Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  Had my mother actually seen the birds last night, I asked myself, or was she only teasing me? Perhaps it was the fever that had made her talk so strangely, so much more strangely on reflecting today than it had seemed last night. Moreover, I wondered why she had forgotten the mountain air and the pine trees in the Adirondacks this morning when she had been so enraptured at the thought of them last night. I did not want her to go! I was sure she did not need mountain air—the doctor himself, at the beginning of her illness, had told me that the idea that climate had anything to do with pulmonary diseases was nonsense—and I believed that on the contrary what she needed most, and what she would always need, was my pampering, for she was a very young child. And while I pitied Dr. Galbraith, I was not willing to sacrifice my mother to his loneliness, not even in the memory of his devout French Madeleine. Nor, on the other hand, was I any more willing to sacrifice him, poor gallant goose, to the persecutions to which Mamma had subjected my father.

  Briefly I desired to tell Dr. Galbraith how she had literally driven Papa away, and when school was out, I started down the road toward the hospital. But I turned back, realizing what such a revelation would imply. It would be the grossest impertinence on my part to tell him, a physician, and presumably acquainted with mental as well as physical disorders, that my mother was insane. It struck me that perhaps I had been wrong all along, that he had no improper designs on her, that in reality the cabin in the Adirondacks was a sanitarium. I planned to talk with him that night and to beg him not to take her away.

  The doctor did not call for me at the Brunsons’, and as there were guests at dinner and the cocktail shaker had been refilled so often that I did not begin to serve until nearly eight, I was late in leaving for home. Maudie had gone sometime before, inviting me, as she did almost every night, to drop in “for a snort.” For the first time I had been tempted. I was very fond of Maudie, even though she was tiresome, and my spirits never failed to rise in her presence so that even my boredom was curiously exuberant. I did not want to go home; there was something gruesome about the doctor, and I kept thinking of the memento mori on his desk in the library where he drank alone, as his servants reported in the village. And I thought of the marble tabernacle for the crucifix. When I visualized the latter, I was simultaneously reminded of the shoals, I cannot possibly say why except that the word “marble” suggested something chilled and ghostly and “tabernacle” made me think of the dark-room at school where the physics teacher developed films and where, because of the structure of the room or its position in the building, the acoustics were peculiar and the sound of feet in the hallway above was like the surge of waves.

  I thought perhaps he would not come tonight or that he would have left by the time I got home. Consoled a little, as I passed by Maudie’s cottage I was glad I had decided not to go to her, for from the open door, brightly lighted with a Coleman lamp, came the sound of her loud, untrue contralto harmonizing with two masculine voices in obscene excerpts from “Frankie and Johnny.” The rest of the way home, I reiterated a telepathic message to the doctor, “Go home, Dr. Galbraith, go home.”

  But his car was beside the house. The kitchen was mobbed with flowers as though a garden had magically been planted there since I had been gone. Branches of lilac drooped over the sides of the blue sink; the table was piled with jonquils and iris; on the chairs, wrapped in wet newspapers, were sprays of syringa, forsythia, and Japanese quince. Old marmalade jars and jelly glasses were filled with lilies-of-the-valley whose little ivory bells trailed down or nestled close to their broad caressing leaves. I stood on the threshold, breathing in the sweet air. A breeze blew through the kitchen window and carried to me the whole essence of the lilac with which it had been charged as it traversed the sink. For a moment, overjoyed with his bountiful gift, I was remorseful that I had been suspicious of the doctor. His flowers showed that our pleasure was his purpose.

  From the bedroom, as usual, came the voices. They were laughing tonight over some private joke and I gathered that it had to do with the cabin in the Adirondacks, for I heard the isolated words “lake” and “firewood” and “chipmunks.” Evidently they had not heard me for they continued to talk as I walked about the kitchen from one group of flowers to another. Shortly the door opened and the doctor came out.

  “Good evening,” I said. “How lovely your flowers are!”

  The doctor grinned obscenely at me and leaned against the table for support. One foot, handsomely shod in a half-boot, moved in an uncertain circle on the linoleum. The bright bronze hands tossed fretfully from their limp junctures as he said thickly and in a masterful imitation of my mother’s accent, “I am so glad you like them, dear. They are all from my garden and they are all for you.” His sweet breath came to me in gusts, mingling with the flowers’ fragrance. Abruptly, his hands and feet were stilled and he rose to his full height, rocking slightly but apparently in command of himself again. “It’s close in the bedroom,” he said, still thickly but now without the accent. “I felt a little giddy for a moment. I was just about to examine your mother. It wouldn’t do to fold up in the midst of that, would it? Give a patient a bad idea, make her say, ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ ” Suspecting that he had a mission of delicacy in coming away from my mother, I asked him if he would like to wash his hands before he made his examination, and although the door to our “bathroom” was open and revealed only the toilet, its sole article of furniture besides the shower, he thanked me, said that was what he had come out for, and went in.

  After I had kissed my mother in the dim bedroom—for instead of her lamp, only a single candle burned on the stool at her side—I went to open the window at her request. Just as I turned back into the room, Dr. Galbraith entered and resumed his seat at the side of the bed. I saw that more of his flowers were strewn on the floor and my mother clutched a spray of lilies-of-the-valley in her hand. She had not been working on her embroidery; there were signs of no activity at all, and to my relief, I saw that there were also no signs that the doctor had been drinking here. Beside the window was our clothes closet—a rod across which had been stretched a cretonne curtain—and I stepped back into the large shadow it cast, less out of the desire to spy than out of reluctance to pass the doctor and be required to speak to him again.

  “All righty,” he said. “We’ll just have a look at this clogged-up ventilator and then I’ll be running along. Will you just slip your nightie down over your shoulder, please?”

  My mother obeyed docilely, gazing the while at her nosegay. “Isn’t it sweet,” she murmured, “just like little darling bells.”

  Dr. Galbraith ran his hand over the smooth round of her shoulder and a look of alarm fled over her face as she glanced up at him. Almost shyly he looked away and fumbled at the clasp of his stethoscope case. But he did not complete the business. “Oh, Shura!” he cried. “Let’s not pretend any longer!” He slipped his arm under my mother’s shoulders and drew her up to him, covering her face with long kisses as his whole body shuddered.

  My mother struggled and screamed, her head flung back and her eyes dilating as the stubborn man continued to kiss her neck. “Sonia! God Almighty!” I stepped forward into the weak light but the doctor was oblivious of me. “Darling, forgive me, I frightened you.” His forehead glimmered with drops of sweat which he wiped off with the back of his hand. My mother, whimpering, could not take her fascinated eyes from him while he, as if he were paralyzed, hovered over her, afraid to kiss her again, yet afraid to move lest he break the enchantment cast by her unworldly eyes.

  I touched him on the shoulder, feeling nothing but the deepest commiseration for him, and he drew back from the bed. But still he could not rise and, relapsing into his violent desire for her, he grasped her stiffened hands as she shrieked again, quivering pitiably like a baffled mole dislodged from his safe tunnel. “The sores!” she howled. “Oh, oh, God! They’re all over me!” He stood up and perceiving that I was beside her and that
she was free of him at last, my mother turned away from us and buried her head in the pillows, and there lay murmuring.

  “What the devil is she saying?”

  “She’s talking in Russian. She does that when she’s upset.”

  “My God!” He strode in fury out the door and I followed him. “Well?”

  “My mother has always been a little strange, Dr. Galbraith,” I said, “ever since my father went away. Even before that I guess.” He stood with his arms at the sides of his long gray tweed coat. He was staring bleakly at the barnyard scene above the table. “Dr. Galbraith,” I went on, “there is no way I can pay you. I’m very grateful, really.”

  “I had never considered a fee. A doctor assumes responsibility for a patient without thinking of the money,” he said impatiently.

  “I’m so sorry about it all, sir! You see, I think my mother is insane.”

  It was the first time I had said the word aloud and it shocked me almost as much as it did him. He stared at me, absorbing the words after the sound was gone. “Insane?” he repeated. “Why, of course she is insane, but, I must confess, she hides her symptoms well. I swear, Miss Marburg, I had no proof of it until tonight.”

  “What shall I do?” I asked him, for it was natural for me to appeal to him since he shared my knowledge. His expression changed from disgraced rage to anxiety. “Come to my office tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “and we’ll discuss it. She shouldn’t hear us, you know, in her excitable state. Tomorrow, promptly at four.” He hurried out, businesslike, professional, hiding beneath his manner the relief he must have felt in knowing that my mother had not “rejected” him since she was incapable of doing so.

  When I had heard his car drive away and I went in to her, I saw the marks of her real madness in her glazed eyes that looked at me without recognition and did not move as I moved but continued to focus in the place I had just quit, and in her rigid pose which broke only when she tore the petals languidly from the doctor’s flowers, and in the steady monologue in Russian that ended at last in a fitful sleep. And when, in the morning, there was no change in her and she would not eat, but pushed the tray aside, spilling the tea on the counterpane and watching it spread, I thought there was no hope. “Mamma?” I tested her, but she would not look up. I should perhaps stay with her, I thought, lest she conceive some devilish desire to hurt herself or to wander to the village in her nightdress. But because she was no longer recognizable as my mother, but was only an inhuman parody of her, I was frightened and did not want to remain in the house. A little faint, because I could not eat my breakfast, I took up my schoolbooks, locked the door behind me and started down the road.

  It was a fine day; as green as leaves, the water was bifurcated by the yellow spear of the land. Our little white house and the Kadishes’ blue one sagged on their shallow foundations, hiding from my backward view the Boston shore-line. Just ahead of me, Father Mulcahy sauntered slowly, reading his breviary. As I passed him, looking sideways into his raw-boned face that years in Chichester had not filled out or sweetened, it occurred to me with a wild, obscene humor that I might ask him to come exorcise my mother. I was so close to him for a moment that I could smell the wine on his mumbling lips and by leaning a little towards him could read, at the top of his book: “Die 28 Apr.—S. Pauli a Cruce.” He jerked his head like a rooster and said, “God’s warning.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said good morning.” He looked curiously at me.

  “Oh! Good morning, Father. I thought you said . . .” And I ran on, strangely exhilarated by the priest’s odor, with which the air still seemed saturated, though I knew that was impossible and what I smelled now was the perfume of the lilacs blooming in all the yards.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  DR. GALBRAITH was not in his office at four on the next afternoon, and I was told that he was ill. I did not believe it, but felt sure he was avoiding me. Nor was he there on the next day, and the nurse, refusing to tell me when he might be back, suggested that I go to Dr. Roberts. On the fourth day, having resolved that this would be the last time I should inquire for him (I thought the nurse had been given my description with the orders that on no account was I to be admitted to his office) and should then go to the other doctor, I was informed that he had died that morning, a little before noon, of a heart attack. Upon the words “heart attack” the nurse ever so discreetly placed a stress which told me that he had perhaps died of what he said but that its cause was a prolonged debauch.

  The nurse behind the circular counter wheeled her swivel chair back into place before her typewriter and began sorting large yellow cards. I wanted to ask her more, but I could not think of a way to frame my questions. To be sure, the doctor’s death was no more than coincidence and my mother, who all day long talked tenderly to herself in Russian and one by one ripped the petals from his fading flowers, was no more to blame for it than I, or than this imperturbable woman in the starched white cap. Though I had cared nothing for this stammering dandy and had many times wished him out of the way, I had wished him no harm, “out of the way” having meant only “out of our house.” But I was shaken with something simulating the grief I had felt when I dropped my brother’s hand, and my knees went weak, as I remembered that I had sometimes pitied the man. I had pictured him in his library, perfectly groomed, as if his loving toilet had been made for some honored guest, though no one ever called on him, and he sat alone, sunk in his jejune thoughts that the whiskey enshrouded. Gossip ran that in this room, the shrine of his dead wife’s sacred objects, there was a bar concealed in the paneling which opened at the pressure of a button, so that in the evenings Dr. Galbraith could dispense with the services of his butler who was allowed to enter the room only in the morning to clear away the evidences of his master’s lonesome spree before the parlor-maid came in to clean. I wished to ask the nurse if he had died there. Once he had told me that two malachite urns stood on his mantelpiece and that the draperies were ruby-colored brocade. Perhaps he had chosen as his shroud one of his Scotch tweed suits in which the brown was enriched with red and with it he had worn green socks and a green cravat.

  “When is the funeral?” I asked, although I did not really want to know.

  “I haven’t the least idea,” replied the nurse without looking up. “You might ask his housekeeper. All I know is that he is to be cremated.”

  I felt that if I moved from the counter where I rested my elbows, I would fall in my weakness. An interne who had been watching me absent-mindedly as he whirled a piece of rubber tubing round and round, pocketed his plaything and stepped to my side. Out of a mechanical kindness, he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Take it easy.” I burst into tears, inexplicable to myself, and stumbled through the sunlit lobby, my legs enfeebled, my mind a blank. The scene detached itself from its aseptic smell and the white entourage of nurses and internes: its properties receded and I, hurtling up the road, was too alone to measure the degree of my loneliness, for I did not know where to turn for advice.

  Yet, on the day following the doctor’s funeral in Cambridge, I was receiving counsel from young Dr. McAllister in the same office where I had first seen Dr. Galbraith. That other day, the hygienic glare of gray walls and white wainscoting had combined with the blue shadows of snow-filled trees beyond the windows into a hard, glacial light. The old man’s skin had been green as if its natural yellow hue had been mixed with the blue shadows, and his eyes, pillowed by their pendulous sacs, had ambled sensually over me while his addled brain danced in bewilderment. The tall, bony elms of the hospital courtyard had whined and rattled and then, when the wind died, a company of discursive sparrows raised their voices in the hush. The only other sign of animation to be seen from the window was a solitary pigeon promenading over the slate roof of an adjacent ward about whose red chimney wound the steam from two small exhausts.

  The new occupant sat before the open windo
ws through which, gentle and billowing, came the May day’s limbering breezes and edgeless light. The world beyond was spacious and subtly illuminated; the landscape, perhaps as much as the young doctor’s adroit kindness, loosed the strictures of my terror, and after my first ferocious declaration that my mother was insane, I was able to speak without a stutter.

  Dr. McAllister was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty; he was spare and angular and erect and his obvious good health recommended him, whereas Dr. Galbraith’s diseased complexion and unstrung manner had made him seem, from the very beginning, an uncertain ally. The tone of the young man’s voice was restorative, for he was at once casual so that my story seemed automatically less calamitous than I had thought, and authoritative so that I knew I could depend upon him.

  I had come to him because I had not wanted to consult Dr. Roberts, who, being a good friend of Dr. Brunson, might, despite his professional ethics, drop a few hints to the dentist. I wished, so far as possible, to keep secret this new excitement of our household. To be sure, everyone in Chichester had said for years that my mother was mad, and the children who had used to come to play up towards our house no longer came. The villagers and the shopkeepers had, after Ivan’s death, stopped inquiring about her. But still, they had no proof.

  It had not been easy to gain an audience with Dr. McAllister, who was a house-physician and not allowed to have private cases, and so I had written him a note, saying that Miss Pride had asked me to look him up. He had sent back the reply that he would be delighted to meet me at such-and-such an hour on Sunday afternoon at a tea-room in Marblehead. It was the hasty note of a busy man who, aware of his duty towards his friends, parcels out his leisure time with no sign of the irritation he feels that he can keep no part of his life to himself. I would have let the matter rest there had I not, on returning to my mother, found her up and dressed, carrying a basket on her arm with the intention, I was afraid, of going to the village. I had urged her to go back to bed, but my entreaties were futile for she understood nothing but Russian. I had then given her a glass of brandy (she had at least not forgotten brandy) in which I had dissolved one of the sleeping powders left over from her illness. I must say here that this ingenious trick afforded me the only amusement I had in ten days. I could not help smiling, as I pulverized the pill, at the grave necessity that had driven me to practical joking, and when she began to droop, after no more than a quarter of an hour, I laughed outright. I had then locked her in and run back to the hospital where, on a sheet torn from my loose-leaf notebook, I wrote Dr. McAllister that I had an urgent message for him from Miss Pride. A cold, dubious answer came back at once saying that he would see me in his office in a few minutes.