“I know what we’ll do this semester! We’ll run a small second seminar, very exclusive—demonstrate theory in action, take our eager-minded students through a handful of contemporary writers, examine what specific knowledge might have profited them! Contrast them with better writers, you know, Hersey versus Hemingway. Penn Warren’s World Enough against Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.”
“Yes,” Fred agreed excitedly. “The cultural patterns. Experience instead of aimless reporting. Faulkner, not Steinbeck.”
Hyman slapped my husband on the leg. “Excellent choice. We’ll raise the stakes on our young ladies!”
“Stan,” Fred said, trying out the name. “This will be great!”
“They’re not bad to look at, either, most of them. The students. An enthusiastic coterie of willing acolytes.”
Fred nodded. To his credit, he was unsure of how to answer.
I had been about to go out onto the porch, to sit with them and listen. The door was open; I would not have to make a sound. But instead I returned to our room, huddled under the thick quilt, and tried to keep a brave face in case the walls reported directly to my hostess. I wanted beyond anything to spend the winter living in this house. I was amazed by the Hymans. I wanted their approval. Nonetheless, I wondered how safe we were with them.
• • •
I SLEPT BADLY under the cold, opaque eyes of the windows, troubled by dreams of a sort I’d never had. Each time I awoke, my body wanted to spring from the bed, panicked and afraid of something real: My sister Helen, resisting the insistent pawing of her employer, Mr. Cartwright. My father in a well-used car: avuncularly proud of a particularly fine storefront blaze as firefighters scrambled to unleash their hoses; unaware of the cops creeping closer in the gloomy alleyway. My mother, outside somewhere dark, alone, missed by no one. And Fred. I dreamed something of Fred I cannot bring myself to recall. Not even now.
Four
IN THE MORNING, Fred and Stanley left for the college on foot. Apparently, the campus was just up the road and through a gate. “You’re welcome to join us for lunch, Stanley says.” Fred had returned upstairs to remove his tie. “There’s a new library building, you can take a look. And then walk across the driveway to the main building. Looks like a mansion with columns. It’s called the Commons. Or you can walk into North Bennington, but Stanley says you saw most of it yesterday.”
“Can we stay here? Will they want us? In this house?”
At home, we slept in the living room of Fred’s parents’ apartment. There’d been some discussion about moving us into Fred and Lou’s room, and Lou moving onto the sofa, but since we intended to be temporary, that hadn’t happened. I didn’t mind it much; I’d never had a lot of privacy. Still, I could tell that Fred’s mother would prefer to be the only woman. When I rinsed my stockings, I hid them under the side table, draped over my shoes. I kept our area neat, and I helped with the cooking, and I did everything I could to behave like a guest, but I knew it didn’t help. Downstairs in the candy store, she whispered to the customers as she weighed out licorice drops or Bit-O-Honeys. Whatever I was doing wrong, the old ladies agreed on it, shaking their heads in sympathy as if Selma Nemser’s life were one long mourning ritual. When my mother dropped in to say hello, Fred’s mother stiffened and came around the counter to exchange hugs. She stayed at my mother’s side, escorting her past the table of cut-glass candy dishes. They chatted by the door, friendly as could be, but when my mother left—I would get a cursory hug and inquiry into my health; I never did know what she wanted when she came—Mrs. Nemser always breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the penny candy counter. On the way, she checked to make sure nothing was missing. I suppose she tried to hide this from me, but how could she? I was so ashamed of my mother that I, too, held my breath. Which is all by way of saying that I understood why Fred’s mother didn’t want me around. I wouldn’t have wanted me, either.
He could have married anybody. In our neighborhood, there were very few girls who wouldn’t have been grateful to have him. Smarter girls. Richer girls. Prettier girls. But he had wanted me.
Now he gave me a tight, uncomfortable look. “It’s good, isn’t it, Rosie? They want us to stay here. And the money, I mean, the baby, it would be better to save some money.”
I smoothed the well-laundered cotton of the quilt over the nearly imperceptible rise of my stomach. How had she known?
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll try it and see.”
I nodded.
“What are the child ballads?”
“The most authoritative collection of ballads and their variations. From the 1800s, but still considered to be the masterwork of the field.”
“A collection of children’s ballads?” I asked.
When he laughed, I always felt a little relieved, even if his amusement came at my expense. “No, Francis Child was a Harvard professor, the first professor of English. Before that, they were called rhetoric professors. It was his life’s work to gather all these ballads and their variations from around the world.”
“Oh,” I said, mollified.
“Why?” he asked.
“No reason. I just wondered.”
“Were you listening last night?” He didn’t sound angry, so I nodded.
“‘The Demon Lover,’” I said. “That’s what you called it.”
He rolled the length of his discarded blue tie through his fingers. “It’s my favorite, and Stanley’s. And hers, too.” I patted the bed, but instead he went to the closet and draped the tie through a hanger. He described the ballad then, telling me about the cloven-footed sailor who returns to reclaim his lover years after he’s been reported dead. The woman abandons her trustworthy carpenter husband and their children, flees to what turns out to be her doom. The devil’s request, impossible to ignore. I shivered, patted the bed again, but Fred remained standing, something puzzled and reluctant in the set of his shoulders, the stiffness of his jaw.
“It’s British,” he told me. “And Scottish, and eventually there were American variations as well. Always the same message, even though the words change.”
“Some people are dangerous to love,” I said.
We were silent for some moments.
“Shirley works in the morning,” he said then. “So you’ll have to be quiet. I think the kitchen’s fine, and the parlor, but not the library, where the desks are. That back one is her desk.”
I nodded again.
“Try to like it, Rosie. Try to like her.”
“I do,” I told him. “But why would she like me? They’re all so smart, so well educated. I don’t fit in.”
He sat on the bed, took me in his arms. “Rose Nemser,” he said. “You don’t know yourself at all.”
I started to cry. “Her kids. I don’t like them.”
“The kids?” He was genuinely surprised. I was surprised myself. It was as if I were trying to establish an alibi for a crime I’d not yet decided to commit. Hadn’t Sally and I dried the dishes together companionably last night, chatting about her disdain for her new boarding school’s rules? I’d admired her sly smile and the daringly straightforward way she dealt with Shirley—thinking nothing of seizing her mother round the middle with both arms and squeezing tightly, her eyes shut in order to better savor the pleasure of it.
“Don’t make me go back,” she’d said then. Shirley kept rinsing the soapy dishes under hot water, placing the clean plates on the dish towel she’d laid out along the counter.
“Momma, please. I’ll be good and study, I’ll keep my room straight, and stay away from boys. I’ll be delightful.” Shirley glanced at me with a wry smile. Sally’s grin included me as well, as if I might play some part in deciding her fate. “Delightful, Momma. I promise.”
I dried two more of the rosebud latticed plates—faded gold rims did not detract from their elegance—and stacked them on the sideboard
before Sally said again, “Please, Momma. And I’ll befriend Rose, I’ll show her everything, I’ll be a hostess par excellence.”
I stiffened without realizing it, so that the plate I was drying knocked dangerously on the sharp counter edge. To my relief, Shirley said, “You need to finish high school, my friend, not dangle after our fairy-tale lovers, pretty as they are. We’ll finish here. You might as well go upstairs and start your Ellison essay. I’ll take charge of putting on the dog for Rose and Fred.” The look Sally shot me was cautious, as if she’d noted a hitherto unseen risk in my presence. I met her gaze flatly, then offered to finish rinsing the dishes. In truth, Sally was okay. She was hardly as interesting as Shirley, but how could anyone possibly be?
“Rosie Klein from Pine Street,” Fred said now, his breath warming my hair. “My Rosie. Nothing matters but you. Not before, not now, not ever. You are the reason I want to teach here. The reason for everything. To take care of you, to make a life with you, that’s all that matters.”
What words could answer? I had, I think, tethered myself to the notion that someday a man would love me, and keep me safe, and I would become whole and able to greet the world without fear. I had married Fred believing that he was my chance for happiness. Now I was certain my luck had truly turned for the better. “Go on, then,” I told him. “Go see the campus. I’ll be fine.” Eyes still damp from weeping, I grinned and pushed him off the bed. “Get going. I’ll see you tonight. I’ll be fine here, Freddy. Go.”
His relief was palpable.
I waited in the room until I heard the front door slam behind the men, listened to the sounds of china and glassware clinking as breakfast dishes were cleared from the table. I let my heart quiet and my tears dry, and then I slipped down the hall to the bathroom, to get ready to spend my first full day with Shirley Jackson.
• • •
I WAS NERVOUS. The evening before, she had been hard work to keep up with. Half the time I didn’t even know who we were talking about: Howard’s name came up twenty times before I realized she meant the poet Howard Nemerov. Paul? That was the painter Paul Feeley. They were friends with Ralph Ellison; the up-and-coming writer Joyce Carol Oates had recently spent a weekend. They knew everybody at The New Yorker; Stanley wrote for the magazine. At one point, Stanley said something offhand about Shirley’s story “The Lottery.” I’d read it, a long time before, about a ritual stoning in a New England village, and I opened my mouth, eager to contribute and delighted that I could, but before I could gather words together, Shirley made a joke about a professor of theirs from Syracuse, someone named Brown, and Fred seemed to know who he was and they were all laughing—even their oh-so-knowledgeable kids—and I was left behind again.
So that morning, I admit I went down the stairs slowly, already worried I would be unable to entertain my formidable hostess.
She was in the kitchen, leaning against the sink with the water running. Yesterday’s dress again. A cigarette trailing smoke. Her hair caught up in a limp ponytail. She was watching something out the window, staring intently, and I didn’t want to startle her, so I cleared my throat before taking a step across the threshold.
“Good morning,” she said, not turning. “There’s coffee on the stove.” Her voice was different from the night before, lower, the sound of countless cigarettes effable.
“What a wonderful sleep I had,” I offered, knowing even as I spoke how dishonest the words sounded.
“I have to sleep,” she said. “If I don’t, I can’t work.” She glanced over her shoulder, meeting my gaze frankly. Like me, she’d been crying. “And if I don’t work, it’s bad. We need the money. Four kids, this house, you can imagine.” She tightened both faucets, and took her apron off, leaving the dishes in the sink.
We’d not talked about whether I would work, Fred and I. His mother never had; she was pretty and helpless and hardly knew how to open and shut the windows in their apartment. Her job at the store was little more than a social position, a way of visiting with her friends, keeping an eye on their children. Fred’s father—most of the fathers I knew, my own the sole exception—would have been embarrassed if his wife had to contribute to ongoing expenses. A wife could work for something specific; if she wanted to buy new furniture she could take a job in a department store and reap the discount, without shame. Though most of the women I knew had been forced to work on and off over the years, no one ever talked about it. A woman freely admitting, without shame, that she was working for money! Particularly an artist, the kind of woman with the right to behave with any eccentricity. That was the brilliant Shirley I’d seen the night before; now her admission of financial obligation—with its implicit confession about financial need—made her only more fascinating.
“You don’t love it?” I blurted. “The writing?”
She pulled out a kitchen chair, dropped her heavy frame into it, stubbed her cigarette atop the mound of butts in the ashtray. “You come right to it, don’t you?” She was amused, not angry, or so I hoped. On the shelves behind her, dishes were piled willy-nilly, bowls stacked with plates of all sizes, teacups and coffee mugs teetering against one another. A cuckoo clock ticked hollowly, water gurgled in cranky pipes, birds called to one another in the yard. A fly buzzed against the window screen but didn’t find a way in, despite the many gaps in the webbing. I waited without speaking for Shirley to continue.
“Sit,” she said, and I did, taking the chair opposite hers, my back to the kitchen door.
I have never known any other person, not in all my life, as unpredictable about silence and sound as Shirley Jackson. That winter of our friendship, there were more times like this one, when we sat in placental silence, than there were hours when she skittered out stories the way one might have expected. This very first morning, it was as if we were trying to get to know each other without speech or movement, merely measuring each other against the cadences of our breathing as the morning sun drifted, slowly, down the kitchen hallway and streamed along the dark, scuffed wooden floors.
After the longest time, when I could trace some vital pulsing in her that matched both my own and that of the life evolving inside me, I abruptly began to feel her as invasive, to feel her mind seeping into mine and wandering through the network of my thoughts. As if she, and the baby already growing, were forces larger and more powerful than what I was myself. And then I could no longer process clearly, could not articulate a whole and complete idea any longer. I wanted to say something, to break the silence, but my throat went tight; my hands, against the cool of the kitchen table, were sweaty. I forced my eyes to blink, raised them to gaze at her; her own eyes were closed and she was humming softly, her fingers moving against the edge of the table as if sorting out the sounds on alien piano keys.
I opened my mouth and closed it. I had never felt so hollow or so grounded; I had never felt so seen. Not by anyone, not even Fred.
In one of Shirley’s stories, one I’ve read only recently, a young girl travels with her brother and his wife to a solitary hotel on an island made of rock. She steps out onto the rock of the island ahead of the others, and soon discovers that, in her eagerness to be first, she has marked herself the island’s next spirit prisoner. She will not be able to leave, ever, and all because of that first excited dance off the boat and onto land. I wonder, sometimes, about such accidents, the turns of fate that determine so much of our lives. I am not a particularly smart woman, nor even a canny one, and yet I have been able to learn from experience. I admit, honestly, that when I thought I loved Fred, back in the beginning, I only loved the dream of love. I wanted a home, to be cared for, to be able to believe in another who would not betray me, who would never leave me. Fred, dear as he has been, has betrayed me terribly, even though he has never left me behind. Stepping onto the island of marriage was a way forward; I didn’t know it was an option that would limit what came later. And Fred, bless and curse him, must have been similarly cavalier: Or els
e why me? And yet our rhythms seemed to match.
Even at our worst, and we have had our share of worsts—even then, we have trusted one another to hang in and fight for what we are. I think Shirley and Stanley had that, too. Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core. Without her, he was nothing. Without him, she could not go on.
“What are you thinking about?” she said to me suddenly.
I had not drifted off into the future, as it must seem, but was afloat somewhere equally hazy, pillowed in my own embryonic seas. I lowered my head, embarrassed.
“Do you ever wonder, what if I had turned left instead of right? Just then, when I was heading to the door? If I had chosen right, not left, and walked up the street, or up the stairs, what different fates awaited?”
I nodded. Now I think we had been pondering a nearly identical idea.
She leaned in, her pale fleshy cheeks aglow. There were coffee grounds on the table, but she put her hands right there, in the pocked puddles. She said, “I dream about it all the time. I get in the car, I have to drive Stanley here or there, and he says to go right and I am certain it should be left. I am certain left is the direction. Left, left, left, but I go right. I listen and go right.”
I nodded. She told me to wait, to stay where I was, and she moved quickly down the hall, graceful despite her size. She returned with a small moss-colored book: “You must read this.”
“I will,” I said, nearly breathless with the importance of it. It was an old book, worn along the binding, its pages foxed by damp. I could smell the sweet mold, anticipate the crackling of the pages, and I held it up so I could read the title. An Adventure tooled in gold leaf, its authors Two Ladies. An adventure. “I’ll start it now.”
“Girls without mothers, you and me. We have to help one another.” How did she know? I put a hand on my belly. “You’ll be good to her,” Shirley said then, and, as she turned to leave the room, added, “My mother thinks I failed her. I’m not thin or dressed properly, not ladylike enough, don’t meet her standards. But she has no idea, not really. At least yours has an accurate grasp on the realities.”
Shirley Page 3
