The Enfield Marine units — "On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled…"
On warm nights, one long-limbed bespectacled lady who seems more autistic than catatonic tends to wander out of The Shed wrapped in a bedsheet and lay her hands on the thin shiny bark of a silver maple in #5’s lawn, stands there touching the tree until she’s missed at bedcheck and retrieved; and since Gately graduated treatment and took the offer of a live-in Staffer’s job at Ennet House he sometimes wakes up […] and watches the catatonic touching the tree in her sheet and glasses, illuminated by Comm. Ave.’s neon or the weird sodium light that spills down from the snooty tennis prep school overhead on its hill, he’ll watch her standing there and feel an odd chilled empathy he tries not to associate with watching his mother pass out on some piece of living-room chintz.
Context
The one warehoused body the scene watches long enough to love: the bedsheet tree-toucher (Mrs. Lopate, unnamed until p. 818), retrieved at bedcheck like a misplaced object, and Gately's empathy for her routed straight through the memory of his mother on the chintz. The theme's counter-gaze: not the firecracker test but the vigil.