IT WAS A LITTLE too warm for his overcoat as Norman walked through the streets of his native town under the fine drizzle. Indeed, there was nothing to suggest the season in the atmosphere of remembered Sunday quiet; it could have been summer or spring fogged by his memory of the place. The few figures were distant, the shops remote in familiarity. Yet he was oddly relaxed by the monochrome look of the sedate old buildings. He could hear his own footsteps. The rain-softened edges of roofs, the blur of elm branches against the smoky ivory of sky, the dull shine of the iron railing around the green, and the heavy lift and fall of the flocked pigeons, all had the stillness, the inviolate calm of pictures in an old photo album; all was sweet and touching, but delicate enough to shape his frail memories in a form too light to elicit pain.
He was glad he had come, he thought, anticipating that the day here would show him himself as he really was. It would allow him to hold himself off from the chaos of the recent months, to see his job as no more than a job.
A car went by with a swish and a whine of tires; he smiled in sudden memory of an uncle’s old Essex, whose wooden steering wheel he had manipulated in a solitary game of speed after the wheels had been taken off the car and it had rested at the back of his uncle’s yard. Full of cheerful sentiment, he peered into the Sabbath-closed coffee shop he had once frequented, and he was moved by the empty cake stands on the counter and the dull sparkle of the grill.
Now he crossed and walked along the western perimeter of the green, eying the college buildings and the rusty moss along their foundations. A bus hissed by with lighted windows, and he was warmed by sadness. His face was soothed by the gentle mist.
Soon he reached the beginnings of his own neighborhood, and he remarked the quiet homeliness of the Victorian houses. How small it all was! And then he was in front of his own house, with no feeling of drama, looking at the gray clapboard stained by rain. The familiar windows, that door. My God, he half expected to see Norman Moonbloom come walking out, calling over his shoulder to someone dear inside. For some time he stood there, bemused, comfortably haunted, pressing the house and the ground and the sky upon his heart, only to find with some dismay that, when he closed his eyes, all of it had left no mark he could discern.
And then a fat man in a raincoat came out of the house. He stared at Norman blankly. Norman smiled and walked on.
“It’s like walking through the past,” he said to himself, enjoying the role of ghost. He passed the junior high school he had attended and of course remembered it as much bigger. Here he had passed from room to room among other children, weighted with books, unsolicited, circumspect, earnest, smiling on the fringes of pushing boys and girls, often thinking he was part of everything that went on, sometimes feeling otherwise.
The street widened to contain long blocks of esplanade masted with elms and looking like great green barges sailing into the park at the far end. He passed tall old houses with oval windows in their doors or stained-glass fanlights or shingled towers. He remembered romping here. Romping? No, dreaming, or at least sleepwalking. Suddenly he stopped in the pearly mist as something regrettable struck him; he was not the ghost here, not now—this place and his former life here were ghostlike. No matter how intensely he desired to return to the peace and quiet of the way he had lived most of his life, he was irrevocably cut off. He looked around at the still and shining town in the rain, and his yearning choked him as he realized that the ghastly life of his recent months was all he had. The terrible images of the tenants rose up and strode over the toy landscape, crushing his serene past. And the town did not cry out to him for help, but somehow lumped him with those awful alien figures. What a mistake this had been! If he had not come back, he might have been able to maintain a dream of his old home, might have used his memory of it to sustain him. How he hated all of them, those grasping, importuning tenants, with their filthy illusions, their sickly disguises!
With a feeling of grief, he waved down the first bus he saw and rode back through the town. From the lighted bus the streets were grayer, dimmer. The occasional people were like shades, the buildings like tombs. His own house was a blur of nothing; downtown, with his favorite luncheonette, was an unlighted slide that revealed contours without life.
It was a relief to board the train, where the sound of people’s voices and the feeling of movement returned him at least to his body. For a while he watched the landscape sliding by in the early twilight, not thinking about anything ahead or behind. He rode the air without anger or pain or hunger, a sort of mote being sucked toward a great nucleus of noise and size, unanimated, almost peaceful, until the candy butcher came ranting through the car, pouring his lyrical madness over the plush and damp wool and flesh.
“Awrange drinks, cheese sandwiches, peanut-butter Nabs, ambrosia, nectar, pâté de foie gras, Hershey bars. This car does not have a diner. Buy now, I accept Diner’s cards and Carte Blanche. Mounds, Nestlés, ham sandwiches made with ham from the very finest of Estonian suckling pigs . . .” Sugarman’s eyes lit up like a blue gas flame. “Ah, Moonbloom, you thought to run away? No dice, little agent; you are hooked, addicted. The withdrawal pains are worse than everything. Meanwhile, how about a spot of refreshment?”
Norman groaned and steeled himself for what could not be avoided, and the train whistle howled derisively as it sped him back to the city.