The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  I scrabbled my feet on the rough concrete floor, trying to rise, feeling the wall for something to hold onto, dizzy still.

  But it was not the damp wall I felt upon reaching up. It was a wooden door, cracked and splintering. My hand found the latch and, pulling myself upright, I leaned there a moment in blackness, breathing. Then, thinking to find a light within, I opened it.

  A smell of rust and mothballs and rot. I felt around inside for a switch, my skin crawling. When I found it, the room fizzled with a weak, tea-coloured light, the bulb over my head glowing by a single corroded filament.

  A storage room. Or, not even a storage room, a crawl space. Not big enough to stand up in. I leaned inside and poked around. Nothing, it seemed, of any importance. Boxes of curios, china figurines, books, old furniture, silvery Christmas bulbs packed in tissue like eggs in a nest. A cord was strung from beam to beam of the low, cobwebbed ceiling, and hung with metal clothes hangers. A dress dummy leaned against the far wall, white as a corpse, its shoulders disappearing eerily into the shadows.

  The electric light fizzled. I bent to pry the lid off a sealed box, the cardboard dusty and damp. Children’s toys, a red engine upturned over strips of jumbled railway, as if there had been some disaster. I opened another. It appeared to be filled with crusted rags. I plucked one off the top, exposing a nest of baby rats, groping blindly. An awfulness in their vulnerability. I straightened abruptly, dropping the rag, disgusted, and in doing so, jostled the hangers with a terrible metallic clatter and the light fizzled again and went out.

  I reached up to touch the bulb, scorching my fingers as the light flickered on weakly, then went out again. I felt around for the rag and, using it to protect my fingertips, reached for the bulb again. Touched it. The light flickered on.

  She was there: crouched among the boxes.

  I recoiled, plunging the room again into a terrible darkness. I grabbed the bulb, heedless of burns, and the light came on and stayed on as I screwed it in tightly.

  Of course, there was no one. Could not have been room for anyone besides myself. It was my mind which had seen the child, not my eyes. I could picture, still, its face there, peering out, horrible, from among the boxes. Not Molly’s face at all. It could not have been. I swallowed a terrible tightness in my throat as I stood there in the doorway, aching.

  Then I backed out of the room and punched off the light, groping my way back up the stairs, blind.

  4

  Constance careened us through the twisted streets of Boston’s South End, the gas lamps ghostly in the falling snow. The drifts were all across the road. Constance plowed through them, her father’s Lincoln halting and swerving and chugging on again.

  She sang, at first, full tilt in a flat contralto, Di-ner, is there no one fi-ner, in the state of Caroli-ner, but forgot the rest of the words and finally just hunched silently, maniacally, over the steering wheel, propelling us through the dismal Victorian streets, reeking of sweat and gin punch and Tabu gone stale with the hour. Her coat was open over her lap and her dress hiked up to the top of indigo stockings, her thigh lean and finely muscled. I would not have called her beautiful. Handsome, perhaps. But more than this, there was a certain careless strength to her. A certain recklessness. A certain darkness.

  The Lincoln slammed into a drift and stopped. The engine died. Constance cranked the starter brutally, again and again. Nothing. She put her forehead against the steering wheel and laughed. All around us the snow fell and fell in the dead city.

  When she finally stopped laughing, the silence was profound, enormous. She turned her face toward me, her mascara all looped blackly under her eyes like a soldier.

  She was, I admit, irresistible.

  We are none of us free from the terrible humiliation of our humanness. Our bodies betray us. Our emotions likewise. Our minds, perhaps, most treacherous of all. Everything subject not to what our heart but to what our psychology conceives.

  Lack of love, they say, is not what makes an unhappy marriage, but lack of friendship. In Jane, then, there was neither friendship nor love. But neither was there in Constance.

  Inconstance, an unhappy accident of language.

  Afterward I walked the Boston streets alone, the wet, heavy snow to my shins. It seemed to take hours. I imagined the scene which would greet me at home: Jane sitting on the sofa in the same old sour dressing gown, Molly asleep on her lap. I would enter, shaking snow in the alcove. Finally out, eh, I would say. Must be a relief. Snowing like the dickens out there. I would hang my overcoat carefully, fiddle a long while with my galoshes. Arthor, Jane would say, evenly. I called my mother. She had threatened as much in the past. I would step into the room, peer at her in the lamplight, as if I could not conceive what she was saying.

  She would look as if she had been crying, but she might not have been; she’d looked that way for weeks. Do you know, she would say, what time it is? I cannot believe you went out tonight, to a party. I would tell her again it wasn’t a party. She would wipe her nose on a wadded hanky, tell me she was going back to Rochester, back to her parents. I would act honestly astonished, honestly confused. Oh, we’d had these scenes before. I cannot believe, she would say, you went out this evening. I would tell her I had no choice. She would say that was what I always said. I would be unable to deny it. In fact, it was how I often felt in those days. As if I had no choice. I would say, I don’t understand why you’re so upset.

  If you want your secrets kept, they say, cloak them in candour.

  My god, I would say, then, gaping. You think I’ve been unfaithful. Is that it? She would rise, struggling with Molly’s weight, tell me she was going to bed. Nothing happened between me and the girl, I would say, angrily. Between me and anyone. Not even between me and you in quite some time.

  She would turn and cast me a long glance, then shut the bedroom door firmly behind her. She would be frosty in the morning, unresponsive. I would act as if I did not care. And maybe I did not. Maybe I was tired of caring. Maybe I, too, was tired of such scenes. Tired of feeling old. Just tired.

  I steeled myself for it as I turned onto our street. We were the last on the block, the lower floor of a slumped brownstone in a row of slumped brownstones, cloaked now in patches of snow, as if diseased things. Light fell through the drapes onto the unshovelled front steps and I tripped on my way up, ready for the confrontation but hoping too, maybe, just a little, that this time it would unfold differently. I pictured them again, as I had earlier in the evening, but tenderly now, curled together in a pool of lamplight on our old sofa and I softened.

  I slid my key into the lock, but it was already open. Strange, I thought, and pushed the door ajar, stepping quietly inside. I paused a moment in the alcove. The sofa stood empty and orange in the light of the lamp still burning there. It was not like Jane, frugal always, to leave a light burning unnecessarily. I stamped my snowy galoshes lightly, then crossed the wood floor to where our bedroom door stood gaping weirdly. Streetlight fell coldly in through the window. The bed was as I had left it. Unmade, empty. I punched on the light.

  Jane? I said.

  I crossed the room, wrenched open the closet door, looking for her travelling case. I rummaged about in the heaps of soiled laundry.

  A faint knocking at the front door and I turned and stepped back into the living room, my wet galoshes slipping against the wooden boards.

  Mrs. Hill, who lived upstairs, teetered in the alcove in her husband’s greatcoat, wringing her tiny red hands. I stood staring at her dumbly, something, a certain numbness, already settling over me.

  What is it? I finally managed.

  Oh, Mr. Crandle, was all she said.

  Mr. Hill drove me in his old Chevrolet and we made slow progress. I saw nothing: snow, the black river—did we cross it? I think we did; we must have—the ghost lights of a predawn December.

  When, at last, we pulled up in front of the emergency room at Weymouth, all blazing with light, I stepped out and then asked, for some inexplicable rea
son, Aren’t you coming in?

  What things we do in times of crisis.

  Mr. Hill just bit his lip and shook his head, his face green with the dashboard lights, there in the Chevrolet wafting plumes of exhaust over me. I shut the door, a groaning, clipped sound in the winter air. I can hear it still. But he did not leave. And I did not leave. I stood and stood. And finally he turned off the engine and got out and I followed him, this man I scarcely knew, who rapped the floor of his apartment above us sometimes, but timidly, a gentle reminder, when our shouting grew too loud. He led and I followed, stupidly, the snow banked up to our knees, and through the front doors, not bothering to stamp our galoshes, and inside to a desk, where Mr. Hill spoke quietly to a nurse who stood looking at me over his shoulder—oh, good Mr. Hill, where are you now?—before leading us away, down that polished hall, shedding snow as we went in great, heavy clumps and no one seeming to mind about that, no one seeming to care. And then Jane was there, hunched over in an armchair, as if someone had delivered a great blow to her stomach, as if she could not catch her breath, and I stood looking at Mr. Hill, as if he should do something, as if this were his story. And then he was gone. And we were alone, then, in that white room. Just Jane and me.

  Who can say how the days thereafter unfolded. There were vague impressions, and memories, sometimes so sharp I could taste them, feel them. The smell of flowers. A soft blue sweater with pearly buttons. A certain waxed wood beneath my palm. Or had I imagined that, the last bit? I no longer knew.

  There are things I would not remember. Things I told myself I did not. And when you shut a thing up, when you shut it—

  No. There was everything; and then there was nothing. That is the way with loss. It does not come in gradations.

  At some point it was day again, brutally. The light seared my eyes. All down our street the snow had browned from passing automobiles. There was nothing anymore of beauty in it. There was nothing. Only Jane climbing into the front seat there with her mother while her father slammed the black trunk shut, and no one looking at me, no one. As if I had never been there at all.

  What is it about the darkness which draws us? At once inward and outward. I had always been too easily drawn, too easily, Jane would have said, had said, too easily enveloped. I, who feared once, as a child, not the witching autumn, but spring, that clear-lighted season of ghosts when Jesus rose from the tomb, bloodless and terrible, rolling away the stone in the sunlight with his own deathless hands. I imagined Jane’s shock at hearing such a confession.

  Oh, yes, the darkness drew me. Had drawn me always.

  There was something in me, I knew, something perhaps in us all which, no matter our rational selves, was haunted.

  Five

  1

  Something had changed in me. Was changing. There was something sinister in Sixty-Six. Something sinister in the face of that child, something ugly, angry. It was not Molly. I knew that. But, then, who was it? And what did it want with me, attached as it seemed to be to my employer? It meant to tell me something; I was sure of it. But what?

  That night of my fall down the stairs, the child did not return. I slept badly, dreaming terrible dreams of being propelled up and up to where darkness thinned and into the gray ether toward some terrible knowledge which lay just out of my grasp, and then I was falling, hurtling into something cold and black and soulless, something that chilled me to my very core, that roused in me a feeling of despair which made me want to weep as I had not done in a long while.

  And then I was awake, and alone. Two letters lay on my bedside table, weighted down with the chunk of gravestone. They had surely not been there the night before. My door, of course, remained shut and locked. I picked up the letters. The first was another from my employer to his mother. A fresh wave of guilt washed over me. I still had not delivered the first. The hours and days seemed to slip away from me always, in fragments, as if they were not in my control, as if broken things that crumbled in my hands. I lifted the second envelope, addressed to me. I saw with no small degree of shock it was from Jane.

  I rose hastily and opened it at once, hands shaking so terribly I tore the pages. I could scarcely believe what I read. I sat down on the edge of my bed, reviewing the letter several times over before dropping it onto the table in dismay.

  Jane had booked train passage: she would arrive in three days’ time. What I had hoped for so long had come to pass now that I no longer desired or even welcomed it. The way of all things.

  It could not be. But how was I to stop it? What could I tell her?

  She could not come, and yet come she must.

  I ventured forth early into the misty streets with single-minded determination, my collar buttoned against the cold and a woollen muffler wrapped snugly round my throat. I clenched the letters addressed to my employer’s mother tightly in my fist in the chance that some ill wind would snatch them away and send them drowning into the Seekonk. Certainly, there had been enough of such diversions over the past week to set me off my course.

  And, then, I marvelled: a week. Only that. It felt like years.

  Jane was to come. God only knew what I was to do when she did. I would lose Flossie. I would lose my position, to be sure. And so I must, at least, finish what I had been asked to do. I felt compelled to, now, having seen him so broken. I knew, only too well, that kind of loss.

  Hope Street wound down toward the river, empty still at that hour but for a lone man in a trenchcoat waiting on the corner with a briefcase, checking his wristwatch. I cut sharply up Lloyd, past the winter-dead rose bushes of St. Sebastian church, its gray stone tower medieval in the fog, and on into wide, tree-lined Blackstone Boulevard with its storied mansions set well back from the street. Shining automobiles rattled by with regularity. In one of the curving drives, a child in a cowboy hat and fringed vest crouched slapping at the gravel with a toy shovel. A housekeeper raised an upper window with a sharp smack and leaned out. I thought she would call to the child, but she only watched a moment, then shook a white dust cloth briskly, as though in surrender, and slammed the window shut again. An elderly gentleman rode a bicycle up the sidewalk, bells jingling. I stepped into the street, out of his way.

  Morning, Sheriff, the man said to the boy, and the child pulled a toy pistol from his holster and fired after him.

  I was nervous, unsure what I would find in my employer’s mother. A monster, he’d said.

  But, no, that was not right: it was she who had called him a monster, not the other way around.

  I followed Blackstone for what seemed a long time. The yards began to broaden out into farms and the mansions thinned and the trees grew more densely and I wondered if I’d come too far. It seemed I had left the city behind and entered the countryside. All was brown and gray and tattered gold. The air smelled of wet feathers, of ice just come off the mud at the river’s edge. A flock of crows or starlings or some raucous dark birds blasted out of the shrubbery like devils in a rattle of leafless branches. I had almost resolved to turn back when I noticed the landscape ahead seemed to become less wild again, more orderly. Rounding an obviously groomed bank of junipers, I came to an expanse of lawn. And paused.

  I looked behind me. I checked for street signs. There were none. I walked closer, looked with a kind of wonder over the clipped brown lawns rolling out vastly and the curving drive and the circular flower beds still dormant with cold, the clipped hedges of box elder and rhododendron and, there in the near distance, the red-brick edifice I knew so well from my window. I stood marvelling. What a strange coincidence. There it stood, at the crest of the property. I was quite pleased with such fortuitousness. I could inquire inside about the address I sought and get a look around the place at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone. I walked nearer. The building was even more handsome than it had appeared from my attic window, luxurious even, and yet there was about the whole place a taint of something else, something marshy and decayed. There was about it the sort of restrained stillness one finds in on
ly the unhappiest of houses. I walked to the foot of the lawn where a discreet sign rose up from the grass next to a gravel drive. I stared.

  Butler Hospital for the Insane.

  And, beneath, an address. I felt a coldness settle over me. I lifted the envelopes. The address was the same. It was this very building I sought.

  I looked over the grounds again. The whole place had darkened, it seemed. A flatness to it in the early light. The dark windowpanes reflected nothing. The ivied brick had a wet, heavy, salty look, as of some fortress on the edge of the sea.

  I roused myself and followed the curving drive to the main building, my shoes crunching in the cold silence. The place might have been abandoned, the kind of place one reads of in ghost stories. I followed the drive as far as the sweeping front entrance, then hesitated at the foot of the wide white-painted stairs, looking up at the blackened windows for a sign of life.

  A movement to my right startled me and I turned to see a young woman stepping through the shrubbery, picking at the twigs in her hair with one hand. She looked up at me in surprise. A white face, plump in a pleasant, full-featured way. Her eyebrows so fine and highly arched that I realized what I’d taken for surprise was merely her natural expression. She wore a nurse’s cap, slightly askew. A white collar poked out from beneath an old black woollen winter coat covered in cat hair which she clutched about her shoulders. Her skirt and stockings and shoes were white also, though on the tip of one shoe, the right one, there was a large brownish stain. I averted my eyes, noticing then that she held a cigarette behind her back.

  I’ve startled you, she said.

  Not at all.