Mrs. Lepellier was helping Leper toward the stairs. “Don’t go,” he said between chuckles, “stay
for lunch. You can count on it. Always three meals a day, war or peace, in this room.”
And I did stay. Sometimes you are too ashamed to leave. That was true now. And sometimes you
need too much to know the facts, and so humbly and stupidly you stay. That was true now too.
It was an abundant Vermont lunch, more like a dinner, and at first it had no more reality than a
meal in the theater. Leper ate almost nothing, but my own appetite deepened my disgrace. I ate
everything within reach, and then had to ask, face aflame with embarrassment, for more to be
passed to me. But that led to this hard-to-believe transformation: Mrs. Lepellier began to be
reconciled to me because I liked her cooking. Toward the end of the meal she became able to
speak to me directly, in her high but gentle and modulated voice, and I was so clumsy and
fumbling and embarrassed that my behavior throughout lunch amounted to one long and
elaborate apology which, when she offered me a second dessert, I saw she had accepted. “He’s a
good boy underneath,” she must have thought, “a terrible temper, no self-control, but he’s sorry,
and he is a good boy underneath.” Leper was closer to the truth.
She suggested he and I take a walk after lunch. Leper now seemed all obedience, and except for
the fact that he never looked at his mother, the ideal son. So he put on some odds and ends of
clothing, some canvas and woolen and flannel pulled on to form a patchwork against the cutting
wind, and we trailed out the back door into the splendor of the failing sunshine. I did not have
New England in my bones; I was a guest in this country, even though by now a familiar one, and
I could never see a totally extinguished winter field without thinking it unnatural. I would tramp
along trying to decide whether corn had grown there in the summer, or whether it had been a
pasture, or what it could ever have been, and in that deep layer of the mind where all is judged by
the five senses and primitive expectation, I knew that nothing would ever grow there again. We
roamed across one of these wastes, our feet breaking through at each step the thin surface crust
of ice into a layer of soft snow underneath, and I waited for Leper, in this wintery outdoors he
loved, to come to himself again. Just as I knew the field could never grow again, I knew that
Leper could not be wild or bitter or psycho tramping across the hills of Vermont.
“Is there an army camp in Vermont?” I asked, so sure in my illusion that I risked making him
talk, risked even making him talk about the army.
“I don’t think there is.”
“There ought to be. That’s where they should have sent you. Then you wouldn’t have gotten
nervous,”
“Yeah.” A half chuckle. “I was what they call ‘nervous in the service.’”
Exaggerated laughter from me. “Is that what they call it?”
Leper didn’t bother to make a rejoinder. Before there had always been his polite capping of
remarks like this: “Yes, they do, that’s what they call it”—but today he glanced speculatively at
me and said nothing.