My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister—Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal—to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister’s wife wrote to Miss Emily’s relations in Alabama.

  So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, “They are married.” We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

  So we were not surprised when Homer Barron—the streets had been

  finished some time since—was gone. We were a little disappointed that

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  there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

  And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets.

  Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

  When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was

  turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning.

  Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

  From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’

  contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

  Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of

  the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

  Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more

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  stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house—

  like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

  And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

  She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

  V

  The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

  The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on

  the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch

  and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

  Already we knew that there was one room in that region above

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  stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

  The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room

  with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

  The man himself lay in the bed.

  For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

  Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

  t h e d e a d

  j a m e s j o y c e

  Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the

  office on the groundfloor and helped him off with his overcoat when the wheezy halldoor bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressingroom. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

  It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate ’s pupils
that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane ’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember, ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stony Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr Ful-lam, the corn factor on the groundfloor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household for she had the organ in Had-dington Road. She had been through the academy and gave a pupils’

  concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms.

  Many of her pupils belonged to better class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia,

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  though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve ’s and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid work for them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well, the best of everything: diamond bone sir-loins, three shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well with her three mistresses.

  They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

  Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And

  then it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane ’s pupils should see him under the influence: and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel or Freddy come.

  —O, Mr Conroy, said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for

  him, Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good night, Mrs Conroy.

  —I’ll engage they did, said Gabriel, but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself.

  He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily led his wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:

  —Miss Kate, here ’s Mrs Conroy.

  Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive and asked was Gabriel with her.

  —Here I am as right as the mail, aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow, called out Gabriel from the dark.

  He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women

  went upstairs, laughing, to the ladies’ dressingroom. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with

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  a squeaking noise through the snowstiffened frieze, a cold fragrant air from out of doors escaped from crevices and folds.

  —Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy? asked Lily.

  She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and glanced at her. She was a slim growing girl, pale in complexion and with haycoloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler.

  Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the low-est step nursing a rag doll.

  —Yes, Lily, he answered, and I think we ’re in for a night of it.

  He looked up at the pantry ceiling which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano and then glanced at the girl who was folding his overcoat carefully at the end of a shelf.

  —Tell me, Lily, he said in a friendly tone, do you still go to school?

  —O no, sir, she answered, I’m done schooling this year and more.

  —O then, said Gabriel gaily, I suppose we ’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man—eh?

  The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

  —The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

  Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent leather shoes.

  He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks

  pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

  When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

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  —O Lily, he said, thrusting it into her hand, it ’s Christmas time, isn’t it? Just . . . here ’s a little . . .

  He walked rapidly towards the door.

  —O no, sir! cried the girl, following him. Really, sir, I wouldn’t take it.

  —Christmas time! Christmas time! said Gabriel, almost trotting to the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation.

  The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:

  —Well, thank you, sir.

  He waited outside the drawingroom door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. Then he took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they could recognise from Shakespeare or from the melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

  Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies’ dressingroom.

  His aunts were two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face.

  Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases like a shrivelled red apple and her hair, braided in the same oldfashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.

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  They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was their favourite nephew,

  the son of their dead elder sister Ellen who had married T J Conroy of the Port and Docks.

  —Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown tonight, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate.

  —No, said Gabriel, turning to his wife, we had quite enough of

  that last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got out of it? Cab windows rattling al
l the way and the east wind blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a dreadful cold.

  Aunt Kate frowned severely and nodded her head at every word.

  —Quite right, Gabriel, quite right, she said. You can’t be too careful.

  —But as for Gretta there, said Gabriel, she ’d walk home in the snow if she were let.

  Mrs Conroy laughed.

  —Don’t mind him, aunt Kate, she said. He ’s really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumbbells and forcing Lottie to eat the stirabout. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it! . . . O, but you’ll never guess what he makes me wear now!

  She broke out into a peal of laughter and glanced at her husband whose admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed heartily too for Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke with them.

  —Goloshes! said Mrs Conroy. That ’s the latest. Whenever it ’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. Tonight even he wanted me to put them on but I wouldn’t. The next thing he ’ll buy me will be a diving suit.

  Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly while aunt Kate nearly doubled herself so heartily did she enjoy the joke. The smile soon faded from aunt Julia’s face and her mirthless eyes were directed towards her nephew’s face. After a pause she asked:

  —And what are goloshes, Gabriel?

  —Goloshes, Julia! exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, don’t you

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  know what goloshes are? You wear them over your . . . over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?

  —Yes, said Mrs Conroy. Guttapercha things. We both have a pair

  now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.