Union Atlantic Page 0,81
events would have lessened once the semester ended, but school exchanges had been canceled in the wake of 9/11 and family vacations to Europe called off. Parents told kids to get summer jobs and pulled back from the promise of cars for college. You heard stories of people's moms and dads being laid off from office jobs that if you'd ever bothered to contemplate seemed eternal in their boredom. The town put out the usual flags, and the flowers beneath them bloomed. And for all the worry shot down the cable wires, for all the jokes about duct tape and the town police cordoning off the baseball diamond to detonate a grade-schooler's lost knapsack, for all the hours of news spooling tape on the dirty bomber and Saddam's vast arsenal and the tall, smiling Satan eluding our might in the mountains of some hopelessly foreign country, the drama club still had its bake sale and the library still sold books out on the sidewalk from noon to three on weekends, and you still wished for a clarifying rain at the end of each sweltering day.
Such a rain arrived on the Friday afternoon two weeks after the party, just as Nate was getting to Ms. Graves's house. She led him into the living room and took a seat in her usual spot on the couch. In the stifling heat, the room's disarray was strictly oppressive, the mounds of clutter like plants rotting in a jungle. None of this would ever be cleared away, he thought, not as long as she remained rooted here.
Her voice lacked its usual force and she often paused in her meandering discourse, which contained no more breathless jeremiads. She spoke awhile of Dewey and the spread of primary education, but he could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.
"You needn't worry," she said after a particularly long silence, during which he'd noticed the scabs still visible on her shins. "I know you aren't studying for your exam anymore. You've been good to indulge me like this. I know I've bored you."
"That's not true," he said, gnawing at the blunt end of his pen.
She gazed past him out the window.
"I've been thinking of birch trees for along the riverbank. What do you think? Perhaps a mix of things would be better."
On his way over, Nate had tried telling himself that the documents wouldn't matter, that she had already won her suit. But the excuse seemed thin now; Doug wouldn't want the files if he couldn't gain something by them.
"In any case, I'll make us some tea."
As soon as she left the room, he began darting from one pile of paper to the next, keeping a close eye on the door. He gathered bank statements, tax records, notarized letters, and anything else from that mass of print which seemed relevant. On a stack by the fireplace he saw a manila folder labeled "Society Minutes" and he shoved it in his knapsack along with the rest. His only thought as he went about his task was a disavowed one: that losing his father permitted him this moral lapse. As if, in some grand ledger, his loss had earned him a pass or two.
Ms. Graves returned carrying a tray of tea and biscuits.
"I've been returning to Whitman," she said, as she poured them each a cup. "He's right about most things. But if you take him to heart, you can't always read the poems in your favor. He has this way of looking back at you. Here's one I came across this morning. 'To a Historian.'"
She put on her reading glasses and recited the lines in a slow, reflective voice.
"'You who celebrates bygones, / Who have explored the outward, the surfaces of the races, the life that has exhibited itself, / Who have treated of man as the creature of politics, aggregates, rulers and priests, / I, habitan of the Alleghenies, treating of him as he is in himself in his own rights, / Pressing the pulse of life that has seldom exhibited itself, (the great pride of man in himself,) Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, / I project the history of the future.'
"Bracing stuff, no? The question is, can you chant personality without devolving into solipsism? Can you trust the pulse of life without becoming Mr. Fanning? Because he is the future. One way or the other. His kind of rapaciousness, it doesn't end. It just bides its time."
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LATER THAT EVENING Nate stood in the middle of Doug's