Homesick

coat, straightened Amelia’s hat.

During the cab ride to the church, Stanley, for the most part, sat silent and still in his corner of the back seat, his face turned slightly to the streetlamps which intermittently lit his face in three-quarter profile. Vera didn’t interpret his silence as rudeness because she sensed it was not directed towards her but turned inward on himself. He scarcely spoke at all during the short trip except to reply politely and distractedly to Vera’s comments about the weather. Late that afternoon temperatures had suddenly begun to plummet and they both agreed that snow could be smelled in the air.

As she waited on the steps of the church while Stanley paid the driver, Vera was praying he wouldn’t lead her to a pew in the front. Of course, this was exactly what he did. All along Vera had been concerned over the sort of figure she was going to cut in her shabby coat and out-of-fashion dress and she didn’t relish the prospect of being scrutinized sashaying down the entire length of the church. Now it was even worse because she feared shaming Stanley. Some time during the cab ride it had struck Vera that she was likely mistaken about Stanley’s clothes. They weren’t odd at all. In fact, they were probably exactly the sort of clothes to wear to an organ recital. At the moment, she was looking at him in an entirely different light. He reminded her of a diplomat – polished, elegant, European to his very fingertips, just the man she had imagined herself walking with on the deck of an ocean liner and conversing to in French when she was a girl of thirteen in Connaught. Surely, she was too plainly ordinary a girl to be seen with such a man. Surely people would snicker when they saw him escorting her to her seat.

Once inside the church her doubts diminished. It came as something of a relief to discover that there were some women seated in the audience as shabby as she, maybe even shabbier. There were a lot of very young, very wan, very pinch-faced girls whose hair was cut like Joan of Arc’s that she guessed were likely music students. Then there were the sleek, well-groomed dames huddled in their fur coats besides their bored-looking husbands. Why was it that all these women had the pointy chins and sharp, bright eyes of the small creatures trapped to furnish pelts for their coats? Vera was determined not to be their victim, not to cringe in a trap. She drew herself up to her full five feet eleven inches and sailed down the aisle.

The seats Stanley chose were in the third row, very near the front. Once they had settled themselves he lost himself in studying the program. This was fine with Vera. Having survived one ordeal she was content to recover in peace, to drink in her surroundings without the strain of making intelligent conversation. As she ran her eyes over the scenes from the Bible depicted on the stained glass windows she could sense the church filling behind her and the atmosphere thickening and tensing with anticipation. It must be almost time. She checked her watch. A few minutes before the hour.

Vera directed her gaze to the choir screen. There stood the four apostles carved in stone, granite eyes staring blankly out at the restless flock. Vera recalled a childish blasphemy. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, hold the horse while I get on. As she smiled to herself, a paunchy little man (nothing like the sinewy stone apostles) mounted the steps leading upwards to the altar, turned, and launched into a description of the evening’s program. Vera, her mind wandering, soon lost interest in what he was saying. The unfamiliar words, toccata and fugue, were often repeated and she was dimly aware of his fat white hands flogging the air as he talked.

A hush fell. Vera realized that the man had disappeared. For the first time that evening, she asked herself where the organ was and searched the front of the church for it. She couldn’t find it. Then, just as her eyes passed over the reader’s desk with the great eagle carved in relief, the eagle of St. John the Divine, the opening notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor tumbled down from the organ loft above and behind her, from where she had least expected them to come, as if rolling thunderously down from heaven itself.

She was stunned. The eagle with the outspread wings, each feather distinct and bristling, neck ruffled, curved beak agape, took wing on the stately wind of soaring music. It filled Vera with yearning. She, too, wanted to whirl up, free. What was lost did not need to be lost forever. Couldn’t Stanley teach her? Couldn’t he tell her the wise books to read? Couldn’t he play her the music that fine, educated people listened to? Couldn’t he explain to her the pictures he hung on his wall, teach her the names of their painters? There was no need to remain forever ignorant and common. People could rise. She would rise.

Instinctively, she turned to Stanley and found him sitting hunched on the edge of the pew, elbows propped on his knees, chin jacked on his palms, face rapt. He appeared to be a man leaning forward into the warmth cast by a fire. Watching him, Vera felt that she, too, had a share in the comfort it shed. Already the music had melted the deep lines in his forehead and to Vera he looked ten years younger than when they had stepped into the church.

At the end of the recital Stanley and Vera rose from their seats, reluctant but happy. Outside, the snow which they had both predicted earlier was falling. It was a heavy, wet snow which blurred the darkness and swirled a mysterious code of white dots and dashes through the arcs of the streetlamps. Among the last to exit from the church, Stanley and Vera found themselves virtually alone in the street, the rest of the crowd having hastily dispersed in the snowstorm. There was not a taxi in sight.

“Should we start out walking?” suggested Stanley. “Just until we find a cab, or a streetcar comes along?”

Vera agreed that was a good idea. The big, drowsy flakes surrounded them in a curtain which cut Stanley and her off, isolated and screened them from the rest of the world. If this sense of privacy did not lend Vera the courage to take his arm, at least it made her feel easier in his company. The two of them went down the long, empty prospect of a tree-flanked street, wrapped in snow and their own thoughts, frequently halting so that Stanley could remove the Homburg and dust it with the sleeve of his coat before the snow melted and left water stains. That done, he would press the hat firmly back down on his head and travel another block before it was necessary once again to pause and sweep the hat clean.

Stanley and Vera were forced to wait for a light to change on a busy road. The snow streamed down brightly in the light of windows, the light of streetlamps, the beams of car headlights. Traffic had churned the snow into slush on the pavement. Without daring to look her in the face, Stanley reached out and shyly rested his arm across her shoulders. Before they crossed the road she slipped her arm around his waist.

Two months later they were married.

14

In the weeks before Christmas, wild and frantic were the words Vera most often employed. “That old man is driving me absolutely wild,” she could be heard muttering under her breath. Or, “They are goddamn driving me frantic,” they meaning the scabby crew of buzzards who tracked in and out of the house morning, noon, and night, eating and drinking them out of house and home. What really irked Vera was that her father assumed it was her duty to feed and water these old hogs. “Vera, could you make another plate of ham sandwiches for the boys?” he was always asking. “Is there another pan of date squares?” The last time her father had ordered up sandwiches she had told him where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “You want sandwiches, make them yourself. I don’t see any piano tied to your ass.”

She was surprised when that was what he did. He hadn’t made a scrap of fuss, just meekly left his rummy game and started slicing up a loaf of bread crooked as a dog’s hind leg, so crooked she couldn’t bear to watch and finally took the knife away from him and tackled the job herself.

This was supposed to be Christmas? A collection of derelict old farts cluttering up her kitchen, tracking in snow and leaving puddles on the floor wherever they stood or sat, the door swinging open every five seconds so that the day was one long continual draught, all of them eating as if it were their last meal and drinking up the rye and beer as if it were their last chance for a drink. The house getting dim and blue with cigarette smoke and loud with accusations of cheating and arguments over who played what card in the games of poker and rummy that went on most of the day and night. Daniel and she having their home (in fairness it was theirs, too) disrupted by a bunch of dirty old men, who shouted in their deaf-men’s voices, laughed wet, gargly laughs that rumbled into coughing fits, hawking and spitting, and generally conducted themselves in a pleasant and attractive fashion.

And the feeble excuse her father offered for this holiday invasion was that every merchant in Connaught is obliged to dispense Christmas cheer to his customers. Yes, yes, said Vera, she knew that. But every other merchant