The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “Anyway,” Lloyd added, “they’ve taught us how to fall like paratroopers. And how to bump into things without jarring our bodies.”

  They sat in silence a few minutes. From the other side of the lake came the plaintive call of an owl.

  “Owl,” Lloyd said.

  “Yes, I heard it.”

  “Do you hear Johnny singing?”

  “Singing?”

  “From over there.” Lloyd pointed towards the distant bonfire.

  “I can see people moving around, but I can’t hear any of them.”

  “The bonuses of blindness, Miss Schneider,” Lloyd said in a professorial tone. He held up a gloved hand and began counting on his fingers. “Sharper hearing. More refined senses of touch, smell, taste. And for the lucky few—yours truly included—facial vision. You can’t hear because you’re too distracted by all you see.”

  “And you can hear well enough to know who’s singing?”

  “I flimflammed there. Johnny always sings when we have a social event with girls,” Lloyd said, smiling. “He thinks he’s Frank Sinatra.”

  “What’s facial vision?”

  “It’s when you’re able to tell something’s in front of you and how near it is. Sighted people probably have it, they just don’t need to use it. Some guys don’t ever get very good at it, but I’m lucky—I seem to have a natural capacity. I just know when there’s a wall there, or a table or whatever. It’s like I feel a shadow pass over me when I get close to something. The docs think it might be a change in air pressure against your face.”

  “Is that how you all are able to walk around here without canes?”

  Lloyd gave a short laugh and shook his head.

  “Facial vision’s the least of it, though I’m glad I have it,” he said. “Mostly, we pay attention. Deep, deep attention. Remember that scale model of the grounds I showed you this afternoon? Every new guy spends hours and hours feeling that model to memorize the layout. Then he takes walks with a guide, and after a while, the two things click, and he knows where paths and steps are, where to turn. We listen to how voices and footsteps change depending on the size of the room and on where we are and where other people are, so we don’t have collisions.”

  “What about outside of Old Farms?”

  “That’s where cane work comes in. We have bus steps here for practice, and once a week the New Haven Railroad brings in a train half an hour early so we can learn how to move around the train and the station. And for new places that you’re gonna be staying in a while, there’s brailling.”

  “Brailling?”

  “Feeling with your hands. When I first got to Valley Forge and here, too, I brailled the whole ward again and again until I knew how to get to the bathrooms and the water fountains and my locker without groping. You cold?”

  “Beginning to be.”

  Lloyd got to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. Helen got up, too.

  “Let’s skate back more slowly,” he said.

  “That sounds good to me.”

  Helen oriented Lloyd and they set off. Lloyd didn’t offer her his arm, and she wasn’t about to take it on her own. She supposed he was listening to her skates to stay so neatly beside her.

  “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” he said, after they’d gone some distance.

  “Yes, it really is.”

  “I can taste it in the air.”

  “There’s a full moon,” she elaborated.

  “A full moon. Clouds?”

  “None.”

  “Stars?”

  “Some. The moon’s washed out all but the brightest.”

  “How’s the snow look?”

  “White.”

  “What kind of white?”

  Helen stared at the hills and the woods. Lloyd was right. There were different whites.

  “On the far hills,” she said, “the snow’s a bluish-white, like skimmed milk, and almost gray in the shadows. Closer in, it’s a thicker kind of white, and where there are open spaces between the trees, the snow sparkles like sugar.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can see it. And ain’t it grand?”

  Helen slept in the next morning. The Red Cross bus that took her and the other girls from the skating party to Hartford hadn’t left Old Farms until close to midnight, and by the time she’d settled into her room at the boardinghouse where she was staying, it was almost two o’clock. Lloyd had things to do in the morning, anyway, starting with breakfast at seven, the compulsory daily gripe session at eight-thirty, and then classes. He had a pass for the afternoon and evening, and they’d arranged to meet for a late lunch at a diner. He’d gone there several times with friends and was ready to find his way on his own.

  Helen arrived early at the diner, which was crowded and busy. She took a booth with a view of the front door. When Lloyd came in, he’d probably pause there, and she’d be able to spot him and go to him. She ordered a cup of coffee and opened the morning edition of The Hartford Times.

  Two days ago, under cover of a low fog, German panzers and troops had punched through the sparsely manned American lines in the Ardennes Forest in southern Belgium. American troops, astonished and outnumbered, were fighting fiercely. Nevertheless, many of them had been forced to retreat, and some had had to surrender. Hundreds of American prisoners, hands on their heads, had been summarily shot by SS troops. Eisenhower was speeding Patton to the area with reinforcements. More than a million men were going to be fighting one another. Soldiers who, last summer, had dreamed of a stateside Christmas with their families were now facing the reality that Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, and maybe beyond, would be spent in cramped, frigid foxholes or advancing from tree to tree in bitter cold, through deep snow, under fire from tanks, machine guns, and 88s.

  Helen recalled the variations of whiteness in the snowy woods last night and the prettiness of Old Farms’ red sandstone buildings set in smooth lawns of fallen snow. How horrible to think that in the thick woods and rocky gorges of the Ardennes Forest, snow was only making miserable, endangered men more so. Lloyd’s old division was there.

  Helen folded the newspaper shut. She’d just read that the soldiers in the Ardennes were stuffing newspapers under their clothes for insulation. In an attempt to take her mind off the bad news, she looked out the plateglass window and watched the passing cars and pedestrians. She wondered from which direction Lloyd would be coming.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” a male voice said.

  Helen turned to find a young man in civilian clothes standing beside her booth. He had an overcoat draped over one arm, and Helen spotted an eagle pin in the lapel of his suit jacket, indicating he’d been honorably discharged.

  “The place is full, and the waitress suggested maybe you might share your booth …”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for someone. He should be here any minute.”

  The young man smiled. It was a pleasant, easy-going smile, Helen thought.

  “Of course you’d be waiting for someone,” he replied. “And he’s one lucky son of a gun—if you don’t mind me saying.”

  Before Helen could answer, Lloyd came up behind the man as if out of nowhere and gave him a shove. The man stumbled forward against the table. Coffee splashed out of Helen’s cup.

  “Hey! What the … ?” The man spun angrily around.

  “I mind, buster,” Lloyd said loudly.

  Helen jumped up to intervene, but as soon as the man saw Lloyd’s cane, he dropped his aggressive posture.

  “Sure, sure, soldier,” he said. “No harm done, and none meant. Ask the lady. She’ll tell you.”

  Helen put her hand on Lloyd’s arm, but he shook her off and took a step in the direction of the man’s voice, his cane sweeping out in front of him like a menacing tentacle. A burly older man in a stained white apron hurried out of the kitchen and headed for the trio.

  “If you boys got a beef with each other, you’d better take it outside,” the cook called to them. As he came closer, he, too,
noticed the cane.

  “Say, you must be from over at that school in Avon,” he said to Lloyd.

  “That’s right, mister. What of it?”

  Lloyd shifted his attention to the cook, but in his agitation he turned his head too far and ended up facing the waitress, who was standing nervously beside the cook. She slunk back a little.

  “Now take it easy, son. I just mean I want you veterans to always feel welcome in my place and not be bothered by nobody while you’re here.”

  “Hold on!” the stranger protested. “I’m a veteran, too.”

  “You can sit at the counter, hot shot,” the cook growled.

  “Forget it, I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

  The young man jammed his hat on his head and pointed a finger at Lloyd.

  “You had a tough break, buddy,” he said, no sympathy in his tight voice, “but you and I both know there’s plenty who had it just as tough, or even tougher. And you’re in for one helluva hard landing if you forget that.”

  Lloyd’s scorching scowl dissolved. The young man strode out of the diner, and Helen nudged Lloyd into the booth. The cook and the waitress went back to work, the other patrons quietly resumed their meals.

  “I guess you’re gonna give me a thorough raking now,” Lloyd said glumly.

  “What possessed you to push that fellow? Whatever did you imagine he was up to?”

  “I don’t want anyone annoying you.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of handling a mildly flirtatious young man on my own, thank you,” Helen said indignantly. “And without making a public scene over it.”

  “But you shouldn’t have to handle fatheads like that on your own.”

  “Come on, Lloyd, it’s not as if you found him accosting me in a dark alley somewhere.”

  “And what if he did, huh? I couldn’t do a thing about it. Not a goddamn thing. ’Cause I live in a dark alley and I’m never getting out.”

  Lloyd’s hands, propped on the edge of the table, had curled into fists.

  “I haven’t heard you talk like that in a long time,” Helen said softly. Her irritation had slipped away like sand down a slope. “Not since you were at Halloran.”

  Lloyd opened his fists with a quick motion, as if he were flinging something away.

  “I was scared at Halloran, and plenty mad, too.”

  “And now?”

  Lloyd peered at her with his dead eyes. Helen knew he’d been trained not to let his facial muscles go slack because if he did, it looked to people like he wasn’t listening to them, but in this moment, his steady attention was not mere technique. It was as if, somehow, he were really seeing her. She felt, incredibly, like he was touching her.

  “With everything they’ve been teaching us, I figure I’m gonna be able to take care of myself, and that feels good,” he answered. “I’ll get a pension from the Veteran’s Administration, so I’ll be okay that way, and I expect to work, too—and not in some sheltered workshop, either. But now all of it, the training and the money and even feeling good … well, I don’t know now if it really is going to be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  Helen felt the force of his concentration on her across the table. She had to will herself not to look away.

  “Enough for you.”

  Helen was inundated with emotions. She was surprised, flattered, frightened, joyous, guilty, and flustered, all at once. She had an impulse to find something light and deflective to say, but she heeded, instead, a deeper, stronger instinct not to defuse the moment. Whatever followed between her and Lloyd, right away and on into the future, this moment would be its origin, and she wanted it to be immaculate. So she didn’t say anything.

  “Well, at least you haven’t run away,” Lloyd said with a wry smile.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to? Run away, I mean.”

  Helen took a deep breath. She was sure Lloyd heard it. What would he make of it? If she were in his place, she’d probably think it was not a good sign. But maybe he was smarter about people’s sighs than she was, because he had to be.

  “No, Lloyd, I don’t want to run away,” she said, “but—”

  “But—now there’s a lousy word. Listen, Helen, I know it might be too soon after Billy for you to think about anybody, let alone me, and I know I’m no basket of roses, but I just figured I’d go for broke. Because we—not just me and you, but all of us that’ve survived this war—we gotta get on with it, you know? We’ve got to take risks and build stuff and help each other out and … and fall in love.”

  The waitress arrived then. She’d left them alone quite a while, maybe, Helen thought, to be sure Lloyd had calmed down. Before the waitress could ask and without consulting Helen, Lloyd ordered burgers and Cokes for them both and a black coffee for himself. He obviously wanted the interruption to be as brief as possible.

  “Do you remember, Helen, when you read me those stories? From your automatic writing?”

  “Of course.”

  “And when we talked about how it seems like the dead want something from the living? The war dead, anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I think that’s what they want. What I just said. They want us to dive into life, to make something of ourselves, to make being alive count for something. Leastways, that’s what we ought to do, whether they really ‘want’ it or not, because they’re not here to do it for themselves. Otherwise, what does it matter that we made it through?”

  Helen had never felt so close to Lloyd before, nor to anyone else ever. It was an unanalyzed, emotional reaction, and it was a physical experience, too, as if tangible fragments of free-floating matter in her heart and gut were gliding unerringly into hollows she’d grown so used to she’d stopped noticing their ache.

  “I think you’re right, Lloyd,” she said.

  “And it’s you I want to do all that with. Will you give it a chance, Helen? To see if I’m right about that, too?”

  Helen swallowed hard. She wondered if he heard it.

  “I do want to, Lloyd. I want to give it a chance.”

  “Sounds like there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere.”

  The waitress brought their sodas and Lloyd’s coffee. Helen thanked her, but Lloyd ignored her.

  “I’m no basket of roses, either,” Helen went on. “I’ve changed since we were last together, back before you went to Valley Forge. I didn’t write to you about it because it was too complicated. In a nutshell, I’ve lost my abilities, Lloyd, and I’m not exactly sure yet what kind of person that leaves me being.”

  “A lunk muddling through like the rest of us!” Lloyd exclaimed.

  Helen couldn’t help smiling.

  Lloyd carefully found his cup and picked it up. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup perfectly on the saucer.

  “See that?” he said. “That’s muscle memory. People who can see do things like that all the time without having to think about it or even look at what they’re doing. For me, every motion is a mental chore, but with practice, I can get where some things—the muscle memory things—come automatically. Maybe, Helen, your case is like that. You lost your gift, but there might be something like muscle memory inside you that you can wake up.”

  “I don’t know, Lloyd. I do feel like a lunk.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “You gotta go through a time of fumbling around. Those fumblings are the muscles trying to remember. That’s why they don’t move things out of our way at Old Farms or help us too much.”

  “Does it always work?”

  “I’m not gonna lie to you. Some guys never get it.”

  Helen put her straw in her soda and took a long drink.

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” she said. “If it could happen at all.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t be the same, but it’d be something. For me, it’s a kind of freedom, a bunch of small freedoms, actually, not having to wrestle with every single movement in my day. For yo
u, I don’t know … maybe for you, it’d be like an off-the-cuff sureness sometimes about things, a kind of knowing what’s what without having to puzzle it through.”

  Lloyd reached across the table, his hand open, palm up. It was a bold gesture—nothing had been agreed, really—but his fingers were trembling a little, and that added great tenderness to his audacity. Helen felt a stirring in her core, a yearning that, somehow, was its own answer. Her brand of muscle memory? She laid her hand in his, and he gripped it gently.

  “Lloyd, I—”

  “A chance, Helen. For both of us. That’s all I’m asking.”

  In reply, she squeezed his fingers. He inclined his head and softly kissed her hand.

  “Vanilla,” he said, grinning. “And moss. You smell like vanilla and moss.”

  CHAPTER 48

  APRIL 1945

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going home. In a steady rain, his funeral train was moving slowly north from Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, New York, where he’d be buried in the garden of the house where he was born.

  When the train carried his body from Georgia, where he’d died, to the White House, where his coffin lay in the same room Abraham Lincoln’s had, hundreds of thousands of weeping, praying, singing, and silent people had lined the tracks at stations and crossings along the entire route. The same thing was happening on this final leg of the solemn journey.

  Helen was on a bridge over the Harlem River in the sad, wet dawn. The president’s train would pass on the tracks below. Many others were waiting, too, people of all ages and races and backgrounds. The rain stopped, but the air remained moist. The crowd milled, and people conversed a bit, but they kept their voices low, as they might in church. It had been like that on the streets of River Bend, and all across the country, yesterday afternoon, at the time of the funeral in Washington. Buses and cars stopped where they were. Stores that weren’t already closed locked their doors for a time. People cried openly, men and women both.

  Twelve children were bunched together near the middle of the bridge. Each one was holding a red rose. Some of them fidgeted, twirling their roses or hopping from foot to foot, some leaned over the railing to watch for the train’s lights, but they were, overall, quieter than you’d expect a group of children to be.