Harriet Doerr

by The Tiger in the Grass

Edie bit off her darning thread. She looked backward with her inward eye. Finally she said, “Lily Stiles. The day I went into service in Dorset, Lily went to work at the Rose and Plough.”

  “The Rose and Plough,” repeated Eliza. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a pub,” said Edie, and she explained what a public house was. Immediately, this establishment, with its gleaming bar and its game of darts, was elevated in the children’s minds to the mysterious realm of Lady Alice and Lady Anne and set in place a stone’s throw from their castle.

  At home, Trish’s encounters with her husband’s children were brief. In passing, she waved to them all and patted the twins on their dark heads. She saw more of the three eldest on those Saturday afternoons when she took them, along with Edie, to the movies.

  Together they sat in the close, expectant dark of the Rivoli Theater, watched the shimmering curtains part, shivered to the organist’s opening chords, and, at the appearance of an image on the screen, cast off their everyday lives to be periled, rescued, rejected, and adored. They sat spellbound through the film and when the words “The End” came on, rose depleted and blinking from their seats to face the hot sidewalk and full sun outside.

  Trish selected the pictures, and though they occasionally included Fairbanks films and ones that starred the Gishes, these were not her favorites. She detested comedies. To avoid Harold Lloyd, they saw Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. Rather than endure Buster Keaton, they went to Camille, starring Alla Nazimova.

  “I should speak to your father,” Edie would say later on at home. But she never did. Instead, she only remarked at bedtime, “It’s a nice change, going to the pictures.”

  Trish left at the end of two years, during which the children, according to individual predispositions, grew taller and developed the hands and feet and faces they would always keep. They learned more about words and numbers, they began to like oysters, they swam the Australian crawl. They survived crises. These included scarlet fever, which the twins contracted and recovered from, and James’s near electrocution as a result of his tinkering with wires and sockets.

  Eliza and Jenny, exposed to chicken pox on the same day, ran simultaneous fevers and began to scratch. Edie brought ice and invented games. She cleared the table between their beds and knotted a handkerchief into arms and legs and a smooth, round head. She made it face each invalid and bow.

  “This is how my sister Frahnces likes to dahnce the fahncy dahnces,” Edie said, and the knotted handkerchief waltzed and two-stepped back and forth across the table.

  Mesmerized by each other, the twins made few demands. A mechanical walking bear occupied them for weeks, a wind-up train for months. They shared a rocking horse and crashed slowly into one another on tricycles.

  James, at eleven, sat in headphones by the hour in front of a crystal radio set. Sometimes he invited Edie to scratch a chip of rock with wire and hear a human voice advance and recede in the distance.

  “Where’s he talking from?” Edie would ask, and James said, “Oak Bluff. Ten miles away.”

  Together they marveled.

  The two aunts, after one of their frequent visits, tried to squeeze the children into categories. James is the experimenter, they agreed. Jenny, the romantic. The twins, at five, too young to pigeonhole. Eliza was the bookish one.

  A single-minded child, she read while walking to school, in the car on mountain curves, on the train in tunnels, on her back on the beach at noon, in theaters under dimming lights, between the sheets by flashlight. Eliza saw all the world through thick lenses adjusted for fine print. On Saturdays, she would often desert her invited friend and choose to read by herself instead.

  At these times Edie would approach the bewildered visitor. Would she like to feed the canaries? Climb into the tree house?

  “We’ll make tiaras,” she told one abandoned guest and, taking Jenny along, led the way to the orange grove.

  “We’re brides,” announced Jenny a few minutes later, and she and Eliza’s friend, balancing circles of flowers on their heads, stalked in a barefoot procession of two through the trees.

  That afternoon, Jenny, as though she had never seen it before, inquired about Edie’s ring. “Are you engaged?”

  “I was once,” said Edie, and went on to expose another slit of her past. “To Alfred Trotter.”

  “Was he killed at Wipers?”

  Edie shook her head. “The war came later. He worked for his father at the Rose and Plough.”

  In a field beyond the grove, Jenny saw a plough, ploughing roses.

  “Why didn’t you get married?”

  Edie looked at her watch and said it was five o’clock. She brushed off her skirt and got to her feet. “I wasn’t the only girl in Atherleigh.”

  Jenny, peering into the past, caught a glimpse of Lily Stiles behind the bar at the Rose and Plough.

  After Trish left, two more years went by before the children’s father brought home his third wife. This was Irene, come to transplant herself in Ransom ground. Behind her she trailed a wake of friends, men with beards and women in batik scarves, who sat about the porch with big hats between them and the sun. In a circle of wicker chairs, they discussed Cubism, Freud, Proust, and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row. They passed perfumed candies to the children.

  Irene changed all the lampshades in the house from white paper to red silk, threw a Persian prayer rug over the piano, and gave the children incense sticks for Christmas. She recited poems translated from the Sanskrit and wore saris to the grocery store. In spite of efforts on both sides, Irene remained an envoy from a foreign land.

  One autumn day, not long before the end of her tenure as Thomas Ransom’s wife, she took Edie and all five children to a fortune-teller at the county fair. A pale-eyed, wasted man sold them tickets outside Madame Zelma’s tent and pointed to the curtained entrance. Crowding into the stale air of the interior, they gradually made out the fortune-teller’s veiled head and jeweled neck behind two lighted candelabra on a desk.

  “Have a seat,” said Madame.

  All found places on a bench or on hassocks, and rose, one by one, to approach the palmist as she beckoned them to a chair facing her.

  Madame Zelma, starting with the eldest, pointed to Edie.

  “I see children,” said the fortune-teller. She concentrated in silence for a moment. “You will cross the ocean. I see a handsome man.”

  Us, thought Jenny. Alfred Trotter.

  Madame Zelma, having wound Edie’s life backward from present to past, summoned Irene.

  “I see a musical instrument,” said Madame, as if she knew of Irene’s guitar and the chords in minor keys that were its repertory. “Your flower is the poppy. Your fruit, the pear.” The fortune-teller leaned closer to Irene’s hand. “Expect a change of residence soon.”

  Edie and the children listened.

  And so the fortunes went, the three eldest children’s full of prizes and professions, talents and awards, happy marriages, big families, silver mines, and fame.

  By the time Madame Zelma reached the twins, she had little left to predict. “Long lives,” was all she told them. But what more could anyone divine from the trackless palms of seven-year-olds?

  By the time Cissy, the next wife, came, James’s voice had changed and his sisters had bobbed their hair. The twins had joined in painting an oversized panorama titled “After the Earthquake.” Edie hung it on her wall.

  Cissy, the children’s last stepmother, traveled all the way from England, like Edie. Introduced by the aunts through a letter, Thomas Ransom met her in London, rode with her in Hyde Park, drove with her to Windsor for the day, then took her boating on the upper reaches of the Thames. They were married in a registry, she for the third time, he for the fourth, and spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Skye in a long, gray drizzle.

  “I can hardly wait for California,” said Cissy.

  Once there, she lay about in the sun until she blistered. “Darling, bring my parasol, bring my gloves,” she entreate
d whichever child was near.

  “Are the hills always this brown?” she asked, splashing rose water on her throat. “Has that stream dried up for good?”

  Cissy climbed mountain paths looking for wildflowers and came back with toyon and sage. Twice a week on her horse, Sweet William, she rode trails into the countryside, flushing up rattlesnakes instead of grouse.

  On national holidays that celebrated American separation from Britain, Cissy felt some way historically at fault. On the day before Thanksgiving, she strung cranberries silently at Edie’s side. On the Fourth of July they sat together holding sparklers six thousand miles from the counties where their roots, still green, were sunk in English soil.

  During the dry season of the year, from April to December, the children sometimes watched Cissy as she stood at a corner of the terrace, her head turning from east to west, her eyes searching the implacable blue sky. But for what? An English bird? The smell of fog?

  By now the children were half grown or more, and old enough to recognize utter misery.

  “Cissy didn’t know what to expect,” they told each other.

  “She’s homesick for the Sussex Downs,” said Edie, releasing the h into space.

  “Are you homesick too, for Atherleigh?” asked Eliza.

  “I am not.”

  “You knew what to expect,” said Jenny.

  Edie said, “Almost.”

  The children discussed with her the final departure of each stepmother.

  “Well, she’s gone,” said James, who was usually called to help carry out bags. “Maybe we’ll have some peace.”

  After Cissy left, he made calculations. “Between the three of them, they had six husbands,” he told the others.

  “And Father’s had four wives,” said one of the twins. “Six husbands and four wives make ten,” said the other.

  “Ten what?” said James.

  “Poor souls,” said Edie.

  At last the children were as tall as they would ever be. The aunts could no longer say, “How are they ever to grow up?” For here they were, reasonably bright and reasonably healthy, survivors of a world war and a great depression, durable relics of their mother’s premature and irreversible defection and their father’s abrupt marriages.

  They had got through it all—the removal of tonsils, the straightening of teeth, the first night at camp, the first dance, the goodbyes waved from the rear platforms of trains that, like boats crossing the Styx, carried them away to college. This is not to say they were the same children they would have been if their mother had lived. They were not among the few who can suffer anything, loss or gain, without effect. But no one could point to a Ransom child’s smile or frown or sleeping, habits and reasonably comment, “No mother.”

  Edie stayed in the Ransom house until the twins left for college. By now, Eliza and Jenny were married, James married, divorced, and remarried. Edie went to all the graduations and weddings.

  On these occasions the children hurried across playing fields and lawns to reach and embrace her.

  “Edie!” they said. “You came!” They introduced their fellow graduates and the persons they had married. “This is Edie. Edie, this is Bill, Terry, Peter, Joan,” and they were carried off in whirlwinds of friends.

  As the Ransom house emptied of family, it began to expand. The bedrooms grew larger, the hall banister longer, the porch too wide for the wicker chairs. Edie took leave of the place for want of children in 1938. She was sixty years old.

  She talked to Thomas Ransom in his study, where his first wife’s portrait, painted in pastels, had been restored to its place on the wall facing his desk. Edie sat under the green-eyed young face, her unfaltering blue glance on her employer. Each tried to make the parting easy. It was clear, however, that they were dividing between them, top to bottom, a frail, towering structure of nineteen accumulated years, which was the time it had taken to turn five children, with their interminable questions, unfounded terrors, and destructive impulses, into mature adults who could vote, follow maps, make omelets, and reach an accord of sorts with life and death.

  Thinking back over the intervening years, Thomas Ransom remembered Edie’s cousin in Texas and inquired, only to find that Texas had been a disappointment, as had America itself. The cousin had returned to England twelve years ago.

  “Would you like that?” he asked Edie. “To go back to England?”

  She had grown used to California, she said. She had no one in Atherleigh. So in the end, prompted by the look in his first wife’s eyes, Thomas Ransom offered Edie a cottage and a pension, to be hers for the rest of her life.

  Edie’s beach cottage was two blocks back from the sea and very small. On one wall she hung a few of the children’s drawings, including the earthquake aftermath. Opposite them, by itself, she hung the framed photograph of Lady Alice and Lady Anne, fair and well-seated astride their ponies. Edie had become the repository of pets. The long-lived fish swam languidly in one corner of her sitting room, the last of the canaries molted in another.

  Each Ransom child came to her house once for tea, pulling in to the curb next to a mailbox marked Edith Fisk.

  “Edie, you live so far away!”

  On their first Christmas apart, the children sent five cards, the next year four, then two for several years, then one, or sometimes none.

  During the first September of Edie’s retirement, England declared war on Germany. She knitted socks for the British troops, and on one occasion four years after she left it, returned briefly to the Ransom house. This was when the twins were killed in Europe a month apart, at the age of twenty-four, one in a fighter plane over the Baltic, the other in a bomber over the Rhine. Two months later Thomas Ransom asked Edie to dispose of their things, and she came back for a week to her old, now anonymous, room.

  She was unprepared for the mass of articles to be dealt with. The older children had cleared away childhood possessions at the time of their marriages. But here were all the books the twins had ever read, from Dr. Dolittle to Hemingway, and all their entertainments, from a Ouija board to skis and kites. Years of their civilian trousers, coats, and shoes crowded the closets.

  Edie first wrapped and packed the bulky objects, then folded into cartons the heaps of clothing, much of which she knew. A week was barely time enough to sort it all and reach decisions. Then, suddenly, as though it had been a matter of minutes, the boxes were packed and at the door. Edie marked each one with black crayon. Boys Club, she printed, Children’s Hospital, Red Cross, Veterans.

  That afternoon she stood for a moment with Thomas Ransom on the porch, the silent house behind them. The November air was cold and fresh, the sky cloudless.

  “Lovely day,” said Edie.

  Thomas Ransom nodded, admiring the climate while his life thinned out.

  If the three surviving children had written Edie during the years that followed, this is what she would have learned.

  At thirty-five, James, instead of having become an electrical engineer or a master mechanic, was a junior partner in his father’s law firm. Twice divorced and about to take a new wife, he had apparently learned nothing from Thomas Ransom, not even how to marry happily once. Each marriage had produced two children, four intended cures that failed. James’s practice involved foreign corporations, and he was often abroad. He moved from executive offices to boardrooms and back, and made no attempt to diagnose his discontent. On vacations at home, he dismantled and reassembled heaters and fans and wired every room of his house for sound.

  Whenever he visited England, he tried, and failed, to find time to send Edie a card.

  Eliza had been carried off from her research library by an archaeologist ten years older and three inches shorter than she. He took her first to Guatemala, then to Mexico, where they lived in a series of jungle huts in Chiapas and Yucatán. It was hard to find native help, and the clothes Eliza washed often hung drying for days on the teeming underbrush. Her damp books, on shelves and still in boxes, began to mildew. She c
ooked food wrapped in leaves over a charcoal fire. On special days, like her birthday and Christmas, Eliza would stand under the thatch of her doorway and stare northwest through the rain and vegetation in the direction of the house where she was born and had first tasted tea.

  Edie was still living in the house when Jenny, through a letter from her last stepmother, Cissy, met the Englishman she would marry. Thin as a pencil and pale as parchment, he had entered the local university as an exchange fellow. Jenny was immediately moved to take care of him, sew on his missing buttons, comb his sandy hair. His English speech enchanted her.

  “Tell about boating at Henley,” she urged him. “Tell about climbing the Trossachs. Explain cricket.” And while he described these things as fully as his inherent reserve would allow, the inflections of another voice fell across his. Jenny heard “fahncy dahnces.” She heard “poor souls.”

  “Have you ever been to Atherleigh in Devon?” she asked him.

  “That’s Hatherleigh,” he said.

  If Jenny had written Edie, she would have said, “I love Massachusetts, I love my house, I can make scones, come and see us.”

  On a spring afternoon in 1948, Thomas Ransom called his children together in the same study where the aunts had read Cissy’s letter of lament and recommendation. The tree his wife planted thirty years ago towered in green leaf outside the window.

  The children had gathered from the outposts of the world—James from Paris, Eliza from the Mayan tropics, Jenny from snowed-in Boston. When he summoned them, they had assumed a crisis involving their father. Now they sat uneasily under the portrait of their mother, a girl years younger than themselves. Thomas Ransom offered them tea and sherry. He looked through the window at the tree.

  At last he presented his news. “Edie is dying,” he said. “She is in the hospital with cancer,” as if cancer were a friend Edie had always longed to share a room with.

  They visited her on a shining April morning, much like the one when they first met. With their first gray hairs and new lines at their eyes, they waited a moment on the hospital steps.