Machine Dreams

they stood on the sidewalk playing hopscotch. Three letters a week to Europe on blue onionskin stationery; letters to boys who’d been our heros, and boys who hadn’t. We tacked Kodak snapshots on our walls—small black and white pictures the size of six postage stamps. A soldier in a graveyard and on the back:
All these Germans are dead ones.
You’ve seen your father’s war album—airstrips, everyone in khaki; how it was. Easy to tell good from evil.
    There was one boy I went with off and on through high school. He wanted to go to medical school instead of to war, and be a doctor like his father and two of his older brothers. The Harwins: they were a family of four brothers and one sister, grewup in one of the fine old turn-of-the-century houses, and were well-off. But Dr. Harwin had died when Tom was fourteen, and his mother died two years later, both of heart attacks. Tom was the youngest and Peggy, the sister, was in her twenties and taught phys. ed. at the college. One of the brothers—the oldest, I believe—was a sort of ne’er-do-well; he had a traveling job and then joined the navy. The other two were studying at Duke. They sent what they could, but the mother’s death took the last of the family money. Tom and Peggy had to sell the house his senior year, and the college bought it, just as they’d bought several of the other old homes. Shinner Black was Tom’s best friend and Shinner’s mother ran a rooming house, so Tom moved in for the summer. He didn’t really want to, but Peggy said he’d spend half his time there with Shinner anyway, and they couldn’t take a chance on losing the offer. Peggy was very practical and steady. She used to go along as chaperone when the high school kids went on picnics out by the river. Yes, we had chaperones, can you believe it? But Peggy was like one of us. I remember her lying on the rocks at Sago, wearing a black one-piece with a pleated bodice, and smoking cigarettes.…
    Sago was lush before mine drainage ruined it; the river so quiet, isolated. We went to Blue Hole—clear water circled with massive flat boulders, like a stone beach. We walked a long train trestle to reach it, a shaky old trestle high over the gorge, then down a trail by old tracks and over a wooded bank. Once we broke through the trees and a colony of butterflies, big yellow monarchs, were dipping their wings at clear puddles collected on the rocks. Forty or fifty of them, so silent. And the water was cool and clean then, twenty feet deep at Blue Hole. We swam and got lazy on beer, ate dinner, and went home. Peggy always took a wristwatch and hung it on a bush; we left at seven, before dusk. She’d tell us to wake up, children, and she yelled some hide-and-seek chant into the woods for the ones who’d gone off together. We walked back in a warm exhaustion, watching our feet on the trestle ties; trash, broken toys, trickle of stream in the weeds far down. Peggy said not to look—if you stared straight ahead you could be sure of every step and run to meet the train. She was a beautiful girl, fair, with honey-coloredhair. She and Tom resembled each other; the other brothers were dark.
    Tom’s father died before I really knew him, but I’d seen his mother. She dressed her gray hair in a chignon and always wore gloves in the summer. I have a photograph that must have been taken the summer after the father died: Mrs. Harwin in the garden with her children, wearing a long black-lace dress, a gold brooch, three strands of pearls. The sons flank her, all in black suits, and Peggy is directly behind her mother, peering between black shoulders. Must have been an occasion, a wedding, the men wearing boutonnieres, morning coats, cravats. The wide trellis is behind them, and the shaggy trees. Tom is fifteen and pleased with himself, the kid brother dressed in his first tuxedo. Considering what happened, it’s a scary picture. Only Peggy is still living—all the rest died of heart. And Tom was the youngest; we were seventeen, had just graduated from high school. Now it seems to me he died as a child, before anything touched him. But that’s not really true. He’d already lived through the deaths of his parents, not easy at any age. He was one of the boys, popular, but he had such a presence, a gravity. Everyone respected his family and he grew into that same respect. Sure, he fooled around sometimes—once he and Shinner Black dressed in drag on Class Day. Bobby sox, sweaters over C-cup bras