An Inconsiderate Omission
Morris Merkle feels the telephone has turned against him. Lately Jane’s voice has carried a tone of accusation, and he can’t think why. There was a time early in their marriage when she had every right to accuse him and chose against it—or so it seemed. In the evening, slumped in his red armchair, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America unopened in his lap, the dog at his feet, he considers the mystery that is his wife. She is young, of course, and he is not. He has always suspected his role in her life is that of a father, yet her father would not have approved of him, he is quite sure. Mr. Yarborough. He has seen only one photograph of the man, sitting on a sloped lawn with a furry terrier in his arms. It’s a pose Morris understands, relaxing with one’s faithful companion on a hot summer day.
He has begun to drink again, a little sherry before dinner. This time he feels confident in his ability to stay alert to the temptations of hedonism. He finds himself lonely, yet not drawn to womanizing, as are so many of his colleagues. It is Jane he desires, but he must remind himself it was Eleanor before that. Things change. The heart changes course. It’s the way a man copes. And a woman? His mind wanders to his sister, Dotty, whose affections seem to swell this way and that, like a sail on a blustery day. He realizes, suddenly, that he admires her for it, for her peregrinations. If he were wed to a man like Oliver—a woman in his case—steadfast and content as Oliver seems to be, he too would need the occasional voyage to Mount Olympus simply to feel the blood in his veins.
His Mount Olympus came to him in Eleanor, and he, foolish idiot that he was, believed in that craggy, permanent heaven. This sad thought propels Morris from his chair in search of something to drink. Jane is quite strict about drink, but Jane is gone. He pours himself a glass of sherry—sadly, that’s all there is. He’ll have to get in some decent whiskey. “Hello, Martin,” he sighs, patting his friend on the head and sinking into his chair. The red leather holds him like a buffoonish pair of arms.
They were engaged to marry, he and his Eleanor. He was a young man then, climbing in business, gaining momentum in ways that blinded him. He felt he was proving himself worthy of her, but each success sent her into a jealous rage. He had never before seen anger of a physical nature in a woman, and after these outbursts he was flushed with thoughts of sex. And then one day he opened a letter from her, a paragraph in which she sent him away. He fell to his knees—he was alone in the room—and uttered a sound he had never heard before from his own throat, and never since. Many years later, when he met Jane, he was still a man with an arrow lodged above his collarbone. His first response to her unexpected affection was: never again.
Jane, Jane. She chided him, quite rightly, for not loving her enough, though he did what suitors do, carried chocolate to her door, inundated her with roses (only to discover that roses reminded her of funerals and her parents’ deaths). His heart wasn’t in it, yet he hadn’t the courage to desist. Somehow, shortly after that, they married.
It is the central mystery of his life, how he came to be Jane’s husband. He addresses the question to the dog, who raises his muzzle at the sound of his name. A neat appearance, Morris believes, won her confidence. He was courteous and kind and reminded her of her father. Naive youth was on her side as well. But his capitulation is something else altogether. He wonders if it’s happened yet and knows it has not—or not, at least, in the way he expected, which was the quick, fleshy, treacherous way he had fallen in love with Eleanor. To Jane he never spoke of his engagement so many years in the past. He doesn’t even remember the circumstances by which the matter was raised, but it came not long after the wedding. Jane was entirely undone by what she called his “inconsiderate omission.” Generous of her to speak of it that way when it caused her such visible distress. It grew her up a notch. It turned her inward in a way that, he would never admit to anyone (except the dog at his feet), made her more attractive. It was then he began to fall in love with her, just as she was falling away. The whole episode made her more spicy, more complicated. As time went by, he decided she had forgiven him.
A Dinner Party
Ethyl Schellbach serves up a delicate pork roast garnished with apples, cheese, and pine nuts. Dotty Hedquist has never understood pine nuts. If she wanted the flavor of turpentine in her food, she would take up oil painting in the kitchen. And the cheese seems a bit out of the ordinary. A little too experimental for her taste. She sits between Louie Schellbach and the older of the two visitors. The younger one—she’s quite attractive really, for a professor—is seated next to Oliver.
The Hedquists have just that afternoon returned from the North Rim. Ordinarily they would spend a few days settling in before accepting a dinner invitation, but on the telephone Ethyl practically begged, and in the end they lifted their weary backsides into the car and drove over. From her brief conversation with her hostess, Dotty is led to believe the two professors have overstayed their welcome. They have crossed the line and become freeloaders. But from Louie she understands they are staying at the hotel, they have shared a meal or two and declined several others, the visit is longer than anyone expected, and its nature is not to be discussed. She sighs inwardly, wondering if jealousy is at play here. The younger professor certainly is interested in every aspect of Louie’s work. But this must be old hat to Ethyl. Perhaps what piques the lady of the house is the fact that Louie is interested, or pretending to be, in the work of the young professor. And the young professor is not, as anyone can see with their own eyes, a bearded, slightly simian, bespectacled, socially inept male, but an intelligent, pretty, and enthusiastic female. Not a temptress, but one of those of her sex who, precisely because they pay no attention to it, cannot help but be noticed.
The older one, Miss Clover, is a bit drab in her presentation. She wears trousers and a man’s shirt and sturdy shoes that give her the appearance of someone on the eve of a great adventure. Something alpine, involving ropes and picks and axes and those things for the feet with the French name—oh, what are they called? Having to do with female problems. Anyway, Dotty, who is just her age, has not felt the proximity of that kind of adventure for a long time, not since she and Lowell Dunhill used to walk all day and by nightfall would find themselves in places far from anyone—once on a ledge only wide enough for two—and they’d throw down their bedrolls and share an orange between them and lie out under the stars without a care. But it’s been some time since then. Thirteen years, in fact. How extraordinary.
Crampons! That’s the word. It comes to her as she is listening to Miss Clover lecture on the merits of dry farming. Dotty, never much of a student, feels she ought to be taking notes. “Dry farming,” Miss Clover informs, wagging her butter knife in the air, “is practiced in very few places, and we aren’t sure whether the reasons for that are cultural or—”
Dotty suddenly feels sure she is about to be called on, and to prevent this from happening she interrupts with a question of her own. In a glorious non sequitur, and to the surprise of everyone at the table, she blurts out, “But if crampons are for the feet, what are the things for the rock?”
There is a leaden silence. “For the rock, my darling?” asks Oliver.
Dotty cannot remember a time when he has ever addressed her as “my darling.” It has an ominous, sickening feel to it. “Yes,” she insists. “You know. The little things they pound into the rock. They sort of pull themselves up with them.”
“Up?” asks Oliver.
“Who are they?” asks Ethyl.
“Oh, all of you!” cries Dotty. “The alpineers, of course!” Miss Clover starts to laugh, then suddenly to cough violently. She grabs her napkin and covers her mouth and shudders noiselessly for some time, until Dotty realizes she’s choking and they’ll never hear the rest of the lecture on dry farming because she, Dotty Hedquist, has with her ill-timed interruption caused the poor lady to inhale Ethyl Schellbach’s glorious pork roast. She turns and taps Miss Clover on the back and Miss Clover, her eyes round as teacups, nods
vigorously, which Dotty interprets as an invitation to tap her again, harder this time—more of a whack—which she does, half rising to her feet with the effort. With a gust of air, the offending bit of gristle and flesh is launched from the distinguished botanist’s windpipe, and a gasping Miss Clover collapses against Dotty, practically knocking her out of her chair.
“Elzada!” cries her young companion, whose name, Dotty seems to remember, is Lois. Lois Cutter. Or Jotter. Or Jotter Cutter, or some such thing. She seems about to leap across the table, her pretty face pale and elongated with concern. The two men jump to their feet, Oliver shouting, “Stay calm everyone!” and Louie silent but nimble as a cat. Then the crisis is over. Refusing assistance, an embarrassed Miss Clover groggily pulls herself up, straightens her shirt, and pats her hair. “I must look a sight,” she says, frowning.
“No no, not a hair out of place,” laughs Dotty nervously.
“Good gracious!” says Oliver. “That’s enough excitement for one evening, I should say.”
“Interesting,” says Louie thoughtfully. “I’ve never before witnessed a choking incident that wasn’t accompanied by the classic hands-to-the-throat motion.”
“And you’ve watched many people choke?” wheezes Miss Clover, rubbing her collarbone.
“Not fatally. It’s always worked out much the same way this one did. The only hurt involved is a bit of wounded pride.”
“But choking is no stranger to you, Mr. Schellbach?”
“I myself have never had the misfortune.”
“Yet those around you tend to—”
“Heavens!” cries Ethyl, seated on Miss Clover’s left. “What a gruesome conversation!” She stands abruptly and begins to whisk away the plates.
“Let me help you,” offers Miss Jotter Cutter.
Ethyl turns to her with a chilly smile and shakes her head. “How kind of you, but you’re a guest in my home, you and Elzada, and we don’t ask guests to trouble themselves, do we Louie?”
“We don’t ask,” he agrees, “but if they volunteer . . . ?”
“Guests don’t volunteer,” Dotty chimes in.
“The young lady just has,” Oliver points out.
“It’s highly anomalous,” says Louie, nodding. “I think we need to consider this case on its own merits.”
“Not while I stand here with a load of plates.” Ethyl frowns.
“Come to think of it,” says Dotty, “Jane, who could be considered a guest, does more than her fair share of work. She often does the laundry and is always willing to cook, though Oliver and I don’t happen to like our meat well done or raw, which seems to be all she knows. Maybe that’s how they do it in St. Louis these days.”
“Jane?” asks Louie. “Is this the Jane I met? Your sister-in-law?”
“Yes,” says Dotty.
“She’s still with you?”
“Very much with us.”
“Well, why isn’t she here?”
“She’s at home with a headache,” says Oliver. “She gets headaches, apparently. Either you do or you don’t is what I think. For example, I’m an indigestion man myself.”
“Oliver,” says Dotty sharply. “This can’t be very interesting for the guests.”
“Oh, quite the contrary,” says Miss Cutter Jotter quickly. “We’re fascinated by every little thing. We’ve had quite enough of ourselves, isn’t that right, Elzie? I get headaches myself, actually.”
“Now, headaches,” says Dotty, “in my opinion, are mostly in the mind.”
“In the head, you mean,” laughs Louie.
“What about indigestion?” asks Oliver.
“In the mind as well,” says Dotty.
“Your point,” says Miss Clover, “seems to be that illness is psychological.”
“Perhaps.”
“Including that which results in death?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“But not all deaths are due to matters ‘in the mind,’ as you put it?”
Dotty is silent, considering.
“Drowning, for example,” Miss Clover continues. “Is that too a psychological matter, Mrs. Hedquist?”
Dotty stiffens, lets her gaze fall on the table. Her tongue feels like a great big shoe in her mouth. She reaches out to lift her water glass and finds her hand trembling. She returns it to her lap and says, “No. Of course not.”
Ethyl, who has finished removing the plates, now sweeps in from the kitchen with an enormous brown cake. She lays it on the sideboard, along with the dessert plates and utensils, and invites everyone to come and help themselves. Dotty rises with the rest, though she is suddenly feeling strange and dizzy and could use a little lie-down. What she was going to say before the old professor cornered her was that, in her opinion, Jane wasn’t suffering from a headache at all but a heartache. Wasn’t that interesting? She thought it was. She’d watched it coming on as they drove farther and farther away from the North Rim. Jane had become increasingly more silent, more lost in her thoughts. By the time they got home she looked peaked indeed. She had gone to bed immediately and stayed there, bestirring herself only to call out a faint good-bye.
“May I serve you some cake?” asks Oliver, bending over her. Dotty discovers she is no longer on her feet but sitting in her chair at the table. She nods absently and he leans forward, a look of curious excitement on his face. He reaches for her water glass and picks it up. “What the devil?”
“Oh my word!” she whispers, for something sways at the bottom of the glass. Pale and ragged looking, curled up like an embryo, it is, of course, the piece of pork roast launched from Miss Elzada Clover’s windpipe.
“Drowned in your drink,” he murmurs close to her ear. His eyes sparkle and he goes to cut her a rather large piece of cake.
Humming
She lies on her bed and listens to the noises of the empty house. A clanging pipe seems to call her name: Jane Jane Jane. Something in the wall behind her starts to buzz. It sounds like bees. She imagines honey seeping through the plaster and wallpaper of her little room, touching a finger to the dark spreading wetness, tasting it. Sweet.
Her head pounds strangely but does not hurt. What she is feeling is the beating of her heart. A car goes by outside, and she sits up and hopes beyond hope it’s him. But it isn’t, of course. She knows it isn’t. He’s 210 miles away and doesn’t have a day off until next week.
She’s acting childish. No, childish may not be quite right. Children don’t have such feelings, do they? What on earth does she know about children? As far as she can tell she never was one. Perhaps she’s becoming one now. She certainly isn’t ruled by reason. In a matter of weeks she seems to have lost her reason and perhaps the rest of herself as well. Though something has been gained, surely. Oh, it’s all such a muddle to her!
The noise in the wall is more of a hum than a buzz, though the difference between the two seems purely geometric. A hum is round. Even the letters h-u-m are softly rounded. A buzz is a different matter entirely and has those two angular z’s to prove it. But what could it be, back there behind her head? Suddenly the cause of the humming interests her. Just weeks ago her thought would have been, “Call the exterminator!” and now, because she’s lost her reason but gained something else, she would like to know the name of the creature responsible for this mellifluous intrusion.
She and Morris had quite an adventure with cockroaches. The St. Louis house was a magnet for them, and her duty in the early days of their marriage was to discern when an infestation had taken place and call the cockroach man. He arrived in an unmarked truck, which unfailingly aroused the neighbors’ suspicions, and Jane came to enjoy the feeling of espionage that shrouded these visits. The poison itself had a soporific effect on her, but even the grogginess seemed high adventure. Once, early on, she forced herself to ask the cockroach man whether the “problem,” as she had learned to call it, was due to some failure in her housekeeping. When he assured her that a single crumb could keep hundreds of cockroaches alive for weeks, and tha
t without that crumb they could live indefinitely on invisible bits of lint, a weight lifted and without thinking she flung her arms around him, to which he responded by trying to kiss her. She was dumbfounded and unprepared and yet intrigued that a gesture of gratitude might be construed as a passionate invitation. Perhaps the nuances of intention were lost on most people. Or perhaps love was its own kind of high adventure. She had never thought about such things, for her life with Morris was new and unformed, and she was young, and though her love for him and with him was not what she would call adventure, high or low, she lived inside it in a daily way and was comforted by it, content.
Now, thinking back on this, she feels at least a century older. A new possibility occurs to her: the cockroach man kissed every young wife he could, simply because he could. And some of them, Jane is now certain, kissed him back (she had not). It astonishes her, the world she has been blind to. A world of washing machine repairmen, and Fuller Brush men, and men selling magazine subscriptions, and men hired to paint or poison or mow the lawn. Men dressed in neat suits, Jehovah’s Witnesses, selling religion. Men making their way inside the house, to fix this or that or bring something or get a glass of water. That’s how it happened, didn’t it? The milkman, the exterminator, the florist carrying armfuls of roses into her kitchen—a gift from her husband, who left at eight and returned at six and never ever surprised her at the door. Strangers with jobs to do and to whom she said, “Yes, come in.” Well, that was how it happened, and whether it was good or bad she couldn’t say, only that it was easy as one, two, three and she had never known it.
But Dotty knew it, had known it for quite some time by the look of things. Jane feels too warm all of a sudden. She wonders if the humming in the wall generates heat. She gets up and goes into the Hedquists’ bedroom, promising herself this will be the last of her snooping. She tries to imagine being her sister-in-law and having something to hide. Where would she hide it? In her bureau drawer? In a shoe? Somewhere Oliver would never come across it. And what might be hidden anyway? A love letter? A scrap of clothing? She cracks open the closet but it’s too dark to see, and she doesn’t want to turn on another light. She’s trying to think like a detective. Dotty’s bottom drawer calls to her, and she kneels and opens it and carefully lifts out the slacks and blue jeans, even feeling the pockets. But nothing. The drawer above is full of men’s shirts, some still in the package. They’re the kind Morris wears to work, good-quality Oxford cloth, white, yellow, and blue. There’s even a pink one, and suddenly Jane remembers Dotty wearing a similar shirt to her rendezvous with Deo. But what could a shirt mean? If she were really a detective maybe she’d know. She replaces the clothing and tiptoes out of the room, though there is no need for stealth.
The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Page 12
