Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  She lifted her chin an inch and touched her gloved hand to the knot at the hollow of her neck that held her bonnet in place. “Yes, isn’t it,” she said.

  In the next minute they arrived at the house, and he was on the fourth or fifth step before he saw that she hadn’t followed him up. He turned and found her standing at the foot of the stoop, apparently lost in thought. He went back down to her and stopped on the bottom step, where he offered his hand. He’d interrupted her reverie, but she surprised him now by smiling up at him sadly—maybe penitently?—as she placed her hand in his. On the landing, she paused again. “I want you to know that I’m aware of the absolute horror I’ve been,” she said.

  “You haven’t been a—”

  “Of course I have,” she said. “Just now, you were struck by the beautiful day, while I was thinking how impossible it felt to have to go inside and face Mrs. B’s feast. Of all the ungrateful … honestly, I can’t even think of a word to call myself. And you, Summerfield … you would like to have had people in today … or go to the festival at the pond … or to the theater, and I—”

  “But I only suggested those things in case you might like to do them,” he said.

  “Right, but I didn’t, did I? I’ve been nothing but selfish, disagreeable, and tiresome.”

  He leaned against the railing and crossed his arms. “It’s Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon that’s provoked this,” he said.

  “It most certainly is not,” she said. “I hardly listened to Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon. I’m afraid my thoughts were quite elsewhere.”

  “Well, then you should be ashamed of yourself,” he said. “You were brought up better than that.”

  “I am ashamed,” she said, “but not about Dr. Littlejohn’s sermon. I go to church to sing and pray and take the sacraments, not to be lectured.”

  Suddenly the door opened, and Jane, obviously upset, stuck her head outside. “Summerfield, Sarah,” she said, “I heard your voices. My poor sister’s taken terribly ill.”

  Inside the dark hallway, festooned holly twined around the frame of the great mirror, and the aromas of Mrs. B’s cooking rose from the kitchen below. Sarah quickly shed her bonnet and cape and stood her parasol in an urn by the door. “Where is she now?” she asked Jane.

  Jane, younger than Mrs. B by four years, smaller in every way and as thin as Mrs. B was portly, had the pale and shrinking manner of someone who’d spent her life in another’s shadow. She leaned in close to Sarah now and whispered as if she were betraying a confidence. “She’s upstairs … in bed … with a pan at her side. Really very ill.”

  “How is she ill, Jane?” asked Summerfield.

  She looked at him a little stunned—an unexpected burden had fallen her way, which she doubted her ability to shoulder—and tears clouded her eyes. “She’s sure it was her sampling of the oysters that did it,” she said. “She had me throw the rest of ’em out. A terrible waste, too, costly as they—”

  “All right,” said Sarah, “I’m going up to her.”

  “Oh, no,” said Jane, taking Sarah’s arm, “she won’t like you to. She was very plain on that point. The last thing she wants is to spoil anybody’s Christmas.”

  “Well, I’m going up all the same,” said Sarah. At the base of the stairs, she turned to Summerfield. “You might need to fetch the doctor … but let me go see her first.”

  “I’ve already got everything laid out for you in the dining room,” protested Jane.

  “That’s fine, Jane,” said Sarah. “That’s lovely, but first come with me, and let’s see what’s what.”

  Summerfield stood in the chilly hall and watched the two women climb the stairs and disappear around the bend at the top. Disappointed, he stayed there a minute longer and listened to their footsteps on the second flight and then on the third. Sarah’s reversal of feelings had arrived, late but happily, on the stoop outside—he’d barely begun to enjoy it—only to be usurped by the exigencies of the sickroom. He went into the parlor, where he took a chair close to the fire and loosened his tie a half inch. He dreaded having to call Dr. Tilbrook away from home today. He thought of his clever “compensating oysters”—how peculiar that the delicacies intended to brighten matters had darkened them instead. As he imagined himself going to fetch the doctor, he experienced an urge to run, a strong physical impulse that had visited him now and again ever since he was a boy. It felt sometimes as if an animal inhabited his body and wanted letting out—an excess of energy he’d learned to use to an advantage (with inconsistent results), charging up to the line and releasing the base ball from his hand.

  Now he got out of the chair and stirred about the parlor. He moved to the gaming table and lit the dozen or so little candles on the tree, then pushed back the doors to the dining room, bright with sunlight, where Jane had set the Christmas table: two place settings on either side at the end nearer the windows; their mother’s best dishes, silver, and candlesticks; at the table’s center a crystal vase of white chrysanthemums and a decanter of red wine; on the sideboard, a small turkey with a ring of sausages round it, white bread, pickles, applesauce, onions, and celery. He imagined there would be potatoes and some sort of soup yet to come, hot from the kitchen, and, later, dessert. He poured some of the wine into one of the goblets and took it with him to the window. He looked down into Jane’s fallow garden, then lifted the goblet to his lips, and at that moment, a bird slammed into the glass, so startling him and causing him to recoil he spilled wine down the front of his white shirt.

  He was doing his best with a napkin from the table when Sarah appeared in the wide doorway and stood looking at him.

  “A bird smashed into the window,” he said, blotting the front of his shirt.

  “A bird?” she said, distressed and gliding quickly to the window. She peered down into the garden. “What sort of bird? Was it hurt?”

  “Have you no sympathy for me?” he said. “I’ve spoiled my Sunday shirt.”

  She moved to him and took the napkin from his hands. “I would have heaps of sympathy for you if you’d smashed your head against the window,” she said. “Now go and change, and I’ll get things ready.”

  “What about Mrs. B?” he said.

  “I think she’s in no danger, though I did have the feeling she would rather die than send for Dr. Tilbrook on Christmas. I persuaded Jane to stay with her.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I told her we were perfectly capable of serving ourselves,” she said, taking a clean napkin from a drawer in the sideboard. She turned to the table and began fussing with the chrysanthemums, straightening a stem or two, and added, “I told her we were no longer children.”

  A few minutes later, when he returned to the dining room in a fresh shirt, she’d added to the sideboard a soup tureen and dishes of lima beans, potato balls, grapes, and raisins, as well as Mrs. B’s tipsy cake on a glass stand. She said her brief time with Mrs. B had caused her to lose her appetite but that she would sit with him and have half a glass of wine while he ate. Thus the Christmas meal passed quietly but pleasantly enough, and he rediscovered a thing he’d known before: that the familiar wild energy he’d felt earlier could be tamed with overeating. Midmeal, the bell rang, producing in them disparate reactions—his intrigued, hers anxious—but when he went to the door, no one stood on the stoop. Looking into the street, he saw a band of young hooligans, down a ways toward Remsen, going about pulling bell knobs for a prank.

  With effusive apologies, Jane interrupted them twice, once to tend the fire in the parlor and again to bring up the coffee from the kitchen, each time reassuring them that she meant to return instantly to her sister’s bedside, not to worry. They had coffee and cake by the fire in the parlor and opened their Christmas boxes. Hers from him contained two white handkerchiefs he’d bought on Montague Street, which she claimed to “adore.” His from her contained a silver watch with a fob chain.

  “But we agreed not to spend more than ten dollars,” he said, dangling the beautiful shi
ny thing by the fob.

  “It was Papa’s,” she said. “I only had it cleaned and repaired. All this time it was among the things at Mr. Brisling’s offices.”

  He turned the crown, then held the watch to his ear—the ticking, how it mimicked something alive, made him feel light-headed.

  “By the way,” she said, “Mr. Brisling wants us to stop in after the New Year. Something to do with selling one of Mommy’s properties in Flatbush. I do look forward to the day when we can execute these sorts of things on our own.”

  He understood her allusion: he would one day be a lawyer himself, provided of course he survived to study the law.

  They were sitting at opposite ends of the green sofa. The candles on the little tree had melted down. The sun had left the windows in the dining room, and the parlor had grown dimmer. When he looked at her, she held his gaze in some meaningful way. At last she said, “You’ve had to grow up very fast, haven’t you, Summerfield? Too fast, I fear.”

  “If it’s true of me,” he said, “then surely it’s true of you as well.”

  “But I was born grown up,” she said, laughing. “I don’t recall myself as much of a little girl, ever. Do you?”

  “No, not really,” he said. “You always seemed impossibly old to me. You would forever be older than I, so whatever age you were … it always seemed unattainable to me.”

  “But you,” she said. “You were such an amusing mixture of mischief and good manners … such a boy. Always on the move. Never still for long—until you discovered books, of course. Even then, reading, you would squirm around as if you needed tying down. Or your foot would be twitching, or you’d be drumming with your fingers.”

  “You were very observant,” he said, not entirely happy with the path of her conversation. Their mother had been inclined to such wistful reminiscing, and he’d never quite dodged the intimation, when she did it, that she’d preferred him the way she remembered him, the way he used to be.

  Sarah leaned forward and took the new handkerchiefs from the table, folded them neatly, and laid them in her lap. “There’s a boy at the school,” she said, “Harmon Fellows, twelve years old. His father was killed last month in Virginia, a place called Payne’s Farm. He was absent from school for a week, and when he returned to the classroom, oh, how he’d aged! No longer a little boy at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You see,” she said, “I worry that when boys have to grow up too fast … they can get confused about their feelings.”

  Now he reached for his cup, though it was empty. He turned it once in its saucer and then rubbed his hand on the leg of his trousers. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “I see a great confusion in his eyes,” she said. “He’s caught in a condition that’s neither here nor there … not the boy he was, certainly not yet a man … and I can see that he’s no longer at home inside his skin.”

  She paused, gazed into the fire for a moment, and then looked at him again. “He’s carrying an unhappy truth inside himself,” she said. “And one has the feeling he wants, above all else, to escape it.”

  She stopped there in what seemed a purposeful way, and he allowed a few seconds to pass in silence. Unable to find his bearings with any confidence, he said, “Well, that would make sense, I suppose.”

  She only looked at him but didn’t say anything more. Over the course of the past two weeks, as he’d accustomed himself to her cool withdrawal, he’d thought that if he’d meant to drive a wedge between them, he’d done so by announcing his intentions—the actual war was hardly required. But this, now, whatever it was, lacked the clarity of the wedge.

  Thankfully, a new idea came into his head, and to his rescue. He said, “Your Mr. Gilfinian tells me he’s petitioning the school board for increases for all his female teachers.”

  He might have sworn she blushed then, but he couldn’t be sure, and at that moment, Jane reappeared at the doors to the dining room, cupping something in her hands and weeping. “I found it outside the door, in the garden,” she said, in a child’s voice. “Its little heart was still beating, still beating when I first brought it inside.”

  Sarah—quickly up and putting her arm around the woman, leading her through the dining room, toward the hall and the stairs to the kitchen—glanced back at him once, as if to express regret, and then she was gone. The candles on the dining room table were still lit; their flames, having bent as the women moved through the room, now stood straight again. He heard Jane’s voice faintly from the kitchen stairs. “The poor thing died in my hands,” she said. “It died in my own hands.”

  He had meant to propose a toast to the memory of their parents, and so he went to the dining table, poured an inch of wine into his goblet, and said aloud, “To Mommy and Papa.”

  He emptied the glass and poured another inch. “To Papa and Mommy,” he said, and emptied the glass again.

  Now he returned to the parlor and paused near the middle of the carpet, just behind the sofa. The handkerchiefs he’d given Sarah were good ones, he told himself, but he wished he’d thought of something more original. He wished they’d not seemed so like a boy’s present to his mother. He wished he could rid himself of the impression that she was growing unnecessarily complicated, that her every word and gesture carried veiled meanings.

  She’d asked him to join her yesterday for the Christmas exercises at her school, and since she’d declined every holiday invitation and extended only this one, he’d arranged to leave the office early. The schoolchildren, delightful to the last, gave recitations and sang carols and enjoyed cakes, lemonade, and lady apples. It was sometime during these activities that Mr. Gilfinian, the school’s principal, a clean-shaven energetic man of about thirty, took Summerfield aside and said he wanted him to know that he was petitioning the school board for wage increases for all seven of his female teachers. While he spoke to Summerfield, he appeared to keep one eye on Sarah across the room and from time to time nodded in her direction, as if to imply that he was a champion on her behalf in particular. Summerfield assured the man that his efforts would be appreciated and refrained from saying that Sarah depended very little upon her teacher’s wages, for even with an increase they wouldn’t support a housemaid.

  Among the children, a rumor had somehow got started that he, Summerfield, was Sarah’s betrothed. No fewer than five little girls approached him, flushed and giddy, and asked if he was Miss Hayes’s “fiancé,” a word that apparently bewitched them, its charm undiminished by his negative answer. He began to think that the persistent flow of them was caused by a belief that, with enough repetition of the word, his answer would change. The young boys, for their part, seemed only able to stare at him from a distance and to avert their eyes whenever he happened to catch them at it.

  Afterward, on the walk home, Sarah had thanked him for coming but otherwise kept her thoughts to herself. He told her about the little girls and the rumor, which did manage to make her laugh, briefly, though she couldn’t account for it—she said she’d informed the children in advance that it was her brother who would be visiting. He mentioned the boys, too, how they’d stared, and she explained that she’d also told the children that her brother played base ball for one of the city’s most famous clubs.

  “But I should think that would have made them want to meet me all the more,” he’d said.

  She stopped and placed a hand on each of his arms, as if she meant to instruct him. “Summerfield,” she’d said, giving him a most serious look, “don’t you see? It put you beyond their reach.”

  He was still standing near the middle of the carpet in the parlor—recalling that moment with his sister in the street, virtually transported there—when he felt the first wave of nausea go bucking through him. He steadied himself with one hand to the back of the sofa and yanked at his tie with the other.

  Now the pace of the evening was to escalate, though with an inverse prolonging effect. He would view much of it as through the bottom of a glas
s bottle. A remarkably cheerful Dr. Tilbrook would make an appearance after all, at his bedside. Some sort of vile aromatic bitters would be administered. And somehow, as if by an unprecedented miracle, night would fall.

  In his room, Sarah and Dr. Tilbrook would agree about the inferiority of the gas they were lately being delivered—it burned faster and provided a poorer light. In hushed tones meant to spare him, he would hear them speak about a small fortune’s worth of perfectly good oysters, thrown out, when all along it had been the sausages. Doubled over in agony and heaving, he would strike his head against the rim of a pan, and he would think of a small gray bird crashing with a thump against a windowpane.

  And then, he would open his eyes and see her face as she sat smiling beside him on the bed, holding a cold cloth to his brow. He would think she’d changed her dress, but perhaps she’d only put on an apron over what she’d worn all day. The light in the room would seem an odd mix of gold and pale white. She would catch him glancing at the window and say that, yes, indeed, Christmas Eve’s full moon seemed even brighter a day later, tonight, on Christmas. At his first attempt to speak, his lips would feel as if they were glued shut, but with some effort he would ask his question: “In church today,” he would say, “what did you pray for?”