Half World: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

Henry had taken on the trip, Thomas at the river and her own glamour shot. There were more in the box, wedding photos, Hannah’s school pictures, a photograph that a friend in Washington, Roy Pritchard, had taken of Thomas as a baby. In the picture, Thomas’s eyes were blue and clear as he looked up at the lens, smiling. Then another picture from Roy, taken just a year later. This one with the now-familiar closed book of Thomas’s expressionless face.
    She set the two pictures together on the mantel as she had in Arlington, though she knew it bothered Henry and Hannah. It was painful to be reminded of the Thomas they’d known in that first year. But Ginnie needed to see those pictures together, what the distance between them made plain. That she’d missed something, she’d let something slip past. He had gone somewhere, just like that. Somewhere in that space she had lost him.
    There was a box with the books she was using for Thomas’s lessons, as well as the books the doctors in Washington had given her. Foldedwithin the pages of a behavioral journal she found the self-portrait Thomas had made during one of his sessions, the crayon drawing of how he saw himself: a small metal figure, with a silver head and arms and legs, wheels connected by rods where his feet should be, chugging along on tracks that stretched from one end of the page to the other.
    The Locomotive Boy. This was what one of the doctors in Washington had called him. This after all of the psychiatry sessions, the tests, the disastrous attempts at the special school. Ginnie sitting in the doctor’s office and the man telling her this as if it were a diagnosis of some kind, as if he’d solved the mystery. The Locomotive Boy. Ginnie kept her mouth shut and listened. She’d spent years keeping her mouth shut and listening. She imagined standing, pounding the arm of her chair, clearing the doctor’s desk with a sweep of her arm. She imagined shouting until she was heard by this man, by all of these men. Shaming them into silence. How dare you. This is my son.
    When the doctor had finished, Ginnie thanked him and rose from her seat and picked Thomas up from the playroom down the hall, knowing that this would be their last appointment.
    She did not want him pitied, treated as if he was sick. She was tired of being accused, blamed by specialists who spent as much time trying to analyze her as they did Thomas. She would teach her son at home. She would find ways in, subjects that interested him, that sparked something, inevitably becoming unshakable obsessions, but openings nonetheless. She would use these openings to help him learn about the world, even in the smallest terms. How to read a transit map, a train schedule. How to talk about these things. The doctors, the teachers at his school had seen his long, loud monologues as symptoms, further proof of his illness. Ginnie saw them as successes. Thomas able, finally, to communicate. She didn’t care how loud or for how long he spoke. He could shout about transit schedules until Kingdom Come as far as she was concerned.
    There was a door at the back of the kitchen, a staircase leading to the unfinished basement. She’d had the movers put Henry’s desk down there, his bookcases. She’d arranged his poetry books on the shelves in what she remembered as their order on the shelves of his study in Arlington, though only Henry would know for sure. Some of the books had been with him since college, coming along into their marriage. Springtime in Chicago, she remembered, those early months after the war, soft evenings, sitting in their apartment and Henry reading verses of past friends, schoolmates, and then some of the masters, Yeats, Eliot, Williams. Henry’s voice deep and rich, wondering at the lines, the beauty and the mystery. Ginnie sitting on the window seat in the living room, pregnant with Hannah, watching Henry smoke, watching him read, an accountant by day, his head full of mathematics, but this