In the dress shop, with its bell that announced his entrance, was Marilyn Macauley, trying on a dress. “Tommy, what brings you in here?” Marilyn was thinking of getting the dress for her granddaughter’s baptism a few Sundays from now, she said, and she tugged on the side of it; it was beige with swirling red roses; she was without her shoes, standing in just her stockings. She said that it was an extravagance to buy a new dress for such a thing, but that she felt like it. Tommy—who had known Marilyn for years, first when she was in high school as a student in Amgash—saw her embarrassment, and he said he didn’t think it was an extravagance at all. Then he said, “When you have a chance, Marilyn, can you help me find something for my wife?” He saw her become efficient then, and she said yes, she certainly would, and she went into the changing room and came back out in her regular clothes, a black skirt and a blue sweater, with her flat black shoes on, and right away she took Tommy over to the scarves. “Here,” she said, pulling out a red scarf that had a design with gold threads running through it. Tommy held it, but picked up a flowery scarf with his other hand. “Maybe this,” he said. And Marilyn said, “Yes, that looks like Shirley,” and then Tommy understood that Marilyn liked the red scarf herself but would never allow herself to buy it. Marilyn, that first year Tommy worked as a janitor, had been a lovely girl, saying “Hi, Mr. Guptill!” whenever she saw him, and now she had become an older woman, nervous, thin, her face pinched. Tommy thought what other people thought, it was because her husband had been in Vietnam and had never afterward been the same; Tommy would see Charlie Macauley around town, and he always looked so far away, the poor man, and poor Marilyn too. So Tommy held the red scarf with the gold threads for a minute as though considering it, then said, “I think you’re right, this one looks more like Shirley,” and took the flowery one to the register. He thanked Marilyn for her help.
“I think she’ll love it,” Marilyn said, and Tommy said he was sure she would.
Back on the sidewalk, Tommy walked up to the bookstore. He thought there might be a gardening book his wife would like; once he was inside he walked about, then saw—right there in the middle of the store—a display of a new Lucy Barton book. He picked it up—it had on its cover a city building—then he looked at the back flap, where her picture was. He thought he wouldn’t recognize her if he met her now, it was only because he knew it was her that he could see the remnants of her, in her smile, still a shy smile. He was reminded once again of the afternoon she said she had broken the chalk on purpose, her funny little smile that day. She was an older woman now, and the photo showed her hair pulled back, and the more he looked at it, the more he could see the girl she had been. Tommy moved out of the way of a mother with two small children, she moved past him with the kids and said, “？’Scuse me, sorry,” and he said, “Oh sure,” and then he wondered—as he sometimes did—what Lucy’s life had been like, so far away in the City of New York.
He put the book back on the display and went to find the salesclerk to ask about a book on gardening. “I might have just the thing, we just got this in,” and the girl—who was not a girl, really, except they all seemed like girls to Tommy these days—brought him a book with hyacinths on the cover, and he said, “Oh, that’s perfect.” The girl asked if he wanted it wrapped, and he said Yes, that would be great, and he watched while she spread the silver paper around it, with her fingernails that were painted blue, and with her tongue sticking slightly out, between her teeth, as she concentrated; she put the Scotch tape on, then gave him a big smile when it was done. “That’s perfect,” he repeated, and she said, “You have a nice day now,” and he told her the same. He left the store and walked across the street in the bright sunshine; he would tell Shirley about Lucy’s book; she had loved Lucy because he had. Then he started the car and pulled out of the parking space, started back down the road toward home.
The Johnson boy came to Tommy’s mind, how he couldn’t get off drugs, and then Tommy thought of Marilyn Macauley and her husband, Charlie, and then his mind went to his older brother, who had died a few years back, and he thought how his brother—who had been in World War II, who had been at the camps when they were being emptied—he thought how his brother had returned from the war a different man; his marriage ended, his children disliked him. Not long before his brother died, he told Tommy about what he had seen in the camps, and how he and the others had the job of taking the townspeople through them. They had somehow taken a group of women from the town through the camps to show them what had been right there, and Tommy’s brother said that although some of the women wept, some of them put their chins up, and looked angry, as if they refused to be made to feel bad. This image had always stayed with Tommy, and he wondered why it came to him now. He unrolled the window all the way down. It seemed the older he grew—and he had grown old—the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.