Their first attempts to make love again were failures. They should have been prepared for it, they realized later. Part of the trouble was their tension; they kept listening for the baby, first in the bedroom with the crib six feet away, then in the living room with the bedroom door closed. The other part was the hurried, thoughtless way they tried to get to each other. It occurred to him on the second night that they had solved nothing by moving to the couch; it intensified their single-mindedness; it was more like a scrimmage than an act of love. With the baby asleep they moved the crib into the living room, near enough to the bedroom door, and went to sleep themselves. When she got back into bed after the early morning feeding, it was not a failure. Later, when the alarm went off, he woke up to find her sitting beside him, smoking a cigarette.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Something on your mind?”

“I had to think about it. It was the daylight, I’m sure of it.”

“Don’t get yourself into any habits. We have to take it when we can get it.”

“No, I don’t mean that. All last fall and winter you were on the night tour. Whether we did it when you came home or before you left, there was daylight. I did like it. Maybe it was all I needed to solve my problem.”

“You thought you had a problem?”

“No, not really.” She smiled.

“Okay. Get out of the bed. Fix me something to eat.”

She kissed him. “You’re a good husband.”

They prepared for the examination for Detective Third Grade, and the day after the Saturday he took it, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Joseph Lelands were at his parents’ apartment for dinner. His father went through the building telling the other tenants. They crowded into the apartment to wonder and listen for later bulletins. A few of the women cried and the men tried to guess what would happen. Leland hated it. He hated the idea of it, and after a while, he heard none of the jabber around him. There was no question that he would be one of those who would have to fight. He didn’t want to go away from home. That was all that it meant to him. He had to think of the kind of war it would be and how long it would last, but what he felt most, like a charge of poison in his system, was the disruption of his peaceful life. He was sitting in the kitchen thinking these things and Karen came in and sat across from him. He gave her a game smile. Some teen-agers entered, making noise. For more than a year now, he had been their hero.

“Joe? What are you going to join, Joe? They’re going to take you, too, so you might as well enlist.”