Lady (29 page)

"No, mon. Never see no mo' Easter. Reckon they'll put me in the ground 'fore then."

He made a bowl with his palms in his lap and stared at them, like a seer divining the future in the creases and wrinkles, but the small repetitive shake of the head seemed to see no future there.

"Not so bad, though. We done better'n collards and chitlins and cabin-cookin'. Elthea cook a good dinner, Missus set a fine table. My, my, all that crystal glassware and silver spoons. Reckon how many silver spoons I polished in my day . . . silver spoons and forks and knives and trays and pitchers, and that one sugar bowl, who could say how many times? My, my, think of a island nigger in such a fine house. Wrote Daddy all about this house, he say, 'Boy, you doin' just fine.' Daddy say, Tou ain't a wasted man.' No, sir, no wasted man with no wasted life. Elthea, now, she's a good girl, don'tcha think so, son? Gives a lot, that Elthea. She a giver, all right. And Missus -- Lord, if she don't take the cake and the muffins, too, that Missus woman. Folks set a store by Missus, which is right an' fittin'. Right
an'
fittin'. . . ."

He crossed one leg over his knee, tugging his slipper over his woolen sock, gazing soberly but vacantly into space. After a while, taking notice of his slipper toe, he said, "Reckon how many stitches in such a slipper? Missus does fine needlework, agreed? Sewin' such a pair of slippers for Jesse."

He made a few ruminative sounds, as if assaying for his own satisfaction such a pair of slippers, and the Tightness and fitness of the town's esteem for Lady Harleigh. Closing his palms together, he pulled at the finger joints so they cracked in the musty silence, and he leaned his head back so his Adam's apple protruded to fuller prominence. He drew in a breath, then expelled it wearily, as if the next would be more tiredly drawn.

Without looking at me, he asked, "Son, whatcha gonna do with yourself? Still going to be a sailor? Read your Bowditch's, you want to be a sailor. But you got to get your schoolin', that's the thing."

"Why didn't you get to be a doctor?" I asked.

He scratched, rubbed his back against the chair slats like a luxuriating animal, and gave a tentative tug to his suspenders. I wondered why old sober-sided Jesse favored such colorful gear: the violet suspenders, one of his favorite pink and white striped shirts, a gold collar button winking in the hole, but no collar since he'd gotten ill -- it was as if he'd removed a badge of office. "Why-y," he drawled at last, "things . . . intervened, reckon. Sometimes there's things more important than just being something."

"Like what?"

"Like? Oh, like folks. Other folks can be more important. Anybody can be a doctor if they want to bad enough. Trouble with me . . ."

"Yes?"

". . . was a woman. There's a thing; a woman surely can be the downfall of a man, surely can. Upfall -- no such word, of course -- but sometimes she could be the upfall. The making of a man. Certain women make a man more a man than he'd otherwise attain to. But that's a rare creature indeed. A woman can be a good deal of trouble. There's sinning, and then there's
sinning
. Lord
God
, there's sinning!"

And then he was down on his knees, his hands clasped and lifted to the steam pipes above, while tears rolled down his cheeks and he mumbled an anguished prayer, "Lord God, help this poor sinner, help me, Lord," and his plea was fervent and I saw that he suffered. Then, still on his knees, without looking, he groped for my hand. I gave it to him and he clasped it hard, still mumbling to God, squeezing my fingers together, and I relished the pain of it.

"Where'll they bury me, Lord God, where'll they put me? Where'll they put old Jesse for his sins? Got to find me a spot, God -- got to find me some little place, God."

His tears made two silvery lines down the deep creases beside his nose, and the Adam's apple rose and dropped in the thin column of his neck. He looked at me with the same frantic expression he had offered to God.

"Son, listen -- God's going to turn his back on me. He's going to look away from me, won't take me, won't ever take me, but when I'm gone, you got to look after Missus . . . got to look after her. You do that for old Jesse, will you?"

"Yes, sir."

"You don't have to 'sir' me. You just make me that promise and Jesse'll die happy. Shake, son?"

"Shake, Jesse."

We made our ritual handshake. Then, drawing his neck into his shoulders, Jesse sagged, and before he could topple I caught him in my arms. The bony point of his chin notched against my shoulder, and he settled against me as if in gratitude. Flesh and bone seemed to have lost their weight, to have relinquished their ability to displace volume. He had no heft, he was like a log whose cortex has dried to pulp.

Holding him, I thought, Who is he, this sleepy dark man? Heavy-lidded, fuzzy-headed, red-eyed, what did I know about him? He had been a part of all our lives, we had at times slept under the same roof, had worked and eaten together, but he was a stranger in our midst. And what did we know of him, really, any of us? He was a person who in some indefinable way I could say I loved. If he died, I would be sad. I would miss him. But who was he, really? When he had gone what would I remember about him? With every tick of the clock he was nearer his end, but what would I have of him when he was dead? A boat ride on the river, a hunting trek in Hubbard's woods, a trip in the Minerva landaulet to hear Rudy Vallee, some Christmases and Thanksgivings, and he in his apron and slippers. Perhaps that was all I would remember of him, a pair of slippers padding in the halls, on the stairs, through the kitchen.

And when the time came, when he was gone, dead and buried, I remembered all of these things, but I came to discover that it is not always the larger things that we recall in someone, but the smaller. So it was that in afteryears I often recollected how he cracked and ate his morning egg, using his spoon just so, neat and dexterously, economically, with no wasted motions, a little daily breakfast surgery, and never with his pinkie finger sticking out.

Winter came on, if not apace, then by degrees, and if not with the harshness of the previous blizzard year, then with enough snow to give the semblance of winter. But what fell soon melted and by the time school let out for vacation all signs pointed toward no white Christmas.

Jesse had good days and bad, spent more time upstairs than he did down, but when down was affable and cheerful, as if in leaving this life he wanted to present as good a face as might be managed. One afternoon I heard him make a remark that I found odd, he who had never cared for cold weather.

"Wish it would snow," he said hopefully as I came in through the kitchen with an armload of evergreen boughs for Lady's mantel. All of us had been over through the afternoon helping with the usual pre-holiday procedures: setting the electric candles in the windows, swagging the doorway with its accustomed garlands, hanging the evergreens with Noma lights, rerouting most of the interior lamp wiring with clumps of three-way plugs, and seeking out the carol songbooks, which somehow were never in the piano bench where Lady always insisted they would be. We went over to Mr. Marini's to pick out the Christmas trees, one for our house and the larger one for Lady's, and these lay beside the respective driveways in readiness for Christmas Eve decorating. The titillating smell of baking hung in the kitchen as I stopped, hearing Jesse's remark, and Elthea, who was peeling rutabagas at the sink, tossed a look over her shoulder.

"Why, Jesse?" I asked.

"Why? Christmas comes, ought to be snow, oughtn't there? It's fittin' and proper." He was bundled into his old sweater, and wore his needlepoint slippers, and, as if in a way of maintaining his status in the household, was making a pretense of polishing the silver sugar bowl with a felt cloth. But as he replied his dark eyes had a twinkle in them, a light that I had not thought to see again, and I knew him well enough to realize there must be something behind his comment that I should be able to decipher. Just then Lew and Harry came in with more branches, and when they had passed through to the hallway I saw Elthea steal another look, first at me, then at Jesse.

"Jesse, honey, Indians have rainmakers for when it won't rain -- maybe what we need is a snowmaker."

He polished and growled and then said, "Got my heart set on one more Christmas with snow."

"That's what you say every year. You'll be saying the same thing in this same kitchen to that same boy next year, except he'll have grown a foot."

Jesse winked at me in secret complicity, though of what nature I had no idea, and I went through the door still wondering what he wanted with snow.

As always, he had his reasons, whose source was revealed when in fact snow did fall two days before Christmas Eve. This seemed to offer him satisfaction, and though he chose to remain upstairs that afternoon, Elthea said he was sitting by the window watching it come down. We all wondered what would happen if it continued; the plows would not be out on Christmas Eve. Later, and more mysteriously, Lady telephoned to say she would not be over for our traditional tree-trimming -- nor did she mention seeing us for hers, another odd thing -- but, immersed in the holiday activities at our own house, what with Nonnie's arrival home and the usual cheerful bustle her visits always provided, we forgot about both the snow and Lady until I heard a sound out in front, one unmistakable to my ear. Before anyone else could get to it I had rushed and flung open the front door.

"Anyone for a sleigh ride?" Lady called, bundled up beside Colonel Blatchley, whose chestnut mare was hitched between the shafts, the sleigh twinkling in the streetlight gleam. "Put on your things, come along while there's still snow!"

And so I finally got my sleigh ride, and having come so unlooked-for, it was the more memorable. The sleigh could take only four at a time, and I let the rest go first, one load, then another, while doors opened around the Green and the neighbors waved, and Gert Flagler tromped out on her stoop to see what the racket was about. At the end of each trip the sleigh deposited the passengers at Lady's doorway, then drove around to ours for the next load, and when it came my turn Lady arrived in the sleigh alone. The Colonel, she said, had gone in to mix the punch, and did I mind if just we two went?

I didn't mind.

She wore her fur coat and little fur hat, and when she had us bundled under a warm car blanket, she snapped the reins, the horse stepped smartly out, and off we went. Along Broad Street and then up to Main Street, past the church and the silent graveyard, down Main to the end, then off onto a country road whose path was unmarked by any former tracks.

If a sleigh ride in July is merely being taken for a ride, a hoax of sorts, my sleigh ride that December eve was none. With Lady Harleigh? It became one of my most memorable recollections. The darkened sky above, the snow falling lightly around us, the air tingling, pristine, the cold making my nostrils pinch, the jingle of the brass bells, the muffled beat of the horse's hoofs, the breath pouring from its nostrils like dragon's smoke, the feel of Lady's fur against my cheek, and in the cold the slight trace of her flower perfume; and if no fox came to view out in the whitened fields, nothing else was lacking. She was my Snow Queen, and I her willing prisoner.

We returned the way we had come, talking now and then, but mostly feeling the spell of the moment. I thought what a handsome town we had, how elegant the fronts of the houses along Main Street, with what care they were presented for the passers-by, their lighted doorways and windows and the colored lights over the trees and along the fences, green wreaths over the knockers fluttering red bows.

"Where would anyone live but here, if they could?" Lady said enthusiastically. If her feelings toward the owners of these houses was soon to alter, and theirs toward her, tonight all was as it should be, tonight it was as though the street itself were bidding us a happy Christmas.

We rounded the flagpole in front of the church, brightly lighted for Christmas Eve services, with the organ playing and the choir singing, and when we got to the cemetery drive, Lady turned the horse from the road and we glided in.

How still it was, how quiet. The tombstones rose darkly in rows and clusters, their tops catching the increasing fall of snow. Lady drew gently on the reins, slowed, then stopped the horse, and, handing the leads to me, she lifted the corner of the car robe and got out.

"Just for a moment," she said lightly, and I felt the cold air slide in under the blanket as she walked across the white space toward the stone marking Edward's resting place. In the flurrying snow and the pale light, I could just make out the dark shape of her figure as she stood motionless, looking down at the snow-blanketed grave. Behind her was the small rise of the ancient burying ground, with its markers like great, four-legged tables, where the earliest settlers lay buried.

"I must bring some winter cherries," she murmured when I helped her back into the sleigh and we continued along the snowy aisle between the graves, at last passing out onto the street again. "They're the only things that give color in this weather." I recalled the bowl of orange papery blooms like Japanese lanterns that had been on the table on the night of the "little veal-cutlet supper," the night of the first visit of the red-haired man.

As we circled the flagpole again, church was just letting out; the steps were thronged with worshipers being greeted by the minister and his wife.

"Merry Christmas!" we called, and they returned the greeting, all heads craning to see the charming sight of the sleigh and its driver, who waved her gloved hand and nodded as we went along. Lady grew serious as we passed from earshot of the jocund gathering, and again her hand sought mine and she squeezed my mittened fingers in hers. We came at last back to the Green, stretching away from us into a hazy infinity, but the snowfall was not heavy enough to obscure the height and breadth of the Great Elm, and again I felt the surge of pride and pleasure that this was our elm, the largest in the country, here in our little town. The wind had stolen away the final leaf, and its stripped but telling form rose grave and somnolent, venerable as ever.