For months Christopher Triplett had been waking up in his lean-to deep in the woods to the sound of the Connecticut River flowing by; so when he was awakened on Christmas morning by the sound of traffic on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, he had no idea where he was. It was a new kind of terror for him. The endlessly repeating wallpaper pattern, a stagecoach drawn by four horses past a stately New England house, didn’t tell him anything. Nor did the casement windows through which the traffic sound continued, or the peaked ceiling above him that should have told him it was an attic room. The most foreign of all was the actual bed he lay in. For Christopher that Christmas morning, not knowing where he was soon transmogrified into not knowing who he was and, for a few unbearable seconds, not knowing what he was. It was tantamount to being born as an adult person who had no idea what a person was.
Memory returned to him, like an image rising from a negative in an old-fashioned darkroom, his aunt emerging as a small, gray-haired woman with sharp blue eyes opening a door, her braceleted wrist ushering him into a room. “It will be more private for you up here than on the second floor. There’s a bathroom just down the hall. It’s all your own.”
Then, like a movie spooling backward, he was following her up the stairs again to the room, watching at eye level the hem of her skirt, the back of her legs in their brown nylon pantyhose, and her two feet pressing down against the steps in small black shoes. He would have been only slightly less flooded with relief if he’d awakened from a dream that he’d been sleeping in a dumpster, which he had imagined more than once. It had been only for few seconds that he’d not known what existence was, but during those seconds he hadn’t known what time was either, and so those seconds had lasted forever.
He lay, reveling in the release from terror, under a down comforter in clean white sheets, naked because his aunt had taken his clothes to wash them. When he got up, he would write a note to Sylvia and Elizabeth and Auda to tell them he was safe. And how surprised he was that his aunt had opened the door to him right away. No, not Elizabeth or Auda, just Sylvia. She’s the one who, when he was washing in the river, looked right through his nakedness, as if it were a suit of clothes. Then he remembered he didn’t even know her last name, let alone her address. He’d go back to Fieldington someday soon—if he stayed healthy—and ask her.
He heard footsteps coming up those remembered stairs, and a knock on the door.
“Yes?” He pulled the comforter up to his chin.
His aunt opened the door just enough to put his clothes into the room, placing them in a neat pile on the floor, then stepping back, out of his sight on the other side of the door. “What would you like for breakfast, Chris?”
He hesitated, stunned by his good fortune.
“Corn beef hash?”
“Yes, corn beef hash. How did you know?”
“I remembered from when you were little. Come on down when you’re ready.”
She closed the door. Then, like leaving the house and then right after remembering something left behind, she opened it again.
“Chris?” “Yes?”
“You will take a shower, won’t you?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know whether he was more angry than ashamed, or more ashamed than angry. Uncle Ray would have known better than to ask that question.
He heard her retreating footsteps and wanted to follow them and tell her how he never let himself get dirty, not his clothes either. You just try washing in the river in the winter! How he shaved too. Every day. By feel. Maybe he wouldn’t take a shower. Let her smell him the way he was.
But only crazy people pass up chances to take hot showers. He got out of the bed, and even though he knew it was warm in the room, he was surprised to feel how good that felt. He stepped out of the room into the smell of brewing coffee wafting up the stairs. Carrying his clean clothes in front of himself to cover himself, even though no one was looking, he padded down the hall, the soles of his bare feet luxuriating in the carpet. The bathroom was shiny clean. He remembered it now, from last night when he’d brushed his teeth. He’d kept his head down while he brushed and spat so he wouldn’t see himself in the mirror to learn how old he looked. He was proud of himself for knowing he wasn’t ready yet. One thing at a time. One thing at a time. He did the same that morning.
Then he stepped into the shower stall—a whole room just for a shower!—and turned on the water. It came out cold at first because showers always do that, but he didn’t wait for it to get warm because he wanted to feel it getting warm, and soon the hot water streaming down on the top of his head, over his shoulders, stinging his skin, soothing his muscles, and the soft hissing sound, melted his aunt’s insult away like the steam rising around him. He was clean. Really clean. He stayed in some more, just for the feel of it. When he turned it off at last and stepped out, the whole bathroom was full of steam. He lifted his right arm and put his nose in his armpit and sniffed up the smell of soap.
There, on a chair near the stall, was a big white towel, folded neatly, and on top of that a washcloth. He had never used a washcloth in a shower, he just used his hands, but he wasn’t about to pass up a gift so he picked up the washcloth and stepped back into the stall and took a shower again, cleaning every inch of himself with the washcloth. Then he stepped out and dried himself with the big white towel. Its nubby surface against his skin was a luxury too. He kept on wiping himself with it after he was dry and then he hung it neatly over the back of the chair.
He found his clothes already ironed, sharp creases pressed into his khaki trousers. He put them on, feeling like Christopher Triplett, Sergeant, US Marine Corps, but not enough to wear a uniform. Not yet. One thing at a time. When he went down to breakfast, he’d explain to his aunt why he wore khakis instead of jeans, how when jeans get wet they cling to your skin and lose their shape, especially in the ass, so you walk around looking like you had a load in your pants; but that wouldn’t interest her so he probably wouldn’t tell her. He’d talk about something else instead.
The smell of coffee got even stronger as he went down the stairs. At the foot of them, in the big front hall—white, old-fashioned plaster walls, brown oaken trim—he also smelled the hash. The little window in the front door was stained glass, some kind of tree, a lawn, a sky, sun shining through right at him, landing on his face, clean shaven to prove he was a civilized man. In the dining room, a chandelier over the big round polished table, chairs all around as if talking with each other, a standing screen with a Chinese design in front of the door to the kitchen so nobody would see the maid who wasn’t there anymore, while they talked about things she wouldn’t understand. All these thoughts, like friendly bullets, zinging through the air into his brain. He was that alive!
He stepped around the screen, pushed the door that opened both ways, walked through the pantry into the kitchen and into the gaze of a little girl framed in the photograph on the opposite wall. He stopped walking, stood still. She was looking right at him in black and white. Below them, sitting at the kitchen table, so was his aunt. “Merry Christmas, Chris!” she said, standing up to greet him in a bright-red dress.
He shook his head. To clear the girl away. If he didn’t, she’d grow up to be the one he’d killed.
His aunt frowned. “But we can make it merry.”
His eyes still on the little girl, he shook his head again. To let his aunt know that’s not why he had shaken his head.
“We can,” his aunt insisted. “Oh Chris! I know it’s hard. But you’re home now. You’re safe.”
He looked away from the little girl to his aunt and shook his head again—up and down this time. So she’d think he agreed. And wouldn’t talk like that anymore.
“Good,” she said, though she didn’t look convinced that he was convinced. She crossed to the stove. “Sit down, dear,” she said over her shoulder, looking more like Uncle Ray than she did last night. He sat down at the kitchen table and watched her spoon a big, mounded helping of hash on a plate. The girl in the photograph was still watching him, but he kept his eyes on his aunt. She had a little hump high up in her back, and her hair was white with a hint of blue. He felt a twinge of affection for her. It made him wary.
She turned from the stove and crossed the room in her red Christmas dress with a plate of hash and two pieces of toast in one hand, a cup of black coffee steaming in the other, and put it down in front of him and sat down next to him and watched him eat.
He ate ravenously. He even knew that was the word to describe the way he ate, and though he missed the taste of wood smoke and the feeling of hot food going down inside him while outside him all around there was snow, it was as luxurious to eat breakfast in his aunt’s warm kitchen as his two showers had been. When he was finished, he asked for more. His aunt leaned and kissed the side of his cheek and practically jumped out of her chair and brought the frying pan to the table and spooned the rest onto his plate, and he ate that too, and when he was finished, on a sudden whim which surprised him as much as anything else that happened that morning, he let out a long, loud, unseemly burp: what he would have done, right then, to make his Uncle Ray laugh, if his Uncle Ray weren’t dead. He turned to his aunt and grinned.
He watched her deciding how to react. The silence went on, and then she squeezed his hand and said, “You could always make me laugh when you were a little boy.” She glanced at the picture on the wall.
“You? His eyes followed hers to the picture.
“Yes, me. Who did you think it was?”
He thought, If you were Uncle Ray, I’d tell you.
“It’s been there for years. You never saw it before?” She studied him. He made himself not look away. “Well, you just didn’t take note, that’s all,” she said at last, standing up from the table. “I’m going to leave for church in a few minutes. You want to come?”
“Okay,” he said, so he wouldn’t be alone with the picture.
THE MINISTER, ROBED in white, looked down from her brown pulpit straight into Christopher’s eyes, and read with a sonorous voice: “And in that region there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear.”
Squeezed tightly against his aunt in a pew crammed with Christmas worshipers, it flashed to Christopher that the girl named Sylvia and the Angel of the Lord were interchangeable—and so maybe was his aunt.
Before he could make that thought into a vision of Sylvia, the angel, and maybe his aunt becoming each other, switching back and forth, the minister finished reading and climbed the stairs down from her pulpit. The congregation knelt and began to sing “Silent Night.” He knelt too but kept his mouth shut, waiting for the hymn to end. If he explained to the people around him why he had no right to sing with them, they wouldn’t understand.
His aunt nudged him and moved her hymnal toward him so that it was half under his eyes, and pointed with her finger at the words. He shoved it back toward her so hard it fell to the floor by her knees.
The people in the pew stopped singing. He bent and reached to pick up the hymnal, but his aunt’s hand got there first and pushed his aside. He stood up, fumbled past her and the others in the pew, and rushed down the center aisle toward the doors, holding his breath, staring straight ahead, so he wouldn’t meet the eyes of the kneelers as he passed. Outside, he let out his breath. He started down the steps. He’d go to his aunt’s car and wait there for the service to end. If he knew the way to her house, he would’ve walked.
“Christopher, wait.”
He turned and saw her coming out of the church. “Go back in,” he said, remorseful now. “Finish the service. I’ll wait.”
“No, Chris, I’m not in the mood anymore. Please, get in the car.”
They didn’t speak to each other on the drive back to her house. He went straight to the attic and got up on the bed and pulled the comforter up to his chin.
He awoke several hours later, surprised that he’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t just hide up there forever. He would have to go downstairs and apologize.
Still in her dress, his aunt was in the living room, sitting in a big blue armchair, watching him approach. The Christmas tree was behind her by the window, its lights turned on, and she had lighted a fire in the fireplace. He thought, That’s a job I should do, not her.
He said, “I apologize, Aunt—” and discovered he couldn’t finish the sentence. He couldn’t call up her name!
The hurt recognition of this flashed in her expression, and he rushed on to cover up. “I’m not myself sometimes since I’ve been back.”
She nodded her head. “I understand, Chris. Maybe you should see somebody.”
He shook his head.
“All right, Chris. We’ll talk about it some other time.” She got up, went to the Christmas tree, and picked up a package wrapped in red. “When you were sleeping, I got you this. I would have preferred to give you a book, but bookstores are closed on Christmas day.” She held the package out to him. He hesitated. “Take it,” she commanded.
He opened his hands and she put it in them. He held it for a second or two and then unwrapped and opened it. A box of Whitman’s chocolates. Each nested in its little cup of brown paper. He felt a wave of grief for her, trying so hard to make him happy.
“Try one,” she said.
He put one in his mouth. Nougat wrapped in shiny dark chocolate. Delicious.
“Merry Christmas, Chris.” she said. “Now I’ve got to get Christmas dinner ready.” She headed toward the kitchen. At the screen with the Chinese design, she turned to face him. “By the way, my name is Adelaide.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
DINNER WAS A great big steak, a ton of mashed potatoes, and a salad. “Fit for a Marine,” Aunt Adelaide said, pouring a glass of red wine for herself out of a bottle that was half empty. She’d drunk two glasses while preparing dinner.
“Can I have some?” he said. He didn’t like wine. He was a beer man. He just wanted to make her have to say no.
“Do you think you should—I mean—in your condition?”
“My condition?” Now he wanted to embarrass her by having to describe his condition.
She stared at the bottle. “Well it is Christmas,” she said, sounding as if she were talking to herself. She got up from the table, crossed the dining room to the sideboard, and came back with a glass.
“Never mind,” he said, regretting his meanness. “Keep it for yourself.”
“There’s more.” She put the wine glass on the table by his place and filled it. “Remember to sip it, Chris. It’s wine, not beer.”
He grinned, drained half the glass in two swallows, reached for the bottle, and refilled his glass. She pretended not to notice.
They ate in silence. He drank some more wine, obediently sipping now, beginning to feel its glow. “This a great Christmas dinner,” he said.
“I’m so glad not to be eating it alone!”
“You know, I’m going to go to college and get me a degree in retailing.”
“Retailing?” She was sneaking a look at the bottle. There was one more glass in it.
“Yeah. Outdoor stuff. Canoes, fishing rods—”
“That’s wonderful, Chris!”
“You think so?”
“Yes. Canoes, fishing rods, sleeping bags, tents.” Her cheeks were flushed. “A store like that is right up your alley.”
“I think so too. Maybe we should drink to it, Addy,” he said, emptying the bottle into her glass. “Like you said, it’s Christmas.”
She grinned and got up and went to the sideboard again and came back with another bottle of red and an opener. He opened the wine. “Just one glass more each,” she said. He filled her glass and then his own, and took a big swallow and had some more steak and another swallow and filled his glass and hers again, and he told her his plan to use the GI Bill to pay for college at Southern Connecticut State and get himself a secondhand car and his own apartment, and then the steak and potatoes and salad were all gone. So, they opened a bottle of white because that went better with the chocolates. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked you a cake. But these chocolates are scrumptious if I do say so myself,” his aunt said. They ate the rest while he told her of all the reasons—which came to him as he talked—of why there was a great big market for outdoor equipment, and with each glass of wine they both grew more enthusiastic.
In gratitude, he raised his glass to her and said, “Here’s to you, Aunt Addy. We only have each other.”
“That’s right,” she agreed, smiling brightly. “Everybody else is dead.” And they both burst into drunken laughter.
ADELAIDE TRIPLETT WAS embarrassed the next morning to be still in her bathrobe as she scrambled eggs for her nephew’s breakfast. What he needed after so much chaos was some formality in his surroundings, neatness and order, not the sight of an old slattern suffering from a hangover in her bathrobe and slippers. Last night, even though she’d been quite tiddly, to put it mildly, she had laid out her clothes for the morning before she went to bed: a wool skirt, a white blouse, her blue cashmere sweater. And most important, pantyhose to cover the web of blue veins on her ankles. She was a realist, a practical New England girl. When you are young and if you are pretty, show as much of yourself as you can get away with. When you’re old, wear a lot of clothes.
But this morning she had awakened to the sound of his footsteps coming through the ceiling of her bedroom, and then she heard his shower going, and she got out of bed, threw on her bathrobe, and hurried downstairs. She didn’t want him to come down to an empty kitchen and wait for his breakfast. It was important that he be greeted every morning by a cheerful smile and a breakfast of his choice.
She ascribed to Uncle Ray’s careless upbringing of him that he didn’t even notice she was still in her bathrobe—and to his youth that he could actually consume food after what they’d put away last night.
She brought his eggs to him now, cooked hard, the way he’d said he liked them. (She liked them that way too. They were chicken ovaries after all, disgusting when you thought about it, so she always cooked them to oblivion.) Heaped also on the plate were two pieces of toast and four slices of bacon. She’d already brought him his coffee and his orange juice. She sat down at the table across from him.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he said. She shook her head and shuddered.
But she loved to watch him eat. She longed to tell him how lonely it was to live all alone in this great big old house she and her brother Ray had inherited from their parents, and Ray living way up there in the Adirondacks, and they didn’t like each other all that much even though they were brother and sister, and now he was dead. But the last thing Christopher needed was to know her neediness. It was the other way around. And one of the things he needed was some clothes.
She watched him finish his eggs, put down his fork, and pick up a slice of bacon. “I’d like to go to the VA today and get everything squared away,” he said, and took a bite of the bacon.
Her spirits brightened. “Good!” She’d drive him there and help him navigate all that bureaucracy. Everybody knew the government made things more complicated than it needed to be.
“I’d like to borrow your car to go there.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll only need it for the morning. Why, do you need it?”
“No, I’m not going anywhere. But you’ve been under so much strain—”
“But I still have my driver’s license. I even have a guide’s license.”
“It’s not a good idea, Chris.” she said, speaking firmly. “I’ll drive you there. If the doctors say you can drive, then you can borrow my car any time you need.”
“I’m not seeing any doctors! I’m going to get my enrollment squared away.”
“All right then. We won’t see any doctors today. We’ll just take care of the enrollment.” She paused. “But let’s stop on the way and get you some new clothes.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Think of it as a Christmas present from me.”
“You already gave me a Christmas present.”
“Christopher! It was a box of chocolates. And I ate half of them.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL Adelaide Triplett pulled into the parking garage at the corner of Pratt and Main where they would get two free hours of parking for Stackpole, Moor, Tyron, one of Hartford’s finest clothing stores on Trumbull Street, that she realized her nephew had thought they were going to Walmart. “Would I get dressed like this to go to Walmart?” She was wearing the clothes she’d laid out last night. “This is where I shop, why would I take you some place less?” She used this ploy to appeal to his sense of justice and equity. As she expected, he got out of the car.
Adelaide felt grounded, as if the world was a sensible place where logic prevailed, as soon as she walked through the doors of quality establishments like this century-old clothing store where the pace of changing styles was judicious, where there was a refreshing dearth of things made of plastic, and where a well-dressed salesperson with good manners greeted you and served your needs rather than abandoning you to a wandering search in a huge featureless desert full of horrible stuff made by people who were getting cheated in some benighted faraway place, if not by robots. There was a predictability in this place, a quietness, unlike what she imagined was the random chaos of war. If she could clothe her fraught nephew in garments purchased here, she would gird him in calm.
She introduced Christopher to the salesperson, a tall, trim man wearing a gray suit with a vest, who managed to look simultaneously avuncular and young. “This is my nephew, just back from Iraq.”
“I’m honored to meet you, sir. Thank you for your service,” the man said.
Christopher flushed and looked away. Adelaide wanted to tell the salesperson to think before he spoke. She also wanted to reach for his lapel and feel the thick fabric of his magnificent suit between her fingers and thumb. Of course, she did neither. “He will attend university,” she said, careful not to name which one so the salesperson would assume Trinity. Or even Yale or Harvard.
“Shall we start with a blue blazer?”
It went on from there, Christopher strangely compliant, Adelaide thought, until he was supplied with every kind of item he might need, including a very sporty, warm outer jacket in dark blue wool, suitable for both formal and informal occasions, and a handsome leather briefcase, like the ones executives at Travelers Insurance carried back and forth from home to work so their bosses would think they worked late into the night. When the tailor was brought in to measure Christopher for the blazer and the gray flannel slacks, Adelaide was shocked by how surprised Christopher looked when he saw himself in the mirror.
A few hours later, at the Veterans Administration offices in Newington, which Adelaide chose over the one in Hartford because it was easier to find a place to park in Newington, she stepped back to let Christopher complete his errand on his own. She didn’t want to reveal to what she thought of as “the authorities”—though they were merely clerks—that he might be in need of more help than he was applying for.
A handsome Black woman about Adelaide’s age actually got up from her desk when Christopher told her his name. She guided him to the person he needed to see and introduced him as if she’d known he was coming. When Christopher emerged only a few minutes later with the papers he would need to fill out, a confident look on his face, his mission accomplished, Adelaide was even more amazed. “Thank you very much,” she said to this fine woman whom she longed to hug. She wasn’t about to shake up her world by ascribing this event in which the government performed at a high level to anything other than the exception to the rule, but she was glad that Christopher was the lucky beneficiary.
Maybe she wouldn’t have to cajole him into seeking medical help. Maybe going to college was the only medicine he needed.