Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  He stayed an hour or more with Ruth, but when he went upstairs, he found Ellen still awake, her bed light burning.

  ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but I’ve rested, half-drowsing, listening to the murmur of your voices.’

  He felt her watching him while he took pajamas and dressing gown and went to the bathroom; but he avoided her eyes. In bed at last he asked, as casually as possible:

  ‘Mind if I read a while?’

  ‘No, Richard.’

  He forced himself to concentrate upon the book, feeling her eyes upon him, refusing to look at her; and presently she said:

  ‘Good night, Richard.’

  ‘Good night, Ellen.’

  She turned on her side, her back toward him; and though he was sure she did not sleep, she did not speak again. After a long time he laid his book away, switched out the light.

  But to sleep was difficult. There were too many doubts in him. Surely a lifetime of this would be intolerable, alike for each of them. Were it not better to make a clean break, to confess their rupture to the world? Or if not, then to yield, and by yielding perhaps to recapture something of the beauty and the bliss which she had shown him life could hold?

  During the next two days and nights this dilemma still tormented him. Ellen made no new attempt to break down his defenses, yet when they came to their room at night and when they lay wakeful in the morning, he felt a waiting in her, as though she knew the question were still unanswered, still open, still at issue. She waited, without urging or pleading, for his decision. He had thought that decision made long ago, made and announced to her that day by the waterside where they paused for lunch; but a decision which consisted merely of words was not enough. Either he must surrender — and he came to understand that if he did yield it would be completely — or he must escape forever from her nearness.

  The third morning, he was near capitulating. He had waked before dawn and he lay watching the dark shadow of her hair on the pillow opposite his own, and following with his thoughts every familiar curve of her body under the light bed-covering, till as the light increased he saw that her eyes were open, that she was watching him. That waiting which he had seen before, patient and submissive, as though she put her life completely in his hands, was in her eyes. Their glances held for a long silent moment, and she said at last, smiling drowsily:

  ‘Good morning, Richard.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘It will be a fine day.’

  ‘Fine,’ he agreed. They had planned to go today to Leick’s farm on the shore off to the eastward, a two hour drive. They would take lunch, and Leick would have lobsters to boil. ‘A good day for our picnic,’ he said.

  She stretched white arms above her head, yawned deliciously, lay watching him — and waiting; and suddenly his breath quickened with a sense of imminency, of immediate necessity. He swung his feet to the floor between their beds, stood a moment beside her, leaned down to kiss her. Her cool lips met his.

  ‘Why, thank you, Richard,’ she said. Then she laughed a little, her voice husky. ‘It’s a long time since you’ve kissed me without being asked.’ There was a wistful, hopeful quickening in her tones.

  He forced himself to turn away, as a man forces himself back from the lip of some steep declivity. He crossed to the windows toward the sea and stood there looking out, yet at first unseeingly. It seemed to him that powerful hands were tugging at him, drawing him back to her; he wished to turn and yield.

  But then his unseeing eyes focussed on something in the water offshore. A seal was swimming there, the sleek dark head cutting the water like the head of a human swimmer. A lobsterman’s tender, a small white boat, was fast to its mooring, the lobsterman gone since before dawn upon his rounds. As the seal approached the white boat, it dived, its head disappearing without a ripple.

  And Harland remembered another day when from the lookout at Back of the Moon, focussing the binoculars, he had seen another white boat, had seen Ellen sitting idly in it, had seen Danny’s head disappear under the surface as the seal’s had disappeared, never to rise again.

  So was his decision made. He turned strongly back from the window. ‘I’ve made up my mind, Ellen,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on this way! I’ve got to leave you forever. We can’t go on!’

  For a long moment that seemed longer than it was she did not speak. Then she said, with a laughing grimace: ‘Well, don’t be so serious, Richard! It’s a fine day for — a picnic, just the same.’

  – VI –

  Since there was no haste upon them, they took the road from Ellsworth through Sullivan and along the shore of Frenchman’s Bay, and so by the long way to Cherryfield and on; and the day was perfection, and Ellen had never seemed to drink so fully and completely the beauty of sea and shore and distant hills and radiant sky.

  Byways brought them to Leick’s home. It had been his father’s farm, close along the water; but his father and mother were dead years ago and Leick — except when he was with Harland, or at winter work in the woods, or on some other business of his own — lived here alone. He came to greet them in the yard and bid them in. Harland had known this pleasant small house since he was a boy; but Ruth and Ellen wished to see and to admire.

  They would picnic by the shore, half a mile away. Leick had lobsters ready, packed with ice in a wooden box, and he brought a wash boiler from the shed, and they tramped down through the pasture to the rocky beach. A sea wall here was a shield against erosion, and a massive crib work of logs weighted with huge boulders extended seaward, submerged now by the rising tide. Ellen cried:

  ‘Why, how funny! A sea wall and a breakwater, but there’s no house anywhere near! Who built it, Leick?’

  ‘I did,’ Leick admitted.

  ‘How far out does the breakwater go?’

  ‘To low tide.’

  ‘But what a lot of work for nothing!’ Ellen protested. ‘What did you build it for?’

  Leick, filling the boiler with sea water, adding salt for savor, setting the boiler on two rocks and beginning to build a driftwood fire below, said in mild amusement at himself: ‘Well, I don’t rightly know. Only I get a lot of satisfaction out of looking at it and knowing it’ll still be here a long time after I’m gone.’

  Ellen laughed, but Harland saw her bite her lip. Ruth said understandingly: ‘Of course! Every man likes to leave some permanent mark on the world if he can.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Leick assented with a chuckle. ’Even a useless old breakwater.’

  Ellen said restlessly: ‘Come on, Ruth. Let’s take a walk.’ They strolled away, and Leick, feeding his fire, remarked that Ellen was looking well, and Harland assented, saying:

  ‘She had a stomach upset a while ago, but now she’s fine.’ Then some constraint fell upon them both, and the water boiled, and Leick put the lobsters in, and Ellen and Ruth presently returned.

  Ruth, in that fine hamper which Russ Quinton had given Ellen long ago, bad brought potato salad; and the thermos bottles were full of coffee, and there were bread and butter sandwiches, and chocolate doughnuts, and ice cream in the cool compartment. When the lobsters were done, Ruth made a sauce of tamale and melted butter in equal parts, juice of a lemon, salt and pepper, dry mustard and a dash of Worcestershire; and they cracked the claws with rocks, and dug the sweetest morsels out of the body, using finger and thumb or gnawing teeth, and they were merry in the sun. Ruth produced the thermos bottles, uttered a regretful exclamation. ‘Oh, Leick, I meant to bring tea for you but I forgot. There’s plenty of coffee if you’ll have some.’

  ‘Never touch it,’ Leick cheerfully assured her. ‘It’s all right. I don’t drink tea either, middle of the day, only if I’m in the woods.’

  She began to pour the coffee into paper cups. ‘Here’s your sugar, Ellen,’ she said, and drew an envelope from the hamper. ‘Dick, I know you like yours without, and so do I.’

  Ellen took the envelope and put it for safekeeping into the pocket of the soft l
eather jerkin she wore. ‘Don’t pour mine yet,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready.’ When later she asked for coffee Ruth poured it, and Ellen tore off the corner of the envelope and tilted sugar into her cup. Ruth served ice cream and distributed doughnuts; and when they were done, they threw used napkins and paper plates and cups into the fire, and the two girls went to lie on the turf above the rocky beach, watching dark squall-ripples scud across the water, drowsing in the hot September sun.

  Leick and Harland stayed behind, and Leick scoured the sooty boiler with soap and sand, and Harland filled his pipe and sat near, and slow words passed between them. Leick said he would leave next week to begin a winter’s work in the north woods. ‘So you came just in time,’ he said. ‘Three or four days more and I’d be gone.’

  The gentle afternoon drifted indolently away. The sun was well down the sky and Harland was thinking he must presently give the word to start for home when he saw Ellen, yonder on the bank above them, suddenly sit up; and he heard her speak to Ruth in a strained tone. Her word he did not catch, but the sound of her voice alarmed him; and he rose and went toward them. Ellen, looking up at him, her face white and contorted, said with a wry smile:

  ‘Isn’t it silly, Richard? I’m going to be sick again!’ Before he could speak she bent double, hugging her arms across her stomach. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Oh! It’s like being burned up inside! As though I’d swallowed fire!’

  Ruth knelt beside her. ‘We’ll get her to the house, Dick,’ she said. ‘Put her to bed.’

  Ellen cried out again, twisting with pain, and Harland and Leick made a chair, hands clasping wrists, and took her up between them to carry her to the house. At first she sat erect, her arms around their necks; but her grip was slack, and, Ruth walked close behind, ready to support her. Ellen groaned and sobbed, and suddenly nausea racked her so terribly that they had to put her down and she lay retching on the turf, her head — after the first paroxysm — cradled in Ruth’s arms.

  Leick said: ‘I’ll get something so we can carry her better.’ He loped away toward the house, and Ellen cried between choked spasms of vomiting:

  ‘I’m burning up, Ruth. I’ve got to have a drink!’

  Ruth soothed her. ‘Hush, dear! We’ll have you comfortable in no time.’

  ‘Water!’ Ellen gasped, and Harland started at a run toward the house to find and fetch some; but Ruth called him back.

  ‘She couldn’t hold it down,’ she said. ‘Wait for Leick. We’ll get her to bed.’

  Ellen’s eyes were swimming and she was perspiring with pain, her parched lips drawn back from her teeth; and Harland stood miserably by, all his old tenderness for her awake again, blaming himself for what had passed between them in these days. Leick returned, carrying precariously on his shoulder a door which he had lifted bodily off its pin-hinges, and under the other arm two blankets and a pillow; and they laid her on this rude stretcher, and wrapped her warmly, and bore her to the house and to the great bed in what had been Leick’s father’s room.

  Ruth asked: ‘Can you get a doctor, Leick? We’ll undress her, make her comfortable.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Leick assured her. ’I’ll get Doc Seyffert. I’ll have to go fetch him. I don’t have no telephone.’

  ‘Take the car,’ Harland directed, and Leick hurried away. Harland helped Ruth remove Ellen’s garments — sometimes her tormented spasms interrupted them — and Ruth found one of Leick’s mother’s nightgowns for her, and they gave her water to drink; but Ellen gagged, rejecting every drop, alternating like a woman in labor between agony and torpor when she lay as though stupefied.

  Dusk descended and Harland found lamps and lighted them; and at last Leick returned. ‘He’s coming,’ he reported. ‘Right behind me. I had to chase all over Hell’s kitchen to find him. He was clear out at Pitcher’s, the other end of town. How is she?’

  ‘Mighty sick,’ Harland admitted. ‘I’ve seen her this way before, but I don’t think she was this bad.’

  ‘I’ll cook up some supper,’ Leick volunteered. ‘You can stay all night. There’s room enough.’

  ‘We’ll have to,’ Harland agreed. ‘She can’t be moved.’

  Harland went back to Ellen, and she met his eyes and for .a moment seemed about to speak; but then her teeth set on her lip to bite back the word she had meant to utter, and she turned her head away, her eyes closed. He heard her quick, panting breath and looked at Ruth miserably. She whispered: ‘She’ll be better when the doctor comes.’

  Doctor Seyffert drove into the yard. He was a tall, raw-boned, dogmatic man in his fifties, practicing here upon a subsidy from the town, used to tending ailing children or old men and women with failing hearts or kidneys. Leick had told him what to expect. When he came in to where Ellen lay he said, in a loud, bruising tone: ‘Well, you summer folks will learn some day that lobsters and ice cream don’t mix. One of your lobsters must have been dead; decomposing, full of ptomaines! We’ll soon get rid of them — mustard, white of egg. That’ll do the trick!’

  Ellen, for the moment more comfortable, looked up at him with hollow, empty eyes. ‘Leick won’t like your blaming his lobsters, Doctor,’ she protested with a twisted smile.

  He barked like a dog. ‘Hah! What of it? Let him like it or not, it’s the truth!’

  Harland suggested: ‘It might not have been the lobsters. She’s subject to these attacks, has had them before.’

  ‘Allergic to shellfish, perhaps,’ Doctor Seyffert portentously conceded, laying aside his coat, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Never mind, we’ll get her cleaned out!’ He went into the kitchen to seek the remedies he needed, and Ellen whispered:

  ‘I don’t think he’s much of a doctor!’

  Harland gripped her hand, and Ruth said reassuringly: ‘He’ll fix you up, darling.’

  Ellen turned her head on the pillow to look at one of them and then the other. ‘You wouldn’t let anything happen to me, would you?’ she murmured. Harland felt like a stab the ironic derision in her tone.

  Then the doctor returned. ‘Now we’ll see!’ he said brusquely.

  During the hours that followed, while Leick stayed in the kitchen and Ruth went to and fro, Harland held his post by Ellen’s bedside, feeling in himself her every pang, seeing her beauty fade before his eyes, wishing he had been kinder. She was continually drenched with perspiration, and her countenance assumed as time passed a bluish hue, and her breathing was increasingly labored. The doctor inexorably administered a succession of emetics which racked her terribly, till she choked and sobbed with pain, convulsed and writhing. Harland at last was driven to question the wisdom of this treatment, but the doctor bore him down.

  ‘She’s full of poison. We’ve got to get rid of it.’ His loud voice was like the blow of a cudgel. ‘She can’t recover till we get the poison out of her.’

  Ellen in a strangling voice echoed his word. ‘Poison!’ she whispered feebly, and seemed to try to rise, and clutched at nothing and fell back again.

  The doctor persisted till she was in complete collapse, unable to swallow his harsh remedies, equally unable to reject them. He was himself by that time almost as exhausted as she. They watched Ellen, lying with eyes closed, panting feebly, her mouth open like that of a hen on a hot day; and Harland spoke to her, but except for a faint movement of her head she did not reply. He said in a low tone to the doctor:

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t the lobsters. She’s always had these attacks. Her own doctor calls them nervous indigestion, a sort of semi-acute gastritis.’

  Doctor Seyffert snorted. ‘Semi? Damned acute, if you ask me,’ he declared, and Harland suspected bafflement in him; but then the man added with a loud cheerfulness: ‘All the same, I’ve seen sicker cats than this get well!’

  Harland wished for a more capable man, but — it was near midnight, and to bring someone from Bar Harbor or Ellsworth or Bangor would take hours. He remembered that by legend these rural general practitioners were often better physicians than the most fashionable speci
alists; and after all, any doctor ought to be able to handle an attack of indigestion!

  But as Ellen visibly grew worse instead of better, he forgot everything else in his distress for her. She was in a stupor, her face blue, and when she retched, a dark slime trickled from the corner of her mouth. At last she sank into what seemed like sleep, and Ruth whispered hopefully:

  ‘There! She’ll be better when she wakes.’

  But Harland, watching the doctor’s face, read a grim message in it; and he found confirmation in Elien’s empurpled countenance, her light and rapid breathing. No one so small and tender could endure what she had endured. Sitting beside her bed in a helpless grief, he remembered the sweet cajoleries, the pathetic enticements with which she had sought to win his forgiveness and his love. Her own Doctor Saunders, who had known her since childhood, said nervous strain, or mental distress, might precipitate these attacks. Suppose that day under the oaks, or this morning at dawn, he had surrendered? Perhaps she would not lie dying now.

  For he was sure she could not survive, and Ruth presently seemed to see the truth as clearly as he; and she called Doctor Seyffert urgently from the kitchen. The big man busied himself in baffled futility, till at last Harland muttered: ‘Oh, it’s no use, Doctor. Let her be.’

  So they watched helplessly while Ellen died.

  When she was gone, Doctor Seyffert cleared his throat. ‘Well, well!’ he said, loudly in the still room. ‘Well, there was no help for her! Nothing anyone could have done. I’ll certify it acute gastritis.’ He hesitated, as though half-expecting denial; but when they were silent, he said defensively: ‘If she’d had these attacks before, she should have avoided eating lobster, sea food, anything doubtful at all! Absolute folly!’ Still they did not speak, and he said, gruffly: ‘Sorry I couldn’t save her. I’m sure everything that could be done was done; but if you have any doubt, any question, we can get another opinion?’