Nostalgia

by Dennis McFarland

  “You might recite one of your poems,” says Hayes.

  “So you do know me in my other capacity,” says Walt, clearly pleased.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been slow to infer the obvious,” says Hayes. “It was Captain Gracie’s ‘infamous poet’ that finally woke me up.”

  “Yes,” says Walt, with a sigh. “How peculiar life can be! I started out wanting fame and ended up with infamy. Who knew the love of the masses comes with such pockets of hatred? Very well, then, my friend, I’ll recite a short one, but first … do you mind coming out from behind that mosquito curtain? This place is dreamy enough this time of night without my having to talk to you through a veil.”

  Hayes lifts the curtain over his head and drops it behind his shoulders.

  “That’s better,” says Walt. “As it happens, I have the perfect lines for this very late and somber hour … but you mustn’t be surprised if they make me cry.”

  He leans back in the chair, crosses his arms on his chest, and whispers the lines with a good amount of feeling. “ ‘Year that trembled and reeled beneath me … your summer wind was warm enough—yet the air I breathed froze me. / A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darkened me. / Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself. / Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat?’ ”

  Walt takes out his handkerchief, wipes his eyes, and blows his nose; he glances over at the sleeping Casper and chuckles softly. “I told you they might make me cry.”

  Hayes asks him to repeat the lines, but Walt, says, “Oh, no, I cannot … I’m weak and it makes me weaker.”

  “It’s about the war,” says Hayes.

  Walt only looks at him and nods.

  At last he folds the handkerchief and puts it away. “In truth,” he says, “most of me’s already back in Brooklyn. What’s left of me here’s only an echo of an earlier noise. You haven’t finished the Dickens, have you?”

  “This evening,” says Hayes. “After supper.”

  “And what’s your appraisal?”

  “Very good, I think,” says Hayes, though the book seems like something he only dreamed, his memory of it fragmentary and uncertain. “Madame Defarge’s pistol accidentally goes off,” he adds. “The shock and the blast of it cause the governess to go deaf.”

  “Yes, of course … Miss Pross … you would make special note of that,” says Walt. “Now, my friend, I have an idea: since I’m planning to stay the night, and since you’re awake anyway, don’t you think we might send off a letter to your folks? They must surely assume the worst by now. I can provide you with paper and pencil, stamps and envelopes, everything you need. I’ll even take dictation if you like, though I don’t believe you need me to.”

  “My parents are dead now three years,” says Hayes, glad for his unexpected lack of emotion.

  “How is that possible?” says Walt.

  “I have a sister at home,” says Hayes, dodging the question.

  “Yes,” says Walt, “the sister that gave you the Dickens. We must write to her straightaway.”

  “But I wouldn’t know what to say to her,” says Hayes.

  “Well,” says Walt, “I should think, to begin with, you might tell her you’re still alive.”

  The prospect of composing a letter—one that’s actually to be written down and mailed—feels insurmountable to Hayes. He imagines Walt is right—by now she has assumed him dead. He thinks it would be cruel to shock her with news of his being alive, only to shock her again later, if he returns to the front, with news of his being killed. And if he is in fact to be removed to the Asylum for the Insane, that would prompt her to travel to Washington City for a visit, which he would find unbearable.

  “You are, you know,” says Walt, “still alive.”

  “And in a hospital,” says Hayes. “Though my wounds are not real. A gloom fell through the sunshine and darkened me.”

  Walt smiles. “Your wounds are not visible like other wounds,” he says. “Which isn’t quite the same thing as not real. I imagine your incautious desire to return to the battlefield is so you might get yourself some visible ones.”

  “I would prefer it, yes,” says Hayes.

  “Look at him,” Walt says, indicating Casper. “Is that what you prefer?”

  Hayes does not look at Casper but sees him in his mind’s eye, a yellow cadaver.

  “Or over there at Mr. Raugh,” says Walt. “How would you like surviving but never being able to play base ball again? Would you prefer that? Perhaps you would enjoy being helped to the water closet for the rest of your life.”

  Again Hayes is silent—thinking of Walt’s “hymns of defeat” and Raugh’s “de-feeted”—and Walt, after a moment, says, with a sigh, “I’m sorry … forgive me … I don’t mean to scold you.”

  Hayes says, “I wouldn’t know what to write to my sister. How can I tell her what’s to become of me when I don’t know it myself?”

  This question appears to enliven Walt—he sits up straight again and inches the chair even closer. “I can tell you this much,” he says, “though I probably shouldn’t. Dr. Bliss deems you unfit for service at this time … and, more to the point, believes the asylum will only further harm you. Once he has made up his mind about a thing, he can be a very effective wire-puller.”

  “Wire-puller?” says Hayes.

  “Let me ask you,” says Walt. “When did you last see the loathsome Mr. Babb?”

  Hayes has not seen Babb since the morning Dr. Speck appeared at the hospital. Before he can answer, Walt nods, his eyebrows arched high, and says, “You see, the major has ways of making people vanish. Some mysteriously, never to be seen again … and others only temporarily, at exactly the right moment. Just when they’re about to be collected, taken from the hospital, they simply can’t be found.”

  “Is that it then?” says Hayes. “I’m to vanish?”

  “Perhaps,” says Walt. “We’ll know more by tomorrow. There are still one or two hitches to be got over. Captain Gracie means to subvert us, and we’ve not yet devised a way to subvert him instead.”

  Hayes reaches into his trousers pocket and produces the oily scrap of paper Matron put under his pillow the night she left the hospital. As he passes it into Walt’s hand, Walt says, “What’s this?”

  Hayes only shrugs his shoulders.

  Walt looks up from reading it and says, “Where did you get this, my boy?”

  “From Matron,” says Hayes. “Her last night on the ward, she put it under my pillow … said it might be useful to me.”

  “Matron?” says Walt, shaking his head in awe.

  “What does it mean?” asks Hayes.

  “I can only surmise,” says Walt. “But if it means what it appears to mean, we might not get the interference from Captain Gracie we’ve dreaded. I happen to know he has a very important wife and two young daughters back in Connecticut. May I keep this?”

  Hayes nods, and Walt kisses the scrap of paper and slides it into his coat pocket. “Now,” he says, “I suggest you write to your sister and tell her that you’re alive—all safe, if not completely sound—and hoping to see her in Brooklyn ere long. It’ll ease her mind, even without details. I’ll write to her for you if you like.”

  Walt’s writing on his behalf has a certain appeal to Hayes—it reminds him of the moment, some weeks before, when he gave himself over to being shaved by Walt, surrendering to all the possible outcomes, including a slit throat. “Yes, thank you,” he says. “But if we’ll know more by tomorrow, why not wait till then?”

  Walt appears to think this proposal through. “Tomorrow then,” he says, smiling in a way that seems to mark tomorrow’s prospects as both happy and sad. “Tell me about her. She must be very intelligent, like you. And probably a bit older, I should think.”

  “By two years,” says Hayes. “A schoolteacher.”

  “Yes, that fits,” says Walt. “But not plain like my schoolteacher friend here in Washington. No sister of yours could
ever be plain. Very beautiful, I imagine. And married, yes?”

  Hayes shakes his head.

  Walt, surprised, says, “Not married? Well, then you must have brothers … or at least …”

  Hayes shakes his head again.

  “But if … as you’ve told me,” says Walt, “your parents are dead … what could possibly have prompted you to leave her alone?”

  Hayes’s face burns, and Walt, evidently sensing that he has flustered him, quickly says, “Do you know? I’ve just had a letter from my brother Jeff.”

  He bends and starts rooting inside the haversack on the floor by his feet. “He mentioned his good friend who’s a principal at one of the Brooklyn schools. I wonder if you know him.”

  When he has found the letter, he pulls it from its envelope and begins scanning the page with his pointer finger, squinting in the dim light. “Here it is,” he says. “Gilfinian, that’s the name.”

  Of course Hayes recognizes the name, but hearing it spoken with a mock-Irish accent, and spoken in this peculiar setting, feels to Hayes as if it belongs to somebody he met long ago in his boyhood, rather than as recently as last Christmas. The memory of that day at his sister’s school—the children’s high spirits, the recitations and carols, the cakes and lemonade, the reticent boys, the girls giddy with the false rumor of his being Miss Hayes’s fiancé—brings a sharp pain behind his eyes.

  Walt continues studying the letter, paying him no mind, and says, “That’s a very fishy name … has both a gill and a fin.” Now he looks up rather suddenly. “Do you know him?”

  Hayes feels his heart race and he wants nothing more than to be left alone. He thinks maybe his voice will desert him again, a liability about which he has mixed emotions. He takes a breath and says, “I believe I did meet him once.”

  “But not a friend?” asks Walt, already disappointed. “I was hoping you and Jeff might have a friend in common.”

  “No.”

  Walt folds the letter and puts it back into the envelope. As he’s bent toward the floor and restoring the letter to the bag, he goes on: “Well … of no particular interest then … seems Mr. Gilfinian’s got himself engaged to be married … one of his female teachers … a girl named Sarah … Jeff’s not met her yet. You would like my brother Jeff … I love him more than anyone in the world. Good and kind and smart and … well, the best of us by far. We’d be quite lost without him. I can’t wait to see him again.”

  When Walt sits up straight, Hayes, who has been watching him, averts his eyes. “Why, my dear boy,” says Walt, alarmed, “you’ve gone all pale and peaked! What on earth’s the matter?”

  ———

  THE ROOF GROANS in the wind as if it might lift straight off the pavilion. The many flags coil and snap. The mosquito curtains, gathered and suspended from the rafters, churn like tornadoes. The whitewashers have returned with their tall ladders, this time to paint the vaulted ceiling above the rafters a watery blue. Casper has not yet awakened, and from the looks of him, Hayes thinks he has not moved since Walt tucked and fixed him in the bed the night before. Raugh lies flat and inert as usual, either sleeping or awake, eyes shut. The stench of the canal, stirred by the wind, is worse than ever. Now and again, Hayes hears the strains of a brass band outdoors, now and again the explosive discharge of a steam locomotive and the banging of steel on steel. A dozen or more new arrivals have wandered onto the ward, bloody and bewildered, helped by comrades or attendants, and Hayes has already witnessed no fewer than four corpses borne out on stretchers.

  A black boy in short pants lurches and sways down the aisle, balancing a stack of folded cloths nearly his own height, making sport of it. There are the usual card games and checkers and clouds of tobacco smoke, but Hayes believes he hears more than the ordinary measure of laughter on the ward. In his body—in his ears, behind his eyes, and inside his chest—he feels calmer today, quieter. So far, he has not suspected anyone of doing him harm or plotting against him. He has seen no ghosts, no threatening flames out of the corner of his eye. The pot of tea he brought back from the dining room earlier seems a consoling luxury and for some reason makes him think of Dr. Speck, which cheers him even more.

  Anne, wearing a gray dress under her apron, stops by to check on Casper. She tests the temperature of his brow and examines the contents of the cup on the table. She seems to be avoiding Hayes altogether. At last, she looks at him and tries to smile but flushes instead. The wind gusting through the nearby window rustles her hair; she hooks a loose strand behind her ear.

  “Quite a breeze,” she says and then casts her gaze all about, the length and breadth of the frenzied pavilion. A gold cross dangles on a chain from her neck and rests askew at the top hem of her apron. She puts both her hands into the apron pocket, as if she’s screwing up her courage for something, and then says, “I doubt you’ll be moved to write … but if you do find the time, I would welcome a word from you … how you’re getting along and so forth.”

  “Am I going somewhere?” asks Hayes.

  “I have heard that you are,” she says. “I don’t know when exactly it will be, and I didn’t want you to leave without my telling you good-bye … without my saying … without saying I’m sorry to see you go.”

  “Thank you, Anne,” says Hayes.

  Now she smiles in earnest. “It’s the first time you’ve spoken my name,” she says.

  “I guess it is,” he says, “and you’ve never spoken mine … not to me at least … only ‘Mr. X.’ ”

  “I grew rather fond of ‘Mr. X,’ ” she says.

  “Me too. I think I’ll miss it.”

  Hayes is aware—prompted by what he takes as her awareness—that he did not say, I’ll miss you.

  “And I shall miss you, too,” he says quickly, surprised at how genuine it suddenly seems.

  “Oh, I don’t imagine so,” she says, shaking her head. “All along, I’ve felt there was someone else who has your heart.”

  “Not true,” he says, thinking what an odd and confusing expression, what an odd and confusing business, the business of heart-having. “And even if it were, I shall miss you anyway. You’ve been very kind … and taken very good care of me.”

  “Like a sister,” she says, nodding.

  “You still haven’t said my name,” he says.

  “Mr. Hayes then,” she says, shrugging. “Private Hayes. There, you see—not nearly so good as ‘Mr. X.’ ”

  “Why not call me Summerfield?”

  “All right,” she says, “but I really must go now.”

  She takes from the apron pocket a buff-colored envelope sealed with a white wafer and passes it to him. “I’ve taken the liberty of writing you a note, which includes my name and the address of the hospital. But I must ask you, as a favor, not to read it until after you’ve left.”

  He agrees to her terms and thanks her. As she turns away, he says, “I wonder if you’ve seen Walt.”

  “Not this morning,” she answers.

  “Do you think Casper’s all right?”

  She looks at him as if he has asked a foolish question, which he supposes he has.

  “No,” she says. “But I expect he’ll be all right soon. I’m hoping … well, I may as well say it … I’m hoping dear Casper won’t wake up. Good-bye, Summerfield.”

  As she moves hurriedly into the aisle, she nearly collides with a skeletal black-clad preacher who casts her a disapproving look—a look he turns on Hayes immediately afterward. Hayes at first wonders what the man might have observed that jogged such reproach, but then, as the preacher’s unaltered gaze lights next on Casper, Raugh, and a brown dog that ambles by in the aisle, Hayes reckons it’s a generic and permanent feature.

  Soon the ward surgeon, Dr. Dinkle, approaches, making his rounds. To Hayes’s surprise, he doesn’t stop at Casper’s bed but only gives Casper a quick glance. Hayes stands and salutes the corpulent surgeon, who says with a dissonant lack of irony, “Good morning, Private Hayes, and welcome back to the world of ceaseless bla
bbering.”

  “Thank you, sir,” says Hayes.

  “I’ve had a letter from Philadelphia, from Dr. Drum, who inquired about your health,” says the ward surgeon—a flat statement of fact—and then moves on again.

  The brown dog from the aisle eases alongside Casper’s bed. A hound with floppy silken-looking ears and sagging jowls, the dog looks briefly at Hayes, its melancholy eyes blinking in the wind from the window. It turns to Casper and sniffs at the stump that rests on the small pillow. It gives the dressing a tentative exploratory lick, sniffs again, and then lowers its chin for a moment to the edge of the mattress. The dog, thinks Hayes, is giving poor Casper more attention and concern than any of the doctors.

  With a sigh and a thud, the dog drops to the floor in the narrow space between the beds. When Hayes looks up, he sees, standing tattered and forlorn in the aisle, a soldier about his own age. At first, he thinks it’s the ghost of Billy Swift, but then the soldier removes his cap and reveals an abundant shock of black hair. His right arm hangs in a blood- and mud-stained sling, and beneath his unbuttoned jacket, his middle is wrapped all round with dirty bandaging. Hayes gets off the bed and starts to go to the soldier, who appears transfixed by the hound on the floor. He allows Hayes to escort him to the bed—they move carefully, in half steps—and just as they reach the end of it and the soldier braces himself with a hand on the footrail, Captain Gracie appears and pauses next to them.

  Hayes expects a reprimand—after all, the soldier is obviously a new arrival, and if Hayes means to help, he should be fetching a steward or a nurse—but the captain says nothing, only studies them coldly. Hayes would have thought the captain quite settled on all counts where he was concerned—there was nothing about Hayes still to be explored or debated—yet when at last he meets Hayes’s eye, the usual glare of disdain is oddly complicated by traces of ambiguity. The captain seems as if he might speak but then thinks the better of it, turns, and strides away in a rush.

  “Sit here,” says Hayes to the soldier, as he helps him onto the edge of the mattress. “Did you lose your way? Are you in pain? What can I do for you?”