratory on the fringe of London. I was very busy. A bomb fell, once, within maybe six blocks of our place. It made quite a mess of a cow pasture.” He was lying.
“Don’t be a hold-out! You wrote you were in London summer before last—in the very worst of the blitz!”
“—and I stayed as far underground as I could!”
Biff leaned forward. “You must have seen places, though, soon after they’d been hit?”
Jimmie stuck his jaw out. “Yes.”
“He’s just trying to be dramatic,” Sarah said. “Building up suspense.”