“The first words I ever heard in Russian.”
She repeated them slowly, as best she could remember them. He needed no translation. To the impassioned will nothing is impossible. He was finding direction. His voice deepened. He was helpful about the house. He cleaned the eaves, hung out laundry lines, smoked out hornets’ nests, dried the dishes. He was not only punctual at meals, but during his father’s frequent absences he set out to replace him. He praised what was set before him. He inspirited the conversation. He had inherited his mother’s gift of mimicry and told long stories about the schools from which he had been ejected. Particularly fine was his account of Dr. Kopping, a Protestant clergyman and director of the Pines Point Boys’ Recreational and Educational Camp. Dr. Kopping, “just another boy himself at heart,” closed each day with a short talk about the council fire, inculcating the manly virtues. Anne would run around the table and throw herself at him. “George! George! Do the housemother at St. Regis’s! Do Dr. Kopping again!” The virulence of these caricatures made his mother uneasy. She had reason to be. George did not mimic his father in her presence, nor in Félicité’s, When they were out of the room, however, he regaled Anne with some astonishing portraits—her father killing birds and rabbits, her father exhausted after his hard day’s work at the mines, her father “washing his hands” of George, her father fulsomely endearing himself to her, to “Papa’s little angel.” In a very short time Anne doted on her brother; in a very short time she discovered that her father was ridiculous. Anne accepted correction from George. He seemed to know that little Russian princesses do not scream and stamp their feet, when it is time to go to bed. When they go to bed they make a curtsy to their mother and say, “Thank you, dear mother, for all that you have done for me.” They curtsy also to their older sisters. And if they have been very good, one or other of the princes, their brothers, carries them upstairs to bed in his arms and says a prayer over them in Old Slavonic. If George was planning to be an actor, he did not wait for the glitter of the footlights; he played the head of a noble household at “St. Kitts.”
All the Lansings were impassioned conversationalists; though Félicité’s interventions were rare they were pondered. There was reading aloud; any scene from Molière or Shakespeare set in motion a long discussion. Night after night Eustacia despaired of getting them to bed at ten-thirty. It was Anne who benefited most from these hours of wide-ranging conversation. There was now a new Anne, maturing rapidly. She led her classes in school. She completed the overnight assignments in a mere quarter of an hour in order to take part in the evening’s symposium. Occasionally Breckenridge Lansing returned at ten from some lodge meeting. On opening his front door he would be aware for a few seconds of the warmth and intellectual energy of this home life, and of the sudden silence introduced by his presence. One evening he admitted himself soundlessly and stood listening in the hall:
“Maman, Miss Doubkov says that Russian writers are the greatest writers that ever lived. And the greatest of them all was a Negro. Papa says that Negroes aren’t even people and that it’s no use teaching them to read and write.” (“Chéri, everyone can have his opinions.”) “Well, Papa’s opinions are pretty silly most of the time.” (“George, I don’t want you to talk about your father like that. Your father is—”) “His opinions! I don’t care what he says about me, but when he says about you—” (“George! Talk about something else!”) “When he says about you that you haven’t any more brains than what God gave a gopher—” (“That’s just his joke.”) “It was a BAD JOKE. And when he broke that shell on the mantel that your mother sent you—” (“George, it was just a shell!”) “He STAMPED on it! It came from the place that you were BORN at!” (“The older we grow, the less we’re attached to things, George.”) “Well, I’m attached to my pride, Maman—and to YOUR pride.”
Lansing did not risk eavesdropping a second time.
One of the reasons Eustacia did all she could to render these evenings engrossing (she cut clippings from periodicals; she sent to Chicago for books and for reproductions of paintings) was to keep George off the streets. George inside the walls of “St. Kitts” was a changed human being; outside them, he continued to infuriate the town. He was the “holy terror” and the Big Chief of the Mohicans. No amount of supplication on his mother’s part could alter that. He listened to her with a stormy face, his arms folded, his gaze on the wall over her shoulder.
“Maman, I’ve got to have some fun. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to have some fun.”
Eustacia knew well that the outrages were conceived and executed with one sole purpose—to drive his father to distraction. He rejoiced in his father’s contempt. He, too, seemed to be waiting for something—for his father to strike him, or to order him out of the house forever? Under the rain of his father’s sneers and denunciations he stood with lowered eyes, motionless and with no shade of impertinence in his manner.
“Do you realize that you’ve brought disgrace on your mother and myself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you realize that there’s not one self-respecting person in this town who has a good word to say for you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I don’t know, sir! Well, in September I’m sending you to a new school I’ve heard about where they don’t stand for any nonsense.”
The Mohicans soon outgrew reversing road signs and tinkering with the town clock. They did little damage to health or property; they merely affronted decorum and right thinking. They staged complicated, well-rehearsed practical jokes that ridiculed banks, the laying of cornerstones, revivalist meetings. There was only one of the Mohicans’ recreations that brought the Chief of Police to the door. It terrified Eustacia. The boys enjoyed riding “possum clancy.” Hoboes, by hundred and thousands, traveled about the country on freight trains. When a long train pulled into a railroad yard it often dropped a score of these passengers, like blackberries off a bough. When they found entrance to empty cars or lay on top of them or crouched on couplers, they were said to be riding “roost”; when they stretched out on the undersides of the cars, clutching or strapping themselves to the “riggers,” they were riding “possum clancy.” It was exciting and dangerous. George and his friends often traveled to Fort Barry or Summerville and back in a single night.
“George! Promise me never to ride those freight trains.”
“Maman, you know I took a vow never to make any promises.”
“For my sake! George, for my sake!”
“Maman, won’t you let me give you just one hour of Russian lesson a week?”
“Oh, chéri, I couldn’t learn Russian. When would I use it?”
“Well, when I’m in Russia and get settled down, you and the girls are coming over to live with me.”
“George!!—Who would take care of your father?”
She begged him to stay in one of those schools—at least six months! “I want you to have an education, George.”
“I’m better educated than the fellows in those schools. I know algebra and chemistry and history. I just don’t like examinations. And I don’t like sleeping in a room with three or eight or a hundred other people. They stink. And they’re so babyish.—You’re an education, Maman.”
“Oh, don’t say a thing like that!”
“Papa went to college and he hasn’t any more education than a flea.”
“Now, George! I won’t have you saying such things. I won’t have it.”
Eustacia had a greater concern: was George subject to “fits”? Was he, perhaps, “crazy”? She had no clear idea what “fits” were, nor did she know any marks by which to distinguish insanity. At the beginning of this century such afflictions and dreads were too shameful to discuss with anyone except one’s family doctor, and then in undertones. But the Lansings’ family doctor was extremely hard of hearing. Even if Eustacia had respected Dr. Gridley’s skill, she could not have brought herself to sh
out the details of George’s behavior. Years ago Breckenridge Lansing had quarreled with Dr. Gillies. Dr. Gillies had contradicted him with characteristic finality on a matter of medical knowledge. Lansing did not lightly brook contradiction. He had taken a year of premedical training in his youth. His father was the best pharmacist in the state of Iowa and Breckenridge had assisted him for over two years in the family drugstore. He knew more about medicine “in his little finger” than that old horse doctor had acquired in a lifetime of practice. He refused to greet Dr. Gillies on the street. He instructed Eustacia that henceforward they would consult Dr. Jabez Gridley, the doctor serving the mine’s infirmary. Dr. Gridley was a superannuated “Poor John” employee, like so many others. In addition to being “deaf as a post,” his eyesight was failing. If you described your wound, burn, boil, or rash to him, he could occasionally be of service to you. Eustacia consulted her various household manuals—A Home Book of First Aid and While Waiting for the Doctor—and learned that the boy did not exhibit the classical symptoms of epilepsy. Moreover, she knew that he was so thoroughly an actor that it was difficult to distinguish between his abandoning himself to imaginative fantasies and his being out of his senses. He would beat with his fists on the floor and bay like a famished wolf; he would tear around the room in circles and dash up and down the stairs shouting “mahogany” or “begonia.” In his love of danger he would balance himself on the roof and gables of “St. Kitts” under the full moon, or would climb the taller butternut trees and swing from treetop to treetop at three in the morning. He would cross Old Quarry Pond with ropes when the ice was already cracking to the accompaniment of the most musical pings. The townspeople and even his subjugated Mohicans were in no doubt that he was “crazy as a galoot.” Eustacia had a high opinion of Dr. Gillies (whose wife was perfectly aware that he was “slavishly” admiring of Mrs. Lansing) and had frequently consulted him without her husband’s knowledge. She paid for these visits—Félicité’s anemia and Anne’s ear-aches—out of her own pocket. She called on him now. Dr. Gillies consented to have a long talk with George. George gave a remarkable performance of intelligence, equilibrium, wit, and good manners. Dr. Gillies was not deceived.
“Mrs. Lansing, get that boy out of Coaltown or you’ll have trouble.”
“But how, Doctor?”
“Give him forty dollars and tell him to go to San Francisco to earn a living. He’ll be able to take care of himself very well. He’s not crazy, Mrs. Lansing; he’s just caged. You run a great risk when you cage a living human being. There’ll be no fee for that consultation, Mrs. Lansing. I had a very interesting talk”—whereupon Dr. Gillies gave a long low laugh.
Eustacia shrank from fulfilling the doctor’s recommendation, but held ready a purse containing forty dollars.
The measure of Breckenridge Lansing’s unhappiness could be gauged by the extent of his boasting. He was the happiest man in the United States. It had taken twenty years of hard work and careful management, but—by golly!—those mines were producing as they had never produced before. A well-run loving American home—that’s the ticket! There’s nothing like returning at the end of the day to one’s own family. His listeners lowered their eyes.
He was not only unhappy but frightened. He loved his clubs and lodges, but in spite of the fact that he was the first citizen in town he was no longer elected to their prominent offices. The men in Coaltown were divided into two classes—those who wore high starched collars even in the hottest weather, and those who did not. The former group did not frequent the taverns up the River Road. They were not addressed by their first names in Hattie’s Hitching Post. They did not return at dawn from Jemmy’s shack where, between card games, whole nights were spent in attempts to whip up bloody fights between roosters, dogs, cats, foxes, snakes, and drunken farmhands. If a respectable family man felt the need of a little diversion and dissipation, he arranged a business trip to St. Louis or Springfield or Chicago. Lansing did not at first understand some warnings that were thrown out to him by the governors of his clubs. Within the memory of man no member had ever been ejected from those august assemblies, but a limit to their patience could be foreseen.
Lansing had set out to found that greatest of all institutions—a God-fearing American home. He held that a husband and a father should be loved, feared, honored, and obeyed. What had gone wrong? His conduct was not above reproach—he knew that; but no red-blooded man’s is. His father’s hadn’t been. In the conduct of affairs he knew himself to be intelligent, conscientious, and diligent. He conceded that he had no talent for details. His strength lay in vision and planning; one could always leave details to spiritless drones. Lansing was wretched, frightened, and bewildered.
During the trial Breckenridge Lansing’s character emerged without blemish. Humans shield humans whose frailties do not threaten their property and whose virtues do not devaluate their own. Ashley was that alien body from another climate—from the future, perhaps—who, in all times and places, has been expelled.
In the world inhabited by the Lansings of Iowa and Coaltown, it was generally understood that no man is ever sick. Sickness among males ends at fifteen and begins again, among the less hardy, at seventy. This lent a fine irony to the daily greetings—“Well, Joe, how are you?” “Just bearing up, Herb; just creeping around.” When, therefore, in February, 1902, Breckenridge Lansing confessed to his wife that he wasn’t feeling well, that his “food wasn’t sitting good,” and that there was a “sort of burning and a sort of pinching” in his stomach, Eustacia realized the extent of his suffering at once. He refused at first to see Dr. Gillies and asked for Dr. Gridley. When Eustacia pointed out that he would be obliged to shout the details of his discomfort within the hearing of half Coaltown, he consented to receive Gillies, “that old horse doctor.” Eustacia was waiting on the front steps at the close of Dr. Gillies’s visit.
“Mrs. Lansing, he doesn’t want to tell me anything. Do you think he’s feeling real pain?”
“Yes, I do.”
“He wouldn’t even let me palp him for more than a minute. Told me I was fooling around in the wrong area. Gave me detailed orders about just where I should palp. I told him there was a possibility that he was very ill. I advised him to see Dr. Hunter in Fort Barry, or even to go to Chicago. He said he wouldn’t put foot out of this house. Where’s a desk? I want to write you some instructions.”
The doctor sat down and thought. Turning, he looked Eustacia in the eye. “I’m writing a list of questions about his symptoms. Send one of the children over to me every noon with a bulletin.—Mrs. Lansing, the whole town knows that your husband’s refused to speak to me on the street for six years. That disqualifies me from operating on him or from being of much use. You should ask Dr. Hunter to come down and see him. The sooner the better. Does he get on well with Dr. Hunter?”
Eustacia raised her eyebrows.
“You have a hard time ahead, Mrs. Lansing. I’ll do what I can.”
Lansing insisted that his bed be made up on the first floor in the “conservatory” off the dining room. The word “pain” was never mentioned in the house; there was much talk about whether he was comfortable or not. He subsisted on gruel and beef tea, though occasionally he bellowed for a steak. When he was uncomfortable he was given some drops of laudanum. For days at a time he appeared to recover. At the first sign of comfort he dressed and walked the length of the main street. John Ashley called every day and brought him a large sheaf of office bulletins to sign, thus enabling him to carry on admirably his duties at the mine.
The town followed Lansing’s illness with great interest. During the trial the conviction lay at the back of the judge’s and jurymen’s minds that Ashley and Eustacia Lansing had for months been trying to poison the murdered man.
Night after night, night after night, Eustacia sat near him or stretched herself out on a sofa. He insisted that the kerosene lamp with its wide soothing translucent green shade remain alight until sunrise. He gave up all desire to sleep
; he slept in the day. He wanted to talk. Silence oppressed him. There was always hope that in talk, talk, talk he could alter the past, conjure the future, and impose an estimable image of himself upon the present. At first there were some attempts at playing checkers or parchesi or at reading aloud from Ben-Hur, but the patient was too occupied with his thoughts to attend those interests. Outside the glass door opening on the lawn the owls hooted, harbingers of spring; on a still night they could hear the croaking of the young frogs in the pond. Under the green lampshade Eustacia sewed or, lying on the couch, stared at the ceiling. Often her fingers turned the beads under her long shawl.
Even a healthy man, awakened by accident at three in the morning becomes aware of his heart beating on toward its final exhaustion, of his lungs pulling his weight like a locomotive on a lonesome landscape resolutely carrying its load to the Pacific, to some ultimate discharging station. But Breckenridge Lansing, already frightened, must distract his mind in talk from those “pinchings and burnings.” Finally the sky lightened. There are few human ills for which the coming of day does not seem to bring an alleviation.
Night after night they talked. At times he tended toward the maudlin, but Eustacia would have nothing of it. She could handle his self-esteem roughly. She alternated severity and balm. There is a certain comfort in being reprimanded justly—but only at intervals and within limits. He seemed eager to confess to any shortcomings that were not essential.
Three in the morning (Easter, March 30, 1902):
“Stacey!”
“What, dear?”
“Do you have to do that damned sewing all the time?”
“Oh, you know us women. Sewing doesn’t take up our whole attention. We can hear and see everything that’s going on around us. What did you want to say?”
Silence.
“Stacey, sometimes I’ve said things to you I didn’t mean. I didn’t mean them, really.”
Silence.
“Well, say something. Don’t just sit there like a dummy.”
The Eighth Day Page 36
