In spite of all these changes, and in spite of the considerable difference between Edmund’s scale of living and his father’s — Dorothy had managed with a part-time cleaning woman where in the old days there had been a cook, a waitress, an upstairs maid, a chauffeur, and two gardeners — the big house still seemed to express the financial stability and social confidence and belief in good breeding of the Age of Trellises. Because he had lived in the neighborhood longer than anyone else, Edmund sometimes felt the impulses of a host, but he had learned not to act on them. His mother always used to pay a call on new people within a month of their settling in, and if she liked them, the call was followed by an invitation to the Fishers’ for tea or cocktails, at which time she managed to bring up the subject of the garden club. But in the last year or so that she had lived there, she had all but given this up. Twice her call was not returned, and one terribly nice young couple accepted an invitation to tea and blithely forgot to come. Edmund was friendly when he met his neighbors on the road or on the station platform, but he let them go their own way, except for Gerald Martin, who was rather amusing, and obviously lonely, and glad of an invitation to the big house.
“I AM sewed to this couch,” Gerald Martin said. “My sleeves are sewed to it, and my trousers. I could not move if I wanted to. Oedipus is on the wall over me, answering the spink-spank-sphinx, and those are pussy willows, and I do not like bookcases with glass sides that let down, and the scarecrow is gone. I don’t know what they did with it, and I don’t like to ask. And today I might as well be stuffed with straw. The dream I had last night did it. I broke two plates, and woke up unconfident and nervous and tired. I don’t know what the dream means. I had three plates and I dropped two of them, and it was so vivid. It was a short dream but very vivid. I thought at first that the second plate — why three plates? — was all right, but while I was looking at it, the cracks appeared. When I picked it up, it gave; it came apart in my hands. It was painted with flowers, and it had openwork, and I was in a hurry, and in my hurry I dropped the plates. And I was upset. I hardly ever break anything. Last night while I was drying the glasses, I thought how I never break any of them. They’re Swedish and very expensive. The plates I dreamed about were my mother’s. Not actually; I dreamed that they were my mother’s plates. I broke two things of hers when I was little. And both times it was something she had warned me about. I sat in the tea cart playing house, and forgot and raised my head suddenly, and it went right through the glass tray. And the other was an etched-glass hurricane lamp that she prized very highly. I climbed up on a chair to reach it. And after she died, I could have thought — I don’t ever remember thinking this, but I could have thought that I did something I shouldn’t have, and she died.… Thank you, I have matches.… I can raise my arm. I turned without thinking. I can’t figure out that dream. My stepmother was there, washing dishes at the sink, and she turned into Helena Fisher, and I woke up thinking, Ah, that’s it. They’re both my stepmothers! My stepmother never broke anything that belonged to my mother, so she must have been fond of her. They knew each other as girls. And I never broke anything that belonged to my stepmother. I only broke something that belonged to my mother.… Did I tell you I saw her the other day?”
“You saw someone who reminded you of your mother?”
“No, I saw Helena Fisher. On Fifth Avenue. I crossed over to the other side of the street, even though I’m still fond of her, because she hasn’t been very nice to Dorothy, and because it’s all so complicated, and I really didn’t have anything to say to her. She was very conspicuous in her country clothes.” He lit another cigarette and then said, after a prolonged silence, “I don’t seem to have anything to say now, either.” The silence became unbearable, and he said, “I can’t think of anything to talk about.”
“Let’s talk about you — about this dream you had,” the voice said, kind and patient as always, the voice of his father (at $20 an hour).
THE scarecrow had remained in the Fishers’ vegetable garden, with one arm limp and one arm stiffly extended, all summer. The corn and the tomato vines grew up around it, half obscuring it during the summer months, and then, in the fall, there was nothing whatever around it but the bare ground. The blue workshirt faded still more in the sun and rain. The figure grew frail, the straw chest settled and became a middle-aged thickening of the waist. The resemblance to Edmund disappeared. And on a Friday afternoon in October, with snow flurries predicted, Edmund Fisher went about the yard carrying in the outdoor picnic table and benches, picking up stray flowerpots, and taking one last look around for the pruning shears, the trowel, and the nest of screwdrivers that had all disappeared during the summer’s gardening. There were still three or four storm windows to put up on the south side of the house, and he was about to bring them out and hang them when Dorothy, on her hands and knees in the iris bed, called to him.
“What about the scarecrow?”
“Do you want to save it?” he asked.
“I don’t really care.”
“We might as well,” he said, and was struck once more by the lifelike quality of the scarecrow, as he lifted it out of the soil. It was almost weightless. “Did the doctor say it was all right for you to do that sort of thing?”
“I didn’t ask him,” Dorothy said.
“Oughtn’t you to ask him?”
“No,” she said, smiling at him. She was nearly three months pregnant. Moonfaced, serenely happy, and slow of movement (when she had all her life been so quick about everything), she went about now doing everything she had always done but like somebody in a dream, a sleepwalker. The clock had been replaced by the calendar. Like the gardeners in France, she was dedicated to making something grow. As Edmund carried the scarecrow across the lawn and around the corner of the house, she followed him with her eyes. Why is it, she wondered, that he can never bear to part with anything, even though it has ceased to serve its purpose and he no longer has any interest in it?
It was as if sometime or other in his life he had lost something, of such infinite value that he could never think of it without grieving, and never bear to part with anything worthless because of the thing he had had to part with that meant so much to him. But what? She had no idea, and she had given some thought to the matter. She was sure it was not Helena; he said (and she believed him) that he had long since got over any feeling he once had for her. His parents were both still living, he was an only child, and death seemed never to have touched him. Was it some early love, that he had never felt he dared speak to her about? Some deprivation? Some terrible injustice done to him? She had no way of telling. The attic and the basement testified to his inability to throw things away, and she had given up trying to do anything about either one. The same with people. At the end of a perfectly pleasant evening he would say “Oh no, it’s early still. You mustn’t go home!” with such fervor that even though it actually was time to go home and the guests wanted to, they would sit down, confused by him, and stay a while longer. And though the Fishers knew more people than they could manage to see, he would suddenly remember somebody he hadn’t thought of or written to in a long time, and feel impelled to do something about them. Was it something that happened to him in his childhood, Dorothy asked herself. Or was it something in his temperament, born in him, a flaw in his horoscope, Mercury in an unsympathetic relation to the moon?
She resumed her weeding, conscious in a way that she hadn’t been before of the autumn day, of the end of the summer’s gardening, of the leaf-smoke smell and the smell of rotting apples, the hickory tree that lost its leaves before all the other trees, the grass so deceptively green, and the chill that had descended now that the sun had gone down behind the western hill.
Standing in the basement, looking at the hopeless disorder (“A place for everything,” his father used to say, “and nothing in its place”), Edmund decided that it was more important to get at the storm windows than to find a place for the scarecrow. He laid it on one of the picnic-table benches, wi
th the head toward the oil burner, and there it sprawled, like a man asleep or dead-drunk, with the line of the hipbone showing through the trousers, and one arm extended, resting on a slightly higher workbench, and one shoulder raised slightly, as if the man had started to turn in his sleep. In the dim light it could have been alive. I must remember to tell Dorothy, he thought. If she sees it like that, she’ll be frightened.
The storm windows were washed and ready to hang. As Edmund came around the corner of the house, with IX in one hand and XI in the other, the telephone started to ring, and Dorothy went in by the back door to answer it, so he didn’t have a chance to tell her about the scarecrow. When he went indoors, ten minutes later, she was still standing by the telephone, and from the fact that she was merely contributing a monosyllable now and then to the conversation, he knew she was talking to Gerald Martin. Gerald was as dear as the day was long — everybody liked him — but he had such a ready access to his own memories, which were so rich in narrative detail and associations that dovetailed into farther narratives, that if you were busy it was a pure and simple misfortune to pick up the telephone and hear his cultivated, affectionate voice.
Edmund gave up the idea of hanging the rest of the storm windows, and instead he got in the car and drove to the village; he had remembered that they were out of cat food and whiskey. When he walked into the house, Dorothy said, “I’ve just had such a scare. I started to go down in the cellar —”
“I knew that would happen,” he said, putting his hat and coat in the hall closet. “I meant to tell you.”
“The basement light was burnt out,” she said, “and so I took the flashlight. And when I saw the scarecrow I thought it was a man.”
“Our old friend,” he said, shaking his head. “The Man Outside.”
“And you weren’t here. I knew I was alone in the house …”
Her fright was still traceable in her face as she described it.
ON Saturday morning, Edmund dressed hurriedly, the alarm clock having failed to go off, and while Dorothy was getting breakfast, he went down to the basement, half asleep, to get the car out and drive to the village for the cleaning woman, and saw the scarecrow in the dim light, sprawling by the furnace, and a great clot: of fear seized him and his heart almost stopped beating. It lay there like an awful idiot, the realistic effect accidentally encouraged by the pair of work shoes Edmund had taken off the night before and tossed carelessly down the cellar stairs. The scarecrow had no feet — only two stumps where the trouser legs were tied at the bottom — but the shoes were where, if it had been alive, they might have been dropped before the person lay down on the bench. I’ll have to do something about it, Edmund thought. We can’t go on frightening ourselves like this.… But the memory of the fright was so real that he felt unwilling to touch the scarecrow. Instead, he left it where it was, for the time being, and backed the car out of the garage.
On the way back from the village, Mrs. Ryan, riding beside him in the front seat of the car, had a story to tell. Among the various people she worked for was a family with three boys. The youngest was in the habit of following her from room to room, and ordinarily he was as good as gold, but yesterday he ran away, she told Edmund. His mother was in town, and the older boys, with some of the neighbors’ children, were playing outside with a football, and Mrs. Ryan and the little boy were in the house. “Monroe asked if he could go outside, and I bundled him up and sent him out. I looked outside once, and saw that he was laying with the Bluestones’ dog, and I said, ‘Monroe, honey, don’t pull that dog’s tail. He might turn and bite you.’ ” While she was ironing, the oldest boy came inside for a drink of water, and she asked him where Monroe was, and he said, “Oh, he’s outside.” But when she went to the door, fifteen minutes later, the older boys were throwing the football again and Monroe was nowhere in sight. The boys didn’t know what had happened to him. He disappeared. All around the house was woods, and Mrs. Ryan, in a panic, called and called.
“Usually when I call, he answers immediately, but this time there was no answer, and I went into the house and telephoned the Bluestones, and they hadn’t seen him. And then I called the Hayeses and the Murphys, and they hadn’t seen him either, and Mr. Hayes came down, and we all started looking for him. Mr. Hayes said only one car had passed in the last half hour — I was afraid he had been kidnapped, Mr. Fisher — and Monroe wasn’t in it. And I thought, When his mother comes home and I have to tell her what I’ve done … And just about that time, he answered, from behind the hedge!”
“Was he there all the time?” Edmund asked, shifting into second as he turned in to his own driveway.
“I don’t know where he was,” Mrs. Ryan said. “But he did the same thing once before — he wandered off on me. Mr. Ryan thinks he followed the Bluestones’ dog home. His mother called me up last night and said that he knew he’d done something wrong. He said, ‘Mummy, I was bad today. I ran off on Sadie.…’ But Mr. Fisher, I’m telling you, I was almost out of my mind.”
“I don’t wonder,” Edmund said soberly.
“With woods all around the house, and as Mr. Hayes said, climbing over a stone wall a stone could fall on him and we wouldn’t find him for days.”
Ten minutes later, she went down to the basement for the scrub bucket, and left the door open at the head of the stairs. Edmund heard her exclaim, for their benefit, “God save us, I’ve just had the fright of my life!”
She had seen the scarecrow.
The tramp that ran off with the child, of course, Edmund thought. He went downstairs a few minutes later, and saw that Mrs. Ryan had picked the dummy up and stood it in a corner, with its degenerate face to the wall, where it no longer looked human or frightening.
Mrs. Ryan is frightened because of the nonexistent tramp. Dorothy is afraid of The Man Outside. What am I afraid of, he wondered. He stood there waiting for the oracle to answer, and it did, but not until five or six hours later. Poor Gerald Martin called, after lunch, to say that he had the German measles.
“I was sick as a dog all night,” he said mournfully. “I thought I was dying. I wrote your telephone number on a slip of paper and put it beside the bed, in case I did die.”
“Well, for God’s sake, why didn’t you call us?” Edmund exclaimed.
“What good would it have done?” Gerald said. “All you could have done was say you were sorry.”
“Somebody could have come over and looked after you.”
“No, somebody couldn’t. It’s very catching. I think I was exposed to it a week ago at a party in Westport.”
“I had German measles when I was a kid,” Edmund said. “We’ve both had it.”
“You can get it again,” Gerald said. “I still feel terrible.…”
When Edmund left the telephone, he made the mistake of mentioning Gerald’s illness to Mrs. Ryan, forgetting that it was the kind of thing that was meat and drink to her.
“Has Mrs. Fisher been near him?” she asked, with quickened interest.
He shook his head.
“There’s a great deal of it around,” Mrs. Ryan said. “My daughter got German measles when she was carrying her first child, and she lost it.”
He tried to ask if it was a miscarriage or if the child was born dead, and he couldn’t speak; his throat was too dry.
“She was three months along when she had it,” Mrs. Ryan went on, without noticing that he was getting paler and paler. “The baby was born alive, but it only lived three days. She’s had two other children since. I feel it was a blessing the Lord took that one. If it had lived, it might have been an imbecile. You love them even so, because they belong to you, but it’s better if they don’t live, Mr. Fisher. We feel it was a blessing the child was taken.”
Edmund decided that he wouldn’t tell Dorothy, and then five minutes later he decided that he’d better tell her. He went upstairs and into the bedroom where she was resting, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and told her about Gerald’s telephone call. “Mrs. Ryan say
s it’s very bad if you catch it while you’re pregnant.… And she said some more.”
“I can see she did, by the look on your face. You shouldn’t have mentioned it to her. What did she say?”
“She said —” He swallowed. “She said the child could be born an imbecile. She also said there was a lot of German measles around. You’re not worried?”
“We all live in the hand of God.”
“I tell myself that every time I’m really frightened. Unfortunately that’s the only time I do think it.”
“Yes, I know.”
Five minutes later, he came back into the room and said, “Why don’t you call the doctor? Maybe there’s a shot you can take.”
The doctor was out making calls, and when he telephoned back, Dorothy answered, on the upstairs extension. Edmund sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and listened to her half of the conversation. As soon as she had hung up, she came down to tell him what the doctor had said.
“The shot only lasts three weeks. He said he’d give it to me if I should be exposed to the measles anywhere.”
“Did he say there was an epidemic of it?”
“I didn’t ask him. He said that it was commonly supposed to be dangerous during the first three months, but that the statistics showed that it’s only the first two months, while the child is being formed, that you have to worry.” Moonfaced and serene again, she went to put the kettle on for tea.
Edmund got up and went down to the basement. He carried the dummy outside, removed the hat and then the head, unbuttoned the shirt, removed the straw that filled it and the trousers, and threw it on the compost pile. The hat, the head, the shirt and trousers, the gloves that were hands, he rolled into a bundle and put away on a basement shelf, in case Dorothy wanted to make the scarecrow next summer. The two crossed sticks reminded him of the comfort that Mrs. Ryan, who was a devout Catholic, had and that he did not have. The hum of the vacuum cleaner overhead in the living room, the sad song of a mechanical universe, was all the reassurance he could hope for, and it left so much (it left the scarecrow, for example) completely unexplained and unaccounted for.
All the Days and Nights Page 14