"We've only been here two weeks," Hammer said.
"If you want my opinion," Marietta said, "I'll be happy to give you one. I think it stinks. It's just like a masquerade party. All you have to do is to get your clothes at Brooks, catch the train and show up in church once a week and no one will ever ask a question about your identity."
"Please darling," Hammer said. "Not tonight."
"Oh what's wrong with you," she asked. "What are you so cross about? You've been cross all week. Are you sore because I bought this dress? Is that your trouble? Do you think I ought to buy my clothes at Macy's or Alexander's or someplace like that? Do you think I ought to make my own clothes, for Christ's sake. So it cost four hundred dollars but it looks good on me and I need something to wear. And I don't have many clothes. Well I don't have very many clothes. All right I do have a lot of clothes and I've said something stupid and now you're going to gloat over it. Oh Jesus, I wish you could see your face. You make me laugh."
"You can get nice couturier dresses at Ohrbach's," Mrs. Taylor said.
"Not tonight, sweetheart," Hammer said.
"You're a doormat," she went on. "You're a henpecked doormat and don't try and blame me for it. You're the kind of a man who thinks that someday, someday, some slender, well-bred, beautiful, wealthy, passionate and intelligent blonde will fall in love with you. Oh God, I can imagine the whole thing. It's so disgusting. She'll have long hair and long legs and be about twenty-eight, divorced, but without any children, I'll bet she's an actress or a night-club singer. That's about the level of your imagination. What do you do with her, chump, what do you do with her besides tying on a can. What is a henpecked doormat up to. Do you take her to the theater? Do you buy her jewelry? Do you travel? I'll bet you travel. That's your idea of a big thing. Ten days on the Raffaello, tying on a can morning, noon and night and drifting into the first-class bar at seven in your beautifully cut dinner jacket. What a distinguished couple! What crap. But I guess it would be the France, someplace where you can show off your lousy French. I suppose you'd drag her around Paris in her high heels, showing her all your old haunts. I feel sorry for her, I really do. But get this straight, chump, get this straight. If this blonde showed up you wouldn't have the guts to take her to bed. You'd just moon around, kissing her behind pantry doors, and finally decide not to be unfaithful to me. That's if a blonde showed up, but no blonde is going to show up. There isn't any such blonde. You're going to be lonely for the rest of your life. You're a lonely man and a lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stick, a stone, a bone, a doormat, an empty gin bottle…"
"I think we'd better go," said Mrs. Taylor.
"Yes," said the Phillipses, and there was a rush for the door.
"Good night."
"Good night."
"Good night."
Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar, Romeo and Juliet, block and tackle, thunder and lightning, bacon and eggs, corned beef and cabbage, ham and cheese, curb and snaffle, shoes and socks, line and sinker, true and false, sharp and flat, boots and spurs, snorkel and flipper, fish and chips, white tie and tails, bride and groom, dog and cat, sugar and cream, table and chair, pen and ink, stars and moon, ball and chain, tears and laughter, Mummy and Dad, war and peace, heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death, love and death, death and taxes… He slept and dreamed.
He dreamed that they were in a small country church that they sometimes attended in the summer. The church was cruciform and had a threadbare green carpet. There was a sharp and depressing smell of ecclesiastical varnish. The occasion was a funeral and the coffin stood before the chancel but he could not remember whose soul it was they had come to pray for and he looked around the congregation to discover who was missing. Charlie Estabrooke? But he was on the left with his wife. Bailey Barnes? Bailey was on the right with his whole family. Alex Kneeland? Eddie Clapp? Jim Randolph? Sam Farrar? Dave Poor? Rick Rhodes? Jim Stesse? And Roger Cromwell? When he saw that the congregation was intact he realized that the funeral must be his own.
V
When Tony had been in bed for seventeen days there was a spell of fine weather and Nailles woke one morning feeling wonderful. It was about six. The sun had not yet risen but the sky was brilliant. He shaved and bathed and bounded into Nellie's side of the bed and taking her in his arms he thought she seemed a much younger woman than he knew her to be. They seemed in their loving and being loved to have put down the accumulations of time, as if their baser qualities, like some stern presence, had gone off for an hour or so, leaving them free to sport and revel. When he went to the window the land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew. Septic drain fields lay under the grass and that flock of cardinals in the fir trees might have lice, but while the brilliance of their plumage and the clarity of their singing had nothing to do with peace on earth, love or bank deposits, it gave him such a feeling of exaltation he threw his arms apart as if he were going to embrace the landscape and the birds. "Oh I feel so wonderful," he said. "Something seems to have happened while I slept. I feel as though I'd been given something, some kind of a present. I feel that everything's going to be the way it was when it was so wonderful. Tony will get up today or perhaps tomorrow and go back to school. I just know that everything's going to be wonderful."
Nailles ate a big breakfast and then went up to Tony's room. That neither he nor his wife nor his son had ever been ill made the reek of a sickroom, as it flew up to his nose, cutting and strange. The shades were drawn. Tony slept. He slept in his underpants and his shoulders were bare. His skin was a liverish color. His hair was mussed and had not been cut for a month. He embraced his pillow with desperation. "Wake up, Tony," Nailles said. "Wake up. It's a marvelous, marvelous morning. Wake up and take a look." He raised the shades and a brilliant light poured into the sickroom. "Look, Tony, see how bright everything is. Nobody can stay in bed on a day like this. It's like a challenge, Tony. Everything's ahead of you. Everything. You'll go to college and get an interesting job and get married and have children. Everything's in front of you, Tony. Come to the window."
He took his son by the hand and drew him out of bed to the window and stood there with an arm around his shoulder. "See, Tony, how bright it all is. Doesn't it make you feel better?" Tony dropped to his knees on the floor. "Tomorrow, Daddy," he sobbed. "Maybe tomorrow."
Nailles felt, like some child on a hill, that purpose and order underlay the roofs, trees, river and streets that composed the landscape. There was some obvious purpose in his loving Nellie and the light of morning but what was the purpose, the message, the lesson to be learned from his stricken son? Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made. Tony was sobbing violently and then he spoke-he howled:
"Give me back the mountains."
"What, Sonny, what did you say?"
"Give me back the mountains."
"What mountains, Sonny," Nailles asked. "Do you mean the mountains that we used to climb? The White Mountains. They're not really white, are they? Remember how we used to climb from Franconia to Crawford? That was fun, wasn't it? Are those the mountains you mean?"
"I don't know," Tony said. He got back into bed.
"Well I have to go or I'll miss the train," Nailles said. "I'll see you tonight"
Nailles, waiting that morning for the 7:56, fended off any questions about his son's health by saying that he had mononucleosis. He stood on the platform between Harry Shinglehouse and Hammer. Nailles and Hammer read the Times. Shinglehouse read the Wall Street Journal. Since the dinner party Nailles and Hammer had said good morning but not much more. They sometimes took the same train in the morning but Nailles had only once seen his neighbor on the 6:32 home, when Hammer was asleep, either drunk or weary or both. He had a black dispatch case in his lap and was humped unconscious over this in a position that seemed desperate and abject. What is the pathos of men and women who fall asleep on trains and planes; why do they seem forsaken, poleaxed and lost? They snore, they twist, they mutter names, they seem the victims of some terrible upheaval although they are merely going home to supper and to cut the grass. Nailles watched his neighbor and when he did not wake up at Bullet Park he shook his shoulder and said: "Time to get up." "Oh thank you," said Hammer. It had been their only conversation.