It was quite true that the chief interest in common between Miss Pride and Philip McAllister was Hopestill, proof of which required only the most casual eavesdropping. But it was also true that Miss Pride had known the young man’s family for many years and had moved in the same feminine circles as his mother, who had gone that summer to London, and his grandmother. Dr. McAllister’s father, a retired Unitarian minister, used sometimes to come to see his son and always made a point of lunching at the Hotel. I took pains to stay as near them as possible so that I might not miss any of their talk. The Reverend McAllister was withered and singed and clad from head to toe in decent black. All that relieved his funereal attire was a gold watch chain across his convex middle from which hung a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a dabbler in oddities. He knew, for instance, that the armadillo always bore identical quadruplets; he offered this news with a brief, factual account of the duck-billed platypus, but he went no further, although Mrs. McKenzie, who overheard him, was enchanted and pressed him for details. Or he would trace at length the development of spiritism, but far from discussing it in the light of his religious tenets, he merely presented the case as though it had no bearing on anything else. Gravely he would imitate the Fox sisters, “Ho, Mr. Slipfoot, are you there?” Or, if he were invited to express his opinion of Christian Science, he would repeat an anecdote he had heard about Mrs. Eddy which was perhaps illustrative of his feeling but which suggested, to his discredit, that that was all he knew about Christian Science. He was, as his son remarked of him once, the kind of man who came out ahead in pen and pencil games.
Miss Pride did not particularly like “the Reverend” though she respected him, for she had been taught that it was improper not to respect the cloth. She said in a low voice to a friend who had come to dine with her, “He is a very good Christian, I grant you, but he’s a frightful bore.”
The friend, a woman with a broad, innocent face, said, “I can’t believe he’s a bore, Lucy, though I’ve only met him once or twice. Why, I was dumfounded, when I dined at his house once, at the size of his theological library. And the books were so worn, so obviously studied. No, indeed, a man who has read that much can’t be a bore.”
“I don’t think Reverend McAllister has read them all,” said Miss Pride with a malicious glint in her eyes. “As for their being worn, my dear, haven’t you heard of second-hand shops? But I’m not singling him out. I think the clergy has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf where learning is concerned. Last New Year’s Eve, I went to Estelle Hornblower’s at home and was literally forced by Lincoln Nephews to go into the little white parlor where six ministers were sitting about like a plenary council. Lincoln had said, ‘Lucy, I want to show you something straight out of Trollope.’ Three of the creatures were Anglo-Catholics and were, I do believe, the poorest Latinists I have ever seen. They were talking about On the Sublime and the Beautiful by Theophrastus! Well, the Reverend was there. ‘Hold on,’ says he, ‘Theophrastus isn’t your man. He wrote those little vignettes you call characters.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said one of the Anglicans, ‘I’m not so rusty on my English as not to know those little things—sometimes I believe they’re called hornbooks—were a seventeenth-century invention. But if Theophrastus didn’t write On the Sublime and the Beautiful, who did, pray?’ Do you know not one of them knew and Lincoln Nephews had to set them right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have known,” said Miss Pride’s friend. “I’m so ignorant I would never be able to criticize the clergy in that way. But in case I’m some time asked, who did write it?”
There was an imperceptible pause. “Why, Lucretius,” said Miss Pride. “I thought everyone took that in with his mother’s milk.” But a little later on, she interrupted an anecdote her friend was telling to say, “You’ll tell me that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Didn’t I just say Lucretius wrote On the Sublime and the Beautiful? I must have been asleep, for as I perfectly well know it was Longinus.”
However much she deprecated in private his want of education, she was so cordial to the minister when he took a meal with her that I began to wonder if the old ladies’ conjecture had not been in part correct, that is, that she was anxious to make a match between her niece and his son. For it was only in the presence of these two men that she had nothing but good to say of the girl. Hopestill’s defiance of convention was transformed at these luncheons into her “high spirits, her vigor.” Her beauty, ordinarily spoken of as “something about her that her extreme clothes brings out which I find very strange,” was alluded to with respect. She became “intelligent” instead of “foxy.” But the Reverend was deaf to all these virtues of Miss Mather because he wanted to inform the company that some things had not changed with the times at all, that in reading Emerson’s letters he had discovered that the train fare from Concord to Boston was exactly the same in 1860 as it was today. The young man, to whom Hope’s graces were not news, as soon as possible effected a transition to another subject, less, I thought out of embarrassment than annoyance because he knew Miss Pride spoke with shameless insincerity. Usually, he would inquire of her how she was progressing with her memoirs. “Hush!” she would say in real consternation. “You must not broadcast that. I’d be the laughing-stock of Boston if anyone knew. But since you ask, I’ll tell you quite frankly that at times I despair. There is more to writing even of this sort than meets the eye. If I had a secretary, I feel that I could simply fly through them. The difficulty is that my sentences look so undistinguished when I see them in my own handwriting.” She would glance at me as though to say that she had not forgotten our conversation in her library, and the young doctor, following her eyes, would briefly ponder me.
It was a midsummer night, cool after a sultry day. Gonzales had picked a bouquet of tea-roses and bridal wreath for my mother and I was taking them home, after work about nine o’clock. My mother, her face streaming with perspiration, was sitting beside the stove in which she had built up a raging fire that roared through the open damper. For further warmth she was wearing the old hooded wrapper and my sheep-lined slippers.
“Why, Mamma, why have you built a fire? It’s like a furnace in here!”
I saw that despite her dripping face she was shivering and her teeth chattered between her words as she said, “Maybe you don’t feel the cold if you’re full of brandy. Not everybody has the good luck to have a little something to warm them up on the inside.” The steady accusation in her eyes did not waver, and then I observed that the kitchen was in disorder. The shelves had been ransacked and half their useless objects had been thrown down so that broken glass and monkey wrenches and empty cans lay in a nondescript heap on the floor. Weeks before, at Dr. McAllister’s injunction, I had taken the bottle of brandy to the shop. I said nothing.
“I suppose fairies drank it,” said my mother. “I suppose the same little fairies that stole the golden egg so a person couldn’t buy so much as a thimbleful of wine when they were dying of the cold. I guess they locked the door so a sick woman couldn’t get a breath of fresh air if she needed it. It couldn’t have been the invalid’s daughter, oh, no.”
I had often rehearsed my speech but as it issued, it sounded flat and false. My unsteady voice belied the words: “Yes, Mamma, I did lock the door. I didn’t want to worry you and so I didn’t tell you. A lot of houses have been robbed this last week and I didn’t want the burglars to come here. You know how you lose yourself in your work and sometimes don’t even hear me when I come in. I didn’t want you to be taken by surprise.”
She rolled her head crazily round and round, stopped, grinned at me, and rolled it again, repeating in what I suppose she thought was an imitation of my father, “Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja!” Though the effort of moving in this inferno was exhausting, I started to clear the table, for usually at this hour we had a glass of lemonade and a sandwich of sardines or cheese. “Don’t touch my belongings!” cried my mother. “Don’t you dare!”
�
�Oh, Mamma!” I said, hoping to hide my alarm under impatience. “Don’t be silly, Mamma. I’m not going to do anything to your lovely table-runners. I’m only going to fix us a little supper.”
“Come here a minute, Sonie,” she wheedled. “Come over by my chair. I want to tell you a secret.” I advanced with dread and knelt down when she touched my shoulder. “Closer, sweetheart. There.” She pushed back my hair and pressed her lips to my ear. “I hate you!”
I tried to rise, but she had put her arm around my shoulders, holding me against her with prodigious strength and I felt that she had barely tapped her resources, that if she desired, she could crush my bones. And as she had used to do when my father was her victim, she repeated her words half a dozen times in a monotone but with a crescendo which was meant less to convince me than herself. Sweat poured from our close faces and I felt its tickling rivulets down my back inside my dress. I begged my mother to release me, but she was not sure that we both understood yet and she continued to reiterate her declaration until, like my father, I cried, “Then leave me alone! Let me go!”
She did let me go. She jerked me to my feet with her superhuman strength and, like a skilled wrestler, hurled me to the floor. My head struck the leg of the sink and dazed me for a minute as she stood looking down. I implored her to believe that I had not locked the door to torment her, that the brandy was all gone, that the golden egg had been spent years before. At each of my attempts at speech, she again rolled her eyes round and round and hooted, “Ja, ja, ja, ja!” She drew her chair to the sink and sat down, daring me to try to stir. I lay still. In a few minutes, I could feel the sweat spreading in a pool all about me. My mother leaned across to the table and turned down the lamp, but by the starlight from the window I could still see her glistening face, beatified in the repose that had settled for a time on her lips and in her eyes. If I rose up on my elbow or stretched my legs or rubbed my head which still ached, her crazy skull commenced its revolutions and the “ja, ja!” came forth like the rasping of an imperfect machine.
The heat made me drowsy and though I fought off sleep I surrendered to it for brief, troubled fractions of the hours my mother guarded me. Then I awoke, my head throbbing, my flesh swollen and drenched to see her shining eyes which, so far as I could tell, had not left me for a second. Each time, I heard a loud popping or dripping somewhere outside the house, like water falling drop by drop on metal or like a sheet of tin cracking with expansion. Confused, I imagined it to be hot outdoors and I dreaded the morning and the progress of the day towards noon, that debilitating hour of fire when the heat shimmered in visible undulations over the grass and the sun, the tyrant of the bright blue skies, roasted one like a sucking pig, unstuck the pores of the body so that the sweat poured forth like water from a tap, slackened the senses, and benumbed the mind. It was as if the streaming of my flesh was in anticipation of that hour. Then my mind cleared; I remembered that there was a fire in the stove. I heard the ocean and longed to bathe my scorched body in it; my throat was parched; I conceived the sound as the slow leak of an ice-cold spring. Once I murmured, “Mamma, can I have a glass of water?” but my plea evinced only her derisive grimace and her absurd “ja, ja!”
A little while after the church bells struck midnight, my mother fell asleep in her chair, her head resting against the corner of the sink. I sat up slowly lest I rouse her, took off my shoes and then I crept, inch by inch, backwards to the door. As I passed the stove, its dying but still ferocious fire made me feel faint and ill. I gained the door and stood up; I could see her still in the light from the window. She had not stirred. I slid back the bolt and went out, brought the outer key from my pocket and locked my mother in, and then, revived by the salt breeze, I ran in my bare feet over the sandy path to the shop. The shop was cool and damp and I shivered with the sweet change. I put a piece of smooth leather to my cheek, then pressed my forehead against the windowpane, then coiled the cold rosary into my hand. Coolest was the bottle of brandy which I held in the crook of my arm. I did not go to sleep again for fear my mother, waking up, would find some way out of the house. I remembered how Ivan had told me that if he ran to the shop to escape her, she came to the window and peered in at him. I sat at my desk playing Patience by candlelight. Maudie had taught me half a dozen variations and I played them all, winning often and easily. The dawn was an eternity in coming and yet it was not four o’clock when the gray impinged upon the black shadows and I could see the dim outlines of the Boston water front where lights still burned. In another hour the lobster men set forth; I saw their green dories and their small, white motor boats and heard their terse greetings to one another. But the signs of normal human activity and the faithful daylight did not, as they used to do when I was a little girl, rout my fear. My legs were bruised where I had fallen, and my head ached, no longer from its blow against the sink but from the beginning of a cold. I sneezed and wished for a handkerchief. I knew that I must leave the shop before it was any lighter, for I did not want my mother, waking, to see me through the window, but afraid that she was already awake, I lingered a little longer in indecision.
At the first flush of the sun I slipped out, stooped down low as I passed the house, then ran till the wind whistled in my ears, in the direction of the hospital. My bare feet stung and my temples throbbed, but now that I was actually escaping her I was conscious of nothing but my terror, and if I had paused, it would not have been to stop my little pains, but to look back to make sure that she was not coming. I flew down the street where Nathan and I had dallied by the lilac bushes and noticed that the dead flowers were rusty among the green leaves, but just beyond them on lattices or against the walls of the houses, morning glories had opened up their bright blue horns. Taking the short-cut, I ran past Mr. Greeley’s mortuary where a green neon sign burned still in the front window: “Chichester Funeral Parlor.” In a moment, when I had turned a corner, I saw the hospital at the end of its concrete driveway and to my relief, saw that the operating room on the top floor was illuminated with a livid blue light. I remembered that Dr. McAllister was the anesthetist. Uppermost in my mind then was my need for a handkerchief before I presented myself to him.
3
Dr. McAllister called for me every Sunday morning to drive me to Wolfburg. West and south of Boston, the asylum was not far from a farm where his aunt, with a large staff of gardeners and farmers, grew apples, roses, wheat, cows, and guinea hens. She, her nephew told me, would have liked to believe that she pitched hay, milked cows, churned butter, and cooked for the harvest men. Although the young man freely joked about her to me, almost a complete stranger, he was very fond of her and told me that he would not miss his Sunday luncheon with her for the world. I had not believed him at first, thinking that the aunt was apocryphal and manufactured to allow me to accept his charity. But Miss Pride, who knew of our expeditions, said, “I dare say Philip McAllister likes having company when he goes to see his aunt. You must ask him sometime to drive you past her place. Her roses are so splendid that I have often said she should go into the florist business.”
While the drive to Wolfburg was either tedious (if I wished the visit to be over quickly) or too swift (if I particularly dreaded this day with my mother), the drive back was delightful. It was the late afternoon when the air was unburdening itself of the weighty heat and the tight sky was split with pink clouds. I would have liked to walk a little way into the groves we passed, where twisting avenues, flowery and humid, opened sometimes in a delta at the highway. But the desire was a lazy one and equal to it was the wish that I might go along this way hours longer, my obligations behind me, and all about me the embracing summer, most tranquil at this cooling hour, gentlest on this kind of road where the sheen upon the leaves proclaimed the heat and the shade between the tree-trunks proclaimed its compensation. The opulent overflow of verdure, berries, flowers, was arrested like the subject of a picture.
When we reached Chichester, it had been dark half an hour and B
oston was alight. I stood on the steps of our house, watching the doctor drive away, and stood a little longer looking up at the Barstow where Miss Pride’s three front windows were rosy with the light that came through her striped curtains. It was then, when I entered the house that I realized more clearly than when I had been with her that my mother was no longer here, but in the vast, labyrinthine asylum where she was known by number and species. The mustard-yellow enameled walls of the main corridor were lined with hard benches where we, the visitors, sat bolt upright with cold, fixed faces as if we wished it clearly understood that we had no desire to sympathize or compare notes with one another. The blatant squawk of the girl at the address microphone came through ubiquitous concealed outlets: “Dr. Sho-ort.” Or, in nasal ridicule, “Dr. Finkelstein.” I could tell by the impatience with which they sometimes flung down their magazines that the other visitors detested the bodiless parrot as I did, and I wondered if they, too, desired to talk back to it, or, even better, to seek it out in its vociferous den and, if necessary, strangle it. One by one we were summoned to the gray cubicles where the jovial doctors in charge of our “case” glanced through a manila folder at typewritten sheets, the slowly accumulating history, the record of the arduous battle. As I passed down the corridor in the wake of a matron, silent with ill-nature or boredom or perhaps with the mere consciousness that she was sane, I peeped through the open doors of the offices and saw that all the other doctors looked like mine: their broad, red faces glowed with health; rimless spectacles sat on their neat tan noses; their grandiose condescension gave their voices a vast range of pitch, from a high amiability to a deep-toned expression of totally indifferent regret.
Boston Adventure Page 26
