Nightfall is near.
Atop the hills, a ghostly gray-blue veil gathers. Soon enough, this veil will descend upon the town, the Haven, and the still waters. It is coming now, in fact. I feel it more than see it; and sense it more than feel it. Its moist, sensuous, suggestive stroke brushes my cheek; its wet touch presses upon my lips like a damp fingertip, urging me to silence. The air grows chill. I know that nightfall is imminent because I recognize the familiar draught welling up from the land and the sea as day becomes night on the banks above the calm-flowing Haven. The misty veil's caress across my face excites a swirl of emotions - excitement, longing, nostalgia - all mingling as the mild wind stirs, as the ever-present night-wind courses from the Atlantic.
Orange and crimson streaks upon the western horizon, wildly aflame just minutes earlier beyond my window at The Crescent, now deepen to indigo, salmon, and a faint half-moon peeks into view in the far distance, high above the ocean. A signal, perhaps? To me? I stare, and wonder.
The surface of the Haven itself turns shadowy and mottled. Glints of silver flash as splinters of dying light perish against ripples.
Sounds are muffled and far away. A passing boat sounds a mournful horn. Turning, I barely make it out, but envision the craft wandering doleful in the deepening twilight, calling sadly into the gloom; calling out of habit alone, perhaps, and no longer hoping for reply. Dimly, however, I discern what could be its lights, blinking on and off, and leave the lonely vessel to its search, continue on to the marina, where the bus awaits to ferry us to the site of the evening's reunion.
Soon the gray vapor will billow out thick across the water. For a final moment, though, the beacons from the boats and the colored lights on the jetties shine vivid and bright – but then it darkens suddenly, and a wide causeway of stars emerges overhead, arcing across the waterway to its southern strand. They fill the sky, endless tiny nodes of light, endless luminous lamps, unchanged from when I was young in this place; clear and splendid above the little town.
Although fully awake, indeed acutely awake, my advance to the marina has the aura of unreality; a sense of sliding toward an imaginary place, as in dreams we glide effortlessly from one scene to another, each one gripping, but none of them real – the misty veil, the incandescent arch of stars, the mysterious stillness, the low and tantalizing water-sounds, all creating a fantastic dreamscape – the journey of a fool, a hopeless dreamer, a silly, silly man.
The Haven's steady, stately lap, however, and the rich night-water smells, and the winking lights, and the trod of my feet upon the embankment, are all palpable enough, and indeed I am not in any mirage, so onward I press through the pale fog – and sure enough, only twenty paces further on, there appears a blurry iridescence in the haze, and, through the mist and another twenty paces, I suddenly see figures milling, windows alight, the headlamps of the waiting bus – and then my footsteps cease and miraculously, in a consuming blaze, a phosphorescent burst of light and happiness and speechless unbelief, I arrive, and it is real; engulfed by wide-eyed, joyful friends from a gilded time that did not die, the air ringing with lilting noise, my ears full of merriment, and the slow, dreamy, thoughtful walk from The Crescent and across the unseen bridge of time is over.
At 7:00 p.m. sharp, we departed the marina for the site of our dinner, The Dragon's Claw hotel and restaurant, there to rendezvous with other classmates traveling on their own. As we board the coach, the evening's second series of frames flicks swiftly across my field of vision, and we leave the marina behind:
Away into darkness and sharpening wind we pull, bearing inland, old friends jovial and bantering, everyone talking to everyone, loud and cheerful, the countryside rolling by as we climb the hills, up and up and away from the Haven. It is a land of giddy shades, a bus full of phantoms brought to life – names and faces, faces and names, one after another, strewn together and jumbled, materializing amid exclamations and greetings and wide-open arms, then sinking back into the general melee – Jenkins, Lloyd, Jones, Davies, Thomas, Burrell, James, Larkin, Griffiths, Llewellyn, Mullen, Duffy, all aboard the bus, all present, all in grand high spirits, all young and unmarked again within this magical conveyance, running a route not from stop to stop, but from year to year and age to age.
Caron – who had evidently honed a latent talent for organization, and seemed to have brought to the planning of our reunion weekend all the vigor formerly applied as Captain of the girl's field hockey team – had found just the right location for our celebratory dinner. I was amused by its name; as a venue, however, The Dragon's Claw was perfect. Located not far from the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path and St. David's, a stylish boutique hotel with a cozy, well-stocked, wood-paneled bar, large windows, a spacious dining hall with high ceilings, and long oaken tables made for thumping. Reel three finds our bus arriving at The Dragon's Claw after a 30-minute ride. Already, I was hoarse and gasping for air, as if I had sprinted the entire distance.
There should be no mystery as to the person foremost on my mind as we pulled to a halt. A wave of apprehension and uncertainty swept through me, however – a reprise of the anxiety I had experienced upon arriving at the Grammar School for the Christmas gala on that wondrous bygone eve? Was this a bad idea? No telling what sort of destruction time might have worked, and why risk marring memories that sparkle so like sapphire and emerald, like silver ornaments made just for you? Would I have done better just to leave it alone? To allow glowing, haloed remembrance simply to molder peacefully away, before eventually sinking into the sands of an inevitable sunset? Perhaps – however, it is too late now for second-thoughts, for our coach has stopped and here I am, foolish or not, and reel three clicks and pops into view:
Roaring, hot, deafening - The Dragon's Claw a hopeless wall of sound. Impossible to distinguish one voice from another. Grasping outstretched hands, shouting, clasping, lunging, hugging, slapping backs and bussing cheeks – craning my neck and inspecting the crowd, scanning and winnowing through the drove of hot, bright faces for one particular countenance, one particular set of features, one particular expression – where is she? Is she even here at all? Had some last-minute intervention kept her away? Too many people – old friends all, but so many, an overflow of commotion and not enough space, panting, sweating, perspiration slick on my brow, ears hammering – I continue scanning, however, continue searching; and suddenly there she is, wedged back into a corner, conversing intently with two other women (I recognize them too), half-shadowed. She smiles hesitantly at something uttered by one of the women, then glances to the floor, and I note the faint dimpling in her left cheek accenting her reticent smile – and then her head inclines casually in my direction, almost insouciantly, as if she had already detected my eyes upon her but wished, before engaging them, to pause, and make me wait – then finally her head lifts to catch my gaze, and our eyes meet as the clamor rises higher and fills the room. The furor crests, recedes, then masses anew with even greater intensity, like a giant wave, all simply one titanic din. I smile and shrug, as there is no chance of making my way through the throng, and she purses her lips and raises her eyebrows ever so slightly, her smile dimpling again – and then someone else is pounding my back and crying out my name, and I turn away to rasp another gleeful salutation.
Amid all the high and happy spirits, I came upon Alan Zelinski, and finally learned the secret of his father. It was something hard and sobering, without an ounce of the romance or glamour I had once imagined. I had fought my way to the restroom. As I reached for the door it opened from the other side – and there stood Alan. For a silent moment, we looked at one other – the spindly boy grown thick and sturdy, with his mother's profile, sharp-beaked like a falcon's - then broke into delighted grins. We retreated to a corner and went through the catching-up. Then I asked him, point-blank, because I was never going to get another chance: I was always so mystified by your father, did you ever find out what he did in the war?
Alan frowned and bit his lip. “I did,” he said. “I was never curious about it, the way you were, though. I thought if he wanted to tell people about the war, he’d tell them. If not, well, it was over, in the past.”
“How did he come to tell you?”
“He was in the hospital. He had lung cancer, very advanced when he finally went to the doctor. So it was terminal by the time they found it. He told me he’d started smoking when he was ten. They sent him home for a bit – he didn’t do any real treatment or anything, he wasn’t interested. He was home for a month then went in the hospital and died. That was 1980.”
“He did smoke like a chimney,” I said. “I remember that. I hope it wasn’t too hard.”
Alan shook his head. “No, it was peaceful enough in the end. He was lucky.”
I nodded and said that was good.
“Anyway,” he resumed, “he never told my mother a thing about the war. And she never asked him. She wanted to forget the war, I think. I remember her telling me you were so interested in it because you hadn’t lived through it. A day or two before he died, though, I went to see him – it was raining hard, a really dreary day. I sat with him for a while, then he said he wanted to tell me about the war. He said he’d never told anyone about it because it wasn’t anyone's business, and everyone had some kind of story about the war anyway. But he said he’d decided he ought to tell someone, and since it wasn’t going to be my mother, it was going to be me. ‘Sure, of course,’ I told him. He gave me a funny little smile – he hardly ever smiled, you remember that.”
“Oh, yes, I do remember that. I was afraid of him.”
“He was very gentle, never raised his voice. Treated us very politely. Not a warm man, though,” said Alan. “Anyway – he told me he’d had an older brother, named Tomas. They lived on a farm in a village in western Poland. Just a little farm, they weren’t rich or anything. When the Germans came they burned the village and everything else, rounded up all the animals, shot them for food. Anyone who put up a fight got shot too, men, woman. Both his parents. They put my Dad and his brother in a camp they’d set up, basically tents inside barbed wire, they were collecting people from all the villages in the area. They didn’t know what was going to happen next. One night a couple of them made a run for it, they thought they’d found a gap in the wire they could get through. Of course, it didn’t work, the guards heard them and started picking them off. My Dad was halfway through the wire, sliding on his back on the ground, underneath it. Tomas was behind him, waiting his turn. Then Tomas got shot and fell on the barbed wire. It pushed the wire down into my Dad's face – that's how he got the scar, sliced the side of face open. Dug a trench in his face. But he slid on through and kept running – Tomas was dead.”
I shook my head slowly. “So both his parents and his brother were killed.”
Alan nodded. “My Dad and one other guy got away. Then they just wandered. They hid during the day and moved at night. Eventually they split up. My father wanted to get to the west. The other fellow wanted to stay in Poland. So they went separate ways. He said he just wandered for days, trying to work his way west, to the coast – he thought if he could get to the coast he might be able to get a boat somewhere. He said it was bad – no food, sleeping wherever he could. Then it started getting cold, really cold, and his shoes falling apart. So he got frostbite on his left foot, just his toes – it got his big toe bad, and later they ended up having to amputate it.”
I nodded my head again. “Hence, his limp,” I said.
Again, Alan nodded.
“Eventually, he stumbled into an underground unit in the north, near the coast, working with some British agents. They took him in and got him connected with our secret services. He said we had secret service all over Eastern Europe. They trained him, and he spent the war as a sniper for us– he told me he’d always been the best shot in his family, good with a rifle, kept them in meat during the winter. He said he wasn’t a battlefield sniper – they sent him after Nazi officials, money-men, politicians, that kind of thing. Very quiet stuff, behind the scenes.”
“My gosh,” I exclaimed, picturing the courtly, self-effacing Mr. Zelinski I had known, against the portrait Alan had just painted. “What a story!”
“He said it was the best work he did in his whole life,” said Alan. “He wasn’t half as good at anything else. And didn’t enjoy anything else half as much.”
We sat silently, reflecting. Then, for some reason, I felt compelled to lift my glass.
“To your father,” I said.
Alan and I touched glasses.
Then he put his arm across my shoulder and we returned to the main crowd.
My jaw throbbed and ached from bellowing, over and over, in a croak ever-more guttural, the shorthand narrative of the past three-and-a-half decades. The tumult was just too much, and the space too small. On and on it barreled, however, glasses clinking, bodies jostling, faces reddening under the combination of heat and ale. Then, mercifully, just as it all threatened to curdle into a big, sour mess, a bell rings three times signaling dinner - and this same bell rings sharply again now, three times in the echo chamber of my memory, announcing the opening of reel number four:
Running the length of the dining hall are three long, wide, heavily-varnished tables, and Adelyn has already taken her place. I rest my hand upon the chair next to hers and, as she glances up, arch my eyebrows inquiringly. She smiles, I smile, she rises to her feet, we open our arms and embrace, then hold one other at arms’ length to smile again. At first, neither of us speaks. Then, however, we take our seats and venture a cautious handful of plain, pedestrian words; ordinary and clumsy phrases, not the flowing eloquence I had, in a part of my mind, imagined running between us smooth as stream water rippling over flat rocks. Of course, our most pleasing remembrances belong safely tucked away in the cushioning tissue of time-past, where they can float like clouds and drift on tides, coming and going according to our own subconscious rhythms and currents. It is a gross transgression of the order of things when one of your most heartfelt youthful memories sits beside you with a guarded, curious smile, and covers your hand with hers, as once she did when you were but a callow, uncertain boy. And thus now, after saying Hello, and brushing her cheek, I feel solemn and subdued – but then, she had never been a person of many words, and I remind myself that it was precisely her ease with silence that had made her presence so comfortable in the first place, when I was a newcomer here, and with a serious turn myself. Our conversation, therefore, gropes haltingly along. We keep at it, though, and soon enough the stiffness begins to fall away as the activity around us roils on, and we smile and shrug and laugh again.
“Say something in French,” she exhorts me then, grinning like a devil.
In protest, I say I cannot believe her first request after 35 years of silence is that I speak French!
“But you speak it so beautifully,” she replies innocently. “I’ve missed it so! I came back just to hear it.!”
“Tu es cruel, ma Cherie. Tu connais je parle francaise comme un Americain!”
Her impish eyes gleam bright and blue, and her laughter knits us back together. “It is so much worse than I remembered! So very much worse!”
I shrug.
“And it is still ‘tu’ and not ‘vous?’ Even after all this time?
“Certainment.”
Our little joke undams our hesitation, and now we dive into old times, old memories and associations. It all flows free and loose, full of cheer and humor, and her hand upon mine conjures up memories of two fresh, moonstruck, puppy-lovers, and the unsullied, sweet, and poignant way in which young people become intimates in the earliest blooming of dewy-eyed innocence; all of it now residing deep in the past, of course, and better for it, but sparkling still, and not forgotten in the silty ocean of the everyday.
Our lives, naturally, have taken us in different directions – into our own careers, marriages, families. She teaches English Literature at a girl's school in Canterbury, and spends summers teaching in France – as close as she has come to her childhood dream of living there. And your poetry, I ask – which makes her blush, hesitate, and reveal she has drawers full of it, none of which has ever seen the light of day.
“Will you let me read them now?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m serious!”
“Maybe.”
Life has treated her fairly, she says, with her enigmatic suggestion of a smile. She has expected neither bliss nor perfection. She is happy. So too am I – certain now that indeed it has not been the errand of a fool, this keeping alive against time's onslaught our frigid trek down the long tree-lined hill after the great Christmas dance, and the pale light above her door; this having returned to sit in The Dragon's Claw to feel her hand again upon mine, a sort of silent proof that, in protecting our small, youthful affection against the giant outwash of life's experiences, I have done something good and right. And so, we sit and speak and watch the crowd and think our thoughts.
The hours pass and we settle deeper into the evening, through food and drinks and drinks and food. Surveying the scene, I brood wistfully upon the numberless nights I had dreamed of something like the very scene unfolding before my eyes, only to awake beneath a cloud of dolor in the morning. I marvel again that I am actually here, it is all real, all true, and it covers me like a quilt stitched of warmth and belonging; edged, however, with sharp needles, reminders that fine and grand as the evening and its sentiment may be, it is also a transient thing, which will soon enough belong to the past as well. Which is, in fact, the theme of reel number five – the wicked pain and pleasure of nostalgia, from which there is no true relief, ever:
Later, as the night lengthens and yawns begin appearing upon faces in the crowd, Mickey Dunn, flushed and apple-red, rises unsteadily to his feet – an old school cap perched crookedly atop his head – and, in his capacity as unofficial master of ceremonies, calls for silence. In a bleary kind of way, he thanks each person for coming, and recites the distant locales from whence some have journeyed – a woman from Hong Kong, another from Australia, a fellow from Vancouver, Tom Kellar's daughter from Houston, and myself. A short and maudlin speech follows, much applauded by his beer-soaked audience. He requests a moment of respect for those no longer with us – poor Ryan, plus two more of our schoolmates; one claimed by a heart attack just a month earlier, the other, a former taxi driver in Haverfordwest, dead from drink a long while past. We lower our eyes and all is still, then Mickey pronounces an Amen and the uproar kicks off again, though a bit tiredly now. Mickey gives up talking, retakes his seat with a heavy sigh, and removes his cap, as if formally disavowing all further official duties.
Earlier, I had located McAllister, but only for a few brief moments. Now, however, I seek him out again, find him, plop down beside him, and enquire straightaway about his injury. By this point in the evening, everyone is ready to ask the questions they really want to ask – and anyway, he is an old, old friend. Five of us were in the car, he reports dully; the drunkest one, naturally, doing the driving. Two were killed, two walked away, and I ended up somewhere in between. The left side of his face is paralyzed, and sags just a bit. He has difficulty getting his words started and they run together when he becomes excited. Two years of therapy, he says. But he kept at it, is married now, two children, lives in Reading and works for a finance company. He recounts incidents from bygone times, from rugby matches, from cross-country, from especially memorable parties, rambles to and from school and to the beaches, which I recall as well, and we take pleasure in our remembering together. To my immense relief and enjoyment, I find his shining personality and great good humor unchanged, and picture him once again ringing our doorbell in the morning, kit bag slung over his shoulder, nattering brightly all the way to school about Rangers’ latest fortunes. You were always hitting me on the arm! I cry indignantly. I’ll hit you again! he stammers excitedly, voice rising, and then we sit with our arms on each other's shoulders, just watching.
One of us – I don’t remember which – brings up Ryan, Tommy Ryan. He was a sweet lad, McAllister says, both of us shaking our heads and staring at the floor. Ryan's old friends, he says, still drop by to see his elderly mother whenever they find themselves in town, and a group had called upon her earlier this very day. Ryan's family had been a poor one. I remembered visiting his home one afternoon with a company of pals, a drab row house on a back street. His mother had offered us tea as we waited for Tommy to come downstairs, which we all politely declined. In the stale, quiet parlor, dim in the faltering late-day light, I had noticed the room was filled with pictures of her children. The mantel above the fireplace was crowded with photographs of her three boys, Tommy being the youngest, the baby. More pictures of the boys hung on the walls and cluttered two mismatched tables at either end of the settee. The air was thick and still and we had nothing to say. Mrs. Ryan sat smiling, unmoving, hands clasped in her lap, and no one spoke - then Tommy came bounding down the stairs, jabbering and jesting, and we all jumped up, thanked his mother, and ran out the door to some forgotten adventure. I recalled glancing back as we leapt off the steps, and seeing Mrs. Ryan in a faded, flowered apron, leaning against the open door, smiling and waving and calling after us to be careful, strands of graying hair wafting in the breeze. Now, McAllister and I sit silently, remembering playful, life-filled Tommy Ryan, and pondering the fate that had killed him so cruelly and so young, then wounded McAllister, but had left me, thus far, and in a way, untouched. As we nurse our thoughts, the tide of nostalgia builds and withdraws, eddies and swirls. Ah, I wish he was here tonight, McAllister says. We fall silent again, then I say I wish I hadn’t stayed away for so long – I wish I had come back sooner. I tell him that sometimes I even wish I could have stayed. McAllister smiles a crooked smile, his face drooping on the left, eyes moist and glinting. I wish a lot of things, mate, he says softly, don’t we all? We share terse and rueful laughs, then lean against one another and return to observing our old chums.
Somewhere around midnight, the evening stumbles to its inevitable end. The movie reel of fragmented images, dotted with gaps and illuminated only in parts by bursts of light, is nearly finished, but for a few final frames, the ones I recall most distinctly, the ones I have held most tight:
The party is over, the hour is late, and it is time to leave. It sped by quickly, and the leaving comes quickly too. Out of The Dragon's Claw we file, subdued now, talked-out, into the parking lot, where the air is unusually crisp and chill for May. I begin my goodbyes. Marianne – ageless, elegant – beams serenely. We exchange fond hugs and wish each other well. Jenkins, Dunn, Gwen, Lloyd, and more – each of them I embrace, knowing it will not come again. Then Adelyn and I step aside, draw each other close, and, for one silent moment, enter unseen into another life, an alternate unfolding of events, in which, against all odds, I indeed remained in Milford, and our adolescent affection took root and deepened and flowered; and, in this fleeting instant beneath the stars outside The Dragon's Claw, we slipped neatly through time, inhabited a stone house amid trees, in a glen facing a broad, brown beach stroked by waves and foam, and lived a timeless, perfect life together, became of this beautiful landscape together, grew old and wise and died. The whole of this dreamy journey we traversed in the span of a single clasp, in which everything and everyone else receded and the paths we had actually carved in our lives disappeared, replaced by the simple stone house and the glen and the beach and the waves – and then it was over. Lightly, I brushed her cheek and said I had to go. She squeezed my hand a final time as I turned to board the bus, where I took a window seat, alone. When all the seats were full, the driver turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. I sat staring straight ahead, emotions from the last time I had left my friends behind in Milford slashing in sharp, cutting gales across my mind. Gales, in fact, stronger than ever had been my longing to recover this lost past. Just before we pulled away, however, I heard a knock on my window and turned to see Adelyn, poised on tiptoes in the parking lot, bathed in pallid, blue-white moonlight, a coat clutched about her shoulders and one arm out-stretched, piercing blue eyes wide and bright and fixed onto mine. I laid a hand against the cold glass and stared back hard into her fierce gaze. The bus began to draw away and I pressed both hands and my forehead flat against the cold glass and held her in my sight until the bus turned onto the main road, and she vanished into blackness. Vanished and fell away forever, into the cool May night, and gone. I will never see her again, not in this life – nor the time and place of which she was the dearest part.
In the same way my father derived a special pleasure from rummaging in the hallway closet and dragging out the treasury of slides from his beloved Navy years, I occasionally retrieve these reels of our reunion dinner from their dusty storage place and view them again, enjoy them again, before returning them carefully to safekeeping.