by Ellen Datlow
Though in her poetry N.K. scorned the conventional life of husband, children, responsibilities, bourgeois property, and possessions, in her life she’d behaved perversely, taking all these on.
Elisabeth has heard that Nicola loved the house in Wainscott—at first. A romantically remote place on Cape Cod to which she could retreat, and work. A place where she could be alone when she wished, in solitude.
And she’d loved her children, as well—at first.
Yet, it would turn out that the poet wrote some of her most savagely powerful poems in this house, in the final year of her life. Sequestered away in an upstairs room, barring the door against intruders—her own children.
Terrible things Elisabeth has heard about the predecessor-wife. Terrible things she is reluctant/eager to believe.
In her extreme emotional states N.K. mistreated, abused both children. Screamed at them, shook them. Locked them in a closet. Sight of babies appalls. Doubling myself. Sin of hubris. Stink of pride. Bringing another of myself into the world: unforgiveable.
And How will they remember their mother?—little lambs of sacrifice, shall their eyes be opened?
Alexander would testify at a police inquiry into the deaths that his wife had wanted children to save her life and then, after their births, she’d resented them. She’d loved them excessively (it seemed) but had been fearful of hurting them. She couldn’t bear them around her often but claimed not to trust nannies or the housekeeper. She didn’t want them near windows for fear they would fall through, piercing themselves on the glass. Didn’t like to take their hands to lead them upstairs or across a street, there was the terror of losing the grip of their hands. Could not bear to bathe them for fear of scalding them, or drowning them. Several times she’d wakened Alexander in the middle of the night (in Alexander’s bed: for the two did not share a room) crying she’d cut the children’s throats like pigs, tried to hang them upside down but couldn’t, they fell to the floor and were bleeding to death. . . . Alexander had to take the sobbing hysterical woman into the children’s rooms to show her that they were untouched and then for a long time she stood disbelieving by their beds until saying at last in a flat voice—All right then. For now.
Is madness contagious? Elisabeth shivers in the perpetual wind from the Atlantic.
“. . . Stefan? Reasonably well. Thank you for asking. There’s a girl looking after him tonight, upstairs.”
“How has he adjusted, in this house? It must be . . .”
“No. Stefan is very happy here. I’ve told you. He cries if he’s made to leave even overnight.”
“Really! Is that so.”
“Yes. Strangely so. As I think I’ve told you—all of you.”
“He must be very happy then, with his new stepmother. . . .”
New stepmother. Elisabeth has been only half listening as talk swirls about her head but she hears this, distinctly.
A rude remark, cruel and insinuating, or an entirely sincere remark, made by an old friend of Alexander’s who wishes him and family well?
“Really, we are all very happy here. Elisabeth has been ‘settling in’—wonderfully. She and Stefan are making friends. So far, the summer has been . . .”
Feeling the visitors’ eyes on her. Sensing their disappointment in her, so plain-faced, dull and so ordinary after Nicola Kavanaugh.
Like a dun-feathered bird holding herself very still, not to attract the attention of predators. Very still among these strangers seeming to listen to their sharp witty voices while hearing in the wind from the Atlantic the throaty voice intimate as a whisper in her ear.
But you know that I am not gone, Elisabeth. You know that I have come for you and the boy.
6.
“This house is not ‘poisoned’—not by her.”
Not to Elisabeth has Alexander uttered such words but she has overheard him on the phone, speaking with Wainscott relatives. His tone is vehement, contemptuous. Who has been spreading such rumors of—hauntings . . . ?
He will not be driven away from this property, he has said. Hendrick House will endure beyond individual lives. It will endure long after her.
Elisabeth never has to wonder who her is. Sometimes, the contemptuously uttered pronoun is she.
Bitterly, Alexander says: “Nicola came here, with a pretense of wanting a ‘quiet’ life, and she never made a home here. Her clothes were in suitcases. Her books were in boxes. Ana did most of the unpacking, shelving books. Nicola couldn’t be bothered. She was immersed in her poetry, her precious career. She had her lovers, women and men. She’d promised that she had given them up when we were married but of course she lied. Her entire life was a lie. Her poetry is a lie. When she was sick with depression her lovers abandoned her. Where were they? Hangers-on, sycophants. And her ‘fans’—they were waiting for her to die, to kill herself. The promise of the poetry. But they hadn’t anticipated that their heroine would take her own daughter with her. That, they hadn’t expected.” Alexander speaks defiantly. Elisabeth listens with dread. Like holding your breath in the presence of airborne poison. She doesn’t want to breathe in hatred for the deceased woman; she doesn’t want to feel hatred for anyone.
• • •
How beautiful the house is, Elisabeth never tires of marveling.
But beware. Beauty’s price.
Sucking your life’s blood.
Strange, wonderful and strange, and uncanny, to live in a kind of museum. Classic Cape Cod architecture, period furnishings. Especially the downstairs rooms are flawlessly maintained.
Of course such maintenance is expensive. Much effort on the part of servants, and on the part of the wife of the house. Polished surfaces, gleaming hardwood floors. Curtains stirring in the ocean breeze. High, languidly turning fans. (No air conditioning in any of the landmark houses of Wainscott, so close to the Atlantic!) Long corridors with windows at each end looking out (it almost seems) into eternity.
Rot beneath, shine above. Rejoice, love. Lines from one of N.K.’s chanting poems, “Dirge”—Elisabeth hasn’t realized she’d memorized.
• • •
Does the door lock? No?
Still, the door can be shut. Though no one is likely to follow her here, except (perhaps) the child Stefan, who is away at school on this rainy, windy autumn day.
Alexander is in Boston for several days and even if he were home, it isn’t likely that he would seek her out in this part of the house in which he has little interest.
On the third floor, up a flight of steep steps, Elisabeth has discovered a small sparely furnished room in what had been, in a previous era, the servants’ quarters.
Here there is no elegant silk French wallpaper as in the downstairs rooms. Not a chandelier but a bare-bulb overhead light. A single window overlooking sand hills, stunted dun-colored vegetation, a glittering sliver of the Atlantic.
In the room is a narrow cot, hardly a bed. A bare plank floor. No curtains or shutters. Not a closet but a narrow cupboard opening into the wall, rife with cobwebs and a smell of mildew.
At a table in this little room at a makeshift desk Elisabeth sits leaning on her elbows, that have become raw, reddened. Much of her skin feels windburnt. For here at the edge of the ocean there is perennial wind: gusts rattling windowpanes, stirring foliage in tall pines beside the house.
Elisabeth has brought her laptop here but often leaves it unopened. Her work on the Imagist poets beckons to her as if on the farther side of an abyss but—she is afraid—she is losing her emotional connection with it. Reading and rereading passages of prose she’d written with conviction and passion as an eager young scholar at the Radcliffe Institute and now she can barely remember the primary work, let alone her enthusiasm for it. . . . The spare impersonal poetry of H.D. seems so muted, set beside a more impassioned and heedless female poetry.
Elisabeth strains her eyes staring toward the ocean. Wind-stirred waves, pounding surf frothing white against the pebbly shore. Overhead misshapen storm clouds and in the pines
beside the house what appear to be the arms, legs of struggling persons—naked bodies . . .
Promiscuous life rushes through our veins. Unstoppable.
An optical illusion of some sort. Must be.
Elisabeth can see the thrashing figures in the corner of her eye but when she looks directly at the agitated foliage she can’t decipher the human figures but only their outlines. The impress of the (naked) bodies in the thrashing branches, where they struggle like swimmers in a rough surf.
Turning her head quickly to see—if she can catch the figures in the trees.
“No. You can’t catch them.”
Behind her, beside her, a throaty little laugh. It is Stefan who has crept noiselessly into the room.
Very quietly, though very quickly, like a cat ascending the steep steps to the third floor of the house, Stefan must have come to join her. Hadn’t she shut the door to the little room? He’d managed to open it, without her hearing.
Elisabeth is startled but tries to speak matter-of-factly. For she knows, children do not like to see adults discomforted.
“Catch—what?”
“The things in the trees. That never stop.”
Stefan speaks patiently as if (of course) Elisabeth knows what he is talking about. “You can see them in the corner of your eye but when you look at them, they’re gone. They’re too fast.”
But there is nothing there. In the trees, in the leaves. We know that.
Elisabeth’s heart is pounding quickly. Almost shyly she regards the stepchild who so often eludes her, seems to look through her. Stefan seems never to grow, has scarcely grown an inch in the months since Alexander first introduced them.
My new, dear friend Elisabeth. Will you say hello to her? Smile—just a bit? Shake her hand?
Oh, Stefan’s curly hair is damp from the rain! Elisabeth would love to embrace him, press his head against her chest.
Droplets of rain like teardrops on his flushed face and on the zip-up nylon jacket he hasn’t taken time to remove. Something very touching about this. Has Stefan hurried home from school, to her?
“Stefan! You’re home early. . . .”
Stefan shrugs. Maybe he hadn’t gone to school at all but simply hid in the house somewhere, in one or another of the numerous unused rooms. Or in the forbidden place, the garage.
Stefan ignores his stepmother’s words as he often does. Knowing that the words that pass between them are of little significance, like markers in a poem, mere syllables.
He is at the window, peering out. Wind, rain, thrashing pine branches, an agitation of arms and legs almost visible . . .
Convulsed with something that looks like passion we tell ourselves, Love.
Whose words are these? Elisabeth wonders if Stefan can hear them, too.
It is true, she thinks. The convulsions in the trees. Our terrible need for one another, our terror of being left alone. To which we give the name, Love.
“She taught me how to see them—Mummy. But they always get away.”
Elisabeth isn’t sure that she has heard correctly. This is the first time that Stefan has uttered the word Mummy in her hearing.
“Now Mummy is one of them herself. I think.”
• • •
For the remainder of the long day feeling both threatened and blessed.
The child had come unbidden to her.
A wraith may not be approached, for a wraith will retreat. But a wraith may approach you. If he wishes.
Stefan darling. Try to forget her. I have come to take her place, I will love you in her place. Trust me!
7.
Certainly it is true as Alexander has said, there is nothing poisoned or haunted about the Hendrick family house.
For how could there be anything wrong with a house listed in the National Landmark Registry and featured in the fall 2011 issue of the sumptuous glossy Cape Cod Living. . . .
Yet, things go wrong in the house. Usually these are not serious, and are easily remedied.
For instance: sometimes after a heavy rain the water out of the faucets tastes strange. There is a faint metallic aftertaste, in full daylight you can see a subtle discoloration like rust. And there are mysterious drips from ceilings, actual pools of water, bulges in wallpaper like tumors. Unsettling moans and murmurs in the plumbing.
The water is well water, claimed to be “pure”—“sweet tasting.” The well is a deep natural well on the Hendrick property that has been there for generations, fed by underground springs.
Ana tells Elisabeth that, perhaps, she should make an appointment with the township water inspector to come to the house for a sample of their well water. To see what, if anything, is wrong.
Drips in the ceilings, bulges in wallpaper, groaning pipes—Elisabeth should call the roofer, the plumber as well. Since the fancy silk wallpaper in the dining room has been discolored she had better call a paperhanger too. And there are several cracked windowpanes, after a windstorm, that will have to be replaced—sometimes shards of glass litter the downstairs foyer, though no (evident) window panes have been broken. Ana can provide local numbers for (Elisabeth gathers) these repairmen are frequently called.
“All the old big houses in Wainscott are the same,” Ana says adamantly, “—all my friends, they work in them, they tell me. It is nothing special to this house.”
Nothing poisoned or haunted in this house. We know.
It has fallen to Elisabeth to make such appointments since Alexander is often in Boston on business. Indeed Elisabeth is eager to shield her husband from such mundane tasks for he is easily upset by problems involving his beloved house, and it is increasingly difficult to speak to him without his taking offense.
Also, Elisabeth is the wife of the house. As Mrs. Alexander Hendrick she feels a thrill of satisfaction; she is sure that her emotionally unstable predecessor took no such responsibility.
The new wife is nothing like—her! Alexander didn’t make a mistake this time. This Elizabeth—“Elisabeth”—is utterly devoted to him and the child and the household, she is a treasure. . . .
Listening, but the voice trails off. Always she is hoping to hear: And Alexander is devoted to—her!
Methodically, dutifully calling these local tradesmen and (oddly) no one is available to come to the house on Oceanview Avenue just then. All have excuses, express regret.
But we can pay you—of course! We can pay you double.
Calling a local plumber and the voice at the other end expresses surprise—“Hendrick? Again? Weren’t we just there a few months ago?” and Elisabeth stammers, “I—I don’t know, were you? What was wrong?” and the voice says, guardedly, “Anyway, there’s no one available right now. Better try another plumber, I can give you a number to call.”
But it is a number that Elisabeth has already called.
“Try Provincetown. They’ll charge for coming here, but . . .”
None of this Elisabeth will mention to Alexander. It is only results he cares to be informed of.
So much to do each day. Like a merry-go-round that has begun to accelerate.
Vague thought of having a baby of my own, someday, a little sister for Stefan. About this she feels excitement, hope, dread, guilt.
So many distractions, Elisabeth has (temporarily) set aside her scholarly work she’d been doing at the Radcliffe Institute. Research that once fascinated her. Elusive and shimmering as a mirage in the desert, her PhD dissertation on the experimental verse of H.D. and H.D.’s relationship to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. She has written drafts of the (seven) chapters but must revise, add footnotes, update the already extensive bibliography.
No end to fascinating research! But she must be careful that she does not stray from H.D. to N.K. She does not intend to snoop.
It is uncanny, some lines of poetry by H.D. echo lines of poetry by N.K. Or rather, some lines of poetry by N.K. echo lines by H.D.
A case of plagiarism? Or—admiration, identification?
I have had enough.
&nb
sp; I gasp for breath.
When they were first married and Elisabeth came to live in her husband’s family home in Wainscott it was with the understanding that Elisabeth would return to her scholarly work when things “settled down.” The director of the Hendrick Foundation is a feminist—of course. In the past most Hendrick fellowships went to male artists, but no longer.
No one has urged Elisabeth to complete her PhD at Harvard more enthusiastically than Alexander. When Stefan is older, and doesn’t require so much attention, Elisabeth might find a teaching position at a private school on the Cape. . . .
It is true, Stefan requires attention. The fact of Stefan, the surviving child. Elisabeth knows that she must be indirect in watching over the elusive child, not obvious and intrusive. She must never startle him by a display of affection. And she must never intervene between father and son.
If Alexander is chiding Stefan, for instance. It is painful to Elisabeth to hear but she must not intervene.
As she sometimes overhears Alexander speaking harshly on the phone, so she overhears Alexander speaking harshly to Stefan. Chiding him for being dreamy, distracted—other-minded. For sometimes Stefan is surprisingly clumsy—slipping on the stairs, spraining an ankle; falling from his bicycle, badly cutting his leg. Objects seem to twist from his fingers—cutlery, glassware that shatters on the floor. He is often breathless, anxious. Nothing annoys the father so much as an anxious child who shrinks from him as if in (ridiculous!) fear of being struck.
At such times Elisabeth bites her lower lip, straining to hear. She should not be eavesdropping, she knows. If Alexander caught her . . .
She rarely hears Stefan’s reply for the boy speaks so softly. If there is any reply.
Yet it is true as Alexander has boasted: Stefan appears to be happy in the house on Oceanview Avenue. At least, Stefan is less happy elsewhere.
Indeed he is reluctant to leave on short trips, even to Provincetown. It is all but impossible to get him to stay away overnight. If forced he will protest, sulk, weep, kick, suck his fingers. Even Ana is shocked, how childish Stefan becomes at such times.