Mrs. Baxter greeted him. “Thank you so much, Dennis. I’m such a nuisance. Will you and Maud come to see me soon, Morgan? And bring the children.”
“We will, I promise, very soon.” He unfolded Mrs. Leigh’s old plaid rug and spread it over Mrs. Baxter’s knees. “Good-bye.” Dennis eased the car forward.
Back in the house, Babs Waring stopped him. “Why haven’t you got a drink?”
“I haven’t had a chance to get to the source.” He was immensely fond of Babs.
“Take this.” She thrust the glass she was holding into his hand. “It’s bourbon. Just poured. I’ve had two, so I’m well fortified. I hate funerals. Maud told me she wanted a small service, family and Mrs. Leigh’s close friends. Not this horde.” She looked around: “This medical mob…I doubt the ones from the clinic ever even met Mrs. Leigh.” Then, caustically: “Doctor Leigh always manages to get his way, doesn’t he? I could have wrung his neck back at the cemetery. Sorry. I’ll worry I said that.” She shifted gears: “I told Maudie that as soon as the two of you can, there’s a man I want you to meet.”
“Ah.” He knew Babs well. “Someone you really like,” he stated, smiling.
“Yes. A lot.” (Babs’s husband, Bob Waring, had been killed in Germany the last winter of the war.) “He’s a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He’ll be coming to Cleveland over the Christmas holidays. Maybe then?”
“For sure. You look terrific, Babs. I’m very glad for you.”
“I’m awfully glad for myself, Morgan.” She peered at him: “You’re exhausted, aren’t you. I’ve made a date with Maudie for lunch next Wednesday.” She kissed him on the lips: “You’d better circulate.”
…“Mr. Shurtliff? We’ve not met before, but Douglas has told me so much about you, I feel I know you. I’m Imogene Truffant. I work in administration at the clinic.” She was wearing a black pleated skirt and a pink blouse with a frilled front that emphasized her considerable mammary endowments. Morgan put her age at around forty. “It’s too bad about Mrs. Leigh.” She lowered her voice: “The circumstance, I mean. Douglas is being so heroic, don’t you agree? Of course, she’s been mental for so long, it must almost be a relief to Douglas…. This is such a beautiful house,” she yammered on, footed beside him as if forever. “This is the first time I’ve seen it—”
“Lucy,” he said, thankful for the sight of her. He attempted an introduction: “Miss Blackett, Miss—”
“We’ve met,” Lucy said, cold as ice. “Your father’s looking for you, Morgan.”
“Truffant. Imogene Truffant,” the woman impressed on Morgan.
“That was a ruse,” Lucy told him as they walked away. “Your father’s not looking for you. I got trapped by that woman earlier on. She’s something else. I think she has it in mind to be the second Mrs. Leigh. “Douglas,” Lucy cooed, pursing her lips, imitating the way Miss Truffant had said Doctor Leigh’s name. “The trick is to keep her away from Maud.”
“Where is Maud?”
“In the living room with the real people.”
“I need another drink.”
They angled their way to a make-shift bar set up by the caterers in a bay-windowed alcove at the end of the hall. From out of the library Doctor Leigh appeared, the boom of his voice urging a trail of his fellows forward toward the bar and the dining room. Bernard Carlin, one of Doctor Leigh’s Shaker Club cronies, said: “Here come the healers, Miles Dawson with them. He’s in charge of my wife’s ulcer. I’m shoving off.” Morgan told the bar-attendant that he would pour his own drink, and did. Lucy, viewing the generous splash, murmured: “Easy, love. You’ve still got a long way to go.”
The living room best reflected Mrs. Leigh’s younger years. In it were the possessions her family had given her at the time of her marriage, or that had come to her later by inheritance: a fine set of Hepplewhite side chairs; austere portraits of her Puritan ancestors; a splendid pastoral painting by Bibie; her Steinway piano; a gem of an open-fronted Biedermeier cabinet containing her collection of Victorian hand-painted boxes and eccentric porcelain animals (notably an orchestra of antic monkeys). The room’s spacious extent was divided into islands of grouped chairs and couches. From the doorway, Morgan scanned the faces of the room’s occupants: Peter Leigh, the Howes, the Caspers, Mr. Halliday, Mrs. Blackett (Lucy’s mother), Ansel Shurtliff, Lillie Ruth, Letitia and Lewis Grant, two of his cousins (one out from Cleveland, the other come from Cincinnati), Bill Minot (his one-time rival for Maud’s hand, Bill still a bachelor, still Maud’s favorite tennis partner); the rest of the sizable company composed of what Lucy called “Hatherton’s old guard,” now grouped in a circle around Maud. Included in the circle were Clara Malcolm (in the widow’s black she had kept to since Judge Malcolm’s death) and Mrs. Beresford and Fanny Coates (always referred to by Mrs. Leigh as “my dear, dear friend”). It flashed through his mind to wonder what the members of this circle of Mrs. Leigh’s intimates would say in answer to Maud’s question put to him last Monday night in her first wild grief: “What made her do it, Morgan? What was it that made her do it?” He had not told her his immediate sprung-to-mind answer, which came from Thomas Middleton (that acerbic Jacobean dramatist Geoff Barrows had recently put him on to) who, in his play The Changeling, gives to De Flores the famous, double-edged line to say: “Y’are the deed’s creature.” He had only wordlessly held her in his arms and in the dark stroked her hair and at the spent end of her lamentation, at her vivid request, made love to her, she savagely, and he with her—pagans countervailing Death.
He entered the room, went straight to Maud, kissed her, and stood silently behind her, his hands on her shoulders. Fanny Coates was launched on the sea of a story about going with Mrs. Leigh years ago to an auction at which Mrs. Leigh had somehow managed to twice purchase the same pair of Meissen candlesticks. “It was the rampant way she bid that got the auctioneer and his assistant confused beyond redemption. Not to mention the unfortunate man she was bidding against. We were all drawn into the muddlement, Frances too, laughing at herself, looking awfully pretty in a brown velvet hat banded with blue flowers. The auctioneer insisted on starting the bidding over again from scratch, and we all applauded the second time he banged down his gavel and called out—‘Sold, once, and at one price, to the lady in the beautiful hat.’ Frances was radiant.”
Under his hands, Maud’s shoulders were level; relaxed. “I’m sure I remember that hat,” she said.
“In those days, Frances’s hats were her signature,” Fanny Coates went on. “I can’t think now of the woman’s name who made them for her.”
“Mrs. Polhemus,” Mrs. Beresford shot in.
“Good for you, Ella. Vera Polhemus. She kept a parrot in the back of her shop. A vulgar, noisy bird.”
Maud’s laughter came, unrestrained, marvelous to hear.
The talk ran on, others joining in, developing as in a fugue the subject of Mrs. Leigh’s hats. The group broke up when Fanny Coates announced that she must depart. “If I can,” she said. “I’m stuck” (in the couch’s deep cushions) “like Theseus in the Chair of Forgetfulness.” She laughed. Morgan and Bill Minot hoisted her to her feet. She whispered to Morgan, “May I have a private word with you?” Which, in the front hall, standing close to him, she bespoke: “It’s about Frances’s suicide, Morgan—” She broke off, opened her purse, withdrew an unsealed envelope and handed it to him. “I’ve written down my thoughts about it for Maud. It might help her to—understand. But you read it first, please. You might think it too much for her to bear.” And before he could say a word, she charged on: “Now please, please don’t dream of seeing me to my car. I can manage perfectly well on my own. It was only getting out of that couch—” She turned from him, went rapidly to the front door, opened it—letting in a whiff of cold dusk air—closed it, and was gone. The envelope fitted perfectly into the breast pocket of his suit coat.
The roisterings coming from the dining room suggested a cocktail party in full swing. In the gentler
dignities of the living room, the sound resonated almost as an embarrassment. His aunt, Letitia Grant, said to him: “There’s always some note struck at gatherings like this that’s out of tune with one’s own feelings.” Clara Malcolm was kissing Maud good-bye, Mrs. Blackett at her heels. The hands of the mantel clock were joined at 5:25. There was a general stir of departure. From his stand in the dining room, through its wide doorway, Doctor Leigh must have seen the hall filling up with the living room’s occupants: must have noticed how coats were claimed, the action of arms finding their way into sleeves and then the arms stretched out to Maud—recipient of final embraces. For he came into the hall, effusive and a bit breathless, like an elder senator of thundery repute who has torn himself from committee in order to greet a visiting body of constituents—or rather to see them off—apologizing for having had so little time to spend with them. He was somewhat overwhelmed, he explained, by the large turn-out of his clinic colleagues. “Impossible to be everywhere at once…Good-bye. Most grateful for your support,” he kept saying, dry-eyed, shaking hands. “Good-bye.” From inside the front door he delivered a last wave to no one in particular, hence to everyone in general.
“We must go too,” Morgan told him.
“Is it so late?” he asked, frowning at the sight of Maud and Lucy and Ansel Shurtliff putting on their coats.
“Nearly six.”
“Really! I’d no idea.”
Maud’s voice came clear: “The children and Tessa—” she began.
“Naturally,” Doctor Leigh cut her off. “I do wish though you’d stay a bit longer. There are two or three people I’d particularly like you to meet. No? Well, another time.” Then, to Lucy and Ansel Shurtliff: “You’ll be here another day or two? Splendid. So I’ll surely see you.”
Maud tried again: “We’ll be having dinner at seven. It would be nice if you could join us.”
“I doubt I’ll be able to—”
“Or drop by later for a nightcap,” Morgan interjected, thinking ahead to how empty the large house would be, feeling an impulse of pity for its relic occupant.
A needless concern, as proved by Doctor Leigh’s sure reply: “I’m planning to turn in early. Must get back to normal. I’ve a full schedule next week.” He kissed Maud and Lucy, each in the same way, a light laying-on of his firm lips to their cheeks. He wrung Ansel Shurtliff’s hand; then Morgan’s, at the same time saying: “There are some legal matters I’d like to ask you about.”
“The weekend,” Morgan said.
“Fine. Good night. Good night.” Before they were out the door he had turned from them and was on his way back, hurrying, to the dining room.
He thought she was asleep, but in the dark there was the sudden presence of her voice, low but terribly active—like the hum of a high-velocity top spinning on such a muffling surface as a square of linoleum or the cover of a many-paged book—telling him what of the day she remembered as hideous, what enlightening, what inexcusable, what clear, what dim, what shattering: “My father, Morgan…I won’t ever again be able to kid myself into thinking I like him or can trust him. Not after today. There, I’ve said it—” her sigh a desolation, the top beginning to wind down, the murk of her voice now almost a dreamer’s as, through a few more rotations still out-loud remembering, she finally dropped over into sleep.
Wednesday evening, 12 November 1947
Dear Maud,
I want to keep this letter as brief as possible. It is necessary that I tell you a bit of personal history. When I was in my late twenties, I suffered a lengthy period of depression that was called back then “a nervous collapse.” There was no readily seeable cause for it, no reason I could give then (or now) for it. It simply came on me, a darkness at noon. The clouds hung over me for several months, then went away. The nerve specialist into whose care my distraught family had placed me pronounced me cured, at the same time warning me and my family that what he called “my proneness toward depression” would in all likelihood trouble me all my life and be something of a constant struggle to overcome. I cannot deny the truth of his prophecy. A great part of my adulthood has been given over to the struggle, the worst part of which is fear of backsliding into gloom.
The last time I saw your mother (a week ago today), she confided to me her “terror” that she was lapsing back into isolation. She used that word, isolation. She said she couldn’t stand the thought of another nurse being brought in to police her, that her idea of living was not to linger on “crazy.” My own experience with such sufferings credits me the right to say that I understand her preference to spare herself the prolonged effects of a condition painful beyond my ability to describe. What she did took courage. I am absolutely sure that she employed the last of her clarity of mind to leave this world solely for her own self’s sake.
I have no tolerance for anyone who might presume to think himself good enough or wise enough to pass moral judgment on her mode of exit.
Affectionately yours, Fanny Coates
He read the letter the next morning, and over the next few hours pondered the wisdom of giving it to Maud. In the end, he sought Lucy’s advice.
They took an afternoon walk together while Maud rested. At the edge of the open meadow he handed the letter to Lucy with the question: “Should I give this to Maud?” They stood in place as she read it, the wind rattling the two pages held in her gloved hands. “Oh,” she murmured, half-way through it, struck; and when she had finished: “What a shit problem.”
It made him laugh—her slinging of the apt profanity, employed for precisely the purpose it had achieved—of making them both laugh, lifting the load of the letter’s burden and giving her the lead to ask: “Did you develop the habit of the four-letter word during the war? To the point, I mean, where you had to think when you got home, not to let one slip out?”
Morgan laughed again: “Sort of. I had a gunner, a guy named Sutter”—he relished Sutter’s name on his tongue again—“who had a terrific command of obscenities, enough for all of us. He could string them together the way Cartier strings pearls. One perfectly matched flit after another.”
“I knew an RAF paratrooper in London who could too. He told me he’d perfected his talent as a youth at Eton. He got himself killed in the Normandy landings, four-lettering to the end, I’m sure. I’ve thought a lot about the war these last three days. It’s being back with mother—” She touched his arm: “Careful—a woodchuck hole.”
“Go on with what you were saying.”
“About being back with mother, you mean, and thinking about the war? It’s no big revelation, only that it’s made me see more clearly than ever that if it hadn’t been for the war I’d still be living with her, still be playing the role of the dutiful daughter, growing African violets and taking harp lessons and being jealous of my married friends and going quietly mad…. Just being under the same roof with her—” Lucy made a gesture of helplessness. “Oh, Morgan, you know how black and white her standards are, and about me and the war and men and sex”—underscored by inflection and with a frown—“my late discovery of it and the way I’ve used it, not always wisely. Mother hasn’t an inkling of all that. She’s still stunned that I’m not living with her; she speaks of my living in New York as a ‘phase’ I’ll get over. And she’d drop dead if she knew about Gerry. Her daughter in a messy affair with a married man? Unthinkable.”
Lucy’s relationship with Gerald Davis was one of the many conditions of surprise of the war’s aftermath, long since accepted by him and Maud for what it was: change: a familiar shoreline whose sands a hurricane has shifted…. They had met in England in 1944 and become lovers: Gerry, an American army lieutenant; married; father of two young children; an architect by profession, his work and home well established in New York before the war, and Gerry, at war’s end, returned to life as he had left it; Lucy, to be near him, living now and working (still for the Red Cross) in New York. “How is Gerry?” Morgan asked.
“Hopelessly the same, abetted by me. Unable to spli
t up his home—he adores the kids—both of us sort of settled with things as they are, not pushy about a solution. We always love seeing you when you’re in New York.”
“I have to be there in a couple of weeks. I talked to Maud a couple of days ago about going with me. She wants to, but it’ll depend on Julia and Caroline. It’s still a bit early to tell what’s going on in their heads and hearts about Mrs. Leigh’s death. So far, they seem all right. They keep asking a lot of questions, more or less on the order of the one Caroline asked me this morning—”
“What was it?”
He smiled. “‘How much do angels weigh?’ she wanted to know.”
Lucy smiled too: “What did you tell her?”
“The truth. That I didn’t know. That I’d never wondered. She seemed awfully pleased that she’d thought of something I hadn’t.”
“Caroline would. They’re so different, aren’t they, Callie and Julia? I don’t know why I assumed that as twins they’d be more alike. But they’re night and day.”
“Which do you think is which?”
“As if you don’t know! Julia’s the night. Callie’s the day. Completely noon-time.” Lucy laughed: “When she grows up, she’ll be a really flamboyant woman. Julia’s the deep one.”
They walked on, in accord, with a companionate ease. And after a moment. “It’s great between you and Maud, isn’t it.” Lucy stated.
“Yes. Very.” But because she had sounded so wistful, he humanized his so-positive response with: “Not that the seas of marriage always run smooth.” A crow flew over, calling. From an unseen tree a second crow answered the call of the flying one. “Crow talk,” he said. Then: “About the letter, Luce. Unless you persuade me to the contrary—”
Her perceptions had always been as sharp as a chef’s knife: “But we agree,” she cut in: “You mustn’t give it to Maud. The problem is Fanny Coates.”
Matters of Chance Page 23
