When she was seized, the chatter stopped. And when she resumed speaking—one side of her face drooping, one arm useless—you had to listen. Sometimes the words came out in a rational way. Other times not.
“I would like a husband,” she said, pushing her fingers toward the pitcher of water.
Carlton brought her a posy once. “Carlton is in jail,” his mother told him after a long search for the words.
On another day, when Daisy Lou asked if she wanted an extra pillow behind her neck, the words seemed especially long in coming. “You are a blear,” Mattie finally uttered.
Daisy gently corrected the words in her mind. “You are a dear,” she said to herself as she ran a comb slowly through her mother’s tangle of fading hair. “You really are.”
Dr. Sheehan arrived at twilight to check on Mattie. His stride was calm and stately. At the door, he took Daisy’s hand in both of his and pressed it warmly. She was shocked. He looked at her with something that resembled love. The smell of lilacs rode the soft air.
Most times, Dr. Sheehan was a stern, even cold young man, snappish sometimes, and now suddenly there was this new person, and he seemed—how did one read that look on his face?—he seemed to see her fully and to embrace what he saw. She had the feeling something very untoward was happening, but she couldn’t say what it was.
Maybe, she thought, it’s me. Perhaps I am the peculiar one today. I am the one who is altered and strange.
He walked up the stairs ahead of Daisy, slow and complacent as a husband, and he listened to Mattie’s heart, then put his arm lightly around her shoulders to lean her forward when he urged her to cough.
He took out his beautiful pocket watch—it was larger than most and had scrolls on the silver like figure eights on ice—and he timed Mattie’s pulse. Daisy watched them from the door. Her mother’s streaky hair hung loose around her colorless face.
He sat on the edge of Mattie’s bed, urging her to cough. Something about that—the sight of the young ardent-eyed man with his arm around her mother’s stooped shoulders—produced in Daisy Lou a sense of such sharp mourning and nostalgia that she had to leave the room.
Back in the kitchen, she offered him a glass of iced tea, and he sat at the table, his eyes like fingertips on her face. They talked a little. He asked her what she was reading. She read him part of “Endymion,” a long poem by Stephen Phillips, her favorite poet.
Selene, the dark moon goddess, has removed blitheness from the shepherd Endymion and left him with something riveting. Daisy spoke the words: “But now what melancholy sweet / Steals over me, what magical distress, / Distant delicious trouble and new pain!” She read in a shy, fervent voice. “Ah! Ah! What hast thou done? for I begin / To grieve for ancient wars, and at the thought / Of women that have died long, long ago / For sea-tossed heroes…”
She looked up. Dr. Sheehan nodded gently, seeming to recognize the truth of it.
He had a look of vivid relaxation that she had never seen before. It was not drunkenness. Despite the rumors. She knew drunkenness when she saw it, from Carlton. It was loud and without judgment or discretion.
“Those then who bear the torch may not expect / Sweet arms, nor touches, no, nor any home / But brilliant wanderings and bright exile,” she finished softly.
He asked Daisy some quiet questions. How she taught voice lessons. How one went about coaxing the best from someone else. She recited some of the technical aspects and also addressed the importance of creating a picture in your mind to instill the proper feeling. She told him one must learn to place the tone properly.
She talked about pitch and resonation and training as if the voice were a rambunctious pet. It was a matter of patience and discipline, she said, and perseverance above all else. And then there was the artistic component. She found it helpful to link every piece of music with a certain emotion. She thought Sorrow, she thought Spiritual Yearning, and so on. She thought of the difference between a shepherd girl’s adolescent pinings and a queen’s grief, for instance.
She had never talked this much to a man to whom she was not related. Never come close.
So how do you imagine a queen’s grief? he asked. Well, she said, you think of someone with a natural dignity, a natural gentility, and a high degree of sensitivity. And, like most queens, she is isolated. She is behind walls. She lives a rarefied existence. And then she has lost something upon which her heart was set. The king, or a son perhaps. Or a kingdom. Whatever made being a queen worthwhile. The loneliness worthwhile. She has lost it, and she must spend the rest of her life expressing that grief.
And how is her grief different from that of the young shepherd girl?
Well, it isn’t different in kind, Daisy said. The pain may feel the same for them both. But the queen’s grief is more noble because she doesn’t have the freedom of the shepherd girl to wash the pain away with new experience. No. Because the way she responds to it has to be an example. She is not free to be undignified or confused or changeable. She is an emblem. An example of how to be sad. Her music is lasting.
He listens. He nods. He consults his beautifully scrolled pocket watch.
He looks up and he tells Daisy that she is an artist and she is a queen, and she should never listen to anyone who says otherwise. He rises to leave.
They stand face-to-face. He extracts an immaculate handkerchief from his vest pocket and draws a corner of it along Daisy’s damp hairline. And then he is gone.
Hot. The parlor shaded. Sweat beads on Daisy’s upper lip. Mattie upstairs in bed, eyes closed, her old black fan moving the air past her old face. Otherwise, nothing moves. Not even the leaves on the trees. Not a quiver.
Daisy knows that she should be studying her Italian, but she can’t seem to do it. She has reclined on the horsehair sofa behind the thick paper shades of the parlor windows. She sips iced lemonade and blots her face with a batiste handkerchief.
She finds that she is crying a little for no reason at all. She dabs at her eyes. She dips the corner of her white handkerchief into the cold sticky lemonade and sucks the liquid out like a child. It is faintly salty with her sweat and her tears. She dips it again, sucks it delicately, sighs.
How long she has waited! That’s what she feels on a day like this, this unmoving kind of day that seems the essence of waiting. And for what has she waited? For a sea-tossed hero. For distant delicious trouble. For someone to imagine her because she cannot seem, yet, to fully imagine herself.
She waits in the heat. Her mother’s small cranky cough floats down from the upper floor. She dips the handkerchief again and dabs her forehead with the sugary cold liquid, squeezing the cloth so that the stickiness runs in small rivulets across her closed eyes down her nose and cheeks, onto her tongue. She licks her fingers. A few more tears; not a torrent, just a few. A fragment of a hymn in her head and then the fragment of an opera she heard on Eloise Ketchum’s Victrola and then a fragment of her student Virginia’s wild light laugh. I have a pain, Doctor. Her hand resting now on her waist. It is here, a dull pain that came on this morning. Fingers press. Here? The pain?
Just tea and a piece of toast, and then there it was. The heat perhaps. Here? The fingers firm and knowing. Locating. Placing. Moving in from the outer reaches. Tell me when it hurts. She stretches her arm, her sticky hand, to its full length. Moves it. Here? Anything here? No. No. Her white-stockinged leg tips outward. Her hand moves, the stickiness catching slightly on the material of her long skirt. Here? She licks the lemonade daintily from her lips.
August 16, 1919
Dear Jerry,
Just time to dash off a quick note as I am so busy with Mother I could drop. She must have constant attention and so I am always on the run with her trays and so forth, not to mention total responsibility for the upkeep of the house. Elmer Donlan came over to look at the porch and I have a girl to help me with the shopping but it is very difficult and I must pray constantly for the strength. I know there is a reason for this, that it will put steel in my character
, but oh! I am so tired sometimes I could drop. You asked, Does Carlton help out. He and Fitzi the Paramour come every Sunday to visit and he has made contributions to the food and doctor bills, says he is going great guns as regional manager and home office plans to give him an award.
I have to say I have grown to like Fitzi tho she is not so pretty or stylish with a good figure. But her disposition is fine, easy going, efficient, always good natured, never ruffled. We are quite congenial. Needless to say Carlton is crazy about her & I believe altho I may be too innocent to live, that it is an honorable alliance & I believe they intend to keep it that way until they are both free. Her husband has offered her separate maintenance if she will sign an agreement never to divorce him & she & Carlton refuse any such compromise. Husband says she can have any number of sweethearts & do as she pleases only he will never consent to a divorce. (!)
Carlton says he will give me Papa’s money in a month but I will believe it when I see it. He was very upset about Mother because of her difficulty in speaking but now he is used to it, as am I. Doctor Sheehan comes twice a week now and he says Mother has a tough road to full recovery but her constitution is on her side.
Mother is so beautiful now, it is as if some sort of an atmosphere surrounds her all the time and I think of that Bible verse, about the path of “growing brighter and brighter, onto the perfect day.” She speaks very slowly and deeply and must often search for the words, but when she utters them they sound as if she has been thinking about them for her whole life. Her hair has gone white.
I am so thrilled that you are coming for a visit and I can tell Mother is too! There is no reason to come before October, though I thank you for asking. Doctor Sheehan said her condition has stabilized wonderfully and he said, You’re the one I sometimes worry about, Miss Malone. He said, Miss Malone, What about your own life? And I answered him that I consider it a privilege to care for Mother in her hours of need, and I do. I have been reading Mr. William James on the subject of how the religious temperament is allied to the artistic temperament and I think this is all preparation, and I only hope I shall be worthy of whatever is meant for me. If my vocation is to care for Mother for some years to come, then so be it. Doctor Sheehan is a comfort to me in this. He is a man with a secret sorrow in his life I believe, and we have become quite congenial. Mother did not like him at first but now I believe she is glad to see him.
This long crisis has certainly put me “out of the swing of things.” I have temporarily canceled my Italian and French lessons and have told my own students that I must stop teaching for a period of time. I miss my girls but see no help for it. Virginia, my star student, has asked me to accompany her to Chicago to attend “Aïda.” I shall, though I shall have to get Mrs. Spooner to stay with Mother, because I believe Virginia is ready for exposure to a different level of performance. She has a wonderful gift but lacks discipline and drive.
Lelia Todd came home to visit her parents. She has now been in New York City for almost ten years and she has made a career as a whistler. She has a contract with Aeolian and has two recordings already. One is called “The Bird and the Clarinet” in which she performs the whistling solo, and the other is “A Woodland Flirtation.” In that one, she is both of the birds.
She says she could get me a contract with Aeolian but I don’t know. She says no one in New York is interested in art songs like mine anymore, but that’s probably what a whistler would say, don’t you think?
I got a tooth pulled at the dentist and took gas.
I am so very sorry to hear about the grasshoppers and the crops and the poor animals. How terribly dispiriting, I thought.
I must run now as Mother needs me. Kisses to Vivian and the kiddies. We’ll see you soon and won’t it be grand after all these years!
Your loving sister,
Daisy Lou
7
THE FIRST snow of the season, a flagrant temporary October snow, had already melted to bright patches. The street was a muddy mess. Jerry walked the three blocks uphill from the streetcar, picking his way through the wetness, his shoes beginning to seep. He seemed the only person about, though it was midmorning.
The towering old maples dropped their last leaves silently at his feet. They arched over the street and the houses, sturdy frame houses with porches and newel posts, their ample backyards running into one another. Lawns made for iced tea on a hot day and lazy hand fans against the damp sweet heat. No wind. No trains. A cat sat unmoving on a porch and blinked at him. Piano music, very faint, from somewhere through the trees and the quiet houses. Porch steps swept. All of it bright, quiet, dripping. Only the clouds moved, and when they passed over the sun, the day and the place became muted as an old photo. The way he remembered it. A place that was cupped, neat, ritualized; all the people good people in small and steady ways.
There was embedded grime in the seams of his fingers, and he rubbed at it. Three months, and the switching job had already burrowed into his skin. He had a quick vision of himself atop a boxcar at night. How the wind came up in the blackness and blew out the lantern as he squatted, and then he heard, felt, the wheels begin a slow roll because the yard was uneven and anything could move that wasn’t tied down. Frantically twisting the brake wheel, squinting into the lanternless night, the wind grabbing at him, the coal chute looming four stories high at the side of the tracks, a black column in the blackness—and was that another car just ahead?—and then the stopped car and his jumping heart.
More than once that had happened, and now, in this place, he felt like a sailor who had been set on land, trying to recall the mannerisms of gentility, the conventions of the fixed. He felt uncomfortable; awkward and shabby in his old suit. He carried visions of deserts and dark shapes into this bright drip, drip of melting snow and the sound of a piano exercise, melodyless and steady; carried them up the steps of his own house, the house of his childhood.
A broom was parked near the door. A corner of the porch sagged perceptibly and sent him a pang of guilt. Daisy in this small structure with their mother for all these years, trying to be steady and good. His own seven-year absence, the years suddenly biblical to him in length and import, though the time had contained invitations and near-visits and temporary delays. Still, there it was. Seven years since he came home for his father’s funeral and left again. He felt his chest begin to tighten in the old way.
Daisy ran toward him, arms like a diva’s. They embraced quickly and awkwardly, then she propped him at arms’ length, examining him. She had a brittle birdlike aspect to her that seemed new, and dusty blue circles under her eyes. She brought a faint scent with her that was deeply familiar. Not perfume, but the smell of old cedar dresser drawers, a rigorous smell that made him six years old again, waiting out a Sunday in this soft interior gloom among the dark furniture and half-pulled shades and the tock tock of the clock—that clock—on the mantel.
He made a movement toward the stairway, thinking to greet his mother in her bed, but Daisy stopped him with a light touch on the arm. A cup of tea first, she said. Mother was sleeping. A new doctor had come and given her something that finally made her sleep. She had been so agitated. It wasn’t like her, but, of course, her son didn’t come every day. Her long-gone son.
She didn’t know why Dr. Sheehan, the regular doctor, had sent a substitute. She had thought nothing of it at the time, but now she had a strange worried feeling and planned to make inquiries.
Their teaspoons clinked in the tea. He listened to her talk. The new doctor had seemed quite stern. Judgmental. That was not too strong a word. As though Daisy wasn’t doing everything humanly possible to make her mother, their mother—hers and his and Carlton’s mother—comfortable and happy. Carlton was coming. He had been delayed by an important meeting. He was very anxious to see Jerry too. Everyone was.
She sometimes slept an hour, never more. And then the bell would ring and that would be the end of conversation. So talk now, while you can!
Mattie’s regular doctor, Dr. S
heehan, was beyond reproach. He was an unhappy man—it was in his eyes, there had been gossip—but his only problem was that he was attuned to the sufferings of others. Even the small sufferings, the passing ones like irritation and small-mindedness and loneliness.
She hoped Dr. Sheehan did not have the influenza. She planned to make inquiries.
It had not been easy. And because it had not been easy, Jerry listened. Tamped down his own impatience and weariness and listened. Because he had been gone seven years.
The porch, he had doubtless noticed, had begun to sag on the near right corner. Elmer Donlan was looking into it. Digging and cement would be involved. Carlton said he would pay, but then Carlton always said he would pay.
They got the news about the porch, the full extent of the trouble, that is, last Saturday. That, plus certain other developments, made it the worst day in memory since Papa’s passing and then Mother’s troubles. Certainly one of the very worst. Virginia Winterbourne had sent word that morning, the morning of the news about the porch, that she was simply not going to attend Aïda in Chicago, for which Daisy had purchased reserved seats two months in advance. Virginia had a beau and she simply preferred to spend the day with him and his motorcar. It was an opportunity to learn and to be inspired, and Miss Virginia Winterbourne simply preferred to do otherwise.
Jerry listened, unfathoming. Virginia Winterbourne’s name sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t begin to know why the mention of it produced such a wronged, pinched look on his sister’s face. It was as if he had missed a whole packet of letters, an entire story, detailed and heartbreaking. He nodded as he if knew, shrugged as if to say, What can you do about people like that? He glanced at the mantel clock.
She’s catching up on her sleep. She’s exhausted from waiting for you.
He had a quick vision of his mother in a white nightgown, floating supine above his head.
The new doctor, the one who came two days ago with no explanation at all, by the way, he exhausts her too. He is not, how to put it, congenial. That would be the word. He is cold. He doesn’t care.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 7
