The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

“Tiff,” Doc said, “I think maybe we should talk about this some other …” Hailey took a pin back from her coffee cup and appeared to push at her cuticles with it.

  “I ‘don’t get to be mad about this,’ ” Ivy said. “I probably never get to be the one who gets to be mad. Right? Because I’m the terrible mother who abandoned her daughter. I’m the one who spends her life apologizing. I’m not ever going to be the one who gets to be mad.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Hailey said, pushing the pin back into her chignon, “and this is going to sound like I’m leaving because of the conversation you’re having, but really I’m not, we really do have to go. Speaking of pills, Sibyl has meds she has to take at a certain hour, and it is getting a little past her bedtime.”

  “No, no,” Ivy said, standing, “please stay.” She returned her attention to Tiff. “You’re sick of the family drama, Tiff? You might be surprised to know that I am too. I need a few days to myself, so I hope your moving in with Granny takes effect immediately. We’ll talk when we talk.”

  As Ivy stepped away from the table and walked through the kitchen, collecting her poncho and umbrella, Tiff called after her. “Mom,” she said, her pleading tone met only with the slam of the back door. Doc, meanwhile, escorted Hailey and Sibyl to the front door, apologizing to Hailey as he helped her into her coat. He then took up three clementines and did a quickie juggling act for Sibyl. After they left, Doc headed upstairs, not stomping but certainly delighting in the echoing creak of each rickety step.

  “Are you mad too, Uncle Doc?” Tiff yelled, her hands cupping around her mouth like a megaphone.

  “Yep,” he said, though it didn’t sound all that convincing.

  “I should probably go talk to Mom,” Tiff said.

  I lowered my voice and gestured for Tiff to sit. “You don’t have to be responsible for your mother’s emotions,” I whispered. I turned in my chair to pull a pad of paper and a pencil from a drawer of the secretary in the corner, and together Tiff and I came up with a shopping list, plotting out several menus, starting with the next morning’s breakfast—a tin of blueberries for pancakes, packets of instant cocoa, and a bag of marshmallows in Christmas shapes.

  · 44 ·

  I called Tiff in sick to school the next morning, as we wanted to move some of her things over while Ivy was away for the day. Ivy volunteered in the town of Lemontree, having secured a place for herself on a subcommittee involved in the management of the Myrtle Kingsley Fitch home, based on Ivy’s undergraduate research into the author, her own years in Paris, and a letter of recommendation she’d been carrying around for years from the professor she’d loved, written before their affair had gone sour. In the little house in Lemontree, its long lazy-Sunday porch choked by runaway bittersweet vine, Myrtle Fitch had been born. She’d later abandoned it, and later still returned to it to die.

  After only a few trips back and forth between Ivy’s house and mine, Tiff and I grew tired with the move and irritated with the constant drizzly sleet, so we confined ourselves to the house in our kimonos. Finally, bored by our boredom, we went to the cellar to unearth a box of baking accoutrements—the pinwheel-cookie spritzer, the candy thermometer, the snowman-and Santa-shaped cookie cutters. We successfully managed some fudge and peanut brittle, but our springerles failed to spring—they were flat where they should’ve been puffy, due most likely to the baker’s ammonia that had sat in my pantry for ages growing impotent.

  As darkness fell, guilt and anxiety nagged. We expected to hear from Ivy, and when we didn’t, we weren’t sure of the proper response. Would it just aggravate things to call her?

  “Won’t it hurt her feelings if we don’t at least check on her?” Tiff asked as she stirred and stirred and stirred the pot of caramel on the stove, holding her weakening wrist with her other hand. “I mean, the weather’s nasty. Maybe the highway was slick. Shouldn’t we call and make sure she got home okay?”

  Ivy’s not calling, not stopping by, whether calculated or not, had very effectively dropped Tiff into a funk, summoning up all those years of Ivy’s indifference. We rushed the caramel just a bit, intending to put on our coats and carry a plate of peacemaking cookies to Ivy’s. Before we could embark on our sisterly gesture of goodwill, however, the doorbell rang.

  Tiff and I peeped around the front parlor’s drapes. The thin old man at the door might easily have been mistaken for an exorcist, with his long black trench coat and black hat, his black pants and black galoshes, were it not for the bright red umbrella, its price tag dangling from one of the ribs and whipping in the wind. He stood hunched, his one hand clutching the lapel of his coat closed at his throat.

  The bell rang again, a grating and unmelodic buzz I would’ve replaced years before had it not been so infrequently used. Tiff and I went to the door, both still in our coats over our kimonos. “Yes?” I said to the man.

  “You don’t recognize me,” the man said.

  “Oh, my sweet Lord,” Tiff said. The author photo on the backs of all his books was from his earliest days as a writer, decades before, but Tiff nonetheless identified him. In the photo he sits slump-shouldered, captured in the middle of a lunge for the typewriter like the Phantom of the Opera about to pound out a melody, his hair undone from its waxy pompadour, his fingers hovering bent above the keys.

  Part

  NINE

  · 45 ·

  In the foyer, I took Muscatine’s coat and hat. “This garish umbrella was the best I could do in the airport gift shop,” he said. “Everything was red-and-white football regalia.” Tiff only stared at him, and she seemed to shrink in age before my very eyes, freckling, her wide eyes consuming her face. Muscatine quickly played into it. He leaned forward, gnarling his bony hands into claws, his horror-show shadow stretching along the wall. “My hunger is trying to gnaw its way out of my gut,” he told her. “Let’s satisfy it before it rips its way through.” Tiff appeared to be stifling a genuine scream.

  Part of me felt compelled to scream as well. As thrilled as I was, I was a little terrified too. When the letters had been simply bits of wonder that flitted in and out of my often-empty mailbox, it had been easy to keep it all hush-hush—it had seemed a romantic fantasy. I glanced across the street as I closed the front door, eyeballing all of Doc’s lit windows for any sign of him catching sight of my guest. Doc wouldn’t understand my wanting to keep my correspondence secret. I now saw my actions as Doc might: they seemed a betrayal. He would never keep anything like this from me.

  “Tiff,” I said, “go clear off the dining room table, and I’ll throw something together for Mr. Muscatine.” After dragging over boxes of Tiff’s things that morning, we’d only managed to abandon them in the dining room, on the table of cherrywood that seated twelve but had years before become the house’s catchall. On one end was a jigsaw puzzle of a swarm of midnight-blue butterflies that I’d long since dismissed as unfinishable. Stacked on a few of the chairs were New Yorkers I’d never gotten around to reading but intended to donate to the nursing home. A few tin boxes of recipe cards, some accordion files of government papers, a basket of reading glasses I’ve collected over the years. Even if you overlooked all that old-lady clutter, when you turned on the overhead light, you could smell the dust on the burning bulbs of the chandelier, that hot tickle in your nose that threatens a sneeze.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ll sit in this here seat”—pointing to the chair with the embroidered cushion—“and wrestle off these rain boots.”

  Tiff and I tossed off our own coats and rushed about the kitchen and dining room. That morning, we’d bought a box of frozen French fries, which I sprinkled across a cookie tin with some sea salt, and I took a bucket of leftover beef stew from my freezer. As I prepared the impromptu dinner, I heard Muscatine chatting with Tiff about his fear of flying.

  Bent at the back by its weight, I carried my silver coffee set to the table, inching forward like a chambermaid straight out of Poe. I then returned to the kitchen for the
bowl of stew and plate of fries for Muscatine.

  Whenever you want to know something significant about someone, you must watch them eat. If you marry a girl who talks as she chews, that talking-as-she’s-chewing, three squares a day, may be grounds for divorce. A man who can’t let his peas touch his gravy, or a woman who can’t keep her fork from scratching against her teeth—it may all seem small, and may reveal nothing about true character, but we eat too often with each other to pretend that our dining habits don’t matter greatly.

  Which is to say, Muscatine ate like no one I’d like to eat with regularly. All his complaint about hunger pains, about how he couldn’t stomach eating before or during a flight, all my scurrying about the kitchen looking for quick fixings, and he only nibbled and pecked. He even commented on the heavy weight of the utensils.

  But it wasn’t just his bird-like picking at my stew that seemed to indicate ingratitude. I found myself somehow reading his disappointment in practically his every aspect, even in the way the press of his hat had left a red line on his bald head and the way his ears still glowed pink from the wind; how a stitch on his necktie had snagged loose and his watch slipped around on his wrist. He should be enraptured every second of his life, it seemed to me. After all, he could go anywhere, do anything.

  I considered myself much too old for disappointment—I’d long ago gotten used to the notion of not living different lives. That I was stuck with the life I’ve lived was a conclusion I’d come to a lifetime ago. But to have had his opportunities of adventure, of transformation—I nearly could not forgive him. How could he entertain even a moment of being dissatisfied with anything at all? But I’d egged him on in our letters. Had he not felt I would lovingly indulge him, he would never have confided in me.

  “Do you have any children of your own, Mr. Muscatine?” Tiff asked.

  “I did,” he said. As he spoke, he leaned over and picked up a piece of the jigsaw puzzle and almost instantly identified its place. He then did so with another piece of the puzzle, and another. “I do. Well, I have the daughter of the wife I used to have.” He took a deep breath, then reached across to pick up my coffee cup. He swirled the dregs around like a reader of tea leaves, plucked a pair of bifocals from the basket on the chair, and held them before his eyes.

  “What do you see?” I said.

  “The Crippled Eighty,” he said.

  · 46 ·

  While we’d been feeding Muscatine, Daisy had returned to the CB. Whenever she read from this alternative version of Coffins, her mood would lighten enough to keep her awake the rest of the night, imagining Lenore upstairs, safe in her bed and drifting into a dream. The evening’s bedtime story would shape the world of Lenore’s sleep, and Lenore would be among the girls of Rothgutt’s in a long cotton nightgown with a candle in hand, spiders and bats creeping the dream into nightmare.

  After reading, Daisy always felt physically lighter, and she had taken to closing all the curtains tight with clothespins before dancing an uninspired ballet. She spun around the front room, avoiding furniture, faking pirouettes, sweeping out her arms and twisting her wrists, turning in circles on the balls of her bare feet. She even curtsied for her audience of no one, pinching the bottom of her daisy-print dress and lifting it only slightly as she bent her knees.

  “Stop acting like a little girl,” her father had told her whenever she’d pretended to be a ballerina. But am I not, she had wondered, a little girl? He mocked all her childhood distractions and dreaminess, so she read books only in the bathtub where he wouldn’t come in and sneer at her. He dismissed everything she read as “smutty romance,” though she’d never read romance and for the longest time didn’t know what smutty meant. She even adopted the word into her own vocabulary incorrectly, thinking smut was what made your fingertips gray when the pages got wet with bathwater. When she ate toast and jam, she’d say she needed a napkin for her smutty fingers; when she got the bottom of her feet dirty, she needed to hose them off to clean up the smut. No one ever corrected her, and soon enough even her mother and father took to using the word in Daisy’s way.

  But the books Daisy used to read had been Daisy’s mother’s. Daisy would sneak the books from the boxes pushed beneath her mother’s tall bed; she’d reach in indiscriminately and read whatever she pulled out. Her mother had gone to college with intentions of becoming an English teacher, but she’d met Daisy’s father at a football game, where he’d shared with her the spiced rum in his thermos. He’d proposed three months later, and because he’d been on such exceptional behavior, she’d accepted his proposal, not knowing she didn’t know him at all. She’d thought him a handsome dummy with a wicked sense of humor, a vast improvement on all the unfunny college boys she’d seemed to attract. She hadn’t hated how rough he’d been on her wedding night—she’d liked it, somewhat, the firm hand, the harsh voice, which had all spoken to her own history with a cold and commanding father—but the night had changed her by morning. She’d gone from a college girl settling for less than she deserved to a bit of a tragic heroine.

  The Crippled Eighty had been a kind of salvation for Daisy’s mother. She had slipped effortlessly into her role as matriarch of the homestead and had often spent the whole day in her housecoat. She’d had a colorful collection of silken robes sent in the mail from her old college roommate, who’d married better and traveled the world.

  Daisy’s mother had been the one to dub the farm the Crippled Eighty, certain its lack of flatness, its roll of short hills, would ruin irrigation and any shots at a crop, but it had pleased her to be wrong. She’d grown to love the farm and its lush acres of green in the summer.

  “Promise me,” Daisy’s mother had told Daisy one summer afternoon as they’d sunned themselves on beach towels that had come free with boxes of detergent, “that even after you’ve outgrown your father and me—which you will—that you never turn your back on the Crippled Eighty.” Calling the farm by name had seemed to Daisy’s mother highly civilized, lending dignity to what, to others, might only be agriculture. As they lay back in their swimsuits and floppy hats, they drank root-beer floats and shooed mosquitoes from their skin. “This farm can be a kind of security for you, which is something I never had. Keep one foot on it always. You’ll want somewhere to run back to sometimes.”

  For the longest time, Daisy thought her mother was referring to the farm as the Crippled Lady, and she’d imagined the land as a nude woman reclining. This crippled lady, lying prone, seemed powerful and majestic. It reminded Daisy of the joke she’d read, and had never understood, in The Book of Sick Jokes (bought at the drugstore), which had stayed in her consciousness, picking at her with its mystery, for years: She’s so fat that when she lies around the house, she lies around the house. The joke had had no meaning to Daisy beyond her perception of the Crippled Lady, ruined by weight, surrounding everything like God.

  · 47 ·

  She’s doing some kind of dance,” Muscatine said. He looked through the window of the front door, peeking through the holes in the leaves of the roses in the lace curtain.

  “Dancing?” I said. Tiff and I had helped him onto the property by lifting the slat of the fence for him to wriggle through. Muscatine’s scarf had snagged on the thorns of a bush, and I noticed he now bled from a scratch on the side of his neck.

  Tiff and I too looked through the window and saw that, indeed, Daisy was dancing. It seemed I’d seen Daisy in all sorts of states of chaos and breakdown—I’d seen Daisy drop into muteness, and I’d seen her flap her gums too much. I’d seen Daisy morose, excited. Hopeful, despairing. But this clumsy dance, it was a new ripple. I squinted, cringing, as I wanted to see and not see at the same time. Had Muscatine not been standing there, I might have stood watching until her room went dark.

  Finally I knocked. “It’s S Myles,” I said loudly through the door. The rush of shadows against the curtains stilled, and what seemed several seconds later, Daisy opened the door. Strands of her hair stuck to the sweat of her forehead and cheeks.
“This is Wilton Muscatine, Daisy,” I said.

  Daisy, seemingly unsurprised and not at all starstruck, reached toward Muscatine’s head. He flinched, leaning back in his galoshes, but she continued reaching forward to touch him, to bring back a few fingers with spots of blood. She held them up for him to see. “You’re bleeding,” she said. “We’ll fix it.” She gestured us in and with the brusque competence of a farmwife, led us to the kitchen, where she lifted a tea-kettle from the stove and put it in the sink. “Make some tea for us,” she told me. “I’ll tend to his cut.”

  Tiff kept to the shadows of the hallway, not wanting Daisy to recognize her from before, when the kitchen had been thick with Lenorians, back when she’d stormed in with that plank. But Tiff was difficult not to notice in her kimono and parka and the cowboy boots she’d pulled on in her rush out the front door—black leather boots stamped with red hearts. As she’d stepped from my pickup truck, she’d worried about her white-blond hair, even with the dark roots now spidering out from her scalp. Daisy, she knew, had objected to children in her company, especially girls with hair the color of corn silk. Behind the seat I’d had only one hat, a broad-brimmed straw hat I gardened in, and she’d tucked her hair up into it and pulled on the bead of the neck strap to tighten it under her chin.

  As I filled the kettle, I looked around the kitchen at things that had not been there before. Now, in the absence of Lenore, were sudden signs of children—pinned to the fridge with magnets were finger paintings and macaroni art. Propped up in a chair in the corner was a teddy bear in a fancy bonnet.

  Daisy returned to the kitchen table to dab at Muscatine’s neck with a washcloth, and she applied a bandage patterned with cartoon unicorns. I brought the mismatched mugs of tea—bags of honey-mint was all I’d found in the pantry—to the table, then attended to some cleaning, wiping down the countertops, putting dishes away. I plucked a wooden spoon from where it soaked in a bowl of water in the sink. I resisted telling Daisy she shouldn’t soak her wooden spoons lest they crack.