“My mother? How could you know about my mother?”
“Time,” she answered matter-of-factly. “It slips.”
I stared at her, speechless.
“Or we do, rather. We slip in time, some of us. We do. Or I wonder if that’s what it is.” Her laugh, moderate as it sounded, rippled visibly beneath the surface of her skin. Whatever she was, she was more than just eccentric; this was, to me, an exceedingly exciting notion. I asked her what she meant.
“Read the book and then we’ll talk. Now I’m off to write a little thing for the devil.” She laughed again. I wondered if Stanley was equally strange, if all academics, all brilliant people, were like this. She stopped in the doorway, tilted her head slightly. “And then this afternoon, if I finish my work, perhaps we’ll go grocery shopping, and I’ll walk you up to campus. Show you around. You can see where Fred will have his office, get a look at the harem.”
“Harem?”
“The students,” she said, and I could not tell if her tone was mocking me or mocking herself. “Such pretty, bright young things. Just like you, Rose Nemser. Young and pretty, and ever-so-enlightened. So admiring of the great minds that deign to educate them. Those girls love their professors.”
• • •
AFTER SHE LEFT, I opened the book and turned the first dried pages but could not settle in, the print scrambling under my overwhelmed gaze.
I want to try to reconstruct the way I felt the first time I read An Adventure, but it’s difficult, like trying to separate out the first time Fred and I made love from all the rest, or to recall the specific weight of holding baby Natalie in my arms—I recall her damp warmth more easily than the work required by my muscles. It was a moment in a continuum—not so odd, considering the material—and never felt like something new. The book is the report of two young British schoolteachers who visited Versailles in the year 1901 and got lost in the gardens near the Petit Trianon—Marie Antoinette’s private “farmhouse,” the place where she held her amusements. As they tried to choose between the various paths, everything became excessively quiet, flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still. (I quote from memory, sure that I will always know these words.) From behind them, a costumed man came running, insisting that they head right and not left. Right and not left. They went over a bridge, heard running footsteps, passed a servant and her daughter, and then came upon a woman sitting and sketching in the center of her garden: Marie Antoinette. The sound of horse hooves in the distance. When, months later, they returned to Versailles and attempted to retrace their steps, the path they took was not to be found. It didn’t exist.
No one believed the women.
They were unable to reproduce the experience.
Eventually, the friendship dissipated.
There was never any proof.
Shirley loved this story, the bitter sweetness of both miracle and aftermath. She loved this story and she shared it with me and became my friend. Part of being loved by Shirley, I suppose, was always that I appreciated those women, too. And I still see why they matter, what they teach us: that an adventure can begin without warning, that the most minor decisions—right, left—can change lives in a moment. That friendships, even the best of them, don’t always survive. Oh, and this: that so much of what happens can’t ever be proved—the best we can do is write our paltry tales. Those women at Versailles, young, not special in any way—they were brave to share their stories.
Years after her death, when I saw her journals, I was not surprised at how often Shirley mulled over what might have happened in the gardens of Versailles on that hot August afternoon. What she loved most was how intensely the two schoolteachers were told: Go right. Avoid that path. Take this.
There is never any proof. I suppose I will come back to that. There’s no one alive to confirm that what I’m writing down is true. That the celebrated novelist Shirley Jackson, age forty-seven, and the pregnant nineteen-year-old Rose Klein Nemser, became the best of friends for one brief moment in time, a wormhole, a slip between one world and another. Is it possible to reserve one’s cynicism? Stanley is about to return home, with my husband, Fred, at the end of an arduous day of adulation. Perhaps it is time to mix them their martinis.
• • •
“DID YOU TAKE HER TO THE DOCTOR?” Stanley asked me when both men had returned that evening. The younger son, Barry, had arrived earlier, disappearing first into the kitchen and then upstairs to his room. He’d stopped in to see Shirley but not stayed long. She was still hard at work, the typewriter keys clicking like hailstorms, lengthy bursts, some lasting several minutes or more, to be followed by bouts of silence, the grind of the paper roll, a ping or two, and then another long, emotional outpouring of tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. It seemed the household functioned around that sound, that it was the linchpin and the director of all activity: if she was typing, that took priority over anything else.
We never did get to campus that first day. I’d sat listening to Shirley’s typewriter from the front parlor as I reclined on the clammy leather sofa. Both the armchairs seemed spoken for, even though no one else was in the house, an Agatha Christie opened on one and a set of marked-up galleys on the arm of the other. I had finished An Adventure and skimmed its pages again, and, as the early-September heat drifted in through the side windows, I let my eyelids drop and drifted off to sleep. Downstairs, the house seemed to let me sleep easily, without dreaming. Or perhaps it was the exhaustion from the previous night that caused it. In any case, the nausea of the past weeks had entirely left me, and I felt blissfully at peace. But at Stanley’s question, I sat bolt upright, guilty as charged.
“Doctor?”
“She didn’t tell you.”
“No,” I said, beginning to formulate an apologetic explanation. His eyebrows, dark and heavy, drew together; his scowl reminded me of my father’s, and I had to remind myself that someone like Stanley Hyman was unlikely to use violence. “I didn’t know—”
“Shirley,” he said, raising his voice so that it carried before him as he entered the library. “You forgot Dr. Toolan.”
A short silence.
“I was working,” I heard her say. “Stan. I need another hour, I’m almost done. Can you send Barry down to the market, or ask . . . ask the girl, the new girl. Can you ask the little wife to go get us some chops? Rose. Can you ask Rose?”
Fred, who, arriving with Stanley, hadn’t moved from the high-ceilinged hallway between the two rooms, nodded to me. “I’ll go with you,” he whispered. “Come on.”
I stood obediently.
“We’ll go,” Fred told them. “We’ll get whatever’s needed.”
That was fine with Stanley. He didn’t care how things happened, so long as they did. Some of the new students were coming to dinner, as was their elder son with his wife and children. When we got to the market, Shirley had already called; the chops were cut and the string beans and potatoes had been set aside. We took a container of milk, and some apples, and a bag of farina, as she’d asked the grocer to tell us.
The chops alone were 89 cents a pound, and she’d ordered enough for twelve. I felt faint at the thought of what a household cost to run. Did they always live like this? There was an awkward moment when Fred pulled out his wallet, knowing he couldn’t possibly have enough cash in there to pay, but Mr. Powers told us the Hymans had said to put it on their account, and he walked away before we could pretend to be disappointed. Later, knowing better, I admired the grocer for not taking any cash he could get for Hyman groceries as quickly as possible. He must have been a man most appreciative of the arts, to his own detriment.
We walked up the hill, Fred carrying the two sacks, one in either arm.
“Was it wonderful?” I asked him.
His cheeks flushed pink; I had not an inkling why.
> “It was okay.”
“Who did you meet? Do you have an office? Do you have a classroom? How was lunch? Is the pay enough? Will you like it? Will you have time to finish your thesis?”
“The pay’s fine, Rosie. Nearly five thousand dollars.”
For the first time ever, I imagined a life without worry.
“And we’ll save most of it, staying here,” he said. “They want us to. Stanley thinks you’ll be good for Shirley.”
“Me? How?”
“My office is next to his, it’s huge. It’s as big as the one I shared with those other fellows at Temple. Bookshelves and a desk and a view. And the campus is, well, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. Views in every direction, all woods and trees and a little pond with swans in it, and there’s this field, in front of the main building. The Commons. And if you walk to the other end, they call it The End of the World, there’s a wall and then the world drops off, and you’re staring out at enormous green mountains in every direction.”
“You like it?” I teased him.
“I like it,” he answered seriously.
“Shirley told me about a Bennington student, a girl who disappeared into the mountains,” I said then. “She went for a walk by herself one afternoon and never came back, no one ever found her. I’ll show you her picture, the articles from the paper.”
He shook his head; nobody had mentioned Paula Welden to him.
“Oh, it was years ago, Fred. Still, it makes you think, all those mountain trails leading god knows where. Nobody knows what happened to her.” I sighed. “But Shirley says the students are pretty.”
He shrugged. “They’re okay.”
I was still so happy. I had Fred. My world was safe. “Just okay?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rose. I didn’t do anything.”
We were two houses away from the Hymans’ place, and Fred started walking faster—striding, really—on his much longer legs. “I meant,” I began to say, but didn’t finish. He turned left, into their driveway, and I paused, watching him, but then I kept walking straight, without him, up the hill another few houses, and through the back gate to the college, so that I could see for myself what my husband had enjoyed that day. When the road split, one large building off to the side and the main campus before me, I thought about my direction. Right turns were the order of the day, I told myself, and strolled past a big barn and over a footpath to the little duck pond and then down into the thick of the dormitories.
Someone had told me—I think Barry the night before—how the Bennington College campus was purposely designed so that no building was easily accessible from another. Entryways did not line up; paths were deliberately several degrees off the direct route—the idea was that nothing would ever be too easy, no excursion possible without conscious thought.
On the face of it, the dormitory buildings appeared to my inexperienced mind to represent simple privilege in its most concrete form. One pretty colonial mansion after another, a parade of Taras down a well-maintained, nicely landscaped drive. And the girls, blowing cigarette rings as they walked, their kohl-outlined eyes and lean dancers’ bodies and cleverly embroidered coats and bright stockings and cheerful knitted caps. Bohemian entitlement embodied by one after the other. We were the same age, those girls and I, but it didn’t feel that way to me. We were the same age, but none of them knew what it was to be poor, nineteen, and pregnant. They were too bright, too hip, too extraordinary to be tethered to so banal a fate.
Nobody on the dormitory road said hello to me, not the girls arm-in-arm chattering loudly, nor the ones pointedly strolling alone in poetic abstraction, nor the ones paired off with portly professorial types, chins stretched upward like birds hoping to catch morsels of predigested worm. In this world, I was invisible. If I stuck out, it was as someone not worth remembering.
Nonetheless, I moved slowly past each building on the campus, looking for some particular sign, some marker I would know when I saw it. Eventually, I gave up and headed back down the hill, but I told myself I would return soon, look around again. I am not the smartest woman, far from it, and yet I have a certain instinct for danger.
Five
THE BOY WAS WAITING in my room when I went up at the end of the evening. Exhaustion had pulled me from the lively conversation on the porch; my limbs felt heavy and tired as I climbed the stairs. He was propped against my pillows in the dark, playing his guitar.
Soft lemon light from the hallway dappled the floor. He sat up as I entered, lowered his feet off the bed, lifting the guitar with him so that he could continue strumming. Piles of our not-yet-stowed clothing sat on the single armchair. He nodded with a friendly, egalitarian air. “I wanted to ask. I bet you sing.”
“I’m very tired, Barry.”
“We play, we have a band, and Sally sings. We bet you do, too. We’re pretty good, it’s cool, Laurie jams with us when he comes up on weekends.”
“I don’t sing,” I said, jaw clenching.
“D’you play?” He had such an open face; no one had wounded him. In this bustling house, he knew only love.
“You should be in bed.” I knew my tone was cold. I placed a hand on the doorknob, pulled the door open wider.
“It’s fun. Think about it,” he said, standing, the guitar neck held easily in his right hand. He loped down the long, book-lined hallway to his room, the one nearest his parents’ domain at the front of the house. Oh, I envied him, with his safe bedroom and his long book-lined hallway and the dragonflies that blinked at his windows while crickets nattered outside—someone had taught him to play, not just guitar but with all of life’s niceties. I shoved the door shut with my hip, felt the definitive click as the knob settled into place, leaving me apart and separate.
As I got into bed, I felt the bedroom walls press in on me ever so slightly, like the light, loving palms I used to stroke my pregnant belly. God, I envied those children—but at least the house approved of me.
Six
TEN DAYS LATER, we could still be found at the Hymans’ house. The semester was in full swing and our daily habits had become, in their odd way, ordered and predictable.
Breakfast. Two shifts. First twelve-year-old Barry and the two professors, soft-boiled eggs and hot cereal, lightly browned toast spread with butter and marmalade. Shirley presided infrequently; it seemed to be a meal that made itself, although all detritus was the responsibility of the ladies left behind after the last door slam. By eight-thirty, the house was awash in a thick, peaceful silence, the only sounds the light pattersteps of Shirley’s cats, the ticking of the hall and kitchen clocks, and the low humming the icebox emitted.
I stayed in bed as long as I could. It was only September, but there was already a morning chill in the house that lingered until long after the sun began to glimmer at the mottled windowpanes. As I dozed, I would feel the way life purred through the house even in the stillness. With my head snug on a pillow against the wall, the house’s soul breathed with me, and through me, seeping into the baby’s rhythms and my own. I was sleeping better; I felt prepared for the eerie dreams when they came—I felt the house was talking to me, that it liked me and wanted me to know. And because the house liked me, because the house and Shirley liked me, I felt calm and appreciated, safe as I had never imagined I could be.
From the bed, I glimpsed the first reddish leaves drifting slowly through the air; the crisp scent of transformation had never before been so intense, so pleasant. Coffee had begun to taste good to me again; when I smelled the fresh pot, I tossed back the quilt and pulled on my robe. Downstairs, Shirley might already be at work, but if not we would sit and talk in morning murmurs, as if the baby inside me were asleep and not to be awakened. It was evident now, a taut panel across my belly, and I found it soothing to run my hands over it. The gesture invited every stranger to recognize my condition, and I liked that; I was less shy on the baby’s behalf already t
han I was on my own. I liked even more the way it felt to sit with Shirley, in silence, and wait—me for my baby to grow, and she for the abrupt jolt of inspiration that almost always began her workday.
When it came, whether she was at the dishes or staring out the window, cigarette in hand, or beginning to disjoint a raw chicken, she would matter-of-factly cease the activity—turn off the faucets, push back her chair, drop the knife on the counter—and leave the room. It was as if she were called, each morning, by a voice: Now, now . . . here we go . . .
I finished the kitchen chore she’d begun and headed upstairs to wash and dress. Fred’s gray argyle sweater was my outfit of choice on most mornings, worn over a light wool skirt that I told myself still looked okay, even though I could no longer pull the zipper all the way up or clasp the hook and eye at the waistband. Often, after dressing, I would fall asleep for another hour. I had never been so tired, so absolutely to-the-bone tired, in my entire life, I would think, as I rested against the pillows. I never had to wait for sleep. But after that second drowsing, my energy was high. It was time to walk into town and do the grocery shopping. The baby would be stroked by a number of friendly hands; I didn’t mind this invasive gesture, the depersonalization of me in service of the personalization of the life I carried. In fact, I found it comforting, a confirmation that my baby would matter in the world. And by extension, perhaps I would as well.
Funny how it was the life growing inside me that for the first time let me feel as if the story I was living was my own. Sometimes, watching Fred while he pored over student papers, red pen in hand, I would wonder if he had ever felt himself a hero. Even his scent was a gentle one; the slight musk at his neck in the morning was sweet to my nose. And the thoughtfulness with which he listened, the simplicity of his kindness: In his life, with Lou always present as the acerbic, confident twin, had my husband ever felt himself the star of his own story? I never asked him. The question seemed a cruel one, and he was so very kind to me. Perhaps I was wrong to be silent. But that’s easy to say now.
Shirley Page 4