All the Days and Nights
Page 17
She did not ever say that she preferred me to my older brother, but when I was a child and cared one way or the other, I used to think that she would not have said so often that she carried me on a pillow if she hadn’t meant that my brother was Dr. Donald’s favorite and I was hers. I understood the principle of equity, even though I had not yet encountered the word. I know now that she loved my brother the way everyone else did — because of the terrible thing that had happened to him, and because of his pride, which kept him from feeling sorry for himself. And because he was so wicked when he was little, and so bold. How their faces shone with amusement when someone told the story of the hose, or how, totally unafraid, he said to the gypsy, “Mr. Gypsy, what have you got in your bag?”
Aunty Donald would not have let anyone but my brother remove her from her house to that nursing home, or have believed anyone else who told her, as he did, that it was only for a week or so. She believed him because he had had his leg cut off when he was five years old and still did everything that other boys could do. To see Dr. Donald with him when my brother was a grown man was to see, unforgettably, the image of love. We — my brother and his wife and I — went to the races with him in Chicago. Dr. Donald didn’t touch my brother, but his hands fluttered around him. The expression on the old man’s face was of someone looking into the sun.
• • •
THE balance transferred from the conservator’s account to the executor’s account was $2,073.04. In Aunty’s bank account: $82.55. Half a year’s interest on government bonds: $300. The rent from the house in Dover. On October 24th, the executor deposited the first collection of money found in the house: $293 in bills and $51.40 in coins. On November 3rd: $325 in gold pieces, which should have been turned in thirty years before. Thirty years before, Aunty was in her late fifties, and voted the straight Republican ticket, if she voted at all. She was, in any case, strong-minded. She did as she pleased, without regard for fiscal policies. On May 4th, these items: Proceeds from the sale of old car: $25, the standard price for junk. (I didn’t know they had a car. I thought of Dr. Donald as loyal exclusively to horses.) A flower urn brought $15, which means that some woman in Lincoln had had her eye on it. $18 in gold, and $12.45 in cash. On June 29th, somebody made a down payment of $500 on the house on Ninth Street, the total sale price being $7,000. A big house for that, but it undoubtedly was run down. On August 7th: liquidating dividend from German-American National Bank Stock owned by T. A. Donald, but no mention of the stock, and the bank hasn’t been called that since shortly after the sinking of the Lusitania. An uncashed dividend check turned up somewhere, in a book or in a box of old letters or God knows where. And then, oddly, jewelry not bequeathed in her will. A diamond ring: $175. An amethyst ring with a small pearl: $20. A small pocket watch: $5 (meaning it wouldn’t run). A pearl and rhinestone (!) ring: $3. A small locket on a chain (which I have a feeling I remember, the only jewelry I remember her wearing, but perhaps this is imagination). A diamond ring: $150, and a dinner ring with small diamonds: $200. A down payment of $250 on the house in Dover. Proceeds from the sale of cufflinks, tiepins, collar buttons, etc.: $10. An imitation ruby ring: $7. All this in January and February. In March, a pin, another watch, and a ring: $25. They must have turned up in some hiding place, though the house had been cleaned, by four men, several months before. And probably these items were not mentioned in the will because Aunty had forgotten she had them.
The disbursements are less eccentric. It took $817.21 (the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital, St. Joseph’s Nursing Home) to help her out of this life. There is a charge for sewerage-system service — stopped-up drain or sink or toilet. And Ernest J. Gottlieb was paid $12 for opening a safe in the basement. Some of the money was probably there; or the jewelry. Or the safe could have been empty. Anything is possible. The spray of flowers for her own casket cost $34, and the funeral expenses were $1,470, so she was buried within the circumference of the middle class. She died in June, and the yard was mowed all through July, August, and September, and the water and gas were not turned off until the following February. The doctor bills were $150.50. In Lincoln, doctors still dispensed medicine. Apparently she had stopped taking the evening paper; there is no item for the paper boy. But from time to time during the settling of the estate, notices were ran in the Lincoln Evening Star and the Dover Times. Carl Simmons was paid $3 for painting a “For Sale” sign. There is no telephone bill. In April the yard was raked, the porch and the windows were repaired. There are two items for real-estate taxes. The First Presbyterian Church received $500, according to the fifteenth clause of the will, and various sums of money were paid out for the recording of affidavits and for appraisals, broker’s and auctioneer’s commissions, and court costs. The executor’s commission was $1,500, the attorney’s fee $2,500.
In June the yard was mowed again, and on August 8th the house passed into the hands of somebody else and was no longer Aunty Donald’s. The three knights that for so long rode up to that faded castle have no doubt been covered over. There is no mention in the final report of the peacock feathers or the piano that was never tuned and never played on. My cousin told me that the contents of the house were sold intact to someone from out of town, for $2,000; that the buyer wanted the clothes for theatrical purposes, and also thought they might be of interest to museums and historical societies. It was all carted off to a warehouse somewhere until he had a chance to go over everything and see what was there. It would have been a pleasure to go through Aunty Donald’s things, up to a point, and after that probably nauseating. This is the past unillumined by memory or love. The sediment of days, what covered Troy and finally would have covered her if my brother hadn’t come and taken her away.
Haller’s Second Home
THE doorman, the two elevator men in the lobby all said “Good evening, Mr. Haller” to him and when he stepped off at the fourth floor he didn’t ring the bell of the apartment directly in front of the elevator shaft but merely transferred the package he was carrying from his right arm to his left, opened the door, and walked in. A large grey cat was waiting just inside. “Well?” Haller said to it and the cat turned away in disappointment. There was only one human being the cat cared about and it was not Haller. He saw that the lights were on in the living room, but it was always empty at this time of evening. He put his hat and gloves on the front-hall table and, still wearing his raincoat, went in search of whoever he could find.
He had come here for the first time on a winter afternoon, when he was twenty-two years old. With a girl. Somebody else’s girl, whom Mrs. Mendelsohn embraced and welcomed into the family. The girl was marrying Mrs. Mendelsohn’s nephew, Dick Shields, who was Haller’s best friend in high school in Chicago and on into college. And she and Haller were friends also. And she had asked him to come with her because he happened to be in New York — he had come down from Cambridge to go to the opera — and she was nervous about meeting these people who were about to become her relatives. The whole future course of her marriage and of her life might be affected favorably or unfavorably. And then what did she do but explain to them, before she had her coat off, that if she hadn’t been marrying Dick she would have been marrying Haller. No one took this remark seriously, not even Haller. All in the world he wanted, behind those big horn-rimmed glasses, was to be loved, but he had his hands full with the Harvard Graduate School, and a wife would have been more than he could manage.
That first time, he rang the bell politely and, when the girl looked at herself in the round mirror of her compact, said, “Stop fussing. You look fine. You look like the Queen of the May.” “I don’t feel like the Queen of the May,” she said, and they heard footsteps approaching and a woman’s high, clear, beautiful voice finishing a remark that was addressed to someone in the apartment. Haller thought he was a spectator sitting on the sidelines, but in fact he was about to acquire a second home. This was eleven years ago: the winter of 1930–31. He was now thirty-three years old and still unmarried.
Through curtained French doors he saw a large female figure moving about the dining-room table and, being nearsighted, thought it was the Mendelsohns’ cook. It turned out to be Mrs. Mendelsohn herself. “Hello, Haller darling,” she said, and kissed him.
She was a stately woman, with blue eyes and black hair and a fine complexion. She was half Irish and a half English — that is, her grandparents were. She favored the Irish side. The small, oval, tinted photograph of her on the living-room table, taken when she was nineteen, suggested that she had always been beautiful and that the beauty had been improved rather than blurred by the years. The blue eyes were still clear, the black hair had becoming lines of grey in it. She flirted with her husband. Her children admired her appearance, made fun of her conversation, and were careful not to bring down on themselves the full force of her explosive character. Haller had the feeling that her kindness toward him was largely because of his connection with her sister’s son. There were flowers on the table — sweet peas — and dubonnet candles in yellow holders, and little arsenic-green crepe-paper baskets filled with nuts. “Looks like a birthday,” he said.
“I don’t know whether it is or not,” Mrs. Mendelsohn said. “I got home late and there were no preparations of any kind. Ab has forbidden Renée to bake a cake, and so I’m just trying to rustle something together before Father comes up and is angry because dinner isn’t ready.”
“Where’ll I put the present?” Haller asked.
“Present?” Mrs. Mendelsohn said. “You dare to give her a present?”
“Certainly. What are birthdays for if not to get presents?”
“Put it on her chair, then,” Mrs. Mendelsohn said with a sigh, “and take the consequences.”
He did as she suggested and then left the dining room and walked along the hall, looking in one door after another. Renée was in the kitchen. She was a West Indian, from Barbados, and she had only been with the Mendelsohns a few months, but in this short time she had become the family clearinghouse for all secrets and private messages. Nathan was her favorite; he told her things he told no one else, and made her feel very special indeed, and so was slowly pushing her toward the precipice where the rights of the employer and the obligations of the employed give way, in a moment of too great clarity, to the obligations of the employer and the rights of the employed. But while she lasted, and especially in the beginning, she was a delight to everyone but Mrs. Mendelsohn, who did not like her all that much. The Doctor joked with Renée and praised her cooking. “Enjoy yourselves!” she called when Nathan and Leo and Abbie and their friends went out the front door together, on a Saturday afternoon. “We will, we will,” they promised.
Haller was tempted to go in and tell her what he had up his sleeve, but her back was turned and she looked busy, so he went on to the boys’ room. The light was on in there but it was empty, like the living room. He took his raincoat off and laid it on one of the beds. Then he walked out again, and down the hall to the next door on the right. It was closed. The door of Abbie Mendelsohn’s room was always closed — against what went on in the rest of the apartment and what went on in the world. Her brothers came and went without knocking, and Haller was permitted in there, and one or two other friends. He knocked lightly, and a voice said, “Come in.”
The light went on as he pushed the door open and he saw that Nathan was lying on one of the twin beds and Abbie on the other. She sat up and looked at him. Then her blond head drooped. “Oh God,” she said. “There’s no use trying to sleep. How are you, Haller, dear?”
“I’m fine. Happy birthday.”
“Happy what?” she said, sinking back on the bed.
“Would you like me to go someplace else?”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Nathan said. “She’s just being difficult.”
“I’m so tired my teeth water,” Abbie said.
“Are you sure?” Haller asked. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“It’s what it feels like. I haven’t slept for a week, on account of the kittens. They crawl on my face all night long. Be careful you don’t step on them.”
Haller made his way cautiously to the nearest chair and sat down. The Victorian sofa and chairs had belonged to the great-aunt for whom Abbie was named, and they gave this room an entirely different quality from the family living room. There were flower prints on the walls, the window looked out on a court, and the room was quiet as a tomb. “When are you going to start giving them away?” he asked.
“We gave one of them away this afternoon,” Nathan said. “To a patient of Father’s.”
Officially the Mendelsohns had two cats — the altered male that was waiting at the door and a recently acquired alley cat whose standing in the family was doubtful. Dr. Mendelsohn did not like cats of any description and was convinced that they contributed to his asthma. “Two cats are one more than there is room for in a city apartment,” he announced alarmingly from behind the Evening Sun, but so far he had done nothing about it.
The cat yowled up at Nathan from the courtyard one snowy night, and he went down in his bathrobe and slippers and rescued her. A month later she had a litter of four, behind the closed door of Abbie’s room, and she was raising them without Dr. Mendelsohn’s permission; without, in fact, his knowing anything about it. She nursed her kittens in a grocery carton on the floor between the twin beds, and now that they were able to stagger around on their own feet an opening had been cut in the side of the box for them to go in and out by. When they were not pushing at the mother cat’s belly they clawed their way up the bedspreads, or collected in all but invisible groups on the mulberry-colored carpet, or went exploring. Except one, which Nathan now brought forth from the carton. This kitten could move, and it was apparently not in pain, but when he put his hand under it and tried to make it stand, the kitten collapsed and lay limp and miserable on the bedspread.
“The girl we gave the other kitten to is an orphan,” he said. “First her mother died, and then she went to live with her grandfather and grandmother and they died.”
“What a sad story,” said Haller. “Do you believe it?”
Nathan was dark — dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin — and very handsome. Originally he had his mother’s beautiful nose, but when he was a small child a dog bit him. He was playing with the dog, and teasing it, and it bit him on the nose. He had to have several stitches in it, and his nose was not the same shape afterward. His brother and sister mourned over this accident, as if it had been some tragic flaw in his destiny. He himself was resigned to his loss but did not minimize it.
“She’s only eighteen,” he said. “And her guardian was with her. A very nice woman. When I told her about the kittens she looked at the g
irl and said, ‘Very well, we’ll take the sick one.’ But they took the one with the black mustache, instead. The one that looked like Hitler.” He yawned.
“What you need is a change,” Haller said, hanging over the arm of his chair to watch the kittens on the rug. “Why don’t we all drive south into the spring. We could be as far south as Richmond, Virginia, the first night. We could see the tulips on the White House lawn.”
“How do you know,” Nathan asked, “how do you know there will be tulips on the White House lawn?”
“There will be something. If not tulips then there will be dandelions. When Moris Burge and I drove to Santa Fe last year we spent the first night in a wonderful tourist home in Richmond —”
“That Moris Burge,” Nathan said.
“— and when we woke up the next morning we heard a cardinal singing in the backyard, and the lilacs were all in bloom. I’m not exaggerating. Why don’t we drive south, the three of us, and go straight through the spring? We’ll see iris in Alexandria, and in the southern part of New Jersey there will be pine forests with dogwood — white dogwood — all through them. Or we could go down the Shenandoah Valley and pick violets at Harpers Ferry, like I did when I was seventeen.”
“You’re such a traveler,” Nathan said, but not unkindly.
“The West Indies when I was twenty-three. And Santa Fe, last summer. Where else have I been?”