Once Around the Carousel

Chapter Twenty-Five

Linda knew their hiding in plain sight, staying at her house and the beach, worked only because no one cared what kids did in the summer. But, once school started, people were bound to ask why Sharon wasn't going home, and Linda imagined everything unraveling. She knew Robin would know what to do, Titus too, but getting Sharon to even tell Robin might be impossible. So, with the days of June falling off the calendar, Linda started getting anxious that the two adults she knew could and would help might not show up all summer.

When Titus finally arrived on the last Friday in June, what he found surprised him. He saw the girl's bikes parked under the tree in his driveway's turn-around, so he knew they were on the beach. Howeveer, the scene when he found them ran against what he'd imagined. Rather than cloud watching on the raft, or lying in the sun listening to their radio, he found them sitting stern-faced in his pavilion. The little girls he thought of as carefree children had shrouded themselves in an aura of seriousness. Linda hopped up as he walked in. Finding a couple of tears in her eyes, she wrapped her arms around him, whispering, "I missed you so much," as he bent down.

Sharon's response, or lack of one, surprised him as much as her lack of hair. "Hey Titus, you came home." she said, quickly covering up, pulling a T-shirt on over her bathing suit.

Something was obviously troubling his little friends. He wondered what happened to Sharon's childish exuberance, and what was with Linda's dour look of concern? "What's wrong?" he asked, looking out at the blue sky. "The sun's out, and my favorite beach babes are in here playing cards."

"We're fine," Sharon said. "I don't feel real good, and the sun makes it worse."

Titus wrote off the girls' mood to Sharon's not feeling well. Grabbing a soda, he began telling them about the anti-war marches he and Robin had been to, and broke the news that she hadn't come with him. Friends of theirs were still in jail almost a year after the riots at the Democratic convention. Robin went to Chicago, he explained, to help organize protests for their upcoming trial.

"Robin really wanted to see you, and she sent more hugs and kisses than you want from an old man like me. But she said if anyone would understand how important it is to stop Nixon, it's her two most enlightened students." The girls listened to Titus's explanation of the anti-war movement, which quickly ventured into ranting. Pacing around the pavilion, he ran through the litany of reasons why the government's actions constituted crimes and American had no place fighting a war in Vietnam.

"But Titus, didn't you fight in a war in Europe?" Sharon asked when he told them that the war in Vietnam had nothing to do with America.

"Well, I didn't exactly fight. And that was very different. I don't believe war is ever the right answer; however knowing what we know now, the Nazis had to be stopped."

"And there aren't any bad people doing bad things in Vietnam?" Linda asked, having always wondered why Americans went to fight there.

"There's good and bad people everywhere, honey. But the Vietnamese are no worse than the people anywhere else. I think that someday, it'll come out that we're fighting over there because Nixon and the hawks in Washington feel we should be fighting somewhere. And they think Vietnam is as good a place as any."

In the end, the girls agreed that the war was wrong, that President Nixon shouldn't be lying about it, and that the Vietnamese and Cambodian people should be left to settle their differences themselves.

The girls had never seen Titus so excitable. Even when telling them about his research at Harvard or his travels, he spoke with interest, not passion. At the end of what amounted to a replay of the speech he'd already given on dozens of campuses, he told them he'd only come home to pick up some things and would be leaving the following day. He was even canceling his Fourth of July Celebration. "While Americans are killing and being killed overseas, I think my participation in a fireworks display would be sending the wrong message. But don't worry," he said with a little grin. "Someone donated Fireworks to the town, and they're going to set them off just a little ways down the beach."