Lady (40 page)

I thought of the day I'd rediscovered Teresa Marini, over at the corner table, talking with Cookie Bunder. They were both away at college, Cookie at Swarthmore, Teresa in California. I had gone to the Marini farm and visited for an hour, while Mama Marini stuffed me with half of the dinner she was preparing. Teresa was living with her uncle, who had a vineyard outside of San Francisco, and she was studying to be a dental technician.

But there were other girls around. I found half a dozen of them at the drugstore. They were older, though, classmates of Harry's and Lew's, and most of them I knew only by name. But they looked pretty in their matching sweaters and cardigans, their bobbysocks and plaid skirts, with their hair parted and rolled in the pageboys that were currently fashionable. One I knew was Marge Harrelson, who'd been Lew's girl. She talked with me at the soda fountain. She didn't cry, but Ag had told me she'd had a tough time after Lew was killed. As we spoke, she kept touching the sleeve of my sweater, and I suddenly realized it must have been as familiar to her as it was to me, because it was one of Lew's. Leaving, I asked her if she'd like to have it. I took it to her the day I went to report for duty again.

When I'd taken the books to Helen to give to Lady, I went across the Green to call on Miss Berry. She felt, she said, right as rain, and she looked it. We sat in her sun porch, talking -- the clusters of dogs moving around us, the canary in its cage, the sansevieria plant in the blue pot which had been in her window ever since I could remember. Her furniture looked the same: chairs well sat in, carpets heavily walked on, the plants tended, figurines of painted porcelain, no pictures to speak of. She had to explain the pedigree of the latest dogs, which had sired which, which had died. Like the Great Elm out the windows, like Miss Berry herself, it seemed the dogs would go on forever.

We spoke of Honey, Lady's dog that had been P. J. Sprague's. I said poor Honey must be seeing her last days, she moped around so, but certainly not from old age. We figured out that Honey must be almost ten, which wasn't old for a dog.

"What happened to the dog you gave Lady?" I asked her.

"That dog -- that dog was a little Yorkie -- Yorkshire terrier, don't you know. Pretty little thing. Adelaide was so fond of him."

Yes, I said, I knew that, but what happened to it? Something to do with Edward Harleigh . . .

"Yes, I's'pose," she remarked halfheartedly, and was in no way inclined to pursue the subject. "Adelaide's doing none too well, is she? Poor girl, poor dear girl." Her sigh was despondent; not like Miss Berry at all, I thought. "So young -- so young to go. And to suffer so."

We spoke at length of our friend over in the brick house, but of the little dog not another word was mentioned until we stood at the door saying our goodbyes. As Miss Shedd had done earlier, she kissed my cheek, though her eyes did not tear. Miss Berry never allowed herself the luxury of tears. "When you come back, safe and sound, then we'll sit and have a nice long talk." I thought then there were things she wanted to tell me, but many years were to pass before Miss Berry and I had that talk.

The door closed, and as I stood looking at the Great Elm -- that never seemed to change, either -- a car shot from my left and careened into the drive, narrowly missing the phone pole. It was Gert Flagler, the car was a 1938 De Soto. She managed to more or less straighten it as she jerked to a stop and got out. She was wearing one of her round felt hats, and a butt-sprung tweed skirt with enough yardage for two, and the inevitable brogans, and she swung her great pocketbook with the same old gusto. But I detected a change in her attitude, a slight embarrassment as she ducked her head and put out her paw. "You're home. Glad to see you," she boomed, giving my hand a hefty shake. "Some war. Did you have a visit with Mary?"

I said I had, and was happy to see Miss Berry in good health again.

"I tell her she's immortal. Me, I'll kick off any day that comes around, but Mary, she's going to live forever." She plucked off her hat, blew out her cheeks, and rumpled her hair as she looked at her door front. "We've been living here almost forty years this spring. A long time. Poor Mary cooped up for forty years with an old thing like me. I dunno how she's put up with it." She turned and gave me a perplexed look, one of sudden discovery. "You think I'm just an old fool -- all you kids thought Gert Flagler's just a fat, old fool." I started to protest, but her upraised hand silenced me. "I know, I know. I never was nice to you kids. Didn't know how to be. Scared hell out of me, you did. But I liked you all, honest, if you --"

She shook her head wonderingly, clasping her pocketbook against her chest.

"If what, Mrs. Flagler?"

"If you hadn't always been riding that damn cow. Made her milk go sour, y'know. Still, I liked havin' you kids around -- I miss you now."

It was another twenty months before I came home again, in early August of 1945. The European war was finished, and by then people were saying it would soon be over in the Pacific as well, but our troops were bogged down on Okinawa, and predictions were that the Marines would have to take Tokyo on foot through the rice paddies.

I had been sent to Officers' Training School and been commissioned as an ensign, and assigned to a destroyer which was on "bird-dog" duty in the China Sea, in the Ryukyu Islands, patrolling the waters for downed fliers. Somehow, in that pocket of the globe, a letter reached me. It was from Helen Zelinski. She hoped I was safe, and that the war would be over soon. Then, without further preamble, she gave me the tragic news about her son.

For the past year Rabbit Hornaday had been working for a trucking company over in West Farms, running the route from Boston to Hartford. He was bringing down a load of canned goods from Crosse & Blackwell, and it being a cold night he turned on the heater in the truck. His glasses had steamed before he realized it and, missing a turn, the truck slipped from the road down an incline. He was pinned in the wreckage for eleven hours before he was found. They had had to amputate both legs.

The rest of Helen's letter held no better news. Honey, the setter dog, was dead; had been run over in the roadway by a speeding motorist. This was before Rabbit's accident, and he, being there at the time, had tried to save the animal, but had not succeeded. Lady was inconsolable. As might have been expected, she was much worse. The transfusions were being continued, but with no greater ease. She found little relief from her pain, and in the past year, to everyone's amazement, she had become a difficult patient. In the hospital she had actually slapped a nurse, and the nurse had quit the case. Another she threatened with her cane because the nurse "bustled and was too sunshiny." Dr. Brainard thought a nursing home might be the answer, but Helen, who had moved into a position of supreme authority in matters regarding Lady, had vetoed the proposal. If Mrs. Harleigh could come home again, Helen would take complete charge. Round-the-clock nurses had been hired.

"Half the time," Helen's letter continued, "she don't recognize anybody, of course. She often calls me 'Anna,' which was her mother's name. One morning she got away from the nurse and somehow got down to the kitchen. This was before Harold's accident and he was having a sandwich. Mrs. Harleigh shook her cane at him and we thought she was going to hit him. 'Don't you work?' she yelled at him, and when Rabbit said he was taking down the storm windows she got very red and said, Well, get on with it, then, and stop sitting around on your -- -- ' (you know that word) 'Jesse never loafed around here.' It really was awful, Woody, it took three of us to get her back to bed again. Another time, when she rang her bell and the nurse didn't come, she threw a bottle at her dressing table. You know how she always keeps that gazing-globe on it. Well, the bottle just missed the gazing-globe, but it broke the mirror behind. And it upsets her that one of the nurses is a Negro. She says strange things about her, and I know if the nurse, Mrs. Johnson, hears them, she'll leave. And Mrs. Harleigh
needs
her. The doctor says she may go on like this for a long time, or that she could die any moment. And she's doing very strange things. I begged the nurses not to tell anyone out of the house about this, but because you're so close to her I think you ought to know.

"She keeps talking to her dead husband -- you know, Edward? She still sees a ghost -- I mean she really
sees it
. She talks to it all the time. It's awful strange. Then, sometimes she's perfectly herself and makes sense. She likes to have the gazing-globe put beside her bed and she stares into it, but she tries to cover the reflection of her face with her thumb.

"The nights are the worst, and Dr. Brainard has had to come over several times and give her a shot to quiet her. Once she found a shotgun in a closet and aimed it at the doctor when he came in. She kept saying he was Mr. Ott and she would kill him. Nobody could figure out who Mr. Ott is. When she's making sense, she asks about you and wants to know when you're coming home. I just hope she doesn't die before you get here. The doctor wants to put her back in the hospital again."

All of this I discussed with Teresa Marini when I found her, by accident, in San Francisco. Our ship returned to San Diego, and I was sent briefly to Treasure Island to have my back examined, and I came across Teresa in the De Young Museum. She had spent the early summer at her vintner uncle's, and was leaving at the end of the week for Pequot Landing. Since I was being granted leave, I arranged through friends to secure two priority plane seats, making sure they were side by side, and Teresa and I traveled to New York together, then took the train to Lamentation Mountain. A few days before we arrived, they dropped the bombs, first on Hiroshima, then on Nagasaki, and everyone was saying the war would end there and then.

If anything, Teresa had become more beautiful since I'd seen her last, and I planned on seeing a lot of her during my leave. She had other news of home. Dottie Frame had married an Air Corps pilot, and had gone with him to Georgia, then had left him four months later, and was now back in town. Jack and Phil Harrelson were due to return from Europe at any time, as was Teresa's brother Johnny. Rabbit Hornaday was bitter about his accident and wouldn't talk to anyone, except my sister, Agnes. Agnes was spending most of her time at Mrs. Hornaday's; he was recuperating there, going no farther than from his bed to the porch, where he watched the freights go by.

Agnes met us in Ma's car at Lamentation. She said Lady was having a bad day, and the nurse had asked that I come in the evening. We dropped Teresa at the Marini farm; then Ag and I drove to our house, where I had a happy reunion with Ma, Kerney, and Nancy. Kerney had shot up, and his voice made me laugh, it had gotten so deep. He had cut himself shaving and had a Band-Aid on his neck. Nancy looked the same. Ma was so relieved to have me home that while we sat on the sofa she never let go of my hand. The telephone rang; it was Helen Zelinski calling to say that Lady Harleigh was awake and that I might come over.

I scarcely recognized her, the change was so great. It is not a pleasant thing to see someone you love wither before your eyes, to alter little by little, or even greatly, as she had periodically from visit to visit, month to month, year to year. She was a diminished creature, and now there could be no doubt of it; she was dying.

But she knew me. I took her hand and held it in my two, then her other one came up and touched my cheek. She was crying.

"Have you come home?"

"Yes."

"For good? Are you safe?"

"Yes, I'm safe."

"Oh, my dear, my dear." Her hand felt soft and warm on my cheek. "I was afraid I wouldn't be here when you came." She made an effort to stop the trembling in her voice.

"How handsome you've grown. And an officer, too -- all those ribbons. Your mother must be very glad. What is this bomb they've dropped on the Japs? Was it a big explosion?"

I told her what little I knew, assuring her again that I was all right and that the war would soon be over.

"It will be such a relief. I haven't been able to bake, you know, there's been no sugar."

I laughed and drew up the chair. "Yes, I know. No sugar." She closed her eyes wearily, and I patted her hand, though it provided her little comfort. The nurse and Helen had evidently fixed her up for the occasion. She wore a new bed jacket, and her hair was done up in a little pug on the top of her head. Patches of scalp showed through the gray fibers. Her cheeks were sunken; the skin around the eyes was drawn in wrinkles of pain, with pale blue pouches beneath. All of life seemed to have ebbed from her face; the passion, the ardor, even the smile had been absorbed, blotted up by the steady failing of her person. There was a deadly rasp in her throat, she was having obvious trouble breathing, but from time to time she murmured a few scarcely distinguishable words.

I stayed only fifteen minutes that evening. The nurse came in and signaled me to leave. Each day thereafter I would go and sit by Lady's bedside, and during her lucid moments I would try to amuse her, to occupy her thoughts, and divert them from whatever it was that troubled her so greatly. Sometimes she would recognize me, sometimes not. Once she insisted there was a tiger in the yard and I must get Edward's shotgun and shoot it. I made a show of doing this, and reported the tiger dead. She ordered the mythical creature skinned (Rabbit Hornaday could do this, she suggested); she would like a rug made of it, hoping for enough left over for a muff -- winters were chilly, particularly sleigh riding. Another time she confided to me that the doctor (she couldn't remember his name) had recently taken her off liquor (she'd been off for more than two years), and would I sneak down to Elthea's pantry and mix her a martini? I did, unbeknownst to Helen or the nurses. Lady sipped it gratefully, between pejoratives for the doctor, that "dreadful Porter Sprague," and her own mother. At another time she insisted that Jesse must drive her to the beauty parlor to have her hair looked after.

One afternoon four of us -- Teresa and I, Agnes and Rabbit -- went on a picnic, driving through the old Connecticut River towns to a place we used to go to years before, where there was a waterfall and a shady pool for swimming. I'd brought along a portable radio, and so it was that we received the news of the Japanese surrender. We packed up our things and I kept the gas pedal down as we hurried back to Pequot Landing.