I did this many times that cold, dark autumn. I know Peter did too. I saw it on his face and in his stance, just as he must have in mine. In this way we made our way toward Christmas.
On the sixteenth of December the telephone rang late in the evening. I was sitting in front of the fire in the den, feet up on the cracked old leather hassock, reading over the guest list for the Christmas open house following the choir’s Festival of Carols and Lights two days later, putting off leaving the warmth of the small room and climbing the stairs into the chilly dark of the second floor where our bedroom was. It had been gray and marrow-chillingly cold for weeks—I had been right about an early severe winter—but so far no snow had fallen. Somehow the ironjawed dry black cold was worse than our customary felted white winters. We had had a hard time heating the big old house this year. I began to struggle out of my nest of afghans to get up and answer the shrilling bell, heard Peter pick it up, and sank back gratefully. It would be for him anyway; the telephone pealed endlessly just before the long holidays.
I was frankly nodding over the Js when I heard the door to the den open, and when he did not speak, I looked up. He stood in the doorway in his old cardigan, holding on to the frame, his face bleached and stiff. I felt my lips make the word what? but heard no sound.
“That was Elizabeth Potter in Boston,” he said, and his voice was thin and slow. “Amy died an hour ago. They think it was an aneurysm. She said she had a headache and lifted her hand to her head, and then she just…fell. She was dead when Elizabeth got to her. She wants us to come.”
I began to cry. I got up and went upstairs and began to pack my bag, and then I packed one for Peter while he made the necessary telephone calls and arrangements, and I changed and sat on the side of the bed while he showered and dressed for the trip, and all the while I cried. I cried for the vibrant young woman with the wild curls and flushed cheeks who had borne me up through my first days in Retreat; I cried for the woman with the rich laugh who had had, in later years, precious few reasons to use it; I cried for the slender white-haired woman who had so recently sat on the beach in a red sun hat and laughed once more in pure joy for the love of her daughter. And I cried for myself, because who was there now in Retreat who would laugh like that with me, who would understand and grin when I made a face at the oldest ladies who colonized so fiercely the rockers on the clubhouse porch, who would understand, and smile an answering secret smile, when the sky over Penobscot Bay bloomed with the great fire of the midnight sun? Amy was dead, and with her a great slice of my personal history. Peter was my heart, but Amy was my girlhood.
We got to the town house on Endicott Street where Amy and Parker had moved, once they sold the huge old family house, just as a red dawn was flaming over the Charles. Elizabeth was out the door and into Peter’s arms before we had mounted the hollowed marble steps. He held her silently while she wept, and his face was empty of everything but pity and a kind of focused calm. We had not talked much on the long drive from Northpoint, only a little about the early days of our marriage in Retreat, and Amy and Parker’s, before things had gotten sad and frantic and ruined. But once he had said, “I’m going to have to do what I can for Elizabeth, Maude; you know Parker isn’t going to be able to. She’s probably going to lean on me. Are you going to mind?”
“Of course not,” I said, and meant it. “It was only this summer, when everybody was starting to talk…. Oh, darling, of course not. If you can help her, do. Parker may not even know yet. But surely there are other relatives; I know Amy has family in Vermont somewhere, and it seems to me Parker had a brother who left the mill and went out west somewhere, and there are some cousins in Salem—”
“And when they get there, I’ll be glad to let them take over,” he said. “But please, until they do, just be patient. She’s still very much a child under all that European froofraw.”
And I smiled weakly and said, “Well, maybe way under,” and he chuckled softly.
But when she came rocketing into his arms and buried her face in his neck and scrubbed it back and forth as I myself sometimes did, in affection or passion, something old and cold curled in my stomach and I had to force myself to put my own arms around her and gently disengage her from Peter and walk her back into the house. She was dressed only in a short peignoir of some green seafoamy stuff, over an even shorter nightgown, and her pink-brown nipples stood up in the cold. Her face was swollen and streaked, and her eyes were slitted with grief and a kind of desperate glitter, a wild anguish, almost a craziness.
“Come in the house, darling, and let’s have some coffee and get a warm robe on you and see where we are,” I said, and when we had wrapped her in her bathrobe and I had sat her down on the sofa in the living room and Peter had built up the fire, I wiped her face with a warm washcloth and smoothed back the wild red hair.
“Now,” I said. “How is your father taking it? And what did the doctor say officially? I know you haven’t had time to call any of your people, so we’ll do that for you, I imagine your family uses Fitzgerald’s; most of the old Boston families do. Can I call them for you and tell them what hospital she’s in?”
Elizabeth looked at me, then at Peter. She got up from the sofa and went over to Peter, where he sat in a great Hepplewhite wing chair by the fire, and sat down on the floor beside him and wound her arms around his knees and laid her head on them.
“She isn’t in any hospital,” she said, and her voice was that of a small child, muffled and singsong. “She’s in there on the floor in the den. I didn’t call the doctor yet. I don’t know any doctors here, and I didn’t know what you were supposed to say. Daddy’s still upstairs asleep. Or maybe drunk. Or maybe he’s dead too. Warrie and his nanny are in the nursery on the third floor. They won’t get up for hours. I waited until Peter got here; I knew he’d know what to do. I put a blanket over her, though. It’s cold in the den, and I don’t know where the thermostat is.”
Peter and I looked at each other over her bent head. Amy must have lain there for hours; the call had come to Northpoint close to eleven.
“Sweetie, what have you been doing all this time?” I said. “Somebody has to know about your mother, you know that.”
“Well, Peter’s here now, and you,” she said, still muffled in Peter’s knees. “I didn’t think anything would happen until it got light. I sat with her for a little while, but I got cold, so I came in here. I’ve been reading a little bit. And I had the radio.”
I shook my head in despair and looked at Peter. He simply shook his head too. Then he lifted Elizabeth up and walked her to the sofa and sat her down beside me.
“Go up with Maude and get some clothes on, Punkin,” he said. “I’ll go tell your father, and then we’ll get the doctor. We have to have her taken care of now. You know that, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth said, looking at him with her oblique eyes.
“The doctor will have to take her to the hospital and declare her—deceased, and then Fitzgerald’s will have to get her ready for the services. We’ll take care of all that, don’t worry. All you need to do is tell Maude where your mother keeps her telephone and address book. You and your dad can tell us who to call, and we’ll do that for you.”
“You mean they’re going to take her away?”
“They’ll have to, darling, for a little while,” I said. “It’s the law.”
“But then they’ll bring her back?”
“Well…no, they’ll let Fitzgerald’s come and get her, and they’ll handle things after that.”
“You mean drain all her blood out and put makeup on her,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was shrill.
“Honey,” I began. It was hard to remember that this was a thirty-five-year-old woman.
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“For her sake, Elizabeth, let us take care of her decently now,” I said. “You don’t want people to come and see her lying on the floor.”
“No!” Elizabeth cried.
“Elizab
eth, this would distress your mother very much,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. There was nothing in this fragmented child of the fearless, flame-touched sprite who had shimmered through those long-ago summers in Retreat.
“She of all people would want things to go smoothly so they didn’t cause undue pain to other people. And I know she taught you that too.”
She was on her feet in one fluid motion, the sheer layers of nylon swinging back from the supple nakedness that was still browned from the sun of the past summer and many others. She ran across the thick old Aubusson and planted her feet apart only inches from mine and looked down into my face. She was much taller than I; she had to bend.
“She never taught me that or anything else,” she cried. “She never taught me how to live, and now she’ll never teach me how to die! I hate her! I’m scared and I hate her! I don’t know who’s going to take care of me now!”
I reached up for her and she slapped me, hard, on my cheek and fled back to Peter and wrapped her arms around him once more.
“Don’t you touch me!” she screamed. I stood shocked and numb, but I could hear the hysteria rising in her voice. I could not seem to move. Peter’s face had whitened at her slap, and he held her away from him with both hands and looked intently at her.
“You are not to slap Maude ever again, Elizabeth,” he said. “You have had a terrible shock and we understand that, but you will not slap anyone again. Now get hold of yourself and go with Maude and get some clothes on. We have a lot to do this morning, and your son will be waking up soon.”
“No!” she shrieked. “I won’t go with her! I won’t go with anybody but you! I don’t care about Warrie; his stupid nurse will take care of him. I want you, Peter! I want you to stay with me…stay with me…stay with me…”
The shrieks had fallen into a regular rhythm, and her face was bone-white, eyes closed, mouth squared like a wailing child’s. Peter took a deep breath and slapped her smartly across the face, once on both cheeks, and the shrieking stopped on a long indrawn breath. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Now go with Maude,” Peter said in a normal voice. “And stop this foolishness.”
She stared at him for a long time, her chest heaving, and then turned and came to me and put her hand into mine and stood waiting.
“I should go to Amy,” I said.
“No,” Peter said. “Better let me do that. You’ll want to remember her the way you said you saw her this summer on the beach, laughing in her red hat. Not like this.”
“No,” I said. “Not like this.” And I took Elizabeth’s hand and led her upstairs, so blinded by tears that I had to grope my way along the banisters with my free hand. I have always been grateful that Peter spared me that last sight of Amy Potter. He told me much later it was dreadful, but he never elaborated.
It was a very long day, endless. While Elizabeth dressed I went up to the nursery on the third floor and woke Warrie Villiers’s mamselle and told her what had happened, and waited while she fluttered and chattered in her rapid-fire French, no doubt imprecating these barbarian New Englanders who had the audacity and sheer bad manners to die while she was under their roof. When she had dressed herself in layers of black silk and gone in to see to her small charge, I went back down to the second floor and looked in on Elizabeth. She was fully dressed, in a short, simple column of cream jersey that looked as if it had been poured over her from a pitcher, but she stood in her stocking feet, holding her pale kid high heels in one hand, staring out over the bare traceries of the treetops of Beacon Hill. I could hear that she was humming, tunelessly, and shut the door softly so that I would not disturb her and went in search of Parker Potter’s room. I found him lying naked on his back, covers spilled onto the floor, motionless and pale and distended as a bloated fish in a tide pool and breathing with such stertorous gargles that I thought he too might be dying. An empty bottle of cognac lay on the beautiful thick carpet, stained now with the dried blood of many such bottles. The room smelt powerfully of liquor and sickness and unwashed body, and I walked back out and closed the door. Peter or some male relative was going to have to deal with Parker Potter. I knew I was looking my last on him, and that forever after that when I thought of him, it would not be that grinning, sly-faced young man with the flying red hair I had first met, but this husked, living corpse.
“Goodbye, Parker,” I whispered, and went downstairs, where Peter was settling in at the tall Hepplewhite secretary for the first of the telephoning.
“You can count Parker out,” I said. “Someone’s going to have to put him in the hospital. I don’t think he can get through today, much less a funeral.”
“Dear Jesus,” Peter said wearily. “What on earth is going to become of them? Who’s going to look after Elizabeth and Warrie?”
“I suppose we could take them back with us for a while,” I said reluctantly.
“No,” Peter said, not looking up from his list. “That’s not a good idea. Some of Amy’s people will be here soon, or Parker’s.”
“But Peter, I don’t think she even knows any of her relatives,” I said. “She’s been away since she left school. I never heard of any who were close to her.”
“We are not an option for Elizabeth,” he said, and something in his voice told me to drop it. I did.
A stooped old doctor came soon, and went into the den where Amy Potter lay, and came back out shaking his head.
“Aneurysm, sure enough,” he said. “May have been there all her life. I’m sorry. I loved Amy Potter like a daughter.”
And after he had been up to see Parker, he shook his head again and said, “I’m admitting him to Silver Hill this afternoon. The daughter signed the consent forms. It’s very likely he won’t come out. And he may never know Amy is gone. Will the daughter be staying on here, do you know? If she is, she’ll need to see about setting up some kind of permanent arrangement with them for maintenance…”
“I doubt if she’s up to that,” Peter said. “When his brother and sister get here I’ll turn things over to them; for now, I’ll take responsibility for whatever has to be done. Our families were old friends. I’m Peter Chambliss—”
“Know who you are.” The old man smiled. “Got a little dab of this and that stashed in your father’s bank. I’ll tell the hospital and Fitzgerald’s and the Silver Hill people to talk to you.”
All that day people came in and out of the narrow old house, while the pale lemon sunlight of that cold December gradually faded and snow clouds gathered. The dark, deferential young men from Fitzgerald’s came and took Amy quietly away with them; I took Elizabeth into the kitchen, while they did that, and watched her pick at the toast and coffee a weeping cook prepared. Small Warrie, looking very French and formal in dark short pants and knee socks and a dark jacket, hovered silently beside his mother, his hands always somewhere on her flesh, his dark, slanted eyes fastened on her face. He was polite and silent and only spoke once in my hearing: “Are we going back to Paris, then, Mama?”
“No, hush, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, smoking one cigarette after another, her eyes roving restlessly.
“Is it the end of our money?” he said.
“Certainly not, Warrie, don’t be tiresome,” she said dully. “Grandpa and Grandma have lots and lots of money. We certainly won’t starve.”
“But who will write the checks now that Grandma is dead?”
“I said we’ll be all right. Go somewhere with Mamselle, why don’t you? Go to…oh, go to the park. Ride the swan boats.”
“Mama, it’s cold out there.”
“Then go upstairs and listen to your records! Mama is tired of your chatter and she is sad! Don’t you know that Grandma is dead?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” the boy said softly, and my heart hurt for him. There must seem nowhere in this tall dark house—indeed, in this whole strange country to which his mother had fled with him—where a thin dark boy with too-old eyes was welcome.
“Maybe, when things calm
down a little, you could come and play with my grandchildren,” I said. “They live not far from here, out in Brookline. You met them last summer, up at your grandmother’s house in Maine.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished them back. The likelihood of Sarah allowing Elizabeth Potter’s child to play with small Sally was practically nonexistent. I had simply, in my fatigue and grief and pity, forgotten all that lay between Elizabeth and Petie.
“I really doubt that Sarah would find that appropriate,” Elizabeth said, and even in her distraction and grief she smiled with something near enjoyment.
“I thought that boy fell into the water,” Warrie Villiers said. “Mother said he did, and I would not see him any more.”
“That was my other grandchild,” I said through pain. “I have two more.”
By late afternoon all the Potter and Bartlett kin were gathered in the drawing room, and arrangements for a quiet funeral were under way. Elizabeth sat in her cream and gold, nestled as close to Peter as she could get, and listened remotely as the talk of the orderly tending of the privileged dead washed around the room. Night drew down, and the old servants closed the curtains and brought the drinks tray and answered the softly chiming doorbell, to receive the cards and armfuls of hothouse flowers and the occasional friend close enough to mingle with the family. To all of them, Elizabeth bent her sleek red head and murmured her thanks and suffered her high cheekbones to be kissed, and said no, she did not yet know what her plans were, and yes, it was a mercy her mother hadn’t suffered. She did all this from Peter’s side. When he got up to go into the kitchen, she followed him; when he went into the downstairs bathroom, she followed him with her eyes. After several hours of this, I saw eyebrows began to rise and a few swift looks exchanged among the women, and once I interrupted a whispered conversation in the conservatory. Weariness and a kind of dull resentment weighed me down. We had been up all night and all this day; both of us needed sleep. We needed to get out of this dim house of death and go out to Petie and Sarah in Brookline and sleep long and deep in the vast upstairs bedroom they kept for us. But how to disengage Peter from Elizabeth Potter’s bottomless need?
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