All the Days and Nights (24 page)

“Yes, I remember,” Leo said.

“And do you remember how much it cost me afterward to have them fixed?” Haller said as he left the room and went down the hall. If he hadn’t gone to the kitchen for matches he wouldn’t have known about the plate that Renée was keeping warm in the oven. It was eight-thirty by the kitchen clock. Renée was sitting at the kitchen table. Her normally kinky hair was shining with pomade and hanging in straight bangs about her face. He saw the plate in the oven and said, “Who’s
that
for?” She giggled mysteriously, and he opened his eyes wide in astonishment. “Tonight?” he exclaimed, and at that moment the doorbell rang.

By the time Haller got to the front hall, Francis Whitehead was inside,
and Abbie and Nathan and Leo each had a piece of him, and were trying to go off somewhere with it. He put his little zipper bag down and then grinned at them. “A soldier,” he said. And what a soldier. “Everything I’ve got on is several sizes too large for me,” he said. “And I’ve lost ten pounds.” With his hair clipped close to his skull he looked mistreated and ill. Haller was shocked.

“I’ve got till Tuesday,” Francis said, rocking happily on his heels. “I’ve got thirty-six and a half more hours to do with exactly as I like. What do you think of my World War One pants?”

“They’re lovely,” Abbie said.

“Did you know he was coming?” Nathan and Leo were asking each other. “Did you know, Haller?”

“No,” Haller said. “Renée is the only one who knew about it. All I was hoping for was that he’d call up.”

“I called yesterday morning,” Francis explained. “I picked a time when I was sure you’d all be out.”

“That Renée,” Abbie said, and began pulling him away from the others. “Have you eaten?”

Francis shook his head.

“Renée’s got the whole dinner saved for you,” Haller said.

Pushing and bumping into each other, they followed Francis Whitehead through the hall and the serving pantry into the kitchen. At the sight of them, the black woman turned her head away and laughed.

“Renée, you’re wonderful!” Francis said, and threw his arms around her and hugged her. Then he sat down at the place she had just now set for him at the kitchen table. Abbie and Nathan drew up a stool and both of them perched on it, unsteadily. Leo sat on the kitchen stepladder. Haller paced back and forth, unable to settle anywhere, and asked questions that nobody paid any attention to. Francis looked at his plate heaped with chicken and creamed potatoes and asparagus and said, “I haven’t seen food like this in so long. In the Army you never get a whole anything — just pieces of something. I dream about having a whole lamb chop.” They were waiting to see him raise his fork to his mouth and he did, but then he put it down, with the food still on it. “I must go speak to your mother,” he said, and got up and left the kitchen.

“How like him,” Haller said, “to leave us all sitting here admiring his empty chair!”

• • •

W
HEN
they couldn’t get Francis to eat any more they tried to put him to bed but he curled up on the sofa in Abbie’s room, with the other boys sitting on the floor as close to him as they could get, and he talked till one o’clock in the morning. He began with the group that had left Grand Central Station together. He described their clothes, and what they said, and how they acted. How the boy from Brooklyn who sat opposite him on the train nearly drove him crazy by reading a furniture ad in the
Daily News
over and over. He told them about the induction center: about the psychological examination, which consisted of hitting you on the kneecap and asking, “Any nervous disorders in your family, buddy?”; about the medical examination, which was perfunctory but nevertheless took hours, in a place so jammed with naked inductees that there was nowhere to stand without touching somebody. And how, one by one and still naked, they were started down the length of a long room while voices called out the sizes of shoes, socks, shorts, shirts, trousers, and they found themselves at the other end, fully clothed and outfitted in four minutes.

He didn’t really mind being continually pushed and shoved, herded from place to place, and sworn at. After all, it was the Army. It was not a school picnic. What he couldn’t stand, as the day wore on, was the misery that he saw everywhere he looked. A great many of the men were younger than he was, and they became so worn out finally that they lost all hope and leaned against the wall in twos and threes, with the tears streaming down their faces. Eventually, he worked himself into such a fury that he began to shake all over, and a tough Irish sergeant came up to him and put both arms around him and said, “Wait a minute, buddy. You’re all right. Take it easy, why don’t you?” in the kindest voice Francis had ever heard in his life.

But the strangest thing was the continual pairing off, all day long — on the train, at the induction center, at the camp, where, long after midnight, you found yourself still instinctively looking around for somebody to cling to, and look after. Somebody you’d never laid eyes on before that day became, for two hours, closer than any friend you’d ever had. When you were separated, your whole concern was for him — for what might be happening to him. While you had one person to look after, among the crowd, you were not totally lost yourself. When the two of you were separated for good, you looked around and there was someone in obvious desperation, and so the whole thing happened all over again.

When they arrived in camp, somebody talked back to a sergeant who was not Irish, and he said, “All right, you sons of bitches, you can just
wait.” And they did, from midnight until one-thirty, when they were marched two miles in what proved to be the wrong direction and three miles back, before they sat down, at 2.15 a.m., in a mess hall, before a plate of food they couldn’t look at, let alone eat. All through the next day it continued — the feeling that each thing was a little more than you could stand. And the pairing off. But the next day was better. And the third day they began to relax and settle into their ordinary selves.…

Of the three boys sitting on the floor in front of Francis Whitehead, listening to him gravely, Leo was still too young for military service, Nathan had drawn a high number and didn’t expect to be called before September or October, and Haller was 4-F because of his bad eyes. Most of the things Francis told them they knew already, from what they had read in newspapers and magazines. It was his voice that made the experience real to them. The voice of the survivor. And here and there a detail that they couldn’t have imagined. And because it happened to Francis, whom all three of them loved.

When Haller went home, Nathan and Leo put up the overflow cot in their room, and Abbie brought sheets from the linen closet, and a blanket and pillow from the other bed in her room. The boys knocked on the wall when they were in bed, and she came back to say good night. Nathan was sleeping on the cot, Francis was in Nathan’s bed, and Leo in his own. After she had turned out the light and gone back to her own room she could hear them talking together, through the wall. The talking stopped while she was brushing her hair, and then there was no sound but Francis’s coughing.

She was almost asleep when the kitten commenced complaining from the box on the floor. She had entirely forgotten about it in the excitement of Francis’s homecoming. “A little chloroform for you, my pet,” she said, “first thing in the morning,” and rolled over on her back. I’m twenty-five, she thought. Finally. Thanks to one thing and another, including Haller and his “Oceanides.”

Then she thought about Haller — about her grievance against him, which was that he went on courting her year after year, as if faithfulness, the
idea
of love, was the answer to everything, and had no instinct that told him when she was willing and when she couldn’t bear to have him touch her. Why, when he was so intelligent, was he also so stupid — for she did like him, and sometimes even felt that she could love him.

As for Francis, it was as Haller had said. Nothing that happens over and over is pure accident; and what they (and God knows how many
other people) were faced with, at the critical moment, was his empty chair.

Out of habit, her mother referred to them as “the children,” and it was only too true. She and Nathan and Leo. And Haller.
And
Francis. They were all five aiming the croquet ball anywhere but at the wicket, and playing the darling game of being not quite old enough to button their overcoats and find their mittens. But for how long?
For ever
, the curtain said, blowing in from the open window. But what did the curtain know about it?

The kitten was quiet, but the coughing continued on the other side of the wall. Listening in the dark, she decided that Francis didn’t have enough covers on. If he had another blanket, he’d stop coughing and go to sleep. She could not get to the extra covers without disturbing her mother and father, and so she took the blanket from her own bed, slipped a wrapper on, and went into the boys’ room. All three of them were asleep, but Francis woke up when she put the blanket over him. He didn’t seem to know where he was at first, and then she gathered from his sleepy mumbling that he didn’t want her to go away. When she sat down, he wormed around in the bed until his thighs were against her back and his forehead touched her knee. There he stayed, without moving, without any pressure coming from his body at all. This time it was not the empty chair but a drowned man washed up against a rock in the sea.

T
HE
elephantine Volkswagen bus didn’t belong to the French landscape. Compared to the Peugeots and Renaults and Citroëns that overtook it so casually, it seemed an oddity. So was the family riding in it. When they went through towns people turned and stared, but nothing smaller would have held the five of them and their luggage, and the middle-aged American who was driving was not happy at the wheel of any automobile. This particular automobile he loathed. There was no room beyond the clutch pedal. To push it down to the floor he had to turn his foot sidewise, and his knee ached all day long from this unnatural position. “Have I got enough room on my right?” he asked continually, though he had been driving the Volkswagen for two weeks now. “Oh God!” he would exclaim. “There’s a man on a bicycle.” For he was suffering from a recurring premonition:
In the narrow street of some village, though he was taking every human precaution, suddenly he heard a hideous crunch under the right rear wheel. He stopped the car and with a sinking heart got out and made himself look at the twisted bicycle frame and the body lying on the cobblestones
.… A dozen times a day John Reynolds could feel his face responding to the emotions of this disaster, which he was convinced was actually going to happen. It was only a matter of when. And where. Sometimes the gendarmes came and took him away, and at other times he managed to extricate himself by thinking of something else. At odds with all this, making his life bearable, was another scene — the moment in the airport at Dinard when he would turn the keys over to the man from the car-rental agency and be free of this particular nightmare forever.

Dorothy Reynolds, sitting on the front seat beside her husband, loved the car because she could see out of it in all directions. Right this minute she asked for nothing more than to be driving through the French countryside.
Her worries, which were real and not, like his, imaginary, had been left behind, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She could only vaguely remember what they were.

“In France,” she said, “nothing is really ugly, because everything is so bare.”

“In some ways I like England better,” he said.

“It’s more picturesque, but it isn’t as beautiful. Look at that grey hill town with those dark clouds towering above it,” she said, turning around to the two older girls in the seat directly behind her. And then silently scolded herself, because she was resolved not to say “Look!” all the time but to let the children use their own eyes to find what pleased them. The trouble was, their eyes did not see what hers did, or, it often seemed, anything at all.

This was not, strictly speaking, true. Reynolds’s niece, Linda Porter, had 20/20 vision, but instead of scattering her attention on the landscape she saved it for what she had heard about — the Eiffel Tower, for example — and for the mirror when she was dressing. She was not vain, and neither was she interested in arousing the interest of any actual boy, though boys and men looked at her wherever she went. Her ash-blond hair had been washed and set the night before, her cuticles were flawless, her rose-pink nail polish was without a scratch, her skirt was arranged under her delightful young bottom in such a way that it would not wrinkle, her hand satchel was crammed with indispensable cosmetics, her charm bracelet was the equal of that of any of her contemporaries, but she was feeling forlorn. She had not wanted to leave the hotel in Concarneau, which was right on the water, and she could swim and then lie in the sun, when there was any, and she had considered the possibility of getting a job as a waitress so she could spend the rest of her life there, only her father would never let her do it. She had also considered whether or not she was in love with the waiter in charge of their table in the dining room, who was young and good-looking and from Marseilles; when a leaf of lettuce leaped out of the salad bowl, he said
“Zut!”
and kicked it under the table. He asked her to play tennis with him, but unfortunately she hadn’t brought her own racquet and he didn’t have an extra one. Also, it turned out he was married.

How strange that she should be sitting side by side with someone for whom mirrors did not reflect anything whatever. Alison Reynolds, who was eleven and a half, considered the hours when she was not reading
largely wasted. “If Dantès has had lunch,” she once confided to her father, “then I have had lunch. Otherwise I don’t know whether I’ve eaten or not.” With a note of sadness in her voice, because no matter how vivid and all-consuming the book was, or how long, sooner or later she finished it, and was stranded once more in ordinariness until she had started another. She couldn’t read in the car because it made her feel queer. She was very nearsighted, and by the time she had found her glasses and put them on, the blur her mother and father wanted her to look at had been left behind. All châteaux interested her, and anything that had anything to do with Jeanne d’Arc, or with Marie Antoinette. Or Marguerite de Valois. Or Louise de La Vallière.