by Susan Sontag
“Dalton, you shouldn’t do that. Let her in.” But this time Hester was smiling slightly.
Diddy took heart. “Darling, I will. But you must promise to urge your aunt to go home within a few days. I want to be the one to take care of you, understand. I’ve already told Mrs. Nayburn that I would contribute as much as I could to your hospital bills. I wish I could pay for the whole thing. So, please tell her soon to go. Promise me that.”
“I promise.” Hester lifts her mouth for Diddy’s kiss.
Then Diddy went to the door, and opened it. Mrs. Nayburn, red-eyed, weeping, her gray hair untidier than ever, was swaying on the other side of the threshold. Suddenly, Diddy was overcome with remorse. How unjust he’d been to the woman, and how petty he’d been in himself. She was never a person to him, just a creature. Something looked at under a microscope. Not seeing that she really loved Hester, truly suffered over her. Why had he been so spiteful? So possessive since the first moment he saw Hester? Already on the train, from the beginning, he’d aimed to take complete possession of the girl. Which required caricaturing the aunt, and trying to discredit her with Hester.
“Forgive me!” The tears he should have wept yesterday, after the failure of Hester’s operation, flooded Diddy’s eyes. Opening his arms to the elderly woman, he embraced her. “Forgive me.”
* * *
The relief and exaltation of tears wept in concert. Like the joys of common interests. Diddy wishes Hester could see them next to her bed, he with his arm around Mrs. Nayburn’s shoulder. But drowsy as she is, she must know what’s happening.
Minutes later, iron-voiced Gertrude enters Hester’s room. Making the expected announcement that our patient’s too weak to have any more visiting that evening. Diddy, leaning over Hester’s bed to kiss her goodbye, whispers that he will take Mrs. Nayburn out to dinner and devote the rest of the evening to her. Hester nods. Suddenly she does seem too tired even to speak.
When they leave the hospital, Diddy is busy looking for a cab. Doesn’t notice that the aunt is crying again. When he does, the words sound wrong. “Please don’t. We mustn’t be any less brave than Hester is.”
“I know,” wailed the woman. “I just can’t help myself.”
In the cab, Diddy gives the address of a steak house downtown. “You haven’t really seen the city yet, have you, Mrs. Nayburn?”
“No,” she whimpers. “I just go back and forth from the hospital to the rooming house.”
Diddy accepted the reproach graciously. “That’s going to change now, you’ll see.” Putting his arm around her shoulder. “You know, I’d like to call you Jessie. It would help me feel closer to you.”
“That’s nice, Dalton. Or you could call me Aunt Jessie.”
“Maybe I will some day. I don’t have any living aunts. I had one once, though, whom I liked very much. She was my father’s sister, Anne, but I didn’t even know her name until I was grown up. From the way I heard the adults pronounce it, I’d always thought her name was Aunt Dan.”
Mrs. Nayburn’s face was clearer (now). “What happened to her?”
“Ran away to California with a married high-school teacher in our town when I was nine. My father and mother never mentioned her again, and later I heard that she’d died.”
“Families are a wonderful thing,” sighed Mrs. Nayburn.
“Well,” said Diddy almost laughing, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” When Mrs. Nayburn didn’t make the conventional protest, and even smiled faintly at what he’d said, Diddy felt immensely relieved. If he hadn’t actually misjudged her, she wasn’t as simple and predictable as he’d thought.
In front of Cavanaugh’s. “I think you’ll like this place, Jessie.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“You will be, you’ll see.” Appetite comes with eating, doesn’t it? Diddy will set the good example.
Clam chowder, a sirloin done medium for Mrs. Nayburn and rare for Diddy, salad with Roquefort dressing, hot apple pie, and coffee. That’s not exactly not being hungry. Mrs. Nayburn is a greedy eater. But if the woman’s mouth is busy with food most of the time, Diddy, habitually slow and fastidious at the table, has the advantage. Can do most of the talking himself this meal.
“Goodness, I didn’t know I was so hungry.” Between mouthfuls, brushing a strand of gray hair from the corner of her mouth.
“I told you so. Now you’ll start feeling better.” Diddy, remembering Mrs. Nayburn’s bulging bags of food on the train, senses something unpleasant in his stomach. Which he strives to fight down.
“Aren’t you hungry, Dalton? It’s a shame to waste such a good meal.”
“Don’t worry about me. I always dawdle over my food.” He took a forkful of salad. “My mother used to say I was the slowest eater she’d ever seen.” Why this impulse to bring up his family at the slightest pretext?
“Your mother is dead, isn’t she, Dalton dear?” Another mouthful.
“Yes. She died when I was in college. But we were never very close. I really liked my father much better.”
He must stop talking about himself. Idle chatter: a facile way of putting this woman, with whom he was about to contract a family sort of relation, at her ease. Mrs. Nayburn is cutting up large chunks of steak two at a time, each demanding a good deal of earnest chewing. Here’s Diddy’s opportunity to ask his questions, not just volunteer random information or answer Mrs. Nayburn’s queries. Serious questions, about Hester. Engrossed by the excellent meal, wearied by her recent expenditure of emotion, the naturally talkative woman is quieter. Subdued, stripped of some of her exasperating mannerisms. Even when she speaks, it’s with more gravity. Seems (now) almost capable of the truth.
What Diddy is most eager to know about is Hester’s parents. All he’s been told is that Mrs. Nayburn is the widow of her father’s brother, and that Hester’s father left his family when she was twelve. Became a uranium prospector in New Mexico, disappeared from sight years ago. But what about her mother? Whom neither Hester nor her aunt had ever mentioned.
Diddy asked. Then saw that he’d trespassed on something painful. Mrs. Nayburn halted the motions of her jaws. Looked at him in a strange, imploring way. Was the mother dead?
“No, not dead.” Began chewing again, more slowly.
“Where is she? Does Hester ever see her?” How impossible to drop that word.
Mrs. Nayburn took up her fork and knife to cut into the steak, then set them down. “Hester hasn’t seen her mother in many years.”
“Where does she live?”
“Dalton, I don’t think I want any more. Would you like to finish this piece?”
Diddy stopped eating, too. “Jessie, where is Hester’s mother?”
“This steak is tough.”
“Jessie, where is Hester’s mother?” In his sternest voice. Reluctant people must sometimes be forced to divulge their secrets.
Mrs. Nayburn lowered her eyes. “In a hospital.”
“A mental hospital, you mean.” The woman nodded. “For how long?”
“I think I want my coffee now, Dalton.”
“I’ll get it.” Signaling the waiter. “When was Hester’s mother put away?”
“A long time ago.”
Diddy told the waiter to bring them their coffee (now). “Wait,” said the woman fretfully, as soon as he’d left. “Change the order. Coffee will keep me awake.”
“Tea?” Diddy trying to catch the waiter’s eye again, without slackening the heavy stare he was imposing on Mrs. Nayburn.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I won’t have anything.”
“The lady is changing her order to tea. I’m still having coffee.” Now, his full gaze upon her again. “Jessie, I won’t let you put me off. I have a right to know about what concerns Hester. Now, stop stalling and tell me how long she’s been in an asylum?”
“Since Hester was fourteen.” The woman looked away, apprehensively. Something dark surged forth in Diddy’s mind.
“And Hester became blind wh
en she was fourteen, isn’t that right? You told me that the other day.”
“Yes.… Dalton, let’s change the subject.”
“Then there’s a connection.” Diddy the Persistent. “Between her mother and Hester’s blindness. You’ve just admitted it.”
“That’s something I don’t want to talk about.” The woman’s face took on a hostile, childish look. As much as declaring, in the words of childhood’s chant, That’s for me to know and you to find out? Or registering something truly serious?
“But I must know! If you don’t tell me, I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep from questioning Hester. And if it’s painful for you to speak of the past, imagine how much more painful it will be for her. Tell me now, and I promise never to bring it up again.”
The woman was spooning four lumps of sugar into her tea. “What do you imagine it is?”
“For God’s sake, Jessie!” cried Diddy, in anguish. “Don’t play games at a moment like this. How do I know?”
“Well, think!” Bitterly. “What’s the most horrible thing you can think of?”
Diddy can’t help realizing how ironic is that command to put his imagination to work. Doesn’t he do little else these days but summon up the most horrible things he can think of? What could the awful story be? One possibility: when the mother had become insane, Hester had succumbed to a fit of mad adolescent guilt; either deliberately or inadvertently, had blinded herself.
He said it very slowly.
Mrs. Nayburn shook her head. “No, not that. Something even worse.”
Then Diddy knew. The mother had blinded her.
“How horrible.” Was there anything else to say? “But why did she do such a thing?” Diddy feeling very remote from his words. “Did she just suddenly go mad?” Insensitive sentinels of his thought.
Mrs. Nayburn shook her head. “I suppose we all should have seen it coming. She was so unhappy after Hester’s father left her. Then everybody was saying that Stella was crazy. But we didn’t mean it. And the idea of her harming the child never crossed anyone’s mind. She seemed to adore Hester. Always kissing and hugging her, calling the child her beautiful angel. That was the main reason we were sure things would stay on an even keel with Stella. She acted so devoted to Hester, and seemed so responsible. Overdid it, actually. Worrying about her all the time. About the littlest scratch or cut. Or when Hester would be a few minutes late from school. And then, it was when my husband and I had left for a week to visit relatives in Denver, one day … she did it. Just like that. With lye. And she seemed to know afterwards just what she did, mentioned it often, and didn’t seem a bit sorry. The state’s attorney talked about a trial, but finally they just put her away.”
Diddy had hardly touched his coffee. He could hear Mrs. Nayburn talking. He could even decode the words, and encode some of his own. For instance: “Where was Hester all this time?”
But all the while there is this terrible iron pain speeding toward him.
“Oh, Dalton, that was heartbreaking, too. Hester was in the Children’s Hospital for a whole month. With those awful bandages on her eyes. Being so brave. Just like now.… And every day, when my husband and I would visit her, she’d plead with us to go to the police and tell them she didn’t mind what her mother had done. Just so they wouldn’t keep Stella locked up. Worrying and worrying about her mother, not herself.”
Diddy was silent for several moments. Submerged, grappling with a curious absence of mind. Seeing a smaller version of the Hester he knows (now), lying helpless in that other hospital bed. Fighting off the dreadful Gothic scenario projecting itself inside his head. The woman with disheveled clothes, hair streaming about her face, the light of madness in her eyes. Advancing toward her daughter, bottle of vile chemical in her hand. Hester, asleep in her bed. Or, with her back to her mother, at the kitchen table doing her homework.
The Advance.
The Assault.
The Screams.
The Police.
The Jail.
The Hospital.
Whenever he thinks he’s understood and registered all the cruelty of living, all the horrors of which people are capable, there are more. Too much to digest.
Diddy, still silent, struggling to say something. “You said it happened when you and your husband were on a trip. Do you mean that Hester and her mother were living with you then?”
“That’s right. In the same house, for about two years. After George left for New Mexico, my husband and I had taken them both in.” She began to cry again, and put down her cup of tea. “Oh, Dalton, I shouldn’t say my husband and I.” Took a handkerchief from her bag, and blew her reddened nose. “I don’t deserve any of the credit, not one bit. It was my husband’s idea, God rest his soul. He … he never liked George very much, always disapproved of the way he lived. Maybe he just wanted to show his brother up to the world for the kind of man he really was. And that’s why he took on the responsibility for the wife and child George had abandoned.”
“You don’t really think that’s all there was to your husband’s decision, Mrs. Nayburn,” said Diddy gently. “I can hear in your voice that you think of your husband as a good, generous man.”
“He was,” said the woman, sighing. “I guess it’s awful of me to say he helped them out for that reason. But I did think so then, at the time. I was against the whole scheme. Fought and begged and cried. I suppose I was a little jealous of Stella, too, because she was so … beautiful. Yes, I was jealous. I used to imagine my husband was interested in her, and maybe had always been waiting for George to clear out so he could make a play for George’s wife.… Then there was little Hester, too. I had lots of bad feelings inside me because of not having any children of my own. Maybe I would have welcomed a baby, a little thing that I could mother. But Hester was already twelve when she came to us, and so stuck on her mother she didn’t have any use for me. Though maybe that was my fault, too. She really was a very loving child. Exceptionally so. But I’d hardened my heart against children. When the two of them came to live with us, I didn’t see anything special in Hester at first. I used to tell my husband that all the time. I didn’t even think she was pretty. But my husband was crazy about her. So was Stella, of course. At least we thought so. So, was everybody. Everybody loved that child. So after a while I came to love her just as much as the others.”
Diddy didn’t know what to say. “And she’s lived with you ever since?”
“Except for when she was in a special school for the blind in Chicago. That was, let’s see, just the last two years of high school. She graduated at eighteen and then came home to me.”
Diddy wondering if in that boarding school Hester first made love. With other students or with her teachers? Or with some of both? And what pleasures did she provide for herself after returning to live with her aunt? A blind girl couldn’t stroll on the streets late at night, when her aunt was in bed. But that wasn’t necessary. Mrs. Nayburn, who worked at the Public Library, left Hester alone every day. During the day, Hester could make assignations by phone, and receive her paramours in her own house. Certainly, the girl was experienced sexually. Suggesting not only promiscuity, which Diddy wouldn’t mind if it were exclusively a thing of the past. Suggesting, too, that Hester might have a very detached temperament, affectionate but not loyal. Because of her blindness incapable of settling down with one man: renouncing chance adventures and the touch of others. Because she was blind, Diddy felt awkward even speculating to himself about her erotic life. Would be tongue-tied if it came to questioning her directly about it. Blindness a kind of coercion of others; obliging Diddy to be blind, too.
For all Diddy knew, she could have been carrying on this week with Dr. Collins or one of the interns. Diddy, not usually a morbidly suspicious lover, imagining himself ringed by invisible rivals. But different (now). A girl as willful and spontaneous as Hester, who had made love with him only minutes after they’d begun to talk, would surely be capable of something like that. The attentive touch of a
physician during an examination could easily become a prelude to bed. Hester need only sigh, or make one brief voluptuous movement. What healthy man, even if engaged in his professional duties, could resist such an invitation? He would hardly need the extra stimulus of panic and guilt, and the anguished need to reach out for another person, as Diddy had last Sunday afternoon on the Privateer.
Diddy wanted to become Hester’s protector, not her jailer. And not, God knows, her dupe.
Diddy sipped his cold coffee, signaled the waiter to refill their glasses of water. Really because he still didn’t know how to continue the conversation. Something about a school in Chicago. Nothing to add to that. But he couldn’t keep silent, because of the danger that his face was betraying him to Mrs. Nayburn’s anxious gaze. That he looked (now) as unhappy as he felt.
“I wonder if Hester can be happy with me.” As close as Diddy dared approach the thought poisoning him. Delivered in what he rated a casual, musing tone. But immediately Diddy saw he’d made a tactical error. His remark didn’t reassure, though it wasn’t honest either. Mrs. Nayburn looking anxious, as if she feared Diddy was backing off from his marriage proposal.
“Oh, but she’s the sweetest-tempered girl in the world, Dalton. Everyone says that, and how pretty she is. But you—” she paused.
“What?”
“You aren’t getting any silly ideas about what I told you before? You remember that I didn’t want to tell you, but you made me. Of course, I don’t believe in lying, either. Heavens, not to someone who’s about to become a member of the family. That was my problem. But about Hester’s mother.… I mean, Dalton, no one else in Hester’s family, either on her mother or her father’s side, has ever been crazy. I swear it.”
“Jessie, believe me, I’m not thinking of that.” Patting the woman’s hand reassuringly. “I spoke awkwardly just now. It’s only that Hester is a very complicated person, as I’m sure you know. She keeps a great deal within herself—”
The waiter brought the glasses of water. Diddy ordered another coffee, another tea.