Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  He sighs, collecting himself, and says, “Mrs. B, do you think you might knock on the door gently and then wait for my reply before you enter?”

  She pulls herself up straight and draws back her head, incredulous. “But I’ve brought you lemonade,” she says. “And a new letter that’s just arrived.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “But still … do you think you might do as I ask … knock gently and wait for a reply?”

  “I’ve never been asked to wait for any reply before entering the library or the parlor in this house,” she says. “Not in my over twenty years here.”

  “But I’m asking you now,” he says. “Do you think you might start?”

  “I’m not sure I can,” she answers.

  “Well, I would be grateful if you would try,” he says.

  She looks at him sadly, turning down the corners of her mouth and wrinkling her forehead. “I don’t suppose you’ve forgiven me for blabbing to Sarah last winter,” she says. “About your plan to enlist.”

  “There was never anything to forgive,” he says. “This has nothing to do with that. I only think it would be a lot more civilized than—”

  “ ‘More civilized’?” she says.

  “More civilized than just barging in like that,” he says.

  She frowns at him again and turns to go. She stops at the door. “I wouldn’t have guessed the Union army a place to pick up airs,” she says. “Why, you make me out to be a herd of cattle.”

  He watches her as she closes the door with exaggerated, almost parodistic caution, so as not to make a sound. After another moment, he opens and reads the letter she brought, which is from Al Reach of the Eckford Club. Reach has heard that Hayes is back in town, recovering from an illness, and—assuming he’s been mustered out—wants to encourage him, nay, beseech him, to rejoin the club as soon as possible. With only six of their principal players left, the ranks have never been in greater need. They’ve managed to acquire three new recruits, including an excellent catcher from Philadelphia and a young pitcher from the juniors, who shows promise but still wants a good bit of training. Hayes’s return would be a godsend to the Eckfords—who, this late into the summer, have yet to play their first regular match. He eagerly awaits Hayes’s prompt reply.

  Summerfield refolds the letter and slips it inside the desk drawer, then goes to the low table between the wing chairs and collects three of the newspapers there. Back at the desk he begins tearing the paper into strips, about six inches wide and ten or twelve inches long. After he has accumulated a dozen of these, he rolls each into a narrow cylinder, moistening the seam with his tongue to make it stick, and flattening and gathering the ends to create a tapered effect. Meticulously he works, going mentally blank, and at last he brings out his mother’s brass inkwell and dips the cigar-shaped things into it, an end at a time, to blacken them. One by one, he lays them on the remaining newspaper, side by side, to dry.

  BROOKLYN WAS ONCE a noisy place—a cacophony of hammers and whistles, hooves and hooligans and stray pigs in the street. Now it seems curiously, objectionably quiet.

  Also … overall … purposeless.

  Where is the war now? Where does it still exist? Reading about it in the newspapers somehow makes it even less likely, less real—a burnt ship somewhere at the bottom of the globe, bereft of cargo and crew, adrift in a sea of ash.

  EXPLOSIVE BURSTS OF STEAM, a ringing of wheels, an erratic, startling whistle. He recalls the ride home with Walt, back to Brooklyn, dreamlike, in and out of sleep. Through his own special channels, Walt had managed to obtain tickets for them on an army transport, and though their car had walls and doors, windows and seats, the journey was not unlike the earlier one that deposited him at the hospital, the mammoth world, beyond understanding. Darkness and light. A smell of wet wool. Warm night air. Even a pasture, dotted with white flowers.

  Walt, ill, chronically flushed, coughed sporadically, but was otherwise unusually quiet; when he did speak, he was terse and appeared pained by the rough rocking of the car. In the hospital, Summerfield had envisioned himself in a railcar with Walt—he’d imagined Walt’s patting him on the knee, saying, with his curious compound of maternal maleness, Almost home, now, and Walt did in fact say something to that effect. With his characteristic timing, he nodded and smiled and said, “You’ll soon be among more familiar sights and sounds, my dear.” The moment before, Summerfield had pondered the phantom shapes flying by outside the windows, indecipherable, unnameable; the quivering reflections on the inside of the glass; the curious silence of the men in the car, their apparent reluctance to converse; the play of eyes meeting, and quickly averted. Two worlds, signaled by attire: in Burroughs’s civilian clothes, Summerfield had felt he properly belonged to neither of them.

  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.

  VIGILANCE 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.

  BASE 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.

  DEEP-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.

  ———

  HE 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.”

  DESPITE 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 sta
nd 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.

  GILFINIAN, 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.