Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Laughed?” he said, as if that were a kind of action unfamiliar to him. “Why did you laugh?”

  “I don’t know. But anyhow I don’t need the cough syrup.”

  “Take it,” he said, nodding in my mother’s direction and he poured out a spoonful which he handed to me. It was strong and not unpleasant, tasting a little like Cointreau. I thanked him and he went back to his funny papers, but for the next hour he glanced at me from time to time over the top of Elmer Tuggle and Gasoline Alley (he read thoroughly and very slowly) as if he were trying to fathom my laughter.

  For a long time there was no other interruption, and in this cataleptic tranquillity, my mind was blank, or, rather, was occupied by certain abstractions such as “warmth” or “absence of pain” or “motion.” In demonstrating to myself the last of these, I felt myself sinking through boundless space; I was at once pressed down and pulled down, in the first place by a weightless force from above and in the second by gravity, of which the principle I experienced in a manner more entire than the simple, conscious observation of a falling object could ever induce, just as, at other times when I had been fatigued for some days together, I fancied I could sense in my tired muscles the slow vertigo of the earth. When I emerged from this ethereal baptism, I was more than ever at ease, and I was so freed of any anxieties, in this isolated place and in this parenthetical time, that my mind could roam like an innocent child, at will, through grouped reflections and through favorite daydreams.

  I had been following a string of associated memories which began with a clambake held about this time two years before by the senior class of the high-school. I had seen Ruby Beeler filing a boy’s right-hand fingernails, and I proceeded from that to Mr. Henderson who all one winter had had a blue nail on his little finger. Abruptly the concatenation was unlinked by the obtrusion of a single, clear-cut image which could not be worried into any sort of relationship with what had gone before. Irrelevant, impulsively independent, there was before my eyes a room which I had never seen, but a room in which there was hardly an object that was unfamiliar. It was possible that I had briefly fallen asleep and had dreamed of such a place, and yet it did not fade upon my scrutiny of it, but, static, pictorial, it was present to me like a projection on a screen.

  It was a dark and rather shabby room in which the solid, heavy draperies were threadbare, blotched and rotten in the folds. One of two casement windows was open, giving onto a court, and from it were visible frail balconies where mop-buckets and potted geraniums stood, and all the tattered, dirty overflow of kitchens, the rags and cans and empty cartons. On window-sills were bottles, bowls, and sleeping cats. All the windows were red, reflecting a sunset; the light had an autumnal quality, discernible only through feeling since no other circumstance hinted at the season of the year. There were no trees in sight, yet had there been, they certainly would have been releasing their fissile yellow leaves. Probably if the room had been animated or if from its visible contours I had proceeded to list its likely attributes in other sensory perceptions, it would have included a coolness, a musty smell, and through the windows, the voices of boys loitering on the way home from school.

  The furniture of the rectangular room was ponderous and dark and was crowded together, forming angles and recesses and deep shadows like hiding places. In the middle of the room, quite by itself, was a small round table covered with a white cloth which was clean but limp, as if in the ironing it had not dried properly. A bottle of red wine, bearing no label, stood in the center. The bookshelves which lined one wall and extended nearly to the ceiling were full and contained well-worn volumes largely, it seemed, in French and German. The titles were arranged in confusion. Among them was a bound medical manuscript dating from the fifteenth century. There was a book called Der Traum der Roten Kammer: its binding simulated rice-paper and there was a singular discrepancy between the design (a delicate torii and a path scattered with the petals of red flowers) and the curly German script of the title. Between the two windows stood a little Victorian writing desk, open, and revealing a portfolio of cheap Italian leather, dyed green; on it rested a horribly ingenious tortoise-shell letter-opener of which the handle was fashioned into a lobster’s claw, cleverly grasping a solid sphere of agate.

  It was like the room of some student of wonders and curiosities who had returned the books to their shelves for the afternoon and had got himself this bottle of red wine to enjoy as he looked upon himself in leisure, asking whether his study of prodigies had affected him in any way.

  I reviewed rooms in which I had been, as far back as I could remember, but I could not place it, and while, as I have said, it was by no means unfamiliar and all the objects were as real as if I had owned them for many years, I could not, nevertheless, actually identify any of them. I cannot say how long the “vision” of this red room lasted, but while it did, I experienced a happiness, a removal from the world which was not an escape so much as it was a practiced unworldliness. And it was a removal which was also a return. The happiness was not unmixed: as I gazed at the red evening sunlight winnowed through the brick chimneys of the court, I was filled with a tranquil, mortal melancholy as if I were out of touch with the sources of experience so that I could receive but could not participate: that is, I could assume that boys were shouting on the street, but I could not hear them. The mitigation of the light seemed to sadden me even more, for it had a potential quality of “bursting” in upon me and yet upon my windows, it was a layer of rich opacity which did not, however, prevent me from seeing quite clearly the balconies and the sleeping cats.

  From another world, from the streets of the anonymous city where the room had been in readiness for my return to it, a voice ascended and as the windows were blackened and the room disappeared in a darkness as complete as that immediately after the lights have gone off in a theater, I heard my mother say, “I’m in the crazy house!” Her eyes blazed with the anger of a terrified animal as she was forsaken by the merciful anesthesia which for these months had made her live burial tolerable to both of us. Those powerful eyes now saw the barred windows behind the coy, concealing blinds, saw the inimical, impassive strength of the attendants, saw the moonstruck women grinning and gurgling like babies and they saw, completing the circuit, wider with each new revelation, that I was not a little girl just home from school but was a grown woman whose fine tailored suit and costly shoes cried aloud my treachery. Her lips twitched with panic and vivid splashes, induced as much by fever as by her fright, appeared on her cheeks.

  When she had spoken, it had been softly in a breathless voice, as though she must state her discovery but must do so quietly lest she not hear another noise, and she had not immediately looked for a door through which to escape but had surveyed cautiously her dangerous surroundings. But though I thought I alone had heard her, the vigilant attendant, trained to hear and see things that did not attract other people’s attention, had laid aside his comic strips and sat poised on the edge of his chair, ready to spring forward. Thinking to adjust things quickly, lead her back to her world of tailless birds and little yellow apples, I put my hand on hers and said, “Mamma, will you rub my hands?” But she flung me off and seizing the flowers from their pitcher on the table beside us, she stripped the blossoms from the stems and hurled them like rocks into my face, spattering me with drops of water as a shower of petals fell into my lap and obliterated the embroidered bird. As in the faithful dog that turns on his master, the stimulus for her assault was mysterious. She wanted to inflict pain on me, and in her rage she could not see that the soft rosebuds touched my face as tenderly as snow, and as if blood from wounds was pouring from me, she hissed, “Beast! Cheater!”

  I could not remember what I had used to do with her in her exuberant furies, and with relief I saw the attendant approaching us, casually so as not to alarm the other patients, and knew that he would capably manage to quiet her. I had forgotten to be grateful that I was no longer responsible for her, but
just as a woman whose children are grown recalls, on seeing a baby, the nuisance of infantile care, and as we are sometimes profoundly thankful as we witness the seething turmoil of adolescence that we are not and can never again be sixteen, so I counted my blessings as I watched the attendant draw my mother from her chair and, gently embracing her, move towards the door. Upon a signal from him, immediately after her first outcry—though it had been little louder than a whisper it had sounded like thunder in his alert ears—the other attendants had busied themselves with the patients, fussing with their clothing or asking after their wants, so that the crazy calm, the disruption of which had been threatened when my mother, pelting my face with the flowers, had become the cynosure of inquisitive simian eyes, continued as if there had been no hiatus.

  I brushed the petals off my coat and finding no other place to put them, dropped them into the bag of apples which I picked up intending to take home with me. With the stubborn health of a strong animal despite what had just happened, I was hungry, for I had had neither breakfast nor lunch and the smell of the apples had so tempted me that it was all I could do to restrain myself from biting into one as I left the room. The rattle of the gallstones reached my ears as I crossed to the door and turning, I saw the white-haired old lady smiling beseechingly as she crooked her index finger at me. “Come here a minute, Ellen,” she said. “Granny has a surprise for you.” But one of the wise and lifeless matrons sat down beside her, saying, “Mrs. Andrews, may I see what you have in your little box?” Delighted, the old lady opened it up and said in her kindly voice, “Ellen gets them all when I die.”

  As I went into the white-walled corridor down which my mother and her guard were strolling, like lovers, her head upon his shoulder, his arm about her waist, a doctor, who had been writing something in a notebook as he leaned against a radiator, stepped towards me. “Are you the daughter?” he asked. I replied that I was and I remarked that my mother seemed to be approaching one of those crises with which I was so familiar. The doctor, bluff, corpulent, with a large, limber face in which broken capillaries running in all directions made it look like crazed pink porcelain, shook his head and answered, “On the contrary. We think she is recovering.”

  Instinctively, as if to prove that he was wrong, I looked down the passage towards her and as I did so, she turned her head. “Sonia, Sonia!” she cried, sobbing like a child, but the attendant tenderly bent her head again into his shoulder and they disappeared into a doorway marked “Infirmary.”

  “Oh, no!” I said to the doctor. “She can’t be getting well. Why, she’s much worse today than she has ever been before!”

  “No, you’re wrong, my dear girl. Dr. Tudor and I have lately been much more hopeful about her. To a large extent, she has shaken off that intermittent amnesia, and a good part of the time she is at least semi-aware of where she is. We’re now of the opinion that she will recover, perhaps not completely and not permanently. But it is possible and, indeed, very likely, that in another three months you can take her home.”

  I said nothing. My silence drew a smile of understanding to the florid face. “I’ve been over the case. I understand you had her brought here because you hadn’t money enough to get someone to take care of her.”

  “Yes, I have no money.”

  He did not fail to scrutinize my clothes. “But you’re well enough off now?”

  “I am secretary to a wealthy woman,” I told him, “but I have very little actual money.”

  “Mmm,” he mused. “You’re qualified to be secretary to someone else, I suppose? To someone who would pay cash for your work?”

  “I can’t!” My fingers tightened round the paper bag of apples as I imagined this future life he proposed for me: the rumpless birds gradually crowding us out of our house, the endless cups of tea before a fire so violent it threatened to burst from the stove, the incorrigible maudlin affection manufactured at top speed by the indestructible engine in her person, unvarying in its pattern. I could think only of my return after work in the afternoons: day after day and year after year of her pertinacious life, I would hear my name reiterated in different tones and in combination with a few simple phrases, falling from her lips like tears or like a molten substance used to solder one thing to another in obdurate unity.

  “Why can’t you?” inquired the doctor with interest.

  “Because I am afraid,” I confessed. Until I said the word, I had not been afraid. My feeling had been anger that I must give up my life in Boston as it was now for the lonesome, tedious sort the girls at the business college had been prepared for. And I was as defiant of my mother as if she had conspired against me with someone, perhaps with this optimistic doctor. But I knew, as soon as I had spoken, that I spoke the truth, that I was afraid, not of any harm that might come to my mother through my inexpert treatment nor of any physical harm that I might suffer at her hands. When the doctor asked me, I told him, “Because I think sometimes I might go insane.”

  Still, when he questioned me further, I could give him no reasons save that I could not bear to be alone in the room with the Countess because she reminded me of Mamma and each time, after she had kissed me, I ran through the Common to Boylston Street and then ran back again to Pinckney as though the whistling wind, my pounding heart, my smarting face, could efface the memory of that plastic bosom and those full, intemperate lips. Sometimes my distress was so acute that I was obliged to send down word that I could not eat dinner because of a headache, and all evening I was numb and visited from time to time by an abortive retching, a spasm of inexplicable terror. And I could tell the doctor how sometimes Miss Pride’s eyes and sometimes Philip’s were watchful and that the guard who sat with Mac in the car perused my face for signs of madness and that all these eyes, on certain nights, watched me from the corners of my darkened room.

  The disclosure shocked me: it was as if I spoke of an absent person, sketched impersonally the strange behavior of a fictitious character. But I was not creating. These things were true but until now I had not articulated them nor even recognized them. For months, though, I had felt presences in my room which came in that hazy interlude that foretokens sleep, and I had had the feeling that I was being watched, but like my mother I confused one sensation with another and said that the hallucination had come from the sound of the fire which, dying, soughed like a forest wind.

  I did not convince the doctor. Even to myself my story did not sound like history but like an impromptu fabrication. I had neither the vocabulary nor the analytical gift to state my case in full, arguing from the past as well as from these present idiosyncrasies. But he was not unsympathetic, although he smiled with what may have been contempt.

  “You must control yourself. If you want your mother to be well, you’ve got to help, you know.”

  “But well, sir?” I said. “I mean, how far will she be cured?”

  “Why, I should think you’d be as good a judge of that as I. She’ll be restored, we hope, to her original state of mind. From what we’ve seen here, we know that she is by nature an unstable woman and for that reason could never be thrown on her own. If she had no relatives and were completely alone in the world, I expect we would keep her here, give her some little occupation like helping in the kitchen. But you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “Oh, no,” I hastened to assure him. Then, against my better judgment I went on. “There was a time when I would have given up my whole life to her, but that was before I saw that nothing, no change of atmosphere, no improvement in our standard of living, could make her anything but what she has always been since I was a young child.”

  “And what is that?”

  “A millstone,” I whispered. “But I know I’m duty-bound. You needn’t tell me.”

  “I had no such intention. I’m not a moralist.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment to shut out his professional smile and as I did so, I seemed to descend once more through the
wide, moving air and then, purged, absolved, emptied of all that did not pertain to solitude, I saw the red room with its wedges of shadow, its prospect of eternally slumbering cats. When, with the opening of my eyes, the room disappeared, I thought of adding to my list of suspicions about myself which I had just given him, this phenomenal apparition. For whatever had been the emotions with which I had received the impression for the first time a few minutes ago in the common room, surprise was not one of them: the part of my mind, the spiritual optic apparatus, so to speak, had registered the details of the room so singularly tangible—down to the title of a book in German—when the details were some of them extraordinary, that the exercise could not be mistaken for a daydream or a dream and I knew (but how could I expect anyone to believe this subjective testimony?) that it was not a memory. But I concluded that this morning was not the first time I had seen it, but that something in the external world upon which I could not lay my finger had by accident dislodged it from the populous, diffuse, chimerical mazes of my subconscious mind. I had this second time, as before, felt safe and comforted. And it was because of this that I did not tell the doctor, out of the fear that if I told him, I would lose the room forever. Then as I looked again, straight into his eyes which regarded me with curiosity, I was visited briefly by a feeling of guilt and uneasiness like the thief who, having cached his plunder, feels that he has been observed though a second survey shows him that no one is near. When I spoke—and it seemed to me that a long time had elapsed since his last words—it was with a stammer: “I can’t explain . . . I . . . perhaps you don’t believe me . . . that is, perhaps there’s nothing to what you say. You say she has had fever. Well, often before, when she had fever, she seemed rational. It’s nothing more than that, I can assure you.” I cursed myself for this unsure speech, so insolent in its ambiguity, and as my eyes faltered and fell away from his astonished stare, the doctor said, “Why, you are at sea, aren’t you? You must stop worrying. Go on back to town and see a movie and try to get a good night’s sleep.”