The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (127 page)

“Oh, darling.”

“Will you?”

“I would only cry and cry, darling, and spoil your special day.”

Later that afternoon, Mr. Lanford Ellis—Vera’s older brother and the reigning patriarch of the family—called Mary Smith-Ellis to his room to congratulate her on her forthcoming marriage. He expressed his hope that Stan Thomas was an honorable young man. He said, “You should buy yourself a pretty wedding gown,” and he passed her an envelope. She picked at the flap, and he said, “Don’t open it here.” He gave her a kiss. He gave her a squeeze on the hand and said, “We have always had the fondest feelings for you.” And he did not say more.

Mary didn’t open the envelope until she was alone in her room that evening. She counted out a thousand dollars in cash. Ten hundred-dollar bills, which she slipped under her pillow. That was a great deal of money for a wedding gown in 1956, but, in the end, Mary was married in a flowered cotton dress that she had sewn for herself two summers earlier. She didn’t want to spend the money. Instead, she decided to hand the envelope and its contents to Stan Thomas.

That money was what she brought to the marriage, along with her clothing and the sheets from her bed. These were all her possessions, after decades of service to the Ellis family.

In the Ellis mansion in Concord, Ruth Thomas’s mother showed her to her room. They had not seen each other for some time. Ruth didn’t like to visit Concord and rarely did. There had been some Christmases, in fact, when Ruth had elected to stay in her room at boarding school. She liked that more than being in Concord and the Ellis mansion. Last Christmas, for instance.

“You look wonderful, Ruth,” her mother said.

“Thank you. You look good, too.”

“Don’t you have any bags?”

“No. Not this time.”

“We put up new wallpaper for you.”

“It looks nice.”

“And here’s a picture of you when you were a little girl.”

“Look at that,” Ruth said, and leaned toward the framed photograph hanging on the wall next to the dresser. “That’s me?”

“That’s you.”

“What do I have in my hands?”

“Pebbles. Pebbles from the Ellises’ driveway.”

“Boy, look at those fists!”

“And there I am,” Ruth’s mother said.

“There you are.”

“I’m trying to get you to hand me the pebbles.”

“It doesn’t look as if you’re going to get them.”

“No, it doesn’t. I’ll bet I didn’t get them.”

“How old was I?”

“About two. So adorable.”

“And how old were you?”

“Oh. Thirty-three or so.”

“I never saw that picture before.”

“No, I don’t think you have.”

“I wonder who took it.”

“Miss Vera took it.”

Ruth Thomas sat down on the bed, a handsome brass heirloom covered with a lace spread. Her mother sat beside her and asked, “Does it smell a bit musty in here?”

“No, it’s fine.”

They sat quietly for a time. Ruth’s mother stood and raised the window shades. “We may as well let in some light,” she said, and sat down again.

“Thank you,” Ruth said.

“When I bought that wallpaper, I thought it was cherry blossoms, but now that I look at it, I think it’s apple blossoms. Isn’t that funny? I don’t know why I didn’t see that at first.”

“Apple blossoms are nice.”

“It doesn’t make any difference, I suppose.”

“Either way is nice. You did a good job with the wallpapering.”

“We paid a man to do it.”

“It looks really pretty.”

After another long silence, Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas took her daughter’s hand and asked, “Should we go see Ricky now?”

. . .

Ricky was in a baby’s crib, although he was nine years old. He was the size of a small child, a three-year-old, perhaps, and his fingers and toes were curled like talons. His hair was black and short, matted in the back because of the way he swiveled his head back and forth, back and forth. He was forever grinding his head against the mattress, forever flipping his face from side to side, as though searching desperately for something. And his eyes, too, rolled to the left and to the right, always seeking. He made screeching sounds and highpitched whines and howls, but when Mary approached, he settled into a steady muttering.

“Here’s Mama,” she said. “Here’s Mama.”

She lifted him out of the crib and placed him, on his back, on a sheepskin mat on the floor. He could not sit up or hold up his head. He could not feed himself. He could not speak. On the sheepskin mat, his small, crooked legs flopped to one side and his arms to the other. Back and forth he swung his head, back and forth, and his fingers waved and tensed, fluttering in the air the way sea plants flutter in the water.

“Is he getting any better?” Ruth asked.

“Well,” her mother said, “I think so, Ruth. I always think he’s getting a little better, but nobody else ever sees it.”

“Where’s his nurse?”

“Oh, she’s around. She may be down in the kitchen, taking a break. She’s a new woman, and she seems very nice. She likes to sing to Ricky. Doesn’t she, Ricky? Doesn’t Sandra sing to you? Because she knows you like it. Doesn’t she?”

Mary spoke to him the way mothers speak to newborns, or the way Senator Simon Addams spoke to his dog Cookie, in a loving voice with no expectation of reply.

“Do you see your sister?” she asked. “Do you see your big sister? She came to visit you, little boy. She came to say hello to Ricky.”

“Hello there, Ricky,” said Ruth, trying to follow the cadence of her mother’s voice. “Hello there, little brother.”

Ruth felt sick. She bent over and patted Ricky’s head, which he whipped away from under her palm, and she felt his matted hair slip away in a flash—gone. She pulled back her hand, and he let his head rest for a moment. Then he flipped it with a suddenness that made Ruth start.

Ricky was born when Ruth was nine years old. He was born in a hospital in Rockland. Ruth never saw him when he was a baby, because her mother didn’t return to the island after Ricky was born. Her father went to Rockland with his wife when the baby was due, and Ruth stayed with Mrs. Pommeroy next door. Her mother was supposed to come back with a baby, but she never did. She didn’t come back, because something was wrong with the baby. Nobody had expected that.

According to what Ruth had heard, her father, from the moment he saw the severely retarded infant, started laying out the blame, fast and mean. He was disgusted and he was angry. Who had done this to his son? He immediately decided that the baby had inherited the sad condition from Mary’s ancestors. After all, what did anyone know of the Bath Naval Hospital orphan or of the Italian immigrant? Who knew what monsters had lurked in that dark past? Stan Thomas’s ancestors, on the other hand, were accounted for back to ten generations, and nothing of this sort had ever appeared. There had never been any freaks in Stan’s family. Obviously, Stan said, this is what you get for marrying someone whose background isn’t known. Yes, this is what you get.

It was an ugly, wretched fight, and it upset the nurses in the maternity ward, who heard every cruel word. Some of the younger nurses cried. They had never heard anything like it. The head nurse came on duty at midnight and led Stan Thomas away from his wife’s room. The head nurse was a big woman, not easily intimidated, even by a tough-mouthed lobsterman. She hustled him away while Mary was still screaming at him.

“For the love of God,” the nurse snapped at Stan, “the woman needs her rest.”

Lanford Ellis told Mary of a conversation he’d had with his sister Vera, and of their consensus. He and his sister had discussed the immediate problem and had agreed that Mary should not take the baby to Fort Niles Island. Mary would have no medical support there, no professional help for Ricky. The doctors had already announced that he would need round-the-clock care for the rest of his life. Did Mary and Stan have a plan?

Mary and Stan admitted that they did not. Lanford Ellis was sympathetic.

He understood that this was a difficult time for the couple, and he had a suggestion. Because of the Ellis family’s attachment to Mary, they were prepared to help. Lanford Ellis would pay for Ricky’s care at an appropriate institution. For life. No matter the cost. He had heard of an excellent private facility in New Jersey.

“New Jersey?” Mary Thomas said, incredulous.

New Jersey did seem far away, Lanford Ellis conceded. But the home was said to be the best in the country. He had spoken with the administrator that morning. If Stan and Mary weren’t comfortable with the arrangement, there was one other possibility . . .

Or . . .

Or, if Mary and her family moved to Concord, where Mary could resume her position as companion to Miss Vera, the Ellis family would provide Ricky with private care right there, at the Ellis mansion. Lanford Ellis would have part of the servants’ wing converted into a comfortable area for young Ricky. He would pay for good private nurses and for the finest medical care. For life. He would also find Stan Thomas a good job and would send Ruth to a good school.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Stan Thomas said, in a dangerously low voice. “Don’t you fucking dare try to take my wife back.”

“It is merely a suggestion,” said Lanford Ellis. “The decision is yours.” And he left.

“Did you people fucking poison her?” Stan Thomas shouted after Lanford as the old man walked away, down the hospital hall. Stan followed him. “Did you poison my wife? Did you people make this happen? Answer me! Did you goddamn people set this whole fucking thing up just to get her back?”

But Lanford Ellis had no more to say, and the big nurse stepped in once more.

Naturally, Ruth Thomas never knew the details of the argument her parents had following Mr. Ellis’s offer. But she did know that a few points were made immediately clear, right there in the hospital room. There was no way on earth that Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas, child of an orphan, was going to put her son, no matter how disabled, into an institution. And there was no way on earth that Stan Thomas, tenth-generation islander, was going to move to Concord, New Hampshire. Nor would he allow his daughter to move there, where she might be turned into a slave of Miss Vera Ellis, like her mother and her grand-mother before her.

These points having been established, there was little room for negotiation. And whatever the severity of the argument, the decision was quick and final. Mary went to Concord with her son. She returned to the Ellis mansion and to her position with Vera Ellis. Stan Thomas went back to the island to join his daughter, alone. Not immediately, however. He went missing for a few months.

“Where did you go?” Ruth asked him when she was seventeen years old. “Where did you run off to for all that time?”

“I was angry,” he replied. “And it’s none of your business.”

“Where’s my mother?” Ruth asked her father, back when she was nine years old and he finally came back to Fort Niles, alone. His explanation was a disaster—something about what didn’t matter and what wasn’t worth asking about and what should be forgotten. Ruth puzzled over this, and then Mr. Pommeroy drowned, and she thought—it made perfect sense—that her mother may have drowned, too. Of course. That was the answer. A few weeks after reaching this conclusion, Ruth began receiving letters from her mother, which was confusing. She thought for a time that the letters came from heaven. As she grew older, she more or less pieced the story together. Eventually, Ruth felt she understood the event completely.

Now, in Ricky’s room, which smelled of his medicines, Ruth’s mother took a bottle of lotion from the dresser and sat on the floor beside her son. She rubbed the lotion into his strange feet, massaging and stretching his toes and pressing her thumbs into his curled arches.

“How’s your father?” she asked.

Ricky shrieked and muttered.

“He’s well,” Ruth said.

“Is he taking good care of you?”

“Maybe I’m taking good care of him.”

“I used to worry about your not getting enough love.”

“I got enough.”

Ruth’s mother looked so concerned, though, that Ruth tried to think of something to reassure her, some loving incident related to her father. She said, “On my birthdays, when he gives me presents, he always says, ‘Now, don’t go using your x-ray vision on it, Ruth.’”

“X-ray vision?”

“Before I open the present, you know? When I’m looking at the box? He always says that. ‘Don’t go using your x-ray vision on it, Ruth.’

He’s pretty funny.”

Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas nodded slowly, without looking the slightest bit less concerned.

“He gives you nice birthday presents?”

“Sure.”

“That’s good.”

“On my birthdays when I was little he used to stand me up on a chair and say, ‘Do you feel any bigger today? You sure look bigger.’”

“I remember him doing that.”

“We have a real good time,” Ruth said.

“Is Angus Addams still around?”

“Oh, sure. We see Angus about every day.”

“He used to scare me. I once saw him beating

“He used to scare me. I once saw him beating a child with a buoy. Back when I was first married.”