Punching the needle into a pincushion and without looking up, she went on, “Whatever you may think, there’s nothing remarkable about me. If I were a remarkable woman, I would marry you right now, move to Washington, and, by some manner or means, turn the move into a good thing for Hilly.
“But, not only am I ordinary, I’m a mouse who creeps along the baseboard, my nose twitching for the scent of a cat.
“At the moment, our hidey-hole is the safest place for us, Aunt Martha notwithstanding. From the stain on the bedroom ceiling to the patched screen door, it’s our known world, and I think I can navigate Hilly through it with as little shock and humiliation as possible. He’s confident that this place won’t blow up in his face. And right now, that’s everything.”
“And I, dear Nell,” he replied, his voice solemn, “am a man who needs a lover and companion who is there each night when he turns out the light, and each morning when he ventures forth to slay dragons. I have a great need to be helpful—and I need a helpmate.” No hint of a smile blunted the message.
He stayed, however, and their lovemaking, if anything, was particularly tender and ardent. Later, he fell into a doze. Nell watched him, whispering, so as not to wake him, “You are my great love.”
“I heard that,” he murmured, sliding on top of her. She loved the weight of him on her body. Oh, God, let this last.
But two months passed before she heard from John again.
chapter forty-three
LYING BENEATH THE OTHER MAIL in May of 1921 was the latest note. No more runnin, I gess. How many years had this dark patch lain across her life? Fifteen? The meanness or madness behind it had always felt like something that would burn itself out.
When school let out for the summer, John returned from Washington, cordial but reserved. During his absence, Nell had imagined both his loss (unthinkable) and marriage (equally unthinkable). There simply was no answer, and that meant she would lose him. He would not allow matters to drift.
With June’s arrival, Hilly’s teaching “faculty” suddenly expanded. Despite circumstances between himself and Nell, John remained faithful to Hilly, teaching him to button his clothes and to shave. From Diana Hapgood, Hilly learned to print his name and count to twenty. Every task was weeks, even months, in the learning. As the doctor from the Army hospital had explained, Hilly had become a fear-ridden five-year-old.
As his skills grew, so did the thin trickle of confidence. Hilly wept when he forgot how to button his fly. But when he remembered, four days running, he chortled—a raucous sound, like an angry parrot.
And late in July, Hilly left the apartment for the first time since returning home. Knowing that old Gus Rabel was filling in for his son at the meat market, Nell coaxed Hilly down the outside stairs on a little errand.
Gus ushered them in. “Missus and Hilly, come in. You are looking well, Mr. Hilly.” Reaching for a tiny paper bag, Gus plunged a huge fist into a glass barrel and filled the bag with oyster crackers. Handing it to Hilly, he inquired, “You still like oyster crackers?”
Hilly squawked his strange laugh and accepted the gift, bobbing his head again and again. Nell ordered a pound of hamburger and a ham bone and left with a lighter step.
That summer unraveled in heat and wind. John arranged no whist evenings. The Lundeens, sensing a conflict between their two friends, arranged none either. Increasingly, Nell fell back upon books, and especially Wodehouse. How appropriate, she thought, that her latest acquisition was A Damsel in Distress.
In the mugginess of August, heat rash plagued Hilly. He grew irritable and couldn’t settle down. For the boy’s sake, one Sunday a remote and tight-lipped John drove Nell and Hilly out to the lake.
Underway in the touring car, with the cover rolled back, Hilly stood on his knees in the backseat. The wind poured over him, drying perspiration and soothing the crawly feeling the sweat gave him as it slid down his back and from under his armpits, salting still-tender wounds.
At the lake, John told Hilly, “Take everything off.” The boy looked unsure. “It’s all right, Professor. No one’s going to see you.”
From the screened porch, they watched as Hilly sat on the dock’s edge, dangling his feet in the lake, then easing his whole body into the water. “Nice,” he called, and though it came out “nithe,” they laughed with surprise. And so he said it again. “Nithe.”
From up and down the convolute shoreline came the subdued croaking of thousands of frogs. Hilly waded out to where the water reached his chafed armpits. “Nithe,” he bellowed and stood unmoving for ten minutes before returning to lie down on the dock. All was still.
When John was sitting beside Nell, his silence was more painful than it had been at a distance. Nell was unable to launch words, while he ventured none. “This is what Hilly needs,” she said at length. “This quiet.”
A wordless five minutes elapsed, then: “One last time, Nell. If you decide you’re ready for Washington, for me . . .”
She heard the finality.
A week passed, two weeks. Silence and absence.
Trying to say yes was like pushing against a door too heavy to budge. Then, one day in August, without warning and without reason, the door gave, and Nell plunged into the Void of Yes, as one falling down an elevator shaft. She felt the rabbity, breathless horror of tumbling through space. How had this happened?
John was less ambivalent. Laughing and kissing her hands, he said, “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
August became September, and she was—for God’s sake—expected to make plans. In her trepidation, she was certain of only one thing—Mr. Wodehouse would be there for her. Whatever happened. Wherever it happened. He was portable. A blessed miracle.
During the past year or so, Hilly had conquered all but shoe tying, as regarded his personal toilette. He could bathe himself and wash his hair. He was, as well, intensely neat about his person and belongings.
“I told the sales girl all this, and I said it loud so anybody could hear.” Dropping in on Nell on an autumn afternoon, Eudora plucked off her gloves and declined the offer of tea. “People ought to know the progress our foremost hero is making.”
Disregarding Eudora’s words, Nell clutched her friend’s hands as if she, Nell, were drowning. And indeed she felt as if she were.
Eudora looked startled.
“I think I’m marrying John.”
Elvira wrote:
Dear Nell,
We have been busy here. Dr. Kerchel passed away of a stroke in November. He was like a granddad to my Mary Cora, so we are all in mourning.
I had a strange experience three nights ago, Nell. Maybe it was because of the doctor dying. I had gone to bed and fallen asleep. Then I woke up because I heard Mrs. Kerchel’s daughter Camille go downstairs for warm milk.
After Camille came back up to bed, I was lying awake and thinking about Christmas presents for Mary Cora. We will still have Christmas, even if it’s not so jolly this year.
Anyway, I was lying there and then my bedroom door opened, slow the way you’d open a door if you were afraid of startling someone. The light was dim, but I could see it was a man. He was wearing one of those creamy-colored suits with a vest and a watch chain across the vest and a little gold ship hanging from the chain. And he was holding a Panama hat.
He stood for the longest time inside the door. His face was sad. And now I knew who he was. Someone who’d never hurt a soul. So I waited. Finally, I said, “Be happy, dear.”
He nodded and said, “I’m sorry.”
I said, “You mustn’t be.”
Write and tell me you don’t think I’m crazy, Nell.
Please give Hilly my love and let me know how things are with you.
Your loving Elvira
Nell had long ago guessed the identity of Elvira’s lover, and the photo of Mary Cora had confirmed her surmisal. Now, she wept at the sadness of it all.
Dear Elvira,
I was sorry to learn of Dr. Kerchel’s death. One can
never really repair the hole left by the death of someone dear. Each blessed soul is unique, so how could we possibly replace it?
We are told that death is a punishment for original sin. What a monstrous trick for God to play on his children. I would never place a temptation in the path of my child, then punish him for being weak. All that I write on this topic is heresy, but it is true heresy, from my heart.
I don’t suppose, at this distance, that there’s anything I can do to lighten anyone’s grief, but should something occur to you, please let me know. I will order you a copy of My Man Jeeves, and hope that it brings you a little cheer. Mr. Wodehouse has been my salvation. In the meantime, I’ll drop a note to Mrs. Kerchel, sending condolences and thanking her for all she and her husband have done for you and your darling girl.
You spoke of being visited by a sad ghost. I would never think you were crazy because of that. Throughout her life, my dear Mam has been visited by the ghost of her childhood sweetheart, who was drowned in a fishing accident. Mam said that his visits consoled her. And I hope you will be consoled by your visit. This man must care deeply to make the trip from The Elysian Fields. Isn’t that a lovely sounding place?
Am I a mystic? Mam always said that sort of thing was in the Irish blood. It’s probably in everyone’s, if they gave it a chance. I’m afraid religion has tried to put the kibosh on it.
As I look over this letter, Elvira, I discover what a heretic I am! And yet I go to Mass. Why is that? Because I am a teacher and might otherwise lose my position? If that isn’t hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.
Well, enough of heresy and hypocrisy.
Hilly makes slow but sure progress. He is able to stay at home by himself while I am at school. He remains unable to tie his shoes, which vexes him greatly. But, thanks to Eudora and Juliet, he is reading. Mostly The Rover Boys and such. Each bit of progress is an enormous victory.
My dear, would you do me a favor? Now and then, send a picture postcard to Hilly. He goes out rarely, and he loves correspondence.
A year from now, you may have to send the cards to Washington. It looks as if there might be a summer wedding. Just family and a few close friends—could you and Mary Cora make it back? No date is set. More later.
We still miss you here.
With much love,
Nell
chapter forty-four
IN THE SPRING OF 1921, John’s daughter-in-law, Mathilda, was hospitalized with diphtheria. For a month she lay close to death. During chunks of the spring and the convalescent summer, John was in St. Paul, helping in whatever way he could.
The wedding was postponed. The fabric Nell had purchased she stored in her bureau along with the dress pattern. Nell told Juliet and Eudora, “Maybe a delay is for the best.” Her friends shook their heads. But Nell had seen how upset Hilly was over a change as minor as a new stove.
Old Gus Rabel bought Nell an electric stove for the kitchen and had the Acme carted away. The removal of the old behemoth required three strong men and some dismantling. As the men hefted the torso across the living room, grunting and huffing, Hilly followed, weeping and rubbing bits of the nickel trim with the sash of his robe. When the stove was gone, he stood in the kitchen caressing the sooty wall.
Nell understood. Anything so elephantine and dependable, so much a part of their lives for so long, was not easily dismissed. Yet she, the Luddite, rejoiced in the convenience of the electric stove and in the new little woodstove in the living room, meant to supplement the grudging heat from the hot-air register.
In August, John returned from his son’s home in St. Paul, exhausted and ready to spend long days at the cabin. On the screened porch, Nell set aside the colander of string beans and listened as he read to Hilly from Eight Cousins.
Since the day, roughly a year ago, when she’d fallen into the Void of Yes, an unlooked-for contentment had stolen into her—stolen so imperceptibly and over so many months that one day she was startled by its presence and had to examine it from many angles until she could credit that, yes, she was indeed contented—even happy—with the idea of marrying John.
And she would win additional family for Hilly. Her own faraway Wisconsin family had had little presence in his life. John’s son and his wife would furnish Hilly with cousins or . . . or whatever the relationships would be.
She took up the colander and resumed snapping the ends and pulling the strings from the beans. What could be more conventional or agreeable than these thoughts, and this household moment?
John had grown jowled, and his color spoke of high blood pressure, to which he paid no mind. Well, he was sixty-one and he’d driven himself hard since that first run for the state legislature. When they were married, Nell would tackle the blood pressure. He needed months—no, years—of afternoons like this one.
At the end of the day, really, John needed a wife, as he’d said—one who’d sit with him, de-stringing beans perhaps. She glanced up. What an amazing couple they were going to make. What amazing lovers.
Late September, still warm. They were seated at the picnic table. Luggage packed, John was boarding the eastbound train the next day.
Nell rose and began gathering up their lunch plates. “Would either of you like another slice of cake?”
Hilly shook his head.
John said, “Sit for a minute, darlin’.”
Oh, dear, Nell thought, what’s this? Was he was having second thoughts?
Looking first at her, then Hilly, John told them, “This is my last term in Congress. It’s been grand, but I’m tired. Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 24, 1922. That’s the day you’ll be my blushing bride. Whad’ya say?”
“If I’m not blushing, will you still have me?”
Returning home the next afternoon, Nell changed out of her school clothes and into a cotton housedress laundered until its wild roses had lost their blush. From the top drawer of her bureau, she withdrew a fresh handkerchief, stuffing it into her pocket. Beneath this hanky lay the one Elvira had left behind in her hurried leave-taking. And, here, rolled away to the corner of the drawer, was the apricot pit. She held it to her face. Did she only imagine that it retained a little of its original scent?
What tales that train and the apricot had held: dark ones—ghosts and violence and unsolved mysteries—but sunshine stories as well. Now she was living a sunshine story, the one about the happy bride that the sun shines on. She closed the drawer and two-stepped from the room.
chapter forty-five
NELL GENUFLECTED AND SQUEEZED into a back pew. St. Boniface was overflowing, a crowd beginning to gather in the vestibule and on the steps outside.
Nell wore her gray bombazine and an old black hat to which she’d attached a piece of veiling.
John was dead. He had collapsed in his Washington office, preparing for his return home.
The night before, he had called Nell at Juliet’s, and they’d discussed the wedding. The Lundeens were holding the reception in their backyard. Nell’s dress hung in the closet, ready. “Hilly has rehearsed giving me away a hundred times,” she’d laughed. “We go over to the church every afternoon and march up and down.”
John’s hurriedly embalmed body was sent by train for the Friday wake and today’s High Mass. In the front pew, his son, Paul, and Paul’s wife and children were gathered; behind them sat dignitaries from the state capital and Washington.
The previous evening, Nell had accompanied Juliet and Laurence to the wake at John’s house. Moving up the front walk, Nell had balked. I won’t go in.
Laurence held the door.
Here was the front porch where they’d sat murmuring in the dark, watching Harvester turn out its lights and put itself to bed. And there, through the door and to the left, was the dining-room table where they’d outbid each other, slapped cards down on the oak, laughing carelessly, as if the games would never end. From the walls came John’s voice: “My God, good woman, I think I’ll bid seven diamonds!”
John’s intensity, his brio, were
worn into the carpets and wallpaper, the stair treads and furnishings. Some houses were meant to be destroyed when their owners died.
At the entrance to the parlor, Nell hesitated once more. Laurence grasped her elbow. Across the room was the open casket.
“Would you rather not?” Juliet asked in a low voice.
Nell negotiated the crowd. She could believe the stories of women throwing themselves on their husband’s coffins or into their graves. She lifted John’s hand and kissed the knuckles, then turned and allowed Juliet to lead her away.
She must pay respects to John’s family.
In the dining room, his daughter-in-law, Mathilda, lay a hand on Nell’s arm, saying, “Farmers started showing up with food around 6:00—hams and fried chickens, roast beef, legs of lamb and side dishes, dozens of them.” How else to say goodbye to their fellow farmer, friend, Congressional representative, and, often as not, their lawyer? Townswomen had been up early baking pies and cakes—three times as much food as could be consumed.
“If there’s a memento you’d like, Nell, please feel free,” Mathilda told her. “John once spoke of your fondness for the epergne on the sideboard.” Mathilda mispronounced the word, and Nell loved her for it.
“No. The epergne should be yours.” This was a wildly improbable nightmare, and she was carrying on a wildly improbable conversation inside it. “It’s too lovely for my little place. But the playing cards . . . if you wouldn’t mind.”
In the kitchen, eyeing their own mortality askance, men leaned against the counters, drinking, smoking, recalling John with raised voices and laughter—“You wouldn’t believe it, but . . . Hell of a guy . . . Remember the time . . .”
Now, in St. Boniface, Nell was overpowered by the stench of incense. Her head throbbed and buzzed, shutting out the words of an out-of-town bishop. Nor did she hear Father Gerrold’s eulogy—nor receive Communion—nor even realize the service had concluded until people began shuffling into the aisle. As she descended the outside steps, clinging to the concrete balustrade, Juliet caught her arm. “Come with us in the car.”
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse Page 20
