The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

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  At first, Ellen and Hamish took the train back to Plainsburg from Pittsburgh just once a year, at Christmas. They kept this tradition up with a grim sense of duty, each of them hating it for their own reasons, anxiously awaiting the moment when they could return to the city they now thought of as home.

  Of the five Musgrove children left—Hamish and Ellen, Lucia, and Olivia and Margaret, who were also fraternal twins—only Lucia had stayed behind to live with their mother. Olivia and Margaret had married Philadelphia businessmen and become well- to-do society matrons. They wore fancy dresses and hats, and

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  sprinkled their speech with French phrases that sounded mighty grand, though no one could understand them. Olivia and Mar garet had little to say to their siblings, in French or otherwise; it was obvious that they couldn’t wait to get back to the city. Their discomfort was increased by the fact that Lucia had married a new neighbor, a rather uncouth Bavarian named Kloot Flavia-Her mann, who specialized in pigs. In a reversal of the usual order of things, Flavia-Hermann had moved into his mother-in-law’s house, and so for a time the grounds of Adencourt were home to a smallish herd of swine. This was really more than the Philadelphia sisters could be expected to take, and shortly after this unfortu nate union they began to make excuses for why they could no longer make the journey home.

  Before they began to drift apart, however, it was an inviolable part of the Christmas tradition for the Musgrove children to visit the cemetery where their five siblings lay. All of them hated doing it, but none wanted to be the first to say so. Hamish often had the uncomfortable feeling, when they were all together again—five above, five below—that the dead ones formed their mirror image. In his more poetic moments, he wondered if perhaps they, the dead, were looking up at them, the living, with the same sort of pitying expression on their pale faces; for there was no proof, he reflected glumly, that the world he lived in was the better one.

  There were actually six stones in the cemetery now. A new one had been added to commemorate the loss of the Captain, whose body had been buried where it fell, at Gettysburg. The Captain had been an atheist, and while he was alive no preacher was ever permitted to speak over the graves. But upon his passing, it came out that Marly had been a believer all along, and had kept her faith a secret, lest—like some kind of early Christian—she be per secuted by her Roman emperor of a husband. This faith grew stronger in her as she aged. The notion that her littlest ones had been buried without consecration ate away at her, until finally she couldn’t take it anymore. In 1887, she called her surviving chil

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  dren together for what she referred to as the “Blessing of the Stones,” which was meant to be sort of a group memorial service. A Methodist minister from Plainsburg was invited out to Aden- court. The children, now in their twenties and thirties, grudgingly heeded their mother ’s summons. Olivia and Margaret, who were to die of influenza in the great epidemic of 1917–18, brought their wealthy husbands along. Hamish and Ellen came, too; Lucia, of course, was already there, pregnant with her first child—she and Flavia-Hermann had been trying gamely for years to conceive, and

  had only recently succeeded.

  The Philadelphia husbands wandered the property, comment ing to each other on the profitability of it, or the lack thereof. It was clear that the dark foreigner who had married their sister-in law was wasting a great deal of potential. He ought to have been selling off the trees for lumber, and drilling for oil, and mining for gold or coal, and raising cattle instead of pigs, but he had done none of these things. Instead, he’d accumulated a massive collec tion of ruined farming equipment, which he kept in the barn— mowers and plows and harrows, and the like. Apparently he intended to fix these items up and resell them, but there was no telling when he meant to put this plan into action. That was the way with foreigners, the Philadelphia husbands declared. They simply weren’t in possession of enough good, old-fashioned Amer ican get-up-and-go.

  The ceremony itself was a disaster. Marly dressed all in black for the occasion, something she had not done even at the death of the Captain. This struck her children as particularly morbid. The rest of them had brought clothes that were suited to a serious, im portant occasion—but not to another funeral. It was clear now that their mother had changed in recent years. And none of the children knew the Methodist minister, who nevertheless insisted on embracing each of them for a long and uncomfortable mo ment. Olivia would later swear that there was something posi tively indecent about the way the man pressed himself into her

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  bosom. And Ellen—Ellen, who of all of them had been a model of stoicism—collapsed in tears and screams when the minister in toned the names of the dead children. She remained on the ground, inconsolable, pressing her face into the earth as if she was kissing it—“carrying on like a Catholic,” Margaret would later say to her mortified Philadelphia husband. Hamish finally had to half carry and half drag her into the house, no small feat for a man who spent ten hours a day moving nothing heavier than a pen. Even after he managed to put her in bed, Ellen continued to sob and moan. No one else thought to follow them into the house. Ellen had long been Hamish’s problem.

  “Ellie, Ellie, dear,” he said, standing over her, wringing his hands. “Whatever is the matter? What can I do?”

  “That—poor—little—fellow,” Ellen hiccupped. “Which little fellow?” “The—one—who—drowned!”

  “Do you mean Henry? Why, Ellie, that was years ago! Why on earth should that make you so sad now?”

  “Oh, Hamish,” said Ellen. “Never mind it—but we must leave! I want to go home! It’s too terrible here! I can’t stand it another day!”

  “All right, then, all right, my dear,” Hamish said. He had little experience in consoling Ellen. He’d certainly never seen her behave like this before. Hamish had no idea what to do except to obey her. He pushed his spectacles more firmly onto his nose. “We’ll leave tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sure Mother will understand.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I do. I’ll take it upon myself to explain to her.”

  Ellen sighed with relief then, and became more composed. But Hamish sat next to her for several hours, holding her hand and soothing her at each sign of returning grief. In the meantime, he tried to figure out why his sister should only now be struck so hard at the loss of the little brother who had wandered away from the house nearly thirty years earlier, and who had been found later

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  in the river, in the eddy of a large, rounded boulder. It was the same eddy, in fact, where another body had been found a few years before, that of a strange, yellow-haired man with a ghastly wound in his chest, whom no one was able to identify. That was odd, but there was nothing odd about this coincidence. All man ner of things collected in that eddy, being brought there by the di rection of the current.

  But the drowning itself, he remembered, had fallen hard on the family. Everyone had taken a share of the guilt upon themselves, because although none of them had been specifically charged with watching the boy, who was just over a year old, all of them knew that the accident wouldn’t have happened had they kept a sharper eye out. Things had been different after that, Hamish remem bered. Other children had died before Henry, but he was the first who was lost to simple carelessness, and afterward everything was different. None of them played in the river anymore, for one thing, nor would they eat any fish out of it. And security had grown tighter—all of them had fallen into the habit of doing head counts at least once a day, to make sure no one else had been “taken.”

  That was how it felt to be a Musgrove, Hamish thought, as he slowly nodded off in his bedside chair. You never knew when you were going to be taken, or by what means. It was as if there were something about their line that had offended the very order of things, and nature was setting itself to rights�
�restoring the bal ance, as it were. Sitting there in the tiny second-floor bedroom that had once belonged to Lucia, Hamish felt oppressed by his very name. He wished that he had been born into any other clan but this.

  Hamish and Ellen went home the next day, back to the apart ment they shared, back to the gloom that had gradually descended over them, back to their loveless and spiritless existences. For the next many years, their lives varied little in routine; Hamish went to work, Ellen kept house for him, and neither dared to venture far

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  from the safe but tiny world they had created for themselves, for they grew so accustomed to their sadness that its absence would have felt strange. Until 1917, that is, when Hamish was sixty-five years old. This was when he accidentally discovered Sigmund Freud in a Pittsburgh bookstore, and his life was changed forever.

  It happened when he was walking home from work one day, just weeks before his retirement. His route took him past a certain bookstore that he was in the habit of stopping into, at least once a week. There, without looking carefully, he purchased a small, thin book called Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, believing it to be some sort of newfangled romance novel. Romance novels were Hamish’s secret vice. He devoured them by the dozen, an embar rassing habit. Each month, the bookstore owner slipped him a new shipment in plain brown paper, as discreet as a druggist. The books were filled with passionate phrases and heaving bosoms, and occa sionally, holy of holies, a long, deep kiss. Hamish was ashamed of himself for reading such womanish tripe, but he couldn’t stop.

  The problem was that like his sister, Hamish had never married, but unlike her he would have liked nothing better. Yet he had been sadly unsuccessful in his early attempts with the women of Pitts burgh, who were a little more brash and far more sophisticated than the girls he had known back at home. Having been rebuffed on a few occasions—no more so than any other man, but more of ten than he was equipped to deal with—he had retreated, clamlike, into the world of his imagination. The only women he’d had were between the covers of his books. It may have been less satisfying than the real thing, but there, at least, he could shine.

  Yet Dora was not a romance, as it turned out. It was actually the case history of a young Viennese woman who’d come to the famous Dr. Freud for psychiatric treatment. There was little ro mance, but plenty of darker stuff: namely, incest and lesbianism— or gynaecophilia, as Freud referred to it. By the time Hamish discovered his error, he’d already been swept up in the voyeuristic thrill of learning all the sordid details of a total stranger ’s life, and

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  a crazy stranger at that. Before he’d even finished the little book, he considered himself to have become a devout disciple of the new science of “psychoanalysis.”

  This science, which Hamish defined simply as “the art of figuring out what’s wrong with you,” was something he’d never heard of before. Indeed, hardly anyone had heard of psychoanalysis in those days—especially in Pittsburgh, where life revolved mostly around steel. To Hamish it was like a revelation from the heavens. Finally, he’d come across something that might explain why he hadn’t yet found love, and why he was so unhappy. He felt unspeakably re lieved, even at this late point in his adulthood—just six weeks away from retirement—to be one step closer to unlocking the riddle of his own life. There was nothing in particular about Dora’s case that ap plied to Hamish, but that was not the point. It was that some where out there was a man who understood that people could be fixed, and perhaps this man could fix him.

  Years earlier, when Hamish was just a boy, he’d begun to sus pect that there was something wrong with Musgroves in general. Lately, he had become sure of it. He would always remember the day on which he’d learned of his father ’s death, how he’d lain on the boards of the porch and looked up at the dried, withered scalps of the aborigines the Captain had murdered in some far-off place, waving back and forth in the breeze like an unholy wind chime. It was a moment that came back to him frequently throughout his life. He often thought of it in the middle of doing something else, though he didn’t know why, and he had to force himself to put the image out of his mind. But it wasn’t until late in life that he fi nally made the connection he’d sought between worlds on that long-ago day, one so obvious he couldn’t believe he hadn’t spotted it sooner: the Musgroves were doomed because they were killers.

  Yet Hamish didn’t even know how right he was. He thought his father was the only one who had ever murdered anyone, a fact that he sought to verify with his sister after he finished Freud’s book.

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  “Did Father ever tell you stories about the old days?” he asked Ellen, who, though she was his fraternal twin, had never looked anything like him: she was short and round like their mother, while Hamish was lanky and lean, with a hawkish nose. The only physical characteristic they shared, in fact, was that they were both left-handed—a trait her teachers had tried, and failed, to eradicate.

  “What old days, Hamish?” she replied.

  “His days on the frontier. And of the times before then, when our family was still in England.”

  “Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “I think I remember,” Hamish said. “They were terrible stories. Very bloody. I never listened to him much, but I wish now that I had.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Hamish, why bring that up now? Those days are long over. It’s the twentieth century!”

  “Yes, but those scalps,” he said. “Don’t you remember the Injun scalps on the porch? How they hung from the rafters?”

  “Scalps? Don’t be ridiculous. There was no such thing. How barbaric!”

  But Hamish insisted; he was certain he wasn’t making it up. “I remember them quite well,” he said. “He used to tell the story of how he took them whenever we had company. How it felt like skinning a ’possum. Remember?”

  Ellen laughed. “Our father, telling such stories!” she said. “Hon estly, Hamish, I think you’ve been reading too many novels! What makes you bring this up in the first place?”

  Ordinarily, Hamish would have fallen silent here, for he’d never quite been able to bring himself to tell his sister what he was thinking: modern Musgroves were cursed. But that was before reading Freud’s little book. What he said instead was:

  “I think that I would like to go to Europe, and visit a psychia trist.”

  It was a Friday evening, and they’d been sitting quietly in the

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  parlor, which was how they spent every evening. Nothing could have prepared Ellen for such a statement. She looked as if she’d been shot through the heart. She put one hand to her chest and used the other to steady herself, even though she was already seated.

  “A . . . what?” she quavered.

  “A psychiatrist,” Hamish repeated. “A mental doctor.” “A mental doctor? What—what—what—”

  “There’s no need for excitement, Ellie. Everything is fine. It’s— it’s just an idea I had.”

  “But, Hamish! What on earth for?”

  “Well, because it’s new,” Hamish told her. “It’s the modern way of looking at things. There’s this fellow, Freud”—he pronounced it “Frood”—“who lives in Europe. In Vienna, to be exact. He has the most amazing ability to talk to people and figure out what’s wrong with them. And I simply thought that perhaps I should go and meet him, and have him tell me what’s wrong with me.”

  “But, Hamish! There’s nothing wrong with you!”

  Hamish had rather expected her to say this, but now that she had, he was at a loss for words. He looked around at their apart ment, which they’d moved into five years earlier. For thirty-five years previous to that, they’d lived in a house, but as they’d got ten older they found it too much to maintain. Hamish’s back troubled him after decades spent huddled over a desk, his left arm twisted around awkwardly so that he could scrawl figu
res with his wrong hand, while his vision had dimmed and blurred; and the ever-plumper Ellen had found it increasingly difficult to climb the stairs. It was she who’d insisted they move to a smaller place, one that would require less work. Come to think of it, it was she who’d always insisted on everything. Hamish had not envisioned spending his entire life in the company of his sister. He’d hoped to have children and grandchildren, and be the patriarch of a vast and happy clan.

  But none of that had happened. Nothing, in fact, had worked

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  out quite the way he’d thought it would. His entire life had been one of boredom, sadness, and frustration. Musgroves were still cursed, he thought; only now the curse took a form more appro priate to the world they lived in.

  The world, in Hamish’s lifetime, had become a very different place—almost too different. Automobiles chugged up and down the streets, and from every manufacturing facility came the crash and whir of automatic machinery. None of these things had been known in Hamish’s youth. It was as if they’d been installed overnight. Young people now, too, were an entirely different kind of person—they went to moving-picture shows and soda foun tains, and “spooned” without shame, and used jargon that no one else could understand. One could hardly tell whether they were being disrespectful or not, though Hamish suspected the latter. And there was a railroad now that stretched clear across the con tinent. Instead of sailing all the way around the tip of South America and back up again to get to California, a journey that used to take months, one could go overland, and be there in a mat ter of weeks. And in Europe, soldiers were slaughtering each other with devices of war that had never even been heard of before, or imagined.