Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

‘Of course. Don’t fuss.’

  ‘I’ll come by tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s not your day.’

  ‘Every day going to be my day till that woman gets up to take care of you.’

  So Anna came every day, and cooked for Sybil and did the marketing, and brought in what little mail there was. A letter from Jess. ‘My mother sends her best wishes. They are saving money to come over to the States for a visit.’

  Well, I don’t want them.

  A postcard from Laurie, with a picture of a hotel like a jail. He had gone to Florida with a friend.

  A letter from Montgomery, but Sybil could not read his handwriting.

  A few bills, which she put on a spike for Laurie.

  When she realized, because of the bills, that it must be the end of the month, she wrote out Dorothy’s cheque and put it in an envelope, stamped it and gave it to Anna to mail on her way home.

  Anna brought it back the next day without comment from Sybil’s box at the post office, and Sybil took it upstairs and laid it on Dorothy’s dressing table.

  ‘Sybil Sybil Sybil.’ That was about all the bird would say these days, he was not much use as company. He stayed in Emerson’s room most of the time, but if Sybil left the door open to air the place out a bit after Anna had gone home, he would fly out and perch on the banisters to call to Sybil if she was downstairs.

  ‘What is it?’ she would call back. But he would never say. One morning, he called so loudly from a picture frame in the hall that the milkman heard him.

  ‘Her ladyship wants you.’ He winked, brown and handsome from his surfing holiday. The milkman had not liked Dorothy since she told him that his orange juice curdled even quicker than his milk. She was like that with the tradespeople. Always too sharp. Alienating local friends whom Sybil had known since they were tiny bullet-headed boys dressed up in sheets, mewing at her door for Halloween candy.

  ‘Sybil,’ Roger said again, and coughed.

  ‘How is she?’ the milkman asked, not even simulating concern.

  ‘A little better, thank you. I’m keeping her vary quiet.’ She shut she door almost in his charming face, for if Dorothy was calling her, she had to get up there double quick, dot and carry orno.’

  Some days she grew confused between Roger and Dorothy. Some days she knew it was Dorothy on the bed and Roger on the bedpost. Some days she talked to Dorothy for long spells at a time, and it seemed that Dorothy answered in her head. Is that so? she said, and: You’ve told me that anecdote before, lady. How about putting on another record?

  Some days it seemed that Dorothy was there, her presence everywhere in the house, with a chance of meeting her around evary corner. Some days it seemed that she was gone for good, and Sybil would rove freely through the house, calling out dreadful things about her, and sticking out her tongue at the snapshot of Dorothy in her high red boots in the snow, which curled in the frame of the sitting room mirror.

  She spent quite a lot of time in Emerson’s room, pottering, fiddling, looking at everything Dorothy had. What a pretty pocket book! She took it off to her own room, gay bouquets of flowers on a little basket, and put it on her purse shelf, where it looked surprisingly at home. Why shouldn’t it? It was her pocket book that Jess bought for her at Bonwits last summer.

  She found her nail scissors with the stork blades in a drawer with a mess of old lipsticks and cracking rouge. She found her reading glasses on the closet shelf, wrapped in pink face tissue.

  Sometimes, Dot, you carry a joke too far. She wrinkled her nose. If she could have caught Roger and put him back in his cage, she would have opened the window, but he had been free since she let him out.

  It was a good thing Dorothy had lost her sense of smell, Sybil thought dottily, shutting Emerson’s door and going downstairs with her head feeling light as a dandelion ball, or she could never have lived with it.

  *

  On one of her meanderings through the house, enjoying her freedom, still half expecting to hear: ‘What are you up to now - you’ll trip and fall again,’ Sybil wandered into Ted’s room and saw Bella’s dummy, naked and headless, pushed carelessly among the litter of picnic baskets and dusty dress boxes at the end of the narrow room.

  Poor Marma. There’s not much respect for the dead.

  Sybil stood the dummy upright. The waist was quaintly small, but the bosom was noble and dominating. It looked a bit like old Dot, to tell the truth. How would it look in that navy dress with all the gilt buttons running down the front like a Guardee?

  Dorothy liked dressing up. Here was something she could enjoy, bad shape as she was in. Puffing and uttering the small oaths that came quite often to her lips now that there was nobody to hear, Sybil got hold of the dummy by the neck and dragged it through to the other part of the house, its wooden stand bumping and scraping on the uneven floorboards.

  She took it into Emerson’s room and stood it in the hollow in the middle of the floor, and dressed it up in Dorothy’s new outfit, with two towels stuffed in the front to take up the slack. Headless, it did not look much. What was it Dorothy had done in the days when she was trying to frighten Sybil to death?

  Dorothy’s Easter bonnet was in a box on a high shelf. Sybil knocked it down, bringing with it a pile of shoe boxes and a beach hat that said Cape Cod, Mass. The Easter hat was a flowerpot in full bloom. Ridiculously young, Sybil had thought at the time, but Dorothy was headstrong about hats, making that dead set face in the mirror at the store that made the hat look even less suitable than it was.

  It nested in tissue paper. Sybil wadded that up and balanced it on the dummy’s wooden neck, with the flowerpot hat on top.

  ‘There you are Dot,’ she said, either to the dummy or the body, it did not matter which, ‘in all your glory. I do try to please you, you see. Never say I don’t try to do anything to please you.’

  Fourteen

  ‘Let’s surprise her!’

  Jess came back to America sooner than she had planned. Laurie came home before his three weeks’ vacation was over.

  ‘I couldn’t stay away from you,’ Jess said immediately at the airport, searching his triangular brown face.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

  ‘I never really believed—’

  ‘I know you didn’t.’

  ‘Why did you go away?’

  ‘I had to.’

  ‘You never will again.’

  They clung, in the arrival hall, while crowds pushed round them, and unlikely people, squat, deprived, rushed at unlikely people who had been on the plane with Jess.

  The apartment across the Charles River was home, like a shell. Her mother’s house had been as strange as a hotel, but more uncomfortable. Soon they must move. The lease was due, and this would be too small with the baby. They would never again live in a small cave, alone. There would be the suburbs, a garden, bunk beds for all their boys, white machines churning endlessly at her control in the cellar.

  Without telephoning Sybil, they went to Plymouth to surprise her.

  ‘Poor old lady,’ Laurie said, as they turned off the highway and up on to the bridge to get across to the yellow house. ‘Won’t she be glad to see us!’

  ‘We’re so egotistical,’ Jess said happily. ‘She’s probably hardly noticed we’ve been away.’

  And indeed, when they came calling through the door and found Sybil sitting idle in the half dark, she did not seem unduly surprised.

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ she said, as if it were just an ordinary weekend.

  ‘What’s the matter, Gramma?’ Laurie switched on the light and then stood in front of her, frowning. ‘Have you been sick?’

  ‘I’ve been fine.’ But she looked dreadful, bony and yellow, her eyes sunk in red hollows. Her hair was wild, and she had odd clothes thrown on at random. Her skirt was back to front and her shoes did not match.

  ‘Where’s Dorothy?’

  ‘She’s sick.’

  ‘Why didn’t you le
t us know?’

  ‘Oh - it hasn’t been for long. I’ve been all right.’

  ‘Who’s been looking after you?’

  ‘Anna comes every day. She’s been very kind, though I must confess I’m getting a little tired of pork chops.’

  ‘Where’s Dorothy?’

  ‘Upstairs in her room.’

  Jess heard Sybil cry: ‘No!’ as she started up the stairs. Before she reached the top, the stench hit her and she called out, and in a moment, Laurie was behind her.

  They went into Emerson’s room together, hand in hand, staring, for some reason, as Jess remembered afterwards, on tiptoe.

  They saw the dummy in the flowered hat, and then they saw the bed.

  *

  When the Medical Examiner asked Sybil: ‘Why, Mrs Prince? Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ she would not answer. She hung her head like a child, and started to cry.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Laurie said. ‘It’s bad enough for her, without being cross examined.’

  ‘She may have to answer a cross examination in court,’ the Medical Examiner said, ‘if the District Attorney decides on an inquest.’

  But he was a blue jay squawking drama, hoping to give evidence in court himself. There would be no inquest, since it was all too clear that Dorothy had poisoned herself by mistake with the powdered root of the false hellebore which she kept as an insecticide for her roses. Pathological examination after the autopsy revealed powerful toxic alkaloids, which had probably caused convulsions, paralysis, and finally death from asphyxia.

  ‘Asphyxia, don’t tell me,’ stormed Dorothy’s sister, who arrived, as well she might, in a fierce state of affront which became fiercer when she was told that she could not view the body.

  ‘It’s not - well, surely you would rather remember Dorothy as you knew her,’ Jess said, trying hard, for although she disliked Mrs Hubbard on sight, she was, after all, the dead woman’s sister.

  ‘There’s something funny going on around here,’ Mrs Hubbard said, and Laurie poured her a huge dry martini, which she first refused, and then drank like water.

  ‘It’s terribly sad,’ Jess said. ‘We’re all very upset about it, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally, since now you don’t have anyone to do your duty for you, taking care of the old lady.’

  ‘Now listen—’ Laurie took a step forward, but Jess shook her head at him.

  ‘Dorothy was happy hare,’ she said evenly - it was much easier to keep calm when you were pregnant. ‘We were all very fond of her.’

  ‘You had the radio on when I arrived. Don’t deny it. I heard it through the door.’ The sister was smaller than Dorothy, but she had the same never-bested air that caused both condolences and explanations to slip off her like oil on a griddle.

  ‘Well, gosh’ Jess said, ‘you can’t expect us to sit round crying all day. I mean, we’re dreadfully sorry, but that wouldn’t help Dorothy now, would it?’

  ‘The help should have come before it was too late,’ Mrs Hubbard said, striving to get her lips over her long shiny teeth.

  ‘But we were away, and my husband’s grandmother - how was she to know that Dorothy had made the pills up with the wrong powder? She didn’t know one from the other. She never went up to the shed where the storage jars were kept. She can’t walk that far.’

  ‘Apart from the rights and wrongs of messing around with those so-called herbal remeshes, which my sister would never have thought of if she hadn’t come to this unlucky house, I can’t believe she could make that kind of mistake.’

  Laurie tipped the martini jug over her glass, and she glared at him and drank it, her teeth showing inside the glass as she tilted it back for the olive.

  ‘It must have been because she wasn’t well,’ Jess said. ‘She mixed up the powders. Hellebore, for rose spray. Veratrum viride, the chemist called it. I’d show you the rest of the jar, only they took it away.’

  ‘There’s something funny about the whole thing,’ Dorothy’s sister repeated, but with less conviction than before the gin. She would have thought it funnier still if she had known that Dorothy had lain dead in the front bedroom at Camden House for more than a week. Nobody knew that except Laurie and Jess and the doctors, and it had been kept out of the newspapers.

  Sybil came into the room, leaning heavily on her stick, and bowed with distant courtesy to Dorothy’s sister.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again, Mrs Prince.’ Mrs Hubbard got up, but put her hands behind her back to make it clear that the pleasure did not extend to shaking hands.

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘Why does she pretend not to remember me? I’ve been here before. She took me over the whole house. You see - there is something funny going on’

  ‘What nonsense,’ Jess said, angered now because Sybil looked so battered and bewildered. ‘Of course she remembers you. You remember Dorothy’s sister from Provincetown, don’t you, Gramma?’

  ‘I didn’t even know Dot had a sister,’ Sybil said, pleasantly enough.

  The Medical Examiner came again, as a formality because Mrs Hubbard asked him to, and ate cucumber sandwiches with the plump white hands that had delved into the secrets of Dorothy. When he asked Sybil once more, also as a formality, since he had written her off as quite senile, why she had kept Dorothy upstairs for so long, she shook her head and looked at him as if he were talking Arabic.

  ‘Mother dear,’ said Laurie’s mother, who had come up from Philadelphia to find out, as she said, what the hell was going on, since she could make nothing of her son’s gabble on the telephone, ‘you’ve forgotten to feed your cats. They are lined up in the kitchen as if they were waiting to shake hands with the Governor.’

  When Sybil had left the room, Thelma asked the bald square doctor: ‘What do you think we should do? What’s your opinion of her? She has no family physician now that Dr Matson has retired.’

  ‘She does. She has Montgomery. Doctor Jones.’

  ‘Oh, that young man,’ said Thelma, and the Medical Examiner said: ‘Doctor Jones, yes. Quite an able young fellow. But he’s away now, I think.’

  ‘Let’s wait till he comes back,’ Laurie said to his mother, ‘and then have him look at Gramma. She seems all right now. I know what she did was a bit off, but she seems to have forgotten all about it, and she’s been perfectly normal since we came. Better than ever. She goes in cycles, you know. One week she’s not making much sense, and the next, she’s just like her old self.’

  ‘You don’t need to explain her to me.’ Thelma raised her eyebrows, which she had plucked too recklessly and pencilled back in. ‘She is my mother, after all, not yours.’

  ‘But you,’ said Laurie, who was always polite to his mother, even under stress, ‘haven’t seen nearly as much of her as Jess and I have.’

  ‘From your own choice,’ snapped Thelma. ‘Remember that, Laurie. Nobody has ever asked you to fawn around.’

  ‘I’ll have to be going.’ The doctor spoke to Jess, since it would need a blow torch to break through the icy tension between Laurie and his mother.

  ‘But you haven’t told us what you think.’ Thelma turned her back on Laurie and gave the doctor the closed lips social smile she kept for people she supposed she had better be charming to, without knowing why. ‘Don’t you agree that for her own sake, we ought to—’

  ‘Mother, how can you!’ Laurie said, and Jess said: ‘No,’ and put a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Taunton,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, yes, I daresay. I can examine her myself, if you like, unless you prefer to wait for Doctor Jones. I imagine he would agree that it might be best to have her committed.’

  ‘He never would,’ Laurie said, ‘and if you try to send my grandmother to a mental institution, I’ll have you prosecuted.’

  ‘That’s a boy,’ said the doctor equably. ‘Family loyalty. I like that.’

  ‘How could you?’ Laurie rounded on his mother after the doctor had left. ‘Your own mother.’

  ‘Don’t dramatize, sweet
ie. She is pretty far gone, after all. I mean,’ she raised her eyes, ‘what she did up there. If you can forget that, I can’t. If you want my opinion, which I know means nothing in your arrogant young life, she doesn’t have any of her marbles. Not one. I thought you were rather rude to that fat doctor,’ she added lightly.

  ‘I’m not going to let him shut her up.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘Find another Dorothy.’

  ‘They don’t grow on every tree. Thank God. I couldn’t stand the woman.’ Thelma made the sign of the cross backwards, to counteract speaking ill of the dead.

  ‘We’ll have to get a nurse then.’

  ‘You know what that costs.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you—’

  ‘You forget dear. What money I had, your father drank away. What money I have now belongs to my husband.’

  ‘Uncle John?’

  Thelma laughed. ‘With two kids in college? I doubt it. He’s quite deeply in debt, I understand. No, if you won’t let the State take care of poor Mother, we shall have to find some nice cosy nursing home within her means, where she can have her own things and get the proper care she needs.’

  The purr in her voice drew a picture of a chintzy room, with Sybil’s ornaments and pictures and her own beloved quilt, plants on a sunny window-sill, hymns on Sunday afternoon, a pretty nurse laying a single flower on the tray of chicken and jelly.

  Jess and Laurie sat on the fence between the meadow and the lawn, with the last legacy of the sun streaked yellow and green at their backs between the pines, and agreed that Thelma might be right.

  ‘If she could do that, and the dummy dressed up and everything.’ Jess shivered, watching the windows of the house, where Sybil was walking through drawing curtains, faithful to the memory of Dorothy Grue. ‘There’s no knowing what she might do next. I could go and look at that new place on the shore road. Do you think she might like it? Nothing to worry about. People to talk to—’

  Sybil came out of the back door, looking for them in the dusk. ‘I’ve lit the broiler,’ she said efficiently, as Jess jumped carefully down, feeling the great weight of herself and the half-grown baby squashing the soft turf. ‘I thought you’d want to start the steak. Thelma says she must go to bed early so she can leave first thing in the morning. I wonder why she came? She was asleep through most of poor Dot’s memorial service. I saw her. Was it Thelma who asked that doctor to come back? If he is a doctor. I thought at first he was a plain clothes detective, since he kept asking me why I kept Dorothy upstairs for so long after she shed. As if I could have moved her.’