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IN the first month of her expatriation, Elizabeth ordered a marker for her father’s grave. But she did not go near the grave even after the marker was in place. Her groceries, she ordered over the phone. All of her bills, she paid by check, giving the letters to the mailman when he brought mail. She discontinued all of her magazine and newspaper subscriptions. She stopped listening to the radio. She no longer watched TV. Her contact with the world narrowed down to an occasional phone call from Curtis Hannock, an occasional letter (never answered) from one or another of her former acquaintances, an hello and a goodbye from the boy who delivered her groceries, and the peripatetic gossip provided by Mrs. Barton, who still came biweekly to clean the house.
As more months passed, her days acquired a flexible routine. She would arise at six-thirty in the morning, fix breakfast, eat, tidy up the kitchen, and then return to her room and write poetry till noon. At noon, she would prepare herself a meager lunch, after which she would go outside and work on the grounds, operating her father’s power-mower when the height of the grass warranted, trimming the hedge that effectively shut out the sight of the street, or weeding the small kitchen garden which she had planted next to the garage. Around four o’clock, she would go back inside and start preparing her evening meal. There were days, of course, when she fixed baked beans or a roast, and on these occasions the dish would have been put into the oven some hours before, making the preparation of the rest of the meal relatively simple. Evenings, she spent for the most part playing Bach or Couperin or Scarlatti on the harpsichord, becoming more and more proficient as the days passed. Sunday was her day off. She would arise at eight or eight-thirty, go downstairs, fix herself a light breakfast, and linger over a second and sometimes a third cup of coffee; then she would get whatever main course she had decided on for Sunday dinner into the oven, after which she would retire to the wing-back chair in the living room and read her bible until noon. She would eat dinner around one o’clock, do the dishes, and then go into the library, select a book, and retire once more to the wing-back chair. She read indiscriminately, choosing whatever volume her mood of the moment dictated, and most of the time she was in the process of reading half a dozen books at once. In this way she browsed through such diverse fare as The Charterhouse of Parma, Moby Dick, Das Schloss, Little Men, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Ulysses, and Swann’s Way. Some of these literary pilgrimages she had made before, but all of them, new and old alike, provided her with the companionship which she was wise enough to know she could not get along without.
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SUMMER faded into fall. Elizabeth was shocked when she got her school tax. The village tax had already bled her for $364.65, and now she was confronted with the prospect of being bled for $502.19 more. For a furious moment she was tempted to sell the house; then she remembered all the cherished old things it contained, and sold Byron’s other car—a ’61 Chrysler that was gathering dust in the garage—instead. Curtis Hannock took care of the transaction, and the price took care of the tax nicely and left her with a few hundred dollars to spare. She had Hannock set the amount aside for the state and county tax, which would show its ugly face come January 1st.
The first snow fell, and Elizabeth made arrangements to have her driveway kept open for the rest of the winter. Not that she expected company—her acquaintances had long since given up ringing her doorbell, and, while she had finally gone back to answering her phone, most of the calls she now received were “wrong numbers”—but there was the grocery boy to be considered, not to mention the milkman and Mrs. Barton. The latter’s “news-service” grew more and more extensive with each successive visit, and sometimes when the old woman got in the door Elizabeth despaired of ever getting her back out. Item: Amelia Kelly had just had another baby, which made four to date, and her husband not working and them living on his un-employment-insurance checks! Item: The new owners of the Dickenson Grain-Machinery Company had shut down the factory till after the holidays, and all those poor employees with no money for Christmas! Item: Sid Westover, whose weather predictions had never been wrong yet, was down with lumbago again, so everybody might just as well resign themselves to a long, cold winter. Item: It was said that Matt Pearson, who had quit DGM when the new owners had taken over and returned to his home town to work in a new factory being opened there, was keeping steady company with his boyhood sweetheart, and any day now wedding bells were expected to ring. Item'. Wasn’t it just awful about the Gilbert boy running his father’s car into the tail end of a semi and killing himself? In the middle of January, Elizabeth paid the old woman off and told her that because of mounting taxes and the ever-climbing cost of living she had decided to economize by doing her own housework. “Humph!” Mrs. Barton said, and stamped out.
In mid-March, Elizabeth received a phone call from Curtis Hannock. He would have called sooner, he told her, but he had just heard the news himself: on March 4th, while helping to unload a vertical lathe at the Valley-Ville branch of Fulcrum Industries, Inc., Matt Pearson had been crushed to death when the machine slipped off its rollers, overturned, and pinned him to the floor.
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LET US TAKE the years, the long and lonely years, and watch their slow, sad passage. There are two times—remember that. The time of the world and the time of the house—the present, and the past.
Elizabeth rising, Elizabeth dressing, Elizabeth descending the stairs. Elizabeth writing poetry, Elizabeth playing Bach, Elizabeth crying in her room at night...
Elizabeth Georgina Dickinson growing old.
The grounds, once so meticulously maintained, become more riotous with the passing of each spring. Paint peels from once-bright cornices and sills. Bricks darken with dampness and with grime. Each week, groceries are delivered, and deposited on back-porch steps that have seen far better days, there to be picked up by Elizabeth and taken hurriedly inside. Elizabeth no longer knows the sun or the rain; she runs at the sound of the milkman’s tread, starts at the barking of dogs. Her only meetings with the night are the trips she takes in winter from the house to garage to bring in fireplace wood, two cords of which are split and delivered each year by a farmer she has never seen.
Nor has Elizabeth seen the city in which she lives. Oh yes, Sweet Clover is part of a city now. It was a part of a city before, although no one was aware of it— part of a vast megalopolis that spread all the way from Cleveland, Ohio to Buffalo, New York. Now, the megalopolis has come into its own and eaten Sweet Clover up, and all the green land around Sweet Clover, and the flowers and the trees. It would surprise Elizabeth to know that the farmer who delivers her cordwood is not in the strict sense of the word a farmer at all, but a “general supplier” who left his name with the “Bureau of Services” whose number “information” gave her when she dialed and asked where she might obtain wood to burn in her fireplace.
There is one thing, though, that Elizabeth knows: she knows that her property has tripled in value. Innumerable strange voices over the phone have importuned her to sell—in vain, of course—and her taxes have soared into the stratosphere. So high into the stratosphere, in fact, that it requires the better part of her income to pay them. She thinks that the house itself is responsible for this state of affairs, but she is wrong. The land on which the house stands is responsible. It is the only green land left in the city, and the city officials want to buy it and turn it into a public park. It is perhaps better that Elizabeth does not know this, because turning the land into a public park would mean tearing down the house, and the house is her world. And then again, perhaps it would be better if she did know it. She might change her mind about dying intestate then, and see to it that her property falls into less iconoclastic hands. But in the long run, none of this will matter. In the long run, a slightly different scheme of things will exist, and no doubt the city will get its park without even half trying.
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THAT FALL, Elizabeth’s school tax came to $1540.19. She scrim
ped for four months, but by the time she accumulated enough to pay it the state and county tax —now called the “megalopolis tax” came in with the amount of the unpaid school tax added on. The overall amount was a demoralizing $2536.21.
Somehow, she had to raise the money. If she didn’t, the next tax would put her so far behind that she would never be able to catch up. Her one contact with the world, Curtis Hannock, had been dead these many years, so she could not turn to him for help; and since her annuity was fixed, the only way she could raise money as far as she could see (other than by mortgaging the House of Dickenson, which was unthinkable) was by selling some of her possessions. The question boiled down to a matter of which of them she cared for least, and she had no trouble arriving at the answer: the “newest” ones, of course.
She took an inventory of the furniture, the appliances, the pictures, the dishes, the bric-à-brac, and the books, jotting down the approximate age of each item. Then she made a chronological list, after which she grouped the items into general age-categories. They fell naturally into four groups: the “pre-Dickensonian” period, the “Theodore and Ann” period, the “Nelson and Nora” period, and the “Byron and herself” period. It went without saying that the latter group must be the first to be sacrificed.
She went through the house, inspecting each item individually. With rare exceptions, everything that she and her father had bought had by this time degenerated into junk. She had known of course that some of it was junk—the refrigerator, for one example, which had given up the ghost decades ago, and the television set, for another, which had conked out less than a year after the beginning of her expatriation and which she had never bothered to have fixed. But she had had no idea that the “modern” furniture had reached quite the sad state of affairs she found it in. Would she be able to get anything at all for such a sorry collection of keepsakes? she wondered. She would see.
“Seeing” involved doing something she had not done for years —coming face to face with another human being. But she had no choice, and when the collector to whom the Bureau of Services relayed her phoned request came around, she met him stanchly at the door. It is difficult to say which of them was the more taken aback. The collector saw a tall, gaunt woman, strong of features and silver of hair, clad in clothing that for all its immaculateness was at least half a century old. Elizabeth saw a short, pumpkin-bellied man, round of face and grass-green of hair, clad in a hair shirt with the hairside turned outward, leaf-green, calf-length trousers, and a pair of black shoes with long, snaky toes that brought to mind the roots of a small tree. In any event, it was the collector who recovered first. The minute Elizabeth ushered him into the living room, he headed straight for the harpsichord and said, “I’ll buy this, two hundred dolla.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “That isn’t one of the items that’s for sale. I’ll show you those which you may buy.”
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SHE did so, conducting him from room to room, steering him away, with ever-increasing difficulty, from the Theodore-and-Ann and the Nelson-and-Nora pieces. When they got back to the living room, he said, “For the junk in the kitchen, two dolla, for the trash-furniture in this room, six dolla, for the pila books in the next room, ten dolla... For the harpsichord, two hundred dolla, for the Victorian, Sheraton, and Empire beds, two hundred dolla, for the copper-clock upstairs, fifty dolla, for the grandpop clock downstairs, fifty dolla, for the Hepplewhite sideboard in the eating room, two hundred dolla, for the copper-strip bookcase in the hall, one hundred dolla—”
“But those pieces aren’t for sale,” Elizabeth objected. “Besides, the prices you’re quoting are much too low.”
The collector shrugged. “They’re standard twenty-first century prices, lady. Antiques don’t sell high-wise no more.”
An inspiration struck Elizabeth. “I just remembered—there are some other things in the basement. Would you care to look at them?”
“Show me.”
He offered her “one hundred dolla” for the lot, magnanimously exempting an ancient pre-Dickensonian stove and an ancient pre-Dickensonian sink, both of which he agreed to have his “haulaway boys” set up in the kitchen for her. The offer, however, was contingent upon her selling him the other items he had enumerated, plus a collection of Tarentum glassware which he had spotted in one of the kitchen cupboards. Elizabeth sighed. “I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?” she said. She stood up straighter. Very well—but the spool bed in my room is excepted, and I must have enough for the glassware to bring the overall amount to a minimum of one thousand dolla—dollars. If you like, I’ll throw in the living room rug.”
The collector made a face. “All right—one thousand dolla.”
The house seemed naked after the “haulaway boys” had done their work and departed. There were poignant ellipses in the furniture, empty, and half empty rooms. The worst emptiness of all was the corner where the harpsichord had stood . . . Wearily, Elizabeth endorsed the check which the collector had left, made up the difference with a check of her own, and enclosed both checks in an envelope along with her tax receipts. She addressed the envelope, laid it, along with a third check—this one for twenty cents to cover postage—atop the mailbox outside the door, and weighted both items down with a small stone which she kept on hand for such purposes. The gas bill was due any day now, and when the mailman delivered it he would pick up the letter and mail it. She still thought of “him” as the “mailman”, even though she knew that a purple-haired woman wearing a yellow uniform that looked like a scuba outfit and riding in a scotter-like cart now did the delivering. She had glimpsed her once through the hall window, put-putting up the walk, and once had been enough. Elizabeth seldom looked out her windows anyway. Even in winter the trees and the overgrown shrubs that surrounded the house effectively concealed the world that lay beyond her boundary lines, and that was as it should be. It was a world she wanted even less part of than the world she had left behind her nearly half a century ago.
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THE idea of traveling into the past had never occurred to her, and it did not occur to her now in precisely those words. She merely noted as the days went by that the house, bereft now of virtually all its tie-ins with the “future”, had a new and refreshing flavor. This flavor grew on her, and to bring it out in greater purity she began carrying the various odds and ends that did not jibe with it out to the garage. Gradually, this weeding-out process became an obsession with her, and hardly a night passed that she did not dispose of at least one “anachronistic” object. She excepted the “modern” desk in her bedroom at which she still wrote her poetry, and there were of course certain aspects of the “future” that defied elimination. The “modern” electrical fixtures, for example. The house had been wired in Nelson and Nora’s day, but it had been rewired since, and none of the original fixtures remained. For a while she considered tearing the new ones out, but fortunately she still had enough common sense left to dissuade her, and she got around the incongruity by ordering a gross of candles and burning them instead of the electric lights. Some nights she would even dispense with candles, having discovered that she could read equally as well by firelight as she could by candlelight. Afterward, she would light a candle and climb the stairs to her room, pretending that the comfortable warmth of the house emanated, not from the automatic electric furnace which she herself had had installed circa 1990 when the gas furnace had breathed its last, but from the fire she had just left.
Reading one February night in her wing-back chair, she became obsessed with the notion that all was not quite as it should be. Something in the house (aside from the writing desk in her room, the light fixtures, and the telephone on the Sheraton sofa table) did not quite tie in with the Nelson-and-Nora atmosphere she had recreated. Her gaze roamed the shadows, lingered in this dark corner and that, and returned presently to the book lying on her lap. The name of it was Bolts of Melody; New Poems of Emily Dickinson. Surely the poems of Emily Dickinson belonged i
n the world of Nelson and Nora. Yes—generally speaking, they did; but these particular poems bore a 1945 copyright and had not previously been published. Therefore, they did not belong. Even if they had belonged, the book itself wouldn’t have. It would simply have to go.
So would the other books Elizabeth had overlooked. There proved to be ten of them altogether. One by one, she threw them into the fire. She saved Bolts of Melody till the last, and a tear glistened evanescently on her cheek as she laid the treasured volume on the flames. The cover darkened, curled. The pages turned red, then black. Ashes rose like small gray ghosts, and drifted up the chimney—
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SUDDENLY the house shuddered, and simultaneously the room filled with warm radiance. The light came from old-fashioned tasseled lamps and from a ridiculous chandelier consisting of painted cardboard candles with flame-like bulbs. In the empty spaces between the furniture, other furniture had appeared— furniture that matched the Nelson-and-Nora pieces and blended with the Theodore-And-Ann pieces; that went well with the lamps and the chandelier. The brown discoloration of the walls had been supplanted by flowery wallpaper; the once-lack-luster woodwork gleamed. A young man sat reading a newspaper on a mohair sofa that a moment ago had not existed. A not-quite-so-young woman, bearing a tray on which stood a small teapot and two quaint cups, entered the room. Both the man and the woman wore clothing that dated from the early post-WW I period. Elizabeth stood transfixed, for the man was her grandfather and the woman was her grandmother —Nelson and Nora, happy in the home that was' now theirs, the home they had just tastefully furnished with the new while still retaining the old.
The House That Time Forgot Page 3