Nostalgia (43 page)

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.

L
ONG 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.

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:

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

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.