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"You love the c-countdown," Honoria said, carefully adjusting her brother's silk tie. "And it would m-mean so much to M-Mama and Father if you were there."
"I do not love the countdown. I do not love the festivities. I do not want to celebrate at all."
Having her brother back -- back in Boston, back in her life -- had given Honoria endless joy and relief. He was no longer in danger, no longer separated from her by an ocean and crackling long-distance wires that were often taken out by mortar fire.
But he had changed. They both had. You are no longer the naive little sister I left behind, he had written her once, in a telegram that had arrived a week ahead of several letters she had, with some regret but no doubt, thrown out unopened. By that time, she was a little more clear-eyed about her adored older brother's faults.
She just hadn't expected him to arrive home this profoundly changed. He was quieter, more thoughtful, calmer in some ways and angrier in others, prone to long silent pauses that would once have been filled with words ... and inclined to argue with Mother and Father about matters that had never bothered him before, politics in particular. Honoria had been completely shocked when, two months after he returned from Korea, her brother had moved out of the Beacon Hill family residence and into the Somerville townhouse (so déclassé, Mother declared, so collegiate!) that had stood vacant since Aunt Lucretia had moved to warmer climates two years ago.
Now he was rattling around in four vertical storeys of stairs and rooms and dust-cover-draped antique furniture, and Honoria felt herself torn between her brother's townhouse and their parents' house, belonging nowhere. She rather enjoyed Charles's townhouse, so comparatively small and cute and vertically narrow that it felt almost like living in a dollhouse. But it was just so quiet, so absent of the constant bustle of garden parties, soirees, and servants at the family home. Charles circulated between the kitchen and the room he had claimed as his den, and it was as if he was camping here, not living. Most of all, Honoria just wanted to get him involved in family life again. Her brother wasn't a soldier, but she knew that soldiers could struggle when they returned from war, and maybe it was something like that. He was almost a stranger to her now in some ways, but he needed support and care and the knowledge that his family still loved and wanted him.
"C-come over to Beacon Hill with me, please, Charles." She leaned against him. "Let's enjoy the new year together, as a f-family. It'll be just like the old days, Cook will b-bring out a light spread to the table in the solarium, you know how you love the solarium. It'll be a quiet family affair, just a few guests --"
"Let me guess, the Lathrops? They're such bores. Father's only putting up with Senator Lathrop in the hopes of buying him as a fully owned subsidiary, you know."
"They w-won't stay until midnight."
"No, but the Cranstons will, and Wilma Cranston will be stumbling over the furniture and draping herself on Father by the time we ring in the new year and ring them out of our lives for another few weeks. Do you think she'll 'accidentally' stumble into Father's bedroom in her search for the bathroom this time? Will she take a handkerchief as a souvenir, do you suppose, or a piece of underwear?"
Honoria tried to smother a laugh, knowing it was unkind (and she did try very hard not to be unkind; people had so often been unkind to her) and yet unable to deny that she wanted desperately to laugh about the situation. "She's one of M-Mother's oldest and dearest friends, Charles, please."
Charles swung around to look her full in the face. "Honoria, don't you want --"
She never found out what he wondered if she wanted, because there was an urgent pounding on the door downstairs.
"Now what? A group of drunken lunatics mistaking my house for some debauched party shack up the road, I'm sure. God, I loathe this neighborhood."
She followed him downstairs, where Charles threw the door open with a snapped, "Whoever you hooligans think is living here, I can assure you that -- oh good GOD." His voice changed utterly. "What on earth are you people doing in Somerville?"
"In Somerville?" said the first person who barged in, an energetic man in a loose plaid shirt, his dark hair salted with gray, followed by a blonde woman trying to grab hold of him. "The Somerville of our discontent is more like it, we talked to just about every snob on Beacon Hill trying to find you -- could've left a forwarding address, it would have made this easier."
"You talked to my parents? What did you say to my parents? Good god, Pierce -- do you have the entire rabble with you? No offense, Margaret."
Oh! Honoria began to recognize names, people, descriptions from her brother's tapes and letters and telegrams, which she had pored over in so much detail, trying to tease out the intricacies of his everyday life in a place so different that she could hardly imagine it. However, she hadn't expected to meet them in such a confusing whirlwind.
"This is my dad, Daniel Pierce, MD. Charles Winchester, MD, glad you have some abbreviations in common at least, you'll get along great. Margaret was here already --"
"I absolutely was not," said the blonde woman. "I was in Portland, trying to catch up with you for lunch, since I was in the area, and the thanks I get is being kidnapped --"
"-- and Trapper, you don't know him; Trapper, this is Charles, Trapper's also from Boston, but we don't hold it against him --"
"Uh, hi, Charles from Also Boston. Sorry we're meeting like this. Well, not actually sorry."
"Ex-ex-excuse me." Honoria planted her hand on Pierce's chest. "This is m-my brother's house. You c-can't just walk in without asking."
"Who is this vision of loveliness? You can't possibly be Charles's sister."
"I c-certainly am Charles's s-s-sister," she said. And braced herself.
People were generally hard to predict when they first heard her open her mouth. She was very good at looking put together and accomplished -- which she was -- and the family reputation helped. But strangers .... strangers, she never could be sure about.
But all that happened was that Pierce took her hand and kissed it.
"Pierce! Get your mouth off my sister's hand!"
"I see you got all the good family genes," Pierce said, dipping her hand and putting his other over it. "Your voice is lovely. I suppose all the musical talent in the family went to you."
"How d-d-d-dare you!" she snapped, pulling away. "My brother has a gifted ear for m-music, you -- you -- you c-c-crashing boor. Charles, who is this p-person?"
"This is Hawkeye Pierce, who was raised in a barn," Charles said, pushing past the others with the apparent intent of separating them. "Evidently he's responsible for this incursion. Pierce, stop bothering my sister."
Honoria folded her arms and glared at Pierce. "And you can st-st-stop insulting my b-brother! You s-s-s-sw-swine!"
"She's definitely related to you, Charles," Pierce said. "Honoria, right? Call me Hawkeye. Let me introduce you to my dad."
"I .... I s-suppose so," Honoria said faintly, as she was spun off to shake hands with an older man with silver hair and a charming demeanor and not a single rude comment about her voice or her stammer.
"You two are dressed up," said the one Honoria was pretty sure was Trapper. "Were you going out?"
"We were," Charles said pointedly. "As is traditional on New Year's Eve. That is why calling ahead is also traditional."
"We brought food," Margaret said. "It's in the car. We're not complete barbarians."
"Oh, well, in that case." Charles laughed suddenly, a laugh Honoria had never heard from him before. He unknotted the silk tie she had just spent a few minutes painstakingly getting just so, and flung the end over his shoulder. "Why the hell not."
***
After that, no more was said about going over to the Beacon Hill house. When Father finally called to find out where they were, Honoria heard only part of the conversation, having just escaped an impromptu dust-sheet battle between "call me Hawkeye" Pierce and Margaret in an upstairs bedroom. She hurried downstairs to the den at the sound of the phone ringing, only to find her brother had already answered, a glass of wine in his other hand.
"No, I'm deeply sorry, Father, but the hospital needed me for a duty shift tonight. I was just on the way out the door when you called. Very urgent, very last-minute. I know, I know -- but one must do one's duty." Charles sighed deeply and theatrically. "What noise? I don't hear any noise." There was a loud shriek from upstairs. "Oh, that noise? Holiday revelers in the streets, I expect. Utterly wretched behavior, I quite agree. Oh, what about Honoria?" He looked up and saw his sister standing in the doorway. "Oh, she's -- headed home?"
Honoria shook her head vigorously.
"-- not headed home, of course I couldn't possibly send her alone this late. She'll be quite all right at the townhouse overnight. Yes, you too. Happy New Year."
Charles hung up and met Honoria's eyes, and without warning the two of them dissolved in laughter. It was as if twenty years had fallen away and they were once again children caught in shared mischief.
"Are th-they very angry?" Honoria asked, coming over to sit on the edge of his desk. It was a massive antique, a relic left over from Aunt Lucretia's late husband.
"More puzzled, I think," Charles said. "Are you sure you're all right staying over? You'll be missing the solarium, and the Cranstons."
"Oh n-no, how shall I cope," Honoria said dramatically, placing a hand on her heart.
Charles laughed, then glanced up at an abrupt thump from upstairs, followed by a shriek, and closed his eyes briefly. "If that's Pierce and Houlihan, let us go stop them before the police are called. What are they doing, by the way?"
Honoria pursued him out the door. "Er ... twisting dust sheets into whips and hitting each other, I think. Is this ... normal?"
"Nothing about them is normal. Pierce! Maj-- that is, Margaret! Stop that this instant -- and what have you done now?"
There were pieces of something all over the floor, shattered glass and smashed wooden parts. Like most of the rooms in the house, this one was cluttered with Aunt Lucretia's antiques, and something had evidently met its demise.
"We'll replace it," Margaret was saying as Honoria came in, climbing down from the couch, which she had apparently been standing on. "I'm so sorry." Hawkeye was guiltily swiping the shattered pieces onto a dust sheet.
"You absolute boors," Charles said. "That was my dear aunt's prized antique cuckoo clock. I welcome you into my home, and now this. Unforgivable. Do you understand the depth, the -- the legacy of the family history of that clock?"
"Didn't she b-buy that thing sometime in the 1930s?" Honoria said.
Charles's ability to keep a straight face broke down, and he leaned against the arm of the couch and laughed. "Yes. Also, it was the ugliest thing I've ever seen. But you should have seen your faces."
Margaret calmly reached over and rolled up a dustcover.
"Honoria," her brother said, gripping her shoulder and redirecting her towards the stairs, "run."
***
It was not the New Year's Eve that Honoria had expected, or indeed, a New Year's Eve like any she had experienced before.
There would have been a party in the family home. There would have been guests invited by her parents, and intellectual conversation, with music playing just loud enough to provide accompaniment but not to drown out the conversation. Later, there would be the countdown on the radio (which her parents enjoyed as a vulgar yet bonding cultural tradition), their guests getting discreetly drunk, perhaps Honoria herself being asked to perform a violin recital (which had not been her passion for a long time, but she diligently kept up the skills, knowing that her concert-pianist mother liked to believe she would someday have a career with the orchestra, even though any hopes of Honoria singing professionally had been left behind in early childhood).
This was absolute chaos.
There were people whipping dust covers off furniture in long-ignored rooms just to see what was underneath ("Is that a baby grand piano under there? Can I play it?" "I don't even know you, and what kind of a name is Trapper, anyway?"), finding all the alcohol in the house, and making far too much noise in the back garden. Different New Year's Eve's radio programs were playing in every room with a radio, and people were sitting in other people's laps. Her brother had given up on trying to get them under control and was half drunk himself, and she had rarely ever seen him this happy, only seldom before he left, certainly not since he came back. She wasn't sure if she had seen him this relaxed in their entire lives.
Pierce's dad retired to an upstairs bedroom with a book fairly early in the evening, leaving the rest of them to enjoy themselves. If he had managed to fall asleep up there, Honoria supposed the man must be nearly deaf.
Things quieted down a bit later in the evening, the party paradoxically calming down as people got drunker. Honoria ended up sitting on the end of a dusty, long-unused divan with Margaret to chat a bit. Margaret's life as a former Army nurse -- recently retired to work in a civilian hospital -- was about as far removed from Honoria's as it was possible to be, and she was fascinated by Margaret's colorful stories.
"You d-don't live in Boston, do you?" Honoria asked. She halfway hoped so; they might have met for lunch so she could hear more nurse stories.
"Not even close," Margaret said. "I was in Portland this week for a nursing conference and thought I'd visit Hawkeye while I was within easy driving distance of his hometown. The next thing I knew, he came up with some mad scheme for spending New Year's in Boston, and I was changing my tickets to fly back on the second, and then somehow his dad was coming with us too. Hawkeye is a force of nature when he gets his mind set on something. Did I tell you about the time he invaded the peace talks in --" She looked at her watch. "Oh, it's almost midnight, I'll tell you later. Where'd the guys get off to?"
One floor down, they found Charles and Hawkeye sitting on opposite ends of the couch in Charles's den, quietly chatting. From below them in the kitchen came loud clattering.
"Trapper's making cocktails," Hawkeye explained. "Some kind of family drink recipe for the new year." He held out an arm to Margaret. "Come over here, my New Year's kissing options just improved a lot."
Margaret ducked around to the other side of the couch instead and turned up the radio. "It's almost midnight, so if Trapper is providing drinks, he'd better hurry."
Trapper arrived from downstairs, precariously balancing handfuls of glasses. "Charles, how is it possible that you don't have any vermouth?"
"My house is not a liquor store, you heathen. Where's the champagne?"
"I think we drank all of it already. I can't find any more."
"Oh, for god's sake." But Charles rolled his eyes and took a glass.
Hawkeye helped hand the drinks around, giving Honoria a glass of slightly cloudy liquid which she regarded dubiously. Hawkeye leaned against the wall next to her.
"Mind if I kiss you at midnight?"
"M-my brother will kill you."
"That's all right, I'll kiss him too."
Honoria thought he was joking. But then Trapper cranked up the radio on the last of the countdown, and the announcer's giddy, "It's Nineteen Fifty Four, ladies and gentlemen!"
"Good riddance, 1953!" Margaret screamed, flinging her arms up in the air and spilling half her drink on Charles's desk.
Honoria managed a single mouth-numbing sip of her New Year's drink before Hawkeye took her in his arms and kissed her very softly and tenderly on the corner of her lips. Then he spun around, letting her go, as Charles made a half-drunken beeline for them.
"My sister, Pierce, have you no shame --"
Hawkeye caught him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes and said, "Happy New Year, Charles, welcome home," and then kissed him on the corner of the mouth, soft and affectionate, very much as he had kissed Honoria.
And then Hawkeye let go of him and was off to grab Margaret, who gave a little shriek that was muffled as he dipped her over the couch.
Honoria put an arm around her brother's waist. She sampled her drink again. It was strange and full of conflicting flavors, but growing on her. "Your f-friends are insane," she said, and added more quietly, "I like them."
"See if you still like them when they're hung over tomorrow," Charles said. He touched the corner of his mouth and shook his head. "Come on, we'd better go make sure there are linens and enough beds, or you'll wake up to Pierce on the kitchen table."
"Kitchen tables are very comfortable, Charles!" Hawkeye declared, surfacing from kissing Trapper. "Also, didn't you fall asleep on the bar in the O Club at least once?"
"I deeply regret inviting you, Pierce!" Charles snapped back. "Oh wait, I didn't."
***
In the morning, in spite of the late night and all the alcohol, everyone was up early (ish) and Hawkeye and his father made waffles for them from the meager contents of Charles's kitchen. Margaret ran out to get blueberries and syrup and eggs.
Honoria had slept the previous night in her brother's bed, curled up against his warm, comforting, pajama-clad bulk, not too different from when they were children. Now she sat at the kitchen island wearing her brother's much-too-big bathrobe, and ate waffles and scrambled eggs until she couldn't stuff in any more. Hawkeye was on the phone talking to someone apparently called BJ who seemed to be yelling at him for waking him up at 5 a.m. in California, with the phone cord stretched across the length of the kitchen, tripping people.
This conversation had no sooner ended than Hawkeye was on the phone to someone else, and Honoria caught enough of Hawkeye's end of it to figure out that someone named Klinger was apparently showing up later that day with a car full of people from Ohio.
"Oh no he's not!" Charles shouted from the stove, where he was scrambling eggs. "I'm not here! I've moved, no forwarding address!"
"Ever had kibbeh?" Hawkeye asked with his hand over the receiver. "Lebanese meatballs. Well, you're about to have a lot of it. Sounds like it'll go great with waffles."
Charles's townhouse had always seemed terribly quiet and empty to Honoria. But now, with the kitchen full of people shouting at each other and food and dirty dishes and last night's clutter of drink glasses and sticky patches on every surface, she thought that her brother's house was starting to feel more like a home than their parents' mansion ever had.