The Surrendered

Afterward Nicholas headed south on Third Avenue, his hands calm and empty. Was he on to a usual string of unsuspecting shops? His ski

“Do you have any children, Mr. Clines? Excuse me, I don’t even know if you have a wife.”

“My wife died many years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have a daughter,” Clines said. They were stopped at a long traffic light. “She lives in Philadelphia.”

“What does she do?”

“She and her husband are both clerks in a grocery store.”

“Do they have children?”

“No.”

He was clearly hesitant to continue, but for some reason June felt like querying him.

“You must see her fairly often, being nearby.”

“Only sometimes.”

“On holidays?”

“No, not on holidays,” he said, clearing his throat. The light changed and they proceeded for a few blocks in quiet. He was driving quite stiffly, with both hands firmly on the steering wheel, his head locked straight ahead. She was ready to drop the subject but then he said, “We haven’t spoken in some time.”

“May I ask why?”

“I don’t know why, Mrs. Singer. Nothing bad ever happened between us. There’s no animosity. In fact, I would like to leave her with a decent amount of money, whenever I go. If I didn’t have her, I’d probably have retired already. But she would never know that. I would have to say we didn’t talk too much. Even when she was young.”

“Do you think you should have?”

“I doubt it would have made a difference. Neither of us is very talkative. But I truly don’t know,” he said, with a sudden heaviness that revealed his full age. “Do you think you should have done something differently?”

“With Nicholas? No. I don’t think so.”

Clines didn’t say anything else, and although she knew she was likely sounding defensive or callous she let him drive on without explaining herself further. For she had indeed offered Nicholas everything she had been capable of giving, and more, even as she knew by the time he was three that it might somehow never be enough. Perhaps no matter what you did you could never love someone out of his nature, love someone out of his fate. Love, she had come to believe, had no such power.

Was his nature hers? In the antiques business she had tried to be honest whenever possible, though with old furniture and objets d’art it was difficult to follow completely ethical practices. It was a structurally unreliable enterprise, if not, at times, downright chicane. For one could never really be sure of the provenance of a piece, no matter what anyone told you, whether well intentioned or not. She herself, especially in the begi

Of course when she was young June had stolen things outright, too, but it had been a matter of survival, plain and simple, as with the old farmer’s blanket, and dozens of other items and foodstuffs during the war and its aftermath. And yet, even after she was settled in the orphanage, where there was plenty of food, where there was shelter and safety, there were instances when she would steal things from the other children that could hardly benefit her, and only gave them great unhappiness. Certain sentimental objects drew her eye: a boy’s prized marbles. A girl’s silver bracelet, which had once been her mother’s. A particularly egregious theft had been of a flimsy, creased photograph of a family, which she’d lifted from the back pocket of a sleeping boy. She had nothing against the boy, in fact he was sometimes friendly to her, while most of the others avoided her. Yet she waited three full days before giving it back. She watched him search frantically through his few things, comb the play yard and classrooms on his hands and knees, then could hear him crying one afternoon in the boys’ quarters, blubbering to his dead parents, asking their forgiveness for losing his only image of them. She felt immense in her cruelty, but she told herself, too, that he ought to accept that they were forever gone, that he was actually cursed by having the picture, that he merely weakened himself by examining it all the time and depending on it as though it were his sole source of strength and faith.

No one found out she had taken the photograph, nor about any of the things she’d stolen from the other children. She was suspected, naturally, but nothing was ever proven. The only time she was discovered was when she returned something she openly admitted to taking. It was a book of Sylvie Ta

June asked her to read it aloud to her but Sylvie said it was not like poetry, or a children’s story, something to be enjoyed; it was an account of war, and she said that June didn’t need to read about it. But June persisted, if only because she saw how Sylvie handled the book, with indeed a kind of enjoyment, a certain somber savoring. June would peer inside the bedroom when she was supposed to be dusting, or creep behind to the plot in back, and there would be Sylvie with the faded-blue cloth-covered book in her clutch, often not even reading it, more keeping it close, her form characteristically folded up in a chair with it tucked against her chest, or propped beneath her chin. Whenever June was in the house alone she would steal into the room and try to read a page. It was difficult for her-she was otherwise reading mostly English primers then, though easily-and she realized it would take her hours simply to get past the preface and initial pages of historical background.

So she took it, reading it in her spare late-afternoon hours in the cover of a natural bunker amid the hillside brush and weeds. When the account of the battle began the writing became clearer to her, the words sharpening and crystallizing and soon enough disappearing, the reading coming to her as easily as if she were viewing a picture show in a theater. What the author saw of the battle was horrifying, the grinding carnage of the cavalry charges, of the artillery rounds and chain-gun shot, the piles of sundered, crushed bodies and scattered human remains, the veritable rivers of blood, but it was in fact the days following that haunted him most. It was the unspeakable fate of the wounded that haunted him, their privation and “perfect torture” because of the grave lack of food and water and medical supplies, most of the caretakers being laypersons like himself or the local townsfolk, all willing to aid the survivors but frightfully incapable of doing so. All the churches in the area surrounding the town called Solferino were filled with miserable soldiers, the air of their sanctuaries fouled with the stench of the dead and dying.