“No,” I said. “I guess I didn’t tell them anything. They were all busy when I left.”
That was why I sneaked out, Max, I wanted them to be worried. I wonder if you could accept the fact that I harbor such childish malice if I were to tell you?
“We’ll call them when we get there,” Max said.
I said that would be all right but things were in such a state of chaos when we got there that we both forgot. Children were swarming all over the place. If I’d known there were going to be children there I’d never have consented to go. Children blocked the entrance to the driveway and wouldn’t let us pass until Max said some magic password or another. Further down the drive children played rope and then, when we finally parked the car in back of three others, two little girls clapping hands against each other singing a ghastly little rhyme about a Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack all dressed in black black black, and so on, which Max seemed to find amusing for he just stood there until they’d gone through the whole thing.
In the house it was no better. Adults. Children. Children turn the people who surround them into nonentities. They tried to make me comfortable. They told me how much they all knew about the family, which only made me more uncomfortable. I thought of Max, that first morning, telling me he knew of me.
Here I am, folks, and I’m not even on my way to the hospital.
I found myself answering accusations that doubtless weren’t even in their minds. I defied them to find that borderline which they presumed that I stepped over. My mother, I wanted to say to them, Lily, has never been in a mental hospital. She carries her own around with her all her life. An invisible plastic bubble mental hospital in which she is the only patient and anyone who chooses to penetrate the bubble to amuse her can serve, at least briefly, as a doctor. What do you know about sanity? Distinguishable from each other, they were indistinguishable to me from dozens of other such groups of people who had visited us at one time or another. The old man, head of the house,-an old-time labor leader denouncing the aimless young radicals. The son-in-law, denouncing the reactionary ex-radicals in control of the unions and government. The older wife . . . pursed lips . . . Remember Joe McCarthy . . . the younger wife a combination of apathy and disgust.
“I think I’d better go home,” I said to Max.
“We only got here a few minutes ago,” he said.
“I know,” I said, “but I didn’t call. And I think I’d better go.”
I thanked them and Max said he’d be back in a few minutes and we waded through the children out to the driveway. I sank into the car seat, as exhausted as though I’d taken a trip around the world. Max looked at me and smiled.
“Mimi will be worried,” I said, leaning my head against the back of the seat and closing my eyes.
“Mmmmm,” Max said.
• • •
She burst out of the doorway before the car had even stopped and waddled frantically toward us; I became aware of the enormous bulk she had become.
“Beth, are you all right? Where were you?” she called.
“I’m fine,” I said. I felt very calm and contented.
“We’ve been going crazy looking for you, Vincent said to try Max’s house and I thought it was silly but I tried and nobody was there.”
Barney and Vincent appeared in the doorway but didn’t come after her to the car.
“We were there for a while,” I said, “and then we went to visit some friends of his.”
She hadn’t acknowledged his presence and it was hard to know just how to refer to Max.
“Why didn’t you call me, Bethie?” A touch of hysteria. “You knew I’d be worried, why didn’t you call?”
Vincent stood in the doorway, one hand resting on the jamb, the rest of his body leaning on that arm. Watching.
“I meant to,” I said. “I meant to call but then I forgot.”
Vincent still watching. He’s turned his thinking onto me. Suddenly in a panic. For I’d never fancied that I was a better person than Mimi but had only assumed that Vincent would continue not looking at the part of me which, if he examined it, he might find himself disliking.
I got out of the car, Mimi taking me by the elbow as though I were ill and guiding me back to the house. Max got out of the car and began walking with us.
“I don’t want to be rude,” Mimi said to him, “but I think Beth has had enough for one day.”
Barney, looking amused, turned and went back inside. Max, not asking what it was I’d had enough of but simply touching my arm lightly, said he would call me. I stood there in my magic quilted raincoat, watching Vincent watch Max go.
What were you thinking, Vincent? Did you remember how toward the end of your first long stay when things between you and Mimi were so dreadful, you moved into the guest cottage, which you called the Gamekeeper’s Cottage, and when I asked you why you called it that, you said I wouldn’t understand, and when I said I’d like you to tell me so I’d know even if I didn’t understand, you said it was because you were the Master of the Games? And because I came to Hesse in Josh’s library before I came to Lawrence, I thought for a while that your fantasies had originated with Magister Ludi. Once, when Mimi was looking for us, we hid under the same bed.
There ought to be a law that having once had a certain closeness people are enjoined from turning on to each other that extra vision that is inimical to love. For twenty years you loved me and curbed your vision of me at a point short of where it might cause me pain; you consented to entertain only that vision of myself which it was convenient for me that you have. Why should I have to bear your scrutiny now—just because your capacity for love is limited, so that having come to care more for my sister, you now had to care less for me?
Mimi led me inside, made me sit down in the living room. Barney had sat down in an armchair and was pretending to read a newspaper. I looked around for the boy, whose name I couldn’t remember at the moment, but he wasn’t there. Through the archway I could see the dining table set for dinner. Vincent came in but stood near the archway.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked.
“He’s in the attic,” Mimi said. “Looking at some of the old stuff. He loves it up there.”
“Will he be careful?” I asked.
“Sure he will,” Mimi said. “He’s very careful.”
I said nothing. Vincent was watching me.
“What happened, Bethie?” Mimi asked.
“This morning, you mean? Well, nothing really happened. I felt like taking a walk, and then I ended up at Max’s house, near Max’s house, I mean, and he saw me and came out, and then he was going to Thanksgiving at someone’s house, I think you know them, I can’t remember their name but the older ones know Josh, and then I realized I hadn’t called and we came home.”
“We were so worried about you,” she said after a moment.
“Yes,” I said. “Well, I can understand that.”
“Oh. You can.”
“Of course. I was doing something different from what I usually do. Disappearing like that for so long. If I expect you to take care of me then I guess I expect you to worry about me if I disappear.”
“Then why didn’t you call her?” Vincent asked.
I didn’t answer him.
“It doesn’t matter,” Mimi said suddenly. “It’s all right. I don’t want to interrogate you, Beth.”
“Nobody’s interrogating her,” Vincent said. “I’m just curious. As a student of human nature and all that shit. I’ve always been a student of human nature, haven’t I, Beth?”
“Not of mine, Vincent,” I said. And then, not wanting to talk to any of them, I went upstairs. I told Mimi I would come down when dinner was ready but then I found when she called me that I wasn’t up to it, so I ended up eating from a tray in my bedroom.
The New Order. Mimi and I both received letters from Vincent but mine said nothing. They seemed written out of some desire for familial decorum, a most un-Vincentlike desire. I decided Mimi was encouraging him to w
rite me. I hid away his meaningless notes. His letters to Mimi said everything he was thinking. She left them out for me to read. I ached when I thought of the closeness we’d once had, of the way we . . . particularly in the months after he’d first come. When he’d had no one else in the world to talk to. When we’d spent hours together, in the house, in the woods. It wasn’t just that we talked, it was more than that. Mimi would leave for school and Mrs. Cushman would be busy around the house. Vincent would write during the morning while I worked with Charles, my tutor. (Vincent, who frightened Charles half to death, had been banned from his presence.) But then after lunch we would walk together through the snow, or later when spring came through the grass and high weeds and along the riding paths, Vincent talking the whole time, I never interrupting, never questioning, occasionally understanding. He was practicing his book on me, although I only realized it years later when I read Celebration’s End. for the first time and was startled by its familiarity.
“There’s this myth of men needing women,” says the hero of the book, in exactly the sort of speech that Vincent used to try out on our walks. “Sex and laundry, that’s all we need them for. The food we can take care of ourselves. Maybe we don’t take the crusts off the sandwiches. . . . It’s only women that don’t like war because they feed on lies and their biggest lie is that they may die but their children never will. While their sons are off enjoying themselves at war all they worry about is having their lie pulled out from under them. What if their son died in a bloody ecstasy at the end of a bayonet duel where he killed the other guy, too? What if he never thought there was anything so great about spending forty hours a week at a desk and mowing the lawn on weekends, then when you get too old for that sitting around waiting to die some kind of nice slow death? She doesn’t give a shit if he’d die happier dying young, she only wants him to be there when she closes her eyes for the last time so she can look at him and tell herself that part of her isn’t dying. Y’see what I mean? He can’t even have his own life and death, he’s gotta have hers.”
And by way of reply I would pull off a piece of heather to tickle him with and he would brush it off absently as I reached his neck with it, perhaps talking again, perhaps silent. Then we would continue walking until we came to some favored spot—perhaps the place where the brook goes underground, perhaps the meadow in back of the point where the riding paths intersect, and we would settle down, Vincent as often as not holding me in his lap, for although I was a tall nine-year-old I was very thin and light, his arms around me. He would stroke my head or perhaps my arms and sometimes he would kiss me. And then, as often as not, we would nap together for a little while, a few minutes or maybe as much as half an hour, then we would awaken refreshed and walk contentedly back to the house. Except that one day, I think it must have been in the second spring, Mimi found us asleep that way and was distressed and told us it wasn’t suitable for us to be sleeping together that way, and so we stopped. Not because I understood what was wrong but because it bothered Mimi.
His first letter after Thanksgiving said he was sorry we hadn’t been able to talk more and that would be remedied at Christmas, when he’d be back for at least a week, perhaps with both Steven and his mother. His letter to Mimi was full of questions and strange details of his life with this woman. I don’t mean that the details were strange but only that he wrote them to Mimi as though she would be able to fathom their significance.
What a pair we are. I make the beds because she has a phobia about bed-making. She’d rather iron for a week than make a bed. But then she complains that I’ve done a sloppy job, the sheets aren’t taut, and I APOLOGIZE! You don’t believe it; I don’t believe it myself. I only know that at the moment I’m apologizing, I’m fully aware of but totally unconcerned with the ironies of the situation. The possibility that I’m an idiot for letting myself be shat on by a two-bit whore who wouldn’t have a decent roof over her head if it weren’t for me. My only concern at these times is to relieve her misery. She is quite possibly the most miserable person I have ever known.
Getting her up in the morning is an unbelievable job. I wake up like a challenger who’s just heard the bell for the first round but Myrna . . . I’ve never seen anyone fight so hard against opening her eyes, not even in the Army. Maybe it’s some kind of index of her life that she doesn’t think anything in it is worth waking up for . . . ever.
His next letter was composed of lengthy arguments with himself about the desirability of bringing her here for Christmas; this was entirely uncharacteristic of Vincent, who in principle as well as practice had always done and said what he needed to say or do and only afterward, if at all, stepped back to survey the results. This woman from the beginning had made Vincent hesitate.
Should I bring her if she’ll come? I know you’ll be decent to her, Mimi, that’s not what worries me. And it isn’t Beth, either, because Beth keeps it all inside. Anyway, her dislike of people outside the family is never deep enough to rise to the surface. What am I worried about then? Who the hell knows? The only thing to come to mind is the analogy of introducing a foreign chemical into a given substance without having any idea of its effect. It makes me uneasy and yet I have an overwhelming urge to try it. Why? I don’t know that, either. Except maybe that I feel as though you could help her if she were willing to accept your friendship. She has no one except me. If you tell me not to bring her, I’ll understand perfectly. It may be a terrible idea. Tell me what you think.
Mimi wrote him that she thought it was a wonderful idea and that everything would be all right and he should make sure to let Myrna know in advance how warmly we all felt toward Steven. I was disgusted, but much too resigned to the whole loathesome idea to even argue with her.
Meanwhile I seemed to be virtually losing the habit of sleep. I got into bed at night and my eyes refused to close. Of necessity I acquired the habit of going into a sort of semi-trance, almost as refreshing as sleep itself but never with my eyes closed.
“But you must,” Mimi said when I told her I couldn’t close my eyes. “Everyone closes their eyes when they blink.” Which was probably true, and after that she took several opportunities to swear that she’d just seen me blinking, but if it was true, I couldn’t feel it, and I thought she might have made it up. She came into my room occasionally during the night to check on me. I lay silent in the darkness and when she turned on the little night light I smiled at her. She claimed that some of the times when she came in I was so sound asleep I didn’t hear her but that I didn’t believe at all, or why, when in response to her command to force shut my eyes, would I have been physically incapable of doing it? She called the regular doctor and he said there was no such sickness. She called Dr. Angstrom without telling me about it! I saw it on the phone bill.
Mimi got bigger and bigger. She was really enormous by this time yet she wasn’t due for more than three months. Her obstetrician got furious about her weight every time she saw him and she would come home and swear she was going on a diet and not eat for several hours but then, when night came, the refrigerator door would slam and the cupboard doors creak even more often than usual. The maternity dress she’d bought in October for special occasions didn’t fit her any more. Mrs. Cushman had her try it on to see if alterations were possible but Mimi got so uncomfortable from the tight neck and sleeves that she got upset while Mrs. Cushman was still examining it and ran upstairs and pulled it off, ripping it in order to do so. The next morning she drove to Lord & Taylor to get another but there was nothing in the entire store that fit her. She came home almost in tears and that afternoon took the train into New York to buy clothes, an almost unprecedented event.
Vincent wrote to say the woman didn’t want to come but then the following week he said she would, and that they would fly in the day before Christmas and take a cab from the airport.
Max began dropping in frequently, always bringing regards from the people we visited at Thanksgiving, although Mimi was still a little stiff when he mentioned them i
n her presence. (Once or twice I felt he might not have bothered if she weren’t there.) He told me his house was for sale but that he’d priced it on the high side and didn’t expect to sell right away. Mimi asked if that wasn’t a little silly, to price it too high when he wanted to sell, and he said he wasn’t actually in any big hurry, he was kind of enjoying the snow and there were enough inside alteration jobs to carry him through the winter, if he wanted them. Mimi asked—in a way that seemed quite sharp for her—how come Max had no trouble getting work when some of the other contractors were starving due to the rotten mortgage market and Max said, in that open way of his that made you wonder if he could possibly be telling the truth, that the trick was to work for people who had the cash and didn’t need the mortgages. Mimi flushed then as though she’d been caught at something red- handed, which was strange because it was natural for her not to have thought of that. Later Max told me that the people we’d visited wanted me to come back during Christmas vacation and he had some other friends who wanted to meet me, too. It sounded a little frantic and crowded, the way he put it, so I told him I didn’t know, I’d just have to see what happened, we didn’t even know yet who would be here for Christmas week. Max said it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t find any time for him at all during the entire holiday and I said that he was welcome to come on New Year’s or Christmas or any other time, that after all he had yet to be chased away. At which he smiled mischievously, and I said, “Not by me, anyway.”
Josh and Lily were to be here three days before Christmas but they were delayed so that Vincent and the woman, arriving past midnight of Christmas Eve, were here first. Steven seemed younger in her presence. Slim, sullen and ugly she entered the house, a sinew of unpleasant matter in our midst. Wearing black. She always wore black or brown. Mimi, hugging Steven as though he were her own long lost child, told the woman how happy we were to have her at Yiytzo, how we’d been looking forward to meeting her ever since Thanksgiving, to meeting Steven’s mother because we thought he was such a wonderful boy. The woman nodded dumbly. The string of pearls around her neck was extraordinarily ridiculous looking, as though someone spiteful had gone out of his way to make sure that even from a distance they couldn’t be mistaken for real ones.
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 11