Page 9 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“You can use the phone if you don’t want to write,” Patrick says a few days later when no letters from Nathaniel appear in the mail tray. “Long distance, too.”
“No thank you,” Nathaniel says, a little testily.
“Sometimes you need to,” Patrick says, “even if it’s just to stop yourself from feeling guilty.”
Nathaniel looks up at him, something flinty in his expression. “Nobody’s worried about me. God knows I’m guilty, but not of that.”
* * *
In tenth grade, there was a kid who kept getting sent to the nurse’s office for burning himself in chemistry lab. “Just wanted to see how long I could keep my hand there,” he’d say after getting sent back to class, his hand bandaged in gauze. The next time the Bunsen burners came out, he’d do it all over again.
Reading the newspaper begins to feel like that, like an obvious danger that Patrick should have the common sense to avoid. Instead, he walks to the newsstand when it’s still dark and the streets are almost quiet, Eleanor bundled in a blanket inside his coat, and reads the front page of theTimeswhile standing on the sidewalk. At least the sanitation strike is over, and Patrick can carry out this masochistic ritual in reasonably fresh air.
He doesn’t know what he expects to see. Every day the body count climbs higher, and Patrick reading about it in theearly edition isn’t going to make it stop. He can’t tell if it’s his imagination or if even the reporters seem sick of the war now. The other night, Walter Cronkite—not exactly a long-haired leftist agitator—went on air to more or less say we aren’t going to win this war, and should negotiate a way out.
Today, on the front page, is the news that President Johnson—Patrick can’t even think his name without something livid and dangerous curdling inside him—ended draft deferments for graduate students. Even if Michael had stayed in grad school, he could have been drafted anyway. It doesn’t matter—Michael is dead, it’s final, Johnson can’t kill him twice—but Patrick wants to kick something. Who even fights a war with unwilling graduate students? It sounds like the setup to an unfunny joke.
When Patrick gets home, fingers white with cold and Eleanor furious as usual, he checks on Susan, then goes to his own apartment and makes a pot of coffee and a bottle for Eleanor. Nathaniel comes out of the spare room, bleary-eyed and rumpled, a blanket still around his shoulders. Patrick hands him a mug and the paper. When Nathaniel’s done with it, it’ll get shoved into the bottom of the trash can, because they’ve entered into an unspoken conspiracy to hide the newspapers from Susan.
“Cold out,” Nathaniel mumbles as he pours himself a second cup of coffee. It isn’t quite a question. Nathaniel isn’t capable of speaking with punctuation until he’s fully awake, one and a half cups of coffee in his stomach. Patrick’s added that to his meager stockpile of things he knows about Nathaniel.
It’s gray, windy, and colder than yesterday, but it seems unfair to inflict that information on someone who’s still mostly asleep. “It isn’t raining,” Patrick says.
Eleanor’s fussy this morning—fussier than usual, which is really saying something—so Patrick types out a few letters one handed while trying to soothe her. At noon, Susan wandersinto the shop, actually dressed and only slightly out of it. For a minute Patrick lets himself believe this is progress, but then she catches sight of Patrick holding Eleanor and abruptly goes back upstairs.
Patrick shuts his eyes. When he opens them, there’s a fresh cup of coffee on his desk.
“Thank you,” he says, but Nathaniel’s already gone. The smell of Windex drifts down from upstairs.
Patrick keeps thinking that Michael’s going to be horrified when he learns what a state Susan is in. Every few hours, the thought pops into his head and stays there for a precious few seconds until Patrick remembers that Michael isn’t going to be anything, not ever again.
It’s like the most important fact of his existence keeps slipping his mind, like where he put the phone bill or how many copies ofBilly Buddthey have in stock. How can you just forget that a person’s dead? When Patrick’s parents died, he hadn’t forgotten.
He wants to ask someone whether this is normal. Mrs. Kaplan would know, but she believes long distance phone calls should last under sixty seconds. This does not feel like an under sixty seconds kind of conversation.
“I keep forgetting he’s dead,” Patrick tells Nathaniel. “I keep thinking, Christ, what would Michael do in this situation?”
Nathaniel pauses, one hand still holding the wadded-up sheet of newsprint he’s using to clean the glass case. “Well, whatwouldMichael do?”
It’s a stupid question, because “what would Michael do about Michael being dead” is pure nonsense. Patrick knows the answer anyway.
Michael, with his boundless faith in experts, his belief that everything would work out just fine so long as you followed the rules, his conviction that the rules were on his side, would callthe doctor. The doctor would do what doctors do, and it would end with Susan in Bellevue—or, more likely, a nicer, private psychiatric hospital upstate.
Maybe that’s the right answer, but Patrick knows a couple people who’ve wound up in that kind of place and come out worse. Last spring, Mrs. Kaplan took in a girl who’d just gotten out of an institution. She’d been even paler and warier than Nathaniel, but when she warmed up enough to talk, she told him stories that gave him goosebumps. As far as he cares, the hospital is a last resort.
“Huh,” he says.
“This is what happens when you don’t have a funeral,” Nathaniel says, his back to Patrick as he wipes a smudge off the glass. “Funerals make it feel real.”
Susan decided to leave the entire business of Michael’s burial to the Army and Patrick can’t blame her. Michael would have loved to do their aunt and uncle out of a chance to play the part of dutiful guardians by showing up at a funeral.
But now he knows something else about Nathaniel: he’s lost someone too.
* * *
At the beginning of March, when the baby’s one month old and the telegram is three weeks old, it starts to snow. It’s nothing special, just the kind of dusting that’ll melt as soon as it hits a subway grate.
Patrick’s trying to type a letter to a collector in Minneapolis who wants to buy an inscribed Melville that Patrick picked up at an estate sale last fall, but he keeps getting distracted, his attention divided between Eleanor asleep in the carriage fromVivian’s stairwell and the snowflakes settling on the car parked across the street.
