Boston Adventure

by Jean Stafford

  “Miss Marburg,” said Dr. Tudor, “Dr. Burns, who spoke to you last winter about your mother, has presented his findings to us and we have been going over the case.” He cleared his throat and said something in an undertone to his colleague at the window who then went to a filing case and brought back a bulging manila folder. “As you know, psychiatry is not a definitive science any more than medicine is. And diseased minds are as liable to relapse as are diseased bodies. And, if anything, they are more difficult to diagnose accurately. Now let us say we have concluded that a man with pulmonary trouble has fibrosis. His symptoms, blood-tests, x-rays corroborate our opinion. He is kept in bed sufficiently long to remedy the trouble and we let him get up. But his fever rises, he begins to cough blood. We put him through another examination and find that he has tuberculosis of the lungs. We were probably not wrong in the first place. He did have fibrosis, but the tubercula bacilli, present in everyone, were working under our very noses, so slyly that none of our tests registered their progress. And now we must change our offensive, go back to a point near the starting line and begin again. Sometimes this happens in diseases of the mind. Originally we called your mother a ‘manic depressive’ and we had hopes of her complete recovery by simple treatment. But recently, particularly since her last attack of bronchitis, she has at times revealed symptoms of another disease, that is, katatonia.”

  The doctors all were watching me, and I had the feeling that they were taking note of everything, that they saw, and afterwards would discuss, the slight tic that began at the corner of my right eye.

  Dr. Tudor continued, “I must tell you frankly that what we have concluded is not hopeful. No treatment we know of can certainly arrest the course of katatonia. Two days ago, your mother, who is now in a room by herself, was seized with a violent attack of vomiting, after which a muscular rigidity set in which has continued with rare intervals of relaxation. Sleep is possible only if we give her opiates. Her hallucinations have increased and have become so diverse that they appear entirely unrelated to anything we know of in her history. It is bad news, Miss Marburg, but like all bad news, it is better to know it at once.”

  “Do you mean, sir,” I said, “that my mother will never be well again?”

  “We can’t talk in positive terms like that, as I have said. Patients have recovered. Many have made partial recoveries. Your mother may be one of those fortunate people who do regain their health. But it will take a long time and we can promise you nothing.”

  “Does she know? I mean, is she . . .”

  “You mean, is she unhappy. Subjectively, that is. Let me assure you that she is in a world of her own. She is frightened, yes, but nothing we can do, nothing anyone can do, can remove the cause of her fright.”

  “Perhaps I could! Perhaps if I took her away, back to Chichester, she would be better.”

  The doctor rose and came around his desk, standing over me with a benevolent smile that was yet somehow hasty as if he wished to draw our interview to a close. “Believe me, there is nothing you can do. For the time being, your visits will be of no use. She is very sick.”

  “Poor Mamma,” I murmured.

  “You go on home now. When we have anything to report, we’ll drop you a line. Some day you can see her again.”

  “Some day? But when?”

  “That, I can’t say.”

  “Will you give her my flowers?” I asked him, holding out the waxy Easter lilies I had bought that morning at Mr. Quince’s. Dr. Tudor laid them on his desk and, finished with my case, led me to the door. The corridor was silent, for all the other visitors had gone to their melancholy meetings. My footsteps on the hard, rubbery floor sounded wet and loud, and the sunshine which stopped halfway from the door seemed remote, a golden bay. The indefatigable voice pursued me to the door, calling after me, “Doctor Fink-ull-stein! Doctor Shor-ort! Doctor Baaxter!” I was conscious of the terrible permanence of the asylum: forever, in the same inflections, the voice would chant and bleat the names of the same doctors, would echo through the glistening halls where every surface and every shadow was rounded, where even the doctors, at their most precise, smoothed down the sharp edges of what they said. Only the shafts of sunlight were sharp, but they were laden with round motes.

  Poor Mamma! The red room, now that I needed it, would not come. Instead, there came to me the kitchen in Chichester and the hot night I had lain on the floor at my mother’s feet. Suddenly, with the same kind of uneasiness I had felt when I thought Father Mulcahy said “God’s warning,” rather than “Good morning,” I believed that her change had come about through my own treachery. For several days my conscience did not allow my thoughts to stray from my crime, and it tormented me, saying, “You must not believe them when they tell you she isn’t conscious of her misery.” But at last I conquered the moral voice, and when I told Miss Pride that henceforth I should be free on Sundays to accompany her to church, and she did not ask me for any explanation, the recrudescence of the pain and remorse was momentary. For the time being, I had walled up my mother into the farthest recess of my mind, knowing that the time would come when I must let her out again.

  4

  I had only just learned to smoke. Like most tyros, mistaking the habit for an exciting vice, I had elaborate equipment: holders, lighters, cases, and expensive, unusual cigarettes with which I sometimes vapored through a whole evening without requiring any other entertainment than that of watching the smoke I expelled ascending in lively indirection, the thin columns expanding or splitting, and of feeling an occasional pain in my diaphragm when I inhaled deeply as if a weight had plummeted downward through my esophagus and simultaneously had delivered to my skull a faintly dizzying blow. My imagination, consigning insidious properties to the cigarettes as if tobacco were cousin to opium, through its perhaps intentional error, rendered to my thoughts a dreamy quality, the reality of their objects being interrupted just as my vision of the walls, the windows, the furniture was interrupted by the smoke. I experienced, as in illness, an imperviousness to time, feeling that I was an inviolable bystander before whose serene eyes the raging world catapulted through arbitrary, mechanized hours.

  I was sitting one afternoon in the Concord cemetery, leaning against a mossy tree. Below me was a green, stagnant pool into which now and again fell a twig or pebble but it made no sound for the surface of the water was velvety with mold. From behind me came the sound of the gardener’s lawn-mower and the occasional click of a trowel on stone. The faintest wind soughed in the branches and brought me the smell of pine-needles and lilies-of-the-valley which grew in profusion there amongst the graves. As I had come up the slope called “Authors’ Ridge,” I had seen tourists gazing respectfully at Emerson’s clumsy pink quartz gravestone and at the slabs marked “Alcott.” I had known by their pronunciation that they were outlanders, for they accented Thoreau on the last syllable and pronounced Alcott with a short “a.” Miss Pride detested sight-seers who visited the cemeteries. One day she had seen a man set up a tripod and produce a great lot of photographer’s contraptions to make a snapshot of Longfellow’s sarcophagus in the Mount Vernon graveyard. Taking the law into her own hands, she accosted him and said, “Look here, sir, this is not permitted.” A rude man, he asked for her authority, and she replied, “I just stepped out of my house, Elmwood. My name is Mamie Lowell.” No longer interested in Longfellow, he turned his camera on her and before she could collect her wits, he had taken her picture, saying, “This is even better. I’d rather bring ’em back alive than dead.”

  I knew that I should go on to Hopestill’s house where I was to meet Miss Pride, but I was too languorous to move and repeatedly said to myself as I fitted a new cigarette into my carved holder, a present from Kakosan, that this would be the last. Between puffs, I held the holder horizontal and mused on its giver. It had been a token of her gratitude for my introduction of her to the Countess and had been sent, fantastically enough, by messenger who,
in the employ of the telegraph company, had appeared vexed to be the porter of a parcel wrapped in pale blue tissue paper through whose silver ribbons three dark violets had been passed. “It ain’t a telegram,” he said, not by way of information since there could be no doubt on that point, but to show me that the absurd kickshaw he handed to me was in no way comparable to the important yellow envelopes which it was his proper function to deliver and several of which now conspicuously protruded from his breast pocket.

  Kakosan, along with the present, had sent a note in her characteristically inconsistent style: upon a calling card giving her name in Japanese characters which ran like red bacteria down one side, she had written in a neat commercial school hand, “For a swell pal.”

  She, like Morgan, had disappeared from the blue drawing-room after the cocktail party, although, as I knew from Hope­still, she still received invitations. I concluded that she did not want to see me, remembering her frightened whisper, “That’s Sonie Marburg,” as I went up the stairs. She had made several futile attempts to see Nathan who steadfastly refused to consider a reconciliation. I had seen her only once, by accident. We met at dusk one day as I was going home along Commonwealth Avenue and we stopped beside a false magnolia shrub that had just come into flower. The white petals were smudged with pink and a lilac color; the thick, broad leaves were stiff and glossy as if they had been varnished. We talked only of the flowers and of Ginger Rogers. But on the following day, she sent me a set of brushes in an ivory box which she asked me to give to Nathan in memory of her. She had promised, long before, to teach him to write Japanese.

  Nathan was torn between the desire to keep the brushes and the desire to wound Kakosan by returning them. I persuaded him to keep them since they would be a souvenir of that aspect of her he had loved. It was some time before he ever used them, but when he did, practicing the few brush strokes he had learned from her, there came to the good side of his face a look of tenderness and longing, not for the person he no longer loved nor could love, but for the girl he had known in the beginning, had pursued like a bloodhound down the streets of Boston, hiding behind the subway kiosks as she, this still unknown beauty, stopped to buy fresh posies for her hair. Finally, after months of this delightful chase, he had accosted her at a street corner as they waited for the traffic to pass and had asked her if she knew of anyone who could give him lessons in Japanese. He would put down the brushes, pass his fingers over his marked cheek, and then would pour each of us a teacup of his violent sherry and tell me, for the thousandth time, that he would never love anyone but an Oriental woman again with the same kind of wonder that he had loved Yoshidasan in the first of those days.

  I looked at my watch: at this very moment, Nathan’s train for New York was leaving from the South Station. At midnight tomorrow, he would sail for France. I felt no particular sense of loss. This morning when I had told him good-by in his basement room, stripped of his personal gear, his books and trash and the photographs of Dostoievsky and Heine which had hung over his desk, I had, on an impulse, taken between my hands his mutilated face and kissed him on the lips, and my kiss was not only a farewell to him but a resolute farewell to the temptations he had put in my path which had attempted to make my staid feet nomadic.

  I flung my cigarette into the slimy pond and got up. If there were time, before we went back to Boston, I would take Kurt for a run through the woods behind Hopestill’s house. I hoped that I would be offered one of the rum cocktails which had been invented by Harry Morgan, the household’s former arbiter bibendi. Miss Pride had been making a tour of the Concord gardens in the company of several people whom she did not like, including the Mesdames McAllister, and I was confident that she would find herself in need of a restorative and would suggest to her niece that she “concoct a little something for us.”

  The old lady, all alone, was sitting on the lawn in a cane-bottomed chair. She was reading and did not hear my footsteps on the driveway. I was struck by the singular composition of the picture before my eyes: the spare black figure central in the expanse of shining grass and behind her the white house with its pedimented windows flanked by green shutters and its paneled door which was slightly ajar; burnishing the whole scene, giving to it that final fillip which distinguishes art from nature, was the clear light of early summer as skillfully executed as Vermeer’s sunshine. She looked up with a smile as I approached.

  “I hope you have enjoyed Hawthorne’s grave better than I have done the gardens. I have no horticultural principles, yet had the great misfortune of being taken in tow by Mrs. Bigelow who feels very strongly about tulipes noire. I could not comfort her at Charity Brewster’s, where she was confronted by several specimens.”

  I laughed and asked if Hopestill had accompanied her and she replied, “No. I don’t know where she is. There isn’t a sign of life about the place. Not even her animal is here.”

  Turning her eyes once again to her book, she indicated that she had spent enough time on me and I left her, making my way round the house to the studio. I helped myself generously to whiskey from the bar and put a Brahms piano concerto on the automatic phonograph. There was a sweet flamboyance to the music; it was like a plump and tender hug into which I burrowed luxuriously. Whiskey and music, I reflected, especially when taken together, made time fly incredibly fast. When the long concerto was finished, it was growing dark. A little wind had come up, threatening a storm. The air itself, more than the dark clouds, presaged the arrival of the thunder and the rain. I went back to the house to see if Hopestill had returned. Miss Pride had gone inside and the lawn was bare again save for the deepening shadows of the apple trees along the drive. There was a note for me thrust into the knocker which read: “Undone by the gardens I have gone upstairs to rest. When our tardy hostess arrives, tell her that since we have been given no tea, we shall expect dinner. Lucy Pride.”

  An hour later, just after the storm broke, Hopestill, wild-eyed, tousled, burst into the studio. She did not take off her wet raincoat but sprawled in a vermilion chair and the legs she stretched out before her were clad in jodhpurs, a fact that did not strike me as odd probably because her whiskey had rendered me impervious to surprise. Nor was I taken aback when she asked for the decanter of whiskey and took three large drinks neat and with a masculine rapidity.

  “Do you believe in supernatural things?” she said quickly in a shrill voice and leaned forward with an eager look in her harried face.

  “Some, I suppose.” I regretted that I had drunk so much. I felt that there was something amiss and could not capture it.

  “I mean, do you think hate can kill? There is a story about a woman who makes a doll in the image of another woman and burns it and the woman comes to some dire end, İ think. It’s been so long ago that I can’t remember, but lately it’s been haunting me.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” I said.

  “Where’s Aunt Lucy?” she asked, sitting up. “I want to ask her something. I want her to give me Mercy.”

  “What about Kurt? He’d kill her.”

  “Kurt? Oh . . .” Although she had poured herself a fourth glass of whiskey, she put it down before it had reached her lips and her face became instantly as pale as moonlight. “Kurt is dead,” she said.

  “Dead?”

  “He was killed this afternoon . . . run over on the Bedford road.”

  “Was he off his leash? Weren’t you with him?”

  “No. He had been with me. I was riding. I had been running my horse and he was keeping up with me. Something frightened Chiquita—you know that little Palomino mare?—and she stopped suddenly and reared. Kurt went tearing back, here I thought, but just now, as I was coming up the road, I found him.”

  “I wish you hadn’t let him go with you,” I cried. “Why didn’t you follow him? Why were you a whole afternoon going after him, Hopestill? Didn’t you care?”

  “I had had a little accident and couldn’t get ba
ck. Chiquita threw me.”

  Now I saw the riding trousers for the first time, wondered even in my alarm when she had got them to fit her now misshapen body, and my voice issued as a scream. “You are ill, then!”

  “Yes, I suppose that I shall be very ill.”

  “I must call Philip.” I stumbled to the door.

  “Don’t! He’ll think I did it intentionally.” She slipped off her short boots and her damp socks. “And of course I did. I made Chiquita do it. Once, I remembered, she threw me because I was wearing some Indian bracelets which rattled and the sound made her wild. I wore them today.” And she pulled up the sleeve of her raincoat to show me three thin silver bands.

  “You hadn’t any right!” I said furiously and ran out and round to the house where, without disturbing Miss Pride, I telephoned Philip in Boston. As I waited for the sound of his voice, I could think of nothing but Hopestill’s nimble feet as they had looked just now on the bare floor. They were somehow aged, for the skin was stretched and blanched and over the sharply knuckled bones, the tracery of veins stood out, blue and vermicular. When I had got Philip and he promised to come at once, I went outside and stood in the drenching rain under an apple tree and over and over again hummed the phrase from The Well-Tempered Clavichord, the favorite of the anonymous block-flute player. And I did not leave my dripping sanctuary until, three-quarters of an hour later, the lights of Philip’s car came bobbing through the trees.

  When I went back to the cemetery in October, half a year after her death, I could not remember at once where Hopestill was buried. At the time of her funeral, I had not heeded any landmarks, and all I could see, in my mind’s eye, was her grave as it was yawning for her casket and, a few minutes afterward, as it became a fresh mound and pile of flowers. Built on a hill, this graveyard of a small New Hampshire town was cut by a spiraling road into four or five sloping tiers, all similar in appearance. Identical paths ran parallel to each other and every tree, spruce, or cedar, or elm, was mimicked by a twin. Hope­still was at the very top, beside her father. They were farther up even than the graveyard’s only mausoleum which, in a splendor of marble and genuflecting angels, housed the bones of a distinguished bishop, native of the town, who had returned from the wide world to settle in the dust of his last vestments under his boyhood’s earth. Miss Pride, the connoisseur of graves, had remarked as we drove away, “I’d walk if I were buried there. From what you can tell of his Grace’s taste from that outrageous excrescence, he must have been a trying party when he was alive. I dare say he went in for parlor statuary.”