Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  The doctor had been reading. When I came in, he took off his horn-rimmed spectacles, uncovering eyes which were a blue resembling the flame from certain kinds of wood or oil, a color simultaneously fierce and smoky. In his face there was a union of austerity and simplicity, coming partly from its actual architecture: the defined planes of the jaw and cheek and forehead, the thin lips, the narrow nose, and partly from his expression as he intelligently and nobly appraised me, trying to adjust me to my note.

  “You have a message for me?” he said, smiling and motioning me toward a chair. “You must be a friend of Miss Pride’s.”

  “I am, in a way,” I said. “But I am really here under false pretenses, for I have no message for you. I had to see you. It’s about my mother.”

  “I don’t have a private practice,” he said. “Our head, Dr. Galbraith, recently died, as perhaps you know, and his place has not yet been filled. But Dr. Roberts is in town, I’m quite sure.” As though to clinch his dismissal, he withdrew his spectacles from the pocket of his white coat and opened them.

  “I know that,” I said. “But I don’t want to go to Dr. Roberts.” He waited for me to go on, but I could find no more words, and as I kept my eyes averted from him, seeing the green felt under the glass top of his desk with the harried realization that I had no idea what I was looking at, I knew what his next question was going to be, but as in the dream when our benumbed throats will not let pass a cry for help, I could summon nothing to stave it off, and when he spoke, I heard him as though his voice came from a phonograph record whose revolutions I did not know how to stop: “Look here, I don’t know who you are but I don’t believe you are Miss Pride’s friend. All this mystery doesn’t ring true. Are you quite sure it’s your mother who is ill? I don’t want to sound unkind, but tell me frankly, isn’t it instead that you’ve committed an indiscretion and, to use the common expression, have got yourself knocked up?”

  Because I had known that that was the way he would interpret my timidity and my lie about the message, I could not be angry with him for anything but the vulgarity of his phrase, which he had used in the intention of lowering himself to my level, but at the same time had uttered in almost audible quotation marks to assure me that he would have nothing to do with the matter, that I had come to the wrong person for an abortion.

  I found my voice and said, “Oh, no, it’s not that at all. It’s that I think my mother is insane.”

  “You should have said so at once. Please forgive me, but your coming here was so unusual. Why do you think your mother is insane?”

  I told him her history. As I talked, his attentive blue eyes showed me that he was marshaling recollections that my presence and my story disinterred, was giving the skeletons flesh and blood, yet was keeping me, my “case,” separate like the solo part of a concerto which is enriched and surrounded by the ritornelle. To ease me, to divert me from the horror of what I told him—for one’s sin or sorrow is most intolerable at the moment of confession even when we know that we are soon to be absolved or comforted—he halted me now and again with seemingly inconsequential questions or observations. He had, for example, been to Würzburg and as he spoke of it, pleased that I had caused him to remember the hotel where he had stayed which had formerly been a Franciscan monastery and still preserved an atmosphere of asceticism, he canceled out the distaste and aloofness that had been in his voice when he thought I was pregnant, and without deviating from his purpose as a physician, elevated me to his own plane as at first he had descended to mine. He was, I could tell, profoundly moved by Ivan’s death and burial. He said, “Your story is a Russian one,” and asked me if I had read Dostoievsky. I said I had not, but he led me to the place from which he surveyed the geography of my mother’s mind so that I saw her not as my mother, but as a type, as the embodiment of the traits he had read about. We looked together from our vantage point and, lighted by the stories and the novels from whose context he extracted what was applicable to my mother, I saw her, for a little while, as he did.

  When I had finished my account and he began to speak, he did not offer me any solution and he said he could not counsel me until he had seen my mother and had judged for himself whether her symptoms corresponded to my report of them. It was easy enough, he said, even for an experienced person to confuse hysteria with insanity, and while he did not say so, he implied that possibly because of my concern over Ivan, my own hysteria had made me exaggerate her eccentricities. “She is perhaps best off at home,” he said, “where she can be guarded against excitement. If, that is, she’s curable, and the chances are that she is.”

  “But where else could she be?”

  “Perhaps I have misunderstood you.” He looked away from me and briefly examined the scene from his window as though he were trying to integrate all its essentials, its colors and its forms, as if he hoped to find there the way to put his words best. “That is, I assumed in your coming to me that you wanted more than a listener. I thought you had been debating whether or not to send her to an asylum.”

  Chiefly, I suppose, because there was none near Chichester and I had, therefore, no actual impression of the appearance of such an establishment, an asylum had never once occurred to me. My mother’s madness had been clearly separated from any other madness. And I said to Dr. McAllister. “Oh, but she isn’t violent! She couldn’t be put into a strait-jacket.”

  He laughed. “You’re behind the times. We’re not going to put your mother into a strait-jacket. Why, mental hospitals are no worse than this these days.” He motioned toward the silent corridor. “But we needn’t talk about that any more. I’ll look around some evening soon, as though I were paying a call on you, and see what’s what.” He glanced down at the blue card on which he had been making notes, to refresh his memory of my name. “We’ve covered everything now, haven’t we, Miss Marburg? I would like, though, to ask you one more question. Why was it you used Miss Pride’s name instead of another? You know, you could have said Dr. Brunson sent you.”

  “She spoke of you to me. I connected your name with her and with her niece, for she said you were friends. You see, last February, when my brother died, Miss Pride came to see me and took me into Boston. I had tea with her . . . in the library.” I had heard no more from her. She did not come to fetch me to see the Public Gardens, as she had promised, nor had she sent me the box of books although The Atlantic Monthly came regularly. Boston had receded a little farther each day until now, the sea again seemed the only road to the State House whose glittering dome had once more recovered its pure shape after my new impressions of it had shuffled off into the past. I had thought my afternoon with Miss Pride was engraved indelibly on my mind, but at last I remembered clearly only the horny black trunks of the trees in the Park Street cemetery, only the names Franklin and Revere, and only the metallic voice of the girl saying “Auntie?”

  But the proximity of this man, to whom having tea with Miss Pride was probably the most ordinary occurrence, brought back the objects of our common knowledge: the portrait, the chess table, the silver platter for the calling cards. And with the objects came my hostess’s warm, albeit noncommittal, compliments. On an impulse, I said, “Perhaps you could tell me why she invited me to come to tea?”

  “Miss Pride is a very generous woman,” he said with the simplicity but lack of conviction with which, in speaking of the people we do not like, we acknowledge their virtues that are good in themselves but can serve no purpose to us. “She is known, I believe,” he continued, “as one of the most generous women in Boston. Last year, for example, she gave five thousand dollars to the Community Chest.”

  “I have admired her ever since I can remember,” I told him.

  “Really? Well, then, perhaps that’s one of the reasons she was, as you say, so ‘kind’ to you. I have never had the honor to be at tea with her alone . . . and never in the library.”

  I could not grasp his irony. Did he mean that I had be
en singularly honored? Or had she, by shutting me up in the library, merely been taking precautions against my being seen by a chance visitor? I rose to go, dissatisfied with what the doctor had said and liking him a little less for not praising Miss Pride with the passion that I had believed must reside in the breast of anyone who knew her. He came around the desk and I observed that when he walked, his body did not bend in the slightest; his back was as straight, as inflexible as Ivan’s had been a few hours after his death.

  “You can count on me. But the next time you want to crash a gate, make sure you have the right password. You wouldn’t have got in today if I hadn’t had an inkling that your ‘message’ was nothing but a leg-pull.”

  I knew, by the pink eastern sky showing through the leafy chestnut trees, that it was time for me to be at the Brunsons’. Since my mother had been ill, I had been allowed to come an hour later but had made up for the lost time by working all day on Sunday. Mrs. Brunson was displeased with me, for I had been distracted and had done my work carelessly. Still, she had made a tentative promise to promote me to Maudie’s place in the fall. Maudie had by now completely lost control of her appetite for whiskey and twice had watered Dr. Brunson’s Vat 69 to his humiliation, on the second occasion, before a guest who, sipping a cocktail made from the expurgated bottle, remarked, “They certainly don’t put any teeth in their whiskey any more, do they?”

  In spite of knowing that I would get a dressing-down, I dallied along the way. This garden-filled and springtime world through which I moved was perfumed with the closely clustered lilac blossoms in the yards I passed, roofed over by a coral, turquoise, and violet sky. The heard, but unseen, white skirts of the sea fluttered sweetly against its boundaries. Just as Nathan’s kisses in the fog had warmed my sorrow to its bloom, and my love, though contiguous, had only served to enhance its somber colors, so the young physician’s accidental exhumation of Boston had, immediately afterwards, caused me to see the loveliness of Chichester to which for several months I had been indifferent. And now, stopping to bury my face in a branch of lilac in a sudden infiltration of an unobjectified but passionate happiness, the purpose of my interview seemed to me to be but a tenth part of what had been accomplished, and the least important part, as if my fear that Mamma was insane had been only an excuse to know Dr. McAllister and had been, in a sense, almost as trumped up as my “message” from Miss Pride.

  He had said, “We should not rush ahead to conclusions, but you should think this over. Let us say you keep her at home, protect her for the better part of your life so that you don’t marry or don’t realize whatever your ambition is. Would the martyrdom be worth all that? It’s the question you must answer for yourself, for salvation for one soul is perdition for another and what might send me to hell would give you grace.” His lofty terms, martyrdom, salvation, perdition, grace, were no longer the mere names of abstract states over which I had carelessly slid my eye on the printed page, but were the components of my own future, and I said “grace” aloud, my lips stopped by the dense purple trumpets of the flower I had pressed against them. My happiness confounded me. As though it were as perishable as the crisp lilac, I allowed no thought to come near it and refused to listen to the voices within the house behind the hedge which, organ of their owners’ uncertainty, talked back and forth of the likelihood of rain. But the footsteps which I heard coming behind me, I did allow to intrude upon my mind, thinking perhaps they belonged to the doctor on his way home—his home? I questioned, but could see him only behind the desk in Dr. Galbraith’s office where the white marquisette curtains were inflated by the breeze. The footsteps were quick and the heel-taps rang brashly on the sidewalk. Someone called my name, but there was no need to turn, for Nathan Kadish was beside me and had put his shoulder behind mine. When I saw his face, it was the good side at which I looked.

  “What have you got there?” he asked me, although all I had, as he saw perfectly well, was the branch of lilac that I had bent down to smell, but love is a child at language, speaks nonsense, asks stupid questions, makes insipid replies—“Don’t you know a lilac when you see one?”—and means to convey just the opposite of impertinence.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said. Rather he whispered, so close to my ear that his lips almost touched me, for the voices on the porch reminded us that we were not alone here as we had been in the fog. “I never can remember,” said a woman, “whether it’s feed a cold and starve a fever or the other way around just like I can’t remember whether a ring around the moon means good weather or a storm.”

  “I guess I was thinking about you,” I said, although this was not true. I had been thinking not of him, but of myself in whom the blood had defecated its black humors and had left only love but love as an envelope that was as yet empty.

  “You’re not sore, then?” He meant: Was I not angry, then, that my last glimpse of him until now had been when, shirt-tail out, he hotfooted it for the bus to Boston without a backward glance and had not written me a letter? No, I could tell him honestly, I had not been angry. I had been sore; my heart had been skinned by his silence. I had learned from his mother (who believed, for the simple reason that we were neighbors and about the same age, that Nathan and I were friends, but never dreamed that when she uttered his name my skin erupted into goose-flesh) that he would not be home again until the end of the term for he had got a job working in the Brookline Economy Store and all his leisure time was occupied. But I had not failed to call at the post-office once a day for two months in the hope of some word from him. The soreness had gradually disappeared, like a headache, and though I was not conscious of my relief, I was able now to pass the post-office with indifference. But just as the headache has not really gone but has been hidden under sleep and requires only a sharp noise to cast off its covering and meddle with our nerves again, so Nathan’s appearance—weeks before I had expected him—reminded me of the shame of his neglect, renewed the sensation of his kisses, and made me, as before, stretch upwards as if I stood on tiptoe to scrutinize his birthmark, sudden through the lighted window. And I knew I had not ceased to love him, that the wrappings in which I had laid away my hopes were not winding sheets, were only masquerade, out of which they came now with their sweet, young faces.

  The dense branch swung back to the bush from my relaxed hand as five o’clock rang out from the Catholic church. “Golly, I’m late,” I said.

  Nathan stepped to one side and with a gallant gesture offered me the outside of the walk. He said, “I know you think it’s impolite of me to walk on the inside. I do it intentionally because I do not believe in bourgeois etiquette. Probably you want to hurry because you are afraid of the bawling-out you’ll get from that bourgeois ignoramus who has the egregious impudence to call you her ‘servant.’ I have no doubt that if I invited you to stop in at Red’s café for a Budweiser draft, you would refuse. I’m not reproaching you. You’re merely victimized, a helpless cog in the machinery of social corruption.”

  “I would stop at Red’s,” I said, “but it’s so late already and I promised to be on time tonight. They’re having company.”

  Nathan’s full lips curled in a sneer. “Don’t go into detail, I can get the picture. I can just see their company. Does that illiterate trollop, the daughter of the house, still infect the atmosphere with her noisome presence?”

  I told him that Betty was at school in New York. “As it should be,” he said, nodding gravely. “There she will learn the elegant antics of the capitalistic prostitute. Oh, lofty ideal!”

  He was lagging, coming to a full stop occasionally to convey his italics or exclamation marks by kicking a paling of the white fence, and if I quickened my pace, he pulled me back by the elbow, saying, “Where’s the fire? Courage!”

  I was nervous and bewildered by his talk, and although when his fingers closed over my arm as he detained me, the contact softened my bones and caused me to float without exertion, I could not help bei
ng disappointed that we dwelt in worlds so far apart. “Nathan, are you a Communist again?” I asked him.

  “Again? When was I not? Oh, wait a second. Do you mean am I a member of the Communist Party? Or do you mean am I a dialectical materialist? Am I a Marxist, is that what vou’re asking me?”

  I could only shake my head at his terms.

  “No, I belong to no party, faction, or school of thought. But I hate the bourgeoisie because they are the enemies of freedom. I am a revolutionist, yes; I am a nonconformist, yes. But no, I am not a Communist, I am a cosmopolitan. Sonie”—he turned to me with a serious stare—“I am going to Paris.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Typical,” he said irritably. “Typical of an unimaginative woman to try to pin me down about when. Next you’ll ask me where I propose to get the money and if I intend to live in the thirteenth arrondissement.”