Lady (23 page)

In no time the story was all over town. People talked of nothing else. True Blue Ferguson -- the fair-haired boy, pride of the Academy Parliament, dealer in wit and sound intelligence -- profane and sullied, and skulking out of town, tail between his legs. He was to have been graduated from high school in June, and had his scholarship arranged for in the fall, considerations which seemed slight in the face of his ignominious departure.

People had said Blue Ferguson would go far, and they were right. Far had he gone; but where?

Then the Piersons also left. Nobody saw them go, and no one even knew they were gone until a FOR SALE sign went up in the front yard.

Though Blue's exact whereabouts remained a mystery, Mrs. Ferguson had received a postcard from somewhere in New York City, telling her not to worry, but this was small solace for her. The embarrassment of Blue's illicit connection with Lilah Pierson was as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes, but still people picked over the leavings, and when I thought of Blue, as occasionally I did -- not without meanness, for I felt some sort of personal, if undefined betrayal -- it seemed incomprehensible to me that he would have just sneaked off, and not met the situation head-on and taken the consequences, as I thought someone like Blue ought to have done. But now Mr. Pierson was gone, Mrs. Pierson, too, and reflecting on it, it seemed to me a business both shabby and ridiculous.

The more I dwelt on it the deeper the funk I got into, and as the last of the snow melted away and the weather warmed, what I considered to be my old world seemed to melt too; I would gladly have had winter come again, narrowing my horizon and imprisoning me with its familiar white boundaries. Spring was lurking, and I became fearful of it.

Then a dreadful scene occurred. It happened on a Friday after school when, suffering from I knew not what vague longings, I walked across the still-soggy Green to a favorite spot of mine, on Lady's side terrace. As I would sometimes do, I took along the little bedroom radio Ma had bought us after the flood. At home Nancy always had
The Romance of Helen Trent
or
Lorenzo Jones
or
Backstage Wife
on during that part of the afternoon, and I liked sitting on the terrace, the radio plugged in the outside jack, leaning back against the brick, listening to some music, and feeling the pleasant warmth of the absorbed sun through my windbreaker.

Lady needn't have worried about the wetness affecting her bulbs; there were tulips and jonquils and white narcissus everywhere, and hyacinths all along the terrace wall. The forsythia had almost gone by, but the rhododendron and dogwood were in bloom, the lilac was ready to burst, and the lawn was a deep, velvety green that looked unreal. In later years, after a dreary New York winter, with everything bleak and gray to dullness, when I yearned for flowers -- a hunger for spring color that was like an unsatisfied craving for sweets -- I used to think of Lady's springtime flower beds, particularly that year after the flood.

Jesse was finishing up his project of re-laying the brick walkway from the summerhouse to the birdbath, but instead of setting the bricks in sand, he'd used cement to make sure the work would hold firm. The birdbath had been placed in the center of the little circle, likewise brick and also cemented, with a border of upended bricks around it, in which ivy and flowers had been planted.

I must have been dozing, for, the sun making colors behind my closed lids, I only distantly heard the sound of voices. The window over my head was partly open, airing out the living room, and the words, traveling through from the kitchen, rose in conflict. Lulled by the sun and the music, I was not aware of their precise content, but one voice was unmistakably Jesse's. Opening my eyes, I saw that he had left his work on the bricks, and had gone indoors. Then I heard Elthea speak, and I realized some sort of argument was in progress, Jesse protesting with unheard-of vehemence, while Elthea seemed to be trying to calm him down. Next I heard the familiar sound of Lady's heels on the kitchen flooring, and her tone matched Jesse's in firmness and intensity. I opened the side door and crept into the living room, halting by the wing chair and listening. Still I could not make out all the elements of the conversation, only its tenor, and that in fragments.

". . . don't think that way," I heard Jesse saying.

"I may think any way I choose, may I not?" Lady retorted airily. "After all, it's my house."

"True enough."

Then Elthea: "Now, hon, don't you go fretting yourself into a stew."

"Don't she go fretting herself back to bed, you mean," Jesse interjected.

Til fret myself where and when I choose," Lady replied.

"You must suit yourself, then," Jesse replied. "As in all things."

"But I got
rid
of it!"

"Then be happy. . . ."

"
How
shall I be happy? Aren't I a little too old for that -- now? 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, let your lover climb up'? Shall I let down my hair? My
long
hair? That Edward
loved
? Shall I? Tell me, Jesse -- shall I? It's easy to put photographs and medals away, but I can't put him away, I can't!"

I listened, astonished. I had never heard Lady speak that way, with such calculated sarcasm. Still, I couldn't tell what precisely the argument was about. Something, obviously, to do with the shrine on the gate-leg table. Jesse spoke again.

"You can't because you won't let yourself. And you won't let anyone else --"

"Missus. Or
ma'am
. Don't you say
ma'am
to me? Call me ma'am, Jesse." Again her voice rode on an unsuppressed wave of sarcasm as if she were mocking him for his subservient position.

"Yes. Ma'am," Jesse replied in a dull tone.

"Thank you, Jesse. That was very nice. Very well, Elthea. Your Jesse thinks it best, and we must oblige him. Leave the things where they are."

A moment later Jesse came down the hall. I ducked behind the wing chair as he went out and closed the front door behind him. Meanwhile Lady had begun singing, not in her usual lovely voice, but in a raggedy, oddly kiltered range. I instantly recognized the rhyme Jesse had warned me against letting her hear: "There was an old, old, old, old lady," she sang, and a few more bars; then there was laughter, not a pleasant sound, but ironic and mocking.

Then she broke off and cried out, "Oh, I am being driven mad in this house. Old old old old and
mad
!" These words were followed by indistinquishable ones in Elthea's flowing murmur of protest, then more from Lady, ending with "old old old old" in a tone of anguish. I heard her rapid footsteps down the hall, and the sound of her sobs, and Elthea coming after her.

"Where are you going?"

"I am going," Lady returned with another cry, "to cut off my hair."

"No!"

The word escaped my lips before I realized it, and I rushed through the living room. Elthea was holding on to the newel post, looking up the staircase as I plunged past her and ran to Lady's room.

She sat at the dresser, her eyes wet, her features contorted, a pair of large silver scissors from her sewing box clutched in her hands. Her hairpins lay scattered' about and her hair hung around her face. Coming through the doorway, I saw the shears close on a large hank, slicing it clean. I stared in horror as, like a demented thing, she hacked and cut in a fury of resolve, scarcely noticing me as she went about her awful work.

Clump after terrible clump fell while she chopped around her neck. When the furious energy had expended itself, her hands dropped to her sides and she stared dumbly at the unfamiliar image in the mirror and the havoc she had wreaked upon her person. The scissors slipped from her fingers. She burst into a torrent of remorseful tears. She snatched up a hairbrush and began pulling it through the unevenly chopped hair, moans alternating with cries of rage and anger.

"What have I done, what have I done?" She stared at her image in the mirror, and suddenly her hand lashed out, the back of the silver brush striking the glass and shattering it. Broken pieces fell onto the top of the vanity, and I could see blood along her knuckles. Unmindful of the cuts, she abruptly stopped crying, as if spent, and said in an empty voice, "Well. That's that. Goblin -- goblin -- Ugly people doing ugly things."

Drops of blood were falling on the linen runner. Her face was an awful white, drained of color, and she clutched her abdomen as if such an expenditure of fury had made her sick. There were red smears on her white blouse, and the pewter dish was overturned, scattering pins and the chifforobe key. I stepped quickly forward to take the brush from her, then laid the palm of my free hand against the back of her head and looked at her fractured image in the mirror.

"I think you'll look good with short hair." With a whimper she buried her head against my arm and sighed exhaustedly. I put the things back in the pewter dish and righted it. When she lifted her face again, tears streamed down her cheeks.

"Please don't see me like this."

"You've hurt yourself."

"I'll fix it. Please go -- now?" A little-girl's voice, in a childlike appeal. Obediently I laid the brush down and left the room.

I went back to the side terrace for my radio and, replugging it in our sleeping porch, I saw her, with a scarf tied peasant-fashion around her head, as on foot she turned up the street, heading for the Center. Several hours later, she came back still wearing the scarf. I decided another retirement was in the offing.

I mourned the cut hair. Even though it might grow back, I thought it would never be the same. Something had been taken from me, the structure of my world had in some way been altered, and Lady's tantrum -- for I considered it such -- had in some indecipherable way threatened me. Now, no matter what, it would be a new Lady, a different Lady, and this was painful to contemplate.

I did not see her for some time after that, and though the bedroom shades were not drawn in daytime, still I felt sure the spring boded her absence from the Green. But somehow I didn't care. I considered her cutting her hair for spite as childish, and I was bored with the idea of a grown woman letting her emotions run away with her like that. If her presence had been made available to me, I would have let her know my attitude by acting cool, or shunning her altogether, to teach her a lesson. However, I did not see her, and the opportunity for such ridiculous melodrama did not arise. But I sulked plenty around our house, feeling disagreeable, out of sorts, disgusted with my fellow-man -- and woman. I loved no one in this world, no one I knew or could imagine, for I was sure no one loved me. I was a solitary boy. What had Lady said -- one feeds on solitude? I fed, but was hungry.

Perhaps it was nothing more than spring fever, and if Nancy had been more aware she would have double-dosed me with Iradol-A and given me a good shaking. But my desperate mood -- I was by that time considering running away, as Blue had -- was altered by a chance but memorable encounter, in which existed the opportunity of a greater understanding of myself, and of others, and a realization of what we so often forgot or did not want to realize, the fact that my bones were lengthening, my teeth settling, my cheeks drawing in, and, confirming the measuring marks on the kitchen doorjamb, that I was that most average of creatures, a boy growing up.

This meeting came in that time of kindest April when, the flood having devastated and then receded, the whole Connecticut River Valley was drenched with a picture-book sort of spring. It was on a Saturday after lunch, with a sky bright but scudding with clouds, and when they passed across the face of the sun they cast giant flying shadows over the pastures like the shadows of giant flying birds. Alone, I walked down toward Talcottville by the back road, the collar of my windbreaker turned up, the zipper pulled to my chin, and the inner thighs of my corduroy knickers rubbing with manly, audible friction.

I climbed to the top of Talcott Hill, which rose between the end of Pequot Landing and the nearer side of Talcottville. No-Relation Welles lived in the large house topping the crest, and I could see his horseless cart in the drive. I cut diagonally down and across the pasture to the pond behind the Paulus farm. Mr. Paulus was a kindly man who never seemed to mind our swimming in his pond, and sometimes Mrs. Paulus, a big, blond Scandinavian woman, would bake an apple pie and leave it on the kitchen sill, pre-slicing it for us to help ourselves. I could see Mr. Paulus going down the lane to fetch his cows at the far end of the pasture, where they were already chewing down the young grass. Birds sang, their dark forms spaced out like bits of Morse code along the telephone wires, while others perched in the branches of trees that everywhere already bore the faintest touch of lettuce-colored green, testimony to the greener foliage to come.

When I got to the pond, I followed the course of the stream it made into the woods, where little pockets of clean snow still lay sloped against some of the tree bases, and the thinnest lace of ice trembled against the undersides of the stream banks. I had worn my freshly oiled jackboots, laced with rawhide thongs to the knees, and I could easily wade along the bed of the stream, higher than usual from the flood, feeling the throbbing current against my shins and the crunch of the clean turned stones under my thick soles. I saw a lot of different birds, blue jays and nuthatches eagerly feasting after the thin winter pickings, others only recently arrived from warmer climates, cowbirds, robins, some red-winged blackbirds. I flopped down in a sunny dry spot, taking in all the spring sounds and sights around me. The sky was clear, clouds gusted on the wind, the soft clank of cowbells drifted across the pasture, and at every turning the stream gurgled coaxingly.

"Am I interrupting you?" asked a voice I knew. I opened my eyes and looked up at Lady Harleigh. She was dressed for walking, with heavy shoes and her old flannel skating skirt, and the wool cardigan sweater that hung in the back porch and that Jesse sometimes put on, a scarf around her neck, and her knitted skating cap pulled over her head. "I thought perhaps you were asleep. Just thinking? May I join you?"