Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  As for a moment I stood where she had left me, I tried, quite frankly, to hear what was being said beyond the double doors. I caught only one sentence, spoken by the girl: “No, Aunt Lucy, it isn’t that you depress me, it’s the house. Otherwise, I would have dinner in tonight.”

  I tiptoed across the hall. I did not know what to do. My jacket and tam were nowhere to be seen, and for a terrible moment I thought Miss Pride had forgotten to tell Mac to drive me home and that I should either be obliged to wait until she came out of the drawing-room, displeased to find me still here after she had told me good-by, or that I would have to find my way back to Chichester on foot, through the evil purlieus of the city. Near-by me, I saw a table on which lay a silver plate containing calling cards. The magic names sprang forth from their immaculate plaques in the dim light of the hall: Cabot, Frothingham, Coolidge, Hunnewell, Adams, Heminway. I could feel the very breath of her eminent callers who dropped, as though it were nothing, their venerable surnames in her vestibule.

  A door behind me opened and, startled, I wheeled about, still holding a card that bore the name Apthorp. I thrilled to the recollection of having seen the name in The Education of Henry Adams which I had read by mistake for Civics class instead of The Americanization of Edward Bok. To be caught thus snooping in the calling cards gave me the same feeling of terror that I had felt in grammar school when I was apprehended in the act of passing or receiving a note, and for a second, being unable to make out who was in the hall with me (for I was so confused that I saw a white apron without realizing it), I was sure that I would be turned out of the house in disgrace. But it was only the servant girl with my things to inform me that Mac was waiting.

  3

  My mother had been ill for a long time with stubborn influenza, complicated with bronchitis. For two months, with a few brief intervals, she had been stupefied by fever and by the enervating sweats which came on when her temperature fell. Her sleep was disturbed by nightmares and she would call out to me in a terror that did not leave even when I had wakened her or when she had told me her dream and I had talked soothingly to her. The dreams pursued her even in her lucid moments and she would fall to weeping because the room had taken on the appearance of the cave she had seen last night or because, superimposed upon my face, was a word of Russian written in huge black letters, or because the bed was intolerably filthy to her since a few hours ago, two colossal tomcats had relieved themselves there. I suppose her dreams tarried exceptionally long because of the fever which could construct a complete hallucination from the barest materials: a piece of lint on the counterpane could swell and shape itself into the mammoth cats, or, vice versa, the cats of the dream could be reduced to a piece of lint. Her whole life was a fantasy, whether she was awake or asleep. If by chance her mind cleared and the objects about her righted themselves, it was not because she had recovered her senses, but that pain had driven the delusions away. Then she lay gasping, pressing her hand against the place in her chest that ached and burned from her shattering cough, and what she saw then: the bleak features of her impoverished room, my face ashen from the glare of the snow-light, the snow itself outside the uncurtained windows, these things were worse than her imagined tormentors and she would tell me to draw the blinds and light a lamp, do anything to change the scene of her suffering, to divert her for a few minutes at least.

  Chief of her nightmares was one in which Ivan appeared to her. Often, when I wakened her, she would mistake me for him. She would shrink away and breathe, “You’re dead!” Invariably, after this exclamation, she would be seized with a violent attack of coughing which even her syrup would not soothe. I could hear the tortured rasping of her breath between the barks, and if any ease came at all, she used it up in moaning, “Oh, God! I can’t breathe!” It was no doubt only coincidence that made her suffer particularly after dreaming of Ivan, but I believed, half superstitiously, that she was being punished in her own heart. She often spoke of him and of Varenka, and whenever she heard the foghorns, every muscle in her body tensed and between clenched teeth she said, “It is down where they are, wrapped in seaweed.” Who “they” were she could not or would not tell me. And she thought his hair had grown long and that his nails had pierced through his shroud. “I can see him, Sonie,” she mourned. “His little body, swish, swish with the waves, just like Varenka. Oh, Merciful Mother! Oh, mertvoye ditya!” The Russian words, “the dead child,” were uttered with an elegiac languor, implicit in the syllables themselves.

  It was partly because I was sure she would not believe me that I did not tell her where the dead child really was. Even more, though, it was because I took a cruel and perverse pleasure in what I was sure was the remorse of her inner soul. His death seemed newly accomplished each day and gradually, while at first my grief had been intermittent and like a tide had washed over me only at intervals, now it became a constant and a profound pain, reaching to the farthest corners of my heart, delivering an unpredicted blow to every delight, whether or not I had been reminded of him. Flirting, in a band of girls with a company of boys, I abruptly ceased my giggles; the isolated moment silenced the flattering insults. I could smell the strange rankness of Mr. Greeley’s waiting room, could see the black roses on the little nightshirt, and I could feel in my temples the vibrations of Mr. Henderson’s boat as we passed through the shoals, where the water had a sinister, subterranean rhythm. Or I would waken in the night and leap from the bed, thinking he had called out. Confronted by the emptiness, my being screamed at the knowledge that he was dead.

  Dr. Galbraith came once or twice a week to see my mother, although I had never summoned him. The excuse he gave me, jocularly as though I had no connection either with her or with Ivan, was that he did not want to lose another patient in our house. He gave her, I thought, too much sympathy, so that as she grew a little stronger, she declared that she was growing weaker, and when for a whole day her temperature was normal, the next day it had soared, by the aid of hot tea, to 103 degrees. Beguiled by the idea that she might have consumption, she told the doctor that her mother and father had both died of it, and she was delighted when he promised that as soon as she was well enough to go to the hospital, x-rays would be taken of her chest. In the beginning, I believed that he was deliberately leading her on and that he hoped to cure her psychotic mind as well as her infected bronchial tubes. Thus, one day when he left her bedroom, after a cursory examination and a long talk, I walked out to his car with him on the pretext of asking him how her chest sounded. But instead I told him of her cunning trick of elevating the mercury in the thermometer by immersing it in her tea. “I don’t want Mamma to become a hypochondriac, sir!” I said. “Can’t you help me?”

  But he missed the point entirely. “The temperature may be absent altogether in a case like this,” he said. “It’s the sound of the râles that tells the story.”

  “Oh, I don’t deny that she’s ill,” I replied. “But, Dr. Galbraith, she shouldn’t put the thermometer in her tea!”

  “No, she shouldn’t.” He laughed. “Be sure you don’t give her very hot tea or the thermometer will break into smithereens and you’ll have to buy a new one. Good-by! I’ll drop around in four or five days. In the meantime, just follow my directions.”

  When even her authentic abnormal temperatures had subsided and her cough had gone almost entirely and by her color and her returning flesh I knew that she was nearly well, the doctor still did not discontinue his visits. He came only in the evenings, and sometimes called for me at the Brunsons’ to drive me home, a courtesy that never suited me since he was not the kind of man who could inspire young people to chatter, and if he asked a question, the answer was always too simple, and I would reply in a monosyllable. He would inquire, for instance, if I liked Latin, and because, in his voice, Latin acquired a colossal unimportance, I could say no more than “Yes” or “No,” depending on how well I had translated that day. A gluttonous boredom resided in him and its appetite was i
nsatiable. He might look at the full moon whose reflection floated on the dark blue water and he would sigh with a vast ennui. Occasionally, he exhaled the piney odor of gin and at these times he was more animated, but he looked at me so lecherously and his talk tottered so perilously on the brink of obscenity, that I preferred his other mood. “I bet you’re the kind of girl that keeps the boys at arm’s length, aren’t you?” Or, “What do you young people do after the picture show? You don’t go home and you don’t study. Or do you study nature, that is, human nature down at the Point?”

  Some people, among them the charitable but mawkish Gonzales, declared that Dr. Galbraith had only taken to drink after his wife’s death. But others, like the Hendersons, said he had always “gone pretty heavy on the bottle.” He was known to have women just as he was known to be a drunkard, but he took great pains never to be seen in the company of the women and never to be seen drinking. Thus, his depravity, never demonstrated as sordid, was surrounded by an appealing aura and no one identified so dapper a “professional man” with a “drunk” or visualized him with a fancy woman. Through a wonderful stroke of luck for him, the old ladies at the Hotel knew nothing of his reputation as a voluptuary, and if they had been told that his eccentric color came from jaundice which had been brought on by many years of copious, solitary drinking, they would have said confidently, “Oh, you’re quite mistaken. He goes every year to Florida and somehow manages to keep his tan twelve months at a time.”

  My Latin teacher, a scholarly man named Mr. Sylvester, thinking that Dr. Galbraith was a friend of my mother’s (for he, like the rest of the village, had heard of these visits, but had not troubled to acquaint himself with my mother’s social position so that for all he knew she could have been a well-bred woman who had seen better days) told me that I should value his society since he was a man of rare talents and had written more than a dozen musical compositions, chiefly string quartets. The information had come to Mr. Sylvester in a roundabout way and he could not even recall whether he had heard it from anyone of taste, but he was under the impression that the doctor had been first-rate. “But he gave it up for some reason, and one wonders why,” said the teacher. Accordingly, partly to satisfy my curiosity and partly to stave off his discomforting badinage, I told the doctor one night what I had heard.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did make up two or three little things. I hadn’t thought of them for years. I haven’t played my fiddle since my wife died. Who told you about that?”

  “Mr. Sylvester, my Latin teacher.”

  “Apropos of what?”

  “Nothing. I suppose he knew you were taking care of Mamma.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I suppose you told him your Mamma was sick and that I was bringing her prescriptions and what not? Well, will you give my regards to Mr. Stuyvesant and tell him that my music is a dead soldier?” He had stopped his car beside our house and turning his fuddled face away from me, said into the fresh, windy April air, “You have brought up the past to me by what you’ve just said. When you are my age and can look back as many years as I can, you will remember this evening and say, ‘Ah, at last I know what Dr. Galbraith felt.’ Miss Moffatt, I had the most beautiful wife in the world. She was French and she was religious. My house is full of sacred objects that she bought in the by-streets of France and Italy. I have a prie-dieu. A Spanish crucifix dating from the thirteenth century, set in a tabernacle of Carrara marble. On my desk, a memento mori, a small skull carved of bone. I could never replace the least thing.” He faced me again. “You forgive an old man his reminiscences, don’t you?” He leaned across me to open the door, and as I stepped out, he said under his breath, “The odd thing is I have forgotten every word of French. Madeleine, there, I pronounce even it the English way.”

  The wistful note had left his voice and the sorrowing smile his lips by the time we had entered the house. “I’ll just have a look-see at my patient,” he said heartily. “She is, ah, she’s valiantly combatting this pestiferous bug.” Because I knew as well as he did that the combat was over and that if she wished she could get up any time and resume a normal life, I looked away from him in embarrassment. He sensed it and he said, “The peril of this kind of thing is the relapse, you know. There’s the danger of tuberculosis.” The last word he said in a whisper, stretching up on tiptoe as if to carry the sound completely out of reach of my mother in the next room.

  “Sonia!” came her voice. “Sonia, darling, is the doctor there? I coughed some blood up this afternoon.”

  Dr. Galbraith’s face twisted in a faked consternation.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said sulkily.

  “Coming, Mrs. Morgan!” cried the doctor. “Oh, by the way, I forgot the bouquet I brought your mother. It’s still in the car. My garden is, so to speak, overflowing, and I thought I would like to share it with someone. I don’t know what it will be . . . my man just snipped a few things for me. Would you be so kind as to fetch them?” He went into the bedroom, leaving the door wide open. As I left the house I heard him say, “We’ll get the better of those darned old bugs yet and put some roses in your cheeks.”

  I was out of the house for only a few minutes, but when I came back, I found the door closed although, because the lock was defective, it had fallen slightly ajar. I heard a conversation about my mother’s fancy-work. In her convalescence, she had begun to make fir trees, the decorative possibilities of which she had heretofore overlooked, and extraordinary birds which never pleased her. She would say, “I’ve left out something,” and puzzle over the creatures, turning her hoops now to one side and now to another and never seeing that each one of their plump behinds was destitute of tail feathers. But the doctor, blind with infatuation, assured her that they were beautiful, that she was a “regular ornithologist.”

  “I like to see these homely virtues in a woman,” he was saying in a voice that had borrowed some of the nocturnal quality of my mother’s. “My own wife was a great hand at dressmaking. I still have some of her gowns in an old trunk in my attic.”

  “Did she die or did she light out one fine day?” asked my mother.

  Shocked by her expression, he did not immediately reply. “She died,” he said at last. “It makes one lonely.”

  “Lonely! After my Hermann went away I used to cry myself to sleep every night of the world. But that was nothing to what it’s been like since little Ivan died.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You was saying you have some of your wife’s clothes. I wish to God I had some of Hermann’s. But my little girl sold them all as soon as he was gone.”

  “We can’t expect children to understand these things.”

  There was a long pause. I had put the flowers in a jar and thought to take them in to Mamma, but as I approached the door, I was urged by a powerful curiosity to know what was taking place in the bedroom, and I crept along the wall to peer between the hinges of the door. The doctor was bent forward, his hands palm upward lying on the counterpane. Their skin was even darker than his face and the nails were a corpse-white. The fingers were short and swollen, the skin stretched so tight it seemed about to split like the skin of a sausage as it is being cooked. These clean, brassy hands played the supernumeraries in the drama of the eyes and lips, and as I watched, they curled into cups as slowly as a flower closes. Then the thumbs moved over the nails of the index fingers with voluptuous deliberation as though the contact with the smooth surface were exquisite. The left hand was raised. The man carried the source of the sensation to his mouth, passed the nail several times over the sensitive area under his lower lip.

  My mother’s eyes were cast down but her lashes coquettishly flickered. Her fancy-work lay at her side. The doctor wiped his shining lips with a purple handkerchief (This evening he was dressed in a gray suit and his accessories were purple. He smelled, as well, of lavender water.) as if he had been eating the face before him and its flavor had been so delicious tha
t in his gorging he had been too enthusiastic to mind his lips. But he was not making love. In a moment, although he whispered it, he said, “Let me listen again to that right lung.” I saw him push her nightdress down and explore her breast with his stethoscope, his head bent down so low he seemed to strain not to lay his face on her naked flesh. “Oh, that’s so-so,” he said with a laugh. “I must keep you here another week,” and gazing, deeply stricken, into her eyes, he took her pulse and announced, as if it were a declaration of love, that it was still a little rapid. My mother made no response, but picked up her embroidery hoops across which, this time, was stretched a branch of honeysuckle to which a deformed humming-bird was paying a visit. Dr. Galbraith glanced down and cried, “Charming! How I would like to have some of those things in my house! Would you . . . could I . . . my dear Mrs. Marburg, would you do some table runners for me?”

  “Just at present I’m rather busy,” said my mother. “But perhaps I could do a few later.”

  “Excellent! I’m going to New York next week. I’ll just pick up some stamped things there.”

  “My hoops are cracking.”

  “I’ll buy you some new hoops! I’ll buy you some ivory ones inlaid with gold. I dare say they have such things?”

  “Why, certainly they have,” said my mother. “Once I had a pair of solid gold ones with diamonds set in. That was just one of the things Hermann carried off with him.” She coughed a little and the doctor bent closer to her.

  “What you really need,” he said with such terrible excitement that the stethoscope shook in his hand, “is mountain air. Don’t you know anyone in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks that could put you up for a few weeks?”

  “Ah, doctor, that’s just what I’ve always said! The sea air is bad for me. But no, no, I don’t know nobody in the mountains. I’ll just die here like the child.”