In truth, I thought about my own mother more than my husband. I was consumed with two ideas. The first was a determination to be a far, far better mother than she had ever been to me. No screaming fights with my child’s father that had the neighbors hanging out their windows. No petty theft. No standing on the street watching while a landlord tossed shabby jackets and damp towels from a third-story window, so that everyone on the block knew precisely how paltry our belongings were, far more humiliating than that we couldn’t pay our rent.
I was going to show up for every teacher appointment, help with every science project. I was going to make sure my child had laundered clothes. I was going to clean his ears with a damp washcloth, and teach him which fork to use and how to set a table (as soon as I was certain of those rules myself).
And on the other hand, my pregnancy taught me something else. I became certain that my poor, pathetic mother loved me. To the best of her abilities and at superhuman cost. For all her failures, and they were many, I found it in myself to forgive her nearly everything. I thought about writing to her almost every day. She should know that I loved her, too.
I wanted to explain all this to Shirley. She, too, had a difficult mother—hers a judgmental, conventional socialite who was embarrassed by Shirley’s writings, Shirley’s weight, Shirley’s Jewish husband. I thought Shirley lucky, however; she’d been born into comfort and had the choice to rebel. Did she understand what a luxury that was? Working side by side with her, dusting and changing beds and folding laundry, I had the sense she knew where I’d come from, how frightened I had always been. Sometimes I believed she was the mother who was raising me all over again—to be self-confident and proud, fearless in my speech—and I was the daughter who treated her with honor, never moody or argumentative, always helpful. I knew myself to be less educated, slower on my verbal feet than Jannie and Sally, but I was certain I had them beat for domesticity.
• • •
IN THE AFTERNOONS, before I began to make dinner, I would amuse myself in the Hymans’ library, taking down one book after another to feel the nub of the leather against my palms. Stanley told Fred there were thirty thousand volumes on their shelves. Given the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in every downstairs room and along the hallways, I did not doubt him. There were books everywhere, piled on the side tables and by everybody’s beds and even stacked haphazardly on the floors. Sometimes Fred and I would find ourselves in front of a bookcase, stunned silent at the expanse of volumes. “How can I pick just one?” I asked Shirley one afternoon. She’d come in from a visit to Jannie’s dorm room to drop off clean sheets and towels, and her cheeks were unusually pink from the crisp September air. Dropping the bulging pillowcase of dirty clothes on a chair near the filigreed mirror in the front hall, she came into the library, perched on the sofa arm right by where I sat cross-legged on the floor, books scattered on the edges of my skirt. “Whatever I pick there’ll never be time to read them all!”
“How can you pick just one?” she echoed, selecting the nearest book. She still had her gloves on, but she opened it anyway, and began riffling the deckle-edged pages. “Pick it up and start reading. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t, pick another.”
“But what will I like?” I asked. When she was cheerful and chatty, like this, I twirled up on the inside as if I were made of the dust bunnies I’d startled when I sat down. All I wanted was to keep her with me, grinning and friendly.
“Try this one,” she said. “Maybe you were meant to be a witch.”
“Me? I don’t think so!” It was an oversized black book with gold lettering, the size of a photo album. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. “You don’t actually believe this, do you? I mean, it’s more of a joke, isn’t it?”
Shirley pulled a few more witchcraft titles off a shelf and handed them to me. “For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”
“Shakespeare,” I said, triumphant.
She paid no attention, as if such a realization were so fundamental as to be unworthy of notice. I opened the first book, felt the coarse weave of the ancient pages. “I’ll read it, I’ll join your—what do they call it?—your coven.”
She looked delighted. “We’ll make a spell for an easy childbirth.” For a moment I imagined she might really have her own club of witches, hold meetings out in the backyard where the old elm stump could serve as a perfect altar. I’d been told it was the bar for impromptu summer parties, but I liked this idea far better.
I laughed out loud, charmed, wishing this were possible. “A coven of housewives,” Shirley murmured, and I could see she’d begun to mull with the intensity that meant she’d slipped into her writer’s mind. “Methinks we’ve stumbled onto a rather intriguing idea,” she said, drawing the pencil from her bun so that hair spilled to her shoulders lankly as she crossed over to her desk.
The second book was foxed and worn along the spine, caramelized tape at the top where the leather had split. I opened it carefully: published in 1931, its glossy pages were crumbling at the edges. Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy. I would have asked her where it came from and what she’d learned from it, but she was busy adjusting a piece of yellow typing paper against the paper table, and I knew there was no point.
The typewriter’s clacking began almost immediately. I sighed, closed the book, but not before I saw that there were pages of beautiful prints inside, of fiends sculpted onto the face of churches, oily creases along cheeks and foreheads, demons engraved or painted or drawn by hand. Would that I were an artist and could create such images. To make something beautiful: oh, that seemed the epitome of accomplishment! I ran a hand around the curve of my belly.
As I straightened the stacks of books, I imagined the house watching over us—Shirley still wearing her buffalo plaid jacket, a cigarette in hand as she hunched at the typewriter; and me, cross-legged, using books like children’s blocks to erect a circle of guardians around me. I leaned back against the shelves, watched the rosy beige of the wall as it peeked out between the rows of African masks across from me. I swear the walls glowed approvingly as I lingered there, Witchcraft, Magic & Alchemy on my lap.
I could learn witchcraft, I told myself, with a delicious rebellious thrill. Fred intended to provide our baby with material comforts, a settled place in the world. I’d not need magic, of course, any more than Shirley did. But what power it could give me. I opened the book, began to read in earnest.
• • •
I REMEMBER ONE MORNING, early that October, when Stanley returned home around ten or ten-thirty in order to pick up some books he needed for the reading seminar that afternoon. Shirley was in the library, deep into a nearly constant clickety-clackety typing. The ideas were flowing. She’d exited the kitchen an hour before, without warning, when I’d picked up someone’s half-eaten toast and begun to chew it with ashamed enthusiasm, saying, “I always believe in eating when I can.”
Her smile widened—I felt thrilled when I amused her so—and she nodded, and then removed her apron, repeating, “I always believe in eating when I can.” “I’m silly,” I said, and she answered, “You’re a funny child.” I was inexplicably happy as I washed the dishes and dried them, replacing the bowls and plates on the shelves in their harum-scarum arrangement.
Stanley’s breath was warm against my hair; he’d come up behind me, and I jumped, cheerfully exclaiming in surprise.
“Shh,” he said. “She’s hard at it.”
He placed his fingers lightly on either of my forearms. Shaving cream had dried in a dot just below his right eyebrow, and I could see the black of the pores in his wide, ruddy face. I wanted to wipe my damp hands on the dish towel I held, but I did not want to know if he would grasp me harder if I moved, and so I remained as still as I could while his eyes grazed over the surface of my face.
“Beautiful Rosie,” Stanley said. I suppose that women who are often called beautiful have no idea what th
e rest of us feel like when we hear it, but there are no other syllables so charged. Beautiful. That word easily makes a woman so.
The typing paused. Stanley let go, moved easily past me to the kitchen counter and the pile of books he’d left there earlier.
Shirley’s fingers began to tap at the typewriter once again.
“You’re good for her,” he said.
“I am?”
He opened the topmost book, flipped the pages with great attention. “Last year,” he said, placing a finger on the text to mark his place, “she couldn’t leave the house. At all.”
“Why? What happened? She seems so—she seems fine. To me. I mean.”
“She was frightened. Of the women in the village, of the students. She was ill. That’s what it was. Dr. Toolan thinks she was depressed. But she’s much better since you came here.”
“I haven’t done anything,” I said.
“You give her someone safe to talk to.” I didn’t respond. Stanley raised an eyebrow at my expression, went on to explain himself. “Someone who isn’t thinking about the gossip here. Gossip at the college or in the village.”
“Gossip?” I asked.
He put his books under his arms and gave me a sweet, self-deprecating smile. In that moment, I could see again how a woman might find him handsome. “There’s never smoke without fire, as the old saw goes.”
I waited, trying to ignore the tight way my throat closed.
“But we’re fine now. It’s over.”
Shirley’s typing slowed, and he glanced toward the door, more alert to that sound than any other. “Thank you, Rose,” he said. And that was it. When the door slammed behind him, Shirley’s typing took up its earlier pace. I think she typed straight through until about three o’clock, stopping only when she needed to insert a fresh sheet of paper. Later, as I was about to start dinner, I went to the study door and she was deep in thought, a pencil in hand, poring over a small stack of yellow pages. She looked exhausted but not worn. Happiness in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her glasses, the bend of her neck. I decided not to ask her my question, just to use the potatoes and leave rice for the next evening.
• • •
ALREADY MY RELATIONSHIP with Fred was free of that adolescent engrossment that had marked our first months. Our connection felt matter-of-fact and permanent; he was safety. But he and Stanley didn’t interest me that much. And that’s what we’d become: me and Shirley; he and Stanley. They talked and talked and talked. To be honest, I felt bewildered at the way they thought about literature. I thought of myself as someone who loved to read. But when I listened to Fred and Stanley, I was confused by what they found in books. They rootled around so deep inside what they called “text” that all the story seemed to disappear. Everything I enjoyed was gone. And, though I never said this aloud, it seemed to me that whatever they were doing to stories was unkind and put a distance between what I believed any writer intended—entertainment—and the reader lucky enough to find that particular book.
Fred and Stanley often stayed up so late, talking, that I didn’t even hear my husband come to bed. In our room, I found his scrawled-on yellow legal pads, half the pages written on and turned over, page after page of Stanley’s thoughts and Fred’s thoughts about them, the outpouring of feverishly connected minds. I never tried to decipher the scrawls. Not only was I not interested, I also felt that what they were doing had some unpleasant effect on the child inside me, as if their diligent dissection might distract the nascent being, turn it from a path of pleasure and fantasy to one of surgical analysis.
I heard them talking Shakespeare. Also Freud and Darwin, sometimes Nathanael West and Flannery O’Connor, but always coming back to Iago. Iago, Iago, Iago, until the thought of Shakespeare’s villain brought Stanley’s affable face to mind.
They sat at the dining room table—long after the rest of us had moved on, to the dishes, to the porch, or off to homework (Barry) or murder mysteries (Shirley)—discussing Darwin and Freud and Shakespeare. Stanley remained troubled by Iago, about how best to interpret his motivation. They returned to this subject again and again, so that even I began to understand what it was that they pondered so deeply. They were enamored of the notion of pluralist criticism, had concluded it was unethical, if not impossible, to consider a text simply from one critical point of view. The core of Othello is the question of Iago’s motivation: Why does he lie about Desdemona’s faithfulness? What is his purpose? The whole play hinges on this question. So how to read him?
Stanley: “Is Iago a stage villain? The devil? An artist? A Machiavellian? A latent homosexual in love with his best friend and leader?”
Fred: “He’s all of them, isn’t that what you said?”
Shirley, calling from the living room, standing as she did so, this argument interesting enough to call her from Cat Among the Pigeons: “He’s the devil.”
Stanley: “You dub him the Elizabethan era’s James Harris?”
Shirley: “Most certainly.”
Me, dishcloth in hand, from the kitchen doorway: “Why?”
She: “Because that’s the way Shakespeare wrote him. So will I turn her virtue into pitch.”
It seemed Shirley and Stanley had every line of every work of literature locked accurately in memory. Usually both of them recalled identically, but when there was disagreement, Stanley turned out to be the one with the more precise recollection. He was also, and this is not meant as a criticism of Fred, the one most inventive with the question of how to dissect text. Iago, in Stanley’s view, could be understood only if one used a plurality of critical techniques. Fred soaked in Stanley’s words, nodding over and over as Iago’s motivation was re-dissected through the psychoanalytic view, through symbolism and theology, and through the history of the play itself and of the folklore roots of the fundamental story. Fred, who was already growing a scrubby beard just like Stanley’s, would sit at the table, scribbling down sentences as fast as Stanley spewed them. They drank copious amounts of Scotch, and occasionally—without warning—began to spout dirty limericks until they laughed so hard that Stanley started pounding the table.
Shirley always liked those moments the most. She would put her Agatha Christie or P. D. James down on the chair arm and head back into the dining room, pouring herself another Scotch as if the glass with the melted cubes she’d left in the living room weren’t hers. She was happiest, I thought, when she could let words patter down around her, landing and glancing off her upturned face. If he could make her laugh, keep her entertained, Stanley would push himself to greater effort, saliva glistening on his tongue and lips, red-faced. And when the guffaws died, he was always the one to give that last wistful chuckle, as if he already missed how happy he’d been. “Scotch, Shirley! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, Shoil, if only we had more of it!” And he would pour into whichever glass he could reach, liquor splashing on the tablecloth. And then he’d sigh, longing for more afterglow before raising the refilled glass to his lips.
Both the Hymans could drink a hell of a lot more than anyone else I knew. She popped pills, too, Dexies to wake up and something else to fall asleep, and there were candy dishes with pills in them in the kitchen and by her bedside. Once or twice, I’d heard her offer a Dexedrine to one of the girls, to help with focus when studying for a test.
But she never, ever seemed out of it. Never drunk, never high. He ranged across so many enthused states of an evening that it was dizzying, but not her. Once in a great while, she got angry and left the room, but she did it quietly, in a kind of grand, noble gesture. For a big and untidy woman, she could be most regal.
This brings us to an evening in mid-October. It had to be a weeknight, because Jannie was on campus and Sally back at her boarding school in Boston. Twelve-year-old Barry was upstairs, supposedly doing homework, but I could hear the vibrato of guitar strings as I walked past his room on my way back downstairs after
using the bathroom.
The phone had rung several times during dinner, as often happened. No one answered it. This was also a normal occurrence. But tonight, perhaps because it was chilly and the wind was high, there had seemed to be a greater level of tension about this than usual.
As I held the banister in my right hand, heading down the stairs, I heard the ringing start again. Shirley was already in the parlor, the men were still at the table, still arguing the logic without end of their eternal debate. The phone rang and rang, perhaps ten rings, and then stopped. In a moment, it started again.
Stanley and Fred continued talking, raising their voices above the ringing phone without paying the slightest attention. I walked past the open door and into the parlor, where Shirley sat stiffly in her chair, head cocked to the side.
“He might as well take the call.”
“Excuse me?”
She cracked the back of her mystery and opened it up. “He might as well take her call.”
I said, “Who is it?”
She studied me as if I were either very stupid or extremely naïve.
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“You don’t,” she said. “And it’s delightful, in its way.” She opened her book. It seemed she had begun to read, but then she closed it, sighed, and asked if I felt like taking a walk.
She was often out of breath from the simple act of climbing the stairs, so this surprised me. I nodded, yes, and offered to get both our coats. Shirley’s was a well-worn but still luxurious mink; I liked to bury my face in it whenever I went to the closet. She treasured it, I know, perhaps as much I did my fine blue wool. We went out the front. Somehow she was always able to open that sticky door; I never could, and always used the kitchen entrance when I was alone.
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