Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  Mr. Greeley, the undertaker, had come to take my brother’s body away when I was still at the Hendersons’ house. He was a man of dreadful stature and horrifying countenance which consisted of a pair of lifeless eyes set in deep, dark pits, a long nose which had deviated markedly to the left, and a set of long and murky teeth behind a walrus mustache. He relished his profession. His parlors were situated in isolation on the road towards the hospital. The yard behind his sprawling, tacky yellow house was planted with tombstones, for he was a merchant as well as an undertaker and a licensed embalmer. When Mr. Greeley learned that we had no money and that Ivan was to be buried as a pauper, he could not conceal his disapproval from my mother and Mrs. Henderson. “For a child,” he reproached them, “I have such a nice choice: one sandstone group of angel, lamb, two doves, another along classical lines in which the lily motif is used. My real prize is waiting for a little child, a granite headstone with an all-over design of cast-iron roses.” He went on to complain that a child should not be sealed into the ground without the services of either Father Mulcahy or Pastor Ferguson. The grave would be unmarked, he said, and we would never know where my brother lay.

  Mrs. Henderson, repeating his words to me, assured me that he was not an unkind man but only tactless in his disappointment at being cheated out of a ceremony. But she deplored his effect upon my mother, who had become almost hysterical, had declared that she would die of shame if she could not buy the cast-iron roses for her son. And she had implored the undertaker to wait a few days before he buried the child, for we would surely be able to find some way to have a decent and proper funeral.

  Exhausted, my grief still tightly coiled as the kernel to my shock at seeing him die, I was vexed and said heartlessly to the neighbor woman, “Oh, why can’t Mamma leave well enough alone!” for I felt that now I could not bear to hear her lamentations, which I knew would be forthcoming if the gravestone had become, as I believed it had, a fixed idea.

  Mrs. Henderson replied, “She will forget, Sonie. Never you fear. She’s upset, poor thing, but she’ll get over it.”

  “You don’t know Mamma,” I said irritably.

  “Oh, I’m not so sure. Here, you take her this bit of upside-down cake and see if you can’t get her to take a little nourishment.”

  To my surprise, my mother did not mention the funeral that evening, and in the morning when she spoke of it, I was sufficiently relaxed to feel my loneliness and to think she was right in wanting something better for Ivan than an anonymous grave in a potter’s field.

  We had been shown great kindness by the townspeople: they had sent us flowers and notes of sympathy and someone had brought a book of funeral hymns. Dr. Brunson, with well-meaning generosity, had personally delivered a bottle of imported brandy and had said bluffly, “I think at times like this you ought to think of the living.” My mother had wanted to open the bottle at once but I had dissuaded her. These tokens of commiseration offered us only a spiritual crutch, and there was not one name signed upon the cards that I could call out and ask its owner for the price of a headstone. Not even Gonzales who, although he had neither called on us nor given us flowers, had sent one of his children with a note informing us that he would offer his mass each day that week for the repose of Ivan’s soul.

  That morning, I had gone to the store for a box of matches. The hush which greeted my entrance and passage between the long, brown counters was more than the ordinary respect paid to the bereft. Accompanied by intense stares and a coloring of cheeks and a withdrawal away from the aisle, it had in it an edge of doubt. And when Mr. Bennett, the store-keeper, said to me, “How is your poor mother?” and without realizing that his question was elliptical and expanded would have been, “How is your poor mother bearing up?” I replied, “Oh, she’s awfully well, thank you,” a murmur of voices rose behind me. I knew, although I could not catch a word of what they said, that the story of Ivan’s illness was known and that this self-appointed jury which convened whenever the population of Chichester was reduced or added to was putting down his death as “peculiar.”

  Set into the counter there were bins of dried foods and in the glass door of one, I caught the tilted reflection of my face. I saw, to a shame that made me cringe away, that upon my lips there was a light and careless smile! Then, as though to show my judges that my sorrow had not left me so indecently soon, I turned to face them and as I did so, saw Sarah Henderson and her father at the center of a knot of people in the back of the store. Mr. Henderson averted his gaze as I looked in their direction, but Sarah met me coldly with her enlarged, near-sighted eyes. Then Mr. Henderson looked up. Encircled by the marks of sleeplessness, his eyes accused me, I thought, of bringing trouble to his household, and when, in a voice I could not control so that it was cracked and breathless, I said, “Good morning, Mr. Henderson,” he did not answer. Later, remembering his silence, as wounding as ice to the bare skin, I told myself I cared nothing for his opinion. But my urgent indifference did not heal me.

  A change had come over Sarah Henderson which alarmed her father and herself, and indeed her whole family, and which had begun shortly after Ivan’s first fit. Whether the shock of what she had seen that night wakened what had been merely dormant, or whether her strangeness would have come about anyhow, I cannot say. At any rate, she had begun to walk in her sleep, and while she never wandered farther than the back porch, she was in dread lest she should walk down to the sea and be drowned before she could master herself. She had headaches and bad dreams and she was ill-humored. Mrs. Henderson thought new glasses would cure her headaches, and that her bad dreams came from eating indigestible sandwiches and pickles before she went to bed. And if Sarah would take a little more exercise, her disposition would improve. She had been out of school for several years and had never been able to find work; she had no talents, no interests, and no beaux. Mrs. Henderson said, “You’re bound to get notions if you’re idle.”

  But Mr. Henderson blamed Ivan. He also blamed his wife who, he thought, in going so often to our house, brought back with her some contagious and powerful virus. At last he saw nothing for it but to move away and had got a job in Maine. He was already making his preparations, and this morning in the store he had piled up several pasteboard cartons. Now I have no doubt that we did not drive him away and that the removal to Maine promised the family far more than they had ever had in Chichester. But my self-consciousness dyed everything to match its own color, and for a long time I believed that I had uprooted Mr. Henderson and had unbalanced Sarah.

  The villagers recovered their voices as I stepped away from the counter with my matches. As though by way of apology to me for their silence or to indicate that they had not yet heard the news, they began to talk of things which bore no relation to the death. They commented on the fog and listed its attendant injuries to motorists and mariners, and they prophesied the immediate ruin of the United States under its existing government, exchanged receipts for salt-rising bread, and told jokes involving a judge and a colored man named Rastus. But the lively tone was betrayed by a slackening of pace as I went down the aisle toward the door, feeling the eyes of everyone upon me.

  And yet, when I had been at home only a few minutes, the flowers began to arrive and the notes, composed laboriously in an embarrassment that concealed itself behind phrases like “the dear departed” and “passed on to a better world,” so that I thought I had misconstrued the silence in the store, for the names of some of the people who had been there were on the cards.

  We sat among the sweet carnations and daffodils and roses whose fragrance and chaste petals, some of them made even lovelier by the whorls of steam rising from our teacups, softened the edges of our predicament.

  It was my mother who spoke first. “If it was summer, the ladies at the Hotel would get us a nice coffin and a pretty tombstone. Miss Pride would give us the money if it was only summer. Don’t you have anything left of the golden egg?”

  Th
e golden egg had been used up years ago, but my mother could never believe it and now and again she sought it in my father’s Bible, tearing the thin pages in her impatience.

  I had thought of Miss Pride, but I had hoped my mother would not. The temptation to send her a letter had been strong until I remembered that often I had heard her talking to her friends of the impertinent requests she received through the mail. A young man who described himself as a “would-be writer,” after paying Miss Pride and her deceased father (neither of whom he had ever known) three pages of fulsome compliments, asked her to forward him a Remington typewriter at her earliest convenience. It was his specifying the make of the machine that most appalled her, and she had sent him a lead-pencil with the note, “I regret that I cannot supply you with a Remington typewriter and hope that you will instead accept, with my best wishes, this Ticonderoga lead-pencil.” But, on the other hand, I had heard that she had sent two deserving young men, of good but impoverished families, through Harvard. I thought of how, when I was a little girl, I used to dream of her coming to our house, wearing black silk gloves and carrying a funeral wreath for my dead parents. I said aloud, “I wonder if she would.”

  Pretending that I was going for a walk, I went out of the house, but instead, crossed over to the shop. It was here before Ivan’s epilepsy that I had done all my reading and studying, for in the house I could never be free of interruptions. I had made my father’s work table into a desk, its principal feature being a German silver inkwell embossed with doves which I had found in one of the boxes. The room was dark from the fog and I lighted a candle by whose unsteady flame I composed my letter to Miss Pride. I stated my case formally, saluting her “Dear Madam” and offering her, in exchange for the fulfillment of my “novel request” my services in the humblest part of her establishment for the rest of my life. I asked her to telegraph her reply. But if she were disinclined to forward me the money, I begged her to forget my importunity and to regard me still as her “obedient servant, Sonia Marburg.”

  The moment I had dropped the envelope through the brass lips of the box in the post-office, I burned with shame and had I not dreaded the curiosity of the postmaster, would have begged him to return it to me. The text of the letter now seemed at once flippant and turgid. I had been tricked into my pomposity by the corpulent silver inkwell as though its original owner had left his nineteenth-century clichés behind to mingle with the ink.

  Dr. Galbraith was fitting the key to his post-box and as he withdrew a packet of mail and glanced through it, he was the object of the scrutiny of the postmaster who, leaning forward against his bars, remarked, “Well, Doc, I sure did fill your box this morning, but I guess it’s mostly ads and them journals.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” said the doctor in his pestered way. “Thank you. It’s a very interesting collection,” though he was shuffling the envelopes so rapidly that he could not possibly have told where they had come from.

  “You been riding a horse, Doc?”

  To the doctor’s fuscous cheeks arose a blush as he looked down at his clothes and then at the postmaster, who had not been in Chichester long.

  “Uh, no, no, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

  The doctor’s innumerable costumes were all spectacular and meticulously tailored, and they gave him the air of a “sporting gentleman” of a bygone era. One thought of his “cravats,” not of his neckties, and remembered their large, loose knots in the French style. He very often wore riding clothes as he did this morning, and it was said that he had once been an excellent horseman, just as it was said that he had once been an insatiable student of literature and had once “performed creditably” on the violin. Now, the only reminders of those talents were his dashing habits, his immense, unhandled library (presided over, I had heard, by busts of Dante, Pericles, Shakespeare, and Vergil under whose staring eyes he drank each night to a point of stupefaction), and the recollection of Mrs. Prather who had heard him play the solo of Dr. Joachim’s Hungarian Concerto.

  With his russet breeches, which descended over his handsome legs into boots so lustrous and pliant I longed to touch and crush them in my hands, he wore a checked and belted red-brown jacket and a maroon silk ascot, and upon his head, a green hat grizzled with silvery veins and proclaiming its continental origin by a gamsbart sportively stuck in the band. It was no wonder that the old ladies at the Hotel Barstow, too old to be the object of his lascivious eyes, found him charming and said he “cut a fine figure.” They admired his apparel and said that too often a physician tends to resemble his successor, the mortician. His other suits were of fine materials, all double-breasted and of a cut which did not vary through the years, yet always seemed to be at the peak of fashion. And while the colors and the patterns of the stripes or checks were conservative, the accessory trappings were of the liveliest declensions, being the racing lifeblood of the subdued carcass: neckties (or cravats) of orange silk and crimson wool, printed challis, dotted China silk, pongee, fortified linen, diapered or imprinted with arabesques or stripes or hexagons. His handkerchief and his muffler, if he wore one, matched or complemented the tie as did his socks and the band in his hat. And carrying to its uttermost his nice feeling for detail, he even had alternative spectacles which today, to go with his riding togs, were horn-rimmed, but tomorrow, with blue serge would be rimless octagons, and the next day, if the fancy struck him to dress for dinner and go into Boston, would be a pince-nez with a black ribbon and mother-of-pearl nose pieces.

  Dr. Galbraith did not seem to recognize me, though once or twice he looked in my direction as I lingered in the room, studying the announcements of Civil Service examinations and the photographs of coarse, unshaven rascals with prices on their heads for the robbery of banks or the kidnapping of children. I wished to speak with him but hesitated in the presence of the postmaster who was still regarding him with the frankest inquisitiveness.

  He was about to leave and I prepared to follow him, but the postmaster, perhaps in the intention of keeping him there a little longer so that he might continue his investigation, bawled, “Doctor, what can a person do for the bloat? Seems like every meal I get all bloated up afterward.”

  The doctor wheeled about. “What a thing to say,” he spluttered, “in front of a lady,” and he motioned toward me, “whose brother has just died.”

  The man gaped stupidly behind his bars. “Well, bless your heart, hasn’t she ever heard of the bloat? I’m real sorry to hear the bad news, but I don’t see I gave her any reason to be peeved.”

  “Come, Miss Henderson,” said Dr. Galbraith and held the door open, adding, as we passed into the fog, “What the devil is your name?”

  “Marburg. The Hendersons live next door to us. Dr. Galbraith, I wonder if Mr. Greeley would let us have another day . . . you know, about my brother. My mother doesn’t want him to be buried like a pauper, and I thought if you spoke to him, he might give us some more time so that we can try to find some money.”

  We were walking so close together that our arms kept brushing and each time I moved away from him, his hand groped out towards me for support.

  “Just a minute. I can’t seem to think in a fog.”

  We could see no more than ten feet in any direction, and I felt as if I were suspended in a gaseous sphere, for the blindness of the air made my locomotion seem rotary and almost effortless, and when the doctor softly collided with me, it seemed even more that we were going round and round in a circle, he overstepping the bounds of the outer ring while I, with difficulty, maintained my footing in the inner one.

  I repeated my question to him. “Well, I don’t know . . .” he said.

  Beyond us, we could now and again hear voices and the distant foghorns which only isolated us the more since there could be no proof, until someone entered our shortened range of vision, that the experience was not unique for us, just as it is said that perhaps a tree, falling in a forest, makes no sound if no one hears it.r />
  The doctor stopped me and sighed deeply. “Look here, Miss Martin, I don’t believe . . . I’m not certain, but the fact is that when a cor . . . someone is buried in this way it is not . . . well, frankly, it is not embalmed. I . . . no, I regret very much that it really is an impossibility.” He clasped my arm tightly with his trembling fingers.

  “But we will know by noon tomorrow and it could be embalmed then, couldn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you, my dear. These things are . . . my poor girl, there is no shame in being a pauper! But if you should know by noon tomorrow, I daresay something could be arranged. I’ll speak to Mr. Greeley.”

  I thanked him and prepared to take leave. “How is your mother?” he asked me.

  “Very well, thank you, though she’s terribly upset to think we may not have a funeral.”

  “Ah, yes, yes, it’s too bad. She is an, ah, an admirable woman. What is her name again?”

  “Mrs. Marburg.”

  “Oh, yes. She is very handsome. She isn’t an American?”

  “No, she’s a Russian.”

  “Fascinating!” he cried. “She looks like a painting I used to be fond of. A madonna, you know, something of that sort, very likely by a Russian painter. Will you give her my regards?”

  “Yes, Dr. Galbraith, and thank you for all you’ve done.”

  “It’s nothing, my dear, nothing at all,” and he grasped my arm again before I could escape our hollow ball and get into another where I was alone. When I had gone some yards beyond him, I heard him call, “Morgan, is it, or Martin? What the devil is the name again?” But I did not answer.

  My mother was embroidering when I got home. Upon the chest of Ivan’s outing-flannel nightshirt, she had made an enormous rose in black cotton and was now sketching a wreath of smaller roses to encircle it.

  “The shroud,” she explained.

  I would have snatched my brother’s pitiful nightshirt from her hands, but I knew, by the diligence with which she bent over her work, that if I did, I would be subjected to an endless tirade. I only said, “Listen, Mamma, you mustn’t count too much on the funeral.”