The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  I found I hadn’t the heart for it, after all.

  Too much of the abstract?

  Too much, I said, of the infinite.

  The line rattled.

  No, he agreed. No, you are not young.

  An empty pause, as if we’d again lost the connection, a crackling static during which I could not make out what he said, and then he was back.

  —you cook?

  Cook, sir?

  You know, heat up things in cans. Chili, or spaghetti, or what have you. Baked beans. There are an increasing variety of good things that come in cans, I have found.

  The mention of food caused an involuntary clenching at my abdomen. I had eaten so little in recent days that I had reached a point beyond hunger. Or perhaps I had only convinced myself it was so. We make a virtue of necessity when we must.

  I’ve done my own cooking, sir.

  It wasn’t a complete fabrication. I had done some.

  Just the basics, I clarified, but I know how to economize. And housekeeping as well.

  Self-made man, and all that?

  I have, I believe, striven for self-sufficiency.

  And can you type?

  I can type, sir.

  This much, at least, was true.

  Two, or how many?

  I was stumped. Words per minute? I ventured.

  Fingers.

  Why, all of them, sir.

  He made a humphing sound which might have been admiration or might have been disbelief.

  I cannot say I’ve taken to it, myself. I like to think it is because I have the hands of a pianist, not—he said, giving the word a distinctive snap—a stenographer.

  You are a musician, then?

  My mother is rather gifted. I am, sadly, not. Snapping that word again, elastically. But I do feel there is no harm in indulging in a bit of wishful thinking now and again, providing one does not make of it a habit. By such means of self-flattery do we often comfort ourselves for what we lack, isn’t it so, Candle?

  Indeed, sir.

  You are not one to imbibe in hallucinogenic and incapacitating liquid refreshments, certain, as they used to say, aqua vitae?

  I beg your pardon?

  You are not a drinker, are you, Father Candle? It does run high among certain of your pontifical denomination. All that Blood of Christ business. Sets up a damned poor precedent, if you see my point.

  I told him I did. He did not seem convinced.

  It is, he went on, the greatest unrelieved evil to any delicately cultivated civilization. I am nauseated by even the distant stink of any alcoholic liquor. And not one to use tobacco, either, I hope. I find it worse than the nausea. I can think of no greater horror than a smoking car.

  He coughed.

  I am neither a smoker nor a drinker, I assured him.

  And neither are you then what is commonly called a family man? Which is not to say I have anything against it. But I assume you are not connubially leashed, lest you would not be applying for such a position, in domus, as it were.

  Sir?

  I assume, apart from your good mother, there is no Mrs. Candle, no Lady Candle, no Candle of Perpetual Sorrows. That would complicate things, of course.

  There is no Mrs. Crandle.

  I felt a sudden twinge, a black spot spreading on my soul like mould on pale fruit. I saw Jane’s face, white-lipped, that December afternoon in Boston, where we had walked along the Charles River, Molly running ahead making figure eights with her little footprints in the snow—in and out among the trees with stilted grace—like the trails of deer. Jane had stopped with a hand on my arm to watch the flakes hit the brown water and disappear. She’d said, It’s a kind of extinction, isn’t it. Each one. So permanent.

  How grief collapses time. A year ago, two? Last month? It might have been yesterday, a lifetime. When Jane had turned her face up to kiss me, or rather to be kissed, I had hesitated, the snow seeming all at once cold and soiled and hopeless, fallen angels in the failing light. All was dirty, then, all was rot, the child’s black footprints like burned things, the twisted limbs of trees grotesque against a bled sky, the foul, drunken swirling of the river. The stench of it, the unbearable decay. All, I thought, all.

  By lesser means had I often been tipped into despair. It was a failing in me, to be sure.

  Jane mistook me, then. It was not uncommon between us, these misreadings. I should have kissed her. But when I looked at her, I saw only blackness, a pit into which I was forever falling; my own inevitable failings.

  Mama?

  Molly stood all at once still in the snow, staring back at us, as if something unspeakable had just occurred to her. The flakes settled on her blue felt hat like the loosed feathers of a hunted swan.

  She looks flushed, Jane said.

  Molly’s cheeks flamed in the cold, her black eyes bright, glittering. Jane bent to fuss with the scarf hanging askew around her little throat.

  It’s the fresh air, I said, and walked on, leaving Jane to follow with Molly. It was well past lunch and I was hungry and underdressed for the cold.

  Will you wait, Jane called.

  —and bring whatever small, personal items you require, came the voice over the telephone. The room which will be yours at the very top of the house—splendid views—is comfortably and tastefully furnished in the colonial manner. You will be quite at liberty to make yourself at home.

  It was a moment before I realized what he was saying.

  Thank you, sir, I said. My voice trembled embarrassingly.

  Are you quite sure of your way? he asked.

  I believe so.

  Nevertheless, he proceeded to give detailed, colourfully descriptive, one might even say atmospheric, directions to his home behind the Brown University campus. I was given to understand that a sister or mother or some other elderly female relative (not a wife, to be sure) who normally handled such matters was to be away for a time convalescing from a somewhat prolonged and exceedingly virulent case of the grippe, as he put it, and that I was to be employed for at least the duration of her absence. This would be some few weeks and perhaps, all going well, a good while afterward, he added, if I were agreeable to such arrangements.

  I assured him I was most agreeable. In the meantime there was a more immediate concern.

  I beg your pardon, I began then, hesitantly. We have not discussed …

  I had hoped he would take up the hint, but I was met with only silence. It was awkward, to be sure. I would not have brought it up had my situation not been quite so desperate.

  … the matter of salary.

  More muffled humphing or, possibly, coughing. Perspective, I have found, is everything.

  I do feel, Candle, that between gentlemen talk of money is a coarse matter.

  I only ask … my circumstances are what one might call straitened. I laughed apologetically. I sensed it was not the first time I had done so. I do realize this is out of the ordinary, inappropriate even, certainly not something I’m in the habit of—

  You are guttering, Candle.

  Might I receive a small portion of my salary in advance? It is rather urgent—

  Yes, yes, he said wearily. I find this talk of such low matters—a cough here, he seemed to be growing breathless—degrading to us both. Please, let us speak no more of it.

  He asked then if I needed a review of the directions to his home, and I assured him I could find the place easily and that I would begin making preparations for my move within the hour—another fabrication as there were no preparations to make, only myself and my shoddy valise there in the dank, panelled lobby and outside the lowering skies over the city and the coastal gusts rattling the windowglass, the promise of the storm to come.

  That I need not face it, this storm—another night on the cold, wet streets among the other desperate and unwashed, urinating in the park like an animal, waiting in the damp at the back of the line for the soup kitchen only to arrive at the front to find the kettle had just been scraped—was only just beginni
ng to settle. I assured him he could expect me before nightfall. In truth, I could not get there soon enough to suit me, but I did not say as much to him. It did not do, I had found in such situations, to appear too eager.

  It is a splendid thing you are not a woman, he said, out of the blue. I wasn’t quite sure how I would manage it. A pleasant surprise, Candle. I expect our time together to be quite—he wheezed—illuminating.

  And then he was gone.

  I stood in the rain on the doorstep of darkened Number Sixty-Six, waiting for an answer to my ring. When none came, I stepped back into a puddle and looked up at the building.

  It rose, modest but elegant, two square stories plus an attic in the typical Rhode Island colonial style, with small-paned windows and a carved fan above the panelled front door. Still, while handsome, there was something unwelcoming about it, too, tucked away there in the trees behind the university, a kind of squat and sublimated misanthropy. It struck me often, the similarities between buildings and people; not that they resemble us, but that we resemble them. We, too, only hollow frames subject to the slow indignities of decay, the darkening that age brings. I wonder, sometimes, what lives in us. I wonder what comes calling, what we invite inside.

  But such thinking always troubled Jane.

  The streaked windows of Sixty-Six remained unlit. A sudden movement there and I lifted a hand in greeting before realizing, with some embarrassment, it was only the trees and the storm reflected darkly in the glass. The rain blasted against me. Feeling a flicker of irritation, I collapsed my umbrella, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  My first impression was of gloom. The small foyer of dark wood panelling and floorboards made darker by the storm and the hour. It smelled of damp and wax and something richly, unpleasantly sweet, like overripe cherries. A chime clock ticked on the wall immediately to my left, the swing of its brass pendulum a glint of light in the gloaming, and beside it a panelled door stood closed and—strangely—padlocked into what I assumed was the main floor suite which the man Baxter had mentioned. I wondered what could be behind such barricading. Across the foyer, a second, smaller door, flanked by brass-potted palms, was set into the wall beneath the stairs. This door was not padlocked.

  Apart from these, there was only an iron coat stand to my right and the stairs, banistered and covered in a richly filigreed ruby carpeting, which curved up and to the left into the darkened second story.

  I confess I was dismayed to find the house divided into two, possibly three, apartments. Surely I had been given the impression over the telephone that my gentleman employer was the owner and sole occupant apart from the recuperating relative. Already our conversation of only a few hours ago had taken on a hazy, gilded quality, as of something that had happened years previous, or that I had once dreamed. But I was exhausted, preoccupied, and my memory had never been good, as Jane had frequently pointed out. He might have mentioned it, after all.

  Either way, it appeared no one would be coming down to greet me. I deposited my umbrella upon the iron stand and, after wiping my soaked shoes pointlessly, mounted the groaning staircase.

  When I reached the landing, the air changed.

  I do not know how else to describe it. It darkened, became more dense. The carpet grew unpleasantly thick beneath my shoes, a swollen thing. I paused, disoriented, off-balance, and gripped the cold banister to steady myself, the wax sticky on my palm. My sodden clothing chafed against my skin, and I unbuttoned the collar of my overcoat. I shut my eyes, breathed. Pricks of light raced behind my eyes like mad, blue constellations. I could almost feel the bracing, elemental rush of wind and rain beyond the papered walls.

  It was a long moment before I regained my equilibrium, and I put this off, quite logically, to the storm and the absence of windows on the landing, and to my fatigue and light-headedness at the lack of a decent meal in many days. That I had not collapsed before now seemed miraculous in itself. I hoped I was not coming down with something.

  Still, though I was not a superstitious man, I was aware that I had always been rather … impressionable. Easily swayed, Jane once said. The man Baxter’s face came back to me, abashed as he mentioned his wife, the upstairs tenants. But I had detected something else there, too. A question in his gaze, and in the bleached gaze of the boy as well.

  I gripped the banister more tightly, moved from the landing slowly upward, feeling that weightiness, as if it were pressing me back. A door stood closed in the shadows above me and I climbed toward it, sliding my hand along the nicked banister, my valise thumping against my knees. I hesitated on the upper landing only an instant, then raised my fist and rapped soundly, the noise ricocheting around in the darkness. My trousers clung wetly to my shins and I shivered and rapped again and, inexplicably, looked over my shoulder down the staircase. At last, hearing no sound from within and being, after all, expected, I opened the door.

  I was hit, first, by a wall of bad air, as if neither door nor window had been opened in weeks. As if the rooms had sat long empty, the air unstirred by even the slightest movement. An earthy smell, not altogether unpleasant, flooded over me, mixed with that same musky sweet odour and even taste of old cherries. It filled my throat, recalling to me an orchard I must once have known as a child, the plump, rich fruit warm and soft from the sun. But as soon as I grasped for the memory, it was gone, as is the way with memories. Like ghosts, they can only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes.

  From where I stood in the doorway, the apartment seemed darker than had the main floor foyer. I recalled that from the outside I’d seen all the curtains pulled shut against the streetlamps and whatever scant gray light the sky yet held. That heaviness of air seemed denser there, weightier, as if the darkness were caused not merely by a lack of light but by the presence of something else.

  I noticed, then, a panelled door down a couple of steps at the end of the front hall, set a little apart from the rest of the suite. Though the door was shut fast, a light shone dimly from beneath.

  Hello? I called out. Sir? It’s Arthor Crandle.

  Only the wind and the rain outside. I stepped into the apartment, dropping my sodden valise with an intentional clatter, then rapped my knuckles in brisk manufactured annoyance against the wall where I stood waiting.

  Hallo! I called again.

  Still, nothing came. I could imagine only that my employer was asleep or had stepped out. I walked to the end of the hall and, descending the steps to the lighted room, rapped soundly there, just to be certain. My wet clothes hung heavily from my shoulders and hips as I waited. I cleared my throat, watching the dampness spread out under my shoes in the weak light.

  Then, as I waited, an unpleasant thought: the unnatural, studied silence coming from the other side of the door was neither that of someone having just gone out nor of someone at focused work or even in deep sleep. Rather it was the stillness of someone’s strained listening just on the other side. Watching, perhaps, through the crack there.

  I felt a shiver run through me that was not the cold.

  How I wanted, in that moment, to leave. Even as I thought, My god, what things we do for … not love, certainly. I knew very well it was not love which had driven me there, nor hope, nor even obligation. Desperation, certainly; but more than that: it was grief. A much fiercer and lasting kind of loyalty in the end.

  A floorboard creaked behind me, and I turned in relief, expecting to greet my new employer.

  But there was no one, only the open door through which I’d just come, out of the wet blackness, and my own shining footprints across the floor.

  It was then I noticed the pedestal table in the entranceway. It bore, beneath the small light of an exquisite emerald lamp, a note weighted down, from heaven knew what phantom gusts in that still and airless place, with a human skull of such craftsmanship as to look quite real. I stepped toward it and, repressing an inexplicable urge to poke my fingers into its empty eye sockets, I plucked the envelope from beneath it with hands made unsteady by the cold an
d the strain, and by many weeks of having slept little and eaten less.

  Welcome, Candle, it read.

  What is it in us which blinds us? Standing there in the front hall, I felt a chill spread slowly over me, like a palm cupping cold marble, or a window left open to an autumn night. But for the wind and rain lashing outside, the house was eerily still, eerily silent. And yet I told myself it was only sleep I needed. A bed, warmth, rest.

  I followed a set of creaking stairs from the front hall up to the darkened second story, clutching his letter, my valise bumping noisily against the walls of the narrow stairwell. At a small landing I found two doors and opened one. I felt for the electric light but when I punched the button, nothing happened. From what I could make out, the room appeared to be empty except for a few boxes against the wall and an antiquated cornbroom abandoned in the corner. I closed the door and opened the other.

  When I found the button this time, the bulb in the ceiling buzzed and crackled with a thin orange wire, then flared with light. I raised a hand to my face, blinking, and carried my dripping valise inside.

  It too seemed little more than a large storeroom, lowceilinged and grimly furnished. Behind the clutter of more cardboard boxes I could see a cast-iron bed, narrow and sagging and so short it would surely only allow me to curl up like a fetal cat or drape my ankles painfully across the foot rail. A washstand with a blue-flowered enamel basin and pitcher stood beneath a darker oval on the far wall where a mirror or a picture must once have hung; but all this, too, and the chest of drawers, even the lamp on my bedside table, had been built in miniature. I thought of Alice, having stepped through the looking glass. I reached out and turned on the lamp, which glowed with a rosy light. Certainly the room must once have been used by, intended for, a child.

  Yet clearly it had not been used so in quite some time. My shoes scraped the bare floorboards as I pushed aside sealed boxes thick with grit; even the folded bed linens, when I lifted them from the cold radiator, smelled musty from long disuse. The saving grace: the monitor roof boasted windows which, though smudged and fly-specked, afforded a nearly panoramic view of the city. Below one of these sat my desk. I regarded its stacks of manuscripts and correspondence without enthusiasm, then leaned toward the glass. Past my ghosted reflection I could see the university observatory glowing bluely, as if a celestial creation fallen, and beyond that the hilled Providence skyline, domed and steepled, and in the distance, on the edge of the silvered river, a building more striking still: dark and sprawling, its gloomy peaks and dormers lit but dimly through the rain.