Chapter 21: The Striking Train

The striking train is the part of the clock that makes it speak. The timekeeping train runs silently, turning the hands, measuring the hours, keeping the record, but the striking train announces, declares, makes public what the timekeeping train keeps private, and the striking is the moment when the internal becomes external, when the mechanism reaches out into the room and says I am here, the hour is here, the time is here, listen.

Henry drove to Elm Street on Sunday with the Waltham in his shirt pocket, ticking against his chest, the weight of gold over his heart, and the day was late November, the last Sunday of the month, and the sky was low and the light was thin and the trees along Elm Street were bare, the branches black against the gray, and the houses sat on their lots the way houses sit in New England towns, settled, patient, accustomed to weather, and the Osgood house — the Cape Cod, white clapboard, black shutters — was at the end of the street, under the elm tree that gave the street its name, and the elm was bare too, its branches reaching upward like the arms of a grandmother clock, like the gesture of a thing that is large and old and has been reaching for a long time.

Frances opened the door. The smell of pot roast. The kitchen warm. The table set for two, the Windsor chairs in their places, the napkins folded, the salt and pepper in the center, and the Ansonia ticking on the mantel, even and steady, the pallet stone reground, the beat restored, the clock keeping time the way time wants to be kept.

"Dinner in twenty minutes," Frances said.

Henry sat at the table. He took the Waltham from his pocket. He held it in his palm, the gold case catching the kitchen light, and he set it on the table between them, between the salt and the pepper, between the two place settings, between the mother and the son.

Frances looked at the watch. She did not pick it up. She looked at it the way she looked at the clock on the mantel — with recognition, with memory, with the particular attention that a person gives to an object that has been part of their life for a long time, an object that they know not by its specifications but by its presence, its place in the house, its role in the daily landscape.

"It's ticking," she said.

"It's ticking."

"I can hear it. Even on the table. I can hear it."

"It's a loud tick for a pocket watch. Alistair said it was the loudest Waltham he'd ever heard. He said his father's watch announced itself."

Frances sat down. She put her hands on the table, on either side of the watch, framing it, and she looked at it.

"Thomas gave this to Alistair in 1971," she said. "When Alistair left for America. I was there. Did you know that? I was there when Thomas gave him the watch."

Henry did not know this. He had assumed his parents met in America — in Vermont, at the shop, or at a party, or through mutual friends — and he had never asked and they had never told him and the story of their meeting was one of the unknowns, one of the sealed rooms, one of the parts of his parents' life that he had not explored because exploring it would require asking and asking would require a conversation that neither of them had initiated.

"You were in Somerset," Henry said.

"I was in Somerset. I was twenty-five. I was on a trip. A tour. One of those bus tours that young Americans took in the seventies — England and France and Italy, three weeks, thirty people on a bus, cathedrals and pubs and the wrong side of the road. The bus stopped in a village in Somerset and I went for a walk and I found a clock shop and I went in because I liked clocks — not in the way your father liked clocks, not as a craft, but as objects, as things in rooms, I liked the ticking, I liked the feeling of a room with a clock in it — and I went in and there was a man at a bench."

"Thomas."

"Thomas. And behind him, at a second bench, a younger man."

"Alistair."

"Alistair. He was twenty-five, like me. He had dark hair and large hands and he was holding a pair of tweezers and he was looking at me through a loupe and the loupe magnified his eye and the eye was enormous, was a planet, was the largest eye I had ever seen, and he took the loupe off and his eye was normal-sized and he looked at me and I looked at him and the shop was full of ticking and the ticking was the sound of my life changing, though I didn't know it yet."

Henry sat at the table. His mother was telling him a story he had never heard, was opening a room he had never entered, was showing him the beginning, the origin, the moment when everything that followed became possible — the marriage, the emigration, the shop, the sign, the house on Elm Street, the son, the clocks, the fourteen repairs, the bench, the stool, the lamp, the loupe, all of it beginning in a clock shop in Somerset in 1971, a young woman on a bus tour and a young man at a bench.

"I stayed," Frances said. "I missed the bus. I stayed in the village for three days. I stayed at a pub and I came to the shop every day and Alistair showed me the clocks and the tools and the movements and the way the escapement worked, the way the pallet fork caught the escape wheel and released it, and he explained it the way he explained everything — precisely, carefully, with the assumption that I wanted to understand, that I was capable of understanding — and I fell in love with him. Or with the clocks. Or with the way he talked about the clocks. I couldn't tell the difference and I still can't."

"And Thomas gave him the watch."

"When Alistair decided to come to America. To follow me. Thomas said nothing — Thomas was a man who said nothing, who expressed himself through work and through objects — and on the day Alistair left, at the door of the workshop, Thomas took the watch from his pocket. He had carried it every day for forty years. He took it out and he held it in his palm and he said, 'This is yours now.' And Alistair took it and put it in his pocket and he walked out the door and Thomas closed the door and they never saw each other again."

"Never?"

"Alistair went back for the funeral. In 1988. But Thomas was dead. So they never saw each other again. Not alive."

Henry looked at the watch on the table. The gold case. The monogram. A.T.O. The initials that Thomas had engraved before Alistair left, the claiming, the releasing, the three letters that said goodbye and I love you and this is yours now.

"Thomas had the initials engraved," Henry said. "Alistair's initials. Before Alistair left."

Frances shook her head. "No."

"No?"

"The initials were already there. The initials were always there. A.T.O. Alistair Thomas Osgood."

"But Thomas — if the watch was Thomas's —"

"Thomas's name was Albert Thomas Osgood."

Henry stared at the watch. A.T.O. Albert Thomas Osgood. Alistair Thomas Osgood. The same initials. Father and son, the same three letters, the same monogram, the same identity engraved in gold, and the watch had not been re-engraved, had not been updated, had not needed to be, because the initials were the same, because the father and the son shared the letters, shared the identity, shared the monogram on the back of a gold case, and the giving of the watch from father to son was not a renaming but a recognition that the name was already there, had always been there, that the son's identity was inscribed in the father's property, that the inheritance was not a transfer but an acknowledgment.

A.T.O. Albert Thomas. Alistair Thomas. The same letters. The same watch. The same trade. The same bench. The same tools. The same craft passed from Albert to Alistair to — and here the chain broke, because Henry's initials were not A.T.O., were H.A.O., Henry Alistair Osgood, different letters, a different monogram, and the son was not the same as the father, was not the continuation of the same identity but the beginning of a different one, and the difference was the difference between a replacement part and an original part, between a new mainspring and the mainspring that was there before, and Henry did not know if he was a replacement or an original, did not know if the chain continued through him or stopped at him, did not know if H.A.O. was a continuation of A.T.O. or a departure from it.

"Henry Alistair," Frances said, as if she had heard his thought. "I named you Alistair for your father. Your father wanted to name you Albert, for his father, but I said no. I said we were in America now, not Somerset, and the son should have his own name. So we compromised. Henry from my father. Alistair from yours. And Osgood from the sign."

"H.A.O."

"H.A.O. Not the same as A.T.O. Different letters. Different person. The same family. The same trade. The same shop. But a different person."

Henry picked up the watch. He held it in his palm. The ticking was there, against his skin, and the monogram was there, against his fingers, and the weight was there, the weight of gold and generations and the chain of hands from Somerset to Montpelier, and the chain did not break at Henry, did not stop at H.A.O., because the chain was not made of initials but of hands, of hands that held tools and turned screws and oiled pivots and wound mainsprings and straightened hairsprings and ground pallet stones and tuned bells, and the hands continued, were continuing, were at the bench every morning, were holding the tweezers, were doing the work, and the initials were just letters, were just marks on a case, were not the chain but the evidence of the chain, and the evidence could change — could be A.T.O. or H.A.O. or any other combination — and the chain would continue because the chain was not the letters but the work.

"Take it," Henry said. He held the watch out to Frances.

Frances took it. She held it the way Alistair had held it, the way Thomas had held it, in the palm, the gold against the skin, the ticking audible, the weight felt, and she closed her fingers around it and the watch was in her hand, was enclosed, was held, and the holding was the keeping, was the custodianship, was the continuation.

"I'll keep it in the house," she said. "In the bedroom. On his nightstand. Where he kept his things."

"Wind it once a month."

"Once a month."

"Twenty half-turns. No more."

"Twenty half-turns."

They ate dinner. Pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, gravy. The Ansonia ticked on the mantel. The Waltham ticked in Frances's hand — she had not put it down, had held it through dinner, had eaten with one hand, the watch in the other, against her palm, against her skin, and the ticking was there, was in the kitchen, was a new sound in an old room, a sound that had never been in this room before — the watch had been in the safe, had been in the shop, had never been in the kitchen — and the new sound joined the old sound of the Ansonia and the two clocks ticked together, the mantel clock and the pocket watch, the wife's clock and the husband's watch, in the same room, in the same kitchen, in the house on Elm Street where they had lived together for fifty-two years.

After dinner Henry stood at the door. Frances was in the kitchen, washing the dishes, the watch on the counter beside the sink, ticking while she worked, and Henry looked at the watch and at his mother and at the kitchen and at the house and he thought about the striking train, about the mechanism that makes the clock announce the hour, that makes the internal external, that speaks what has been kept silent, and he thought that this evening had been a striking, had been an announcement, had been the moment when the private became public, when the story of the clock shop in Somerset and the woman on the bus tour and the man with the loupe and the father at the door with the watch in his palm — the story that had been kept inside the mechanism of the family, kept private, kept silent — had been struck, had been sounded, had been said.

"Mom."

"Yes."

"Thank you for telling me. About Somerset. About Thomas."

Frances turned from the sink. Her hands were wet. The dish towel was on the counter, next to the watch.

"He was a good man," she said. "Thomas. I only met him that once, those three days, but he was a good man. Quiet. Stern. He didn't approve of me, I don't think — I was American, I was loud by his standards, I talked too much. But he shook my hand when I left. He held my hand for a moment longer than a handshake requires and he looked at me and he didn't say anything and then he let go. And I understood. I understood that he was giving me his son the way he would later give him the watch — without words, without ceremony, just the holding and the letting go."

Henry drove home. The Waltham was not in his pocket. His pocket was empty, was lighter, was the absence of weight and ticking, and the absence was a feeling, was a sensation, was the physical experience of having given something away, of having transferred a weight from one person to another, the way Thomas had transferred the weight to Alistair and Alistair had transferred the weight to the safe and Henry had transferred the weight to Frances, and the weight was with Frances now, in the house on Elm Street, on the counter, on the nightstand, wherever Frances put it, and the weight was not Henry's anymore.

But the lightness was not loss. The lightness was the feeling of a mainspring that has unwound, that has delivered its energy, that has done the thing it was wound up to do, and the unwinding was not a failure, was not an ending, was the purpose, was the point — the mainspring exists to unwind, the energy exists to be spent, the stored force exists to be converted into time, into ticking, into the measured movement of the hands, and when the mainspring has unwound it is not empty, it is fulfilled.

Henry parked behind the shop. He went inside. The clocks ticked. The ship's bell rang — four bells, ten o'clock. The cuckoo called. The ticking continued, the chorus, the ten voices — minus the Waltham, which was in the house on Elm Street now — and the voices were enough, were the shop's voice, were the sound of the work and the place and the craft.

He went to the bench. He sat down. He looked at the empty white cloth, the cloth where the Waltham's parts had lain, and the cloth was clean, was white, was empty, was the blank page after the last chapter, the silence after the last note, the space after the last tick.

He folded the cloth. He put it in the drawer. He closed the drawer.

He turned off the lamp. He climbed the stairs. He went to bed.

Below him, the clocks ticked. The shop breathed. The night advanced. The escapement regulated. The mainspring unwound. The time passed.

The striking train had spoken. The hour had been announced. The private had become public. The story had been told.

And the ticking continued, the way ticking continues, the way time continues, the way the mechanism continues after the striking is done, quietly, faithfully, keeping the count, advancing the wheels, measuring the distance between this moment and the next, between this hour and the next, between this day and the next, the escapement releasing the energy one tick at a time, one tooth at a time, converting the wound-up force of everything that has been stored — grief and love and skill and inheritance and the memory of a man in a doorway holding a watch in his palm — into something measured, something that moves forward, something that ticks.