Joseph’s chest fell. He’d never had the heart to deny a person their passion. “You’ll stop and change the candles?”
“Very soon, sir.”
Joseph left Lizzy in the care of his impossible maid and mounted the stairs on heavy legs. He lay in bed smoking, something Lizzy had forbidden, the ashtray balanced on his chest. He was exhausted, and a tad drunk, but sleep didn’t come—hadn’t since the move from Snell Street. This was only the second time in eight months that he’d slept in the big bed—after Lizzy’s last turn he’d bunked in the spare bedroom. A misty rain streaked down the windowpane. He heard the faint rattle of Lizzy’s wind chime. He extended his arm across the bed; the sheet was cold. He snubbed the cigarette and pulled on his trousers, fresh shirt, and hat and slipped out the kitchen door at half past one. In the misty fog the streetlamps returned a murky glow. He kept to the shadows as he walked down the hill. He stopped across the street from the house, unbelieving the desk lamp in his old office was on. But Mary had a sixth sense about such things. The lamp had been their signal after Thomas had died. Their rendezvous were less frequent after Pete had arrived, the lamp dark since Elizabeth’s illness. Years later, standing on the deck of the steamship Priscilla as he left Fall River for the last time, Joseph would remember Mary’s kindness as he wept. He’d cling to the deck rail as the boat steamed down the Taunton River. The red light on the Borden Flats Lighthouse another beacon on a foggy night.
The light in the front hall fired on then off as he turned up the slate path. He stopped to steady himself, and then that poor Portuguese girl’s face hit him between the eyes.
Mary Sheehan’s face appeared between the front curtains, fogging the window glass. She sighed, released a small smile, and then nodded her head, as if he were a lost traveler she’d been expecting for hours.
Joseph smiled. “I saw the light.”
“Seems about time.”
A sense of relief coursed through him, and he fell to his knees.
She cradled his head against her flour-stained skirt. The house smelled of fresh bread. She massaged his scalp with her thick fingers, bits of dough stuck between them, and slowly Joseph relaxed. Mary repeated the refrain “Think of the boys” but kept a lookout for movement at the top of the stairs.
“No,” Joseph moaned. He leapt to his feet, punching the vestibule chandelier with his outstretched hand. Mary let out a quick shout. She covered her mouth. Joseph grimaced as he lowered the bloody fingers. A shot of pain seized the hand and wrist that had knocked the silver base. The pain continued up his forearm and into his shoulder. It shot down his spine, encircled his stomach and groin, and then nestled in his knees. A flash of heat gripped his chest. He fell forward into Mary’s arms, driving both of them across the room into his old study. She dumped him on Otis’s old couch and removed his soggy shoes and socks. She washed the wound on his hand and bandaged it. She retrieved a water pitcher on the desk and poured him a glass, hoping to flush the liquor from his blood. Satisfied he could drink no more, she set his head in her lap and took to massaging his scalp. As his temperature fell, Joseph spoke—first of Elizabeth, and then of João. When describing Maria’s face, he felt Mary’s abdomen tighten against his cheek and stopped the story. Soon, he drifted off to sleep.
He woke to chimes from the Remington grandfather clock. Outside, the sky was blackish-gray. He remembered coming to the Snell Street house, but not into his old study. Mary was sprawled across the old leather easy chair. Joseph leaned over to lace his shoes, and a shot of pain gripped his forearm. There was a bandage wrapped around his knuckles. The chandelier. He figured he hadn’t slept more than an hour. He licked the dots of blood on either side of the bandage, then rolled on his damp socks with his left hand and tucked the shoelaces under his heel.
He pulled a couch pillow and propped it between Mary’s head and shoulder. He caressed Mary’s cheek with the back of his hand. He resisted the urge to carry her upstairs, to slip in beside her. She’d been the one who’d challenged him to confront Stanton Cleveland. And then, in the aftermath of the fire, had put her own grief aside to challenge him again to run a fair business. How could he have missed Hollister’s abuse? He kissed her forehead, and stepped toward the study door. A stair creaked, or was it the wind? He paused for a second, heard nothing, and then slipped out the back.
At five minutes to five on the morning of his wife’s burial, an exhausted Joseph Bartlett entered his dark home to find Evelyn lying on the floor next to his wife’s casket. The smell of a body beginning to sour cut through his hangover. Feeling ill-equipped physically to handle the sight, he shut the pocket doors to the parlor and retreated to the vestibule, where he hung his now-shapeless hat on its silver peg and peeled off his wrinkled raincoat. He rubbed his stomach. The vat of water Mary Sheehan had forced him to drink hours earlier lapped against the walls of his bladder. He took a deep breath through his mouth and then slid the pocket doors down their tracks. Lizzy and Evelyn were unchanged, but now his eyes had adjusted to the light and he saw the wax. White wax spiraled down the iron stands the church had provided. It burrowed into the carpet. Wax pooled on the stone pedestals of the plant stands, running over their wooden lips and down the legs like icicles. It had run off the end tables and onto the divan, the easy chair, and the footstool. Every candle Joseph had left in Evelyn’s care to change had burned down to its wick’s end. Joseph exhaled. He snapped off a corner of the petrified wax from the chair cushion, pressed the chip against his upper lip, and took a deep breath—vanilla bean. He whispered Evelyn’s name, but she didn’t stir. He tried again. Nothing. After he’d vetoed Evelyn’s request to have nuns from St. Patrick’s sit with the body (We’re not Catholic, Evelyn), she had taken the task upon herself. Evelyn’s idea of observing meant sleeping on the parlor floor. She hadn’t even removed her dust cap, and her gingham bib apron was cockeyed, covering her round hip. But she had moved the flower arrangements to the breezeway to afford herself more space to stretch out. He hadn’t the strength to deal with this now, so he closed the pocket doors and slipped the hallway Oriental under the bottom gap, hoping to contain the smell for a few more hours.
He set his hand on the banister and mounted the stairs for the second time in six hours in hopes of finding sleep by the top landing. He lay in the spare bedroom, but again sleep eluded him. Finally the pressure in his bladder demanded his attention, and he went down the hall to relieve himself. He drew a bath. Waiting for it to fill, he sat on the toilet and watched the first light peek over the horizon. The dreaded day had begun.
He dressed in the dark suit Evelyn had left out. Henry Daly had shined his shoes. In the hall, he peeled back the black drape from the mirror to check the straightness of his tie. The knot pinched his neck, and he redid it twice. Joseph decided he wanted to spend the final morning of the final day of his married life alone with his wife, reading the paper as they always had before the boys woke. He figured such an attempt at normalcy was silly, but he must try. Tomorrow his wedding band would lose the little luster it had left.
At the foot of the stairs, Joseph paused to consider stepping over Evelyn and begin reading his paper. Thankfully, the boys would not wake to a similar sight. He added this inconvenience to the long list of events he knowingly denied about his life. He’d leave the boys at Mary’s until the house was scrubbed and aired. Joseph waited on the last step for the six o’clock chimes, but when none came he kicked away the Oriental and threw open the pocket doors to the parlor. He quickly backpedaled to the porch and threw those doors open in hopes of creating cross-breeze. Let the fumigation begin. As he measured the morning coffee, he remembered Dr. Boyle had stopped the clocks at 1:35 on June 23. A baking tin soaked in the sink basin. A frosted chocolate cake sat under glass on the butcher block. Joseph zipped through family birthdays and anniversaries. When he could think of none, he removed the glass top and burrowed his finger through the icing to the sponge cake. Chocolate cake with choc
olate icing—Lizzy’s favorite. Crazy Evelyn had made a funeral cake for the reception. What had he done that was special? He smoothed over the deep crater in the cake and replaced the glass dome. He whispered a small apology to Evelyn, wishing Lizzy hadn’t encouraged the poor girl so much.
He balanced the cup of coffee under his nose, stopping at the liquor cabinet to add a dash of whiskey. He decided to pull the ladder-back rocker from the vestibule and sit beside his wife, looking out into her garden as the sun rose in the east. One of the few duties Evelyn had been able to perform in her present state was opening the window shutters. Lizzy’s hypersensitivity to the cold, plus her mad insistence that sunlight would fade her family furniture, was one of the few household rules Joseph did take issue with. Somehow the illness had brought on this queer preoccupation, as if she were afraid the items would ruin before her death. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but now that the parlor was actually acting as a morgue, he didn’t want it to look like a morgue. He wanted light. He’d said something overly sentimental like “The garden view will be a constant reminder of her beauty.” Evelyn had finally unsheathed the windows in a full cry. Jesus, he didn’t understand that woman. And if he had to hear another story about some youthful Irish uncle or cousin dying from dysentery or typhoid, there’d be another funeral to prep the house for. The idea of Evelyn flitting around the house setting wreaths and such, contacting the Sisters for her own funeral, before her actual death, gave Joseph a chuckle, but his face quickly hardened when he reentered the parlor to find the pathetic sot still belly-up on the floor, and surrounded on four sides by puddles of candle wax, one hand gripping a leg of the table that supported his dead wife.
Joseph dragged the rocker across the room cracking the hardened wax and releasing the scent of vanilla bean into the stale air. He positioned it next to the head of the coffin, but a tad forward so he wasn’t head-to-head with Lizzy. He slid the window up and sat back. The first sip of coffee, the most potent, pooled in the hole where his molar had formerly resided. His jaw clenched as the whiskey burned off the live nerve endings. Now only his bandaged hand ached. Outside, a row of shrub roses swayed over the porch railing. Clusters of rose hips were hardened and brown, their moisture sucked dry by aphids he hadn’t taken the time to spray. In past summers, Lizzy’s tweezer-like fingers had destroyed such pests before they’d had a chance to multiply. She had a planter’s luck. Everything she nurtured grew. Joseph would have Wiggins deadhead the roses tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Herald was where he’d left it, tucked into his father’s old rolltop desk, now Lizzy’s writing desk, or was. He broke off a wax tendril clinging to it and rubbed it under his nose. It had hardened within an inch of the oxblood leather blotter, though a separate channel had snaked its way down the curve of the twisted molding. There it froze sheets of Lizzy’s personal stationery into a brick of wax and paper. He flipped the Herald to page seventeen to reread her obituary. He objected to the words “industrialist’s wife” and found the term “society philanthropist” a bit hyperbolic, but the picture had reproduced well. A photograph from a series he’d commissioned last summer, before her final spiral. Today, on the morning of her funeral, the picture gave him a chill, and he quickly tucked the paper back into the desk. His chest seized up. How could that same smiling woman now lay a foot away dried up like a raisin, her cheeks fallen in, fingers like dried sticks? He felt the sensation of standing in a pocket of rain showers with sunny skies all around. How could one exist within or outside of the other? In that instant he wanted all of the photographs destroyed, but without them he feared the boys would remember their mother as a shriveled shell. Her slow deterioration was the reason he’d worked late at the mill these last few months. It was the reason he had allowed Hollister to stay out at night, sometimes skipping dinner. It was the reason—
He heard a purring and looked down as the cats scratched themselves against the rope molding that wound up the sides of the desk. They looped between his legs and then hopped on the sills. A squirrel scurried across the lawn, and Bobbin scratched at the screen.
Joseph pulled out the thick wads of letters that were stuffed in the top pigeonholes of the desk. Most were invitations or announcements, some unopened, from Lizzy’s many affiliates and family friends. Though bedridden, the cards kept her up on society—her one tether to the bustling world. The mail delivery had been one of the highlights of her day, though bittersweet since each bundle of letters served as a reminder of her once-active life. Many of the organizations kept her on their mailing lists for this reason—now they can save themselves the two-cent postage, Joseph thought. These people knew she’d never attend another Young People’s Society meeting, or the Truesdale Hospital nurses’ graduation, or Monty and Genny Duval’s Fourth of July party at Goosewing Beach. Another card announced a special lecture on modernism by Reverend Sperry. The Metacomet Bank was sponsoring an exhibition of Chapin’s and Dunning’s work. He thumbed through a thick stack of cards. He had no idea she was so civic minded. His mail had been set aside by the time he came home, and the business or boys had dominated their remaining conversation. He opened an envelope from the Fall River orphanage. The letter included minutes from the board’s last meeting about their annual picnic. As he read, Joseph choked up. Printed at the top of the stationery was Lizzy’s name—she’d been on the steering committee—Elizabeth Durfee Bartlett, Decorations.
For a moment, he allowed himself to admire how his lonely maid clung to Lizzy. She had met Lizzy with an illness and only knew her with an illness. He blew his nose, then dabbed his eyes. Sick Lizzy was enough for Evelyn to love.
“Mr. Bartlett?” Evelyn sat up on the carpet, an island in an ocean of white wax. The carpet crunched as she moved, the sound like shifting sheets of ice.
Joseph turned from the window. Evelyn snapped off a corner of wax and raised it to her face to examine it. Her eyes danced around the parlor stopping on the other reservoirs.
“Sir?” she said hesitantly. She raked her fingers down her face stretching her eyelids so wide Joseph could see the swollen red capillaries lining the rim of her sockets.
He broke off another wedge from the rolltop, frowned, and then tossed it at Evelyn’s knees. She was near tears. “You have two hours, Evelyn. The family arrives at ten. Put out the coffee. The muffins are at the back door already. There are flowers too. The man delivered the ice while you were sleeping. Please bathe. And make this mess presentable. Evelyn? Are you listening? Wear your black sateen apron for coffee.” The poor girl was suddenly in a fever, on all fours collecting wax. As she crawled below Joseph, he leaned forward on the rocker to block her path.
“It’s fine, dear. Now go find the other candles Minister Johns delivered and light them. I don’t want the boys’ last olfactory memory of their mother to be one of sour milk.” Joseph moved to his left, forcing Evelyn to make a wide loop away from Lizzy. “Stand up, woman!” She hopped to her feet. “Now go!”
As her footsteps faded, he inched the rocker to the head of the coffin and stroked Lizzy’s hair. It still had some spring, some life. Evelyn called from the other room, but Joseph didn’t acknowledge it. He focused on the red roots, not wanting to see the rest of her deflated body. He freed a knot of hair tucked behind her ears. From the desk, he got a pair of scissors and cut off the lock dangling over his thumb. He rolled the fibers into a ball and deposited it in one of the many reply cards on the desk.
“Mr. Bartlett.” Evelyn’s footfalls rounded the staircase, and Joseph scooted the rocker forward.
“I can’t find the candles.”
“In a box on the cellar stairs.”
Evelyn stepped into the room, scrutinizing the coffin. He followed her gaze to Lizzy’s hair.
“Sir?”
Joseph opened his mouth, but his voice caught in his throat. He stared at Elizabeth’s strawberry hair, remembering it floating on the surface of Loon Lake, and later that same year, its bri
lliant strawberry color fanned across white pillows in the honeymoon suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Strands of it got wedged between the motorcar seats, frozen in the bath soap, baked into birthday cakes, and matted against his chest on hot summer nights.
Evelyn pointed at Lizzy’s head. Her voice cracked. “Mr. Bartlett!”
“Goddamn it, Evelyn!” Joseph jumped to his feet. One wrinkle in this day was going to be his way. “It’s the way I like it. Do you hear me?” Evelyn cowered. “It’s how I want it later.”
“But, sir—”
Joseph ran his fingers through his hair. “Will you please, please, please allow me this last morning with my wife?”
Evelyn bowed her head. She paused, then mumbled some sort of reply and backed out of the room. Joseph pulled the paper out from the desk and sipped his coffee. The desk chair creaked as he leaned back. As a matter of habit he checked the cotton prices in New York first. As he scanned the box score of yesterday’s Red Sox game, a dentist’s advertisement caught his eye. teeth fixed. affordable. why suffer any longer? Why indeed! He reached for the scissors and snipped it out.
snell street
“If you nip that roast again, you’re gonna lose a finger,” Mary Sheehan said to Hollister as she shook out a yellow cotton napkin and set it across her lap. She laid her hands flat on the dining room table. The chandelier hung low over the center. The blinds were drawn. Mary caught the eye of her older boys, Ray and Tommy, and nodded. “Everyone hold hands.” Mary bowed, and her children followed. The Bartlett boys stared at one another over the canned peaches. Hollister kicked his brother under the table, and then both fell forward.
“Dear Lord, bless our food. Thank you for the guests at our table. We know Your wisdom will help us over these troubled waters. Everyone pray for His blessing.” Mary took a deep breath; she imagined her dead husband, Tom, sitting in Ray’s chair at the head of the table, and what her stillborn baby girl, Annie, might have accomplished in this changing world. Her chest ached. Joseph Bartlett deserved better. Earlier that afternoon at the burial she’d clutched his elbow as he’d wept.
Spindle City Page 7
