That was when Alice and Sissy came in. "Mommie, Alice and me are going to have tea on the porch."
"Alice and I," Alice said.
"Not just yet. Come here and say hello to my friend Angie, Mrs.... What is your name now?"
"Tyler," Angie said absently.
"Mrs. Tyler. Mrs. Tyler and I were friends before you were born."
Sissy came up and looked at the baby carefully. He was a good baby, quiet and settled like she had been.
"She's so big," Angie whispered. "I never thought she'd be so big already."
"You'll see," Rose said. "That's the way it goes."
"Maybe we should go on outside," Alice said. "What do you say, give the grown-ups some time to talk."
"Wait a minute," Angie said. She gave Duane to Rose and got down on the kitchen floor on her knees. She took the barrette out of Sissy's hair and smoothed it down with her fingers, then clipped the barrette back into place. "There," she said. Her voice was shaking a little. "Now you look better."
Sissy touched her hair.
"What do you say?" Rose said.
"Thank you," Sissy said. She looked at Duane again. "Bye, baby." She started to go and then stopped, suddenly remembering why she had come in in the first place. "Can I sleep with Alice tonight?"
"Here?" I said. "All night?"
"It's okay," Alice said.
"No," I said. "I don't want you over here all night."
"Sister Bernadette said yes. She said yes if it was just once," Sissy said.
"Fine," Rose said. "As long as Alice doesn't mind."
Alice and Sissy went out through the back door and Angie stayed on the floor for a few more minutes. I turned to say something to Rose, but Angie beat me to it. "I never thought about her getting big like that," she said, but not really to anyone. Then she shook her head and smiled at Rose. "She must look just like Thomas, 'cause she sure doesn't look a thing like you."
The words hung in the air for a minute, and none of us knew for sure what to say. Rose turned her face toward the baby, but I don't think she saw him. Then finally Duane started to fuss a little and Angie took him back and everything went back to the way it was before.
"I'll let you two alone," I said. "I know you have a lot of catching up to do."
"It was good to see you," Angie said. "I think about you, Son. You were so nice to me, that night you drove me to the hospital. I never thanked you for that."
"Don't think about that," I said, but I didn't just mean that. I meant everything. Don't think about any of it. I kissed her again and touched the baby's cheek and headed outside, back out to the field to pick up the branches of the sycamore tree.
All the way there I heard his name. It was better before, when I didn't know his name.
Angie and Rose stayed late in the kitchen that night and Sissy was with Alice and I went home and felt sorry for myself. Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy and over the last five years I had forgotten how. I started to pull out the couch to make up Cecilia's bed, and then saw what I was doing and felt foolish. I decided I would build her a bedroom as soon as I was sure the spring rains were over. Her own room on the side of the house. She was getting too big for sleeping on the couch and as little as any of us were home we never saw the sense in moving. I didn't like being home without her, and I was mad at Rose for letting her go so easy.
I heated up some soup for dinner and ate it standing up next to the sink. Then I washed my bowl and went on to bed.
When Rose came in I woke up, even though she was trying to be quiet. "Is it late?" I asked her. I was glad I was up, I wanted to tell her about Sissy, that she should care a little bit about where she was spending the night.
"Not too bad," she said. "Midnight."
"Angie's driving back this late?"
"She called Duane, she told him she was having fun so he told her to stay awhile." Rose's voice sounded light and girlish. I watched her take her dress off in the dark. She sat down beside me on the edge of the bed, wearing her panties and a bra. "We had such a good time," she said, and put her hand over my hand. "I had forgotten how nice it was to have—" but she didn't finish her sentence. She ran her hand absently up and down my arm. "Did you miss me?" she said. "I did."
"That's good to know." She looked at me lying in the bed. She ran her finger up my arm and down the center of my chest. "I said good night to Cecilia. I tucked her in. Alice's roommate had her baby, so Cecilia had her own bed. She said, tell Daddy good night." She put both hands flat out on my chest and leaned toward me. I watched her breasts curve down into her bra. I watched the way they moved with her breath. I thought of how I had been alone a few hours before and now here Rose was, with her hair falling forward on her face, close enough that I could smell the warmth of her. I put my hand back behind her neck and brought her face to mine.
So many girls came and went over the years, after a while it seemed like everybody only stayed for a few days. You get one of their names, and the next time you think to ask someone says she's been gone two weeks already. I wished I was better at this. I used to be.
Alice managed to slow time down. We all got used to her, came to like having her around. But by June it was clear she wasn't going to be there much longer. I tried to tell Sissy, Alice tried. We explained to her about the baby and that when it came Alice would have to go just like everybody else, but Sissy wouldn't hear it. It was summer and she was running all over the place. It was hot that first week in June and Alice had to stay inside near a fan. The weather made her sick, her ankles were swollen. She was sad in her last weeks, as if she suddenly understood after all that time what she was there for. Sometimes when she watched Sissy from the window she looked like she was going to cry, even though Alice wasn't the kind of girl you'd think of as crying.
"I want you to have my parents' address," she said to me one afternoon. "Write me a letter every once in a while and let me know how she's doing. This place is hell," she said, printing out the street name on the back of an envelope. "Who would of thought I'd want to stay on?"
Alice left in the middle of that same night with Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena.
Rose and I talked it over at breakfast. "We have to tell her now," Rose said, "before she starts asking where she is."
I twisted a napkin up in my hands. "She's going to be so hurt."
"It's not you hurting her. It's not anybody hurting her. This is the way things go around here."
Sissy came in and looked around. "I can't find Alice," she said.
"Come here," Rose said. Sissy came over to the table, and Rose pulled her up into her lap. "Alice had her baby last night."
Sissy's face lit up. "When are we going to see it?"
"We can't," Rose said. "Alice is gone. You knew that she would have to leave once the baby was born."
"She's coming back," Sissy said.
"She can't, sweetie. That's the way the nest works. You knew that."
Sissy looked horrified, like you do the first time you lose something in your life, the first time you understand that things can be lost. "She's upstairs," Sissy said, and was up in a flash, but I caught her with one wide sweep of my arm. She buried her face in my chest and cried, worse than she had as a baby, worse than she ever did with a fever. Her back heaved up again and again against my shirt and I rocked her and made clucking sounds. "Alice isn't gone," she sobbed.
"Alice is fine," I said. "She's A-number-one-okay. She just had to go with the baby." I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
"I want her to come back," she cried.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I want my mother," she cried.
"Here I am, baby," Rose said. "I'm right here."
But when Sissy looked at her she turned her face away. "No," she said, crying like it was the end of all the earth. "I want my mother."
4
I TRIED TO STAY in the marines after I was shot. It was almost like somewhere in the back of my mind I knew
that things would be worse, even worse than the hospital and doctors, once I got home. The bullet and the knee were nothing compared to what was coming. Remember, this was 1942, when everyone was going off to war, and the ones who came back to their hometowns wounded or crippled came back that way because they'd been fighting, not because they were screwing around on a marine base in the middle of the night.
So the first thing I said when I woke up in the hospital was, how long before I'm healed up and you can ship me over? It was stupid, because I knew the second that gun went off there wasn't going to be any war as far as I was concerned. The military takes their time in these sorts of things. Even when they knew how it was all going to go as clear as I did, they waited a couple of extra weeks to make sure. Or maybe they forgot for a while and then remembered. But finally I got the word and it was medical discharge. The hospital was pretty much empty. I had a whole ward to myself. It was so early in the war, guys hadn't been shipped back yet. I lied. I told them I had a feeling that when this thing healed up I was going to be good as new, so why didn't they just keep me around awhile and let me do what I could.
The marines may be slow to make up their minds, but once they do they never changed them. Even if I healed up all the way, they said, the chance of reinjury was too great. The hole in my knee was something that I'd have with me, to one degree or another, for the rest of my life.
And that was true, 'cause my foot turned in some and gave me a limp, but it doesn't bother me now unless the cold turns bitter. Even then, I don't think about it. I know there's some pain in my knee, but I never stop and think about where it came from.
I was entitled to a disability check. Seventeen dollars a month.
My parents drove all the way to South Carolina to pick me up. It took four marines to get me into the back of the station wagon, my leg stuck out straight. One of them was Perry, from the bunk next to mine. All the guys had been real good about coming to see me in the hospital.
"I know it doesn't seem like it now," Perry said, "but it'll turn out that you're the one that's lucky. You wait and see, the rest of us will go over there and get shot in places a whole lot worse than the knee."
"Don't say that," I told him. "This is good luck for all of you. Now one of us has been shot, the rest of you stiffs get off scot-free."
Perry asked me if I'd write to him every now and then. He didn't say it, but I knew it was because he didn't get a lot of mail, and I did write to him, pretty regular, until he was killed in forty-five. He survived several landings in the Pacific, but his luck ran out on Okinawa. He stood at the gates of the base and waved good-bye as I drove away with my parents.
"Everybody at home's been worried sick about you," my mother said. "It was in all the papers, even in Nashville. That boy, Bill Lovell—"
"Don't," I said.
"That's the last person he wants to talk about," my father said.
"It isn't that," I said. "It's just it was an accident, is all." I looked out the window and remembered everything we passed from the bus ride coming up. I hadn't even been gone long enough to forget the landscape. "There's no sense looking to place blame."
"Cecilia'll be awful glad to see you," my mother said.
"I got her letters."
"She said she was going to wait at our house until you got home, that she'd stay there all night if she had to."
I wanted to see Cecilia. I wanted to press my face into her hair and close my eyes. That was the part that made it all so crazy. Here I'd been waiting all this time to go away so I could get back and marry her and now I was coming back and I didn't want to be. It wasn't that I didn't want to marry her, I did more than ever. But I felt like I'd let her down, her personally, by getting shot in Parris Island instead of some island in the Pacific. I was never such a fool that I didn't know it was my enlisting that made her want me. We had a deal in a way, even if neither of us came out and said it. You make me proud and I'll be yours. Now that I wouldn't be living up to my half, I wondered if she was planning on living up to hers.
"You suppose she'll still want to go through with the whole thing?" I said.
"The wedding?" my father said.
"The wedding, sure, what with all of this."
My mother craned around in her seat so she could see me. "Oh, Son, you don't know what she's been through. You don't know how she's cried. We've all had our doubts about Cecilia, but I can tell you, things are different now."
"It's all made her grow up a lot," my father said.
"You wait and see," my mother said. "That's one thing you won't have to worry about."
I leaned my head against the backseat window and closed my eyes. Me and Cecilia getting married. I believed them, you know, I really did.
When we got home it was nearly three in the morning. It was a little harder getting out of the car than it was getting into it, on account of the fact there were no marines around to give us a hand, but we did it and I was up on my crutches and standing in front of my house. That's what I remember, trying to get up those steps the first time. I came into the living room and Cecilia was asleep on the sofa and I felt like it had been years since I'd seen her and for a minute I was glad about the way everything had gone because it meant I was getting to look at her asleep.
My mother went over and shook her shoulder gently and said, look who's here. Cecilia sat up and smiled faintly and looked around like she didn't know what she was supposed to be looking for. "Son," she said, almost surprised. "You're home."
I nodded, too glad and tired and miserable to say anything. She got up and put her arms around my waist and held me, and my parents stood and smiled. She felt warm, like a blanket wrapped around you in one place. Then my mother drove her home to her own house, her own bed, and my father helped me up the stairs to mine.
I hadn't been gone ten weeks, but when I woke up the next morning from a dream of Billy Lovell crying over me in the dirt, 1 felt too old to be in that room again. Nothing had changed, my high school pennant and one from Vanderbilt, the maple bed, the red bedspread, the rug and the curtains and Cecilia's junior class picture framed on the nightstand. I'm not saying I'd grown up so much since I'd been gone, though I had some to be sure. It was more that I didn't think I'd be back this way. I was going off to war and now the room was someplace I was supposed to visit and not live. I would come home from the war and marry Cecilia and we would live in a house of our own, a double bed, pots and pans, a radio. It was past ten o'clock, I had slept so late. I thought of all the guys, having run already, through with breakfast, and drilling on the grinder by now.
My mother knocked once on the door and then came in and sat on the edge of my bed. "You sleep all right?" she said.
I nodded. "Yourself?"
"Fine, having you back." She patted my hand. "I have some good news. I called Mr. Franklin, the principal, last week, once we knew for sure when you were coming back, and he said you can come back to school. The teachers will help you make up the work you've missed so that you can graduate on time. Truth is, they probably won't make you do all of it. He didn't come right out and say that, but it was the feeling I got."
"I can't go back to school," I said, not even thinking about it.
"Why not? You're home now."
"I'm too old to go back to high school."
"That's ridiculous," my mother said, standing up. "You aren't any older than you were when you left. You won't be any older than any of your friends. You'll graduate with your class, Son, right on time. You're going to have to make the best of what's happened."
But my friends, Joe Logan and Gary Allbrittan and Randy Todd, would all be gone. They left when I did, or a few days after. By the end of the year pretty much everyone had signed up. "I'll think about it," I said.
"There isn't anything to think about," she said. "Now come on and get up and get dressed. Cecilia called and she'll be here before too long. Do you need help?"
"No. Why isn't she in school?"
"It's Saturday," she said
, and shut the door.
I struggled around with my clothes for a while, but it was all a little harder than I thought it would be. I was used to the nurses being there. Once you get over feeling embarrassed all the time you can see they're a whole lot of help. My leg liked being left alone, me on my back, it up on pillows, and no more movement than whatever breezes came through the room. The business of getting up and getting my clothes and twisting myself around trying to get into them set off a pain I hadn't felt in weeks. I sat back down on the bed and lifted the heavy cast up with both hands. I looked at it, lying there on the unmade bed. It wasn't my leg at all.
Then my father came in and he looked at it too. "Come on," he said, and he looped one of my arms over his neck and pulled me up slow. "Girlfriend's coming over," he said. "We might ought to get you in a tub first." My father was a big man, though not as big as I turned out to be. That year he would have been thirty-nine, since he was only twenty-two when I was born. It's something, to remember my father young like that, knowing I'm so much older now than he was on that day. We crowded into the bathroom, him and me and my cast, and he shut the door.
"Don't think I don't have any idea what I'm doing," he said, pulling my pajama top over my head. "I gave you plenty of baths in your day. Course, that was all a long time ago." He leaned over and turned on the water, slipping the little rubber stopper into place. He kept checking the temperature with his wrist. "Sit down here," he said, and eased me down onto the edge of the tub. "We don't want a lot of water."
The room must have felt good, it must have been warm, with the heat on and the steam from the bath and two grown men, but the only thing I remember feeling was ashamed. I don't know why now, because it was only my father, but at that moment I had let him down, too. Sitting half naked on the edge of the bathtub I wanted to cover myself. "I think I can take it from here," I said.
My father stepped back to get a good look at the whole picture. He was a contractor, he knew how things worked. "I can see you getting in okay, but I can't see you being able to get out."