I eased myself from the sofa and paused there a moment. I cannot explain it, but I had in that moment such a feeling of dread and horror. There was something so terrible in her stillness and in that ordinary detail, that Flossie in that moment did not have a face.
4
I pulled myself from the bath and let the filthy water drain away. My ankle throbbed and I doused it with antiseptic and taped it over with a bandage. It probably needed stitching, but it was, at any rate, too late for that now. I went upstairs and dressed and sat a long while thinking. Then I descended to the front hall. I paused outside his study. I considered knocking but did not. I was afraid to find him still not returned.
The light, of course, still shone from beneath the door. I hardly need mention it.
At Butler, I sat on the bench where my employer had used to sit with his mother. I had a kind of half idea I might find him there. But, of course, there was no one. I sat in the chill wind, watching the ducks on the river, moving between the brown reeds at the water’s edge. So peaceful, they seemed.
I thought it was you, came a voice behind me.
I turned to see the plump, pleasant nurse from my first visit.
Iris, I said.
Ivy, she corrected.
She indicated the bench and I slid over to make room for her.
Her cheeks were pink from the wind and she blinked water from her eyes, seemed to wait for me to say something, though it was she who had sought me out and not the other way around.
I thought the other day, I said, perhaps you didn’t recognize me. In the hallway.
She seemed embarrassed. I recognized you, she said. It’s just Dr. Tinseley. He’s funny about things.
Funny how?
A psychiatrist. They have a certain interest invested in …
Invested in what?
She shook her head, dismissing the matter.
Then she said, I saw you afterward, you know. I walk this way to work and back, every day.
Saw me where?
In the cemetery. In Swan Point. I walk there myself sometimes. It’s so beautiful. I think it’s my favourite place in Providence.
It is indeed beautiful.
After a long moment, she said, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be personal, but …
Yes?
Did you find it, then, she said, nodding in the direction of the cemetery, in there? Did you find what you were looking for?
What makes you think I was looking for something?
She stared out over the river. You had that air about you, you know, that people have. Everyone does. No matter how many times they’ve been there, it’s like each time is the first. They don’t know where to go, just wander around awhile, searching. She turned to me again. Did you find it?
I think so, I said. But you misunderstand. What I sought, I mean.
She looked around a bit, the wind blowing her hair across her broad face. She nodded, slowly. You know, I don’t agree, she said, finally, with the way they do some things. At Butler. I know I’m new, and maybe I’ll get used to it. I don’t know. I hope I won’t. It isn’t right, she said. And her eyes teared up again and she wiped them. This rotten wind, she said.
I pulled a tissue from my overcoat and handed it to her. It must be difficult, I said.
She nodded, blew her nose. Then she said, Do you know there’s children buried here, in the woods?
I felt a shock of alarm. It could not be mere coincidence. But she couldn’t possibly, I told myself. I looked toward the cemetery.
Not there, she said. I mean here. Right beneath our feet probably.
I beg your pardon?
Not children, she said. Babies. Stillborns, they call them, but they weren’t, not all of them, not always. We dug a garden last week in back, for the patients, you know, as a kind of therapy, so they can plant it when the weather warms. She shook her head, looked away, then back at me. There were bones. The tiniest little bones. They push through sometimes in the springtime, between the trees, I’m told, after the frost is gone. Like violets.
How awful, I said.
The women, sometimes they’re pregnant when they get here. But sometimes, she said, they aren’t. The nurses, they used to help them. With the babies. You understand?
I’m not sure I do.
One of the nurses said Sister Clementine … But then she buttoned her lip and it seemed she would say no more.
Sister Clementine?
She looked up quickly at the asylum, then said, all in a rush, I really have to go. I just wanted you to know …
Know what?
That I don’t think it’s right. Dr. Tinseley. I’ve seen him. He’s like a cat with a bird.
I waited at the train station for an hour and Jane was not there. I wondered if perhaps there had been an error on her end; perhaps she had miswritten the information, or missed her train in Rochester. I waited until past dinnertime, the ticket seller casting me suspicious glances over his soup.
Finally, I rose and approached him.
Yes? he said, wiping his chin.
Is there another train from Rochester today?
He pointed at the schedule with a dripping spoon.
Last train from Rochester came in at 6:10.
Yes, I see that. But I’m wondering if maybe there isn’t some other train, perhaps not up there, a late train.
Yeah, he said, sure, like, say, a ghost train, maybe?
I was thinking more along the lines of an unscheduled—
No such thing as an unscheduled train.
So there is no other—
Last train from Rochester came in at 6:10. On schedule. Like the sign says.
At a loss, I walked back to the post office and sent Jane a wire asking her to please send word immediately. I waited for a reply and, when none came, I sent a second. But there was nothing. When the clerk indicated he was about to close for the day, I had no choice but to leave.
I stepped out into the darkening street. There, not half a block away, disappearing into a narrow alley between the hedges, was a man I could have sworn was my employer, emaciated, stooped, slowly wheeling, of all things, a red bicycle. I called out as I ran across the grass and into the alley, hollering, yes, like a madman.
The man heard me and looked up, looked to his left and right, and then finally behind him. His whiskers were long and turned up at the corners, like a Civil War general. A bright bow tie sat tight beneath his chin.
I’m sorry, I said, stopping abruptly. I thought you were someone else.
Be off with you, he said. I’m not in the custom of giving handouts. He turned, muttered something about vagrants, and was gone.
I returned, slowly, to Sixty-Six. I felt like a man twice my age. And felt, too, there was still some final thing, one last discovery. I stopped, stood in the lane, staring up. Something looked different.
Then it struck me: a light shone clearly from the kitchen window, where I had left no light burning.
She was seated at the kitchen table with her back to me, though she rose slowly, carefully, when I came in, and turned to face me in the doorway. She wore a loose, old-fashioned floral blouse pinned at the collar with a pearl brooch and tucked into the waistband of her skirt. Her hair, an iron gray, was pulled back from a face that had likely never been beautiful and was now further ravaged by age and illness. Her dark eyes, nevertheless, were sharp, took me in at a glance. It could be no one else. My employer’s aunt. Annie Phillips.
Allow me to introduce myself, I said, stepping forward.
No need, she said, waving weakly, no need. She sat again and gestured to the other chair, and I took it.
Across the table she seemed, upon second glance, younger than I had thought; her illness had taken its toll. She held herself with the bearing of one who has been long ill. When she moved, she winced visibly. Her eyes, though, were remarkable: bright, intelligent.
Can I get you anything? I offered. Tea?
She shook her head.
I was no
t expecting you so soon, I said. Not until the end of next week, at the earliest.
I came home early, she said. I thought it necessary.
I hope not on my account.
She looked at me sharply again, seemed about to say something, then changed her mind.
You’ve been feeding the cats, she said.
I hope that’s all right. I’ve been rather short on instructions here. Your nephew himself has been quite unwell, I’m afraid. I’m sure he’ll be only too glad of your return. I was surprised, yesterday, to find him gone out. I would have thought he was hardly up to it. I confess I’ve been quite worried …
She looked pained again and, lifting a hand to her ribs, looked away.
Are you all right? I said. Is there nothing I can get for you?
But she just waved me away and rose slowly, painfully.
I’m very tired, she said.
In the doorway, she turned and looked at me again with a curious intensity. Good night, then, she said.
I tossed and turned and could not get comfortable. It felt strange, knowing the aunt was there in the house too, now, though I don’t know why it should have.
In the morning, I rose bleary and clogged from another night of bad dreams, my body sore and sluggish from the abuse I’d suffered while being propelled by winged creatures out into the soulless atmosphere above the city. I was scarcely awake, and aching, and in need of a drink of water, when I fumbled my way down to the bathroom and pushed open the door.
She was naked from the waist up, a wet cloth in one hand, the other arm raised above her head as if in a balletic pose. Her old woman skin hung loose there, like a slack purse of flesh. And on her withered chest, where her left breast should have been, a long, ugly slash, curved like a sickle, raw and crusted over with dried blood.
She cried out—I may have done so as well—and dropped her arm in pain, and I yanked the door shut, so hard it rattled on its hinges, echoing through the quiet house, ricocheting around in the stairwell. I fled to my room, horrified, horrified at what I should never have seen.
I sometimes wonder where the flesh goes.
Ash does not answer, nor the dust.
We grow old, and the flesh, too, begins to reach earthward, searching or giving up. The soul, for me, is not the question. It is the flesh. All that blood. Our hearts. All the pains and aches and bruises. The feel of one’s own skin. All the tactile memories held fast in the palms.
Where do they go?
She was in the kitchen, wiping the counters slowly. Her pained movements made sense to me now.
Good morning, she said when I entered. It seemed more of a question. She did not look at me. I felt grateful.
Forgive me, I began, but she raised a hand.
Please.
I nodded.
After a moment, she said, formally, I have spoken with Dr. Tinseley.
Tinseley?
From Butler. I understand you’ve been to see him.
I thought I detected a note of anger in her tone.
Yes.
She waited for me to say more. How could I?
Finally she said, tightly, I’m so glad you’ve spoken with him. He’s very good that way. Very good to speak with.
I agreed that he was. Yet I was puzzled by the odd tone of her voice.
He says you’re welcome anytime. He said you had a very good conversation.
I nodded, considering the matter. It seemed as appropriate a time as any.
As to your sister, I began.
The aunt looked at me sharply. She waited.
When I said nothing further, she said, She is dead, yes. Is that what you mean to say?
I nodded. But there was something yet more.
I realize, I said, this is none of my concern. That this is terribly personal, but I wondered … I hesitated. Did she … had she ever had … other children?
Did Dr. Tinseley tell you this?
Again I hesitated. Yes, I finally said.
The aunt turned away again. The cloth moved back and forth across the counters, steadily. I thought she had finished with me. That, surely, I had offended her.
Some things are best left in the past, she said, without turning around. She was only a girl herself.
So it’s true.
Then he surely told you it was terribly deformed. She was never the same, afterward. Even after she married. She was never right again.
What happened to it?
It died, she said shortly. She resumed her slow wiping. But you don’t understand. It could never have lived.
I sat there, uncertain how to take her words.
The important thing, she said fiercely, turning to me again, the thing to remember, is that she was never the same. One cannot take to heart things said by—she hesitated—those who are not right in their own heads. In their own hearts.
I understood. I thought I did. We stayed that way a long while. Finally she pulled the kettle from the drawer beneath the range and filled it at the spitting sink and put it on the stove. The blue flame gasped into life.
Outside the window, the cats sunned themselves on the shed roof. The silver tabby was there. The trees had begun to bud. A forsythia burst yellow against the stone wall. And beyond, the boy James, in his shirt sleeves, snaked a branch through the grass for one of the cats. Laughing, laughing, as if all was—as if all could be—set right again. As if he were, just then, outside his house in the country with a red barn open to the sunlight and his father in the fields and his mother cooking their breakfast at the little white range in their kitchen, ordinary, perfect.
When, I wondered, had spring come?
Will you have tea? the aunt asked.
Thank you, no.
It seemed as good a time as any to mention the matter of payment.
She moved slowly out to the hall and came back with a black patent purse, which she set on the table, pulling from it a generous handful of bills, which, to my astonishment, she did not bother to count, but handed to me in its entirety.
I hope this will cover things, she said, for the time being. You will let me know, of course, when you require more.
I scarcely knew what to say. I thanked her and pocketed the bills.
Will you eat something before you go? she asked over her shoulder.
I’m not terribly hungry, thank you.
She nodded, as if she’d expected as much, then went back to her slow wiping. She did not look at me again.
On my way out, I stopped in astonishment at Flossie’s door: the locks hung loose and undone, the door standing slightly ajar. I knocked anyway, and when no answer came, opened the door a little and called inside, reminded of my arrival at the house only a little more than a week ago. My god, how fast it had gone. No answer came and so I stepped inside.
I stood a moment, perplexed. Gone were the violet cushions and sheer draperies and thick white rug. Gone were the bottles of nail polish scattered about the coffee table, and the magazines with their broken spines, and the blue china cups of tea half finished. Gone were the bouquets of white chrysanthemums. The ferns stood again in their stead, but were dried and crumbling at the touch. On the mantel sat the marble horse.
I bent and brushed a hand across the coffee table, leaving a broad, clear streak in the heavy dust, the dust of months. I wiped my hand on my trousers.
At a loss, I sat down on the sofa, as I had used to, and waited. I waited until the light faded and the room was dark all around me and the street lights came on, shining but dim through the heavy draperies.
I might have slept. I wasn’t certain. When I opened my eyes, it was with the sense of a great deal of time having passed, and someone leaning over me in the half-light.
Howard, she said. I thought I might find you here.
She moved slowly, painfully, out of the apartment and up the creaking stairs and I followed.
I’ve made us tea, she said.
I stood in the front hall, watching her. The emerald lamp was lit at my elbow.
Then I remembered. I must check the post, I said.
What for?
I’m expecting a wire, or a letter at least, from my wife. But it sounded wrong.
From Sonia? Why on earth?
From Jane, I said.
She turned away.
I’ve made tea, she said again, flatly, and gestured toward the kitchen. She looked very tired. Come, she said. You’ll feel better.
I almost did. I almost followed her to the kitchen and sat and drank tea and ate. It would have been so easy. Instead I turned and walked to the study door. I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I heard the aunt come to the kitchen doorway and stand watching me. I reached out and grasped the latch. I turned to look at her. She seemed a bit funny around the mouth and eyes, a bit pinched.
Imagination, she said, is a double-edged sword.
As before, the latch clicked, and then the door was open and I looked in again upon the lighted room, the mystery, the heart of all my days.
And I went in.
I dreamed I went to Angell Street again.
All the lights blazed out from the windows there, as if for a party, falling yellow on the walk and on the grass and on the fountain trickling musically into the night. There were fireflies in the woods and they glittered faintly, floated up and up, cold stars against the blackened ether. Then the woods darkened, and the lights in the great house went out, one by one, in every window, and I was being led by the hand through its rooms, slowly, until my fear was gone. How easy to hide oneself there. And, hidden, to lose oneself.
But within all darkness is the possibility of light.
Providence, tonight, is lightless. All down College Street the old houses turn inward. Beyond the observatory, Butler Hospital lies like a dead star, consuming its own darkness. The moon is not yet risen, the stars still dark, though the river is there, winding its black way through the sleeping city.
The Broken Hours Page 21