Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

by Lee Smith

  For instance, there’s no bypass, and right now the traffic is stopped dead, bumper to bumper — where on earth are all these people coming from? Lynn lives right on Main Street, how’s she supposed to get home? Finally, she pulls out but is immediately confronted by a young policeman with a whistle which he will not stop blowing as he energetically motions her to the left, down Wisteria Way. Lynn is startled to see a giant Cat in the Hat prancing along just beyond him, then a dozen silver-clad majorettes followed by the entire Oakwood High School Marching Band, oh God, it’s the Christmas Parade! “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” fills the air.

  Behind the band, about forty kids from Susie’s Dance Studio prance down the hill past the courthouse, turning flips and cartwheels, followed by a giant concrete mixer covered with little children in reindeer hats with antlers, throwing candy to the crowds, which, Lynn notes now, are everywhere, lining Main Street on both sides. A shimmering float sits poised at the top of the hill, covered with beautiful girls undoubtedly freezing to death in their skimpy evening gowns but waving, waving, waving, mouths set in those big sweet smiles. They can do this forever, these girls. Lynn herself was never much good at denial of any sort, not even as a girl, this is why she will never be truly Southern although she has lived down here for twenty-five years now. The band stops still and switches into “Jingle Bells” while the majorettes go into a dance routine. Their batons flash high in the cold bright air.

  Lynn drives down Wisteria and heads for home the back way, braking suddenly for a carriage pulled by two big black horses with slavering mouths and real jingle bells and a top-hatted driver like a sudden apparition from the nineteenth century, straight out of Dickens, which Lynn used to teach. Jesus! Where did he come from? The fringe on the carriage jiggles. Things have gotten a lot more elaborate since the last Christmas parade Lynn remembers — three years ago, was it? Year before last, they were in Mexico at that conference, and last year they were in San Francisco visiting Anne, who still doesn’t know. Nor does Jeffrey, in Rome. Lynn just hasn’t told them, that’s all. Why should she? Why should she have to be the one to do it, when none of it was her fault? And why spoil their Christmases anyway? Why give Lawrence so much power over all their lives?

  Evergreen roping is strung from lantern to lantern along the front walkway of the historic Episcopal church. Angels scurry across the lawn, followed by people in choir robes. The minister, Harry Fitzhugh, stands by the open red doors of the church in a long white robe, looking more like Friar Tuck than one of the heavenly host. tour site #11 reads a placard beside him, printed in somebody’s idea of medieval lettering.

  Oh shit. It’s the Christmas House Tour too, of course it is! There’s a tour site #8 sign in the Woodwards’ huge yard; every single window of their antebellum mansion wears a Christmas wreath with a big red bow on it, second floor too. Three costumed ladies stand down by the wrought-iron gate, ready to welcome the onslaught of visitors. Those hoop skirts make them look like bells themselves, belles as bells, Lawrence would have made something clever of it.

  Oh, good. Lynn sees that the carriage horses have taken a big shit right in front of Mrs. Gardiner’s house, which is on the tour too. Back when Lynn and Lawrence had just moved to town, their first Christmas here, Mrs. Gardiner had stopped Lynn on the street to pluck peevishly at her sleeve and say, “My de-ah, you must know that you should nev-ah, nev-ah put colored lights on your home! Only white! White!” referring to the Christmas tree Lynn had put out on her front porch, with its old-fashioned round colored bulbs, carefully saved from Lynn’s own childhood in Pennsylvania. This was back when Lynn used to decorate her house, back when the children were young.

  A shining Moravian star hangs over the Camerons’ front door, she sees, while a whole herd of electrical reindeer graze in the McClures’ side yard, their bright heads moving up and down. And here comes Lynn’s friend Virginia, walking briskly away from her own house while tour guides cluster on the garlanded verandah behind her. Virginia waves cheerily as she turns toward town where she’s probably going to watch the parade. Of course Virginia has put her house on the tour; she’s unfailingly civic. Virginia has never mentioned Lawrence’s absence, either, out of tact or ignorance, Lynn is not sure which. In any case, Virginia must leave now, this is the way it works, while volunteers lead the paying public inside to view decorations fashioned by members of the local garden club. Lynn remembers one time when these ladies put a huge wreath made of bagels up over the stove in Marilyn and Don Goodman’s gourmet kitchen; the Goodmans invited the entire neighborhood over to eat it the next day for breakfast.

  Lynn herself would hate to have the garden club ladies in her own house even more than she would hate to have the public. In this, at least, she and Lawrence were in accord, though they own the kind of house that looks like it should be on the house tour, a big old rambling Victorian set way back from Main Street, with gingerbread woodwork all along the deep porches enclosing it on three sides. The previous owners had restored it — Lynn and Lawrence could never have undertaken such a mammoth task, neither one of them being at all handy. They had both been married to other people who were the practical ones. In fact, Lynn has sometimes thought of her sweet, earnest first husband, and his ratchet set, with a certain longing.

  But Lawrence made it perfectly plain when he married her: “My dear, I am not domestic,” he had said straight out, “but whatever it is, I will hire it done.”

  Not entirely true, but close enough, Lynn supposes, remembering suddenly what he said when that nice tremulous committee lady paid them a surprise call to ask if they would “show their lovely home.” Lynn had ushered her straight into Lawrence’s office, where he sat in his accustomed gloom, drapes drawn behind him, papers and books strewn across the floor and every available surface. There was nowhere for anyone else to sit.

  The lady made her request.

  “We shall not be participating in this house tour during my current lifetime,” Lawrence had intoned quite formally, giving her the famous stare over his half-glasses.

  “Excuse me?” She fluttered her hand to her throat.

  “I said, not bloody likely!” Then he stood up from his chair, all six and a half skinny, wavering feet of him, towering over this nice lady, who — predictably — fled.

  Now Lynn is ashamed to remember how she and Lawrence had high-fived each other, having vanquished, once again, the Philistines. She has come to hate that easy scorn, that superciliousness, that constant depression that was supposed to excuse everything. Of course she knew Lawrence was depressed from the very moment she met him — how could she not know? It was his stock in trade. After all, he was a playwright, the writer in residence. Initially she found it romantic, even somewhat appealing. After all, she was a graduate student. Nobody had told her yet that depression can be catching — or permanent. A worldview. That was a term they used back then, in graduate school. But Lynn always thought she could fix him, anyway, when she wanted to. When she got ready. This turned out to be not true, which came, over time, to enrage her. “I’m not enough?” she’d screamed at him more than once.

  “Lynn, that’s very egotistical,” he’d say severely.

  She turns into her driveway and pulls up close to the back steps, so she won’t have to carry things so far. Her ankle is still bothering her, even though Doug, the physical therapist, has supposedly fixed it.

  “You’re fine,” he said, patting her tibula. “Good to go.”

  Lynn knows this is not true. She is not good to go. She struggles up the back steps with her groceries, balancing the bag on her hip as she unlocks the door.

  They bought this house with the proceeds from Audubon Park, Lawrence’s big hit, which was just as dark as everything else he’d written, actually, who knows why it was such a success? Six years on Broadway, then the film with Meryl Streep.

  Lawrence had disconcerted the perky real estate girl immediately. “Now what are you looking for, in a house?” she had asked, back at the real es
tate office. “Colonial, modern, near the university, out in the country, what?” She wore a hot pink nubby wool suit, then the height of fashion, her hair caught up in a neat French twist.

  Lynn wore jeans.

  Lawrence took off his glasses and rubbed his huge watery pale eyes and then put them back on. “What I really want,” he said, “is a house I could die in.”

  Lynn started laughing. The real estate girl rustled her papers and stood up on her tiny heels. “Then let’s get going!” she said. She drove them around in her Lincoln Town Car for five hours, until they were punchy and exhausted, finally ending up here just as the sun was setting. It was, Lynn knew immediately, perfect. Not quite the House of Usher — new plumbing, thank God, new kitchen, new HVAC — but it was close enough. And a big backyard where their children could play.

  “We can make a swing here for our grandchildren,” she said dreamily, putting one hand on a huge limb which would be perfect.

  “Or I could just use it to hang myself,” Lawrence said. “Excuse me!” The real estate girl took off her shoes and ran across the grass in her stocking feet to her car, where she sat chain-smoking Salems until they came over and told her it was a deal.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  LYNN PUTS THE GROCERIES down on the kitchen counter, then goes back out for the wine. She can hear the parade moving down Main Street in front of her house. The big bass drum sounds like it’s beating inside her head. Long shadows slant across the lawn now, it’s almost dusk, and suddenly Lynn wonders about that old string of colored lights, someplace down in the basement. She thinks she knows where it is. Maybe she’ll just go down there tomorrow and get it and string it around a boxwood. The carton of wine is not as heavy as she’d imagined, but she takes the steps one at a time, carefully. She’s still limping, damn it, she is not “good to go,” no matter what Doug says.

  The truth is that Lynn had loved physical therapy, she had loved the sunny, cheerful little gym at Tar Heel Orthopedics with all its primary colors and shiny machines. She loved Doug and Louise and Mike, all of them impossibly young and impossibly fit, she loved the routine of the gym and the easy camaraderie and the way they all encouraged each other, she and the other patients, many of them in far worse shape than she was. They still had pins, stitches, braces, casts. Complications. By contrast, her doctor had said, Lynn’s was a clean break. She’d known it the minute she stumbled off the curb and heard the bone pop like a rifle shot.

  “The three most important rules of aging,” Dr. Lamb had told her as he set it, “are these: Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.”

  And now they have released her back into the real and dangerous world, Doug and the doctor. Doug said that she would recover full mobility, and soon she’d be back up to her regular ADL level.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “What is my ADL level?”

  “Activities of daily life. Your ADL level ought to be completely normal in no time,” Doug told her, not knowing of course that her ADL level has never been completely normal.

  Lynn manages to open the door and switch on the hall light, but that’s depressing because the house is a wreck, it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks, nothing is working, nothing seems even capable of getting fixed, of ever working again. Her ADL level is shit, actually. The broken dishwasher sits out in the middle of the broad central hallway where it has been sitting for ten days now, waiting for Mr. Terrell to come and haul it away, while the new one lurks in its huge cardboard box in the kitchen, waiting for a plumber to come and install it. It seems likely that neither one of these people will ever come, that neither one of these things will ever happen.

  Lynn sets the carton of wine down on top of the old dishwasher in the hall. Well, okay, she’s been drinking too much. Or, possibly, she’s not drinking enough. Who can say? Whose god-damn business is it anyway? She takes off her coat and drops it on the bench, then goes into the kitchen with the mail and throws it down on the kitchen table on top of yesterday’s mail. Okay, she’ll read it all at once. Then she’ll pour herself a little glass of wine as a reward. The Pinot, perhaps.

  The doorbell rings. Lynn ignores it. She puts the real mail, Christmas cards and letters, into one stack; the bills in another; the year-end pleas for contributions into another. The bell rings again. Lynn starts slitting envelopes open with a paring knife. She reads a Christmas letter which begins, “It’s been a big year for the Hobgoods, what with two new grandchildren and an autumn trip to Tuscany for Bill’s sixtieth . . .” Sixtieth what? Lynn is thinking furiously, she hates it when people leave off the noun.

  SUDDENLY LYNN THINKS SHE hears voices in the hall. By the time she has stood up from the kitchen table and walked through the shadowy dining room, she’s certain of it. Sure enough, the front door stands wide open, and a whole crowd of women wearing hats (hats? ) has clustered around in the hallway.

  “Hallo? Hallo?” one of them keeps calling.

  Another (determined, even bossy) voice says, “Well, let’s get some light on this subject!” and the hall light is switched on abruptly.

  The hats are red. The women stand blinking in the light. One, smaller and more frail than the others, leans on her walker. “Robin, I just don’t know about this.” She sounds fretful.

  “Hallo? Hallo?” the tall brunette keeps screaming up the staircase.

  Lynn comes to stand in the dining room arch. “Can I help you?” she asks.

  “We’re here to see the house,” announces the very tan blonde standing closest to Lynn.

  “This house is not on the tour,” Lynn says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it most certainly is! Tour Site number 14!” The brunette abandons the staircase and elbows her way through the group. “Look at this!” Her dark eyes, set too close together, are snapping. She thrusts a brochure at Lynn.

  “Let me see that.” Luckily Lynn still has her reading glasses on. She examines the map, which has been badly drawn and badly printed. “You’re looking for the Barkley School,” she explains. “It’s on the next corner, see? One more block up Main Street. It was a boarding school before the Civil War,” she adds, trying to seem friendly.

  “But we already walked all the way up this hill,” moans a pale, plump woman whose red hat is as round as her face.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help that,” Lynn says firmly. “As you can see, this house is not on the tour. Just look at it.”

  “But look at poor little Melissa, why she’s just about to die! She pushed her walker all the way up here!” The plump woman points at the older one, who has now turned her walker into a seat and sits upon it, breathing hard. “If we could just stay for a minute,” Melissa begs softly.

  “When was this house built?” the tan one asks. Her cap of blonde hair sits on her head like a mushroom. “You ought to be on the tour anyway. This a lot better than the last house we went in.”

  “We’re not, though,” Lynn says hopelessly. “We’re not on the tour.”

  But now they are all milling about, widening their area, peeping into other doors that open off the central hall. “That’s a beautiful sideboard.” Several peer past Lynn into the dining room.

  “Rita, come look at this, you won’t believe such a mess!” The mushroom blonde peers into Lawrence’s study, where no one is allowed. “Why, it’s just a pigpen in there.”

  Suddenly Lynn can’t help it, she starts laughing uncontrollably.

  “Now come on.” The tall brunette nudges Lynn. “Can’t you just let us look around for a minute? After all,” she adds reasonably, “we’re already here.”

  “Well, you certainly are,” Lynn hears herself say, then, “Okay. What the hell? Why the hell not?” Some of the ladies glance at each other, suddenly wary, when she says “hell.” But Lynn continues, “Come on. Sure. I’ll give you your own personal house tour. Why not? I haven’t got one other single goddamn thing to do.”

  “I think we’d better go.” A thin redhead wearing a lot of gold jewelr
y speaks up for the first time.

  “Georgia, are you crazy?” somebody else says. “Think about that hill. We’d have to walk all the way down it, then go a whole block up again, to that school, then climb up that hill . . .”

  “Who cares about a school anyway?” the pale fat one says. “I vote we stay here.”

  “Then we’d better introduce ourselves.” The brunette with the too-close-together eyes is obviously the leader, she reminds Lynn of a high school principal. No! Of an assistant high school principal. “I am Robin Atwater,” she says, “and this is Mary Lane Faucette” — gesturing toward the pale plump woman who looks like a snow lady, Lynn realizes now, exactly like the snow lady and snowman her kids used to build out there on the front lawn every winter. “Angela Flack” — Robin indicates the blonde. “Melisssa Cheatham,” who nods from her walker, hand to chest. What if she dies in my front hall? Lynn is thinking. What then? Georgia Mayo is the thin redhead with the gold jewelry. Rita Goins is the big-haired one wearing the mink coat and all the makeup; she used to be very pretty, Lynn can tell. You can always tell. But that Angela Flack looks like she has spent half her life in a tanning booth. What is it with all this tanning anyway? Lynn has always wondered. Doesn’t Angela know how bad this is for her? Doesn’t she even read Parade magazine?

  Robin introduces them all, then pauses expectantly.

  But instead of introducing herself in return, Lynn asks, “So what’s with the red hats?”

  “Oh, don’t you know?” several of them cry out, obviously surprised. “Don’t you know who we are?”

  Lynn shakes her head. “Sorry,” she says.

  “It’s all based on a poem,” the snow lady offers.

  “What poem?” Lynn is really surprised.