Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  But it was neither the waiting nor the short visit with my mother that distressed me. It was the knowledge, after I had lighted the lamp in the house where she had always lived, that I had left her behind and that perhaps at this very moment she was imagining what I was doing. It was usually an hour before I was quieted, and then I began to read. Later, if the memory of her empty, staring eyes or her incoherent words came to me, I rationalized, said that she did not suffer as much as I since she was barely aware of her surroundings. I repeated to myself the doctor’s exhortation that I must not feel guilty. His advice called him forth to replace my mother, and I searched the conversation we had just concluded for clues of how he felt towards me, if I were anything more to him than an element of a case that had been foisted upon him.

  I had been nervous, on the first of these drives to Wolfburg, recalling that Miss Pride had said the young man was “brainy” and I feared that he would discover that I was ignorant, that he would report his finding to Miss Pride, and that I would fall from favor. Consequently, I spent the Saturday evening before the trip poring over the several copies of The Atlantic Monthly which had come and memorized certain facts about Russia, about overproduction, about co-operatives. But my preparation was unnecessary. Dr. McAllister shaped the conversation to suit himself and I was relieved of any responsibility. He was principally interested, I found, in religion, but I was never sure whether he was religious or merely inquisitive. When he spoke of the survival of the churches in the Soviet Union and said he longed to go to Russia to see how religion accomplished its ends under official atheism, he spoke as someone might who wished to visit Heidelberg to hear medieval drinking songs in a country where only German was spoken, or to see pagan rites in Christian Mexico. I had told him once that my father was a Catholic and he questioned me in detail on fasting, confession, and holy days of obligation. Only occasionally could I give him an answer, and he marveled at my want of knowledge but marveled even more at my father’s neglect of my spiritual education. He had heard (again his information was a tourist’s) that no nation had bred a more devout species of Roman Catholics than Germany. And he observed, “If you had been brought up a Catholic, you’d know how to feel toward your mother, I dare say. You’d know so much better than I, a doctor, that you’d have no need of the advice I’ve given you.” On another occasion, he asked me if I had ever heard my father speak of the Cistercians. “If I were a monk, that would be the order I would choose. I sometimes think there would be nothing pleasanter than a vow of silence.”

  I had noticed on my first visit to him in the hospital that his posture made one think his bones were of an unbending substance and when I observed over a period of time that he never relaxed, I inquired of Miss Pride if she did not admire his carriage. “Not at all,” she returned, “but I do admire his fortitude.” She told me then that, afflicted as a child with infantile paralysis, he had been able to assume only two positions, that one perfectly erect, the other bent nearly double at the waist. When he settled upon medicine as a career, he wished to be a surgeon and subjected himself to an operation of great delicacy which, if it were successful, would allow him to move freely. A surgeon could not be limited to a perpendicular position and a forty-five degree angle. The operation, involving the replacement of some of the atrophied spine, was followed by a period of twelve months in a cast from which he was released, totally unbenefited. He had had then to abandon his ambition. He did not reveal his disappointment to anyone, said Miss Pride, and refused to recognize his “handicap” or to refer in any way to what he might have been if his luck had been better. I think he endured a great deal of pain, at times, and I pictured him when he was alone, giving in to the agony that he had reined in all day just as I, on Sundays, delivered myself to the dejection that had been engrafted in me by the visit to the asylum earlier in the day. And as this gloom seemed to await me in my house, like a devilish creature that I had promised myself to on the condition that it would not come out into the light when I was still with my friend, so I thought that Dr. McAllister unleashed his tormentors in his room and permitted them to do as they liked with him for the season of his solitude.

  Unlike Nathan whose disfigurement had given him a morbid appetite for abuse—turned either against himself or against those who he imagined laughed at him—Dr. McAllister had taken his much greater deformity almost as a gift of Providence, for, forced by the needs of his body into frequent hours of leisure, he had had the time to read extensively. But the leisure was work and if he relaxed his sickened muscles, he allowed his mind no rest. He slept no more than four hours, originally for the sake of discipline and later because his strict self-denial produced in him a habitual insomnia. He had told me, when I came to the hospital at five in the morning, that he had only just been preparing for bed when he was summoned to the operating room at four o’clock. The evening, he said, he had spent in studying a Russian grammar, suggested to him by the inconsequential babblings of my mother.

  It was perhaps because he knew the whole of my story and had even lived through a chapter of it himself that he took an interest in me which was disproportionate to any offering I was capable of making him. Or it might have been, instead, that the Sunday drives were a prolonged but unconscious apology for his unjustified rebuke on the occasion of my first visit to his office when he thought I was seeking an abortionist. No mention was made of his mistake again, not, I am sure, because a review of the incident would have caused him any embarrassment, but because he had forgotten it when I ceased in his mind to be the kind of young woman liable to the charge. He thought that the principle of my being was a fanatical filial piety, carried to a degree that necessarily excluded the sort of selfish attachment which could terminate in so sordid a dilemma as an illegitimate pregnancy. His misconstruction, his over-simplification of my relationship with Mamma made me suspect, sometimes, that he had not the insight into people which is, we are told, the prerequisite of the successful physician. Now neither had Dr. Galbraith understood our household but for a different reason. He had been a blind man leading the blind. But Philip McAllister, through an intellectual, an almost literary faith in the perfectability of human nature, believed that had I not been completely devoted to my mother, I should long ago have run away from home. Thus, assigning to me the sanguine humor in distinction to the bilious or the choleric, he neglected to take into account the fourth, that is, the phlegmatic, which made up at least half of my composition. But whatever his motive was, he succeeded in my gradual reformation. By respecting my loyalty to my mother, he unwittingly shamed me into a real loyalty whose articulation was my faithful weekly visit to the asylum which came, in time, to be essential to my life. Although nothing was accomplished and frequently I was not allowed to see her (For she had seasons of bitter hatred for me as the cruellest of all her persecutors. These came when something sharpened her senses and she realized where she was.), I was determined to regain her love just as the sometimes uncertain communicant is determined to learn faith through his reception of the holy wafer and his prayers.

  Yet I sometimes confessed to myself that I was exactly the opposite of the altruist. The renascence of her love would gain more for me than for her; mine was a craven peace-making. I was further hypocritical in that I acted for the young doctor’s applause. Just as I had concealed from Miss Pride the marks of sleepless, undisciplined nights, in the doctor’s presence I feigned joy at seeing my mother again after seven days’ separation, and, on the return, grief at her unhappiness. We can be over-scrupulous, beg our confessors to double our punishment since they, we declare, have been too innocent to grasp the magnitude of our sin. We can, in love, doubt that we really love and suspect that we have bluffed our lover into the passion which will at any moment perish when he sees we have won him with half lies; or, brooding over a slip of the tongue, a misstatement, we can convince ourselves that our minds are really stupid and that all our words are fraudulent. Our conscience is speaking to us in parables. T
hus, my desire to become once more the center of my mother’s life was earnest. What was contemptible was my publication of it to the doctor as if it could not stand alone, or as if since it could engender no reward for me I must seek his praise for compensation.

  His education of me had its more practical specialties. Where I had heretofore read at Miss Pride’s prescription and had felt false to her standards if I had chosen something not primarily useful, I now, at the doctor’s advice, followed my own inclinations, and was even persuaded that the writers she most admired, that is, James Russell Lowell and Emerson, were by no means inviolable and that the mortar of her ivory tower was chauvinism, not knowledge or taste. For observe, Dr. McAllister counseled me, she was uncritical of style and uninterested in a writer’s conception of truth, but if he had been buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord or lay in a less illustrious but still New England graveyard, he was a great man. She believed neither in Emerson’s oversoul nor in Thoreau’s religion of blueberries and Walden Pond; she was unimpressed by Henry Adams’ genius, had even remarked once that he was a little too long-winded for her liking. I was not disillusioned by this exposé, but on the contrary delighted in her consistency, deplored by her demigod as the hobgoblin of little minds. But at the same time, I was liberated from the tyranny of The Atlantic and of Harriet Martineau’s peregrinations.

  It was towards the end of the summer that Dr. McAllister first asked me what I proposed to do after the Hotel had closed. I told him that Mrs. Brunson had invited me to be Maudie’s successor. (Maudie had gone to Idaho as soon as the Brunsons left for Provincetown. She went by bus, taking with her a quart bottle of whiskey and parting from me with a hearty handclasp and the exclamation, “Idaho, here I come! It’s round-up time for this here old bench.”) The doctor said, “Is that what you want to do?” As if I were speaking to him in his professional capacity and telling him the symptoms of a disease which I knew to be incurable, I told him that since I could remember my goal had been Boston, that the only career I had imagined for myself was serving Miss Pride as her housemaid or her laundress or her lady-in-waiting.

  “I dare say that could be arranged,” he said. “She spoke to me the other day of getting a secretary and I’m under the impression that she had been thinking of you. She is very fond of you, you know.”

  I was not so pleased as I felt I should have been. It was as if she had sent the doctor as her ambassador for some obscure purpose of which even he did not know. And I was invaded by the same doubt of her that I had felt when she brought the cyclamen after Ivan’s death and I had seen her in the winter sunlight for the briefest moment as an old, ugly woman inspired by a tenuous and urbane evil. But the doctor’s blue eyes, in which were registered many thoughts in no way connected with me, were so ingenuous that I was convinced he spoke the truth and that she was, indeed, fond of me.

  “That was good of her,” I said. “But it doesn’t help me, because I have no qualifications to be her secretary.”

  “But even that is of no importance. I’ve told you, I think, that she’s thought to be one of the most generous women in Boston and there is no reason why she shouldn’t send you to a business college.”

  On an impulse that I regretted and in which I heard myself speaking with Nathan’s irascible and naïve resentment of wealth, I told the doctor how Miss Pride had conveniently arrived in Chichester the day after Ivan was buried in the potter’s field, although I was certain she had got my letter sometime before. He answered with a laugh, “You don’t understand the first article in the philanthropist’s code which is that one never takes suggestions but always hunts on his own hook for the places where his money will do good. If it weren’t for that, I would have suggested myself that she send you to a business school. As it is, we must simply wait and see if it occurs to her. And if it doesn’t, that still won’t mean you can’t go to Boston. I’m a native of the place too and have ways of getting young ladies jobs. I might even hire you as my receptionist, though you wouldn’t like that.”

  Our conversation took place on the last Sunday he drove me to Wolfburg. In the middle of the next week he was leaving Chichester for a vacation in Manchester where, as I knew, Hopestill Mather was spending the summer. Afterwards, he was going back to Boston to begin his practice in an office, outfitted by his doting mother with glass brick partitions, a costly imitation Kashmir, lucite magazine tables where would lie what she called “the leading periodicals” and the alumnus bulletins of Groton and Harvard. He had described the appointments of his office with what I felt was an unwarranted sarcasm and had told me that if I were ever ill, after I had come to Boston to live, I must allow him to examine me with his Shreve, Crump, and Low stethoscope kept in a Mark Cross case.

  He shook my hand when he had stopped before my house and said, “Good luck. Perhaps we’ll meet again in Boston.” But I felt no promise in his words. I felt that he was already absorbed in the mainland while I was re-dedicated to my insularity and as, from the corner of my eye, I saw the lighted window at the Kadishes’ and the shadow of Nathan’s younger brother, I read the doctor’s optimistic sentence as the epilogue to my long, feverish dream. A few hours later, reasoning that actually I had never been closer, that he was a more persuasive advocate than I could ever have been myself, I realized that I had not felt my isolation from the house on Pinckney Street confirmed forever, but that I had known I should never navigate the space between his planet and mine. The acceptance, without the least titillation, of the window which had once enshrined my first lover’s birthmark, on reflection brought me, like a slow-working liquor, to a luxurious intoxication and I knew that for a second time I was in love.

  My house was cool and it smelled of oranges that had faintly rotted in the window-sill. I wished that I had asked Philip McAllister to come in to drink some brandy so that in the course of an hour I might feed upon his mobile face and his rich voice. I went no further in my demands, but I knew that so long as I remembered him, the light from the window next door would have no power to make me regret or desire or stew in anger.

  On the Sunday after Dr. McAllister left, Miss Pride came to my house, catching me, to my consternation, reading the comic strips instead of, as we would have both preferred, finding me ensconced behind the last issue of The Atlantic Monthly or Mr. Emerson’s Self Reliance. I had been lying on the floor, moreover, on my belly and had been breakfasting, as I read, on a banana and a jellied doughnut. When I sprang to my feet at the sight of her standing primly at my kitchen door, I put the inflated doughnut, oozing out its raspberry heart, on the shelf amongst the pipes and tools and empty jars. My guest had never been in the house before (or anything like it, I suspected) and as we talked, she examined everything, not overlooking the remains of my disgraceful meal, with extreme care as if she were trying to find one object less dreadful than the rest. With a candor that was both brutal and complimentary, since it assumed that my taste was akin to her own, she asked me if I did not find the two pictures above the table appalling. I agreed and she said, “I knew you wouldn’t mind my speaking plainly. It is one of the privileges of age.” Now I had some years before acquired an animadversion to the little girls and the springer spaniels and to the barnyard and, because I idealized him, I could not imagine what had possessed my father to buy them. But I concealed the identity of their purchaser by saying, “They were in the house when my father came. He always hated them but my mother was fond of them.” She ignored this false and cowardly aspersion on my mother and stated the purpose of her visit.

  “I thought, since Sunday is not one of my motoring days, that perhaps I could lend you Mac and my car for your trips. I told Dr. McAllister that he was rude not to warn me sooner that he was leaving. It only occurred to me this morning when I was served by the substitute waitress. I had forgotten it was Sunday.”

  I thanked her, not without noting privately that she herself was leaving Chichester a week from today. But she went on, “And some
thing else came to my mind at the same time. Perhaps I mentioned the memoirs I hope to write this winter? And didn’t I tell you I needed a secretary to do the ‘dirty work’? I know you haven’t the qualifications but after all you could go to a school of some sort to learn, couldn’t you? The fact is that my niece who, as you know, has been living with me, is going to New York for the winter and I shall quite rattle about by myself in my house. I would like to offer you your lodgings as well as the trifling gift of your tuition. Would you be interested?”

  She rose and drew on her gloves as if the matter had been settled and her question had only been rhetorical. I stammered, “Oh, Miss Pride, you are very kind to me!”

  She glanced at the floor where my rainbow funny papers lay and I was not sure that she would not retract her invitation. But she said, looking up at me again, “Not at all. Now Mac is right outside and I’m going to walk back to the Hotel so you can start out to see your mother.” She started to the door but turned. “My dear, you won’t bring your pictures to my house, will you?”

  BOOK TWO

  PINCKNEY STREET

  Chapter One