The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “If the woman had had lots of company my job might have been harder, but she did not like to ‘entertain,’ as she said, although she had relatives all over the county, and every time I would read the local newspaper I would see the names of dozens of people who had the same family name as hers. On one very rare occasion when one of these relatives dared ‘come calling for tea,’ I was serving the tea to the relative while the woman excused herself to go find something or other, and the relative whispered to me, ‘Don’t you realize she is the richest woman for six counties around? Why, she could afford a whole houseful of servants if she wanted them!’ No ma’am, I said, I didn’t know that, and it’s not any of my concern. Each Christmas the woman would give me a generous raise, and go on talking about ‘the statute of limitations,’ whatever that meant, and telling me that when the time came I could go home.

  “She did have two other servants besides me, her white woman cook and her chauffeur and yardman. I had seen him when I first saw her, when I was lying in the ditch; it was a chauffeur’s uniform he had been wearing. He had picked me up and put me into the back seat of her fancy automobile. He was also white, the only white chauffeur/yardman in the county, and in time I heard that the other chauffeurs, all Negroes, ribbed him unmercifully behind his back, and occasionally to his face. He was a very sad, forlorn young man, almost as sad as you. Don’t interrupt. As soon as he saw me in my maid’s uniform, and knew that I was going to work for the woman, he began trying, every time he found me alone, to work his will on me…that’s neither my expression nor his, but the woman’s: she would often say to him, not in my presence but I could overhear, ‘All you want is to work your will on that poor girl. Do it if you must, but the moment I catch wind of it, you are unemployed. Out of work. Jobless. And unpaid. Is that clear?’ And he would mutter ‘Yes’m,’ and turn away, but within hours or even minutes he would be after me again. If he had possessed an ounce of chivalry or just plain old good manners, I would probably have yielded to him, in time, but he was so abrupt and tactless and lecherous that he repelled me. I don’t think he ever thought of me as a person but just as a starched maid’s dress with a serviceable mannequin inside. Often he would say to me, ‘You’re just a c—’ and use that ugly word referring to the female part.

  “I think I must have broken a mirror, in the asylum or in that cheap hotel, to bring myself seven years of bad luck. But I don’t recall that the asylum had any mirrors; it would have been dangerous…unless the patients were allowed access to a mirror only when the attendants were holding it…but perhaps I could have stricken a mirror from an attendant’s hands, knocking it to the floor. Or maybe in my haste to get out of that cheap hotel I had opened the door of my room with such force that it struck a mirror. Or when, at the woman’s mansion, I looked at myself in the mirror—dirt-caked, frazzle-haired, wild—my image caused the mirror to crack. Whatever mirror I broke, in reality or in make-believe, I was doomed to those seven dull years of bad luck. The woman was often sick and had to be attended to constantly. The chauffeur/yardman would take advantage of her being bedridden to neglect his duties, becoming completely idle, and his idleness increased his fantasies of having me, so that he became increasingly foul-mouthed and offensive. Once I hit him right after a very nasty thing he said to me. He said if I ever hit him again he was going to rape me twelve straight times even if it meant the loss of his job.

  “On my days off, and in the evenings after the woman had gone to sleep, I would stay in my room, with the door locked, reading, but I was never able to find anything about a ‘statute of limitations,’ and even if I had it would have been meaningless to me, because, don’t you see, I was not even aware that I had been in the state asylum for three years. When I dreamed in my sleep I would sometimes have nightmarish dreams of white corridors that went on forever, but I never recognized them as the corridors of a hospital for the insane. In other dreams I could re-experience having given birth to my daughter, and of holding her, and of nursing her, but I had completely blotted out, even in dreams, my sister taking her away from me. One Christmas, after the woman had given me one of her old dresses and told me how much she was raising my salary, and I asked my annual question about when I could leave and try to go home, and she started talking about the statute of limitations, I interrupted her, saying, ‘Pardon me, ma’am, please, but could you explain to me what the statute of limitations is?’ She waved her hand back and forth in the air, as if the statute were a pesky fly, and mumbled some double-talk about ‘time limits’ and ‘expiration of rights’ and ‘lapse of enforcement’ and ‘in absentia.’

  “The years went by. Sometimes, on my day off, when I was in my room, I would grow tired of reading, or sewing or whatever, and look out the window and see the chauffeur/yardman working in the yard.”

  You interrupted yourself to ask me, “Old Horn, should I be telling him all this?”

  Tell him everything, dear Mouth Organ. Although your Seven-Year-Gap may seem only a diversion, it has a purpose. On a more prosaic level, your six years in the “hermitage” of the woman’s home were equivalent, in a way, to the Bluff-dweller’s six years now as a hermit, and both, you might say, were most unhappy years. But those years were your destinies, your fates, preparing you for what was to follow. If it had not been for those years…

  “Hush, Horn, and let me go on. All right?”

  Sure. You needn’t even be too delicate.

  “Well, on my days off I would sometimes watch him working out in the yard, pushing the lawnmower or trimming the hedges or planting a rosebush. He worked very slowly, as if he didn’t much care for what he was doing. I would watch him and think: Is he thinking of me? I would wonder what fantasies he was having of me. What was he doing to me? Where? How? With what force? And then I would begin to have fantasies of him.

  “We were fantasy sex partners all those years.”

  Chapter twenty

  You spared him the details of your fantasies, which is just as well. For although you were speaking of some of your ripest years, those six or seven preceding your thirtieth year, you are, after all, a “senior citizen,” dear heart, and it would not be too seemly for a senior citizen to dwell upon the graphic minutiae of sexual invention. Suffice it to say that you have always been a highly desirous as well as desirable woman, and although you were fated to spend those seven years, and then another seven years on top of them, without any gratification from the opposite sex, that drought was more than compensated when your hero/rescuer came back into your life and married you, in 1939, when your majestic French horn was a mere tin whistle, who, however, had aspirations of growing up and marrying you himself and taking advantage of—no, wrong expression—making full use of—again, wrong—fully appreciating that marvelous, loving, sensual appetite of yours. Having had to sacrifice myself in favor of your hero/rescuer/husband, who was, let us say, a double bass to my tin whistle (and although the duet for double bass and harmonica seemed to work pretty well, he often drowned you out), I became lost out here in the distant woods. But now you were a woman of almost eighty, and while you know full well that you are just as desirous as ever, most people, or at least most people below the age of, say, almost eighty, would not ordinarily think of you as desirable, therefore I cannot permit the Bluff-dweller, much as the thought has crossed his mind, to make love to you. That’s one reason we need Liz Cunningham: to take such thoughts off his mind.

  The next time your grandson visited, you told him about her and asked him to release into her custody the 89-volume set of journals or diaries kept by the First Eliza Cunningham (for convenience sake, and because we’ve passed the halfway milestone of this journey, we must henceforward refer to them as “First” and “Second,” although quite possibly they are one. Your grandson owns, among his several art treasures, a copy of “The Bathers” by the almost obscure nineteenth-century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the original of which is in The Art Institute of a large midwestern city. The painting shows one Boug
uereauically voluptuous woman standing, or rather standing on one leg and kneeling the other upon a large rock, looking down at another nude woman languidly sitting on the ground. Actually, these two women are the same woman in different poses and different hairstyles. The significant thing is that both women look almost exactly like Eliza Cunningham, as if he has owned the painting as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy—although whether or not he will ever see Eliza Cunningham in the nude beside the water, or rather two of them nude beside the water, remains to be seen.) Your grandson, unbidden by you, unbeknownst to you, then summoned his foreman, “Foreman,” our Bluff-dweller’s distant cousin, and gave him instructions to, just as he had compiled a thorough dossier on the Bluff-dweller some years before, unearth everything he could possibly find about Second, in particular, and First, if possible. Foreman was instructed to take as much time as he needed, spare no expense, but on the other hand not to fool around nor frequent bars a lot. (This is what is known as “smiling embouchure” of the French horn.) Your grandson was still grieving over the departure of his cousin/mistress/lover for the Coast. He began to write letters to her. Remember that we are not seeing him write these letters; we are not permitted to see him, just yet; we are only hearing about these things from you.

  “My grandson is writing letters to his Mistress,” you told the Bluff-dweller one day. “She hasn’t answered yet.”

  Did the Bluff-dweller care? It was hard to tell, indeed.

  “He wants to know,” you went on, “if you have reached any decision about restoring the town. He thinks that if he could tell her that you will agree to plan and supervise the restoration of the town, she might come home.”

  Did the Bluff-dweller care? It was hard to tell, indeed. All he seemed to care about was hearing more of your story. You must appreciate the excellent self-restraint by which the words “Would you go to bed with me?” were always on the tip of his tongue but never, never came loose.

  Meanwhile, Second was spending a lot of her time in The Unfinished Room, rummaging and sorting through First’s wardrobe and other furnishings. Much of this is beyond repair and must be discarded. The rest she mends.

  When you went to visit her again, you found her sitting in her room behind The Third Door, dressed in a charming ankle-length wrapper, made of percale, neatly trimmed with braid on collar, yoke, and over the shoulder flaps, with a flounced bottom. You thought, That’s what women would have been wearing the year I was born. She was holding in her lap one of the journals of First.

  She said, “This is what I was wearing the day you were born,” and you were stunned but also skeptical. If there’s any quality you possess, heart of my heart, next to your emanation of femininity and all that implies, it’s a healthy dose of skepticism.

  “You look lovely,” you remarked.

  “Thank you. I feel lovely. And your grandson, I think, fell in love with me at first sight.”

  Uh-oh. Now we’re in for it. Throw that back at her, please. “I’m afraid, honey, that you sound downright conceited.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. But he just stood there gawking at me, and nearly dropped the box full of my journals. And then he said—but I mustn’t tell you what he said. You’ll find out in due course. But I must tell you that if indeed it was love at first sight, then the feeling is mutual. He is truly the spit and image of his great-great-great-grandfather. Except, if anything, handsomer, taller, more intelligent, and, of course, much wealthier, although The Governor was, for his day and age, quite a wealthy man.”

  “Before you become too involved with my grandson,” you said, “there’s someone else I would like for you to meet. I would tell you about him, but don’t let me interrupt your reading of the diaries.”

  She closed the journal (Vol. 2 of First’s 89) and set it aside. “I feel I almost know it all by heart anyway,” she said. “Go on.”

  You went on. More than on. For hours you talked to her, telling her all that you know, all that we know, about the Bluff-dweller. You told her all that he did not know about himself.

  When you concluded, she remarked, but Kindly, “It sounds as if he is hopelessly mired in self-pity.”

  “Maybe not hopelessly,” you offered, without much hope.

  “So you want me to call the Bluff-dweller’s bluff?” she inquired.

  You laughed at her wordplay. “Do you think he’s bluffing?”

  “Of course he is! One doesn’t choose to live that way without being something of a fake.”

  “Pardon me, Liz,” you said, fingering the lace of her old dress, “but isn’t the pot saying something about the kettle?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Aren’t you faking a bit, by pretending to be Eliza Cunningham?”

  She blushed. “But I am Eliza Cunningham.”

  “Yes, and I’m Florence Nightingale.”

  She looked hurt, and stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an invitation from your grandson to view a certain painting.”

  “Which painting?”

  “A Bouguereau. Or a copy of a Bouguereau.”

  You sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but he ordered that copy made. He hired one of the best painters in that city to go to The Art Institute and copy it.”

  Forgive me, love, but you shouldn’t have told her that. In fact, I must exercise my prerogative, and erase those words from the tape. She did not hear you say that. I’m sorry. She went one way, and you went the other, toward home. She went west, and you went east. The Bluff-dweller was sitting in your breezeway, waiting for you. Your grandson was sitting in his swivel chair behind his powerful telescope, watching Second trudge up the long steep winding road that leads to the top of the mountain and ends there at his house. We cannot see him sitting there, although he can see us. When Second, panting a bit, at last came within view of the house, her pant changed to a gasp; her narrowed lids opened wide. Neither Second nor First, let alone First, could have imagined a dwelling like that: two tightly conjoined spheres, perfect globes, ballooning up out of the ground. Everything was round; even the windows were round. The door was round; the door buzzer was round; we had to leave Second standing there pressing her round finger against the round buzzer, whilst ’round the woods around the round house concealed speakers wafted a round of roundelays.

  As you sat in your rocker facing the Bluff-dweller, you were thinking, My grandson’s a fake too, I guess. I reckon we’re all of us fakes. But how are you a fake, sweetheart? I asked. “I’m a fake because I’m an artificial matchmaker, but I can’t keep her from falling in love with my grandson.”

  “Who?” asked the Bluff-dweller.

  “A lovely young woman,” you replied, and for a moment you wondered if, just as you had told Second everything you knew about the Bluff-dweller, you owed it to the Bluff-dweller to tell him everything you knew (which wasn’t much) about Second. No, you intended to “surprise” him with her, when the time was ripe. “How are you this evening?” you asked. “How’s your dog? Had your supper yet? Looks like it might rain, doesn’t it?”

  After supper, it rained.

  The Bluff-dweller choked on a bite of his apple pie, fighting the words that kept sliding from the tip of his tongue to the back of his throat: Would you go to bed with me sometime? Since I am telling you this, he might as well have spoken them. What would you have said?

  Pardon?

  Oh. I see. I’ll bestow a gentle but total silence on that answer.

  The Bluff-dweller wanted to know, “You never made love with your fantasy sex partner?”

  Chapter twenty-one

  Not that I wouldn’t have, if only he could have been polite about it. Sometimes I would imagine that he would sneak into my room at night, and, instead of using his coarse words and his ugly gestures, simply take me in silence. There were certain times when I was feeling so passionate that I took to leaving my door unlocked at night, in the hope that might happen. And yes, one night while I was lying in bed thinking it might happen
he came into my room. I actually reached out for him, I was so eager. But instead of embracing me, he put both his hands on my breasts and squeezed as hard as he could. I screamed, and it woke up the woman, who came quickly into my room. He ducked under the bed. The woman asked me what was the matter. I told her I had been having a nightmare. She went away. After a while he came out from under the bed and sat on the edge of it. ‘Thanks, babe,’ he said. ‘You’re mighty damn lucky you didn’t tell on me. Why’d you holler so? Don’t you like for me to feel them big titties?’ and he reached for my breasts again but I slapped his hands away. ‘Why’d you leave your door unlocked? You wanta f—, don’t you? You’re hot for it, aint ye? I kin tell. I kin smell ye.’ ‘Get out!’ I snarled at him, and he went. For a long time after that he never bothered me again. I went on, occasionally watching him doing the yard work, and having fantasies about his fantasies of me. I always went with the woman on her weekly shopping trips into town, sitting in the rear seat beside her. The chauffeur would ‘play’ with me in the rearview mirror, winking, ogling, puckering his lips or licking them, but he never again ‘approached’ me until…but that’s the end of this part of the story. In fact, after a couple more years had gone by, and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger, and had no opportunities at all for meeting other men, I made up my mind to let him have me, if only he tried, regardless of how crudely he tried, but he did not try. It was almost as if he and I were stranded together on a desert island, or were the last survivors on earth, and might as well do something about it, about the fact that we had been created male and female. I did not remember the times in the cheap hotel room with my hero/rescuer/lover; I would not be reminded of them for another eight years; I could only remember the one occasion when that same non-hero/non-rescuer/lover had raped and impregnated me, nearly ten years before, and I thought that I had not had sex with a man in ten years since then, and that occasion had been very unpleasant. So I buried whatever scruples I had and made myself available to the chauffeur. I didn’t exactly begin to flirt with him, but I was very Kind to him, and tried to talk to him. But he seemed to have lost interest in me. One night—I hate to tell you this, but I shouldn’t omit anything—I was so crazy to have him that I went to his room. But he wasn’t there. I sat down and waited, thinking he had gone off the grounds to smoke a cigarette—the woman wouldn’t allow him, or anyone, to smoke on her property, and the chauffeur liked to smoke. I sat there for a good long while, feeling both uneasy and a little proud of myself. Wouldn’t he be surprised! I even considered taking off my clothes and getting into his bed, but I didn’t. I did unbutton my blouse. Finally he returned, staggering a bit as he entered the room. He gave me hardly more than a glance and fell on the bed. I had been rehearsing my words, my two words, and I spoke them: ‘I’m yours.’ He just groaned, but then he began to giggle, and he said, ‘Too late, honeybunch. I just got back from town. Went to a whorehouse and bought myself three different floosies. Some other time, maybe, baby. Some other time, if you’ll get down on your knees and beg me for it.’ I was left feeling as I did when I learned that my first beau—this was my grandson’s great-uncle, and we were engaged to be married as teenagers—that even though we were engaged he still was fooling around with other girls, and I remembered how hurt I had been when I first found out about it. Why should I be jealous of the prostitutes that this oafish chauffeur had patronized? But I was. Because he was all I had. Isn’t that horrible? It was degrading, and it got worse, I can tell you. I never reached the point of begging him, but I got close to it.