Shirley

by Susan Scarf Merrell

  Down the hall I heard giggles through another open door. Somewhere a shower ran, and a toilet flushed, and a violin made nearly pleasurable sounds. The hallway rug was worn almost to the wood, patched in places, smelling of old perfume and pencil shavings. My damp loafers felt heavy.

  On Jannie’s floor was a pile of partially knitted wool, a scarf she had undertaken before Christmas. Back then I’d been jealous watching Shirley teach her a better way to cast on stitches, and I’d been pleased to see how Jannie dropped the project when Shirley stopped paying attention to it. But here was the scarf, at least a foot longer than it was the last time she’d had it at the house.

  “You keep secrets, too,” I said. But Jannie remained asleep. She was short, like Shirley, with pale brown hair that swirled limply on the pillows without tangling into Sally’s blonder curls. They breathed the same way, shallowly and through their nearly touching noses. Sally’s hand slept on Jannie’s; I imagine their feet were intertwined beneath the patchwork quilt. I cleared my throat. Loudly. I wanted to have it out with them. I think I had the idea that if they forgave my rudeness I’d be able to go back to the house a grown-up, someone that Fred and Stanley and of course Shirley would have to take more seriously as well.

  “Wake up,” I said. “Wake up.” But nothing. I stood for a moment longer, and then turned and walked slowly down the hall. Just before I entered the stairwell, I could swear I heard Sally’s giggle, suppressed by a sweatered elbow or length of quilt, but audible all the same. I stopped. I didn’t hear her again.

  I stayed in the hallway, my heart pounding. Everywhere around me the sounds of life being lived, laughter and running water, someone jumping, another girl’s high voice recounting the story of an evening debacle at rapid, excited speed. I held my breath, tiptoed the length of the hall to Jannie’s door.

  They were cheek to cheek, still, sitting up now, heads against the wooden headboard. As I entered the room, their smiles froze.

  “I didn’t think you were asleep.”

  “How dare you come here?” Sally said. She swung her legs to the floor, began digging around for her shoes with stocking feet. Jannie sat up straighter against the headboard, silent.

  “I wanted to explain, to tell you why we came back,” I said.

  Sally shrugged the shoulder of her brown cardigan back up, checked the buttons, drew the sleeves carefully down to her wrists. “It’s not as if we’re interested.”

  “I don’t want to have trouble, I didn’t want you to be angry.”

  “Why would you care?” She stood, began rooting in the tangle of sweaters and slippers and books and notebooks on Jannie’s floor for her jacket.

  “Because you were right, what you said to me. I am the same age as you”—I looked to Jannie—“and I have been trying hard, so hard, to be a good guest at your house, to be part of your family—”

  “Part of Shirley’s family,” she said snidely.

  “Yes. And for Fred, to make sure Fred makes a good place for himself here.”

  “He’s certainly done that.”

  “I know,” I said, and again I started crying. Even I was tired of my tears.

  They watched me coldly.

  “I wanted it all to be different, to be special, don’t you see? And now look what’s happened. What he did.”

  “What did he do?” Jannie asked. She honestly did not seem to know.

  “Screwed a student. At least one.” God, Sally’s voice was cruel. Just the tone of it was like being stabbed.

  “He did?” Jannie asked with interest.

  “Your father taught him exactly what to do.”

  Jannie blinked several times, took her glasses off, cleaned them, and replaced them on the bridge of her nose. “My father?”

  “You know what he is.”

  Sally said, “Don’t listen to her Jannie, don’t. She’s making it up.” Sally’s pale skin was as red as the jacket Paula Welden wore the afternoon she took off from campus and headed for the Long Trail, bright, bright safety red—Had this been her room, I wondered, and why not? It could have been—and Sally took Jannie in her arms and lifted her to standing. “We’re going to dinner,” Sally told me. “You can tell them we’re eating on campus tonight.” A sheen of sweat glistened across Jannie’s forehead.

  “Are you ill?” I asked, but no one answered.

  She went down the hall to where the bathrooms were. Sally said, “She doesn’t think about our father the way you do, she doesn’t like to. So save your histrionics for the house, for people who have no choice about listening to them.”

  I was stumped. I said, “You know about Stanley, don’t you?”

  “I’m no fool. I see things.”

  “But she—”

  “What’s the difference, Rose? Let her cling to what she clings to; it won’t hurt you.”

  I clutched her arm; I could tell it was too hard; she tried to shake me off. “I dreamed she’d died,” I said. “Shirley. I dreamed she died and Stanley married someone else and everything was awful.”

  Sally’s breath came hard. She glanced at the doorway, but Jannie was not yet back. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re crazy and evil enough for Shirley to write about you, but I won’t give you the pleasure. Get out of here.”

  “I’m trying to help,” I said.

  “Then go away.”

  She left me in Jannie’s room, and I heard her down the hall, pushing open the bathroom door. After it closed, I could hear her voice but not her words, and I left, walking slowly, fingering the matchbook in my jacket pocket with one hand, the other holding on to the banister for balance.

  Outside, I felt eyes on me everywhere, as if the students were mockingbirds perched high inside each dorm window, staring and laughing, sneering and chattering as I made my way up the drive. Their cars blocked my path, their disdain seemed to float in the air like dandelion weed; all I wanted was to get back to the house. I clutched the matches tightly; with my fingers I could tell that less than half the book was used, but all I wanted was to be in my house. My house, Shirley’s house, the place where I was safest. Where even if Fred had wronged me, I was needed.

  I did not let myself think about the students. How lucky they were to have been loved enough to be there, to be children without babies, to be young enough to fuck their professors and go on with their studies and their dreams. I had never been young enough to take any risks, I told myself furiously. I had never, ever been lucky enough, or safe enough, to make mistakes. What freedom that would be.

  I strode back to the house filled with self-pity and rage. When an image of Paula Welden appeared, a captioned picture in the boldly headlined tabloid in my head, I dismissed it and marched on. Whatever Shirley had done to her, there on the mountain, Paula Welden had been loved. Not even she had endured the misery and betrayal that had been my lot since birth.

  Oh, I realize how this sounds, how awfully childish, how awfully selfish I was. I do not defend myself. I only want to tell the truth.

  • • •

  I SAID TO FRED, not half an hour later, “Even with what you did, you need me.”

  “I do,” he said. “And I’m sorrier than I can say.”

  “You need me,” I said again.

  He nodded.

  “We made a promise, we have a life together, our whole life, and now I’ll never forget, I’ll never forget what you did!” Somewhere downstairs, someone closed a door, perhaps to give us more privacy. Stanley put on one of his jazz recordings. It made me mad. I wanted them to hear us. I wanted everyone to be with us, all of them, I wanted them all to be a part of what had been done to me, to celebrate my injury, to atone for it, to make it right.

  “Shh,” Fred said. “The baby.” But Natalie slept through all of it, and downstairs life went on as normal, and that was the way of it. I know we talked some more, and there were apologie
s and promises, but honestly, the fact that we were both there, in the same room, made all discussion moot. The inevitability of going on was understood.

  Twenty-two

  STANLEY, OVERHEARD IN THE KITCHEN. I was making my way downstairs in stocking feet, not because I was sneaking but because I intended to return to bed with my morning coffee. I did not feel the need to breakfast with Shirley. I wanted to be alone, in the bed, staring at the floral wallpaper—challenging the house to tell me its intentions. Was I to be ejected like poor Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill House? Ejected and then forced by death to be immured in the house forever?

  Was I crazy? Well, of course I was. I see it now. I do. I was crazy and I was right, and it was Stanley’s voice I heard as I headed toward the kitchen.

  Yes, Stanley, overheard: So we return to normal.

  The hiss of the water as she soaked the still-warm frying pan. She: I kept my promise. Brought them both back safe and sound. Now you keep yours. No more phone calls.

  He: No more adventures. No more spells.

  Obediently: I’ll work on my book and see the good doctor.

  Reassuringly: And Rose will manage the house. It was right to bring her back.

  She: But no more phone calls, Stan. I mean it.

  Whatever he whispered in response made her giggle. When I entered the kitchen, having cleared my throat twice on the last few steps, their faces were arranged to greet me. We made terse morning conversation and I escaped upstairs. I felt the bed sigh pleasantly as I sank against the pillows.

  And so began the first morning of that last week.

  Twenty-three

  THAT LAST WEEK, I spent less time in the kitchen and more in Shirley’s library, reading the witchcraft books, of which she had so many. Spells were my focus, so small and so powerful. As the Lancashire witch Mother Cuthbert defined them, a spell is a piece of paper written with magical characters, fixed in a critical season of the moon, and conjunction of the planets; or sometimes by repeating mystical words. Of these there are many sorts. If someone had asked me, I wouldn’t have said what I was looking for. A charm to keep a husband faithful? To find a missing mother? There had to be a spell to save a doomed friend from death.

  I sneaked into their bedroom and took some hairs from her hairbrush. I put them in my dresser drawer, tucked inside my stocking bag. I would have taken a shirt or scarf of hers as well, but I was afraid she’d notice and misunderstand. I’d hate her to believe me a thief.

  I went down to the library, and Mrs. Morse seemed to feel it was dangerous to speak to me, as if I’d been infected by whatever curse controlled the household. She nodded formally, and turned to speak to one of the other local matrons, barely meeting my eyes as she checked out my books. But then, just as I was about to turn away, she said, “I suppose you’ll be pleased to know his friend is back, the professor’s friend. Turned up safe and sound, no matter what that crazy family tried to do to her.”

  “Oh,” I said, relief pulsing through me as if it had replaced my blood. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Won’t tell a soul where she went, or why.”

  “Perhaps it was a family matter.”

  “She’s just too fine a woman to blame others,” Mrs. Morse averred darkly.

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” I said. Even though I was fairly certain that Mrs. Morse was right. Whether it had been a spell or one of Shirley’s more “pragmatic” gestures made no difference. We were Shirley’s, each of us her fictional possessions, whether we knew it or not. And then Mrs. Morse surprised me:

  “That Mrs. Hyman can’t turn us into another one of her evil stories. No, she cannot.” And with that, the librarian picked up the books I’d returned and began to pluck out the circulation cards, each flick of her fingers resentfully swiping clean my temporary stewardship of those volumes.

  • • •

  THE MALAMUDS WERE LATE, and Stanley was already pretty drunk. Ann had called to say they’d had a long lunch with the Bellows, who were visiting for the day on their way to Cambridge. Bern had taken a nap afterward. He was making up lost writing time, and she expected they would be at the Hymans’ house by eight-thirty, “or nine at the latest.” Shirley, who had managed the call with such considered politeness that I knew she was irritated, did not return to taking dried apricots out of the warm cider she’d used to plump them; instead, she left her fingers draped over the telephone receiver as if she were committing the phone conversation to memory. I took a handful of bay leaves from the bag in the back of the spice drawer; when I turned around to add them to the bowl with the apricots, Shirley was gone. The typewriter’s click-clack began immediately.

  No matter. I could reconstruct the recipe for Shirley’s glazed ham with apricots from memory, I was almost positive. Off went the radio, so that I could better dredge the procedure from the cellar of my thoughts, while at the same time heeding the typewriter’s rhythms from the library. Melted butter, chopped onion, and then the cider reduced by half. While the cider simmered, I scored the ham, used a skewer to make holes at each diamond edge for the cloves, and patted brown sugar on the entire roast. Already the kitchen smelled marvelously festive, as if tonight might be a bacchanalian celebration.

  Malamud was coming! His world was mine. Reading The Assistant had been like reading about myself—streets I could picture, stores I’d been in, characters so familiar the book read like gossip from one of my childhood neighborhoods. His people were as endearingly imperfect as Shirley’s, but he took them more seriously. His affections were sympathetic in a different way; he seemed kinder, somehow, his intent less ironic. I never thought he was laughing at Morris Bober, or at any of the characters in his short story collection, the one that won him the National Book Award. Two such important writers in one small village; now that I thought about it, it was surprising I’d not met him before this.

  It seemed that life had returned to normal that final week, although in the way of things when one is pretending routine as usual, routines held an element of thwarted fury. Oddly, I had returned to trusting Fred. I had no doubts, now, that when he set out for work he cached his loyalty to me next to his class notes in the soft leather briefcase Stanley had given him at Christmas. Call it another volume toted in from home for use in student instruction. That week, the days were mild and beautiful; after the troubled sleep of the night, I was awakened not by Natalie’s cries but by the cheerful morning calls of innumerable friendly birds. Spring on the wing, skies smeared with pale and poignant blue—there was a gentle quality in the air, and in the house, where we were all studiedly kind to one another.

  We were past intimacy. No more confiding, although our actions were tinged with the understanding of our mutual affection. Had I forgiven too early, too completely? Remember where I came from—betrayal was what I knew, and I had never seen a man with such remorse—as a tattered extended family, we were past the inevitable and had survived it.

  As I read in silence in the living room each day that week, Natalie cooed in her basket at my feet. I knew it was silly, I really did, and yet I made myself believe in Shirley’s spells. Her books described the way to make a witch’s sacred circle, and most mornings I took time to rig one around Shirley’s desk using kitchen string. I’d sit there while she was in the shower or upstairs napping, repeating the silly rhymes I’d written asking protection for the mother of this house, for life and peace and prose that would transcend whatever misfortunes I sensed in the offing. I lit my candles, tucking the matches into the pocket of my skirt as I wished my circle into being, said my foolish phrases. I believed with categorical fervor. I so wanted to believe, I made it so. Sometimes as I heard the loud squeal of the shower faucets being turned off upstairs, I would feel the squawk reverberate down my spine, my essence urgently called home. I’d cease my exhortations with deliberate speed, drawing the kitchen twine back into a little knot that I could store inside Shirley’s p
encil jar, putting the candles back on the shelf. Even the smell of matches would have dissipated before her footsteps sounded on the stairs, and yet that half-amused smile told me she approved of what I’d done.

  Today, however, I’d not had the chance. There were still coffee grounds on the counter by the stove and breakfast dishes in the sink; the ham to prepare, along with mashed sweet potatoes and the frozen peas I would doctor with canned mushrooms and cream. I’d wanted to read Malamud again if there was time, to dip into his short stories or the novels so I might not shame myself in his presence.

  Earlier that morning, Shirley had found this laughable. “A few of the short stories are fine, I suppose. He’s quite predictable. How he won a National Book Award is a mystery Miss Marple could not solve.”

  “He’s not good enough?”

  She did not want to answer, merely tilted her head and walked down the hall to her desk for the first time that day, where I could hear the creak of the typewriter platen as she wound a fresh piece of foolscap around it, followed by the hesitant rhythms of the morning’s first typing.

  I couldn’t help myself, followed her into the study. I selected the Hymans’ copy of The Assistant from the bookshelves. Without looking up from her work, she said, “He’s not as good as me.”

  He’d won the awards, not her. I couldn’t help wondering if I would like him. “I don’t know a man like Morris Bober,” I said. “But I always believed, I always wanted to believe, that there were people like that. When I was young.”

  “Bern Malamud did not invent the Jews.” The sharp morning light glinted off her glasses so that I could not see if her eyes had narrowed at the thought of him. I put the book down, sensing it was wiser to do so. At lunchtime, when I went in to see how she was doing, she’d closed the volume and replaced it on the shelves.