Yet it was not Ernest but rather the other, dead son, who had been their parents’ favorite, or had become so by dying, and Ernest knew it, for no effort was made to conceal it from him; he knew it and he never resented it. I did, and not having the patience of a saint myself, I showed it.
“It’s a terrible thing, Mr. Robinson,” the old lady once said to me, “to lose your son.”
She sat on my right, Ernest on my left at the wheel of his pickup truck. It was as though he were not there, as far as she was concerned.
I said, “Yes, that must be a terrible thing, Mrs. van Voorhees. I just hope you appreciate how lucky you are to have left to you a son like yours.”
There was certainly nothing about her deserving of such devotion as Ernest’s. I found her spoiled by his attentions, a chronic malcontent and complainer, tiresome, foolish even before her brain began to go soft, misshapen by age, and to sit beside her in the cab of that pickup with the windows shut tight and the heater going full blast was to feel—well, as if you were in, and not alone in, an outhouse.
It was Ernest who did the shopping, the cooking, the housekeeping, the laundering. It must be said that at none of these tasks did he excel. Their diet was monotonous, the house not the neatest, the clothes drying on the line rather dingy. But he did them all, uncomplainingly, in addition to his outside work, and on top of all that he looked after his elderly neighbors along the road, shopping for them whenever they were down sick, shoveling them out from under the snow whenever the man of the house had a bad back, doing for his neighbor no more than his neighbor would do for him, though none ever did because Ernest never got sick, never needed help. Not quite all there!
The years passed, so many of them that even the notable ones, those marked by storms, floods, droughts, were repeated time and again and lost their distinction, sank in the mass and faded from memory. The snows melted and the grass grew and had to be mowed, the leaves fell and had to be raked, the snow fell and the paths had to be shoveled. Our summer afternoons were filled with the steady drone of the mower as Ernest’s plodding figure, as regularly as a shuttle in a loom, passed back and forth outside the windows. He raked the leaves as though he were motor-driven and when this seasonal chore was done we heard the snarl of his chainsaw day-long down in the woodlot or nearer by when, out behind the shed, he chopped the logs into fireplace length, the pile of sticks and the mound of sawdust patiently growing mountainous. And in these latter years, always, in the heat of summer and in the cold of winter, when the engine was left running and the heater on, Mother sat in the cab of the pickup truck for hours while Ernest worked. She had grown deathly afraid of being left alone and now accompanied him everywhere he went. She was afraid of falling sick or of simply falling and not having Ernest there to help her and of dying alone in the house before he got home.
In the beginning of this final phase, to pass the time, she read. Or rather, she looked at the pictures, or merely turned the pages, in the same half-dozen old tattered magazines—magazines of special interests as remote from hers, had she had any interests, as hunting, travel, fashion. Later on she dozed away the hours. I woke her from her sleep whenever I took Ernest and her a glass of lemonade or a cup of hot chocolate, until the time came when I found the glass or the cup hardly touched and after that I left her alone. Passing the truck where it sat in the drive on my way to the mailbox across the road I would see her slumped asleep, shrunken, frail, barely breathing, and it was an object lesson in the irony of existence. There was no such thing as a long life and yet there was such a thing as too long a one. Her gold brooch, her diamond engagement ring and her wedding band, now as loose on her dried-up finger as the band on a game bird’s leg, were the only reminders of the woman she had been. She had shriveled to skin and bones and her hair had thinned to the scantiness of the fur on a coconut. The effort to pin it up looked as though it were Ernest’s, not hers, and indeed, the mind balked at imagining the bodily functions of hers it was now his duty to attend to. The features of her face had lost their symmetry and gone awry. She was half blind, half deaf. Yet she lingered on. Rigorous natural selection, over a long span of time, had made of the old original Dutch stock of these Berkshire Hills a hardy race. Every township had its centenarian. And the same people who longed to live forever themselves saw in old lady van Voorhees what it was to live that long and heaved a sigh for her and for poor Ernest. He would have her on his hands for years yet to come, and then when she died he would owe it to her that he had many a long, lonely year to live on without her, with nothing whatever to live for.
To my question, the one time I ever put it to him, how old was he? Ernest’s reply was, “Old enough to know better.” Having had his little joke, he did not retreat from it; I got no answer. I was surprised at this vanity about his age in a person otherwise totally lacking in vanity and to all outward appearance content with his lot, without regret for time lost or any sense of its having been misspent. Longevity is often the boast of those whose lives have been the emptiest.
He looked both aged and ageless, bent as though to his lawn-mower or his snowshovel even on the streets of the village and moving with that plodding gait made even more elephantine by the clothes bought always too big for him, big as he was, at church bazaars, thrift shops, a figure out of a drawing by van Gogh or a painting by Millet, and yet with the bland, seamless face, unworn by worldly emotions, of the celibate, the anchorite.
Always narrow and confined, the lives of Ernest and his mother contracted further with the closing in of time. Both had loved to play bridge, their one entertainment, and had long been regulars at the Tuesday night bridge parties at the village Grange Hall, where Ernest often won the door prize. But as the old lady’s mind began to fail her she became increasingly undesirable as anybody’s partner. Her confusions, her mistakes, and her gaffes grew more and more frequent. Finally she became an embarrassment to Ernest and, hard as it was to believe, a story got about that on what turned out to be their last attendance at the Grange Hall he had actually been publicly short-tempered with her. For some village gossips nothing was sacred and there was even talk of an ugly, a shocking scene between them as he hustled her to the cloakroom and out to the truck to be taken home. In any case, that was their last appearance there.
Now they never went anywhere, except for lunch daily to the diner in the village where they had been regulars for more years than anybody could remember. They had their own table there. That, however, was not entirely owing to the proprietor’s gratitude for the van Voorhees’ loyalty to him, though that was the fiction kept up. It rather spoils a touching story, but the plain truth of the matter was that the van Voorhees were segregated from the other customers at the diner because the old lady had become incontinent and close proximity to her would have spoiled anybody’s appetite. That same unfortunate infirmity may have been partly the reason why their few friends, the few of those whom time had spared, visited less and less often and finally stopped altogether. Their friends excused themselves on the ground that they did not want to embarrass Ernest. As for him, the best son a mother ever had, he never gave a sign that he noticed anything.
I could sympathize with those friends. I did not have to imagine the atmosphere in the stuffy, overheated living room of that tiny trailer. I was obliged to ride between Ernest and the old lady in the pickup truck once a week to the town dump to get rid of my trash. I had gotten started doing that years ago, before the smell began, and now could think of no way of getting out of it without raising questions and causing pain. Distasteful to me as they were, those trips were a pleasure to Ernest, a break in his monotonous routine. It was hard to deprive a man of his enjoyment when that was so meager a thing as driving you weekly to the municipal garbage dump. So I went along, breathing through my mouth and trying not to hear with either of the two heads I felt I had at those times.
Some people have tape decks in their cars; in Ernest’s pickup, on our weekly trips to the dump, we had Mother, our one cassette.
Poor old soul! Nearly blind and nearly deaf, painful to behold, foul-smelling, she was now quite dotty as well. It was as we passed the Bohnsack place, just a quarter of a mile from my house, that she switched on.
Already by then she was lost and had asked Ernest at least twice where we were. Little do I know about saints, though given this chance to study one, but I suppose that even their patience can wear out, and having been asked that question now times out of number, Ernest chatted on without answering.
“Ernest! Ernest!” the old lady, getting no reply and growing panicky, would squawk. “I’m talking to you! Where are we, Ernest?” Born just five miles from there, never in her life having traveled farther than fifty miles away, she was lost in the fog, in the featureless and unfamiliar terrain of her own decaying mind.
The sight of the Bohnsack farmhouse calmed her. It also unfailingly evoked the story of how the Bohnsacks had come home from church one Sunday morning long ago to find their hired man on the roof of the house stark naked and stark mad and how he had stayed there for two whole days before being coaxed down and being tied up and sent off to the insane asylum.
Between that one and the next of her long life’s landmarks she would get lost at least twice more and would squawk at Ernest demanding to know where we were, and also that many times if not more would insist that he drive slower because the bumps in the road hurt her stomach and had ever since as a girl she jumped out of the hayloft and threw it out of whack.
The Jehovah’s Witness church brought out the story of how they had come to her door, two of them, and tried to convert her and how she had sent them packing. Lost again, she was restored to calm by the sight a bit farther down the road of what was now The Highway Inn. A farmhouse then, it had been one of the many homes of her childhood, and what a time they had had trying to get rid of them bedbugs! One hundred and four times a year I heard about the bedbugs, how many times Ernest had heard about them—well, in fact, Ernest had long ago ceased to hear it. As a defense against hearing this and the other set pieces, such as that prompted by the Garrison place, where his younger brother had come close to getting caught by the no-good daughter of the house, Ernest kept up a running chatter of his own. This went into my left ear while Mother’s went into the right. If sometimes I felt I had two heads, other times I felt I had none at all, that into my one ear, as into a speaking tube, and out the other passed her questions to Ernest and his answer, when there was no longer any getting out of one, to her. The trip home was a re-run, in reverse, which accounts for my hearing all this twice as many times annually as there are weeks in the year.
What would Ernest do without his mother to look after?: the question came to seem an idle one. Indeed, you now heard it asked in the village, what would she do without him to look after her? Which would have been a harder case materially but not of course emotionally. However, it never came to that pass. For though it looked as though she were destined to outlive him and go on forever, during the bitterest stretch of last year’s bitter winter old lady van Voorhees died, aged God only knows what. Ernest came very near dying along with her. Some were convinced that was what he had been trying to do. And nearly everybody thought he would have been better off if he had.
We were away on vacation at the time, gone south to escape the rigors. I heard about it by letter. It was Jay Campbell, my friend and neighbor, another of Ernest’s part-time employers and the doctor in the case, who wrote informing me, knowing I would be especially concerned, I being the nearest thing to a friend that Ernest had. But it was not until our return in the spring that I heard the details.
Ernest was then still in the hospital but his mother was already long in her grave, a last mark of his respect and of the self-sacrifice he was prepared to make for her. For, be it understood, in these parts the dead cannot be buried in winter, not, that is, without considerable expense, the ground being frozen so hard and to such a depth that only the heaviest earth-moving equipment can open it. With the return of the robins and the wild geese and the spawning runs of the herring and the shad in the river the ground can again be worked and one of the crops for spring planting is the dead; over the winter they are kept in cold storage. Last winter was, as I have said, a hard one even for us.
But although it is accepted as a fact of life, the local people dislike this usage forced by the climate upon them, and the family that says, “Never mind the cost, Mother is going into her grave now, without delay,” is one that is looked up to. It came as a surprise to nobody that even from his hospital bed and chronically hard up as he was, Ernest van Voorhees had directed that his be laid at once to her eternal rest.
A virulent strain of the flu, made worse by the weather, had swept the region, bringing life to a virtual standstill. It was the sort of epidemic that drew Ernest, always immune himself, out on his errands of mercy for his stricken neighbors. Not this time. His absence from his accustomed rounds was noted only quite belatedly, so unused was everybody to thinking of him, or his mother either, for that matter, being sick. Both were, as the neighbor discovered who knocked on their door, sick enough to alarm the man, to make him call in Jay Campbell.
Ernest looked every bit as bad off as his mother, which was to say he looked worse, taking into account their respective ages. A glance at them was enough to tell Jay that both had pneumonia, but to his recommendation that they enter the hospital Ernest returned a flat “no.” This did not much surprise Jay. He was used to that irrational fear of hospitals so common among country folks, and to this Ernest added the false sense of security of never having been seriously ill, the false confidence of having for so long nursed his mother himself, and his jealousy in the possession of that filial obligation. Disclaiming further responsibility, Jay did the only thing he could do: he phoned in prescriptions for drugs to the pharmacy and had them delivered to the house. Ernest agreed to let him know should either of them take a turn for the worse.
After that Jay was busy doctoring so many victims of the epidemic he had little time for thought of any particular ones. Patients of his who were neighbors of the van Voorhees, seeking at last to repay the many favors Ernest had done for them over the years, reported being thanked but no-thanked, which, considering the old lady’s indestructibility and Ernest’s own lifelong ruggedness, worried none of them overmuch. “Smoke still coming out their chimney. Reckon they must be alive in there,” they said. “Take a lot of killing, them van Voorhees.” After a week or so of hearing nothing further about them, Jay concluded—insofar as he gave the matter any consideration at all—that they were recovering on their own.
When the phone call came Jay could hardly make out who the man was on the line, much less what he was struggling to say. How, in his condition, Ernest had managed even to get to the phone was a wonder. He said he reckoned the time had come for them to be taken to the hospital. The time had not just come, it had come and gone, several days before.
After being brought in by ambulance, the old lady lasted just twenty-four hours. Meanwhile Ernest was responding to treatment in the intensive care unit no better than his mother had. His condition worsened hourly. His pneumonia was the least of Ernest’s troubles. It was discovered that in addition to it he had peritonitis from a ruptured strangulated hernia.
“He must have been going around with that hernia for years,” Jay said to me, and I groaned to recall the hours of raking leaves, pushing the lawnmower, shoveling snow, lifting logs that Ernest had put in for me. Heroically neglecting his own condition to look after his old mother, Ernest had very nearly killed himself.
Emergency abdominal surgery was performed on Ernest although even the doctor who did it considered the case hopeless.
“Made of leather,” that was Jay Campbell’s comment on Ernest’s miraculous survival.
I found him emaciated, pale, feeble, and still in a mental daze when I went to see him in the hospital. I thought the locals were right, that with nothing left to live for he would have been better off dead. His listlessness and a
bsence of mind were owing to shock and grief, loneliness and lack of purpose more than to his own close encounter with death. I forebore to condole with him on the loss of his mother, afraid even to mention her name.
Visiting hours were almost over and I was preparing to leave when Ernest asked me to find and hand him his mother’s purse from his nightstand. He then entrusted to my keeping her gold brooch, her engagement ring, and her wedding band. But not without first an incident affecting in the extreme. As he was fumbling in the purse for the jewelry something flew across the bed and struck the wall with a clatter. At the same moment Ernest let out a screech.
“Get those out of here!” he cried.
I looked on the floor and under the bed I found the object, or rather the two objects: his mother’s dentures. It was deeply affecting, this pain at the sight of something so intimately associated with his mother, with which she had sustained life itself, and now would never again have use for.
I disposed of them in a trash bin out on the street.
It was to a house from which his mother was now absent but which was filled with mementoes of her that Ernest came home. Old lady van Voorhees had been one of those people who never throw anything away. Into that tiny trailer was crammed everything brought there from the big old family farmhouse. To clean it all out would be an enormous undertaking, one that I urged Ernest to let wait until he was stronger. But reminders of his mother and of their long life together were too painful to him. Just as his first act on being discharged from the hospital was reclaiming her jewels from me and selling them, he now insisted on cleaning out the house as soon as he was inside it. For the next week he and I in his pickup truck, its bed heaped high, plied back and forth from his place to the dump. Very different these trips were from the former ones, with silence now on either side of me. When we were done not a relic of Ernest’s mother remained. Every least trace of her sojourn on earth, lengthy as it had been, was gone.
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 21
