Nostalgia (41 page)

Some of the uniformed men slept, pressed close against one another, swaying. Always the rattle of wheels below.
A raging world
, thought Summerfield, closing his eyes;
hurtling them through the night
.

A train
.

And,
Not dead. Beyond understanding
.

V
IGILANCE REWARDED
: at irregular intervals, the library’s tall lace curtains swing inward into the room a few inches—held there, suspended, by a current of air—then sway silently back into place. During the few seconds of suspension, he makes sure to hold his breath.

B
ASE BALL ONCE SEEMED
to him the answer to an important inner question—pursuing it, playing it once settled some private confusion—but now he has lost any inkling of the original problem.

Since his mind has become such an intriguing and often-frightening organ, he has begun experimenting with telling himself lies—it’s rather like tossing a trick ball at a batsman, just to see what will happen. He has, for example, told himself that the figures who stood at the end of his bed in the hospital were not ghosts at all, but angels.

D
EEP-GOLD SUNLIGHT
and the shadows of leaves fall over the topmost part of the library curtains, a pattern of lace upon lace—a layered effect, heavy and hot—that makes one long for the cold sharp blade of winter.

Now and again he takes two letters from his hip pocket—the two he brought with him from Washington, the one from Walt, the other from the nurse Anne—and passes his fingers over the paper, worn smooth and slack as cloth.

H
E ARRANGES HIMSELF
among the several pillows in the window seat and falls asleep. Soon a great pillar of fire, a towering pine, wavers and topples, crashing to the ground and shaking the earth; when first he opens his eyes, a mist of red sparks still wafts slowly down from the library ceiling.

He’s sweating, and his head aches. As he sits up and touches his feet to the floor, he sees a face peering at him from around the wing of the farther chair—Sarah, barely visible in the dusky air. She smiles and says, “You’re awake.”

Strangely reassured, he says, “I suppose I am. How long have you been sitting there?”

She stands, moves across the room, and slides the small desk chair alongside him. She still wears her white dress from the school day. As she sits down, she says, “Nearly half an hour.”

“Did Thomas not see you home?”

“He did,” she says. “And was gravely disappointed by my not asking him to stay.”

“I hope you didn’t send him away on my account.”

“Not exactly,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, not entirely … not entirely on your account. He wanted to celebrate the start of the summer vacation, naturally, a perfectly reasonable desire—to have supper together or something. But I only wanted to … I don’t know what I wanted. I felt absurdly tired. When I found you asleep, I sat in Mommy’s chair and watched the room grow dark. Somehow very restoring after a day of … 
festivities
.”

“Was it not what you expected?” he asks.

“Oh, yes,” she answers. “Exactly what I expected, only much, much longer.”

She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs it to her brow. “When I first came in,” she says, “I asked Mrs. B if she’d brought you any tea. She only shook her head and seemed very peculiar about it.”

“I’m afraid we had a few words,” he says.

“What sort of words?”

“I only asked her if she might try to knock on the library door … rather than pound … and wait for my reply before entering.”

“I see,” she says. “I don’t imagine that went over very well.”

“No.”

“It can’t be easy,” she says. “Managing us into maturity, and now being managed
by
us. Is it because you might not wish to be disturbed?”

“It’s because I don’t wish to be startled out of my chair,” he says.

She appears a bit startled herself, but then, after a moment, nods thoughtfully. “You were whispering in your sleep,” she says.

“What did I say?”

“I couldn’t understand most of it, but several times you repeated, ‘I can’t … I can’t.’ ”

It occurs to him to ask her not to sneak into rooms and spy on him when he’s sleeping, but he restrains himself because he feels kindly toward her for sending Gilfinian away.

After a long pause—in which he might have spoken but didn’t—she says, “Summerfield, you know you’ve told me almost nothing.”

“There’s almost nothing to tell,” he says.

She considers this and then says, “I don’t think that can be true. I’m sure it’s not possible. Thomas suggested I should allow you to come out of your shell at your own speed.”

“Is that how he put it? Do you think he meant to compare me to a snail or a tortoise? Or maybe to a clam?”

She sighs and looks into her lap. “You don’t know the pains he took on my behalf to find you,” she says. “To learn something about what had happened to you. His concern for you was steadfast … as it remains.”

“Well, then I guess you’d better follow his advice,” he says. “And allow me to come out of my shell at my own speed.”

“Very well,” she says, hopelessly, and stands up. Almost at once she touches the crown of his head and asks, “Oh, dear … what’s happened here?”

He recoils, casting about the window seat for the smoking cap, which he finds quickly and puts on his head. “Can you possibly leave me alone?” he says.

She looks down at him. The gray light through the lace curtains flattens her features, but he can see clearly that she is anxious.

“Of course,” she says. “Why not?”

She drags the chair to its place at the writing desk. “But before I go,” she says, her voice unsteady, “perhaps you’ll tell me what these hideous black things are you’ve left on Mommy’s desk.”

He gets to his feet, goes to the desk, and begins gathering them up. She might have stepped back but instead moves closer, stands next to him, and lays a hand on his shoulder. “You made these,” she says, obstinately kind. “Summerfield … darling … what are they?”

Now he drops them onto the desktop, where they land in a jumbled heap, and he experiences the pressure of his lifelong impulse to run. To his own surprise, he says, too sharply, “They’re corpses.”

Immediately remorseful, he sits in the chair, not looking at her. “At least that’s what I think they are,” he says. “I think they’re corpses.”

D
ESPITE HIMSELF
—and despite how
shell
evokes artillery projectiles—he appreciates Gilfinian’s suggestion for the good influence it has apparently had on Sarah’s approach to the problem of his return, his having survived the war, his still being alive after all: she would allow him to proceed with his acclimation at his own speed. (Certainly none of her actions would be rash or wanting thought.) Since Friday in the library, she seems to have taken the idea to heart and has met each of his small flare-ups with patience and equanimity. Still, he has no intention of coming out of any shell. If it is possible to go farther
in
, he will do that instead.

Friday evening, after supper, Mrs. Bannister—having knocked gently on the parlor door and waited for Summerfield’s reply—approached him and Sarah to ask if they might do without her and Jane for the next three days; they wanted to visit their cousins in Deerpark. It was not the first time the sisters had retreated to the country for the Glorious Fourth, on which occasion, in Mrs. B’s opinion, far too many people get far too “glorious.” And, as everyone knew, Jane detested all manner of fireworks—firecrackers especially made her nervous—and though they couldn’t entirely escape them on Long
Island, they could, it seemed, get farther away from them. Naturally Sarah said yes, and at eight o’clock Saturday morning, the two women set off in the rain for the rail station.

On Sunday, Summerfield went with Sarah to Holy Trinity. He’d agreed to go only if they arrived five minutes late and left five minutes early, to avoid the risk of any socializing. Throughout the service, he kept his eyes either closed or fixed on the hymnal or prayer book. His thoughts repeatedly strayed and blurred, and he found the groined roof and the purples and ambers of the windows curiously oppressive. Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon began with the words, “Tomorrow our great country turns eighty-eight …” and briskly ventured off onto the nature, causes, and costs of schism. Summerfield saw in his mind’s eye a cloud of black smoke rising from behind the pulpit like an enormous flower, splaying its five petals and darkening the air of the chancel. At the Eucharist, he stayed in the pew, not because of any religious conflict but because of a deep irrational reluctance to enter the aisle, to take a place in line, to wait, to inch forward.

Now, as they walk the few streets home from the church, Sarah strikes him as unnaturally pensive—he imagines her silenced by Gilfinian’s suggestion, treading cautiously, not asking questions she might otherwise ask. The day has turned cloudy, cool enough at this hour for her to leave her umbrella closed, and she repeatedly taps the tip of it on the pavement, a prickly noise that sets his teeth on edge. At last he says, “Do you think Mrs. B and Jane will be coming back to us?”

“Whatever do you mean?” she says.

“I fear they left because of my unexpected homecoming,” he says. “And my starting to lay down new rules.”

“Summerfield,” she says, “Mrs. B and Jane—like everyone who knows you—are overjoyed by your homecoming.”

Her tone is more pedagogical than he would like, but he knows she only means to put his mind at ease.

“They’ve gone to Deerpark before,” she adds. “They’ve always come back.”

“It seemed … I don’t know … abrupt,” he says.

She nods. “It did seem abrupt,” she says, “but I wonder if they
weren’t undecided about leaving. I wonder if Mrs. B didn’t think it too soon for them to go, scarcely more than a week after your arrival.”

“Of course,” he says. “And then our little blowup in the library settled the matter for her.”

“Blowup?” says Sarah. “You didn’t say you had a blowup.”

“Our little spat then.”

“That’s even worse,” she says. “I hate that word.”

“Well, call it what you want,” he says, “but I bet I’m right. Is that your Gilfinian sitting on our steps?”

She stops suddenly—they are about ten houses away—and Summerfield has the feeling, based almost entirely on instinct, that she might duck out of sight if she could. For no apparent reason she opens her umbrella.

“I believe it is,” she says, disclosing no emotion, and then takes his arm and continues forward. “He must have walked over from church … from Clinton Avenue.”

As they draw nearer, it appears to Summerfield that Gilfinian—seated on a lower step in his Sunday best and leaning against the railing—is sound asleep. “I think he might be napping,” he whispers to Sarah.

“That’s impossible,” she says, stopping again.

A breeze stirs the limbs of a nearby locust tree and sheds down a few feathery leaves onto the pavement. “Oh, dear,” she says. “He’ll be terribly embarrassed if we surprise him.”

“What do you propose? Would you like us to stand here until he wakes up?”

She releases his arm and closes the umbrella. “What I would like,” she says, “is for you to be kind to him. There’s no good reason why you shouldn’t be friends.”

Summerfield laughs—something about the prospect of any friend (not specifically Gilfinian) makes him uneasy—but then he sees the serious look on Sarah’s face. He recalls her role, since the time of their parents’ death, as his moral guide—how, prior to his going to war, he’d done well by trying not to disappoint her. Kindness to Gilfinian seems little enough to ask, easy enough to concede. He smiles and shrugs his shoulders. “Okay,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

On the steps, a brown derby hat rests next to Gilfinian, who sleeps with his bare head against the railing and his hands pressed together in his lap. Next to the hat sits a large basket, covered with a blue-and-white checkered cloth.

Sarah leans toward him and says softly, “Thomas, dear …”

He blinks and immediately turns crimson. “Oh, my goodness,” he says. “I dozed off.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t eaten by a wild pig,” says Summerfield, joking, but apparently frightening Gilfinian instead. Under his breath, he says to Sarah, “Sorry …” and then passes Gilfinian his hat, which the man puts on gingerly, as if he were trying it on for the first time.

G
ILFINIAN
, having brought along a pic-nic dinner prepared by his mother, wanted to walk to a park and eat outdoors, but Sarah rejected the idea with a query for which he plainly had no answer: “Why is it men always want to eat outdoors?” she asked. And so they ate Mrs. Gilfinian’s cold pork roast, potatoes, and applesauce in the dining room—“in the custom of Homo sapiens.”

Afterward, Sarah retreated downstairs to the kitchen, telling Gilfinian that if he
had
to smoke, this would be a good time for it, during her absence. The two men moved into the parlor, where Gilfinian stood at the hearth and undertook to light his pipe. Summerfield—wanting more than anything to go upstairs to his room, shed his Sunday clothes, and lie down—sat at one end of the sofa and tried not to meet Gilfinian’s gaze, which (he’d discovered over dinner) transmitted an unceasing desire to be liked.

Now, drawing at intervals on the pipe to get it started, Gilfinian says to him, “Sarah told me … that while you were … in camp … you became fond of backgammon.”

An innocuous enough remark, it has the disagreeable effect of conjuring for Summerfield a mental tableau of Sarah’s reading his letters to Gilfinian. “Yes,” he says, yanking loose his tie.

“Backgammon was my father’s game,” says Gilfinian. “He called it tables. I’m afraid I have more enthusiasm for it than skill … but
we must play sometime. And now that vacation’s upon us, I’m determined to teach it to Sarah.”

“I would rather you didn’t,” says Summerfield.

“Why not?” says Gilfinian, clearly taken aback.

“That is,” says Summerfield, “if you don’t mind … I’ve promised to teach her.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” says Gilfinian. “I didn’t mean to … well, I’ll lend you my set if you like.”