by Otto Penzler
My father, an education administrator, left us when I was fourteen, to remarry. I was furious, heartbroken. Dazed. Why? How could he betray us? But Mother maintained her Christian fortitude, her air of subtly wounded pride. This is what people will do, Bethany. Turn against you, turn faithless. You might as well learn, young.
Yet I pushed. Up to the very end of her life, when Mother was so ill. You’d judge me harsh, heartless — people did. But for God’s sake I wanted to know: what happened to my Grandmother Nissenbaum, why did nobody seem to care she’d gone away? Were the letters my mother and Connie swore their father received authentic, or had he been playing a trick of some kind? And if it had been a trick, what was its purpose? Just tell me the truth for once, Mother. The truth about anything.
I’m forty-four years old, I still want to know.
But Mother, the intrepid schoolteacher, the good-Christian, was impenetrable. Inscrutable as her Pappa. Capable of summing up her entire childhood back there (this was how she and Aunt Connie spoke of Ransomville, their pasts: back there) by claiming that such hurts are God’s will, God’s plan for each of us. A test of our faith. A test of our inner strength. I said, disgusted, what if you don’t believe in God, what are you left with then? — and Mother said matter-of-factly, “You’re left with yourself, of course, your inner strength. Isn’t that enough?”
That final time we spoke of this, I lost patience, I must have pushed Mother too far. In a sharp, stinging voice, a voice I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Bethany, what do you want me to tell you? About my mother? — my father? Do you imagine I ever knew them? Either of them? My mother left Connie and me when we were little girls, left us with him, wasn’t that her choice? Her selfishness? Why should anyone have gone looking for her? She was trash, she was faithless. We learned to forgive, and to forget. Your aunt tells you a different story, I know, but it’s a lie — /was the one who was hurt, / was the youngest. Your heart can be broken only once —you’ll learn! Our lives were busy, busy like the lives of us grown women today, women who have to work, women who don’t have time to moan and groan over their hurt feelings, you can’t know how Connie and I worked on that farm, in that house, like grown women when we were girls. Father tried to stop both of us going to school beyond eighth grade — imagine! We had to walk two miles to get a ride with a neighbor, to get to the high school in Ransomville; there weren’t school buses in those days. Everything you’ve had you’ve taken for granted and wanted more, but we weren’t like that. We hadn’t money for the right school clothes, all our textbooks were used, but we went to high school. I was the only ‘farm girl’ — that’s exactly what I was known as, even by my teachers — in my class to take math, biology, physics, Latin. I was memorizing Latin declensions milking cows at five in the morning, winter mornings. I was laughed at, Nelia Nissenbaum was laughable. But I accepted it. All that mattered was that I win a scholarship to a teachers’ college so I could escape the country, and I did win a scholarship and I never returned to Ransomville to live. Yes, I loved Pappa — I still love him. I loved the farm, too. You can’t not love any place that’s taken so much from you. But I had my own life, I had my teaching jobs, I had my faith, my belief in God, I had my destiny. I even got married — that was extra, unexpected. I’ve worked for everything I ever got and I never had time to look back, to feel sorry for myself. Why then should I think about her? — why do you torment me about /ier?Awoman who abandoned me when I was five years old! In 1923! I made my peace with the past, just like Connie in her different way. We’re happy women, we’ve been spared a lifetime of bitterness. That was God’s gift to us.” Mother paused, breathing quickly. There was in her face the elation of one who has said too much, that can never be retracted; I was stunned into silence. She plunged on, now contemptuously, “What are you always wanting me to admit, Bethany? That you know something I don’t know? What is your generation always pushing for, from ours? Isn’t it enough we gave birth to you, indulged you, must we be sacrificed to you, too? What do you want us to tell you — that life is cruel and purposeless? that there is no loving God, and never was, only accident? Is that what you want to hear, from your mother? That I married your father because he was a weak man, a man I couldn’t feel much for, who wouldn’t, when it came time, hurt me?”
And then there was silence. We stared at each other, Mother in her glisten of fury, daughter Bethany so shocked she could not speak. Never again would I think of my mother in the old way.
What Mother never knew: In April 1983, two years after her death, a creek that runs through the old Nissenbaum property flooded its banks, and several hundred feet of red clayey soil collapsed overnight into the creek bed, as in an earthquake. And in the raw, exposed earth there was discovered a human skeleton, decades old but virtually intact. It had been apparently buried, less than a mile behind the Nissenbaum farmhouse.
There had never been anything so newsworthy — so sensational — in the history of Chautauqua County.
State forensic investigators determined that the skeleton had belonged to a woman, apparently killed by numerous blows to the head (a hammer, or the blunt edge of an ax) that shattered her skull like a melon. Dumped into the grave with her was what appeared to have been a suitcase, now rotted, its contents — clothes, shoes, underwear, gloves — scarcely recognizable from the earth surrounding it. There were a few pieces of jewelry and, still entwined around the skeleton’s neck, a tarnished-gold cross on a chain. Most of the woman’s clothing had long ago rotted away and almost unrecognizable too was a book — a leatherbound Bible? — close beside her. About the partly detached, fragile wrist and ankle bones were loops of rusted baling wire that had fallen loose, coiled in the moist red clay like miniature sleeping snakes.
The Two Ladies ot Rose Cottage
from Malice Domestic 6
In our village, they were always known as the “Two Ladies of Rose Cottage”: Miss Eunice, with the white hair, and Miss Teresa with the gray. Nobody really knew where they came from, or exactly how old they were, but the consensus held that they had met in India, America, or South Africa, and decided to return to the homeland to live out their days together. And, in 1939, they were generally believed to be in or approaching their nineties.
Imagine our surprise, then, one fine day in September, when the police car pulled up outside Rose Cottage, and when, in a matter of hours, rumors began to spread throughout the village: rumors of human bones dug up in a distant garden; rumors of mutilation and dismemberment; rumors of murder.
Lyndgarth is the name of our village. It is situated in one of the most remote Yorkshire dales, about twenty miles from Eastvale, the nearest large town. The village is no more than a group of limestone houses with slate roofs, clustered around a bumpy, slanted green that always reminded me of a handkerchief flapping in the breeze. We have the usual amenities — grocer’s shop, butcher’s, newsagent’s, post office, school, two churches, three public houses — and proximity to some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.
I was fifteen in 1939, and Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa had been living in the village for twenty years, yet still they remained strangers to us. It is often said that you have to “winter out” at least two years before being accepted into village life, and in the case of a remote place like Lyndgarth, in those days, it was more like ten.
As far as the locals were concerned then, the two ladies had served their apprenticeship and were more than fit to be accepted as fully paid-up members of the community, yet there was about them a certain detached quality that kept them ever at arm’s length.
They did all their shopping in the village and were always polite to people they met in the street; they regularly attended church services at St. Oswald’s and helped with charity events; and they never set foot in any of the public houses. But still there was that sense of distance, of not quite being — or not wanting to be — a part of things.
The summer of 1939 had been unusually beautiful despite the politic
al tensions. Or am I indulging in nostalgia for childhood? Our dale can be one of the most grim and desolate landscapes on the face of the earth, even in August, but I remember the summers of my youth as days of dazzling sunshine and blue skies. In 1939, every day was a new symphony of color — golden buttercups, pink clover, mauve crane’s-bill — ever-changing and recombining in fresh palettes. While the tense negotiations went on in Europe, while Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, and while there was talk of conscription and rationing at home, very little changed in Lyndgarth.
Summer in the dale was always a season for odd jobs — peat-cutting, wall-mending, sheep-clipping — and for entertainments, such as the dialect plays, the circus, fairs, and brass bands. Even after war was declared on the third of September, we still found ourselves rather guiltily having fun, scratching our heads, shifting from foot to foot, and wondering when something really warlike was going to happen.
Of course, we had our gas masks in their cardboard boxes, which we had to carry everywhere; streetlighting was banned, and motor cars were not allowed to use their headlights. This latter rule was the cause of numerous accidents in the dale, usually involving wandering sheep on the unfenced roads.
Some evacuees also arrived from the cities. Uncouth urchins for the most part, often verminous and ill-equipped for country life, they seemed like an alien race to us. Most of them didn’t seem to have any warm clothing or Wellington boots, as if they had never seen mud in the city. Looking back, I realize they were far from home, separated from their parents, and they must have been scared to death. I am ashamed to admit, though, that at the time I didn’t go out of my way to give them a warm welcome.
This is partly because I was always lost in my own world. I was a bookish child, and had recently discovered the stories of Thomas Hardy, who seemed to understand and sympathize with a lonely village lad and his dreams of becoming a writer. I also remember how much he thrilled and scared me with some of the stories. After “The Withered Arm,” I wouldn’t let anyone touch me for a week, and I didn’t dare go to sleep after “Barbara of the House of Grebe” for fear that there was a horribly disfigured statue in the wardrobe, that the door would slowly creak open and . . .
I think I was reading Far from the Madding Crowd that hot July day, and, as was my wont, I read as I walked across the village green, not looking where I was going. It was Miss Teresa I bumped into, and I remember thinking that she seemed remarkably resilient for such an old lady.
“Do mind where you’re going, young man!” she admonished me, though when she heard my effusive apologies, she softened her tone somewhat. She asked me what I was reading, and when I showed her the book, she closed her eyes for a moment, and a strange expression crossed her wrinkled features.
“Ah, Mr. Hardy,” she said after a short silence. “I knew him once, you know, in his youth. I grew up in Dorset.”
I could hardly hold back my enthusiasm. Someone who actually knew Hardy! I told her that he was my favorite writer of all time, even better than Shakespeare, and that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer, just like him.
Miss Teresa smiled indulgently. “Do calm down,” she said, then she paused. “I suppose,” she continued, with a glance toward Miss Eunice, “that if you are really interested in Mr. Hardy, perhaps you might like to come to tea someday?”
When I assured her I would be delighted, we made an arrangement that I was to call at Rose Cottage the following Tuesday at four o’clock, after securing my mother’s permission, of course.
That Tuesday visit was the first of many. Inside, Rose Cottage belied its name. It seemed dark and gloomy' unlike ours, which was always full of sunlight and bright flowers. The furnishings were antique, even a little shabby. I recollect no family photographs of the kind that embellished most mantelpieces, but there was a huge giltframed painting of a young girl working alone in a field hanging on one wall. If the place sometimes smelled a little musty and neglected, the aroma of Miss Teresa’s fresh-baked scones more often than not made up for it.
“Mr. Hardy was full of contradictions,” Miss Teresa told me on one occasion. “He was a dreamer, of course, and never happier than when wandering the countryside, alone with his thoughts. But he was also a fine musician. He played the fiddle on many social occasions, such as dances and weddings, and he was often far more gregarious and cheerful than many of his critics would have imagined. He was also a scholar, head forever buried in a book, always studying Latin or Greek. I was no dullard, either, you know, and I like to think I held my own in our conversations, though I had little Latin and less Greek.” She chuckled, then turned serious again. “Anyway, one never felt one really knew him. One was always looking at a mask. Do you understand me, young man?”
I nodded. “I think so, Miss Teresa.”
“Yes, well,” she said, staring into space as she sometimes did while speaking of Hardy. “At least that was my impression. Though he was a good ten years older than me, I like to believe I got glimpses of the man behind the mask. But because the other villagers thought him a bit odd, and because he was difficult to know, he also attracted a lot of idle gossip. I remember there was talk about him and that Sparks girl from Puddletown. What was her first name, Eunice?”
“Tryphena.”
“That’s right.” She curled her lip and seemed to spit out the name. “Tryphena Sparks. A singularly dull girl, I always thought. We were about the same age, you know, she and I. Anyway, there was talk of a child. Utter rubbish, of course.” She gazed out of the window at the green, where a group of children were playing a makeshift game of cricket. Her eyes seemed to film over. “Many’s the time I used to walk through the woodland past the house, and I would see him sitting there at his upstairs window seat, writing or gazing out on the garden. Sometimes he would wave and come down to talk.” Suddenly she stopped, then her eyes glittered, and she went on. “He used to go and watch hangings in Dorchester. Did you know that?”
I had to confess that I didn’t, my acquaintance with Hardy being recent and restricted only to his published works of fiction, but it never occurred to me to doubt Miss Teresa’s word.
“Of course, executions were public back then.” Again she paused, and I thought I saw, or rather sensed a little shiver run through her. Then she said that was enough for today, that it was time for scones and tea.
I think she enjoyed shocking me like that at the end of her little narratives, as if we needed to be brought back to reality with a jolt. I remember on another occasion she looked me in the eye and said, “Of course, the doctor tossed him aside as dead at birth, you know. If it hadn’t been for the nurse, he would never have survived. That must do something to a man, don’t you think?”
We talked of many other aspects of Hardy and his work, and, for the most part, Miss Eunice remained silent, nodding from time to time. Occasionally, when Miss Teresa’s memory seemed to fail her on some point, such as a name or what novel Hardy might have been writing in a certain year, she would supply the information.
I remember one visit particularly vividly. Miss Teresa stood up rather more quickly than I thought her able to, and left the room for a few moments. I sat politely, sipping my tea, aware of Miss Eunice’s silence and the ticking of the grandfather clock out in the hall. When Miss Teresa returned, she was carrying an old book, or rather two books, which she handed to me.
It was a two-volume edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it was the first edition, from 1874, and was probably worth a small fortune. But what fascinated me even more than Helen Paterson’s illustrations was the brief inscription on the flyleaf: To Tess, With Affection, Tom.
I knew that Tess was a diminutive of Teresa, because I had an Aunt Teresa in Harrogate, and it never occurred to me to question that the “Tess” in the inscription was the person sitting opposite me, or that the “Tom” was any other than Thomas Hardy himself.
“He called you Tess,” I remember saying. “Perhaps he had y
ou in mind when he wrote Tess of the d’UrbervillesT’
Miss Teresa’s face drained of color so quickly I feared for her life, and it seemed that a palpable chill entered the room. “Don’t be absurd, boy,” she whispered. “Tess Durbeyfield was hanged for murder.”
*
We had been officially at war for about a week, I think, when the police called. There were three men, one in uniform and two in plainclothes. They spent almost two hours in Rose Cottage, then came out alone, got in their car, and drove away. We never saw them again.
The day after the visit, though, I happened to overhear our local constable talking with the vicar in St. Oswald’s churchyard. By a great stroke of fortune, several yews stood between us and I was able to remain unseen while I took in every word.
“Murdered, that’s what they say,” said RC. Walker. “Bashed his ’ead in with a poker, then chopped ’im up in little pieces and buried ’em in t’ garden. Near Dorchester, it were. Village called ’igher Bockhampton. People who lived there were digging an airraid shelter when they found t’ bones. ’Eck of a shock for t’ bairns.”
Could they possibly mean Miss Teresa? That sweet old lady who made such delightful scones and had known the young Thomas Hardy? Could she really have bashed someone on the head, chopped him up into little pieces, and buried them in the garden? I shivered at the thought, despite the heat.
But nothing more was heard of the murder charge. The police never returned, people found new things to talk about, and after a couple of weeks Miss Eunice and Miss Teresa reappeared in village life much as they had been before. The only difference was that my mother would no longer allow me to visit Rose Cottage. I put up token resistance, but by then my mind was full of Spitfires, secret codes, and aircraft carriers anyway.