by Lee Smith
“It’s this poem that goes, ‘When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / with a red hat . . .’ and I forget the rest . . .”
“Who’s it by?”
“Oh, who cares?” Robin snaps. “The point is how we interpret it, what we do.”
“But what do you do?” Lynn asks. Besides breaking into innocent people’s houses, she does not say.
The women look at each other. Then Georgia stands to attention. She looks like a soldier in her bright red blazer and all that gold jewelry. “Nothing!” she cries.
“What?” Lynn must have misunderstood.
“Nothing! I said, nothing!” Georgia shrieks, giggling.
The others chime in like a high Greek chorus: “We’ve been doing things for other people our whole lives, and now it’s time for us to enjoy ourselves . . . so we take trips, we go out to lunch . . . Our entire purpose is having fun! We are releasing our inner child!”
“Well, I suppose the least I can do is show you around the house, then,” Lynn says. “Let’s start with the pigpen. But just stick your heads in the door, please, there’s really no place to stand, as you will see.”
Obediently, they bunch up at the study door.
“My goodness, I have never seen that many books in one place in my life except in a library,” Angela remarks. “Who reads?”
It’s like an accusation. They all turn to stare at Lynn.
“Well, we both do,” she says finally.
“You do? All these books?”
“Yes, we both read quite a lot. In fact, we’ve both been teachers all our lives, and actually, my husband is a writer, as well. Quite a famous writer. And I used to be a writer too.” Lynn can’t imagine why she’s adding this part. But now they are all staring at her.
“Oh, that must be so boring,” Georgia — the redhead — finally says.
“Why, what do you mean?”
“I mean, well . . . you have to write all those ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’ all the time, don’t you get really tired of it? I would,” Georgia announces decisively.
“I guess I’ve never thought of it quite that way,” Lynn says politely, thinking damn good point as she ushers them into the living room.
“Well, you certainly haven’t decorated for Christmas, have you?” Robin asks pointedly.
“I’m not on the tour,” Lynn reminds them, overwhelmed suddenly by the clutter of their lives, which now strikes her as appalling rather than eclectic — hodgepodge furniture bought here and there; her grandmother’s antique crewel-work armchair; that huge, square glass coffee table they got in New York, covered with art books, most of them Lawrence’s beloved German expressionism; the Chinese porcelain vases they brought back from China when Lawrence was invited to participate in that PEN tour (and they went down the Yangtze in that yellow boat just at dawn, oh God); and that half-woman, half-horse sculpture from New Mexico bolted to the chimney (Lynn has never been sure whether Lawrence was fucking the sculptor or not). The rugs from Turkey, the brass elephant from Morocco, the Tibetan temple door on the landing, the tapestry they bought from the old man in Turkey. Lynn loved Africa best of all, the Serengeti, looking out across those endless plains.
The women stop before one of Lawrence’s treasured Max Beck-mann prints hanging in the hallway, a formally dressed man holding a cigarette in one hand, staring insolently out of the frame. Rita says, “I think that’s what you call undressing somebody with your eyes,” while the rest of them giggle. “I wouldn’t have that man in my house!” somebody else declares.
Lynn points to a sketch of San Galgano, in Tuscany. “I did that,” she says, and they turn to stare at her.
“You did?” says Georgia, as if she doesn’t quite believe it.
“And this watercolor too.” Lynn indicates a placid canal in Belgium, a trip they took with their best friends from Berkeley, the Hoffbergers, long since divorced.
“Now that’s a nice one.” Robin pauses at an old photograph of Lynn’s family out on the rocky shore of their house at Cape Breton, Lawrence in his most disreputable fishing hat, the children in shorts, herself in rolled-up jeans throwing a stick for their beloved dogs Plato and Emily Dickinson, long since dead. Maybe Lynn should get herself a dog, now there’s a thought.
“Those must be your children?” Robin prompts, and Lynn says yes, that Anne lives in California with her husband and two daughters, both adopted — little Chinese girls — and Jeffrey is in Rome for the year on a fellowship.
“Really?” This idea seems to strike Robin as radical. “They’re not coming home for Christmas? Your son will be over there all by himself ?”
“Well.” Lynn tries to hide a smile. “He’s thirty-five, and he has a partner.” An Italian hairdresser, she does not say, whom they have never met.
“I see.” Robin squinches her eyes even closer together.
Lynn is beginning to hate her.
But the women will not move on. “And when was this picture taken?” Angela asks.
“Oh, years ago,” Lynn says, “but we still have this house in Nova Scotia, we go up there every summer. We’ve been going for thirty years. The children love it, they always come for a while, no matter where they’re living, especially for the Fourth of July. That’s sort of what we do instead of Christmas. We boil lobsters out on the beach, and corn and clams in this big iron pot . . .” Lynn goes on and on describing their Fourth of July ritual, unable to stop, furious at herself for telling these women these details. Because this will be the sore point, the sticking point, won’t it? Who will get this house? This house that you can’t quite see in this photo graph, hidden back there behind the birches. This house where the children spent every summer of their childhoods, which the children love. Which Lawrence loves, and she loves too, thinking of those long red sunsets and the spray in her face as they head out into the bay in the ancient Boston Whaler which used to belong to Lawrence’s first wife’s first husband. Could these women even follow that? Could they ever understand anything at all about our lives?
“Dave and I went to Canada once,” Mary Lane says, “but the water was too cold to swim.”
Lynn hears Georgia say to Robin in an undertone, “You know, you could really do something with this house if you got all the junk out of it. Look at all this crown molding,” as the group goes through the dining room.
“Wait, oh wait!” Melissa cries piteously, falling behind on her walker.
The kitchen is such a disaster (dishes in the sink, groceries still in their paper bags on the counter) that Lynn tries to rush the red hat ladies on through, but by now they’re totally into the tour, pausing to exclaim over the ferns that Lynn has brought inside for the winter — “Why, it’s practically a greenhouse in here!” — and the hand-painted tiles all around the sink and stove, tiles which Lynn carried back so carefully from Italy where they had had that lovely high pink house in Lucca with a view of the sea from the bedroom window and those long lace curtains sweeping the floor, that passionate year of fights (that cleaning girl) and then making up, why once she’d let the baby — this was Anne — cry for half the morning while she made love to Lawrence, swept up in overwhelming guilt and desire. She and Lawrence used to dance out on the balcony too, as she recalls, to the music of the village band coming up from the piazza, and once they had danced in the kitchen, to no music at all. What would the red hat ladies think of that? But surely they had had some fun with their own husbands? Surely it hadn’t been all duty, all carpools and PTA?
But she too has spent a large part of her life taking care of others, Lynn realizes. She is as old as these red hat ladies, even older than Georgia and Robin. So why isn’t she out there fulfilling herself too, having fun? Releasing her own inner child? Or does she still have one? Maybe that child has been killed off now by too much drinking and too many very long dinner parties with other overeducated supercilious people such as herself and Lawrence. Maybe she ought to join the red hat ladies. Or maybe she ought to become a Republican. She’d
been amazed when Gore lost. She’d been amazed every time Jesse Helms won, all these years of living in North Carolina and they’d never known one single person, not one, who ever admitted to voting for Jesse Helms. But somebody did, because then the vote rolled in. Lynn bets that most of the people in that Christmas parade voted for him, possibly some of these ladies in the red hats as well. Some of them must be Republicans. Robin is one for sure. Momentarily Lynn envies them, at least if she were a Republican, she could be so goddamn positive about things, about something at least, about anything. Anything at all. She’d like to become a truly positive person like Doug and Mike and Louise at physical therapy, and improve her ADL. Improvement is possible, Doug has said so. Doug has promised. A great deal of improvement is still possible! Things can be fixed! Maybe Lynn should just break her other ankle, so she can go back to the cheerful little gym — no, that’s ridiculous!
She leads the women into the back hallway.
“Well!” Robin stops dead in her tracks, eyeing the broken dishwasher with the box of wine on top of it.
“Oh. Who drinks?” Angela asks, and Lynn says, “I do.”
This cracks them up, these red hat ladies, but Lynn has had about enough of them by now. She shows them the music room. “Is that really a Steinway?” Georgia wants to know, and Lynn says yes, it is, adding that Jeffrey is really a concert pianist. She leads them down the hall toward the front door, but clearly they don’t want to leave yet, they dawdle, they don’t want to set off down that long hill.
“So!” Robin stops by the newel post. “Aren’t there any ghost stories associated with this old house?”
SOMETHING SNAPS INSIDE LYNN’S head. “Why, yes,” she says. “As a matter of fact, we do have a ghost, because actually there was a terrible death right here.”
“Right where?” The ladies peer nervously about themselves. It’s getting dark outside, and it’s a little spooky in this hallway, even with the chandelier on. It’s always been dark in here. Lynn decides she’s going to paint the entire downstairs a sort of creamy eggshell color, brighten it up some.
“Right there!” She points to the dark at the top of the stairs. “Now here’s the story.”
They draw in closer.
“It was back in the nineteen twenties,” Lynn says, “when this house was owned by a very attractive couple awaiting the birth of their first child. The husband had been sent here to open a new bank, the Carolina Southern, right down the street there in that old stone building next to the pharmacy.” Everybody nods. Lynn continues, amazed at herself, “Nobody knew much about this young husband — he seemed to have risen up out of nowhere, though he was perfectly charming and clearly very smart — but she came from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Wilmington. He was a gambler and a spendthrift, though nobody knew it yet, and the new bank was in serious trouble when her mother — now, this is the wife’s mother, Mrs. Mildred Osgood, a widow, one of the Cape Fear Osgoods — came up from Wilmington to spend the Easter holiday and stay on for the birth of her first grandchild, as this daughter was her only child. So it was Easter Sunday, nineteen twenty-three, when the tragedy occurred.”
“What tragedy?” Mary Lane breathes.
“Well, the daughter was downstairs all ready for church — they belonged to the Episcopal church — but her husband and her mother were still upstairs dressing, and she was afraid they were going to be late, so she called up the staircase and begged them to hurry. Later, she could have bit off her tongue, because her mother appeared briefly at the top of these stairs and then tripped somehow, breaking her ankle, and fell all the way down this entire staircase, head over heels, landing in a crumpled heap right there.” Lynn points dramatically to the hooked rug at the bottom of the stairs. “She died instantly. And of course the young couple was just distraught, overcome with sorrow, and in fact they never got over it.”
“Never?” It’s Mary Lane again.
“No. Never. Because after the mother’s death, there was a presence in the house, a certain presence, you would feel someone beside you when no one was there, you would sense a presence in the room, and when she got old enough, the baby would smile at it, at the person who wasn’t there. So the young couple left, after a few years, but things did not go well for them. He died in an automobile accident, drove his car off the bridge into the Neuse River, and she became an alcoholic back in Wilmington. She drank white wine all day long.”
“What happened to the child, then, their baby?”
“I don’t know,” Lynn says.
“Do you think he did it? The husband, I mean? Do you think he pushed her down the stairs, for the money?” Robin Atwater’s mind is just clicking away.
“It’s possible. I just don’t know. There are some things we can never know,” Lynn says.
A silence falls around them then, like snow. Down at the end of the front yard, the streetlights come on along Main Street.
“Have you ever felt that . . . that presence?” Angela asks softly.
“Oh yes,” Lynn says. “Many times.”
There’s an audible intake of breath, an involuntary drawing together.
“And I’ll tell you something else.” Now Lynn is getting reckless, she knows she’s going to blow it, but she can’t resist, she just can’t.
“What?”“When Mrs. Osgood fell down the staircase, she was wearing a red hat!”
Nobody says a word.
“Oh, you’re kidding, right? You just made that up,” Georgia Mayo says finally.
“Did you make it all up?” Mary Lane sounds very disappointed.
“I think that’s just mean!” Melissa Cheatham, in her walker, sounds like she’s going to cry.
“Well, girls, it’s getting late, I think we’d better be going on now.” Robin takes control again. “Thanks so much,” she says briskly, extending her hand but pulling it back when Lynn has barely touched her long, sharp, manicured nails. “Quite entertaining, I must say! And now, good-bye, and Merry Christmas.” Robin shepherds them out the door. It’s drizzling now, getting dark. Lynn turns on the porch light and stands to watch as they straggle over to the side street, helping Melissa along, then moving in their group down the long hill, farther and farther away. Carolers are singing someplace nearby, their voices float out on the chilly air.
“Merry Christmas!” Lynn calls after the ladies. “Merry Christmas!” She watches them until they turn the corner and disappear, heading back down Main Street. Obviously they have decided to skip the Barkley School after all.
Now, finally, she’ll get that drink. Lynn laughs as she closes the door behind her and walks back down the long haunted hallway to grab the Pinot. She’s still smiling when she goes into the kitchen to open it and finds Lawrence sitting at the kitchen table, wearing his overcoat, going through the mail.
HE LOOKS UP AT her over the half-glasses, white hair floating out all around his head like a dandelion gone to seed. God, he’s aged, he looks really old now, like some character out of Alice in Wonderland. “Bravo, bravo!” He starts that slow deliberate sort of clapping he does which always drove Lynn mad. “Well done, well done, my dear! Very creative! I commend you.”
“You were here? You heard all that?”
“Ah yes, my dear, I had just come slinking home through the back door, appropriately enough, dragging my tail behind me.”
Lynn glances out into the back hall. She didn’t notice any luggage when she passed the broken dishwasher. No, his bag is not there, it’s definitely not there. So what does this mean? Does he imagine that he has come home for good? Or is he just visiting? Lawrence stands up to take off the huge overcoat, which strikes Lynn now as an affectation, especially that capey thing, and the belt — why, it’s downright theatrical, really. Lawrence seems theatrical too, an old ham, a joke.
He says, “I especially liked the mother-in-law’s name, Mrs. Mildred Osgood, and that line, ‘one of the Cape Fear Osgoods.’ That was quite good, you know.”
Lynn had somehow forgott
en about his deep, stupid voice-ofGod voice, which they all love so much on NPR. And that accent — almost English, isn’t it? Lawrence claims he got it at Harvard, but plenty of people who went to Harvard don’t sound like that, do they? She opens the bottle.
“And that detail about the baby smiling at the presence in the room, very nice. You should go back to writing fiction, you know. You really should. You’ve a gift for it.”
“I won’t, though. I have other plans,” Lynn hears herself saying.
“Well, what are they?” he asks. “Good works? Ha ha.” He does his harumphing laugh, he’s being ironic, of course.
“Perhaps.” Lynn gets herself a jelly jar from the sink and pours some wine into it. “If I ever do go back to writing, the first thing I’m going to write is a long epic poem titled ‘Irony Sucks.’ “
He raises those scraggly white eyebrows. “Aha! A manifesto? You are interesting, you know. You are still interesting.”
“Thank you.” Her ankle hurts. She walks over to sit down at the littered table.
Lawrence gets up, opens the china cabinet. “Bravo!” he says again. “In any case, bravo! You have vanquished the opposition.” He takes down one of those little green glasses they got in Venice, actually at Murano, out in the lagoon, where there’d been some sort of a workingman’s organization holding a celebration, singing and dancing, arms linked, all of them singing and dancing as one. Lawrence and Lynn had stood up and joined them. Come to think of it, that might be as close as they ever got to feeling like part of something else, like part of a group. Usually, it had been the two of them against the world.
He fills the delicate green glass and lifts it. “To you, my dear.”
“To Deborah Woodley,” Lynn says instead, raising hers. “So, where is she?”
“Gone.” He lowers his glass. “Gone with the wind. Or so it would seem.”
Lynn lifts an eyebrow, sipping her wine.
“Yes,” he says. “I ‘brought her down,’ apparently. ‘You bring me down,’ is what she told me, to be precise. She is considerably younger than I, as you know. We had gone to a holiday party where she had a wonderful time, as usual, and I did not, again as usual. And on the way home in the car, she said she was tired of me bringing her down.”