Natural Enemy

by Jane Langton

  “SOS? Oh, you mean the Save Our Sites Committee?”

  “Isn’t that a clever abbreviation? And of course sometimes it really is a matter of life and death. Take this place here, for instance. I don’t think the Herons have done all they could with the house, do you? It’s a little shabby, don’t you think? If it were mine, I’d paint the outside white and the shutters black and — oh, you know the kind of thing. Wouldn’t it be fun? And I’d have a polished brass knocker on the door and a picket fence and a pretty glass lantern on a pole.”

  “Who lived here anyway?” said Peggy Glover. “I mean, during the American Revolution?”

  “Why don’t we find out? Somebody must have! Some minuteman! There should be a sign beside the door. You know, a plaque, a brass plaque, so everybody would know. And an effort at restoration. But I hear the poor girls don’t have a dime. Oh, Virginia, dear, how I have felt for you in your great loss!”

  Muffy threw out her arms and enclosed Virginia in a vacant embrace. Virginia endured it, standing upright like a loose board.

  “I’ve just been wondering, Virginia,” said Muffy eagerly, “if we couldn’t recommend your house to the Save Our Sites Committee. I mean, we could all help out. We could have a weekend, just for the house. We could paint it up. I mean, all it needs is a little — a little —”

  “Elbow grease?” suggested Virginia.

  “Exactly! And we could all rush over with our paintbrushes, the whole membership, you know, with buckets of white paint and, you know, ladders, and have a working picnic. And we girls could bring casseroles, and pies. What about some day this summer?” Muffy’s eyes were focused on a vision of checkered tablecloths on the grass and pie baskets and cheery husbands and jolly children frolicking on the lawn.

  “I’m sorry,” said Virginia amiably, “but I don’t think —”

  “And the inside,” said Peggy Glover. “I know someone who could help you out. An expert on old interiors. You know, like wallpaper. Pretty Williamsburg patterns with drapes to match. Canopy beds. Dust ruffles. Of course all in the best of taste.”

  Virginia looked dreamily at her shoes. “Raspberries,” she said.

  “What did you say?” said Peggy, thinking she had been insulted.

  “Raspberries and cream. Good taste always makes me think of fresh raspberries and cream.” Then Virginia looked up eagerly at Muffy. “You know, I often wonder whether or not there is some absolute standard of aesthetic perfection out there somewhere.” She gestured at the window.

  “Where?” said Muffy, glancing blankly at the window.

  Virginia laughed and waved her hand at the ceiling. “Oh, you know, in the stars. I wonder about it all the time. I wish there were. I wish I knew.”

  Muffy glanced at Peggy, then turned back to Virginia tactfully. “What Peggy was talking about, I think, Virginia, was simply a true feeling for the past. Authenticity. You know. Keeping everything sort of old, in keeping with the house.”

  “I think about that too,” said Virginia, “all the time. I wonder what it must have been like here a long time ago.”

  “Yes, yes, what it must have been like!” echoed Muffy.

  “I expect it was pretty savage, don’t you think so?”

  Muffy’s smile faded. “Savage?” she said.

  “Stark. Bleak. No trees, only stumps. Cowpats. Horse dung. Pig manure. Smoke-blackened rooms. Unwashed illiterate people huddled against the cold. Trampled dirt around the house. A muddy cart track to Concord. Do you know, wherever we dig around here we find pieces of broken china and glass and scraps of old iron, as if they just hurled everything in all directions out the window.”

  Muffy looked at Peggy, shocked by this perversion of their common vision of the past, with its butter-churning, candle-making, musket-seizing forefathers — those large comfortable families beaming around their jolly hearthsides where great black pots were bubbling over blazing logs; the women bustling around the kitchen in aprons and ruffled mobcaps, baking bread in their beehive ovens; the men smoking long clay pipes; and then at bedtime everyone picking up those little pewter candlesticks — that nice gift shop in Concord had some just like them — and climbing the stairs to their plump featherbeds. Muffy stroked Virginia’s arm affectionately, and scuttled away with Peggy Glover.

  The minister of the Second Parish moved in quickly to take Muffy’s place. “You’ll call on me, won’t you, Virginia, if you ever feel the slightest need?” He too squeezed her arm. Arthur Potter was a balding young man with the beginnings of a cozy tummy. He was new to the Second Parish. He had started his ministry with eager enthusiasm, but recently he had begun to find funerals a trial. At first it had been challenging, trying to put into practice the techniques he had learned in divinity school for handling death and dying. “Death and dying” — it had been all the rage at school — not dying yourself, naturally, but getting together in groups and discussing it. Reverend Potter had never personally known anyone who had actually passed away, but the talk sessions had been exciting, just so fabulous, all about the emotional needs of the bereaved, and so on. So his first actual funeral had been doubly disappointing. The family had been so grief-stricken they had cursed his kindly mini-sermon and his tender handclasps, and had screamed at him to get out of the house. The next woman, with her dying husband, had been even worse. The widow-to-be had been positively gleeful, if not downright flirtatious.

  But now Edward Heron’s death provided Mr. Potter with another opportunity. He was eager to exercise his talents for creative consolation on two women as interesting as Virginia and Barbara Heron. Did he dare stand on tiptoe and give Virginia an avuncular kiss? Something in the way Virginia was gazing at the floor told him it wouldn’t be quite — not yet. He took her hand instead and gave it a couple of extra-firm double squeezes.

  His director of teenage religious education was less cautious. Cherry Peaches Schermerhom was new to the congregation too. This morning she had begged for a part in the memorial service in order to get into the heart of the spiritual community at once, to plunge to the very center of the suburban tragedy right away, to see human beings with their artificial surfaces torn away, their naked selves stripped bare. But then, right here in the home of the deceased, Cherry Peaches had been struck by an idea so exciting, so really fantastic, that she had decided to just barge right in, to be open and honest. When Cherry Peaches Schermerhorn got on the ball, there was no holding her back. “Cherry Peaches Schermerhorn here,” she said. “I mean, my name is really Cynthia Pauline, but everybody calls me Cherry Peaches. Could we use it?” she said, beaming at Virginia. “Your place, I mean? The kids? Could we come here sometime for a retreat?”

  “A retreat?” said Virginia warily. “A retreat from what?”

  “A retreat from what!” Cherry Peaches laughed merrily. She was a radiantly healthy girl with orange hair fizzing out of her scalp and a good deal of spherical geometry bursting out of her clothing. “It is a funny word, isn’t it? It’s just the kids, you see, in the church. They need to get away from their parents. You know. To retreat, if you will, from the nuclear family, the happy hour, the two-hundred-thousand-dollar home, the TV. They need to get away from divorce and the cutthroat competition of the executive marketplace and the feverish success-orientation of their mothers and fathers. They need to sort things out, to sum things up, to get their heads together, to remember where they came from. You know.”

  “Where they came from?” said Virginia slowly. “But I thought you just said they need to get away from where they came from?”

  “No, no, I mean where they originally came from. The bassinet. The mother’s breast. The safety of the womb.”

  “Cherry’s been really so successful with our teenagers,” said Arthur Potter enthusiastically. “She knows how to get them to come to grips with their own infant traumas. It’s really just fabulous, what she’s doing. So exciting, all the latest discoveries in adolescent therapy. Encountering the dark side of the self, all that sort of thing. Som
etimes all they need is a good scream. You know. It’s all really just so fantastic.”

  “All we want, you see, is a rural setting. Nature, the source and mother of us all.” Cherry Peaches put her hand on Virginia’s arm. Touching was so important. “Some place like this. I mean, it would be like going deep into the country, the primitive experience of the farm, without the trouble and expense of going to Maine or Vermont, you see?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” mumbled Virginia, wanting to scream herself. A picture came unbidden into her mind, a memory of a clumsy Palestinian village she had manufactured long ago in Sunday school out of flour and salt. Turning away, looking for help, she reached for her sister.

  Barbara was there. Barbara inserted herself between Virginia and Arthur Potter. She was shaking hands, expressing gratitude for official ministerial services. She was seeing them to the door. She was coming back to introduce Virginia to an old friend.

  “You remember Mary Morgan, don’t you, Virginia? She’s Mrs. Homer Kelly now. That’s a name that means something around here. Have you met Homer? Homer, my sister Virginia.”

  Virginia remembered Barbara’s friend Mary. She remembered the three of them down on their knees at the muddy edge of the pond in the heady sunshine of springtime, collecting pollywogs in jars of cloudy pond water, and thrilling rides down the snowy hillside in the winter, and the bumping scrape of the dented tea tray on the driveway at the bottom of the hill. Virginia shook hands with Homer Kelly and smiled at Mary, who looked the same as ever — large-boned, dark-haired, and calm. “What you two are famous for around here,” said Virginia, “is having John for a nephew. We’re so grateful for having him here right now. We’re really glad he came along.”

  “That boy,” said Homer, grinning proudly. “Of course, you know he betrayed our sacred trust. We thought he’d help us take care of his little brother this summer. But, no, he’s deserted his post, abandoned ship.” Homer looked curiously at the young woman who was supposed to be as beautiful as the dawn. Well, she wasn’t. Mary should have her head examined. The girl was lank and thin, her clothes drooping as if she had never taken them off the clothes hanger. Her colorless hair was hooked back behind her ears. The two sisters looked alike. The older one was gaunt, not bothering to be good-looking, the younger woman spare in the same way, not bothering to be beautiful. The difference between bothering and not bothering was a subtle carelessness and inattention to detail. You had to care somehow, if you were going to be beautiful as the dawn. Homer stood aside and observed the keen glances of Barbara’s deeply lidded eyes and the way Virginia rushed in with a warble of absurd loquacity, her eyes alight with amusement, her long fingers waving in the air, her dazzling metaphor left hanging, her ponderous question unanswered, set aside, given its due place in the mysterious scheme by which life in this house ran its course. Smart. The woman was probably terribly clever. A passage from Walden came into Homer’s head — “Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.” An idiotic piety, implying absolutely zilch. Homer put his arm around his wife and began urging her toward the door.

  Everyone else was leaving too. People were hovering in the doorway, bestowing dry kisses and feathery embraces. In the hall Mary caught sight of Mrs. Bewley bending over the mound of jackets and scarves and pocketbooks. “Oh, Mrs. Bewley,” said Mary, pulling her gently toward the door, “MAY WE DROP YOU OFF?”

  But Buddy was reaching for Mrs. Bewley too, taking her gallantly by the arm. “I’ll see her home,” he said. “It’s right around the corner. OKAY, MRS. BEWLEY? ALL RIGHT WITH YOU IF I COME IN AND PAY YOU A CALL?”

  Mrs. Bewley snatched up Miss Plankton’s lorgnette from her bosom and gazed at him regally. “WELL, SURE,” she said, “YOU BET.”

  John stood in the door and watched Buddy shout gaily in the old woman’s ear as they negotiated the stone step and moved across the courtyard. He envied Buddy his comfortable way with women, the ease with which he could put his arms around an elderly lady or kiss a girl as if he were their uncle. How old was he, anyway? Twenty-four, maybe? Twenty-five? Six or seven years older than me. That’s all. It’s funny the way it feels like about thirty or forty. I’ll never catch up, if I live to be a hundred. I’ll always just be a stupid little kid whenever he’s around. “So long, Aunt Mary,” said John. “Uncle Homer.”

  But Aunt Mary was looking back at Dolores Leech, the town nurse, who was just settling herself down for a good heart-to-heart talk with a grey-faced Barbara. “Are you coming, Dolores?” said Mary. “We go right past your house.”

  “Oh,” said Dolores Leech, getting up reluctantly. “Well, all right, in that case.”

  The door closed on Homer and Mary Kelly and Dolores Leech.

  Barbara’s shoulders drooped with relief. She picked up a teacup from the floor and put it on the mantle. For the first time she caught sight of Mrs. Farhang’s flower arrangement, a spare work of art consisting of a cabbage rose and a stalk of rhubarb. “Good God,” said Barbara, “what’s that?”

  “It was some lady who came early.” said John. “Mrs. Farhang. She’s this big flower arranger. She just wanted to help you out.”

  “Well, thank God, she’s gone now,” said Virginia. Plucking the rhubarb out of the jar she put it rakishly behind one ear. “If one more person had come up to me with another Dear Virginia, I would have run outside and hidden myself in the woods.”

  “Oh, Virginia! Virginia, dear!”

  A woman was standing at the foot of the front hall stairs. “Oh, you don’t know me, but we did meet. I mean, we did once. Dotty Gardenside. I think it was at the church, perhaps, or was it —? Oh, I’ve heard so much about you both, and I’m sorry the occasion is so inauspicious. I just want to say how dreadfully sorry I am about the untimely — I mean, I’ve just been upstairs having the teeniest peek at your darling home. What a lovely place you have here! No bath on the first floor? No lav in the master bedroom? And what a pity there’s no garage! Virginia — may I call you Virginia? I mean, I’ve heard so much about you. I mean, I feel I’ve known you all my life. Are you girls going to be staying on? I just happen to be a professional realtor. Gardenside Associates. Or would a simpler home in a condo or an apartment seem more attractive now?”

  Barbara stared at Dotty Gardenside. The woman had studied the obituaries in the paper, looking for sudden changes of address, hoping for further sad transferrals by the bereaved survivors. A hearse follower. “You’re an old friend of my father’s?” said Barbara, moving forward menacingly.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t have that pleasure.” Mrs. Gardenside backed nervously to the door and poked under a bench in the hall. “My bag. It isn’t here. It’s missing.”

  “I expect it’s in your car,” said Barbara coldly.

  “It was here, I tell you. Right here, with a hundred and fifty dollars in cash and all my credit cards. I put it right here.”

  “Well, I’m sure none of our friends would have taken it.”

  “I’ll have to notify the police.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that’s the right thing to do. Good-bye, Mrs. Gardenside.”

  The door closed with a bang behind Dotty Gardenside, and Barbara threw back her head and laughed. “Mrs. Bewley swiped it. Oh, God bless Mrs. Bewley. Oh, thank God, that’s the last of them.”

  But there was one more. Muffy Weatherbee, bright-eyed, her face flushed pink, was bursting in the door again. “Oh, Barbara dear, Virginia. Forgive me, but I was just driving out onto the road. You know, that nasty curve where your driveway comes out on Route 126, and I had such an exciting notion, I just thought I would rush back and tell you. It’s 126, you know. They’re going to reroute 126.”

  Barbara was stupefied. “They’re going to what?”

  “Haven’t you heard? They’re going to straighten out the curve. They’re going to come right up your driveway with a big new road. That’s what I heard. Oh, wouldn’t it be just terrible? So I had this terrific idea. The Save Our Sites Committee will make it a historic site. A
museum. We’ll fix it up, you know, the way I said, with all the Williamsburg —” Muffy was breathless with visions. “Oh, I’m so excited. You’d have to open your house, of course, once or twice a week, but it would mean we could all share in the heritage. I mean, because it’s part of local history!”

  Virginia towered in the doorway, monumental, barring the way. “I’ll walk you to your car,” she said.

  “And then the road people wouldn’t be able to budge, do you see?” Muffy trotted excitedly after Virginia across the grass of the round garden. “They’d have to build the new road on the other side. You know, they couldn’t invade the sacred premises of a historic site.”

  “No,” said Virginia, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, but we wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Because I’ll bet a minuteman lived here. We’ll have a brass plaque on the house and a sign out on the road, and — what did you say?”

  “I said no. We couldn’t. We just couldn’t. We like our house the way it is now.”

  Muffy opened the door of her car and got in. “But that attitude is so shortsighted, so — don’t you think you’re being very selfish? You people are only stewards, after all, of this priceless — I mean, doesn’t it really belong to everyone? And what about 126? Did you hear what I said? They’ll come right up the driveway!” Muffy looked up at Virginia, at the small head far away against the sky, dark against the sun, refusing.

  Virginia felt sorry for Muffy Weatherbee. How could she stop the buzzing, the little drilling whine? Leaning down into the car window, she gestured with her stalk of rhubarb. “It’s all right. The house, I mean. We’ll take good care of it.”

  Her kindness was more intimidating than her refusal. Muffy gaped at her, then at the boy who had appeared from nowhere. Cowed, she started her car, stalled it, started it again, backed up, turned it around and fled at last down the driveway, disappearing among the new green thickets of maple saplings beyond the curve of the stone wall.