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thank you but she wasn’t our kind of people, but then Naomi showed up and talked her into it.
    Charlene began spending every Sunday with us. Grandpaliked her a great deal when I brought her over. It was her first time on a horse, which thrilled her. Duane made himself scarce—it was always difficult for him to deal with more than one person at once. Naomi gave Charlene lessons in sewing and made some clothes for her that couldn’t be bought short of a long drive to Omaha. Naomi told me in private that she hoped Charlene wouldn’t sell herself to pheasant-hunters again in the fall. She said more than one upstanding woman in the area had done so, so it wasn’t an item on which a woman should be judged unfairly.
    One night when she was staying over Charlene told me the rumors were true. She said she was saving up to leave town and go to college. I asked her what all the men did to her, but she said if I didn’t know already she wasn’t going to tell me. I said I did know but was interested in the details. She said she got to be very picky because they all wanted her, and one man from Detroit paid her a hundred dollars, which was what she made in the café in an entire month. The only embarrassing quality of her visits was the degree to which she was impressed by our house and Grandpa’s. It was natural of her but it upset me. We had few visitors and I certainly knew that we were what was called “fortunate,” but one tended to take it all for granted. Furniture and paintings in both houses had been accumulated on travels beginning with Great-grandfather, but mostly by Grandfather around World War I in Paris and London, and later by his wife, and also by my parents. It was the time in life when you wanted to be like everyone else, even though you had begun to understand there was no everyone else, and there never had been.

    My bad luck, innocently enough, started with religion. We had always gone to a small Wesleyan Methodist church a few miles down the road. Everyone did for miles around except the Scandinavians who had a similarly small church that was Lutheran. Once a year, in July, the churches held a joint barbecue and picnic. It was all quite friendly and social, our religion, and our preacher, though very old and quite ineffectual, was admired by all. On this particular Sunday we had to get to churcha little early because Ruth served as the pianist. Charlene was with us—she had never been to church until she began coming to our house for Saturday night and Sunday, and found it interesting though peculiar.
    I remember it was the first Sunday after Labor Day and it was very hot after the brief cool spell when I was out at Duane’s tipi. Our regular minister was away on vacation in Minneapolis, and his replacement was a young, handsome preacher from theological school who was a fireball and aimed, according to the mimeographed announcement, to be an evangelist. We were accustomed to restrained homilies on the tamer aspects of the New Testament, and the substitute preacher swept everyone in the congregation off their feet, except Naomi who was quietly tolerant. He thundered, roared, strutted up and down the aisle, physically grabbed us; in short, he gave us drama and we were unused to drama. The gist is that many of the inventors of the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb were Jews, or “children of Israel.” God had called upon his Chosen People to be his tool to invent the destruction of the world, which would call forth the Second Coming of Christ. All those who were truly saved would be drawn up in the Rapture before the Conflagration. Everyone else, no matter how sincere, would endure unbelievable torture with millions and billions of radiation-crazed zombies devouring each other’s flesh, and the animal and sea world going berserk, and primitive tribes, including Indians, rising up to slaughter the whites. I remember thinking for a moment that Duane would save me.