Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  FEBRUARY 1, 1900

  Double arrived today, which will make everything easier. I think that Rob as well as I sensed that we were nearing a point of no return, and except for chance meetings at the Winters’s house we have not seen each other. I try, I honestly do, not to think about him, but it is like being in a vast and terrible desert and trying not to think about the green oasis just over the next dune. David, David, wherever you are, what have you done to me? Love, honor, and obey until death do us part, but what about the death of the heart?

  We all went to the train to meet Double, even Esperanza and Rob. When she finally descended the iron steps from the railway car to the platform, I thought for a moment I had been mistaken, that it was not Double. It wasn’t her looks that had changed so much, though she was shockingly thin, it was that all of her vitality was gone, as if she were dying of a wasting disease. Her smile was empty, as were her eyes, and her voice had no life. The children were shy of her, there was a look of pity on Esperanza’s face, and Rob looked positively grim even though he had never known her as she had once been. In differing ways life has been cruel to both of us, and I wondered if I looked as different to her as she did to me.

  I hugged her warmly and introduced her to the children and to Esperanza and Rob. She stood there smiling woodenly, and suddenly without any change of expression, the smile never leaving her lips, tears rolled unchecked down her thin cheeks. For an awkward moment none of us knew what to do, frozen in shock, but then Rob took her unresisting hand and, tucking it under his arm, led her toward the waiting buggy, her small valise in his other hand. The rest of her luggage would be brought by Mr. Sommers in his wagon.

  I can see why Kate fears for her — I do myself. She is like some kind of mechanical doll that cunningly walks and talks but in reality has no life of its own. It has been something like six months since Stephen died, and she is still as stricken as if it had happened yesterday. What a pity they had no children. Having to take care of and love another human being would, I should think, help tide one over the worst part of grieving for a lost love. But how would I know? I have never been allowed to love a man, and after seeing what it has done to Double, I am no longer sure I want any part of it.

  FEBRUARY 3, 1900

  I tried to get Double interested in helping me with Melanie, but she said in that too even voice she uses now that she had tried doing some volunteer work in a military hospital in Boston but found that she couldn’t stand being around all those mutilated bodies. She wasn’t desirous of being around Melanie’s mutilated body, either. I am at my wits’ end, for nothing that I suggest seems to interest her. If anything she seems to avoid the children as much as possible, and they in turn have come to ignore her. I don’t know what hopes Kate and Christian had for her stay here, but whatever they were, they are likely to be dashed.

  At the Winters’s house Rob took me aside on the pretext of discussing further treatment for Melanie. “Is Double taking any medicine?” he asked point-blank.

  I shook my head. “None that I know of, and I’m sure Kate would have mentioned it if she had.”

  “She’s taking something,” he insisted. “Have you noticed the size of the pupils of her eyes? It could be laudanum,” he added musingly, “or some other kind of opium derivative.”

  I was shocked. “What a terrible thing to say! Are you sure?”

  He shrugged. “She’s on something, which also accounts for her separation from reality.”

  “What should we do?”

  “First of all, find out what she’s taking. Whatever it is, we can’t just pull her off it unless you’re willing to have her hospitalized. With all of the opium floating around in nostrums for everything from rheumatism to menstrual cramps, she wouldn’t have any trouble getting hold of it.”

  I remembered something that David had told me once, or was it Double herself? Not Grandmother Elisabeth but their real grandmother, who had died when Christian was born, was supposed to have been mad, but it was Christian’s idea — or Grandfather Gideon’s? — that her addiction to opium had destroyed her mind. I knew it was a joke in the family that you couldn’t get Christian to take any kind of medicine for anything.

  Rob took me by the shoulders and looked at me intently. It was the first time he had touched me since the day of the picnic, and I’m afraid I flinched. “If we are going to help her, you have to understand the nature of the problem, Janice. Double has come to terms with her grief by trying to escape it. My guess is that the family doctor probably gave her sedatives and the like in the beginning, and she found that she couldn’t go on without them.”

  “How terrible for her. Thank heavens you never saw fit to give me any laudanum even after you prescribed it for Francis that time.”

  His face softened, and he touched my cheek briefly. “You were so unhappy I didn’t dare. Janice —” His voice sounded strangled. He pulled me to him then and sought my mouth with his.

  Our mutual need and want were all there in the marriage of our seeking mouths, in that kiss that was so totally different from David’s apathetic pecks that it seemed ridiculous to call both by the same name. I thought my heart would burst as it threatened to break right through the cage of my ribs, and the blood thundered in my ears. If it hadn’t been that Melanie chose that moment to call impatiently, I don’t know what would have happened. As it was, we broke apart guiltily and stood looking at each other with dismay, our faces alternately pale and flaming.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I didn’t mean to do that.” His breath was still coming quickly.

  “Don’t be. But you do understand that we mustn’t let this happen again, don’t you? I couldn’t trust myself, you see.”

  His expression anguished, he gave a sound that was half a groan and fled the room. I gathered up the shreds of my self-possession and went to find out what Melanie wanted.

  So we have finally declared ourselves. Somehow I must see to it that we are never alone with each other, with better results, I hope, than the last time I made that vow.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1900

  It was childishly easy to find Double’s medicine; I suppose it never occurred to her that anyone would look for it. It was a blue bottle with a label that read “Dr. Ashton’s Compound for Ladies.” In her valise there were three others. I wondered what to do, remembering Rob’s caution about not depriving her of it all at once unless she was to be hospitalized. I determined to try to talk to her, though I dreaded it. I sat her down out in the garden and began.

  “Double, is there anything you would like to confide in me?”

  “Why no,” in that emotionless voice.

  “I know that you’ve been taking medicine.”

  “Oh yes,” she improvised readily. “My — my monthly cycle has been upset ever since —” She stopped, and tears began to run down her face, though her expression did not change. “Ever since —” she tried again, but still could not finish.

  “Yes, I know,” I helped her gently. “But it’s more than your monthly cycle, isn’t it, Double? You’ve been taking it all along, haven’t you? It’s been six months now — you’ve got to start tapering off and face life. I can guess what Stephen meant to you, and I know it’s hard, but for your sake —”

  Suddenly she came alive for the first time, and her eyes blazed into mine as she broke into my platitudes. “Can you guess what Stephen meant to me, Janice? I don’t think so. I know my brother rather well, you see, and I doubt very much that the self-contained David Hand gave you very much of himself. Stephen and I were everything to each other, everything. We were only truly alive when we were together, and now they tell me that he was blown apart or shot or whatever in their stupid war and lies rotting some three thousand miles away. Those hands so warm and knowing on my body, that mouth that laughed and kissed me, all are nothing but decaying shreds of decomposing flesh. And meanwhile David goes his selfish way untouched, untouchable. It isn’t fair. Even with the medicine I can hardly bear it.”


  What was there to say? I couldn’t tell her to stop it, I had no right. She hurt me more than she knew when she told me that I had no idea what love really was. I know all too well that if I loved David still I would not be harboring the thoughts I have of Rob. God help Double and me both; in our different ways we are both victims.

  FEBRUARY 6, 1900

  Rob stopped by today, and I managed to get him aside long enough to tell him that Double had admitted to taking the medicine and even to using it in order to bear her loss. He shook his head grimly.

  “Somehow we’ve got to get her off it. The longer she depends on it, the harder it will be.”

  “Why do you have to interfere at all?” Her voice made us both start guiltily. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Mrs. Nye, I am a doctor, and the whole reason for a doctor’s existence is to make people well. You’re not well, you’re sick — perhaps sicker than you know. That medicine contains opium, Mrs. Nye; let us not engage in euphemisms. The opium is helping you somewhat now perhaps, but it will take larger and larger doses of it and finally there will be no dose large enough. Meanwhile it will prevent you from facing and dealing with your situation.”

  “I don’t want to face it, I don’t want to deal with it, I often don’t even want to endure it,” she replied.

  “Ah, but you must,” he insisted. “We all must endure, sometimes more than we think we can bear. Tell me, if you had been the one to die, would you have wanted your husband to stop living, to immerse himself in a drugged dream world that would preserve his grief forever?”

  “You don’t understand at all!” Her voice shook, and I realized that he had reached her. “I tried, God knows I tried. In the army hospital there was one boy who couldn’t have been eighteen I used to write letters for. He had been blinded and mutilated facially beyond any recognition as a human visage. Even now I keep dreaming over and over that Stephen isn’t dead after all, that he comes back and I hear him knock, or rather scrabble, at the door. I am ecstatic and I run to open the door, only to find him grotesquely dragging himself along the ground like an insect that has been stepped on, and the face he turns up to me in supplication is the face of that mutilated boy. Can you wonder I take opium?” she demanded.

  I have never felt so shocked and pitying, but Rob wouldn’t give up. “You will continue to have that dream,” he said inexorably, “as long as you refuse to face your Stephen’s death. Will you let me try to help you?”

  She looked at him stonily, and I was sure she would refuse. “Do as you like,” she said indifferently at last, and I realized that I had witnessed a minor miracle.

  FEBRUARY 10, 1900

  Already some of Double’s seeming indifference has sloughed away as Rob keeps cutting down on her dose of opium. He spends a great deal of time with her; I wonder how his practice can stand it. I have felt out of sorts lately and thought that perhaps writing in the journal would help, but I find that I do not feel like doing it after all.

  FEBRUARY 21, 1900

  Double is a different person, though I have my doubts as to whether she is a happier one. Now she frequently bursts into wild fits of sobbing and sometimes looks afraid. Oddly the children seem to accept her better in this condition than they did in her former woodenness. Francis asked me the other day why Auntie Double cried so much — had she fallen down and hurt herself? I told him that was as good a description of what was wrong with her as any.

  Rob says, and tells her the same, that her state is a perfectly natural one related to her withdrawal from opium. Though she is quite capable of going out and buying more of Dr. Ashton’s Compound for Ladies, Rob has apparently somehow convinced her that in that way lies madness. I seldom see him except briefly as he goes through the house to take her out in the garden where they usually have their sessions when the weather allows. I often wonder what they talk about for so long every day — you would think that they would run out of things to say. I can see them now from the window next to my writing desk. He is holding her hand and talking earnestly to her. I never before realized what a handsome woman Double is. Now that her color has improved, her thinness becomes her. I wonder how long she is going to stay here.

  MARCH 15, 1900

  It is difficult to remember that in Boston there is probably still patchy snow on the ground. Here the grass that was already so green in January is high now and beginning to be splashed with flowers. It won’t be long before the hillsides to the east are blazing with poppies and lupin, whole slopes of brilliant orange and blue. I must take the children and Double on a picnic then; I’m sure Double has seen nothing like it. This time I hope that Rob doesn’t come. When I am tired, my mind sometimes slips and I remember too well how I felt when he had Francis on his shoulders and held me close in his arms.

  Double seems to be doing extraordinarily well. Christian and Kate have both written to say how pleased they are with her letters, and Rob has been interesting her in becoming involved with the antiwar movement. They went off to a meeting the other night, and she came back full of plans about protest marches and letter-writing campaigns. Rob was beaming at her as if he were a Pygmalion who had fashioned a perfect Galatea, and I felt like strangling both of them.

  MARCH 29, 1900

  For me it has been like a light going slowly out to see Rob and Double become ever more intimate. He comes daily, and they often go off together. Sometimes they accompany Melanie and me on our drives to the beach. One thing that has happened is that Melanie has transferred her dislike of me to Double, and she and I now get on together surprisingly well. Rob has had an iron brace made for her weakest leg, and she can now walk surprisingly well, though she has an awkward, unnatural way of holding her hips.

  Double is yet a different person again, much more like her old self. Her father has business on the West Coast with a shipbuilder near San Francisco who claims to have perfected a new propeller design, and he will be stopping in to see us for a few days next week. I am very fond of Christian — he has been more of a father to me than my own — and I am looking forward to his visit no end. I am only sorry that Kate isn’t coming, too.

  APRIL 4, 1900

  I don’t know how to put down these events, they are so bizarre and tragic, but I can’t help feeling that I have been in some unknown way at least partly responsible, though Rob says there was nothing I could have done.

  I didn’t waken this morning until late, nearly nine. For once the children made no noise, though they made a terrible mess of the kitchen trying to get their own breakfast. Esperanza was in the midst of tidying up when I came down.

  “Has Mrs. Nye come down yet?”

  “No, senora, I think she sleeps.”

  I was due at the Winters’s at ten, and chances were that Double mightn’t waken until I returned. I had the impression that she hadn’t been sleeping well. Melanie, of course, chose today to be perverse and insisted upon being driven clear to South Beach, I think hoping that I would cut her walk on the sand short. I didn’t, for I knew that if she got away with it this time, she would demand the same treatment again. There was another session of argument at the house when she refused to climb the stairs by herself as Rob had directed.

  When I reached the house at last, it was to find that Rob had just arrived, too. Esperanza was in the kitchen making lunch. This month I raised her pay to fifty cents an hour, and as a result she can’t do enough for us. Now she indicated that the senora was still sleeping.

  I turned to Rob. “Do you want to wait until she wakens by herself or waken her?”

  He pulled out his watch. “She must have slept twelve or fourteen hours. I can’t stay forever today and I must see how she is, so let’s wake her up.”

  As I walked quietly into the semidarkened room, I could hear her snoring loudly, which surprised me. She hadn’t snored before that, I knew, for sounds traveled too well upstairs for me not to have known. I tapped her gently on the shoulder.

  “Double, wake up, dear.”

&nbs
p; When she didn’t move, I shook her a little and then quite hard. Still she snored on. Alarmed, I turned her over and gasped as I saw that her face looked oddly swollen and had turned a strange dusky blue color. The lids were half-open, but only the whites of her rolled-up eyes showed. I could not take it in that this gargoyle face belonged to Double, the laughing girl whom I had known almost all my life.

  “Oh God,” Rob exclaimed behind me, “she’s poisoned herself.”

  Chapter III

  APRIL 5, 1900

  I am deathly tired but strangely not sleepy — strung up, I must suppose, by the events of the last two days. I stopped writing last night because Rob came in looking drawn and very tired himself. He sank down on the bed with a sigh.

  “I came to ask if you would watch her for a couple of hours — she shouldn’t be left alone. If I don’t get some sleep, I’ll collapse and be no good to anyone. I thought you would have been in bed.”

  I shook my head and closed the notebook. “Is she sleeping?”

  “I think so. At any rate her eyes are closed.” He rubbed his hand over his face wearily. “Damn, I wish I could have foreseen that.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Rob. No one could have tried harder than you did. Do you know, there was a time I thought you were falling in love with her.”

  He looked suddenly alert. “Did you now? How curious!”

  “Why curious? You were with her constantly, and she’s an attractive enough woman.”

  “Ah, but she isn’t the one I’m in love with.”

  We seemed to sit for a long time staring at each other silently. We both knew what he meant. The lateness of the hour, our fatigue, the letdown after the long grueling mental and physical task of bringing a human being literally back from the dead, all these had conspired to lower our defenses perilously.

  “Rob, I mustn’t —” I broke off helplessly, and this time it was I who fled the room.