The Ballad of West Tenth Street

by Marjorie Kernan

  Also, the place inside her where she stored her hatred of the wicked nurse was nearly complete. She could almost describe its shape. It felt good to hate someone. Lately she’d been very canny, had eluded the wicked nurse’s pinchings. And she’d drawn a picture of her, one that looked just like her, but subtly showed all the ugliness and evil in her, and left it lying in the cafeteria. The staff had passed it around, snickering. And no one tried to pin it on her, everyone knew she just drew that dog, which had to be drawn quite badly.

  She’d also decided to cut down on the pills. Keeping them under her tongue until they could safely be disposed of, she pretended to still be pliably medicated. In a week or so she’d be off them completely. It wouldn’t do to stop taking them in one go, she knew, having a certain knowledge of drug lore through her upbringing.

  That morning someone had opened a door in the back, bringing in a smell, a smell of damp leaves and another, one that tugged at her mind. Jonquils. She said the word aloud in her head, testing it.

  The moon had risen over the treetops beyond the great lawn. It shone in the window, bright enough to see by. Lifting the top of her pajamas she looked at her scars. They were almost healed. A sensation buzzed through her. When she recognized it as pleasure at seeing her skin nearly whole again, she knew that soon she’d be ready.

  Touching the copy of Jane Eyre under her pillow first, a ritual she did not dare to ignore, she got quietly out of bed to look up at the moon from her window.

  It looked down at her and spoke. “Wait for me, I will guide you,” it said. It had a lovely voice, sort of shivery and smooth at the same time.

  “I’m most awfully grateful,” Gretchen replied. “But I’m sure I could manage on my own.”

  “But my dear, it would give me such pleasure. This is a particularly dull part of Connecticut. Hardly anyone walks about at night here. They drive their cars right to the door, and scurry in as though night were not the most beautiful part of the day. Amorous teenagers and a few inept thieves—why can’t thieves learn to consult an almanac?—are my only entertainment. I must be off, till next week then?”

  “Yes, good-bye,” Gretchen said, holding up her hand.

  31

  Colonel Harrington sat in his armchair by the fire, in a sleepy post-tea bliss. Deen was playing a Debussy etude, while Hamish and his young Scottish friend had gone next door to play their guitars.

  He lay back, a dreamy look on his old, whiskered face. He delighted in picturing what the Cap’n had done to fit out the inside of his tiny cabin. Fortunately Ettie and the children brought him news of the Cap’n often, describing the shelves he’d put up and lined with red paper. He reveled in the fact that the Cap’n had cut the edges of the paper in zigzags, something he thought was straight from the pages of a Victorian lady’s magazine. Ettie had told him that the Cap’n had made several pictures to put on the walls. Beautiful ones, she said, all over with flowers and birds and animals. Apparently he’d painted them himself, had quite a dab hand with a brush. Was there perhaps a budding Douanier Rousseau in his garden shed? What a lot of clever and artistic people he’d fallen in with.

  Except for Deen’s music, the house was quiet now, but often it hummed with the sounds of tea trolleys, bottles being opened, and chatter. Such delightful sounds. The house had become precisely what the colonel had always dreamed of—a comfortable home filled with his family’s furniture and the sounds of children. The girl and her brother had decided to take the top-floor bedrooms next to Ettie’s, and at night he could hear their scrapings and small feet, well, that might be a bit rosy, for the boy did clump quite a bit. Still, it cheered him even in his bed to know that the house was being used as it should, as a place of shelter for a small tribal group.

  The Cap’n, he noticed, was very, very careful to be quiet in the garden; clearly the good man was concerned that he not disturb him. But the screen door to the cabin had a squeak, as all good screen doors should, and sometimes his cat let out a questioning meow. What a very fine cat that seemed. He knew from petting it that its tail was as thick and soft as a cloud, and also what Ettie had told him—that it was striped orange and white. Striped like an animal that sat in a tree and had very wise eyes, she said, like one she’d seen on a nature program. He supposed she meant a lemur.

  His hands folded over his stomach, he slept, his feet stretched out toward the fire. He dreamed of pleasant things, especially so because he no longer dreamed of more troubling parts of his past.

  The Harrington family had lived in an old and rather fine brick house that had been built by his great-grandfather. When the colonel, as he was now known, was born, it had already accumulated all it could hold in the way of furnishings, and his mother, whose family home it was, left untouched what she had grown up with. She was a Harrington twice over, having married a distant relation.

  The colonel was an only child and not a happy one. He might have liked to have been happy, but happiness was not something his parents encouraged. His mother, born at the end of the nineteenth century, had been raised in an essentially Victorian consciousness, one that led her to regard the birth of her child as a highly disgusting episode.

  The bloody primality of it, in fact, had convinced her that what she’d gone through was not what God intended, that her own body was aberrant. Being of a very private nature, she asked no questions of the doctor, but became convinced that her insides had putrefied.

  The colonel’s father did not find it inconvenient to no longer pretend to woo his bride. He cared only for the properties she had brought him. Sitting at his desk each day, he tallied them endlessly. It was his great scheme to add to them, to budget down to the decimal point their incomes and expenditures, greedily assessing when he might buy another with the profits.

  The colonel had gained his sobriquet in the Institution. His parents had placed him there after his eyesight had gone, in 1952. He’d graduated from university three years earlier, at which time he’d done as his father requested, returning home to learn the ropes of the family holdings. He lived at home and spent a good deal of his time touring the state, making reports on building conditions and tenants for his father.

  The truth was, his father was a slumlord. He’d held on to all the office buildings, farms, and industrial properties that had come with his marriage, then used the profits from them to buy housing in rundown neighborhoods. The worst of it was, the rents paid weekly for these atrocious hovels were higher than the going rate. His father explained it to him as if displaying a wonderful piece of business acumen: You see, they have to pay it. And if they don’t they can be turned out at once, and there is always someone even more desperate than they to take their place.

  The colonel often wondered, those first few years at the Institution, if his blindness had not been brought on by his fervent desire not to see the misery of his father’s tenants. He hadn’t argued at all when Dr. Matheson told him they’d decided it was best that he be cared for at an institution. He didn’t realize until he got there, that it was one for the insane. But by then he had no wish to be anywhere in particular. And he supposed he had been acting a bit odd lately.

  At the Institution he had a private room and was allowed a few comforts, such as an armchair and a gramophone. And there, because he treated everyone, the cleaning staff, orderlies, doctors, and fellow inmates, with great courtesy, he was treated with courtesy also.

  As the years passed and his hair grew gray, he became a sort of statesman there. The staff and patients turned to him for advice or to settle their disputes. His room had become a cross between a study and a drawing room, as various bits of furniture were offered to him. It had a carpet, a chesterfield, two more armchairs for visitors, some small tables, a sideboard, a desk, a radio, which he prized, and a hot plate on which he could make tea.

  It is surprising that as the decades passed no one inquired as to why someone so clearly sane was still there, but it was a rather parochial place, as institutions go, and they’d gotten t
o think of him as a fixture. He certainly never complained, and as keen younger doctors with more modern ideas tried to shake the place up, somehow he remained inviolate, in his cozy chamber in the old wing, a structure dating back to the prewar era, which in the South, meant the Civil War.

  His father died in 1967. His mother, on the other hand, saw out her hundredth year. She never had visited him once, in the forty-four years he was there.

  With her death came documents and a very large estate. She hadn’t wanted to leave him a cent, but he was the only true Harrington left, and the devil if she’d leave it to some half-breed Harrington. She did, though, have the satisfaction of leaving a large sum to her doctor, on the condition that as executor, he see that the boy never be freed from the confines of the Institution.

  The doctor promptly put the idea of a large sum of cash out of his mind, and, rejoicing that the old bag of bones was truly dead, studied up on the medical and legal procedures for springing someone from the loony bin. He’d secretly made a number of visits to the colonel and had no doubt whatsoever about his sanity.

  The judge surreptitiously wiped her eyes and even the lawyers looked less blandly indifferent when the colonel rose at the hearing. “Ma’am, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I should like to live life in a real house for the years left to me. I would also, should you grant me the ability to do so, establish a trust for the amelioration of the tenants that have passed into my keeping, to offer certain properties to them for below market rate, build a system by which each of them may be able to rent to purchase, or, in the very least, live in far better conditions.

  “As to my own plans, I would be lying if I said I would like to learn Braille, or improve myself very much. I fear I’m too old for that. I would, though, like to live quietly in a real home, where perhaps I could make the acquaintance of some friends, hear the sound of talk around me, and share a drink with them.”

  The colonel woke with a snort. Ah, that was the sound of the dumbwaiter that Mrs. D had had installed; that woman thought of everything. Ettie would be wheeling in his supper any minute. The children had theirs in the kitchen with Ettie. They hadn’t discussed it, but he thought it a highly civilized arrangement. It wasn’t that he didn’t wish their company, but being blind, he found it difficult to concentrate on maneuvering a fork and to make conversation at the same time. Though Ettie was awfully good about preparing foods that he could manage and keeping a strict order to their arrangement on the tray.

  Mrs. D had interviewed all the applicants and hired Ettie, of course. But what luck to have found Mrs. D. It had been the real estate lady who’d mentioned her name, another rather terrifyingly efficient woman.

  What a trouper Mrs. D had turned out to be, with a heart like a lion when it came to defending her own. And she’d understood at once his wish to appear sighted, had colluded with him to effect it in the most diabolical ways, making him maps with raised lines showing the exact layout of the rooms in the house, then helping him learn the numbers of steps. What a remarkable woman. Why, she’d even done a recce of the Hollanders’ main floor for him, rehearsing him until he felt confident to try it, and painting a most vivid picture of the style of the room and its mistress.

  Robert had spent the afternoon redoing the gas line to Ettie’s stove, having declared the original workmanship a criminal act, one no doubt perpetrated by some union dude. Having saved the household from being blown to kingdom come, he was naturally invited to stay for supper. Ettie and Hamish had made crab cakes with lemon aioli, asparagus, and pommes Anna. Hamish did not display the same fascination for baking as he did for what he called “real cooking,” so Ettie made the dessert, a flourless chocolate and walnut torte. Though he ate three slices of it, his snobbery being solely one in which he deemed that men don’t make cakes.

  “No, you kids go on upstairs, I’ll help Ettie with the washing up,” Robert said, waving them off. “I know for sure it’s good for you to wash dishes and all, but you two seem to have character to spare, so go on, watch TV or something.”

  “Look what the Capitain make for me,” Ettie said, when the children had gone. “So nice, is it not? I show him the pictures you give me, of the children and I tell him, Oh, I cried when you did that. How you are such a nice man to say, Ettie, she needs pictures of her young ones. So he say, Ettie, may I make you a frame for them? Look, he painted it all over with flowers.”

  “Hunh. Yes, it’s nice, anyone can see that, but kinda sloppy, don’t you think? What’s this supposed to be, a tulip or some chicken’s foot? You think you ought to be letting that old guy give you presents?”

  “Yes. I do think this. I think it’s good that he is nice and has many things to paint. And that he lives so neat in that little house and washes everything and shines his boots and is quiet like a mouse. Never one thing out of place there. You don’t say that! All the sadness in his eyes? You give him something he paint for you—his eyes not so sad when he paint, and he like to do anything for you.”

  Robert looked at her, what a little spitfire she was, with her fists on her hips and her cheeks blazing. What a woman. “Now, here’s our coffee, calm down, guess I owe you an apology. Guess I just got a teensy bit jealous and all. Now sit down and talk to me, I want to ask you something.

  “Ettie, you think that old man upstairs might like a part-time handyman? A place like this sure needs someone after it all the time. I mean to say, if someone were here and did, say, two days a week work on the place keeping it up, maybe just for room and board? The other days I could carry on with my regular jobs, keep earning some money. I don’t make a whole pile of it, that’s for sure, but enough to keep off the streets and I give a little help to my daughter, she’s got her firstborn now and while her husband’s a steady enough fellow, there’s never enough to go around, is there, with a new baby in the house.”

  “Tyrell, the best, best baby,” Ettie breathed. “See, I put his picture with the children’s, in the frame.”

  “Now that I look at this frame again, it strikes me as a real thing of beauty. You understand what I’m asking?”

  “Maybe. First I ask Colonel, then we talk more, yes?”

  “That old man, he’s too proud to tell anyone he’s blind, isn’t he? Goes around acting like he can see as good as you or me. Has all sorts of dodges.”

  “You can’t know this, I never tell anyone!”

  “But it’s true, ain’t it?”

  “Yes. Meez D know and I know, now you know. Don’t ever tell him, please. If you do, it will hurt him so much. Maybe later, if, well, if you are here more, maybe he tell you himself.”

  Maybe he should’ve had a ring or something, he thought as he walked to the subway station. Maybe he’d blown it bad. Maybe he’d thrown away his chance for that woman’s love. But no, it would’ve been crowding her—first he had to find out if she wanted to change things, might consider the idea. She was the kind of person that once she gave her loyalty, would never look away, so he’d have to slip into her world. Not that he had anything at all to give up if he did—two lonely rooms in a building in Brooklyn, with a sofa, a TV, and a bed. His daughter was all grown up and living in Philly, she loved him all right, but didn’t need much of him.

  The one thing that worried him was that if he became one of the colonel’s employees, he might lose his right to sit and drink sippin’ whiskey with him on Thursdays. Might have to toughen up his insides and pretend not to mind about it. It could be done though, and he might find that after a few months he didn’t even mind. After all, there wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t do if he could take Ettie’s hand and call her his own. Imagine her, keeping so mum about the old man’s blindness. Never peeped a word, always acted like he was just fine.

  It must take a mountain of courage to bang around, acting like you can see. That’s why Ettie did what she did, she admired him. Sure she did, anyone with a bit of gumption would. Everyone on the planet was screaming about their little teensy problems, crying out that it was somebody
else’s fault they couldn’t make do, while a few other ones sat still and took it, made the best of it. You just didn’t hear about them or read about them in the papers, because they kept their own counsel.

  The train car rattled and shook as it dove beneath the harbor. The power supplying the lights inside failed, then flickered back. With a screech and a hiss, the train pulled into city hall. The occupants of the car waited, then the train pulled away, swaying around a curve as the driver built up speed.

  32

  The moon rose over a great clean sky, a sky punctuated by a few clouds as lovely and palely white as fruit trees in full bloom, which sailed across it on a soundless wind.

  Gretchen bound her slippers onto her feet with some strips of cloth she’d hidden, tied her bathrobe tight, then put her shawl around her. She picked up the framed photo (no glass) her mother had given her of the family, and peeled the paper backing away. Under it she found the credit card Sadie had whispered that she’d put there, just in case, darling. She put it carefully in her pocket.

  Rollingbrook prided itself on having no obvious signs of wishing to keep the “guests” in—the windows were neither barred nor locked, but they were covered with heavy screens that were removable only from the outside. Gretchen cut the screen deftly with a scalpel she’d stolen from the emergency station. She cut enough to be able to push it out, then stepped over the sill and into the night.

  There was no time to linger to enjoy the beauty of the spring night, her bathrobe and pajama legs were much too visible, but she put her face up to feel the moonlight for a moment, then moved swiftly toward the woods beyond the mowed lawn.

  Once within the safety of the trees, she let out her breath. Stock still, she listened, but there were no shouts or sounds of pursuit. She looked around her, determining what direction to take. The one that said to her to follow its path led straight into the densest part of the woods. It was very dark that way, there where the trees ruled the land. But her father had given her a second name, had called her Mab. Mab, he’d said, was queen of all the woodlands, a girl who could turn herself into a sapling and whose long hair was combed each morning by the wind. She put her hands out before her and walked into the shadowy world.