The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At least, not enlisted soldiers. Perhaps there were officers in these families, of high rank. But even these, Helene had never heard of. It was common in these circles to talk of the war—the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan—but only as politics: not as actions involving individuals like Nicolas Zelinski.

  No one knew a veteran! Still less, a disabled veteran.

  Helene felt a flush of shame, indignation. Badly she wanted to make up this injustice to this stoic man.

  “Yes. You could say so.” Nicolas spoke slowly, in a voice of careful neutrality. “I have ‘had that experience.’”

  Behind the counter, the phone began to ring. Slowly Nicolas moved to answer it, just perceptibly dragging his left leg.

  Of course he is wounded. He is too proud to speak of it.

  He doesn’t want pity any more than I do.

  Helene saw, behind the counter, on a shelf crowded with books of which most were ragged paperbacks, the old stained leather-bound Euripides: Plays.

  The titles of the other books, which Nicolas seemed to have been reading, or had purloined from a bin of donated books with the intention of reading, were not visible to Helene.

  The telephone call was perfunctory, not personal. Helene tried not to overhear.

  A caller requesting a pickup. Giving directions, which Nicolas took down.

  Helene had turned off her cell phone, leaving Quaker Heights for Trenton. Or was it that Helene’s cell phone didn’t seem to work in Trenton. There were friends in Quaker Heights and relatives scattered in the Midwest who called her frequently since her husband’s death, concerned for her; worried that she was no longer answering their calls, as she once had; but Helene had no wish to speak to these people. All they could tell her was that they too missed her husband, and grieved for him, and felt so very sorry—so very sorry—for her; beyond this, they had nothing to tell her of value to her, for her survival. With a defiant sort of gaiety she thought No more! I am not to be pitied any longer.

  “Do many people come into the shop, on an average day?”

  Nicolas laughed. “Many? No. But those who do are very —special.”

  “Are we!”

  “Some of the donations that come into the shop, like those you brought yesterday, that are classified as ‘necessities,’ aren’t usually sold here but distributed to veterans and their families in the area. We work with Mercer County services—‘welfare.’ ”

  “And is that—do you feel that that is—fulfilling? Rewarding?”

  Nicolas looked at Helene as if she’d said something witty. But Nicolas did not laugh.

  Fulfilling, rewarding—these were not the right words. Helene was in a panic not knowing the right words.

  “How—how long have you been here?”

  “Too God-damned long. It’s—like—a tear in my actual life—the life I was supposed to live—some kind of ‘black hole’ that sucked me in—now I can’t climb out.”

  Helene wanted to ask And what is your actual life?

  Badly Helene wanted to ask Would you accept help, to reenter your actual life?

  He’d been given a job at Helping Hands after he’d been discharged from rehab, he said. This was at the VA hospital in New Brunswick—the rehab clinic. A year, eighteen months . . .

  Helene thought of her husband who’d died shortly before his fifty-second birthday. He had been a kindly, courteous, thoughtful man—a reticent man, highly intelligent and brilliant in his field of highly specialized estate law—yet in essential ways he’d been an immature man; for they’d never had children, to force maturity upon them. Nor had Helene’s husband experienced much risk, physical hardship or danger—the adventures of his life, mountain hiking, sailing, backpacking in eastern Europe as a college student, had all been elective, volitional. And here was Nicolas Zelinski—his young life torn from him.

  Helene wanted to ask Nicolas if he’d been married, or was married now. If he’d had children.

  Badly she wanted to ask! But she dared not.

  Instead she asked, as if it were a casual question: “Where will you go, Nicolas, when the shop closes?”

  “You mean—goes out of business?”

  The sardonic quick-fl ash of a smile, that seemed to be teasing her.

  “No—when you lock up, tonight.”

  “When I ‘lock up’—tonight—I will go—where d’you think I will go?”

  Helene smiled, uncertainly. Was the man being sarcastic, or was this a playful sort of banter? An affectionate sort of banter?

  “Well—I don’t know: home?”

  Home was not an easy word to utter. With a cruel sort of childlike naïveté Helene hoped that Nicolas had not a home.

  “Half-right, ma’am.”

  Half-right? Helene didn’t understand.

  Some sort of half-home?

  “And—where is this?”

  “East Trenton.”

  “Do you—drive?”

  “I take a bus.”

  “A bus! I see.”

  “I walk over to Broad Street and get the bus there, out to Liberty. I live just off Liberty.”

  Nicolas was speaking more congenially now. As if the circumstances of his life were absurd, comical—or not his own, exactly.

  “And do you have a—family?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Helene wanted to lay her hand on Nicolas’s wrist, in commiseration. But maybe the man didn’t want commiseration from a stranger? Maybe having no family was his choice?

  “If you—you’d like—a ride home—I’ll be driving in that direction, I think.”

  Her heart beat rapidly. It was as if—she’d run up a flight of stairs!

  In fact Helene had no idea in what direction she would be driving, to return to route 1. She knew only that Broad Street was a major thoroughfare in Trenton and that very likely Broad intersected with route 1.

  Helene believed that Nicolas would tell her—stiffly—that the shop wouldn’t be closing for a while, or that he didn’t need a ride anywhere. Instead he said, “OK.”

  Outside, it had grown dark. Helene peered at her watch seeing with surprise that the time was late—nearly 6 P.M.

  Nicolas told her he had only a few things to do before he locked up for the night.

  “Don’t hurry!” Helene said. “I can wait.”

  Why here, this place. This terrible place.

  But where, otherwise? For all places are equidistant from home now.

  In Helene’s car as she drove toward the center city Nicolas said, “Just take me to the bus stop, that’s far enough, thanks”—but Helene insisted upon driving him home. Following his directions along Broad Street in early-evening traffic for a mile or two—surprising to Helene, so many people in Trenton seemed to be taking buses; there were so many buses!—and how rare it was to see a bus in Quaker Heights where everyone, even teenaged children, owned their own vehicles. Nicolas said, shifting his long legs uncomfortably, “I have a car, actually. I don’t drive it much, it needs work.” You could see that Nicolas admired Helene’s car which had been her husband’s car, a new-model silvery Acura sedan, but—out of masculine pride?—he said nothing.

  Helene’s thoughts raced. So much to ask this man! . . . so much to tell him. She could ask him about the veterans’ charity, and how she might become more personally involved; she could ask him about college, why he’d dropped out; and about his wartime experience, in the Middle East. . . . So badly she wanted to tell him I am so very lonely. I think that I will die, I am so very lonely.

  Already they were at Liberty Street, intersecting with Broad. So quickly!

  Helene had an impression of a street of row houses. Like South Falls the street was lined with parked vehicles—some of them abandoned and denuded, flattened tires on metal wheel rims.

  “Guess you won’t mind, ma’am, if I don’t invite you inside.”

  Before Helene could reply, Nicolas snatched her hand and pressed his mouth—hungry, wet—against her startled skin. And in the
next instant he’d slammed out of the car, and was limping away without a backward glance.

  Came into her life when it seemed her life was finished.

  3.

  “Jesus! Ridiculous.”

  Waking in the morning with a jolt—that terrible sinking sensation when the brain, stunned by sedation, clicks on—and will not click off for many hours—she understood with devastating clarity that she must never, she must never never return to Trenton again, to the veterans’ thrift shop on South Falls Street.

  “Not ever.”

  That graveyard of cast-off things, soiled and battered furniture and ugly machine-made rugs, not one of which Helene would have placed even at the rear entrance of her house, that led into the garage; not one of which Helene would have placed in the garage. Her nostrils contracted with the recalled odors of Helping Hands, and the contaminated air of Trenton; she gave a shudder recalling his smell—the intimate smell of the ravaged man’s body, his clothes and his hair.

  The sensation of his mouth against the back of her hand: not a kiss, you would not call it a kiss, just the abrupt press of his lips, teeth, tongue onto her skin, that felt afterward as if it had been burnt.

  “Ridiculous! No more.”

  The Savile Row suit, the handsome black wool overcoat, many pairs of shoes—“dress” shoes—these, the widow had kept back. The widow had not yet “donated.”

  Reasoning Too much, too soon is not a good idea.

  In the days following, her life resumed.

  This was the widow’s truncated life: the remnants of the life she’d lived with her husband, now deceased. For a widow remains the wife of the deceased. So many death-duties were required, and all involving the death certificate which is the document a widow comes to fear most.

  For the death certificate is an absolute and inviolable fact.

  And the death certificate is a starkly impersonal document suggesting how impersonal, how ordinary, how unimaginative, how banal the terrible death is, that the bereaved mourns with such emotion.

  Helene was thinking of him—the man with the stubbled jaws, whom she’d first seen oblivious of her, essentially indifferent to her: uncaring whether she lived, died or had ever existed. But then she was thinking of Nicolas Zelinski who’d smiled at her with genuine emotion; she was sure, it had been genuine emotion. Embarrassed when she’d held the Icelandic sweater up against him, in an intimate and even wifely gesture but yes, he’d been moved as well.

  He’d looked at her with desire, of a kind: she was sure.

  The pale eyes fixed upon her, the rich man’s widow, a woman past the first bloom of her beauty and yet not much older than he, now rather gaunt-faced, stark-eyed, with a nervous bright hopeful smile that transformed her face so that you could see—you could almost see—the vibrant young woman she’d been, once; and in her innermost heart, she remained.

  We had not met at the right time. But now—it can be the right time.

  •••

  Where in her previous life Helene had had little concern for money, now in the afterlife of the widow she became sick with anxiety. Waking in the night panicked that she’d forgotten to pay bills—that she knew which bills were to be paid, and when—(the Quaker Heights property tax bill, for instance, which was near nine thousand dollars quarterly); panicked that services might be shut off without warning—gas, heat, water, electricity. Her husband’s computer was a blank, black screen, she could not access his e-mail accounts. She’d heard of women so paralyzed with depression they neglected to open mail, failed to pay mortgages, taxes, and lost their houses. She discovered that she wasn’t any longer opening letters but letting them accumulate on a kitchen counter. Her stomach cramped as if it were being devoured from within by a rapacious parasite. She wept easily, she had little control of her emotions that fluttered and whipped like small flags in the wind. Frantically she searched for her husband’s financial records, at the insistence of their accountant. For income taxes had to be paid, both federal and New Jersey. She could make little sense of what she discovered—investment reports, printouts from Merrill Lynch, thick brochures of hundreds of pages. It was a nightmare from which there could be no waking except the most stuporous sleep. The accountant came to the house, met with Helene in her husband’s study, a middle-aged man of no singular distinction at whom Helene had never really looked before: seeing now in his close-set eyes a look of sinister intent, though addressing Helene he seemed innocent, concerned for her—“professional.”

  Checks made out to the U.S. Treasury and the New Jersey Department of Taxation—checks for large sums of money—the widow numbly signed at his bequest.

  I must have someone I can trust.

  Only in love is there trust—even the possibility of trust.

  The accountant did not love her—how then could she trust him?

  She thought Someone who would love me.

  Who?

  In her handbag she discovered a little card—NEW JERSEY DISABLED VETERANS HELPING HANDS TRENTON. She must have picked it up at the thrift shop, but could not remember.

  She called the number. She asked for “Nicolas.”

  A heavily accented voice informed her: “Not in today.”

  She felt a pang of disappointment. Her hand shook, gripping the receiver. Yet wryly she thought, It’s a good thing. No more.

  Later, looking for the little card, she couldn’t find it. Even in the recycled-paper container, she could not find it. And so, she looked up Helping Hands in the yellow pages another time.

  Seeing that she’d circled the quarter-page advertisement in red, like an exclamation. The line drawing of a pair of clasped hands had snatched at her eye, irresistibly.

  Listed in the yellow pages were numerous “charitable organizations.” She might have chosen Rescue Ministry of Trenton, Children’s Home Society of New Jersey, Goodwill Industries, Big Brothers & Big Sisters of Mercer Co., Gateway Foundation, Salvation Army, Military Order of the Purple Heart which resembled Helping Hands but lacked the magical clasped-hands that so stirred the heart.

  He had seized her hand, unexpectedly. Her right hand, gripping the steering wheel of her car.

  As he’d prepared to climb out of the car, at the intersection of Broad and Liberty streets, he had seized her hand and kissed it, suddenly. Almost faint, she recalled the brush of his lips against her skin, and not the hungry wet pressure like an animal’s mouth; she remembered her astonishment, and afterward the sensation of warmth that suffused her heart.

  And all the way back home to Quaker Heights, to the five-bedroom wood, fieldstone and stucco Colonial on three acres shaded with oak trees, white pines and red maples, the kiss had burned in her heart.

  4.

  In a lowered voice he spoke.

  In a lowered voice confiding in her.

  In the candlelit dining room of the old inn on the Delaware River. In a corner table, near a fireplace in which romantic flames—gas-jet, simulated—rippled sinuously without heat.

  “. . . died when I was at Rutgers . . . my first year . . . I had a scholarship . . . wanted to study history, and law . . . maybe classics . . . I liked to write poetry . . . what I called ‘poetry’ . . . died of a ‘fast-acting pancreatic’ cancer . . . I had to drop out of school . . . my head was messed up . . . had to work . . . got into some trouble with drugs . . . more messed up . . . the world rushes past you if you drop out . . . if you are ‘wounded’ . . . ‘disabled’ . . . can’t get back to the life that was meant for you . . . rushes past and never returns.”

  He was speaking quietly. He was not speaking bitterly. As he spoke his pale eyes drifted over her, Helene’s hands, Helene’s beautiful hands, clasped together on the tabletop, on the white linen cloth, in candlelight. Is this a dream? I am so happy, I am frightened.

  That this man would confide in her, so intimately. What a triumph it was for the widow, in her aloneness!

  He’d been speaking of his mother. The loss of his mother. It was clear—(Helene thought
it was clear)—that Nicolas had loved his mother very much but also blamed her for dying and leaving him.

  There was great sorrow in the man, and also great anger. Heat wafted from his body as he spoke to Helene in a halting yet forward-plunging voice like one unaccustomed to speech.

  The physical presence, physical closeness of the man. Helene was transfixed as if she had not ever—not ever, yet in her life—experienced such closeness, that threatened to overwhelm her.

  Please let me take you to dinner she’d said. It’s the least I can do for you she’d said.

  It was an impersonal gesture of gratitude. She hoped he would understand that. You who have served your country. You who have been “disabled” in the line of duty.

  On this evening in late November in the dining room of the historic old General Washington Inn, just across the Delaware River from Trenton, in Pennsylvania. On the walls were myriad reproductions of the Battle of Trenton of December 1776: Revolutionaries firing upon Hessian soldiers in their red British uniforms. And above the fireplace a reproduction of the iconic General George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Helene had wanted to take her newfound friend to a special place, not an ordinary Trenton restaurant, and so she’d brought him to this locally celebrated inn where other diners observed them with a flattering sort of covert interest.

  Their waiter, too. Courteously attentive while at the same time frankly staring.

  For they were a mysterious couple, Nicolas Zelinski and Helene. It wasn’t likely that they were married: not only were their ages not quite right but the man with the scarred face was speaking much too intensely to the woman, leaning close to her and scarcely ever looking away from her; as the woman, listening intently, scarcely ever looked away from him.

  Nor was it likely that they were related: for they were so clearly from very different backgrounds and social classes.

  Though Nicolas was wearing, just slightly uncomfortably, the beige cashmere blazer, a long-sleeved white shirt and an Italian silk necktie that Helene had given him.