The Distinguished Guest (7 page)

Part of what Lily had done in her memoir was to trace the recurrence of that feeling through her life—her own
Lilyness
, as it were. The quick triumph and equally quick defeat of it
when she voted for Roosevelt and then was pulled out of Vassar by her father as a result—and she remembered it as that, almost physically that, a pulling. He came unannounced to Poughkeepsie
by train after he’d received her letter. (This letter was careful and polite. It put forward in painfully logical terms the reasons Lily had chosen Roosevelt over Hoover. It was signed,
“Ever your devoted daughter, Lily.”) By the time she knew her father was on campus, he’d already seen the dean, and arranged for her luggage to be packed and sent on after her
departure. He gave her twenty minutes to gather an overnight bag, and they walked back immediately to the train station. He didn’t speak to her on the long ride home, and she didn’t
again feel the stirring of her will, her sense of self, until she met Paul Maynard, come to serve as a substitute pastor in their church while Dr. Atherton was ill.

And now, here is Lily in the guest room at Alan’s house, arranged the way she likes it, going through the letters Paul wrote her at that time and a little later, before they were married,
when he had gone ahead to the church in Ohio. Alan and Gaby have hired a girl for her, Noreen, dumb as a post but good-hearted, Lily will concede, and Noreen has set Lily up for the morning, the
box of papers—mostly these letters, but some from her mother too—on the table pushed in front of her, and a bowl of cereal, oatmeal with maple syrup, cold by now, off just to the side
of them.

As Lily finishes each letter, reading slowly, thoughtfully one last time, she tears it with trembling precision in two, then four, and drops it into her wastebasket, set close to her chair for
this purpose. She is doing this because she is old. She is dying, she feels. It has begun. And she has left the world exactly what she wishes it to know about Paul and herself, about their love and
their marriage and the end of all of it. These letters are nobody’s business but hers. She wouldn’t like anyone, even family, pawing through them after she’s gone. (These are the
very words she said to Noreen, who agreed with her absolutely. And when she said them, she imagined it just that way: big hands, animal hands connected to no particular body, roughly stirring
through her letters—these memories—scattering them through sheer carelessness.
Wounding
them, as Lily thought of it.)

The correspondence is in file folders, ordered in clusters of years, usually three or four years together in one folder, but sometimes only one when there were many letters. Lily arranged it in
this fashion when she began to write her memoir. She hasn’t gone through it since that time. Oh, occasionally, searching for a certain memory to nourish a story idea, she has tracked down one
in particular, or read through a year of her life, but she hasn’t read some of these early letters in twenty or more years, and certainly not in order.

When Paul moved to Ohio, they were already engaged, and planning to be married within the year. Paul had gone ahead alone to “establish himself,” which meant, as they all understood,
to save some money. (Though Lily had come into her trust by then, her money was not to be used for any joint expenses, at his insistence.) Most of the letters contained long accounts of social
events in Belvaine, descriptions of people she would meet, especially of the women who had spoken of looking forward to her arrival. Sometimes Paul would be invited by a church family on a day trip
or outing to some local historic sight or natural wonder. Lily is struck now, reading the letters, by the energy he had for these encounters and trips, by the care he had for detail in these
letters, by his concern to give her a sense of what it was like to be there. He wanted her to feel, already, a part of it, and of his life.

When Lily finishes this, she sets it down. This memory shocks her. So long ago, and in anger and bitterness over what Paul eventually did—as she saw it—to their marriage, to their
life together, to the church they shared, she had cast their love in different terms from the ones that have come back to her, reading this letter. She had thought of the Lily who moved out of her
father’s house to marry Paul as someone moving from one suffocating relationship to another. She had written of her marriage as an ugly chrysalis inside which she was slowly transformed into
a being who could emerge only as it was discarded. And that is how she has come to remember it too, with this coloration of embittered hindsight. She had forgotten—how could she have
forgotten?—the gladness in her heart when these letters came, the joy of the thought of joining her life to Paul’s.

Paul!
she is thinking now, and she sees him as he was then; tall and big-boned, but skinny and so fair that from across a room—and it was across a room that she first saw him, in
the church hall at a welcoming supper—his eyebrows and lashes disappeared and he looked strangely old and frail. But when he stopped at their table and was introduced, holding a plate of food
heaped so high Lily wondered he wasn’t embarrassed to admit such hunger (he was always hungry, she discovered later), she saw that he had thick pale eyebrows and lashes. That with his keen
gray eyes, his sloping jaw and long nose, he looked, in fact, like a wolf. And hungry indeed! His eyes ate her, and it was she who looked away.

This picture arrives as news to Lily; it shakes her. She is flooded, suddenly too, with the memory of her youthful self—she would have been twenty-five at this point—of her
unquestioning love for Paul. He asked . . . no, he didn’t even need to ask! She sensed what he wanted and stepped forward in anticipatory offering.

Lily’s face, though she doesn’t know it, is a mournful mask.

And then it shifts, just slightly.
She will not
. She shakes her head.
This cannot
.
No
. (There is no need for her to think this thought through, but she feels a kind of door
willed shut inside her, and then the welcome sense that she is safe again, that she need not consider any longer the feelings which threatened.)

She snorts and reaches for another small spoonful of the cereal.

Lily will take all morning to eat the cereal. This is what it’s come to. Parkinson’s. Worst so far in her face, which is frozen in blank, childish expectancy; and in her throat, so
that swallowing is a slow, consciously controlled activity. She has been taking the evening meal with Gaby and Alan, but she eats almost nothing, preferring to wait until she’s alone again to
struggle with solid food (though Gaby, seeing how little Lily manages to get down even then, has recently begun to put her dinner into the blender before she brings it in to Lily). She can drink
more easily, and she does, and several times has wound up a little tipsy by the end of the meal. When Alan expressed concern the night before, she said, “It’s all calories, dear
boy.”

Of course, Lily reminds herself ruefully, she is like a child. It’s worth remembering that. Not reduced to diapers yet, but it will come, if she allows it to. The gloppy food has, the
purées of what the grown-ups had for dinner. The baby-sitter to make sure she gets to the toilet when she needs to, to help her dress and fix her meals.

She likes Noreen, she reminds herself. She has spent herself lavishly, actually, considering her diminished energy, charming Noreen, because she would find the merest hint of distaste for
herself on Noreen’s part unbearable. And it has worked, to a degree. Noreen believes herself to be caring for a distinguished guest, a famous author, a
personage
, and Lily has subtly
encouraged this.

Though she saw that Noreen was peeved when she mentioned her guest for tea today.

Guests are Lily’s vice, the only one now but drink left to her. Writing was a vice, but in the last year, Lily has had trouble indulging it at all anymore. Guests are the residue of that
life. She wouldn’t have them if she hadn’t done the writing, and now she finds life unimaginable without them.

The possibility of feeding in this way on their attention was revealed to her so slowly that she didn’t initially appreciate what it might mean. At first there were just a few letters,
people wanting to know if they could meet her, have a drink or coffee, or lunch; do an interview for this literary magazine or that newspaper. Lily always said yes; and slowly she discovered that
the encounters animated her, renewed her. She felt she was uncovering a version of herself—strong, opinionated—that she hadn’t fully understood before. She was playful. She
invented things sometimes. Or changed them. Distorted them.

Then the Parkinson’s started and it gradually grew harder for her to write. In fact, the last two stories Lily has published were written years earlier. She revised them a little before
she sent them off, and pretended to everyone that they were her latest productions. Privately she knew better. And privately too she realized that she had begun to use the visitors as a way of
making fiction of her life, since she seemed not to be so easily able to make fiction on the page. Sometimes recently, in the midst of telling a story, she will realize how far from the truth she
has strayed, and it thrills her. She will stop, shrug. “Of course, it may be that none of it really happened that way,” she’ll say, and smile. “Who can tell?” And
she’ll pour the guest more wine, more tea or coffee, the pitcher or bottle rattling against the cup, the glass, in her trembling hands.
Enigmatic
, she’s been called.
Complex
. And even more visitors arrive.

Lily has brought with her to Bowman a list of people she’s corresponded with from this area who wish to meet her. And in spite of Noreen’s grumpiness—you’d think she
entertained every day—she’s had only two to call in the two and a half weeks she’s been here. This afternoon’s will be the third, though she intends to make something
different out of this one.

She announced it at dinner the first night she was here. Alan had just finished telling her about Noreen, explaining how none of them could be home through the day, so that hiring someone to
help her out had seemed the answer.

“We’ll be very sociable then,” Lily said. “I’m to have an amanuensis too.”

“A what?” Thomas said. “Sounds like a surgical procedure.”

“Well it isn’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “If we had a dictionary, you could look it up.” She glanced around the room and then turned to Alan. “In my youth,
we had a dictionary in the dining room for just such occasions.”