Maud would be back on Thursday. He fell asleep thinking of her, missing her, finally, the most.
Sometime around the beginning of October they moved Lillie Ruth into what she called “the bliss” of her new home. “For good and all, we’re with each other,” she told Maud: “Together, under the same roof.” When it had come time to “decorate” the rooms (Lillie Ruth’s word again), Maud had consulted her at every step. Curtains, rugs, furniture. (“It must all be to Lillie Ruth’s liking,” had been Maud’s dictum.) From her small house, by way of wordly goods, Lillie Ruth brought very little: her Bible, her clothes, her Sunday hats (some dating back to Mrs. Leigh’s time), and one solid chair, wooden-armed and wooden-backed, its frayed cushions replaced by new ones covered in the same floral fabric she and Maud had chosen for the curtains that adorned the windows of: “my parlor”—which proud word she applied to the room where she would sit on future occasions with the few “outside folk” who mattered to her: those of her time who were still flourishing: her Baptist minister and some of the older singers in her church choir (in which she still sang). “Deep River.” “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder / Soldiers of the Cross.” “My savior Lord / Be with me.” Spirituals that had long inspired her.
In Morgan’s eyes, hers was a joyful faith of immense possibility, modestly aspired to—one whose bright, mortal impulse he had experienced, even fancied he understood. In the last four or five years, he had become less and less able to stomach religion of the melancholy pulpity kind that offers windy, cunning answers to eternal riddles, answers which, in their narrowness, seemed often (to him) to exclude the potential for different answers; and worse: that robbed conjecture of frolic.
Lillie Ruth’s presence in their home augmented the pleasure he took from the house itself: heightened its rooms in feel to a sweeter measure than ever. He couldn’t tell whose delight was the greater: his, or Maud’s, or Lillie Ruth’s.
Before they went away, he had imagined the letters Julia and Caroline would write home to him and Maud.
The letters would be long ones, filled with interesting information and fascinating observations and amusing anecdotes about every aspect of their lives’ new circumstance. Page by page, the letters would reveal the individual states of their minds and hearts.
What a fantasy!
Letters? Oh, no time for the writing of letters (they separately declared). But notes, yes: “Whenever possible.” (Whenever possible turned out to be not often.)
Ah, though: the telephone! They did, frequently, call home. Julia’s voice. Caroline’s. A few minutes then of voluminous talk, after which, with the ’phone put back in its cradle, he and Maud would review what they had just been told, what words they had just heard, by which clues they would come to a few conclusions about how each twin was “adjusting” to college life: how fitting in and getting on, keeping up; staying afloat. And then they would smile or frown or sigh a sigh of satisfaction or confusion, depending on the way it seemed to them the plot (“My dear Watson; my dear Holmes”) was momently thickening.
(…It was a fine, frosty, moonlit night in early November. They were returning home at a late hour from a dinner party. The driving was easy. They had gone for several miles without speaking: one of those calm, wedded silences he deeply loved—gently broken when Maud, in the voice of a dreamer who wakes to the surprise of being awake, said: “I was so sure I’d miss them terribly. Terribly.”
[Caroline and Julia, he knew she meant.] “And you don’t?” he asked.
“No. Oh, I do think of them a lot, but not in the hourly way I’d imagined I would. What about you?”
“Ah, Maud. My love! I too was sure I’d miss them terribly.”
“And you don’t,” she stated.
Verbatim, he told her: “No. Oh, I do think of them a lot, but not in the hourly way I’d imagined I would.”
“Stop the car,” she said.
He did.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He did.
And it was then, in the shared experience of surprise at how their parental suppositions had betrayed them, that he told her, laughing, about the fabulous letters he had imagined Julia and Caroline would write home.)
A few informing words engraved on stiff white cards summed the complex, decade-long story of his professional life:
KISSEL AND CHANDLER
HEREBY ANNOUNCES THAT
THE FIRM NAME WILL CHANGE:
EFFECTIVE JANUARY 1, 1958
THE FIRM
WILL BE KNOWN
AS
KISSEL, CHANDLER, SHURTLIFF & COLT
The announcements, many in number, were mailed from the Cleveland office on the last Monday of November. There followed many verbal and written congratulations, all sunshine, and for a while, grand to bask in.
In mid-December, Caroline and Julia came home for the Christmas/ New Year’s holidays.
Early in the morning, at the Cleveland Terminal, he and Maud stood together, peering through a set of barrier windows that provided a steamy downward view onto the depot tracks where newly arrived trains were stopped. It was like watching the opening action of a movie. They both saw the twins at the same time: “There they are!”
Rollicky was the way Caroline and Julia looked, and lit, stepping down from the open door of a tail-end Pullman car onto the long train-side platform, the porter handing them their suitcases (Morgan watched them decide not to wait for a redcap), then starting to walk forward, chummy, side-by-side, coming on, getting gradually closer, veering a bit to the left as they approached the ramp that led upwards into the terminal’s rotunda, and, as they mounted the ramp, attempting to run, laughing because they couldn’t—run—burdened as they were by their suitcases and what seemed (to him) to be a mind-boggling number of smaller bags slung on straps from their shoulders. “Callie’s cut her hair!” he heard Maud say. Julia’s, though, was longer than ever, a fair cascade smoothed back from her face and held at the nape of her neck by a wide amber clip. The clip made him think of Miss Sly, which thought occupied him, in a sense, emotionally, detaining him—Maud had left his side. Being tall, he was able to see her standing in a crowd—over there—at the top of the ramp, her arms opened out to Caroline and Julia, who were now just entering the rotunda. The flash of Julia’s amber hair-clip again caught his eye. But now—he immediately noticed—the clip was askew, dangling down at a slant in her hair. Its clasp had come undone. And then the clip fell—he saw it fall—onto the terminal’s tiled floor, and he moved swiftly forward, head down, intent, swiftly to retrieve it before it would be stepped on and crushed, there were so many people moving erratically around. So it was from a bent position, and belatedly, that he stood up to kiss Caroline, then Julia, and then to hand to Julia, to her surprise, her amber hair-clip—
—all in a second remembering himself as a fourteen-year-old boy, shaking, as, on stage, faced toward the filled assembly hall of his boarding school, he recited from memory a poem of Browning’s. “Memorabilia” was the poem’s title…. It was weird, really weird, there in the noisy, bustling terminal, the way the poem sprang so completely to mind….
In the car, driving home, Caroline and Julia and Maud talked and talked, skipping from subject to subject, a kind of spirited verbal hopscotch. And all the time, dominant above their voices, the poem stayed steady in his mind. And when they were out of the city, out in the country, he stopped the car at a spot he deemed safe and shifted his torso around toward the back seat, toward Julia and Caroline (Maud at his side) and, urgently—really in order to rid himself of the poem—appealed to them: “Indulge me! Allow me to test my memory by reciting a poem to you.” And as they looked at him, smiling, he announced (just as he had years ago, in his school’s assembly-hall): “‘Memorabilia,’ by Robert Browning:
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop to speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!
But you were
living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter.
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
’Mid the blank miles round about:
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
Well, I forget the rest.”
He recited each verse easily, not once hesitating. Stunned himself a bit thereby, then fell silent, joining Maud and Julia and Caroline in their silence: an intimate silence, eccentric to the four of them, familiar and tranquil and trusting. No need, therefore, for him to explain the why of his compulsion to recite the poem aloud to them (the “why” anyhow too prodigiously complicated, even for his own understanding). And after a moment he said: “Thank you, ladies,” and laughed with them and ran his thumb over Maud’s cheek, then looked again at Julia and Caroline: “It’s terrific, the four of us, together again,” he said. He turned in his seat and started the car, Maud and Julia and Caroline talking again, himself now a participant, all of them animated and excited, speeding down the stretch of road that ran parallel to the banks of the ice-rimmed Chagrin River, anticipating the sight, soon, of the marking griffin-gates of their home-lane: entry into the making of new memories.
(Ah! that amber hair-clip, picked up like that eagle’s feather! About almost everything else of that morning of the twins’ return—“Well, I forget the rest.”)
Amid the seasonal decorations of hung mistletoe and scarlet-berried holly and fragrant pine boughs brought in from the woods and ferny ropes of evergreens wound around the staircase banister; amid, in a sky of a million stars, the single liturgically brilliant one on which the Magi trained their eyes for guidance to the stable wherein lay the Babe, imagined each year newborn; amid, between families and friends, the house-to-house, place-to-place travels (great personal seekings); amid all the feasting and earthly plenty of Christmas and of New Year’s toasts and high resolutions and elegiac rememberings of bygone days: amid all these multifarious distractions, Morgan’s and Maud’s attention dwelt most on Julia and Caroline.
They couldn’t help comparing the Julia and Caroline of Now with the Julia and Caroline of Yore—Yore being so recent a time as last summer, though in relation to how much each twin had changed during the intervening three and a half months, last summer seemed to belong to the distant past—all the contrasting qualities that had previously distinguished them were now so fully particularized, so greatly enlarged. Morgan was sure that, now, a stranger meeting them for the first time would not at once take them to be twins, but instead as two strongly resembling sisters who had been closely conceived, born eleven or so months apart. Oh, with each other they were as perceptive and as intimately capable as ever, but the old interacting alchemy of their twinship no longer inextricably combined them: each had become her own mistress.
Each was conscious of this great change, and each, in her distinct way, attributed the coming about of the change to their residing at college in separate dormitories. Caroline lauded the arrangement—all but raised the flag over the success of it: “By living apart, we’re individually known and individually regarded. I’m me, and Julia’s Julia. It’s perfect!” Julia spoke of the arrangement in a way far more personal: “By being on my own, I’m finding out a lot about myself, some of it sort of strange to get used to.”
Each had made her own set of friends. By description, Caroline’s set sounded older than Julia’s set; older, not so much in age as in the Serpent sense: whether by instinct or by rehearsal, Caroline simply knew a whole lot more about the world’s workings than Julia did, which knowledge showed most in her humor—in the fast way she picked up double-meaning possibilities (quizzical lift of her eyebrows, a gambit smile, then her laughter, proportionately, disarmingly decorous, but still definitely on target). She was faster than ever, too, at protesting what she considered to be a spoken or written fallacy. (“Ah, but Callie! Be gentler,” Morgan advised her: “Adversative keenness is stimulating, but if it’s so mordantly expressed, you’ll never persuade us to your side.”) She was vivid! And in a way catching. In her presence, people of all ages seemed to become more alive: it was as though by being near her, some smoldering ember in themselves took on fresh fire. She was equipped, (Morgan thought) to move mountains. (With a bit of luck, and if, if she learned discretion, she just might, someday, really might move mountains.)
Discretion was Julia’s inborn gift. Julia: still soft, still actually innocent, but (and the proviso of that “but” was enormous) in imagination so talented that, while being still a resident of Eden, she could intuit, could feel the contrasting, impending atmospherics of life outside the Garden. This talent had the effect of causing her to seem at times…sad. Not in the gloomy sense. Her capacity for pleasure was too rich to allow for anything as cheap as gloom. In the awed sense—sad; made sober by her young discovery about life that as marvelous as it is, and thrilling, it is also a very problematic affair, often unsafe and as often distorting: a hall of mirrors…. She was a keen, accurate observer and a terrific listener. And like all people who are more interested in others than in themselves, she was everybody’s confidante. Well, to a degree: discernment being also her gift, she knew the difference between what was important to hear, to lend mind or sympathy to or to rejoice over, as against what was a waste of time to listen to. Yet even with the backing of that innate discernment, the fact remained that when she was drawn in, it was all the way and with a strong tendency for keeps. (And in some future time, drawn in by passion for some as yet unmet love—well, that would be the moment when Fate would declare itself: when Fate might rule.)…One Sunday afternoon, she and Morgan took a walk together and she told him: “I want to be a writer.” “I’m not surprised,” he said. Then, quickly, she said: “I won’t mind if you tell Mother, but please, Morgan, don’t tell anyone else, not even Pip.” He said: “It’s a difficult, wonderful thing to want to be. I’m flattered you’ve told me. I’ll leave it to you to tell Maud in your own time; she’d like best to hear it from you…. Does Callie know?” he risked to ask. Julia shook her head: “No.” (It was then, due to the final tone of her answer, that he took in the real extent of how far apart she and Caroline had come to be.)
During the holidays, there were of course whole intervals of time that resembled—except for the weather—last summer’s days. The young crowd, as nomadic as ever, came and went and came again and again went away, but now, when they stayed, they skated on the iced-over pond or carried on sexual flirtations by hurling softly formed snowballs at each other. One day they made a big snowman of the W. C. Fields type, complete with a cigar between his sculpted, red-painted lips and on his head, somebody’s father’s cast-off top hat. And next to W. C. Fields, they made a snow-woman: Mae West (the size of whose breasts Maud made them modify, plus removing the stuck-on tits: two purple plums). Sometimes, driven indoors by the cold, they would all sit around on the floor before a blazing fire and talk and talk, or put on records and dance; once in a while, after a peppery choosing-up of sides, they would play very sophisticated games of Who Am I? or of Dumb Crambo. There were whole hours when the tiled area of the front hall looked like the floor of a badly run sports emporium that specializes in arctic footwear, there would be so many pairs of kicked-off boots and overshoes lying around in melted-snow puddles.
Caroline was enormously popular—a siren in the lads’ eyes—hotly sought after as a date for nighttime parties and dances. Julia went to fewer parties (“As many as I want to go to,” she said), usually with her friend Bruce Wilson, who was serious and peculiarly confident. Morgan and Maud’s old rule about midnight’s being the hour to be home from evening parties was extended to one A.M.: NO LATER THAN! They were most always in bed, often awake, always chaste, awaiting
Julia’s knock on their bedroom door and her softly spoken: “I’m back”—(often earlier than the deadline hour), and for Caroline’s knock (rarely earlier—three times almost dangerously later) and her similar, reporting words.
Over the holidays Doctor Leigh, ever on the fly, put in a few vigorous appearances. Ansel Shurtliff came for Christmas and stayed on to welcome in the New Year, for which event Geoff and Alan arrived from New York on December 30, bringing with them late Christmas presents, distributed—festively—to one and all that evening after dinner. Alan handed Morgan an old, thin, leather-bound, worn, but still intact book: “I found it in a secondhand bookshop down in the Village. It’s a queer little production.”
Morgan, extremely curious, opened the book to its first page and read out loud its title: “A Digest of Celtic Names; Compiled by Ian MacNaghten, Esq.; Privately Printed—1909.”
“Turn to page twelve,” Alan said.
On page twelve, marked in the margin by a filled-in circle of faded India ink, he saw his name: MÔ-GN [Welsh]: A dweller on the sea.
He read it to himself, and sat there, silent, hugely surprised: until that moment, he had had no knowledge that his given name was Welsh in origin, let alone, what, in Welsh, it meant.
He heard his father’s voice, his laughter: “You look dumbfounded, Morgan! We’re all panting to know what you’ve found page twelve.”
He passed the book, opened to the stated page, to Ansel Shurtliff. “Did you know this, Pa?”
Matters of Chance Page 33
