She was in the tower. She saw Daddy going down to the boathouse. Then Walter came out. He went along the railroad tracks and Daddy followed him. A little later Harriet left the boathouse and came back up through the woods. She reached the house and went upstairs to her bedroom. Mildred stood outside her door and heard her crying. She was glad.
—You were glad, I said.
—I thought that was the end of it.
—But it wasn’t?
—It was the end of it all right.
What she meant was, the very thing happened that she’d been afraid of. She never got him back. A few hours later they told her he’d been hit by the Albany train.
It cost her, saying this. She became distraught. She took a few minutes to compose herself. Then she was pointing at the tracks where a low wooden platform allowed vehicles to pass over the rails to the towpath. That’s where he died, she said.
My father.
—Why did he do it?
She glanced at me and then looked away. She puckered her mouth like she had the day before. Then she started to talk. We sat in the truck for an hour and not a living soul emerged from any of the houses, the place was empty, it was dead. Not even a train.
She was young when she married Walter, she said, they were both young. Her sisters were all against it. They’d heard stories about him. I wanted to know what the stories were, I wanted to know everything. What was he like? He was like you, she said.
—How like me?
He had my coloring, very fair-skinned, she said, and his hair was like yours, almost white. A strange boy. He heard things, like you do, and he’d get distracted. He’d get lost in his thoughts. You never knew for sure what he was feeling, he kept it to himself. He wrote things and sometimes he’d read them to me. What were they about? Oh, the river. The woods. Me, she whispered. But when he was happy … When he was happy the sun came out—
She smiled a little. She’d loved him of course.
So it was small things we had in common, she said, but they alarmed her. She’d think, Where did that come from? She found it uncanny we were so similar. It had unsettled her. I thought, She must have felt I was accusing her, but of what I didn’t know. Of not saving him. All these years I’d kept her misery alive, that was why she hated me. After they were married they’d moved into the servants’ rooms at the back of the house and he was taken on as a groundsman. The place was kept up to a higher standard then. There was more money, more staff. There were dogs and horses. They threw parties. People came up from the city.
She fell silent. She was gazing through the windshield at the railroad tracks. I told her I never knew the house in those days, it was before I was born. She said it was all coming to an end even before Walter died. No money, she said. The doctor had to take on more patients. She didn’t know what happened but there was some disaster and then there was no money anymore. She thought it was Harriet’s money they lost. The doctor was out all hours of the day and night. Your mother was bored. She’d wander around the house with nothing to do. She’d never got along with the local people. She’d known a different life, growing up in England. There were times she helped Mildred in the kitchen just to make work for herself. In the summer she’d always be in the garden. She got frustrated because it wasn’t like an English garden. The soil was poor and the season was short so she couldn’t grow the things she wanted to. Walter helped her with the garden and that’s how it started.
—How did it start, Mildred?
It was like she’d just bitten into a lemon, the taste in her mouth was so bitter. I grew up here, she said, but your mother, oh, your mother, she was different. She was English. But we got along fine at first. Then she took a liking to Walter.
Another long pause.
—I began to suspect something, she said at last.
She fell silent again.
—Go on, I said. You started to suspect something.
She wiped her eyes. She began to speak again but without looking at me now.
—It got bad in the house after that.
—Okay.
I wasn’t surprised. Harriet wouldn’t be satisfied by a cold man like Daddy. He’d never be enough for her, not in that way. Mildred was staring at the tracks again and it was her sour face I saw, the face I’d known all my life. Walter and Harriet between them made that face. Walter wouldn’t talk to her about what was going on but it had become obvious. How? I couldn’t find them, she said. They’d disappear. I knew they’d gone off together. Then later there’d be looks between them. It made me sick. I couldn’t be around them.
She was sure they talked about going away together—those two! Your mother, she said, running off with Walter Knapp!
I didn’t see what was so strange about that.
—What about Daddy? I said.
—I couldn’t tell him. How could I tell him?
—He didn’t see it for himself?
—He wasn’t here during the day. At night he’d drink whiskey and then go to bed. It wasn’t much of a marriage even before your mother started up with Walter.
There was silence for a while in the cab of the truck. It had all played out over one summer, when they could meet out of doors, find places in the woods or elsewhere on the property like the boathouse. She started to buy him gifts. Mildred found them, a silver cigarette case, a ring. Books. She’d have given him anything, she said. She thought Harriet had demeaned herself. Walter was good enough for Mildred, oh yes, she’d have made a good life for the two of them, she’d have looked after him, better than Harriet ever could.
—I didn’t blame him so much, she said. I couldn’t expect him to just ignore your mother, it wasn’t in his nature. He was like a leaf in the wind that way. But for her to then bring love into it—
This was what excited her deepest scorn. Harriet brought love into it. In Mildred’s eyes it made it all so much worse. In mine it was the only thing that mattered.
—Then he died and it wasn’t an accident, was it?
He died for love but Mildred couldn’t see that. She shook her head. She didn’t speak for a few minutes. She covered her face with her hands. Then it came out, what Daddy had said to Walter. He told him he’d make sure he was sent to prison for a very long time. He said he could make that happen and Walter believed him, although I think he was distraught not so much about going to prison but because he’d lose Harriet. But he’d lost her already! That was the worst of it, that it was over once it was discovered. Walter thought he had a choice but it was no choice at all, and Mildred said it was all just an illusion, that Harriet had convinced him to believe some foolish illusion and he thought he couldn’t leave her.
—If he’d just come to me—
She shook her head again. She couldn’t afford even to consider the possibility that they were in love.
—He decided there was only one way out, she said.
—Did Daddy know that?
—He suggested it.
Mildred now told me she had been in the boathouse that day. She’d followed Daddy and tried to stop him going in, but there was no chance of that. He was very angry. But what he found he hadn’t expected. Walter had torn his hand on a nail. He was sitting on the planks in the sunlight, by the water, and Harriet was kneeling over him, dabbing at the cut with a wet handkerchief. She looked up when Daddy came in. She didn’t seem surprised. She told him he should be doing this, she meant looking after Walter’s hand.
—Get out, said Daddy.
Walter was in some pain. It was a deep cut and there was blood all over Harriet’s dress.
—You can’t stop us, he said.
—Shut up, said Harriet.
—Get out, said Daddy again.
—Oh Morgan, said Harriet, don’t be tiresome.
Mildred glanced at me, as though to say: You believe this? How she behaved? Walter stood up. He was clutching her handkerchief to his palm.
—I love her, he said.
Mildred turned to me. I thought she was go
ing to cry.
—Go on, I said.
So then Walter walked slowly out of the boathouse, she said. He didn’t even look at me. Daddy followed him. They went south along the tracks in single file. I could see them, two ghostly figures in the mist. I was becoming distressed by this point. Mildred asked me if I was strong enough for the rest. Oh, I was strong enough. I saw it all clearly now. I saw Walter at Tillman’s Landing with his bleeding hand, sitting on the ground against the station-house wall, facing the tracks. Daddy was crouching close beside him with his long back bent, a hand on the boy’s shoulder. His pale eyes were hooded as he described in a whisper a woman pacing her bedroom, beside herself with the terror of exposure, of being on display, the prospect of the thing coming out in open court—
—You want that, Walter? You want her to go through all that?
Then up comes Daddy’s head as the Albany train is heard approaching, the clanging of its bell. Here, now, he whispers, do it now, Walter, I’ll be with you. And he reaches down to my father, who then rises to his feet, and together they walk toward the tracks as the train comes into view, hand in hand like father and son—
Silence in the cab of the truck.
—He didn’t care about Walter, said Mildred at last, it wasn’t him he was angry at. It was her. He wanted to hurt her. He told me so himself. He said he was tired of feeling humiliated. That’s why he made Walter do it, he wanted to punish her. No other reason.
—And afterward? I said quietly.
—Oh afterward, she said. He felt sorry about it afterward, but she never forgave him. He tried to make it right between them but she wouldn’t listen. Not even when Iris was born. Not even when she was dying.
She paused.
—And for you it was already too late, she said.
—What do you mean?
—She was pregnant.
Back in the city that night I reflected on what had been done to me, or no, not what was done to me but what was withheld, what was denied, what was still denied. It wasn’t just Daddy, it was Sidney too, because he excused him, he defended him, and having told me the truth he then denied it, and I couldn’t seem to just shut my feelings down. So much better to be numb, I thought. To be dead inside. To be blind, to be deaf, yes, above all to be deaf. Better the bulwarks—
Sidney was going out of town for two days. He asked me if I wanted him to cancel his trip. No, I told him. I’m all right, I said. He left in the morning and he took Howard with him. That night I went to the Dunmore Hotel. I wanted to hear Eddie Castrol play the piano.
Chapter 7
I won’t forget those somber drives Howard and I took to Atlantic City that winter when we talked of all manner of things both grave and trivial but without ever forgetting the dying woman at the end of our journey. Wry, weary, in some pain, apparently resigned to an early death but comforted by the presence of her son and sustained by the salty candor of her mother, Barb bore her illness with fortitude and humor. But she distracted me from Constance and this was not good. After her last visit to her father’s house she’d been distant and impenetrable. She no longer trusted me because I was skeptical about the story she’d heard from Mildred Knapp. She said I was on his side, he being Daddy. Several times I tried to talk to her about it but it did no good. Her mind was made up. So I left her alone. I told her I’d be there when she needed me.
But I was stretched too thin just then and I didn’t understand how precarious her situation had become. One day in February a call came from Iris. She’d gone back up to Ravenswood. She had bad news, she said.
—Tell me, I said.
—He’s had another stroke. I don’t know what to do.
I left the city early the next morning, alone. Howard was staying with his grandmother in Atlantic City. My sense of dread deepened the farther north I got. It was a bleak, chill, late-winter landscape. The trees were bare and there was snow on the ground. I arrived at the house. I sat at the kitchen table and Iris told me what had happened since she got here. There was one morning, she said, when he’d appeared in the kitchen saying that thieves had been in the house. They’d stolen his watch and his hairbrush. He wanted to call the police but Mildred dissuaded him. Then he wanted to drive into the village, but he couldn’t find the truck keys. Mildred had had to hide them.
The next morning I sat in the office of Morgan’s doctor, a serious young man in horn-rim spectacles called Hugo Friedrich. He’d taken over the practice some years before. I asked him if Dr. Schuyler should be in a nursing home.
—I wouldn’t envy you, trying to move Morgan Schuyler out of his own house, he said. His tone was sardonic. He paused. In terms of treatment, he then said, I have nothing to offer you.
—How long has he got?
—One year, maybe two. Maybe seven.
He gazed at me impassively. He seemed almost to relish his inadequacy in the face of this disease. I asked him to please make another house call.
—He wouldn’t see me the last time.
—I’m sure you understand the sort of man he is.
—Yes, I know what sort of man he is.
—And you won’t allow your antagonism to interfere with your clinical duties.
I’d gone too far.
—Professor Klein, he said, please don’t tell me my clinical duties. I’m saying that I’m no use to you if I can’t get into the patient’s bedroom. Yes, I’ll try.
He stood up. The interview was over. But he had to know what was expected of him. When Iris went back to the city, Mildred Knapp would need all the help she could get from this doctor.
I was in the kitchen with Iris when the old man appeared in the doorway.
—I’ve been asleep, he said.
—You had a good sleep, said Iris.
—Not good enough. I woke up.
This was how he talked now. It was a lousy sleep because he woke up. He’d changed. He was a sick man. It diminished him. He sat at the table and asked for a glass of wine. When it was put in front of him he stared at it and I saw the life drain out of his face. His eyes died and his features grew slack. His mouth fell open. It was as though all meaning had fled from him. He knew the meaning of nothing and had no meaning himself. There was emptiness where the old man sat. Iris looked at me and shook her head. Don’t even try, she seemed to be saying.
It lasted forty minutes. Then he came back to life. He reached for his wine. His hand was unsteady. It cost him everything he had to pull himself out of it, whatever black trough he’d been sunk in. There’d been an absence of affect, cognition, will: self, in short. Now he was attempting to make conversation. It was harrowing to watch. A little later I went out and made my way down through the trees to the river. Sticks and other debris drifted by on the current. The water was flat calm. To the north the delicate arch of the Kingston Bridge floated in the twilight like a sketch in charcoal on gray paper. Beyond it the Catskill ridges were blue against the dusk. We seemed to be approaching the end of something, some phase of life, and I hoped to Christ it wasn’t my marriage. I felt sure I’d been wrong to leave Constance by herself in the city.
Oh what can ail thee, wretched wight, / Alone and palely loitering …
Yes, and palely loitering I watched the river grow molten and then flush red as the sun went down behind the mountains. A flock of geese flapped low across the water, which turned pale as ice, elsewhere suffused with the fire of the dying sun. When the Albany train went through it was with a great clangor of bells. Then I saw Iris picking her way down through the trees, her fur coat flapping open and a cigarette between her teeth.
She sat beside me on the dock. As her father’s condition deteriorated she became more dispirited, this hadn’t escaped me. But still I heard the compassion in her voice as she spoke of finding him stooped and fearful in the kitchen door when she’d first arrived at the house. The corridor was dark and at the far end he stood half turned toward her with one hand lifted. She’d dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs and gone forward. He�
�d started to retreat into the kitchen. His hand was still lifted to ward her off as though she were a stranger come to do him harm. It shocked her that he didn’t know who she was.
She then told me he’d had the second stroke the day Constance returned to the city. Did I know what Constance had said to him? I didn’t. She became a little tearful. He was old and sick and Constance should just leave him in peace, she said. She should leave him alone. I was again struck by their difference in temperament. Clear emotional currents flowed close to the surface in Iris and they were easy to read. Constance’s feelings were so tortuous, by contrast, and so veiled, so complicated, that I felt exhausted even thinking about her. A small wave rolled in from somewhere out in the river and broke gently against the pilings. We felt the dock shift beneath us. It wasn’t safe.
—How still it is, Iris whispered.
A few moments later she was silently weeping. When I touched her shoulder the grief all at once poured out of her and she cried like a child, rocking back and forth on the deck. I put my arms around her and held her. It was like a summer shower, very sudden and intense. Then it was over. I asked her what that was all about.
—Oh who knows, she said, groping for a cigarette.
I suspected it wasn’t only her father’s decline that troubled her. There was a man in the city and her heart had been broken, this much I knew but no more. I told her she was too young for all this sorrow.
Late that night she came down to the kitchen and found me there. She said she couldn’t sleep either. She sat beside me on the old bench by the woodstove. I put my book down. She thanked me for being kind to her earlier. Her eyes were red and her mascara was smudged. Her feet were bare on the cold stone floor and that lovely heap of blonde hair was tumbled about her shoulders. She sat beside me and gazed at me with an expression of wry sad humor.
—Did she tell you about Eddie? she said. I returned to the city in the morning. I encountered only light traffic but by the time I could see the George Washington Bridge I was going at a crawl. There were shrieking car horns and gas fumes and rage. I was tired. I thought of that senile old man and all he was accused of and I tried to organize it into some kind of a story. Those two women, each one damaged, each one desperate because of him, Iris no less than Constance. I couldn’t seem to do it. I felt the same frustration when I tried to see the city with any clarity now, for it too defied comprehension in its current state of entropic dissolution, by which I mean decay. Breakdown. An idea occurred to me. I glimpsed the title of my next book, the one I’d write once I’d laid aside the bloody albatross, my Conservative Heart. Why that book defied all my efforts to finish it I didn’t know. But this new one, it would be called A Scream in the Night. It would be a psychosocial study of urban breakdown, the collapse of a great American city. It would be a damn sight easier, I thought, to explain what was happening to New York City than to figure out what was going on in my wife’s psyche.
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