The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney

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СКАЧАТЬ all, the kind of laughing and sarcasm that is easy to boys who know each other well, the long tedium of the march being broken up by the transmuting cliques and rivalries, the idle boasts and challenges to same. Much seems to revolve around arm wrestling or drinking contests. They’ve carried many of the old grudges all the way to the front—the competed-for girls, the lost football games, the schoolyard fights. Percy can’t get comfortable. He is not one to be chatty in any event.

      June and the rains are unceasing. They march with long woolen coats on, making the day all the more stifling. They will make camp in late afternoon, and they will sit as the smell of the stew begins to waft across the cheerless fields. They will play cards and write letters.

      The lice embed in the skull, the skin is unwashed for many days’ time, his wispy beard itching under the helmet strap, and the stomach aching for more than what is given after a day’s march with a four-stone pack. But who is he to complain? Everybody’s putting up with it.

       3. Sad revelations acknowledged at a certain point in one’s life

      There is never enough money, and likewise never enough room. It is 1938 and he has turned forty and they still live in that third-floor apartment up under the eaves in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is careful with their money. There is a Depression on. Most of his mild wealth is in cash, in rubber-banded stacks in the heavy iron safe in the corner of the bedroom. The quote-unquote nest egg. The quote-unquote Family Fund. He has forbidden her from knowing the contents of their worth. She is not privy to the safe’s combination.

      He is past forty and she’s just a bit younger. They remain up under the eaves waiting for something to happen. But there will be no discussion of the fact that nothing has happened, nor likely will happen. He comes home from the mill and sits in his chair and reads the evening newspaper, and after dinner they might listen to the radio. At night she sleeps as his coughs rumble up, up from other lives, but never extinguished, one guttural hack that arcs through the entirety of adult life.

      Tonight is like all the others. They’ve just eaten dinner and he has settled into his overstuffed chair, that one prized possession, to read his evening paper. He keeps up with the troubles on the other side, this growing new war. It is stunning that this is to be. The memory of The Great War is an unshakable constancy for him, descending in his dreams or simply as a thought that rides on with him, like clouds in the sky of his life. This Depression keeps one’s ruminations more immediate. Everyone is struggling.

      He is in the middle of his life and he has felt its long skein of easy concession. Even in the twenties, when others were doing well, he was only finding his way, first to Toronto, where the Canadian veterans had no work, then to Massachusetts, to the mill. When most of those others were brought down by the Crash, his only consolation was that he didn’t have too far to fall. When he and Martha now find themselves childless in middle age, they are neither fully surprised nor disappointed.

      “We probably didn’t have the money for it,” Martha says.

      “Probably not,” he says.

      “We have our life . . . this one,” she says, and he can only nod.

      “It’s not your fault,” she says, and he doesn’t nod at all.

       4. The suggestion of a mild but potentially troublesome situation

      The outer edges of the clubhouse recreation room are mostly peopled by the infirm and truly aged, not the healthy aged. It is a fact of this generation and also of medicine that Percy Atkins is one of a very small number of ambulant, lucid men in this “community,” while conversely there seem to be untold numbers of preternaturally healthy female septuagenarians who barrel around the place with the kind of energy that sends unceasing loads of brownies north to grandchildren and keep the gardens of Ocean Breeze so perfect the flowers have begun to look artificial. They all say “Hi!”—that big American “hi” he hasn’t completely gotten used to in all these years. They have sun-splotched, lined faces under whimsical sunbonnets and hair hued as idiosyncratically as their beloved varietals, any color you want, any version. They chatter from the lawn chairs that they cluster along the covered breezeway leading from each front door to the scorching parking lot with its sponge-like asphalt. They retreat after lunch to their blasting televisions and their histrionic “stories” that blare multiphonically from open windows. They seem not to need air-conditioning even in the stoutest heat, while he and the other old men seem never to turn off their wheezing, window-mounted units.

      And they are all here now, these women. In fact, at this moment, they are for the most part dancing with each other. The square dancing itself has not yet commenced, so the ladies are dancing in couples to the prefatory polka that issues from the record player in the corner, attended to by Staff. Staff is an assortment of tanned women in their late thirties who appear in the morning hours to be sure that if one is eager to paint, exercise, discuss great books, create floral arrangements, or write in calligraphic form, that one may most certainly do so. Most of them seem to be named Eileen or Nancy, most likely the most popular baby-girl names of the late 1920s, but they must be differentiated as they come and go, leading to such coinages as “The New Eileen” or “Blond Nancy.” Most of Staff will answer cheerfully to either of the names, even if they are not even one of those. Staff will likewise remember your name without fail. Hi, Percy!

      The women dance on. No men have yet entered the fray. Most sit in chairs at the edges with their lemonades and ginger snaps, lost in themselves, leaning on their canes, even in their cowboy garb. Many profess to be here only as spectators. Staff has decided that Women dancing as Men will wear yellow roses. Staff has thoughtfully provided for the event.

      Off toward the main entrance to the recreation room is Mrs. Gottlieb, who seems to have positioned herself strategically so as to be the first to greet all arriving guests. Mrs. Gottlieb is exceptionally friendly, in mufti with a billowing dress that, while quite loose, further advertises the sheer mass of the woman. Her makeup, as is the case with most of the women, is primarily a crimson lipstick that breaches the borders of the lips themselves and will be applied and re-applied as the festivities continue.

      He looks around the room, and as he does his tongue works itself along the edges of his dental plate, a nervous gesture. How old he has become. He has come to realize in late age that old women aren’t any more attractive to him than they were when he was younger, and the converse must most certainly be true. He is fit, all things considered, but he is an elderly man, white hair cut close along cracked and sun-leathered skin. We all just want a bit of respite from the solitude. Who is he to be picky? But as Mrs. Gottlieb turns and her glance catches him looking, she smiles coquettishly.

      She lives in the next spoke over in their wheel, in Cluster 3, and she loves to wave. She’s always standing up from her gardening and waving, in big arcing arm motions that worry her aging flesh, waving as he walks to his car in the early-morning cool, waving as he returns. Hi, Percy! His return wave has consequently been a more tentative one, mostly in the wrist.

       5. The regrettable moment in which things must be ventured

      Dawn. Through the buildup, the bombardment of the Germans has been relentless. It is a gray and sticky day in which the uniform, soaked through from the previous days’ heavy rains, barely lets him move. His boots sink in the mud of the trench floor, oozed up over the duckboards, and all along the way there are boys crouched over their rifles, waiting the order to go over the top.

      Percy is huddled in the trench next to his chum from home, Wesley Hitchens. They have been together since induction, two former schoolmates who didn’t know each other very well. Wesley is terrified, while Percy has simply become disconnected from it all, has somehow been able to blot from his mind the idea that there is any outcome to the actions СКАЧАТЬ