He is past forty and she’s just a bit younger. They remain up under the eaves waiting for something to happen. But there will be no discussion of the fact that nothing has happened, nor likely will happen. He comes home from the mill and sits in his chair and reads the evening newspaper, and after dinner they might listen to the radio. At night she sleeps as his coughs rumble up, up from other lives, but never extinguished, one guttural hack that arcs through the entirety of adult life.
Tonight is like all the others. They’ve just eaten dinner and he has settled into his overstuffed chair, that one prized possession, to read his evening paper. He keeps up with the troubles on the other side, this growing new war. It is stunning that this is to be. The memory of The Great War is an unshakable constancy for him, descending in his dreams or simply as a thought that rides on with him, like clouds in the sky of his life. This Depression keeps one’s ruminations more immediate. Everyone is struggling.
He is in the middle of his life and he has felt its long skein of easy concession. Even in the twenties, when others were doing well, he was only finding his way, first to Toronto, where the Canadian veterans had no work, then to Massachusetts, to the mill. When most of those others were brought down by the Crash, his only consolation was that he didn’t have too far to fall. When he and Martha now find themselves childless in middle age, they are neither fully surprised nor disappointed.
“We probably didn’t have the money for it,” Martha says.
“Probably not,” he says.
“We have our life . . . this one,” she says, and he can only nod.
“It’s not your fault,” she says, and he doesn’t nod at all.
4. The suggestion of a mild but potentially troublesome situation
The outer edges of the clubhouse recreation room are mostly peopled by the infirm and truly aged, not the healthy aged. It is a fact of this generation and also of medicine that Percy Atkins is one of a very small number of ambulant, lucid men in this “community,” while conversely there seem to be untold numbers of preternaturally healthy female septuagenarians who barrel around the place with the kind of energy that sends unceasing loads of brownies north to grandchildren and keep the gardens of Ocean Breeze so perfect the flowers have begun to look artificial. They all say “Hi!”—that big American “hi” he hasn’t completely gotten used to in all these years. They have sun-splotched, lined faces under whimsical sunbonnets and hair hued as idiosyncratically as their beloved varietals, any color you want, any version. They chatter from the lawn chairs that they cluster along the covered breezeway leading from each front door to the scorching parking lot with its sponge-like asphalt. They retreat after lunch to their blasting televisions and their histrionic “stories” that blare multiphonically from open windows. They seem not to need air-conditioning even in the stoutest heat, while he and the other old men seem never to turn off their wheezing, window-mounted units.
And they are all here now, these women. In fact, at this moment, they are for the most part dancing with each other. The square dancing itself has not yet commenced, so the ladies are dancing in couples to the prefatory polka that issues from the record player in the corner, attended to by Staff. Staff is an assortment of tanned women in their late thirties who appear in the morning hours to be sure that if one is eager to paint, exercise, discuss great books, create floral arrangements, or write in calligraphic form, that one may most certainly do so. Most of them seem to be named Eileen or Nancy, most likely the most popular baby-girl names of the late 1920s, but they must be differentiated as they come and go, leading to such coinages as “The New Eileen” or “Blond Nancy.” Most of Staff will answer cheerfully to either of the names, even if they are not even one of those. Staff will likewise remember your name without fail. Hi, Percy!
The women dance on. No men have yet entered the fray. Most sit in chairs at the edges with their lemonades and ginger snaps, lost in themselves, leaning on their canes, even in their cowboy garb. Many profess to be here only as spectators. Staff has decided that Women dancing as Men will wear yellow roses. Staff has thoughtfully provided for the event.
Off toward the main entrance to the recreation room is Mrs. Gottlieb, who seems to have positioned herself strategically so as to be the first to greet all arriving guests. Mrs. Gottlieb is exceptionally friendly, in mufti with a billowing dress that, while quite loose, further advertises the sheer mass of the woman. Her makeup, as is the case with most of the women, is primarily a crimson lipstick that breaches the borders of the lips themselves and will be applied and re-applied as the festivities continue.
He looks around the room, and as he does his tongue works itself along the edges of his dental plate, a nervous gesture. How old he has become. He has come to realize in late age that old women aren’t any more attractive to him than they were when he was younger, and the converse must most certainly be true. He is fit, all things considered, but he is an elderly man, white hair cut close along cracked and sun-leathered skin. We all just want a bit of respite from the solitude. Who is he to be picky? But as Mrs. Gottlieb turns and her glance catches him looking, she smiles coquettishly.
She lives in the next spoke over in their wheel, in Cluster 3, and she loves to wave. She’s always standing up from her gardening and waving, in big arcing arm motions that worry her aging flesh, waving as he walks to his car in the early-morning cool, waving as he returns. Hi, Percy! His return wave has consequently been a more tentative one, mostly in the wrist.
5. The regrettable moment in which things must be ventured
Dawn. Through the buildup, the bombardment of the Germans has been relentless. It is a gray and sticky day in which the uniform, soaked through from the previous days’ heavy rains, barely lets him move. His boots sink in the mud of the trench floor, oozed up over the duckboards, and all along the way there are boys crouched over their rifles, waiting the order to go over the top.
Percy is huddled in the trench next to his chum from home, Wesley Hitchens. They have been together since induction, two former schoolmates who didn’t know each other very well. Wesley is terrified, while Percy has simply become disconnected from it all, has somehow been able to blot from his mind the idea that there is any outcome to the actions they take. His consciousness refuses to ride ahead of the moment at hand. Years later, he will recognize that the courageous one of them was Wesley, brave enough at least to take each action with full knowledge of his remote chances. Percy will recognize he had simply run away in the only way that he could.
They have been here a long time and life down in the ground makes each hour and day crawl by with brutal exactitude. Percy is nineteen, Wesley eighteen, and they’ve found an affinity that traces itself back to nothing more complicated than their bottomless preoccupation with card games. Whist, in particular. They are forever hunting for thirds and fourths when they can be off-duty in their funk holes cut into the sides of the trenches, and from time to time, some of the Highlanders Regiment clamber down the boards in their kilts and tam o’ shanters to join a game and try to steal away some biscuits or a tin of marmalade. Beyond, the earth is turned and cratered, the trees are stripped of their leaves, the only birds they see in the sky are the lurching homing pigeons, in their low trajectories, carrying messages on their legs.
The word has circulated down the way: When the order comes, they are to climb the steps that have been shovel-carved into the front of the trench and begin advancing, shoulder to shoulder. They have on their fifty-five-pound packs, all the equipment they will need to set up in forward positions.
“Last time in this bloody trench,” Wesley whispers, his voice quavering.
“Indeed.”
“I hope they find higher ground for us to dig the next one.”
“I suppose,” Percy says, for it is he who is not keen on the idea of getting out of this trench, despite its fetid mud, its stink, and its complement of slithering rats.
Now they hear the relayed shouts from down the line, and they begin to clamber