The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  As I stood watching at the window, a light in one of the dormer windows went out, and I was caught by melancholia, as I have always been at the sight of a light going out across a vast distance, like the sudden, cold extinguishing of a star.

  The light came on again, only to be put out a second later. This flickering continued nearly a full minute, as if someone there were sending a signal out across the darkening city, through the storm; as if someone were seeking a reply; and I almost felt, in that moment, in that cold room with the wind and rain raging outside, that the someone being signalled was me. But then the light went out and stayed out. I waited some time but it did not come on again.

  Before me, on the chipped windowsill, the desiccated bodies of flies lay thickly. I touched one with my thumbnail, lightly, and it crumbled to dust. I turned from the window and, putting out my own lamp, pulled off my wet shoes and socks and trousers and climbed into bed in my shirt sleeves, too tired even to bother washing up. From the bed, I could still see out the low window to the dormered building that had so caught my interest. I waited a few moments to see if the light would come on, but there was nothing. It occurred to me then, that, though my attic room was practically ringed with windows, all of the furniture—the bed, a small, dingy armchair, the desk and ladderback chair—were oriented toward this window, this view. It gave me a queer feeling and I made a mental note to rearrange things to my own taste in the morning.

  I said a quick prayer, as had long been my habit, against the suffering of loved ones and for my own failings and for the unhappy intersections between the two. There had been a time in my youth when prayer had brought me actual comfort and so I’d continued the ritual—out of a kind of familiar obligation, as was sometimes the way with habits—long after I had lost faith in it, when it left me only as exposed and unmoved as the solitary, ordinary, lonely bedtime ritual of removing one’s own clothing.

  Thus have you also been cast off, Crandle, I told myself, and closed my eyes.

  But I could not get comfortable. Apart from the smallness of the bed, the room was cold and I lay shivering and sleepless beneath the musty, too-short blankets, finding myself staring out across the city through the window, listening to the rain batter down upon the shingles above my head, and the house creak and shift in the high wind. When I held a palm to the wall, I could feel a draft seep as through something porous, as if the wall were not plaster but skin. The starched sheets chafed, the pillow lumped unpleasantly.

  It was then, as I tossed about seeking comfort, that my hand came upon a small, hard object beneath my pillow, and I pulled it out and turned on the lamp. In my palm lay what appeared to be a triangular chunk of concrete, which I took at first for a broken bit of sidewalk or building masonry.

  And yet, as I turned it beneath the lamplight, I found it to be curved smoothly on one edge, polished but for its broken side, and all in all it gave the sense of something vexingly familiar—some exceedingly common thing—though just what somehow eluded me. I put out the light again and lay back against the pillow, rubbing my thumb against its smooth side as if it were a talisman. Possibly it had been so once, placed there as a charm against darkness for whatever child had inhabited that room. A charm against loneliness. It seemed terribly sad to me that the charm was still there, the child long gone.

  At last I began to sink into sleep, down and down, with that sense of dark plummeting, as I imagined dying might feel.

  I was startled awake. I knew not how long I’d slept, if truly at all, but a sudden thought brought my blood ripping hotly into my veins, startling me into the unfamiliar dark.

  I switched on the bedside lamp and looked at the stone in my palm, the skin there welted red where I’d clenched it. I rubbed its smooth edge with my thumb.

  A piece of gravestone.

  I turned and turned it in my hands, and at last put out the light and lay listening for some time to the storm outside. The rain tapped at the windows; the wind creaked and whistled at one corner where a pane was loose from its caulking. Across the city, the light did not come on.

  Finally, I closed my eyes. The stone radiated a deep and abiding cold which would not warm in my clenched palm. Though its presence might have been chilling to some, I found it only sad, as Jane claimed I found all things. And I suspected she was right, without having the power to change it, that melancholy I had known all my life, and which too must be a gift of God.

  2

  I awoke to a room filled with the pewtered light of a coastal morning, turning the walls a velvety lilac blue. The close, musty air felt rinsed after the storm. Beyond the windows, mourning doves shifted and sighed in the dripping branches. An automobile hushed past on the wet street. Somewhere, a child bounced a rubber ball against the sidewalk with a muffled, metrical regularity that set my teeth on edge.

  I felt tired; a faint chill still lingered around my bones. My eyes ached at the backs of their sockets. But I had slept. And under a roof, and in a bed. I intended to write Jane first thing and tell her I was well situated and that I would soon be in a position to send money, likely that very day. I was not such a fool as to hope it might mean anything to her; hope, as they say, is the worst of all evils, prolonging only torment.

  I lay awhile beneath the covers, turning the stone over in my palm. I was surprised, in a way, to find it still there. The house below me was silent, and though I listened for movement there was nothing. Beyond the windows, the city lay spread out in a misty, gray light, the observatory dark and somehow disenchanted—or was it unenchanted?—at any rate ordinary, and the sprawling, dormered building in the distance, which had so captured me the previous evening, quite ordinary too in a handsome, rather gothic, somehow forbidding way. I studied its four stories of red brick, choked in ivy, its chimneys puffing great gallows of mauve smoke into the cold, and only with great effort could I tear my eyes away.

  The view was, as my employer had promised, splendid; the house situated on the very crest of College Hill. The lower town spread out before me on three sides, the narrow colonials and Georgians huddled together beneath peaked roofs, watercoloured, chimney pots smoking, the trees leafless and profound, still black with rain. The mercurial river coursing flat silver into the bay. The spires and pinnacles and belfries of the downtown proper, stately and ornate as the Orthodox crosses of Old Europe. Beyond, the rolling countryside cobwebbed in the early light. I wondered that my employer had not taken these rooms for his own use.

  I recalled, then, his letter. I plucked it from the bedside table and opened it. It was a long letter, at that, and written right up to the very edges of the bright orange pages, with no margins even to break the eye. If handwriting is, indeed, indicative of character, then his cramped, nearly illegible scrawl filling every inch of the page said a good deal indeed.

  He was an odd sort, to be sure, writing in a kind of baroque, formal tongue, and I had the distinct sense, when reading, of having received his letter out of the distant past. In addition, he was not one to use five words when fifty would do. No point in repeating all the remarkable detail the note contained; important only that he left a tarnished, silvery key (presumably to the front door), long-winded, formally polite instructions as to the general management of the house, a list of errands and a veritable treatise on the work I would—and did—find awaiting me on the desk.

  It occurred to me then that he had not yet given me his name. Nor had he mentioned it on the telephone. I flipped to the last page of the letter. He mentioned an aunt, Annie, currently convalescing, said something about we Phillipses, but as to his own name, he’d only scrawled something that looked like Ech-Pi. I tried to make sense of it, but no matter how long I looked, the letters did not mutate into a recognizable name.

  Ech-Pi. Imagine.

  I wondered if I would meet him that morning, though his letter had given me no reason to believe I would, neither that morning nor any other, as he claimed he kept inconvenient hours, sleeping—when he was able—by day, and working all th
rough the night. He wrote further that he had been unwell for some time and had not much left his rooms, and suggested that our communication should be epistolary until he was feeling well enough to meet. He claimed, in fact, that he preferred it so, as one never really became acquainted with another until they had maintained a correspondence. Still, I could not help but think we should cross paths, and likely sooner than later.

  He had, however, left no money for my promised advance. I read again his insistence that he not be disturbed, under any circumstances. And I thought, rather peevishly, that if he wished not to be disturbed he might have delivered on his assurance.

  I rose and dressed quickly in the cold room, in my one spare suit of clothes, a light summer suit ill-matched to the morning’s damp, my good jacket and trousers hanging like a doppelgänger in the window to dry.

  I stopped.

  Surely I’d not hung that suit the previous night. I recalled distinctly dropping my wet clothes to the floor and climbing, weary, into the cold bed. I could still recall the sound of my belt hitting the floorboards heavily. And yet there they hung, neatly, by the window. I could only imagine I must have been more exhausted than I’d supposed, to forget. Then again, such an habitual act could hardly be memorable.

  I folded the letter into my trouser pocket with the key and made up my bed. After a second thought, I pocketed the piece of gravestone as well. Before venturing downstairs to find the bathroom, I paused a moment at the door to look back at the suit, hanging before the window, turning slowly in the blue light.

  Imagine my astonishment, upon clicking on the overhead bulb in the cramped bathroom, to discover a clawfooted tub filled nearly to the brim with trash.

  Not the usual household trash of the muckier sort, but rather candy bar wrappers and the emptied boxes of other confectionary, chocolates and gumdrops and sugary lozenges. I rifled straight through to the bottom of the tub, so confounded was I by this perverse collection. Nothing but candy wrappers.

  After more rummaging about, I found beneath the sink some paper bags and filled several and twisted them shut and put them aside and rinsed the tub. The rest of the room, too, was in a state of what Jane would call disgrace: dust balls skated along the baseboards; the sink rimed with the powdery residue of old tooth polish; bits of toilet tissue littered the floor like ticker tape. Off-putting, to say the least. Nests of gray hair clung to the edge of the wastebasket like spiders. Fingernail scissors rusted on the lip of the sink. Everywhere a stench of unwashed underclothes. With some effort, I cracked the sticky window to the morning air, the sill there peppered, too, with a winter’s worth of flies. I recalled the doubtful gaze of the clerk at the agency: hisskeeping.

  I washed my hands and face in the icy trickle from the tap—the drain gave off a sour odour of old spittle—and only then did I notice no mirror hung over the sink. I peered about, dripping, my eyes stinging with water. I dried my face on a crumpled towel, then dug around back in the cabinet for one of those ladies’ hand mirrors, which are used, I am told, chiefly in the viewing of the back of one’s head; but none was to be found. I ran my fingers cursorily through my hair. A quick palm across my jaw told me I was in need of a shave. It was liberating, in a way, to know I was in a position where no such thing would be necessary. What could my appearance possibly matter to a man who would not meet me?

  The kitchenette proved no better than the bathroom, the counters covered in a greasy film, likewise the floor, the soles of my shoes sticking unpleasantly. A table in the corner was lost in stacks of books and papers and unopened mail; against one wall a pile of cardboard boxes and empty tin cans, their tops flipped open like razored eyelids; a pair of dirty galoshes leaned by a door leading to a rickety exterior set of stairs; the wall above the range so spattered with cooking oil it shone.

  Oddly, though, there was not a dirty dish, or cup, or spoon to be seen. I found the pots and crockery all clean and put away neatly in the cupboards, which nevertheless stank of damp and too-few openings. On the door of an ironing closet hung a calendar, issued by the Insurance Company of Providence, depicting the gateway arch in Federal Hill with its famous pignoli cluster dangling obscenely. The month showing was February and I flipped the pages forward to April, feeling uneasily as I did so that I was violating some kind of inexplicable order. I shut the closet only to open it a second later and flip them back to February again. When I turned on the faucet the pipes banged and lurched, and a thin, spitting foam of gray water spattered into the sink. I located the kettle in a drawer beneath the range and filled it and put it on to boil. But upon closer examination of the cupboards, I could detect not a single leaf of tea, nor any food at all besides a few unopened tins of Zocates and chili con carne and Protase and an ancient can of cocoa ranged unassumingly next to a line of spoiled-looking jellies—or so I imagined they were—with unlikely labels, handwritten: dandelion, stinging nettle, hawthorne. I pushed the dusty preserves and the tinned bread and meat to the back and opened the cocoa, struck by an earthy, wet-wool smell, not altogether unpleasant but certainly not chocolate. I spooned it out in clumps. The kettle shrieked and I poured out the steaming water. In the small icebox I found a crusted tin of condensed milk of questionable date and poured a bit of that in as well and stirred, my spoon clanging against the sides of the cup like a cathedral bell in the silence. Finally, I sipped the concoction and, finding the odour worse than the taste, which could perhaps best be described as faintly mushroomy, I took the cup and went to the front hall, pausing there a moment in the gloom. The light shone from beneath the study door, as it had the previous evening, but I could detect no sound of anyone stirring within. I returned with my cup to the kitchenette and wiped off a seat at the table.

  From the window I could see across a good-sized, overgrown garden to the yellow boarding house, temporary home of Baxter and James, as if they were partners in law. A low, glossy hedge in need of trimming and, between the two properties, a charming shed, the roof of which appeared to be—astonishingly—covered in cats. Creatures of various colorations and markings, sitting with their tails curled round them or prodding the eaves or patrolling the roof with serious, studied airs, like dancers just taking the stage. I counted some dozen of them. As I watched, a broad-shouldered silver tabby scaled the barren trellis up the side of the shed, then coiled himself just below the lip of the eaves, watching the others, tail twitching. When he pounced, the rest scattered. I knew that sort well. I’d never cared for the beasts. There was something about them so alien, so cold. Looking into their eyes, I saw no connection and knew very well they would gladly slit me open and eat me steaming from the inside out, then sit mildly wiping their gory muzzles.

  Turning from the window, I sipped my cocoa and, taking up pen and paper, began my letter to Jane.

  I spent the remainder of the morning with shirt sleeves rolled tightly past the elbow, carting out trash and cardboard boxes and newspapers to the bins at the back of the yard. The level of grime I discovered once I began exceeded all my expectations, even given that my employer had been on his own for some four weeks, according to his letter, and that he was a writer, with a writer’s habits. I swept dust and debris from the floors and, getting down on hands and knees, vigorously scrubbed every inch of the kitchen and bathroom with a stiff brush and buckets of hot water and a yellowed cake of lye soap on a saucer—which I had at first alarmingly put aside as a bit of margarine for my lunch—and which left my hands puckered and raw, and my fingertips thoroughly bleached of ink stains. I scraped crusted food from the kitchen counters with a metal spatula, and hacked at the rusted film in the sink. A black, hardshelled, antennaed thing crept up horribly out of the drain, groping blindly, and I cranked on the hot water, watching it flail in the vortex until it was flushed away. I screwed the plug in tightly, then turned my efforts to the greasy range.

  All morning I scraped and scrubbed and polished. I ran over the furniture with a damp cloth. I shook carpets out the windows with a sharp snap. By noon I had manage
d to improve most of the apartment, leaving untouched only my employer’s study and another set of rooms behind closed doors across the front hall. These I assumed belonged to the lady of the house, the aunt he had mentioned in his letter. I pushed all of the curtains open and punched on every electric light and pried the windows up to the sea air. And still the place felt stale and dark.

  One small delight: I discovered, after clearing away some of the kitchen clutter, three pots of primroses on the windowsill—yellow, magenta and orangey-pink—and I was so pleased to find them there, still blooming in spite of their miserable surroundings, it was as if I’d discovered the first crocus of spring breaking through late-lingering ice. I crumbled off all the dead leaves and blossoms and watered them until liquid ran like steeped tea from their pots.

  But, I will confess, all morning as I moved about the apartment, I found myself looking now and again over my shoulder at nothing. I could not quell a strange feeling: that something—someone—moved through the rooms with me, just ahead of me. That I was not alone in that apartment. As, of course, I reminded myself, I was not.

  I rattled about a good deal while I cleaned, taking comfort in the loud, ordinary noises, the sloshing and scrubbing and clanging, and thinking surely, sooner or later, to rouse my employer from his chambers. But the study door remained closed, and though I paused often as I passed through the hall, I heard nought.