Roy Hutchins: The Nostalgia Gene

On the eleventh of November, he was sick with something else. He went to bed with a fever right after getting home from the Emporium, Mrs. Peterson hovering helplessly with offers of hot broth or tea. But Edgar felt hot and dry and his side hurt when he breathed.

"I don’t want anything … thank you," he gasped politely.

By the next noon, when the alarmed Emma Peterson had Dr. Ward in, Edgar was barely conscious. Dr. Ward frowned, ordered hot water bottles and gave Edgar a huge dose of hot whiskey with lemon.

"Penicillin, please," whispered Edgar painfully. "Or sulfa. It’s pneumonia, isn’t it?"

"Poor fellow’s delirious," said the doctor to Mrs. Peterson.

Edgar realized dimly that he had made a blunder, but that no one would know. Then the fever took over and he blanked out.

Dr. Ward claimed ever afterward that clean living was what pulled Edgar through—the fact that he wasn’t conditioned to liquor gave the medicinal whiskey virgin ground to work in.

All Edgar knew was that he came to and found himself so weak that he could scarcely speak. Mrs. Peterson and her daughter, Marta, bustled in and out to care for him. He hadn’t paid particular attention to Marta before, but in the days of lying helpless and being literally spoon-fed, he began to know her very well.

Marta was a plain girl, he had thought, but he had never seen her private smile before. Marta was rather dumpy, he had thought, but he had never watched her bend to pick something up or twist to reach for a medicine bottle. Her dresses, he discovered, were deliberately all wrong for her—Mrs. Peterson had no intention of disturbing her boarders unnecessarily.

In the shocking intimacy of his bedroom, Edgar was increasingly disturbed. Marta was unfailingly cheerful, eager to wait on him. Every half-hour, he heard her step in the hall.

"Hello!" Marta would say, sweeping lightly to his bedside. "How’s our patient now? Feeling better? Oh, dear, do let me just straighten that sheet. It’s all wrinkled. Would you like some milk or some fruit?"

"Not right now, thank you—perhaps a little later," Edgar would reply, fixing his gaze determinedly on the window or the ceiling while she bent over his bed, disturbingly rounded and disastrously close.

And as Edgar’s recovery progressed, Mrs. Peterson dropped more and more into the background. On the day Dr. Ward said he might try sitting up for a while, it was Marta who stood by for the experiment.

Edgar started nobly, made about a foot of arc by himself and faltered. Instantly, it seemed, Marta’s arm was around his shoulders and a firm, warm projection cushioned his cheek.

He very nearly collapsed, but she sat him up.

Three days later, he held her hand for a moment and, though she blushed, she didn’t draw it away in a hurry.

After a proper interval, their engagement was announced. Half the maidens in Greencastle wept in the privacy of their pillows that night.

Edgar had had a serious problem and solved it. He had found the right girl and married her. This should be the end of his story and it would be, except for two things—Edgar’s gene and the date of his birth.

Edgar’s gene came from his grandmother via his father. The stories that gentle old lady told her orphaned grandson were the only outlet she had for her own powerful urge to turn back the times. And there had always been someone in the family who bemoaned the passing of the good old days, so strongly and constantly as to bore others to the verge of violence.

Back even a few decades, no carrier of the nostalgia gene had any outlet but conversation and dreams. Edgar, though, was born to an age where science provided the knowledge and the equipment for him to find the practical solution.

If Edgar’s gene had carried any other trait, red hair, placidity or hemophilia, for instance, or if it had been recessive instead of dominant, this might have been a very different world. But the result was inevitable from the moment of Edgar’s birth and the chain of events that proved it was as flawless as the steps of Gauss’s theorem.

He prospered after he and Marta were married. In three short years, he was made manager of Cloud’s Emporium and just before that, Marta had surprised him with a daughter—surprised him because he was certain of a son. He wasn’t inclined to be stubborn about it, however, and when the child put a pudgy little hand up to his cheek in a gesture that was probably caused by reflex or gas pains, he was completely won.

When little Emma reached three, she was incurably addicted to bedtime stories, though only those concerning knights in armor and their ladies fair. Edgar grew to hate the names of Arthur and Galahad, but if he tried to tell a different story, his daughter had her own way of stopping him. Rearing back in his arms, she merely shrieked, "Ting Arfur, Ting Arfur!" until she turned blue, at which point Edgar always gave in.

There was no doubt that little Emma had inherited the gene.

In 1906, old Cloud made Edgar a full partner in the Emporium and just eleven years later, little Emma wrote home from New York City with the shocking news that she was engaged to a doughboy from Brooklyn.

Edgar and Marta rushed East to unmask the scoundrel, praying they would be in time to save Emma’s honor.

The scoundrel, when unmasked, was a mechanic with weak eyes and a passion for poetry, who was completely miserable in the infantry. His manners were acceptable and he had enough intelligence to let Edgar beat him thoroughly at cribbage, whereupon Edgar offered to finance the opening of a garage in Greencastle if the young folks would move back there when Jim’s hitch in the Army was finished.

"Emma is all we have," said Edgar in his classic style. "It’s quite lonesome back home for Mother and me since she’s been in the city. We—well, we should like to know that you and, later on, our grandchildren will be settling in a home near us."

Emma blushed and Jim tried to dig the toe of his boot into a crack between the floorboards.

"Besides," added Edgar, becoming aware of Marta’s look, "Greencastle is a fine town and right up with the times. I think a garage will do a fine business there."

Jim was inclined to be reluctant, but Emma gave him a side-wise kick and said of course they’d come home and settle. She gave Edgar a big hug and a kiss and he beamed on everybody for the rest of the evening.

A few months later, Jim’s weak eyes caused him to pass a colonel without saluting and, within days, he had a medical discharge. Emma and the garage were waiting in Greencastle, so Jim took the first train.

In '19 and in '21, Emma produced grandsons, delighting everyone and especially Edgar. Emma herself was thoroughly puzzled when the boys reached the age for bedtime stories; she discovered that they were not particularly interested in tales of bold knights and fair ladies. She would have been happy to recite the legends of Arthur every night, but the boys, it seemed, preferred even poor poetry to a good, stirring joust.

Edgar privately decided that Jim’s poetry gene had proved more dominant than his own, which was perhaps just as well.

Though not interested in making a fortune, Edgar nevertheless did well financially, using his knowledge of the '20s as an investment guide. Jim’s garage prospered and he opened another, while his father-in-law multiplied his spare cash in the stock market. In July of 1929, Edgar suddenly retrenched for both of them, went bearish and arranged to sell short a number of important shares. The entire family protested that he was losing his mind, but Edgar was firm. By November first, they were amazed, horrified and rich.

The following year, Emma gave Jim the daughter he had wanted. And, within three years, it was apparent to Edgar that tiny Susan carried the gene. From the first time Grandpa experimentally told her a story of the '90s, she wanted no others. Her mother found this also rather difficult to understand, but at least the '90s were in the past, which was better than poetry.