Her practical response did not ease his lingering mood of sorrow.
“You’re brooding,” she mildly accused.
“It was an extraordinary thing to see,” he defended.
She frowned: “You sound as if you think it was—unnatural.”
“I didn’t mean to,” he instantly rejoined.
“After all, they’re still tiny, and they had all those close months in the womb—”
“Yes,” he interrupted, “but still…there was something about them that went way beyond just physical closeness, something—”
Maud held up an arresting hand: “Don’t,” she said; then quickly, urgently, “You’ll do a great wrong if you turn what you saw into a big mystery.”
He made a movement of surprise: “Go on,” he said.
Her response came like lightning. “Each has her own soul,” she told him fiercely, “and each human soul is independent. If we don’t believe that, we’ll queer them for life.” Before he could speak, she surprised him further with: “It’s Scripture.”
“Scripture?” asked not as a test.
Which she understood. Quietly, she answered: “Mr. Halliday told me so.”
He smiled: “Bless the Reverend Mr. Halliday,” he said genuinely.
She came back with: “He’s not the total ass you think he is.”
“Maud! When did I ever say he was a total ass?”
“Well—”
“It’s only his eternal smile, his everlasting fair-weather optimism and perpetual good-will, his persistent willingness to spend half his life praying for my salvation, that puts me off—but that he’s a total ass—why the thought’s never crossed my mind.”
Her laughter exploded like sudden sunlight. Then she sobered. “He’s right, though, about each twin having her own soul.”
“He is. And you are too, to know it.” He met her eyes: “But what we need is another crib.”
“I agree,” she said. “I’ll see to it this afternoon.”
So ended that day’s lesson.
Lillie Ruth Newhouse was the Leighs’ cook.
She had “come” to the Leighs back in 1918, when Maud was four years old. In 1940, twenty-two years later, she was still reigning in the Leighs’ kitchen, turning out the best biscuits under Heaven, the juiciest roast chickens, and for special occasions, an eight-inch-high angel-food cake without equal in the world. And still singing…When you entered the big, high-ceilinged front hall of the Leighs’ house, you could hear her giving drawn-out, worshipful voice to the line of a spiritual as she did some quiet, ruminative task like putting together the stuffing for a bird, or peeling potatoes, shelling peas, cleaning greens and the like; but if she was involved in some livelier chore—whipping egg-whites, or turning the handle of the ice-cream machine—the bouncier beat and peppy tunes of “Camptown Races,” “Patty-cake Joe,” or “Oh, Susannah” would pour forth, rendered in a weird mix of tooth-whistle and song: the repertoire you heard was an indication of what you’d eat later on.
She was small in build, spry, and, to quote Mrs. Leigh, “darling in heart.” She had a smooth-complexioned, light brown face, a wide, high brow, a fine mouth, and fine, heavily lashed eyes. In 1918 when Mrs. Leigh hired her, she laid claim to being “around forty years old” perhaps she was a bit older, perhaps a bit younger. By 1940, her hair was rapidly graying, and she was given to dyeing it, but laughingly said she didn’t know why she bothered: “The white comes in faster than I can black it out,” she’d say, lowering her head for you to look at, whether to show the white part that was blacked out or the black part in white ascendancy, was never clear.
She spoke of the Leighs as “my people” and called Maud “Baby,” or “Maudie,” depending. To the Leighs, she was “family.”
No one knew better than Doctor Leigh how much and how well Lillie Ruth understood the terrible reach of what she had once described to Morgan as “the dark place in Mrs. Leigh’s mind,” this being the cause of Mrs. Leigh’s removing herself to her room from time to time and drawing down all the shades, and in a lost way, with clenched hands and closed eyes, weeping…. “She’s had one of her bad times,” Lillie Ruth would report to Doctor Leigh on a now-and-again evening, and Doctor Leigh would know that Lillie Ruth had spent hours sitting at Mrs. Leigh’s side, rubbing her hands in an effort to unlock the fisted fingers, and talking to her in a soft, dove-like, repetitive, bridging tongue whose meanings he had never been able to fathom, or, for himself, on his wife’s behalf, to master and put into practice.
These “spells,” as Lillie Ruth called them, had begun in the late 1920s. Doctor Leigh had at first thought they were symptoms of early menopause, but that had been a wrong diagnosis: their source, as proved by time, was mental, not physical. (“A malaise of the spirit” was the phrase a colleague used.) Over the following years, the “spells” seemed to pattern themselves like cut-outs traced from a master design: they did not lengthen in duration or occur with greater frequency, nor did the mute sorrow or cosmic weariness or skewed vision of the world (whatever the nature of the problem), appear to intensify: they but came and went in the predictably uncertain way of weather. About them, Mrs. Leigh refused to speak. When Doctor Leigh would appeal to her to tell him why she wept, her body, along with her facial features, would freeze, and she would stare off, stiff and still as a joss, her thoughts her own, unreadable, Doctor Leigh felt, even to her own eyes. Once, only once, he confided to Morgan that his wife’s tendency to gloom hung over his life “like the sword of Damocles.”
When Morgan was courting Maud, she had told him her mother was “prone to moods.” She had gone on: “Sometimes she gets very sad. Never for long though; Lillie Ruth knows how to bring her around.” Then she had added: “Lillie Ruth’s a saint.” It was early in the spring. They were seated side by side on a bench in the Leighs’ garden, their hands in their laps. The profound physical tension between them acted as shackle and gag: sustained conversation was impossible. When they did speak, it was in spurts—fragments of thoughts spoken in thin, fervent, almost furtive voices that would not carry beyond their hearing. The nearby incessant churr of an April cricket acted upon their nerves as would a last, testing tug on a rawhide binding already strained to the breaking point. Pale with desire, Morgan received Maud’s confiding words about her mother as an intimate gift, intimately given: a bond between them. He wanted Maud to know he understood her dread of her mother’s moods—the strangeness of them and how they set Mrs. Leigh apart from other people—but he did not (yet) feel free to particularize, so broadened the perspective: “Everyone feels sad from time to time,” he said; and, after a moment: “You surely love Lillie Ruth, don’t you?” Maud had nodded: “Almost as much as I love mother.”…So of course, in the agony of his love for Maud, Morgan too loved Lillie Ruth: gave himself over, first, to the notion of loving her, and in time genuinely came to.
It was not surprising then, that in early November of 1940, he sought out Lillie Ruth and told her: “I need your help.”
Lillie Ruth waved him to a chair drawn up at the kitchen-table. “Sit down and have a cookie. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“Maud will listen to you, Lillie Ruth.”
“Not always, Morgan. What is it?”
“I can’t get her to see she needs help with the twins.”
“I told that to Doctor Leigh last week,” Lillie Ruth hastened to say. “I told him there isn’t anybody can keep on like she’s going. She’s thin, too.”
“I know, but whenever I suggest we try to find someone to help out, she resists the idea. She says there’s no one on earth she’d trust to look after them.”
Lillie Ruth laughed, showing a tongue red as fireweed. “Maudie can be stubborn sometimes. She’s got a jealous streak, too.”
Morgan spoke to the charge of stubbornness, but he left the other alone. “Do you know of anyone who could help her, Lillie Ruth? Because if you do, and if she thought the idea came from you, I’m sure she’d take to it.”
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br /> Lillie Ruth went through the lengthy process of pondering. “I’m familiar with plenty of girls looking for work, but they’re all too young. Not serious enough. You have to be serious where babies are concerned, Morgan.” (As if he didn’t know.) Then Lillie Ruth said: “Lucinda’s niece, maybe.”
“Ah.” Lucinda was Lillie Ruth’s best friend—sharer of her days off, a member of the Blue Choir in Lillie Ruth’s church, a wearer, like Lillie Ruth, of important hats on Sunday. “Lucinda’s niece—” Morgan repeated.
“She’s been with a family in Elyria, but they moved last month to Wisconsin. They all but promised her a place in Heaven if she’d go with them, but she didn’t want to uproot herself and go off somewhere so far away.” Lillie Ruth handed Morgan another cookie. “Lucinda brought her to church last Sunday.”
“Oh?…So you’ve met her.”
“I surely have.”
“Is she married?”
“No, and not likely ever will be.”
“Why’s that?”
“She blotched.”
“Blotched?”
Lillie Ruth nodded. “Uhm…has little white patches on her skin. Men don’t take to that, leastways no men I’ve ever heard of.” She laughed the issue away. “There’s only a couple of blotches on her face—little ones—no bigger than snow-berries. The big ones Lucinda says are on her legs, but stockings cover those, and the ones on her arms, well, she wears long sleeves.”
“How old is she?”
“Around thirty, I reckon. Old enough to be serious.” Lillie Ruth looked straight into Morgan’s eyes: “I’ll talk to Lucinda tonight. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I’ve found out.” She bagged cookies. “Take these with you. See Maudie gets one or two.”
“I’ll save at least three for her.”
“She’s too thin, like I said…. She needs help. Steady, serious help. Don’t you worry, Morgan. Myself and Lucinda, we’ll put our heads together. It’ll work out.”
“I feel better already.”
Lillie Ruth walked him to the front door. “One thing’s for sure, Morgan: Caroline and Julia are the prettiest babies I ever about saw anywhere. When they grow up, the boys’ll come from all directions looking for a smile from them. We’ll all have to stand around with flit-guns in our hands to spray them off like you would flies.”
Morgan threw up his hands: “If we live that long, Lillie Ruth! At the rate things are going—”
“It’ll work out, Morgan. You leave it to Lucinda and me.”
That was how it came to pass that Lucinda’s niece, Tessa Jackson, entered their lives.
The year was vanishing into memory.
At Christmas-time, Morgan sent a note and a picture of the twins to Miss Sly. One the back of the picture, he wrote: “Caroline and Julia Shurtliff—December 16, 1940.”…Miss Sly responded with a conventional greeting-card of a seasonally decorated tree. Beneath the large sprawl of her signature were the underlined words Thank you. That was all.
In the late afternoon of December 31, it began to snow. Morgan put the tire-chains in the trunk of the car (“just in case”) and through the white of the wind-driven storm, he and Maud drove into Cleveland to attend the annual New Year’s Eve party given by his Aunt Letitia (his mother’s sister) and her husband, Lewis Grant. On this night, the Grants’ tall, pillared house, of the so-called Greek revival style, was ablaze with lights. Seen distantly, through the densely flying snowflakes, it looked detached from the earth, as if afloat: “Like a child’s dream of an ocean-liner,” Maud said.
They were to spend the night, their first away from the twins. Tessa, by now well proven, had shooed them into the car with the words: “I know as well as both of you put together exactly what to do for Caroline and Julia. Exactly. So—git—!” said with a back-door, banishing wave of her hand.
As they drove off, Maud told him of the careful arrangements she’d made with her parents and Lillie Ruth and Lucy Blackett for any “back-up aid and comfort” Tessa might require. “They’ve all promised to look in on her,” she concluded.
Morgan laughed: “I hope she survives all the attention.”
In a near whisper, Maud said: “I feel like I’m running away with you. Eloping.”
“It’s been a long time since we larked off,” he answered.
“I bought a new dress for tonight.”
“Ah…I can’t wait to see it…. It’s starting to sleet. I may have to stop to clear the wind-shield wipers…. What color is it?”
“Deep red.”
“My royal wife,” he murmured. “You’ll be the belle of the ball.”
“Are you as happy as I am, Morgan?”
There was in her voice the charm of an appeal that went back to their first months together. Morgan heard it as being so: as a sudden revived interest in self and sexuality that of late had been eclipsed by maternity—reawakened now by the blustery night, by their closeness in the warm, enclosed car, by the fragrance of the scent she was wearing, by the fugitive stimulation of their isolated progress over the snow-strewn ribbon of road: by the fact of the dying year.
He said: “I love you more than I have ever loved you.” Not in a suitor’s voice, but in the viewing, consequential voice of a fulfilled man.
In the soft light from the dashboard, he saw the slow descent of a tear snail its way down her cheek. He touched her arm: “If you cry,” he told her, “I will, too, and we’ll end up in the ditch.”
At eleven o’clock, the Grants’ sizable company sat down to a festive, formal feast that in duration linked the final hours of the Old Year to the first of the New. Morgan’s father was present, seated at his sister-in-law’s right. Opposite Morgan, Maud was placed. Across the wide span of the table’s mahogany gleam, their eyes kept meeting, surprised each time by the force of a promise made for later keeping. Close on to midnight, by the fictions of candlelight, toasts were proposed. Morgan caught a fleeting look of alarm on his father’s face: War, he thought: he’s thinking about the approach of war.
On the clock’s stroke of twelve, Lewis Grant rose to his feet and lifted his champagne glass and solemnly spoke the momentous words: “To the year nineteen hundred and forty-one.”
3 Unto Nations Wide
Wars and alarums unto nations wide.
—EDMUND SPENSER, THE FAERIE QUEEN, 1590
1941
In April, Morgan and his father met for lunch. Morgan had requested the meeting; requested, too, that it not take place in Hatherton. “I have to be in Cleveland on Thursday,” his father had responded: “Is that soon enough?…At my club, then, at twelve-thirty”—where, settled at a quiet table in the tall-windowed, portrait-hung dining room, Morgan asked: “Do you remember that time we had a problem with a snake, Pa?”
Ansel Shurtliff nodded: “I do indeed. Vividly.”
…It had happened the year before Morgan’s mother died, when he was eleven…. On a fine mid-May day, Morgan—intensely proud to be allowed to—had helped his father and Crosby with the spring-clearing of the rose garden. (Back then, Crosby had been his father’s gardener.) In the large rectangular plot, the three of them had worked amiably together, pruning the bushes, feeding the roots with Crosby’s special blend of fertilizers, then, with measured, smoothing strokes, raked the freshly turned, moist soil. When the task was completed, Morgan had stood, feeling manly, between his father and Crosby and listened as they voiced their satisfaction with what had been accomplished. “Order! Sublime order,” his father had crowed. “You were a great help, son.” Morgan said: “I liked doing it,” to which his father looked directly into his eyes and told him: “I’m glad.”
Crosby began to gather up the tools: a spade, a three-pronged weeder, pruning shears, the bamboo rakes. And then Morgan heard his father’s surprised voice: “How did we miss that?” said with a gesture toward a long stick, blemish to the otherwise pristine scene, lying between two bushes at the far end of the rose-bed. Morgan felt a certain sink of spirit: the stick reposed in that part
of the plot he had been assigned to rake. He said quickly: “I’ll get it—” and hared away to pick it up. He got to within three or so yards of it when he slowed, then abruptly stopped: the stick was moving—curling back upon itself in a complexly deliberate way. “Pa—” he cried.
His father came running, Crosby too, and he heard with a thrill Crosby’s ejected oath, “Jesus, it’s a copperhead.”
The length of the snake’s body was now fully coiled upon the throne of its tail, the triangle of its head, raised.
Ansel Shurtliff seized Morgan’s arm. “Come—” he commanded. Morgan could still remember the sensation of the lightness as his father sped him over the ground and how, at their heels, Crosby’s weightier footfalls sounded like those of a pursuing bull. Near the house, in the haven of its high-roofed shadow, they drew up, panting. “Stay here, son,” Ansel Shurtliff breathed. Then, to Crosby: “I’ll get my gun.”
A moment later, the two men went back across the lawn’s broad reach to the place of the snake’s lie. Morgan, trembling, covered his ears in expectation of the gun’s report. But then, he saw his father’s shoulders drop at the same time Crosby spat, and he knew the snake was gone. He watched patiently as they searched for it. Finally, though, they gave up. “May I come now?” Morgan shouted, and his father called back, “Yes, but be careful.”
Crosby vouched they’d likely never see the snake again.
“So you don’t think we should warn Mrs. Shurtliff and Maggie?” Ansel Shurtliff asked of Crosby. (Maggie was the cook.)
“I wouldn’t,” Crosby answered. “Especially Maggie. She’s Bible-minded about snakes. Went into hysterics over that little garter one she saw in the kitchen-garden last summer.”
“So we’ll keep this between ourselves, right, Morgan?”
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