In the lobby Frederick asked if she had enjoyed her stay. Yes, of course she had, she always did, everything was wonderful. (The thief opens the yellow metal door with the remote control gadget in the car and drives into the garage.) They chatted amiably about nothing and then, as the time of Helen’s departure approached, Frederick had the bellhop bring down her suitcase while she checked out. He carried the suitcase into the street and hailed her a taxi. Again they shook hands warmly, looking forward, they both said, to next year, and Helen slid him another ten-dollar bill.
The bus ride home seemed, as always, to pass more quickly. (The thief carries the boxes one at a time into the kitchen of the bungalow.) Helen watched the scenery unraveling now in reverse as the city peeled off her like a sunburn. She thought about all her purchases and was immensely satisfied.
By five o’clock Helen Wingham is unlocking her own back door and stepping gratefully into her own back hall. She leaves her suitcase there, the door unlocked, and goes into the kitchen, grinning. (The thief unpacked the three boxes and lined up the objects on the kitchen table.) Helen finds it reassuring to see her own self reflected in each and every object, and beyond herself, there are the reflections of all the other hands which have touched them, all the other lives with which these innocent objects have intersected over time. (The thief opened one of the mason jars with a pop, took a large spoon from the cutlery drawer, sampled the peach and pepper relish, declared it delicious, and put the jar in the refrigerator.) Oh it is so good to be home!
The house is hot and stuffy, having been closed up tight since Friday. (The thief made room for the other jar of relish in the cupboard to the right of the sink and arranged the tea service on its tray beside the cookbooks on the counter.) Helen opens the kitchen window and puts the kettle on to boil. She takes the everyday tea things from the cupboard and a tiny spoon14 from a wooden rack on the wall.
She sits at the kitchen table, looking out at the empty road through the white lace curtains. (The thief fiddled with the Cupid mantel clock but was disappointed to find that it could not be made to keep good time.)
Rejuvenated, Helen lugs her suitcase up to her bedroom. (The thief went into the living room.) She opens the window and looks out over the garden. The town boy has obviously done his job well. All the vegetables and flowers look robust and vigorous. She can see there are some beans that need picking and the peas are definitely done. (The thief, having no fireplace, no mantelshelf, placed the clock on the coffee table beside a candy dish in the shape of a fish and a large arrangement of plastic flowers.) Helen unpacks her suitcase and puts her things away. She notices that the right door of the glass-fronted bookcase is standing slightly ajar. Inside, all the photo albums on the middle shelf have toppled over. (The thief surveyed the corners of the living room through the viewfinder of the camera and then placed it on the coffee table beside the clock.) When she opens the door to straighten them, Helen realizes that the blue plush album is not in its proper place. This is most unusual.
Helen turns and looks all around the room. She can’t remember the last time she looked at the album. She checks the other shelves in the bookcase, the bedside table, inside the large trunk15 at the foot of her bed. She even lifts up the white eyelet counterpane and checks under the bed.
She panics briefly, thinking of premature senility, wasn’t there a cousin with Alzheimer’s, what were the signs? (The thief went back into the kitchen and rummaged through the junk drawer looking for a hammer and a nail.) Helen reassures herself by reciting the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet. Her memory appears to be intact.
She is hot. She is tired. She is hungry. (The thief removed a framed print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers from the wall behind the couch, hammered in a new nail, and hung the angel painting there.) Maybe there is the beginning of a headache behind her eyes. Maybe later, when she feels better, she’ll find the photo album.
For now she will put away her suitcase and have something to eat. There are some bagels in the freezer, some cream cheese in the fridge. She goes down to the basement for a jar of peach and pepper relish. (The thief sat down on the couch and turned the pages of the photo album, peering into the faces of stiff-backed strangers posed beside plant stands, grand pianos, and miscellaneous pets.) Helen could have sworn she had two jars of relish left. But there is only an empty space on the shelf where they should be.
Helen is beginning to feel anxious. She imagines the jars of relish, the photo album, all the other objects in her house, the books, the tables, the dressers, the rolltop desk, and the rocking chair16, everything rearranging itself in her absence in some macabre dance of the inanimate.
Then she sees it. (The thief looked for a long time at the photograph of a stern-faced woman holding a serious fat baby in her lap.) The pocketknife on the picnic basket. The hole in the window screen. At first she cannot move. Her hands go to her throat. She is suddenly cold in the heat. It does not occur to her that the thief could still be inside. It does not occur to her to abandon her house and run.
She picks up the knife and stares at it. She leans closer to the window. (The thief picked up the heavy encyclopedia which proved to be filled with all manner of interesting arcane knowledge.) The hole in the screen is a neat vertical cut, a little opening through which her own small hand just fits. She slides the window shut and locks it. She folds up the knife and puts it in her pocket. She goes back up the basement stairs.
In the kitchen now she sees the empty space on the middle shelf of the china cabinet. (The thief skimmed through several sections of the encyclopedia including “The Dog Lover’s Guide With Dictionary of Canine Diseases and Supplements on Domestic Pets, Poultry-Keeping and Bee-Keeping”) Helen sees that the tea service is missing, but not the brass candlesticks, the Bohemian crystal berry dish, the gold-lined toothpick holder, and not (thank God!) the very rare calling card holder17 with the bulldog on it. Clearly this thief with the very small hands was an amateur who didn’t know the value of antiques. Helen had immediately suspected the town boy, of course, but what could he possibly want with an eight-piece tea service?
Helen feels the remnants of her city self rising to the occasion: she will be practical before she falls apart. She will make sense of what has happened before she allows herself to feel violated, angry, or frightened. (The thief, in the section called “Encyclopedia of General Knowledge: Essential Facts on All Significant Subjects Clearly Stated and Exactly Defined,” looked at photographs of Mount Vesuvius, Stockholm City Hall, and an Australian aborigine armed with three boomerangs.) Above all else, she will not cry, she will not cry, she will not cry, not yet.
Helen walks from room to room assessing the extent of her losses. She knows she should call the police but first she wants to see exactly what is missing. (The thief opened the leather-hound notebook filled with Helen’s handwriting and turned eagerly to the first page.) Her curiosity is beginning to get the better of her.
In the living room the Cupid clock and the typewriter are gone. In the library she sees the empty stand which had held the encyclopedia. Not one other book is missing. Not one other book is even out of place. (The thief read the first entry, dated April 26, 1975, obviously written shortly after Helen had moved into the house: Rain. Lamb chops, peas, mashed potatoes, apple crisp for dessert. Unpacking almost done. Long quiet evening. On the average human head there are 100,000 hairs. They grow 0.01 inches every day.) In the music room, only the box camera is missing.
Helen goes upstairs. The angel painting on the landing is gone. She rubs her hand over its silhouette on the wallpaper. (The thief flipped ahead through the pages and read: October 20, 1979. High wind, trees moan as their branches are stripped. Leaves to rake tomorrow. Beef stew, too many onions. Can’t sleep. Headache. Hire someone to put up storm windows. The seven deadly sins are anger, envy, covetousness, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth.)
Helen looks into each of the rooms along the
upstairs hallway but finds nothing amiss. The only sound is that of a dead leaf falling from a large potted fig tree at the end of the hallway.
She goes back into her bedroom. She looks through the jewelry chest. She is relieved to see that everything is still there, especially happy to see her favorite watch18 which she often wears on a gold chain around her neck. (The thief read: January 15, 1983. Snow all day. Meatloaf, home fries, creamed corn, and a butter tart. Cozy, reading in front of the fireplace. Perfect silence save for the sound of the flames. The seven virtues are faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.)
She looks through her clothes in the armoire and the dresser. She imagines the thief’s fingers on her blouses, her dresses, her cool silk slip. She feels to the bottom of her underwear drawer and discovers that her notebook is missing. (The thief read: May 24, 1988. Planted geraniums, nicotiana, cosmos, snapdragons, pansies, and six tomato plants. Had hair cut yesterday, also car serviced. Salmon steak, rice, lettuce fresh from the garden. The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova who made 48 orbits of the earth in a three-day mission in June 1963.)
Helen knows she should call the police but she cannot bear the thought of them tramping through her tidy rooms, poking at her belongings, fondling all of her precious objects with their big rough hands. She imagines them laughing at her and her thief, both of them inept and eccentric, both of them fools. (The thief read: July 28, 1992. Heat wave. Flowers looking desperate though I’m watering twice a day. I was desperate once too but I never knew for what. Water? No. Silence? Maybe. A cloudless shimmering sky. Too hot to eat. Cheese and crackers, carrot sticks, sliced tomatoes, vanilla ice cream. Cannot remember the smell of snow. The ice which covers Antarctica is approximately 6500 feet thick.) Helen imagines the policemen laughing and slapping their knees.
She pulls open the drawer of the bedside table and is relieved to find that the thief has not taken her Holy Bible or her gun.19 She remembers how, when she bought the gun, the salesman kept assuring her that it was a pure collector’s item, had never been fired, not even once. (The thief read: September 14, 1994. Spaghetti and meatballs, green salad, garlic bread, cherry cheesecake, one small glass of brandy because tomorrow is my birthday. Make appointment to have furnace cleaned. The heart of a seventy-year-old person will have beat at least 2.8 billion times. Tomorrow I will be fifty-three.)
Helen takes off her clothes and puts on her white nightgown. She knows she should call the police but she cannot bear the thought of the burglary being talked about all over town tomorrow, all those smug women in their kitchens gossiping happily about her and her thief, saying, no doubt, that she had been asking for it, living out there all alone, friends with no one, who did she think she was anyway? (The thief put down the notebook and rolled a piece of blank paper into the typewriter.) At the moment she could not have answered this question, parts of her carefully constructed self having been so suddenly stripped away.
She is so tired. She looks down into the backyard. It is not yet dark but the moon is rising, almost full. She will get out there in the morning and pick those beans. (The thief placed two small hands in position on the keyboard and typed: This is the story of my life. This is the little story of my little life. Once upon a time there was a woman.) But for now she will just go to bed. It is too hot for blankets so she lies down on top of the counterpane with her small hands folded on her chest. She knows she should go downstairs and lock the back door but she does not. She knows she should be frightened but finds that she is not.
She imagines telling this story to Frederick next year at the hotel in the comfortable lobby when he stands close to her and asks how she has been. She imagines how they will laugh, how Frederick will lean toward her and put his warm hand on her bare arm, how she will feel his sweet breath on her face.
(The thief got upfront the kitchen table and went out to the garage.) Helen lies very still. She feels very calm.
By the time darkness falls, Helen is almost asleep. (The thief started the car and backed it out of the garage, out of the driveway, into the street.)
Suspended between waking and dreaming, Helen sees the bedroom doorknob turning. She cannot decide whether she is dreaming or not. She thinks about the angel of doorknobs. The door is opening. A figure is standing in the doorway, walking toward her. A small hand is reaching out to touch her nightgown, her shoulder, her hair. She can feel sweet breath upon her face. She knows she should be frightened but finds that she is not.
(The thief is watching the house.)
(The thief is walking through the front gate and around to the backyard.)
(The thief is in the garden.)
(The thief is standing in the moonlight looking up at Helen’s bedroom window. The night is balmy and bright. The white lace curtains flutter against the screen in the dark. Any minute now the thief is going to call her name.)
Any minute now the thief is going to call her name.
THE SPACIOUS CHAMBERS OF HER HEART
The heart, in the adult, measures five inches in length, three inches and a half in breadth in the broadest part, and two inches and a half in thickness. The prevalent weight, in the male, varies from ten to twelve ounces; in the female, from eight to ten: its proportions to the body being as I to 169 in males; I to 149 in females. The heart continues increasing in weight, and also in length, breadth, and thickness, up to an advanced period in life.
—Gray’s Anatomy, 1901 Edition
Evangeline Clark loved four things, and four things only. Her heart having only four chambers, spacious though they might be, she had limited herself to loving four things.
First there was music.
The Right Auricle is a little larger than the left, its walls somewhat thinner, measuring about one line; and its cavity is capable of containing about two ounces.
This love she had learned from and shared with her mother who was a pianist, long dead now but still an inspiration to Evangeline. The home of her childhood was always filled with music, her mother at the piano all morning and all afternoon. The meals were slapdash, the house was a mess, but always the air in the cluttered stuffy rooms was saturated with beauty and truth and just plain joy. Sometimes when she had insomnia due to the weight of the world on her slender shoulders, her mother would play Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words in the middle of the night and the sound would come gently to Evangeline safe in her little bed, the high notes sprinkling down around her like confetti, the low notes like an August downpour, quarter-sized raindrops on warm asphalt.
At the crucial moment of her life, when she might have become a concert pianist, her mother had become instead her mother. For that was how things were done in those days: one or the other, not both, multiple loves in those days being deemed mutually exclusive. Regret and resentment, like infidelity, were not acceptable maternal manifestations. For this, Evangeline was grateful.
Although she had no musical talent of her own and so had never learned to play an instrument, Evangeline kept the air in her house too always filled with music, any kind of music. There was country and western for hurtin’, rock and roll for dancing, jazz for the nerves, blues for the blues, and classical for catharsis. And especially there was Mendelssohn for the middle of the night, to smooth the wrinkles out of the weight of the world.
Secondly there was color.
The Right Ventricle is triangular in form, and extends from the right auricle to near the apex of the heart. Its anterior or upper surface is rounded and convex, and forms the larger part of the front of the heart…The walls of the right ventricle are thinner than those of the left, the proportion between them being as I to 3…The cavity equals in size that of the left ventricle, and is capable of containing about three fluid ounces.
This love Evangeline was learning from and sharing with her husband, who was a painter, a very good painter whose vivid larger-than-life canvases were shown all over the continent. Brilliant and electric were the words most often applied by the critics, use
d indiscriminately, it seemed, to describe both the man himself and his provocative and penetrating use of color. Her husband was indeed a brilliant and electric man, a volatile genius who was always painting in his studio or wanting to. Evangeline quickly discovered that most of the maneuvers and mechanics of daily life struck him as mundane, if not a downright waste of time.
From him she learned that all things, animal, vegetable, or mineral (also plastic, polyester, or nylon), were intrinsically important not because of function but because of color, which is all the naked eye naturally cares about anyway. He spent a lot of time mixing colors, trying to create the true green of grass, the true blue of sky, the true red of blood, and the true ineffable color of the sun, which is not yellow at all, though we have been tricked from an early age into believing that it is. This search for the true color of everything was, he said, like trying to create life in a test tube. But what is life, what is truth, what is the color of your breath in the summer, what is the true color of flesh?
Although she had no artistic talent of her own and so had never painted a picture of anything, Evangeline took great pains to keep her house (his house, their house) full of color. She had a stained-glass window installed in the bathroom so that her husbands naked body (also his naked eye) would glow like an illuminated prism in the shower. This calmed him down considerably because any form of clarity (plain glass, cellophane, Saran Wrap, or water) tormented him unbearably because it was unattainable. She was careful to dress herself in bright colors (yellow scarf, green blouse, blue skirt, red tights, purple shoes) because clearly her husband adored her when she appeared before him like this, with the bands of color encircling her body like a rainbow of pretty ribbons, wondrous bandages from her head to her toes.
Forms of Devotion Page 5