Shirley (8 page)

I
N
J
ANUARY
, about a month before the baby was due, I was in the library listening to seal-plump Mrs. Morse, the village's library director, a widow who used the position of her desk—overlooking the quaint triangular square—to monitor all visible activity, and used the position of her job—overseeing the exchange of written information—to monitor all thought. It was Mrs. Morse who told me everyone knew those bohemians from the college thought they were better than the regular folks, better than us. She thought I was the Hymans' hired girl. Fred was rarely in the village, except in Stanley's company, and perhaps it hadn't occurred to her that I was old enough for marriage. I didn't really look it, except for the indisputable fact of my pregnancy. Mrs. Morse seemed to assume I was an unfortunate from upstate that Mrs. Hyman had taken in, most likely to practice witchcraft on. Mrs. Morse definitely kept a protective eye out for me.

It was Mrs. Morse who nodded discreetly toward a well-dressed blond dropping books at the return desk. “That's her, Professor Hyman's friend.”

“His what?”

“His lady friend.” She sniffed. “Not that a married man should . . . but one has to pity him, saddled with that strange, strange woman.”

And that was how I learned the most fundamental fact of the Hyman household, that Stanley had fallen in love a couple of years earlier, with a local woman, a bright, attractive woman in her mid-thirties, utterly suitable were he not a married man. Theirs had been a love affair, not a rapid-fire set of encounters, not fucking on his office couch or in her dorm room. She had a home. He wanted to live there. Shirley, on finding out, had nearly died. She had just published
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, the story of two oddly intertwined sisters who live on a grand but decaying estate on the outskirts of a town just like North Bennington. The elder sister has been found innocent of the poisoning murder of the rest of their family; the girls and their uncle were the only survivors.

Much of the novel has to do with the way the villagers hold the sisters in deferential hostility. The penultimate scene, in which the villagers actually attack the castle, was one I thought of the day we left Bennington forever. Riddled illusions, riddled dreams. I was so far past crying by then, so done with admiration, so exhausted by devotion that my fealty to the Hymans had charred and gone brittle: it, too, had transmuted into resentful fury.

Such fancies were what Shirley Jackson could and did spend her best time cultivating.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
is both beautiful and terrifying. Still, every imagined work is based in truth: Shirley's hostility to her fellow villagers was exposed in the
writing of this novel, and when it was done, she felt not relief but fear. For many months, she did not leave the house, except to visit the psychiatrist Stanley convinced her to see.

Mrs. Morse knew all the details. One had to admire the depth of her research. She nodded proprietorially at the woman, who had stopped to pull her gloves on, while I shook my head doubtfully.

“But she's so, she's so . . .”

“Pretty.”

I had to agree. The woman was graceful, blond, conservatively bloused beneath her beige car coat. But stranger than her quiet, pulled-together appearance was the carefully composed nature of her face. Shirley's eyes, even deflected through the thick panes of her cat's-eye glasses, were bright and inquisitive, always darting. Even when she was at her stillest, after several Scotches or first thing in the morning, those eyes never stopped searching: they read moods and weather, tracked a cat across the living room rug, found Barry's friend—the one she'd nicknamed Mealtime because of his unerring instinct for arriving as the dishes were placed at the table—peering in a window, knew where the scissors had been left, surmised what the postman's wife had fed him for lunch. And this woman—I think, but am not sure, that her name was Caroline—deposited her books in the return bin and left the library without once scanning the room for stories or signs, for usable details.

“She doesn't seem at all like his wife,” I said. “Like Shirley.”

Mrs. Morse made a sound that I can only term a ladylike version of a snort. “Nobody's like that one. Not here or anywhere.”

“She's a good woman.”

The librarian shrugged, opened the copy of Mary Stewart's
This Rough Magic
I'd selected, and inserted a circulation card. “
Odd
is the word I'd use. Not like the rest of us, doesn't get along.”

I thought about explaining that a woman like Shirley didn't have to get along, that it wasn't necessary to belong if you were special. I even opened my mouth to do so.

Mrs. Morse seemed to know what I was about to say. “She's a strange writer, my word, those things she writes. Some of us call it mean-spirited. We know who she means, no matter what names she picks. A decent woman doesn't write about her own neighbors, does she?”

I stammered. “I don't know.”

She closed my book with a snap, handed it to me. “He seems like a nice man.”

“He is,” I said.

“She's a nice lady,” Mrs. Morse said, tilting her head toward the door through which Stanley's mistress had exited.

God, I was young. I genuinely believed that moral people lived in small towns, that this was the reason they ran from the Sodom of cities. I didn't understand how weighing one point against the other is a little bit like the geometry of a triangle, perfect in the abstract and impossible in reality. I still believed that people who cheated looked different. Mistresses were large-breasted and blousy, with crayon-red lips. Men who cheated had tired eyes and ran tongues across yellow teeth, leered at random women.

Even worse, I didn't understand that gossip is as dangerous in the country as the urban variant I'd known. Here, too, it alters with
repeating and retelling. It is those people who like to clean a story up, improve it—those who know the power of a good read—who are the most dangerous, perhaps. Stories in their hands are altered and reshaped, are thrown and centered, drawn up high and pulled wide like potter's clay. They teach the material of life to conform, that's what they do; it is, and I now know this for certain, an inherently immoral act.

That afternoon, after I placed the chops in the icebox and arranged the Scotch and red wine along the sideboard in the dining room, I stretched out on the misshapen leather couch near the front parlor bookcases and let the baby's insistent kicking keep me from falling asleep. I'd had no idea I could serve as a panacea, but now I knew I'd been one. This household had needed me, and I'd arrived. I'd been more useful here than I'd ever been before, to anyone.

I did not pick up the book about the ladies from Versailles, but it was as if I had, as if my drowsy state freed me from the swollen grounding of my pregnancy and let my thoughts roam, pernicious, up the walls and under floorboards, wafting up the radiator pipes and out in bursts of steam, inspecting the bedrooms and the bathrooms, the long hallway that ran the length of the house from Shirley's room in front to mine at the very back, the closed trunks in the attic with their mantles of accumulated dust and the pile of discarded trousers and sweaters on the floor of Barry's room—I would get to his laundry, I told myself, and felt the baby thump competitively against my ribs. I had taken on the laundry for the family without demur; I was so grateful and it was such an easy thing to do.

•   •   •

S
HIRLEY
WAS
ASLEEP
on their bed, wearing a gray velvet dress, a sheen of sleep heat dampening the broad planes of her cheeks, her pages from the morning at her side. Pencil clutched in clenched palm. She slept so heavily it was difficult to see her breath moving through her body; yet as I floated I saw for the first time the pictures her mind made: a demon dancing and yet it looked like me, a cat curled across my shoulders, candles aflame and violin strings plucked in single-minded cacophony. I saw the book of spells she'd shown me—leather-bound and ancient gray, its pages flipping in midair—and when I opened my eyes I was still on the couch, my hands crossed over my pregnant belly, one leg firmly on the floor. The floorboards emitted that series of light, cheerful creaks that confirmed no one was walking anywhere, that I was alone.

I turned my head, wiped the sleep spittle from my mouth, gazed drowsily at the bookshelves. The book of spells lay on its side, on the floor, as if it had willed itself off the shelf.
A spell for making Stanley faithful,
I told myself.
Or one to make a missing mother return.
Did I want her back? Or would I rather Shirley was happy? I pulled myself up from the couch with a groan and retrieved the book but did not open it. I wanted my mother, yes. But I wanted her to be a person she could never be. Was there any spell inside these musty pages that could turn such a flawed being into someone I'd be proud to call my mother? I didn't think so. When I closed my eyes, I could think only of Shirley, and how even she, worthy as she was, was forced to suffer such pain. I suppose I drifted off again, because I saw Shirley clamber out of bed, retrieve
her cardigan, and button it slowly, as if there were something very much on her mind, something that had been decided.

Next I was with her as she strode down the high hill of Prospect Street and up the matching slope on the other side of the village green. She seemed to know precisely where she was going, pale cheeks flushed, boots crunching the sugary layer of frost—was it morning? The sky was pinkish, the view mottled with that gray-blue steam that floats above the valley as the fog rolls off the cold mountains and down, onto the paved, inhabited parts of town. We had not walked in this direction before.

We knocked briskly on a front door, ignoring the politer possibility of the doorbell. And when she answered, I already knew who she would be: Caroline, Stanley's putative lover, no house slippers or ragtag writing cardigan for her. Of course, her loafers were polished, bright copper pennies in the slots. She was too well bred to blink at the sight of her unexpected caller, merely crossed her arms beneath her correctly sized chest and shifted a thigh to prop the front door ajar. She did not invite Shirley inside.

I knew I was asleep; I knew where I was, propped against the pillows on the couch in the Hymans' library, pale afternoon light streaming through the ancient windows and across my legs. And yet it was morning, it was cold, and I was outside, adrift, like a balloon that had lost its tether but not its purpose, and I could see Shirley's mouth moving as she spoke, the way her tongue lifted against her teeth and then drew back, the way her words were steam clouds rising against the warmer inner surface of the open storm door.

I want to say I heard what they said to each other. I didn't. But I knew. I knew Shirley told her not to call again.

Caroline's knuckles tightened; I could see it, hidden as they were beneath the crossing of her upper arms, the cabled wool of her navy sweater. She said, “I haven't telephoned. I am not that type of person.” Offended but reserved, that careful near-smile playing on her lips.

“You would bore him. In a week, you would bore him to death.”

Caroline's chin lifted. “I would comfort him.”

“As if he needs that. He is expert at finding a willing pair of legs to open wide enough. For
comfort
.”

“You're cruel.”

“Merely honest.”

Shirley's open jacket brushed the gray flannel of Caroline's trousers, that's how close she stepped. “He'll never leave, and I can tell you why. He depends on me. For everything, from the first thought he has in the morning until the last sip of Scotch he downs at night. He trusts me. Whatever
comfort
you provide, you'll never take my place.” She tapped Caroline's wrist with an arthritic finger. Tapped it again, so lightly. I swear she barely touched her. But Caroline recoiled—grabbed that forearm with the other hand, pressed fingers around the bare flesh with her breath held; she was too well bred to show how much it hurt. “Stay away from me.” Her gentle voice gone stiff and, if it was possible, even more formal.

“I have no interest in being near you.”

“You'd die without him, that's the only reason, that's why he stays.”

“So he tells his doxies.”

When Caroline shut the front door in her face, Shirley seemed delighted. She was in no hurry to close the storm door. I watched
her gaze triumphantly at the white-painted surface, at the burnished brass knocker, at the silly decorative window too small and high to allow a visitor—at least one as short as the current one—a view inside. Shirley's breath came quickly, steam rolling over steam, the fingers of her right hand so awkwardly misshapen, the nails short, tips grimed as always with pencil dust. I breathed with her; her lungs were mine, and then I opened my eyes, heard her typing in the next room, and fell back asleep again, but this time without dreams.

At least when I awoke a half-hour later, I felt somewhat rested. It was warm in the house, and her pile of pages had mounted while I napped. She was cheerful as we began the dinner preparations. I remember that we talked about the baby's practical needs, that Shirley promised she would dig out the rest of her children's old clothes from the attic for me. I wondered why Laurie's wife had not received them and felt victorious.

•   •   •

T
HAT
NIGHT
,
AT
DINNER
, Stanley and Shirley were in particularly fine form. In the late-afternoon post, she'd received an invitation to come back to Syracuse, their alma mater, to receive an award, and she was immensely flattered. “Redemption is mine,” she proclaimed, raising her wineglass to ours.

“Redemption is thine, and mine as well,” Stanley said, and she began to bemoan the work it would take to get there, the organization involved, the packing and planning for the family's well-being in her absence. He corrected her, arguing there was little involved. “Man's work is from sun to sun—” she began, and he interrupted,
“And Shirley's novel is never done,” and I remember the way their eyes met, how very, very married they seemed to be. I was happy. I liked the way Barry watched his parents; I liked the way Fred grinned into his napkin, as if pleasure had spilled over, soiled his face. That librarian was a jealous liar, I told myself. The beef stew on my plate was rich with tomatoes and wine; Shirley had taken kitchen duty tonight, and it was one of those occasions that her concoction turned out to be masterly. I hated that librarian. I hated the idea that there were currents I could not detect, that one could be pulled under, even here.