by Susan Wilson
Corporal Nicholson. Keller. Shy guy. Rarely spoke until spoken to, which was difficult for me because I found myself shy around this perfect stranger in my house. If he’d been one of those easy sorts of guys, like Rick’s former teammates, all full of jokes and playfulness, it would have been easier for me. But Keller was quiet and respectful and clearly trying hard to keep himself out of my way. Once a week, he asked if he might use the bathtub. Once a week, he asked if he might use my washer. I told him I’d do his laundry, and he blushed, as if the thought of my handling his BVDs was humiliating. Frankly, I was just as happy to have him take care of his own washing for exactly the same reason. It was just too intimate between male and female strangers.
“I can’t have you do that for me. I’m fully capable of doing my own laundry, and you’ve got enough to do without my becoming a burden to you.”
“Mr. Nicholson. Keller, you’ve taken a burden off me.” The minute I said it, I regretted it. I sounded like I thought my husband was a burden. I’d meant the physical burden. “I don’t mean it like that.”
“I know what you mean.” He lifted his army duffel bag full of dirty clothes up onto his shoulder. “Thank you.”
I didn’t know if he meant for the compliment or the use of my Maytag.
Our days passed into something resembling a routine, and I realized one afternoon as I handed Keller a stack of folded towels and shooed him upstairs to the linen closet that I had overcome my initial unease with having a strange man in my house. What helped was that I had begun to see him not as a full-fledged grown-up, but as a younger brother. Like my younger brother, Kenny. Kenny was a tease and a pest and a disappointment because, if I’d been destined to have a younger sibling—effectively pushing me into middle-child status—I’d wanted a sister. Like Keller, Kenny was eighteen when he joined the service. He survived the Aleutians and came back just as pesty and teasing as ever, although it was only in letters and during the quick hello he was afforded during the once-a-month phone call my parents made. “Hey, Knucklehead, you still bossy as ever?”
“You still being a brat?” My riposte was never as clever as I wanted it to be. I’d lost a little of my edge.
I didn’t know if Keller had come back from the war the same as he had been or whether he’d been changed by it. He had no relatives, he said, so he had no experience of being a younger brother, pesty or not, but that’s how I saw him, or, rather, how I chose to see him—well, not the pesty part. Keller was as considerate as anyone could want. But I chose to look at him as a kid brother. Keeping him at a safe remove, but a couple of degrees up from employee.
* * *
“Keller, I was going to sit in the living room and listen to the news,” I said one night. “Would you like to join me?” Typically, Keller retreated to his garage space as soon as he’d gotten Rick into bed for the night. Usually, I sat with Rick until he shooed me off to bed, but on this night he’d wanted to read and sent me out of his room early.
“Sure.” His dark brown hair had grown out of its military clip since his obligatory Reserve weekend. Since then, he’d let it grow, and its poker straightness defied the Brylcreem he dabbed on it, falling against a natural center part and flopping across his brow like a little boy’s. He shoved it back and it fell forward.
I resisted the urge to comb it to the side, like I did with Rick’s when he, too, let his hair grow out of his summertime clip, when the three or four curls on the back of his head would appear and I would tease them into life with my fingers and then he would tease me into life. “How about I make us a bowl of popcorn? I think that there’s a variety show after the news.”
The living room held only a three-cushion couch and a wing-back armchair that had belonged to my grandmother and that my parents had shipped to us as an anniversary gift the fall before Pearl Harbor. When I brought the popcorn into the living room, Keller had already warmed up the radio and was sitting in the armchair. Pax was on the rug, stretched out full length, so that his head was under the coffee table. I stepped over him so that I could sit on the end of the couch closest to Keller and we could easily share the popcorn, over which I’d generously drizzled real butter—a luxury even then.
The minute I set down the bowl, Pax popped up, his amber eyes on the bounty. “No begging, you.”
“When he was in the service, he was taught never to take food from anyone but me.” Keller grabbed a handful of popcorn. “Now look at him.”
I did and saw that the velvety black of the fur on his muzzle was fading with the onset of gray hairs. Even the sooty tips of his A-frame ears were threaded through with this immutable sign that our dog, our baby, was growing older. Rick had found Pax in 38, a tiny puppy. Our dog was almost eight years old. Still fit, still lively, but no longer young.
We’d been married almost seven years. By this time, we might have had two kids, maybe three. Sometimes lying awake in my solitary bed, I thought of those never-conceived children and felt hollowed out, dried up, and no longer young.
* * *
I finished my ice cream soda and reapplied my Maybelline carmine red lipstick. A thin paper napkin sufficed as a blotter. Time to go home, time to go back and see if Rick had trounced Keller once again at chess.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Keller is standing outside the glass-block breezeway, contemplating the angle of doorsill and ground.
“You look like you’re solving a puzzle.” Francesca comes up beside Keller. She’s been out for the afternoon and he notices the fresh haircut. She looks nice. She looks relaxed. “I am. I’d like to build a ramp here. You know, to get the wheelchair out of the house easier.” The wheelchair, not the man. “I can build one for the other side, too, so that he can get out to the backyard.”
“It would help. Do you think you can do it?”
“I’m sure that I can do it. It’s a matter of geometry. But, listen, I also want to widen the doorways, get rid of the sills. So he can wheel himself out of his room.” Even though Keller suggests this, he wonders if Rick will ever leave his room. Being around Rick reminds Keller of the World War I veterans sitting outside the nursing home in Great Harbor, slumped in their wheelchairs, heads down, Sometimes they hadn’t been seriously wounded, but their spirits were shattered. Their outward wounds had healed, but their spirits never would. Rick is like them, staring at the wall day after day, refusing to be grateful that he is back home. Frankly, it kind of pisses Keller off. It stinks, being crippled, but at least he made it out alive.
Bucky Carson didn’t make it out, killed in the same action where Keller and Pax were both wounded. Neither did Dick Adams, and Keller still feels that sharp, disbelieving grief whenever he thinks of this particular death. Dick and his war dog, Rudy, both gone in an instant.
“I just don’t know if the landlord will go for it. He might not be keen on making that kind of dramatic change to his structure. Maybe just the ramp for now.”
Francesca slings her handbag up over her arm and goes into the house through the open breezeway door. Her shadow drifts over the thick glass blocks like an undersea creature. Keller thinks that he’ll go in and check on Rick, see if he wants anything—except another game of chess. One humiliation a day is enough for Keller. After that, maybe he’ll go to the lumberyard and get started on the materials for the ramp. He closes the breezeway door behind him and enters the kitchen. Francesca is there, still in her light coat, her handbag open on the table, its contents spilled out.
“Keller?” Francesca starts shoving the coin purse and checkbook and comb and lipstick back into her bag.
“Ma’am?”
“It’s good you’re here.” She snaps the handbag shut and walks out of the kitchen.
He feels himself flush. He’s not sure how to respond. No one has ever said that to him before.
“I’m glad to be of help.” But she’s in the hallway and his words fall into empty air.
Then she’s back. Her coat and bag put away, she reaches for an apron. As she does,
she steps closer to Keller. One hand keeps him from backing away. “Keller.” She’s more than a head shorter than he is, so she lifts herself up on her toes and leans toward his ear. “He’s very glad you’re here. He might not say it, but he is.” Her breath is close to his ear—she doesn’t want Rick to know she’s talking about him—but the effect of her soft whisper against Keller’s cheek incites in him the urge to place his hand on her waist and press his cheek against hers. She smells of laundry soap and fresh air.
Once when on patrol, Keller and Pax had come upon a small farmhouse, a crowded clothesline strung out behind it into the rare spring sunshine. The woman who lived there boldly walked out her door and left it open, as if to invite inspection. Pax was unconcerned as they walked the perimeter, so they left the yard quickly. But before they did, Keller, weeks from his last bath or clean uniform, walked between the lines of drying sheets and shirts, inhaling the idea of being clean and freshly clothed. Just like having a loving family, the concept seemed unattainable.
Keller swallows and closes his eyes. “I know he is. And I’m very glad to be here.”
Keller uses the bathroom before he goes in to check on Rick. He needs a moment; he can’t go into that room with the feel of Francesca’s hand on his arm still there; with the desire to touch her back still evident in the pink of his cheek.
Pax is flopped on the bare floor, stretched out full length, taking up most of the space not already taken up with bed and tables and wheelchair. His head is beside the wheelchair; his tail is under the hospital bed. The room is stuffy and the dog is softly panting. He raises his head when Keller comes in, and Keller can hear the flop-flop of his tail against the hardwood floor beneath the bed. The tail bangs against a spring with a little chiming sound. Rick’s lap blanket is on the floor, and Keller bends to pick it up. Rick doesn’t like to sit without something across his knees; he’s always cold, even in this closed-up room. “You should have called me.” Keller settles the blanket back in place.
“It’s all right. I can’t keep you running back and forth like some deranged butler.”
“I don’t mind.”
Pax extricates himself from under the bed and sits with the two men, his fond eyes addressing first one and then the other. His muzzle cracks open in a wide pant like a smile. He is perhaps the happiest creature Keller knows. Hours on patrol, or enduring endless hours of barrage as the big guns went off in near-ceaseless repetition, and the dog happily settled wherever Keller was. And now he was happily settled between the two of them. Keller thinks that the dog is bound to be bored. His life for the past three years had been one of work. Good work, important work. The only restlessness Keller sees is late at night, when the dog wants to patrol the perimeter of the tiny fenced-in yard. He isn’t satisfied to do it by himself like a regular dog; he noses Keller into line and the pair of them walk around the yard. If Keller doesn’t adhere to the dog’s sense of performance, he gets a look as if to say, You’re asking for it, grunt. Fall in!
Pax is like a retiree, a warhorse put out to pasture. Except that he’s taken on the role of companion with the same dedication as he did scout. And then Keller is struck with an idea.
“You know, maybe we can teach Pax how to pick things up for you.”
They practice with medicine bottles and chess pieces. Rick knocks something off his tray and Keller points at it. They’ve decided on the command “Pick it up” slurred together: “Pickitup.” As used as he is to learning tasks, the dog figures it out in less than six tries. Proud of himself, he waits impatiently for Rick to drop something else. And Keller finds himself proud, too, not only of the dog but of himself for coming up with the idea. He loves it, this ability to communicate ideas between species. The moment when the dog looks at him with complete comprehension. As if they are speaking a common language.
It was like that in the war. Sometimes it spooked Keller, how well the dog understood him.
Chapter Thirty
“You’re going to have to be clumsy every ten minutes to keep him happy.”
“I don’t see that as much of a problem.” Rick says this without irony. He’s infernally clumsy, and he still hasn’t, after all this time, figured out that he has only one hand. He keeps instinctively reaching with his absent right hand, frustrating himself and his occupational therapists. Relearning how to do everything with the wrong hand has been difficult. He still fears soup, although forking the pieces of meat that Francesca has kindly precut for him has become easier if he thinks of the British fashion of left-handed eating and tips his fork with tines down. He doesn’t say so, but Rick longs to be able to cut up his own meat. What a simple lost talent. His missing fingers itch to take up the knife and slice off a big thick piece of ham from a picnic shoulder. Sometimes he thinks he misses being able to do that more than getting up out of this chair and walking out the door. But not as much as feeling the smooth surface of a baseball, reading its individual personality in the stitching, the weight of it balanced tenderly in the palm of his hand before he settles it into position for a curve or a sinker or a fastball.
No amount of success with a fork in his left hand can compensate him.
* * *
Even with the windows closed, Rick hears the sound of sawing and hammering. Keller is building him a ramp so that it will be easier to get from the house to the hospital. Keller doesn’t say exactly that; he just says it’ll be handy, a quick slide right to the door of the car. No more teeth-jarring thumping down steps, no more humiliating reminders of his helplessness. Keller thinks that if it’s easier to leave the house, Rick will. Except that he can’t think of any place he might be taken other than the hospital. No other reason to struggle to get into the car. No place he wants to go.
“What do you think of this?” Francesca twirls into the room like a debutante. She’s wearing a new dress, very fitted at the waist, and a lot longer than the dresses she wore before he went to war. The sleeves are a little puffy, trimmed with a white band. It’s a blue-and-white print. She looks very pleased with herself, and it’s so nice to see a genuine smile on her face.
“Very nice. You’ve been shopping?” Lately, with Keller there, Francesca has been going off almost every day, and she doesn’t always tell him where she’s going. It’s like she’s slipping out, a teenage girl secretly meeting a boy on the corner, hoping her parents don’t notice that she’s gone.
“No, silly. I made it.” She gathers up the skirt, examines the hemstitching, tut-tuts. “See, I’m uneven here.”
“It looks very nice, and you could have fooled me. Looks like something you’d pick up at Jordan Marsh.”
Francesca twirls again, obviously enjoying the swish of a full skirt. Her trajectory puts her beside him and she plants a kiss on the good side of his face. “Keller’s almost done with the ramp. What say we get out of here tonight and get some dinner out?”
“And then what? Go dancing?”
“If you’d like.” She doesn’t hear his sarcasm, or she’s ignoring it.
“No. I don’t think I’m ready for that. For going out.”
“Rick. This isn’t good for you. It’s time to—”
“Time to what, Francesca? Time to do what, exactly?” He turns his face away from her.
“Time to get on with your life. You’re doing much better. I know what your occupational therapist told you. He told you that you need to get out, and you do.”
“He’s not the one who will be subjected to the pity stares.” There, he’s said it. The festering notion that he will be unable to abide being looked at with pity. He doesn’t want the pity of those who came back from the war whole, or the “there but for the grace of God” pity of those who never went, to the curious stares of the rude and the innocent fear of monsters in the eyes of children.
“That’s in your head, Rick. Yes, people may give you a look; that’s natural. But they understand and maybe even admire you.” She touches his unblemished cheek with her hand. “I admire you.”
; “Please don’t.” Even Rick doesn’t know if he means that she shouldn’t say any more or that she should stop touching him. Her touch is a taunt, a reminder of his other disability.
“Okay. So, I’ll just go change and get lunch started.” Francesca has gotten so good at keeping her voice modulated. She never lets him see her hurt or mad or frustrated. She tips the door half-closed on her way out.
Rick puts his face in his hand, so sorry, so very sorry for being the man he has become.
A cold, wet nose pokes through his fingers. Pax seems intent on spreading Rick’s fingers wide enough that he can then give him a consoling lick on the nose. Rick leans his forehead against the dog’s brow. “Pax, what would I do without you?”
Pax has nothing to say about that. He settles beside Rick, gives his front paws a freshening up.
One of Rick’s slippers has come off. He’s just noticed. “Pax, pickitup.” He points to the footwear. Pax seems overjoyed to perform this small request and retrieves the slipper as if it were a rabbit dashing away. No Labrador had ever retrieved something as exuberantly or as gently. Now all he has to do is teach the dog how to put it on his foot. Rick takes the slipper out of the dog’s mouth and praises him, as Keller instructed, with a scratch on the chest. It seems such a little recognition of the vast service the dog performs, but Pax seems pleased. It’s true that the dog seemed to come to life as Keller was teaching him to pick up the things that Rick knocked to the floor, that his canine enthusiasm for learning is unbounded. He’s a dog with a brain, and one that revels in performing his tasks. How did that happen? Before, Rick had a hard time getting him not to pull on the leash. Francesca could barely control him. All that energy had been funneled into the war machine and out had come this obedient, talented dog. But Pax’s attachment to Keller is still jarring, still capable of creating a spurt of jealousy that makes Rick have to turn his face away from this guy who has proved to be such a godsend. Pax will spend all day with him in this room, but if Keller comes to walk him, the dog literally leaps up with joy. A kid going out for recess couldn’t show more excitement. Is it the exercise or the time with his other master that incites it?