10
MY MOTHER felt the chill, and she gave a little shudder, and she linked one arm with Bert’s and the other with Buster’s and drew the boys closer to her.
“What do you suppose it means?” she asked. She shuddered again.
“Means?” asked my father.
“Yes,” said my mother. “I mean, it must mean something, don’t you think?”
“Why?” asked my father.
“I don’t know why, exactly,” said my mother. “Maybe I’m just being silly, but doesn’t it seem a little weird to you—the way we were all drawn here by it?”
“Huh?” said my father.
“I see what you mean,” said Buster.
“You do?” said my father.
“I think so,” said Buster.
“Well, let me in on it, will you?” said my father, meaning to be funny. “I’m completely in the dark.”
“It’s just,” said Buster, “it’s just, the way it interrupted everything, the way one minute we were going about our business, doing whatever we were doing, and the next minute we noticed the fire in the sky, or maybe we heard the sirens, and from then on the fire took over. It took us over. You see what I mean?”
“Um, yeah,” said my father, and here he may have blushed, because it wouldn’t have been at all unlikely, I think, that at the time when he had heard the siren, he had been rummaging through his brother’s dresser drawers searching for notes from my mother or snapshots of her.
(Buster would almost certainly have had snapshots of her, since he was an amateur photographer with a darkroom in the basement. So my father would probably have been looking at Buster’s snapshots of my mother when the sirens sounded. At the time, my mother was equally enamored of both of the Leroy boys and couldn’t decide which one her heart favored, and if my father had been searching through Buster’s things, then he would have reacted with a start when he heard the sirens and would have tried quickly to arrange the notes and snapshots as he’d found them. Buster’s mentioning the sirens would have reminded my father of all that and brought to his mind the likelihood that later that evening, when they returned home after the fire had burned out or had been extinguished by the Babbington Volunteer Hose Company, Buster would notice that his mementoes of my mother had been disturbed. Later, after Buster was killed in the war, my father inherited Buster’s snapshots of my mother, and the portraits and figure studies he had made of May Castle, a friend of my grandparents’, and his photographic gear.)
“That’s right!” said my mother. “I’ll bet that all of us here, for the rest of our lives, will remember what we were doing when we heard the sirens or saw the glow. And of course we’ll always remember this night.”
She looked at Buster with dreamy eyes, eyes aglow with more than the flames from the Nevsky mansion, and thought to herself that it was most certainly true, that she certainly would remember this night. She gave Buster’s arm a little squeeze, drew him a little closer to her.
“So, it seems as if it must mean something,” said Buster. “As if it ought to mean something—especially to us, the people it brought together here.”
“Wow! Too deep for me,” said my father, with the dismissive wave that I would come to know well by the time I reached his age—that is, the age he was on the night the Nevsky mansion burned.
My mother drew Buster a little closer still, and he returned her squeeze.
[to be continued]
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