Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  LONG AFTERWARD—very long afterward, he thinks, but he can’t be sure—he again hears someone speak his name. He believes it’s his sister’s voice, muted by walls and doors, and with each repetition of his name, she seems to draw closer to where he is: inside his father’s armoire, in darkness, all safe at last.

  He must have dozed off. Independence Day. The chronic detonations of firecrackers outdoors, so like gunfire, unhinged him. Now he has slept, deeply, and awakened feeling much better, restored to himself. Quietly, he gets to his feet and pushes open the door to the armoire. Quietly, he steps out into the dimness of his father’s dressing room. He no longer hears Sarah calling his name and assumes she has gone to search for him elsewhere. But when he opens the dressing room door, she stands at one of the bedroom windows, not looking out but looking down.

  His sudden appearance gives her a start. She gasps, puts her hand to her heart. “You frightened me,” she cries. “What on earth are you doing in there?”

  From his vantage in the dressing room doorway, she is mostly a silhouette. Judging from the light behind her, it must be near sunset. Neither of them moves; they confront each other across a distance of several feet. She appears to hold something in her hand, a card of some sort.

  “Where’s Gilfinian?” he asks.

  “I’ve sent him away again,” she says. “You know, Summerfield … you might call him Thomas.”

  “I don’t wish to call him Thomas,” he says. “Why did you send him away?”

  After a pause, she says, “Would you like for me to be frank?”

  “Please.”

  “Because I don’t feel I can trust you to be polite to him,” she says.

  “Have I been rude?”

  “Not exactly,” she says. “But you’ve been far from cordial.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” he asks.

  Now she comes forward and moves alongside him. “It’s the photograph you sent to me in your letter,” she says. “Here … see … very handsome despite the scraggy whiskers.”

  He can barely make out the image in the dusky light, and he doesn’t much care to in any case. This close, he smells her perfume, a mix of rosemary and jasmine. Her pale-yellow dress appears almost white. “Why do you have it?” he asks. “Why were you looking at it just now?”

  She faces him, still close, and then, after a moment, lowers her head. “I thought you were in your room,” she says. “When I didn’t find you there, I became worried. I am worried about you, Summerfield. I’m sure you heard me calling your name. Why did you not answer?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  “You can’t have fallen asleep in Papa’s dressing room. Not unless you—”

  “What have you done with their things?” he asks.

  Now she looks at him a bit puzzled at first, but then with a kind of determination. “Mrs. B helped me sort through them,” she says. “We’ve stored quite a lot. I gave a few things away. Of course I kept what I wanted of Mommy’s. And everything of Papa’s I thought you might want.”

  “Couldn’t you have waited?” he says.

  “Waited for what?”

  “Until I came home.”

  “You seem to have forgot that for many weeks on end I had no word from you. You seem to have forgot that for some of those weeks I thought you dead.”

  “And besides,” he says, “you needed to get it ready, didn’t you?”

  She puts her back to him and returns to the window, silent.

  He moves closer and says, “You know, Sarah, if Mommy were alive, she wouldn’t permit this.”

  She nods, three times, slowly, without turning. “And so now you get even with me,” she says. “Though it’s unfair of you to twist things that way. As if my marrying were the same as your going to war … which was entirely unnecessary. When I told you Mommy wouldn’t let you go if she were alive, I was desperate.”

  “But Gilfinian’s unnecessary,” he says.

  Now she turns and faces him again. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m back now,” he says. “I’m back.”

  “Summerfield,” she says, “do you imagine that I—”

  “Yes,” he says, “I do imagine. You took up with him out of fear.”

  “First of all, I didn’t ‘take up with him,’ and I wonder how it is you profess to know my mind so perfectly.”

  He goes to her, takes the photograph, tosses it to the floor, and grasps both her hands. “Don’t I?” he says. “Don’t I know your mind? I’ve seen you with him enough. You patiently abide about half of what he says and does. You gaily reject every one of his ideas and supplant it with one of your own. Is that the future you want? Is that the future you want for him?”

  She pulls her hands free but doesn’t otherwise withdraw. “So you know my mind better than I know it myself,” she says. “You can see the future as well. What else, Summerfield? You’ve plainly come back altered, but I didn’t know …”

  She stops. Her eyes fill with tears and catch the reddening light from the windows.

  “What’s plain is your uncertainty,” he says. “The only thing surprising is that he doesn’t see it.”

  She bows her head.

  “Or maybe he does,” he adds. “And, like you, discounts it.”

  Without lifting her head, she says, “Do you know how many nights I wept myself to sleep? Of course you don’t. How could you?”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers, but she looks up at him skeptically.

  “I still don’t understand,” she says, through tears, “why … if you were in a hospital … you couldn’t have written to me. I don’t understand how you could put me through such pointless and preventable grief. It was cruel of you. I felt … before you left last winter … that you meant somehow to punish me. I felt, while you were away, that you meant to punish me. Then, when I presumed you dead, I was convinced that you’d died … needlessly … to punish me. Now you’re back … and despite my joy, Summerfield … I feel you mean to punish me still. And I can’t for the life of me think how I’ve wronged you.”

  She looks at him fiercely, tears pouring forth and falling over her cheeks. “Tell me,” she says.

  With both arms he pulls her against himself and kisses her on the lips. Her body tightens, releases, tightens again, and then she pushes him away. She meets his eye, briefly—not with the question Who are you but with the answer This is who you are—and then she turns and rushes from the room.

  From the floor near his right foot, within a white rectangular border, his own dim image, the likeness taken of a former self, stares up at him.

  On Tiptoe

  Six days later, on Sunday, he sits at the table by his window writing a letter and pauses for a minute, touching the end of the penholder to his lips. Through the glass, the visible patch of afternoon sky above the tree line glows white with a seamless cover of clouds. Jane—more pasty and insubstantial even than usual—enters the room to collect his dinner tray, and as she crosses the carpet toward the table, she fades away, apparently dissolving into the wallpaper and woodwork behind her. From the floor below, he hears his father’s voice, deep and full of cheer, followed by the music of his mother’s laughter; he has the feeling they’re readying themselves for an outing. Next Sarah wanders in idly, wearing a pink dress and bent on prying; she positions herself next to him so that she can peer over his shoulder.

  With his hands and forearms, he shields his work—two pages, the letter he’s writing and the letter he’s answering.

  “Jane was just here and disappeared before my eyes,” he says to Sarah. “Simply faded away into thin air.”

  “We always knew she would eventually,” says Sarah. “I’ll tell Papa—he’ll know what to do. What’s that you’re writing?”

  “If you must know,” he says, “I’m writing a letter.”

  “A letter to whom?”

  “Mind your own business,” he says. “It’s nobody you know.”

  “Oh, really,” she says, and attempts
to pull his hand from the tabletop.

  “Go away,” he says. “You’re being rude.”

  “All right,” she says, tugging playfully on his ear before she returns to the hallway. From the threshold, she leans again into the room, with one palm on each side of the doorframe. “But I don’t see why you don’t tell me,” she says. “You know I’ll find out sooner or later.”

  Shaking himself back to reality, Summerfield looks down at the letter he has started. He considers adding, I have just had the most curious daydream.

  He continues staring vacantly at the page a moment longer, disappointed by his ungainly penmanship, his already crooked lines. He rereads the few words he has written so far:

  Brooklyn July 10 1864

  Dear Anne—

  Please rest assured that you have not lessened yourself in my eyes with your kind note. On the contrary

  He slides the other letter from beneath the page—which, dated with the address of the hospital, shows a legible, even beautiful hand:

  My dear Mr. X,

  My mother, whose regard for ladies’ behavior manuals is surpassed only by her regard for Scripture, would be mortified if she knew of my writing this note. I proceed despite the clear sound of her voice, inside my head, reminding me that by initiating a correspondence with a gentleman not my relative I risk lessening myself in his eyes. I trust in your good will & in the certainty of your taking into account our uncommon times & circumstances. I have no doubt that I shall think of you after you are gone from here & I should very much like having a word from you, how you are getting along back in Brooklyn, &c. Whether you are moved to write or not, please know that I hope & pray for your safe journey home & happy reunion with your family.

  Your friend,

  Anne

  Now there comes an actual knock at his door, Mrs. Bannister to collect his dinner tray. “I’m glad to see you dressed and out of bed,” she says, crossing the carpet toward the table. “I should have known better than to go away and leave you children alone. I might have guessed something would happen.”

  “Happen?” he says, turning in his chair. “What is it you imagine has happened?”

  She is already back at the doorway. Startled and self-defensive, she says, “Why, I only meant your and Sarah’s taking ill. That’s all I meant.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  Not long after she has gone, he believes he hears the bell downstairs, and he waits for a result, but none immediately comes. Yes, he thinks, we are like children again, sick in our rooms at the same time—though of course he would be hard-pressed to put a name to the illness. Evidently, like himself, Sarah has allowed Mrs. B to think what she likes, that their withdrawal to their rooms for six days in a row must mean they are ill. He has heard Sarah passing in the hallway, outside his door, but he is sure she has neither left the house (not even for church today) nor received any visitors. They seem to have reached a sort of bizarre and lamentable deadlock, and although he would very much like to break it, he has not been able to conceive of a way.

  In yet another mode, he experiences himself swung between two walls. At times he feels himself prepared—even if he can see no clear path or scheme—to take up the part of life that is to happen on the latter side of the kiss. Whatever its unhappy effects on Sarah, the fact of it, its heated and awkward entry into their history, has somehow unburdened him. Just as she appeared minutes ago in his daydream, she exists for him now (he believes, even subconsciously) as a sister and only a sister; also (he has noted, without being able to explain it), he no longer seems to bear the obligation of not disappointing her. In short, the event was not at all as he had imagined it would be, and, in at least this singular incidence, the shame of desire turned out to be greater than the shame of commission.

  Then, at other times, he suffers the worst kind of remorse about what he has done, what he has felt, who he is, and sees himself doomed to a life of perverse longings and unmerited losses—which quickly connects with the other thing, the larger thing, the Wilderness, the regret of having survived, the thunder and flames … beneath which hums the high-pitched whir, the rasp of the surgeon’s saw, the plucked string growing tighter, the cries of the dying … beneath which simmers the smoke and the brilliant impenetrable silence, the speechlessness, the loss of meaning.

  Following On the contrary, he writes:

  it has provided me with some tangible proof of you—my time at the hospital seems most dreamlike

  No, he doesn’t want to imply that she is like a dream to him, for it is both insulting and oddly suggestive. He scores dreamlike with the nib and tries to think of a suitable substitute. At last he writes:

  uncertain and when I think of you I am glad to have

  Is it a too-direct expression of fact, to say that he thinks of her? Might it kindle an inflated—

  He lays down the pen and holds his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the tabletop. Truthfully, he can think of no word for the terrible deep-rooted compunction that so often overtakes him, the sorrowful dereliction that makes his hands shake and his imaginary wounds sting and bleed, that sops him with the sense that no one can really be trusted, that he is alone, beyond forgiveness, less than human, and will forever dwell in a half world of rattling skulls, the stench of latrines and the sweet coppery stink of burning flesh, the sucking sound of the blade going in, the blade coming out—a kind of boiling syrup that pours over him and darkens the air, stills and steals the air, leaving an ash of bafflement and ugly, pointless vanity.

  He has been reading Emerson, which strikes him, at turns, as incisive and as if it were crafted in code. He imagines that if Mr. Emerson examined him, the diagnosis would concern the condition of his soul. He thinks of the roses under Emerson’s window, how—simple and pure in their existence—they make no reference to former or better roses; how there is no time to them; and how, by contrast, man “with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.”

  Another knock comes at the door, Mrs. B again, this time to say that there are two gentlemen downstairs wishing to see him.

  “I showed them into the parlor,” she says. “I said they might wait there but that you are not well, and I could make them no promises.”

  “That’s exactly right, Mrs. B,” he says. “It’s undoubtedly a delegation from the Eckford Club, come round to cajole me in person. Please tell them—”

  “Oh, they don’t look like ball players to me,” she says.

  “Well, they wouldn’t necessarily … what name did they give?”

  “The older one,” she says, “the big, oddly dressed one with the bushy beard—he said only to tell you Walt had stopped for a visit.”

  WALT’S BROTHER JEFF—at least a decade younger, tall and slender, with a long face, long nose, and long mustaches—says immediately that he mustn’t tarry, he has errands, but that he’d hoped to glimpse Gilfinian’s betrothed if she were possibly at home. Summerfield, stumped, looks (probably hopelessly) to Walt, as if Walt might not only divine the problem but also offer a solution. Walt—in a respectable-looking blue suit, and still wearing his hat—smiles, apparently perceiving that something wants smoothing, and says, “My dear boy … I fear we’ve ambushed you.”

  “No,” says Summerfield, “it’s just … if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and see …”

  He turns toward the hall door, intending to find Mrs. B and ask her to approach Sarah. But when he opens it, Sarah herself stands in the hall, one hand still resting on the newel post. She says, “I believe I heard someone humming a tune down here only a few moments ago. Do we have company?”

  It is the brittle shell he has met once before, some months earlier. Paradoxically, she wears his favorite blue-plaid dress.

  Walt, who has heard her, comes toward the door, saying, “Oh, dear … I didn’t know I was so loud as that!”

  In the parlor, as Summerfield makes introductions, Sarah appears both in awe and at sea, almo
st as if she were in a trance. Of course Gilfinian has mentioned his friendship with the brother of the famous poet, but Summerfield has told her nothing of his own connection with Walt. To help her, he says, “Walt visited me regularly when I was in the hospital. More than anyone, he’s responsible for seeing me home.”

  “You can’t just now be telling her this,” says Walt. “I believe I feel slighted.”

  “There’s been surprisingly little time for—”

  “I’m only teasing you, my boy,” says Walt. “I’m sure you’ve had more important things to talk about. No doubt graver things as well.”

  Sarah narrows her eyes, and Summerfield wonders if Walt has reminded her of some graver thing. But she says, “Please … do tell me the name of that beautiful melody I heard you humming.”

  Walt turns to Jeff. “What was it, Jeff, do you know?”

  Jeff rolls his eyes upward, as if Walt asks him this question a hundred times a day. “Donizetti,” he says, flatly.

  “Ah, yes,” says Walt. “ ‘Spirto Gentil,’ that’s it.”

  “Well, I found it haunting,” says Sarah. “I’ve heard about your work in the hospitals. How admirable you are!”

  “Thank you, dear,” says Walt, “but I assure you, I’ve received much more than I’ve given.”

  “It’s true,” says Jeff. “He ‘received’ his near-death, for one thing. You should’ve seen him when he first got home.”

  “I only needed a rest,” says Walt, to Sarah. “Jeff exaggerates … a family weakness.”

  Sarah casts her eyes about the room and says, “Has no one offered you any refreshment?”

  Walt points to two empty glasses on the gaming table. “Your Mrs. Bannister brought us what we wanted most,” he says. “Some of your delicious, pure clean water.”