Authors: Noëlle Sickels
The Medium (41 page)
“If you boys got a beef with each other, you'd better take it outside,” the cook called to them. As he came closer, he, too, noticed the cane.
“Say, you must be from over at that school in Avon,” he said to Lloyd.
“That's right, mister. What of it?”
Lloyd shifted his attention to the cook, but in his agitation he turned his head too far and ended up facing the waitress, who was standing nervously beside the cook. She slunk back a little.
“Now take it easy, son. I just mean I want you veterans to always feel welcome in my place and not be bothered by nobody while you're here.”
“Hold on!” the stranger protested. “I'm a veteran, too.”
“You can sit at the counter, hot shot,” the cook growled.
“Forget it, I'm taking my business elsewhere.”
The young man jammed his hat on his head and pointed a finger at Lloyd.
“You had a tough break, buddy,” he said, no sympathy in his tight voice, “but you and I both know there's plenty who had it just as tough, or even tougher. And you're in for one helluva hard landing if you forget that.”
Lloyd's scorching scowl dissolved. The young man strode out of the diner, and Helen nudged Lloyd into the booth. The cook and the waitress went back to work, the other patrons quietly resumed their meals.
“I guess you're gonna give me a thorough raking now,” Lloyd said glumly.
“What possessed you to push that fellow? Whatever did you imagine he was up to?”
“I don't want anyone annoying you.”
“I'm perfectly capable of handling a mildly flirtatious young man on my own, thank you,” Helen said indignantly. “And without making a public scene over it.”
“But you shouldn't
have
to handle fatheads like that on your own.”
have
to handle fatheads like that on your own.”
“Come on, Lloyd, it's not as if you found him accosting me in a dark alley somewhere.”
“And what if he did, huh? I couldn't do a thing about it. Not a goddamn thing. 'Cause I
live
in a dark alley and I'm never getting out.”
live
in a dark alley and I'm never getting out.”
Lloyd's hands, propped on the edge of the table, had curled into fists.
“I haven't heard you talk like that in a long time,” Helen said softly. Her irritation had slipped away like sand down a slope. “Not since you were at Halloran.”
Lloyd opened his fists with a quick motion, as if he were flinging something away.
“I was scared at Halloran, and plenty mad, too.”
“And now?”
Lloyd peered at her with his dead eyes. Helen knew he'd been trained not to let his facial muscles go slack because if he did, it looked to people like he wasn't listening to them, but in this moment, his steady attention was not mere technique. It was as if, somehow, he were really seeing her. She felt, incredibly, like he was touching her.
“With everything they've been teaching us, I figure I'm gonna be able to take care of myself, and that feels good,” he answered. “I'll get a pension from the Veteran's Administration, so I'll be okay that way, and I expect to work, tooâand not in some sheltered workshop, either. But now all of it, the training and the money and even feeling good ⦠well, I don't know now if it really is going to be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
Helen felt the force of his concentration on her across the table. She had to will herself not to look away.
“Enough for you.”
Helen was inundated with emotions. She was surprised, flattered, frightened, joyous, guilty, and flustered, all at once. She had an impulse to find something light and deflective to say, but she heeded, instead, a deeper, stronger instinct not to defuse the moment. Whatever followed between her and Lloyd, right away and on into the future, this moment would be its origin, and she wanted it to be immaculate. So she didn't say anything.
“Well, at least you haven't run away,” Lloyd said with a wry smile.
“No.”
“Do you want to? Run away, I mean.”
Helen took a deep breath. She was sure Lloyd heard it. What would he make of it? If she were in his place, she'd probably think it was not a good sign. But maybe he was smarter about
people's sighs than she was, because he had to be.
people's sighs than she was, because he had to be.
“No, Lloyd, I don't want to run away,” she said, “butâ”
“Butânow there's a lousy word. Listen, Helen, I know it might be too soon after Billy for you to think about anybody, let alone me, and I know I'm no basket of roses, but I just figured I'd go for broke. Because weânot just me and you, but all of us that've survived this warâwe gotta get on with it, you know? We've got to take risks and build stuff and help each other out and ⦠and fall in love.”
The waitress arrived then. She'd left them alone quite a while, maybe, Helen thought, to be sure Lloyd had calmed down. Before the waitress could ask and without consulting Helen, Lloyd ordered burgers and Cokes for them both and a black coffee for himself. He obviously wanted the interruption to be as brief as possible.
“Do you remember, Helen, when you read me those stories? From your automatic writing?”
“Of course.”
“And when we talked about how it seems like the dead want something from the living? The war dead, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think that's what they want. What I just said. They want us to dive into life, to make something of ourselves, to make being alive count for something. Leastways, that's what we ought to do, whether they really âwant' it or not, because they're not here to do it for themselves. Otherwise, what does it matter that we made it through?”
Helen had never felt so close to Lloyd before, nor to anyone else ever. It was an unanalyzed, emotional reaction, and it was a physical experience, too, as if tangible fragments of free-floating matter in her heart and gut were gliding unerringly into hollows she'd grown so used to she'd stopped noticing their ache.
“I think you're right, Lloyd,” she said.
“And it's you I want to do all that with. Will you give it a chance, Helen? To see if I'm right about that, too?”
Helen swallowed hard. She wondered if he heard it.
“I do want to, Lloyd. I want to give it a chance.”
“Sounds like there's a âbut' in there somewhere.”
The waitress brought their sodas and Lloyd's coffee. Helen thanked her, but Lloyd ignored her.
“I'm no basket of roses, either,” Helen went on. “I've changed since we were last together, back before you went to Valley Forge. I didn't write to you about it because it was too complicated. In a nutshell, I've lost my abilities, Lloyd, and I'm not exactly sure yet what kind of person that leaves me being.”
“A lunk muddling through like the rest of us!” Lloyd exclaimed.
Helen couldn't help smiling.
Lloyd carefully found his cup and picked it up. He took a sip of coffee, then set the cup perfectly on the saucer.
“See that?” he said. “That's muscle memory. People who can see do things like that all the time without having to think about it or even look at what they're doing. For me, every motion is a mental chore, but with practice, I can get where some thingsâthe muscle memory thingsâcome automatically. Maybe, Helen, your case is like that. You lost your gift, but there might be something like muscle memory inside you that you can wake up.”
“I don't know, Lloyd. I do feel like a lunk.”
“That's good.”
“Good?”
“You gotta go through a time of fumbling around. Those fumblings are the muscles trying to remember. That's why they don't move things out of our way at Old Farms or help us too much.”
“Does it always work?”
“I'm not gonna lie to you. Some guys never get it.”
Helen put her straw in her soda and took a long drink.
“It wouldn't be the same,” she said. “If it could happen at all.”
“Of course it wouldn't be the same, but it'd be
something
. For me, it's a kind of freedom, a bunch of small freedoms, actually, not having to wrestle with every single movement in my day. For you, I don't know ⦠maybe for you, it'd be like an off-the-cuff sureness sometimes about things, a kind of knowing what's what without having to puzzle it through.”
something
. For me, it's a kind of freedom, a bunch of small freedoms, actually, not having to wrestle with every single movement in my day. For you, I don't know ⦠maybe for you, it'd be like an off-the-cuff sureness sometimes about things, a kind of knowing what's what without having to puzzle it through.”
Lloyd reached across the table, his hand open, palm up. It was a bold gestureânothing had been agreed, reallyâbut his fingers were trembling a little, and that added great tenderness to his audacity. Helen felt a stirring in her core, a yearning that, somehow, was its own answer. Her brand of muscle memory? She laid her hand in his, and he gripped it gently.
“Lloyd, Iâ”
“A chance, Helen. For both of us. That's all I'm asking.”
In reply, she squeezed his fingers. He inclined his head and softly kissed her hand.
“Vanilla,” he said, grinning. “And moss. You smell like vanilla and moss.”
APRIL 1945
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was going home. In a steady rain, his funeral train was moving slowly north from Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, New York, where he'd be buried in the garden of the house where he was born.
When the train carried his body from Georgia, where he'd died, to the White House, where his coffin lay in the same room Abraham Lincoln's had, hundreds of thousands of weeping, praying, singing, and silent people had lined the tracks at stations and crossings along the entire route. The same thing was happening on this final leg of the solemn journey.
Helen was on a bridge over the Harlem River in the sad, wet dawn. The president's train would pass on the tracks below. Many others were waiting, too, people of all ages and races and backgrounds. The rain stopped, but the air remained moist. The crowd milled, and people conversed a bit, but they kept their voices low, as they might in church. It had been like that on the streets of River Bend, and all across the country, yesterday afternoon, at the time of the funeral in Washington. Buses and cars stopped where they were. Stores that weren't already closed locked their doors for a time. People cried openly, men and women both.
Twelve children were bunched together near the middle of the bridge. Each one was holding a red rose. Some of them fidgeted, twirling their roses or hopping from foot to foot, some leaned over the railing to watch for the train's lights, but they
were, overall, quieter than you'd expect a group of children to be.
were, overall, quieter than you'd expect a group of children to be.
“We've come to say good-bye to the president,” one girl had told Helen when they'd trooped by a little while ago.
A few yards away, Helen's father was standing between her mother and her grandmother. On Helen's right, close beside her, stood Lloyd. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her even closer.
“He's coming,” he said. “I hear the engine.”
A few minutes later, everyone else heard it, too. People pressed up against the bridge railing and leaned towards the sound like sunflowers turning to the sun. The headlight of the locomotive came into view, then the locomotive itself, with its plume of white steam. The children stopped fidgeting. The soft conversations ceased. A few people knelt and bent their heads in prayer. Walter reached one arm around Emilie's shoulders and the other arm around Ursula's. Helen took Lloyd's free hand and entwined her fingers with his. A man near them lifted a small boy up so he could see.
It was a long train. It had carried the president in life, too, with all his retinue, so there were club cars and a diner, a line of sleepers for the press and staff and the Marine guards, a baggage car, a vehicle-carrying car, a communications car, and the president's private car. After the noisy locomotive had passed beneath the bridge, the children with the roses began singing
God Bless America.
Train wheels clacked, couplings squealed, but the children's high-pitched voices prevailed. Some adults joined in, the song spreading along the bridge like a creeping grass fire. Helen tried to sing, but after only one line, she couldn't continue.
God Bless America.
Train wheels clacked, couplings squealed, but the children's high-pitched voices prevailed. Some adults joined in, the song spreading along the bridge like a creeping grass fire. Helen tried to sing, but after only one line, she couldn't continue.
Finally came the last car, the president's private car. Its seats had been removed to make room for a pine bier. The circular windows were open. FDR's long, flag-draped coffin was clearly
visible, resting on the bier and flanked by uniformed servicemen at attention, one from each branch of service.
visible, resting on the bier and flanked by uniformed servicemen at attention, one from each branch of service.
“The casket's passing now,” Helen told Lloyd. “It's got a flag over it, and an honor guard.”
“Is Fala there?”
“I don't see him.”
“He loved that dog.”
Helen recalled all of the times she'd seen photos of FDR with his Scottish terrier. The president always seemed to be smiling in those pictures. But now that she thought of it, he had smiled quite a lot for a man with his heavy responsibilities. He was large. That was all there was to it. He was a large man in every way, including joy and mirth. She smiled to herself, thinking that he'd probably make a large spirit, too.
People had begun leaving the bridge, though a few continued to watch the train as it moved away from them, heading north. Helen remembered the trains from early in the war, lively with jovial young men jostling one another at the windows to reach into the baskets of fruits and doughnuts being offered by pretty girls alongside the tracks. She remembered, too, the trains that had passed through River Bend in later years, shades drawn down over closed windows, trains full of wounded men and coffins.
“You two ready to go?” Walter asked, approaching Helen and Lloyd. His voice was husky.
“I'd like to stay until I can't hear the train anymore,” Lloyd replied.
“We'll meet you at the car,” Helen said to her father.
Walter waited for Emilie and Ursula, who'd been walking arm in arm a bit behind him. Then the three of them continued on.
“The president used to say âmy friends' all the time in his radio talks and speeches,” Lloyd reminisced as he and Helen
began walking off the bridge several minutes later. “And he really felt like one. I feel like I've lost a friend.”
began walking off the bridge several minutes later. “And he really felt like one. I feel like I've lost a friend.”
“And a protector,” Helen added.
“Right. That, too.”
“It's hard to believe he's gone. He'd been looking so tired since Yalta, but somehow I never thought of him dying. It's shocking.”
“'Cause it was so sudden, I guess. And 'cause we need him so much.”
Helen was glad, for FDR's sake, that the death had been sudden. It would have been hard for a man like that to linger. And she was glad he'd been in a place he loved, a warm place, where spring was already well established. April in Georgia. There'd be peach trees in bloom, and dogwoods.
“It doesn't seem right that he won't get to see the end of the war,” Lloyd said.
“He will if he still wants to.”
“Well, he knew it was coming soon, anyway.”
Patton and Montgomery were ready to cross the Rhine, meeting only sporadic opposition from German troops, many of whom were green boys hastily armed. The Russians were in Vienna and nearing Berlin. German cities had been devastated by intense American bombing. On the day Truman was sworn in, two more large concentration camps, Buchenwald and Belsen, had been liberated. Negotiations were underway for the surrender of the Germans in Italy. In the Pacific, the invasion of Okinawa was continuing. Clearly, Allied victory was inevitable, though the ferocious resistance of entrenched Japanese soldiers and
kamikaze
pilots would make it costly.
kamikaze
pilots would make it costly.
So many dead, Helen thought. Over 13,000 from New Jersey alone. People she had known. Her first love. She held more tightly to Lloyd's elbow. This was life now, this man's solid arm, this daybreak bridge, her own body and darting mind. This is
what life had always been, a seamless ball of exaltation and sorrow and many pedestrian moments. She wanted to savor it all, to remember to stand still at some point inside each living hour, pleasant or heartbreaking, bland or crucial. She believed it was the only way. Because, really, there was no standing still. Every moment was a departure. She wanted to notice the fall of scarlet leaves and the apple-green budding of new ones, the scent of swelling yeast, the fullness of laughter, the taste of icicles, the hundreds of tiny ways people cared every day, whether it was a man washing his car on a sleepy Sunday afternoon or a girl pushing her brother on a swing, the smile of a stranger or the wordless, confident touch of a friend.
what life had always been, a seamless ball of exaltation and sorrow and many pedestrian moments. She wanted to savor it all, to remember to stand still at some point inside each living hour, pleasant or heartbreaking, bland or crucial. She believed it was the only way. Because, really, there was no standing still. Every moment was a departure. She wanted to notice the fall of scarlet leaves and the apple-green budding of new ones, the scent of swelling yeast, the fullness of laughter, the taste of icicles, the hundreds of tiny ways people cared every day, whether it was a man washing his car on a sleepy Sunday afternoon or a girl pushing her brother on a swing, the smile of a stranger or the wordless, confident touch of a friend.
The dead were at her back and in her heart, but they were leaving her to her own devices, successful or mistaken, as they did everyone. They'd come to her, Helen believed, simply to say that life was important and life was not all. She'd passed on the message as best she could. She'd continue to pass it on by how she lived, how she treated other people. She was keeping her inner ear open to whatever subtle variations on the message might emerge, but she wasn't expecting again anything as dramatic as Iris or other spirit visitors, nor vivid premonitions. That door was closed. It was enough, now, to know it existed.
“Do you want to go home right away?” Lloyd asked.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I'd like to walk a while. Maybe find a place for breakfast later. I don't feature sitting just yet.”
“Me, either. But we have to stop by the car and tell my folks.”
“Sure.”
Helen, only inches in front of Lloyd, stepped off the curb. He followed without hesitation, almost simultaneously. They crossed the street into the brightening morning.
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