Where You Once Belonged(40)

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But as it turned out Danny Pohlmeier did live, as Dr. Martin said he might. He was in the hospital in Denver for two or three months and then he was in a cast for another half year or so. When he was home again he came to the house one night to talk to us. He sat on the couch and cried into his hands while he told us about it. After he had stopped talking there was nothing more to say. We walked him to the front door and he left. Nora and I did not blame him for what had happened. We did not feel that way about it. He was a nice boy and it was obvious that he felt very badly. Still we never mentioned his name to one another again.

In fact we were hardly speaking at all. It was an awful summer. Nora was quieter and even more withdrawn than she had ever been. She couldn’t sleep at night and she had begun to take things to make her sleep. Then she would get up late in the morning with a headache and move silently about the house. In the evenings she would still garden a little, among her roses, pulling weeds and dusting the flowers with insecticide, but she wasn’t much interested in her roses anymore and she had begun to wear white gloves whenever she worked outside. They were the same gloves she had worn previously to church and for women’s society meetings; now she was using them to protect her hands from the soil in the backyard. It was as though she were afraid of being contaminated by even that much of Holt County. Finally at the end of summer we agreed that it would be better if she left town for a while.

We gave people another reason for her leaving, however. Earlier that spring her father had been forced to retire from teaching at the university and he had decided that he wanted to move to Denver, to be in a larger city. He needed help to make the move. So at the beginning of September, Nora went to Boulder to assist in making the arrangements. We were both relieved that she was going to be gone for a time.

Then she refused to come back. It was at this time that Nora rented for her father the large apartment on Bannock Street, on the ground floor of an old Victorian house. It was a roomy place. It had leaded windows and outside there was ivy growing on the brick walls, with a black wrought-iron fence separating the house from the sidewalk and street, and evidently the whole thing suited the old man so well that he was quite pleased with his daughter and even told her so. Consequently Nora stayed awhile longer to help him establish his desk and his books. Then she decided to stay with him permanently. She took a job at the city library downtown and returned every evening to cook supper for him. It was an arrangement they both seemed to like. She wrote me a letter about it. That was how I learned that she was not coming back.

I wasn’t certain how I felt about this. The truth is, I did not miss her particularly. It was easier in the house without her there, without having to watch her every day. But a week or two later, on a Sunday, I drove to Denver to see them. I took Nora and the old gentleman out to eat at a restaurant. It was a place they suggested. There were white linen cloths and linen napkins folded in cones on the tables and heavy silverware beside the white plates. There were several wineglasses too. Dr. Kramer ordered the wine and when the waiter brought the bottle to the table the old man made a bit of dignified show, sniffing the cork and feeling it with his papery fingers. He decided the cork was sufficiently moist and told us it proved that the bottle had been placed on its side, that the cork hadn’t been allowed to dry out. Then the waiter poured wine into his glass and he tasted that and it seemed that the wine was satisfactory too. We all had a glass of wine.

So it was a long complicated meal of four or five courses. But Nora and the old man appeared to enjoy it. I had to admit that Nora’s face looked lovely again; the rigid control she had held on herself during the summer seemed to have been relaxed and she looked almost girlish once more. She sat beside her father and was very attentive to him. They discussed each course as it was brought by the waiter, sampling the food the other had ordered and making comparisons. Later we had dessert and coffee. Then we were finished with dinner and so we drove around in the city for an hour, across town through the city park and past the zoo and the museum, and back through the Cherry Creek retail area toward Broadway and Bannock Street. At the apartment again, Dr. Kramer decided he would take a short nap.

“Of course,” Nora said. “Why don’t you rest for a while, dear.”

“But don’t let me sleep too long. You know I mustn’t sleep too long.”

“No. Just for an hour.”

“No more than that.”

“I’ll wake you in an hour. Then we’ll have some tea.”

She followed him into the bedroom. Through the opened door I could see her bending over him, removing his shoes and covering him with a blanket. They were quite affectionate with one another; they called one another “dear.”

When she came back to the living room I said: “Why don’t we take a walk now? I need some air and I want to work off this dinner. Maybe we can even talk a little.”

It was early evening then. It was in the fall of the year and the trees standing up in front of the old houses in the neighborhood were just beginning to turn. The apartment they had rented was in an old established area of Denver. Formerly it must have been an attractive part of town; there were many large brick houses, built before the turn of the century, but the houses were nearly all divided into apartments and the streets were lined with cars. We walked five or six blocks south along Bannock Street and then turned west where we could see the mountains, high and blue-looking out beyond the city, and then north, and then east again to make a circle. It felt good to be walking. It was pleasantly cool outside and we saw a number of Hispanic families sitting out on the big porches of the neighborhood houses, playing music and drinking beer and talking, while handsome little black-haired kids played games in the yards or rode bicycles on the sidewalks, and I thought there was a sense of real life in the neighborhood, of things happening which would be interesting to know about. But soon Nora was ready to return to the apartment and her father. “I should wake him,” she said. “If he sleeps too long, he won’t be able to sleep again tonight.”