Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid

by Judith Rossner

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  For Dorothy Shapiro Perelman

  Part I.

  July-October

  A nightmare is terrifying because it can never be undone. A piece of paper tore with an incredibly loud screeching noise. My eyes opened. Then what? If the paper had torn while I was awake I could have taped it but if the tearing of a dream paper tore me then I was torn forever. I could scream for my sister Mimi and she might or might not hear me and come in to find out what was wrong, and if she did come my fear might be somewhat allayed, but nothing she or anyone else said could ever make that piece of paper whole again because it had torn in a world where we were powerless.

  While in the beautiful well-ordered lie of our everyday lives there was almost nothing we could not do. We commanded the flowers to grow and within the more or less predictable limitations of soil and weather, they obeyed our commands. We turned wool into rugs and sweaters, crab apples into jelly, wood into fire. We put screens on the windows and summer came; we replaced them with storm windows to permit the snow to fall. “Our lives denied our nightmares, which was why I stayed awake for all but four or five hours each night.

  I looked at my clock. It was just past four. The house was very quiet but outside the bluejays and grackles were already making their harsh daytime noises. I felt exhausted and I would willingly have gone back to sleep but the dream that had exhausted me had also left me full of vague fears that made sleep impossible. At five o’clock I opened the curtains and pulled my rug frame over to the window and then, in the gradually brightening morning light, I hooked woolen remnant strips into the rug canvas until I finally heard Mrs. Cushman walk through the hallway and go downstairs to make breakfast.

  • • •

  A while after breakfast I walked up to the road to get the mail. It was the very end of June and the last blooms had long since gone from the azaleas and rhododendron in the interior garden, but alongside the winding driveway the peonies and sweet william were in full bloom and the woodlands were shot through with orange day- lilies, yellow butter-and-eggs and here and there a clump of violets or delicate white trillium.

  The mailbox was full of flyers and business letters, at the bottom of which I found a postcard from Vincent saying that he would arrive the following week. I was delighted; Vincent always had exactly the opposite effect on me that he had on most people.

  I walked back to the house and showed Mimi the card, which pictured a lighthouse on a beach at Cape Cod.

  “Cape Cod,” she groaned. “Only Vincent would spend a year in Europe and then go up to Cape Cod before he came here.”

  As though she were in a hurry for him to arrive. She hated his visits as much as I loved them.

  “I wish he were here now,” I said, thinking that Vincent might be able to drive out the evil spirit that had possessed me during the night. I sat down at the kitchen table. I was so tired by this time that I had a physical sense of coming apart. As though I were a piece of putty that might, if my brain couldn’t get control of my body, spread out and spill over the chair seat.

  Barney came down then. Barney, whose hair had been grey for years, always looked entirely grey in the morning.

  “Vincent is coming,” Mimi said.

  “Mmm,” Barney said. “Why don’t you cry now and get it over with?”

  “Ohhhhh.” She poured his coffee and sat down again, a small roundish pink mass next to the lanky grey mass of her husband. What a picturesque trio—I slender and sallow to the point of yellowness.

  “I’ll never get anything done for as long as he’s here,” Mimi said. “I never do. No writing, no housework, nothing.”

  Not because Vincent interfered with her work but because his very presence threw her off balance.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “You know he’s impossible, Elizabeth. You know it’s not me. Everyone is upset by that lunatic, everyone but you and Barney.”

  This was true. Most people were disturbed by the naked quality of Vincent’s needs. He at once lusted for their understanding and bitterly disliked them for his dependency. He demanded comprehension with a violence that taxed people to close their minds for safety. We had in the attic the first letter Mimi had ever received from him. Written from Vincennes in 1943 when Vincent was eighteen and Mimi eleven, it begins without salutation: “I am your half brother. I suppose you know that.” It was typical of Vincent that the letter neither reflected his age nor catered to hers. What Vincent had to say was said without regard for such trivialities. “I suppose I should ask you how my mother is but the truth of the matter is that if she can’t even bother to tell me herself then I don’t care.”

  Poor Vincent. If she had troubled to write him she would not have been Lily. Lily wanted us, her three children, to be her three friends—but never friends in need. We were to be gay pals. She didn’t hold it against Vincent that she’d abandoned him and his father to run away with Josh. Why did he have to refer to all that unpleasantness when he wrote to her? Why couldn’t he just tell her about school, send news of people she knew in Vincennes, instead of begging her for snapshots of herself and describing how he and his father split the housework between them? Lily. Lily the chair without arms. Mimi and I had survived Lily’s friendship more easily, Mimi because she was herself and I because I had Mimi, who was five years old when I was born and already sure of the way things were done.

  “My father was called back into active service after Pearl Harbor,” Vincent wrote. “I just finished high school here in Vincennes, living with my father’s father, and now I’ve been drafted, which is okay. Soon I’ll be shipped someplace, I don’t know where. I need someone to write to who’ll always be in the same place, not moving around like my father and me. If I write to you will you save the letters and answer them, not all of them but enough so I know you’re still in the same place? There’s no time to waste so let me know right away. Vincent.”

  There was never time to waste, even now, so many years later. Always there was that urgency. To talk to someone. To find out something. For Barney and me Vincent’s visits were pleasant diversions from our own inwardness but for Mimi it was maddening to have in the house someone who very nearly bristled with need yet would take nothing from her, who only needed to give.

  “I feel like getting out and doing something,” Mimi said. “You want to go to a movie, Barn, or go have a drink with someone?”

  “All I want is another cup of coffee,” said Barney, whose mood was apparently uncompromisingly sour.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, giving him the coffee. “I mean tonight. What do you think?”

  “I think that you’re confronting me with major decisions when I haven’t even had two cups of coffee.”

  Barney of course detested making decisions at any time of day, not just in the morning.

  • • •

  But they did take a drive to have drinks with friends, and Barney got even more drunk than usual so that he couldn’t drive, and Mimi drove home, or nearly drove home, because at the point where she was to turn off Sugar Hill Road and onto our drive she instead ran the car into the culvert that runs beside the road and under our drive where they meet. They had to leave the car there and walk to the house, where I was waiting for them, having tried to sleep but been frightened by a vision of a huge bald and bloody head suspended outside
my bedroom window. Mimi called the garage right away but it was two in the morning and of course no one was there. They went upstairs in a marvelous mood, giggling like a couple of naughty children, leaving me sitting at the kitchen table feeling neglected and disgruntled, for I’d looked forward to chatting with them over tea when they came home.

  I must have been sitting there for an hour or two, paralyzed by a fear of sleep and a lack of interest in doing anything else, when there was a knock at the kitchen door. I peered out through the top panes and standing there was a man—a tall blond prince out of some fairy tale. I opened the door on the foolish assumption that men who look like fairy-tale princes couldn’t be dangerous.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour but I saw the light on. . . . I just smacked into a car up near the end of your drive.”

  I nodded. “My sister’s car. She went off the road and it was too late to get the garage.”

  He smiled. “The trouble is, she didn’t go all the way off. She’s nearly halfway across it and without any lights on I didn’t see it in the dark.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think they realized.”

  We stood looking at each other, not knowing what to do.

  “My name’s Max Merganser,” he finally said. “I live up the road about a mile.”

  I was startled. I knew almost no one outside of family friends since I seldom left our grounds—yet it was inconceivable that this particular person should live nearby without my knowing him. Silly.

  “My name is Beth Cane,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know your brother . . . half brother.”

  “Vincent?” I was puzzled. Vincent had lived such a solitary life when he was with us after the war. “How do you know Vincent?”

  “We met the first year he came to live here.”

  “How long have you lived in Welford?” I asked incredulously.

  He smiled. “All my life. Except for the past few years. My father had Otto’s, you know? The butcher shop in town?”

  This too seemed incredible.

  “He died a few years ago,” Max Merganser said. “I’ve been living in L.A. but my mother died in April and I came back to fix up the house and sell it.”

  Suddenly I felt very foolish at keeping him standing there in the doorway.

  “Would you like to. come in?” I asked.

  “Maybe for a few minutes, thanks,” he said. “I guess there won’t be anyone at the garage yet but I can try.”

  I put up some tea while he was ringing them without success.

  “I left one of those lanterns on the back hood,” he said. “But I guess it isn’t that dark, anyway.”

  “I never even realized Vincent had friends in Welford,” I said when we sat down. Thinking that Max must be at least ten years younger than Vincent.

  “Oh, sure” Max said. “It was a whole bunch of us, although I guess I kept seeing him longer than the others. We weren’t exactly friends at first, we were all still in high school when he came back from the Army and we thought he was pretty old and experienced.”

  There was only a few years’ difference, then. Yet Vincent was nearly forty-two and Max looked like a boy.

  Max smiled. “At first we couldn’t make him out at all. We’d be walking home from school, you know, and he’d just sort of appear near us and get into an argument about the football game or something like that and then somewhere around here he’d disappear into the bushes. For a while we didn’t even know he came from Ye Gods. . . .” He hesitated, uncertain whether he’d offended me. I smiled and he went on. “He’d make up these crazy stories if we asked him about himself. The only thing he told the truth about was the Army. He’d ask us all kinds of weird questions like how much sleep we got at night, if our mothers were good cooks, did we get bawled out when we didn’t get good marks, things like that. At first we thought maybe he was some kind of crook wanting to blackmail our parents.” Max laughed at the memory. “Then one day we saw him coming up the drive here and when we asked him if he lived here he said as long as he’d been caught he’d have to admit it, his mother worked in the big house and he lived in the gamekeeper’s cottage. It was always like that, if he finally told you something about himself it turned out to be a joke or a lie, not a lie, really, because he didn’t think for a minute that you’d believe it. I remember we couldn’t get over it when we found out who he really was.”

  “Who was he really?”

  Max blushed. “I mean, you know . . . that he was your brother.”

  “But you didn’t know me.” Fighting the realization that I was known by strangers. The crazy girl who stayed up on the hill.

  Max shrugged. “I used to see your sister around once in a while. She was only a few years behind me in school. I knew . . . you know, it’s a small town.”

  “I never thought about it,” I said slowly. “Maybe you think it’s stupid but it’s true, anyway. I assumed if I wasn’t interested in other people they wouldn’t be interested in me.”

  He smiled at me in a friendly way.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said—perhaps more fiercely than I meant to. “I don’t stay here because I have to, I stay because I want to. I’m happy here. Does that seem so crazy to you?”

  “Nope,” he said, “it seems fine to me. This is a beautiful place.”

  We were silent for a while. He said he’d better try the garage again but when he did, there was still no one there. We had tea and when he admitted to being hungry, I made him some bacon and eggs.

  “It’s a rough year for selling houses,” Max said. “The mortgage market is very tight. I suppose you don’t know about stuff like that.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, it’s complicated. The part that matters to me right now is that people can’t get money from the banks for buying old houses. It’s a crazy old house, anyhow. It needs a lot of work. I’m doing a lot of it while I’m around. I’m a contractor. Know what that is?”

  I said I guessed I did, it was like a builder, and he said that was right, that others made the plans and he executed them.

  I smiled. “You execute old houses.”

  He thought that was funny but he was concerned that I not misunderstand—what he did actually gave old houses a new lease on life. I said I thought that was wonderful. He asked if I meant that and I said that I did.

  “My folks were pretty upset about it,” he said. “I mean that that was what I wanted to do. My mom, especially. She used to go wild every time she saw me fooling around with a couple of sticks of wood and some nails. As far back as I can remember I remember her telling me not to waste my time. She thought I ought to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that.” He grinned. “Anything like that.”

  “What does your house look like?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s great looking from the outside,” he said. “I mean, not like this place, it’s not a mansion, but it’s real pretty. Inside it’s a little dark. One of the things I’m doing. I’m putting in a new kitchen and making a glass wall in the back.”

  I must have grimaced without knowing it.

  “Don’t look like that,” he said. “It’ll be beautiful. There’s a stone wall in back of it, complete privacy. You’d love it.”

  I was doubtful.

  “You’d have to see it,” he said. “I’ll tell you—” but then he stopped and I had to prompt him by asking what he’d tell me. “I was going to say I’d take you there and show it to you but I don’t know if you . . . you probably wouldn’t want to go.”

  “Yes I would,” I surprised both of us by saying.

  “Great,” he said. “In a few days I’ll come and get you. There’s just a couple more things I want to do before anyone sees it.”

  A few minutes later he went up the drive to meet the men from the garage, who’d promised to be right up. Later that day he called to talk with Barney about insurance but since I never answer the phone, I didn’t speak to him. I asked Mimi if she h
ad ever known him and she said oh yes, of course she knew who he was. In school plays he’d always been the messenger of the gods, or the sweet young boy who got killed in the war, or something like that, because he was so beautiful that everyone loved him. At first he’d been a full four years ahead of her but then he’d been left back a year somewhere along the line so that she’d already finished her freshman year of high school when he graduated. She remembered that even then he used to insist on calling himself Max, his father’s name, instead of the name his mother had given him—Marsden or Maximilian or something terribly unusual and elegant like that—and his mother had made a tremendous row at the school when she discovered he’d been permitted to list himself as Max in the yearbook.

  • • •

  Lily called from Beverly Hills to find out if we’d heard from Josh, which we hadn’t, and to say she would be here in a couple of weeks. It wasn’t like her to give that much notice; I thought she must be having some new private disaster. The departure of some young boy she could no longer afford; the death of some old man who for years had come once a week to talk about the past. Bought as a sanctuary not for us but for Josh and Lily, Yiytzo was little more than a prison in her eyes, or at best a temporary refuge. Not that she didn’t love the place, not that she didn’t think it was beautiful, not that she didn’t think it was the most marvelous place in the world. For children. Hollywood, in contrast, was no place at all for children to grow up. We were taught this long before we could understand that Hollywood was on the West coast of the United States while Welford Heights was three thousand miles away in the East. It was the reason we didn’t live with our parents. It was necessary for Josh and Lily to be there most of the time but Hollywood was no place for children to grow up. So we lived in the home Josh had purchased in 1930 from the estate of a financier who’d been a Depression suicide. For the house and land together he had paid eight thousand dollars, a good portion of the money earned from his first (and only) novel, Our Blood, Their Tears, a reasonably early drop in the flood of anti-war novels between the two world wars which received a sizeable advance and also was bought for serialization by the Hearst chain.