Richard’s first meeting with Mr. Lytle had not come until March, when the Lytles had hosted their own engagement party for Paul and Claire at their home just east of Wilmington, on a wild expanse of land that rested between the city and a thin slip of barrier islands. It had not been a working plantation for more than sixty years, but it was immediately apparent to Richard that the Lytles’ lives were defined by an all-consuming desire to resurrect and reanimate the past.
The Lytles’ party had been a grand affair comparable only to the many other grand affairs that Richard quickly learned were the hallmark of the family’s wealth and prominence. Although the Lytles had made their fortune in rice on the coast and tobacco farther inland, the current generation now staked the family name on their social standing and willingness to express it. What seemed like hundreds of guests attended the party and floated in droves from one high-ceilinged room to another. In the crush of men in tuxedos and Confederate gray and women in sequined gowns and antebellum dresses, Richard quickly lost track of names and associations. Claire had already slipped away from them and disappeared into the crowd with Paul and the other young people, and Richard clung to Katherine’s hand while she navigated the crowd just as effortlessly as she seemed to navigate everything else in her life.
He’d always viewed Katherine this way. His earliest memories of her were rose colored with her easy nature, and he often caught himself remembering her as the fifteen-year-old girl who’d helped him and her distraught father load boxes of her dead brother’s books and clothes and belongings onto the train platform in Raleigh all those years ago. Richard and Katherine’s brother David had been college roommates at Chapel Hill, and Richard could still feel his throat where it had cinched tight with worry and uncertainty about what to say to David’s father, a man who at that time had been no older than Richard was now. Although they’d hardly spoken to one another, Katherine’s soft eyes had peered at him over boxes and stacks of her brother’s books as if to assure him that his sadness at her brother’s death was something that would pass, something that even so young a girl knew would not last forever.
Richard, on the other hand, had always felt constricted, confined, unsure of which way to step or how to hold his smile or where to look or what to read into the faces of the people before him. He’d been drawn to Katherine because she’d always been the one to lead him through their shared emotional territory. They’d never spoken of it, but both he and Katherine knew that he’d returned from the war even more cautious, guarded, and uncomfortable than he’d been before he left. Claire had only been seven years old at the start of the war, but she was almost eleven by the time he returned, and it had seemed that the two of them found themselves strangers to one another, as if their lives had continued in those four intervening years on separate trajectories that would never realign.
His difference upon returning wasn’t simply marked by an emotional distance. A physical bulwark had been set in place as well. In bed at night, it wasn’t uncommon for him to leap toward Katherine in his sleep if her toe were to graze his leg. His hands had even once found her neck before he opened his eyes and saw her terrified face in the soft predawn light coming through the curtains. Loud noises—bursts of laughter, a piece of silverware falling to the floor, music—often provoked the same terrified feeling as an invisible body touching his own in the darkness of his bedroom. The only thing he could control was his work at the mill, and his life disappeared into it. He often lost all awareness of time. Days, weeks, and months seemed to pass, their goings only marked by what kind of hat and coat he wore during his walk down the hill to the mill office. He found that the stiller he remained, the quieter the world around him became, and it wasn’t long before he recognized stasis as his favorite posture, no matter whether he were standing in the carding room at the mill or sitting at his desk or lying in bed beside Katherine, willing his eyes to remain closed and his hands to stay by his sides if and when something of her body touched his in the night.
He never knew for certain what terrified him so. In the beginning he explained his outbursts in terminology she might understand: “Bombs,” he’d say when she’d ask him what he was dreaming of when he screamed himself awake. But as the war receded into the distance and time lurched forward he found it more difficult to think of the war, much less talk of it, even in the smallest and shortest of terms, so he found other ways to explain his terrors. “I was dreaming that someone was in the house,” he’d say. “Someone was trying to hurt you and the baby.” And other times he would shrug his shoulders beneath the cloak of darkness and roll to his side and pretend to fall back asleep.
At the Lytles’ party, Richard had felt hemmed in by the number of people, especially the colored help: young, dark-skinned waiters who carried trays of champagne and wore neckcloths and long blue coats festooned with brass buttons; middle-aged mammies in frocks and headscarves who served food from great silver bowls; an old, shoeless bald man Mr. Lytle had introduced as “Uncle Peter,” who wore only a muslin shirt and tattered breeches stood in the parlor, a squeaky violin hoisted to his shoulder.