Lady (39 page)

"She's as well as may be expected," her letter ran, "but she's been in and out of the hospital half a dozen times since May. And it's been so hot. Dr. Brainard says she is holding her own as best as can be hoped for. She seems so different to me. She talks a lot about her mother. I don't think she liked her very much. She don't seem to want to sit quiet or still for long. She keeps pulling at her dresses and puts on and takes off her bracelets all the time. Sometimes I don't understand her so good, but most of the time I do. Lots of times she sees a ghost -- I think it's her dead husband. She don't want to pay attention to things like the war. The news about your brother upset her real bad, and she always asks when you are coming home."

The report of Lew's death at the Anzio beachhead had come to me through official channels. It had been a bitter blow to me, to all of us, and I knew how badly Lady would take it, but there had been no shielding her from it. It was Miss Berry who had gone and told her. Aggie had written that Miss Berry was up and around again, as well as ever.

When I came home that winter, I saw immediately the changes in Lady that Helen had mentioned. As I walked into her bedroom, she darted Helen a blank look, then put on a party smile. "Here's a nice young man come to see me." She regarded me brightly, but I realized she had no idea who I was. I came across the room and stood by her bed. "Yes, young man? You're in the Navy, is that it? Does your mother have a star in a window?"

"Yes." I bent and kissed her. She drew back with a sudden swift realization, her eyes brightening. "Is it you?"

She knew me then. Helen left the room, and I drew up the chair beside her bed. Honey lay on the rug, half under the dust ruffle of the bed, as if trying to get as close to her mistress as possible, and looked out at me with great, limpid eyes. Surely the dog knew that Lady would not be with us for long, surely she was as sorrowful as I. Even with Helen's warning, I was not prepared for the change in Lady. While I had been in the Marianas, at Saipan and Tinian, she had aged considerably. Though her skin remained unlined, with hardly any wrinkles, it was drawn tight across the bone structure, and had the bluish glint of the long-ill. Her hair had gone completely gray, and though it was still looked after with care -- Helen's work, I supposed -- she was not the Lady I remembered. Her nose thrust out with beakier prominence, and I was more aware of the bump below the bridge.

"Well, what have you been reading"?" I asked lightly, noting several books on the night table.

"Oh, those -- it's something called Forever -- something. I can't remember. It's about a trollop. I can't see the print. The girl doesn't read to me so well."

"Would you like me to?" The book was
Forever Amber
.

"Yes. But not that one. Take those back to -- what's her name -- Miss Shedd? and see what else she has."

"Did Miss Shedd pick these out for you?"

"Don't ask me things like that. I don't
know
. I only know they're unreadable."

"All right -- 'not to worry, not to fret.'"

"You." She pushed her hand weakly and playfully at me, and I made conversation as I might, telling her where I had been and how it had gone, and delving for whatever there might be amusing for her in it all. There was little. The war was in its third year, and though, since the battle of Leyte Gulf, they said the tide was slowly turning, for us it didn't turn fast or far enough.

Whatever talk she initiated on her own dealt either with her mother or with the wartime shortages, which she found a continuing nuisance.

"Imagine, Helen can't even bake -- there's no chocolate, no sugar, no anything."

"Try it with honey. That's what Mother does. And you can still get coconut."

Helen came in with Lady's dinner. I started to get up, but she signaled me to stay seated.

"We've got meat tonight, Mrs. Harleigh," Helen said cheerfully, with a look at me. "Aren't we lucky? Mr. Andersen at the A. & P. got some beef, and he saved some for us."

"Meat? Meat? What sort of meat?" Lady lifted the silver warming lid and looked at the plate. "What on earth is
that
?

"Rump roast! I can't eat rump roast."

"Of course you can. Woody will stay while you eat it. And don't you go feeding it to him; he gets plenty of beef in the Navy, isn't that so?" She fixed me with a look.

When Helen had gone, Lady picked at the carefully prepared food, but ate little. I didn't urge her.

After a while she went into a doze, and the tray tilted on her lap. I removed it, then stretched my back, which had been giving me trouble since Tulagi. I stood at the window, looking down across the Cove, at the yacht-club docks, empty of boats, the houses with their smoking chimneys, the barren trees, and, beyond, the bleak country roads, winding through white fields, snowy fields where foxes made their lairs, and the wind sang old songs.

Down in Lady's back yard I saw that someone had neglected to bring in the gazing-globe. In the frozen garden leaf blankets protected the un-hardy perennials, shrubs were tented with stakes and burlap. What greens remained were shriveled, their leaves cringing against the cold. The icy walkway of brick, laid so carefully under Jesse's meticulous hand, still led precisely to the carefully laid-out circle of cemented brick, the vessel-shaped stone pedestal at its center, and, resting on its curved lip, the gazing-globe.

Dimly gleaming amid the frost-blue shadows, it seemed a small silver planet, orbitless, fixed, immutable, yet all-seeing, potent, and hypnotic, the harborer of secrets past and future. A fragile yet enduring sight, familiar and evocative, and I thought I could not remember a time when it had not been so.

Lady stirred, and asked what I had been looking at; I felt she had been observing me for some time. When I said it was the gazing-globe, she fretted, saying Rabbit was careless, didn't he know it could crack in the cold?

"Go," she commanded, "go and get it. Bring it here. I want it where I can see it. I never get to see my garden anymore. What's the sense of things if they can't be used!"

So I brought the gazing-globe in, and set the nub in a vase on her dressing table, where the globe shone before her mirror and among the glass perfume bottles and her ivory vanity set.

"There," I said, "is that better?" But she was crying, wringing her hands together and twisting her head on the pillow. I sat and tried to calm her. "What is it?" I asked, turning her troubled face to me.

"It's a terrible thing -- me -- alive. Why can't I die? How terrible that Lew should die, and I must go on living. God can be so cruel --"

I had hoped to avoid talking about Lew. I didn't know what to say, her tears upset me so. Her expression became fretful again as she turned her eyes back to the gazing-globe on the dressing table.

"It's the goblin's mirror, all of it, isn't it?" She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I didn't want to see things in the goblin's mirror. Ugly people doing ugly things. How ugly it all is --"

"What is?"

"Today. The world. The war. Ugly, ugly, ugly." She pounded her fists on her thighs. I tried to restrain her, but she thrust my hands from her, and threw her head back with a forlorn cry.

"Oh, I am a vain and foolish woman. Yes, foolish. I have wanted the esteem of the world, and why? Tell me, for what?"

She sobbed and would not be consoled. Then, face contorted, eyes streaming, she turned her head to me and groped for my hand.

"I have done terrible things in my life -- dreadful things."

No, I said, and no again, but it was no use. I brought the nurse, who gave her a sedative, and at last she fell into an exhausted, murmuring doze.

We drew the blackout curtains, and while the nurse knitted in the chair, I sat on the foot of the wicker chaise, wondering at what Lady had said. In the curve of the gazing-globe I could see her distantly reflected, her head moving on the pillow and illuminated by the bedside lamp. Friend of my youth, not old even now, yet dying, but unable to die. Dying in the bed she had shared with Jesse Griffin, whose memory possessed her now as Edward Harleigh's had before. Guilt, and guilt. Ugly, and ugly. But "terrible, dreadful things"? Yes, she had been vain, perhaps even foolish, but, still seeing her reflection, I thought that it was as someone had written, "the best mirror is an old friend." Nothing she had done or could do would be terrible or dreadful to me.

It was her sad way of looking at her life, as the globe was a way of looking at images, at all of life, at the world. And again I saw what she had wanted me to see, that in the globe all continued in one unbroken line; there was continuance in time and space, and in existence. Infinity into eternity. And I thought perhaps that was why the Snow Queen in the story had set Kay his task, and why he could not do it; because "Eternity" could not be spelled from broken bits, but must come of its own accord and of one unbroken piece.

Later, I sat in the kitchen talking with Helen Zelinski. It was pleasant having a quiet moment, and it seemed to me, as we sat in the pool of light spreading over the old table, that the shadowy forms of Jesse and Elthea Griffin hovered somewhere around the edges, she coming from the pantry with a loaf of fresh-baked bread, he from the cellar in his slippers. It spoke to me of the years that had gone, and I thought I could sit there forever, content never to leave that friendly old room.

Just before suppertime Rabbit's truck pulled into the drive. Aggie was with him; they had been cleaning his mink cages and were cold and tired. Rabbit had brought two skinned hares to help his mother with the meat shortage.

"Oh, dear," Helen said doubtfully, "I doubt Mrs. Harleigh'd eat rabbit. Maybe I can fix it so she'll think it's chicken."

I could see that Rabbit was envious of my uniform, and he asked a lot of questions about shipboard life, and fighting in the Pacific. I really didn't want to talk about the war. As I got up to leave, there was a hurried knocking on the back door, and when Helen opened it we found Porter Sprague blustering on the threshold.

"Someone left their lights going. That your truck out there?" he said sternly to Rabbit. He had on a tin hat and a Civil Defense band certifying him as an air-raid warden. Rabbit ran out to douse his lights while Mr. Sprague made official noises and jotted a note on a little pad.

"Just for the record. You home on leave?" he said to me. "That's some fruit salad you have there." He leaned to view my chest ribbons and I had to explain to him what each one was.

"I'd be out there myself, if they'd let me," he told the room at large. "I was with the i39th in France, y'know." Rabbit came back and resumed his chair without saying anything. "I wish all you boys could know," Mr. Sprague banged on, "that we're doing what we can right here on the home front. The Spouse is a spotter, y'know -- plane-spotter. Every night, over there on the dike, don't matter what the weather. Too bad about those eyes," he said to Rabbit in a commiserating tone. He was as falsely hearty as ever; some people never change, I thought.

"How's Mrs. Harleigh doing?" he demanded of Helen.

"As well as can be expected," she replied mildly.

"Well, now, that's fine, just fine. You tell her Porter Sprague and Spouse send best regards. Hope she'll be up and around soon. Tell her we speak of her often, Spouse and I. How is your little girl, anyway? We never should have listened to that child." He polished the dome of his tin hat on the sleeve of his mackinaw, and replaced it. "Well, have to finish my rounds -- two rounds a night, all around the Green. Amazing how old Miss Berry goes on, isn't it? Say --" He fumbled in his pocket, took out a bill, and pressed it into my hand. "You have a couple of beers on P. J. Sprague and Spouse when you get back to -- well, wherever you're going. And slap that Jap, eh?"

Chuckling over his joke, he went out. Helen got up and closed the inner door.

"What did he mean about Dora? About listening to her?"

I looked at Rabbit and Ag, not knowing what to say. Rabbit said, "Who cares? You know how he is."

"No, I don't know how he is. What did he mean?"

"Forget it, Helen," I said, getting up and ostentatiously looking at the watch Lady had given me for graduation.

"I won't forget it -- I want to know." Helen was trying to hold in her anger, and she was fearful at the same time, realizing that we were covering something up.

Ag spoke. "I think she has a right to know. It would be better for her."

I sat again, and told what I remembered of the poison-pen letters, of Dora's part in the affair, and of Jesse's death on the railroad tracks that day. When I finished, Helen was leaning her elbows on the table, crying.

"Dora did that? It's awful." She was aghast that it should have been her own child who had caused the misfortune. It was a terribly painful scene.

Undressing for bed that night, I looked at the money Mr. Sprague had pressed on me for "a couple of beers." It was a twenty-dollar bill. Well, I thought, it was a generous gesture, anyway. Maybe some people do change. Even so, it was difficult to think of him as anything but a cocky old blowhard, still trying to be a big frog in a small pond.

Years later, when I came home after the war, walking past their house on Main Street one evening, I saw a light in the living room. Impulsively I crept across the lawn and sneaked a look through the living-room window. He was sitting in a chair, while Mrs. Sprague sat on the sofa sewing. They were conversing quietly, but with animated interest. Then he got up and, passing the sofa to go into the hallway, he bent, kissed her on the cheek, and gave her hand a fond pat. They must have been in their seventies by then. Birds of a feather, I thought, but it was a nice thing for him to do.

Next day I took Lady's books back to the library and asked Miss Shedd (still Miss Shedd; she hadn't changed) to see if she couldn't find something amusing or interesting. She found me a Bennett Cerf humor anthology, and an H. Allen Smith, and before I left she leaned across her counter and kissed my cheek. There were tears in her eyes. Whoever thought old Miss Shedd was capable of that kind of emotion? "Keep safe," she said as I left.