Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

Evidently Walt sees this in his face, for he says, “Don’t worry, my friend. I’m not about to wave them around here, but I have in the pocket of my coat not one but two car tickets.”

  Captain Gracie passes by in the aisle accompanied by a member of the guard. He glances at the three of them as he goes, but only for a second and then looks quickly away—as if their sort doesn’t merit even an iota of his consideration.

  Burroughs says, “What about him?”

  “All squared away,” says Walt. “Deepening my respect for topsyturvydom … Matron’s scrap of paper has worked its magic. Abigail Cox, a female nurse in Ward K, turns out to be a very sweet but very brittle cookie … and crumbled quite readily. I felt sorry for the poor girl. I fully expect the captain to turn a blind eye. You might have noticed him just now in the aisle, practicing.”

  Hayes, a bit dizzy, says, “So I’m to leave with you … today?”

  Walt smiles. “I told you already what Dr. Bliss feels about you. We’re skirting officialism … and what’s left are papers, forms, signatures, et cetera … which can catch up to you in Brooklyn as well as any other place. By the way, what happens today doesn’t preclude your return to the front later, if that’s still what you want. It’s my earnest hope that the war will be over sooner than that.”

  Burroughs bends forward from Casper’s bed and retrieves the parcel he left beneath Hayes’s table.

  Walt, observing, says, “Ah, yes, the all-important package.”

  Now Walt takes out his watch and looks at it. At that moment, Dr. Bliss enters the ward from one of the middle doors, coatless and wearing a bloodstained apron over his uniform. All the soldiers who are able, including Hayes, stand at attention, but Dr. Bliss strides down the aisle waving his arms like a bird in flight, encouraging the men to stay as they were.

  The ward remains silent, and even Mrs. Duffy stops playing, mid-phrase. As Dr. Bliss is about to pass her milking stool, she bids him to stop. Gazing up, she says something to him, which appears to give him pause. His response to what she has said is a moment’s hesitation, followed by a reluctant consent. He leans down and whispers something into her ear. She nods. He removes his apron, folds it, and holds it beneath one arm. He smiles round at the many wounded and sick soldiers, all of who seem to be in a state of suspense.

  At last, Mrs. Duffy strikes a chord, and the surgeon in chief, in splendid voice, begins singing the first verse of “Woodman, Spare That Tree!”

  At once, Walt whispers to Burroughs, “Go … go now.”

  Burroughs stands and reaches for Hayes’s hand.

  “Go with John,” says Walt. “He’ll tell you what you must do.”

  Hayes grabs from the table the Dickens novel, into which he has already placed the two letters, Walt’s and Anne’s, and then he and Burroughs walk quietly to the back of the ward. As they go, Hayes bravely glances at the other soldiers, who listen to the music with rapt attention (“In youth it sheltered me / And I’ll protect it now …”), their eyes already glistening.

  Burroughs opens the door to the bath-room, allowing Hayes to enter first, and then latches it from the inside. He places the package on the table, where rest a pitcher and basin, a towel, and a block of soap. He unties the string, and still facing away from Hayes, says, “Take off your clothes. Quickly as you can.”

  Hayes doesn’t move but only looks around at the plain brown room, dimly lit by one small window—the two tin tubs hanging on hooks in the wall, the little round mirror the size of a base ball above the table.

  Burroughs pours water into the basin and then turns to face him. “I’ll put my back to you if you’re modest,” he says, “but we must work fast.”

  Hayes starts to undress, thinking that his short tenure in the army ridded him of modesty.

  “Take off everything,” says Burroughs, “even your drawers. I’ve brought fresh ones for you. The suit’s exactly like mine and should be a good fit. Now come over here and wash up a bit.”

  The two men switch places, Hayes naked now, and for a second, Hayes worries about Burroughs seeing his shrapnel wounds. Then he recalls that he has none. It almost amuses him.

  As Hayes sponges himself with the soapy water, Burroughs says, “Walt will be waiting for you by the front doors. I’ll hang back here for a few minutes. You’ll have to walk the entire length of the ward by yourself, but you’ll do fine. Carry your book in your hand, that’s a good touch. Don’t stop for anything. Don’t speak to anyone. Walk straight to where Walt’s waiting. As you go out together, you might tell him the meaning of the word walt. He’ll like that.”

  Hayes nods, and then Burroughs says something about his having seen Walt naked once, something about Walt’s ruddy pink roundness, but Hayes is listening to the music he hears through the wall, Dr. Bliss’s clear beautiful baritone:

  “When but an idle boy

  I sought its grateful shade;

  In all their gushing joy

  Here too my sisters played.

  My mother kissed me here,

  My father pressed my hand—

  Forgive this foolish tear,

  But let that old oak stand!”

  Afloat

  Early on the first day of July, a Friday, Summerfield takes his coffee into the garden, where he finds Jane pulling weeds from her tomato patch. The sun is well up, though it hasn’t yet cleared the treetops at the riverbank, and he identifies the high misty glow in the air as sunlight reflected off the water. Since his return home a week ago, it has become his habit to dawdle about wearing his father’s embroidered smoking cap and slippers—he reads the newspapers, naps when he can, sorts through the mail that accumulated in his absence—and he has the distinct impression that the three women of the house, each in her own way, labors to accommodate his new and lurking presence. Now he gazes down at Jane, on hands and knees among the tomatoes; she looks to him paler and thinner than ever, as if, in time, she’ll simply fade away. He places his nearly empty cup on a nearby potting table. “I see the cabbages are coming along,” he says idly. “What kind are they?”

  Jane pauses, raises her head. “I used to know the name, but I’ve forgot it,” she says, and returns to weeding.

  He dodges a laundry pole and moves to the shed at the back of the garden, where vines, sagging with scores of young pods and small purple flowers, climb on strings against a wall. “Your beans are thriving, too,” he says. “Do these have a name?”

  “I expect they do,” answers Jane, “but I don’t know it. Mrs. Perkins gave ’em to me. They’re long and green and get purple stripes when they’re ready, and then you cook ’em, and the stripes disappear.”

  He returns to the tomato patch. “Have we always had tomatoes?” he asks. “I don’t recall having tomatoes when I was a boy.”

  “Your mother was suspicious of tomatoes,” says Jane.

  “These fuzzy ones look as if they’ll turn yellow,” he says. “What are they called?”

  “I call ’em yellow,” says Jane with a sigh. “Yellow tomatoes. Mr. Foster gave me the seeds. That’s all I know. I’m not one for names.”

  “I can see that,” says Summerfield.

  Jane gets up from the ground, wiping her hands on her apron. “Excuse me,” she says, not looking at him. “I must go and wash.”

  An orange cat leaps onto the fence at the back of the garden, trots silently to the corner post, and disappears into the tall grasses on the other side. A warm breeze stirs the air, promising a scorching day. Summerfield puts his hands in his pockets and looks up at the blue and cloudless sky. He didn’t sleep well last night (like most nights), his dreams full of thunder and voices and tall columns of fire. Since his return to Hicks Street, he has had an odd and ongoing feeling of suspension, as if he has been catapulted through the air and his feet haven’t yet touched ground. He is back at home. He joined the army, saw three impossibly long days of battle, survived. For more than a month Sarah thought him dead. Everyone assumes he walked through hell, though certainly not without so
me measure of glory. But his memory of Virginia is blurry, insubstantial, indeterminate, as if he’d gone to touch what he thought to be a hard surface and his hand sank into it instead. He frequently suffers an urge to return, to touch the thing again, to confirm its nature and actuality. Increasingly, the stuff of his dreams mixes with the stuff of his waking hours, and when he sleeps, he often finds himself running, both in the dream and from it. Two recurring images stay with him during the day: a great wooden box (larger than a casket) and charred cylindrical shapes, tapered at the ends; he recognizes each of these as a sort of container but further recognizes that he can say nothing about their contents.

  Sarah now steps into the garden, dressed gaily in a white frock with pink ribbons and carrying a straw bonnet in her hand. “Summerfield, darling,” she says. “Won’t you please change your mind … there’s still time.”

  The “Summerfield, darling” is new, and he doesn’t care for it, though he can’t think exactly why—only that he has noticed before the irony that terms of endearment, spoken in a particular way, can put distance between people.

  She comes to where he stands in the flagstone path and kisses him on the cheek. “Won’t you change your mind?” she says again.

  The public schools are to close today for the summer vacation, and she has entreated him to join her for the celebratory exercises at midday. In truth, he wouldn’t mind going, save for having to greet Gilfinian—his greeting Gilfinian, he suspects, her primary purpose. “No,” he says, “I won’t change my mind.”

  “But why not?” she says. “What have you to do here? I understand your need for rest—I do—but it’s been a full week. Don’t you think you might benefit from a little outing?”

  “I might actually,” he says, “only I don’t feel like going. I don’t feel like people.”

  “You mean you don’t feel like Thomas.”

  “Oh, Sarah, I’m barely out of bed,” he says. “Must we talk about him this early in the day?”

  “I suppose not,” she says, “but we’ll have to talk about him sometime.”

  Now she throws her arms around him and withdraws, laughing. She flattens her hands against his chest, patting him there three times for emphasis as she says, “I still can’t believe you’re here … alive … real!”

  He feels an impulse to shrink from her touch but manages to contain it. He says nothing, though he thinks the three conditions she has named are exactly those he himself finds most mystifying.

  Reaching up to touch his hair, she says, “You’ll want to get this cut before you go to base ball practice. There’s a new barber’s saloon in Montague Street.”

  He only looks at her.

  “Of course you’ll go to practice,” she says, abruptly serious. “Why do you look at me that way?”

  “How am I looking at you?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know … as if you would run away again. It frightens me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Jane just now came inside and told me you were interrogating her in the garden.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” he says. “I only asked her what kind of tomatoes she was growing.”

  Sarah looks as if she doesn’t believe him. “Summerfield,” she says, “will you tell me … when you discover it yourself … how I might help you? I’m not so dull as to let my own relief at your return blind me to—”

  “How old is he anyway?” he says suddenly.

  Affronted, she pauses for a moment. “He’s thirty-one.”

  “Thirty-one! That’s nearly a decade—”

  “Summerfield,” she says, “first of all, Papa was six years older than—”

  “I’m sure you know he could do very happily with much less than you,” he says. “There’ll be an awful lot of you squandered there.”

  She appears both astonished and hurt. “You exchanged a dozen words with him at a Christmas party last year,” she says. “You can hardly claim to know him.”

  “Then look me in the eye and tell me you think I’m wrong.”

  “It’s not like you to be arrogant, Summerfield,” she says, lowering her head. “It’s not your nature … I’ve always admired that about you.”

  “Then look me in the eye,” he says. “Tell me you think I’m wrong.”

  She turns her face to one side. “I do think you’re wrong,” she says, “but even if I thought you right, it’s not your place to say such things. It’s horrid. What possible effect can it have but to make me unhappy?”

  “I say it precisely in the interest of your happiness,” he says. “And you haven’t looked me in the eye.”

  “I won’t be put to tests,” she says. “I must say you’ve a very strange way of showing your interest in my happiness. For weeks, I thought you dead. I thought you’d accomplished what you set out to do … to leave me thoroughly alone. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, Summerfield, but you weren’t here, were you … night after night, as I—”

  Just then Thomas Gilfinian comes out the kitchen door, waving his hat and crying, “Hallo, hallo!”

  Sarah moves hurriedly to the shed, putting her back to the house and situating Summerfield between herself and Gilfinian, who approaches the flagstone path, beaming. “Welcome home,” he says, offering his hand, “welcome home, lad.”

  Summerfield thinks it odd to be welcomed to his own home by a visitor, but he supposes Gilfinian means it generally, Welcome back to Brooklyn. He doesn’t much like being called lad either, and he finds the man’s green plaid vest oddly familiar and a bit garish.

  “What a day!” cries Gilfinian, and then calls out to Sarah, “Sarah, dear, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she answers, turning and coming forward now. “I’d only got some dust in my eye.”

  “So, tell me what you think,” says Gilfinian to Summerfield, smiling in a comradely fashion. “Will General Grant move against Petersburg again? I understand it hinges on the condition of the railroads.”

  Gilfinian refers to the question of how successfully the army has isolated General Lee from the support of his western reinforcements—but Summerfield refuses to be drawn into a jovial dialogue about troop movements, as if the war were a fascinating outdoor sport. He says, “I don’t know,” and then looks pointedly at Sarah.

  His attention thus deflected, Gilfinian turns to her, takes the bonnet from her hand, and places it on her head, undertaking to tie the ribbons. “You best put this on,” he says.

  Summerfield sees with satisfaction that she blushes, embarrassed at being treated like a child. He smiles at her from over Gilfinian’s shoulder, and she casts him a defiant look.

  “There,” says Gilfinian, ducking cheerfully beneath the brim of the straw bonnet to kiss her cheek.

  Summerfield has never before seen his sister permit a kiss from anyone who was not a blood relative, and it appeared to him—though he can’t entirely trust his own judgment—that she tolerated more than enjoyed it.

  “Thomas,” she says, “I’ve been trying to persuade Summerfield to come with us today.”

  “Oh, yes, you must,” says Gilfinian. “You wouldn’t want to miss our eloquent Mr. Hastings, our trustee, reading the Declaration of Independence.”

  Summerfield—who hadn’t recalled Gilfinian’s being quite so short, nor having such rosy, pudgy cheeks—smiles again, widening his eyes, and says, “ ‘Let Facts be submitted to a candid world.’ ”

  “What?” says Gilfinian. “What’s that?”

  “He’s quoting from the Declaration,” says Sarah quickly.

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course,” says Gilfinian. “And you don’t want to miss the pupils’ calisthenics … and ‘On the Hill the Sunlight Playeth.’ Do come with us, won’t you?”

  “Thank you,” says Summerfield, “but I believe I’ll stay indoors. I think it’s going to be hot.”

  Gilfinian turns to Sarah and says, “I’m afraid he’s immovable, my dear. And I can’t very well argue that it won’t be hot.”r />
  “But you’ve never minded hot weather,” says Sarah. “You like hot weather.”

  Summerfield shrugs his shoulders. “Maybe I’ve changed,” he says.

  At that moment, as if to settle the matter, the sun clears the treetops and floods the garden with a blinding light. They each begin to move toward the house. Summerfield notices the pungent smell of the tomato vines, instantly awakened by the sun.

  Just before going through the door, Sarah turns to him. “If you don’t relish visiting the barbers,” she says, “I’ll do it for you this evening, after supper.”

  He holds back to retrieve his coffee cup. Then, once inside, he hears Gilfinian, already on the stairs, whispering, “He’s awfully thin, isn’t he?”

  ———

  IN THE AFTERNOON, he sits at the writing desk in the library, lost in thought—or lost in something akin to thought, a somber composition with far fewer notes than rests and virtually no melody at all. He removes his father’s smoking cap and touches a bald spot, about the size of a quarter, on the right side of the crown of his head, where, the previous night, he twined the hairs singly around a finger and absentmindedly pulled them from his scalp. For a moment, he hoped he’d only dreamed he’d done this stupid thing, and it’s with a sense of shame that he accepts it now as fact. The last several minutes, he has been pondering an apparent paradox within himself—that having looked into the face of death, he sometimes feels fearless and at other times feels afraid of just about everything. He imagines himself swinging between two walls (another image of suspension, of not touching ground) and dimly recalls a passage from one of Emerson’s famous essays—something about man, in pursuit of truth, being swung between walls, unmoored, submitting to “the inconvenience of suspense.” Well, he thinks, it was nothing of his own doing—he can take no credit for it—but if Mr. Emerson would have him unmoored and afloat …

  The face of death, he thinks suddenly, realizing he has no idea what it means or what it might look like, and just then Mrs. Bannister raps sharply against the library door and flings it open, marches into the room with a tray, and startles him so badly he nearly cries out. He quickly puts the smoking cap back on. She takes from the tray a tumbler of pale-green liquid and a single letter and sets them down on the desk.