Free Katherine Keenum by Where the Light Falls

was not required of her boarders, nor expected in the morning.
    He dragged himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, weighed down by an unfocused sense of dread. Memory of the night before crept back and, with it, certainty that the tintype of Marie would never again have power to move him. He had learned of her death when he came home from the war. She had been dead some fifteen years now; the past was gone. Early in his bereavement, whenever he saw a view that would have delighted her or passed a band concert in the park, the moment of recognizing a pleasure as hers had been sweet; the instant stab of loss that followed had been deep and real. Out of such moments, he had made a practice of addressing her mentally as if to share things with her. He let her voice rally him for his absurdities. When had the habit lapsed and faded? When was the last time he had thought of her at all? The realization that had felled him the night before remained true in the morning: His devotion to Marie was a sentimental self-delusion, which he had given up long ago without even noticing. For that matter, the real eighteen-year-old Marie was probably nothing like the girl he had repeatedly resurrected in memory. Obviously, she wouldn’t be now, not if she had lived. But for all he knew, she had betrayed him while he was away. She hardly ever wrote, he told himself brutally, then felt ashamed. Why malign that sweet girl in his blue funk? Hating his room more than he hated moving, he went downstairs.
    Mrs. Wiggins’s tea was stronger than her coffee, a coarse black China tea that stood up well to milk. He drank a large cup and ate toast. He had no appetite for her badly cooked eggs or dry chops, but the stimulant did him good.
    Back in his room, he picked up the closed tintype case and bounced it in his hand. Smiling a little sardonically at the experiment, he pushed it open with his thumb. The image of the pretty girl was still a flat gray irrelevance. He was no longer shocked by its failure to move him, though some part of his mind grieved. He might as well throw it away. But he didn’t. Some caution, or perhaps a flickering thread of light in the back of his mind, led him instead to bury it in the bottom of his handkerchief box.
    At the drugstore, he kept his customary hours. It was a busy morning. A warm wind during the night had brought in the kind of balmy day that presaged spring, and with it all the patients who had been kept indoors yesterday by the sleet. The newer customers with simple needs or doctors’ prescriptions to be filled were glad to see Hans, whose ruddy cheek and alert eye attracted them; the older ones, those who remembered the Ohio Ninth Infantry,
Die Neuner
, and those who needed a diagnosis, generally waited for Edward. He attended each one with forced concentration despite an incipient headache. Not even the newcomers, who were intimidated by the gaunt shadows under his cheekbones and his sunken eye, doubted the assurance with which he prescribed remedies and compounded dosages. Not even Hans.
    That night he forced himself to attend a lecture on the
Reichpatentgesetz
, the new patent law in Germany. His head pounded. Saturday, he worked all day. Saturday night, he tried to lose himself in the raucous gaiety of a music hall but had to flee the noise and smoke. On Monday, his hand trembled in the morning, but he kept himself on the job. He was late to work on Tuesday; he took to walking instead of eating at midday. Hans began stepping forward to greet all customers. Edward’s condition worsened. Finally, the mother of one of his slain comrades in the Ninth came in, a woman who had known the Murers back in Germany. She leaned past Hans at the counter to peer at Edward hunched over in his chair behind the bead curtain.
    “Is it one of his headaches?” she asked, in an undertone.
    “He’s been like this for a week,” whispered Hans.
    “So. Go take a cab, tell the driver to wait, and fetch