by Hugh Hood
“You go to see her?”
“I do.”
“When Grover isn’t there?”
“He is always there. He daren’t leave her, you know, for fear she’ll die while he’s out of the house. But I’ll grant him one good grace. He usually goes down to the cellar while I’m there. Can’t face me, I suppose.”
“How does she act?”
“Well, she wanders. She is sorry for what Grover has done to me; she is ashamed for him. She always asks for you, Maura, and you should go to see her, if only out of kindness.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She was always a visionary and religious, and of a self-sacrificing temperament, first her mother and father and now Grover. She seems to have gone completely religious, speaking in symbols and so on. She has been reading Revelation, I suspect.”
“I’ll go and see her,” concedes Maura, not entirely reluctantly.
Peering through blue spruce and cedar, Grover studies the three tamaracks from the porch, trying to ignore the river below them which he has never loved, and assessing fondly the intervening plantings which have suddenly devolved upon Ellie and himself. When he courted his wife thirty years ago, coming fearfully to the old house because of the uncertainties of her father’s temper, pausing on the front walk and studying the movement of dragonflies in the porch light, he had wished that it were warmer near the house, that someone might fill the space between the house and the tamaracks with sod, flowers, and other trees and vines, to take away something of the starkness of the house’s situation, perched icily on the promontory unscreened from the winter reflection off the river’s ice. He had been lucky. For most of the subsequent thirty years while he and Ellie tried their luck in Kingston, Belleville, and for a few desperate years in Toronto, they had had a caretaker who paid them for the privilege of keeping the property up and even improving it. A nominal rent but one that paid the taxes — and the house was regularly painted, heated, kept immaculate, ventilated, and the memory of Ellie’s terrible father gradually expunged.
Grover had liked Dr. Boston, though he couldn’t abide his widow, and had tried to deal fairly with him. He had accepted forty dollars a month from him for nearly thirty years and had never counted it up to see what it came to. Edward had had inexpensive living accommodation and had been free to improve the property for his own comfort if he wished. That the Bostons had come in time to think of his house as immutably their home was certainly natural enough but scarcely his concern. That Dr. Boston had planted and cultivated a perfectly splendid arbor, a lovely jungle of carefully selected trees and shrubs between the house and the tamaracks, that he had installed a darkroom and a new furnace, was his business, done with his eyes wide open. However much the Bostons might have resented their involuntary move into the smaller half of the house, they had been given fair — and more than fair, generous — notice of the event.
Grover knew that the enforced move was not what had killed Dr. Boston, although his death had certainly followed hard upon the move, coming three months after it had been accomplished. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t do over the house the way he and Ellie wanted it; but Dr. Boston had inconsiderately died and he was to be blamed for it, he supposed. The doctor’s widow didn’t seem at all interested to see what he was doing with so much unaffected delight to remodel the place according to his own ideas of comfort, his and Ellie’s.
But they had gone ahead the way they’d planned during long years of living in inconvenient apartments, dreaming of the wealth of space they’d one day enjoy. They had saved, made sketches, eyed antique stores and scrabbled around in back-concession attics looking for curly maple antiques, planning at length to reclaim the house and furnish their half with their painfully acquired and stored treasures. And when the time had come, despite Edward’s inconvenient death, they had gone ahead with their plans. He had done it all for Ellie, had followed her in all things, had done everything for her because he’d cherished her and had hoped to exorcise the crazy memory of her parents.
“Softening of the brain” they’d called it when her mother died, the state of medical science being what it was in the Stoverville of thirty years ago. Like mother, like daughter, and like father too. For Ellie was going the same way — he saw it though he tried not to — and here he was in a house, or half of a house, that wasn’t really his, had never been and would never be his, that now, watching her sicken prematurely, he hated and didn’t want any more. He couldn’t get out of the house, not even to go to the grocery store; there were razor-blades lying loose in the medicine cabinets, mirrors that might be broken and wrists to slash. He didn’t know what they might come to and couldn’t leave the house for fear.
Light, not sunny light but cold white light, slides through the cedars and spruce, giving them a smoothy suave waxy sheen. Standing on the south corner of the porch, catching sharp gleams off the water through the glancing leaves, he wishes now that they’d kept their last mean apartment in Toronto. It is with a sense of felt physical release that he watches Maura push through a hole in the fence, enter the arbor, and make her way automatically, without pausing to place her feet safely on the springy overgrown turf, along winding paths aslant the promontory, coming to pay her call. Now he sees the oddness of their situation: Maura is a native of the place who’s fled and felt no ties; he’s an outsider who’s gotten stuck fast inside. “Softening of the brain.” They have a hospital of a kind these days in Stoverville and he knows what they’ll call it.
Then the shrubbery shakes and parts and Maura stands revealed, mounting the sagging porch steps. Behind her the small green and copper leaves whisper together and, all at once, miles away to the east, a steamer hoots once.
“Hello,” they say together, almost strangers, and again, with embarrassment, “well, hello!”
“I’m here for the weekend,” she says with constraint, “and I wanted to see you both.”
“You can see her,” he says, forever an inside outsider. How the girl resembles her father! More and more he feels sixty-five and out of place.
“How is she? You know, Grover, she’s the one person in Stoverville … well … she was a second mother to me.”
“I wish we’d had children.”
“You do?”
“Certainly I do. But her health was never up to it.”
“Oh! How is she now?”
“Lying down,” he says abruptly, with a shiver. “Come along, I’ll show you what we’ve done with the house.” He pauses. “You don’t mind our doing it over, do you?”
“Of course not. It’s yours, after all. But how is she?”
She won’t be diverted, it seems. “When her mother died, you remember, it was the same thing. But they’ve a new name for it now, which sounds a little better.”
“Most people said that old Mrs. Phillips was out of her mind.”
“She wasn’t, exactly. They called it ‘softening of the brain.’ That’s the trouble. It runs in the family, don’t you see?”
“But there isn’t any such thing.”
“They don’t call it that any more. Now they call it,” and he rattles off the foolish phrase, “premature senility induced by an insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain.” Her circulation is poor and the artery which feeds the brain is narrowing — like hardening of the arteries — I don’t recollect the medical term.”
“Sclerosis?”
“That’s it. Arteriosclerosis affecting the brain, and hypertension too, of course. She’s all right sometimes but she wanders. And then she was always religious, you know.”
“Is she still?”
“Worse, if anything. Good heavens, Maura, she sees ghosts. According to her the house is full of people. And I — I can’t see anything. I tell you, it’s frightening. Come inside, I’ll show you around. You see on the floor here in the hall I’ve installed a parquet, black and white squares. Very
cheerful, don’t you think?”
He conducts her around the familiar rooms, exhibiting them in their novel guise. Soon they hear a voice calling from upstairs. Ellie’s.
“I’m coming down. I’ve a housecoat here,” she warbles with enthusiasm, “and I’ve had a good sleep, Grover.”
She has no footfall. She had been soundless in Maura’s memory, never letting the floorboards announce her coming. She had floated around her unfortunate father and mother like a creature from another world, a wraith. Now she floats down the quiet staircase more impalpable than ever, her face bloodless, her hair gone silver, white white white, like someone who lives in the river, Maura thinks, like somebody made of water. She stretches out her arms and floats along, singing that thin melody. What happens in her head, does she hear anything? She doesn’t look at you but over your shoulder, seeing things beyond and to one side of you. Poor Grover. No wonder he’s afraid that the house is full of people who can’t be seen or heard. Her gaze closes around and behind you like water, and you aren’t solid.
“My dear child,” says Ellie moving soundlessly over the black and white squares while Maura, entranced, feels but doesn’t see Grover melt away out of vision bound for his workbench, to feel the cutting edges of his chisels and wonder about them.
The two women embrace and Ellie is so weightless that Maura can hardly feel her hug. She, poor chunky brown-eyed girl, solidly there, whoever else vanishes, feels as if she’s tearing an invisible tissue of air as she follows Ellie into the drawing room. So she takes good care to sit facing her across the room, not relishing the idea of that disturbing weightlessness at her side.
“You’re always the same girl,” says Ellie, plucking at the sleeves of her flowered housecoat with birdlike hands, blue in the veins, crooked fingers locked in an immutable grasp, “and I thank God you’ve got your mother’s eyes and not ours.”
Her own eyes can’t be still but rove desperately around the room.
“I’m embarrassed for myself and Grover,” she says. “I feel as though we’ve wronged you, although I’m thankful he feels nothing of it, the dear man, I don’t believe he knows what’s going on.” All at once a nervous tic starts up in her left cheek and she straightens her spine, sitting up abruptly on the sofa.
“He showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal,” she says, blinking.
There is just nothing to be said to this for apparently she has left lucidity behind her, putting Maura in the position of an unwilling witness to a personal collapse. How can she get out, what can she do? There is nothing to do but sit there and make conversation during the rare lucid intervals.
“Seven stars and seven gold crowns, seven tapers, three trees, three thrones,” says Ellie, shivering slightly. Then she shakes herself and tries to fix her eyes on Maura. “Grover wouldn’t understand, would he?” she begs, and launches into the unforgettable.
“The house is full of gods,” she begins, “all around us, gods and the dead. I saw my father yesterday, staring hatefully at the parquetry, and he told me that he didn’t understand or like it, finding it bad taste and confusing to the eye. He told me not to marry and I wouldn’t listen. I refused to listen though he told me from my cradle upwards. I couldn’t bear children though I wanted them so. I mustn’t transmit my milky brains to them and yet I tried and tried because Grover wanted them so. They warned me against Grover, both of them. He’ll never understand, they said, he’ll never guess and you mustn’t tell him. And yet our children might have been saved from it, if the doctors knew all they claimed, instead of letting my father go to his grave in the belief that he’d lost his mind.”
“Naturally I meant to marry Edward. We were born in the same month to the same family, and outside the forbidden degrees of kindred by a hairsbreadth. He might have helped me and there’d be no question about the house. Because he was a physician, don’t you see, and could have stopped me before I came this far. You’d have been my child and you are my child though you won’t admit it.” She glares almost directly at Maura, just missing her eyes.
“There he is,” she says flatly, “sitting beside you, your father.” And Maura vainly resists the motion of her head which assures her that the three-years’-dead man is not there at all.
“I see him. The house is full of him, twenty-eight years of him, poor Edward. He lived his soul into this house and there he is.”
“He’s dead,” says Maura, speaking for the first time in minutes.
“Don’t stare at me with those hard brown eyes. They don’t belong to you. God knows I wanted children and where am I now? A sick old woman being kept a prisoner by a stranger who won’t let me alone. I know. He’s afraid, afraid.” She spreads her palms over her cheeks and smooths the twitches out. “Do you like the way we’ve changed the house?”
“I think it’s all lovely, Ellie,” says Maura, crossing the room and taking her by the arm, helping her to her feet. “I’ve been through it all with Grover. It’s all lovely.” She leads the other woman into the hallway.
“Are you leaving?”
“I think so. I told mother I’d be home for lunch. Perhaps I can come over Sunday night.”
“And then you go back to the city? You’ll have children, Maura, I know it. You’re going to be married, aren’t you?”
At this prescience, Maura shudders. “I hope so,” she admits, kissing a dry cheek, “and please take good care of yourself.”
As she pushes the yielding shrubbery aside, as it whistles softly around her, she hears Ellie call: “It comes to Grover or to you, and soon, soon.” And she resolves to herself that it can’t possibly come to her.
“Oho!” says Mrs. Boston with delight of a kind. “Oho, oho! I told you, didn’t I?”
“You told me something, but not all that,” says Maura, utterly exhausted.
“She must have been having one of her bad days.”
“All her days must be like that,” reasons Maura tiredly. “She can’t have any good days if she’s as bad as that.”
“It’s partly assumed, you know.”
“Oh, mother, for goodness’ sake! She’s dying. She can’t reason.”
“The poor woman,” says Mrs. Boston with real compassion, “and so she said that it would come to you or Grover.”
“Yes.”
“She must have meant the house.”
“Oh, that and everything else.”
“There’s nothing else to inherit.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know.”
“There could be no two people more hard-hearted, Maura, than you and Grover Haskell!”
“Why do you dislike him so much? You should be grateful to him.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” exclaims Maura, petulantly. “Perhaps because he got her out of the way. He’s not a malicious person at all. I like him. I pity him.”
“And well you may,” says Mrs. Boston, “because he’s caught, there’s nothing he can do. He hoped for years to get his hands on our house and now he hasn’t got it — it’s got him. He caught a shark.”
“I’ll make a prediction,” says Maura grimly, “and I want you to remember it. If Ellie dies and leaves the house to him, as I hope to God she does, you, Mother, will be over there three nights a week playing cards with him within six months.”
Mrs. Boston springs to her feet and begins to pace up and down the narrow bed-sitting-room which comprises the bulk of her small apartment. She doesn’t resemble her daughter, at this strained point in their relationship, nearly as much as usual. She shows in her walk and in the defiant toss of her head how completely she knows that there can be no estrangement between them; she can trust Maura.
“My God, how right you are,” she confesses with a full agitation, crushing a hand over her neat straw-coloured hair. “Of course I will be. Out of idle curiosity, yo
u believe, and loneliness.” She turns briskly to Maura. “I know mine is not a dignified position. I’m quite aware of what people say.”
“People don’t say anything, as far as I know.”
“You live in Montreal.”
“But I hear what goes on.”
“Nonsense! You haven’t been here in a year.” As Maura protests, her mother puts up a grim hand for silence. “I’m not reproaching you. In your place I should do exactly the same. Stay away! Hunt some man down! You can do it!” She smiles at her daughter because they love one another. “I sound like a cheerleader.”
“I’ve nearly done it,” grins Maura sourly, “and Ellie knew all about it before I said a word.”
“She has radar,” says Mrs. Boston, “or second sight.”
“You would adore your grandchildren if you had any.”
Mrs. Boston winces. “My God, how right you are,” she exclaims for the second time in three minutes. “Have some!” she begs. “Start the whole thing off again. I don’t want you to be the last. We never meant you to be the only child.”
“I’ve borne it,” says Maura.
“So you see me over at Grover’s house, playing double solitaire with him, the two of us mourning our barrenness, all alone and exactly like each other. Very well, I’ve admitted that I don’t hate the man. He’s not a wicked man, I suppose.”
“It’s simply that you’re both caught.”
“He’s caught worse than I am, Maura. He’s planned and worked to possess himself of that place. He used to come to us on vacations, and when we had him in to dinner he’d look around as if it were already his. You could see his mind at work, estimating the cost of new velour drapes for the dining room. I used to laugh.”
“Not tactful, anyway.”
“No, he’s like an infant. He has no notion of tact. And then he asked us to move while your father was sickening with what killed him, though I will admit in justice that he couldn’t have suspected it, and then he moved in and Ellie began to collapse, and now she’s gone the way her parents did and at the end they were both suicidal.”