Was the victory worth the cost? (The Listener, probably young and TV-reared, hence [probably], a bit suspicious, might ask.)
Yes. (The Speaker answers.)
On what grounds was the victory worth it? (The Listener persists.)
Of a clear conscience. (The Speaker answers.)
Whose? (The Listener asks.)
Mine! (The Speaker says; then asks of his testing Listener): Is there any other?
7 Shifts of the Shoreline Sands
Mid-November 1947
The church was filled to the limits of its capacity. In his resonant voice, word by word, the Reverend Mr. Halliday advanced the service toward its conclusion: “Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant, Frances. Acknowledge, we beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock. Receive her into the arms of thy mercy, into the rest of everlasting peace.” The Amen of the commendation having been said, the six pallbearers took their places beside the coffin. Cued thus, the organist, vox humana, began to play Bach’s chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr, to which minor-key phrases the pallbearers lifted the coffin and began to walk it with conformed footfalls slowly down the aisle.
The congregation stirred, breaking its silence with sighs and muffled coughings and whisperings, the stealthy suppressions suggestive of night—transformed in one’s imagination as the faint ululations of distant owls, the far barkings of bothered dogs—such smothered sounds as seem Death’s worst own, applicable to this funeral’s most heart-stopping particular: suicide.
Now the primary mourners moved from the front pews into the center aisle, forming a ritual line behind the coffin, behind Mr. Halliday: Doctor Leigh first, resolute, head held high, marching by his own insistence alone; Maud immediately following, Morgan supporting her; Ansel Shurtliff next, in company with Lucy Blackett, each holding a twin’s hand—Caroline and Julia having been deemed old enough, at age seven and a half, to attend their maternal grandmother’s funeral (“but not the burial,” Maud had determined); then Lillie Ruth on the arm of Maud’s cousin, Peter Leigh, followed by Tessa and Dennis; then other Leigh relatives and a small contingent of Shurtliff relations headed by Letitia and Lewis Grant. Last, trooping together down the aisle, a veritable army of Doctor Leigh’s professional associates from the Hatherton Hospital and the clinic in Cleveland: fellow surgeons, ad hoc specialists and their disciple interns, nurses, administrative personnel, which parade, after it had passed, freed the remaining congregation to abandon its pews and randomly take to the aisles, center and side.
Outdoors, the November day was not kind. A thin veil of bone-chilling mist hung over the land like a shroud. Facing into the weather, the mourners proceeded from the church to the adjacent cemetery. There, shivering, they came together around the newly dug grave.
At the foot of the grave three men holding shovels stood beside a mound of soil. “If you will, please,” Mr. Halliday addressed them. The shortest of the three men touched his hand to his cap. Atop the coffin the first thud fell. Then a second, and a third. “In sure and certain hope, we commit Frances’s body to the ground; earth to earth. The Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.”
“Is it necessary to wait?” Doctor Leigh put the question to Mr. Halliday in a low voice.
Meaning, as Morgan interpreted the inquiry, until the grave was filled. He tightened his grip on Maud’s hand: she had so stiffened at her father’s question.
“It’s as you feel, Doctor Leigh,” came Mr. Halliday’s reply.
“It will take some time. The weather’s very harsh.” Doctor Leigh emphasized his words by tugging at his cashmere muffler, pulling it up and out from beneath the collar of his chesterfield coat, arranging it for greater warmth around his neck. “I think it would be best to conclude the ceremony as quickly as possible.”
Mr. Halliday said: “If that’s your wish.” He halted the work of the men with a sign of his hand and turned back to the gathered mourners who, following his lead, recited with him the Lord’s Prayer, the murmur of their voices taken by the mist, lost in space. At its conclusion, he opened out his arms and held them, all including: “Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of all comfort, deal graciously, we pray thee, with all those who mourn, that casting every care on thee, they may know the consolation of thy love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
At once, Doctor Leigh turned to Maud and Morgan (flanked by Ansel Shurtliff, Lucy and Lillie Ruth), with the obvious intention of cueing them into step with his own immediate departure.
But Maud, clinging to Morgan, tears in her eyes, announced: “I want to stay.”
“It will make for an awkward situation if you do,” Doctor Leigh advised her.
A crisis, Morgan’s thoughts ran: another crisis of Doctor Leigh’s blind creation, its climax blessedly averted by Lillie Ruth, who touched Maud’s hand and gently, perfectly told her: “There’s all these folks expecting to go to the house, Maudie. Your father wants you with him to receive them.” (“Receiving people” had been one of Mrs. Leigh’s social phrases.) Lillie Ruth’s old voice, heeded by Maud since childhood, influenced her; and Mr. Halliday, who instantly assured her: “I’ll of course remain”—and Morgan, desperate for her, knowing her limits, whispered to her, “I’ll stay with Mr. Halliday, darling.” And Ansel Shurtliff helped by taking her hand from Morgan’s clasp and with his other hand reaching out to Lillie Ruth and then, by achieving the attention of Doctor Leigh (busy now at establishing visual contact with his colleagues) with the out-loud statement (tinged, to Morgan’s ears, with rare censure): “Whenever you’re ready, Douglas.”
The Gordian knot having been cut in his favor, Doctor Leigh at once set off, stepping as to fife and drum smartly forward in the direction of the church parking lot, his goal his home with its certain comforts of lit hearth fires, good food and drink. Behind him, Maud, tears pouring down her cheeks, in the clasped company of Ansel Shurtliff and Lillie Ruth and Lucy.
Properly, the others followed. All of them. As is said, like sheep.
Leaving Mr. Halliday and Morgan standing at the head of the grave. Mr. Halliday broke the silence: “Please go ahead now,” he told the three men. Thuds of earth fell again on the coffin. Within moments, the men struck the true of a rhythmic, rapid pace. Mr. Halliday turned to Morgan: “It never takes as long as one thinks it will,” he said quietly. “You ought to put your hat on, Mr. Shurtliff. It is very cold. If I had mine with me, I surely would”—spoken in the practical, situational voice of a military officer who tells a sub to be “at ease.”
Morgan did put on his hat, and out of reflex of old habit settled himself into the wartime stance of contingent attention: legs parted in a slight V, arms resting at the sides of his body, eyes forward. In his forward-faced view, gleaming above the nearer, older tombstones, was the relatively new obelisk that marked Judge Malcolm’s grave, memories of whom, fleetingly dwelt on now in this day’s sad circumstance, filled him with a deeper than ever sense of loss. Beyond Judge Malcolm’s grave, importantly placed on a rise of ground, was the turn-of-the-century Van Sinderen mausoleum, beneath which ivy-clad marble portico he and Maud, before they were married, used to sit for hours on a broad seraph-footed bench, talking, talking, locked in each other’s arms. Ending his view was the long west side of the church with, rushing upwards, its ruling steeple piercing to shreds the filament veils of the drifting mist. Water, he thought, was Mrs. Leigh’s chosen element, this wet day of her funeral an apt conclusion to her death by drowning.
Over the last six months, she had succeeded in fooling all of them, putting on a face of interest in life, declaring, with a burst of a smile, that yes, she would like to go for a walk or take a drive or come to dinner; going three times with him and Maud into Cleveland to symphony concerts; thrilling Lillie Ruth by playing the piano again (slow music; the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, two or three lento preludes of Chopin, some of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words—pieces learned in her yout
h); and she had taken to reading aloud to Caroline and Julia—Heidi and Black Beauty and The Wind in the Willows, and poems by Longfellow and Whittier—intoning the texts in a voice regained of its strength and velvet allure. She was “irresistibly courteous,” Ansel Shurtliff said of her, his own ceremonial manners mirroring hers on those occasional times when he was visiting in Hatherton and would call on her and imbibe with her a late-afternoon glass of sherry.
Throughout these recent months, Morgan had been continually baffled by Doctor Leigh’s seeming indifference to his wife’s emergence from shadow into sunlight: that he gave no sign of welcoming it; did not rise to greet it; did not partake of it. It was almost as if he begrudged her her reappearance. “The abatement of her mental imbalance.” “Her improved state of mind.” Such were the words he uttered from the sidelines. A couple of weeks ago, Morgan had seen Mrs. Leigh looking at Doctor Leigh wistfully, as if she were viewing him in a distant context of charm and pleasure. They had been married in the summer of the year he had completed his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital and she had graduated from Smith College. It was odd (as Morgan now thought of it) that he did not know how they had met; in just what way chance had thrown them together. A party at the Boston home of a mutual friend? An introduction made by an acquaintance while on a Sunday walk in Fenway Park? Once upon a time they must have been happy. Maud was sure of it, recounting childhood memories of how lively they had been, how they exuded “fun” of watching them kiss; of standing in their open bedroom door when she was five or so and seeing the reflection in the cheval mirror of her mother’s long thick hair unpinned, loosened down over her shoulders, her father playing with it, gathering it up like soft hay into a bundle and burying his face in it laughing.
How well she had fooled them! To a point where, last June, the latest of a long line of nurses (all despised by her) was dismissed; Mrs. Corcoran, though, retained, but only as a stand-in for Lillie Ruth on Lillie Ruth’s days off, and at such times (not infrequent) when Doctor Leigh, pending dawn surgery at the clinic, stayed overnight in Cleveland.
Ah, her cunning! All summer long she had been fascinated by the swallows that nested in the huge old barn at the rear of the Leigh property, praising the construction of the birds’ nests, applauding their dawn-to-dusk energy. She had had Dennis place a wicker chair right in the center of the barn, directly under the crisscross of beams that sustained the grandeur of its Victorian cupola. “My throne,” she called the chair in which she sat for rapt hours watching the swallows. Hirundo rustica was their Latin name. “Come with me, Morgan, and see my birds.” How many times had he gone with her to the barn? Eighteen? Twenty? “Look how they dash”—tracking with her eyes the blue and tan of a fork-tailed streak. “Like comets.” Listen to the young ones, she would say. Such a happy racket! She extolled the barn’s other allurements: the perpetual hum of bees, the comings and goings of mud-daubers always busy at adding to their mud hives, the sleepy fragrance of old straw and old wood, the nostalgic smell of leather saddlery left hanging in the tack-room. Under her enthroned aegis, Julia and Caroline grew too to love the barn. “A magic place,” they called it, using their grandmother’s words. If you had to title the story, it would be called The Summer Weeks of the Barn’s Enchantments, told wonderfully aloud by Frances Leigh. Who could have guessed that her hours spent in the barn involved another story, untold, of a plot in the make. Things, never mentioned: a cinder block lying on the floor beside the old horse-trough; a long length of rope coiled around a wall-spike; a rusted crowbar leaning aslant in the frame of the north window. And directly behind the barn, near the foot of a sassafras tree, the well: lidded over by a round wooden top fitted at the middle with an iron handle.
In mid-October, all on the morning of the same day, the swallows flew away. Just short of a month later (last Monday, after lunch), Mrs. Leigh went to her room to take her ritual afternoon nap. This was the hour known as “sacred” to her family and friends, when she was never to be disturbed. This was the routine time too for Lillie Ruth—Dennis driving her—to go marketing. Monday, too, was Doctor Leigh’s “regular” day at the clinic in Cleveland.
Lillie Ruth and Dennis left the house about two-thirty. They were back by a quarter to four. Lillie Ruth said she had “a feeling” that something wasn’t right the minute she and Dennis walked through the back door. She didn’t even take off her hat or drop her coat, just went straight up the back stairs to the second floor, down the hall to Mrs. Leigh’s room, knocked on the door, got no answer, turned the knob, entered the room’s emptiness: saw the piece of paper on the bed. “My time has come,” was the message written on it. “Dennis,” she had wailed. They went from room to room to room, calling, searching the whole big house, attic to cellar. Closets, too. Nowhere. Outdoors then, running, Lillie Ruth circling the house, calling; Dennis through the garden, running over the lawn’s extent, skirting the outside edge of its hedged boundary, then back, the two of them converging from opposite directions at the barn’s wide front door, left open by Dennis when he’d taken the car out. The barn silent; empty. But: its narrow back door open—the well, uncapped—seen beyond. “Call the police,” Dennis told Lillie Ruth…. No more than ten minutes before Officer Bailey arrived; a bare few more before the ambulance careened into the drive, the fire truck too, sirening, men storming out of the vehicles, running to the back of the barn.
As Officer Bailey put it to Morgan that evening: “The way she did it, Mr. Shurtliff, she couldn’t fail.”
The crowbar: used as a lever to pry up the well’s wooden lid and slide it off to the side. The long line of rope: one end wound around the trunk of the sassafras tree, secured by two knots; a portion of the other end bound and tightly knotted around the ankle of her left leg, the rope’s terminus end threaded through the cinder block’s open center and knotted a resolute three times. On the well’s limestone edging were the scraping marks made when she had shoved the cinder block forward for its advance descent down the well’s shaft, herself following a split-second after, the cinder block striking the water, sinking to the well’s deep bottom, anchoring her with it in liquid entombment.
“It’s nearly done,” Mr. Halliday said.
The men were tamping down the soil with the backs of their shovels. The shortest of the trio again touched his hand to his cap: “We’ll set in the grass turf tomorrow, Reverend. Anything more for now?”
“Thank you, no.” Mr. Halliday spoke to each man: “Much obliged to you Willy, James, Fred.” Morgan shook their hands. Then the men, carrying their shovels, went away.
There was one last thing to be done: the laying onto the grave of a cross of white lilies. “Let’s do it together,” said Mr. Halliday. They stooped and picked it up. The lilies’ heavy scent seemed the most the cross weighed. They placed it on the grave. (“She’s been lifted up, Morgan, like Elijah and Moses, into the Lord’s presence.” So Lillie Ruth had told him yesterday.)
In the last few minutes, the mist had thickened into a drizzle. “You must be at least as cold as I am,” Mr. Halliday remarked. Warmth and a change into dry clothes would be most welcome, he went on to say. But even damp and chilled as they were, they did not hurry away from the grave, but departed it companionably at a meditative pace. “I’m thankful Lucy Blackett’s here,” Mr. Halliday said. “Most thankful for Maud’s sake. Such a strong friendship, theirs. Sisterly. Very rare.” The rhetoric of Mr. Halliday’s sermons flowed, but in conversation he tended to speak in jerks or cognitive clumps. “Until yesterday at your house, I’d not seen Lucy for years,” he went on. (Since the end of the war, Lucy had been living in New York.) “She’s become a great realist. Totally different from the shy illusionist she used to be. I suppose it was her wartime experiences that wrought the change.” They were at the point on the gravel path where it forked—one way to the parish house, the other to the church parking lot. “You’re all right, Mr. Shurtliff?”
“Oh, yes…I was thinking about your word—‘illusionist.’�
�
“Innocent might be a better one to describe how Lucy was. For that matter—how we all once were.” His smile was wan, and like his eyes it roved past Morgan toward the cemetery. “Well, we must think about getting on to Doctor Leigh’s.”
“Yes. I’ll see you there in a few minutes.”
He entered the Leighs’ house to a racket of voices. A white-jacketed caterer’s attendant took his coat and told him that Doctor Leigh was in the library: “That way; the second door on your left.” The hall was filled with doctoral strangers out from Cleveland. A bald, portly man, emanating sympathy, nabbed him: “You’re Douglas’s son-in-law, right? I’m—” (his name lost in the buzz around them). “Awfully sorry about Mrs. Leigh. I met her once a long time ago. Yes, I’m at the clinic. Bones and joints.”
Lewis Grant gripped Morgan’s arm: “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a Mrs. Baxter, Morgan, very befuddled, who says she wants to see you before she goes. She’s over there—”
“Ah. Thanks, Lewis. She’s an old, old friend of Mrs. Leigh’s.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” the bones-and-joints man said.
“Thank you for coming,” Morgan told him. He crabbed his way to Mrs. Baxter’s side.
“Morgan,” she said, and instantly began to cry. “I loved Frances.” She dabbed her eyes, her handkerchief held in a hand crippled by arthritis. “I shouldn’t have come, but I wanted to see Maud for a moment. And now I must go. No, really, I must. I came in a taxi, but your uncle insists on having Dennis drive me home. Is that all right?”
“It’s exactly right. Let me see you to the car.” It took some doing, threading her, cane and all, through the crowded hall and down the steps of the front porch. Under the porte-cochere, Dennis was standing beside the car.
Matters of Chance Page 22
