Someone tried to call to them, breaking the spell, and the man turned slightly, pulling the woman’s face against his shoulder to comfort her or to hide her. A shadow passed over the face of the moon, and they were gone, another strange night before the war came.
In the morning, Daisy and I were both decently back in her bed, and I thought I could still detect a shimmer of starlight in the corner of her mouth, tangled in the hair at her nape.
Daisy and her lieutenant were the great secret of the summer, one that I was thrilled to be included in. I covered for Daisy, I watched them with bated breath because it was all terribly romantic, wasn’t it, and when he finally left for Europe with the others, Daisy wasn’t seen for days, locked in her bedroom and refusing food and comfort.
She had come out in fall, when there was Red Cross and relief work to do, and then not long after that, her aunt in Baltimore grew sickly, and she went with her mother to look after her and to see Baltimore. Daisy and I drifted apart, somewhat, after that, and we would have drifted even further if it wasn’t for the thing I helped her with a few years later. That year, however, enshrined her in my heart as something gleaming and shining, something whose touch was almost holy and whose heart could call down light.
I was a little bereft after Daisy went to Baltimore, but I found my feet quickly when I realized that the excuse of war work could keep me out for long hours rolling bandages and preparing care packages. I spent the war years hopping houses and hopping beds, restless in my own way and strangely comforted by the unease that soaked into everything we did. The world was on fire, but we could only smell the smoke.
Daisy wouldn’t have come to some of the places I wanted to go then, anyway, and as the war hung over everything and my position in Louisville became stranger and even less sure, there were a lot of places I wanted to go and things I wanted to do.
Daisy had the world in her hands, but she was never what you would call worldly. Her pleasures were domestic, her disasters, similar. They always had been.
Then the war ended, everything changed, and nothing changed, and I was still, frustratingly enough, nothing more than myself.
The judge was in a long and dignified decline. He was simply seen less and less often in town, and then less and less often at home. It drove his clerks to distraction, and at home sometimes I would enter a room and think I was quite alone until I smelled the scent of his tobacco, carried in a little embroidered pouch in his pocket, and heard his customary grumbling cough.
He had good days and bad ones. On the good days, he was nearly solid again, rattling his silverware against the china, handing the servants their pay and venturing up the street for a bit of ham and mustard on rye, what he liked to speak of as his only indulgence. （It wasn’t. There were also the gambling slips to be paid off after he died as well as the annuity of a beautiful young girl just a few years older than me who lived on Toussaint Avenue.）
On the bad days, there was a hollowness to his eyes, and his body took on a shapeless colorless quality. It was as if he was testing out his next role as a ghost, choosing a look that was positively medieval over his own modern appearance. On the bad days, he lurked in the corner of the eye, full of a kind of dull menace. Two servants quit when they saw him drift rapidly towards them in the upper hallway, and he broke one poor girl’s neck when he startled her and she fell down the stairs.
He revived, briefly, for Daisy’s wedding. She married Tom nine months after Armistice, the shadow of her bad March not even touching her hems. She woke Louisville to a ringing of bells and glamour, life returned, and even the judge had to heed it.
Before I let myself get swept away by Walter Finley, I remembered the judge seated at a table of town luminaries, nodding and looking gravely pleased, even if he was put out by the fact that Daisy had insisted on an integrated jazz band for at least a portion of the reception. The war was over, and the world was breaking down the doors even in Louisville.
The judge left early, and I left late with Walter. Walter was from St. Louis, staying with his Fenton cousins in Louisville, and he was related to Daisy through some rather tortuous chain of blood. After the war, he lost a great deal of the tiresome dignity and restraint that he had been bred to, and so was banished from St. Louis until he could remember some of it again.