Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  Now, drawing at intervals on the pipe to get it started, Gilfinian says to him, “Sarah told me … that while you were … in camp … you became fond of backgammon.”

  An innocuous enough remark, it has the disagreeable effect of conjuring for Summerfield a mental tableau of Sarah’s reading his letters to Gilfinian. “Yes,” he says, yanking loose his tie.

  “Backgammon was my father’s game,” says Gilfinian. “He called it tables. I’m afraid I have more enthusiasm for it than skill … but we must play sometime. And now that vacation’s upon us, I’m determined to teach it to Sarah.”

  “I would rather you didn’t,” says Summerfield.

  “Why not?” says Gilfinian, clearly taken aback.

  “That is,” says Summerfield, “if you don’t mind … I’ve promised to teach her.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” says Gilfinian. “I didn’t mean to … well, I’ll lend you my set if you like.”

  “Thank you,” says Summerfield, “but I plan to buy us one of our own.”

  Gilfinian places his pipe (which appears to have gone out) onto Mr. Hayes’s silver pipe rack on the mantel. He moves to the sofa and sits next to Summerfield, closer than necessary, and clears his throat.

  “There’s something I want to say to you,” he says, looking earnest and perturbed. “I want you to know that I’m … by nature, I mean … I’m not an interloping sort. I don’t fancy being the fellow who stole your sister from you. If you’ll let me, I’d be an elder brother to you instead. You see, Sarah means for us to live together here, in Hicks Street, after we’re married. I can’t fault her for that—it’s a great deal more comfortable than Mother’s house … and less populated. But I’m well aware of its being your home, lad … yours and Sarah’s, and … well, I want you to know you’ll always be welcome here. We assume you’ll go on living here with us … hope you will … for as long as it suits you.”

  Summerfield, overwhelmed by the quantity of information given here, can’t think where to begin. There’s Gilfinian’s nature to consider, and his desire to be an elder brother, as well as their future living arrangements—none of which Summerfield has previously contemplated. To make matters worse, a fragment of Walt’s lines (recited in the hospital) suddenly intrudes into his thoughts, “cold dirges of the baffled,” and so he is most grateful when, after only a moment, Sarah appears at the dining room door and Gilfinian stands up, diverted and thoroughly absorbed by her entrance.

  “Well,” she says cheerfully, “what shall we do tomorrow?”

  The question strikes Summerfield as oddly philosophical and far-reaching. He recalls the bellowed Forward! that flew down the long ragged gash of the earthworks at the Brock Road, its rapid repetition something like gunfire, and how the troops had poured out of the trenches, a blue-breaking ocean wave, and charged into the woods.

  Gilfinian indicates for Sarah to take his seat on the sofa, and then he moves back to the mantel. He says, “I’m thinking of Coney Island and a saltwater bath.”

  “Oh, no,” says Sarah, “that would mean a train ride. And loads of dust.”

  Gilfinian opens his mouth to speak but then only nods—of course he has foolishly forgotten about dust. “Well, there isn’t to be a parade this year,” he says, “but we’ll have fireworks on Fort Greene.”

  “That might be fun,” says Sarah, and looks at Summerfield.

  “Not for me,” says Summerfield. “But you two go.”

  “What, and leave you here all alone?” says Sarah.

  “The aldermen have put everything into Fort Greene,” says Gilfinian. “On account of a steep increase in the cost of fireworks … they’ll pay as much for this one display as they used to pay for three.”

  “We wouldn’t dream of leaving you alone,” says Sarah, to Summerfield.

  “Not even if it’s what I prefer?”

  “No,” she says, “not even.”

  “I imagine it’ll be quite grand,” says Gilfinian. “I’ve read about some of the pieces … one of them starts as a horizontal wheel, then changes to a vertical globe, representing the motions of the earth. All sorts of colors and fires and stars … scarlets and greens and blues and so forth … and then it ends with the names of Grant, Meade, and McClellan.”

  Sarah casts a smile Gilfinian’s way, and Summerfield thinks he detects too much benevolence in it, a smile she might cast an awkward, well-meaning child. He’s offended by Gilfinian’s easy recitation of the Union generals’ names, as if they were his good friends; and there’s a pain at the base of his skull, akin to the throbbing brain-pang he’d felt when he was lost in the forest.

  Sarah says to him, “Tell us what you would like to do. What about a match of base ball? There must be oodles tomorrow.”

  Obviously, she means to question him at some length—tiresome for sure, but fortunately he has plenty of experience with questions. It now occurs to him that Gilfinian’s speech about interloping and living arrangements was practiced between them, her withdrawal to the kitchen calculated to provide an opportunity.

  “I would like to stay at home,” Summerfield answers. “I think I would like to read a book.”

  “A book?” she says. “What book?”

  “I don’t know. Emerson maybe.”

  “Why Emerson?”

  “Why not Emerson?”

  “Oh,” says Gilfinian, gazing distantly toward the windows. “Another’s called the Jeweled Cross of the Legion of Honor. I wouldn’t mind seeing that one.”

  “You could bring Emerson with you then,” says Sarah. “We’ll walk over early and spend the day.”

  She remains splintered into more than one person, he observes, just as she was during the weeks before he left for Virginia; now he understands this as Gilfinian’s effect on her. He further observes that she wears their mother’s gold locket, the carved octagonal pendant Mrs. Hayes had worn regularly and that enclosed strands of her children’s hair. How maddening that Sarah should wear it—how could she possibly confound him more?—keeping close to her heart strands of their interwoven hair.

  “Summerfield,” she says. “I beg you … again … not to look at me that way. It’s … it’s … I don’t know what it is, but—”

  “I only noticed you’re wearing Mommy’s locket,” he says.

  She grasps it protectively, as if she thinks he would take it from her. “Yes,” she says, “I am. Why do you call attention to it?”

  “No reason,” he says.

  “Would you rather I didn’t?”

  “Why would I have an opinion one way or the other?” he says.

  She appears to ponder the question for a moment—and to reach an idea she’s unwilling to express.

  “Well, then,” she says at last, putting the subject aside and glancing at Gilfinian. “What about tomorrow?”

  “I think it’s got to be Fort Greene,” says Gilfinian. “I’ve just recalled another of the advertised pieces … something with the intriguing title Gallopade of Serpents. We wouldn’t want to miss something called Gallopade of Serpents, would we?”

  Sarah casts Gilfinian that same indulgent smile again and then says to Summerfield, “What about it? You could bring your book along if you like.”

  Fatigued and inexplicably edgy, Summerfield stands and moves behind the sofa. “No,” he says. “As I’ve already said … I prefer to stay at home. Please go without me.”

  “Well,” she says, shaking her head. “I have to say that staying at home and reading a book doesn’t seem a very fit way to celebrate—”

  “To celebrate our independence?” he says. “Yes, I guess we should be very happy … very grateful we have our blessed independence.”

  He turns to Gilfinian. “Tell me,” he says. “Do you suppose there’ll be lots of Roman candles? Rocket sticks … golden lances?”

  Gilfinian, unsure of where he’s treading now, says, “Yes, lad … I expect there’ll be a considerable—”

  “Crystal fountains? Jets of fire?”


  Gilfinian tries to smile. “Yes, I expect so,” he says.

  “Revolving suns? Perhaps a grand volute … a feu de joie?”

  “Summerfield,” says Sarah, “Thomas was only—”

  “I wonder why there won’t be a military parade?” says Summerfield. “I wonder if it’s because there are no regiments wanting to march in one?”

  He excuses himself and leaves the parlor abruptly. Once he has closed the door and stands alone in the hall, he lingers for a few seconds, thinking he’ll hear their voices, their tone if not their actual words. But there’s only silence, which makes him feel sorry and ashamed. The fanlight over the outer doors imparts a dismal glow to the hall, where the air is cool but alarmingly thin. As he starts to move toward the newel post and the stairs, he’s aware, to his left and behind him, of the great mirror, whose frame was twined at Christmastime with festoons of holly. He’s absolutely certain that if he turned and looked now, his would not be the only image reflected there.

  AS HE WALKS DOWN the wide aisle toward the wardmaster’s room, he notices that he’s wearing civilian clothes belonging to Burroughs, and he reminds himself he must return them before he leaves for Virginia. A steady wind blows throughout the ward, stirring the flags and mosquito curtains, and, most odd, everything is blue and wavy, as if he were looking down the chimney of an ink bottle. All of the beds are unoccupied, stripped of their linens, and he imagines everyone has died and gone to the deadhouse—there’s nobody left to fight the war. President Lincoln, dressed in a frock coat and stovepipe hat, sits at the night watcher’s table reading a picture magazine; next to him stands a tall wooden box. As Summerfield passes the table, the president looks up at him and smiles bravely, as if he’s choking back tears, his lips encrusted with painful-looking fever blisters. Now he smells the odor of burnt hair and sees, some distance down the aisle, that one of the beds is in flames. Captain Gracie madly flails the mattress with a blanket, crying, “What have I done, what have I done?” A uniformed soldier lies in the bed, charred and weeping, but he cannot tell who it is. As he draws closer and is about to see the face, the poor fellow’s cartridge belt detonates pop pop pop pop pop and he startles awake.

  Of course it is a string of firecrackers going off somewhere nearby, and though he has shut his window, lowered the shade, and drawn the drapes, he can hear the myriad of explosions, near and far, small and not so small, all around Brooklyn. He sits up, on the edge of the bed, and covers his ears with his hands, thinking he has made a terrible mistake.

  ———

  AGAINST HER GREAT RESISTANCE, he persuaded her to go with Gilfinian to Fort Greene. She’d come and knocked softly on his door before he’d gotten out of bed. Already dressed for the day, she’d brought him a tray with coffee and toast and jam. She sat next to him and said she understood, of course she understood thoroughly, that he wouldn’t feel like celebrating … celebrating anything, let alone the birth of the nation, now cleaved in two and destroying itself. “I’ve decided to stay at home with you,” she said. “We’ll pass the day quietly. We’ll read together. We don’t even have to talk.”

  But he’d begged her to go, claiming (truthfully) that he hadn’t slept well, didn’t feel well, and wanted nothing more than to loaf all day in bed. If she stayed at home on his account, it would only make him feel worse. He referenced one of Gilfinian’s pyrotechnic “pieces,” the Gallopade of Serpents, and said he wanted her to come home later and tell him all about it. Eventually, reluctantly, she gave in—the fireworks display on Fort Greene would be over by sunset, but she promised to be home even earlier—and not long after she left the house, he dozed off and dreamed he was back in the hospital.

  Now, as he sits on the edge of the bed, hands covering his ears, flinching at every outdoor explosion, he regrets his own persuasive powers and wishes he were not alone. Then, immediately, he regrets having wished it, for something in the air suggests he might not be alone. He feels his heart inside his chest. On the floor before his window, a bit of light radiates from below the scalloped hem of the drapes. He fears that someone has stolen into the room while he slept and now conceals himself behind the drapes; he believes he sees, among the shadows there at the floor, the toes of a man’s boots. He removes his hands from his ears and thinks he hears the man’s breathing. Outdoors, quite near, there’s another jangling salvo, and he stands, quickly walks to the window, and yanks open the drapes. No man hiding there, no intruder, no ghost. Only the flat blank canvas of the shade.

  HE FORCES HIMSELF to bring up water and spend some time at the toilet-table. He bathes with a sponge and cleans his teeth and nails. He applies soap to his face with the brush and takes a razor from its case. He makes only one stroke and wipes the blade with a paper, but then abandons the shaving because each recurrent fusillade outdoors jolts him, and he cannot trust his hand. He wipes his face with a towel. He uses the dumbbells for ten minutes, after which he sponges himself all over again and gets dressed.

  He goes downstairs to the library, finds the book of Mr. Emerson’s essays, and takes it from the shelf. He sits in his father’s wing chair but only holds the unopened book in his lap. He wears his father’s embroidered slippers and smoking cap. He crosses one leg over the other and is suddenly overcome by a deep sense of fraudulence: aspiring to be a man, he has tried to behave as one, a charade so wanting in substance it has failed even to convince himself. What is it, then, that sits flinching and quailing in a chair, in a room of cold ash and half memories, in a house absent of both mother and father? Whatever it is, it lacks a rational essence, lacks even the narrow abandon of a boy. The constant crack-and-pop of the fireworks outdoors has renewed the ringing in his ears. For a minute or more, he feels pinned to the chair, eyes closed, unable to move, and then there’s a sharp explosion somewhere downstairs. Hooligans have broken into the house and set off a firecracker indoors.

  He lays the book aside and takes the poker from the hearth. He goes out onto the landing and creeps down the stairs. Careful to avoid the mirror in the hall, he inspects the living room and the dining room, both vacant. He continues down to the kitchen, also vacant. He checks the door to the garden, which is bolted. He leaves the poker there and covers his ears with his hands.

  Going back up the stairs from the kitchen, he discovers that his leg has started to hurt, high on the back of his thigh, and this fills him with rage. In the hall again, enraged, he purposely confronts the mirror. Looking back at him there is the young man from the dream, the one on the bed engulfed in flames, only now the soldier is pressing his hands over his ears, as if to block out something he doesn’t want to hear. Summerfield believes him to be someone he knows but can’t put a name to him. Hatless, his face covered with soot, his eyes red with weeping, his charred sack coat releasing corkscrews of smoke, he casts Summerfield a pleading look.

  Summerfield closes his eyes and backs away. When he bumps the wall behind him, he turns and starts up the stairs, just as a volley of detonations erupts out in the street. Again he thinks, I have made a terrible mistake, and as he passes the door to his parents’ room he believes he hears someone speak his name. He opens the door, enters the room, and finds no one there, but most strangely the room is transformed, disarranged, stripped almost bare. The drapes have been taken down from the windows, as well as the bed curtains, and the rug rolled up. The wallpaper has been removed but not replaced, exposing a piebald plaster that resembles an enormous map of an unknown world. A variety of boxes and trunks are stacked opposite the windows. A visible layer of dust coats the tabletops. He wanders through the room in a state of awe and confusion, and then, all at once, he grasps the meaning of all this: having ridded the room of their parents’ things, Sarah’s readying it for herself and Gilfinian. In the next moment, he recalls the green plaid vest Gilfinian wore on Friday last, familiar and garish—it had belonged to Mr. Hayes! She must have given it to Gilfinian. Perhaps Gilfinian helped her sort through their parents’ belongings and took whatever he liked.

>   He goes to the round-top table, now pushed against the footrail of the bed, and slides open its small drawer. The Lover’s Marriage Lighthouse, the disquieting book he found there some months ago, is gone, but now the empty drawer emanates a sweet coppery odor once known to him but forgotten. Next, he moves around the left side of the bed and into his father’s dressing room, where it seems that his vision contracts to a small circle enclosed by a starry darkness. He closes the door behind him, which has the happy effect of muting the sounds of the war outside. Drawn to his father’s dressing table—for here the purging of the rooms has admitted an omission or two—he gazes down at his father’s badger-hair brush and touches its soft bristles; he opens the case of razors, seven in all, one for each day of the week. Because it is Monday, he takes the second in the line. He looks into the little mirror, uncommonly moved by the recognizable image of his own face. As inside his head, a voice groans, I beg you … I beg you … I beg you …, he holds the blade to his throat.

  He hears the sound of rain beating on a roof.

  He presses the blade harder and then hears Walt’s voice: … a riddle to be solved … a rose in the garden …

  His hand shakes. He mentally admonishes himself not to be such a coward, presses the blade yet harder, and then sees, reflected in the mirror to the right side of his own backward face, the box, the tall box, larger than a casket, that has recurred in his dreams: his father’s elm-wood armoire.

  He puts back the razor in its case, turns around, and opens the door to the armoire, which he finds vacant, emptied of every trace of his father’s things. He puts his head inside, breathes in its clean woody aroma.

  Once he has entered the armoire, in which he can stand without ducking, he lowers himself, sliding his back along one side, to the fabric-covered floor. Only mildly dismayed by the fact that both his old shrapnel wounds have begun to bleed again, he’s calmer than he has been all morning. He pulls the door shut. Swaddled in darkness, he hears no gunfire, no voices, nothing but the sound of his own breathing.