House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Claire gave a small whimper of pain, and Virginia looked at her. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, they got her over that finally, and she seemed to do all right with her mother’s people. She went to school in Philadelphia, and on to Swarthmore, and it was while she was there that she met Buck. He’s a good bit older than she is; he was already starting to make a success in computer sales, and he thinks she must have seen something of her father in him. The brother too. She often told him how much he reminded her of both of them.

  “I gather they had a very good marriage. They didn’t have children for a long time, and she’d travel with him when he went out of town, and had quite a good career as an interior decorator. She always depended on him a lot, but he enjoyed that. Then the son was born, and he was simply Anita’s world. Buck’s too, but a man usually has other things. Buck had his work; he loved it. Anita gave up her business to take care of the boy. He must have been a really exceptional boy. He’d had every honor and office he could hold at Lawrenceville, and he’d been accepted at Princeton. He joined the army against Anita’s wishes, but Buck was proud of him. He’s basically a pretty simple man, I think. He was proud that his boy felt an obligation to his country when so many others were burning their draft cards and running off to Canada. Anyway, the boy—Toby, they called him—went to flight school and got to be a helicopter pilot. Anita was frantic of course, but the boy loved flying, and he was a good pilot. He’d flown sixty-something sorties. He was set to come back to the States in a week or so to be an instructor. He called them from Taiwan to tell them. And the next day the officer was at the door to tell them that he hadn’t…come back from his last one. Buck was out of town—he traveled almost constantly then—and Anita was alone. It was the next morning before they could reach him. He said she was just literally almost destroyed.”

  She paused, and that long-ago pain in a New Jersey living room coiled into the room almost palpably. Claire closed her eyes. I knew she was thinking about her three sturdy sons and a knock on her door in the middle of a sunny morning.

  Virginia went on in a voice formal and level against the pain. “The doctors kept her pretty well sedated for a while, but then she just…withdrew. After the first day she never cried again, Buck said. She didn’t talk much, and she wouldn’t let him dispose of any of the boy’s things. She wouldn’t let his room be touched. She sat in it for hours, rocking in an old rocking chair there, and he just couldn’t seem to reach her. He was terrified that she was going to slip back into the catatonia. The boy had been just the age her brother was when he died. Just about Duck’s age. The two things were so alike, you see.

  “Buck is an outgoing man. He needs to be around people. He needed somebody he could talk to about his son. He really needed that, but he couldn’t, to her, and he didn’t dare leave her alone for long. He was just isolated, and it wasn’t fair to him.” She said it fiercely, looking around at us as if she dared us to contradict her. None of us did, of course. No one spoke.

  “Well, she didn’t go into the catatonia, quite,” said Virginia. “But she moved through the house like a robot, they stopped talking almost entirely, they stopped…having marital relations. He begged her to let him apply for a new territory, to get out of that town and that house, to make a new life somewhere where there weren’t so many memories. She refused. She would not leave that house. He said it was the only real emotion she showed the whole time. He said he should have seen where she was headed, but in a funny kind of way she seemed almost contented there, and quiet. She functioned, in a not-there kind of way. He thought she’d work through it in time. One weekend he came home all full of plans to take her on a long cruise to the Caribbean or to Europe or somewhere, and she looked at him and said, ‘What do you think you could buy me that will replace what you gave away that was mine?,’ and he realized then that she blamed him for encouraging the boy to join the army, or at least for not discouraging him. It almost killed him.”

  Tears were running silently down Claire’s face and stinging behind my nose. Walter and Roger and Charles were not looking at each other. These terrible words should not be spinning out into this dim, polished, peaceful room. These words brought unimaginable enormity too close. Virginia went on in the same level voice, but her hands were clamped to the arms of her chair, and her knuckles were white.

  “You can probably guess what happened after that. A man like Buck isn’t used to bottling up pain. Men like that need other people. But men like that often don’t know how to ask for help from friends or acquaintances. He didn’t have anybody. Anita didn’t seem to need him at home any more. So he started going out on the road more and more often, working incredible hours so he could sleep at night, bringing in more and more business. He said it was sort of funny, really, that at the time money meant the least to him he was making more than he’d ever thought he’d make in his life. He just couldn’t seem to do anything wrong. In that five or six months after Toby died he almost doubled his commissions, and they’d already been the best in his company.

  “But then he started drinking, really drinking, for the first time in his life, and in the end it just…did him in. There was a woman too, in one of the cities he usually visited, and a lot of the time he was with her when he was supposed to be somewhere else. He said he still loved Anita with all his heart, but it was something he just couldn’t seem to help, and Anita never gave any indication at all that she suspected he had somebody else. She was spending most of her time in that awful room by that time. But his firm knew about the woman. A lot of people did.

  “It caught up with him eventually. He started getting ugly with some of the company’s best customers, and of course the word got back to the home office, and after a while they really didn’t have any choice but to fire him. He said he’d have done the same thing himself. He was with the woman in—Dayton, I think—when they made the decision to fire him, so they sent him a wire there and told him not to come back. He left the girl’s apartment, but he stayed in Dayton for another week, at a hotel. He doesn’t remember any of it. But he woke up one morning and he said he absolutely knew that if he had one more drink he would be dead. He would just die. So he went home to Anita, and he was going to straighten things out between them no matter what it took. He was going to get her a good doctor and start at AA himself. When he got home she was sitting in the chair in the boy’s room and she didn’t even see him. She must have been there for a day or two, he said, because she…she had soiled herself and her clothes. There was a letter on the floor beside her from the woman in Dayton. It had been sent to Buck’s office, but they had sent it to his house with his last check and his other things. Anita had read it of course. There couldn’t have been any doubt in her mind about what had been going on. And that’s when she went back into the catatonia. She just didn’t move again. He got her into the best private hospital he could find, but she didn’t move or talk again for almost seven months after that.”

  Tears had started from Virginia’s eyes by now, running into the corners of her mouth. I thought I could not bear any more of this and made a movement toward her to stop her. She held up her hand. She licked away the tears.

  “Wait, Colquitt, I’m almost finished. They had some savings and a summer place on the Jersey shore. He sold that, and he sold the house. He took an apartment near the hospital. He started at AA. He said that he knew by then that loss and pain couldn’t kill you, but guilt could, and when the doctors first told him there was very little hope of reaching Anita, he went into a church—the first one he came to walking along the street from the hospital—and he promised God that if He would make Anita well, he would devote the rest of his life to taking care of her and being the best person he could be. He said that in that moment he believed absolutely and totally in God, and in Christ, and all the rest, everything that went with it, because there simply wasn’t anything else in the world he could do. He asked for a miracle. And within a month he got it. She began to respond. And he found t
his job, and the house, and he brought her here. There was just enough left to make the move. And of course he got a very good deal at Computer Tech because he’s very, very good at what he does, and he hasn’t had a drink in more than a year.”

  Her hands dropped into her lap and she smiled, a misty, soft Virginia smile. We waited.

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the whole thing. He gave Anita one of her tablets last night, and after she went to sleep we talked for most of the night. I didn’t want him to feel he had to tell me any of that, but he insisted. He thinks the only way she’s going to get completely well is for all of us to know all of it, so there are no secrets and no whisperings and no…undercurrents that can touch her. He hoped it would help you understand Anita better.”

  We were silent again. This sort of shattering disclosure makes most of us almost unbearably uncomfortable. It is harder to live with than almost anything I know. Our set shrinks from it. In distance there is decency.

  “I think it was the bravest thing I ever heard,” said fastidious Virginia Guthrie, whose own private distresses will go forever unaired.

  “But if it matters to any of you, don’t feel badly about not seeing them. He doesn’t care about that. He has his wife back. He has what he wants and needs. He’d like to have our friendship, but it has to be openly and freely and honestly given. Those are his terms. There will be setbacks, almost certainly, like last night with poor Duck. But they will work them out. There’s a lot we six can do to help, and one thing is either to know all this and accept them openly or not to see them at all. Nothing else will do.

  “He has my friendship for as long as he wants it,” she added. “They both do.”

  We all pledged it then, and meant it. I did, from the bottom of my heart, and I knew Walter did. Claire snuffled a little and Roger cleared his throat, and Charles Guthrie looked at his wife with the luminous wonder I have seen a few times before. I knew he had cast his lot with Virginia sometime in the hours before dawn, when she had come back to their house to tell him this. I had never felt closer to the other five people in that room than in that moment, with all veneers and varnishes and glosses gone. I never have again.

  Virginia served us coffee and one of her spindrift angel food cakes then, and we talked a little longer about the Sheehans, with no constraints or small cool reserves between us. Just before we left, Claire said, “The whole thing reminds me of that story by—who was it? Graham Greene? Where the woman promised God she would give up her lover and follow Him always if He’d just let him be alive. It was in England during the war, and there had been a direct hit on the house they were having a rendezvous in, and she knew with absolute certainty that he was dead. And she got down on her knees and prayed for a miracle, and he came walking through the door. Not even hurt. This reminds me of that.”

  “The End of the Affair,” I said. “But that had a pretty miserable ending. The woman died. Buck has his miracle, it seems to me. His happy ending. At least, I hope he still does.”

  “Knock on wood,” Claire said.

  “Heathen,” said Roger Swanson fondly and slapped her on the rump, and they went home. Walter and I followed in silence. The house next door was dark and quiet and seemed to breathe sweetly in sleep.

  12

  THE WEEK AFTER that evening at the Guthries’ we went down to the island just off the coast that we have both loved since we came to this city. It is one of the Sea Islands, but not one of the glossier ones. It is a sleepy, gently shabby little island, with a sprinkling of chic new condominium resorts and one newly restored grand old hotel, and a flock of rambling old clapboard cottages facing the ocean, owned mainly by the second and third generations of the families who built them. A great many people in our city vacation and summer there, and when Walter left the agency he worked for to start his own with Charlie Satterfield, part of the deal they worked out was half ownership of the cottage Charlie’s father had built on the island in 1925—just before the Depression put beach houses out of reach for most Southerners for decades. Charlie takes his brood of four down for the entire month of August, and since Walter and I are more flexible, we like to use the house a few days or a week or two at a time throughout the year. There’s never been any wrangling about who wanted the cottage when.

  We fell in love with it when we first drove off the beach road and down its rutted, sandy, burr-matted lane. It is as forthright and solid and square as a wellborn dowager, gray-shingled and green-shuttered, and skirted on three sides by a screened porch that looks straight into the tired, flaccid surf of that warm ocean. No trees grow near it, but a flag snaps smartly in the freshening wind at the turn of the incoming tide, and two outsized hammocks and an old-fashioned glider, as well as a porch swing, sag and creak and groan comfortably on the porch. The porch is where most of our living is done. We eat there, and entertain there, and on hot nights we have slept there, in the hammocks, waking up early with the already hot morning sun red on our lids and rope-square imprints on our bare behinds. We once made love in one of the hammocks, or tried to, but it wasn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and I really think Walter insisted only because he thought it madcap and adventurous and a trifle kinky. We ended up tangled together on the porch floor in weak, hysterical laughter, with rope burns.

  These were two good weeks. Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled, somehow, at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain. Our times at the cottage are more than refreshment and rest for us. They are a sort of renaissance, a reaffirmation, a statement of policy and condition of our life together. We know most of the summer colony, and we play a little tennis on the lone, weedy old clay court, and have a few people for lazy drinks now and then, or go to some other surfsinging screened porch for drinks and cold suppers. But mostly we are alone with each other and the sun and wind and water.

  Our weeks on the island are as far removed from our life in the city as if we had been to New Zealand. When we get home it takes me a day or two to get my bearings again, to find my footing in the back-home world that is only half familiar to me. So when Claire called the night we got back and said, “Guess what? Anita’s joined the garden club and is having a dinner party for twenty people—y’all will be invited—and played golf with Buck and Roger and me yesterday,” I thought stupidly, Anita who? And then I remembered. Anita Sheehan, next door. And then it all came flooding back through the lingering sea-strangeness, and I said, “Well, I think that’s fantastic, Claire! Bless her heart. She’s making a superhuman effort, isn’t she? Is it an awful strain being around her?”

  “Not in the least. None of it seems to be an effort for her at all. If you didn’t know—all that stuff—you’d think she didn’t have a care in the world and had never been sick a day in her life. I never saw such a change in anybody. She’s not exactly outgoing of course, but she’s sweet and funny, and looks like she must have gained at least ten pounds, and can drive a golf ball a country mile, and actually said ‘damn’ when she three-putted the last hole. I don’t know what happened to her. I never would have believed anybody could come back so fast after that scene at your house.”

  “All that in two weeks? Buck really must be the happiest man in America.”

  “He just beams. All the time. Just walks around grinning from ear to ear. Col, you’ll just have to see her to believe it.”

  I did see her, the next morning, on my way out to the car to go to work. She was bringing the newspaper down their driveway from the mailbox, wearing shorts and a jersey, and she looked like a different woman. Literally. Her beautiful skull had a modeling of sweetly fitting flesh now, and the fabulous cheekbones wore a stain of sun and natural color. Her eyes crinkled at the sight of me; her hair shone and bounced on her shoulders, and her body wore a becoming five or ten new p
ounds. She looked spectacular. I simply stared at her.

  “Well, hi, Colquitt,” she said, smiling. “Welcome home—only it’s not so much fun coming home after a vacation, is it? Virginia told me you two had gone down to the beach. You look great, all tanned and rested.”

  “You’re the one who looks like you’ve been on vacation,” I said. “You look just wonderful, you really do. I never saw such a—” I had been going to say “change,” and then winced inside myself for the insensitivity of it. The fragility and madness and fear, the dreadful moment on our patio, the whole terrible chain of events that had led to that moment, all those would be inherent in that one word, “change.” I stopped. She smiled.

  “I know. ‘Such a change in anybody.’ Don’t be embarrassed. I’m delighted with it myself, and I’m glad you noticed. It has been an incredible change, hasn’t it? Colquitt, I’m not going to apologize to you for that inexcusable scene at your house the other night, because I know that you know all about us now, and you understand.”