Having been closed up for weeks, the room did indeed seem to hold within its four walls its own collection of foul vapors. I walked over to one of the large windows and raised it. It was a mild night in September, with the faintest hint of the autumn to come to southwestern Kentucky. The heavy draperies moved slightly as the air flowed in. I walked back to the doorway and turned on the overhead fan, then walked to the far side of the room to open another window.
This is when I found the key. It was on the top ledge of the bottom panel of the window. I actually felt it before I saw it. As I pushed back the drapery and then released the latch that secured the window, my hand brushed against something small and metallic, something that moved. I knew it was the key to Eliot’s desk as soon as I felt it.
Eliot was obsessively neat. Sharing personal secrets did not come easily for him. I had attributed this characteristic to his background, for he had told me that his father had praised him only once in his entire life, when he had successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. Though the compliment was significantly diluted—“Finally, one of my sons has earned a doctorate”—Eliot felt gratified to know that he had succeeded in his father’s eyes where his brothers had not.
Nor did he receive much praise from his mother, who suffered from ill health during most of his childhood. Nor from his first wife, whose attention was likewise distracted by poor health. Never rebounding from the stress of childbirth, she died while Portia and Alonso were in first grade and kindergarten. Growing up thus in an ungenerous home, then losing his wife when he most needed her help with the children had taught him, I reasoned, to keep to himself, to guard his resources, to give in small amounts.
The fact that he would keep his desk locked, then, didn’t surprise me as much as that he would have hidden the key in such an unimaginative place. If I hadn’t run across it accidentally, I couldn’t help wondering how long it would have taken for me to find it. Perhaps that was the rationale behind the hiding place, however. Perhaps Eliot was quite sure no one would think to look in an obvious place like a window ledge.
As I stood before his desk with the key in my hand, I could not explain the foreboding in my heart. I knew, of course, that Eliot would not want me looking through his things. Even though I felt quite sure that he would never wake up again, would never know what I was about to do, I still feared doing something of which I knew he would disapprove. Generally mild-mannered and courteous, he had not rebuked me often, but those times were branded on my heart.
Also branded on my heart are the five minutes of time following my unlocking of the desk.
There were six drawers in his desk, one of them a larger bottom drawer filled with folders, all neatly labeled with a black fine-tip fountain pen, the only kind Eliot ever used. This is the drawer I went to first as the most likely to hold important documents.
And this is where I found his treasury of filth. The labels on these folders were no doubt intended to discourage meddlers, for they were dry, innocuous things such as “Houghton Contract,” “San Diego Proposal,” “Othello Outline,” “ENG 503 Syllabus.” The pictures themselves were organized into categories and bore evidence of much handling. I sat in his chair and looked through the twelve folders, one time through each. I didn’t skip a single picture.
I saw pictures of unspeakable, unthinkable perversion, things I had never dreamed of, image after image of vile human pollution. My senses were stunned, not only by the pictures themselves but also by trying to follow the steps that led to their being here in my husband’s desk. Someone had thought of these scenes, then had planned their execution. Someone had stood behind a camera and taken the pictures with the express purpose of distributing them. Human beings had been used. Compared to the women in these pictures, those in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated were Victorian ladies.
And how many other men besides my husband, I wondered, had received copies of these pictures, had prepared a sanctuary for them in the very homes they shared with wives and innocent children? And how had they been received? By mail? Had they exchanged hands in some clandestine meeting place? Had they been purchased in some den of evil? Did they come in sets? Did one look through catalogs and place an order? And how many other women had stumbled upon them as I had? Had they sat as I now sat, stupefied and past all grieving at such documentation of their husbands’ secret lives? There are no words to tell what such knowledge does to a woman.
This was the old-fashioned way of viewing such images. Today he could have concealed his vice by the use of a computer. But for all of his brilliance, Eliot had shunned electronic advances. He had often said he preferred doing his writing the way Shakespeare had—with paper and ink. He left to me the transcribing of his handwritten pages into typed form, which I did on a typewriter, first a Remington manual and later a Smith-Corona electric. After he died, I learned to use a computer.
And my intellectual, scholarly husband—had he never considered the likelihood that I would find these? Had he never realized that someone besides himself would someday be sorting through his personal papers in his absence? Had he never considered destroying them?
And then it hit me: I was holding in my hands undeniable evidence not only of a corruption I had never suspected but also of a selfishness of the greatest magnitude. No doubt he must have known that someone would discover his cache someday, that very likely I—eighteen years his junior—would be the one. But he was counting on being gone in a permanent sense whenever this happened, and, as the consequences of the truth couldn’t touch him then, he had refused to surrender his immediate pleasures for a mere eventuality.
Chapter 8
As the Gentle Rain From Heaven
The yellow-billed cuckoo, an unoriginal songster, emits a continuous call of kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk with no variation of pitch or rhythm. Though often heard, the bird is seldom seen. It likes to conceal itself among sheltering foliage to gorge on hairy caterpillars.
And so it was twenty-five years ago that I sat in Eliot’s study and learned why he kept his desk locked. At the age of fifty-five I was educated concerning the depths of man’s depravity. I had lived among good and evil people for all of those years, had heard profane language, had seen cruelty enacted firsthand on playgrounds, in classrooms, in homes, on street corners. I had witnessed the telling of lies, had participated in the act myself, had seen hundreds of murders and adulteries portrayed on television and movie screens, had read true and fictional accounts of theft, conspiracy, drunkenness, betrayal, brutality, shameful conduct of every stripe.
Yet that night in Eliot’s study I felt as if a veil had parted between innocence and knowledge, as if every foul deed I had ever known before that time would have filled no more than a teacup compared to the flood that had now swept over me. I felt as a child must feel who suddenly wakes in the nighttime to sounds of his door splintering from the weight of a monster. Before the child can cry out, the door is down and the creature has leapt onto his bed and is mauling him. Overcome with fear, the child looks into the monster’s eyes and knows that death is better than living with the memory of this moment.
But I am not a child. I would choose the monster’s eyes, the mauling, the black memories any day over death. I would fight to the end. I can sometimes keep the memories at bay by looking around me, setting my eyes on specific things far removed from Eliot’s study, remembering that many years have passed, that it is now instead of then, that I am here instead of there. I sit up now and let my eyes travel around my newly cleaned apartment, taking in the wooden blinds, the round table where Rachel serves my meals, the television, my recliner, my bed in the far corner. I see other things: a bookcase filled with books I have not read, a lamp with a red shade, an artificial fern in a yellow ceramic pot, a framed picture of a soldier saluting the American flag. They are only things. They stir nothing within my heart. They were here before I came. They will be here after I go. They have nothing to do with me.
I see the door between my apartment and Rache
l’s kitchen, the door through which I hear many things. Last night I heard Patrick read from the Bible again. It was a story about a boy’s lunch of bread and fish that multiplied itself to feed a crowd of five thousand.
I look toward the window I have come to think of as my bird window. No sign of activity there. I look at the other three windows and see that dusk is already beginning to sink into the trees in the backyard, filling in the spaces between them. A small table stands beside the recliner at my bird window, the Book of North American Birds sitting within easy reach. In addition to this table and the round one where I take my meals, there are two others in my apartment: the nightstand beside my bed and an end table beside the sofa where I now sit. I see several issues of Time magazine on this table. They are random back issues, but this is of no concern to me. I have come to view time as a circle that repeats itself. One can skip a lap of the circle without missing anything of importance. Or as waves of the ocean. One more or fewer makes no difference in the rolling expanse of the water. Today’s news is not to be prized over last week’s or last year’s. It has all happened before and will happen again.
I reach forward and pick up the magazine on top. “DIED: JULIUS DIXON, 90, rock-’n’-roll songwriter; in New York City.” When no cause of death is given, as in the case of Julius Dixon, I assume that the person’s time on earth exceeded man’s normal life span and he expired, simply put, of old age. Or “of natural causes,” as is often said.
I try to imagine what a ninety-year-old former rock-’n’-roll songwriter would be like. While spooning Metamucil over his All-Bran every morning, would he hum snatches of his biggest hits from the 1950s? Would he tap out the rhythms with the end of his cane? Time magazine reports that Julius Dixon’s first hit was “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” Did he think of those words as he lay dying? Did he think the atmosphere was appropriate for a death scene? His most popular song was “Lollipop,” performed by a group called the Chordettes. Time describes it as a “buoyant” song. I wonder what Julius Dixon thought of his life’s work as he drew his last breath. I wonder if the memory of his song “Lollipop” played through his mind and gave him a feeling of buoyancy as he stepped from the shores of life into the waters of death.
When one is eighty years old, as I am, the handling of time is her greatest challenge. There is no place to rest comfortably. The present is an empty waiting room. The past is a narrow corridor, along which doors open into examining rooms too brightly lit, full of frightening instruments to inflict pain. The future is a black closet at the end of the corridor. No one knows what is inside this dark cubicle. The possibility of nothingness is a terror. If present, past, and future seem out of order in this analogy, it is no wonder. There is no tidy sequence of time when one is eighty and waiting to die.
One keeps wandering into the corridor without meaning to, then stumbling back to the waiting room, then later somehow finding herself stretched out in one of the examining rooms, stopping her ears with her hands to block out the echoes of time, starting up and groping for the door to get back to the waiting room, where there are windows, stacks of old magazines, and a television to fill the deadly silence. And always, always as one flees back to the present, she carries with her the knowledge that at the end of the long corridor is the black closet. It is unlocked, and the hinges of its door are oiled. They swing easily.
But it is November, I remind myself now, and a quarter of a century has passed since the night in Eliot’s study. I look at the telephone on the small table beside my bed. I have used it one time since my arrival to call the automated bank service, to verify that my money was transferred successfully from the bank in Kentucky to the one here in Greenville, Mississippi. I look at the wall beside the doorway into Rachel’s kitchen, and I see the electric clock made to resemble the face of the sun, with yellow plastic spikes representing rays around the circumference. The cord, half of it concealed by a straight-back chair, snakes down the wall to the outlet. The numbers and sturdy black hands of the clock are large and easily seen from every vantage within my apartment. At any time during the day I can lift my eyes to see how many minutes have passed since I last checked. I notice that Rachel has already reset the sun clock, which was disabled during the rewiring project.
I look over at the smaller windup clock beside the telephone by my bed. This is the clock I can see when I turn the lights out at bedtime. Its numbers and hands glow pale green in the dark, and I have grown accustomed to its loud tick-tock throughout the night. Sometimes when I wake from a troubling dream, I hear it and am calmed. I am still here, I tell myself. I recall a puppy we had in my childhood that howled and whimpered through the first two nights. Someone told us to put a clock in his doghouse to simulate the heartbeat of his mother. We did it, and on the third night the puppy was quiet. I think of how easily duped living things are.
I see my silver hairbrush on the dresser and a small photograph of my parents in a pewter frame. These things—the windup clock, the hairbrush, and the photograph—are my own, yet like the other things, they stir nothing within me. They are only things.
There is a blue clothes hamper beside the bathroom door, into which I deposit anything I want Rachel to wash for me. A white plastic wastebasket sits on the floor next to it. More than once I have had to pause and look at what is in my hand: Into which receptacle do I want to drop it? Once I accidentally threw two pieces of unopened junk mail into the clothes hamper. I left them there, and Rachel removed them later. Another trash can sits beside my recliner, and yet another sits beside the nightstand. A fourth is stationed under the sink in my bathroom. There is no need for so many trash cans. I don’t know what Patrick and Rachel were expecting from me. All four are checked and emptied regularly.
So I am in an apartment with four trash cans and four tables, I tell myself, not in Eliot’s study in Kentucky. I am at my nephew’s house on Edison Street in Greenville, Mississippi. Patrick will soon be home from the Main Office. He will have supper of some kind in a sack. Rachel is across the street. Perhaps she is helping Teri “in a pinch” again. She will be home soon, also, and will take my supper from the sack, arrange it on a plate, and bring it to me on a tray. Maybe she will bring me ice cream later for dessert.
The television is still on. Lou Grant is in the newsroom giving Ted Baxter a dressing down for some violation of good sense, and Georgette is in the background looking sympathetic. Murray and Mary are at their desks, heads lowered, trying to act busy. This was one of the few programs I used to watch regularly some thirty years ago. I liked the fact that Mary, Rhoda, Georgette, and Sue Ann, though they all seemed to have a high regard for marriage, nevertheless led happy, interesting lives in different ways as single women.
Since I was married by then, I could afford to admire their pluck in the adversities of singleness. Had I still been single, I might not have enjoyed the program so much, perhaps would have resented the attempts to depict the single life as a series of funny misadventures. For though I had not been struck with the blessedness of the married state in my sisters’ and parents’ lives, I had always harbored the dream that it could be so. I was not unhappy as a single woman, but feeling that I was missing out on something important, neither can I say I was especially happy. One’s marital status is not relative, though in many ways happiness is.
Too much knowledge is not a good thing. I have seen people ruined in various ways by knowing more than they need to. My five minutes of knowledge knocked away the foundation on which I stood. I could have remained steady, I believe, had I not discovered Eliot’s secret. I could have borne the shooting, the hospitalization, the death and funeral, Alonso’s trial, and all the adjustments that accompanied the sudden change from wife to widow. I was used to working hard. I would have set my face to the rising sun every morning and gone about the task of survival. I would have valiantly forged ahead as the Widow Hess, dispatching my duties and asking for no special favors. If there had been no pictures to find, I would likely have
remained in Eliot’s house, would have continued to teach freshman composition at South Wesleyan, would have maintained my contacts with Eliot’s acquaintances.
But the ground had fallen away from my feet. The thirteen years of our marriage disappeared in a puff of smoke, as a magician’s trick. I knew in an instant that it had been a sham. Perhaps someone would argue with me, would say Eliot’s flaw was a sickness that had no bearing on his love for me. I would argue back. His flaw was a sickness, certainly, one that engulfed his whole heart and soul and mind, one that left no room for love. Only for the briefest second was I tempted to invent some other explanation for the pictures in his desk, to deny his behavior, to rationalize the denial by remembering how timid and uncertain he seemed to be during lovemaking, how lacking in imagination. Surely this same man couldn’t enslave himself to such baseness.
But the truth settled upon me as a sure thing. Eliot had no idea how to love a real woman. He had forfeited reality for warped fantasies. His pictures had had the same effect as an addiction to mind-altering drugs. Was I merely being prudish? I wrestled with the question. But then the pictures would rise again, and again I knew that no one with a soul could love such things.
For a man like this, a thing so dull and mundane as a wife could hold no pleasure. For thirteen years I had competed with a mistress of unparalleled power, one whom I didn’t even know. But I was no rival against the seduction of twelve folders in a desk drawer. I wondered for the flash of a moment if he had shut himself away from his first wife the same way, by retreating to his private collection, and then the thought vanished as quickly as it had come. What did it matter when the perversion had begun or who else had suffered from it? It had emptied my heart. I had no strength to care.
Winter Birds Page 8
