Falling into Place by Thomas Swick

Author:Thomas Swick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Philly Days

I sat at the desk in my brother’s old bedroom, under the gaze of Samuel Johnson. (I had cut his picture out of a magazine and taped it to the wall.) Books and papers covered the side bed, while a radio, tuned to WFLN—which came in only at night—joined books on the shelf of the other bed’s headboard. A heavy, black L. C. Smith & Corona typewriter, purchased at the Salvation Army Thrift Store across the street from the Trenton Times building, decorated the pullout arm of the desk as I composed sentences on a yellow legal pad.

I was writing a book about the pilgrimage. The walk, I had decided, could serve as a microcosm of my entire time in Poland. I envisioned a colorful account rich in people, conversations, descriptions, observations; it would encompass religion and politics, past and present, and show how in Poland they are all entwined. Every morning, after breakfast with my mother, I climbed the stairs back to the bedroom to write. After dinner, I drove across the river to read Henryk Sienkiewicz in the Lafayette College library.

Sienkiewicz was not a writer I was drawn to, despite the fact that he had started out as a journalist and become something of a travel writer, publishing accounts of his journeys around the United States and Africa. But he was best known and rewarded—the Nobel Prize in 1905—for his sweeping historical novels. The only one that interested me was The Deluge, the second volume of The Trilogy, for it concerned the seventeenth-century Swedish invasion of Poland and the heroic—some believed miraculous—defense of the Jasna Góra monastery. But, before plunging into his hearty prose, I would go to Periodicals and read the Spectator wags.

My routine was interrupted by a swollen gland. I had not been feeling well—I’d recently developed a fever—though I put it down to delayed physical shock from the exertions, and paltry meals, of the pilgrimage combined with the emotional stress of separation and adultery. My diarrhea, I told myself, was the no-longer-dormant product of a cup of foul well water I’d gulped before smelling it. At lunchtime one day, watching a soap opera on TV, I sat up when one of the characters was told that his swollen gland might be Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“That’s why I don’t watch soap operas,” my doctor said when I told him about the scene. He gave me some medicine and said it would soon go away.

It grew larger. I became reluctant to leave the house. When I did, I looked obsessively at people’s necks, both sides beneath the jawline, searching for a bulge. No one else had one. I envied the men their unstretched collars.

I returned to the doctor, who this time wore a look of concern. He wanted to get a biopsy, he said, and scheduled me for surgery.

The mildly unreal sensation of being home suddenly became more so. It had been hard enough moving back in with my parents, finding my world suddenly emptied of friends, colleagues, students, Hania.

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