“Back up, Lillie Ruth. Tell me how it came to be that Doctor Leigh bought the property—”
“Oh he just went and did it, Morgan, all on his own. I didn’t know a thing about it until he came to see me a week ago last Tuesday—the day before your Mr. Chandler died. That’s when he gave me the envelope and explained to me what he’d done. He didn’t give me a minute to say anything. He only put on his hat and walked out the door. He hasn’t been back since. I was so flabbergasted I didn’t know for a while what to think or how to feel—”
“How do you feel about it now?”
“That’s what I want to talk over with you, Morgan. I’ve thought and thought about it—”
“And?”
She waited a second, then raised her right arm, bent at the elbow, the palm of her hand showing—a pulpit gesture: “I think he did it for Mrs. Leigh. After all the time that’s gone by since she died, he’s been talking about her lately. I guess it’s on his mind, her drowning herself and him so bent on his own life he didn’t see well enough how troubled she was. Getting older like he is, Judgment Day staring him in the face, I reckon he’s scared.” She paused, then preached: “Where I’ll live, Morgan—we should let it stay settled the way he’s settled it. Just let it be.”
Her complete understanding of Doctor Leigh’s motive and the veracity of her simple description of it, formed the base of an argument he could not refute (pissed though he personally was by his father-in-law’s chicane method of atoning). He said: “We’ll let it be.” Then: “I’ll telephone Doctor Leigh and make a date to see him. If he doesn’t volunteer to tell me he’s bought the property for you, I’ll have to bring it up. I need your permission to do that. May I?”
“Yes. And I’d like you to tell him for me that I’m grateful to him. I’ll tell him myself the next time he comes out, but I’ll rest easier if he knows it in the meantime.”
“I’ll tell him,” he said, his mind racing (his pulse too), thinking of all the other people who must be told (and as soon as possible) of his decision to sell the house, feeling the pressure of the speeded up necessity to do so—the sudden necessity just one of the several consequences resulting from Doctor Leigh’s precipitously interposed act of buying the property for Lillie Ruth. He stated aloud the names of the first two people on his list: Tessa and Dennis. “They’re very much on my mind,” he said. “I’ll tell them next week I’m going to sell the house.”
She responded at once: “It won’t surprise them. They know how it is for you, that with Maudie gone you can’t be happy here anymore.”
(He dared not comment on her concluding words.) What he strove to do next was to lead her, gently, into the matter of his conviction that she should not live alone. “I’m especially concerned about Tessa,” he said: “About where she’ll live—”
“Oh, I know where she’d most like to live—”
“Where?”
“With me. Live with me.”
He was as fast as a bass snapping at dawn bait: “And would you like her to live with you?”
“More than anything.”
“It’s done!” he said. “I promise you I’ll arrange it.”
She had a way of showing jubilation better than anyone else he knew. She gave him a smile, brilliant as sunlight—then praised the Lord.
He did, then, project a bit of a time-plan: “It’ll be mid-August when we clear out the house. Julia and Callie’ll be free then for a couple of weeks before they go back to college. They have to have a say about a lot of things—which of their possessions they’ll want sent on to the New York apartment, what should go into storage. It’ll be a huge task for them and for me.” He all but sighed: “God, I dread to think of it.”
“We’ll all put our hands to it, Morgan. Don’t you worry, it’ll all work out.” Then, out of context, almost child-like, she said: “I haven’t felt so peaceful for a long time.”
(He hadn’t reached her point of peace—yet. But she did make him feel that someday he might.) He made no secret of looking at his watch. “I’m sorry to say I must go, Lillie Ruth. I’m meeting a friend for dinner in Cleveland. What time is Tessa due back?” (He was reluctant to leave her without company in the house.)
“She fixed it with Dennis to have him drive her out from Hatherton at six. They’ll be on time. And Wills is here, in the garage. I’ll be fine. You run along.”
“I want to change my clothes—spruce myself up a bit…. Don’t get up, Lillie Ruth.” He bent to her; kissed her cheek; thanked her; received from her again the pact of her marvelous smile.
…And who was the unnamed person he was on his way to meet in Cleveland? For whom he was risking arrest by driving at a speed well in excess of the legal limit? Of course: Miss Sly.
Since January they had seen each other only four times. Communication between meetings had been by telephone. At least once a week he had called her, New York to Cleveland, or she had called him, Cleveland to New York, short, bridging calls prompted by love, a love no more or less strange than any love. (As it existed between him and Miss Sly, Love went under the alias of “Friendship.”)
He arrived at the restaurant a bit ahead of the appointed hour and waited for her in the glass-domed atrium-like foyer, pacing back and forth, the day’s earlier revelations still working on him in opposing ways—muscle, relief, absurd ire, degrees of wonder—his first glimpse of her at the restaurant’s front door an instant ballast. He hurried toward her. “Mr. Shurtliff!”—she sang out in advance of their embrace.
“Miss Sly.”
Seated at an alcove table, drinks in hand, they touched glasses, and she said it was wonderful—“Being together in the flesh. Now we can talk about all the matters we won’t have broached with each other over the ’phone.”
This opening was not her usual one. Usually, she led off with an imperative “Tell me”—after which pilot command she would name the subject she was most eager to hear, from him, about. Her opening tonight begged (he felt) a reversal: his turn to tell her to tell him (about what he did not know to name). “Tell me,” he said.
She took his point, and smiled over it, then put to him an imperative opposite of “Tell me.” “Ask me,” she said, “what I hope I’ve finally made up my mind to do.”
The oddness of her request stimulated him to state the question in full: “What is it you hope you’ve finally made up your mind to do?”
He expected an entertaining answer, a breezy kind of tale about some long-held, endearingly capricious whim she was at last going to satisfy. He sat back, prepared to be amused. So it startled him to see how intense and serious she suddenly became (troubled, he thought). “What?” he prodded, this time gently.
“Retire,” she said, very, very quietly, then at once enlarged the word to its fullest personal and professional extent: “Relinquish my position as head of the Tilden-Herne Adoption Agency.”
He was silent—surprised to silence—and she went on: “I’ve wanted to talk with you about this, but it seemed too difficult on the phone—impossible, really—I’ve been in such turmoil trying to right with myself the idea of voluntary retirement—it goes so against the grain of how I was schooled to think about life—the ethic that one keeps at one’s chosen work as long as one effectively and honorably can—any other way of behaving, self-indulgent. But I’m getting on toward seventy and I’m yearning to do some things just for myself—read more than I can now, and get back to my easel—take some drawing lessons at the Art Institute—travel—” (her list was written in her eyes’ appeal, in her voice’s ardor)—“and there’s the press of time—my growing feeling that if I delay much longer, the chances are I never—”
He couldn’t let her finish. He reached across the table and gripped her wrist: “You don’t have to justify,” he said.
Her body, her whole presence, went still—the way a large, alerted animal can go suddenly still, frozen in place. Until she blinked. “Repeat that,” she said.
“You don’t have to justify.”
“Oh my dear Mr. Shurtliff, how you have saved me! I dread to think of the spectacle I’d have made of myself next Tuesday, ranting on as I have with you, projecting guilt, virtually apologizing for my desire to step down—”
“Whoa!” he reined her in: “You’re going too fast. What happens next Tuesday?”
She threw up her hands. “How stupid of me! I should have thought to tell you straight off that the Tilden-Herne board of directors meets next Tuesday, and I’ve imposed on myself that date as a then-or-never deadline for informing them—”
“Be prepared,” he cut in. “They’ll do their damnedest to dissuade you.”
“Well, they won’t succeed,” she replied. “I’m decided. I want out, and I am going to get out.”
She was completely herself again: Miss Zenobia Sly, grandly in charge.
“Oh, I won’t just march away—won’t leave the agency in the lurch. I’ll give the board ample time to find and install a successor. But I swear to you they’ll not succeed in getting me off the track of my intention to retire.”
He took a moment—the lawyer—thinking how to frame some final words of support—affronting words (outside the established etiquette of their relationship) that might remain with her should she begin to weaken. “Hell,” he said in a low, physical tone, “just tell’em. Just tell’em, baby.”
She delighted him. She—she laughed. A cascade of vivid laughter. “I will,” she exclaimed in a voice that rang of Eureka! “I must, because I see that if I don’t, you will cease to respect me enough to address me ever again as ‘baby.’”
It would linger with him how he marveled afresh, then, at their relation: would it always increase, he wondered, as over the years it steadily had, and in a way external to their nourishment of it, as if—all by itself—it existed for them?
“What time on Tuesday does your board meet?”
“Two o’clock.”
“Call me when the meeting’s over. I’ll be in my office, very eager to hear about it.”
“I will want to call you, and I shall.”
It was as in a play, the interposing action then of the waiter appearing and placing before them their meal’s first course (fresh asparagus soup). And after the waiter left them, after they had tasted the soup and remarked upon it (“Delicious”), Miss Sly said: “Now about you, Mr. Shurtliff…You look very tired. It’s been a misery for you, Roger Chandler’s death—the double injury of losing both a beloved friend and your firm’s most senior partner. I can’t help worrying about you.”
She said this in the practical way of a presiding shepherd. His perpetual sense of her as being somehow something akin to a shepherd was heightened by a visual illusion…. Caught in a beam of light from a ceiling chandelier, the rounded top of the eternal amber comb that held in place the huge bun of her done-up hair glowed—the arched effect over the top of her head a halo: an illusion it heartened him to consider. Because it set him up to confide to her that, hard as the blow of Roger Chandler’s death had been, the truer reason for his tiredness was differently sourced. “It has to do with my Hatherton house,” he said. And he told her then of his recently-come-by realization that he must part from the house. Briefly, he summed the why. He was lawyerly, meticulous, about not confusing his personal why with the house itself: so intrinsically glorious; so beautiful. Of his fear of the memories contained in its high rooms, he made no mention. Yet, subversively, the memories crowded upon him and seized him, and for a dangerous moment—like a swimmer overwhelmed by the force of an immense, sudden sea-swell—he went under, lost his breath, struggled, regained the air, inhaled—and rapidly stated: “It is my plan to sell it.”
“We will hope to a well-wedded couple with growing children,” she instantly said, aware of his distress, involved in it, thinking (he understood) to abet his recovery by an image of the house’s continuance in keeping with his own brilliantly happy years in it.
“And a dog,” he said.
“Or a cat,” she replied. Then gave up her attempt to help him. “Somehow one finds the strength to do these heartbreaking, necessary things. And one should always endeavor to practice what one preaches. Your need, your private need to sell the house requires of you—” She paused, then tossed at him (he saw the coming word, aimed in its noun form), “—no justification.”
“Baby,” he quietly said.
“Exactly.”
They faced each other, whole: a pair of equilibrists.
And then, after a moment, he said: “I spent a somewhat extraordinary hour with Lillie Ruth this afternoon.”
“Tell me.”
He structured his telling as an episode in an on-going story. It was easy to do because she was thoroughly familiar with all the story’s characters—Lillie Ruth, Doctor Leigh, dead Mrs. Leigh, Tessa; he had for years so often spoken of them to her, and in many contexts. He began by confessing his long-sustained dread of informing Lillie Ruth of his decision to sell the house, then gave his account of how Lillie Ruth in her prescient way had taken the lead by telling him—“We don’t belong here anymore, Morgan,” with which words “She freed me!” he said now to Miss Sly, cadencing the wonder with an outward and upward lift of his hands, as of something marvelous let go into the air. “You see what I mean—”
“Yes. Yes I do, Mr. Shurtliff. Go on.”
So he did, and completely…. As regards Doctor Leigh’s role in the story, her remarkable memory served to make her a contributor to the narrative. She cited the year—“1947”—and recalled the details of that year’s summer when Mrs. Leigh had sat day after day in the Leighs’ grand, cupola-crowned Victorian barn watching the swallows dart up into the geometric forest of the barn’s high rafters, bidding others to join her at her sweet, innocent vigil—Lillie Ruth singing, walking across the carpet of grass that lay between the Leighs’ fine house and the barn, carrying trays, serving up iced tea and lemonade to the gallery of bird-watchers, everyone thrilled by Mrs. Leigh’s summer-long happiness—everyone except Doctor Leigh: Mrs. Leigh sitting there, plotting with herself her suicide—
“Of course!” Miss Sly exclaimed: “Lillie Ruth’s intuition of why Doctor Leigh has purchased a future abode for her is as accurate as accurate can be! And she and you, Mr. Shurtliff, are right not to protest his having done so.” Then, in a quieter voice: “It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how our past actions catch up with us, how we can’t outrun them no matter how hard we try.”
All this verbal terrain had taken a while to cover. They were now nearly finished with the meal’s main course (perfectly cooked roast of lamb; pink). Mortality and memory and homely philosophy aside, they were carnivores. He put down his fork. In much the same way he liked to look for a myriad time at a familiar, long-admired tract of land, he liked simply to look at her, first at certain parts of her face, the sensitive mouth, slightly beaky nose, rounded chin, high, decisive forehead, valleyed eyes that could be blue, could be gray-blue, could be blue-green; then to contemplate the entire visage: permanent to him. “As of this evening, only you and Lillie Ruth know I’m going to sell the house. Now though, now that I’m free to, I’ll inform others. Julia and Caroline”—he lingered over their names—“I can’t tell them until they’re back in New York with me, out of college for the summer. They’ve got their final exams to get through. I must wait—” He perhaps looked (as he felt) suddenly burdened again, suddenly chaotic—
—for she interrupted him with the diverting remark: “I thought of them on their recent birthday, their nineteenth—”
“Which we’ve yet to celebrate,” he cut in, glad for the shift. “They’ve requested and I’ve promised them a party with our New York friends and an assortment of their college mates. Caroline’s the gala girl,” he smiled. “She’ll organize the party.”
“You have a birthday soon, Mr. Shurtliff—”
(Ah, she did remember everything.) “Yes; I’ll be forty-eight in June.” Then, directly: “I don’t know the month of your birthday.”
&
nbsp; “September,” she said. “I’ll be seventy in September…. Oh, I am so eager to be shed of my Tilden-Herne responsibilities! And I warn you, when I am, I expect to go often to New York—”
“Where I’ll entertain you royally any and every time you’re there.”
“I shall count on you to,” she replied. Then, with her chin rested in the palm of her right hand and her eyes full on him: “You’ve become a New Yorker. It’s written all over you—that you’ve found peace there.”
“Is it?” he laughed. “Well, I have. I’m tremendously excited about my work there, and I like living there. It’s endlessly surprising.”
“And you’re well settled in your apartment?”
“Almost,” he answered. “I desperately need to find a cook-housekeeper. I’d just begun to contact some domestic employment agencies a couple of weeks ago. Before Roger died. I’ll pick up those contacts the minute I get back. I hope, hope to find someone and have her moved in and functioning by the time Julia and Caroline arrive—”
“No!” She fairly leapt at him: “No, Mr. Shurtliff. That’s wrong of you to do on your own. You must involve your daughters in your search for a housekeeper. Let them sit in on the interviews. Allow them a voice. You must, must include them in the making of their new home.”
She said all this with terrific speed and heat. She had never before, with him, been so—personal.
But Lord! How what she had said did strike him!
“You do understand, don’t you, Mr. Shurtliff?” she insisted.
“Perfectly. And I assure you I will do it.”
Matters of Chance Page 40
