Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  She looked up innocently. “But you promised the cast-iron roses, darling! Why, Sonia, I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to make the shroud if you hadn’t promised me!”

  “Mamma . . .” I began, but words were useless. I drew a chair to the fire and sat brooding, my eyes fixed upon the oven door where the word “Enterprise” was elaborately printed in blue. “For God’s sake, Miss Pride, help me,” I thought. “If she doesn’t get the cast-iron roses, what will I do?”

  The fog continued into the next day so that when we got up, it was only the clock, not the appearance of the world, that told us it was morning. From six until noon, I waited for the telegram. I was no longer ashamed of my letter. I was conscious of nothing but the hours ascending to their climax, three o’clock, which was the hour Mr. Greeley had told me he would “dispose” of the body. One of the hours dragged by so slowly that each second of it was a lifetime, but the next was swiftly gone. Because, in my impatience for the message, I could not bear my mother’s humming and smiling as she patiently filled in those gruesome black roses, I had gone to the shop soon after breakfast where I fidgeted with the playing cards and dreamed over Ethan Frome. Each time I heard a voice calling another name, not mine, I bent my head over my desk and closed my eyes in a total blankness of disappointment. Hopestill Mather’s time-blackened slippers, which had remained all these years where I had put them on the day my father went away, infuriated me as they had not done in a long while. I would have slashed to ribbons what was left of them if my father’s tools had not been rusted beyond use. Now, at this very moment, when grief and terror were consuming me, Hopestill was probably laughing, with her handsome head flung back, her bright mind far from death or poverty. What would she do, I wondered, on a slow, gray day like this? She would still be in bed, under a light green eiderdown. Or perhaps she was having her breakfast on a tray and in a little while would lazily get out of bed for a long, perfumed bath. Why, her allowance for a month would pay for my brother’s headstone!

  The time was so deliberate that I could fix my attention on nothing save the knocking at our kitchen door and even my desire for what the telegraph boy would bring became vague. My necessity was so pressing that several times I was sure I heard my mother call to me. At last, indeed, I did hear her, and I ran out. As I crossed the yard I heard, like an insistent warning, the long-held note of a foghorn which was answered on the other side of the tongue of land by another, the two echoing and re-echoing. Then they subsided and there was a silence until a still more remote bleat sounded up the coast.

  My mother was smiling radiantly and I smiled in response, sure the telegram had arrived. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “You sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

  I glanced round the room for a yellow envelope, but I saw none. I observed that my mother had laid aside Ivan’s nightshirt and was now making a basket in cross-stitch on a pot-holder.

  “We have been stupid,” she said. “Why, Sonie girl, the thing to do is to give our little boy an ocean burial the way the sailors do.”

  “In the water, do you mean, Mamma?” I cried.

  “Yes. It’s clean out there, and, oh, so much better than to be buried like a poor person!” She leaned forward eagerly and took my hand, saying in a whisper, “After dark, we can go tonight. No one will see us.”

  “But we would have to have a boat. Oh, no! No, Mamma, I can’t bury little Ivan that way.”

  She tried to persuade me. Softly and affectionately, she described the dignity of such an act, told me how the bells and the waves would be eternal mourners for the little boy. She said the strange things that grew at the bottom of the sea would be fine flowers for his grave. If we must go out in a boat, would not Mr. Henderson take us? We three would go out, dressed in black, early in the evening. It would be ever so much nicer even than the cast-iron flowers.

  Hearing once again the inconsolable moan of the foghorns, I was almost won but I did not speak.

  “You run ask Mrs. Henderson,” she coaxed, “and then go to the man who took him away. You fix it for me, sweetheart.”

  Mrs. Henderson had toward the sea the animadversion common to all the wives of Chichester mariners and fishermen. She personified it as a treacherous siren, forever discontent with her partial government over the men and striving with all manner of clever devices like storms and fog, to win full sovereignty over them. Thus, when I told her of my mother’s proposal her bland face was disordered with revulsion. She recovered her voice and told me she was very sure so irregular a procedure was quite illegal, but as she was by no means an authority, we would go together to inquire of Mr. Greeley, and we set out through the fog.

  It was a little after two when we were admitted to the mortuary parlors by a disheveled and grumpy housekeeper who, having been so long in the society of cadavers, seemed to have lost the use of her voice and addressed to us a solitary grunt, presumably intended as a command to us to follow her. We waited for Mr. Greeley in a small, cold room, immoderately decorated with rubber plants which had grown to a disquieting height, and furnished with seedy leather rocking-chairs. Perhaps I only imagined it, but it seemed to me that under the smell of disinfectant that pervaded the house, there was the rank odor of putrefaction, and I whispered to Mrs. Henderson, “Oh, let’s go home! I’m frightened!” But the undertaker had entered the room. He greeted us with as warm a smile as his parody of a face could muster and said, “Ah, ah, then you have found a way to get the little boy a headstone. Well, I’m glad, indeed I am. I hope you’ll take my jewel, my roses. He will sleep better beneath it.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “We can’t have a funeral after all. But there is something else . . . Mrs. Henderson, you tell him.”

  The woman told him my mother’s plan, and as she talked he pulled the ends of his mustache, exclaiming softly, “Ridiculous! Fantastic! What on earth!” And when she had finished, he rose to his full, improbable height and declared, “One may not cast a body into the street or into a running stream, or into a hole in the ground, or make any disposition of it that might be regarded as creating a nuisance or be injurious to the health of the community. This is the law, Madam. And ‘running stream’ can, in this instance, refer to the water of the bay or of the ocean. Do you think that I care to be apprehended by the Boston Harbor Police? Do you think that you have the authority to do what you wish with this body?”

  I could feel the large and abundant tears crawling down my cheeks at his impressionistic yet graphic picture of my brother’s corruption. Seeing my misery, he was gentler when he spoke again and even laid his hairy hand, which wore a Masonic ring, on my jerking shoulder.

  “Look here, young lady,” he said, “you let me bury him now as I planned and if you get some money some day, we will disinter the body and start all over again. All right?”

  I nodded my head, for I could not speak. I heard Mrs. Henderson inquire if she might at least supervise the dressing of the child for whom she had had so great an affection and heard the undertaker refuse. She took me by the elbow and I rose. “God bless him,” she said, and as we left the room, Mr. Greeley’s voice came to us in a clatter of enthusiasm. “I hope you will be able to get my rose piece! The best of luck to you!”

  “You mustn’t mind him,” said Mrs. Henderson as we started home. “It’s his job, and a thankless one.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame him! I only don’t want to have to tell Mamma.”

  “Well, then, we won’t tell Mamma,” said Mrs. Henderson with a trace of annoyance. “I suppose there’s nothing against a white lie to give you a little peace of mind, Sonie.”

  “But she’d want to go to the grave sometime.”

  “Not if she thought he was buried at sea, dear.”

  “But she wants to go out in the boat herself, Mrs. Henderson!”

  “Oh, we could change her mind with a hot toddy, I think. You mustn’t suppose I don’t know your m
other,” she said grimly. “And since we’re going off to Maine directly, I’d like to think I left you without too many worries. Let her come down to the wharf, yes, and let her see you get into the boat with Ross. He’ll take you out a little piece and she’ll never know the difference. If she wants the poor lad to be down with the seaweed, let her think that’s where he is.” She was very angry. With an outraged, “I declare!” she fell silent for so long a time that I thought she had not been in earnest. The plan was, I saw, ideal, but I dared not hope it could ever be realized, for I was certain Mr. Henderson would not agree to so romantic an enterprise.

  We had reached our cottage before the neighbor woman spoke again. “Sonie, you mustn’t ever think I was being harsh with you a while back there. I was out of sorts with your mother for a minute, thinking as I was how you’re nothing but a child yourself and put up with all these carryings-on. I’ll serve my time for those mean thoughts about poor Mrs. Marburg. I do think it’s best to humor her. We’ll do what I said now. I’ll step across to your place after supper.”

  That evening, about seven o’clock, my mother and Mrs. Henderson and I were waiting on the beach by the wharf. Although we could not see them, we could hear the dories dip and sway at their sodden moorings. Someone passed behind us and we could hear the hiss of his slicker and dimly we saw his lantern. My mother, wearing her bright winter dress covered with an old, rusty black cape, stood erect beside me. I was surprised to see that she was a little taller than I. Her arm was linked in mine, and through the mist I could see her long fingers on my coat sleeve. Mrs. Henderson stood on the other side of us. None of us spoke, but there was something in my mother’s stance and in the way her hand, seemingly relaxed, was firm on my arm, which told me that she was profoundly excited and a stealthy glance at her parted, upward curving lips, informed me that her excitement did not come from grief. My glance, shifting, met Mrs. Henderson, who had likewise been looking at my mother, and it seemed to me that her eyes, behind her faintly glimmering spectacles, would be cold and unforgiving.

  “A nice night,” said my mother after a time. “Don’t you think it’s nice, Mrs. Henderson?”

  “A little chilly,” replied the woman. “I’m worried about you, Mrs. Marburg. I don’t think you’re dressed warm enough. As soon as he comes, we must hustle back to the house.”

  “Oh, yes,” cried my mother. “Oh, of course we must! Did Sonia tell you what that good man said when he brought the brandy? He said, ‘I think at times like these, you ought to think of the living.’ ”

  It was some minutes before we heard Mr. Henderson call out to us. “Ready!” he cried. “Can you see, Sonie? Come straight to the end of the wharf.”

  I stepped forward, the two women following me until we reached the wharf, which seemed no more than a long, insubstantial shadow. Mrs. Henderson squeezed my hand, and my mother, who had already withdrawn, called, “Dear Sonia! Dear little girl!”

  “Mamma!” I cried in an abrupt, inexplicable desperation. “Mamma! Mamma! Where are you?”

  “Hush!” said Mrs. Henderson.

  “Are you lost?” came Mr. Henderson’s imperative voice.

  “She’s coming, Ross!” returned his wife.

  I lingered for a moment at Mrs. Henderson’s side. We were both motionless. We heard my mother’s feet lightly running over the wet sand, and in a little while, an eerie voice singing in the distance. Then I ran to the end of the wharf, my head down, scuffing my rubber soles to keep from falling on the slippery boards. I went down the ramp to the float where the boat was moored. As Mr. Henderson stretched out his hand to help me, a phrase of my mother’s song came swelling towards us on a little wind.

  “Mr. Henderson, I’m sorry . . .” I began.

  But his calloused hand was full of sympathy and he muttered, “Rich or poor, a person must stand by another person.”

  The dories softly plopping in the water made a sound sadder even than the horns. “We’ll go round the Point and out a bit,” said Mr. Henderson. “I like a fog myself.”

  The whirr of the motor prohibited talk, and the foghorns were all but obliterated save when they were very near. To our right, until we rounded the Point, were the lights of Boston, blurred into one long line which shifted with the movement of the boat. Miss Pride and her niece would be just sitting down to dinner. I could hear Miss Pride say crisply, “I had another of those beastly begging letters today. Do they think we’re made of money?”

  The water was choppy around the Point and I was filled with a mixture of terror and exultation when I considered that not far from here were the high seas in whose tumultous bowels lay the bones of the dead and the timbers of shattered ships. The fog was a little lighter. Far away were dimly visible a bunch of lights and I knew that it was the steamer to New York proceeding to the Cape Cod Canal. What worlds there were on this side of Chichester! On the bay side, there was Boston, single and supreme. But here: the furious cemetery, over the residents of which one plowed in a massive ship to Europe; the fabulous New York; and to the west of New York, that variegated land so tediously described in the geography books. I supposed that bizarre as its name was, even Nebraska was real. The feeling and the taste of the spray were unaccountably thrilling, and I, forgetting the absurdity of our errand, wished that we might all night long cut through the water, our motor as loud as gunshot in our ears, and all about us the danger of death. And I knew then why Mr. Henderson had been so amenable to his wife’s suggestion: he, I was sure, enjoyed the outing as much as I.

  Suspended in my excitement so that for that brief time my life was one dimensional, I could not tell how long it was before Mr. Henderson cried at the top of his voice, “Now, girl, it’s time to turn back!” Then I wished my brother’s body were in the boat. Here, out at sea, I would push it into the water and the waves would move him miles away The putrid smell, in its thick envelope of formaldehyde, which I had detected in the mortuary, returned to me and I retched as I did whenever I smelled ether. I would rather have Ivan in this vast natural grave than in the unmarked, communal earth where lay the unclaimed bodies washed upon the beaches.

  I bent my head in my hands and cried because the child was dead, and I did not look up again until I knew we were going through the narrow shoals at the Point. I could see the sharp, glistening rocks and could hear the gulping of the water against their base. Since I could remember, I had been afraid of this place, for here, in a storm, a fisherman’s dory had been dashed against the crags and his two children’s bodies had never been found. We entered the dense fog again and made for the wharf. As he shut the motor off, Mr. Henderson said, “Well, Sonie, well, you had your ride.”

  I said, “Mr. Henderson, I am very grateful. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “You? No, I don’t think you’re crazy, Sonie.” He was searching for something in the bottom of the boat. “Look out you don’t lose your way in the fog.”

  “Well,” I said. “Good-night, then.”

  “Good-night.” I moved on up the ramp. “Was that your mother singing?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “I never heard a thing like that before.”

  Though his words had perished, I now, as I reached the float, apprehended the note of fear in his voice.

  I had just passed the great shadow of the Hotel when I heard footsteps somewhere near me. “Where are you?” cried a man’s voice.

  “Here!” I called. “Are you lost?”

  We approached each other, crying out at intervals, my invisible companion saying he had lost his way. We met then, and I was able to make out the indistinct contours of Nathan Kadish whose voice had been in no way familiar.

  “What a hell of a thing,” he said angrily. “I can’t even find my way home.”

  “I’ll lead you.” We took hold of one another’s hands and moved forward through the murk, he with his other hand thrust out before him as thou
gh he were brushing branches aside.

  “I went to see you and your mother told me where you were. Listen, Sonie, I’m sorry.”

  We groped in silence. I did not know whether to tell him that the journey in the boat had been a ruse to fool my eccentric mother or to allow him to think that I had buried Ivan so that he would not know we were now technically known as paupers.

  Suddenly, when our feet told us we had reached the road, he stopped and seized me. His mouth waspishly raged over my face with kisses while he held me in an embrace so disabling I could not breathe or defend myself. “Isn’t it queer like this in the fog?” he whispered.

  “Let me go, Nathan,” I gasped.

  “Come back this way. Let’s sit on the Hotel porch.”

  We walked far apart, the fog rearing a barrier between us; we found the path leading to the Hotel, fumbled up to the top step, and sat down side by side.

  “I suppose you think it’s funny that I picked tonight of all nights to start making love to you. I didn’t do it accidentally. I was waiting for a sign and tonight I got it when your mother said that Henderson was taking you out in his boat.”

  “What kind of a sign was that?” I asked him.

  “Oh, that you’re deep.”

  “But it wasn’t my idea,” I protested, immediately regretting my honesty. “It was Mrs. Henderson’s.”

  “Hell,” he brooded. “But you are deep. I couldn’t be in love with a woman who wasn’t. If I could, I would have been in love with your mother for her looks.”

  I laughed. “In love with Mamma? Why, she’s middle-aged!”

  “She’s thirty-four, as you told me yourself.”

  “But, Nathan! You’re nineteen.”

  “That doesn’t cut any ice. I happen not to be in love with your mother. My interest in women does not lie entirely in their accidents but in their substance, and the substance of your mother appeals to me about as much as the substance of Mrs. Gonzales. However, the point is not that I am not in love with Shura Korf, but that I could be if I wanted to. I might add that I at one time conceived a major passion for a woman of forty and discontinued the affair only when she talked of divorcing her husband, a beauty-parlor operator, in order to marry me. And mind you, it was not her age that made such a marriage unappetizing to me. I am, and I acknowledge it without false modesty, extremely precocious and I have known for many years that marriage precludes love.”