Shirley (22 page)

Eventually, he spoke. “We'll go,” Fred said. “We'll go anywhere you like.”

“Let's go, then.” Those long-fingered beautiful hands, the lanky limbs, the bright inquisitive eyes, they waited for me. And I said,
“Why me, Fred? Of all the girls you could have had, why me?” He reddened. “Why me?”

He cleared his throat. “I love you,” he said carefully. “And I love the way you look and how you think and who you are. And I don't care who you become, I'll love that, too.” I rolled my eyes. “And you're alone, you see? You're mine. And I'm yours. We don't have to share.”

And so I stood and wrapped the baby in her blankets. On the dresser, I left no note, only the half-used pack of matches I'd found in the buffalo plaid coat when I borrowed it to walk up to the Bennington campus. I wouldn't need them, after all. And for the second time in as many weeks, we borrowed Shirley Jackson's car without asking and took off for Williamstown. On the way out, we used the front door. It opened for me, easily, and I knew what that meant. There was cigarette smoke everywhere, and a fire in the fireplace, and the sound of high-pitched laughter and Stanley had put Coltrane on the stereo. At the door, I turned around, shrugging Natalie higher against my shoulder. I could swear the house was laughing, as if we'd performed all winter for its entertainment, and nothing more.

F
RED
WAS
NOT
OUT
OF
WORK
for long. Stanley, more gracious than I could ever dream of being, placed some phone calls on Fred's behalf, and we found ourselves in Syracuse early in the summer. We rented an apartment near the campus, a dingy one-bedroom in the basement of a small house. I was tired; it was hot; Fred's mood from day to day impossible to predict.

He had taken a step backward, working as a teaching assistant for an elderly professor named Lord. He made additional money supervising an undergraduate literary magazine. Mostly, Fred focused on finishing the last section of his dissertation, determined to be back on tenure track before the year was out.

I was polite to him, and he to me, and I took it as both job and duty to be assiduous in my wifely attentions. There were good days, such as the hot August afternoon when we borrowed another married grad student's car and drove to the lake in Skaneateles, and I dipped Natalie in the shallow water and then lowered myself into the lake and felt myself weightless and cool, paddling about while Fred and Natalie watched me from the flat sandy shore. We stopped for ice cream at a little roadside shack, and while we sat on a picnic
bench, under the trees, Fred fashioned a doll for Natalie out of an oak leaf and two toothpicks and a paper napkin. She glared at it with intensity, as if willing it to come to life. Fred's eyes met mine.

“Another witch,” he said lightly. “I can see her mind casting spells, even if she doesn't have the words yet.”

“Spells and haunted houses. I've had enough of all that to last a lifetime.” I gave her a little taste of chocolate ice cream, but Natalie only licked the cold sweet politely, her attention focused on Fred's oak leaf doll.

“It seems like none of it ever happened. None of it was real,” he said.

His tone was wistful. I missed them, too. Already the winter had taken on a rosy tone; even the worst parts had acquired the sweet deckle edges of memory. There were long, long stretches when it was as if someone else's husband had cheated, someone I knew well and liked, who wasn't me. For his part, Fred never seemed to wonder at what I'd done, with Stanley, or why I'd done it. If asked, I swear I would have blamed that monstrous house. It had poisoned me, I thought, as much as slow-dosed arsenic would—I'd not grown immune, but slowly sicker. Now we were alone—for the first time, really—healthier, recovering.

We grinned at one another. It was all good, dragonflies darting near the spilled puddles of congealing ice cream, cars snaking past us on the dusty road—other families out seeking novelty and relief in the summer heat—and I said, “I never asked you, did I? How many times you slept with that girl. And how many others.” I kept my voice light and conversational, not wanting to upset the baby.

He put the doll down on the silvery cedar. “You haven't asked, not once.”

“I'm asking now.”

“We're fine now, it's behind us.”

“That's why I want to know.”

How mature we sounded, how calm. Without the doll to study, Natalie's eyes closed. Breath slow, she slipped into her afternoon nap against my belly. Not for the first time, I imagined we were breathing in unison.

Fred crumpled his napkin, put a hand on either thigh, and shook his head. “I'd rather not, not here, Rosie. I'd rather talk about this another time, at home.”

Near us, a young couple leaned against one another on one side of their picnic table, his tawny curls intermingling with hers as they shared a single cone. They were probably no younger than I was, but I felt ancient in comparison, watching their hands, petting and exploring, the way her hips shifted when he ran his fingers along her neck. Sensing my interest, he turned, his mouth brushing the top of her head. He winked. Affectionate, that wink, as if its maker knew the universe loved him. He lowered his cheek back against the girl's, forgot me.

“I'd like to finish it,” I said. “Have it done. Not think about any of it, ever again.”

Fred silent, a forefinger tracing little circles into the grimy table. “I figured, I guess I thought that you were over . . . I don't know.”

“When did it start? How many of them, Fred? And was it the whole time we were there, one student after another, or only her?”
I did not mean to get louder; Natalie made a mewling sound in her sleep, tucked her chin against my breast.

“Just her. And only twice. I don't apologize, I don't. But there were other, well, opportunities, so many of them. As if I was the fool. They didn't make me do it, it was my fault. I'm not excusing myself, not at all. But the way people talked, what they understood, the way the rules were. I was different. I was the one who was strange.”

“What was her name?”

“Don't do this, Rose. It doesn't help.”

“You want me to just put it away? Forget about it? Move on?” I was tempted to fling myself away from him, storm off toward the car, but keeping the baby asleep seemed as important. A sparrow pecked at the packed dirt by the table, alert to the possibility that Fred's mostly finished ice cream cone might fall there at any moment.

“Where was she from?” I asked quietly.

“Connecticut, somewhere.”

The couple got in their car, a Chevy. Instead of driving away, they sat talking animatedly, as if engaged in making up a story. A story about us.

“I keep wanting to forgive you, I do. I keep trying to figure out the way to do it, to put this behind us, to move on. For Natalie.”

“For us,” he said. “I don't want to give up on us.”

I said, “I'm not the one who did it.”

Fred slammed a hand down on the picnic table. The girl in the car giggled loudly. “God, Rose, what am I supposed to do? How
can I prove to you how sorry I am? I can't take it away, what happened. I was terrible. I admit it. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Now what? How can I fix it? Tell me what to do.”

What right did he have to be angry?

“It's not my problem,” I said coldly. “I am not the one who . . . I'm not the one who fucked another woman. Fucked her. You did. You have to fix it. You have to make it right.”

“But how? I don't know what to do.”

“How could I know? I'm no expert. This isn't my area,” I said. The boy started the Chevy and backed out, onto the highway, raising a cloud of dust that shimmered in the humid afternoon light. He straightened the car, heading west, back toward Skaneateles. The girl stared at us through her open window, shocked, as if, without meaning to, she'd stumbled onto our horrible secret. Ten years have passed, but still I could blush, thinking of her face.

“Rosie, don't be this way. I'll do anything. I'll do anything you want me to. I'll spend the rest of our lives proving to you what a good husband I can be, how important you are. It's always about you, Rosie, it always is. No matter how badly I screwed things up.”

He started to sneeze, an alarming series of explosions that went on and on and on, his eyes growing wider in apology, damp with tears. He could not catch his breath. I had the baby on my lap, could not move without awakening her, and Fred and I watched one another—him sneezing, me guarding our daughter—for perhaps a full minute, until his outburst stopped, as suddenly as it began, and we both started to laugh.

Sometimes that's as good as crying, or yelling, for breaking an
impasse. I couldn't help myself. “Okay, Fred,” I said to him, the smiles still on both our faces. “We're done with it. That's all.”

“I love you, Rosie,” he said. He came around the table, and helped me up, balancing for me as I hauled myself to standing, Natalie against my hip. She stayed asleep. We got into the car, and Fred turned on the motor, put the car in gear. I didn't say the words back to him, not then, but I remembered how.

You think you know what you can handle, and what you can't. But the truth is, almost anything is endurable. Because we're made that way, to make the best of what we have. I never told myself, well, this is Tuesday and it's now been a year, or even two, and soon I will forget. I never organized and made a plan to put it behind us, and nor did he. But we went on, and in truth, we got better. And in time, I came to see that I trusted in him more than I had before we went to Bennington: I knew the worst of which he was capable, I knew what it would do to him, and I knew we could survive it.

I'm not saying this was the perfect solution. Only that I don't regret it.

T
HE
HOUSE
,
and you don't have to believe this, had told the truth. Shirley Jackson did die that summer, just as I had dreamed she would. So very Shirley-like that this would be the case.

We must have made that trip to Skaneateles Lake on August 7, a Saturday, because Shirley Jackson died in her sleep on the afternoon of Sunday, August 8. She'd gone upstairs to take a nap, apparently in a cheerful mood. Shirley never awakened. She was forty-eight years old.

I found out on Monday, August 9. Fred called from the campus office he shared with five other grad students. Stanley and Shirley had met at Syracuse, in the late 1930s, and news of her death was buzzing down the brick-trimmed paths and through the academic offices, shock passing through the faculty like a virus.

“Shirley's died,” Fred said awkwardly, and at first I didn't understand what he meant. And then once I did grasp the words, I could not grasp the reality. Experienced as I was in poverty and abandonment, I knew nothing of death.

He said, “It's too late now. You should have written to her.”

I tasted bitterness in the back of my throat. “She could have written to
me
.”

“I'm sure there'll be a service.”

“Go if you like.”

“We could both go.”

I unplugged the iron, emptied the heated water into the sink. When he realized I wasn't going to answer, he said, “Never mind. There's no need. With that crowd, nobody will know who shows up and who doesn't.”

“I did nothing wrong, Fred. I did nothing wrong.”

His voice was stiff. “Do I have to say it again?”

I remember that after we hung up, I sat on the couch, watching saliva bubble at Natalie's mouth, her closed eyelids flutter, some dream overtaking the peace of her sleep. I sat. I did not cry, or sort the dirty laundry into darks and lights, or think about dinner. I did not think. I simply sat, and watched and waited. One road had closed, one path to resolution. I would never make it up with her, never get to apologize or tell her what she'd meant to me. I would not be her friend again. I had not conceived this possibility.

Forgiveness. I hoped she had forgiven me.

S
TANLEY
DIED
FIVE
SUMMERS
after Shirley did, five years ago, in 1970. A heart attack at the end of a convivial dinner at the restaurant down the hill from the house. Irony of ironies, he'd married a Bennington student only months after Shirley died. The house had told me that, as well. Who knows if they were happy? I've heard the new wife was pretty, one of his folklore students, well trained in musicology. If memory serves, she was pregnant at the time of Stanley's death.

Stanley's Iago book had just come out. It was not a huge tome like most of the other Hyman books, but Fred nevertheless deemed it Stanley's culminating masterpiece. In examining Iago's motivation using a multiplicity of critical techniques, Stanley demonstrated how much prejudice comes built in to a particular methodology. Reading the book, I could hear Stanley's voice, could hear him arguing with Fred—that note of amusement that always tangled through even his most pompous assertions, as if to make clear that he was smarter than even his own language would demonstrate.

Stanley, by the end, was no longer interested in producing a critical technique that met Aristotelian standards, in developing an
overarching scientific standard for analyzing literature. He'd come to believe that every method of analysis was flawed, that the wise critic had to draw on a multiplicity of disciplines at once, keeping a keen eye out for his own prejudices and biases. I found his Iago book accessible and fascinating, and often thought about it afterward, imagining how Stanley might have read a new Roth novel, or Joyce Carol Oates or John Barth, or Iris Murdoch.

Fred cried when I handed him the folded-over section of
The New York Times
with Stanley's obit. We were still in Syracuse then, the dog days of the August of 1970, swimming in dank upstate humidity as we raked through our gloomy basement apartment, packing five years of our lives into cardboard cartons, this in preparation for the move to Stanton. A temporary downgrade to the English department at a prep school would be a little side note, dinner-party fodder, a rest stop on Fred's professional journey. Just because Syracuse had denied Fred tenure didn't mean he wouldn't find another tenure track position elsewhere the following year. Still, we were silent as we crated books and sorted winter clothing, each of us isolated in separate sulks, bitter thoughts.

Well, yes, I admit that I was disappointed. Fred was the star to whom I'd hitched myself, and while, on the one hand, I knew how special he was, how brilliant and hardworking, how deserving, there was that other hand, the one that resented him for not vaulting past his earlier errors. His dissertation, the one that had garnered so much attention while still in progress, had been defended, accepted, and published with little notice and even less acclaim. So much for the Child ballads and their repressive, pasteurized variations in American folksong. Fred had broken with Stanley over
subtleties in the lineage of intellectual reasoning that led from Frazer and ancient ritual, through Freud and Malinowski, to Kenneth Burke and the question of the way the individual's understanding of his or her culture is transformed by the very words the culture uses to describe the symbols and ideas it values. Perhaps Fred resented Stanley's adoration of Burke on a personal level, and let it cloud his professional judgment. Ironic, isn't it, that a set of symbols deriding Burke transformed Fred's position in their common culture precisely as Burke might have predicted?

Thus, although Fred had been diligent with his students and dutiful in attending faculty meetings, volunteering for committees and shouldering scut work, he'd not made the tenure grade. Financial security first. Fred wasn't even thirty yet; there was ample time to regroup.

We were pragmatic when we had to be. Fred had been given fair warning by his department head; no surprises there. We spoke of our situation the way one speaks of an illness, as if it were outside us, at a distance. Situation, I said, do you see? We never spoke of it as failure. And I think it's true of both of us that we loved our little family more than any title or place to live, any power to be earned. We were delighted to shepherd our pretty girl around the central campus; we protected our group as if it were an indivisible unit, the prime number of our collective well-being. And so we soldiered on, past this unattractive reality, without going through sessions of blame and recrimination.

But the news about Stanley seemed to tap a well of sorrow in Fred. He finished reading the obituary, placed it on the table, and began to dig through cartons of packed books until he pulled out
Stanley's
The Armed Vision
. The pages were that tissuey paper publishers use for huge academic books and volumes of collected Shakespeare, and Fred gently ran his fingers over the pages as if they were love letters he'd stumbled on, sitting on his heels in front of the box. Rocking from toe to heel, back and forth, silently crying as he stroked the pages of Stanley's book.

Natalie had been napping and now called loudly from the bedroom, signaling delight at having found herself awake. Fred did not look up. Instead, he closed the book, sat down hard on the wooden floor, and leaned back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut tight.

“Someone should write about him,” Fred said. “He'll disappear, he won't matter, and it's wrong.”