The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘Your mother wants to see Mr. Moulthrop’s paintings and waxworks,’ he might say. ‘I’m too busy for such nonsense. What anyone wants to sec wax dummies of a lot of pirates and murderers for, I don’t know, but she read a piece in the Journal about them and she’s bound to go, so you keep her company.’

  Ephraim was glad to do so, glad to be with Jenny. She studied the figures of the two pirates, Gibbs and Mourley, complete to the red streak left by the ropes around their necks, with a strange, still interest; and a scene representing the Salem murder held her for long moments intent. They went together to other entertainments of a lighter character. They heard James Kendall of the Boston Band play the bugle in the First Baptist Meeting House, heard Monsieur Canderbeck perform on harp and violin. Jenny professed to enjoy these performances, and discussed them in appreciative terms with her friends among the audience afterward. Ephraim alone would have found them wearisome; but with Jenny at his side they seemed to him delightful.

  He and she were constantly together. Isaiah, perhaps because he was secretly sensitive about his increasing deafness, stayed more and more at home. Pat Tierney’s broken leg robbed them for a while of the use of the carriages; and Isaiah used this as an excuse to give up going to church, declaring that it was too far to walk. Except for an occasional visit to the Coffee House or to the bank, he seldom ventured out. Jenny on the other hand, since Mrs. Hollis relieved her of all household cares, often went abroad. If it was for a round of calls upon the wives of the leading citizens of the town, she went alone; but for the Lyceum lectures, for the meetings of the temperance society in which she was intensely interested, and even sometimes for her shopping expeditions, she asked Ephraim’s company.

  He went with her, too, on more personal errands. Ephraim found that there were a surprising number of families to whom she played good angel, and who—whether she came laden with bounty or not—welcomed her affectionately. She commanded not only the gratitude and affection of these needy folk whom she befriended, but the friendship and respect of everyone they met. Jenny had earned as a child a reputation for devotion to her father; she was known now as a fine and loyal wife to Isaiah. There were enough Bangor folk who remembered Isaiah’s sharp dealings in the past and who knew his greedy penuriousness to feel that a young woman as beautiful as Jenny deserved credit and honor for being so good a wife to a disagreeable old man.

  They went together several times to see Pat Tierney, propped in a chair with his broken leg in a heavy splint; and the Irishman was apt to say: ‘Sure, ma’am, and it’s worth breaking a leg to sec your face here! Like as not when this one is well I’ll break the other so you’ll come again.’

  Jenny laughed and told him he had a charming tongue. ‘Are all Irishmen so polite?’ she protested.

  ‘There’s no politeness in it, ma’am,’ he assured her. ‘But as for politeness, if it’s politeness to know a pretty face when you see one, there never was an Irishman who wouldn’t do that, ma’am!’

  They found him one day in a high humor, and he told them the reason. ‘Sure and I’m on my way to make my fortune,’ he declared, ‘and me flat on my back too!’ And he explained: ‘Them that came to see me talked so much about land and bonds and all that I had to buy a small bond of my own with my savings, so now I can talk business as big and bold and free as any of them.’

  Jenny’s point of view on the increasing speculative fever was borrowed from Isaiah, who was torn between his certainty that the speculators were fools and the cupidity which was aroused in him by the tales of enormous profits being made on every hand. So she chided Pat now for risking what he had worked so hard to earn and save; but Pat said with a cheerful impudence:

  ‘Risk, is it? Why, if I lose the whole, there’s always yourself to put me back to work and maybe pay me a dollar more, so in no time I can save as much again!’

  She laughed and warned him not to be too sure; and on the way home she told Ephraim that speculation was no better than gambling, and that it would be the ruin of them all.

  Ephraim disagreed. Since the gamblers dealt in bonds rather than in the land itself, even the poorest man in town could have a hand in the speculation, and he pointed this out to her. That means there are a hundred buyers for every seller,’ he argued. ‘If I were Isaiah, I’d be buying and selling all the time.’

  She warned him never to tell his father that. ‘He’s just beginning to have some confidence in you,’ she reminded him. ‘I don’t want him to doubt you again.’

  Her advice was sound. The old man came home that same day, after one of his increasingly rare trips down town, in a sputtering anger.

  ‘The whole world’s crazy!’ he declared at the supper table. ‘That black man that cleans out spittoons down at the Coffee House quit his job today. He’d heard so much talk about bonds that he was bound to have one, and Bert Chick wrote one out and gave it to him free and clear. It don’t even pretend to be a bond for a conveyance. Bert just wrote on it: “I do solemnly swear, promise, obligate, testify, certify and with due mendacity assert that this paper is a good and valid bond, and know all men by these presents that I avow this to be my sworn bond and utterance for three years after date with interest at cent per cent so help me Hannah!” So the negro thinks he’s too rich to clean out spittoons any more, and he quit his job.’

  ‘I declare,’ Jenny protested, ‘it’s a shame to abuse the poor colored men!’ She was beginning even then to take her stand in the occasional discussions of slavery. When at the time of Maine’s elevation to statehood the Southern Congressmen had insisted that Missouri also come in as a state to maintain the balance between the friends of slavery and its enemies, the question had become a live issue in Bangor. Of the few colored men in town, Abraham Hanson was the best known. He had come to Bangor seven or eight years before and opened a barber shop near the Court House, where his good humor and his infectious chuckle won him as many patrons as did his skill with razor and scissors. Someone had written for him a rhyming advertisement which, under the heading, ‘To be shaved or not to be shaved,’ appeared in the Journal. He was so conspicuous a figure in the life of the town that Mr. Hardy painted his portrait, splendid in a high white stock. When sympathy for the Greeks was at its height, he announced that he would put in one day’s work for their benefit; and on the day set he refused all pay, insisting that he was working that day for the Greeks. This was so manifestly absurd that men began to say, in good- humored contempt, that a man was ‘as simple as Abe Hanson.’ Jenny referred to him now. They’re so easy to fool! Even barber Hanson is a simpleton! I should think Mr. Chick would be ashamed to make sport of the poor man.’

  But Isaiah snorted scornfully. ‘Serves him right for a dunce!’ he exclaimed; and he added: ‘Not but what that bond’s worth as much as most of them. Man came in from Boston on the packet today, and Jim Frye made him a bond on fourteen acres, more or less, of land out at the end of Washington Street, that piece that Walter McGaw owns, at three hundred dollars an acre, and sold the bond to him for two hundred and fifty dollars. Jim took him out and showed him the land, too. But he don’t own it any more than I do.’

  Jenny asked: ‘Won’t he have to make the bond good?’

  ‘With what?’ Isaiah chuckled. ‘Jim never saw two hundred and fifty dollars in his life before. He’s gone off to Boston to blow in the money!’ His voice was shrill in a sudden rage. ‘Why, ten per cent of the bonds they’re buying and selling ain’t worth the paper they’re written on.’

  Ephraim listened to these and other tales without comment, but when he could, he went to the Exchange, standing like a swimmer by the margin of a cold pool who tests the water with his foot, trying to muster courage to dive in.

  IV

  There was another fever in his blood. As the days and weeks passed and they were more and more together, thoughts of Jenny entered into every part of him. Isaiah’s deafness this year grew rapidly worse, so that he heard less and less of what was said around him; and his eyes were dimmin
g too. He bought new spectacles and discarded them and bought others and discarded them in turn, insisting that no one knew how to make a proper pair of specs nowadays. He refused to admit that his own faculties were failing, and insisted he could hear as well as ever and see as well, and that the trouble was people mumbled their words, and kept the shades down so that rooms were dark. He thought modern candles were of inferior quality, no longer giving as much light as they had used to; and on sunny summer days he might insist that there was a great forest fire somewhere up in the woods, that smoke dimmed the sun. Ephraim discovered one day that at a little distance his father did not recognize him; and he found that if they were all together, he and Isaiah and Jenny, at table or in the sitting room, he and Jenny could talk in low tones without being overheard at all.

  The effect was to lend a certain clandestine note to the simplest passage between him and Jenny. If in Isaiah’s presence, but in such tones that he could not hear, she and Ephraim discussed her intention to go to Wright’s store that afternoon to inspect a new consignment of West India goods, or the fact that Ephraim had heard at John Bright’s news room reports that the Selectmen would prohibit driving carriages faster than a walk within half a mile of Kenduskeag Bridge, their harmless conversation became a secret and a furtive thing. Sometimes Isaiah caught the murmur of their voices without hearing their words, and demanded to know what they were saying; but this only lent zest to the game. It was always Jenny who answered him; but she might tell him the truth or not, and if she invented a conversation for his benefit, the effect was to intensify in Ephraim his feeling that there lay between them a secret understanding.

  Either with Isaiah or without him they were much together. They checked Ephraim’s work for mistakes, and as Isaiah entrusted more and more of his affairs to his son they studied ledgers and documents of all kinds, and gravely discussed questions of business policy and the ramifications of Isaiah’s many interests. At such times they might sit side by side, books or papers spread before them; and Ephraim felt the faint tingling warmth of her nearness, and his nostrils caught that delicate fragrance which, artificial or not, always hung around her. He might find himself staring at her hands as they unfolded some document and opened it, watching the exquisite articulation of the bones in wrist and fingers, the perfection of her every movement. When the sun struck across her cheek, he could see the faint down there, so delicate that except by reflected light it was invisible. Except on occasions when she took particular pains with her toilet, she did not curl her hair, but drew it back smoothly to the rich knot on the back of her head. The lobes of her cars below the heavy strands were as softly tinted as the petal of a rose, and the curving lines of her ear delighted him when while she was intent on the papers spread before them he turned to look at her. They were at such moments so near together that he could sometimes see the pulse beat in her throat, below the slant of her jawbone, or in the nook where her collar bones met. He was intensely conscious of the perfection of the bony structure of her body; the roundness of her skull, the swelling of her forehead above the outer corners of her eyes, the bones in her forearm turning over one another when she turned her hand, her rib case elastic and flexible accommodating itself to her quiet inhalations. There was no part of her of which, even without thought, he was not aware; and every part of her seemed to him to combine to produce a celestial harmony, at once so entrancing that its very sweetness was cloying, and at the same time so faint that only by an aching tension could it be heard at all. When he was apart from her, it was almost a relief to escape for a while from her spell. With her, he was like a man in a dark room, whose eyes and ears and all his senses strain to discover the presence near him of some other occupant. He was by her still, magnetic presence maddened as one is maddened by half-heard sounds, by the murmur of voices when the words spoken cannot be understood, by objects in such shadow that their outlines cannot be clearly seen, by fragrances which have a haunting familiarity yet which cannot be identified. His was no possessive passion, no longing to seize and command her. It was rather that all of him wished to surrender to her. He was like a man in a river in spate, holding fast for safety to some great rock while with all his heart and soul he wishes to let go his hold, to be swept away, to drown.

  The rock to which helplessly he clung was the fact that she was his father’s wife! Again and again, alone in his room through white nights, he vowed to himself that he would go away, quickly, before harm came; but he never again proposed to his father that he go, nor to Jenny herself. His resolutions, made while he lay sleepless and tormented, vanished and were forgotten when he saw her at the breakfast table, her cheek fresh and her eye clear so that he thought of a freshly opened flower on which the dew still lay. When he was with her, to think of leaving her was intolerable. It was only when he was alone that he weakly swore to himself that he wished never to see her more.

  V

  In the early fall, almost casually, Ephraim found in another direction some surcease from the storms Jenny provoked in him. There were on the second floor of the big house several bedrooms. Isaiah and Jenny occupied those at the west end of the house, where the stair came up from the lower hall. Another, next to Jenny’s, was immediately above the front door; and this, reserved for guests who never came, was seldom used. Ephraim’s room was at the east end of the house and in the corner overlooking the street. Beside it there was another which was the particular domain of Mrs. Hollis, and where she kept her household accounts, stored the linen and bedding, and did her daily stint of mending. There or in the kitchen she was during the day usually to be found, although at night she went to her own home.

  But there was a third floor in which two smaller bedrooms had been finished off. The cook, a certain Mrs. McGaw whom Mrs. Hollis had engaged, lived at home, coming early every morning, staying till her kitchen was all in order in the evening; but a month before Ephraim’s homecoming, Ruth Green had been installed in one of those upper rooms.

  This was at Jenny’s suggestion. Ruth was Mrs. Hollis’ granddaughter. Her father was dead, and her mother and two or three younger children lived with Mrs. Hollis. Mrs. Hollis first brought Ruth to the house when an attack of rheumatism crippled her.

  ‘I can’t hardly hobble,’ she told Jenny. ‘So I can’t wait on table, but I’ll show Ruth how to do.’

  Jenny from the first liked the girl, and when she found that Ruth was clever with a needle, and could run a hot iron over the most delicate fabrics without scorching them, she entrusted the care of her garments entirely to the girl. Eventually she suggested that Ruth come to live in the house. ‘Mr. Poster’s getting old,’ she told Mrs. Hollis. ‘And he might be taken bad sometime in the night, and me alone with him. I’d like to have Ruth here, in case I need her to go fetch the doctor. Knowing there’s someone else in the house will make me feel easier.’ So it was settled.

  Mrs. Hollis had been glad to see Ephraim again. She had sometimes when he was a youngster taken his part against boys who bullied him—as most boys did. She thought when he returned that he was a mite peaked- looking, and her maternal heart went out to him. When one day he showed signs of a slight cold, she kept him abed and fussed over him and poured into him some nauseous draught which she was sure would cure him, and rubbed his hollow chest with a mixture of tallow, camphor and turpentine in which she had the greatest faith.

  Ruth liked Ephraim too. She was a pretty girl, with a quietly appealing beauty. He came to think that she was in many ways like Jenny. They were about the same size, the same coloring, with the same slenderness. Ruth had never seen any town but Bangor, and Ephraim with his background of Cambridge and Harvard College was in her eyes an impressive figure. He had even visited New York, not once but three times; and once he had gone as far as Philadelphia and Washington. The fact that he worked at his copying in his room meant that when she came to make his bed and put the room in order he was often there; and when he began to notice her and talk to her, she found courage to ask him questions.r />
  He was pleased and a little flattered by her interest, and she made her tasks in his room last as long as possible while she listened to the tales he told. The day he first kissed her, she turned pale and trembled in his arms, and said he mustn’t and pushed him away; and he laughed at her and told her she was the sweetest thing he had seen between Bangor and Washington and that she deserved to be kissed, and she told him he was terrible. Thereafter when on other occasions he repeated the offense, she was at first frightened and uneasy; but the day came when she clung to him in a soft happiness, her lips tremulous under his.

  That sudden half-surrender startled him, and he warily decided to let the girl alone. This was as much a fear of consequences as any scruple; but he told himself she was just a friendly child, still in her teens, and that he liked her—and liked Mrs. Hollis—too well to make them both unhappy. He took care thereafter not to be in his room when she came to do her morning tasks, giving her no chance to be alone with him; and her eyes when she served him at table or when they met and passed elsewhere in the house were faintly bewildered and reproachful at this change in him. Yet Ephraim clung to his resolutions, trying to put her out of his mind.

  VI

  It was, indirectly, Jenny who broke down his vows at last. He had gone with her to a meeting of the temperance society at the Hammond Street church, where Judge Appleton talked on the dangers of moderate drinking, and the Reverend Mr. Pomroy discussed conditions in Bangor, declaring that forty-odd stores sold liquor openly, and that at night, especially along the waterfront, there were so many drunken men that no woman alone could walk safely there. Afterward Jenny and Ephraim strolled slowly home together, and with her hand lightly on his arm she spoke of what Mr. Pomroy had said, and of her childhood in the house down toward the Point, and how as the town grew roisterers had more and more often been about.