The Broken Hours

by Jacqueline Baker

  I mentioned I have a view of Butler, from my room.

  The doctor waited.

  There is a dormer window, on the upper east corner …

  Yes?

  I see a light there sometimes—it sounds strange, I know—a light going on and off. As if someone were pressing the button.

  Indeed?

  Yes.

  The doctor stared back at me. I felt he was waiting for more. I knew not what to say.

  The light, I said again, just flickers on and off. Sometimes for several minutes.

  Strange. The doctor smiled. Perhaps the cleaners, wiping down the buttons. We have stringent codes of cleanliness here at Butler, you know.

  I nodded. Yes. No doubt you do. I tapped my fingertips against my knees. Well, I said. There was no putting it off any longer. I rose, felt the letters in my pocket. I appreciate your taking the time, I said, and pulled out the letters. If you’ll kindly direct me to the correct room.

  He looked up at me a long moment, frowning deeply.

  What is it?

  He paused, studying me. Surely Sister Clementine told you?

  I felt a sinking at the pit of my stomach, and I sat slowly again in the chair.

  I’m sorry, he said. I thought you understood. It was a gall bladder operation. She claimed the day before the procedure she had no wish any longer to live.

  She is … dead, then?

  Buried in the Swan Point Cemetery, out back, along with her husband, Winfield. You can easily find her gravestone there in the Phillips plot.

  But, I said, so long?

  Fifteen years, yes. He tapped his fingers lightly on the desk, then leaned forward. These things, he said, they are often genetic, you understand. They pass from one generation to the next, as easily as blue eyes or curly hair. You understand?

  I understood. I tucked the letters back into my pocket, felt them burn there.

  At the door, I turned back. And did the son, I asked, ever visit the mother here?

  He looked at me a long time. Finally he said, He did. They would stroll by the river and sit at length on a little bench there. They were very close, at the end. Yes, he was here often. But …

  Yes?

  As far as I know, he never once, in all those years, ever came inside. He seemed to consider. Then he said, You know—forgive me, I’ve forgotten your name.

  Crandle.

  Crandle, yes. Forgive me, Mr. Crandle, but may I make an observation?

  Certainly.

  You seem to have become rather deeply involved, yourself, in the matter.

  No, I said. I wouldn’t say that. Concerned, yes. But, someone in such close proximity, suffering so, really, how can one not be aware?

  Yes, the doctor said, nodding slowly. That is often the question.

  I stood on the steps of Butler, glad of the cold, the fresh air, and felt I could begin to breathe again, though the weight of the asylum loomed enormous at my back, throwing its shadow over me. I felt a chill and stepped out into the sunlight.

  The grounds spread out before me, dull with the last of winter, the sky big and blue above, a full-blown sky. A breeze rustled the browned vines along the wall at my back, sent a clatter of leaves to the ground, and I crushed one with my shoe until it was dust. The doctor’s words weighed heavily. He had managed to shed both light and darkness. No place worth knowing, I thought, yields itself at sight; no person; no thing. And I wondered where the phrase had come from, if it had been something the doctor had said. I could not recall.

  Down at the far end of the building, past a pared bed of bloomless rose bushes, I could see the young nurse, Ivy, leading the woman in the knitted hat by the arm in the clear light, as one would a tentative child. As I watched, Ivy stopped and knelt with her white stockings in the damp brown grass to tie the woman’s shoe. I had to turn away at such an intimate, such a humble, motherly gesture.

  I descended the steps onto the gravel drive, feeling in my overcoat pocket for the chunk of gravestone. And stopped. All at once I knew exactly where it had—where it must have—come from.

  I turned and followed a swept cobbled path briskly along the front of the asylum. The vines up the bricks rattled drily. At the edge of the building, a man in dirty overalls stabbed the dirt with a spade and I was forced to step off the path into the wet grass.

  Rounding the corner, I saw the manicured grounds spread out in a long sweep down to a wooded bluff and the river beyond. I walked across the wet lawns and, picking up a path there again at the edge of the woods, followed it through stands of leafless shrubbery and bare, mossy hardwoods to a little fieldstone shelter with a graceful shingled roof. I was astonished to see there, all along the base of the southernmost wall, daffodils, just budding. They were dwarfed, reluctant things, and I marvelled, rubbing my chilled hands together, at the thought of such tender buds braving that frosted air. Above them hung the sign I had been looking for. I opened the low iron gate, which creaked into the still air, and stepped inside, let it swing shut again with a clang.

  From that prospect, it appeared to be a park. I followed a groomed path curving between long, glossy walls of holly and came out in a little clearing, with a view of a pond upon which mergansers sailed serenely, cutting the water in long, black Vs. An elderly couple sat on a bench there, mufflered, holding gloved hands, their breath pluming out beautifully in the hard sunlight. There was a smell of new grass and a sweet, pleasant scent which must have come from a big, willowy tree, blooming with stars, which hung over a stone wall near the pond. Life, it seemed, as if conscious of the near proximity of death, burst forth sooner there.

  I ascended a series of stone steps, slippery with dew, and then I was in the cemetery proper.

  The place was larger than I’d expected. I spent a long hour winding among headstones—some so mossed and weathered as to be illegible—and winged angels and Russian crosses and stone obelisks. There were cracked slabs dating to the late 1700s, crumbling and browned, the earth all around sunken and soft beneath my shoes. Trees dangled their branches protectively round fenced family plots typical of a certain misanthropic New England mentality. The grasses where I’d strayed from the path to examine carvings and inscriptions—As You Are Now, So Once Was I—were long and wet, and my shoes were soon soaked through and I was chilled and weary. I sat to rest on a mossy stone wall. Then, as if fate had led me there, I saw it. Phillips. I rose again and crossed the grass, circling the family plot: Robie, Whipple, Winfield, Sarah Susan.

  I felt a thrill: there, round the back of his mother’s gravestone, a piece was missing near the base. I felt of the chunk of stone in my pocket. Of course, it made perfect sense.

  But I could not help being saddened, then, at the thought of such a memento, and I wondered if perhaps my employer thought he’d lost it. I made a mental note to return it to him at the earliest possibility. Crouching down, I pulled the chunk from my pocket and held it up to the gravestone.

  It did not fit.

  No matter which way I turned the piece, I could not make it do so. I turned then upon Winfield’s stone. But his was perfectly intact.

  I stood a good while in the cold sunshine, turning the piece of gravestone in my fingers, baffled. A flock of birds lifted from the treetops in absolute silence. I watched them disappear.

  Then I propped the letters in their envelopes very carefully against the mother’s grave. The sky was enormous, filled with light, and all around me the gilded branches burst out over the bluffs; beneath, the slow, coldly muscled coursing of the river. A wind had come up off the bay; the sky felt unbearably, icily blue, and though it was the middle of April, it felt for all the world like winter was only just setting in.

  3

  Flossie seemed to have gone for good. I felt anxious but also angry, somehow, as if she had simply abandoned me to the darkness of Sixty-Six. In truth, I suppose, I had come to hope—hope, yes—that something might grow up between us. Some good thing, some light thing.

  And, then, when I was ho
nest with myself, I knew there was a part of me that was glad also. Or, perhaps not glad but relieved. Jane was to come. Jane must come. And it made things much simpler if Flossie was not there.

  I saw no one when I returned to Sixty-Six. Even the child, the presence, seemed to have gone. Only the silver tabby appeared at the kitchen window at dinnertime, or just past, when the streets were already bathed in dusklight. He sat on the shed roof waiting, like a ghost, until I raised the glass and put out a bowl of something good that I had, again, failed to eat. I had no appetite still and my trousers hung from my hip bones. I’d had to use a kitchen knife to work another hole into the leather of my belt.

  As for the tabby, he was, in spite of his ghostly coloring, muscular and real. I had come to regard him with a kind of wonder and horror. There was about him nothing of the ephemeral; he was what he was, no less and no more. When he pushed against my palm, I pushed back, feeling the agility in him, the strength. The heat of all that blood.

  That night I knocked, softly, at the study door. I could not put it off any longer. I felt none of the dread, or fear, I had used to feel, only a kind of embarrassed pity. There was nothing, it seemed, that life from some people would not wrench away.

  When no answer came, I tried the latch. It was unlocked. I inched the door open and called, quietly, It’s me, sir. Crandle.

  A rustling as of blankets and a sigh and then, What is it?

  May I come in?

  I waited outside the cracked door. More rustling and what sounded like a shifting of furniture across the floor, a dragging, and then he said, Come.

  The heavy draperies were drawn against the dusklight. A lamp shone dimly on the table by the door, and I realized this was the constant light I must have seen from beneath the door. Beside it was a dusty jar containing a dead snake, mottled, dessicated, blind. Someone had taken pains to pose the creature in a manner the effect of which was hardly lifelike. I looked away in disgust.

  The matches I’d dropped days ago still lay scattered across the carpet. I stooped to brush them quickly into my palm before looking about the room.

  By dim lamplight, the space was much larger than I would have thought, and crammed with furnishings and papers and books, a maze of bookshelves, really; an antique rifle hung on one wall and clustered photographs and illustrations and shelves of curios; an elegant classical bust of a woman veiled in cobwebs; armchairs and occasional tables and two large desks, at opposite ends of the room, as if it were arranged for two people instead of one. The larger of these was situated under the window facing the street. The room was, in fact, so crammed with things that at first I could not make him out; it was like those children’s puzzles in which one must find the hidden figure.

  Finally I saw him, hunched in the big Morris chair in the shadows at the far side of the room, just outside of the pool of lamplight. He appeared so heavily covered in blankets that I could see only shoulders—rather broader than I’d imagined—his face indistinguishable in the dim light.

  Tell me, Candle—he smacked his lips drily, as of someone waking from sleep—when is spring to come.

  I was puzzled at first, wondering if he was speaking metaphorically. I struggled to shape an adequate reply, but then he said, I don’t recall a springtime ever so miserable as this one.

  It strikes me as a bit milder today, sir, I said.

  Not in here.

  I stood uncertainly in the doorway, wondering would he invite me in.

  I have beheld all the universe has to hold of horror, he said, sounding as if he was quoting someone, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever after be poison to me.

  I’m afraid I don’t know who that is, sir.

  No, he said, heavily.

  I felt of the gravestone in my pocket.

  I believe I have something of yours. It only occurred to me today you might be wanting it.

  Yes?

  It’s … I pulled the stone from my pocket. May I come in?

  I am not well, Candle.

  I apologize, sir. I just … perhaps this is of some importance to you?

  Well?

  I took this as an invitation and stepped tentatively toward him across the room. I almost thought he might warn me back, but he did not, and the closer I came, the more I could make out his face dimly there in the shadows. It seemed, much to my astonishment, from what I could see, quite normal.

  I’m sure I stood staring, gaping perhaps. It was a face quite long and narrow, lantern-jawed. Withered by illness, the face of a sick man, clearly, gaunt and strained, drained of all color, but hardly monstrous.

  Will you speak, he said then, or is this to be some parlor game?

  I beg your pardon, I said. I wanted only to give you this.

  I handed him the chunk of gravestone and he took it with hands long and fine-fingered. As he leaned forward, his face spasmed and twisted, as if with great pain. He raised a hand self-consciously, to hide himself.

  Forgive me, he said, from behind his hand. It is a condition I’ve had since childhood. Saint Vitus’ Dance. Enchanting name for an ugly syndrome. Worse when I am ill or tired, I’m afraid. I know it is unpleasant to look upon.

  I made motions of denial, but I had to admit it had been grotesque and frightening. He leaned back in his chair again, turning the stone over in his hands.

  Where did you find it?

  Upstairs, I said, in my room. If I’d known …

  Known?

  If I thought it had any significance to you, I would have returned it sooner. I’ve been carrying it around. I’m not quite sure why. An embarrassing admission. I half-expected to be upbraided by him.

  Do you know what it is? he asked instead.

  I didn’t, at first. But then, after a while, I thought it must be a piece broken from a gravestone.

  Yes, he said. And no.

  He was quiet a long while, and when he finally looked up at me, it was as if he was surprised to find me still there.

  Please, he said, sit. A proper meeting has been a long time coming. I hope you will forgive such rudeness.

  I sat on the edge of a rocker a few feet away. It groaned beneath me and I stiffened to stop the noise.

  In fact, Candle, he said, lifting the piece of stone, I have not seen this in quite some time. A childhood memento. I had wondered where it had gotten to, and then time passes, and we forget, as we do with all things that once meant a great deal. It is necessary, I suppose, such forgetting. A blessing, really. He lowered the stone to his lap, where it lay cupped in his palm.

  You know, Candle, I was handsomely indulged as a boy, by my mother in particular. We had an idyllic estate, the most beautiful in Providence, I dare say, in what was practically the country, back then. My grandfather, with whom I was close, fell on hard times. When he lost his fortune, everything else hit an inevitable downslide. When he died, it seemed all was lost.

  The rocker creaked beneath me and I stopped it.

  So it is from his grave.

  He closed a weak fist over the stone.

  It is not. You see, I spent a good deal of time as a boy with my grandfather. My mother needed often to be alone. She suffered terrible migraines, was so sick from them she had bouts of vomiting so violent it left her gaunt-eyed and shaking. And, of course, she was always what she called “nervous.” My father was not much in my life. A salesman, away a good deal, with a demanding position. And so he fell ill from the pressures, was paralyzed, died not long after. My grandfather was the only other male in a house filled with women, and so it was only natural we should have a certain affinity. He was a great reader himself and loved especially a good ghost story. Perhaps this is where my own interest began. No doubt it is. He used to love telling me scary stories when I was a boy, and in truth I did not often feel afraid. Only once, when I’d expressed some discomfort at bedtime over some nonsense tale or other which he’d spun, he took me and led me, long after everyone else had gone to bed, through the darkened house, room by room, p
ointing out ordinary objects, touching them with me, exploring the familiar places that seemed so transformed by lack of light but were in fact still ordinary, still the same. After that night, I don’t recall ever feeling afraid again. It was as if he’d taken the mystery out of the darkness and replaced it with himself, the comfort of his presence, and of his voice.

  At any rate, he had a story for everything, every phenomenon, every landmark, every person we’d meet all up and down Angell Street. Even the servants who lived up on the third floor, he had stories for them, dark stories that made them more than human to me, mythical, as if every ordinary face hid secrets and magic. Every place on the estate, the carriage house, the orchard, the woods, he had stories for them all. I spent a good deal of my boyhood exploring all of those places, and creating my own imaginary populations and cities among the grass and the dirt.

  It was while occupied thus one afternoon that I came across a spot behind the carriage house, back near the woods in the tall grasses near the empty neighboring lot, where someone had placed a small concrete marker. I thought at first it was only a rock, all overgrown and covered in moss, but then noted its unusually square shape and I pulled away the long grass and brambles and rubbed at the moss only to discover, engraved there—can you imagine?

  I shook my head dumbly.

  The name of my own mother, Sarah Susan Phillips.

  I watched my employer uneasily, but said nothing.

  Of course, I had no idea what it might be, or why the name of my mother, alive and well, might be written there, but I played for some time around the place, using the stone as a fortress wall for a village of Arabs I’d imagined there, until one afternoon my grandfather happened upon me in that place and asked what I was doing. I told him. He seemed odd about it and advised that I find another place for my games, and being myself a rather precocious child, I sensed his demeanor had something to do with the stone, and so I asked him about it. I believe I may even have said something about it looking like a grave and remarking how strange it was that I should find it here with my mother up and around and quite well indeed. I believe I pressed the matter, no doubt I did, irrepressible as I was. I threw a bit of a tantrum, as I was wont to do in those days, and finally the old man said he would tell me but that it must be a secret just between the two of us and that I must never let on to my mother or anyone else what he was about to tell me. Of course, we had many good secrets, he and I, so this was hardly unusual, and so I agreed, knowing quite well this was the way he prefaced all of his best stories.