September Song (15 page)

As for her attentions to me, I could scarcely stir but what she was at my side. Actually, by that time I had learned to feel my way anywhere in the house. I knew the number of paces from one point to another and just when and in which way to turn. I had in my mind a map of it all from which I could have given directions. But Ursula so enjoyed making herself useful, having someone to care for, being appreciated. This too I think came in part from having been an orphan, with no one to lavish care upon. She adopted me.

I avoided people, not wanting my presence to dampen their spirits. Talk about my condition was carefully avoided, talk about anything else frivolous. My self-imposed isolation made me all the more grateful for Ursula's company. For James too it was a relief to come home in the evening to someone besides just me, someone bright and busy, cheerful.

But the young woman had no life of her own and I feared she would get lonely, bored, depressed at being shut in with an invalid all the time. I still went out occasionally, but while I had my Rex, she insisted on accompanying me. I could not refuse her company without hurting her feelings but I feared that my being with her would turn off any young person who might want to strike up a conversation, make friends with her.

In the afternoon she read to me. Recorded books were available for the blind and the service was free and efficient and in the evenings I listened to them through my earphones, but I liked a living voice and Ursula enjoyed the books along with me and that added to my enjoyment. We paused and discussed what we had read. We laughed together and we cried together. Our sessions began and ended with her saying, “Synopsis,” and “To be continued.”

The reading over, she drew my bath, and after that I napped—or pretended to. I urged her to go out by herself, go downtown, go shopping, see a matinee. I would have no need of her. I told her that our home was her home and that she must feel free to invite her friends there. She never did. I supposed she wanted to spare them the sight of me and to spare me being seen and pitied. I said, “When your guests come you will want to be alone with them, of course. I will go to my room while you entertain downstairs.” Still she invited nobody. I supposed that she did not want them to see the confinement and narrowness of her life. At last I thought that as an orphan she had few friends or none. I felt that she was solitary by nature, or had been made so by her upbringing.

It was not, I am sure, to worm her way into my affections in order to secure a home for herself that she was so devoted to me. I was sure of that because she did not need to do so. She was soon made to feel like one of the family. It made the house more human to hear her hum and sing. She might be caged, but she was a canary.

After my nap she made me up. These attempts to maintain my “attractiveness” saddened me and I sometimes said, “Oh, what does it matter what I look like?” but she said, “Now, now. None of that. We must keep up our appearance.”

One afternoon as she was penciling my eyebrows I yielded to an urge that had become an obsession with me. I reached out and lightly touched her face. She flinched, I felt it, and, already embarrassed by my impulse, feeling that I had taken a liberty and forced upon her an unwanted intimacy, I drew back my hand as from a flame. But she had recoiled simply out of surprise, not revulsion, for she instantly corrected herself and, taking my hand in hers, placed it on her forehead. Several times I ran my fingertips over her features. I felt a smooth, ample brow, large round eyes, a full mouth, a well-formed chin and a firm jawline, a shapely neck, rich hair. The patience with which she submitted to my examination declared to me that she felt she had nothing to fear from it, nothing to hide.

When I let her go I said, “Now I will be able to picture you in my mind. I know you better than before.”

As the doctor had told me to expect, with the progress of my disease the remissions had grown fewer and further between and of shorter duration. Each might well be the last. So when I woke that Friday morning able for the first time in a long time to see a bit I did not cry and curse as I had done before. I determined to enjoy it for however long it lasted. Like a child at a fair, I would soak up sights. I would make for myself an album of images. They would be like souvenirs of a vacation. I would store them as on a roll of film, develop them later in the darkroom of my mind, linger lovingly over them forevermore.

For me the world that day was an art museum, rich in treasures. The house was a collection of dim-lit Dutch interiors. All out-of-doors was a gallery of Impressionist landscapes, the garden pond one of Monet's water lilies. So fresh was everything it was as though, seeing it for the last time, I was seeing it for the first time, and I was humbly thankful for my period of grace. All was out of focus, fuzzy, but perhaps the world was best seen when seen not too distinctly, in none too great detail. I let my faithful Rex feel no less necessary than ever, and with him at my side I spent much of that afternoon outdoors, going without my nap. Close my eyes for even a moment when I could see a last little something with them?

Flowers were in bloom. Roses! Snapdragons! Zinnias! Hollyhocks! I might have been Eve, before her expulsion from her garden, conferring their names upon them. Saying goodbye to them, I was preserving them, like pressing them in a book. For summer was on the wane and soon they would not be there for me not to see. They would fade and die as my sight would. But the bouquet my mind had gathered would remain as unchanged as a picture. And in the very impermanence of living things I now found a certain consolation, or if not consolation, some measure of acceptance of my lot.

That evening I sat alone in the living room, made up, combed and clothed by Ursula, waiting for James to come home. He was due any moment, and he was seldom late. His business was going well then and he was leaving the office at quitting time. I tried always to greet him cheerfully. I hated being the ball and chain I felt myself to be.

The sun was low, sending through the windows a horizontal beam like a trained searchlight. Too bright for even my poor partially restored vision. Like being dazzled by light on emerging from darkness.

James came in and thereupon Ursula entered the room.

For me to say that my eyes were opened then is no trite expression. Nor is it to say that I could not believe them.

She was naked.

Breathlessness alone kept me from gasping.

Like scissored cutouts silhouetted against the light the two embraced. Then she knelt, opened his trousers, reached inside, found what she was after, and—

I shut my eyes, but too late. They had seen more than I in my prayers had ever pled to see.

My first feeling was not one of outrage—that would follow. Mine was sickness of heart. Outrage and indignation were what any woman would have felt on discovering that this was going on in her own house. What so appalled me was that my condition should be a part of their pleasure. I felt deprived of my very self, treated as a thing.

Meanwhile, occupied as he was, James was saying, “Well, Irene, dear, how did your day go?”

I found my voice and managed to reply, “So far so-so. But it isn't over yet. Is it?”

He thought I was reminding him that this was a special day, one on our calendar. He was quick to say that he had not forgotten. I said sweetly that I was sure he would remember. I told him that he would find a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. It had in fact been there for days. I had sent Ursula to the cellar for it. She had been puzzled to find the bottles not lying on their sides but standing on their heads. I said champagne was stored that way to keep the corks from drying and shrinking and letting the effervescence escape. She asked were we celebrating something and I said yes, but I did not say what.

Our wedding anniversary had passed unobserved. I was hurt by James's forgetting but perhaps not hurt as much as another woman would have been. Why should he want a reminder of being yoked to me?

I doubt he knew that evening that the date was wrong, he was engrossed in more immediate matters, but I believe she enjoyed the added zest to her wickedness in making a mockery of it, in, shall I say, pulling the wool over my eyes.

We toasted the occasion. The chill of the wine went to my veins, the bubbles to my brain. But it was not the wine that dizzied me. The change in my world was so sudden, so great, that for a time I lost all sense of who I was.

Seeing her sitting there in her brazenness I had a mad moment of thinking, well, maybe you are what is keeping my husband and me together. And what would I do without him? Or without you? The sense of my helplessness and dependency swept over me like a breaker.

We chatted. I was the most talkative. There was laughter. I may have been the one who began it but their joining in sparked my fury. Behind my smile I said to myself, “Outrageous! You heartless fiends!”

Dressed as we were we dined
en famille
. James cut up my meat for me, and I forced myself to eat. I kept the conversation going quite gaily, thinking that they would enjoy their mischief all the more the bigger the fool I made of myself, and thereby earn for themselves the severest penalty. What was that to be? None I could think of seemed harsh enough to satisfy my bloodymindedness.

Our days, Ursula's and mine, were all so alike, so uneventful that we had little to recount to James in the evening. For us a call at the door by the Jehovah's Witnesses was an occasion. One staple of our dinner table conversation was our reading. Together we brought him up to date on the latest developments in our current book. We were then halfway through
Pride and Prejudice
. But rather than tell of Elizabeth Bennett's empty-headed sister's attraction to fatuous Mr. Collins I now said, “This being the day it is, I am reminded of the book we read not long ago.
Jane Eyre
. Remember? The last part, when Jane comes back and finds her Mr. Rochester blind and tells him she loves him now more than ever. There was a time when I would have scoffed at that. I would have said that only in Victorian novels are people so noble and self-sacrificing. You have taught me better, James. Praise to the face is open disgrace, I know, and I hope you are not blushing, but there comes a time when a full heart must speak out and give its thanks where due.”

I then sighed and said, “The end of the book is unconvincing, I am afraid. Mr. Rochester regains the sight of his one eye and they live happily ever after. Now that does happen only in books.”

James had earlier made a trip to the cellar.

“This,” he now said, proud of his honoring of the day, “is Chateau Lafitte, 1982.”

I was reminded of operatic trios, the characters singing conflicting sentiments but all orchestrated together. Said I to myself, “This is the grapes of wrath.”

Into my mind came the phrase, “Justice is blind.” I saw myself with the sword in my one hand, the scales in the other. But how in my condition was I to accomplish my revenge, one commensurate with the crime? James kept a loaded pistol in the drawer of his nightstand, but I was incapable of firing it even at point-blank range. Meanwhile, even as I considered, my eyesight was fading. With what was left of it I must act fast, before my personal night fell.

After dinner we returned to the living room. As I listened to the strains of Mozart through my earphones Ursula sat on James's lap, kicking her legs over the arm of the chair while he fondled her.

How in my helplessness was I to accomplish my revenge? It was just that, my condition, that came to my inspiration. I could hardly keep from crying aloud, “Eureka!” The very weapon I wanted was at hand. The one I would have chosen from among all others, given a choice. An eye for an eye! For what I was about to do I would need none. It seemed to me providential. Its availability set the seal of approval on my plans. I was being aided and abetted by the very gods of vengeance. I was their impersonal agent, with no choice but to carry out their orders. Humankind itself demanded justice for the crime done to one of its pitiful.

A short time before, one of the bathroom sinks had clogged up. So badly that none of the products advertised on television worked. From a plumbing supply store James got a bottle of something called Grand Slam. Concentrated sulfuric acid it was, so powerful that—although actually anybody could buy it over the counter—the label read, “For professional use only.” The label said to wear goggles and rubber gloves while using it. A gas mask ought also to have been advised. It boiled and bubbled and hissed like a dragon in the drainpipe, and the vapors and fumes from it that filled the house were those of hell. It did the job.

James stored the half-empty bottle in the upstairs broom closet, not among other bottles, where it might have been mistaken, but in a spot all by itself, and he told me just where it was so I could tell the housekeeper not to go near it.

I was accustomed to finding my way in the dark. It was my element.

Her door stood open in expectation.

“James?” she purred. And that guided me like a missile to my mark.

Ursula

Often at night I wake up screaming, and often I scream waking.

After graduation from school I stayed on at the orphanage for several years, tutoring the children. The pay was low but the place had been my only home. I knew I must move on, and I read the Help Wanted columns in the papers, but I had no special skills, and I feared the outside world. What I wanted to find was a live-in job. Appearances were against me. I was young, and I was not unattractive. The wives whose ads I answered did not want me in their homes. Then one day I saw an ad for a companion to a blind lady. I applied and was hired.

The lady was all but helpless. I found myself the mistress of the house. There was a cleaning woman who came twice a week but I did the shopping, the cooking. I read to her, chose her clothes, dressed her hair. It was being her companion that I disliked. She depressed me. At times I shut my eyes trying to feel what it was to be her. It was like holding my breath under water. Alive, yet doubly detached from the world as she knitted and listened to music through her earphones, she sat in her armchair as stiff as a statue in its niche. Seeing those skeins of yarn being turned into shawls and scarves I could not help thinking of a spider spinning its web. Sometimes I shuddered and said to myself, “There but for the grace of God go I.”