All three men picked up bags. Jim put his down again to shake hands embarrassedly with a dozen people whose faces were familiar but whose names were lost in six weltering years. They supplied them and told him what businesses they were in or where they lived, and he remembered fragments. Then the Baileys started around the station, chattering about the unseasonable freeze and snowstorm. Biff got to the car first and opened the door; Jimmie stood outside for a minute, looking at it.
“A ’forty-two,” Biff said exultantly. “Like it?”
“Yeah.” Jimmie’s enthusiasm was not great. “It’s magnificent. Haven’t seen the new American models for a long time. It’s a peach. Drives itself, I’ll bet. Sees in the dark and plays records.”
They laughed, but not quite certainly. The car started. Jimmie peered from a window while his family partially recovered from some vague emotion he was beginning to feel in them—a sort of disappointment, probably. Jimmie filed it away and allowed himself to revel in remembered geography, in architecture recalled. Muskogewan’s highest structure—the Purvis Building, eleven stories—and the old Post Office, empty, across from a modernistic new one, the fire house, the Horkin Store, “A Block of Bargains,” and Dunley’s Drug Store. Ordinary stuff, dream-poignant for Jimmie.
They turned at the Athletic Club and went out Park Street. There were changes in the old home too. The gingerbread trimmed away, some glass brick windows in the walls, a glassed-in porch around at the side, and a real garage instead of the barn, which had served for so long. A four-car garage. They stopped in the place where the porte-cochere had been and bustled out, talking again. His mother mostly—gossip about people and places and the new differences—nothing that meant as much to Jimmie as observing for himself. And they wondered why he had stayed away so long. So did he—now. He’d been very busy. Very busy….
A manservant opened the door—a white man—and Jimmie remembered that his mother had been afraid of male servants, once. He cocked an internal eyebrow. The Baileys had gone a bit swank since his departure. Not very; just some. They could doubtless afford it. His father was an officer in one of the two biggest banks; Biff and Sarah had finished school. Nothing more logical than to spend a little on improving the manor house. It was still comparatively modest.
The furniture in the living room was modern. There was an electrical piano and a superautomatic phonograph-radio, but the fireplace was the same and so were the oak logs burning in it—another beloved recollection. His father offered him a cigar and he took it. Coats were handed to the servant. They sat down, Sarah and his mother and Biff with cigarettes. Jimmie drew on the cigar and looked at it and looked at them and smiled sleepily. That was, usually, his way of smiling—the long smile of a man with good nerves and a warm heart.
His mother said, “I’ve been rattling on, Jimmie! You haven’t had a chance! And we’re all dying to hear! So tell us everything about it!”
He had a sinking feeling; he thought he knew what she meant. “About what, Mother?”
“About what? The war, of course!”