Nostalgia (12 page)

Just then one of the scruffy characters with a broom appears
behind the old man; working the handle in a scouring fashion, he passes, from right to left, limping, in and out of Hayes’s line of vision. The broom makes a grating noise, and somehow Hayes knows that sand has been scattered on the floor as a means of cleaning without water. Though he won’t turn his head to look, he understands, when the man speaks, that he addresses the patient in the adjacent bed. “I see you dogging me with them sunken eyes,” says the man. “I expect I’ll have that bedsheet for you tomorrow.”

From his chair, the old man speaks into the pages of the book: “But that’s what you told him yesterday. And the day before that. Must the poor creature be always made to lie in a puddle?”

Again Hayes doesn’t turn to look, but he judges, from the abrupt halt of the grating noise, that the man with the broom has stopped in his tracks. Now he reappears, leaning in close to the old man’s ear. With a challenging, saccharine tone, he says, “Well, why don’t you take yourself over to the linen room and see what you can find that I can’t? Or better still, I have no doubt but that you could go out and
buy
him some if you like.” Now he straightens up, gives a conspirative nod to the end of his broom handle, and moves along.

The old man only laughs and looks again at Hayes. Again he smiles, this time wearily, and says softly, “Mr. Babb doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m wealthy—which is beyond funny—and it makes him angry that I choose to visit the hospital when he would give his eye-teeth, if he had any, to be excused.”

His gaze rests for a moment longer on Hayes’s face, as if he hopes against hope for a reply, but then he lowers his eyes again to the book, removes a fan from the pocket of his coat, opens it, and fans himself as he continues reading: “ ‘He regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.’ ”

He stops again and says to the man in the next bed, “I
will
find you a clean sheet, Leo, even if I have to go to my rooms and take it off my own bed.”

Now he lowers his voice and speaks to Hayes: “It really is appalling the kind of incompetent rabble that can rise to power in a hospital. I’ve seen the likes of Mr. Babb kill a patient, dosing him with the
ammonia nitrate meant for use as a foot wash. I almost thought it intentional.” He shuts his eyes and shakes his head, apparently outraged, but he seems to check himself, willing himself back from that former atrocity to the more agreeable business at hand. He smiles at Hayes apologetically.

“From the looks of it,” he says, “this novel’s been left out in the rain. The covers are swollen and the pages wavy.” He lifts the book to his nose. “Smells like wet rope, gone sour.” He laughs softly to himself and adds, “But otherwise first-rate.”

He coughs and clears his throat with some effort. Then reads: “ ‘So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears, beforehand. All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow …’ ”

H
AYES HAS SLEPT AGAIN
, and when he wakes, sweating inside a tent of gauze, he feels as if an animal inhabits his body and wants letting out—that excess of energy known to him since boyhood. He recalls the first time he felt it, an evening long ago when his father made him wait inside an office while he conducted a class in the adjacent studio. That night, a question began to form inside him (made not of words, but flesh and bone), a question whose answer, he would discover, was base ball. Even now, he imagines that if by some magical means he could be transported into the midst of a match, all would be right with the world again, order and reason restored. As it is, he must content himself with the memory of an afternoon near Brandy Station, when scores of soldiers threw their forage hats into the air, and their yells, echoing in the nearby woods, had nothing to do with killing or dying.

The old man who read to him earlier has gone, along with the chair he occupied. He can see through the netting that the gas burners on the walls of the ward have all been turned down low. The place is quiet but for the occasional sound of a man snoring, or another coughing, or sighing, or softly moaning. The many visitors have left.
Two or three male attendants roam the ward quietly, but the female nurses have retired to wherever they go at night. Hayes is certain that the female nurses will return in the early morning, though he cannot account for how he knows it. He seems to know a great deal he can’t account for. An aroma of tobacco pervades the air, masking but not dispelling the other smells—what he now thinks of collectively as “rot.” These are the hospital odors, but through the open windows wafts another foul smell, and Hayes knows, inexplicably, that it comes from a nearby stagnant canal, an open sewer. He knows, without raising his head from the pillow, that at the middle of the ward, he will find a night watcher, who sits at a table smoking a pipe and reading a magazine by the light of a shaded lamp. If Hayes leaves his bed and goes to visit the sinks, he must pass this table, and the man will peer at him briefly, without a hint of interest, without a word or a nod. Hayes knows the exact location of the water closet, at the end of the ward opposite the dining room. The ward itself is a long narrow pavilion with beds arranged in two rows along either wall. Hayes’s bed (iron, with lengthwise wooden slats) has a number, which, by association, is Hayes’s own number, 33. He knows that this ward is one of many like it, and that the hospital—located not far from wharves and a railroad depot—comprises dozens of buildings connected at their midpoints by covered passageways. He knows that among the buildings are a kitchen, a bakery, a post office, stables, a laundry, and a chapel. He knows that close to the stables and the chapel is the deadhouse.

He was wounded in battle; abandoned by his company in the field; left to find his own way home. He endured a long and perilous journey, keeping to brush and streambeds for fear of being shot, either as an enemy or as a deserter. It seemed to him at first that he hadn’t survived, that he’d died, and that these new shadowy confines and ghostly drapes and shapes constituted the afterlife. Now he understands that he was rescued, brought by rail and boat and stretcher to a military hospital in Washington City, where he has been for a few days already. He was stripped and bathed and put into some kind of white bed-shirt with long sleeves and brown stains on the cuffs. He has been questioned and examined by two different officers in charge, as well as one very austere woman. He remains unable to speak, and when he
has been given the opportunity to write his name, his hands shook so severely, both pad and pencil went flying. A tag, pinned to his chest, reads
UNKNOWN
. A pink card is clipped to the end of his bed, indicating by its color (he has gathered) what food he is to be served—soup, bread and butter, boiled potatoes, tea with milk. The other patients have two cards clipped to their beds, a colored one and a white one, which Hayes believes records the patient’s diagnosis. If he’s correct, he supposes it means he has not yet been diagnosed. He does not recall his wounds being dressed, but he imagines they have been seen to, for he suffers less pain than before. He walks with a slight limp—due to a persistent soreness in his thigh—though he can get by without the cane or crutches many others require. Exhausted by his ordeal, he sleeps day and night. When he is awake, he frets (itself another inducement to sleep). Apparently, he is being allowed to convalesce here, but not everyone has been kind to him, and he senses duplicity behind the smiles of those who have. He possesses no documentary proof of his impromptu discharge in the Wilderness. He has avoided the eyes of most of his fellow patients, for he believes they regard him as suspect. Some of them are horribly wounded—clearly dying—others quite low with disease. Still others linger in the wards because they lack the wherewithal to get home and have nowhere else to go. Since the sick and wounded arrive from Virginia by the hundreds every day, the beds in the wards have been moved closer together, to accommodate folding cots with canvas covers. Hayes believes there are those who would have him out of his hospital bed and stood before a firing squad. His single design for protecting himself is simple: for as long as possible, he will conceal his identity. This strategy—based on the notion that no one will proceed against him if they don’t know his name—is less than infallible. But as it dovetails with his inability to speak or hold a pencil, it is also the only strategy he can think of.

Now he resolves to remember everything he knows, not to forget the particulars of his situation. Earlier, when the old gentleman read to him from the novel, Hayes’s mind drifted into a dreamy state, in which he experienced things as if for the first time (thus the strange-but-familiar feeling). Perhaps, he thinks, this state might seem
happier—“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”—but it is unsafe. Through the netting, he sees a tall black stovepipe running up into the vault of the roof. Across the way, two Union flags fall from poles that jut at an angle from brackets mounted to the window frames. He sees the lamp hanging from the ceiling, extinguished now as always; its brass parts glow in the lowered gas lamps, and soot dulls its chimney. This, he decides, will be his anchor. Any time he feels himself drifting, he’ll look to the lamp, and it will bring him back to himself.

To Hayes’s right, the young man in the next bed begins to hum a tune, softly. He is not much older than Hayes, freckled, with reddish-brown side-whiskers, and called by the name of Casper. Like most of the patients on the ward, he rarely takes off his bummer’s cap, and Hayes, who arrived without one, envies the comfort he imagines it gives him. Casper’s left arm has been amputated just below the elbow, and the stump, swaddled in yards of bandaging, he has adopted as an infant child. He holds it with his right hand and rocks it and now and again sings to it; if people speak too loudly near his bed, he sometimes hushes them, gently admonishing them not to wake the dear, sleeping stump. Hayes admires Casper’s resourcefulness and good cheer. The soft tune he hums makes Hayes think of his own mother. (The young Summerfield stands in the hallway outside the slightly open door to her room, where, braiding his sister’s hair, she holds some pins between her lips and hums a wistful melody.) Hayes closes his eyes and listens to Casper’s lullaby, but soon he becomes aware of a small commotion to his left. The patient on that side of him—Leo, the poor man who has been shot through the bladder and leaks into his bedding—is outstretching his arm across the space between their beds. Hayes finds the part in the netting and takes from the man a small looking glass. Leo, entirely silent as always, seems satisfied and withdraws his arm, back into his own gauzy tent.

Hayes peers briefly into the glass (where he finds gazing back at him a pair of surprisingly ancient-looking eyes), and he tries to think why Leo would pass him the mirror in the middle of the night. He cannot imagine what the man’s intention might be. But the next morning, when he finds Leo’s bed empty and watches as a surly attendant strips its sodden sheets, he’ll construe the incident of the looking
glass as the feeble and brokenhearted impulse of a middle-aged soldier with no one to bid good-bye.

W
HEN HE WAS
very young, perhaps four or five, his father took him one evening (for reasons he was never told or, if told, never understood) to his Brooklyn dance studio, where Mr. Hayes was to conduct a gentlemen’s class at eight o’clock. They’d set out on foot for the studio around seven, and as it was October, dusk had already cloaked the houses along Hicks Street. A bright yellow moon rose over the river, which meant that the fascinating new streetlamps, powered by gas piped beneath the ground, would not be lit tonight, a disappointment. Mr. Hayes said something about the “crisp” air, a remark Summerfield connected to the clopping of horses in the streets. He’d never before visited his father’s studio—which was located on the upper level of a two-story building opposite the City Hall—and he was immediately taken with the large room’s golden floor and enormous windows with arches at the top. Most odd, Mr. Hayes had brought along a pic-nic supper in a hamper, and after the ordeal of lighting the many tallow candles of the studio’s two chandeliers, they retired to a small connected room that served as an office. Here an oil lamp was lit, and they ate slices of cold meat, apples, and asparagus at the corner of a dark imposing desk. There was lemon cheesecake for dessert, but just before they got to it, someone arrived at the office door—a dashing and jolly man, who, when introduced to Summerfield, clicked his heels together and saluted like a soldier: Mr. Houseberry (funny name), who played piano for the gentlemen’s class. Mr. Hayes offered his piece of cheesecake to Mr. Houseberry, who made a negligible protest, sat down on a stool next to them, and ate it, exclaiming again and again, “What a treat! What a treat!”

When he was done, Mr. Houseberry pulled a handkerchief from inside his coat and began to wipe his mouth and whiskers. While still executing this thorough clean-up, he said gravely, “So, Mr. Hayes, tell me, where do you think this ugly slave business will end? This secession business, this Compromise business, where is it all going to end?”

Mr. Hayes glanced at Summerfield and drew his lips into a thin line. He shook his head sadly and sighed. “I honestly don’t know,” he said at last.

“Well, I think it’ll surely end in war,” said Mr. Houseberry and returned the handkerchief to its place inside the coat. Summerfield couldn’t tell—not from the man’s face, not from his tone—if war pleased or displeased him.

“I hope not,” said Mr. Hayes. “Or if it does, I pray it comes quickly and ends quickly, long before Summerfield’s of age.”

“That’s the bind, isn’t it?” said Mr. Houseberry. “That’s the pickle. Efforts to avoid only serve to delay. And then we’ll be in for the ruin of the long-smoldering fire.”