Page 16 - WTP VOl. X #3

Reunion (continued from preceding page)
“Charlie Lambert, Charlie Lambert,” he said to Patsy. People around the table were standing up, making plans for the afternoon. They carried their glasses into the kitchen.
“Esther’s domain,” she said. “Whatever happened to her?”
Holmes pictured Esther standing at the old gas stove, scrambling eggs on weekdays, making omelets on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know. Dead, probably.”
“Probably,” she said. “We’re sure old enough.”
“She was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known,” Holmes said.
They decided to settle down in the old living room, stretching out this personal time a little, sitting in two worn, upholstered chairs. There was still a soft drink machine against the wall. Back in the day, someone had removed the bottles of soft drinks and stocked the machine with beer. Twenty-five cents a bottle, the club broke even on the deal. Holmes had enjoyed drinking a bottle of beer at the end of the day, something to go with whatever dinner Esther had cooked up.
“My father died in my senior year,” he said. “She was very nice to me.”
“I think I remember that,” she said. “You were gone for a week. When you came back, there was some kind of tragic aura around you. We were afraid to go near you. Of course, we were afraid to go near you most of the time.”
“Why?”
“Oh, people thought you were very forbidding. I just thought you were a snob.”
“Not me,” he said. “Always a man of the people.”
“And now, what? You work at a bank?”
“I’m a banker for the people.”
“I work in advertising,” she said. “I advertise for the people.”
They laughed.
“I think,” he said, “I was in a kind of fog that week. I was probably depressed, I was certainly grieving. I remember sitting in this room after dinner one night, and Esther sat and talked with me. What I remember most clearly was her listening. She just listened. And
smiled, of course. She had a great smile.” “She was very nice.”
Actually, the word “nice” was inadequate to describe Esther. He remembered her sitting with him while she peeled potatoes with a paring knife. He talked: about his father, about their difficult relationship, about the funeral service, even about the hymns they had sung. It happened forty years ago, but when he was finished telling Patsy about it, he could hear his own voice sounding throaty. Patsy squeezed his hand, said she was going to meet some friends, old room- mates, and he was welcome to come along. He said thanks and no thanks. He wanted to take a walk by himself, visit some old spots. They were the last to leave the building, agreeing it would be good to see more of each other later on.
He walked by himself across the campus, then crossed the street and found the house he’d rented in his senior year, the year Florio got busted. The front porch, where he’d sat for four consecutive nights writing his dissertation, buzzing along on a handful of black diet pills someone had given him, had been torn off, and the house was just a dull, dilapidated square box with too-small windows. Paint was peel- ing, and two of the windows on the second floor were missing panes of glass. It was a student slum when he’d lived there, of course, but at least it had that porch. He remembered those four consecutive nights: The creative surge driven in part from the approach- ing end-of-semester deadline; also by the falling- into-place of ideas he had been chasing through the semester on surplus value theories; and yes, also
by the pills, which provided an edgy alertness that carried him through the nights. He remembered how the birds started chirping along with the sky turn-
ing gray, and how the sunrise coincided on each of the four days with his finishing another chapter. He would put his work away then and walk up the hill to the dining club, where Esther would be scrambling eggs. She would smile at him, and he’d smile back, shaking his head. “Morning, Esther.” And she’d ask him how many eggs he wanted. She understood tired- looking college students.
He stood on the street corner, looking down the hill toward the small city of Compton, where there were bars, restaurants, a movie theater, and even a strip club. A new memory occurred to him: Charlie Lambert, who had been inquiring for several weeks if Holmes had any pot to sell him, stopping at his front porch one of those nights, interrupting his concentration, saying, “Hello, how are you? What
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