Home on Leave

by ANN LEIGHTON

1

REALITY is a powerful thing to grasp after years of insulation. It runs through one like a strong current and one cannot let it go or imagine what the days will be like when one is limply alone again. Suddenly everything is real and normal — overpowering words when one has lived for long without them.

The children come true, like little Galateas on whom one has worked for years. The house breathes and speaks itself a home. The animals begin to move, rising slowly from recumbent and symbolic positions, like big game in educational slow movies of Africa. Little trees throw good shadows. Birds come to sit in them, and on fine limbs which a few years ago were tiny grafts waxily stuck into raw stumps. Even the landscape springs to life. The little hill rejoices all around. The distant hills skip for joy. Even here. How profoundly true the psalmist sang.

But the harps and the waters of Babylon and the black tents of Kedar — those are not the props of my exile. Mine has been good and profitable and is bearing fruit. When I go to the airport to meet his plane, my only slightest qualms are my new gray hairs and that I may have lived so far from real life for three years as to seem unreal myself. I know the rest will be approved.

And it is. My gray hairs and unreality are unremarked. His hair is all steel-gray and his face is tired, but his grasp of living is as unshaken and firm and as spellbinding for me as ever. All my smaller annoyances and frictions and unfocused small bits of misery are fluffed off. Chaff and the wind, again. And the ungodly are really not so. That lovely piece of wishful thinking from the first psalm is true then. For us, anyway.

For weeks Lucy has suspected every strange man on the doorstep of being her father, ringing to be let in, but now that he is here she knows him perfectly and remembers how she sits on the edge of the bathtub while he shaves, to admire him in that fascinating ritual. That is almost the only time she lets go of his hand.

And the boys — Tim relaxes his throaty manliness and laughs and clowns and makes up for his three years of strained maturity. And John rises to untouched heights of responsibility and comprehension and puts away childish ways overnight. And everyone is very happy.

The first moment we can leave the house we have to walk slowly all about the place, to see what has happened to everything. This graft and that, the tiny seedling really looking like something, the saplings now worthy of birds’ nests, the new sweep of close-cut grass, the lusty hedge, the fruit trees heavy with good fruit from the cold hours of pruning. And here are things we have forgotten, but remember instantly, of course, and that this is what we meant them to be . . . they are coming on well.

It is just the right time to have leave. We have peaches and plums and apples and pears and grapes, for someone who has tasted so little fruit for so many years. And Rose has saved special jars in the store closet, fiercely tied with white string and doubly sealed, so that he can see what the strawberries and raspberries and cherries were like. It is all there for him. And honey from the bees. And the hens are laying well. The fruits of the earth. Our earth.

But we must show all we can do. The children can all swim, Lucy in breathless circles from the ladder and back again, John in bubbling tricks and comic dives, Tim in a powerful crawl. And Lucy can play the piano and sing about cobblers and cats, and the boys have made things — lots of things, now we come to see them all — benches and tables and aircraft carrier models and real little boats for themselves for the pond beyond our new wood.

And it is all there — the voice that I had forgotten comes back as quietly as if it had never gone. And the little pieces I have been carrying about, and trying to fit together, all spring together now and live, as if they had never been fragments. And it is true — we are one. Even after all our time apart we move easily about a room together. We do not collide or have to wait for each other. It is a sign if one moves easily in a confined space, just as walking well on the street together can show people who sleep well in each other’s arms. It is all part of the natural coöperation of a real marriage.

And into the chewed-newspaper nest of my mind, as fragile as a hornets’ nest and as unlike the real world, he brings facts and stout silences about plans for the future, some of which he knows, that are as heartening as whole piles of inky clamorings. The attic litter is cleared away and I walk with truths easily and do not have to have even the future either black or white or to accept emotionally and eternally the military expediency of the moment.

The first weeks we have summer weather and go on picnic sails to the back beach and play about in the sand, a family again, by ourselves. I lie on the top of a sand dune and look through the grasses at the boys playing in the water about the boat with their father, diving under it, wrestling, shouting and laughing, having their rights as boys with a man to play with. And at Lucy, wading out to them and calling and laughing and swimming in her circles like a frightened bee and then standing again to laugh and call and be as one with the men. And there is a special feeling, a separate emotion, to being a family, as real in its corporate conviction as the more positive and outgoing one of being lovers or a mother. Here we are, all alone on the white dunes by the blue creek, our family, all of us. Wonderful.

Then there is the great colorful upheaval of a New England autumn. Our road is a yellow tunnel of light under the maples. Distant hills lie beet-red and grape-purple. The blueberry bushes we set out on the little point are torches now. And still the tobacco plant blooms and scents the air by the door and I cut flowers and fill the rooms.

And the children go to school. It is true, this is a man’s world. Tim goes off to a very good school I had never considered for him so early, and appears on the honor roll, a position his father says we must not expect him to hold, but it is a good beginning. And John’s headmistress, who has been worrying for years about his not being able to write well, suddenly agrees that it is they who should have taught him, and his father arranges to have him have writing lessons — and he thrives. Of course. But it took a man, even for that. And Lucy goes back and can suddenly do all the things she should be able to, even after all her absences. Of course. Her father is at home.

And then we go off, on some job about the war, and to cities, and I love it. I love people in and out, even silly people, and city noises and smells and the press of living that comes from not being able to throw all the nonessentials into the wide view. But he hates it. He has eaten in restaurants for years and seen people in droves and walked in cities in shambles, and he wants to be home again. He scans the sky above the streets and sniffs the air and says what sort of day it is at home. So, as soon as he is free, we hurry home. And I am glad, too, though it was heartening to be with him while he was busy with the war. It felt nearer to the real world than I can feel while I burn the garbage or feed the hens at home. I wish I could be with him in the real war.

But what is one to do? Leave the children now, having given them a push as far ahead as I can? Take back my own life from them now and use it as I see fit for myself and for him? And to whom do I owe what? To myself least of all. So I suppose I shall stay.

On the way home for the last time he says suddenly what it is all about, the first time we have admitted it. “If Lucy’s husband,” he says, “never has to go to war, I shall feel I have done a good job.”

2

So now it is all to do again, except for more strength and fresher memories and the knowledge of how to go on alone. Shall I, I wonder, ever get back the determinedly positive and gay attitude? It seems very silly now. I do not believe I shall need that front again. Now, somehow, things have been set in such an ordered turmoil of reality that the old pretense seems like a paper valentine. Why should I pretend anything, even to myself? Get on with the time and the work and discard the shell of any foreplanned attitude. Nothing can hurt me now except the ultimates, and no attitude is any protection against them.

I shall not pull my room to pieces again and make it into one sternly for me alone. Easier far, now, to keep the knickknacks on the bureau, the clothes in the closet, the things in the drawers, and just wait for the war to end. The very smells of tobacco and tweed and shaving soap are comforting in themselves. It may be a surrender, a reversion to a state worthy of my collie who slept on a sweater he commandeered for himself from my closet until I should come home from boarding school, or college, or marriage. But it is easier now. I shall leave things as they are and take heart.

The children have given me back their upbringing. All the equilibrium with which I have tried to equip each one has been rendered up perfectly, skillfully, calmly. Tim said goodbye to us all at school on Sunday as if the whole family always came in a body, fond, excited, his father in uniform, John in as grown-up clothes as he possesses, trying to look twice his size, Lucy the epitome of little sister, open-eyed, adoring, pretty enough to collect several attentive males above her cup of cambric tea. Sunday was a happy success due to whatever we have made of Tim.

John cried at night because he would miss his father so much. Remembering my own helpfully stiffening challenges, I told him his father had not seen his father for years and years when he was a little boy, almost not at all until he was quite grown up, while people who lived in India. . . . But he said, with more truth than he knew, that they could not have been such good friends as fathers, so nobody really cared if they saw them much or not. Whereas his — But he promised not to make things hard.

Breakfast was almost like any other breakfast, with Rose walking solidly and reassuring in and out and the sun shining in across the creeks and marshes, except that Lucy, putting jam on her toast, said with quavering casualness, “Will you be able to get back here again before you go to England or Africa, Daddy?” She missed the toast with her butter knife and blinked, but she did not cry. She knew he could not get back, but we all affected to think that a change in plans might mean another few days. He said he would try, and she smiled tearily and ate her toast. And would I be home that night, they asked anxiously as we put them on their school train. As soon as I could get home, I promised. They are almost old enough to leave, but not quite. There is sense in my staying back, after all. I will be here until they do not worry about coming home to an empty house themselves.

We do a last tour of everything, planning what we shall have here and there when the war is over. Then there are thirty-five minutes left and we walk to another place and plan again. And then there is no time and we get into the car and every inch is leading us away.

One looks at a ship or a plane and asks, Can you get him there safely? and there can be no answer, not even an inward conviction that all will be well. Mechanical things lack the quality of transmitting confidence — or is it only that I was born to a generation keyed to the living will, and what it hoped was God’s, and so unable to derive the breath of trust from spiritless machines? If I had been born a generation later I might have been able to extract the essence from inanimate things and feel which is good and bound to go through and which not. One looks at a good horse and knows, given fair conditions, that he will win. One looks at a dog and knows that he will summon that something extra of the spirit that will allow him to distinguish himself. The dog pressing against one’s knee, the horse beneath one gathering himself for the real effort — one knows about them.

But what does one look at to receive assurance from a ship, from a tiny ship about to run alone, to try to get there ahead of grounded planes, of slowly proceeding convoys? The anchors jut from their holes at the bows like popping lobster eyes. It may and it may not. It all depends — and not on the strength of any spirit. On the chances of the sea and the whim of the enemy. Or so it seems to me, trying to extract some secret assurance from those popping, bulging eyes.

We joke and walk about in the cold wind and behave like people seeing each other off in peacetime. How else behave when all one cares about is at stake? He says I must go home to the children as soon as I can get a train. I agree. We affect to think it will be best for them. I know it is supposed to be the best refuge for me — as if I needed one. As I do. And then I consign him to the little ship at the last possible moment and am driven away by a taxi man whose very back seems to me to ooze doubt while I try in one last willing look to graft determination and invincibility on to the little gray bow.

Rose meets me at the darkened door with soup and funny stories about the children and someone who has worked there that day and been less than efficient. Rose’s harp will be of purest gold and automatic. I run upstairs and look at the children, as safely asleep as if I had put them in myself. And Shot tucks himself up on his rug in my room, where he has slept ever since he arrived from England at the beginning of the war. His black eyes in his creamy panda face roll at me in a way that I am sure is comprehending as I get into bed.

At my mother-in-law’s in England there is a big gate that opens out from the drive. Through it the five sons began to go out and come home and go out again to the ends of the earth — to India, China, Africa, America. They called it the Exiles’ Gate, veiling the harshness of the implication in soft Arabic words. We have seen people go away through the gate and have gone ourselves, and no one ever took it from the natural run of life and made it too hard to bear. If I can give our children that natural equanimity, that ability to spare others one’s deepest despairs, I shall have passed on their inheritance.