“You see?” Ruth said. She said it as if every point she had brought up had been proven beyond further debate. Her job was the protection of her children. Whatever assailed them was evil and wrong; worry over world conditions and the dreadful advances of science upset the young; ergo: the world should be altered. Ruth obviously could not reason beyond that—to the theoretical possibilities, to the absolute need of protecting her young from something fantastically worse than nervousness.
This narrowness, this ingrained sense that River City would always be there because it had always been there, the emotional identification with the immediate here and the refusal even to look at the hard and horrible face of tomorrow yonder, annoyed Charles more than such things usually did. He did not realize that his private irritability was colored by the private disappointment in his leave. He would even have denied stoutly that his visit to his favorite relatives had been a second-choice manner of spending the evening.
He took up the challenge again. “I don’t see, Aunt Ruth. What I see— all I see—is the one fact we must never lose sight of! So long as even the potential threat of A-bombs on America exists, nothing we can do in the way of arming ourselves, of testing weapons, of civil defense, is too much. I think little Don here is jittery because you’ve made him jittery. I think—”
Jim said, firmly, “Cut it, son! Mother’s mad.”
She was “mad.” She controlled her temper long enough however, to order the wide-eyed, very blonde Marie to take her towheaded brother upstairs and put him in bed. Then she whirled on her nephew. “I know you’re a soldier. That’s no excuse for your coming to a quiet, peaceable, domestic scene and scaring hell out of mere children!”
“Somebody ought to be scared,” he answered.
“ You should be! People like you! People like your crazy father! Yes. People like my sister, stringing along with that everlasting playacting about sudden death! A fine way to bring up a whole generation, watching grown men and women make like they are dead and dying. I tell you, Charles Conner….”
“…and I tell you, Aunt Ruth, you ought to go get those ancient newspapers out, where they announced Russia had exploded an H-bomb, and sit on your broad backside and reflect what that means to your kids—”
“’Bout time,” Jim Williams said, mildly still, “for you to be running along, isn’t it, Chuck?”
He went.