That night, you Googled Barry’s name and found nothing. So many years had passed; who’d remember? Where would Barry’s name have been preserved? He seemed to have never existed. You remembered back in ’75, when word had quietly come that his parents had moved away, some new job or escape from worries. But now, so long after, people would remember him. You lay down in bed against your sleeping wife and felt the powerful promise of the simplicity, and the real facts of your life.
But your conversation had apparently given Dennis the peace not to speak, or perhaps he had simply died before he had a chance. No one told you anything. After a long stretch of months in which a tap did not come to your door, you went to the online obituaries and saw that he was gone. You checked on Father Shea, and he too had passed years before. Your younger daughter walked in the room, said you looked weird, and walked out. By dinner, you were who you were again.
Later on that year, your mother succumbed, the story of the missing bedsheet forever silenced. Back in town to close the house, you now did not venture into the dark woods. You and your sisters sorted things out and renewed bonds. You promised to stay in touch, knowing you probably would not.
That evening, at a hotel by the airport, you watched local TV. To your shock, you saw a vaguely familiar face. A woman, real estate. She was the girl, from all those years before. You’d nearly forgotten her name. She was, like you, an aging person. Now she sold high-end real estate and seemed to have had at least some ineffectual cosmetic surgery. She had a horsey, drawn face, and wore a giant rock on her left ring finger. Did she ever think of Barry? He’d only been a boy who made her promises then went off hitchhiking, leaving her out of his adventure. You wondered about it as you tried to sleep.
You flew home and idly considered the third of you, Jeff, somewhere out there with the other half of your secret, the last person with the power to tell. You sat on your deck and drank some wine and watched the sunset over the Pacific. Another day elapsed between you and that night. You had come to this place, imprisoned by what you were, what you had done, never able fully to be inside the life you made. You imagined how you would feel to just live.
The irony of getting away with something was that you were your own keeper. You were the executioner: In a pang of remorse you could just open your mouth and change your life. You felt almost as if you would. But, greedy, you always wanted to savor one more day, even as that day turned leaden with a memory that no longer went away. It could not be put aside as it was your senior year of high school, when something that had happened six months before may as well have never happened at all. Who were you? How did you find the way to make it just not be? Now, an older man, you decided that if the time came, to tell, you would edit Dennis and Jeff from the story, a small act of charity.
The vast ocean shimmered below you, endless expanses in which things could be effortlessly hidden, even as what you looked at was only a knife’s edge to the greater stretches past the distant horizon. Even as the silver surface only whispered of the dark depths, the things you could not see. This was your life now, orderly, calm. This was how things were now. Clean. You knew you would sleep as well as one might be expected to, all of us with our own given histories.
My Name Is Percy Atkins
1. A more immediate observation of a vintage wallflower
The air-conditioning is already getting a bit dodgy. On this fall evening, 1968, Tampa, in the clubhouse of the Ocean Breeze Apartment Community, the air comes out leaden and sweaty, and Percy needs to take purposeful and conscious breaths, deep down. The perfume is absolutely bloody stifling, too many florid old ladies packed into too small a space.
He stands at the edges of it all, where the checkerboard linoleum meets the woodgrain paneling, where the metal folding chairs are placed with liberal room in between for the wheelchair people, where everyone is old and where he may be the last one who still feels the same boyish anxiety that goes with the thought of actually approaching a female, even at a retirement-community square dance.
He wears a tag that is pinned to his shirt, over the heart. The tag already has the MY NAME IS . . . printed on it, and the community center calligraphy class has filled in the name in flamboyant hand: Percy Atkins. He is dressed in a cowboy shirt (white yoke over salmon body, no fringes but pearl-like snap buttons, bolo tie with a turquoise setting, chinos, slip-on deck shoes, and a straw cowboy hat with a red trim, something the dime-store cashier might have thought he was buying for a grandchild. He has no grandchildren or children, and he has lived in Ocean Breeze for only a few months. He’s been in Tampa for nearly ten years. He was widowed not even a year ago and he had finally decided he could not bear the house alone. Now he’s damned near afraid to go out.
Ocean Breeze is made up of the central clubhouse/pool complex, from which six long buildings radiate like spokes, each of those spokes a train-like procession of small efficiency apartments, a blacktop parking lot out beyond, encircling the place like the tire on the wheel. He has mostly stayed inside since arriving here. Early in the mornings, he drives in his Buick Special to his old neighborhood, where he can walk the familiar streets and then onto the nearby city golf course, where he is not an unfamiliar figure, where he will not be asked to leave, and where the occasional errant shot bouncing toward him helps him know he can move lightly when he must.
He is a compact man, and lean, the waist still at twenty-eight inches but the chest much shrunken from what it was in his working days. He’s lived in the States for more than fifty years. He’s taken an American wife and now he’s buried her, and what were once yearly trips back to England (all-night train to New York and a Cunard liner across) having first been infrequent and then not at all as Martha became more unsteady.
Percy Atkins coughs, thinking about that. About him, of all people, surviving his wife. That one was a complete surprise. He never thought he’d be approaching something, in his dotage, resembling dating.
2. Various recollected unpleasantnesses, often repeated
1916: The smell of the dank wool is the most curious connection to home. His whole life, that wet musky scent that is walking in the Sheffield rain, on muddy roads; the smell of horse and ale and hay; the smell of sodden childhood. His boots sink to the ankles and he slogs on, shivering, the skin taut beneath the wool underwear and wool uniform and rucksack. This is the farthest end of the world for a boy from Britain: France. The oozing roads, the fulsome language he cannot disentangle. The puzzle of the terrain on which his column marches, heading for the front alongside a convoy of lorries.
He volunteered for this, as all the boys of his neighborhood, the “Pals” who have been called upon by Lord Kitchener to serve. His unit, the 2nd Barnsley Pals, have fallen in behind the Accrington Pals, with the Fusiliers ahead of them. There is a sense of giddiness in them all, the kind of laughing and sarcasm that is easy to boys who know each other well, the long tedium of the march being broken up by the transmuting cliques and rivalries, the idle boasts and challenges to same. Much seems to revolve around arm wrestling or drinking contests. They’ve carried many of the old grudges all the way to the front—the competed-for girls, the lost football games, the schoolyard fights. Percy can’t get comfortable. He is not one to be chatty in any event.
June and the rains are unceasing. They march with long woolen coats on, making the day all the more stifling. They will make camp in late afternoon, and they will sit as the smell of the stew begins to waft across the cheerless fields. They will play cards and write letters.
The lice embed in the skull, the skin is unwashed for many days’ time, his wispy beard itching under the helmet strap, and the stomach aching for more than what is given after a day’s march with a four-stone pack. But who is he to complain? Everybody’s putting up with it.
3. Sad revelations acknowledged at a certain point in one’s life
There is never enough money, and likewise never enough room. It is 1938 and he has turned forty and they still live in that third-floor apartment up under the eaves in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is careful with their money. There is a Depression on. Most of his mild wealth