Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  And there she’d sat at that table with all those stacked-up dishes round her, but frozen, paralyzed, wanting, oh desperately, to get up and rush through that door and not even knowing if Daphne was still standing there behind her. Only scraps of words and phrases and all to be put together, pieced out by her imagination, “not paying the old lady,” “running out on her,” “getting out of here.” Had she heard something about Europe, Paris, about the story that had been accepted? Maybe, perhaps she’d made it up. There she had sat and listened and finally she had heard the door stealthily opening and then feet as cautious as a pair of thieves, the boards creaking in the basement hallway, the opening of the outer door; then faint but audible the latching of the area gate behind them.

  TEN

  Miss Sylvester regarded her little patch of view. She had never been able to accustom herself to it and tonight it was of such transcendent beauty, the air, the sky so clear and that small slice of a moon sailing past the tower, the stars quivering, this astonishing array of windows building up before her eyes their citadels of crystal light. Strange it should have been her portion to look out on such a spectacle as this. Strange to have lived on earth through these last eighty years. And an altogether extraordinary business writing her book, laying it away unopened and then rereading it today, sitting here turning the pages as one might turn the pages of anybody’s novel, all the while reliving it, giving it back to memory, to that stream that still continued flowing. It was, she thought, looking out upon the moon, the stars, and all the glittering windows, as though they challenged her, something of a cheat—a cheat, the cutting her story off, rounding it to a finish with all that tragedy and melodrama in the basement.

  Life carried on and that knowledge to which she’d been so brutally exposed became as time went on an item of familiar baggage in her heart. How long had she stayed on in Grove Street, three years or four? She wasn’t sure, and the year she’d sold the house and moved to that comfortable place in Eighth Street would probably remain uncertain were it not for the fact that luck had been involved, getting out before the crash, selling the house at a good profit and making all those arrangements about the legacy, the settlement of seventy thousand dollars on the grandchild she’d never seen, completed in the spring of that same year, the funds invested soundly, capital and accruing interest to be paid at his majority and all achieved without so much as breaking that agreement never to reveal herself either to her son or to his issue.

  And the years that followed her moving out of Grove Street, goodness gracious, more than twenty of them. What with the world events that rushed upon her out of the headlines, off the celluloid, out of the air, collapsing, colliding, careening madly off into time and space, how could she possibly keep track of them? After the crash that period of depression, queues of the unemployed and that soup kitchen right around the corner on Green Street, never emerging from her door without the sight of hungry men. Then there had been Hitler and all the terrifying rumors (just when had she first heard of Hitler?), then Roosevelt and the moratorium, the first inaugural speech, that voice in which you somehow trusted, then suddenly the rolling of the beer barrels so jolly in the midst of all that apprehension, and behold the bars, the mirrors, bottles, the ladies with their glasses, and all the time the rumors growing louder—youth movements, storm troopers, Jews in liquidation, windows broken in Berlin, shops raided in Vienna, the burning of the Reichstag.

  How many years since she’d divested herself of her personal possessions and moved into this singularly impersonal room and here, confronted with her lone estate, resolved to write her little story, to sit down every single day and try to tell the secret she had kept throughout the years? Was it the anonymity of her life against which she’d rebelled? One had a right to one’s personal history; if one had experienced strong emotion, endured one’s special brand of agony, one was entitled to express it. At any rate with all the Schrecklichkeit that marched upon the world—Hitler entering Vienna, rolling across the bridge with all that show of military might, Czechoslovakia, Munich, Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain stepping from his plane carrying his scroll and his umbrella—switching on the radio, sallying forth to see the newsreels, how determined she had been to stick to her resolve. Why, it had obsessed her utterly. All the rumors from the air, that sense that everybody had of waiting on some dread, calamitous, unprecedented moment had not been able to deter her. Desperately she’d stuck right at it, working each and every day. It had, she is free to confess it, almost killed her, but when the spring arrived, exceptionally soft and lovely, she’d felt on certain days a curious joy, as though her heart had been assuaged, her spirit given wings to soar, to mount. There, spread upon the Flushing marshes was the great World’s Fair—the fountains and the palaces of peace, and she had walked among them in the warm spring weather, an old, old woman in her declining years with something slowly growing, taking shape within her.

  The King and Queen had visited the Fair, had eaten frankfurters with Mrs. Roosevelt and returned to England safely. Finally in August that cloud that hung above the world exploded, burst asunder—Poland invaded, England, France at war with Germany, Warsaw bombed, the whole world waiting for Paris and London to be strafed from the air. During the long winter of the phony war with what dogged perseverance she had labored at her task. She could bring no order, no organization to her work, it simply fell to pieces in her mind. Up and down the floor she’d paced telling herself she was the greatest fool alive. Then out of that dead calm, ah God, with what swiftness came those bolts of lightning, Norway invaded, the overrunning of Denmark, the occupation of Belgium, the overrunning of France, Sedan, the fall of France, and the miraculous Dunkirk; then a pause before the crisis and finally, staged forever on the screen of air and sky, the battle of Britain, all those nightly bombings, conflagrations, the show put on for everyone to see—that English bravery, with Churchill looming like Colossus, and all America invited to stay at home and listen to those cheerful voices of the bombed-out people in their shelters, jovial as though assembled at some pleasant nightclub, London every day in flames at all the movie theaters, and there she’d stayed to watch it, with her novel weaving through the holocaust and the horror.

  After that to cap the climax Rudolf Hess flying to Scotland, and then to cap all climaxes and all surprises Hitler invading Russia, nothing to think about but Russia, those place names tolling in the mind like dirges, Kiev, Smolensk, Nizhni Novgorod. Would they hold, had they fallen? That meeting—Churchill shaking hands with Roosevelt aboard the battleship, the Atlantic Charter. And on a Sunday, the seventh of December, breaking through the music. Was it a prank by Orson Welles—a jamming of the radio? Pearl Harbor. Where exactly was it? What did it mean? Were we at war, lined up against the Axis, in it with out allies to the finish?

  Disaster falling on disaster, Wake Island, Bataan, the stand at Corregidor, the sinking of the English ships, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies; and presently the celluloid offering the eyes the visual images, the far-flung lines of battle, that wilderness of snow in Russia, the armies fighting in the snow, the cities holding—Moscow, Leningrad, and in the spring those corpses on the leafless trees in the demolished hamlets, convoys in the Atlantic, sinkings, aircraft carriers in the Pacific, dogfights in the waste of sky and ocean, landing craft, soldiers disembarking on the lonely beaches, battles in the jungles, flaming tanks, the boys arrayed in leaves and branches, with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Popeye running in and out of Armageddon—sitting in that macabre twilight, wondering if she had the courage to complete her novel, Alamein, Guadalcanal, Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca, our landings in North Africa, and Stalingrad, the bleak, the desolated city, Eniwetok, Tarawa, Okinawa, Truk, Stalin under the palms with Roosevelt and Churchill.

  And then again the voices, the announcements, sitting beside the radio—the channel safely crossed, the epic beachheads, Caen and the channel ports. And in the summer, voices that announced the Russian conquests
, cities taken back, that gathering sense of safety, victory approaching, the Battle of the Bulge and hopes set back at Christmas, confidence restored, that softening up, the ceaseless strafing of the German cities, our armies on the march, the crossing of the Rhine (victory so close that you could touch it), Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt at Yalta (the black cape, the skeletal face)—peace and the spring approaching. Suddenly that voice that struck out like a blow—Roosevelt dead at Warm Springs, the funeral train (lilacs in the door-yard blooming), the crowds at stations weeping. Then spring with all the blossoms; peace in Europe long awaited. And summer with the victories in the Pacific, the Philippines regained, the islands hopped. Truman in conference with Attlee. Truman’s announcement on the sixth of August, those words reverberating round the world. Alamogordo, Hiroshima.

  Nagasaki; peace.

  Peace, repeated the old woman, peace, and remembering the news that she had read that morning, said aloud, or thought that she had said it, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?” and she attempted to get up, for she was late and Adam waiting for her (dear me, dear me, how much money had he said he wanted? She must go to her desk and get it. Fifty dollars was the sum? No, no, she would not leave her manuscript to Adam, she would destroy it when she returned from dining. Plenty of novels in the world already. She had had the experience of writing it—that was sufficient, quite sufficient) and had she risen to her feet, had someone dealt her a stupendous blow and was it Nanny at her elbow urging her, “Yes, now, take another step, the money’s in the desk, go there and get it,” or was it the august angel with his hand upon her shoulder?

  She fell, her head escaping by the fraction of an inch the corner of the desk and there she lay stretched out upon the carpet while the telephone upon the table by her bed began to ring, continued ringing.

  And Adam who was mad and standing in the booth at the Armenian restaurant cursed roundly. “Damn the old woman, damn Mol,” he said, banging the receiver onto the hook and then as he heard the coin click in the cup beneath the telephone, he pocketed his last remaining nickel and went back into the dining room to wait for his old lady, under the impression that she was on her way.

  www.doverpublications.com