Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  The Happy Memories Club

  I may be old, but I’m not dead.

  Perhaps you are surprised to hear this. You may be surprised to learn that people such as myself are still capable of original ideas, intelligent insights, and intense feelings. Passionate love affairs, for example, are not uncommon here. Pacemakers cannot regulate the strange unbridled yearnings of the heart. You do not wish to know this, I imagine. This knowledge is probably upsetting to you, as it is upsetting to my sons, who do not want to hear, for instance, about my relationship with Dr. Solomon Marx, the historian. “Please, Mom,” my son Alex said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Mama,” my son Robert said. “Can’t you maintain a little dignity here?” Dignity, said Robert, who runs a chain of miniature golf courses! “I have had enough dignity to last me for the rest of my life, thank you,” I told Robert.

  I’ve always done exactly what I was supposed to do — now I intend to do what I want.

  “Besides, Dr. Solomon Marx is the joy of my life,” I told them all. This remained true even when my second surgery was less than successful, obliging me to take to this chair. It remained true until Solomon’s most recent stroke five weeks ago, which has paralyzed him below the waist and caused his thoughts to become disordered, so that he cannot always remember things, and he cannot always remember the words for things. A survivor himself, Solomon is an expert on the Holocaust. He has numbers tattooed on his arm. He used to travel the world, speaking about the Holocaust. Now he can’t remember the name of it.

  “Well, I think it’s a blessing,” said one of the nurses — that young Miss Rogers. “The Holocaust was just awful.”

  “It is not a blessing, you ignorant bitch,” I told her. “It is the end. Our memories are all we’ve got.” I put myself in reverse and sped off before she could reply. I could feel her staring at me as I motored down the hall. I am sure she wrote something in her ever-present notebook. Inappropriate and unmanageable are some of the words they use, unpleasant and inaccurate adjectives all.

  The words that Solomon can’t recall are always nouns.

  “My dear,” he said to me one day recently, when they had wheeled him out into the Residence Center lobby, “what did you say your name was?” He knew it, of course, in his heart’s deep core, as well as he knew his own.

  “Alice Scully,” I said.

  “Ah. Alice Scully,” he said. “And what is it that we used to do together, Alice Scully, that brought me such intense . . . oh, so big . . .” His eyes were like bright little beads in his pinched face. “It was of the greatest, ah . . .”

  “Sex,” I told him. “You loved it.”

  He grinned at me. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sex. It was sex, indeed.”

  “Mrs. Scully!” his nurse snapped.

  Now I have devised a game to help Solomon remember nouns. It works like this. Whenever they bring him out, I go over to him and clasp my hands together, as if I were hiding something in them. “If you can guess what I’ve got here,” I say, “I’ll give you a kiss.”

  He squints in concentration, fishing for nouns. If he gets one, I give him a kiss.

  Some days are better than others.

  This is true for us all, of course. We can’t be expected to remember everything we know.

  IN MY LIFE I was a teacher, and a good one. I taught English in the days when it was English, not “language arts.” I taught for thirty years at the Sandy Point School in Sandy Point, Virginia, where I lived with my husband, Norman Scully, and brought up four sons, three of them Norman’s. Norman owned and ran the Trent Riverside Pharmacy until one day he dropped dead in his drugstore counting out antibiotic capsules for a high school girl. His mouth and eyes were wide open, as if whatever he found on the other side surprised him mightily. I was sorry to see this, as Norman was not a man who liked surprises.

  I must say I gave him none. I was a good wife to Norman, although I was initially dismayed to learn that this role entailed taking care of his parents from the day of our marriage until their deaths. They both lived long lives, and his mother went blind at the end. But we lived in their house, the largest house in Sandy Point, right on the old tidal river, and their wealth enabled us to send our own sons off to the finest schools, and even, in Steven’s case, to medical school.

  Norman’s parents never got over his failure to get into medical school himself. In fact, he barely made it through pharmacy school. As far as I know, however, he was a good pharmacist, never poisoning anybody or mixing up prescriptions. He loved to look at the orderly rows of bottles on his shelves. He loved labeling. Often he dispensed medical advice to his customers: which cough medicine worked best, what to put on a boil. People trusted him. Norman got a great deal of pleasure from his job and from his standing in the community.

  I taught school at first, because I was trained to do it and because I wanted to. It was the only way in those days that a woman could get out of the house without being considered odd. I was never one to plan a menu or clip a recipe out of a magazine. I left all that to Norman’s mother and to the family housekeeper, Lucille.

  I loved teaching. I loved to diagram sentences on the blackboard, precisely separating the subject from the predicate with a vertical line, the linking verb from the predicate adjective with a slanted line, and so forth. The children used to try to stump me by making up long sentences they thought I couldn’t diagram, sentences so complex that my final diagram on the board looked like a blueprint for a cathedral, with flying buttresses everywhere, all the lines connecting.

  I loved geography as well — tracing roads, tracing rivers. I loved to trace the route of the Pony Express, of the Underground Railroad, of De Soto’s search for gold. I told them the story of that bumbling fool Zebulon Pike who set out in 1805 to find the source of the Mississippi River and ended up instead at the glorious peak they named for him, Pikes Peak, which my sister, Rose, and I visited in 1926 on our cross-country odyssey with our brother, Clyde, and his wife. In the photograph taken at Pikes Peak, I am seated astride a donkey, wearing a polka-dot dress and a floppy hat, while the western sky goes on and on endlessly behind me.

  I taught my students these things: the first sustained flight in a power-driven airplane was made by Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903; Wisconsin is the “Badger State”; the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars in 1626; you can’t sink in the Great Salt Lake. Now these facts ricochet in my head like pinballs, and I do not intend, thank you very much, to enter the Health Center for “better care.”

  I never tired of telling my students the story of the Mississippi River — how a scarlet oak leaf falling into Lake Itasca, in Minnesota, travels first north and then east through a wild, lonely landscape of lakes and rapids as if it were heading for Lake Superior, then over the Falls of St. Anthony, then down through Minneapolis and St. Paul, past bluffs and prairies and islands, to be joined by the Missouri River just above St. Louis, and then by the Ohio, where the water grows very wide — you can scarcely see across it. My scarlet leaf meanders with eccentric loops and horseshoe curves down, down, down the great continent through the world’s biggest delta, to New Orleans and beyond, past the huge fertile mud plain shaped like a giant goose’s foot, and into the Gulf of Mexico.

  “And what happens to the leaf then, Mrs. Scully?” some student would never fail to ask.

  “Ah,” I would say, “then our little leaf becomes a part of the universe” — leaving them to ponder that!

  I was known as a hard teacher but a fair one, and many of my students came back in later years to tell me how much they had learned.

  HERE AT MARSHWOOD, A “total” retirement community, they want us to become children again, forgoing intelligence. This is why I was so pleased when the announcement went up on the bulletin board about a month ago.

  Writing Group to Meet Wednesday, 3 P.M.

  Ah, I thought, that promising infinitive “to meet.” For, like many former English
teachers, I had thought that someday I might like “to write.”

  At the appointed day and hour, I motored over to the library (a euphemism, since the room contains mostly well-worn paperbacks by Jacqueline Susann and Louis l’Amour). I was dismayed to find Martha Louise Clapton already in charge. The idea had been hers, I learned; I should have known. She’s the type who tries to run everything. Martha Louise Clapton has never liked me, having had her eye on Solomon, to no avail, for years before my arrival. She inclined her frizzy blue head ever so slightly to acknowledge my entrance.

  “As I was just saying, Alice, several of us have discovered in mealtime conversation that in fact we’ve been writing for years, in our journals and letters and whatnot, and so I said to myself, ‘Martha Louise, why not form a writing group?’ and voilà!”

  “Voilà,” I said, edging into the circle.

  So it began.

  BESIDES MARTHA LOUISE AND myself, the writing group included Joy Richter, a minister’s widow with a preference for poetry; Miss Elena Grier, who taught Shakespeare for years and years at a girls’ preparatory school in Nashville, Tennessee; Frances Weinberg, whose husband lay in a coma over at the Health Center (a euphemism — you never leave the Health Center); Shirley Lassiter, who had buried three husbands and still thought of herself as a belle; and Vern Hofstetter, retired lawyer, deaf as a post. We agreed to meet again in the library one week later. Each of us should bring some writing to share with the others.

  “What’s that?” Vern Hofstetter said. We wrote the time and place down on a piece of paper and gave it to him. He folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket. “Could you make copies of the writing, please?” he asked. He inclined his silver head and tapped his ear significantly. We all agreed. Of course we agreed, we outnumber the men four to one, poor old things. In a place like this, they get more attention than you would believe.

  Then Joy Richter said that she probably couldn’t afford to make copies. She said she was on a limited budget.

  I pointed out that there was a free Xerox machine in the manager’s office and I felt sure that we could use it, especially since we needed it for the writing group.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Frances Weinberg started wringing her hands. “They might not let us.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Martha Louise said majestically. “Thank you, everyone, for joining the group.”

  I HAD WONDERED if I might suffer initially from “writ-er’s block,” but nothing of that sort occurred. In fact, I was flooded by memories — overwhelmed, engulfed, as I sat in my chair by the picture window, writing on my lap board. I was not even aware of the world outside, my head was so full of people and places of the past, rising up in my mind as they were then, in all the fullness of life, and myself as I was then, that headstrong girl longing to leave her home in eastern Virginia and walk in the world at large.

  I wrote and wrote. I wrote for three days. I wrote until I felt satisfied, and then I stopped. I felt better than I had in years, filled with new life and freedom (a paradox, since I am more and more confined to this chair).

  During that week Solomon guessed “candy,” “ring,” and “Anacin.” He was getting better. I was not. I ignored certain symptoms in order to attend the Wednesday meeting of the writing group.

  Martha Louise led off. “They just don’t make families like they used to,” she began, and continued with an account of growing up on a farm in Ohio, how her parents struggled to make ends meet, how the children strung popcorn and cut out paper ornaments to trim the tree when there was no money for Christmas, how they pulled taffy and laid it out on a marble slab, and how each older child had a little one to take care of. “We were poor but we were happy,” Martha Louise concluded. “It was an ideal childhood.”

  “Oh, Martha Louise,” Frances Weinberg said tremulously, “that was just beautiful.”

  Everyone agreed.

  Too many adjectives, I thought, but I held my tongue.

  Next, Joy Richter read a poem about seeing God in everything: “the stuff of day” was a phrase I rather liked. Joy Richter apparently saw God in a shiny red apple, in a dewy rose, in her husband’s kind blue eyes, in the photographs of her grandchildren. It was a pretty good poem, but it would have been better if she hadn’t tried so hard to rhyme it. Miss Elena then presented a sonnet comparing life to a merry-go-round. The final couplet went:

  Lost children, though you’re old, remember well the joy and music of life’s carousel.

  This was not bad, and I said so. Frances Weinberg read a reminiscence about her husband’s return from the Second World War, which featured the young Frances “hovering upon the future” in a porch swing as she “listened for the tread of his beloved boot.” The military theme was continued by Vern Hofstetter, who read (loudly) an account of army life titled “Somewhere in France.” Shirley Lassiter was the only one whose story was not about herself. Instead it was fiction evidently modeled upon a romance novel, for it involved a voluptuous debutante who had to choose between two men. Both of them were rich, and both of them loved her, but one had a fatal disease, and for some reason this young woman didn’t know which one.

  “Why not?” boomed the literal Vern.

  “It’s a mystery, silly,” Shirley Lassiter said. “That’s the plot.” Shirley Lassiter had a way of resting her jeweled hands upon her enormous bosom as if it were a shelf. “I don’t want to give the plot away,” she said. Clearly, she did not have a brain in her head.

  Then it was my turn.

  I began to read the story of my childhood. I had grown up in the tiny coastal town of Waterville, Maryland. I was the fourth in a family of five children, with three older brothers and a baby sister. My father, who was in the oyster business, killed himself when I was six and Rose was only three. He went out into the Chesapeake Bay in an old rowboat, chopped a hole in the bottom of it with an ax, and then shot himself in the head with a revolver. He meant to finish the job. He did not sink as planned, however, for a fisherman witnessed the act and hauled his body to shore.

  This left Mama with five children to bring up and no means of support. She was forced to turn our home into a boardinghouse, keeping mostly teachers from Goucher College and salesmen passing through, although two old widows, Mrs. Flora Lewis and Mrs. Virginia Prince, stayed with us for years. Miss Flora, as we called her, had to have a cup of warm milk every night at bedtime; I will never forget it. It could be neither too hot nor too cold. I was the one who took it up to her, stepping so carefully up the dark back stair.

  Nor will I forget young Miss Day from Richmond, a teacher, who played the piano beautifully. She used to play “Clair de Lune” and “Für Elise” on the old upright in the parlor. I would already have been sent to bed, and so I’d lie trembling in the dark, seized by feelings I couldn’t name, as the notes floated up to me and Rose in our attic room, in our white iron bed wrought with roses and figures of nymphs. Miss Day was jilted some years later, we heard, her virtue lost and her reputation ruined.

  Every Sunday, Mama presided over the big tureen at breakfast, when we would have boiled fish and crisp little johnnycakes. Mama’s face was flushed, and her hair escaped its bun to curl in damp tendrils as she dished up the breakfast plates. I thought she was beautiful. I’m sure she could have married again had she chosen to do so, but her heart was full of bitterness at the way her life had turned out, and she never forgave our father or looked at another man.

  Daddy had been a charmer, by all accounts. He carried a silver-handled cane and allowed me to play with his gold pocket-watch when I was especially good. He took me to the harness races with him, where we cheered for the horse he owned, a big roan named Joe Cord. On these excursions I wore a white dress and stockings and patent-leather shoes. And how Daddy could sing! He had a lovely baritone voice. I remember him on bended knee singing, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” to Mama, who pretended to be embarrassed but was not. I remember his bouncing Rose up and down on his lap and singing, “
This is the way the lady rides.”

  After his death the boys went off to sea as soon as they could, and I was obliged to work in the kitchen and take care of Rose. Kitchen work is never finished in a boardinghouse. This is why I have never liked to cook since, though I know how to do it, I can assure you.

  We had a summer kitchen outside, so it wouldn’t heat up the whole house when we were cooking or canning. It had a kerosene stove. I remember one time when we were putting up blackberry jam, and one of those jars simply exploded. We had blackberry jam and broken glass all over the place. It cut the Negro girl, Ocie, who was helping out, and I was surprised to see that her blood was as red as mine.

  As time went on, Mama grew sadder and withdrew from us, sometimes barely speaking for days on end. My great joy was Rose, a lively child with golden curls and skin so fair you could see the blue veins beneath it. We slept in the same bed every night and played every day. Since Mama was indisposed, we could do whatever we wanted, and we had the run of the town, just like boys. We’d go clamming in the bay with an inner tube floating out behind us, tied to my waist by a rope. We’d feel the clams with our feet and rake them up, then flip them into a net in the middle of the inner tube. Once we went on a sailing trip with a cousin of ours, Bud Ned Black, up the Chickahominy River for a load of brick. But the wind failed and we got stuck there. We just sat on that river, for what seemed like days and days. Rose fussed and fumed while Cap’n Bud Ned drank whiskey and chewed tobacco and did not appear to mind the situation so long as his supplies held out. But Rose was impatient — always, always so impatient.