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Show 23-4 "Not for a while. He's still asleep and will be all day. Maybe in a few days. But he's fine." Andrew was fine. When I finally saw him, his face was bandaged all except his eyes and a tiny hole around his mouth where he drank through a straw. I called him the invisible man and then had to tell him the story. He grunted. But he could still play checkers. And look at my books. And then school started. And fall came. It came suddenly this year with a cold rain and days of wet and sogginess. The leaves hung on the trees in limp clusters. The summer which had brought so many changes to all of us was left behind with the blinding sun and the caroling of the cicadas. The world around us began to pull itself back from the war, to look to the future instead of the past. The newspapers carried fewer and fewer stories from Europe, as if to help us all forget a place as well as a time. No one sang the war songs any more, the songs that had been banned from our house since the beginning, and few men were seen on the streets in their uniforms. The hospitals filled up with normal illnesses, old men like Grandfather with heart attacks, women having babies, children with broken legs and swollen tonsils. But my family did not forget all that the war had left us. Father continued at St. John's, treating the young men who he said should have been out punting on the lake instead of hobbling on shattered limbs down long white corridors. Grandmother continued to wrap herself in the memory of Paul, that gentle ghost who haunted her as surely as any demon did a Scottish castle. And my mother? She who could not face illness or suffering now began to spend more and more time at St. John's. I saw her there one afternoon when I was looking for Andrew. She was helping in the office and waved to me as I went past. When I asked her why she was there, she blushed and said she was just helping out a bit. |
