Shirley

Also by Susan Scarf Merrell

FICTION

A Member of the Family

NONFICTION

The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships

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Copyright © 2014 by Susan Scarf Merrell

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The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from “Not Waving but Drowning'' by Stevie Smith, from
Collected Poems
of Stevie Smith
, copyright © 1957 by Stevie Smith. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merrell, Susan Scarf.

Shirley : a novel / Susan Scarf Merrell.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-63653-4

1. Jackson, Shirley, 1916–1965—Fiction. 2. Entertaining—Vermont—Bennington—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.E7426S55 2014 2013046531

813'.54—dc21

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Jim

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

—The Haunting of Hill House

“Y
OU
HAVE
GREEN
EYES
,” she said. I handed her my end of the fitted sheet and she tucked the corners deftly together, folded again to make a smooth square, her knob-knuckled fingers making quick work of a task I'd never had to do. Bed-making I knew all too well, but, oh, the luxury of a second set of sheets!

“No,” I said. “My eyes are blue.”

The closet door opened easily for Shirley, mistress of all the warped wood in this eccentric house. She stacked the folded sheets, nodded for me to follow her down the cramped back staircase to the kitchen. There were breakfast dishes to do. She washed, her hands reddened by the soapy water. I dried. Finally she responded.

“Envy. It's wanting what other people have.”

Well, that was pointless to deny. I added two chipped saucers to the stack on the cupboard shelves. One of the black cats, the one with the white splash of fur on her paw, undulated irritably from behind the teacups, tail high. Shirley emptied the water from the basin, splashing the faucet stream to rinse the scummed soap left behind. “I only want what I have,” she said. “I want exactly what I
have.” She wiped her hands on the dish towel, pushed her wedding band back on with a grimace.

“You know who you love,” I said.

She laughed, as if I'd said something terribly clever. And then she added, “I'll do what's needed to keep what's mine.”

“I see.” I could picture my mother waiting outside the playground fence when I was very young, feeling herself unwelcome—or unworthy—while I played with schoolmates. Was it love that made her hover there? I didn't know. She did what was needed, just as Shirley claimed to do. “You protect what's yours.”

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “I do.” She pointed to the packing box on the wobbly kitchen table. “I brought that down for you. Things for the baby, attic treasures. You're welcome to use any of it.”

Confused, but eager to please her, I undid the flaps and opened the carton. Withdrawing a crinkled ball of newsprint, I carefully unfurled the paper until a child's cup emerged. “Pretty!” Easy to be enthusiastic about such a solid piece of china, the limpid-eyed bunny painted on the side. The child I was making could one day hold this cup in his or her hands, would never know what it was like to come into a world without Beatrix Potter china, and look, stuffed among the wrapped baby dishes—a green sweater with a cheerful button-eyed polar bear sewn onto its belly. Already I knew my baby would be far luckier than I had ever been.

“The cups were from my mother.”

“One for each child?”

“We could have used help with the rent, but she sent us china and silver spoons. That's Geraldine.”

“I love them.” I was breathless at the thought of having a mother who provided such bounty.

“We had to buy each child on layaway,” Shirley said. “Couldn't pay the doctor or the hospital. But she sent bunting. For the crib we couldn't afford. And christening gowns. You can imagine how well those went over with Stanley.” Her laugh was not a happy one.

Whatever Shirley disliked about her mother had to be small change compared to what I'd grown up with, I thought. I wanted Shirley's baby cups, and the silver spoons, and the bunting if she offered it, and the clothes her four babies had worn. I wanted things, for I had never had them. I pulled a piece of newsprint off a cereal bowl, straightened it out, laid it on the table. “Who's this? Missing student?”

She peered at the photo. “Oh my, that's from a dozen years ago at least.”

PAULA WELDEN MISSING SINCE SUNDAY FROM COLLEGE CAMPUS: SEARCH IS MADE OVER WIDE AREA: GIRL'S FATHER ARRIVES HERE FROM HIS STAMFORD HOME; WHEN LAST SEEN MISSING STUDENT WAS WEARING RED PARKA, BLUE JEANS AND THICK-SOLED SNEAKERS

Eighteen years, in fact. “She looks like you, Rose, doesn't she?”

A hole in the fabric of one day and entry to another. I glanced around the kitchen, anywhere but at Shirley—if I were Paula Welden, I would have been thirty-six that September morning.
“Did they ever find her?” It seemed terribly important, immediately so. It wasn't that we looked alike; it was something more. It mattered, oh, it mattered more than anything, to believe that if there had to be women in danger, there would be those who found them.

I shivered, felt the walls of the kitchen shiver with me like so many sheets flailing on a clothesline on a windy day. I pulled out a rickety chair and sat. I had to.

“They found her, didn't they?”

Shirley began to unwrap the other cups, smoothing page after crumpled page. “No, never. I remember some people thought she'd run away. With a boyfriend. And our local police came under the gimlet scrutiny of the FBI.”

The girl was lovely, her blond hair smooth and cut to the shoulders, her smile relaxed. She was from elegant Stamford, Connecticut—a far cry from South Philly—and her father came up to aid in the search. He must have loved her. If I had seen Paula Welden's picture, knowing nothing else, I would have wanted to be like her.

“Me, too,” said Shirley softly. I'm not sure I had spoken.

“Did you know her?” I asked.

A pause.

The black cat on the windowsill stopped licking his paw, tongue protruding through tiny, sharp teeth. The house itself held its breath; not even a floorboard creaked. “I never met the girl,” Shirley said finally, her voice light. “Not once.”

She was an honest woman, or so I believed. But can anyone who makes up fictions hour after hour and year after year be wedded to
the truth? Even now my memory recircles the events of my year in Shirley Jackson's house, what I understood at the time and what I now trust to be fact. Conditions of absolute reality have a glare all their own, like sunspots on water or the glinting of ice against a mountain boulder on a cold Vermont afternoon. You think you know where you are, you are sure of what you've lived through, and yet, at the same time, the whole thing seems a dream.

Perhaps this makes it easier to believe.

B
UT
THAT
WASN
'
T
THE
BEGINNING
. My story starts with a single word.

Money.

I'd never had any, you see, and though Fred was wealthy by my standards—his father owned a small candy store and they could afford three meals a day—we knew nothing about the rich but what we gathered when we could swing an afternoon at the movies. My own family wasn't dirt poor. Nothing so romantic. We were city poor, meaning that I was invisible every single day of my young life. Invisible on the street, in school, at home. Invisible, except when creditors came looking for my parents: Mr. Hoffman the butcher, Sam Rabinowitz the grocer, Mrs. Schumann from the store where my mother regularly stole underclothing for me and my sister.

Yes, she was light-fingered. But not greedy, and for the most part I think the neighbors respected her. Under similar circumstances, wouldn't any mother hope to be as determined? People were pragmatic about my father as well. Of course they didn't like him—perhaps feared him—but when his services were needed, there was little hesitation.

I loved both my parents, despite the way they clawed at life, but with none of the compassion of my elder sister Helen's parental adoration. I felt sorry for her. All I ever wanted, once I was old enough to see my family clearly, was to be free of them. Not a day went by that I didn't feel two things: fear and yearning. And I guess I was greedy because of it. I ate too fast, when there was food. I went to my friends' apartments and lusted after their dresses, their books, their mothers' hugs. I didn't know I was lonely. I didn't know there was another way to be.

That was my childhood.

After high school, I worked as a cleaning girl at the Bellevue-Stratford, a hotel in center city, close enough to the Broad Street line that I could get there right after my classes at Temple University. I ran the carpet sweeper, checking under the bed for buttons, forgotten stockings and loose change that I conscientiously delivered to the head of housekeeping. My mother received ten dollars a week so I could remain in the cramped bedroom I shared with my older sister. When I bought my first pair of high-heeled pumps I kept them in my schoolbag to make sure no one borrowed them. One day, I would be in charge of something, a store or a family. Literally anything. I dreamed of firm decisions, impeccable in their correctness.

In the meantime, I cleaned toilets and made beds. I kept my eyes low. Oh, and I read every book my English professors assigned, swallowing Wharton and Dickens and Eliot whole. How their women lived! Such writing! It untangled tragedy from the banality of day-to-day, rendered it beautiful, artistic, worthy. Like Catherine Morland in Austen's
Northanger Abbey
, I knew myself a heroine.
No better way to clean a stranger's hairs from a sink basin than to imagine oneself a poetic figure burdened by an unraveling story—

I'd wanted to take a business course, but most of the girls I knew from South Philly were studying to be teachers. And when I went to register, the woman at the main desk glared over her reading glasses and told me taking business was a dishonest way to find a husband. I couldn't bear for that stout crone in the pilled cardigan to know I was less womanly than she. Half sick with resentment, I registered for English.

But Fred was the graduate teaching assistant for English 2022, the nineteenth-century British novel, so Mrs. Feldman in the registrar's office turned out to be the canny one.

I already knew of him, of course. We'd gone to neighboring schools. Everyone knew who the Nemser twins were: Fred's brother, Lou, won a writing competition and was hired for the cops beat at the
Philadelphia Examiner
straight out of twelfth grade, and Fred edited an underground literary magazine. They were tall and thin and very serious. Not rebellious, exactly, but able in argument. Lou was popular with girls; when I was a lowly seventh-grader, and they were lording it on the street corner outside their father's store, Lou dominated my fantasies. I doubt he ever noticed me. Then we were evicted from our apartment—another fed-up landlord tired of waiting for rent—and we went to live with my father's cousin in Germantown, and I switched high schools for the second time. We moved twice more before my junior year ended. It wasn't until my father left us for good that my mother and sister and I got to stay in one place.

Fred walked me to the Stratford, making me a good half-hour late for my shift, the very first time I went to his office.

Now that I was a college student, and Fred was my teacher, I could see he was the handsomer of the two brothers—shyer, his nose slimmer, his teeth a bit crooked, and his heavy-lidded eyes invasive in their interest. Blunt fingers riffled my first paper, a discussion of authorial point of view in
Pride and Prejudice
, and it seemed to me that even my childishly scrawled sheets looked beautiful as he flicked his thumbnail at the edge of the pages, making a
click, click, click
as he complimented me, said I had a gift for literary criticism. He wanted my conclusion rewritten, drawing a clearer parallel between Elizabeth Bennet's instinct toward self-awareness and Austen's intrusive narrative position. I nodded enthusiastically, feeling my hair bounce on my shoulders (I was proud of my hair, straight and blond, an anomaly not merely in the Jewish ghettos of South Philly but even in my own family), delighted by his approval.

He was walking my way, he said. And when I said I wasn't heading home, but to work, to the Stratford, he reddened. “That's okay,” he said. If I didn't mind.

I didn't.

We cut across the campus, stepping around dingy snow that insisted on drifting over the shoveled paths, ice crackling under our boots. My navy coat, the one that had come from my sister Helen's employer, was barely needed. The heat between us embarrassing, a public nakedness. To his credit, Fred remained able to talk, telling me about his interest in folklore and ballad, about his dissertation, about the feelers he'd received from English departments as far
away as Syracuse, as prominent as Harvard. As we passed the faculty club, Fred stopped to greet Professor Bricklen, the creative-writing instructor I'd had the previous semester. “This is Rose,” he said. “Rose Klein.”

I almost wished I were invisible then. “Rose Klein, yes.” Professor Bricklen's gaze scraped down me, from head to toe. He was one of those very large men with piggish eyes buried under the folds of his brows and cheeks, and yet his glare was ferocious. “She took my intro course, Professor Nemser.” I stood my ground, silently meeting Bricklen's gaze with what I hoped was pride, if not defiance. Of course he remembered me. He was the kind of man who would remember girls like me more than the others. “I can only hope that her work ethic has improved.”

Fred took me by the elbow. “This is my friend Rose.”

I suspect, looking back, that this was precisely when we teetered over into love. We walked steadily down Broad Street for nearly half a block before I thought to thank him. But I didn't. I pretended it hadn't happened, as did he. I never told him that Professor Bricklen liked his female students to sit on his ample lap while he critiqued their work. I let Fred think Bricklen found me mediocre rather than stubborn.

Five months later we were married. I was pregnant, with Natalie, although I didn't know it. Two months after that, we were in North Bennington, Vermont, spending our first night with Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, the novelist Shirley Jackson, in their sprawling, messy, book- and kid-filled home, on the hillside just off the Bennington College campus.

It was about money, because we needed it, now that I was
nineteen years old and pregnant. It was about money, because Stanley's department wanted to hire Fred, even though he hadn't finished his dissertation. It was about money, because money was the nutrition I'd been starved of, and what I would always crave.

Oh, why pretend? Money was what I called it, not knowing any better. But of course it was always about love.

•   •   •

I
KNEW
WHO
SHE
WAS
, Shirley, and I'd read some of her essays and stories, in
Ladies' Home Journal
or other magazines. I knew she was supposed to be a witch, that she had lots of children, and I thought she would be slim and tall, with a wicked sense of humor and a stylish haircut. I was nervous on the train, trying to focus on the novel of hers I'd taken from the Temple University library, a book about a haunted house and a crazy girl named Eleanor who goes to stay there. Eleanor hated her sister, I'd gotten that far, but I couldn't identify with the character at all. She had no instinct for saving herself. How could I respect a fragile girl like that? The other character, Theodora, was crazy in a different way, loud and outspoken, the kind of woman who embarrassed everyone around her.

The story made my head ache. Every time I closed the cover and tried to nap, the first line popped into my thoughts, inscrutable and irritating:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

“What does that even mean?” I asked Fred, pushing the open novel onto the papers on his knee. He glanced at the lines, shook his
head, and slid his typescript back out from under, lifting the pages up in the air as if he'd suddenly become farsighted.

“It doesn't make sense,” I said stubbornly.

“Well, don't waste time wondering. You can ask her for yourself when we get there.”

Funny, thinking back on it. I didn't tell him how thrilled I was about the adventure, so excited to meet a famous writer, to stay in her house. In my mind, I was not only traveling with Fred, I was journeying toward Shirley. And there you go—traveling with Fred; journeying toward Shirley. As if I already knew how much she would matter.

The train coach was loud and full of smoke, and Fred scrawled pencil notes in the margins of the typescript he was bringing to show Professor Hyman, sighing as he did so in a way that added to my distractibility.

I patted his arm. “It's going to be fine,” I said.

He turned to the next page of his manuscript.

“Fred. Fred, honey. You'll be fine.”

“Not now,” he said. He jotted something in the margin, pressing the papers against his raised knee to make a surface.

“Fred?” I said. “What if she doesn't like me? If she thinks I'm . . .” He took my hand, not even raising his eyes off his work.

“Everyone likes you,” he said absently. He'd obviously forgotten the things his mother had grumbled when we announced we were getting married.
Go find a nice girl, Freddy. Someone you can be proud of.
If she liked me, she certainly hadn't shown it yet.

I looked out the window. Fields jounced before me, lazy cows and rusted tractors the only relief from endless expanses of
late-summer cornstalks massed askew. It was as hot as Philadelphia, but thicker, more claustrophobic, as if vegetable spores clogged the air, snagging on the open train windows as we blew past. I didn't feel that second being alive inside me. I barely felt my own self, my breath's rhythm the unsteady reverberation of the train. Still, that second life was going to make me matter—it would have needs I could fulfill, would give volume and weight to the hardly noticeable manifestation that was me. I leaned my head against the seat, tried again to close my eyes but couldn't. Farm fields claimed my attention, blurring one into the other as time itself blended into mush until, finally, we arrived at the North Bennington train station with a great ceremonial screeching of brakes. My husband shuffled his papers together, grabbed our new suitcase, and assisted his bride down the train steps with solicitude.

“Fred Nemser! Fred Nemser!” Stanley waited for us under the covered porch of the station, shielding himself from sunlight. What an extraordinary sight he was—short, wide, balding, toothy, bespectacled, rumpled, a veritable compendium of academic clichés and yet oddly compelling. I can't, even now, explain why, except to say that when he looked at me, I felt he saw me. And when he saw me, I felt worthy.

“This must be the estimable Rose. Welcome to Bennington! Come meet Shirley and the family.” He hoisted our suitcase atop his very plump shoulder and escorted us for quite a distance down the street to a small square. We turned left, up the hill, all of us glistening with perspiration. Along the way, Stanley described the class he wanted Fred to take on for him. It seemed Shirley had been unwell, and he hoped to lighten his teaching responsibilities by
sharing duties on his folklore course. “It's the biggest course at the college,” he said flatly, in the way of men pretending not to care about those matters of which they are most proud.

“I can do the ballads,” Fred offered.

“I've read your dissertation draft. Impressive. You have some perceptive notions about Frazer and
The Golden Bough
, but you miss important links between folk music and folk myth. We'll discuss what you must do.”

“Thank you.”

“No need to thank me! A pleasure to find a young man with such noble inclinations. A member of the brotherhood already. Not for the faint of heart, our work. Ignore Negro spirituals at your peril, my friend! I'll have you read my jazz/blues writings. You should be able to handle all the musicology.”

Stanley was out of breath. Fred tapped our suitcase as if to remove it from Stanley's sweaty shoulder, but it was too late. “We're here,” said our host, turning left, onto a path between two gawky bursts of privet.

What a house it was. A huge façade, hulking high on the property, four white columns across a sagging front porch. Shutters painted, but not recently. Bicycles toppled against the bushes. Jars of all sizes (dusty, some with dried flowers, others with pebbles or marbles or brackish water), a bucket, a ragged broom, and a tray of half-full drinking glasses—contents brownish-gold and dry—books on the railings, and a long-forgotten doll abandoned in the weedy flowerbed. But to me the worst were the trees: gargantuan evergreens, trees out of nightmares, monstrous and dark enough to seethe across the yard by themselves, stripping all light and lawn in
their paths. “Hill House,” I murmured, thinking of the novel in my purse. It occurred to me then that I'd never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.