The escort followed, trying without success to catch hold of Hilly. But as he neared, his charge broke away and began jigging back and forth across the empty portion of the platform. Behind the two, with a shrill lament, the train began to pull away.
As suddenly as he had begun jigging, Hilly faltered. Momentary comprehension lit his face, like the brief burning through of dawn on a sullen day. He looked down in amazement at the front of his trousers where a urine stain was spreading. His face puckered and tears welled in his eyes. His body trembled. He turned his head to hide his shame. Gradually, with the escort standing behind him laying a hand on his shoulder and speaking softly into his ear, Hilly sank to his knees.
The fringes of the crowd in the parking lot started to crumble and disperse, heads ducked, as if by looking down they could seem not to have been there, not to have seen. The metal clasps of rubber galoshes flopped metallically as men moved toward cars and buggies. A few young people nudged each other, tittering.
Gone now were the flag wavers, gone the band, the mayor, and the Key to Harvester. Nell knelt beside Hilly, speaking in a low voice. At length he stood, looking into her face. Tell me who I am.
chapter forty-one
“YOU’RE MY SON. I’m your mother. I’ll look after you. I’ll keep you safe,” Nell crooned in the backseat of John’s car. In the front, the young soldier who’d accompanied Hilly sat beside John.
Pictures passed through her mind, as they would a thousand times in the coming days and nights: a baby handing Juliet a wooden block; a boy in the park, swinging with little Larry on his lap; a flushed adolescent returning from a run in the country; and a young man shedding quiet tears after Cora and George’s deaths.
John left the soldier at the Harvester Arms Hotel. In front of Rabel’s, Nell told John, “Hilly and I need to be alone.”
In the apartment, Nell led Hilly to his room. She had laid out his old flannel pajamas on his bed that morning. Now he held the worn softness to his face.
Bathing him later, she noted the raw emptiness where two toes had once been, toes lost to frostbite, and she ran hesitant fingertips along the shiny red welt on his side where shrapnel had been removed at a field hospital.
When he was toweled dry, she showed him the commode and explained its purpose, hoping he had some recollection of it. But she could take nothing for granted.
She helped him into the pajamas, and he crawled into his bed, showing neither curiosity about nor familiarity with the room which had for so many years been his. He was an unquestioning animal who submitted to being led. And he was a boy who had wet himself on the depot platform.
Nell pulled the rocker close to his bed and watched him sleep, rising only to make tea and toast early in the afternoon.
Hilly was home. He was where he belonged, and Nell was grateful. Off and on through the day and evening, she wept for the wounds to his body and mind. And when several times he moaned or cried out, she held his hand, touched his cheek, sang to him. Tending him thus, she did not try to imagine what their lives would be like as the weeks passed. She made no plans. It was enough to see this day out.
The hunger to watch him sleep, to touch him, to draw the blankets over his shoulders when they had slipped—that hunger was so powerful, it did not permit her to leave his room until long past midnight.
When she did climb shivering into her own bed, she lay for an hour massaging her temples and reviewing the improbably long day. Then, without thinking, she reached for Wodehouse.
What would she do without Mr. Wodehouse to lift her almost bodily into his world—into a clean, sunny place where no wars drew sons from their beds and all young flesh was sound and golden? Where else could she find the guarantee of half an hour’s escape? When you hadn’t the courage to face the future head on, you could still approach it obliquely, on a circuitous route through the printed page. Was there anyone on earth who’d understand how grinding fear could be locked away for a moment of laughter?
Opening Something Fresh, Nell read, “The sunshine of a fair Spring morning fell graciously upon London town. Out in Piccadilly its heartening warmth seemed to infuse into traffic and pedestrians alike a novel jauntiness, so that bus drivers jested and even the lips of chauffeurs uncurled into not unkindly smiles. Policemen whistled at their posts—clerks on their way to work . . . It was one of those happy mornings.”
Sunday morning, Nell opened Hilly’s closet and bureau drawers to show him where his high-school clothes were still kept. He glanced at them, puzzled.
She chose trousers, an undershirt, an outer shirt, and warm socks, laying them across his rocker. Mewling, Hilly looked from the clothes to Nell and back, sensing that something was expected. His frustration was tormenting, and so she began unbuttoning his pajamas, explaining each step as she did.
Hilly paid little attention, instead pointing to an old stain on the ceiling where melting snow had seeped in from the roof. The jigsaw-puzzle shape seemed to fascinate him.
“Yes,” Nell said, “that’s where the roof leaked.”
He shook his head, agitated. “Nah. Nah.” The rest of what he said Nell was unable to translate.
“There’s breakfast on the table,” she told him, leading him to the kitchen, where a fire burned in the cookstove.
She had prepared oatmeal. Toast, cut into triangles and spread with strawberry jam from Diana Hapgood, lay on the plate beside the cereal. Again, the mewling and the perplexed gaze.
Nell picked up the spoon, placing it in his hand. Guiding it, she stirred butter, brown sugar, and milk into the oatmeal, and raised the spoon to his mouth. After a few such trips from bowl to mouth, Hilly grasped what was expected, but like a small child’s aim, his was not always true. Nell fetched a dishtowel and tied it around his neck.
She wondered what they had taught him in the hospital. Had it been easier to feed and dress him than to teach him?
When he had eaten half the oatmeal, Hilly rose with jerking hesitation and returned to the bedroom, his gait awkward, protecting the wounded foot. Climbing into bed, he curled up like a caterpillar unkindly touched.
“No one will hurt you here,” Nell told him from the doorway, her hands in the apron pockets fisting with grief and anger.
Breakfast dishes were put away and pails of water hauled up from the pump behind Rabel’s when the knock came: the young soldier who’d accompanied Hilly.
Settled in the rocker, he handed Nell a small but heavy package and a little box tied with twine.
“I didn’t think yesterday was the time to give you these, ma’am—your son’s belongings. The gun is a German sidearm he must have picked up in the field. The bullets are removed. They’re in the box. There’s some other things in there with the gun. Not much, but the folks at the hospital thought you’d want everything.”
Nell nodded. Indeed. She was silent for a long minute.
The soldier waited, either accustomed to this reaction or dispirited by it. Maybe each of these meetings ate at him, diminishing something solid and sure.
“Thank you,” Nell said, rising and laying the package on the table beside her chair, “for all you did for Hillyard. I know you tried to protect him yesterday.” Surely there was something she could do or say to tender small payment for his kindness and awful duty? “What about a cup of tea? There’s store-bought cookies.”
“Nice of you to offer, ma’am, but I’ve got to catch the eastbound pretty quick.” He rose.
At the bottom of the outside stairs, he fitted his cap back on and gave Nell a solemn salute before heading toward the depot. How could it be, Nell wondered, that someone so important to one’s life was there and gone, in less than five minutes? I didn’t even ask his name.
She climbed onto a chair and thrust the gun and the box of ammunition to the back of the top shelf in the kitchen cupboard.
His harmonica; several handkerchiefs, washed and ironed; a Catholic missal and rosary; and a tiny address book were the remaining contents of the package. She sa
t down in the rocker to leaf through the address book, finding Sylvester Benjamin of Dubuque, Iowa—Silly. She would send condolences to his parents, and perhaps inquire if they had a spare photo of their son. It might comfort Hilly.
Six callers stopped in the afternoon: first, Laurence, Juliet, and a manly young Larry, all offering help—“Please let me stay with Hilly afternoons,” Juliet insisted, “while you’re at school, just till he’s settled in”; then Eudora, face swollen and red, apologizing for the elaborate homecoming—“I will never forgive myself for putting you and Hillyard through that.” And, finally, some time later, Aunt Martha. Inside the door, she glanced around. “Hillyard?”
“Lying down.”
Nodding, the old woman settled herself into the green chair. “The girl’s doing my shopping.” The “girl” was Agatha, a maiden lady probably Nell’s age, who met Martha’s standards: she was without family, could handle a horse and buggy, and was accustomed to abuse.
“We need to talk, don’t you think?” Martha opened.
“About?”
“Hillyard.”
“What about him?”
“Where will you send him?”
“Why would I send him anywhere?”
“You can’t possibly care for him.”
“But I’m going to care for him.” Nell had failed to offer Martha tea, and now knew she wouldn’t.
“Don’t be foolish.”
“I’ve never been less foolish.”
Martha shifted in her chair, glanced toward the kitchen as if something might yet be forthcoming from that quarter, then turned an imperative gaze on Nell. “You saw what happened at the depot. He’s not in control of himself. He’ll be a public spectacle.”
Nell rose. At the door, she said, “Out.”
Martha pushed herself to her feet. Obviously there was to be no tea. “I’ll come again when you’re sensible.”
At length, John arrived, bearing doughnuts from a bakery in St. Bridget. “Hilly lying down?”
“Since breakfast. The only time he’s spoken was when he noticed the water stain on the bedroom ceiling. And then I couldn’t understand what he said, except that he didn’t think it was a stain.” She set cups and saucers on the table. “He’ll have to learn to talk again.”
John was silent, licking sugar from his fingers, then wiping them for long minutes on his handkerchief. Finally he rose and dipped his hands in the washbasin. “It’s going to take a while. But in Washington we can get the best help for him.”
Nell handed him a towel, then sat. “He needs to remember this old life. And this apartment. Maybe after that.”
“And if he’s never better?”
Nell was silent.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No.”
Later, when she had seen Hilly to bed for the night and was herself preparing to end the day with a cup of hot chocolate, Nell sat at the kitchen table, staring into the near distance, at the day that must follow this one, and the one after that. The chocolate cooled and grew a wrinkled skin.
Leadenness held her on the chair.
Long minutes passed, and as they did, from the side of her vision, stage right as it were, a verdure crept slowly forward, gold coins of sunlight dancing on green carpet, surrounding her with warmth. . . .
As she waited, wondering, a wooden lounge chair, a kind of deck chair, coaxed her, and she moved toward it, ran a hand along the cross-slat at the back, and slipped down onto the cushioned seat, between the broad, flat arms, smooth as satin beneath her fingers.
Now voices, light and untroubled, soothing in their buoyant lack of care, approached from between a pair of willows. Several figures in summer whites materialized, fresh from tennis perhaps. Catching sight of Nell, one called out, “How good to see you! Let us get you a lemonade—or you might rather a cold tea?”
Nell rose from the deck chair. Wodehouse clasped her hand. “So glad you could get away.”
chapter forty-two
THAT FIRST WEEK, Larry, now a high-school senior, ventured into Hilly’s bedroom with a deck of cards. “Rummy?”
Hilly shook his head and turned toward the wall. Failing the card game, Larry grabbed Hilly’s harmonica from the bureau and blew into it.
“Unhh, unhh, unhh,” Hilly screamed, clapping his hands over his ears and churning from side to side in the bed. Juliet and Nell came running.
Shaken, Larry backed from the room. “It made him remember something, don’t you think?”
“That’s the problem,” his grandmother said. “We don’t know what will jog his memory. Something opens a door, maybe only a tiny way, but it’s too much.”
On his next visit, Larry brought one of his childhood books, the Just So Stories. Sitting in the living room, he began reading in a carrying voice:
I’ve never sailed the Amazon,
I’ve never reached Brazil;
His voice was calm and cadenced, hypnotic as he continued:
But the Don and Magdalena,
They can go there when they will!
Yes, weekly from Southampton,
Great steamers, white and gold,
Go rolling down to Rio
(Roll down—roll down to Rio!)
And I’d like to roll to Rio
Some day before I’m old!
I’ve never seen a Jaguar,
Nor yet an armadill—
O dilloing in his armour,
And I s’pose I never will,
Unless I go to Rio
These wonders to behold—
Roll down—roll down to Rio—
Roll really down to Rio!
Oh, I’d love to roll to Rio
Some day before I’m old!
Within minutes, Hilly emerged, tentative and wary. Had the words struck a buried childhood memory? His robe was clutched tight around him, armor against an assault. At the living-room doorway, his glance caromed from corner to comer. Larry read without pause.
At length Hilly circled the room. Reaching the daybed, he lowered himself and lay with legs pulled up, arms still clinging to himself.
Larry and Juliet began to read aloud to Hilly daily. Some days he ventured forth to listen, many days he did not. One could neither explain nor anticipate. On those days when Hilly emerged and listened with tolerance, Juliet felt girlish exhilaration, as if a reluctant beau had shown her attention.
One day, she told Nell, she had giggled with joy at his presence, then glanced quickly to see if that had frightened him. Making a mental note—it’s all right to giggle—she had turned the page and continued.
From a large and stiff envelope, Nell extracted a photograph and accompanying letter.
Dear Mrs. Stillman,
We were saddened to hear of Hilly’s problems and gladdened to know the delight and comfort your son had in our boy’s friendship. Thank you for copying out lines from Hilly’s letters. I believe they will bring some solace to Sylvester’s mother.
Mrs. Benjamin is still recovering from our boy’s death. We lost an eight-year-old daughter to malaria when Sylvester was twelve, so this loss has felled my wife.
We would both be interested to hear of Hilly’s progress. From what we learned of him from “Silly,” he is an extraordinary lad.
Yours truly,
Sylvester Benjamin Sr.
Silly’s photo showed him as Hilly had described: a big, brawny boy with a winning smile. When Nell handed it to Hilly, he kissed it and fell on his bed weeping and laughing.
In the fall, when Nell returned to her classroom, Hilly had been home about seven months.
“Eudora or I will check on Hilly in the afternoons,” Juliet said. “He does love being read to. Settles him, don’t you think?”
Good women.
Eudora had been reading aloud from Little Lord Fauntleroy. Listening, Hilly hung his head, physically upset that a boy—just because he was a lord—could be taken from his home in America and sent to live in England. Eudora further bewildered him by try
ing to explain titles and ascendancy.
In November, she began teaching Hilly to read. He was less enthusiastic about reading than being read to, but Eudora thought that he should have the rudiments. Besides, she was in her element, carting in books from her son’s early school years, plus a thick album she herself had put together, each page containing a picture and beneath the picture a word printed in India ink. Hilly could not yet sound out words intelligibly but he was learning to associate printed words with shapes and colors and sounds.
His sleep, however, continued to explode in nightmares. When she heard him cry out, Nell rushed to his room and held him. On a night early in January 1920, he screamed, “Silly, Silly!” over and over.
“You have no idea the stories I’m hearing,” Aunt Martha said a week later. “They can’t all be lies. Hillyard’s going to get you into trouble, my girl.”
“I won’t put him in St. Peter.”
Aunt Martha hadn’t moved from her spot just inside the apartment door. “I’ve tried to be helpful, but my patience is at an end. That boy will disgrace the Stillman name.”
“When did you ever try to be helpful, Martha? When Herbert died and you brought ground-cherry jam?”
“I’ll hire a lawyer.”
“That’s your privilege.” Nell wasn’t concerned. The woman was too tight with her purse for that.
Weary, John said, “Dear woman, I don’t understand you. You’re afraid of the stories she’ll spread, yet you won’t consider going to Washington. You and Hilly.” Home for Easter week, he stood beside her at the stove, an arm around her waist.
Water was on the boil, and Nell moved John aside to pour it into the waiting pot, nodding toward Hilly, standing in the doorway. “Not in front of Hilly,” she said, and the subject was dropped. But John was silent during their tea, not quite reachable.
Dinner out of the way, John built up the dwindling fire in the cookstove with fresh wood from the stack behind the building. Nell studied him as he worked, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. He was the man nearly every unmarried woman prayed for—loving, gentle, intelligent. She set aside the chemise she was mending. Folding the garment, she hesitated, choosing her words: “I’m a conventional woman with a damaged son.”
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse Page 19
