He took Kit with him if she got up quickly when she heard him wake and dress. She walked out with him into the checkered shade and the sounds of birds awaking, out along those mysterious shorn rides bordered with placid trees and undergrowth, the rough. He let her try to hit the ball, stood behind her to model her stance and swing, flinging her arms like a puppet’s. Now and then she lofted a ball sweetly into the day. Once she watched it float (with mysterious solemn slowness, hooking badly) right between a rising goldfinch crossing one way and a monarch butterfly sailing another, as though they played in Eden.
Eden: Falin said that we are entranced with Eden because it is at once changeless and fleeting. It was on the golf course that Ben told her he was planning to join the army.
“I can’t tell Mom and Dad yet,” he told her. “So I’m practicing on you.”
They sat on a little bench between holes. She would remember the little herm that stuck up there by them, brushed metal, a dirty white towel hung around it: the ball washer.
“I thought you were going to college. To Thomas Aquinas.”
“I thought I wanted to. But. I want to do this.” He grinned at her. “That’s good, though, see. That’s what they’re going to say.”
He was turning a drab little flower in his fingers. Six months before he had driven home on a great black motorcycle and then told his parents it was his, he had bought it with his own money, earned at the jobs he was always able to get. He found it easier to explain and account for what he had done than to tell them what he planned to do. They were lucky that what he had gone and done so often made good sense, or at least wasn’t dangerous or wrong.
“A soldier,” Kit said. “Mom and Dad’ll kill you.”
“Soldiers,” he said, “don’t get killed by their parents. That’s not the idea.”
“Oh jeez. Ben. But.”
He began to explain, as much to himself as to them or to her. He had an obligation to his country, if he didn’t do it now it would be hanging over him till it was done. College wasn’t cheap, and if he got all the way through his army training, not only would he have completed a lot of work that would count toward a degree—language, for instance—he would be eligible for good scholarships and loans. The GI Bill. He talked carefully, building a small watertight house around himself, putting each brick in place with care. Dad had been in the army, after all, hadn’t he; this was a time when everybody ought to be willing to defend this country, everybody knew the dangers. If you joined up you served longer, yes, but you got top choice of programs and locations.
Every brick he put in place shut him off further from Kit.
She almost never thought about the future, it seemed brazen or dangerous, the very thing that the gods got you for doing. Ben though: he loved planning and believed in it. So he was probably right about the army, that it would be a good deal for him, and work out well. But why didn’t he see that it would leave her without him, with no future that she could envision, no way to get ready?
“They’ll miss you so much. Mom will miss you so much.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “I think they’re ready. They say I eat too much.”
“You do. But they love that. They love you.”
“Well,” he said softly. “I love them.” Kit clapped her hands over her face then so that he wouldn’t see, pressed her hands into her traitorous eyeballs, but it didn’t help. The one thing she knew she mustn’t do, weep, the one thing that would push him away; knowing always made her weep more.
“Oh here we go,” he said. “Old Goofy Glass.”
That was so cruel that she began to laugh. The Goofy Glass was part of a magic set he had had once, an ordinary water glass that somehow sweated or oozed from invisible pores so that whoever held it was soon awash, or the table where it was put down, the knee it was rested on. She laughed and then went on crying, and though he had never done so before, he put an arm around her shoulders and waited, saying nothing, till she could stop, and they could go home.
The next week, after a talk with George and Marion, and another with Father Conklin at Little Flower Church, he went on his black bike to the recruiting office on Courthouse Square and did whatever he had to do (she wanted to ask him, make him tell her every detail so that it would be hers as well as his, as she had made him describe his dates and his road trips, but just to show him the depths of her desolation she hadn’t).
He would (he had told her this much) stand and take a vow, his right hand raised, a vow he could not then get out of unless he turned out to have been lying to the army in some way in order to get in, about his age, or his criminal record or whether he was a member of the Communist Party or another subversive organization. And then they would tell him to take one step forward, after which he would be declared to have obeyed his first order without question, and would be a soldier.
She lay on her stomach on her bed, the blind half-drawn and the room hot and dim and smelling of varnish. She wondered (though the wonder never quite rose over the limn of hurt consciousness) how she would ever be able to do anything daring or good ever again. She would never again dare to go down to the muddy end to get what she wanted or needed, and if she did she would crush it and lose it. Everything, everything in the world; what everyone had that she didn’t know how to get, or even to want.
She hadn’t moved when she heard the bike come back in the late afternoon, approaching down the far highway and still only a wish, then turning onto the long drive, then loud, day-smashing, beneath her window. When he cut the engine the noise raced through the air, homeless for a moment, before dissipating.
“Why are you here?” she asked him from the top of the stairs.
“Well,” he said.
“Are you in the army?”
“Yup.”
“Why did they let you come home?”
He had hung up his jacket, and turned smiling to her. “You weren’t listening,” he said. “I didn’t think you were. I explained it to the folks. If I sign up now, I get a month’s leave right off the bat. I don’t go in till September. Special deal.”
She looked down at him looking up at her. She hadn’t listened, had hid in her room for the last two days.
“I was thinking,” he said. “I promised a while ago I’d teach you to drive. That would take about a month. Does that sound good?”
She would not exult or unbend or giggle or do anything stupid. Nothing he had done or offered warranted that. September was far away, but it was already coming closer, closer now by a minute than when he had made his offer. “I’m not old enough to get a permit,” she said. “Not till January.”
It was another of those objections that he didn’t deign to hear. He only stood smiling, and waited for her to come down the stairs. And soon she did.
5.
Once again it is May and the walls of my house have grown thin
And the windows where I wait and watch are wide open.
How high it is up there where the tops of the trees are speaking sign
And the swallows are turning, white bellies, blue backs, in the sun!