You see, I figured I’d done my bit for the church over the years. I didn’t think I owed it anything. And I didn’t intend to spend my days typing notices and mailing out newsletters with all those other widows. Relicts, my grandmother used to call them.
Alec, I told him, you are a nice boy and a good son, but this is none of your business. I have done housework all my life, only this time it’s going to be for pay and not for family.
So that was that, though he never gave up trying to get me to change my mind. And he told everybody that working was just a passing fancy of mine, that it wouldn’t last.
Well, it did last, like I said, for nearly nine years. My first job was my last and only one. And that was because I found Dr. Hollisher.
He lived in one of the cottages on the beach at Indian Head Bay, a nice little house with wide screen porches all around and oak trees towering overhead, reaching right across the roof. It was so shady and cool in summer, he hardly ever used air-conditioning. Of course it was chilly and damp during the winter rains, but they don’t last long.
His name was Milton Eugene Hollisher, so it said on the National City Bank checks he had ready for me every week, waiting on the hall table, same place every time, one end tucked under the big brass hurricane lamp. He never once gave me my check directly, hand to hand.
He told me he was retired. I heard somewhere, at church maybe or at the grocery, that he’d been a psychiatrist at the big VA hospital at Greenwood, but I don’t know for sure. He didn’t talk about himself.
We got on just fine. He was one for putting things plainly and I always did like to have everything clearly understood.
“Mrs. Emmons,” he said to me the very first time I went there—almost but not quite inside the front door, he was waiting for me on the porch—“you are on time to the minute, I admire that.” He waved me to a cane rocking chair. (It was one of those screen porches with rockers and plant stands full of ferns and a ceiling fan turning slowly.) “I should like you to come at ten and leave at two or earlier, if possible. Please do not play the radio. The only television in the house is a single black and white set which is tuned to my evening news station. It is so very small it can hardly tempt you to turn it on. Please do not whistle or sing at your work. That was splendid for Snow White, but I do not think it is suitable for this house.”
I sat in his rocker. And looked around. The porch was spotless, not even a speck of dust on the shiny glass tabletop, though it was a dry summer and fine blowing haze hung all day in the air. He must have wiped it clean just before I came.
And I, to use his words, admire that. To have things neat for the housekeeper to start off—yes, I did like that.
There was a large nest of mud daubers building in the outside corner of the porch. I pointed to it. “You should do something about that. They’ll be inside pretty soon, you know.”
“I am very allergic to stings,” he said, scarcely looking at it.
“I’ll take care of it with a spray can.”
He nodded.
I realized then that we were talking as if I had the job already. As if he’d asked me, which he hadn’t, and I’d accepted, which I hadn’t either.
“And of course,” he said, “you will have to wear other shoes.”
I looked at my feet: black oxfords, the most comfortable shoes in the world.
“They have crepe soles,” he said. “I do not like people to walk silently.”
“Well,” I said slowly, “most people prefer the quiet.”
He shook his head violently.
“All right,” I said.
I tried for a week. My bunions burned and my spine ached, and I went back to my rubber-soled shoes. He was upset all right. I had to tell him I couldn’t work otherwise—anyway, he gave up about the shoes. Eventually I thought of a solution. Years ago, when I was a girl, we all wore charm bracelets with dozens of odd shapes dangling and rattling. I hunted up my bracelet—took me a while to find it—and wore it to work every day. I felt like one of those fat pet cats who wear silver bells to warn away birds. But it satisfied him.
Months later, out of the blue, he said, “You know, I’ve grown to like the sound of your bracelet.”
“I’m reliving my youth,” I said. “This thimble, see, that’s my tenth birthday, and the bell was my fourteenth. My husband brought me that Eiffel Tower from Paris when he came back after the war.”
By that time, Dr. Hollisher had walked away. He could never manage to listen or say more than a dozen words before hurrying off with a busy distracted air. Like a man who has more to do than he will ever manage. In truth, of course, he had nothing to do but amuse himself and all day to do it in.
Still the sound of the silver was bright and cheery. And the memories kept me from being bored. After a while, though I was doing the work (I suppose I was doing it properly; he never complained), I wasn’t there at all, not in the house on Indian Head Bay. I was years away. I even found I liked thinking about the past. I’d never done that before. All my attention had been needed in each and every day, first with the children and then Ed, my husband, and his illness. In a way the past was like that bracelet, locked up in a drawer, unnoticed and unthought about.
So, one by one, I remembered all the times suspended there in silver links. Birthdays and parties when I was young. A peach chiffon dress, ankle-length with a ruffle at the hem. Rooms that were filled with giggles and the funny smells of children, a little like wet puppies, a little like fresh bread.
That bracelet kept me company as I polished and dusted and sprayed Windex and swept the leaves from the steps.
“You are smiling,” Dr. Hollisher said to me once. “Why?”
But of course he didn’t wait for my answer. Soon I heard the screen door close with a little soft hiss—he had automatic closing mechanisms on all the doors, he hated them to slam—then his car start. And I went back to putting paste wax on the metal porch furniture. In this climate it’s the only way to stop rust.
Wearing that bracelet, I went from child to young woman. The wonder days, that’s what they were. When everything had a high Technicolor light, all girls were beautiful, all boys were handsome. When danger and uncertainty varnished everything, even the simplest, with excitement and importance and pain and joy. When young men went to war, leaving their pictures on pianos and mantelpieces, linked to home by a thin chain of V-mail letters and food packages and sometimes War Department telegrams.
Nothing lasts, not even remembered glory—after a while I wore out my memories. Like a plate put in the dishwasher too often, they just faded. The gold edges flaked off first, then the shine and the pattern, and then it was just a used-up bit of nothing.
When that happened, I stopped wearing the bracelet. I packed it in the box with my high school yearbook, my bronze medal in Seventh Grade Statewide Spelling, my plaque as District Homemaker of the Ninth Grade, and a couple of pressed gardenias. Then I put the whole thing back where it had been, the top shelf of the hall closet, next to the old photograph albums.
If Dr. Hollisher missed my jingling bracelet, he didn’t say anything. Myself, I don’t think he really noticed. By then, you see, he was used to me and he didn’t have to think about me at all. He could go about his own business, do what he was interested in doing. And he was interested in so many things.
Like radio. For a couple of years he took courses in electronics at the community college in Buena Vista. (My cousin, who was a secretary there, saw him: bald head in a room full of kids just out of high school.) One day a steel tower went up next to the house, and a lot of expensive radio equipment went in the small back bedroom. (He called the Salvation Army to take away the furniture that had been in there.) He had endless trouble with the antenna, that tall tripod with its flopping crossbars, like a high-wire acrobat’s poles. The upper section was supposed to move up and down, to improve reception at certain times, but the electric motor never really worked. Servicemen came time after time to tinker with it, some gray-su
ited engineers stood around and stared at it. One of them told me the antenna would never work properly and Dr. Hollisher should scrap it and begin all over again. I didn’t think that was very likely, but I left a note repeating the message anyway.
Even if it wasn’t perfect, the antenna did work. Neighbors told me lights burned in that room all hours of the night. He began keeping careful radio logbooks, lining them up on the new shelves he’d bought. He even went back to school to learn Portuguese, to understand better some of the people he could now talk to.
Then too he had his chess. He was a very enthusiastic player. He’d turned the second extra bedroom (the house had three) into a study, with a couch and a big soft armchair. He played chess there.
He had games going on all over the world, people he never even saw. The best was a man in Spokane, but there was also a Catholic priest in Belgium, a car dealer in Mexico City, somebody in Chicago who used official government business envelopes; there was a book publisher in London and a retired colonel in Hawaii who signed with just his initials: VSC. Dr. Hollisher recorded each game in its own ledger. He was very methodical.
And for each game he had a different board. Really different—there was a cheap plastic one, and a very expensive one in cast pewter, a rough carved wooden one (a patient gave me that, he said), a modern one of black and white stone. The strangest was a very large one with ivory pieces four inches high, and all the figures naked. King and knight had the bodies of athletes; bishop was old and thin with fasting; queen was beautiful and seductive; pawn was a crouched fat dwarf.
Dr. Hollisher kept all the boards in a row. How do you remember which is which? I asked him. Why, he said, each player’s set suits him perfectly. I recognize them at once.
Who was the naked board? I wondered, but I couldn’t seem to ask.
He played a lot of cards too. Wednesday was always poker night at his house. He’d ask me to make sandwiches—ham and roast beef, no tuna salad, and no lettuce, ever—and he’d fill the refrigerator with beer.
Tuesday was his bridge group. About every six weeks it would be his turn, and I would set up the tables and arrange things properly. He had a caterer bring in the little sandwiches and the salads and the fancy petits fours. He’d buy extra ice and check his whiskey supply and put half a dozen bottles of white wine in the refrigerator. And in the morning I’d find crumbs and sprinkles of sugar all over the living and dining rooms, and long lines of black ants marching up out of the garden to carry them away.
I suppose he had other friends, like any retired man would, but they never called during the morning when I was there. If the phone rang, it was always the contractor or the plumber or Belters Electronics with some new theory about why his antenna didn’t work. Once it was the community college registrar to say that they’d lost his forms, would he stop by the office, please. And occasionally, it was a woman named Judy.
“She’s called twice already today,” I said to him when he walked in.
“I know.” He put the message slip in his pocket.
He didn’t return the call, not while I was there.
Usually she spoke brusquely and quickly, like I was some sort of answering device. But once she said, “He can’t make up his mind, can he? And he never could.”
“Is that a message?” I asked, quiet and polite.
“Yes.” And she slapped down the phone.
To him I said, “Judy called again, the message is on the pad.”
He said, “Thank you.”
“Who is Judy?”
“My daughter.” And he went out into the garden to tend his camellias. He was beginning to be interested in the problems of hybridizing, enough to enroll in a course at the state university, even though that meant a hundred-mile drive each week. Distances didn’t seem to mean anything to him. The people at the gas station told me that he was there three or four times a week, filling up. He kept busy all right, but he didn’t seem frantic or restless, at least not to me. He even slept very peacefully: his bed was barely mussed in the mornings, the covers still smooth and tight. He must have slipped inside very carefully, like a letter into an envelope.
Of course he did have very precise ideas. Once he had the painters completely redo the living room and dining room because they hadn’t used the exactly right shade of pale blue. He wasn’t being mean or stubborn; he just knew exactly what he wanted and he had to have it. Things were very important to him.
Prissy old maid—that’s what his neighbors thought. I got to know them all. You can’t come day after day and not have a talking friendship with the people on the other side of the fences. (With him it was a nod and a smile and how are you without stopping.) And they were all so curious about him—as if an old man living alone was somehow remarkable and strange. Only once did something unusual happen.
One evening, at suppertime, they told me, a blue Buick with rental plates parked in the drive and a woman with dark hair and a yellow dress went in the house. A long noisy argument began, very long and very noisy.
Dr. Hollisher closed all the windows and drew the curtains but indistinct mumbling voices still drifted on the damp night air. Around midnight—the neighbors all stayed up long past their usual bedtimes—the woman walked into the back garden and shouted, “What are you doing with all these fucking flowers?” (Mrs. Herbert, the right side neighbor, blushed when she told me.) For a few minutes the woman walked up and down in the garden, grabbing at plants and trying to pull them out. She managed to uproot a few day lilies and a row of daisies, but the bigger azalea and camellia bushes gave her only handfuls of leaves and small twigs. Blazing angry, she put her foot against a camellia trunk and kicked, losing her balance to fall full length in the soft greasy soil. Dr. Hollisher, who’d been standing silently in a corner of the porch, helped her up and back inside.
After that, things grew quiet, though the lights stayed on until daylight. The neighbors were beginning to think about calling the sheriff when the dark-haired woman appeared again, jumped in her car, and drove away, leaving twin streaks of rubber on the concrete. Dr. Hollisher watched her go.
Of course when I came some hours later, I had to hear all about it. Every one of the neighbors rushed to my car and told me the story through the windows. By the time I entered the house, I figured I’d heard everything and it wasn’t any of my business. I was intending to go about my work as if nothing at all had happened.
Dr. Hollisher was waiting for me in the kitchen, drinking coffee. That in itself was pretty surprising: usually he only drank tea. Otherwise he seemed no different, he was shaved and dressed neatly as always. He did not even seem sleepy. “You will find a great deal of disorder in the house,” he told me quietly. “Most unfortunate. A quantity of garden soil has been tracked in and there are cigarette ashes just about everywhere. I myself noticed at least four butts go into the blue cloisonné vase on the desk. My daughter arrived last evening and chose to make a public scene. She is my only child. Her mother and I divorced years ago and she subsequently died. Please tell that to the neighbors, who will be curious.”
Actually the house wasn’t half as bad as he seemed to think. It only took some work to get it back in order, some extra sweeping and vacuuming. The door to the room with his broadcasting equipment had been locked, so nothing was out of place there. The second bedroom was a mess. His daughter had slept there—the bed was rumpled, the sheets and pillows tossed about. There was a spilled ashtray and a large burn hole in the rug, a broken glass in the corner and a smashed plate. All the chessboards were upset—thrown across the room, it seemed.
I stayed a bit later that day to get it picked up and cleaned. The odor of cigarettes and spilled whiskey hung in the air for a day or so, but that was all. When the rugs came back from the cleaners, Dr. Hollisher set up his chessboards again, checked his ledgers and returned the pieces to their proper positions.
He was a very patient man.
Eventually Dr. Hollisher got interested in boats. Which wasn’t surprisin
g—his house was right on Indian Head Bay, his lawn sloped down to the sand. First he built a pier. Many people had them—a twenty-, thirty-foot catwalk to a small rickety platform. The sort of thing you wouldn’t mind losing to the fall hurricanes. Years ago, when I was young, the town had its own pier—a huge platform a hundred feet out over the water, palm-roofed. All day long there’d be fishermen there, and crabbers. At night, the warm nights, young people would come from up and down the coast. You could hear them laughing and singing half a mile away. And it was lovely there, with the tiny colored lights shining along the roof and the moon showing streaks on the water, mullet jumping and croakers making their funny sound. Ed Emmons gave me his class ring there. (It was too big and too heavy for my finger, so I wore it on a chain around my neck until we were married two months later and I got a proper gold band.) That pier was destroyed in the last hurricane, twenty years ago. Blown clean away, not even the pilings left. The town’s never built it back, people don’t need a place to go on summer evenings, not any more, not with air-conditioning and television.
Anyway, like I was saying, Dr. Hollisher built his pier—a modest, sensible one. For a week or two he was content to put on a big straw hat and sit out there crabbing. Then he discovered boats. The house filled with books and diagrams and plans.
He bought his first boat, a small sailing dinghy. He’d be out all day long, crossing and recrossing the bay, alone, teaching himself from the instruction manuals he brought along. For a beginner he wasn’t the least bit timid or afraid. Once I saw him off Goose Pass, way over in the northeast corner of the bay. Since the wind was southwest and building up a nasty little chop, I knew he was going to have a terrible time coming back.
Next morning when I came to work, he was fixing a second pot of tea and he looked very tired.
I said, “I saw you over at Goose Pass yesterday.”
“Yes,” he said, pouring the water. “Did you notice the wind?”
“You must have been late getting back.”
“Slightly after four this morning.”
Nine Women Page 7