‘I didn’t really mind it. I’d grown up with it and I could handle it.
But I didn’t have the knack. Stuff wouldn’t grow for me.’
She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.
‘It’s good to be back,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll stay a while. I think
Father needs to have someone around.’
‘He said you planned to write.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘he did. He didn’t act as if he shouldn’t.’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose it makes any difference. But it’s a thing that you
don’t talk about – not until you’re well along on it. There are so many
things that can go wrong with writing. I don’t want to be one of those
pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish,
or talking about writing something that they never start.’
‘And when you write,’ I asked, ‘what will you write about?’
‘About right here,’ she said. ‘About this town of ours.’
‘Millville?
‘Why, yes, of course,’ she said. ‘About the village and its people.’
‘But,’ I protested, ‘there is nothing here to write about.’
She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. ‘There’s so much to
write about,’ she said. ‘So many famous people. And such characters.’
‘Famous people?’ I said, astonished.
‘There are,’ she said, ‘Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and
Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the
department of history at…’
‘But those are the ones who left,’ I said. ‘There was nothing here for
them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set
foot in Millville again, not even for a visit.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘they got their start here. They had the capacity for
what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I
finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and
stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other
village of its size.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness,
but not quite daring to.
‘I would have to check,’ she said, ‘but there have been a lot of them.’
‘And the characters,’ I said. ‘I guess you’re right. Millville has its
share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor
Higgy…’
‘They aren’t really characters,’ said Nancy. ‘Not the way you think of
them. I shouldn’t have called them characters to start with. They’re
individualists. They’ve grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They’ve not
been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they’ve been
themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist
today can be found in little villages like this.’
In all my life I’d never heard anything like this. Nobody had ever told
me that Higgy Morris was an individualist. He wasn’t. He was just a big
stuffed shirt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he
wasn’t. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop.
‘Don’t you think so?’ Nancy asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have never thought about it.’
And I thought – for God’s sake, her education’s showing, her years in
an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare centre,
her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of
theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the
feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and analyse the
place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but
it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or
boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the
village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook
and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home;
rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social
research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village
to inspection and analysis and she’d strip us bare and hold us up, flayed
and writhing, for the information and amusement of the kind of people who
read her kind of book.
‘I have a feeling,’ she said, ‘that there is something here that the
world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world.
Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger
that serves to trigger greatness.’
‘That inner hunger,’ I said. ‘There are families in town who can tell
you all you want to know about that inner hunger.’
And I wasn’t kidding. There were Millville families that at times went
just a little hungry; not starving, naturally, but never having quite enough
to eat and almost never the right kind of things to eat. I could have named
her three of them right off, without even thinking.
‘Brad,’ she said, ‘you don’t like the idea of the book.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I have no right to mind. But when you write
it, please, write it as one of us, not as someone who stands off and is a
bit amused. Have a bit of sympathy. Try to feel a little like these people
you write about. That shouldn’t be too hard; you’ve lived here long enough.’
She laughed, but it was not one of her merry laughs. ‘I have a terrible
feeling that I may never write it. I’ll start it and I’ll write away at it,
but I’ll keep going back and changing it, because the people I am writing of
will change, or I’ll see them differently as time goes on, and I’ll never
get it written. So you see, there’s no need to worry.’
More than likely she was right, I thought. You had to have a hunger, a
different kind of hunger, to finish up a book. And I rather doubted that she
was as hungry as she thought.
‘I hope you do,’ I said. ‘I mean I hope you get it written. And I know
it will be good. It can’t help but be.’
I was trying to make up for my nastiness and I think that she knew I
was. But she let it pass.
It had been childish and provincial, I told myself, to have acted as I
had. What difference did it make? What possible difference could it make for
me, who had stood on the street that very afternoon and felt a hatred for
the geographic concept that was called the town of Millville?
This was Nancy Sherwood. This was the girl with whom I had walked hand
in hand when the world had been much younger. This was the girl I had
thought of this very afternoon as I’d walked along the river, fleeing from
myself. What was wrong, I asked myself.
And: ‘Brad, what is wrong?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is there something wrong?
‘Don’t be defensive. You know there’s something wrong. Something wrong
with us.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ I told her. ‘It’s not the way it should be.
It’s not the way I had thought it would be, if you came home again.’
I wanted to reach out for her, to take her in my arms – but I knew,
even as I wanted it, that it was not the Nancy Sherwood who was sitting here
beside me, but that other girl of long ago I wanted in my arms.
We sat in silence for a moment, then she said, ‘Let’s try again some
other time. Let’s forget about all this. Some evening I’ll dress up my
prettiest and we’ll go out for dinner and some drinks.’
I turned and put out my hand, but she had opened the door and was
halfway out of the car.
‘Good night, Brad,’ she sad, and went running up the walk.
I sat and listened to her running, up the walk and across the porch. I
heard the front door close and I kept on sitting there, with the echo of her
running still sounding in my brain.
5
I told myself that I was going home. I told myself that I would not go
near the office or the phone that was waiting on the desk until I’d had some
time to think. For even if I went and picked up the phone and one of the
voices answered, what would I have to tell them? The best that I could do
would be to say that I had seen Gerald Sherwood and had the money, but that
I’d have to know more about what the situation was before I took their job.
And that wasn’t good enough, I told myself; that would be talking off the