Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,140
in the floorboards. It surprised me some, the smallness of the room—it just about fit all five of us. “Let me crack the window,” said Claire. I was careful to take the end of the bed where there was most support—I didn’t want it creaking. I put my hands down on the mattress so it wouldn’t bounce and I leaned against the wall where I could feel the cool of the plaster against my back. Janet sat on the beanbag chair—she hardly made a dent in it—and the others took the far end of the bed, while Claire herself took a small white chair by the window where the breeze came in.
“Here we are,” she said.
The sound in her voice like we’d come to the end of a very long journey.
“Well, it’s lovely,” said Jacqueline.
“It really is,” said Marcia.
The ceiling fan spun and the dust settled like little mosquitoes around us. Along the shelves there were lots of radio parts and flat boards with electronic gizmos, wires hanging down. Big batteries. Three screens, their backs open and tubes showing.
“He liked his televisions?” I said.
“Oh, they’re bits of computers,” said Claire.
She reached across and picked up a photo of him in a silver frame on his table, passed it around. The frame was heavy and it had a MADE IN EN-GLAND sticker on the back velvet. In the photo Joshua was a thin little white boy with pimples on his chin. Dark glasses and short hair. Eyes that weren’t comfortable looking in the camera. He wasn’t in uniform either. She said it was taken just before his graduation from high school, when he was valedictorian. Jacqueline rolled her eyes again but Claire didn’t notice—every word she said about her son seemed to spread the smile on her face. She picked up a snow globe from his desk, shook it up and down. The globe was from Miami, and I thought, There’s someone with a touch of funny—snow falling over Florida. But when she turned it upside down it was like there was some other gravity in the world: she waited until every little flake had settled and then she turned it again and she told us all about him, Joshua, where he went to school, the notes he liked on the piano, what he was doing for his country, how he read all the books on the shelves, how he even built himself his own adding machine, went to college, then out to some park somewhere—he was the sort of boy who was once liable to put another man on the Moon.
I had asked her once if she thought Joshua and my boys were friends, and she said yes, but I knew nothing was probably further from the truth.
No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.
No shame in saying either that I let her rattle on, even encouraged her to get it all out. Years ago, when I was at university in Syracuse, I developed a manner of saying things that made people happy, kept them talking so I didn’t have to say much myself, I guess now I’d say that I was building a wall to keep myself safe. In the rooms of wealthy folk, I had perfected my hard southern habit of Mercy and Lord and Landsakes. They were the words I fell back on for another form of silence, the words I’ve always fallen back on, my reliables, they’ve been my last resort for I don’t know how long. And sure enough, I fell into the same ditch in Claire’s house. She spun off into her own little world of wires and computers and electric gadgets, and I spun right back.
Not that she noticed, or seemed to notice anyway; she just peeked up at me from under her gray streak, and smiled, like she was surprised to be talking and nothing could stop her now. She was a picture of pure happiness, collecting one thought after the other, circling around, going back, explaining another thing about the electronics, detailing another about Joshua’s time in school, rattling on about a piano in Florida, doing her own peculiar hopscotch through that boy’s life.