“If our water’s delicious and pure clean,” says Sarah, “I believe we have your brother to thank.” Turning to Jeff, she adds, “Thomas has told me about your engineering … in the water office.”
Jeff, obviously pleased, says, “Oh, not at all … my contributions are flimsy at best.”
“There, you see it again,” says Walt. “Exaggeration in the form of false modesty.”
“In any case,” says Sarah, “I thank you for our good water.” To Walt, she adds, “And I thank you for helping my brother home … and for helping him recover from his own malaria. I’m fully aware that not everyone survives it.”
“Malaria?” says Jeff, to Walt. “I thought you told me—”
“Your brother had some first-rate doctors,” says Walt quickly, glancing first at Summerfield and then, differently, at Jeff.
A short silence occurs, and then Jeff, possibly sensing that he has somehow misspoken, says, “Well, I must be off. I’ve got my long list. Walt, I’ll be back for you within the hour.”
Sarah offers to help Jeff locate his hat and then sees him to the door.
Left alone with Walt, Summerfield finds in Walt’s eyes a gaze of understanding that conjures the days of his own muteness—when meeting Walt’s eye was everything. Walt comes forward and gives him a deeper embrace than he first did while Jeff was present. He kisses him briefly on the lips and says, “Darling boy, here you are.”
They hear the sound of Sarah’s laughter in the hallway, and Walt says, “I wonder if we might sit.”
“Of course,” says Summerfield. “I’ve kept you standing all this time.”
He guides Walt to one end of the sofa and relieves him of his cane. He takes a seat at the opposite end of the sofa, where he places the silver handle of Walt’s cane against his shoulder, like a firearm, and pretends to shoot at the parlor windows.
When Sarah returns to the room seconds later, Walt is still laughing. She sits on the ottoman near him and says, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some tea or lemonade or … more of our delicious water?”
Walt heaves a great sigh and removes his hat, laying it down beside him on the sofa. “No, thank you, my dear,” he says. “I’m quite content.”
He reaches for her hand, which she gives him, and he holds it in both his own. “This friend of Jeff’s,” he says, “this Gilfinian … he’s a lucky man.”
She withdraws her hand and says, with surprising seriousness, “Not nearly as lucky as you might assume.”
As if she means to enlist his support, she looks—for the first time directly—at Summerfield, who cannot think what to say. In the next moment, he finds Walt looking at him, too, with a similar and bewildering expectation.
At last, he says, “Of course Gilfinian’s lucky … very lucky. I would say lucky’s exactly what he is.”
He believes she almost smiles—subtly, fleetingly—and then she says, “I think Summerfield’s been in his room reading Mr. Emerson the last several days. It’s making him abstract.”
“I hope that’s all it makes him,” says Walt. “It’s the least of the dangers in reading Mr. Emerson.”
“Yes, I agree,” Sarah says.
Summerfield—who cannot discern the substance of what it is she agrees with, and who feels the slightest bit colluded against—says, “I’m afraid I don’t know what either of you mean.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” says Walt, waving a hand dismissively, “I don’t know what I mean either.” To Sarah he says, “Do you know what you mean?”
She laughs and says, “No, I don’t, actually. I almost never do.”
Bantering, thinks Summerfield, silly flirtation.
“It’s a difficult business,” says Walt. “Everything’s so persistently illusive, don’t you find?”
“Very,” says Sarah, and they laugh together.
She turns to Summerfield and says, gaily, “Summerfield, darling … when you say or do a thing, do you always know exactly what you mean?”
He supposes it’s his face—either serious or stony, he can’t tell which—that causes her to fall so abruptly silent and to blush. Rashly, she has quit the brittle shell and taken up this clever giddy role, brimming with innuendo, and, in the process, fallen short of her own values. For his own part, Summerfield thinks perhaps he’s simply losing his bearings, that after days of solitude, the motion of society is too much for him; he thinks of his father’s ballroom polka, the music growing faster, the unknowable men (capable of anything) ending in a heap. He recalls how happy it made him when he first learned, only a few minutes before, that Walt had stopped by, and as if to steady himself, he says, “You look better than when I last saw you, Walt. How are you coming along?”
Walt’s eyes cloud over with tears. “I was well enough today for my first outing in Jeff’s cab,” he says. “I’d hoped for some sunshine, but we may get some yet. You see … my very first outing, and I came to you, dear boy. How are you coming along?”
Summerfield can’t think why he says what he says next, except that it’s what occurred to him: “I met a man in the Wilderness who reminded me of my father.”
Walt nods and then smiles sadly at Sarah, who returns the same sad smile and looks into her lap.
“Our father, I should say,” says Summerfield, “mine and Sarah’s … a man named Phipps … just about Papa’s age … the age Papa would be now. Had his coloring, too, and a similar-sounding voice. When the rebels flanked us on two sides, broke us apart and beset us … I took cover with him in the limbs of a fallen tree. We waited there at the edge of a small clearing in the woods. A Confederate boy … about twelve or thirteen years old … soon walked into the clearing … and this man who reminded me of our father shot and killed him, asking God’s forgiveness. Of course we were quickly discovered, and Mr. Phipps left me … took off running into the thicket. He knew he would likely be shot or captured, but he meant to draw the rebels away from me. He was willing to risk his own life to save mine … yet, only the moment before, he had shot and killed a young boy.”
After a pause, Walt says, “This is what you meant at the hospital … when you told Captain Gracie that it was sometimes hard to tell right from wrong.”
He’s not at all sure that’s what he meant then—nor can he clearly recall the interview with Captain Gracie—but now that Walt says it, it seems true, and so he nods.
“The whole war’s like that, isn’t it,” says Walt. “Everything about it.”
Summerfield nods again and says, “Our colonel told us he knew our side would win because he’d seen it portended in the heavens. He’d watched one afternoon, after a storm, as the gray clouds scattered and gave way to blue sky.”
Sarah looks at him perplexed, so he says, “Because of the color of our uniforms … he took it as an omen.”
Walt chuckles. “There was a bit of wisdom circulating around Washington recently, before we left,” he says. “I heard it three different times, in three different places, from three different men: that in the war, God could not be on both sides at once. I never expressed my doubts on the subject, but I did wonder … maybe that’s precisely who God is.”
“If you’re right in what you say,” says Sarah, “then … just as we were taught in Sunday school … we’re surely made in his likeness. I’ve certainly felt myself on two sides of a thing at once.”
“Yes,” says Walt, “but we say we’re of ‘two minds.’ We say of ourselves that we are ‘torn.’ Maybe God’s supremacy lies in his capacity to be thoroughly of one mind, entirely on both sides of a conflict at once, and not the least bit torn.”
Now Walt leans forward and says, “Summerfield, my friend.”
He waits for Summerfield to meet his eye.
“Summerfield, my friend,” he repeats, a medium, summoning a reluctant spirit.
When Summerfield does meet his eye, he sees Walt as he first encountered him: a solicitous, gray-haired, gray-bearded old man; perpetually flushed; pink around the eyes; sympathetic to the point of so
metimes seeming telepathic; a sunny veneer cloaking a private sorrow.
“All of us have more than one side to us,” says Walt. “And sometimes these sides oppose one another. There’s no thoughtful person who doesn’t find within himself both friends and enemies. I don’t know if my saying this to you is a comfort or not. Please tell me what you have to say about it.”
Summerfield is silent but soon finds himself shaking his head as he tries to ponder Walt’s remarks. He believes they cut to the heart of the matter, but he cannot quite bring himself wholly into the room after having allowed himself to slip back into the Wilderness—a consequence his instincts have warned against.
After another moment, Sarah stands and says, “I’m going to fetch us some lemonade after all,” and leaves hurriedly through the dining room.
Walt says, “She’s so lovely … and I’ve upset her. I didn’t mean to.”
Summerfield still says nothing, and so, after another pause, Walt whispers, “You told her you had malaria.”
Summerfield nods and then looks toward the gray windows. “I might take a stroll,” he says. “Get some air.”
“What, you mean now?”
“Only for a few minutes,” he says. “To the river and back.”
Walt looks puzzled, but then soon nods slowly. “I think I understand,” he says. “You mean to leave me alone with her.”
“If you don’t mind,” says Summerfield. “You see, I haven’t been able to … of course I have my voice … but I haven’t been able really to talk.”
“And you want me to explain you to her,” says Walt.
Summerfield gazes down at Walt’s cane for a moment, which rests at an angle against the sofa cushion between them; keeping his head lowered, he reaches for the cane and passes it handle first to Walt. “If you don’t mind,” he repeats softly.
Walt plants the tip of the cane on the floor, puts both hands atop the handle, and rocks it in a little circle round and round. He knits his brow, exaggeratedly, and draws his mouth into a straight line, considering hard. At last—world-weary, a belle at a ball who has been too often asked to dance—he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I don’t mind.”
As Summerfield reaches the hall door, Walt adds, “But walk swiftly, will you? This won’t take me very long.”
AT THE FOOT of Remsen Street, he can see, looking southward, even above the trees of the private gardens, the tops of the grain silos at the Atlantic Docks. And before him spreads the panorama of the river and Buttermilk Channel, the stiff fringe of piers on Manhattan Island, the ribbonlike forests of ship masts on both shores (every kind of vessel docked), the tiers and casements of Fort Columbus and Castle Williams, and the blue-gray water, turbulent with currents, wind, crossings, and industry: clipper ships, whaleboats under oars, passenger ferries and wherries, lumps laden with anchors and chains, a handsome ketch in the foreground with a green star on its mizzen sail. In the distance, both north and south, a haze rises off the horizon, more violet than the water. On each side of the river, the tall chimneys of foundries and distilleries and the steeples of churches pierce the air, in which, near and far, seagulls inscribe their circles small and large, low and high, wings unmoving. An array of white parasols on the open stern deck of a ferryboat looks like flowers, a floating garden. All about, miniature people fish, boat, and swim; boys jump from and climb onto piers; antlike troops on Governors Island drill near a line of toy cannons; flags and pennants dot the spectacle with a variety of color; barges powered by a steam-tug slowly move their grain cargo toward the Narrows; a breeze rushes up the neat escarpment, carrying the scents of the river; and he thinks the scene is like a smart contraption with thousands of moving parts, enormous in size and complexity, and will continue long after he and everyone now alive has rotted back into the earth. He knows the bowels of Castle Williams hold Confederate prisoners, some of whom will die never having seen their loved ones again, others, luckier, exchanged for Union captives. This war will end, other wars will flare up to claim their own rosters of the dead, and the myriad of chimneys, like brick piles driven into and soaring out of concrete, will go on belching fumes, silver smoke, and soot into the skies of new centuries. Pilots will pilot now-unknown crafts driven by now-unknown sources of power. At the Navy Yard, faster, stronger, more lethal war vessels will be conceived, built, and repaired. Wheels, brighter and sharper, will turn at unimaginable new purposes, pipes pump unimaginable vapors into and out of the boroughs, ship hulls rock with unimaginable stuff, storehouses store unimaginable wares. How, he wonders, could such a vision—laid out in splendor, implying so certain a succession, so certain a permanence—appear so aimless, its players and purveyors damned to make old mistakes in new ways? The answer, he understands, resides in his wretched state of mind, but he cannot seem to dismiss the outward truth of it. Numerous couples and parties of family or friends arrive at the foot of the street, lingering for a while where he lingers, viewing with awe what he views, departing before he departs; he can hear them talking to one another, a frivolous-sounding murmur that signals the stupidity of everything they have to say. To his right and just behind him, a man sits on the lower steps of a stoop and has been watching him. Now, apparently, he has decided to approach, and Summerfield steels himself for whatever bland or vexing business is in store. The man, small and drawn down by poor posture, comes and stands next to him; by way of introducing himself into his company, he lights a cigar, and Summerfield only hopes, hopes and prays, he won’t want to talk of the war.
“Have you heard?” the man soon says, touching his fingers to the brim of his hat. “Rebel troops moved into Maryland yesterday. They can’t be far from the capital now, and most of the Federals who would otherwise defend Washington have already been sent down Richmond way.”
Summerfield turns and looks into the man’s face, a splotched, swollen, weather-beaten visage, lined by too many years and too many brands of struggle; everything about him suggests that he’s alone in the world and lonely, the fabric of his suit shiny and worn, his shirt collar soiled yellow, a smattering of gray in his whiskers—perhaps a farmer or mechanic in his Sunday clothes, come to the city for the sights, these sights, the spectacle, the sweep, the great dubious prospect. The man’s news is exactly the wrong kind and awakens a vague fear inside Summerfield’s belly. He returns his attention to the vista and notices high overhead a white disk behind the clouds, the sun on the brink of burning through. Something about the man’s tone suggested that his report didn’t spring from the usual vein of “war excitement” but that he wanted to relieve himself of a matter that really troubled him—and so Summerfield says, “Is there somebody … that is … do you have someone in harm’s way?”
The man presses his lips together and looks down at his shoes. “Not anymore I don’t,” he says. “Already lost both my boys.”
“I’m sorry,” Summerfield says.
“I’m glad their mother didn’t live to see it,” he says. “I have to admit I wish the same for myself more days than I care to count.”
After a pause, the man says, “Did you buy your way out?”
Because Summerfield doesn’t answer at once, the man adds, “It’s fine by me if you did. Believe me, I would’ve made no bones of it for my boys if I’d had the money.”
Summerfield, who cannot think how to begin to explain his situation to the man, only continues to gaze at the busy sparkling channel below. How can he explore with a stranger this limbo of invisible wounds, a drunken discharge on the battlefield with no corroborative document, the influence of friends in influential positions? He is mustered out, to be sure, and has been assured there’s nothing to worry about, but who knows how long he must wait for the proper forms and signatures? There is, after all, still a war to fight, a war to win.
“That’s okay,” says the man, evidently taking Summerfield’s silence as consent. “I don’t blame you a bit. My priest tells me I should be proud, and I guess I’m fairly up to the hub with pride … but I ask you … wh
at’s that next to the flesh and blood of your own living breathing sons, brought into the world and raised up on love? A pretty sorry swap, if you ask me.”
“Yes, it is,” says Summerfield, and the man says, “Damn right it is.”
After a minute more, Summerfield apologizes and says he’s expected at home and has already stayed too long. He shakes the man’s hand and then takes his leave.
A few paces up Remsen Street he glances back: the man has moved alongside a nearby couple, is likely about to repeat the news of the rebel invasion of Maryland.
As he turns the corner, he can see, from a distance of two streets, a carriage in front of the house, Jeff already aboard, and Walt and Sarah standing at the top of the stoop. Jeff spots him from the same distance, points for the benefit of the two others, and then waves.
Just before Summerfield arrives at the steps, he sees Sarah kiss Walt on each cheek; she says good-bye and goes into the house, closing the door behind her.
“I’m sorry,” says Summerfield. “I stayed gone too long.”
Walt does not respond but makes his way, visibly fatigued, to the bottom step and onto the pavement. He tugs down the floppy brim of his hat, as if to make it tighter for the ride, and then, reaching into a side pocket of his coat, he says, “I’ve been keeping this for you.”
He passes into Summerfield’s hands an amber-colored base ball and adds, “Bachelors twenty-four, Twighoppers twenty-one.”
Summerfield—moved by the sight of the ball, and moved by Walt’s keeping and delivering it—thanks him. He brings it to his nose and smells a mix of grass, dirt, and horsehide. As he and Walt embrace, he whispers, “Walt … Walt, what am I to do?”
Walt releases him and smiles thoughtfully but only moves forward a few steps and gives Jeff’s blood-bay horse a couple of pats on the neck. When he comes back to Summerfield’s side, he says, “Give me a hand up, will you?”
Summerfield helps him aboard the carriage, which squeaks with the new weight. The horse lifts a front foot and clops it down again. Once settled next to Jeff, Walt leans toward Summerfield and says, “I’m not a doctor, only a poet and a soldier’s missionary. But I’m confident the best of physicians would approve my prescription for you: go and play base ball, dear boy. It’s what you were created to do. Go and play base ball.”
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