They said the war would be over soon, but they always said that. Not that it was officially a war. A police action, the president said, although the newspapers didn’t agree. The Korean War, they called it.
Eleanor was watching the CBS evening news to get the latest updates. General MacArthur was eagle-eying the North Koreans across the mountains, or at least from his hotel in Japan, where he waggled his cigar at the cameras. Millions of communist Chinese soldiers were marching in, thick red arrows on a map tracing their route. It sounded less threatening in print than it looked on her aunt’s new television set. They called it black and white, but to Eleanor the picture looked black and blue, the world bruised with crisis. More nuclear tests in the Pacific, too. A mushroom cloud bloomed on the television screen, newsreel footage Eleanor had seen before of the beautiful man-made apocalypse.
She got up to turn off the set. It wasn’t just the news; she had a headache. Yet what was going on in the world left her terrified. North Korea invading South Korea, communism fighting capitalism, nuclear weapons always a threat. And her fiancé was in the thick of it, when Eleanor longed for peace and stability after the Second World War. She’d been a child in London during the Blitz, tugged into air-raid shelters, her ears ringing with sirens and wails, learning far too much about fear before she was twelve years old.
She’d also been an adult during the Blitz, and that wasn’t a metaphorical description of a girl who had experienced war. It was the impossible literal truth.
Visions. Eleanor had been having visions lately, some of them brief glimpses of other lives, some long vivid dreams, months going by in a night; all of her dreams, no matter how long, complete immersions in different times when she was herself but life was unimaginably different. She had no idea why this was happening, feeling pushed around by a cosmic mystery. She also had a question: Was this the real time she lived in, or was it just another dream?
“You don’t have a headache, do you?”
Eleanor turned to find her Aunt Clara coming in from town, taking off her gloves, her enviable coat: a fawn-coloured creation she’d stitched together with salvaged mink for the collar and cuffs. Eleanor hadn’t heard the front door close, leaving her no time to prepare for her aunt’s worried frown. She’d tried to explain a little of what was going on—a very little—but that had been enough to frighten Aunt Clara. There was mention of psychologists (psychiatrist being too big a word), perhaps the doctor to wrestle down the headaches.
Since they didn’t have the money at the moment for, let’s say, specialized care, in silent mutual agreement they’d retreated to a diagnosis of migraine and a bottle of Dr. Blyth’s little pills.
“I’ve never had a megrim in my life,” her aunt said. “Migraines, as they insist on calling them here. But I’m aware they take many different forms. Lights and colour, all of that.”
“You have no idea,” Eleanor replied.