Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  Ruth, since his word demanded a reply, said wearily: ‘Oh no, Doctor. That would do no good now.’ She leaned forward, burying her head in her arms on the bed where Ellen lay; and Doctor Seyffert looked at Harland in defiant challenge.

  ‘That’s right, Doctor,’ Harland assented. Ellen was gone. Perhaps if they had summoned at once another doctor she might have been saved; but now — recriminations were an empty business. ‘I’m sure you did all anyone could have done. Thank you for coming. We appreciate it.’

  Doctor Seyffert bowed and left them alone with Ellen. They heard from the kitchen for a time his loud voice as he spoke with Leick before he drove away.

  – VII –

  Harland was stupefied by the impact of this tragedy. He sat in Leick’s kitchen with his hands, the palms upturned, idle on his knees, while Leick and Ruth carried through the sorry routine that follows on the heels of death. In midmorning Ruth led him to lie down and try to sleep; and though presently he heard a car in the yard and quiet movement in the room where Ellen lay, merciful sleep did come to him at last. When Ruth woke him he did not at first know where he was, nor remember why.

  She told him gently: ‘Ellen’s gone, Dick. We must go now, too.’ And when his eyes cleared and she saw that he was awake, that he remembered, she explained: ‘We’re taking her to Boston. Leick will drive us to Bangor to catch the same train, so we can go home with her.’

  He nodded submissively, rising to do as she bade, wondering and grateful because she could be so steady and so strong; and he wished he could confide in her, could tell her all the truth that now came crowding into his mind. If he had not been so unrelenting, Ellen might now be alive, smiling and beautiful and loving him as he remembered her; and he thought: ‘I would have forgiven her soon. I couldn’t have gone on, holding out against her. She loved me, and she was so sweet, so sweet!’ There was grief in him like a wailing. In sorrow and despair, he held himself to blame.

  He wished to say these things to Ruth, but he could never say them to anyone. Confession was a weak surrender, a craven appeal for absolution. He must expiate his crime alone. Yet he thought Ruth guessed a part of his mind; for next morning in Boston she said, as though to reassure him:

  ‘You made Ellen very happy, Richard. You did so much for her.’

  He bit his lip to hold back the self-accusing word, held his tone steady. ‘I don’t suppose any two people were ever happier than we were, last summer at Back of the Moon.’

  ‘I know,’ Ruth agreed. ‘She told me so, only the other day. We were talking about our three lives, about the fact that we were all — getting back to normal. She said she was happy, but she said she could never expect to be as happy again as she had been there last summer with you.’ Harland could almost hear the sardonic note that must have been in Ellen’s voice. Then Ruth added: ‘She told me that you had promised to take her ashes back there.’

  Richard looked at her in dull perplexity. ‘Ellen’s ashes? To Back of the Moon?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Ruth assented, as though surprised at his surprise. ‘Had you forgotten? She said it was in one of your happiest hours, when you and she were together one day at the lookout on the hill above the lodge. She said she asked you, made you promise.’

  In a dizzying rush, memory of that afternoon came back to him, bitter sweet, poignant and beautiful. They two had been alone for an hour while Danny slept, and the day was fine and the sky as deep as all eternity and the ardent springs of youth and love flowed full flood in them both. He remembered how before they went down to the cabin again she stood with arms outspread as though to embrace the beauty which lay below their high vantage, and he remembered her word: ‘Richard, Richard, I love it here.’ And he remembered his own sharp sweet terror when she exacted from him that pledge of which Ruth spoke. He saw her in his thoughts as he had seen her then, and he nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ he said in a low tone. ‘Yes, I remember now.’

  Thus it happened that when the time came, he carried out that almost forgotten promise. Leick, having driven them to Bangor, had brought Harland’s car on to Boston, Harland not then expecting to return to Maine; and these two went by train to Bangor together. They parted there; for Leick was to go up river with a crew that would build new logging camps in a tract of spruce. ready to be harvested. He would not even take time to return to his farm. ‘Jed Hatcher, lives up the road, will shut the place up and see it’s all right,’ he explained. ‘I’ll write him a post card.’

  Harland bade Leick good-bye, and then he chartered a plane to take him to circle high above the lovely blue crescent of the little lake so long familiar. The day was crisply clear, touches of autumn color here and there brightening the sweep of forest that extended in all directions, giving way on the south to farm lands that ran along the sea. While they soared thousands of feet above the ground, the motor’s slip stream swept Ellen’s ashes off upon the wind, and Harland as the hard gale tore them from his grasp — for he half-wished to cling to them just as now that she was gone he wished to cling to her — remembered a day long ago when she had ridden a great circle around that mountain meadow in New Mexico so that her father might possess forever the spot he loved. Thus Harland, in full forgiveness, gave Back of the Moon again to Ellen now.

  When the last grain of ashes was gone, he was reluctant to depart. It would be rest and peace to leap from the plane and like a falling leaf go drifting downward to the blue waters of the pond — where Danny, and Ellen too, would welcome him. But that was a coward’s way. He signalled the pilot and they swung westward, to return to the world again.

  11

  RUTH through those last days with Ellen at Bar Harbor through those last days with Ellen at Bar Harbor had found a new sweetness in the other; and after Ellen’s death, she was gratefully sure that they had never been so close before. Ellen had seemed to seek her company. Once — Harland had gone alone to climb Cadillac — Ruth at her window saw Ellen coming up through the garden from her father’s workshop, and called to her, and they had a lazy afternoon, idle and at ease. Ellen said Ruth might do what she chose with the shop. ‘I’ll never want to use it, I’m sure,’ she explained. ‘If I ever decide to go on with his work, I’ll get a place of my own somewhere. I went down this afternoon just to see how it would seem, but I could never stand it there.’

  Their talk inevitably turned to Harland. Ellen said his abtraction, which Ruth remarked, was because he had not yet become reconciled to the fact that they must be forever childless. ‘He’s always wanted children so,’ she explained, and Ruth nodded.

  ‘It’s sad and hard that you can’t ever have any, Ellen, but you can make it up to him in other ways.’

  ‘Oh I mean to, I want to,’ Ellen agreed, half-whispering, tense and yearning; and she said, thinking aloud: ‘We were so happy at Back of the Moon.’ Her eyes misted as she spoke of their serene and smiling days together there. ‘Usually we were with Danny, of course, and he was sweet, and we loved him; but it was always as though Richard and I shared a delicious secret, and when our eyes met, something flashed between us; and now and then we slipped away alone, into the forest, or up to the lookout, or away to the far beach at the end of the pond; and then it was as though great bells were ringing far away, and the air and the earth seemed both to be in tune with them, and so were we.’ She looked at Ruth with eyes suddenly full of mischievous mirth. ‘But there, darling, I shouldn’t say such things to you! Are you shocked at me?’ Ruth only smiled, and Ellen said, speaking once more half to herself: ‘There was one day — we’d gone up to the lookout above the cabin; and for an hour love and life and death seemed to merge and to be all one, filling us both completely. I made him promise me that day that when I die — I don’t expect to live long; I never want to grow old — I made him promise to take my ashes back there. Don’t let him forget, Ruth, when the time comes!’ She laughed. ‘Or I’ll surely haunt you both!’

  When after doing Ellen this last service Harland returned to Boston,
he came from the train direct to Ruth’s apartment. She was just finishing breakfast, and she boiled eggs and made fresh coffee for him. Afterward they sat in talk, of what was past and of what was to come, and he said:

  ‘Ruth, I’m going away.’ He hesitated, and she felt in him the desire to confide to her; but he went on: “I can’t stand it here — or anywhere else where I’ve ever been with Ellen. I’ve got to go to places I’ve never seen, and among people I’ve never known.’ He shook his head in a dull bewilderment. ‘I’m like a sick dog. I want to be alone.’

  ‘Will you be gone long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t even know where I’m going. London first, I think; or perhaps Paris, with Italy for the winter and then England in the spring. I’ll stay away till I begin to want to work again.’ And he asked, in belated realization that she too had a problem: ‘Will you stay here?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she assented. ‘If I’ve got to rebuild my life I’d rather do it on familiar ground, with the materials I know.’

  ‘I expect you’d advise me to do the same.’

  ‘No, no,’ she cried, unwilling to influence him in any way at all. ‘No, Dick. You’ll do the wise, best thing, I know.’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m sailing from New York Tuesday,’ he said in a flat tone. ‘Unless you’d rather I didn’t go.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m sure you’re wise to go.’

  – II –

  Harland departed, and a week or two later Russ Quinton, saying that business had brought him to Boston, called upon Ruth. Because he was so closely linked with what her life had been, she was frankly glad to see him. Russ had put on a little more weight, he had lost a little more hair, but he had that same way of walking with his toes thrown out so that he seemed to waddle, and he smiled as easily.

  ‘I just came to pay my respects,’ he explained. ‘Professor Berent’s friendship once meant a lot to me, you know.’

  ‘I’m so glad you came.’

  ‘I was sorry not to be able to offer my sympathy when Ellen died. I was away, knew nothing of it till I came home. That was a shocking thing.’ She nodded, and he asked: ‘Where’s Mr. Harland?’

  ‘He went abroad,’ she said. ‘He was — terribly shaken, of course.’

  ‘I’d like to write him a line, express my sympathy.’

  ‘He didn’t know where he was going,’ she admitted. ‘Didn’t leave an address. I think he’s in London, or possibly Paris. He had no plan.’

  ‘I wonder if he’ll ever come back.’

  She too wondered, but she said steadily: ‘Oh, I’m sure he will, some day.’

  ‘I suppose a story writer takes things harder than the rest of us,’ Quinton reflected, and he said: ‘Someone told me last winter that Ellen was going to have a baby.’ She realized that his every statement was in fact a question.

  ‘It was stillborn, last spring.’

  ‘Oh, too bad. Say, Harland’s had a tough time. His brother, and then his baby, and now his wife.’ She found herself shaken by memories as he went on. ‘I talked with old Doctor Seyffert,’ he explained. ‘He says Ellen suffered a lot.’ Ruth nodded and he spoke understandingly. ‘It was hard on you, too, seeing her suffer.’ Her throat was full, not only with dregs of pity for Ellen’s agony, but with a beginning anger at him for his persistence. ‘And you lost your mother, too,’ he remembered.

  ‘Yes, Mother too,’ she assented, wishing he would be done and go away. He seemed almost to relish this talk of tragedy. Some people were like that, rolling bad news like a sweet morsel on their tongues.

  ‘Doctor Seyffert said he’d never seen anyone die just that way.’

  ‘Ellen used to have terrible attacks of indigestion, even when she was a child.’

  ‘Yes, the doctor told me,’ he agreed. ‘But I’d have been willing to bet Leick would know better than to give you folks a bad lobster.’

  ‘Oh, I never thought it was that,’ she declared. ‘It was just — well, Ellen was tired, as we all were. She’d had an attack not long before, and I suppose the last one hit her before she was strong again.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t anything she ate?’

  Ruth shook her head. ‘She ate just what we did,’ she assured him, and added: ‘Not quite so much, perhaps. She never was a hearty eater, and the rest of us were good and hungry.’

  ‘You didn’t all eat the same lobsters,’ he reminded her, and she wondered at his tenacity which seemed so purposeless.

  ‘No. But she didn’t eat all of hers. She left the tail, I remember. The rest of us had two or three apiece.’

  ‘And of course none of you were sick.’

  ‘No. No, I’m sure it was just her condition, her — susceptibility.’ Then, remembering and anxious to satisfy him, she added: ‘The only thing she ate that we didn’t, she took sugar in her coffee, and Mr. Harland and I didn’t, and Leick didn’t drink any coffee.’ She smiled at the absurdity of her suggestion. ‘But sugar wouldn’t make her sick, of course.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think so. I hear Mr. Harland had her cremated.’

  ‘Yes, she had asked him to.’

  ‘Scattered her ashes at Back of the Moon, out of an aeroplane.’

  She said in some surprise: ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Oh, it made some talk,’ he confessed. ‘A thing like that gets around.’ He smiled his ready smile. ‘Folks’ll talk about anything, you know, down in Maine.’ And he said: ‘It would have been kind of interesting to know just what did kill her, but Doctor Seyffert said you didn’t want any other doctors, or an autopsy or anything.’

  ‘I — we couldn’t see that that would have done any good.’

  ‘Unless maybe to help doctors know what to do with the next one that got sick the same way.’

  ‘I’m afraid we didn’t think of that,’ she confessed, feeling herself on the defensive.

  ‘Naturally you wouldn’t,’ he agreed, and after a little, to her relief, he rose. ‘Well, I might see you next summer, if you’re coming to Maine.’

  ‘I expect to,’ she assured him, rising too.

  ‘Maybe Mr. Harland will be back by then.’

  ‘I’m — I don’t know.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, good-bye.’ He extended his hand. ‘Nice seeing you.’

  She went with him to the elevator; and when the car descended and he was gone she returned to her apartment in a surprising confusion, feeling without knowing why that his call had not been as casual as it appeared, puzzled and wondering and a little afraid. But she could find no reason for that fear. Russ was like a lonely spinster, interested in everything that happened to people in the world he knew, full of human curiosity, and with that marked appetite for morbid detail which so many folk were eager to indulge. She imagined him cross-examining Doctor Seyffert, prying and probing with a grisly persistence; and she shivered with distaste, remembering that — though she readily liked most people — she had always disliked this man.

  She was quite sure, suddenly, that he had never forgiven Ellen — nor, presumably, Dick — since Ellen jilted him. He might even have felt a dreadful satisfaction in knowing the torment Ellen suffered before she died.

  – III –

  Harland’s first letter reached her in December. It had been written from Paris, but he said he was leaving at once for Egypt. ‘I’ve been completely idle,’ he explained, ‘making no friends, seeing no one except strangers, people met once or twice and then forgotten. I’ve no desire to write anything, not even letters. This, except for one or two matters of business, is my first. A casual acquaintance the other day spoke of a trip he’d taken up the Nile. That’s why I’m going to Egypt. So you see I’m just a feather drifting in the wind.’

  She found it hard that winter to fill her days. Her life was, for the first time since her childhood, empty of responsibilities; and there was upon her no financial pressure. Professor Berent had already achieved a modest competence before receiving that fortune from Glen Robie. He had set u
p trusts for Mrs. Berent and the two girls, to pass to the survivor or in equal shares to the survivors upon the death without issue of any one or two of them; and the remainder of his estate was by his will divided equally among them. Thus since his death and Mrs. Berent’s and now Ellen’s, Ruth — except that under Ellen’s will she and Harland shared equally — was wealthy. But she was unwilling to be idle, so she took a secretarial course, thinking that when Harland — as she was sure he would — returned and began to work again, she might do his typing.

  In February a letter came from Calcutta. ‘And I’m going on to China,’ Harland wrote. ‘There, I’ll be halfway around the world, so whichever way I move, I’ll be heading toward home again. I may backtrack, or I may go on. I’m far from any plan.’

  ‘But I’m beginning to come to life, Ruth. I met a man on a Nile steamer who interested me sufficiently so that I filled a notebook or two with some of the ideas his talk suggested. If I’d ever written any short stories, I might do one about him; but I don’t know the medium. Maybe I’ll try one anyway. His life would make a novel, but I haven’t the resolution to tackle so long a job.’

  All of his letter except this paragraph or two about himself dealt with things seen and heard. He wrote with an undercurrent of humor, sometimes tender and full of understanding, sometimes ironic and harsh, yet always lively and amusing. Ruth as she read understood his state of mind; and she found reassurance in this understanding. His scars were healing; he was on the way to becoming a well man again.