by Paula Fox
The following afternoon, she found Mrs. Vernon Fletcher, hatted and gloved, standing in Helen Sears’s small office. Mrs. Fletcher gave her an intensely shrewd look, narrowing of the eyes, judgmental pursing of the lips. Annie thought, that’s her world face—she’s dumb as a log.
“You do look like your mother,” said the woman with a dry little laugh. Or was she clearing her throat?
“He’s sinking,” Helen Sears said.
“I’ve been to the house,” Mrs. Fletcher reported with a tinge of triumph.
“Is he conscious at all?” Annie asked.
“Only a minute now and then,” replied Helen Sears.
“It’s a disgrace, the way he’s neglected it. Some of those fine old pieces.”
“The sleigh bed is mine,” Annie said sharply, coldly.
“Well! I’m not one to claim what isn’t mine.”
“We shouldn’t talk this way,” Annie said, thinking of her visit to the antique dealer, the haste with which she herself had sought some profit before the old man was dead. Suddenly sickened by Mrs. Fletcher, by herself, by Helen Sears’s unlined but aging maiden’s face, she said, “Although I shouldn’t pretend anything. I went to an antique man in Nyack to see if he’d buy the bed. I’m going to sail for England on March fourth, and I simply didn’t know what to do about it.” She looked apologetically at Mrs. Fletcher’s black felt hat.
“Yes, the bed…” Mrs. Fletcher said speculatively. “I thought that was a valuable article. What did he offer?”
“He said he’d see. Maybe a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Well, you won’t be able to get it until the will is probated, you know, and by then—” She shook suddenly with powdery laughter. “Why, you’ll be in fresh green fields!”
Helen Sears picked up a pencil and looked at it closely.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Mrs. Fletcher, recovering her poise at once. “I’ll give you the money. Then you can leave the whole thing in my hands. Won’t that be helpful?” She turned to Helen.
“In times like this,” she said, “one must be helpful.”
Helen Sears allowed herself a small venomous smile. She dropped the pencil. “Well, if you ladies have finished your business—”
“Can I see him?” Annie asked.
“Of course you can see him.”
Mrs. Fletcher cleared the interior of her pale, thickly powdered throat. “I’ve seen him. I can’t say he saw me. It’s a vile disease. I’ll wait here for you, Annie. We’ll finish up the matter of the bed after you’ve made your visit. Please try to understand that Vernon and I will be left with all the details—you understand? Unpleasant details that younger folk leave to us older folk.”
In the corridor, Annie walked silently next to Helen Sears, whose hands were clasped in front of her. “It’s always like this,” she said. “With the relatives. I’m used to it. You needn’t feel bad. It’s not disease that’s vile. It’s families.”
“I feel awful about the bed. But—”
“No, no. Don’t explain. You’re on your way. It’s the natural thing. Mrs. Fletcher isn’t as bad as she behaves. Everybody is scared of death.”
Surprised by such magnanimity, Annie touched Helen’s arm and said thanks.
“I still have a human feeling or two,” Helen said without emphasis.
Uncle Greg’s eyes were closed. Annie stared at him a long time. There was no subtle change here, but, rather, one of coarseness; from the middle of his wasted face rose the barely fleshed ridge of his nose; his lips hung loosely, caked with gray froth. It was as though his face were being punched and beaten by an invisible fist.
He opened his eyes a few times during the hour she spent by his bed. He smiled vaguely at the ceiling, murmured something she couldn’t make out, went back into that strange vacuum that looked so much like sleep.
Before she left for the city, Mrs. Fletcher explained that she had called Vernon in Providence to bring the money for the bed and that he would be leaving to join her here as soon as he could manage to get things in proper shape at the animal hospital. The word hospital reminded her of something. “Well, when you’ve seen as many dying and dead animals as I’ve had to, well, we’re all animals in the end, not that I don’t believe in a supreme power, you understand, but life ends in a mess, it’s all a mess if you ask me, still you’re young yet and that’s the best time. When you’re young.”
Vernon arrived several days later and handed Annie an envelope containing a hundred and fifty dollars. He was a short dumpy man with a dead white face that looked as if it were waiting for one permanent expression to be painted on it. He had a tendency to clutch his wife’s arm.
Annie went to Macy’s and bought herself a heavy beige coat that reminded her vaguely of some other coat she had once had. She had enough left over to buy some wool gloves and underwear and a black wool skirt. She couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to, but she felt a kind of joy as she watched the wrapping up of her new clothes.
On March first, she spent the afternoon at the nursing home. The Fletchers wandered in and out, Mrs. Fletcher pursing her lips and shaking her head as she stared down at Uncle Greg, Dr. Fletcher as expressionless as flour, an unidentified presence of some sort near the bed.
The old man moved restlessly that day, plucking and picking at the thin hospital cover, and he muttered ceaselessly, his words drowned in phlegm, yet carrying the persistent tone of one who tells a story with desperate insistence lest he be interrupted. Twice, a nurse came to plunge a needle into his withered arm. A glass straw was inserted between his swollen lips but the liquid never rose through it. Ambulatory patients peered in now and then and passed on down the corridor; trays rattled at early supper time; the geranium petals glowed against the window, beyond which the flakes of a snow flurry struck the glass, then melted. It grew dark. Time lost its measures. Annie discovered that the loud breathing she had been listening to for some time was her own. Once he spoke: “I’ve lost that key again,” he said quite clearly, then lapsed back into incoherency. Helen Sears came and tapped her shoulder. “You might as well go,” she whispered. “This may go on all night. Just come early tomorrow.”
In the morning, she parked the car on the thin, soft layer of snow in the driveway. Helen Sears was waiting for her in the little office. The Fletchers sat on a couch, side by side, silent.
“He’s dead,” said Helen. “He died at three twenty.”
———
They weren’t Jews, Mrs. Fletcher said, so the burial would take place after the proper interval and Annie would either have to cancel her sailing or miss the funeral. The choice was so cruel—she was, momentarily, so affected by the injustice of having to make such a decision—that it overshadowed her uncle’s death. Helen Sears was watching her with a kind of detached interest, the way she might have followed the progress of an insect confronted with an obstacle in its path.
Annie, unable to bear the Fletchers’ complacency, Helen’s death professionalism, drove to the cemetery, parking at the circular entrance and walking up the path on the fresh snow. She had not known until this morning that her mother was buried in a “family plot” and the news, given to her by Vernon Fletcher in his pallid fainting voice, had struck her like a blow. Her mother, she thought, as she walked toward the north hill, had been here all along.
She passed a new marble stone in front of which lay one long red gladiola sprinkled with snow. Just beyond, where the hill rounded from east to north, was a group of three small gravestones. As she stood in front of one, a man in a shabby plaid woodsman’s jacket came out of the trees bordering the north side of the cemetery. His hands deep in his pockets, he walked toward her, kicking the ground with the toes of his thick work boots.
“Ground hard,” he said. “Too hard. Feel that wind? It’s likely to bring more snow. Sometimes, this time of year, we have to stack them up in the crypt over there. Well, we’ll see.”
“My uncle died,” she said.
“You’
re his niece? Well, I knew him. For a long time. Now I got to dig the hole for him.”
She looked down at the legend on the gravestone. Elizabeth, she read. Next to her would lie Gregory. Behind were the graves of Elizabeth’s and Gregory’s mother and father, her grandparents. She shivered as the wind hastened among the bare tree branches and lifted the soft snow into small flurries.
The gravedigger hunched his shoulders and walked back in the direction from which he had come. Annie remembered the damp cold feel of the doll she had found in the trunk in Uncle Greg’s attic. Then she hurried away from the cemetery. This would be over. Then her real life would begin.
“I can’t stay for the funeral,” she told the Fletchers. “If I don’t go on that ship, I won’t have enough money to ever go.”
Dr. Fletcher seemed not to have heard her. Perhaps he only heard barking dogs and hissing cats. But Mrs. Fletcher pursed up her lips and shook her head. “It’ll be on your conscience, dear,” she said with unconcealed triumph.
Helen Sears walked with Annie to the nursing home entrance. She hardened herself against the sardonic comment she expected. But Helen Sears said, “Lots of people don’t come at all. You were good to visit all these days. If I hadn’t had that fury given me by God’s curse, if I hadn’t been cursed with that old murderous bitch, I might have gone on a ship sometime, somewhere.”
That night, Annie packed her suitcases. She gazed for a long time at the passport that had arrived the week before and which now bore a British visa. Her passport photo smiled inanely up at her. In the space for next of kin, she had written Theda’s name and address.
“I’m going to England,” she said aloud. Then, just as her father’s laughter had issued forth so mysteriously in this bleak room a few nights earlier, she heard her own voice of five years ago, saying, “I’m going to California,” and the excitement, the expectation, the sense of having thwarted all the forces arrayed against her setting out on this new journey drained away like the fugitive euphoria of alcohol, thinning into sickness. “Hell!” she cried out. Then she sank to the floor and wept for Uncle Greg.
The morning was bright; the wind had died down. She ate breakfast in a drugstore and in the afternoon went to see a movie about gangsters. She had promised herself a call to Theda that night, and she felt calm and determined and even indifferent to whatever lay ahead. It was as though she had delivered herself over to the impersonal force which would bear her along through this night to the gangplank of the ship which she would certainly cross tomorrow morning.
A few minutes before eight thirty, at which time she had decided to go out to the drugstore and try Theda’s number, someone knocked at the door. She could not think who it might be. Surely Walter had gotten all he wanted from her! The knock sounded again. She unlocked the door and opened it. A soldier stood there looking at her, a duffel bag at his feet.
“Annie?”
She stared at Max Shore speechlessly. “Annie,” he said. They embraced. His hat fell to the floor. Beneath the coarse fabric, the insistent utility of his uniform around which her arms clung, she felt the substance of his bones, his flesh, his actuality.
At last, he did not so much release her grip as unlock them both from each other. He looked at her face; he examined her features minutely. “The door,” she said, barely opening her lips to speak so as not to interfere with his rapt inspection that brought her the weight and pain of her own corporeality.
He turned, dragged the duffel into the room, and shut the door. They went to sit on the studio bed. He put his arm around her.
“What did you do today?” he asked after a moment.
“I went to a movie about tough guys,” she said.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes. I often want to be that way, calling people ‘creeps’ and shooting them down like dolls—instead of the way I am, always on the lookout for a little smile, a laugh, a tear, a kiss.” She burst into laughter. He laughed with her. “You like your own jokes, don’t you?” he said.
“I love them!” she cried.
“Today, I was demobilized,” he said. “And I made a reservation to fly to Los Angeles on a constellation.”
“I’m sailing tomorrow to England on a ship called Constellation.”
“And yesterday?”
“Yesterday. My uncle died. The funeral is the day after tomorrow. I won’t be there.”
“Do you feel bad about that?”
“Only from the outside. What people will think of me. No. He’s dead now. I found him when I came back from California, helpless in his bed, the roof falling in, snow melting on him from the holes in the ceiling. He must have been dying for a long time. I think about how alone he was. No living presence for so long, his life leaking away in that old empty house. He’d been a child there. I was, too.”
“Let’s go someplace and eat. I came straight here. I’m hungry.”
She was silent a moment, leaning over, her hand on her chin, her elbow balanced on one knee.
“You’re going back then, to Eva.”
“I’m going back,” he said. “Thomas has a bad illness of the eyes.”
“Eva said there was something.”
“She wouldn’t tell me. I had to call the doctor finally. She couldn’t say it. She suffers from an appalling tension…it’s the tension of hope. It’s her only savagery—that insistence that everything turn out all right.”
“What does he have?”
“It’s called retinitis pigmentosa. It means the retina becomes pigmented. Eventually, he’ll lose peripheral vision.”
“There’s no way to stop it?”
“I don’t know.”
She stood up and put on her new coat. He watched her, noting how much she’d changed and yet how much she was the same, thinking of that quality about her which had first taken his imagination and how, after all these years, it still held him, the ineluctable force of her strangeness. Perhaps she was bound to some atavistic memory of his own, an image of life before speech, the mythic world of early life, before he had become linked to others, before he had accumulated the bonds that tied him to the conscious progression of days and years. He saw a strand of her hair on the pillow near his hand. He reached toward it, then drew his hand back. It was everything, nothing; it was too dangerous. His body feared her even as his mind embraced her.
They went to a delicatessen on Eighth Street. She strained to tell him why she was going away…“I’ve been so ashamed all my life. I had this idea that a different country, even places where I couldn’t speak the language, would change everything.” He thought, but didn’t say, that she was going to places where, now, there was only shame. She suddenly swung off on a new tack and began to tell him about Dr. Vernon Fletcher.
“He was so blank,” she said excitedly. “Oh, I didn’t think he ought to be grieved at Uncle Greg’s death. Only that he seemed like the walking dead! And he had that morbid Irish hair.”
He laughed and said, “What?”
“As if the hair cells had given up centuries ago and put out a little fringe of gray shred to hide the secret.”
“Do you know anything about Ireland? The Irish?”
She frowned. “Not much.” Then she smiled. “But I might deduce something from Dr. Fletcher’s hair.”
He wanted to tell her about Europe, about the war, about the small camp—not one of the publicized ones—that his unit had discovered in the middle of a village in western Germany, about a wheel of corpses in the center of the compound, the stone-faced villagers watching the American soldiers through the barbed wire. But he said little. She would find another Europe, not his, not theirs.
“Would you go with me to a place?” she asked, over their coffee. “I was there the last night before I left for the West. I’d like to go back now, just for a visit. There’s a cafeteria. We could have dessert. Tony says I’m one of those people who are always backtracking on themselves. I guess I am. It’s a long ride on the subway.”
“Anywh
ere you want,” he said.
They got off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street and walked up the incline from Broadway toward Riverside Drive, then south a few blocks. In the lobby of the hostel, a few languidlooking people sat on couches or stood talking in small groups.
“It used to be almost all foreign. But now everyone looks American. Even the Indians are gone.”
He followed her into the reading room. She was moving quickly, eagerly, as though sure of finding something of value. A man was reading a book in a corner chair.
He went with her to the windows.
“It was December,” she said. “There was a man out there, almost naked. Someone explained he was suffering from shellshock from the first war. He had a ritual he was following. He must be dead by now.”
She looked around the room abstractedly as though whatever she was searching for might still be in it. He took her hand. She led him to the piano.
“There was a young boy who came in to play the piano. He was wearing a suit that was too large for him. He was very shy, I remember thinking, embarrassed. I wonder what happened to him?”
He hardly knew what he was saying, but he held her hand firmly.
“What happened to you?” he asked, looking down at the piano keys.
He felt the tension of her fingers in his. She was staring fixedly at the bench as though the boy were still there in his too large suit.
“I was taken to California,” she said. “After a while, I escaped.”
Introduction copyright © 2001 by Frederick Busch
Copyright © 1972 by Paula Fox
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
All rights reserved