"ALLEGED to have mugged," the old lady muttered and she shivered although the room was warm, too warm, hot and dry, withering still more her old skin, an unnecessary astringent that made her scratch. She folded the paper with trembling fingers and attempted to swat an agile fly.
"I wonder what that means now," she said, "'alleged to have mugged'?" The inference was naughty, the language of The New York Times, secret. She hid the paper between the cushion and the chair and let her eldest daughter, the old maid for whom she had no respect, kiss her lightly flushed and crepelike cheek,
"Hi, Granny, are you O.K.?"
The old lady sniffed and moved irritably in her chair, keeping to herself with some effort her disgust for Lamby's youthful lingo, her silly nostalgia, her vulgar grip on her lost youth, her fretful "girlish" look.
"O.K.," she mumbled. "Humph."
"What, Granny."
But the old lady's eyes were good enough to see that Lamby was looking at herself in the mirror over the mantel and didn't expect an answer. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep but her lavender eyelids quivered and her mouth twitched. "Humph!" she said again. She was in a bad mood.
"Darn fly!" she said; the persistent creepy thing alone in the big room was attracted to the old lady's black silk dress and the cold cream, maybe, near her hairline, a spot on her bosom from lunch. "Filthy house, bad housekeepers, dirty dishes!" she said to herself, and out loud, "I want my tea."
"You've had it," said Lamby, not turning around but watching her mother's reflection in the mirror. "You've had your tea, Granny, Daisy brought it to you, you said it was good, remember?"
"Do shut up!"
"Granny!"
"I'm not your granny, Lamby, call me Ma-Ma, you're not a child."
Lamby's Hp trembled.
"Ma-Ma," she said.
"Don't be a fool," the old lady said.
"Stinker!" the aging daughter said to herself, "Old bitch!" but she was frightened at the vernacular of her nieces and turned to her mother and said meekly, "May I get you anything?"
"Get out!" said the old lady using up the rest of her anger. "Git!" she said softly.
Lamby figuratively added the insult to a long list of similar ones that she kept in a Little box in her mind. She meant to get even. She was collecting evidence.
The old lady was not sleepy; she had long since passed the age of curative slumber at any hour of the day, the retreat into darkness, the idiocy of unconsciousness, the petit mal of cat naps. Four hours a night was her limit and in her head she carried on a number of continued stories and curious anecdotes and addenda, prefixes and appendix; exordium and lullaby. It is true, her mind, built like a weird indented and curled-up ropy sponge like anyone else's, not Mongolian, wandered, and proper names eluded her; cities didn't count and the dates of important events, with the exception of the Battle of Hastings, had been erased and forgotten; she could not name the Presidents of the United States and even the ones she had known personally might have been Eddie. Lamby irritated her and interrupted her self-entertainment and her everlasting curiosity, too, that kept her alive. "Alleged to have mugged?" She took out the paper again and another minor headline caught her eye. "'Subway bumper apprehended.'"
"How's that?"
It was Sissy, the one with all of Lamby's nieces to her credit, which in some departments was in the red. The minute the old lady raised her eyelids that she had lowered again as protection against another interruption, she remembered Sissy's adultery that had not bothered her much. Sissy, to the old lady, wore Hawthorne's letter A embroidered on her chest and that's about all. She liked Sissy, considered her the most worth while of her living children. She reminded her a little, but not much, of herself. Sissy's experiences were strictly one-dimensional, you might say, about six feet two; she was no dreamer, no scholar, she couldn't even cook, but she had no silly affectations and didn't irritate her mother as Lamby did, and she was pretty. The old lady mentally disinherited any members of the family that were plain, they were as good as illegitimate to her. She had a pride of good looks. "We are a good-looking lot," she used to say, and she herself had been a "real beauty." She saw herself as such step into the yellow phaeton in her blue silk, twirling her tiny, lacy, hinged parasol; and she did not miss the groom's hot look at her as he stood at the sleek mare's head waiting for the young mistress to take the reins when she felt like it.
"Well, Ferris, have you a tummyache?"
The groom turned slowly crimson and bit at his lip.
"No, miss."
"No, Miss Maisie," she corrected him. "No, Miss Maisie."
"No, Maisie," she said, almost tenderly; her heart was beating fast with the fun of it and her tight corset pushed up her full breast and tightened itself, if possible, around her little waist that the groom could have easily encircled with one big rough hand. He lowered his flaming eyes and said nothing. The mare fidgeted. "Whoa, girl," he murmured caressingly.
"Ferris!"
"Yes, miss."
"Yes, Miss Maisie." (What sport!)
"Yes, Miss Maisie."
"Yes, Maisie!"
Silence.
The mare gently raised up ever so little on her hind legs, a matter of inches, and tossed her head.
"Take the reins, miss, Holly wants to go; whoa, girl, there now!"
"Presently," said Maisie.
"Whoa now! Easy!"
"Get up behind me," said Maisie, "quick! I've got her; we're off!"
With no choice of his own Ferris was up behind her and sat down hard as Maisie gave the mare her head and for a second let the end of the curling whip be seen by the agitated and flighty animal.
"Ma-Ma," said Sissy a second time.
"Fiddlesticks!"
Sissy laughed. "Daydreaming again, sweetie?"
The old lady responded to Sissy's affectionate tone and opened her eyes, giving her an engaging (still!) smile, pointing up the corners of her mouth and showing the indented ridges of small even teeth that had once been a milky transparent blue and had transfixed with admiration a number of beaux. The lips that had been full and palpitating were thin, dehydrated, and of a purplish tinge, not unattractive, but startling and unexplained next the ivory-colored skin, Dantesque, like a mask for a weird occasion. She had a sharp almost cruel glance that kept the respect and held the attention, too, of the observer; even the absent-minded old collie in the house, deaf and cataracted in both eyes, as well as generations of plump inconsiderate puppies of different makes and nationalities, belonging to the grandchildren, "lay down" for Ma-Mo, and the yellow and black cats tiptoed along the mantel or sat in corners and stared unblinking at something they felt was superior and meant it.
"I'll be in this evening, Ma-Ma, if I can get the car away from the girls," said Sissy. "Go back to your dreams, Ma-Ma."
The old lady had already closed her eyes; the collie came and lay at her feet, his nose across her pointed slipper, and the room was dim. That fool Daisy will be in to light the lights....
"Who was it... Ferris?" she asked herself. "Yes, it was Ferris." She quickly reviewed the pretty scene and stepped again into the phaeton, so light, and yet it gave to a still lighter weight, her own. This time she had left the hinged parasol at home on the bed and wore rose-colored gloves, short and smart, with one button, so tight that the little oval of flesh leapt out half an inch high at the palms, pink, inviting kisses; "No, that was one of the others," murmured the old lady shaking her head. The collie looked up. "Down, sir!"
"That was... that was..." and she tried to place him, superimposed as he was for the moment on the less gallant but more exciting figure of Ferris, the groom, who did not kiss ladies' hands, no matter how plump and soft but instead he... "Philip," she said out loud. "Later..."
"Take it easy, miss!" Ferris had almost begged as Holly at a fast trot trundled the light carriage over the narrow straightaway and Maisie clucked with her tongue to make her go faster, but held the reins taut not to let her break her trot. That would be vulgar.
"Ahhh!"
The old lady proudly recalled her horsemanship, her elegant little "figger" in blue silk, her fearlessness; she sighed for her desirability, the spell she had cast. The vivid girl faced the curving roads now, ducking at intervals an overhanging branch, Ferris behind her, and they went into the woods that for thousands of acres surrounded the big clearing where her father's house had been built. The road grew soft and red, loamy, and Maisie let Holly walk, but the mare's pointed ears twitched with excitement and apprehension. She lifted her feet high and set them down daintily; her sides were covered with sweat. "Oh well, what happened next..."
The old lady was incapable now of blushing for the girl who blushed that night in her maiden's bed for the bold little slut she had been in the afternoon in her father's woods with her handsome groom. But the pleasure of his wild embraces when he finally succumbed to her blandishments and teasing, his seeking hands, his hot mouth and flaming eyes, his dense brown locks that smelled of the stables, and hard thighs, the little Maisie could not censor but only wanted again and lay awake living it over until the swallows in the ivy announced it was daylight', and her newly aroused passion, unused to the energy it took, the calories it burned, sent her into a deep short nap.
Daisy interrupted their dual "sleep," it seemed, just as each Maisie was recalling the pretty girl's impudence even under the hard kisses; as she caught her breath and, still hot from his passionate caresses, how she said, "Now will you call me Maisie!" And he had uttered, spat out, a name; a good name for what Maisie was doing, doing to him against his will; his pleasure had left him quickly, and the ugly word shot up into the air in the silence of her father's woods like a flare announcing their whereabouts, sobering them both but not for long. The thrill of the nasty cognomen sang in the girl's ear and fluttered there like a moth. She liked it. But it can't be written because the young girl and the old lady censored it in the polite company, themselves included, that they later grew up amongst. The groom Ferris was a privileged minority in the sum of Maisie's more sophisticated and decadent flirtations.
The old lady stirred uneasily, not wanting to let the scene go out of her mind; she hung onto the detail of the mare's nervous insight into the struggle between the sexes, how she danced and side-stepped and shied at white paper all the way home and whinnied and coughed. "Whoa, girl! Easy! Easy, sweetheart!" The tenderness in the groom's voice all for a horse.... (But didn't her silky sides still hurt from the stallion's beating hooves there. She had given him a blow herself with her flighty heels, under his chin, when she scampered off; she had heard his yellow teeth rattle. Then she had nibbled the sweet grass in the corner of the field and seen him roll and plunge and groan and snort and with tremendous effort get himself upright again; he had stretched out his neck and called to her, but she paid him no heed. Beast!)
Old Maisie hunted for the lost name she had been called only once, but it eluded her; she saw the orange and black cat with the white paws weaving in and out along the mantel between the red Bohemian glass and pale green Venetian decanters.
"Scat!"
The cat came down firmly and evenly on all four paws and went out slow, gracefully, her tail high, cross. "Mum?" said Daisy.
"Fool," muttered the old lady. "Eat you out of house and home."
The girl tiptoed awkwardly around the room turning on the lamps, rearranging a magazine, picking a thread off the carpet.
"Leave things alone, not kitty-cornered; put that magazine back the way it was!"
"Yes, mum."
"Daisy!"
"Mum?"
"Have you got a beau?"
"Oh mum." The girl turned a vivid red.
"Is he good-looking?"
"That he is, mum."
"Thick black hair? Long legs? Eh?"
"Oh mum," said the girl, losing some of her fear of the old lady who never said a decent word to her, "as long as, as long as... aye they're long, mum," she finished lamely, her eyes shining.
"Get along, now," said the old lady impatiently but not unkindly, "mind your manners and pick up your feet."
"Oh yes, mum, that I will." She was heard singing in the kitchen a wild Irish tune. "The old lady isn't so bad," she said that night to the gardener's son. "She's an old bitch," he said cheerfully.
"Straight out of the bog," the old lady said, "and impudent." She shoved her foot forward and dislodged the dog. The collie rose and looked her in the eye.
"I beg your pardon, Bunce," the old lady said, and the dog lay down again at her feet, watching her with his strange, glassy, cataracted eyes. Did he see her at all? What did he remember? Philip? Bessie? Dodge? Dougherty? The time...? "Daisy!"
"Mum?"
"Quit that racket."
"I didn't mean to, mum."
"Ninny."
The old lady rose painfully and, followed by the aged collie, went into what had been the old man's "den." She often confused it with what had been her father's "study"; the difference, one supposes, one of those tinier differentiations between the times, or possibly, the North and the South. The old Maisie had inherited the room, in any event, at Sissy's wise, at least kindly, suggestion; it would be Ma-Ma's playroom, a place she could go away to and close the door, a ground-floor attic, eliminating certain physical effort, not mentioned, a safe place, not mentioned, where she was within calling distance and no need to pull the ladder up after her, be too warm in the summer or too cold in winter. At some expense, but warranted, they all felt, a modern lavatory had been added, gleaming and cosy, for Ma-Ma's convenience, her powder room. Then, too, with the old lady out of the way but within calling distance, it was as if they had sent her to camp, a respite for themselves, too; and the living room with its chaises and later, love seats, a place for Paula's and Maggie's boy friends to loll and smoke and tease and make love ("Neck," said Lamby. "Phaugh!" said the old lady. "Smooch," giggled Janey, the littlest monster of them all. "I saw you! Smoochy-woochy-couchy-luchy!"), where formerly Sissy's affairs had reached, each one, its climax, except for that adultery that she had left home for. Her men had been, like Ma-Ma's, beaux and admirers but in every other way, with the exception of a difference in fashion and smart colloquialisms, the same old thing. Evolution didn't show, nothing sloughed off from lack of use, inherited characteristics were inherited, acquired characteristics were fun.
Old Maisie took The New York Times out of a deep pocket in her skirts and put it away temporarily. "To mug," she thought and glanced at the big Webster's dictionary open to a display of heraldry because it was pretty that way, but "Later," she said, as she had a little while ago dismissed Philip, "there is plenty of time," and she looked forward to a growing list of subject matters to be gone over in her active mind; it was the only future she could count on, her past. "Some rainy day when the light is bad." She still had that Colette novel to finish that was in another deep pocket; someone as usual had interrupted, "Do you want anything, Granny?"
"Peace, peace and quiet," the old lady had answered. "Pack of ninnies."
Maisie's reminiscences were, one suspects, one-dimensional, factual snapshots by the million, some bright and clear, some faded, spotted, parts missing, curling at the corners, that slid across her forehead almost faster than she could catalogue them. Maisie's heart, or the seat of her emotions, did not count so much any more as did an avid, almost historical sense, a sort of "Dear Diary, this is Tuesday, I wore my new pinafore to church and spit at my nurse." Manners and customs of the North American upper classes; a kaleidoscope of past events; the composition dictated by an astonishing memory for detail, and censored only in some instances by the times she had lived in, the persons of her parents, or possibly a nurse, a tutor, a prenatal abhorrence, for the judge, her father, had hushed, turning pale, her silly rhyming, the sing-song prattle of very little folk who skip in time to some savage rhythm, the words that tumble out of their soft lips sometimes charged with meaning, excavated from somewhere, a Tutankhamen's tomb of significalia, shocking the listener who has forgotten the patois and grown up. ("Oh, look at the hunter, the hunter, the hunter, oh, there goes the --, the --, the --."
"Go to your room, Maisie! And stay there!") Fifteen years later she heard the lost word and recognized it and did not blame the old judge a bit for turning pale at an expression she thought she had invented. She learned its meaning from the strangled tones of the handsome groom accompanied by a demonstration she need not ask the meaning of. She still cannot recall the bitter insulting name ("What was it now!") the same groom in his passion called her. She will overhear it before the year is out. But as we have said, the old lady's feelings, as such, were no longer aroused very much either by her own memories or by the daily goings-on in the present. Irritability and a kind of impotent anger at interruption, and disorder, and plainness, and stupidity, remained: a mild, really, cerebral reaction to everyday stimuli; her aged body continued to function just enough to keep her alive and clean; her nerves, closer and closer to the skin, it seemed, tingled and jumped with annoyance, but, well, sex, with its powerful drive, no longer lay waiting at the bottom of everything, in a bureau drawer, in a sickle moon, on a man's lips, in a wallpaper design; it did not. He curled up in the flaming sunset or unfold itself in the cumulus on a summer day. It had but now it didn't. Curiosity, yes, she couldn't let go of wanting to know, but the connotation was innocent because she was sexless, neither male nor female. Maisie's recollections are without shame for the same reason. Pride remains, however, indented in the protoplasm. Neither does she judge or censor herself any longer but she does, on the whole, admire herself as she used to be: she had been spirited and saucy and so pretty! Her responses, then, are minor ones, attenuated, the rest had been abstracted, she was no longer the seventy per cent water, as it were, which is sex, and that throws its weight around, as it were again. Her displacement was slight, as the little scales in the modern cabinet d'aisances recorded. She weighed scarcely more than her corset and accessories, but her fingernails still had to be clipped, her skimpy hair grew an inch a year, as both would, we are told by pathologists, and will, for a certain time after she and we are interred, a stubborn proof of our desire for longevity.
Not much of her childhood, unless it was statically and suddenly brought back to her as in the above, the rhymes with meaning beyond her years, skipped or sulked in her grey matter any longer, as it had when she was middle-aged and normally psychosomatic, hypersensitive and plumper, with headaches; and fearful. Her prodigious memory, now, circled the years mostly of her majority, and a comparative anatomy between, following her beaux and her exploits, her progeny, the dead ones and the live ones; and the dead ones were the more amusing companions. Definitely!
The old lady stood for a moment in front of Bessie's portrait. Bessie, the only one who could have really matched her. The little monkey! Sissy, It was true, got herself with child every year and committed adultery, too; Sissy at forty-five was still producing... or wasn't she? Maisie tried to remember. The past came tumbling so easy into her mind but this morning? Yesterday? When was Sissy's last lying-in? She had to figure it out: Janey was the youngest, Janey was ten-well, it was close.... Sissy at forty-five was still producing as regularly as a cat and as easily. Her waistline rose and fell once a year as if she were merely breathing deeply and holding it; the only difference in her regularly appearing breed and Maisie's-that they were every last one of them alive, blooming and sensuous and healthy, with colored cheeks like garden roses while Ma-Ma's, as numerous, were most of them dead (Lamby might as well be! Old maid!), their bodies, in memoriam, confined in oval or square frames according to their sex which, one supposes, was otherwise dust and ashes; their cheeks highly varnished and their likeness candid and cold, any sensuousness in the drapery and mufti alone. They had "shuffled off this mortal coil" from meningitis and measles and, accident prone, had fallen into wells, the older ones bowled over by runaway thoroughbreds; childbed fever had taken a couple and heart "disease"... typhoid fever, two more; without much fuss, no last words, they left their uneasy but philosophical parents-well-resigned, and ready to try again. Planned parenthood had not been dreamed up, and biblically enough, one of the admonitions most lived up to was "Thou shalt cleave to one another." One imagines the seed was mostly sown at home, which was proper, and the harvest reaped quite soon by God Himself. Maisie saw the five children punctured with quantities of penicillin and wondered if they were worth it; it was expensive.
The portrait of Bessie was rather good, nameless and forgotten the artist, that household nomadic, ambidextrous bum almost, who used, from house to house, to paint, as if they were barns or cribs, the young and old landed gentry, for their descendants to wonder at; sooner or later to be restored as Bessie had been and the others whom Maisie kept on the walls of her hideaway as cross reference to her wandering anecdote. Bessie, portrayed at, let's say, the age of twelve, had still beneath the yellowing varnish a mischievous, sprightly look, like, as her mother had called her, a monkey. And her features, too, overworked by a too painstaking artisan, were a little drawn and elderly like a monkey's. A fine gold chain excellently photographic brought out the swelling of her throat, Rossetti-like, and a small gold cross, gift of her communion, lay just above where her Little breasts must surely have been, concealed as they were by white paint which had been the modest guimpe, the uniform of the preadolescent. The artist had laid the paint on so flat that the neck and face above it looked as if they were peeping over the garden wall. Bessie, affectionate, naughty, impudent and sensuous, at sixteen had soberly passed away of meningitis, unaided by science, which was sleeping, but tenderly administered to by an old doctor with a colorful variety of pills and an occasional mustard plaster. Her precocious soft body that had already burned under the caresses of her brothers and her cousins and had so tempted every male that visited the house, was taken away to the dusty cemetery on the hill dressed in a modest jumper, its sweetness lost, its virginity intact, its desires stifled under a handful of earth. But she lived on in Maisie's old head like a paper doll, beloved, her prize possession. Maisie had forgot her remorse, her wild self-condemnation upon returning from the ball, to find her eldest daughter quite dead, the shades drawn, the servants in tears, the old doctor's "It was for the best, ma'am, we did what we could, God rest her soul, amen; remember-ah- your precious burden, ma'am." Inside her as she leaned over Bessie and wept, she could feel the plaintive pawing of the almost bloodless boy who would be born dead. The handsome man she had married stood in the doorway. "Come, Maisie, come, my beloved, it is all over."
Old Maisie was spared these emotional details, drained as she was, almost bloodless, as if a gigantic leech had been the indicated medication for her. The only sediment left in her veins led her to study the intricate and gorgeous gilded frame attentively, that Daisy had neglected, that day, to dust.
"Careless, lazy, good-for-nothing!"
The massive, yet cleverly delicate, ornate gilded frame was busy with cherubs, dimpled, with tiny members like buttons; each little belly precisely indented in the exact center; some of the toes, no bigger than peas, rubbed completely off from Daisy's fool dusting.
"Bog-hopper!"
But Daisy tried hard and it was fortunate the old lady didn't, at least not now, recognize the painstaking mending. Daisy used to dream in Gaelic as she polished up the tiny private parts. "Little tantivy," she said caressingly. "Whoops!"
"I broke it off," the girl told the gardener's son that night in the kitchen; it lay between them like a gold nugget on the red-checked tablecloth as they drank their strong hot tea. "I'm going to glue it back on. If Gramma ketches me! Oh! Oh! Sure and it's a love of a little..." The gardener's son blushed. "Stow it," he said and turned his eyes away from the accidental circumcision, the gilded curtailment.
Hung on either side of the beauteous Bessie, separated by her on the wall as they had been truly by her tricks and love of seeing them quarrel over her in life, were Dodge and Dougherty, nine months apart, Maisie was sure. One had followed the other as if they were twins, "one in the morning and one in the afternoon," she murmured, and they had tumbled and played together like savage Little puppies, inseparable until Bessie's reign of terror. Both of them sat for their portraits in identical positions, each held his bowler, each wore his hair parted in the middle, slicked down to his ears, and each wore a short tight jacket, waistcoat and grey pants, a big sloppy cravat and choking collar. Each, with one leg lifted, might have been sitting on the old Yale fence where each had matriculated, each had succumbed; each had been sent home in a box, packages Maisie hadn't wanted to open. Their shiny faces reflected the Light; their serious expressions belied their shindigs, their inherited characteristics, their simmering blood, the horsewhipping they had endured because of Bessie's tattling, their explorations into forbidden places. What fun they had had, what Little rascals, lovable rogues! The old lady forgot, or did not count, the casualties along their short but headlong route, the fainting pregnant kitchen maid, the village girls, hussies all; the professor's wife at New Haven, the hullabaloo of the wronged, the indignant cook.
Maisie smiled; a faint grimace passed over her parched face as she peered closely at Dodge, the elder. A tiny facial differentiation kept him straight in her mind, "Yes, this one is Dody." Bessie had bit him hard and deep on the cheek, even in a temper she loved him, and he wore, ever after, for that short and passionate evenness, a synthetic dimple as ravishing as a girl's, at the corner of his mouth, even when he was sulky. And he was: sulky. If they had only known it, he was manic depressive, with powerful counterspells of euphoria and dejection. In his despondent moods he had a disgust of life, taedium vitae, mal du pays, that was positively poetic. His pouting Lips and downcast look, the depth of his melancholy, enchanted his sister Bessie, and she adored him in these interludes, petted and kissed him, picked up after him. It was a weapon but he never learned how it worked and could not make use of it; it came over him when he least expected it and he could not ape it or recall it at will. It was the real thing. "Bilious," they said and dosed him with sulphur and molasses, sickening him still more, dulling his spirit: "Leave me alone."
"What is the matter?"
"I don't know."
Just as suddenly as the blues had overcome him, a rise of spirits would take place, a levity that didn't make sense, a feverish frivolity and absurd sense of humor, an overemphasis that frightened the observer more than the gentler prostration of soul had distressed him. In between his exaggerated moods he was, it is true, an exceptionally intelligent lad, good-looking and lovable. Dougherty too, the younger, had his inhesions and unlikely aspirations, his inspired nonsense and willful periods. Neither ever seemed, however, to let the subject matter, as it were, depress or animate him. Whatever was the cause of high or low spirits, triumph or remorse, it came from within, from a secret source, and had nothing to do with the occasion. They helped themselves to pleasure and bore up as best they could under the loneliness that in turn possessed them, and "devil take the hindmost" it looked like, but wasn't. Without motive or plan they did not deserve the punishment that might have been theirs if they had lived to accept the sentence. They did not wait to reap the titillating harvest that they had sown or lie down in the cots they had soiled, but neither did they grow up to be corrupted in less headlong ways, sins, not so much of the flesh, to be counted against them, but of arrogance and pride and hypocrisy, sins of the spirit; elder statesmen with hair shirts and bullet-proof vests. They had been saved senility, too, and the obsequious hatred of their fellow men.
The two glassy portraits of the little neurotics held the attention of the old lady a long time and Bessie's, which hung between them, and who lay between them, too, in the cemetery on the hill. How close they had all been, the two boys and that Bessie! They mingled their dust and ashes now, inseparable; precious incest. The old lady shook her head from side to side although the curving tremulous smile at her memories persisted, as if painted on her old face. She had shaken her head like that threescore years ago when she had been troubled beyond her book learning at the esoteric games and secret signals of the little triumvirate, before they were separated to be educated... but even after that, hadn't they been closer than was... decent? Hadn't the boys, on vacation at home, renewed their acquaintance with Bessie, fought over her all too violently as they grew older and each, it appeared, wanted her to himself? Hadn't Bessie slapped, and spit at, the kitchen maid: "Leave Dody alone!"?
"Bessie, I shall have to ask you to behave yourself."
And what had the boys taught Bessie to do, that in their long absences she played by herself and didn't answer when she was spoken to? "Bessie!"
"Ma-Ma!"
"Ma-Ma! I'm back!"
The old lady gazed at Sissy without, for the moment, recognizing her; it was nature's way of sparing her the shock of a too quick return from the past; it would have stung her nerves to see Sissy, one of the live ones, in modern dress like that, come out of nowhere. "Bessie."
"No, Sissy, Ma-Ma, I'm sorry to be late, the girls..."
"On the contrary," said the old lady, "you are early," and she was, one supposes, in the timelessness of Maisie's preoccupation, paraphernalia of the past, early. She stared at Sissy.
"Child, you're getting plump again. How do you feel?"
"Oh, Mo-Ma, please!"
"Suit yourself."
"It's my foundation."
"It's your what?" The old lady visualized a pile of bricks, as plain as day.
"May I sit down, Ma-Ma, or..."
She contemplated, the old lady, a gay parade of perambulators; baptisms; a line of white girls going to communion and returning quite serious, their homecoming kisses bitter from the wine, Jesus' blood; rowdy as ever in the afternoon. Would it never end, the... the... What was it? Genesis?
CHAPTER TWO
MAISIE had never been analyzed, not actually paid for it, but time and patience and longevity accomplished the benign symptoms of the cure: complete selfishness and objectivity was Maisie, a diathesis, a quiddity was hers. She was Ego; her slight body was essential stuff. She was Me, now, not I, with its introspection, its sensibilities, as noted before, its headaches and chills, its pity and intrusion into other people's sorrows, its identity with misery, its introversion, its nymphomania, remorse, "Why did I do it?", its wherefores and inability to practice the antibiblkal "Don't cry over spilt milk,"
"What's done is done," the want to be forgiven, the neurosis of love. All gone! Without much time left to enjoy her isolation and her norm, her new freedom, she had her fling, nevertheless, and without actually incarcerating her they shut her up in her playroom which has been described. How did they know that she dreamed of a mechanism, a chemical, maybe, a sandwich, a robot, a rocket, that would accomplish her desire: inter the lot of them in an atomic upheaval that at the same time, in rotation-like, would bring back the dead ones, good as new, and Dougherty, voted most likely to succeed, would be president of the Union and Bessie write a column; the little girl who drowned in the well blossom and start menstruating, the premature boy expand his lungs and let out a big sob! What was left of her was a killer, but senility-plus and the good mental health, the normal outlook mentioned, kept her enchained, kept her from cutting off their heads and really mutilating Lamby; Daisy, out of the bog, could be suffocated in a pound or two of pastry flour, and Paula? A collision on the turnpike could be arranged (The New York Times). Shucks, why bother.
"Now that the ball is o-o-over," the old lady hummed.
And they, the live ones, without actually knowing it, longed, one supposes, for her demise, an even further withdrawal, geographic; wanted to place her in a closer still confinement and move her up on the hill, sweep out her room and burn her memoirs, disinfect her belongings; wouldn't they surely say at last, "It was for the best"? But only Lamby, the old maid, the dispossessed, encouraged the recurring daydream of herself sneaking into the old woman's room and choking her to death with her bare hands. Stinker! Old bitch!
Maisie's conversation, when she was a Little drunk from hot tea, feeling an occasional leftover euphoria, was not without interest and sometimes funny in its jumpy anachronisms, its overflowing anecdote and obsolete big names and amnesias. One listened sometimes for the end of a tale that would make headlines, often as it ended in forgetfulness or a change of pace and characters; a kind of Dadaism could shock or irritate the listener. Maisie's visions were as confusing as surrealism to them and they didn't have the key, either, that Maisie, if she had one, herself, secreted. She had lived, it was true, through a lot of things. Things and events, speculations, hurricanes and inventions. The march through Georgia was a polychrome as clear as the view through the living-room window. She remembered the Balloon Hoax, the blizzard of '88, the Boer war, the Boston Tea Party, so she said, Lincoln's assassination, the invention of the telephone, the grounding of electricity, the first Mixmaster, bloomers and bustles and high button shoes, outside plumbing, and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood.
"That was the night the President came to dinner... 'Mr. President,' I said..."
"Which president, Granny?"
"Eddie."
Janey, who hadn't quite learned to control herself, got red in the face. "Did you know George Washington too, Granny?"
"Go to your room this instant, Janey!" said Sissy.
"As a matter of fact I did," said the old lady. "I sat on his lap."
When Maisie, herself, sensed an error, perhaps in her timing, her doubt was expressed always by the addenda: I sat on his lap, feeling, one supposes, that it made up the difference; she had been, indeed, very young at the time, but Pa-Pa had brought him home for a julep.
"Yes, Ma-Ma."
The old lady closed her eyes and saw Jefferson Davis bending over her mother's hand. "You are to be congratulated, Charlie, on your wife's good table as well as on her beauty," he said. "I thank you, suh," the old judge had replied.
"It was Jeff Davis."
"Jeff Davis," she repeated, as if it had been denied, and she saw columns and oleanders, and three big wild turkeys sitting on the tree, their fiery plumage; and later the smell of them hanging heads down outside on a hook, stiff with rigor mortis and the chill of autumn, staring at her, upside down, with glazed round eyes. She had helped her mother make a... what was it? Hot toddy? No! A...
"I'll have my milk shake," she said, as the scene changed to a backdrop of Chinese lanterns and a smoky New England evening.
"Wait, Ma-Ma, and see Paula."
"Paula?"
"You said, you know, that she might wear your blue silk from Paris, Ma-Ma, to the party, the old-fashioned party for charity... you remember?"
"Certainly I remember... have Ferris harness the mare... I can't walk! Stuff and nonsense," she added, "old-fashioned indeed! It took long enough coming all the way from Paris, I want it taken care of, what's more."
"Paula promised to be ever so careful, she said she would never come home if the least thing happened to it."
"She spills... Paula is sloppy, Sissy, what do you intend to do about it, she's an untidy girl and will make a bad wife, no telling..."
Paula and Maggie, and Janey behind them, crashed into the room.
"They're too big," said the old lady, "much too big, all of them."
Daisy appeared at the pantry door, her round face pink from the heat of the kitchen and the dividend of kisses from Jimmy (the gardener's son), who stayed away, curious as he was to see the vision, he felt sure, of Miss Paula in the old lady's Paris gown.
"Oh, oh, I can't stand it," Paula giggled, "it's so tight!"
The others are convulsed with laughter at Paula's struggles.
"I can't... breathe!"
"Saints preserve us," said Daisy, her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Miss Paula, you're pretty as a pitcher."
"Pitcher is right," screamed Janey, "a handle is all she needs."
Maggie is terribly jealous but can't help laughing at Paula's attempts, her writhings, to get comfortable in the tiny-waisted blue silk.
"You're too fat for Granny's dress!"
"I'm... just... pleasingly plump," said Paula. "For Christ sake let me out of here!" Her pretty face is pink, there are tears in her eyes.
"Paula!"
"I'm sorry, Mummy, I'm sorry, but oh! oh! they'll be here, what will I do?"
"Let out all your breath. Get light," suggested Janey, punching Paula's soft belly.
"Oh, Janey, you little rat!" Paula lifted up her skirt and kicked her sister; her bare legs shone.
"Saints preserve us," giggled Daisy.
"Don't you think you should wear stockings?" said Sissy doubtfully.
"Why?" said Paula.
Paula's breasts are pushed up nearly to her chin and the yellowing lace scarcely covers her dime-sized violet nipples. In spite of her foolery she knows she is lovely and Maggie aches with the knowledge, too.
Maisie is smiling her pointed smile; she knows that lovely and desirable as her granddaughter looks, she can't hold a candle to herself as she had looked, and she wishes they would all go away. "Painted little hussy," she thinks. Paula's lipstick, generously laid on, is a fiery scarlet; she remembered her own natural coloring, how all she did was secretly bite her lips to make them redder and they used to swell a little, too... her mother had used fine white starch for her own cheeks and sifted it over her neck and bosom.
"Paula, I wish you would not use that awful pancake make-up," said Sissy. "You're prettier without it."
"She's got a dc-hickey," said Janey.
"Shut up!" laughed Paula.
"That stuff is down to her stomach!" Janey shrilled.
"Tummy," corrected Maisie, sotto voce.
"Cripes!" screamed Paula, "the time! Where is that idiot? Mummy, may Jimmy drive me to the club? Peter's always late, he's probably tight, too."
"Paula, I want you to be not later than one thirty."
"Oh, Mummy, it won't be over!"
"It will, the club dances are always over by one."
"Oh, Mummy."
Sissy looked as if she had never been out that late in her life. "One thirty," she said firmly. "O.K."
"May I kindly have my milk shake?" asked Maisie sarcastically, "if you've nothing else to do, the lot of you."
Lamby had avoided seeing Paula in the blue silk dress; she had to five over, it seemed, generation after generation of good looks and charm that she herself had been deprived of. She was fed up with old Maisie's tales of conquests and capitulations; Sissy's drove of beaux and big choice of husbands, her flirtations carried on long after her marriage, and, still, her middle-aged, but real glamour. Now it was Paula, and Maggie was pretty, too, if not as obviously so as Paula; soon it would be Janey who, if she had only known it, had been handled a little already by her cousins, and dreamed of going to bed with a soldier; and riding, too, a white stallion like Joan of Arc, in her trail a perfect horde of pretty young men, crying "Long live beautiful Janey." Lamby's only petting had come once in a while from leftover smitten young men who, feeling warm all over and generous after a long evening with Sissy, would catch up with her on the stairs or on the porch and hug her.
No satisfaction had ever come to Lamby, not even in her dreams. How she had longed to be a boy and rape her sisters, get even with their pretty faces, spoil them completely for the pain they unknowingly gave her! Lamby had loved, as an adolescent, to distraction almost, the family doctor until she had heard him say to her mother, "She needs a real good purge to clear up her skin," and her passionate love had turned to murderous hatred. He had been the one, already paunchy, who, with knees apart on a straight chair, had first drawn her attention to the male anatomy, had awakened a desultory sexual curiosity. Her libido had merely registered a mild disgust for his lumpy parts, but later, having forgotten the original distaste, she was attracted to him and, lonely, had built up a nympho-manic continuous dream of him that he shattered in the hall... "a purge," he had said. Nastiness! She had taken, in her sleep, to dreams of women, their white breasts and smooth legs, and once, if the clap of thunder had not awakened her, came near to felicity; her fright and near-felicity had mingled. But these soft dreams must have had a mechanism for complete censorship: Lamby took no interest in women, even disliked them, felt a revulsion for their nearness and their society kisses. In the back of her head there stood a man. She had not given up. The sentiment, the sulky something of passion, the maternal instinct toward the male, the boy in him, was gone; an aging but avid yearning remained. It might be pride. Who knows.
Lamby measured out the bourbon for Ma-Ma's nightly milk shake into the big toddy glass that had belonged to the old man and added the milk. On the top she shook some grated nutmeg. She heard Paula's laughter in the driveway as she drove away with Jimmy, the tinny shifting of gears, the rattle of the battered station wagon. She picked up the bottle of bourbon again and out of the neck of it took a good swig.
"Watch out for the toddy glass!" called the old lady, as she always did. "Don't be careless and don't spill, watch out now!"
"I am watching out," muttered Lamby impudently.
"What's that?"
"Yes, Ma-Ma."
"Impudent!"
The milk shake lulled the old lady into slumberland almost before she had time to plan tomorrow's reminiscences. "Bessie," she murmured, "he down there on the couch... I want... talk to me, Bessie..."
"Ferris," she said, upon awakening on the dot; it was one thirty; the old clock downstairs distinctly said, "Ping!" One thirty had been on her mind; someone had said, "Be home now at one thirty sharp."
Silence.
The old lady lay with wide-open eyes waiting for something. She was used, at her age, to long wakeful nights; she had had her four hours and did not fret. She felt no fear in the thick dark of her room. How Ma-Ma, her Ma-Ma, had complained and sighed, and yawned, and wilted next day, over her insomnia, but she had been younger then, had later, in her nineties, got used to it, felt fine. A sweet astringent smell got into the old lady's nose a moment before she recalled the remedy that she used to help Ma-Ma's maid make in the pantry; how they "bruised" a handful of anise seeds, "steeped" them in rose water. How her mother looked as pretty as ever, ready for bed, with the two little lawn bags bound to her nostrils, her fine eyebrows arching up like a pony's ears, a fistful of thick curls falling over her lovely forehead, not too high, not too schoolmarmish, a real lady; she had worn a lace cap to bed, and gloves lined with cream; she had the softest plumpest hands, like Queen Victoria's, with dimples instead of knuckles, a tiny mauve shadow inside each indentation... "You may take the children away now"... the old judge... where did the horde of children come from? There had been twenty. How? When? "What did I want to know?" said Maisie to herself. "Why bother." She heard Bunce snoring in the hall outside her door and the old clock gave a little shudder and said distinctly, "Ping... ping... ping."
"I said I'd be home at one thirty sharp," said the old lady; she was very confused. "Am I home yet?"
The smell of anise had filtered away but for the last time the question of where did Ma-Ma get her babies came back, as if she were a little girl again; but wiser and older ones might well wonder, too. Maisie's Ma-Ma had never addressed her husband other than as "Mister"; never let him see her unless she was fully dressed, any words suggesting intimate apparel or furniture were taboo; parts of the body nameless; conversation domestic and cool; good nights always said downstairs.
"Good night, Mr. Herbert."
"Good night, my dear."
So how?... Maisie's mother had been a Yankee so she must have bundled, but no one would have guessed it from her face. This last is editorial, and not in old Maisie's head as she lay comfortably on her side, waiting for something, something that she had mislaid in her mind.
Ping... ping... ping... ping.
"Time will tell," she murmured; she was in the groove; it would.
And in the meantime, Lamby, completely unnerved by other people's pleasures, other people's dimples, deprived of feminine allure, unable to get in touch with the spit an' image in the back of her head, frustrated beyond female endurance, was slowly and surely getting drunk. In a word: leaving the premises once again; because this was not Lamby's first binge. Lamby had found the lighted exits more than once, the heavenly medication: "Drink me," it said. Lamby timed her spiritual wanderings to fit the old lady's unconscious hours, four of them.
Lamby opened her closet door and from the top shelf took down the bottle labeled conspicuously Clorox, and from behind it a glass that had held mayonnaise. She was careful and sharp about details, no one must miss a table glass and come snooping around for it; besides, the deceit was part of the femininity she longed for. She drank a quarter of a glass of the bourbon as if her throat were wide open; it went down without convulsion, without her needing to swallow.
"Ahhh!" The fiery caress hit her hard; there wasn't time for play; this was it. As if she had not planned it, she walked steadily to the dressing table and opened a drawer. She took out and arranged before her the contents: three lipsticks; an eyebrow pencil; a round box of mascara; a choice of rouge, powder and various creams; perfumes. She proceeded slowly and at intervals visited the closet. Her cheeks grew soft under her fingers as she lovingly manipulated them, her mouth swelled and smiled and arched as she cleverly drew it on and filled it in with three shades of scarlet. The thin hard mouth became a tantalizing receptacle for love, a yearning sucking instrument of desire, a bold and jutting invitation to rapture. Her heart beat faster in spite of the great gulps of depressant she had swallowed; her hands trembled a little as she painstakingly marked on and blackened her eyebrows, feathered them in, ah, she was an artist! She liked their meeting in the middle and curving to the hairline at the sides. She smoothed on the lovely deep rouge and blended it evenly, covering it softly with beige powder so that she resembled a peach. How they would bite her! She did not neglect to color the tips of her ears and lay on a delicate rosy pink almost to her nipples, which must be hid because they were inverted (how it angered her when she was sober!). She brushed a sparkling mixture into her hair that she wore short like the girls, and last of all an invention of her own -before fastening the foamy rubber make-believe breasts, she drew a seductive line with the eyebrow pencil between them. She wanted even more than she could buy, "These are just right, madam, very chic," but Lamby longed for a great squushy bosom, always had, "Oh, big ones! Big ones!" she had prayed. Paula's lovely oversized melonlike breasts made her sick with envy. She put down the perfume atomizer hard and it cracked, but she whispered the four-letter word, she wasn't completely drunk yet, and she was afraid of the old woman down there who had ears as acute as a ferret; even asleep she'd hear, she could hear the worms crawling in the ground like a robin. "I heard you!" She appraised the work of art she had produced in the mirror critically. She took up the little gadget she had found at the Five and Ten and bent her eyelashes up hard and generously applied the mascara with a stiff little brush. She outlined her eyes carefully with a black pencil and with her forefinger added the sky-blue shadow to her lids. Lamby longed to kiss the pouting mouth she saw reflected, it dazzled her; for a moment she felt an evil penetrating desire for herself but she didn't know how and it went away. She got up and swayed a little as she stepped into the black lace panties, but she was getting tired of the whole thing; she was incapable of seeing a thing through, had little imagination, really. She did not grasp the possibilities and let the whole thing go. Feeling a return of diluted anger, a slight inner depression, she went to the closet for quick oblivion, but a mechanism warned her, "Get this stuff off before you... before you..." Her head reeled.
Ping... ping... ping... ping.
She was frightened, the time was up.
"Lamby!" the old voice quivered up the stairs and through the keyhole. "Lamby."
Lamby lost her head and tipped the bottle up, felt its warmth and sweetness give her a split second's respite.
"Fresh air," she said, coming to.
She went to the window and pushed it up, sat on a stool and leaned out. The harvest moon, low in the west, shone on her synthetic face and exposed make-believe bosom. She looked as if she were everlastingly leaning out of a casement soliciting the passersby, a painted salacious grin on her face, her eyebrows elongated, the division between her breasts penciled in; an unsavory-looking woman, for sale.
The last hooker changed her mood, gave her confidence, made her laugh; "Caught with my pants down," she said vulgarly. "Lamby," she mimicked.
"Hi!" she called out. Someone, two people were coming cautiously up the drive displacing the little blue stones. Scrunch... scrunch...
Even Bunce stopped snoring, the old clock hesitated, Maisie did not call out. Everything listened. Lamby stared and controlled herself. The big orange moon silhouetted Paula and the gardener's son like cutouts, and the clinging hazy November dawn sent their voices out into the night as far as there were ears to hear, as if they were at sea. Listen!
"Paula, you said you would!"
"I'm afraid, Jimmy."
"Of what?"
"I don't know."
"Have you never done it?"
"No! No! Don't ask me!"
Her mouth was stopped and only Lamby saw them struggling and swaying together.
"Look, Paula, you said if I came back here we could go in and you would, you said everyone would be asleep. It was your idea."
You could almost hear their beating hearts, the thick clinging of their lips; the blue silk gown snapped and sparked like summer lightning.
"No! No!" pleaded Paula in a loving weak voice.
"This then!" and he easily lifted one of her round breasts from its lacy frame. Paula stood still, her chin down, watching him. She put her hands on his narrow hips and it was a pretty picture, like a valentine with a backdrop of hearts and flowers. Encouraged, he cautiously slid his big hand down her thigh.
"No! Please! Not here! I'll go in with you."
"Quick!" said Jimmy, beside himself with desire.
Lamby closed the window and, trembling all over as if in a chill, went to the closet. She finished the bottle and sucked at its neck for the last few drops; it wanted to tease and avoid her mouth, but she drained it and threw it in the back of the closet among her shoes and boots and paraphernalia. She fell across the bed, and opening her dressing gown, murmured comforting words to herself, "Sweetheart, baby," but her spirit did not respond. She tore off her spongy bosom, and as if some one had come up behind her and given her a merciful blow, the coup de grace, lost consciousness; her mouth hung open, the rouge and bright lipstick came off on the pillow, and the old clock jauntily struck five.
Maisie, wide awake, wondered if Paula had spilled. Bunce raised himself laboriously and growled very low.
"Down, sir!" said Maisie and made one final effort in her ragged old head to visualize whatever it was she was looking for, waiting for....
Jimmy, inside the room that had housed so many similar scenes: a girl and a boy fighting for supremacy over the differences in each other, the differences spoiling their felicity, was a young man in a hurry; he was used to quick surrender. Paula, shaken and frightened at his progress, begged for time.
"Wait, Jimmy dearest," she whispered.
"I've finished waiting," he whispered back, anger welling up in him at the delay in his pleasure; her procrastination inflamed and infuriated him. Daisy didn't flirt, neither had Harriet, the grocer's daughter, needed any persuasion at all. Who did Miss Paula think she was! His longing and anger made him brutal. He stopped her mouth with his hand and no one heard the agonizing wail, but she got away. She had turned cold at reality. His passion spoiled his precision and he lost her. He stared at her, humiliated and sick.
"Oh, Jimmy," said Paula, seeking comfort after her ordeal, comfort from the enemy, silly thing! "Put your arms around me, kiss me good night, Jimmy."
"You little whore!"
He said it loud and plain.
The name! The word! Maisie's old body twitched spasmodically. At last it had come to her-from nowhere! She had a quick technicolored vision of her father's woods; the shiny rear end of Holly, the mare, her sides wet with sweat; and Ferris, handsome, defeated and angry. "Now will you call me Maisie!"
"Whore!"
"Well," she said, "I've got a better memory 'n any of them. My eyes are good, too." She raised up her hands to look at the long tapering fingers but it was still dark. "Prettier than Ma-Ma's at ninety," she said to herself, "and I'm a hundred.
"Well, Bessie..." and she closed her eyes to a more soothing abstract darkness than that which persisted so long in the room.
"Granny, are you awake?"
"Go 'way, child, can't you see your old Granny is asleep."
"But Granny."
"But me no buts," said Granny, good-naturedly. "Granny!" There was a sob in Paula's voice. "Well, what is it? Did you spill? Eh?"
Paula stood in the dark at the foot of her grandmother's bed. "Granny," she pleaded, "let me stay here, it's too late to go home now."
"What time is it?" said Granny noncommittally and without interest. What difference did it make.
"One thirty," Paula quickly lied.
Ping... ping... ping... ping... ping... ping.
"I mean..." said Paula.
"Well, what do you mean," said the old lady, querulously. "Do get on with it. Stay where you like and do pick up your feet."
"Oh, thank you, Granny dear." She hesitated... how much had Granny heard... what did she know? "Don't tell Mummy!"
"I haven't spoken to your mother in twenty years," said the old lady, "come next Michaelmas, and I don't intend to start now." What old memory was plaguing her?
"I'm sorry I woke you up; thank you, thank you again, Granny."
The old lady didn't answer and the beige light of dawn began to seep into the house. Evidence of sorrow and shame, violence and anger, espionage, had been secretly destroyed in the night, even Lamby's room with wide-open windows smelled faintly of Chanel Number Five and outside an early morning November chill had deposited the frost an inch deep. There were no footprints. When Daisy came in, sleepy-eyed and grumpy, to pull aside the curtains there was not so much as a cigarette butt, and no fingerprints on anything at all.
"Guess what!" screamed Janey. "Paula isn't home yet!"
"Be quiet, Janey, she phoned me from Granny's, she didn't want to wake me, eat your cereal." But Sissy had an uneven look.
Janey stared at her.
"Eat your cereal."
"Ma-Ma," said Sissy, "Paula did spend the night here?" She wanted very much to believe it.
"Never saw her before in my life," lied Granny, poker-faced. She watched Sissy between her fluttering pink lids. "What's she up to, can't fool me," she said to herself. It was a new day and she felt fresh.
"I wouldn't see that young man if I were you," she said, "he's not our sort."
"Oh, Ma-Ma!" said Sissy, laughing, "you're a dear."
"Drivel."
Lamby's hangover preceded her into the room and Sissy frowned.
"Where's Maggie?" Lamby said, trying to brighten up. "I'd like to shoot some golf."
"Tomboy!" snapped the old lady.
Lamby gave her a dirty look., "I suppose Paula's still shut-eye from the party." Lost forever in Lamby's drunken sleep was any recollection of last night. Paula was safe, except from herself. The old lady felt as if there were ghosts in the room, live ones, and she waved her hand before her eyes. "Get along with you," she said, "scat!"
"What's for dinner, mum?" said Daisy. The Irish apparition did appear from nowhere. She had been listening-at the pantry door. She looked sulky and downcast as only the Irish can, spreading around them an ectoplasm of despondency, a very slough of despair. It nagged and enraged the old lady; she could smell it.
"Git!" she said. "None of your sniveling in here!"
"Yes, mum, your honor." The girl backed out, not in the least offended. She was too low in her mind for the old lady's insults to touch her. She had not learned anything listening at the door and Jimmy hadn't shown up with the vegetables for dinner, the late crop of carrots and beets, cabbage and bleached celery, a handful of parsley. She would have warmed his cold hands, and if no one was looking, kissed his mouth hard; planned their meeting place for tonight and then maybe had the courage, in his strong arms, to tell him... Terribly depressed and made bold, devil may care, by it, she risked her neck. She stuck her head through the pantry door and said in a stilted, dignified tone, "We haven't no vegetables."
"Who's that?" asked the old lady, forgetting she had just dismissed her. "Oh, good morning, child," she said. "Lamby, I want you to plan a nice supper, Mr. Fiske is coming."
"Mr. Fiske?"
"Mr. Fiske?"
"The historian." The old lady sniffed at their ignorance.
"Who, Ma-Ma?"
"Fiske!" she said angrily. "Fiske, the historian!"
"Yes, Ma-Ma, we will." Sissy shook her head at Lamby.
"And none of that cold gruel you had when we had company last time, with onions in it. Phaugh, who ever heard of such a thing!"
"That was vichyssoise, Ma-Ma."
"Vichy-fiddlesticks, it was gruel."
"We won't have it, Ma-Ma, it's too late in the season... something hot..."
"We won't have it period," said Maisie. "Come, Bunce," she said, and smiled; she was leaving them for a while, "I'll pretty up."
"Spooks," she said, as she settled herself, "sneaking around, enough to give one the creeps."
Sharp-eyed, she noticed, immediately, a white glare on Bessie's gilded frame. A tremor of indignation shook her. The old lady was Argus-eyed indeed, and looking for trouble, as volatile as yeast. It had come off again; Daisy's careful mending didn't work.
"Daisy!"
"Ma-Ma?"
"I said Daisy!"
The name was carried from lip to lip; she heard it reverberating: Daisy... Daisy... Daisy...
"Mum?"
"Where is it?"
"What, mum?"
"'What mum,'" the old lady mimicked, "you know very well 'what mum.'"
But Daisy really didn't know; her face was red and swollen from weeping and from, if they both had known what the other was missing, a similar loss: Jimmy's.
"Please, mum, may I go... I..."
"You will sit right there until you tell me where it has gone."
"What, mum?"
The old lady had stalled for time, what was it called? She couldn't for the life of her remember its name, the little thing that Daisy had carelessly polished off the cherub, and no wonder, no one had ever told her and it wasn't in The New York Times or Chitty on Blackstone.
"The watchamacalht," she said. "Oh."
The old lady looked at the girl's stupid dazed face and it reminded her of something long ago... that same look, forlorn and sullen, glutinous and resentful; there was terror in it, too... Dody's fainting pregnant kitchen maid!
"Master Dodge?" she said softly, almost eagerly.
"What, mum? Please, mum."
"You may keep the thingamabob, my girl," the old lady said kindly, "it's nothing to cry about, it's neither here nor there."
"Oh, thank you, mum."
Still ignorant of the old lady's loss, intent on her own, Daisy went to her box of a room next the laundry and looked at her puffy face in the mirror, her red eyes. Cruelly, the untouched beauty of Paula's lovely face came into her mind, like a valentine.
"Sweet Jesus!"
It was part prayer and part invective.
The old lady mused: Dody's little girl had stood before her and she had given her something, a present. Her mind had skipped a generation easily, not wanting to dwell, one supposes, on the unbearable, or unwilling to see herself as she had been. "Hussy!" she had called the kitchen maid, "lying, thieving, little slut," and she had petted Dody and been secretly proud of his manhood; at fifteen, there was no doubt of it, he had easily seduced the girl and the child had been the image of him, as pretty as Bessie. That was why she had insisted on keeping the little thing, sending it out to nurse with one of the tenants, had it brought up right on the premises, after packing its mother off to the old country whence she came, wiser but not much richer. The old man, Maisie's husband, had licked Dody, horsewhipped him good; she hadn't dared interfere, but he hadn't been able to whip it all out of him by any means; his fame spread to the village and he was in demand. The girl who was born of Dody's high spirits to the kitchen maid had waited unknowingly on her grandmother, who sometimes stared at her and curled her lips and again wished, but did not dare, to caress her. She was a little bit of a thing, the quick plasma of one orgasm; undernourished, too, inside her frightened mama, and squeezed almost to death by her tight corset, hidden, until the moment of her slippery birth on the laundry floor, from the eyes of her mother's employers and starved by her fear of being dismissed for her too apparent carelessness. Dody had gone up to her room in the eaves, on a bet, to prove his majority to his brother and his friends, and she had giggled and let him try: "Come on now, Master Dody, let's see what you're made of." Inflamed from playing with the boys in the barn, excited by talk of women and girls, his curiosity inspired by Bessie and her tricks, it had been easy and quick. "It was nothing much," he told the boys, and the kitchen maid, impressed and eager for more, couldn't get him to come back. There were other games at fifteen. And that was when Bessie, jealous, had slapped her and said, "Leave Dody alone!"
"Lep or no lep, g'lang!" Pater Familias, the dispenser of colored pills and mustard plasters and purges, had shouted to his skinny nag; Death flashed in the sky with the northern lights and neck and neck he raced with it again, full of the joy of it. He had undone the blue child and pronounced her female, had washed his hands, had taken a good stiff drink of undiluted scotch, helped himself out of the decanter on the sideboard, and kept one more family secret faithfully.
Maisie listened. She thought she heard the cloppity-clop of the nag, its wheezing and sighing, the rattle and squeak of the old buggy straddling and bumping over a frozen winter road. She shook her head.
"We'll see," she said, "it's no use crying over spilt milk."
That had been the old man's feeble advice. He was getting too old to punish the high-spirited sons he had, God knows how, engendered, but he still got some pleasure out of it and each time didn't want to hear any more about it. He had leered at the buxom kitchen maid himself and felt her knee touch his leg sometimes when she had been allowed in the dining room, the waitress off. The boys were catching up fast with their bad blood, their choice of women, the fun of the scullery as opposed to the "ladies" they would no doubt (but not in this case) marry and beget on. He had slipped the wench a fiver as she struggled out with her rickety luggage, her barrel of knickknacks, as if he were the guilty one. "Good riddance," Maisie had said. "Yes, my dear."
"I'm thirty-nine," the old man had said, "and I would like to retire," and did.
Old Maisie sighed and fidgeted and tried to remember where all the capital that had seemed as firm as the rock of Gibraltar, as everlasting as the chalk cliffs of England, had gone, but it was unpleasant homework, to be laid aside for her best subject:
"Mother, dearest, you're the only one who understands me," said Dodge.
"Dear boy," murmured the old lady, nodding at his glistening likeness.
"Mother, dearest, you're the only one who understands," said Dougherty, slicking down his curly yellow hair and pulling at his embroidered waistcoat.
"Sweetheart," the old lady said out loud.
"Sissy!"
"Yes, Ma-Ma, I was just leaving."
"Sissy, what does the doctor say? Do try for a boy this time... all those big girls... didn't I hear Doctor Edwards?"
"Ma-Ma, please," said Sissy, "I'm going... may I bring you anything?"
"An ounce of horehound drops and some anise."
"I'll try."
"Do, Sissy, it would be nice to have a boy for a change."
She had all day to dream of boys and their shenanigans, lean men and leaner boys. She felt confident and closed her eyes.
"But what did become of Dody's little girl...?" The well! Had she drowned in the well? The old lady pulled herself up from her chair, "Get out of the way, Bunce!" and started rummaging in a desk drawer; a handful of old and faded pictures, round ones and square ones, slid onto the floor. "Darn!" Then she saw the little daguerreotype, velvet-lined, looking right at her on the desk. Lisa! It was Lisa who drowned in the well, her own baby; it kept escaping her.
"Lisa drowned in the well," she said, as if she were disciplining her old self. "It couldn't be helped." And Dody's little daughter disappeared around a corner in her mind, for good.
Two years ago the State police had come upon a crumpled old woman in her Sunday clothes, lying in the ravine. "Dead as a mackerel," the captain said, "too bad."
"Suicide," they wrote, and that had been Dody's little girl, the one Maisie mislaid in her old head. No relatives could be located but the old woman held in her hand a letter from New York City that read, Dear Mama: I can't come home for Christmas. The old woman, they said, had worn a path to the ravine, must have considered the jump a long time, and finally, armed with her explanation to God in her daughter's handwriting, had just fallen off on purpose; only a nine-foot drop, but enough, enough for the poor old thing. It was easy, easier than putting out the cat and climbing upstairs to bed, alone. Long since gone off in his buggy in the clouds was the old doctor who would have identified her by any strawberry mark or evil stain upon her broken body, excepting when Maisie thought she heard him and his bony nag with the heaves, outside. "Come in, Doctor Edwards, and sit by the fire, it's a wretched night."
"Tell me about Lisa, again," said Janey, her eyes shining, and the old lady told her over and over and over.
"Did she look like me, Granny?"
"Yes and no, she did and she didn't, she was prettier 'n you."
"Oh. Did everybody cry, Granny, hard?"
"It couldn't be helped."
"Suppose I fell in the well and drowned, would everybody cry, even Mama?"
"Go along, child."
"Can I have a television for Christmas?"
"Certainly."
"Toodle-loo, Granny."
"Toodle-loo," said the old lady. "Toodle-loo," she repeated to herself and chuckled., "Humph," she said, catching herself. Lamby stood there with her milk shake powdered with nutmeg.
"Goodnight, Ma-Ma, I hope you sleep well."
"I shan't."
"Don't then," said Lamby to herself.
CHAPTER THREE
MAISIE, often skipping around in her head for events and subject matters, one thing leading to another, reconstructing her family history and guessing at dates, built up for posterity a short-lived crazy patchwork quilt of the North American continent. She mixed up generations and professions, medical lore and Indian mythology. She did have a deal of reliable information dating back, almost, to the beginnings of Colonial America; from both Jamestown on the banks of Virginia and Plymouth on the Bay of Massachusetts. Many minor but significant matters could be vouched for in old family Bibles and almost unreadable documents, receipt books and diaries. She identified herself with and often believed herself to be, and have suffered the privations of, a Mehitabel, an Eleazer, Sarah Lincoln, Joanna Hobart and "she that was mother to Sir William Phipps, the late Governor of New England" who had no less than twenty-five children besides him. "She had one and twenty sons and five daughters," and no wonder, kin as Maisie was also to the Hingham matrons: Hannah Beal who had twelve children, Sarah Cushing, twelve, Christian Dunbar, thirteen, Rebecca Hersy, twelve, Hannah Jacob, twelve, Mary Joy, fifteen, Elizabeth Stodder, twelve, and Remember Ward, twelve! Family records, indeed, bore out these birthday facts, anachronistic as they surely were in Maisie's juvenilia and memories. The prolific birth rate of languishing and vapourish New England matrons from age fifteen on to early demise, as a rule, vindicates her word in our history books of provincial society. And like Maisie, generations later still without much medical knowledge, the death rate kept pace with the birth certificates signed, almost, in the blood the dealers in physick let. The colonists, divorced from the mother country and its "Royal Touch," the miraculous cures of epilepsy and scrofula by the thousands perpetrated by, for instance, James and Charles, depended only on a motley crew of "Practitioners in Physick" who were very profitably employed. "Chirurgeons" and mid-wives, casually licensed, provoked and confounded the medical Muse with their carryings-on and their lyings-in, and babes, scarcely weaned, soberly died of smallpox, scarlet fever and measles, dosed, as they were, with mithridate and Venice treacle, opium, spices, licorice, and red roses, better off as they might have been with an amulet than St.-John's-wort and a compound of vipers. Maisie remembered her grandmother's dipping Louisa, who suffered from rickets, and a little later hobbled off to Heaven uncomplaining, head foremost into cold water three mornings in a row, before giving her a mixture of snakeroot and saffern steeped in rum, comfry, hartshorn and knotty grass. She had often been bled as a child, herself, and it is hard to understand where Maisie learned of Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood, as the old people, her begetters, that she dwelled on in her mind, were ignorant of anything but Galen's herbiage well into the eighteenth century and bleedings "freed the patient of hostile humours" late into the nineteenth. It was a wonder there was any blood left to circulate. "Prick the gums with the bill of an osprey!".
Among Maisie's souvenirs was a charming letter Governor Winthrop had written to her great-great-grandfather on her Ma-Ma's side of the Mason and Dixon Line in 1656 which reads, in part, as follows: Lett me tell you an easy medicine of mine own that I have scene do miraculous cures in all sortes of Ulcers, and in knitting soddainly broken bones.... Beate to subtile powder one ounce of crabbes eyes, then putt upon it in a high glasse four ounces of strong wine vinegar. It will instantly boyle up extremely; lett it stand till all be quiett; then strain it through a fine linen; and of this liquor (which will then taste like dead beere, without sharpness) give two spoonefuls att 1 time to drinke, three times a day and you shall see a strange effect in a weeke or two.
Underneath this Shakespearean witches' brew her progenitor had added one of his own (this exchange of prescriptions by amateurs must have been quite the thing): For all sortes of agewes... pare the patient's nayles when the fever is coming on; and putt the parings into a little bagge of fine linen and tye that about a live eeles necke, in a tubbe of water. The eele will dye and the patient will recover.
Her own Pa-Pa, the old judge, Virginian, had penciled a medical and spiritual addenda to these New England solices: Things bad for the heart: beans, pease, sadness, onions, anger, evil tidings and the loss of friends.
Maisie's head abounded in theses, conceits, fancies and phantasies, but there was, as said, a good modicum of amazing fact and it was all mental pabulum for her, sustaining her through long days and nearly as long nights, keeping up her morale in time of stress, or doubt as to her position in the household, spooky and unreal as it was to her, who lived more comfortably in the past. She suspected at times a decline in control, a demotion from absolute power, from matriarch to old lady, a proxy of herself without portfolio; she only sporadically felt it and not for long, but she resented it: "Kitty cornered! Put it back straight!" And she would recall, and quote, presidents and royal governors, deacons and world-shaking events; climbing up, in this devious way, back on her throne, mentally alienate herself from them all, all that she had given suck, what's more; she couldn't help it if they were daft, barmy, cracked.... And her disordered reasoning soothed her, sent her back in an abstract phaeton to her delusions; some of them so pretty! In the long halls of her memory she stored the Southern portraits, too, of belles cloistered in the Old Dominion who had preceded her; out of the loins of planters and roisterers and skippers, too. She gazed at their sweet upturned noses and short upper lips, with skulls no bigger than a monkey's. Some of them inherited from way back a livid aristocratic pallor; a few, an almost dull English stare, a carefully acquired, over the generations, isolation and immunity in their stance; throwbacks, even in Virginia, and, in New England, out of place. "Their underdone quality looks!" her Ma-Ma had sniffed, "and no backbone!" Maisie smiled at the anatomical insults that the women of the Reconstruction Period heaped upon one another, and took an eccentric pleasure in what she called "spirit." Ricocheting back to New England, she spent many hours enjoying the talents and canny intelligence of her contemporary, in her mind, Yankee ancestors, chuckling over wise sayings, embroidered platitudes, unheard-of and impudent quackery, fabulous speculations and well-turned bargains. She was capable of contrasting their independent ventures and virtues with the Southerner's dependence on the liberality of nature, the bland acceptance, julep in hand, of the bounties of the earth; but she admired all her dead. "Here, now, let's see, who's this good-looking boy?... he's the image of my Dougherty!" She traced down with her long finger the finely written names in her grandfather's Bible and decided immediately that it could be no other than Increase Fitch who married... hum... let's see... Abigail Spare-hawk. She laid aside the big book and carried the ball alone from there. It was Increase Fitch, son of William (and Jail Porter). "That would be my... no... let's see... never mind." Well, anyway, Increase being the youngest son was meant to carry out the New England tradition and take the cloth to which he had no particular aversion, or inclination, either. Maisie chuckled. His father's big landholdings made him wish for more of the same. He nevertheless went along to Harvard and accepted his conventional fate. After graduation, easy for him, he was called to the church and did a little fiery preaching which was fun, but his brother's law books interested him more. He was admitted readily to the bar, and became the "most noted jurist in that colony." Maisie remembered the words written in the Bible without checking, "and the oracle of the council." But land was in his head and his talents bored him. Maisie tried to think of the descriptive phrase that was right there on the tip of her tongue... "Equivalent Lands!"
Yes sir! Massachusetts had ceded to Connecticut one hundred and six thousand acres! Increase got ten thousand acres as his share as commissioner. There was a scandal of some sort, naturally, but he developed himself an English manor and wouldn't sell any of it, not an inch of it. Then he inherited more land, and bought some more, too, and so on.... Maisie sighed. That was only the beginning... Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire... and at one penny halfpenny an acre! Whew! The young clergyman had done well as well as good. Land! (Maisie had honestly inherited the love of acreage, somewhat dishonestly, to say the least, acquired by her puritan ancestors and the huge grants thrust upon them, by her Southern kin.) The old lady relaxed from the effort expended on the above, fairly accurate as it was, and dreamed of undated dandies with powdered wigs, jet-black beauty patches on their cheeks, like girls; scarlet and grass-green fitted coats; velvet and millefleurs tapestrylike waistcoats, and silver and gold buckles, cascades of foamy lace at their bosoms; elegant tight, so tight, breeches proclaiming the sex that was otherwise indistinguishable from the ladies; "Cowslip wine," she thought, "and cherry bounce and raspberry fling."
Maisie Sparehawk Herbert was as proud of her rebel aristocratic blood as she was amused and vain of the New England squires who trooped through her mind, dressed no whit less fashionably than the others, but cannier in the head. Maisie knew she was pur sang, of the carriage trade, the quality; no skipjacks or chaw-bacons in her family tree! The Herberts had been and still were the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery and might drop in any time, and Captain Ratcliffe, one of the three skippers to sail into Jamestown in 1607, had chosen to bear the same name as old Judge Herbert's mother although his real name was something else... she could not remember; an impostor Ratcliffe had been, according to her mother's friend, John Fiske, but a mighty fine name he had chosen to sail under and he had often got the better of Captain John Smith, too, impostor, rogue or charlatan notwithstanding... humph! Ousted Smith again and again and became president of the council in his place. "Think I don't know!" said the old lady out loud. "Shucks, it's like yesterday," and she nodded, her old brain weary with data.
Maisie came to with a start. Someone had said, "Philip!" She listened, her tired heart skipping around, its shallow beat eccentric and uneven as a hunting dog's. There was no sound; the lights had been lit, and Bunce lay at her feet, gently snoring, unconcerned. The orange and black cat felt it, though. She sat staring at the old lady like an oriental image in soapstone; only the very tip of her tail twitching erratically, an evil grin on her heart-shaped face, her spangled whiskers aslant. Maisie, in good form in broad daylight, would have "scatted" her but she felt the need (something was in the air) of placating her.
"Kitty?"
The animal continued to stare as if wishing to hypnotize the old lady.
"You little elemental," Maisie whispered; Ma-Ma, her Ma-Ma, had described a cat so, that crept over the eaves at night, dodging the short mauve moonlight shadows.
"Philip!"
The old lady heard it clear as could be. Where had she been for those few seconds only, that she had nodded, that she woke with a start like a guilty child, fearful, with irregularly racing heart? You could see the pulse, as big as a pea, jumping between the ultramarine-blue veins on her wrist.
"You!" she said to the cat. It was the same cat, the very cat, the only witness of her adultery with her husband's brother. The young Maisie looked straight into the cat's eyes over Philip's shoulder as he embraced her. She had not been afraid then. The old lady's agitation began to leave her; she could not be spooked as you and I from the past; she was not afraid of the dead. And now, only the realness of this same cat who certainly heard someone say "Philip" as clear as she had heard it, confused her. The cat did not stir as the old lady said for the third time: "Philip!"
The handsome Philip had delicately and tremulously ravished the spirited and beautiful wife, mother of eight at the time, of his eldest brother and dishonored and betrayed the "old man" who supported his philanderings at home, really at home this time, and abroad. Philip's dashing cravats and the thrilling sideburns that caressed his cheek and jaws smelled sweet of contented women-discontented wives-and teeming mothers. He did not care for, or trust, girls; their vapours and hysterics, their absurd faith in their lovers and innocent flirtations, their want to pin him down and take up housekeeping. He seldom visited a lady twice, and Maisie was no exception. For a while she had foolishly longed for a second visitation, one more delicious thrill, and sent him little secret notes, gay, not too meek or too demanding, and then had lain, as usual, again and again with the "old man"; each time, it seemed, getting up with a little frantic new life inside her. She could scarcely keep track of the months, and the old doctor delivered her again and again of the weight within her.
"Do you know what to do?" Philip had whispered when he had finished.
"Of course not," she had said modestly. "Certainly not, sir!" she had added, as if she flipped him with a lacy fan for a naughty indiscreet speech; and she had told the truth, nevertheless: What was there to do? And she dare not ask him an intimate question even in the bodily intimacy, the skin intimacy, of his embrace. He might have carried an amulet from Paris, some secret receipt from Montmartre, but Maisie hadn't an idea. She had not even wondered at the next child's gestures or looked for a resemblance; she might have been a savage from the pages of The Golden Bough who really and truly didn't know, hadn't solved the mystery of birth any more than of the curious rhythmic rotating moon, and copulated strictly for pleasure. Maisie accepted the "old man's" ministrations because she was stuck with it and she lived with him as a good wife with one exception for forty years. She was not without her principles and conventions, and asked none of the questions, either from Ward's Sentence and Theme or from literature in general: Am I free? Am I entitled to my own life? What is happiness? These questions did not provoke her and so did not confound her. She was strong and well, and her fruitfulness nothing unusual. She did not resent it or think, "I might do something else."
She had been relieved when the old man died, not so much because of his habitual begetting as of impatience with his maudlin ideas, his saccharine notions, his drooling, his hiccoughs, his non-ego, the sharp male smell of him, so different from Philip, who, like a bee, withdrew with himself a little perfumed honey each time he visited and deposited a little of it, too, the next time. She did not make the comparison; it was simply there.
Maisie always avoided, in her recollections, the period of adjustment from riches to mere comfort that had been hers when the old man had had the impudence to leave them all, the omnific Maisie and her brood, with-well-no one knows, and Maisie, as has been said, "forgot."
"Scat," said the old lady, at ease in her mind again; Philip and the "old man" could have gone out, hand in hand, of her venerable dome, drifted away, one to Heaven, one to Hell, the Schopenhauer possibilities of a contingent question did not occur to her; her frustrations, we know, are tinier ones than that, and neither did she insist now, or enervate her subliminal self, fretting about what happened a minute ago to her psyche, than she had, as an adulteress, asked who begot whom.
The little elemental dropped to the floor noiselessly without having left an indentation anywhere and as she strolled out, the expression on her face suggested that she had indeed been the very cat that Maisie believed her to be, a cat not to be shoved around, a cat with a good memory, who would not forget anything.
Philip had come into her head uninvited, as she nodded, from way back; there had been no association of ideas; he had popped up like a jack-in-the-box when she least expected him, the result perhaps of a certain procrastination on Maisie's part, a putting off till later, a some-other-time-not-now Philip. Well, he was gone; a very mild and senile nostalgia remained.
"I'm dumfounded," she said and blamed it on the cat; she had a pretty good grip on her memories, wasn't often caught with her pants down and she still didn't know that it was herself who had said, three times: Philip. Vespertine, past even the grand climacteric, she had lost the reasons for suspecting herself of guilt and self-censorship; she was only aware of an uneasiness that came over her when Philip threatened her. Perhaps she had not been at her best in that situation and desired simply to forget it, out of pride; it doesn't matter.
She readily recalled pleasanter memorabilia and returned smilingly, there was plenty of time, to the boys, twins of her bosom, their continued story that would only end with the old lady herself.
The lads had matriculated at Yale College when they were no older than fifteen, which wasn't very unusual. The annals of that institution rang little bells in Maisie's doting pneuma. She settled down happily, breathing shallowly, scarcely burning any calories at all, to the pleasure of college life; illustrated and embellished, as a kind of backdrop to her lively lads, by halftones and views of Connecticut Hall, Trumbull Gallery, College Square, President Clap's monument, portrait of Governor Yale, and an "Exact View of Yale College, with Its Scenery." Maisie heard again the pleasant muted pop of tennis balls, the cries of young gentlemen at football or wicket; "Oh, the bullfrog in the pool..." she hummed, tapping her foot. She heard cries out of hearsay: "Yale! Yale!" sing through the corridors and involutions of her brain, as the students, fed up with bucolic monotony, looked for trouble and found it in the town, returning home with bloody heads. She opened her eyes and peered into the corner of the room for reference. "No," she said. Her eyes had fallen on, her attention had been diverted to, the old tomes of Chitty on Blackstone that staggered on the shelves, disintegrating, smelling of death, already riddled with pale worms. Ahhh, the well-conditioned lads and young swells were all dead, too, of fever! Every last one of them! A shiver passed through her as if she, too, suffered a chill, caught in the evil climate, as they had caught it, what with inadequate housing and the filth of-the lack of-she glanced at her little powder room and one tear fell; a sickening dry sob shook her. "No," she said bravely, and the handsome "bully club" she had been seeking in the first place leaned, as usual, in the corner, easing her gently back to tales the boys had told of its origin and its use. Its big yellowing ivory head had smashed originally the skulls of impertinent and raucous "Townies" who so wholeheartedly resented, to put it mildly, the influx and unwelcome presence of young gentlemen in their midst. Its gold adornments are tarnished and brittle but the engraved lettering is clear, Sparehawk, '40. It is not quite clear to the old lady which of her Sparehawks toted the thing home, presented as it was to the young buck who smashed the most skulls the fastest, but it was easy to believe that Dodge or Dougherty would have got a leg on it at least, without much trouble, and brought it home to her, another badge of their virility that she so prized. She knew it was, at any rate, the last "bully club" presented at New Haven where young gentlemen, if indeed Yale College still stands, prefer now less spectacular and bloody honors, insuring their acceptance in such conservative houses as the Fifth Avenue Bank. She sniffs as she thinks of Paula's beaux, an anemic lot, with bad manners, and beardless.
Dodge hadn't lost any time, or Dougherty either, close behind him, in renewing his acquaintance with the girls and little tarts, but a professor's wife, bereft as she was of practically everything, let him love her, and he really did. Maisie had been torn between jealousy at his rapt letters home about a "lovely woman whom I hope to make my wife" and the shrewd knowledge that the bold minx, twice his age, might be of use to him. She had been proud, too, that a stripling, her Dody, had so easily seduced an intelligent woman, wife of another.
Dody's eager manhood had startled the pretty wife with roving eyes out of her wits, and she threw them out the window, as it were, as she pulled down the shades and sent away the nursemaid on an errand. Dody, whose experience had not taught him to dawdle, wasn't as surprised as he should have been if he had known more about the gradations of the sex. Mary Elizabeth had held hands with boys before and accepted unresponsively the occasional lapses of the professor of concatenation and apothegms. She daydreamed of well-armored, passionate, gift-giving and ribbon-displaying white knights on entire horses, and sometimes was awakened in the dark by an unsought-for passion that she forgot, but she had no intention of giving all, ever, and preferred it that way. She was too astute in a feminine way for the lovely boys, as she thought them, who gazed at her with a longing that sent them home with evil impulses, and who called her intimate pet names among themselves. She assumed, in the progression of their desires, a modesty that was really a fact. She could dream of love but could not really take off her-let's say-bra and panties. As a girl, she had wondered how in the world these obstacles which she thought unassailable were overcome in real life. She could not imagine nudity. Her marriage to a man who could not imagine anything, kept her behind this eight ball that couldn't be budged. She received him in the dark when she had to, and was up and dressed before he awoke. The boys never saw so much as the small dark mole on her inner thigh, or the suggestion even of a bosom that Dody uncovered in broad daylight.
"Mister Herbert!"
"Call me Dody."
Dody's immediate success was no surprise to Dody and he did not live to meet the woman who meant "no," if there was such a one somewhere, immune to his charm and his faith in his ability that the little kitchen wench had endowed him with, under the eaves. And Mary Elizabeth accepted the inevitable with good grace.
Being a woman she caught up with and surpassed him in no time at all. Having learned that the premise was good, her logic, or intuition, supplied the rest and, from patiently sleeping with the schoolteacher to swooning with pleasure in a boy's arms was an ellipsis that scarcely needed any concentration or homework. She soon taught him, at least he learned, that a lady is finicky in her pleasures, and liked it. He learned from her, too, about Shelley and Keats and Byron and Leigh Hunt and Mary Lamb; the Carlyles; and to put his heart into his kisses. She taught him to prolong his desires and polish up his technique and he tagged along after the things she thought up quite willingly. The thrill of deceit shone out of her big black eyes and the excitement of waiting for felicity until the professor's step was heard on the porch was better than the original purely physical seduction which left them nothing to do but make fudge.
He adored her.
He did not know that they had, as if in a quadrille, changed places, but she did. All gone were the daydreams of white knights on entire horses, the abortive cerebral imaginings of everlasting love. As if the bright heat of his love-making had dispelled the foggy foggy dew, she became overnight, as it were, a sensualist; while Dody from just that and no more, something he was born with, turned into a smitten lover, smote indeed from behind by an unscrupulous and predatory woman, a selfish little prig turned both thirty and libidinous. But the neurosis, so called, of love, that sublimated Dody was a step forward for him; better than retreating into the slime, as she had, was his myopic, illusory flight to a twilight zone, of sorts not unattractive. In time the slower male might have, if God had been willing, progressed into the real thing, an integrated personality, the last metamorphosis Dody would have wanted, so let us not regret too much his early demise. As in any illness, one must, we are told, get worse before one gets better, Dody's spells of euphoria and dejection, with a subject matter now (she loves me-she loves me not), wrestled with the grain of sanity inherent in his stock like an overwhelming dough with its leaven. Without that drop of genesis he would have been as loco as some of his comrades thought him truly to be. Mary Elizabeth had him as spooked as a horse who has met a camel, and she knew it. She was, astonishingly enough, perfectly aware that Shelley and Keats and Mary Lamb were a form of protracted sex play in this instance. She was, as Maisie guessed, an intelligent woman and she held her man-child. Only a more desperate fever alienated him from his mistress, a killing one that was followed by the final and potent chill of death. The woman he loved could not, by nature, mourn him long although she searched for him elsewhere and elsewhere until the authorities, bedeviled by such as she, had her moved out behind East Rock where she was geographically impossible to make, her lilting voice inaudible to the impressionables.
"Ma-Ma?"
CHAPTER FOUR
PAULA, seventeen, and so pretty, found Jimmy, the gardener's son, much more exciting than, as Granny had described them, a string of boy friends, anemic and beardless. And as Granny had, before her, doubtless found Ferris, the flaming-eyed groom. With a selfishness, unintentional but real, the preoccupation with self, to speak of it kindly, of her age group, she did not consider, naturally enough, why should she, Daisy. She did not see, as she gazed fixedly inward, Daisy's red and swollen eyes and the sullen hopeless glance of hatred that was bent upon her, a very gloomy sight, indeed. She didn't notice Daisy at all. She did not know that Daisy's passionate hatred was a much more powerful thing than Jimmy's passionate dalliance. All that Paula had done to Jimmy was give him a taste for his betters, and her only hold on him was her social inaccessibility which he longed to rectify by simple arithmetic and get on with his work, sleep in peace with his little peers. He did not in the least understand what Paula wanted of him and, unsure of himself and vain, he hated her, too, for not letting him finish what he had begun that night. That he finished it down in the village comfortably enough did not heal the wound in his ego. Jimmy, it is apparent, is not in love. Paula, as ignorant as he of what she really wanted, knew a little of what she did not want; she did not want to let go of a delicious new something that had come into her life that seemed, unfortunately, to reside only in Jimmy. She did not question that she loved him-this, then was it-and the shock and mortification of his verbal insult slid away and was somehow rationalized in a young mind that was not used to solving problems. She did not believe that he meant it and saw him again alone just once more. This time it struck home and the boy's stubborn insistence on his own pursuit which seemed to have no reference to herself as a person, and it didn't have any, cured her on the instant, and she jumped out of his arms again and really fled the premises. Jimmy hadn't the least idea how to make the most of the head start he didn't know he had with Paula and maybe he didn't have the time required to seduce her either, which skips at least one small tragedy in the big geode of casualties that few keep track of and are seldom announced; and deprives us of an artistic conclusion, as well, for the time being. Maisie, unaware of current events, might have advised her granddaughter. How had the beautiful and spirited young Maisie, for instance, kept in subjection the groom, Ferris; kept him in his place and at her heels for fifty years, until he had died, an old man, crotchety, arthritic, and puffy in the jowls, his mistress as desirable and saucy in his eyes as in the beginning of their cute flirtation.
Paula's tears, shed easily, left no mark on her lovely face and Daisy had no way of knowing that they were sisters under the skin, in opposition, as it were, for different reasons. Jimmy had easily made both of them cry. It might have worked out better, with Daisy wanting badly what Paula fled from, but Jimmy, the common denominator, had ideas of his own, too, and nothing came out even.
Paula found a young curate who would take much longer than Jimmy, and felt for him something of that chain reaction that the gardener's son had started and it gave her enough for the present until the young captain in the Marines would take over, blurring her girlish sorrow, give her back her feminine stance.
She stopped crying bitterly and secretly in her room and breathed deeply; but nothing is easy, seldom is it within ourselves to erase what has been written.
"Paula, I think you should not be too friendly with Jimmy," said Sissy, a little late. Sissy and Paula had been on their way to church where Paula hoped to have a little time with the young curate after service, and they had met Jimmy who had looked impudently and hotly at Paula and failed to raise his hat. Paula had gazed straight ahead like a lady but she had felt his look. "He ought at least to take off his hat," went on Sissy, but Paula's shining profile did not betray anything but the sweetest innocence and Sissy thought, "Maybe he knows about me!" and blushed, in the foil of Paula's artlessness, at her own earlier transgression as she had not blushed at the time. "He could, you know," she thought, "his father could have seen us; perhaps they even discuss me between themselves!" She shivered and put it aside.
So Paula felt dissatisfied and guilty and insulted all over again, and quickened her step; she tried to conjure up, superimpose, the image of the slim young curate over against the so-male form of Jimmy, and partially succeeded.
But old Maisie, at dinner, interrupted Sissy and Lamby. She caught, way off somewhere as she was, bored with everyday conversation, the tag end of something Lamby was saying that went like, "... I can't think what she said."
"Whore?" offered the old lady agreeably.
Paula blushed as red as a pomegranate and jumped out of her chair, upsetting a glass.
"The child should excuse herself when she has to leave the table," said the old lady.
"Ma-Ma!" said Sissy, more astounded than shocked. "Paula is only seventeen and so sensitive... really, Ma-Ma!"
"Tut! She'll get over it. Lamby, how old are you? It was only yesterday that you wet the bed..."
"I have to go to the John!" said Janey suddenly.
"The what?"
"She wants to go to the bathroom."
"How's that?"
"To the outhouse, mum," said Daisy, who was passing the mashed potatoes, and sometimes had an Irish insight into the old lady's anachronisms.
"Well, why didn't you say so! You can go tomorrow, she added vaguely, "if it doesn't cost too much."
As Daisy left the room Lamby raised her eyebrows at Sissy and Sissy shook her head.
"She's not listening," said Lamby. "Ma-Ma, would you like anything more?"
The old lady did not reply.
"Well, Sissy?"
"The girl doesn't know any better," said Sissy.
"That doesn't solve the problem," said Lamby. "Who do you think it is?" she added avidly.
"The thing is," said Sissy, frowning, and she inclined her head toward Ma-Ma, "she hates someone new fussing around."
"She'll raise a stink," said Lamby. "That's for sure."
"Those girls have them easily," mused Sissy. "Perhaps if we do nothing at all... oh, dear."
"She'll scream bloody murder," said Lamby.
"Do you think I should speak to her?" said Sissy.
"How soon would you say she would have it?" asked Lamby.
"She looks about five months gone," said Sissy. "What is the date today?"
"The date?"
"Yes, what is the date?"
The old lady opened her eyes, rested and fresh from her dreaming, and said, almost hollered, "1066!" It was her one date and she was proud of it. "Shall we have coffee in the withdrawing room," she said graciously. "Darn radio, can't hear yourself think. Mule train..." she hummed.
"She's crazy as a bedbug," muttered Lamby.
"See that you don't wet the bed again tonight," admonished the old lady, "or I'll tell cook pot to let you have any more lemonade."
"Christ!" said Lamby to herself. "I'll kill the old bitch, no foolin'!" and excusing herself, she went up for a big swig of the powerful "lemonade" at the back of her closet, marked Clorox, a cleanser, indeed, for what she had to endure. The heat of it went down into her guts and equalized the adrenalin that had no normal outlet.
Daisy let out a caterwauling scream that shattered the bulbs in the lamps in the living room and moved the solid silver a half inch over in the felt-lined drawers. At the same time Bunce thought he heard something; one imagines that the note was so high, the vibrations so uncountable that perhaps he did, deaf as he otherwise was. Still it wasn't too high for the others to hear it and it lifted them out of their beds. The old lady, packing, in her mind, for a short visit to her sister-in-law in Cockeysville, Maryland, protested. "I'm feeble," she said, "a feeble old woman, shut that claptrap off!... What's that? I don't care if it is Winston Churchill," she mumbled, fancying herself aggrieved and contradicted. Bunce lay down feeling himself deceived and mistaken.
"Yeeee-eee-owowow!"
The hair raised up along his shoulders; and Lamby slid open the door, her face white, shaking hard, as if her dreams had come true and she had murdered the old woman.
"For Christ's sake, Ma-Ma!"
"None of your slang, miss, what's got you up so early?"
"You didn't hear?... what I heard?" Lamby began to doubt the bloodcurdling yell, tried to think back... how many had she had?
Well, there it was again.
"Turn it off!" yelled the old lady.
Lamby fled down the hall to the telephone; it had come to her, she remembered, it was Daisy!
"Hello! Sissy? Daisy! Get over here quick!"
As Lamby waited in the hall for Sissy, as frightened as a young girl might have been by the unknown, chilled and shaken by Daisy's bloodcurdling screams, complete silence, as if the storm had passed, and the swallows did start whistling in the ivy, reigned. It was so still that she jumped when the icebox started up and the milk bottles on the top shelf, too close together, chattered like glass bells from the vibration. She shut her teeth down and waited for the next cry, she wanted to be ready, but it didn't come. She heard Sissy on the porch and opened the door.
"Did you call the doctor?" said Lamby.
"No, I didn't-at this hour. If it's the baby it will take a lot longer, there's plenty of time. I just came over to calm Ma-Ma."
"Oh," said Lamby, "you needn't have bothered."
"I'll go see Daisy, poor thing," said Sissy; she looked pretty and cool and efficient and Lamby felt like an elderly scarecrow and an ignorant fool. Christ! Even at moments like these Lamby's jealousies beat at her chest with clenched fists.
"Daisy!" called Sissy; the girl's door was locked from inside.
No answer.
"Daisy, are you all right?"
Silence.
"Daisy, answer me, do you want the doctor?"
"No, mum," came a sullen reply.
"What is the trouble?"
"Nothin'."
"Why did you scream?"
"I didn't scream, it wasn't me."
"Very well, I am going back home... Won't you let me in?" Silence.
"Daisy! Let me in!"
But nothing more could be got out of Daisy.
"Are you sure you heard her scream?" asked Sissy of Lamby, doubtfully; Lamby smelled strongly of bourbon.
"Jesus Maria," said Lamby.
"It's a little late for me," said the doctor and he gave the sisters, Lamby and Sissy, a scornful hard look. "Call the police."
"Police!"
"It is either homicide or manslaughter," he said.
"Manslaughter!"
Lamby stared in fascinated horror at the thing in the basin, and could not pick up her feet as if she were in one of her anxious dreams, one of her unrequited nightmares.
"Manslaughter!" said Sissy. It was as if the wrong word held their attention and gave them time, kept them from laughing, or in some idiotic way expressing a horror that was looping up their intestines and squeezing their hearts.
"Why, it's a girl," said Sissy softly, as if everything were all right, and a beribboned bassinet in the next room, sweet peas and carnations and a silver cup, and relatives and a glass of wine.
No one in his right mind could accept the little creature, still soft but spotted with dried blood, in the basin. The doctor, from habit, had washed it as best he could and determined its sex for the record, and now he was scrubbing his own arms and drying them. He fixed his tie and peered in the mirror over the basin where the little thing lay exposing its soft and swelling female genitalia that had caught Sissy's attention, saving her from screaming, it seemed so normal. The doctor absent-mindedly drew back his Lips and peered at his shiny white teeth, looked sideways at himself and gave himself a smile. He was rather handsome.
"Do you want me to call the police, or will you?" he said.
"But she couldn't have meant to kill it... why that would be murder," Sissy said. "Precisely; righto."
"I'm going," said Lamby and left. She saw the lighted exit: Walk, don't run.
The big cop from the village paled at the scene of the crime. Sissy had got used to it, but O'Brian saw for the first time, coming in out of the wholesome fresh November day, the blood-spattered bathroom, the slippery floor, and the yellow, drained as it was, absurdly small victim with its wet black hair, its pallid little sucking mouth-and he, too, noted its sex like a fleur-de-lis between its tiny legs.
"Saints preserve us, it's a girl," he said. "An' who may I ask is the perpetrator of this atrocity, miss?" he added, pulling himself together.
"Why, you must know Daisy-she's gone, she left- we found it like this on the floor..." She spread her arms and frowned.
"Sweet Jesus!" said O'Brian, "sure an' it was a terrible accident should happen to no one." He looked at the overflowing toilet and remembered his old woman. He had come back from his beat, sturdy and good-natured, to his young wife of six months and found her sobbing bitterly. "Look what I did! It came out! It drowned!" Daisy should have not lost her head like that, Daisy, his niece, as she did. She had lifted it out, saints preserve us, and cut the cord with a pair of shears, that still lay in the corner, too close. Then, in terror, she dressed in her good suit and ran away with her suitcase, God knows where, to the old country maybe, for refuge. (Father, oh Father, will you forgive me. Yes, child, yes.)
"Sure an' it was born dead anyhow," O'Brian said, "an' then it drowned."
"The blood, all the blood," Sissy said. It was new to her-all the blood. Well cared for, she had always opened her eyes to brand-new babies in lacy shawls and spotless diapers with clean soft skins. She had never even seen their little navels until they were healed and looked like dimples.
"It's a mess to be sure," said O'Brian. "She cut it off with them shears," he mused. The shining cord lay like a coiled spring, a bracelet, under the basin.
"Sure an' the whole thing was a terrible accident," he said.
"Lamby! Sissy!"
"In a minute, Ma-Ma."
"In a minute," the old lady mimicked, "in a minute, in a minute... land sakes!"
She sensed an oblique attention, not wholly hers.
"What is it, Ma-Ma." Sissy closed the door behind her as what had to be done was being done outside. Need they have been so solicitous? The old lady saw only what she wanted to see, responded only to what she wanted to respond to; but she was curious, wanted to catch them off guard; what were they up to? They were canny.
"Fix me a dose of salts," she said. She watched Sissy narrowly, detected something, felt disorder somewhere like a draft. But Sissy had got hold of herself, relieved at O'Brian's easygoing solution, and she smiled gently at her mother as she gave her a diluted dose of what she had asked for.
"Anything else, Ma-Ma?"
The old lady felt there was more to it, but shrugged.
"I told you not to see too much of that boy," she said, closing her eyes. She missed Sissy's real blush. "Get along with you and fetch me..." She looked vaguely around her.
"The New York Times, Ma-Ma?"
"It will do," she said, "it will do."
Daisy, the greenhorn, the bog-hopper, the ninny, left nothing but a little accumulated dirt behind her, a few rusty bobby pins, a half-finished bag of salted peanuts and a 25 cent edition of Bad Girl. They all forgot her as they had in her presence, as they had a series of others who came and went, letting down or taking in the cambric uniforms of servitude, but free, nevertheless, to move on. Nobody cared much except for the inconvenience of breaking in a new one. Daisy's shocking sin was washed away with Ivory soap by a colleen right down the gangplank off the last boat, and as she scrubbed she mingled her tears of desperate homesickness with the suds.
Jimmy, the unrepentant sinner, had taken a broad hint from the big cop, and was well on his way, or else this Deirdre who sobbed into her pillow at night for loneliness might have felt his powerful charm, too, and in a given inexorable time taken the rhythmic beating of child-bearing, the terrible punishment of unlicensed love, the damning evidence that one carries around inside, denying it until the moment it is bloodily expelled by your own frantic efforts and will surely be found. And yet this perfect crime is committed again and again as if young women stood in line for it, longed for it.
Maisie surprised everyone by merely shrugging when the news of Daisy's vacation was broken to her.
"What is your name, my girl?" she said kindly to the pretty Deirdre.
"Deirdre."
"Nonsense!"
"But, ma'am, it is my name."
"No airs, miss, I shall call you Daisy."
"Yes, ma'am."
And so the old lady went right on calling Deirdre, Daisy, as the present made no impression on her whatever and it would take twenty years or more, with all the reminiscing Maisie had on her docket, before she caught up with Deirdre, or the sorry ruin presented to Daisy by the gardener's ardent son.
CHAPTER FIVE
"WHAT'S become of Colin?" said the old lady suddenly, looking directly at Sissy. "Who?" said Sissy, startled.
"You know who," said the old lady, and for a moment she did, too, but it was passing quickly away from her. "Colin," she repeated and looked questioningly at Paula, could she be mistaken?
Paula shook her head, "I don't know any Colin," she said, "Granny."
"Lamby?"
Everyone but Sissy looked at Lamby. The old lady, chagrined at the sudden loss of a perfectly sensible recollection, laughed feebly and shook her finger at her eldest daughter. "One of Lamby's beaux," she said, "handsome, too! What's become of Colin?" she said, not caring any more.
"Leave the table, child," said Granny, paling, "at once!"
"Oh, Ma-Ma, she didn't say anything."
"She will," said Granny, "forewarned is forearmed."
"Look!" cried Janey, "I've got four arms," and she stuck out her legs.
"I think you'd better go now," said Sissy, but she was relieved at Janey's spotlighting the attention, taking Ma-Ma's obviously perfectly good recollection out of the room with her.
"'Night," said Janey, good-naturedly. "Woof, woof, I'm a dog. I'm Colin-Olin."
Sissy saw a mild revival of interest cross the old lady's face and turned away but she felt her mother's look, she was struggling to remember, "Botheration!" she said.
"Don't trouble yourself, Ma-Ma," said Sissy, feeling ashamed of her deceit.
"I'll thank you to mind your own business," snapped the old lady. "Where's Daisy traipsed off to now," she added.
As it wasn't really a question, no one answered, but again Sissy was reprieved. At some crossroads in her mother's mind Sissy and Colin stood close together in each other's arms. It was with Colin she had become an adulteress; it was for Colin she wore the letter A that Ma-Ma visualized on her bosom.
"Paula," said the old lady, determined to converse, "what are you up to tonight?"
"Nothing much, Granny."
"I asked you a civil question and I expect a civil answer," Granny quoted from way back.
"But I'm just going to the movies with some friends, Granny."
"Who is he?" said the old lady, her mind still on the opposite sex.
"I really don't know," said Paula, patiently. "Frances' brother is home; it's a blind date."
"Poor dear," said Granny without any feeling. "I see better'n I ever did."
"Well," said Lamby to her sister on the porch, "an elephant never forgets."
If only Sissy could, but it was not to be expected with that Colin, the memory of whom, which she did not fight too hard against, still thrilled her. Her short and passionate mutiny, if that was it, against domesticity and trivialia and the unconditional devotion of a good man, her husband, had created almost, Colin. A business acquaintance of his, a fellow commuter, he had been right there all along but Sissy had not felt the need of him. She had listened out of inertia and a sort of bred-in politeness and with some distaste to his wife's dangling confidences and opaque criticisms. Sissy distinctly felt that the whole thing was in frightfully bad taste, not so much Colin's philandering which was none of her business, but the discontented and pouting wife's discussion, at all, of her mate. Sissy knew that her own husband, good and intelligent as he was in an uncontroversial way, irritated her a little at times, but to discuss one's husband with another woman she felt to be at least common and really disloyal. Even after her affair with Colin she did not feel disloyal or mean, whereas the other woman's betrayal seemed to her unforgivable, treasonable and disgusting. Her only remorse, which was not exactly remorse, it might be called a dissatisfaction with herself, was a conjectural uneasiness without definitive subject matter. Could she have held Colin? Sissy had never the least bit doubted, or lacked confidence in, herself, her woman self, before. The memory of what she had no way of solving or proving to herself tagged along after her at intervals and spoiled a little the moving beauty of a love that was so inexpedient and selfish like a diamond; something that could not be deducted, could not be "used," unmotivated, unrewarding. Convenience did not enter into it, it had taken courage, too; it was lovely....
While Lamby had been born with a sheaf of black hair down her back, disgusting her mother, frightening her a little (a monster?), and sported to this day a line of feathery hair etched down the center of her belly like the boys, Sissy was without doubt a female from the start. From the word go-she had; and Maisie aided and abetted her wholesome femininity. Lamby's undernourished womb, from the beginning, had long since shriveled and dried up, but as long as she could remember she had felt the disquieting pain, the gnawing physical frustration of an everlasting menopause, and had screamed, as a girl, with crampy pains that didn't make sense, the clenched fists of abortive and decimated, impoverished womanhood, poor thing, non sum qualis eram-born too soon, of a long line of conventionals who drew with a heavy pencil a line that did not deviate, between the sexes. Talents built on similar frustrations as hers were not encouraged, or considered by Lamby herself; Lamby didn't want votes for women, or a career, or even free will; Congress did not beckon. As has been pointed out, she wanted only what she wanted and went so far as to shop for secondary sex characteristics in the better shops and seek for an ecstasy in the fiery oblivion she kept on a shelf. No one can say she did not try or that she gave up easily.
But Sissy, purely female from birth, couldn't help herself, and without any effort flourished like a young willow that thinks with its roots and wins prizes with its foliage. Think of the infinite way-backness and uncountable parental and ancestral traits that heaped up to produce at long last, side by side, out of the very same womb, sisters in name only. (For the skeptical, Maisie's adultery had preceded by a number of years the conception of these twain.)
As adolescents, the bloodcurdling rows of Sissy and Lamby had shaken the foundations. The wallpaper curled as if in anguish, little bits of plaster piled up in the corners, the dogs fled, their tails between their legs, the premises, the cats arched their backs and spat sideways. Ma-Ma had trembled and the old man paled- what in Heaven's name had he begot at last! And he felt his years.
And Sissy spit at her, her cheeks flaming and her blue eyes black, and shooting sparks. "Old maid!" she yelled.
Then Lamby would let out a shriek and rush to her room and, with a pencil stub picked up at random, write the four-letter word she had heard the cook use when she burned her finger, all over the portrait of Sissy, hand-painted, that Ma-Ma had hung in her room until the lead was shattered, and she herself relieved; next day to wash it off in fear. And then the sweet face with cheeks like peppermint candy and wheat-yellow curls would have its respite and Sissy herself after a long innocent sleep would resemble it again in the morning. But Sissy, blonde as an egg and good as the gold that made her look golden, was the one who topped both the cook and Lamby with an expression written in rounded characters that she slipped under her sister's door, after such a scene as has been described, for her to find in the morning. Premeditated, knowing its effect on Lamby, it was each time a continuous Chinese torture rather than a coup de grace, and a sin. All the venous impure blood in Lamby's system would climb into her head and her ears ached with it; her eyes became bloodshot with its overflow and her narrow face, suffused with it, turned almost black. It was Sissy's sin but Lamby did the blushing. It was Lamby's shame. That Lamby was evil, then, and Sissy innocent seems to be it, but whether it is true or merely apparent does not even remain to be seen because that is the way it always was and that is the way it would stay. Lamby had a knowledge without being told, of evil, sensed very well what the phrase meant. Sissy didn't and never really would. "Love me," she said and meant it. What her beaux, her husband, Colin thought, is aside the point and bestride the problem. That Sissy seemed to seduce easily is part and parcel of her, what one might rightly call innocence. "Love me," she said and love is all she saw shining out of her lovers' eyes and all she felt, followed by no shame whatever, ever. She was without the necessary knowledge of evil, clinching it, that cannot be taught and cannot be acquired; and Lamby, in her solitary room, next door, not exactly frigid, but certainly impotent, a female babilano, born with original sin imprinted in her plasmic conscience, suffered doubly, for herself, and vicariously, it seemed, or really and truly, for the sloe-eyed, rose-cheeked sister who would never really know what guilt was, like Chloe, little love.
Well, could she have held Colin? It was the only doubt in her love life. After she created him it had been easy to love him and she gave him an accumulation of dreams that had been building up in her like a sweet sap that was ready to be tapped. Colin was ready because that was his state of mind as regards pretty women. He knew from experience that a voluptuary lay only partially sleeping in Sissy but he also knew in this instance that it should not be startled and could not be gradually seduced with goodies. He was sure that Sissy did not give him a thought, scarcely knew he existed, which was true, and would snub him good if he laid a hand on her or whispered in her ear. But he was tired of pretty Mrs. S --, and in looking about for something else halfheartedly, saw no one that he couldn't have and no one that he wanted enough to go all over it again, the future assured, the end in sight, and tears. Myra S--, really pretty, was indiscreet and was capable of making scenes. He was so fed up with her deep and moony stares, her little attentions under the card table, as it were, that he would have liked to strangle her. No woman ever really repelled him but stupid women irritated his nerves after the event and their clinging fingers and obvious everlasting built-in desire cooled him off for good. He would have liked to insult Mrs. S--in some physical brutish way. "Look, it's gone," he would tell her. She misunderstood his intent look as he really thought he'd do just that, and at her acknowledging smile over her two no-trump he lowered his eyes. "Look, I'm dummy. I'm going out for a smoke," he said and went outside into the shrubbery, and that's where pretty Mrs. S--, thinking it was a ruse and a rendezvous with herself, found him with Sissy after she had overbid and hastily played out her hand in spades. "I'm dummy," she said, and wasn't she.
As for Sissy, trapped in the shrubbery of her own free will, the time had come; it looked like infidelity) her marriage vows a scrap of paper, sealing her infamy with a kiss, but she had simply been punctual at a meeting prerequisite to an adultery which she did not plan but which she would commit. She was not predatory, neither was she callous, but she was impartial, as has been said, and as to be impartial in its big sense is to be virtuous, Sissy, although we cannot call her immaculate, virginibus, puerisqtie, neither should we "sing Miserere" or "cry peccavi"; she didn't, and wouldn't. Let Lamby, befogged with liquor and lecherous yearnings, misbegotten, weep.
Sissy smiled.
If she had been aware of the assignation and its significance she might have said, "It is exactly half past eleven, you are right on time," but she thought she had gone to the mint bed for fresh late mint, cold and stunted but aromatic, for some juleps. She even, in her innocence, was longing for the little party at her house to break up so that she could go to bed (alone).
"Sissy."
"Colin."
He knew better than to wait a split second. The pomegranate that had gleamed on a limb too high for him to reach, shivered and fell away from its meager branch and fell into his outstretched hands. The sensualist, the carpet knight, the crapulous, held in his arms the woman he had not dared even dream of possessing and, lazy, had not planned to seduce. He moved his big hands over her responsive body gently, so gently, as if she might break, and waited for her to lift up her mouth. When she did he took her lips inside his own with a genuine sob. Completely off his guard with the purity of his real desire, tears jumped into his eyes, his vocal cords thickened and shortened, he could not speak, and he clung to her sweet wet mouth as if, starving, he sucked at his mother's breast. He felt his knees as weak as water and it was Sissy whose loins supported his. The moment, that was after all a moment only, disengaged itself from time and stood still. Neither spoke, neither advanced or retreated, the intimate pose of love looked like a white statue in the park, a bent and tender head, a raised and rapturous face. The long and ardent columnlike legs, the balance of perfection, the ease and grace of an anonymous and wordless architecture built itself up in that moment from what seemed like nothing but it was, wasn't it, an idea, a concentration, the stuff that builds pyramids. Unworthy as Colin was, he shared in this handsome performance, and a pure white heat, perhaps, burnt up any impurities in the mixture.
Sissy, being a woman, clung to the precious illusion, but Colin knew, as he returned to the house, even before he met Myra's eyes, that he had been fooled. He felt as if he had been lifted out of a magician's hat by the ears and exposed to ridicule, a wet and slinky, pink-eyed rabbit.
Away from Sissy, he reverted to type and imagined snares, laid delusions and set a score of booby traps to catch her, but he needn't have. She was right there. Still he believed she was inaccessible and made plans to seduce her; he needed it that way. Bored as he was with the usual thing, almost sick of victory, he nevertheless, from habit, or because he thought, and was proud of it, that he had the formula and it was a shame to waste it, determined to pursue and possess a virtuous woman, Sissy, and retire. Yes, he meant just that, retire.
The memory of what Sissy did to him in that moment stung him. The hunter had been succored by the hunted, his wounds licked. The woman had been happy without him. He had seen the rapt look that he had not anticipated, that he had not really, he himself, induced, and it was as if, in his terrible vanity, he felt that the woman, the special woman, had done it to herself, and he was not far from wrong.
Overcome, unprepared, abashed at true love staring him in the face, the philanderer, the make-believe lover, the fornicator, was in that brief encounter unmanned in the shrubbery, impotent as a fish, and Sissy hadn't even noticed it!
Well, wasn't Sissy the silly thing.
Colin, ashamed of his love that had smote him from behind, as it were, when he wasn't looking, and humiliated by his momentary loss of virility in the loving embrace of a good woman, returned to Myra and without any palaver or baby talk readjusted himself, one might say, temporarily. Not having read anything much, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal, a lot of silly and sometimes pathetic, sometimes threatening, love letters addressed to himself, and maybe when he was a boy, A Tale of Two Cities, and without insight, Colin didn't know that cohabiting with Myra wouldn't affect his love for Sissy; a man of action has to find things out the hard way.
So he returned almost at once to her and she expected him, did not imagine that he was suffering or suspect him of infidelity to herself.
And at last in her arms he gave her, made her, that which had been written, it looked as if, beforehand; but not, strictly speaking, of his own accord! Furious at himself for this "boy's love," this integrated serious thing, this sentiment, for Sissy, this tenderness and transport that unnerved him, he tried hard to break away from it, return to what he thought of as the male prerogative, his dynastic rights, almost, his pashalic bumbledom. He felt, it is true, like a woman in Sissy's embrace, seduced each time by an Amazon who took his sword away and swooningly fell upon it, depriving him at the same time of his only weapon and his manhood. He hated her happiness and his own-unprovoked -as if he dreamed it. He was really a misogynist, hater of women. Sissy spoiled his percentage and his average.
But he stopped seeing Myra, avoided her as if she were poison now, instead of the antidote he imagined she would be. Smitten, lovesick, he hung on the lips of Dido, some spell, some witchcraft reversing that sublime and simple vision, "Dido hanging on the lips of Aeneas." He was Sissy's captive, and so she returned to her family and almost drove the knave of hearts mad with her queenship, her not-thereness. Knowing that the formula was obsolete, he was indeed lost. Should he wait everlastingly in the shrubbery? That he was incapable of.
When Colin's wife came to tell Sissy that they were moving to Minneapolis, Sissy wasn't listening. Dreaming of Colin, remembering the feel of her body in his arms like a silver fork in its mold, she was letting reality slide, to Sissy there was such a thing as too much and she was taking a rest from Colin in order, too, to watch him in her mind's eye, go over the past thrills, anticipate the future ones, because she was all woman really, no single-breasted Amazon at all; Colin's imaginings, if she had known them, would make her laugh, "Silly Colin!"
Weeks later Sissy woke up and realized he was gone. "Why didn't somebody tell me?" Still she didn't fret overmuch or take on or get panicky, and gradually he receded in her memories, leaving that doubt, reinforced, but not much, by pretty Mrs. S--'s gossip, "I don't know the woman who could hold Colin," and maybe she was right. Sissy, pregnant again, with Maggie, was content, it was the thing she did best, and in her mind there was no connection between childbearing and passion. Not that she did not know, if she was asked, that one was the cause of the other, but she voluntarily separated big things, perhaps to enjoy them more, concentrate on each, and her perseverance amounted to real talent. Just as Maisie, there is no way of knowing whether for the same reason, never asked herself any questions of who begot whom, neither did Sissy; they were her babies, each one a kind of, if not virgin, vestal birth. If one day she should take up the study of morals, she would do a good job on it and not weaken her thesis by a too personal approach. In a way she was a thinker but without portfolio; you wouldn't guess it. Sissy, contented, didn't fret, serene, didn't, like a young and confident wife, wonder now she had him how to hold him; the suspicion that she hadn't, and could she have, came much later when he wasn't available. She might, indeed, not even have wanted him if she had had to devise ways and means, you know, like "See what a good cook I am," no curl-papers, feminine hygiene. What she didn't count on, or not count on, was Colin's easy give-up point. Colin wasn't a poet, he was at heart, to mix a metaphor, a fornicator. He did love Sissy, but he didn't like it and even if he did (like it) he was just a male and couldn't wait. Well, he was stupid.
Sissy didn't wonder, after Colin, why she wanted a room of her own, she just did. She wasn't fussy but gradually her husband's absent-minded habits, no offense intended, made her blush, at least raised the hair on the back of her neck. Sissy's husband, insensitive, undressed himself with a bang and left his trousers in a lump; vaguely eyeing his nudity in the long mirror, he gestured to the president of the board and repeated his lines; crossing the room, his private parts idly swinging against his thighs, he embroidered his thesis, and with a "thank-you-have-I-made-myself-clear-gentlemen" he did not close the door in the bathroom. So Sissy, if she had been a reader of books, preferred a room of her own to a room with a view. It didn't mean a bit that she didn't love him. She loved him just as much as ever and Colin was almost out of her blood. It had been an acute attack and was about over, but it left her, as we have said, with a stutter, a slight limp, as it were, a myopia as she gazed inward... "Could I have...?"
A note from Myra in the morning's mail said, Colin is dead, and it ended in the he she would, being like that, eventually, perhaps already, believe, of course we were just good friends. Sissy had long since, without questioning herself, moved back into her husband's room and didn't mind any more his behaviorism. After Maggie and then, a little later, Janey, God laid his hand on her and said, "Enough," and a gentle dose of the menopause put an end to her greatest talent, the thing she did best, and Sissy, rested, bloomed.
Colin is dead, the letter said.
"Sissy, what are you staring at?" said the old lady.
"Colin is dead," said Sissy out loud.
"Colin... Colin... never heard of him."
"He was," said Sissy, "a friend of mine," but this lie, this implied lie, equivocation at least, made her frown, she wanted to get away from Myra, the Myras, all of them. "I mean, Ma-Ma," and she looked steadily at the old lady, "I loved him." She meant the act itself.
Maisie, apperceptive from fasting and a minimum of sleep, sensed, without any premise or logic (because she really didn't know what Sissy was talking about) the adultery that she had long ago known about, but, past the age of self-identification, thought no more of it than she did, except when the very cat outstared her, her own.
"Shucks," she said.
At news of Colin's death, the tenuous string attached, not tied around Sissy's little finger to remind her, but attached to her viscera, gave way and was absorbed. What had been a slight distortion in her character, not unattractive, disappeared and she lost something, besides Colin, for good.
"Where's Lamby, shall I have her make your toddy?" said Sissy.
"Half sea's over, three sheets in the wind," the old lady said clearly. "Tipsy as David's sow."
"Ma-Ma! How can you say such things!" (So Maisie knew!)
The old lady chuckled. "I'm not dead yet," she said. "Jelly beans," she added, fondly, "is what I like."
Janey, hopping into the room from school, heard the last words of the old lady. "Me, too, slurp, slurp!" she said. "Where's Grant's tomb, Granny?"
"Humph," said the old lady, not following.
"Did you know President Grant, Granny?"
"He spit too much is all I can say."
Janey giggled, "Ptui-ptui."
"Janey!" warned Sissy.
"Leave the child alone, she has an inquiring mind," said the old lady. "Where did you say you saw him?"
"His tomb, Granny..."
"Oh, just like him," said Granny. "Some things are better left unsaid," she added sententiously.
"Darn old homework," said Janey. "Who cares about the Boston Tea Party."
"It was rather dull," said the old lady. "I sat next to old Mrs. McDaniel... she's aged."
She met Janey's impudent stare unblinkingly and Janey must have felt the need of topping the old lady's complacency.
"Brothers and sisters have I none but that man's father is my father's son," she said, looking directly at Maisie.
"Exactly," said Maisie, not the least nonplused, but "The child is brutal," she thought, "and wishes to intimidate me."
"Oh, big deal," said Janey sarcastically, talking to some invisible one around the corner. "Ver-ry funny!"
Sissy shook her head; the codes, if that is what they were, of Maisie and Janey evaded her, but that each led a satisfactory and even sensible inner life, even as she did, she felt was true. She didn't think it out but she knew it. Paula, too, and Maggie, she believed were sane. Lamby? They all had phases. No one of them could exactly decode the other but there was a message in each. Who knows the logic of the aged, the senile, which cannot be dismissed as vagaries or aberrations, and Paula, adolescent, what motivated her and what was her explanation? Maggie, fifteen, moody and uneasy, what was her thesis and what sort of decorum did they all make together? A sedimentation test, a metabolic reading, a blood count and a cardiograph, what would it prove? Presbyopia in Maisie, anemia in Maggie, a heart murmur in Paula, premenstrual symptoms in Janey? Maybe Sissy herself, sanest of the lot now that the little piece of catgut was absorbed that had tugged at her viscera and the menopause had cured her of trying, it looked like, to people the earth (a compulsion, it seemed), had a benign tumor.
"What about Nagasaki and Hiroshima?" said Janey, continuing her quiz, wiggling and twisting.
"Fool inventors!" snorted Maisie, and "Bang! Bang! You're dead," she said pointing her trembling old finger at Janey.
"Can you tie a bowline on a bight?" Janey yelled, "Granny!"
"Janey, stop it," said Sissy, "leave your Granny alone and do your own homework, Granny's tired."
"There's one born every minute," sighed the old lady, closing her eyes.
"Janey," she said opening them again, "don't go near the well."
Janey went out in the kitchen and made herself a big peanut butter sandwich.
"You'll spoil your supper," said Deirdre.
"I'm going to jump in the well!" said Janey, her mouth full, it had just come to her and her eyes popped.
"Shame on you, you'll get your feet wet," said Deirdre, "go along with you now."
Janey, without any map, no plans, no idea of navigation, went straight to the spot where if there really was a well there it would be. The old house, a shell, a phantom, bent over like an aged crone, off center and leaning to one side, Janey had seen before and heard it called a crying shame. The bricks of the chimney had gradually crept down its roofs and heaped up on the ground and they overlapped each other as if the turning of the earth on its axis had accomplished the design and distributed them like steps; the big cellar door gaped like a wound; the glass in the windows was shattered; an old iron bedstead could be seen listing with the upstairs floor and a chamber pot with blue flowers on it stood on the rotten kitchen table; the door off its hinges hanging, as it were, by a thread. A sign said, No trespassing. No hunting. No fishing. It was a forbidden place, a rickety, dangerous booby trap and Janey's heart beat fast as she disobeyed a long-standing rule, "Keep away from the old house, it's rotten." As for the well in Granny's admonition, no one thought seriously of that, that was way back; no one even knew which side of the Mason and Dixon line it was situated and it was even considered a little hole in the old lady's tympanum by some. Lisa? Maybe. But Janey recognized the well the minute she saw it, the old lady's stories made perfectly good sense to her, and she climbed up its side sticking her sneakered toes into the crevices, and finally straddled it and looked down.
"Crisis!" she said. "It must be fifty miles deep!"
Although the top of the well was several feet across, the bottom way down there looked no bigger than a little round mirror in Paula's compact, a black mirror, but it reflected Jane's image clearly, her impudent little face, her round eyes, her saucy mouth. She raised her hand to her forehead and it did, too. "Hello!" she called down to it but it didn't answer.
"Crisis!" she said again.
She looked around her and found a stone and dropped it in. It seemed to take a long time to fall. Janey had time to wonder if it would ever reach bottom... Plunk! The dead wet sound came back up the well a good minute, she thought, after she saw the image of herself break into a hundred pieces and settle back looking like molasses in a pan.
Janey looked a funny little Narcissus staring down into the old well; she sat comfortably now, for her, on the thick cold edge of it, a three-point sitting, her bottom and one foot flat on either rounded side, her knees up, her head between them. She wore jeans and a sweater so it was easy and she stayed like that almost motionless, her curls hanging down her cheeks, for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours.
Janey's daydream, the image of herself focusing her attention, was good literature, it had a beginning, a middle and an end, it had scenery, costumes, minor characters, paragraphs, chapters, asterisks and compound sentences, it even scanned, it had a love interest, and she sat like a lotus, symbolic, atop the stinking old well....
Indispensable Janey's reign was not so much a dictatorship as a blessing and her subjects knelt before her bier and wept at her untimely end. They braided tuberoses into her hair....
A little stiff and cold, hungry, Janey wiped the tears away with the back of her hand; her heart was beating in great slow throbs and her face was flushed; a fear she could not place made her jump when an old apple fell off a nearby tree and hit the ground hard. The moment-ago princess, dressed in cloth of gold and pearls in her ears, nimbly stood up, her legs apart, over the ancient well and saw herself, a queer triangle with a tiny head, reflected in its depths. "If I were a boy," she whispered and she unzipped the fly in her jeans.
But the fear came over her, a feeling of guilt, not so much for her straddling pretense as for her long self-centered daydream that had been perfectly innocent, so lovely. These are things not easy to explain, but when she got home late for her supper she tried to act as if she had been there all along doing her homework.
"Where have you been?"
"What have you been doing?"
"Nothing," said Janey, and she blushed, "I wasn't doing anything," and her mouth felt dry for her sin, her nameless sin, her headless, legless sin like a glob of protoplasm, if she had been able to visualize it.
In the meantime, in Janey's absence, the old lady had an experience that shook her, and when Sissy came in and saw her cheeks, the color of a leaden sky, she was worried. She did not want to startle or irritate the old lady and said nothing. She went around the room straightening up, pretending to.
"Ma-Ma?"
Maisie did not answer, although her eyes were open, she was not feigning sleep.
"Would you like me to call Doctor Taylor?" Sissy suggested gently.
"Stuff and nonsense!" the old lady quickly replied. "I'm not pregnant."
Sissy, relieved, laughed; a little of the old lady's own peculiar color came back into her face. It was passing, whatever it was.
"Bumpkin," she said, "slubberdegullion, embezzler!"
The old man had got in somehow without anyone (where had Deirdre been?) seeing him or hearing him. Bunce had, in fact, Bunce, usually cross and suspicious of strangers, feebly wagged his tail and the orange and black cat had smiled. He had come into the room and sat down and looked at Maisie, a strange grin on his wrinkled face, and made a timid gesture of almost supplication. Maisie was never startled at apparitions and did not suspect at first that this old creature of skin and bone, withered and dehydrated like an insect on a pin, might be, for instance, a burglar, a madman, the radio repairer. She meant to say, thought she said (as a person in a dream says out loud different things than he is dreaming), "What can I do for you, my good man?" but she said softly, "Philip?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Landsdowne?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You've aged."
"Haven't we all, ma'am."
"You might have written!"
Maisie pouted and a young, almost flirtatious look passed over her face, lightening it.
The old man tremblingly wiped his dripping rheumy eyes with a dirty handkerchief. "Bin marchin' all day," he said. "Marchin' and marchin' and marchin', marchin' through Georgia."
"What!" said Maisie; she inspected his ragged clothes. "What uniform is that?" she said, suspicious.
"Confederate, ma'am," he said, "I'm proud to say, and I don't take no nonsense from Yankees!"
"Perhaps you did not mean to say 'Marchin' through Georgia,'" said the old lady, intent for his answer, aware that he was trapped. She forgot who he was, felt only a desire to win. But she outdistanced herself and before he could answer, as he opened his mouth to reply, she said, "Jeff Davis is the president of the Confederacy." She had meant to quiz him-"Who, my good man, is the president of the Confederacy?" she had meant to say.
"That's right," said the old man.
"What?"
"Ole Jeff, he's president all right, heard it on the radio."
"I was forgetting myself," said Maisie politely, "have you dined?"
"A cup of coffee," the old man whimpered, "a cup of coffee, if it please your majesty... the parade..."
"Parade?"
"Was long."
The old man, with an effort, got up out of the chair and pretending to shoulder a gun straightened himself and took a few marching steps.
"Just before the Battle, Mother," he quavered.
"Be seated," said Maisie, "and I'll ring for tea."
"If you could spare a dime..."
"A singular request," said Maisie haughtily. "What regiment were you in?"
"I was a bugler," said the old man cajolingly. "I was only fifteen... a dime, ma'am, from those as can spare it to a poor ole man, ol'est livin' veteran, a ole sojer who fought and died for his country... little thanks," he whined, "from the likes of pretty ladies like you." He eyed her to see the effect of his flattery.
"You may go," said the old lady. "I'll ring."
The old man didn't budge.
"Begone! I have rung," said Maisie.
The old man edged toward the door, but first he spit on the floor. "Go on an' ring, y'ole whore, ring and dingdong to yer!" He stumbled out. "Dingdong, ding-dong! Toot toot! Git off the track...." He was gone.
"Daisy!" called the old lady feebly.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Why didn't you come when I rang?"
"Ma-Ma," said Sissy, "you were dreaming."
"I shall have my Dad dismiss him for his impertinence," said the old lady with some spirit.
"Who, Ma-Ma?" said Sissy.
"That impudent groom," she said, and the whole incident, even the effect on her old blood vessels, passed away from her.
"Kitty?" she said to the cat. The cat looked out the window and said nothing; only the last inch of her tail moved irritably. Could she, too, have been misled? Who was the aged derivative, a veteran of what wars on what borders? Along what parallel had he marched? Had he been there at all? He must have been. Not with all her genius could the matriarch have figged him up out of her imagination with all the bits of this and that from the past, and then had him call her that private name to which she alone was entitled.
"I saw him," said Janey at supper.
"Who?" said Sissy. The old lady didn't look up, she was mincingly chewing her creamed chicken with her front teeth and was absorbed in what she was doing. She did not want to spill.
"The kindly old investigator, goin' along talking to himself," said Janey. "You know what?"
"Oh, must we," said Paula.
"Down boy," said Janey. "Mummy?"
"Yes, dear."
"You know my teacher, well you know what she wears around her neck? She has a gold chain and guess what? Ugh... fish again..."
"Mind your manners," said the old lady. "Think of the starving Armenians."
"Who?"
"You know who."
"Mummy?"
"Yes, dear."
"It's an eye! It really is, cross my heart and hope to die, a whole big blue gorgeous eye in glass! It's her husband's eye, he's dead, ugh!"
Janey, so cute, so normal, good-natured and lovable, like a cupcake in this family of highly seasoned fritters, you might say. Paula, though she still looked innocent, was self-convicted, Jimmy had left a scar on her ego, too; Maggie was thinking up hurdles and revenges, longing for seduction. Lamby was shortening the intervals between her "high lonesomes," Maisie exaggerating longevity while she probed into the past, even if it hurt, something compelling her, like a single-minded archeologist, to search in sealed places for proof of an existence she meanwhile ignored. The shaky aged clock hummed and ticked and rang out the passage of the irrevocable and the irretrievable, the young ones lengthening out and swelling into womanhood, the older ones just perceptibly dehydrating, shrinking a little, each in her way sublimating, compromising, not expecting too much any more. "She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes!" bawled out Janey. She saw herself in diminution, no bigger than a glittering pin, the perspective following her like a wake behind a ship. She waited for her tiny self to dip and disappear behind the horizon.
Way down deep Janey was playing the fool, perhaps, because she was lonesome, she was clowning for air, anxiety was inherent in her, she felt but could not express it, outside the pale, as it were, of family life. Her nightmares had no subject matter, like her fears they were borderless, without circumference, while Lamby, old enough to know better, had the real thing: She felt her hands closing around the old lady's throat and she woke again and again from the homicidal dream in an agonized sweat. Maggie, too, had minor night terrors, too ridiculous to count, and so she never told, never wept in her mother's arms as Janey sometimes did, because how could she explain that she was a clothespin! Janey's healthy yells, "Help, there's a dinosaur in the bathroom!" didn't presage much.
Maggie, as a little girl, normally ridiculous, thought she was adopted (illegitimate) and she didn't know how close she was to being right, as to fact, at least. At fifteen she stared at Lamby and wondered if she, too, would end up an old maid, unloved, ugly. It looked as if Maggie, if anyone, would, under just the right pressures and circumstances and air currents, make a dramatic appeal for clemency by an overemphasis of some kind, run away to something else, drain the contents of the medicine chest, or climb down into the old well, maybe, and in a trance even drown there, come home a lovely and beloved corpse then, herself peeking through the door at everyone's grief, but it was Janey who wasn't "like that," who did it.
Janey, like Alice, believed in mirrors; she suspected, without the equipment to think it out, her imagination told her, that life went on on both sides of the big mirror over the mantel and that the real one was behind it, not in front of it. People, she was willing to admit, did the same things-the way she did at the bottom of the deep black well-but it meant something else. It meant something much more dignified and beautiful and glorious; it made sense. Wasn't the sky a deeper, stranger, nicer blue and herself more precise? People had to mimic the gestures of the ones behind the mirror, even the cat, eyeing her other self as she assumed angles, knew that, but the ones back there did it for a reason, on purpose; they knew all the answers. Janey raised her arm over her head reflected in the tiny pool but a split second after the image. "I don't want to do that but I've got to because you did," she hollered down the well. She stuck out her tongue. "You made me," she cried, and a murmur and a trickle and a whisper did not deny it.
Analogically, too, we should consider, even reflect, on Paula: Hadn't Paula thoughtlessly (but impelled!) reflected the old lady in her blue silk gown and come to grief from some error in timing, maybe, in Jimmy's arms (you little whore! how it stung her), but no wound had been inflicted on Maisie who knew what she was doing "back there" in Ferris' embrace and the nasty word had thrilled her, Ferris become her subject.
And Janey had to mimic on this side of life what Lisa did on that. She had all the details from Granny, hadn't she, but something didn't click or fit, she didn't really know what she was doing. Lisa did and smiled adorably out of the blue velvet frame. (Love me, kiss me.)
"Lisa!" called Janey. "Who am I?"
The old lady had forgotten why Janey shouldn't go near the well, she just kept on saying it, the way the rest of us say, "Don't point." Why? Well, this is hardly the time to go into that: the evil eye, the hex, the spit an' image stuck with pins to induce and hurry up the demise of one's enemy. Don't point, don't cast that spell, and gradually a hidden reference is all that is left: Don't point. The reason is forgotten, buried deep in the ancestral what-for and it's just plain bad manners. And Granny's "don't go near the well," with Lisa long since dead and twice obliterated in her old mind, is nothing much. That it seemed a presentiment after the fact can only be ridiculous, in the very language itself....
"Tell me about the olden days," said Janey.
The old lady smiled.
"'You ain't got no yeller calico?' 'Who says I ain't got no yeller calico?' 'I ain't says you got no yeller calico-I asks you, is you!'"
Janey rolled her eyes and followed the funny joky story out of Granny's past. "I'sa comin' though my haid is bandy leo," she caroled and Granny tapped her foot.
But Janey, very young, came back to the point.
"What really happened to Lisa, Granny, honest and truly, cross your heart and hope to die."
"Bessie?" said the old lady looking directly at Janey who resembled no one at all, and wondered who she was.
"No, Lisa."
"Don't catechize me," said Granny querulously, "I've work to do."
"I've been workin' on the railroad, all-the-live-long-day," sang Janey and the old lady hummed the tune, too, in her head.
"Well, toodle-loo," said Janey, politely, "sleep tight."
The old lady had already closed her eyes. "Tell them," she murmured, "that I am not at home."
"Did you call, ma'am?" said Deirdre at the door.
The old lady jumped. "Land sakes, child!" she said.
"Would you like anything?"
"If Mrs. Wharton calls again with Mr. James, tell them I am not at home," said the old lady.
"Yes, ma'am," said Deirdre tactfully. "Saints preserve us," she said in the kitchen and crossed herself, "she's touched."
Corybantic maybe she was, Maisie, but she spent a pleasant half hour planning the menus for the little men of distinction who would be home from New Haven for the holidays, and wrote a spirited letter to The New York Times of the disgrace to all of Lobby Prison where she said her husband's two brothers were still incarcerated although the war was over. "My heart bleeds," she wrote, "as do the hearts of sisters throughout the civilized world, for this unprecedented abomination in the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ and I trust, Mr. President, that you will make it your bounden duty to rectify it, at once. I am, Sirs, yours in Jesus Christ, May Sparehawk Herbert, deceased." Maisie wrote her letters on invisible foolscap, one might say, and posted them in hollow imaginary trees, but she enjoyed writing them, nevertheless, and no harm done. The letter finished and signed with her distinguished name, she felt again around her neck the thin arms of the little simian, Bessie.
"May I, may I? Please, Ma-Ma, dear?"
"What, Bessie?"
"Sleep with you know who?"
"Dodge?"
"No, Ma-Ma."
"Dougherty?"
"May I? Yes, yes, Ma-Ma?"
Maisie couldn't remember why she had not let Bessie sleep with the boys but there had been a reason once and it must have been a good one. But Bessie's sweet teasing raised the corners now of her purple lips and, scarcely breathing, so close, in her eleventh hour, to death that she resembled it, she passed from dreaming easily into a light sleep.
"Ma'am?"
"Go 'way, child," said the old lady fretfully, hunching her shoulders. "Begone!" she said and opened her eyes, startled. She stared at Deirdre. Who could she be? "You should have had yourself announced, miss," she said, "and I am not at home to strangers."
"I'm Daisy, ma'am, and..."
"Of course, of course," said the old lady, "as if I didn't know. What is it now, am I to have no peace this day!"
"Captain Ratcliffe to see you, ma'am."
"I said I was not..." began the old lady cantankerously, "what was that?"
"Captain Ratcliffe, ma'am, to see you."
The old lady struggled a moment with her doubts, what interchange of state might this be, was the girl making fun of her?
"Show him in," she said, narrowing her eyes. (She might have said, "I'll see your hand, lay your cards on the table.")
As "Daisy" disappeared for a moment, the old lady snorted. "Now we'll see if that little bog-hopper can produce Captain Ratcliffe," she thought. Things had never taken such a turn before and she had better put a stop to it before it got out of bounds. Suppose Janey were to come home on the arm of Edmund Burke! Ridiculous ghosts! (She meant the live ones.) She felt jealous. "He might have let me know," she growled. "Well..."
"How do you do, ma'am," said a tall and prepossessing young man. He seemed a little shy and did not at once come forward. He smiled, the engaging smile of the very young; he meant it.
"You're taller than I thought you were," said the old lady, immediately accepting him, and touched by his youth and his candid gaze-this was no trick, "and the image of your mother; come, sir, and sit beside me; did you have a stormy passage? Do sit down, you must be tired, dear boy."
"It was nothing," said the young marine, modestly.
"Don't believe him, Granny!" called out Paula coming into the room. "He was the bravest of all. I'm sorry I'm late, Ian, dear. I was baby-sitting."
"Paula, mind your manners and keep your thoughts to yourself!" said the old lady irritated almost beyond endurance by this interruption. "This is Captain Ratcliffe, an old friend of my grandfather's on such and such a side." For the moment, in her annoyance, she forgot that she was his lineal descendant.
"But Granny, I brought him to introduce him to you," said Paula, tactless and happy.
The old lady gave a great "Humph."
"Of course, Granny," said Paula, suddenly realizing the old lady's delusion, "I knew he was your cousin... we're all cousins Ian says."
"I should hope so," said Granny, "I should hope so." She felt better, but the big moment had passed; she tried to regain it. "And Captain John Smith," she said, "he is well? The reprobate, fancy his lying like that... What mischief has he been up to now?"
Paula blushed for her Granny's lunacy, but her young marine smiled gently at the old lady and said, "I don't think he's such a liar, Mrs. Herbert, it has been more or less proved that Pocahontas saved his life."
"You may be right," said the old lady, "it's been a long time, quite a spell."
"Cannibalism," said Ian, his eyes shining, his white teeth glistening, "is one of the unfortunate aftermaths of-well-extreme hunger, if you know what I mean."
"Oh, Ian darling! You're hungry!" Paula jumped up.
"Stand down, Paula," said the old lady, the parliamentary language suiting her mood, she meant it.
"I mean cannibalism in Virginia," said Ian, staring in fascination at Paula's Granny.
"Naturally," said Granny.
"Lord So and So," said Ian, "perhaps you have heard, was himself burned at the stake when it became known that he had-well-ate, I mean eaten, his wife. She was a blonde," he improvised, and he smiled so adorably that both the old lady and the young girl wanted to suckle him. "White meat," he said softly.
"I beg your pardon, Captain," said the old lady, "but my grandfather told me that only Yankees ate each other, I doubt very much..."
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I have just come from a picnic on the St. James and the colonists cooked an Indian..."
"That's different," said the old lady.
"I, myself, prefer blondes," said Ian, looking at Paula. "I like to eat them up." He said this last very low and the old lady became suspicious.
"What are you saying?" she said.
"Granny, dear," said Paula, very pink, "Ian and I are engaged."
"What?"
"We're engaged."
The old lady sighed. "Well, don't overdo it," she said. She raised her hand, and Ian, a nice boy really, and delighted with his new relative, bent his head and kissed it. "I hope I may come again and talk," he said. "May I?"
"Indeed you may, dear," said the old lady. She was almost touched. "Watch out for the redskins, cousin!" She felt as if it was, and yet wasn't, a little joke, and Paula and Ian didn't know either.
Bunce thumped his old balding tail twice, energetically for him, as Ian left, and the cat, who had been audibly washing herself all over, between her legs and behind her ears, during the visit, suddenly leapt off the mantel and skidded sideways in front of him in a bid for his attention as if she wished to prove that she was just as crazy as the old lady.
Well, Paula's blind date had indeed materialized (he saw with his twenty-twenty vision a lot more than most young men) and they planned to marry.
"If she ever finds out you're laughing at her!" said Paula.
"But I'm not. I wasn't," said Ian. "I like the old girl, she-she fascinates me. She's an original." He looked at Paula and an uneasy thought came to him-where had he seen Paula before? In Paris on the boulevard St. Germain? In Essex on a horse? In Amsterdam- that pink buxom Dutch girl? He remembered a nurse who had washed him and tended to his needs and when he was healed slept with him-how many Paulas? But he wanted and needed a Paula. "Come here, Paula."
"Ian?" Paula had seen the expression, an expression of doubt, almost as if he wanted to run, on her lover's face, and the old scar hurt. She wanted to be comforted at her sudden loss of confidence but she was afraid he might think... what who thought...
"Baby doll," he murmured and he kissed and licked up her tears. "You're a sweet thing."
"But not an original," said Paula archly, she couldn't help it.
"God damn," said Ian to himself, "how stupid she is!" but he felt so badly that he had thought what he did not wish to think that he said, "God knows I love you, Paula, don't ever leave me," and he did, as he said it, mean it, he needed her.
"I love you, Ian," said Paula, "how sweet you look in your uniform," and she put her hands on his waist and felt him; what she meant was, "I desire your body"; she wasn't stupid. The English girl had linked her arm in his and pressed her wrist into his hand; "Amedican?" she had said. And the Dutch girl had said, "Bruder?" and thought, "Do it to me"; the girl on the boulevard had said, "It is sharming day, no?" and he had gone home with her. The nurse, without any fooling, had said, "You're well now and can go back the doctor says. You may sleep with me tonight if you like but be sure, to bring--." He censored the nurse as he put his arms around Paula.
"Show me your room, sweet," he said.
"Oh, Ian, no."
"Well, what's in here then," he said and he pushed her gently into the first door on the left. "Come," he said and he eased her willingly enough down beside him. He kissed her mouth and it swelled up and opened for him; he felt each round breast respond, too. He stroked her legs, her smooth thighs.
"Ahhh," said Paula, breaking away from the kiss that was building up into a rhythm in her blood, and again, really this time, he caressed her.
Sure of her, he let go of her, and Paula felt as if she had been pushed off a balcony. Really as if she were falling, she clung around his neck, big tears came out of her eyes and she gave a gulping little sob.
"You are adorable," said Ian, and she really was.
Her passion that had leaped at the feel of his hands and the pull of his mouth on her underlip left her quickly as he disengaged himself, and she stared at him, going back over it in her mind, visualizing what they had looked like together, and her soft and lovely face was such a deep rose that, as the setting sun shone in on it through the window, she looked like a memorial in a church. The light reduced the pupils in her eyes to the size of the head of a jet-black pin and the china blue around them seemed divided in a design like the spokes in a wheel. The pupils grew and diminished, almost, as she breathed.
Ian admired her and knew she was his and was glad. "It will be even better when we are married," he said.
"Yes," said Paula and she saw herself pouring his coffee, thought of, having his babies, "yes, Ian, won't it be wonderful."
Ian saw her naked in his bed and longed for the deep and precious sleep that would be also his... afterwards. Paula would someday ask him why. That terrible oneness that comes over a man, that quick and sudden loss of conflict, so that he is blacked out, becomes no one, with no identity (and he loves it!), that disengagement, she never would understand and might even resent. It's just one of those secrets. Didn't she have hers? She did, but she didn't know it. But wouldn't Ian wonder, too, and think, "Where is she? What is it? What is she keeping from me?" As for his own dark invisibility, nonexistence and nonresistance after the fact, "Sure, what of it?"
The whole family of women loved Ian as if he were a valentine, and each, with the exception of Sissy, felt his physical appeal, his manliness coupled with a winning almost feminine something or other, that made him more than a differentiation of sex and in Paula's case a breadwinner and a satisfaction, later, to her senses every so often-made him an exception, a partner. Sissy looked at Ian and sensed but did not feel, understood but did not partake of, his-sex. It was as if she had, and she had, outgrown him. His youngness did not charm her or weaken her, possibly because her maternal instinct was more than satisfied, it was busy as could be. She recognized in Ian a fine healthy animal with longings, perhaps, beyond his comprehension, but sane, trustworthy, and she was quite content to let him have Paula; she, herself, felt nothing and was glad of it; he was young and warm and damp. Her appraisal was disinterested.
"Your mother is very attractive," said Ian.
"Yes," said Paula, "I'm glad you think so," but she wasn't, she was jealous; even Paula, pretty as could be, was jealous. It was as if Ian had been dropped naked and shining into a savage village of deserted females, their men all gone off to war.
Janey climbed all over him and immodestly straddled him, punched him, wrapped her arms around his legs, pinched and tickled him, nearly swooned with pleasure from a pickaback ride. Every look she gave him was an invitation to lust, straight and simple and pure as a blood transfusion. But if any of the others (what about Ian?) recognized in her cavortings and proddings and pokings the mating instinct of the very young, no one said anything.
"Get off Ian," is all Paula said, "you're mussing him all up."
"Janey, do behave," said Sissy, but that's just what Janey was doing-behaving.
Maggie! Maggie was a parcel of puzzles, a secret mixture, a longing bride of sin, almost, itself, complicated beyond solution, and a variety of moods not even in the books. Her dark eyes brooded on something unmentionable; the taste of blood, her own, was in her mouth and did not sicken her. Was she born possibly in that marsh, that Cephesian marsh, the scene of man's birth according to Pindar, that cat-o'-nine-tails made her blush? Or did Tiki knead her out of red clay mixed with his own blood (New Zealand myth), the incestuous taste lingering on her tongue? Maggie, in a kind of catopsis which was more than perspicacity, knew she was different (illegitimate), dark and stormy like a squall. She longed for an orgasm that would tear her to pieces and cast her into everlasting hell. She longed to drink to the last drop her own sinful blood.... Her shyness was devastating, and Ian felt it. He watched her when she wasn't looking. He saw beneath her sad looks and veiled eyes-danger. He watched her hands when she grasped a doorknob and he shivered.
Ian had been graduated, not with honors, but with regret, by the university which hated to let him go, a healthy, intelligent white man, unique, they felt, in the lot of introspective neurotics, not hale fellow and not well met, whose pigmy libidos longed to return to the maternal womb, uterine brothers all, a fine state of affairs, their names writ in water on the parchment of their diplomas and the university running out of pap and pabulum for such as they. "We're little black sheep who have gone astray-baaa-baaa-baaa."
But the Army and the Navy and the Marines noticed the same thing and they snatched him and tossed him in the flames, as they used the most beautiful maidens to propitiate the vine. They gladly chanced the total sacrifice of Ian and said, "We wish there were more of them." So Ian became a leader of men and he kissed them good-by and wrote home to their mothers; he helped to bury them on the sides of the mountain. But an anger built up in him and the fasting and the enforced insomnia and the bitter cold of the nights and the blood of his friends on his unwashed shirts fed and fattened his slow-burning fury. It went on and on and a kind of lust took hold of him. In his leanness and his hunger he longed for strange food like a pregnant woman; he visualized indecent sandwiches and bitter drinks; and by the light of a single candle he made symbolic drawings that might have decorated the caves of Icelandic wild men fed on tallow alone and blubber. He forgot his home, the campus, his girl, and no longer opened his mail. Then they shot him in the guts where it hurt and hurried him off to save him, gave him a medal and back pay and two weeks in a hospital where the medics tenderly lifted out his insides and put them on a table and examined the coils thoroughly. They sewed him up and left him with the pretty, candid nurse who called his attention to his handsome body and explained, almost pedantically, its possibilities and potentialities. After this real catharsis, this complete examination in the nude, this lesson in reality that matched his maddest and most sickening dreams, it was time to go home and kiss his mother and sisters, shake hands with his father and take his girl to the drugstore for a soda. But the nurse who had smelled more of Lysol than Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass that she used when she was off duty had clinically spoiled him for holding hands with a virgin, and Dad and Mom could wait, so he went to Paris and other capitals that he had read about, until his money gave out, and then with little gifts for his folks and his medal in a box, he left his real life behind and sailed in a slow boat for home. The slower, the better, he was not eager to return. He was surprised to find that when he looked in the mirror over his dresser, he looked exactly the same as when he had left, as if the image had waited for him to return, hadn't budged. "It must be Mom's doing." It was true she had preserved him, him and his belongings and his paraphernalia: "Don't touch anything in Ian's room," she had warned his sisters. "Everything must remain the same," and it seemed to have, even himself. The eyes were as blue-black and clear and bright, the skin warm and smooth, his short brown hair was not touched with grey and his mouth was not grim, but soft and quick to smile as a girl's. He shrugged, mystified, at the young lad in the mirror and his parents said at dinner, "You haven't changed a bit," and, "Of course, Ian's just the same."
He need not face his girl because, as his sister gently told him, she had not waited for him, and the same night he got home he was the blind date that Paula had told Maisie about. "Nothing much," she had said, "I'm just going to the movies"; and now these two planned to marry, and blissfully, night after night, they caressed each other and whispered and anticipated the real thing, popping it up and practicing for perfection. Neither told the other a thing of the wounds each had endured, Paula possibly because at last she had the specific medication, now, that she needed and was healed, and Ian because his mother had, with her powerful maternal concentration, preserved him. It did not enter Ian's consciousness to seduce Paula; he played to his heart's content and she did, too, but he could wait, in this case, as if, oddly enough, it was a negative compulsion, and Paula's maidenhead was as safe as if it were up in her bureau drawer in a silver box with a sapphire on the lid.
But one night when they lay together, Ian looked over Paula's forehead and saw Maggie standing in the doorway, her finger on her lips. Her eyes were like the opaque deep darkness in a shotgun barrel, matching the blackness of the hall behind her. Everyone had long since gone to bed. For some reason Ian did not speak or get up or change the subject; if anything he intensified his caresses and Paula sighed in his arms. Ian let Maggie watch and it heightened his pleasure in her sister. It looked as if Maggie wasn't good for Ian, the sweet Ian who loved Paula, a bit. Maggie wouldn't be good for lots of people, a whole list of them was written down somewhere on a ledger, in a little notebook, too, with what looked like blank pages in Maggie's little-girl desk. Dear Diary...
"I love him!" said Maggie, alone in her room, staring into her mirror. "I love him! What does Paula know of love... as I know of love..." and she looked into a dark and yearning face that had written across it in big letters, unknown. And she did belong to that unclassified minority, one of those dead-end souls, almost, but embodied, deathless; like the "new"
"old" fish-mammal a fisherman off Madagascar hooked the other day and got his reward, too, for suspending Time itself. "Its name is coelacanth," said the professor of ichthyology. But you couldn't call Maggie by any old Greek name.
"Maggie," whispered Ian, "what is the matter?"
"Nothing." Maggie wouldn't sing.
Out of the Cephesian marsh, peopled with cat-o'-nine-tails, analogous to Maggie's imaginary birth, making her different, and out of this child's perverted, it seemed, imagination, there grew, aided by frustration and inhibition and censorship, trials and tribulations, sleepless nights and naughty addenda, at last, the purest daydream imaginable: a desire for brotherly love, implicit in Ian, "Ian, my brother"; her theme: All for one and one for all, and her thesis: Democracy.
Lamby also peeked.
"Aunt Lamby," said Paula, "isn't Ian beautiful?"
"You can say that again!" said Lamby.
Paula suddenly felt sorry, love was making her generous, for her old maid aunt who would never know the bliss she felt in Ian's arms, and hugged her.
"Down, girl!" said Lamby, and she took out a cigarette but her hands trembled and right in the middle of her forehead hung a bottle like a pendulum in a clock.
"See you later," she said.
And she did. Lamby was a peeping Tom. She peeked for a vicarious thrill, no matter how anemic.
"Cousin Maisie, may I come in?"
"Cousin Ian, dear boy..."
The old Maisie and the young captain of Marines, good soldiers both, found each other excellent company and spent hours and hours together.
("You don't have to be so polite, Ian," said Paula in between times.
"She's wonderful," said Ian.)
"The old girl," as he had called her, tickled his imagination, and she did have something, something devastating, and Paula didn't have it! "How long will she last," he asked himself, meaning Paula. The war of the parallels had sharpened up his perceptions and love didn't completely anesthetize him any more. Even in Paula's arms, kissing and fondling her, "On our wedding night," he thought ahead, "I'll be thinking." In Paris and London and Amsterdam it had hit him hard on the back of the neck (after his first introductory and purely clinical coitus with the disinfected nurse), like a sharp shell from the enemy, a hit, or a hand-to-hand and mouth-to-mouth encounter, and his knees buckled under him and his head reeled, his blood pounding, his tongue curled up, and all his life, his being, his essence shot out of him leaving him like something washed up on the beach....
"What are you staring at?" said Paula, pleased at his intent look, but turning around and looking behind her. "Is somebody here?" she said for fun.
"I love you," said Ian; he wanted to say, "Save me, take me home, wash me and dry me and put me to bed," but he didn't. "Come and kiss me," he said.
"I'll eat you!" Paula said suddenly, lifting up her body to him. She opened her mouth and snapped her teeth and gave a low growl pretending she was a dog, and shook her short curls, but she had been stricken, passion had jabbed her softest and most sensitive parts; still, she laughed it off, as it were.
Ian looked at Paula's perfect face and he saw her loveliness, her charm; he noted her sweetly rounded calves and remembered the satin feel of her and... the warmth, the softness, he would really find there, the loss of consciousness, the sweet crack-up... but he compared, even in moments like these, his young and desirable and nubile beauty with "the old girl." Maisie had a mysterious and cerebral fascination for him and he cannot help the comparison that lowers his esteem but not his passion for Paula.
Maisie and Ian discuss Torts ("Hand me my Chitty on Blackstone") and the Pimlico Mystery, the Dreyfus Case, the Moat Farm Murder; when Maisie glibly recited in gory detail the monstrous slaying of "Christopher Marlow by ffrancis Archer" on the first of June, 1593, Ian topped her with his breezy recollection of the abduction and murder, two centuries earlier, of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, by Thomas Mowbray; the chief accomplice to the bloody deed that "Colfax, ful of sly iniquitee... O false mordrer, lurking in thy den!" of whom Chaucer damningly versified, to be quoted by a young marine in 1954 who majored in English at Yale University.
"Is that so," said the old lady, delighted, and not taken aback a bit by so much erudition. "Your memory is as good as mine, I do declare!" and, "Fancy them calling you 'the imbecile Captain Ratcliffe'!"
They also compared notes on the Edwardses and the Jukes; colonial history, and magic; beaten biscuits, blizzards, coaching, the carryings-on of the "Governor's Set" when the Royal Governors lavishly entertained in the South.
"I read in The New York Times..." said Ian.
"Yes? What's that?" said the old lady eagerly.
"I read that a chapel has been dedicated to Pocahontas, in England."
"The British!" sniffed the old lady.
"But isn't that nice," said Ian.
"There was no need for Mr. Rolfe to make her his wife," said Maisie, "no need whatever. The British may do as they please, but I shall not receive her here!" Excited, she reached for the bell to ring for Deirdre.
Ian gently raised his hand and took her wavering outstretched fingers; he raised them to his lips.
"Your servant, Cousin Maisie, at your service," he said.
"Dear boy..." said Maisie. "Tomorrow we shall order the trap and drive in Papa's woods..."
"Goodnight, Cousin Maisie."
"A bientot."
Just before he closed the door, she lifted her hand, palm outward. "But I cannot receive Pocahontas," she murmured.
"Certainly not," said Ian.
Outside he ran into Janey who was jealous and had caught the last words of her Granny. "Iaye inkthaye athaye anniegraye isyaye utsnaye," she said.
"'He that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell-fire,'" said Ian, and he meant it.
The old lady kept him on his toes mentally and she had a special appeal, too, that he could not place, "an old-world charm." He laughed at himself for choosing that phrase to describe her to himself. She had her Rabelaisian, her slightly bawdy side, too, an eighteenth-century humor and use of words, too, from Fielding and Sterne and Smollett. He thought of her sometimes with her hair done high, a foolish frilled cap on top of it, her bosom exposed to the nipples, a naughty sensual smile on her lips, an engraving from Love in Several Masques. She excited him... he even dreamed one night that Maisie, enticing and seductive, with a big mouth and warm legs lay on her back in the field behind his house and provoked him almost out of his senses, but he awoke with his terrible desire un-appeased. Ian was so young, how could he divorce charm from sex-well, even if he could, awake and sane, he couldn't, asleep and mad. Maisie's dotage, on the other hand, saved her from modern dreams and she persisted, besides, in fitting him into the past, rather than the present. She sometimes loathed the fawning and obsequious "ghosts" who never contradicted her and never conversed intelligently, never expressed an opinion, all of them, even Sissy, who might have amounted to something! Every one of them was loco. But Ian! Ian was a gentleman and a scholar, her sort. Her cup ran over when he spoke of his graduation from Yale College and brought her news occasionally of the boys. According to her mood, or perhaps we should say, tense, he spoke of them as being very much missed by their classmates, or doing very well indeed and sent their respects and love to Mater. Ian read out loud a crumbling letter from Maisie's treasury of old data:
Yale College
1st February, 1839
Dear Madame:
The announcement of the death of our lamented classmate has caused us to feel deeply both for ourselves and for his relatives who are deprived by this sudden blow of one so justly dear to them. Especially with yourself would we sympathise. A mother's affections are indeed strong; and when he around whom they were twined pofsefsed the amiable qualities of the deceased doubly severe must be the stroke which severs him from you.
Warm-hearted in his friendships, frank and courteous, your son had sincerely attached to him the love of those whose intimate he was. Whilst there is consolation, there is also, in a measure, additional sorrow in lingering over the memory of those kindly traits of character which belonged to him. If it will at all soothe the bitterness of grief to have companions to share it, the gloom which has overspread the clafs, while it speaks loudly of the worth of him we lament, tells you that you are not alone in your sorrow.
Whilst we would offer you the poor tribute of our tears, we rejoice in the belief that you have higher consolation in that Faith which traces in every dispensation, however grievous, the hand of God ordering all things for good. It is indeed the richest blejsing of our holy Religion that amid the trials of life we can look up to a Heavenly Father and feel that our ways are all ordered by Him.
These beautiful and touching words of inspiration, though oft quoted, have lost none of their power to still a troubled spirit; "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him-for He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men." This trust in the mercy and goodnefs of God is a solace to our woes which the Christian most dearly prizes: It gives to his being a noble character, opening to him, even on this side of the grave, a view though distant and imperfect, of the high glories of his spiritual being. With the sincere prayer that this trust may support yourself and family under your present severe affliction, we remain with every expression of sympathy,
Truly yours,
Thomas C. Yarnall
Jacob Perkins
Donald G. Michell
Committee of the Sophomore Clafs.
We subjoin the following proceedings of the clajs. At a meeting of the Sophomore clafs held Thursday, January 31st, 1839, the following resolutions were adopted.
Resolved: That, as a testimonial of respect to the memory of our late clafsmate, D. P. Sparehawk, we will wear crape on the left arm for thirty days. Resolved....
"Cousin Maisie," said Ian, looking up, "are you asleep?" The old lady's head was bowed, her lips slightly open, her bosom rose and fell gently. On the mantel the painted cat swayed, flexing and releasing her claws, two rays as if from tiny searchlights escaping between her slanting, nearly closed eyes. Bunce snored loudly without pride; all ten cushions of his paws, the nails long and curving from inactivity, pulsating, as he dreamed his dog's dream of his last run, the scent of a rabbit in his quivering nostrils. Ian did not move. He thought of all the dead young men who had painstakingly improvised the carefully written letter in his hand and he glanced at Dody in his gilded frame and at Dougherty in his who had soon followed his brother-another letter had doubtless been written, new resolves made and carried out. He thought he saw duplicate smiles on the boys' lips as if he understood them, and he carefully folded the old letter that preserved their innocence as his mother had preserved his in the mirror. "It's just as well," he said to himself.
"Cousin Maisie?"
The old lady started. "Yes, yes. Who's there!"
"Were you asleep?"
"Stuff and nonsense, you write a very good letter," she said.
Ian felt she did not recognize or remember the correspondence and repudiated its solemn contents if she did. Her sufferings were long gone, and death...
"It will all come out in the wash," she said unexpectedly.
Ian, interested in the batch of yellow letters, picked another and smiled as he read it; noting the date, he figured it had been written by Maisie's great-grand-mother. It proudly expressed mother love for a little, very little, boy, who must have grown up to be Maisie's grandfather. "Listen, Cousin Maisie," he said, thinking to amuse her after the laborious letter of sympathy and death that had sent her to sleep, "... he is a most remarkable little fellow; weighing seventeen pounds... he tries to stand and crows..."
"Pish!" exploded the old lady.
"Why, Cousin Maisie, it's your grandad!" laughed Ian.
"Beaupere!" she said. "Seventeen pounds!" She visualized for a second the lean, bareboned, hardbitten old Yankee. "Crow indeed!" she said. "Fiddle-faddle!"
Well, Maisie, fickle, was doing all right with the young man so often at her side and sometimes disposed of the boys with a wave of her hand and with a what-were-we-saying? and changed the subject when Ian said, really interested, "I'd like to meet Bessie." Maisie leaned forward and whispered loudly, "She's a bold little hussie," and when he repeated his wish, "She'll come to a bad end." It looked as if Maisie had really gone back quite a ways, grown very much younger, as these strange words placed her, for the moment, back in the old-fashioned drawing room, beside Ian as an old beau-too young not to be jealous of her sensuous, precocious and blooming daughter; a rivalry already imminent in the nursery.
Together they went over innumerable old daguerreotypes and photographs and sketches, in almost all of which Maisie figured in the foreground. There was Maisie as a little minx with hand-painted cheeks, lolling against a fur rug thrown over a chest, with pink knees, and foolish rosebud mouth, her little skirt draped across her stomach and held up to one side with a rosette. There was Maisie with her sisters and her schoolmates, and Maisie with her tutor, Maisie in her phaeton and Maisie in a sleigh, and a charming group with Maisie serving chocolate, a picnic, a white cloth was spread under a big elm, sub Jove, a la belle etoile.
"I like this one best," said Ian; he held a photograph of Maisie stretched on an intricately carved Victorian sofa, lying over against a drapery of plush; one arm was laid along the back of the sofa and from her listless hand a rose hung down on a long stem. Maisie was looking straight at the camera; a sensuous and mysterious expression in her round eyes and on her full lips was caught and held there by the camera.
"Shucks," said Maisie, "I was prettier than that."
"Impossible," said Ian, gallantly.
"You had limbs, didn't you," Ian said, smiling at her.
"Indeed I did," she said.
"Not legs?"
"Certainly not!" The old lady was amused and Ian made up a little essay on "Limbs into legs into cheesecake."
"Cheesecake? No, thank you, too heavy."
He went on to discuss the use of the razor and the depilatory in the feminine toilet while the old lady chuckled and frowned and occasionally interrupted vivaciously.
"You boldly exposed your bosoms," he said, "but never your ankles; and the voluptuous and tantalizing bustle! What an idea! Enhancing your behinds like that! And look"-he pointed at a fashion drawing out of Godey-"look how tight the skirt is drawn across the front of her, really you can't miss a thing, it's indecent!"
"Tut, tut," said the old lady.
He told about the gradual shortening of ladies' dresses until, as he put it, "they reached halfway up the thigh. Only a cummerbund might have been left, if just as suddenly they hadn't dropped again; now we have the cover-up look to tease us men, with only an occasional plunging neckline, wow!... what I don't like is ears, I prefer soup-length hair, I hate the sticky fringe pasted on girls' heads and poodle haircuts. Eeek, I hate nasty ears!"
The old lady covered her ears coyly.
"Oh, not yours, Cousin Maisie, yours are distinguished and pale and tall, but girls' ears are obscene." He pretended to shudder.
"Little sluts," said the old lady sympathetically.
The whole family wondered what in the world Maisie and Ian were doing every day for hours on end, but it seemed preposterous to suggest that the maid stay in the room with them, or that they be chaperoned in any way.
"Ian, darling," said Paula, "you forgot what we planned for this afternoon."
"But Cousin Maisie is such fun," said Ian tactlessly, quickly adding, "We have our whole life ahead of us, sweetheart, you and I."
"Yes, Ian." Paula was satisfied. But Ian wondered what Paula would be like in twenty years.
"Ian," said Paula, "Granny gets plenty of attention, she's positively spoiled by all of us. Now, Aunt Lamby -if you want to be nice-"
"Lamby?" said Ian.
"Yes, poor Aunt Lamby."
"Lamby is hot," said Ian unexpectedly.
"Ian!"
Ian had found Lamby in the pantry last night making the old lady's toddy and she had already had some of her own private supply. Ian reached across her for a glass of milk, "Whoops," he said, "I'm sorry," as she staggered a little against his side; he grasped her arm to steady her and Lamby lifted up her chin, slow-motion. She sucked in her lower lip that was rouged and raised her heavy eyelids. What Ian saw in her uncovered look startled him, but at the same time gave him an evil stimulating desire. Lamby's invitation, under different circumstances, he might well have accepted.
"The old bitch!" said Lamby huskily; "furious. "Wait!" she said to Ian, but the ecstatic impious spell was broken and Ian fled. Lamby lost her man and it was her last chance. Murder was in her mind and her throat was dry with it as she went up to her room, where she desperately wet it down again and again. Not only had she felt real desire but she had inspired it, she well knew, and the old woman had cut her off from her last hope of pleasure. In her dipsomania she imagined that she had been circumcised and curtailed, abridged, nipped forever in the feminine bud. Poor Lamby.
"Whatever do you mean," persisted Paula, "aren't you ashamed; Aunt Lamby?"
"Yes," said Ian, "Paula, my sweet, yes. You heard me." He laughed. "Witch of Endor," he said and crossed himself. "Sexy hag!" he muttered. "I'm teasing you," he said finally and Paula easily believed him. Her sexual development was a thing of nature, purely physical and a little ahead of her; her mind and imagination could not project any other image than her own lovely one, or ones very similar. That in ugliness and sterility there might he a sexual sorcery, that analogous vampires wore symbolic amulets, or that Lamby could possess, sewed in her panties, a periapt, was definitely not in her reveries; and of the male and his occult world of weird orgiastic fancies she knew nothing. That poor Aunt Lamby's unveiled look had disclosed two wells of liquid aphrodisiac to Ian was not in her ken.
"Don't tease me any more," she said.
"I won't," said Ian, "let's forget it." He wanted to.
And, as he never saw again that look, it wasn't hard to forget Lamby, and Lamby, taking deeper and deeper potions, failed to recognize Ian next morning, as it were, so he felt nothing but pity for the secret woman in Paula's aunt.
But Paula, with all her enticements and poutings, couldn't break up his affair with Maisie. He began to confide in the old lady and she listened, although she sometimes appeared to doze, to his confessions. He told her things he would not dream of telling Paula or consider repeating to his mother and sisters. He spoke to Maisie, or rather, at Maisie, as if she were an oracle, impersonal and unprejudiced and bisexual, a true hermaphrodite like that Greek one in stone, faceless, but with limp waving curls on its shoulders and male genitalia between its legs. And he conceived for the old lady that strange love for the listener. The listener who does not intrude, scarcely is there, but in whom one reburies one's guilt forever.
"Think nothing of it," said Maisie.
CHAPTER SIX
"IT'S going to pour rain," said Janey, coming in from school for lunch, "it's going to rain for weeks and weeks, cats and dogs and bucketsful, then we'll get out the ole rowboat and take along our few possessions and some hardtack. It'll be pretty awful, the flood and the waves and pouring rain, we'll probably starve." Her eyes shone with the pleasures of privation. "See!" she said, delighted, as a roll of distant out-of-season thunder seemed to corroborate her. "Boing! Man the boats, mates, and get goin'."
Janey expected a reaction from Sissy, at least a response; she needed a certain amount of emotional attention and she kept at it, but Sissy didn't even say, "Janey, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, don't be selfish, you've never been hungry"; she was staring at the door.
"Willie!" she said.
Sissy's husband stood there.
Up until now Willie had donated absolutely nothing to this little history, mostly of women, possibly because he gave so little, added such a minimum to their inner lives, worth mentioning, but his appearance now like an apparition to Sissy, unexpected and unwanted, at least out of point as to time, ghosts, forces him on our attention and we feel justified in giving him a page or two. Willie, never, in Sissy's memory, ever missed a train or let a blizzard, or as in this case, a mere northeaster, interfere with his regime. Willie always made the 8:15 in the morning and returned on the 6:20 in the evening. His appearance, then, in the doorway at 11:00 a.m. looked like a trick of Sissy's imagination, as if she had conjured him up. "I wasn't even thinking about him," she said to herself, "at least I wasn't aware of it"; a very faint feeling of guilt came over her-she had meant, one day, to tell Willie about Colin, sotto voce, because that is how she felt about Colin (sotto voce) now that he was dead: maybe this was an appointment. "Willie, what's wrong!"
Willie swayed in the doorway-no, it must be that the doorway moved-Willie unsteady!
"Sissy-" but he said it, "Thithy."
"It can't be my ears," said Sissy to herself. "Willie, you've been drinking!"
"Crisis!" said Janey. Here it came-the drama, the excitement she craved, and she sat down on the sofa and took off her boots, a front seat at Cinerama; my, how Mummy's eyes shone and Daddy was drunk as a lord!
"Leave the room, Janey!"
"A cop!" said Janey, awe-stricken; what luck!
"Like you to meet a friend of mine," said Willie, grinning sheepishly. "Shake hands with the Law," he feebly joked. It was true, a solemn-faced officer stood behind Willie in the hall, his badge reflecting the light.
"Hit 'n run?" suggested Janey tentatively, in a big whisper.
"Never felt better in ma life," said Willie. "How about another lil' drink, ole man," and he clapped the Law on the shoulder.
"Steady," said the Law.
"Ma'am," said the officer, "is this your..."
"Husband," interrupted Sissy, "yes, this is my husband."
"To have and to hold 'til death do us part," went through her head.
"He's a little under the weather," said the officer, "and I accompanied him home."
"Thank you, officer."
"A cup of black coffee, ma'am, and-well, good day, ma'am." Something on Sissy's face made him add, "A very polite gentleman, some of them get mean, an ice-bag, perhaps, well, good day, ma'am."
"Willie," said Sissy, sternly, as the man left, "go to your room!"
Willie smiled and swayed. "'Mere," he said, "give us a kiss."
"I said go to your room this instant!" She glanced at Janey, but there was no help in Willie, she was alone. "Drunk as a lord," said Janey, "drunk as a lord."
"Willie! Go!"
"Look," said Willie, his temper changing, "am I a man or a mouse!" This was it, and he trembled violently.
Tact sealed Sissy's mouth, even Janey's. In the air there was a decision to be made and they left Willie, as if they had been advised by an expert, all by himself, like a tightrope walker suspended over nothing whom no one could help. Willie made the decision: sweeping out his arm like a scythe, he swung it through the air and Sissy's best yellow glazed vase received the blow.
Janey felt the reprieve first. "Daddy!" she sang out, "there goes your allowance!"
After the hangover Willie didn't take the 8:15 and Sissy felt irritated at his presence; he followed her around, mild as ever, but with a little frown puckering his forehead. "How foolish he is," Sissy thought, "the big baby."
"Willie," she said, "you don't have to apologize again."
"All right," said Willie, but he followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He picked up the saltcellar and carefully salted the palm of his hand and licked it. He picked up the pepper mill....
"Look out," said Sissy, "that's pepper."
Willie ground some onto the table and pushed the little pile of it with his finger.
"Willie, if you've nothing to do, get me the butter."
Willie went to the icebox and opened the door. He looked absently into it and after a while Sissy said, "Please, Willie, shut the icebox door."
"Anything else?" said Willie, having produced nothing.
"Yes," said Sissy, she began to wonder about Willie's wits, "hand me a saucepan, you'll find it under the sink." Willie took out a can of Babo and read the directions carefully. He replaced it and sat down at the kitchen table again. He began to whistle softly to himself.
"Willie," said Sissy, "won't they miss you at the office?"
"Oh, no," he said. "They won't?"
"They won't miss me," he said, shaking his head. A peculiar little smile lifted one corner of his mouth.
"But you had better go tomorrow, Willie." Sissy suddenly thought, "He isn't going tomorrow either!"
"I'm not going tomorrow either," said Willie, retaining the crooked smile and looking out of the window, but his body had stiffened a little. He seemed to wait for Sissy to scream or something, was he teasing her. What in the world had come over Willie? Sissy, used to the suspenses that her children created to gain her attention, began to beat an egg. Willie watched her, and didn't follow the pattern, he didn't say, "Why do you suppose I'm not going back to the office tomorrow," or "Guess what, Mummy." He said, "Beatin' an egg?"
"Yes, I am," said Sissy.
"Well, I guess I'm in the way, if there's nothing else for me to do, I'll go down to the post office and mail a letter.
"Sissy," said Willie, coming back, "I'm sorry I got spiflicated."
"Really, Willie, please, it doesn't matter." Sissy felt a mild hysteria coming over her, but she put the mixture into the oven and carefully reduced the heat.
"Well..." said Willie.
"Yes?" Sissy looked up, it was time, just the right time, he would speak. But he didn't, it was as if he just didn't work, like a zany old clock that didn't keep time.
"I got to go, if I want to get that letter mailed," said Willie.
"Well, do you?" said Sissy a little sarcastically.
"What dear?"
"Want to get the letter mailed?"
"I had it somewhere," said Willie, slapping his pockets.
Sissy was in a deep and wholesome sleep, dreamless, when Willie woke her up, he had to shake her. "Sissy, are you awake?"
"I am now," said Sissy. "What is it?"
"Sissy, I'm a heel."
"Please, I'm sleepy, Willie."
"I just can't get over it. If you only knew how bad I feel, how sorry I am, getting drunk like that."
"For Christ's sake!" said Sissy, but she lowered her voice, she hadn't quite lost control. She blushed. Sissy never used what is called strong language. "Really!" she said. She snapped on the light. "Where are you, Willie, get back in bed." She had looked at Willie's bed, sure he was there, and was startled, he wasn't. It hadn't even been slept in. Willie stood in the center of the room fully dressed except for his tie and shoes.
"What's that in your hand!"
"A gun," said Willie pitifully, "just a ole gun."
"Willie dear," said Sissy, "be a good boy," and she went up to him and unclasped his trembling fingers. "Someone might get hurt," she said gently, with a smile, "let me have it." She took the gun, where had he got it? and locked it in the desk.
"Please put out the light," said Willie, his voice firm.
"Why?"
"It'll be easier."
"What will be easier?" Sissy showed no fear, really felt none. "I must call the doctor," she thought, "this is serious."
"To tell you," said Willie.
"Well maybe," thought Sissy, and she said, "It's out, Willie," as she snapped it off. Willie had made up his mind and lost no time.
"I've been fired," he said.
"Willie!"
"Fired," he sobbed.
"Willie, my darling," said Sissy, "come sit beside me, it's not the end of the world."
"Willie fired?" she thought. "Why?"
"Another firm will be glad to have you," said Sissy. "It doesn't make any difference, a change will do you good, there, Willie, darling, don't cry." Where in the world was Sissy's insight? How hard she was making it for him.
"Gimme the gun!" said Willie hysterically. "Shhh, baby."
"I'm a... I'm a..." said Willie, "that's what I am." Big tears rolled down his cheeks.
"You are not a heel and I don't care if you get drunk, in fact that's exactly what you need, I'll get you a drink," said Sissy and she got up.
Sissy's back was turned and so he managed to get it out quickly; it seemed doubly dark with Sissy's face gone. "I'm an embezzler," he said, loud and clear.
Sissy wheeled, anger welled up in her, she lost her control. "You're crazy!"
A disturbed look came over Willie's pallid tear-stained face, he looked inside his jacket on both sides as if for the tailor's date.... "I don't think so," he said after a while.
"The simpleton," thought Sissy to herself. "What am I supposed to do now?"
"Willie," she said, "let's go to bed."
Willie flared up. "Go to bed! What's the matter with you, didn't you hear me! I'm an embezzler!" He seemed almost proud of it.
"I heard you," said Sissy quietly.
How irritating she was, didn't she care! "It doesn't seem to bother you that I am going to jail," said Willie crossly.
"Oh," said Sissy, "jail?"
"Jail," said Willie pompously.
"Oh, no!" said Sissy, frightened.
He saw the fear on her face and it strengthened him still more. "That's where you go for stealing," he said.
"Stealing?" said Sissy. It seemed worse than embezzling. "Oh, no, Willie, not stealing."
"And forgery," added Willie, with some dignity. "I got pretty good at it, I have to admit."
Sissy stared at her husband. "Fancy," she said to herself, "sleeping in the same room, sometimes the same bed, with a stranger for thirty years!" She went to the dressing room and put on her bathrobe, added a Little lipstick.
"Not going to bed now after all," said Willie, triumphantly. "Don't you want to know," he said slowly, "how much?"
Sissy couldn't believe her ears. "No," she said, "I don't think I do."
"You don't think it's important? How much?" Willie was astonished and disappointed.
Sissy hung her head and wondered what had happened to her marriage, where she had been all those years, who really was, Willie? She looked at him blankly.
"Women," said Willie, "don't know anything about business!"
"How much?" said Sissy, dully, thinking somehow, in some peculiar way, that she was changing the subject. And she was: this began to be like a play, an entertainment one went to to get away, escape from one's own deep sorry thoughts. Did Willie really think how much made any difference? "How funny men are," she thought, lumping them all together, "they think so dishonestly; it's one thing to steal, but to think so dishonestly." She underlined it in her mind.
Willie felt he was losing her attention, so he doubled the actual amount.
"One-hundred-thousand-dollars," he said. But he had overdone it, Sissy couldn't imagine that much money, really. She said nothing.
"Don't you think that's a lot?" asked Willie. "I mean it is quite a bit, if I do say so myself."
"I guess," said Sissy, "I'll sleep in the other room if you don't mind, I want..." she tried to be tactful, "I want to read awhile... you're all right now, dear?"
"Oh, sure," said Willie, "g'night." As Sissy was almost out the door, Willie's bombastic mood changed. "Sissy?"
"Yes?" Her hand was on the knob. "I'm sorry I got drunk."
"Oh, that!" said Sissy, relieved; she giggled hysterically. "Think nothing of it."
Willie slept soundly, believing he had confessed, believing, too, that he was a man, a male-"one-hundred-thousand-dollars"-he cupped his hand over his private parts and confidently slept, just as he had as a little boy after a big day and his mother had said, after scolding him soundly, "It's all right now, Willie, go to bed." Both the scolding and the reprieve had reassured him, as it did now.
His second mother lay in the next room wide awake.
Sissy, used to eight hours sleep, didn't feel very good in the morning. She had spent the night like a drowning person watching her past life, its incidents and occasions, pass across her forehead. But she could not pick out the telling snapshot that would clear up the mystery of Willie. Neither playing tennis, or clipping the willows, or swinging off the 6:20 did she glimpse the evidence in his look, the symptom that she should perhaps have taken care of. Naturally she blamed herself for his delinquency and accused herself of neglect. After a pleasant courtship, a church wedding, gifts, the babies had started coming, and her attention had been given to them, but she had been brought up to believe, at least she did believe that her husband was there, dependable, in an emergency might be of some help. Well, here was the emergency and she was alone. Colin? She heard herself say, surprisingly, "That rat!" It was like a baptism: she named him and forgot him for good.
Willie, the felon, felt rather better than usual. Willie was not a seeker after the truth. If he didn't feel good, he took a pill, but he never inquired further into the causes of things. He had upped the fifty thousand to one hundred thousand to gain Sissy's attention, but he believed now that it was a hundred thousand and a pleasant sense of awe enveloped him. But he fooled, cryptic as it seems, himself as well as Sissy by a partial confession nevertheless. The thing he never intended to tell Sissy he camouflaged with numbers and an eye-catching sleight-of-hand performance that he had staged that night in the bedroom, calling himself names and begging forgiveness for his drunken spree. The orgy, the tears, the confession, Sissy's forgiveness, was the pattern, even the logic, certainly the cure, and the premise, the real thing, the real sin, the shocking truth, was lost sight of.
Sissy got used to the idea of Willie's going to jail; they had let him off with a short sentence as it was the first offense of an obviously stupid man who was not exactly a menace to society. His colleagues had pleaded for him, his lawyer had stressed twenty years of honest living, the alienist said that he was a sick man and the jury had recommended mercy. The judge, a fellow commuter and bridge partner, had blown his nose hard and quoted, "Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone."
Willie manfully arranged his affairs and whistled softly to himself about the place as if he were going to Bermuda.
Then Sissy, who thought she had put the shock behind her and was resting quietly-she was taking a pound cake out of the oven, how good it smelled, it was perfect-when unprepared, completely unprepared as she was, to cope with it, it came to her, in the form of a question, "What did he do with all that money!"
Sissy sat down at the kitchen table, and with her head on one side, tried to think. She had used her own money to go Willie's bail, that she knew. That they had not spent any more than usual she also knew, in fact, they had lived very frugally, indeed, within their income, and Sissy had pinched a little, although it was against her nature, with Paula's wedding in mind. Well, Paula would just have to have a tiny wedding and definitely could not have the navy-blue dyed mouton jacket to go away in. Sissy shook her head. "Kindly stay on the point," she said out loud. "What happened to one hundred thousand dollars!"
"Willie!"
"Coming!"
She asked him.
He spread out his hands. "It just went," he said. Willie looked her straight in the eye. "It just kind of melted away," he said sadly, "I shouldn't have got drunk."
Then it happened: Sweetie Pie, it began, It's been a long time since you held me in your arms-where have you been? Thank you, lover, for the check, you really shouldn't but it did come in handy... the cabin looks so nice so please let me know when your next "business trip" will be....
"Ahhh!" Sissy shook with anger, not at Willie, silly Sissy, but at "the little bitch."
She had picked up the note absent-mindedly, thinking nothing of it, when the words Sweetie Pie jumped at her off the page; even then she thought it was some of Janey's nonsense. But it was true, Willie was having a vulgar affair! How really indecent of him, how completely nasty. For some reason his pale parts drifted into her vision like leftovers floating down a stream. "How disgusting!" she cried out. She couldn't help it, she saw the nasty little lovers plainly: Willie's ridiculous pink buttocks and the little bitch, but she had no face because Sissy couldn't, or didn't want to, place her. It is not clear whether Sissy was jealous but it didn't seem so, it was, rather, a sickening disgust, a disillusionment, an almost horror of her foolish Willie. That she had slept with him once a week for thirty years appalled her.
But Sissy didn't say a word to Willie. She kept out of the way of his hands and when she saw that look, knowing that it meant just one tiling, and that, the thing she was determined never again to endure, she used all her ingenuity to dissipate it. "Let's go to the movies for a change, it will do you good."
Willie, no great lover, but a creature of habit, upon finding Sissy uncooperative, stayed out all night and came back smelling of liquor. "I'm a heel," he said. It became a refrain and Sissy no longer denied it.
Sissy waited for him to be taken to jail before she collapsed. "Pusillanimous sneak," she sobbed, and, "That dirty little bitch." She was aghast as the words flocked out of her mouth and hung a moment in the air before exploding in her ears. Sissy was having her first attack of self-indulgence, her first crack-up, and she was surprised how good it felt. "Why didn't I think of this before," she giggled.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAISIE never asked for Sissy and did not seem surprised, either, when her favorite daughter, sane and courageous and pretty again, came back from her emotional tour of the capitals, as it were, and said, "Can I get you anything, Ma-Ma?"
"Where's Willie?" said the old lady, who hadn't mentioned Sissy's husband for a decade. She knew Sissy was married, but Willie made no impression on her at all. And as Willie had always felt uneasy in his mother-in-law's presence, they scarcely spoke when they did by chance meet. Willie used to avoid her eye for fear of her recognizing him (really recognizing him, perhaps) and Maisie used to think, "Now who on earth is that," and "What is he doing here," but he seemed too insignificant to insult and she held her peace; "the plumber maybe."
Sissy made a quick decision. "Willie embezzled one hundred thousand dollars," she said quietly, but it surprised her that she felt as she said it that Willie amounted to something after all.
"How much?" said Maisie. "How much did you say?"
Sissy felt a slight return of hysteria: "Two hundred thousand dollars," she said. "So it did matter 'how much,'" she thought; how foolish she had been to think that "embezzle" was the key word. She quickly added to herself, "It isn't that Willie slept with another woman, but how many other women!"
"A trifle," said Maisie unexpectedly.
"I guess I'm out of step," thought Sissy. She felt calm and, well, almost lighthearted. She smiled at Maisie. "It's a beautiful day, Ma-Ma, it will soon be spring, won't that be nice? Won't it, Ma-Ma... be nice?"
"That All Depends," said Maisie in capital letters. Did it mean anything?
Nobody missed Willie, it was a negligible erosion, his going away, and not much noticed. Paula, after all, was in love and all her attention was very much localized, Janey was off in a circumscribed world of her own; Sissy, after her collapse, seemed born anew, a kind of euphoria protecting her from the facts of life, and Maisie, well Maisie was writing, one might say, her memoirs. Ian wondered a little at his fiancee's detachment, her lack of sympathy for her poor old papa, not to mention her pretty mother, but he enjoyed her lovely looks and warm promise so much that it did not really bother him, he shook it off. It was as if Paula's character was none of his business.
Maggie was the only one. Up until Willie's weakness, as it was gently called, his illness, Maggie had scarcely given her father a thought. She believed she was the only one of the lot who was different, who was capable of dark and dreadful eventualities. (She scorned Paula's palpable innocence and it was good to scorn Paula, who had always been so pretty, so lovable, so popular. It gave Maggie a stance.) But Willie's breaking the law changed her lack of feeling for him into a real kinship. She longed to comfort him and planned long talks with him when he came back, they would understand each other. In the meantime Maggie wanted Ian and she meant to have him. Ian's handsome body and shining eyes plagued her sensibilities from morning till night. She watched him, every move he made stirred her, every word he said caressed her skin, and Ian knew that Maggie watched, also, his love-making. He was angry at himself that the knowledge of this dark child's deep eyes upon him as he kissed her sister, increased to a degree his desire... for whom? Paula, feeling his excitement, rejoiced, but murmured, "Wait Ian, wait Ian." And he waited. "June," she whispered, "will soon be here and then..."
"Do you really know what-then?" asked Ian.
"Almost," said Paula, hiding her face, "how could I help....."
"I think I'll do it now," said Ian.
"Ian!"
"I will," said Ian, "now, why should I wait?" He sounded cross. "I'm going to."
Paula lay in his arms, her blouse undone, her legs bare. Ian could see the dark round shadow in her navel, and he became absent-minded, he almost forgot who she was, he stroked her softly and waited.
She was near bliss when she sensed, womanlike, the change in rhythm, the loss of his personal attention as if she were someone else, as if he were doing it for a reason. She did not think in words and her experience was slight, but his negligence, it might be called, cooled her and she withdrew herself.
"Wait," she said. "It will be lovely in June," she added sweetly.
"What," he said.
"I said, it will be lovely in June."
"Perhaps not... so lovely," said Ian. His love-making with Paula was exhausting him. He felt an evil wish to "give her the works."
"Lovely!" he said sarcastically to himself, but out loud he said, "You're tired, sweetheart, let me carry you upstairs," and he tenderly fastened her blouse, arranged her skirts, and lifted a lock of hair off her forehead, carefully tucked it behind her ear. He kissed her cheek.
"There, dearest, you're all safe and good." At the moment he felt absolutely nothing for her.
"Good night, Ian."
"Good night, sweet."
"If there was only someone in the village," Ian muttered to himself as he walked home, but a disgust shook him, he wanted none of it. He was trapped. He loved Paula. He turned and hesitated as he came to the driveway leading into Maisie's; there were no lights except in the little annex where the colleen, Deirdre, slept, but that thought made him laugh a little uneasily -he wanted a moment with Maisie, was she asleep? What did he want of her anyway?
"Ian?" A warm soft hand slipped into his, the moon lit up but as if from inside her, Maggie. "It's Maggie."
"Who else," he thought, "and who better."
"It's late, go home," he said as if to a friendly dog.
"I love you," said Maggie.
"Soft little paw," murmured Ian, addressing her hand that he did not let go.
"Brother," whispered Maggie, she was so close he could feel her tremble and he felt only compassion.
"I'll take you home," he said, "where it's warm."
Maggie looked at the indentation of Paula's and Ian's bodies on the couch and Ian did not miss her almost furtive glance. He did not move when she put her arms around his neck and laid her cheek against his breast. "She's a little thing," he thought, "and hard, like a boy." It seemed natural-he would feel a heel if he didn't, besides-to return the resilient burden of her embrace. Maggie sensed it like the gentle but tensile and yielding pressure of the sea when she dove in and treaded water, it was delicious. But she felt-sweet as it was, like a little girl being comforted and that is not what she wanted. She wanted to he on the couch like Paula and...
"Like this," she whispered. Smiling as if she knew a secret, she undid her blouse and without a moment's hesitation Ian took one small breast and gently caressed it. Maggie sighed and her eyes closed as if she were going to sleep.
"That's all," said Ian to himself, but all of a sudden Maggie maneuvered herself into his arms and it was over so quick that Ian was amazed when a sob and the sudden relaxation of Maggie in his arms made him realize what had happened.
"Maggie," he whispered, "my little Maggie." He felt an urgent desire for her. Her skin smelled and tasted of love, her body was no longer hard, but soft and pliant and obsessive, her head fell sideways as if she were dead.
"Jesus Christ," said Ian, and it was really a prayer. "Get out of here, Maggie," he pleaded, he felt his desire nagging at him.
"Please," said Maggie. It was like a child asking for a doll and Ian's passion turned to a tender affection. He even laughed softly, "Maggie, sweet, what is it? What is the matter, my littlest love, my baby girl?" and he caressed her, his palms clinging to the smooth warm skin. He took her eager face between his hands and kissed her mouth; it was a special kiss. It was his tribute. He felt no evil desire. She was a little woman, come of age.
"There," he said, straightening up, and his tone said, "you have your doll," and it also had in it a finality, because Ian had made up his mind quick never to touch Maggie again. Something warned him that another encounter would change him from a gentle character into a foul-mouthed beast, spitting lust. Maggie was dangerous, he had known it all along and he saw in her eyes the glow of a conflagration that he did not wish or dare to be the first one to strike a match in the vicinity of....
"If she only knew!" he thought.
What made him think Maggie didn't know?
(Or Lamby, for that matter. Lamby had seen the whole thing. Lamby had peeked and seen plenty, but it was more from habit than for vicarious pleasure; it titillated her mental lobes as if a tiny seismograph were located there, but of bodily enthusiasm there was none. She could have been tossed into the middle of a mythological orgy of nudity and crazy desire in honor of the god Pan without muscular or nervous response. But her intelligence would tell her that she was deprived and so now, as in that imaginary case, she did feel anger, an anger that made her want to kill. It was the only sensation, the only passion that would release her.)
Maggie looked at Ian, the little woman was not satisfied, and her eyes begged and teased for an assignation. Ian's everlasting male curiosity wondered at the everlasting desire of the weaker sex and so he spoiled the finality of his decision by asking her, "Weren't you happy a minute ago, Maggie?" He whispered it, he felt shy with this eager, single-minded child.
Her lips only formed the word, "Yes"; he could not hear her.
"Then let me go, dear."
"It is you I want," she said evenly, as if she had planned to say it for a long time and Ian, the Ian of a good deal of experience with women, blushed. He blushed because it was so evident what Maggie meant under the circumstances. She did want a doll, a very crude one, and he possessed it. "The little beast!" He felt for a moment the way a woman feels most of the time. "She might make some pretense," he thought. "Women!" he said to himself. "What do they know of love!"
"Tomorrow night?" whispered Maggie. "No," said Ian.
Maggie hesitated, then she said, "Just once."
Ian's psyche started, it was a refrain, a begging, idiotic refrain, that he himself had often used, "Just once, for Christ's sake!" Maggie was ruining his self-esteem fast. "Look," he said coldly, "if that's all you want, look elsewhere."
Something had indeed happened to Maggie's ideal of brotherhood and democracy; the essay she had started at school, in an ecstasy, on "My Brother, He Is Everywhere" would remain unfinished as a document; the ecstasy would stick and the title would still be indicative and telling. Ian felt his loss of prestige and was chagrined, his ego hurt.
"Don't make it so difficult for me," Maggie whispered.
"I'll make it just as difficult as I can," said Ian.
"Flirt," said Maggie suddenly.
"Good Lord," snorted Ian, "I'll be a son-of-a-bitch!" He was catching it, this girl child thought like a true son of a woman, a male wanton! Why did she have to keep quoting him.
"Listen," he said, changing the subject-he still felt responsible, in spite of her taking the initiative, and it was easy now that the interview had cooled his natural ardor, "I am, or will be soon, your brother."
"Yes," said Maggie eagerly.
"Do you want to sleep with your brother?"
"Yes," said Maggie sweetly, how slow he had been, "When?" she said.
He laughed. "It's a date," he said. But he didn't know he would keep it. "I'm no seducer of virgins," he said to himself as he walked toward home for the second time that evening, but Maggie's eyes that glistened like wet pavement reflecting skyscrapers stayed with him a long time. He did not hesitate again at Maisie's driveway, but he noticed that there was no light in Deirdre's room. The moon, high now, picked him out and a short shadow followed him like a sleuth in plain clothes, it clung to him almost indecently. Ian, feeling a little lighthearted after his great show of character, twice, turned up his coat collar and peered sideways into the moony shadows and glanced behind him at his dwarfish shade. "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me," he mimicked, talking like a kid, "r-r-r-r-r-r-t," he machine-gunned it for fun. But the rest of the walk was solemn, he was grown up, he felt his responsibilities. Only Maisie's friendship was a fifty-fifty companionship, and he looked forward to seeing her with relief.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JANEY didn't come back last time, and Sissy's new lease on life after her "tantrum,"
"It's time you thought of yourself for a change," the doctor had said, and Sissy thought maybe he was right, didn't last long. At first she was angry; "Just when I was feeling so much better," she said to herself and then, as if Willie's metamorphosis posed the possibility, even probability, that a second transfiguration might take place under the same circumstances (when she wasn't looking), she knew.
She did not have to wait long for proof of her shocking vision. They did carry Janey in, wet and limp and quite dead, a sweet dreamy look on her face, a mysterious withdrawal in her wide-open eyes. Sissy, strengthened by her previous emotional beating, did not break down again. Alone she went through the motions and pantomime necessary to the heartbreaking occasion. Alone she accepted the abnormal mutation, one might call it, of Janey. Janey, the one who wouldn't do it, not one of the others who might (Maggie!), did it. Too young to give herself a second chance, perhaps, too normal to separate herself into two people (Janey a schizophrenic!), she had gone to join that Lisa. It had been a love affair that Janey did not know how to satisfy, was that it? The physical urgency of her fantasies had been manifest in her straddling the well in her momentary desire for a quick change of sex symbolized, by a gesture, and her strange fear, her guilty anxiety after her long daydreams, herself the central figure, a kind of cerebral self-abuse with a built-in reflex: guilt. It is hardly fair (certainly no one real was there, there is no evidence that would hold up in court) to evaluate like this the sweet and foolish Janey that we have got to know in these pages, and rack our brains and break our hearts looking for the answer to an enigma. And it is unfortunate that Sissy blamed herself for taking off a couple of weeks after Willie's ridiculous performance to have hysterics, so that, self-centered in the guise of "the mother," she believed that it was surely in just those two weeks when she wasn't "paying attention" when she was having cold baths and hot tea, and a quarter of a grain of Phenobarbital every hour on the hour-it was just in that special unit of time that Janey, separated from her, had formulated the atrocious scheme and carried out the desperate deed. In other words, all of Janey's ancestral traits and acquired characteristics and genes, aided or not aided, as the case might be, by her pituitary gland, her metabolic rate at that time of day, her blood sugar count, the weather too-all these things could have had no effect on Janey-if Sissy had been watching. Once more, silly Sissy. Janey left no notes and there was no evidence of premeditation, there was no motive, but the body, the corpus delicti had been found. The hardest part had been solved and little Janey's cadaver was The Evidence. The Law seemed satisfied, almost tired, and there was no man hunt. A little girl had f alien in a well. Yes, and poor Sissy, with proof in her own mind of her premonition, knew that she had done it.
If only Janey would bounce in and say, "Look at the millennium!"
Sissy, usually so practical and wise, did not know, could not decide, whether to tell Ma-Ma. It was certainly the conventional thing to do, but no one wanted to disinter that Lisa whom Ma-Ma seemed to have completely forgot; and, at this time, Lisa, whom Sissy had never known, seemed almost as real as Janey persisted in being, in Sissy's mind: a disquieting little ghost, two disquieting little ghosts; hand in hand they had done the same thing, a naughty sorority. Sissy wanted to do the right, the correct thing, but hoped that Ma-Ma, listening intently to one of Ian's stories, would simply dismiss her irritably, at the interruption.
She told her; quickly, gently, there were tears in her eyes.
"Shucks, it'll all come out in the wash," said the old lady.
Sissy flared up. "She's dead!" she said angrily. "Think no more of it," the old lady said kindly, "she'll be back."
As Sissy left the room, the ordeal over, and still in good enough shape emotionally to be angry, Maisie said to Ian, "Always room for one more." Sissy heard her, she meant the hill!
The old lady had certainly sounded lucid enough and Ian, even Ian, who understood her so well and loved her, was shocked. "If she isn't crazy, she's as hard as nails," he thought.
"Ian," said the old lady, uneasily, "do run after your Cousin Sissy and ask her if she's tried St.-John's-wort."
"I will," said Ian. He leaned forward and stroked her hand. "Don't worry," he said. The old lady's eyes were clouded and her lips twitched.
"What was that!" she said. "Bunce, who's there! Hark!"
"No one," said Ian.
The old lady glanced at the cat but she was sleeping, like a fur piece stretched at full length on the rug. Bunce didn't look up. As if she had checked two barometers that she trusted, the old lady calmed down and smiled, "You were saying, dear boy...?"
CHAPTER NINE
"PLEASE turn down the radio," said Maisie politely.
Sissy paled and Ian stood up quick, Lamby backed out of the room. From the kitchen came the sounds of a mighty struggle. Ian arched his back and let his shoulders drop-on the alert. So did the cat. Bunce raised his head and looked questioningly at the old lady.
Deirdre screamed, seemed to take a deep breath and scream again. It sounded between screams as if a body were being thrown to the floor, against the walls, and into the furniture. "God, Mary, and St. Patrick, come to my aid now!" yelled Deirdre. "My Da's gone loco and cracked, it's bediviled he is this instant, 'tis his reason's disordered!"
"'Tis no reason of mine that's disordered," came the answer. "A fine thing it is indeed a daughter of mine, the likes of you, contrivin' and makin' sheep's eyes and gettin' yourself big with my grandson, faith, a bastard, bad cess to your high-falutin ways and highty-tighty nothin's too good for me blather!"
"Me is it!" screamed Deirdre.
The sound of a hand come down hard silenced her. "That's for your impudence, me pretty, don't plague me, I'll be killin' ye--"
"Do ye hear him now, my own Da!" sobbed Deirdre noisily. "He'll destroy and mortify me!"
"It's yourself as destroyed ye and me your old Da, faith, is mortified to be sure, it's a nasty slut ye are and not fit to raise a bairn."
Deirdre came running into the living room, her face swollen, her clothes disordered, her mouth crushed. "Help!" she cried and staggered toward Ian. "I swear on a pale moon I'm innocent and it's my Da's as drunk as could be this day, God save us all from calamity."
"Come down off your high horse, miss," said Maisie, sternly.
"Cut the comedy," said Lamby who had had her shot and, fortified, come back.
Deirdre appealed to Sissy, "To be sure it's only a wee bit pregnant I am and my Da is to murder me for that, a poor girl in a strange land as Mary and St. Patrick well know, to be sure, as innocent as a new wee lamb I am that; saints and all preserve us this day, faith, it's the truth, mum."
"Calm yourself, Deirdre," said Sissy, "I'm sure that something..."
"Mother of God, the taypot's a-whistlin'," yelled Deirdre and she raced to the kitchen.
There was no doubt about, although no one who was anyone, busy with his own or her own interests, had noted, Deirdre's pregnancy. Deirdre, as Daisy had been, was a minor character, a bit player in this theatre, introduced, perhaps, to alleviate the tension of too much privileged tragedy. Easy come, easy go, Daisy and Deirdre did just that. No one wanted another homicide in the kitchen or in the bathroom and Deirdre was dispatched with two weeks' pay and a short reference almost before she could dry her tears... "This girl is honest and clean"; there seemed no need to dwell on her tendency to become pregnant-live and let live. Well.
"Who do you suppose?" said Lamby.
"I don't know and I don't care," said Sissy crossly. "Really," she thought, "sex again."
"She never went out and no one came here to see her," mused Lamby.
But that someone had comforted the tearful Deirdre was apparent to all of them and neither did old Maisie miss it. She said nothing, pretending to be intent on a game of solitaire but as Lamby continued to hunt in her mind for Deirdre's seducer, and make suggestions, a delivery boy, the plumber, the carpenter, she looked sideways at Ian and gave him a big slow wink. She was sure it was he.
Ian shook his head but the old lady chuckled out loud.
"What are you laughing at, Ma-Ma?" said Sissy, glad that she, at least, was not upset.
"There, I've won again," said Maisie putting down the last card in the deck. "Shucks, I always win. I was thinking of Dody, the little rascal," she added. And she was, of Dody and the plump and limber easygoing little wench under the eaves who had made a thoroughgoing man of him in ten minutes, how the old man had caned him, there had been a child, too-Maisie frowned -Lisa had escaped her, she could not remember...
"Janey and I have had a good long talk," she said to Sissy (Sissy shivered), "and I think you will have less trouble with her from now on."
"Will you have your toddy, Ma-Ma?" said Sissy desperately.
"In good time," said Maisie. "She's a spirited child and I like her, she's just cheeky, that's all."
Janey had no doubt been accepted in Maisie's little hall of fame, a dead darling now, like Bessie and the boys.
"Good night, Ma-Ma." Sissy couldn't stand it.
"Pleasant dreams, my dear," said the old lady. "Come, Ian, help me to the study."
"Cousin Maisie," said Ian, when they were alone, "I didn't do it." He grinned at her and repeated it, "I didn't, Cousin Maisie."
"Come, come;" said the old lady, "there's no need to fib to me."
"But, Cousin Maisie."
"But me no buts, I'll say not a word to the others. She was a pretty little slut."
"I don't like pretty little sluts," said Ian.
"A good rough and tumble with the likes of Daisy now and again will do you no harm," said the old lady. "Paula's a little stiff."
"Oh, Cousin Maisie," said Ian, wanting to change the subject and also to erase the tempting vision of himself with a buxom colleen (he saw it all, blue sky overhead and straw in her hair! Saints preserve us!), "if only I had met you first!" As a matter of fact, he meant it.
"Ah," said Maisie engagingly, "I would have been your match."
"And I yours," said Ian manfully (he doubted it).
"Well, we'll see," said the old lady.
"Good night, dearest," said Ian.
"Good night, dear heart," she murmured. "Thadeus."
"Thadeus! I'm a son of a bitch," thought Ian. "The old girl was quite the little trick." He marveled at Maisie.
CHAPTER TEN
WELL, finally that "adjustment and harmonization" that Nature with a touch of this and a touch of that mixes up and spreads out thin took place in the little household that at moments had felt itself marked for destruction, at least something special. Gradually the anesthesia of routine, the rising and setting of the sun and moon, hunger and thirst almost rhythmically appeased and quenched, even the movement of bowels and releasing of bladders occupying their attentions; daily baths, housekeeping, daydreaming and nightmares, waking and sleeping, mollified and soothed the aches and pains of these present and a pleasant loss of memory, almost, enabled them to plan ahead and hope for the best. Poor dears. Maisie, magna cum laude, was a hundred and really adept but the others, it looked as if, kept accenting the wrong note, not knowing, one supposes, as Maisie seemed to, the tune.
And that is how June came and Paula, radiant, and Ian, handsome and manly, were married without any fuss, things being as they were. No one noticed that the bride's father wasn't there to give her away or that the flower girl was missing (that little Janey, "O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"). Maisie scarcely marked the hour, it meant nothing to her.
"I think," said Maisie at the supper table, "I will be leaving you all for a spell."
Glances shot from eye to eye and Lamby cleared her throat.
"Lamby," said Maisie, "the spittoon is in the study, we do not expectorate at table."
Lamby flushed; something said inside her, "This is it, I'll be goddamned if I'll take any more of it!"
"Oh, Ma-Ma!" said Sissy, sorry for Lamby, who she saw was trembling.
"If you will all mind your manners and not interrupt me," said Maisie.
"Yes, Ma-Ma."
"I am going to Cokeysville for a visit with Cousin Graceful."
Everyone had felt for an instant that Maisie had meant to announce her everlasting departure and with the exception of Ian who smiled with relief at her realistic itinerary no one could help being disappointed, a Little at least. Sissy bit her lip and was ashamed, but Lamby said to herself, "Shit."
"Ma-Ma," said Sissy, "I think you are quite right."
"Oh you do," said Maisie sarcastically.
"The trains are very comfortable," said Sissy. She thought it would do no harm for the old lady to plan a little trip which, of course, she would never take. She had no idea where Cokeysville was although she did know that Cousin Graceful was long since dead. "I will get a timetable," she said, "and we will pack your little overnight bag." She hated herself for the second of relief she had felt a moment ago at what she thought was one of the old lady's premonitions and she meant to make up to her for it.
"A timetable?" said Maisie.
"It tells what time the trains leave," said Sissy gently.
"I'll travel in my own way," said Maisie, "by the stage, and I'll take my hamper and pelisse."
"Oh."
"Unless," she said archly-the corners of her mouth turned up and a mauve flush mounted to her cheeks, the little dark-blue veins crossing her temples stood out, "I go in a rocket ship!"
"Think they can fool me!" she thought to herself. "Engines, indeed! Not for twenty years!"
"Well," she said, "any objections?"
"Granny," said Paula sweetly, "maybe in twenty years you will."
"Just as I said, just as I said. Humph!" she added. "What makes Paula so smart," she thought. She felt as if Paula somehow had detracted from her deduction. "Too much lipstick, miss," she said.
Maisie glanced at Paula and remembered something. She looked over Sissy, too, and back at Paula again. "Isn't it high time you were married," she said knowingly. "Sissy, I'd speak to Paula if I were you."
"Really, Mummy!" said Paula. She turned the color of a geranium and her blue eyes were almost black. Along with her body her pupils were expanding too.
"The sooner the better," said Granny.
"Dearest," said Ian to the old lady, "I made an honest woman of Paula last June."
The old lady counted on her fingers. "Humph," she said.
"What's become of Daisy?" she questioned. She had a way of changing the subject and yet definitely not changing the subject at all. "I'd like a cup of tea."
Out in the kitchen the big Swede, Stella, sat drinking strong black coffee and shaking her head from side to side, if it weren't for Miss Sissy she'd surely give notice; that the old lady was mad she was convinced and it hadn't been easy ("Daisy!"
"Yes, missus.") to submit to a loss of identity the very first day and a change of nationality the next: When she stumbled over Bunce, the old lady had spoken as if she weren't there. "Straight out of the bog," she had said, "can't she pick up her feet." In her scrubbings she had come across bloodstains, too, on the bathroom walls. "Now how did blood get there," she said to herself. She was hardy and sensible, not given to imagining anything at all, but a broken tooth and a lock of hair had been swept into a corner in the kitchen, there had been shattered crockery in the wastebasket and a leg freshly off a chair. She had run into Miss Lamby rouged up like a clown and smelling of bourbon. "Howdy," Lamby had said, "how's about a snort?" And little Miss Maggie had jumped a foot when she had gone late to the parlor to gather up Coke bottles and empty the ash trays. "Don't tell!" Miss Maggie had whispered; what was the little thing doing in the hall outside young Mrs. Ratcliffe's room that she should nearly jump out of her skin!
Everyone went to bed, it was quiet and the big woman, full of energy still, she could have cleaned six such houses as this, poured herself more coffee....
"Stella!"
She paid no heed. She had dipped her head with pursed lips to the fragrant brew. She held the pose and waited. So the old lady knew perfectly well what her name was....
"Stella!"
She did not move. A stubborn hard look came over her wide fair face. She took a good hot swallow. "Daisy!"
She put the cup down.
"Yes, missus." She meant to show her she was one or the other. The old lady was full of tricks. What was she up to now?
"Reach me my pen and ink," said the old lady. She was sitting up in bed, bright-eyed, a little lacy cap at an angle over her fine brows.
"Shouldn't the missus be resting," said Stella not unkindly. "It's one o'clock."
"It's no such thing," said Maisie. "Do as you're told."
And Maisie began writing her will.
While Stella, the blonde big Swede, well made and nicely hinged, whom Sissy had hired in the hope, it seemed, that a change of nationality, a Swede in the pantry, would somehow be differently constructed and impervious, finished her twentieth cup of Java and reluctantly went to bed.
"Don't make your will all the time," said Sissy, "it makes me feel badly."
"We all have to go sometime," said the old lady sententiously. "Yurp," she said, lapsing into Janey's vernacular, "thas the way it goes."
My inlaid lazy Susan, she wrote carefully, to my good friend Cotton Mather; to Mr. Fiske, my cameo that he so much admired; my jade Buddha given me by Lord Camavan to my beloved sister Jail, if she be living. Item: my sixty-four thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight full paid shares of the capital stock of the La Cruz Mining Company transferable only on the books of the Company in person or by attorney on the surrender of my certificates, to my son, Dodge Herbert, provided he shall survive me. Item: my seventy-eight thousand nine hundred and forty-two full paid shares of the capital stock of the Santa Juliana Mining Company I give and bequeath to my son, Dougherty Herbert, provided he shall survive me....
"Ma-Ma?"
"What's that?"
"It's so long, dear, don't tire yourself."
"It's nowheres long enough," snapped the old lady.
"Don't leave me anything, Ma-Ma," said Sissy. "You know I'm all right, Papa..."
"Listen to this," said Maisie, "listen carefully: After my lawful debts are paid and discharged I give, devise and bequeath all my real and personal property of every kind and description whatsoever to my beloved daughter Sissy absolutely and forever to do with as she may see fit."
"Oh, Ma-Ma."
"And," said the old lady, "and what's more, I hereby appoint my daughter Sissy to be sole executrix of this my last will and testament. How does that suit you, miss?"
"Ma-Ma, really, it's too sweet of you."
"Think nothing of it. Where's Cousin Ian?"
"He will be here soon."
"I want him to have my carriole and Paula shall have my phaeton."
The old lady nodded and Sissy tiptoed out of the room.
"... Being of sound and disposing mind," old Maisie murmured, "and memory... and considering the uncertainty of this life... do make, publish and declare this to be my last will and testament..." She seemed to be asleep; Bunce was snoring gently but the orange and black cat sat upright, she was keeping an eye on the old lady, the last inch of her tail moving spasmodically. She opened her mouth gently and prettily about halfway and yawned.
"... and memory... and considering... do make, publish and declare..." the old lady repeated. "It's very pretty... devising and bequeathing... to whom it may concern... it's lovely... this day, 1879, Maisie Sparehawk Herbert..."
The old lady breathed quietly, the corners of her violet lips turned up, her bosom rising and falling shallowly, one pointed slipper rested on Bunce's side and the pen slipped out of her long, almost fleshless fingers. The light came sideways into the room as the sun set.
"So that's that," said the old lady and she painstakingly sealed the final version of her wordy will with Janey's old bright-red sealing wax. Ian loaned her his signet ring that he wore on his watch chain, for the impression, and it did say plainly enough Si Je Puis just as the imbecile Captain Ratcliffe's no doubt had, as a bearer of arms, way back, even further than that; Norman, it was.
The old lady looked very well indeed. You even got the impression that some day she would amount to something, she was talented, precocious, and Ian looked her over attentively and fondly. He felt her pervasive charm, he loved her little flaming spirit, "Dear Cousin Maisie," he said.
"Cousin Ian," she said, "what, may I ask, is mugging?"
Ian laughed. "You've been reading The New York Times again," he said. "Well, you come up behind your victim-so"-he stood behind her chair-"and you place your dirty hands around her lovely neck-so- and you reach for her pocketbook-and beat it, that's mugging, but," went on Ian, "in this case you kiss your lovely victim-so-" and he kissed Maisie's eyelids; he felt them quiver and for some reason he wanted to cry.
"Oh, well," said Maisie, "why couldn't they say so in the first place."
"Anything else, dearest?"
"Bumping, what on earth?" but the old lady asked it shyly, surely bumping in the subway would be more interesting than the petty theft he had described.
"Cousin Maisie, I'm very much surprised at you," teased Ian.
"Fiddlesticks, do go on." It seemed as if the old lady's curiosity must be symbolically satisfied at last before she could rest. "I'm an old lady, what does it matter," Maisie insisted, but her eyes shone.
As Ian did not care to demonstrate the maneuver, he tried to tell her without gestures.
"Oh," she said, "is that all."
"It's rather nasty," said Ian.
"Well," said Maisie, "it takes all kinds."
"Just call on me any time," said Ian.
"Good night, dear boy."
"Stella!"
The old clock seemed to answer the call, and softly, like a spoon in a teacup, it rang three times. Ping... ping... ping.
"Stella!"
Stella lifted her head from a sound sleep. Not quite awake, she pushed one massive leg out of bed.
"Stella!" she heard the old lady call imperiously.
"No," said Stella to herself, "I won't," and she turned over on her other side and went to sleep; some skyline in Sweden, taking over her dreams softened the hard stubborn line of her mouth and she looked pretty, her big bosoms folded against each other like pillows, her round hip curving like a hill. There was no waking her now.
The old clock gently carried on, it was the only sound, it almost purred: tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock.
"Lamby!"
Lamby stood on the upstairs landing. She had heard the old lady calling Stella so imperiously but now the tone of her voice Lamby felt was insulting.
"Lamby, you little simpleton," she heard the old lady mutter. "Lamby! Come here, you fool!"
Lamby stood still and trembled. "Stinker," she said, "old bitch." She shut the door but she still listened...
Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock.
Lamby reached up into the closet, her heart beating much louder than the clock, it beat hard in her ears and her stomach contracted. She opened her throat, "Ahhhh." She sat on the side of the bed and emptied the bottle. She tucked herself in and the warmth of the liquor seemed to produce a pink fog in her mind, but it did not soothe her as it usually did. After a series of starts and jumps over which she had no control and a sudden relaxing of her jaws that made her bite her tongue, she lost consciousness.
Downstairs old Maisie listened to the retreating tread of her old heart as if the hired man were going down the cellar steps. She noted the diminution of her reason, the captious mounting of blood into her ears, her nostrils, her eyes. She lifted her hand and in the pale light of early morning she studied it thoughtfully, but with all her strength she could not hold it upright, it fell. "Fiddle-faddle," said the old lady huskily and with some eerie ectoplasmic show of strength and determination she stood on her feet. "Thadeus," she said in the voice of a girl and she fell straight down as if there were a hole in the floor. She crumpled quietly into a semicircular position and a few drops of blood on her lips looked like wine and in her ears like rubies.
The cat was the first to know and she gave a piercing scream as if death were a big tomcat who had accosted her; the pitiful screech twisted and looped across the walls and into sockets and whistled through the keyholes, vases trembled and the glassware in the pantry sang out.
Bunce carefully turned his head that trembled with palsied age and protested with glazed eyes'. The sound had hurt him; his thickened eardrums were a barrier now and did not vibrate or send any message to his dog's brain, he was blind, too, but he absorbed, it seemed, events nevertheless, through the nerve endings which were still sensitive. He sensed a change come over his mistress-a slight change; a queer fearful scent reached his nostrils and they quivered. He moved aside as she went down and he felt a growl coming into his throat, the so silent Bunce gave an ominous lion-like roar. Instinctively the hair stood in a dark line down to his tail which curved under him and clung to his belly as if he, too, like the cat feared a sexual attack from behind. He half circled the corpse and stood guard at the door. He had no idea whose body lay there, he did what he did because he must. He felt footsteps coming along the floor.
"Ma-Ma!"
...
"Ma-Ma! May I come in? It's Sissy."
...
The old dog grew suddenly very weak as help came. He folded up and carefully lay down, blocking the door; he was dead.
"Ma-Ma! It's me, Sissy, your eldest!"
...
"What's wrong!"
...
"Ma-Ma!"
"Granny, it's Maggie, let me in, Granny!"
...
"Ma-Ma!"
...
"Maisie!"
...
"Maisie!"
...
"Ma-Ma!"
...
"Granny!
...
""Ma-Ma!"
...
"Missus, it's Daisy with your tea, missus, it's Stella!"
...
"Oh, oh!" Sissy the brave and the cool wrung her hands. "Get Miss Lamby!" she said as Stella put her shoulder to the door against which the old collie lay. "Lamby! Get some whiskey!"
Lamby stood behind them looking through the door that had easily swept the skinny Bunce along the floor. Her eyes were as glazed as the dog's and her hands were lifted with fingers still curved as if around the old lady's throat. The homicidal dream was in her stance, her look, her pose. That she had done it she had no doubt. Through lips that were dry with a terrible thirst she heard herself say, "Stinker! Old bitch!" but no sound came out. She had not awakened; and no bruises were found on the old lady's throat.
At the same time that big Stella lifted the old lady as if she were a hollow doll back into her bed and carried Bunce like a papier-mache toy outside, Paula drew her lips up away from her teeth like a dog in the middle of a fit and in an agony of scrunching pain that took away her consciousness, her body, performing mechanically without her will, expelled her baby and she didn't know any more until she heard from a distance as if through a fog, lying as quietly and still as death, a heavenly peace in her whole self, the words, "It's a girl."
The doctor bent over her and repeated gently, "It's a girl."
The nurse, her cool fingers on her pulse, said, "It's a girl."
Paula smiled.
"Honey, it's a girl," said her husband. "Can you hear me, sweetheart, it's a girl."
Paula didn't want to open her eyes or stir but she raised her hand an inch off the coverlet and did open them a moment. "Tired," she said, still smiling, "lovely."
Ian kissed Paula's hand and let his forehead rest upon it. She felt his tears. Ian was weeping for a lot of things, including the date with Maggie which he had kept last night, but at present, like Paula, he felt a delicious sentiment and peace and I suppose it was-what did Maisie call it-genesis.
