You know his history. That he was an injured stray found in a roadside ditch back in 1943, his age therefore a thing of estimation. But by that spring of 1958, he was for sure a deep sixteen; more likely seventeen. Now, crippled and in pain, he waited for Maud to return, confident that when she did, she would work on him some magic that would do away with whatever it was that was keeping him a rag, keeping him from running, keeping him quiet, keeping the house quiet too and the people in it, no one of them running around much either these days.
Morgan knew him: knew him for the soul he was: knew that these were some of the things going through his dog’s mind—things that he hoped over and livened to whenever he heard a car come down the lane. Surely this time…
The vet, a tender, realistic man, told Morgan the time had come. Morgan said it must happen at home, in the library, Ralph’s favorite room, over by the west windows that afforded the broadest view across the lawn. Put Ralph’s blanket there. Next Saturday—the first Saturday in May—would be the day it would happen. In the morning.
Ralph was surprised to see the vet here. Usually, he met him there, in that other place, with its peculiar smells and the despised presence, often, of cats. So, though he didn’t make the effort of rising to his feet when the vet showed up in the library, he did wag his tail (something he never did in the circumstance of that other place); wagged it harder when the vet stooped to pat him. But stayed lying down, warm in the morning sun…. They talked for a moment, Morgan and the vet. Then Morgan sat down on the floor. He said, “Ralph. Ralph, boy,” and reached out his hand, took a front paw and held it. Ralph nosed his hand.
It was over in a matter of seconds.
Ralph lay then, dead, looking, if you only glanced, asleep.
Earlier that morning, Dennis had helped Morgan dig a grave in the dog cemetery up on the brow of the hill where the daffodils would soon be blooming. There, in the company of those other beloved, gone canines—Lear, Ripsy, Solo, Duffy, Daisy, Star—now, a new stone marker:
RALPH
1943-May 3, 1958
“In all my life, it was the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” Morgan wrote Julia and Caroline that night.
The soon-to-come trip to Europe with Julia and Caroline created the problem of finding a responsible man who would be a capable protector of Lillie Ruth and Tessa and act too as a general guard of the house and grounds. Someone who would be there night and day. Dennis solved the problem. “My cousin Willis, Mr. Shurtliff. He’s the answer. He’s just been retired as night-watchman at the Ralston plant, not on account of his age, he’s only fifty-seven, the Ralston people wanted him to stay on, but Willis, well, his kids are grown and moved on, and Willis’s wife, she died a dozen or more years ago, and Willis just a little while back took it into his head to look for new work, said he was tired of the same routine he’s kept to for so long,” Dennis ran on, non-stop. “Lillie Ruth and Tessa know all about Wills. He’s one of our church, and the Ralston people if you ask them will give. Willis as good a recommendation as the gold Pullman watch and chain they gave him when he retired.”
Willis Cob. Called “Wills.” By mid-May, Wills was settled in the quarters over the garage that had once, long ago, housed a chauffeur. During the daytime he worked around the place with Dennis. At day’s end, when Dennis went to his own home, Wills took over. Lillie Ruth said: “Don’t you worry about anything’s going wrong here while you’re away, Morgan. Wills’ll see to everything just fine.” The inexactness of her word—“everything”—was an evasion: she knew Morgan wouldn’t hear of her thanking him directly for providing a night-time guardian for herself and Tessa. She put her hand on his arm, light as a dropped autumn leaf, her old eyes regarding him, brimming. It was one of the many times he sat with her, both of them often silent, remembering Maud.
The Cunard liner was huge and beautiful.
To Caroline and Julia he praised the ship as a noble, proud survivor of World War II. All during the war years (he told them) she had crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in conditions hazardous beyond words—thousands and thousands of soldiers aboard her. He personalized her, posing the possibility that she was the very ship that had borne Geoff and Alan home to the States after their release from the POW camp…. And then he spoke of the war’s end and of how she had spent months and months in dry dock being refitted and refurbished as a luxury liner: made again a majesty of the sea. “And what a queen she is!”
Their suite (in first class) consisted of Julia’s and Caroline’s stateroom, his stateroom, and a sitting room. These quarters opened onto a private deck. Caroline said it was as if they were royalty, the way the staff took care of them. Such is the Cunard tradition, Morgan replied, then went on to say that the standard of service was as fine today as it had been thirty-two years ago when he was fifteen and Pip had taken him to Europe on another Cunard liner.
Inevitably, and almost immediately, Caroline discovered the crowd of college students traveling in cabin and tourist classes (Cunard’s strict designations), and it was to those regions of the ship she wended her way in the afternoons. Usually Julia went with her. He encouraged these hours spent with their contemporaries. When they returned from these escapes they regaled him with stories about the people they had met. There was the happy coincidence of finding a just-graduated Bryn Mawr girl (this trip a graduation present from her grand-parents), and believe it or not, a pair of “twin guys—Yalies,” who were, in Caroline’s words, “fantastic fun.” And there were two girls (“English lit majors, University of Michigan”) whose company Julia especially enjoyed; and others. As they told him about these new friends, they would glance at each other: coded messages not always readily (by him) translatable…. A thought formed in his mind—of connection—between the lively nature of these escapes and the fact that they took place in that part of the ship he remembered from his seafaring wartime life as being a ship’s most actual realm, where one was close to the rhythmic workings of the ship’s engines, where one could “feel her pulse” (as Sarkis used to say), where the sea’s lappings against her side were audible, all of which sensations were barely realizable in the elevated remove of first class.
The Atlantic stayed smooth for this June crossing.
Julia and Caroline loved dressing, formally, for dinner each night. He listened to them talking and laughing as they readied themselves to go with him to the splendid dining room. When they emerged from their stateroom in their long dresses, they always looked particularly lovely, charmed and charming. He would hold out his hands to them and, thinking of Maud, he would embrace them. One evening there was a dance, a “gala,” and a worldly, unattached, middle-aged Norwegian man swept Caroline onto the dance-floor, not once but five times. The ship’s photographer took a picture of them—dipping—to music that encouraged knee bends and slides and close flirtation, not quite a tango. Julia danced with a reticent, well-spoken youth from Richmond, Virginia (traveling with his parents). She and the young man looked soft, gliding over the floor, talking as they danced; smiling. The young man’s left hand stayed light and shy in the middle of her back, just above her waist. Held in the Norwegian’s commanding grip, Caroline looked avid. Maud’s word—wired—sprang to mind (Ah, Callie).
High life on the high seas.
But then there were those other times when the three of them sat quietly together on their private deck in the sea-hazy sunlight, times when Maud was present in their minds, times when they would speak of her. Those were the times when he felt about Julia and Caroline that they were his self-appointed protectors, that on this voyage they were not in his keeping, but that he was in theirs: that they were saving him.
…A week in and around London; then Stratford; then Stonehenge on an afternoon of dramatic weather—purple-black clouds and rain that seemed to turn green as it neared the ground; Salisbury (the rise and glory of the cathedral); three more days spent rambling in the English countryside. Then to France: Paris, where for a couple of afternoons and evenings Caroli
ne and Julia linked up again (by prior arrangement) with the shipboard college crowd, augmented by fresh faces. Then by car to Chartres and Orléans and Avallon (Vézelay bypassed as having been too promised to Maud); then, via circuitous roads bordered by poplar trees, back to Paris for the plane-hop to Venice. After Venice, in slow stages, again by car, to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome to Cherbourg for the return voyage to New York.
The trip filled most of the summer.
…“Would you like to read this, Morgan?” Julia asked him in mid-August, when they were back home. “This,” handed to him, turned out to be a kind of diary-notebook, her record of the trip: A Journey, Sea, Land, and Air. “Why, Julia!” he said, deeply pleased: “Yes.” He read it that evening, every word, surprised by the pictorial and atmospheric accuracy of her descriptions of the places and things that had especially captivated her, surprised most by the emotional range of her responses to certain of the trip’s random happenings: her account, for instance, of how she had “desperately bargained” for a finely wrought nineteenth-century silver salamander “spotted” in the window of a side-street antique store in Avallon, the salamander described as being “about six inches long; raised head; large, slanted, slightly protruding eyes; a long mouth receding into the neckless beginnings of its slim body; splayed-out feet, the toes delicate but gripping and inquisitive, like little fingers; a long diminishing tail curling back on itself at the end…The instant I saw it, I knew I wanted it, not only because I like salamanders and this one looked so real, but because of my faith in the myth about salamanders that they can withstand the trial of being put in fire and come out alive. I wanted it as a symbol, to have for myself, for future inspiration. The man in the antique shop stated the very lowest figure he would sell it at, still too steep a price for me to pay from the available money allotted me for purchases on this trip, but Morgan advanced me the difference against my next month’s allowance, so I was able to get it. The man in the shop gave me a padded draw-string bag to keep it in, ‘safe, during your travels’ he told me in English. As I write, the salamander is in front of me, out of its bag, lying on the dark wood of the desk in Callie’s and my hotel room here in Avallon. The way its body shines reminds me of the day Mother and I saw a salamander sunning itself on a rock in the middle of our creek. I was six, maybe seven. We sat on the creek-bank watching it for what seemed to me a long time. It was while we were watching it that Mother told me that flames couldn’t harm it, not flames from the God-made sun, or flames from man-made fires.” (He read these sentences and for a moment was blind, unable to read on until after he cleared the tears from his eyes.)
Caroline told everyone, everyone, that from beginning to end, the trip had been “fabulous” beyond her wildest dreams, “fabulous.” To a special few people she showed the picture of herself dancing in the infatuated arms of the worldly middle-aged Norwegian. His name (she informed the special few) was Niels. Niels Somethingorother. On the last day aboard ship, he had slipped his card into the side-pocket of her purse, but somewhere along the way she had lost it.
(Before they left for Europe, he’d given Miss Sly an itinerary of the trip and the addresses of the hotels where they would be staying. She had fixed him in her strictest gaze: “You will honestly keep me posted about how you are, how you’re bearing up without Mrs. Shurtliff. You will, won’t you.” Thus she opened the way to a correspondence more intimate and in assembly greater than had been amassed between them during the years of the war. City by city, her letters awaited him at the check-in desks of the named hotels. “Dear Mr. Shurtliff—” He wrote her frequently. Cards and letters. “Dear Miss Sly—” Never, ever, did she address him by his first name; unthinkable that he would ever call her “Zenobia.” They cared for each other in a way too unusual for such usual familiarity. Yet it was as he had known it would be—this heightened, more flexible, more assuming relationship that had set in between them since Maud’s death. At sea, on the day before they were due to arrive in New York, he sent her a cable: “If you can, save next Wednesday for lunch. Will telephone to verify. As ever, Morgan Shurtliff.” And so, that following Wednesday, they met, and with their strange ardor, embraced. And, in their usual restaurant, after they were seated, she peered at him for a whole moment, deeply, with the large eyes of a wise lioness gazing from a high position over a large tract of land, reading the terrain, reading him: and then she said: “I can tell…. You’re still aching. Oh, my dear Mr. Shurtliff.”)
Julia and Caroline had two short weeks at home before they went back to college. They opted to go by plane, so he parted from them at the airport. He stood amidst a crowd on an outdoor deck and watched the plane zoom down the runway and rise from the ground. By the time he got to his car, it was well aloft; in another couple of minutes, it had disappeared into a flock of clouds. He thought that from now on, the plane would be the way to go; speed, now, the great impulse; the great thing. No more the train, that old, important, earthbound prolonger of expectation. Think how the train had once been hailed! How Victorians, saluting the wonder of it, had dubbed it “The Iron Horse.” Hail now the plane, celestial, way up there, ripping through the clouds, still ascending. Angels of Heaven, beware!
In October, on a week-end visit, his father spoke out: “You’re drinking far too much these days.”
“Don’t censure me,” Morgan warned.
Dinner was long over. They were in the library, Ansel Shurtliff sitting in a straight-backed chair, Morgan in a wing-chair, sunk in it, staring into the fire, morose, face flushed, forehead damp.
“It wasn’t my intention to censure you, but as you’ve used the word, I assume you’d prefer to be honestly ‘censured’ than silently pitied, by me or anyone else.”
What a barb! “I’m going to bed.”
“It is late. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
He was aware of the graceless way he rose from his chair, aware that as he crossed the room he veered a bit, right to left, and furious when he stumbled on the library’s threshold floorboard. “Shit,” he murmured, not caring that the crude expletive reached his father’s ears; his father sitting there, observing his sloppy exit.
He woke with a headache. He put himself through the drill of a cold shower. He shaved with an unsteady hand. But his memory of the night before was intact: that clash with his father; his father’s sticking barb. He was late getting downstairs for breakfast. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said to his father.
“Have your breakfast, son. We’ve got all day to talk. Or shall we start now?”
“Why not?” It came out hard-spoken, airy and defensive.
His father turned on him a candid look tinged a bit with the mystical (a look known to Morgan as a presager of paternal reminiscence). “All right…I’ll start off by telling you what happened to me after your mother died.” (Of all possible openings, he had not expected this one.) “All things considered, I think I behaved fairly well in the first months after she died. There were so many things to be dealt with, so many honorings owed to the dead, and of course, first and foremost, there was you, a twelve-year-old boy in piteous distress, hurting in your young way as much as I was hurting in my older way. The effort of attending to all such immediate matters sustained me for a while. Kept me on track. Gave me a sense of purpose. But then, about six months down the road, and more or less unexpectedly, I hit trouble. Trouble in the form of myself…I ran into myself coming down the road from the opposite direction and I saw myself in disarray, without much hope of a future of much value. I can’t think of a better way to say it…. It was the endless erratics of adjustment to life without your mother that had finally gotten to me. Most of all, I felt unmanned. Unvirile. That’s when I hit bottom, which is where I think you are now, at the nadir of your grief. But I kept plodding on, doing what I thought were all the right things, trying not to think about myself. Not facing myself, I mean…You’ll never guess who freed me. Your Aunt Letitia! She sat me down one day and lectured me on what she cal
led ‘The Art of Being Selfish.’ Fancy Letitia doing that! She told me to stop being ‘noble.’ She said if I didn’t begin to take an interest in myself, no one would give a hang about me, not even the people I thought I was being noble for. Oh, she was mean, the way she lit into me.” Here, Ansel Shurtliff laughed: “You know the way she dresses up for every occasion…. Well, for the delivery of her lecture to me she’d gotten herself up in a red dress, that big diamond brooch she’d inherited pinned on her bosom. She looked like one of the Roman Furies—that blood-red dress and that dazzling brooch underscoring every word she said, plus the way she kept shaking her finger in my face, telling me off…. Your egg’s gotten cold…. I think I’ve made my point, except to say that in my opinion, for what it’s worth to you, the time’s come for you to make some root and branch changes in your life…. Shouldn’t you ask Tessa to boil you another egg?”
That was the Saturday morning start of what, afterwards, he thought of as “the crisis week-end,” perpetrated by his father.
On Sunday afternoon, just before he stepped into his Jaguar for the drive to his home, Ansel Shurtliff made his final speech: “Don’t make the mistake of living in the past, Morgan. It’s a futile, fatal thing to do. Let Maud go, loved as she will always be…. And now I’m going—I hope not entirely to your immense relief.”
Then that handshake. The Jag’s engine’s purr. A last glance.
“Good-bye until soon, Pa.”
Matters of Chance Page 36
