Acquainted with the Night (9 page)

One moonlit summer night as he lay awake with the windows wide open, the farmer heard his wife’s voice calling his name far out across the fields. He rushed to the window and called back into the night. Over and over her voice called, now closer, now farther off, as if it were drifting about, seeking him in the dark but powerless to find the way. Then the dog went to the window and began to bark. As the shrill howling persisted, the voice came closer and closer until at last it was there in the room, that voice he used to feel was almost palpable. The farmer was overjoyed. All night long his wife’s voice talked with him and kept him company, while the dog crouched silent in a corner. They talked, as always, of small daily things—the farm and the town, the vegetable garden—and of love. The range and timbre of the wondrous voice were unaltered by death. As day broke she left.

She came often after that. Each time, the farmer passed the whole night with her, talking of daily things and feeling joyful, if baffled, at this great gift given back to him, at least in part. Whenever her voice sounded from far off, the dog would go to the open window to help her find her way. For only that horrible howling, puncturing the night like an arrow, could guide her; the farmer’s own, human, voice was of no avail.

For a long time the farmer lived thus, enjoying the mild companionship of the dog by day and the beloved voice of his dead wife by night. But the dog was growing old. During their walks through the fields he noticed that she trudged ever more slowly, breathing with effort. Yet fiercely devoted, she strove to keep up with him, would not desert his path. One day the farmer sensed she was no longer behind him; he went back a short distance and found her collapsed on the ground. He carried her back to the house, settled her on a rug in front of the fire, and gave her water from his cupped hand till she closed her eyes and died. He buried her under a tree near the barn.

Now the farmer suffered an excruciating loneliness. In daylight he walked alone and in the dark he knew the agony of hearing his wife’s voice calling out there, unable to find him without the howling to guide her. Many nights the voice called, raw with pleading, while the farmer shouted out the window to no avail. As the voice despaired and faded he would shut the window with bitter tears in his throat. The voice stopped seeking him. He pondered whether it was worse to have no gifts at all, or to have gifts given and so cruelly withdrawn.

Then one night as he lay sleepless, there came the awful voice of the dog, howling far across the fields. The farmer rushed to the window. The dog’s voice came steadily closer, finding its way with ease. Although he could neither stroke her nor play with her, and although she kept silent once in the room, the farmer took comfort and rested more calmly, feeling her presence. He reflected, though, how strange it was to have as companion a voice that had best not make itself heard, for very ugliness.

On a moonlit night when the dog had come, the farmer was sitting at the window when he heard his wife’s voice again, calling over the fields. He leaped to his feet and called back as loudly as he could. Suddenly from right beside him came the lacerating howl of the dog, slicing into the still night. He longed to hug her in gratitude, but there was nothing to the touch. Just as before, the dog’s voice howled until the wife’s voice found its way into the room. The farmer was trembling with emotion; he longed to embrace her, but again he had to content himself with what he was given.

His wife’s voice was joyous too; but scarcely had she begun to speak of this recovery of each other than her voice was overpowered by the dog’s insistent howl. Sternly, the farmer commanded the animal to be silent, but for the first time she refused to obey him. The wife’s voice grew higher, urgent: she was calling for help. Her words became screams, then pure shrieks of sound swooping through the air; meanwhile the howling reached an unearthly pitch, filling up the room, exulting in its rough, wild fury kept at bay so long. The farmer veered about in a frenzy of helplessness, arms outstretched and flailing for something to touch. The wife’s terrified shrieks got short and staccato, like the plucking of a taut string against the prolonged howls tearing into the dark. Madly, the farmer raced about, hands plunging and stabbing at the empty night. Till at last there was one drawn-out, descending note wailed in unison with the dog’s rapid panting, and then both voices sank and subsided, and there was nothing.

When the townspeople came to investigate they found the farmer gone, the house abandoned. The bedroom was all in disorder, as if a rampaging wind had whipped things up and left them to fall where they might. From near the window, reported some, came now and then a hoarse, panting noise, like a beast out of breath.

M
RS. SAUNDERS PLACED HER
white plastic bag of garbage in one of the cans behind the row of garden apartments and looked about for a familiar face, but finding nothing except two unknown toddlers with a babysitter in the playground a short distance off, she shrugged, gazed briefly into the wan early spring sun, and climbed the stairs back to her own door. She was looking for someone because she had a passion to hear her name spoken. But once inside, as she sponged her clean kitchen counter with concentrated elliptical strokes, she had to acknowledge that hearing “Mrs. Saunders” would not be good enough anymore. She needed—she had begun to long, in fact, with a longing she found frightening in its intensity—to hear her real name.

She squeezed the sponge agonizingly over the sink, producing a few meager drops. No one called her anything but Mrs. Saunders now. Her name was Fran. Frances. She whispered it in the direction of the rubber plant on the windowsill. Fran, Franny, Frances. Anyone seeing her, she thought, might suspect she was going crazy. Yet they said it was good to talk to your plants. She could always explain that she was whispering to them for their health and growth. Fran, Franny, Frances, she breathed again. Then she added a few wordless breaths, purely for the plants’ sake, and felt somewhat less odd.

There was no one left to call her Fran. Her husband had called her Franny, but he was long dead. Her children, scattered across the country, called her Ma when they came at wide intervals to visit, or when she paid her yearly visit to each of the three. Except for Walter, she reminded herself, as she was fussy over accuracy, except for Walter, whom she saw only about once every year and a half, since he lived far away in Oregon and since his wife was what they called unstable and couldn’t stand visitors too often or for too long a period.

Her old friends were gone or far off, and the new ones stuck to “Mrs. Saunders.” The young people who moved in and out of these garden apartments thought of themselves as free and easy, she mused, but in fact they had their strange formalities, like always calling her Mrs. Saunders, even though they might run in two or three times a week to borrow groceries or ask her to babysit or see if she needed a lift to the supermarket. She pursed her lips in annoyance, regarded her impeccable living room, then pulled out the pack of cigarettes hidden in a drawer in the end table beside her chair. Mrs. Saunders didn’t like these young girls who ran in and out to see her smoking; it wasn’t seemly. She lit one and inhaled deeply, feeling a small measure of relief.

It wasn’t that they were cold or unfriendly. Just that they didn’t seem to realize she had a name like anyone else and might wish to hear it spoken aloud once in a while by someone other than herself in her darkened bedroom at night, or at full volume in the shower, mornings. And though she knew she could say to her new neighbors, “Call me Fran,” as simply as that, somehow whenever the notion came to her the words got stuck in her throat. Then she lost the drift of the conversation and worried that the young people might think her strange, asking them to repeat things they had probably said perfectly clearly the first time. And if there was one thing she definitely did not want, she thought, stubbing the cigarette out firmly, it was to be regarded as senile. She had a long way to go before that.

Suddenly the air in the neat room seemed intolerably stuffy. Cigarette smoke hung in a cloud around her. Mrs. Saunders felt weak and terribly unhappy. She rose heavily and stepped out onto her small balcony for a breath of air. Jill was lounging on the next balcony with a friend.

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Saunders. How are you? Isn’t it a gorgeous day?” Tall, blond, and narrow-shouldered, Jill drew in a lungful of smoke and pushed it out with pleasure.

“Hello, Jill dear. How’s everything?”

“Struggling along.” Jill stretched out her long jean-clad legs till her feet rested on the railing. “Mrs. Saunders, this is my friend, Wendy. Wendy, Mrs. Saunders. Mrs. Saunders has been so terrific to us,” she said to Wendy. “And she never complains about the kids screeching on the other side of the wall.”

“Hi,” said Wendy.

“Nice to meet you, Wendy,” said Mrs. Saunders. “I don’t mind the children, Jill, really I don’t. After all, I had children of my own. I know what it’s like.”

“That’s right. Three, aren’t there?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Saunders said. “Walter, Louise, and Edith. Walter was named after his father.”

“We named Jeff after his father too,” Wendy remarked.

“Mrs. Saunders sometimes babysits for Luke and Kevin,” Jill explained to Wendy. “They adore her. Sometimes they even tell us to go out so she can come and stay with them. I don’t know what it is you do with them, Mrs. Saunders.”

She smiled, and would have liked to linger with the two young women, but suddenly she had to go in, because a furious sob rose in her throat, choking her. She threw herself down on the bed and wept uncontrollably into the plumped-up pillows. Everyone in the world had a name except her. And it would never change. Nobody here, at this stage in her life, was going to come along and start calling her Fran. Franny, surely never again. She remembered the days—they were never far from her mind—when her husband was sick and dying in the bedroom upstairs in the old house, and fifteen, maybe twenty times a day she would hear his rasping, evaporating voice calling, “Franny, Franny.” She would drop everything each time to see what it was he wanted, and although she had loved him deeply, there were moments when she felt if she heard that rasping voice wailing out her name once more she would scream in exasperation; her fists would clench with the power and the passion to choke him. And yet now, wasn’t life horribly cruel, she would give half her remaining days to hear her name wailed once more by him. Or by anyone else, for that matter. She gave in utterly to her despair and cried for a long time. She felt she might die gasping for breath if she didn’t hear her own name.

At last she made an effort to pull herself together. She fixed the crumpled pillows so that they looked untouched, then went into the bathroom, washed her face and put on powder and lipstick, released her gray hair from its bun and brushed it out. It looked nice, she thought, long and still thick, thank God, falling down her back in a glossy, smooth sheet. Feeling young and girlish for a moment, she fancied herself going about with it loose and swinging, like Jill and Wendy and the other young girls. Jauntily she tossed her head to right and left a few times and reveled in the swing of her hair. As a matter of fact it was better hair than Jill’s, she thought, thicker, with more body. Except it was gray. She gave a secretive smile to the mirror and pinned her hair up in the bun again. She would go into town and browse around Woolworth’s to cheer herself up.

Mrs. Saunders got a ride in with Jill, who drove past the shopping center every noon on her way to get Luke and Kevin at nursery school. In Woolworth’s she bought a new bathmat, a bottle of shampoo and some cream rinse for her hair, a butane cigarette lighter, and last, surprising herself, two boxes of colored chalk. She couldn’t have explained why she bought the chalk, but since it only amounted to fifty-six cents she decided it didn’t need justification. The colors looked so pretty, peeking out from the open circle in the center of the box—lime, lavender, rose, yellow, beige, and powder blue. It was spring, and they seemed to go with the spring. It occurred to her as she took them from the display case that the pale yellow was exactly the color of her kitchen cabinets; she might use it to cover a patch of white that had appeared on one drawer after she scrubbed too hard with Ajax. Or she might give Luke and Kevin each a box, and buy them slates as well, to practice their letters and numbers. They were nice little boys, and she often gave them small presents or candy when she babysat.

Feeling nonetheless as though she had done a slightly eccentric thing, Mrs. Saunders meandered through the shopping center, wondering if there might be some sensible, inexpensive thing she needed. Then she remembered that the shoes she had on were nearly worn out. Certainly she was entitled to some lightweight, comfortable new shoes for spring. With the assistance of a civil young man, she quickly was able to find just the right pair. The salesman was filling out the slip. “Name, please?” he said. And then something astonishing happened. Hearing so unexpectedly the word that had been obsessing her gave Mrs. Saunders a great jolt, and, as she would look back on it later, seemed to loosen and shake out of its accustomed place a piece of her that rebelled against the suffocation she had been feeling for more years than she cared to remember.

She knew exactly the answer that was required, so that she could find reassurance afterwards in recalling that she had been neither mad nor senile. As the clerk waited with his pencil poised, the thing that was jolted loose darted swiftly through her body, producing vast exhilaration, and rose out from her throat to her lips.

“Frances.”

She expected him to look at her strangely—it was strange, she granted that—and say, “Frances what?” And then, at long last she would hear it. It would be, she imagined, something like making love years ago with Walter, when in the dark all at once her body streamed and compressed to one place and exploded with relief and wonder. She felt a tinge of that same excitement now, as she waited. And it did not concern her that the manner of her gratification would be so pathetic and contrived, falling mechanically from the lips of a stranger. All that mattered was that the name be spoken.