Lady (28 page)

At the grave we set in the bright autumn flowers we'd bought at the Marini farm; they would last until a frost, Lady said.

"How old is Jesse?" I asked as I troweled and she cultivated.

"Do you know, I've never really been quite sure."

"What does the doctor say?"

"Oh, pooh, Jesse will be fine. Certainly he will." She said it with such conviction it only brought home to me again how dependent she was on her two faithful friends, Jesse and Elthea, for all that people considered them only servants. In my mind's eye I could see them, Elthea in her starched cap and apron, and he coming into the room in the late afternoon in his slippers, asking, "Will that be all, Mrs. Harleigh?" Knowing he would in a moment bring in the martinis he'd already prepared; and later we would hear his slippers on the stairs as he followed Elthea up.

We washed off the flowerpots which Lady always saved for sprouting seedlings at home, and though the work was done, still she seemed inclined to linger at the grave, fussing and making futher small adjustments to the plantings. Finally she said the last "There," which meant she was satisfied; then she spent some minutes in the church, and we left for home.

We arrived almost at sunset. I put the tools back, and when I came out I found Lady sitting in the summerhouse. It had grown chilly and she had put on the old sweater from the back porch. She seemed tired. In addition to the cemetery gardening, she had been working around the house all day, helping Elthea, whose many duties had increased since Jesse's collapse. When I joined her in the summerhouse, Lady gave me a fleeting smile and said she was having a moment by herself. I started to leave, but she asked me to sit with her. I remembered what she had told me once about "solitary feeding," and was willing to respect her silence. But this afternoon she seemed communicative, saying that Mr. Marachek, the postman, had brought a letter that morning from the Hoffmans, who were in Berlin, where Lady had been born.

"What is Berlin like?" I asked.

"Heavens, it was so long ago. Very beery, I should think."

"Don't you remember anything about it?"

"Well, there was a little garden at the back of our house with a fruit orchard, and in the spring all the trees would be in bloom. Like the ones your father planted."

"Is that all?" I was disappointed, imagining she'd have all sorts of stories and recollections.

"I suppose there are other things. I remember Christmas was always wonderful there."

"Better than our Christmases?" For some years now, all of our family had been coming to Lady's for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, while she, Jesse, and Elthea, would come over and help us trim our tree. It had become a tradition.

"No, not better. Just . . . different. . . . Childhood Christmases are always different, somehow. I remember the ornament that went at the top of the tree. Papa would hold me up and let me set it on. It was a Saint Nicholas -- not a Santa Claus, but an old man with a long white beard and a white robe."

"Like God?"

"Yes, I suppose so -- if that's how you picture God. But Germany isn't a good place to live in anymore." She took the letter from her sweater pocket and read parts of it to me. It was filled with news and items of interest, but it sounded as if the Hoffmans were not enjoying the trip to their homeland. Mrs. Hoffman, who'd written the letter, related several witnessed incidents of brutalities in the public streets. I wondered why Germans were being attacked by their own countrymen.

Lady explained that the people beaten were Jewish, but I couldn't understand this. What did their being Jewish have to do with anything? Were they as different as all that? Was it because they had all the money, as I had overheard Mr. Sprague saying? Because they'd put the X in Christmas, making it Xmas, so the Jewish merchants could sell more on the Christian holiday? Miss Berry's mother had been a Rose, descendant of the same Rose family whose daughters had been kidnapped by the Pequots. George and Anne Rosen were the only Jewish kids in town. Rose -- Rosen. Was the difference an "n"?

Hitler was a dictator, and we all knew about dictators. Mussolini, Franco, Stalin -- there were plenty of those. Totalitarianism was becoming an everyday word in our lexicon. Here in America there were people who said Roosevelt wanted to be a dictator. And there was an entire echelon of minor demagogues, each of whom bore the earmarks of incipient dictatorship: Huey Long (assassinated the year before), Father Coughlin, Senator Rankin -- even Mr. Bilbo from Mississippi, who wore gravy-stained shirts in the Senate. Father Coughlin, once an ardent Roosevelt supporter, now damned him from the pulpit, even calling him a Jew, and saying his name was actually Rosenfeld. (This, it appeared, was worse than being a Rosen.) If people knew about these men, I asked Lady, why did they listen?

"Because they want to believe in them," she answered. "But people are seldom really who they appear to be. They are only what they are. Sometimes it takes a lot of work and many years to discover what a person really is." She leaned her chin on her hand and absently ran the edge of her sleeve under her nose -- that old back-porch sweater, whose frayed tips fell over her fingers. Her voice was quietly reflective as she continued, "We all wear other faces, it's true. The good are not nearly so good, and, as for the bad, I'm sure they're much worse than people think. But there are bullies the world over. And very shortly the world won't be a very pleasant place to live in anymore -- not anywhere. Trouble has a long finger -- it can touch so many places."

"There's lots of bad people in the world, aren't there?" I suggested, as if just having counted them.

"I'm sure there are probably more good ones than bad, or else we couldn't have progressed this far. At least it's something to believe in, all the good ones. We must find something to believe in, totally, with all our hearts."

"What should people believe in?"

"My dear, who can tell? That's up to the individual. Perhaps God is as good as the next thing. Until you find a person, someone living . . ."

"Have you believed in someone?"

"Yes, I have. I have believed so much sometimes I thought it would be the death of me . . . the very death. But never be incredulous of people -- they will always manage to surprise you."

"How?"

"In all ways. People are people wherever you go -- they run to type, they fit categories. At least in my experience they do. But look out for the exception to the rule -- they're the ones you have to watch."

Falling silent, she let her glance drift to the gazing-globe, and made a few indistinguishable murmurs, lost in some private reverie. I pictured the grave in the churchyard we had left earlier, and it occurred to me that it was Edward she had been speaking of, that it was his memory she had believed in, and that had sustained her for all these years.

Presently she said, "We must remember to bring the globe in before it gets colder. I'd hate to have it crack in a quick frost."

"Could it?"

"Couldn't it? The glass is very fragile. It's lovely there, isn't it?" she went on musingly. "The perfect spot. Come and look."

She led me down the walkway to the circle of brick, and the globe centered in the middle on its stone pedestal, with a stone bench close by. I glanced at Lady, then picked the globe up between my fingers, and held it.

"Careful, darling, that's a mirror, you know -- seven years' bad luck." Unconsciously she touched her hair, and I supposed she was remembering the day she'd smashed her vanity mirror. I replaced the globe, carefully fitting the small glass projection on its underside into the hole in the pedestal, which held the globe in place.

She took my hand and we walked around it, watching ourselves as we moved, first with the shrubbery behind us, then the large elm tree, then the back windows, the drive, the carriage house, another elm, the slope of the lawn, and the bushes again. But we two, we remained the same, and it was like seeing ourselves caught in a little silver world of its own.

"You see what that's like?" she asked.

"Sort of . . ." I voiced my thought about the little silver world.

"But exactly -- that's how it is, just that way. If you walked and walked around it for a long, long time, the leaves behind us would turn and then drop and become new leaves again, and the trees would grow taller and older and you would, too, but everything would go on, it would all continue, and you wouldn't even notice the changes." She touched the silver sphere with her finger, whose tip, reflected, enlarged as she made a little circle on the top. Then she drew me down on the stone bench.

"You see how things look whole? Not only your little piece, or someone else's little piece, but all the pieces, all unbroken, all flowing together. It seems to me that when I look in there I can really see what God meant the world to be like. The earth is round, and so is this globe. All is visible, you can see everything in its place, and each thing is in relation to each other thing. Everything is in balance with everything else. That's the way the world should be."

I could see it. I could understand what she was saying. I knew it was exactly that way. We were side by side, seeing ourselves, and our surroundings. It was a way of looking at things, at images, at life, the whole world. Everything seemed to proceed in one unbroken line; everything continued, in time, in space, in existence, all held in that silver globe, and reflected by it.

Still seated on the bench, we fell silent. Around us could be heard the sounds of leaves falling -- light, papery sounds. A squirrel rummaged in the chrysanthemums behind us. There was the tang of smoke in the air, and a crisp chill. A bird popped out of the hole in one of Jesse's bird-houses, darting its head about as if wondering where summer had gotten to. Kerney's banged-up tricycle lay where he'd left it, overturned amid the dying hydrangeas. Everywhere the plants had been cut back, tied up, some covered for winter. The luminous dusk came on, the sky dimming in the east, while beyond the Cove long fingers of clouds drew down over the hills of Avalon. Mauve, rose, gray, the colors of the pearl on Lady's little pewter pin box, these were the colors I saw in the sky.

I looked at Lady. Her lips were curved into a smile that I can only describe as bittersweet. She was looking into the gazing-globe, and I turned to see what she might be seeing now. As we watched, behind us, toward the west, the sun, a small autumn ball of cold fire, was held in the curved silver surface, reflected as if from deep within, as light shows the fiery heart of a jewel. Then it dropped, slowly, slowly, seeming to slide down the lower part of the globe as if into another hemisphere. And was gone, and there were only shadows and the light from the sunset sky, and the wind blew cold. Lady pulled her sweater across her front, hugged a shiver out of her, and we went in for tea.

By Thanksgiving, Jesse was up and around again, but it became clear that however old we may have imagined him to be, he was yet older, and since the stroke his years were beginning to show. He shuffled, rather than walked, as if by some inner instinct he were purposely shortening his stride to lengthen his life. The skin on the backs of his hands was like dusty dark paper; his face had gradually lost its healthy sheen. His black woolly hair, rather than going gray or white, seemed to have turned rusty, and he fidgeted when Elthea gave it its customary shearing every month or so. He seldom spoke unless spoken to, but was constantly making the growling sounds in his throat, as though in protest against some unseen hand. And if the hand were unseen, still we knew whose hand it was he feared: the hand of death. He appeared grateful for any little attention, or the slightest display of affection. He seemed to draw nearer to Elthea than he had in the past, spending hours in the kitchen in a chair, clasping and unclasping his long fingers, and silently moving his lips or grinding his jaws; when I was there, too, I would catch him looking at her in a way that said he desired to establish some secret communication with her. He kept his chair as near to the stove as he could without getting in Elthea's way, and sought other places to provide himself the warmth his body seemed now to need: by the living-room fire, in a sunny window, even the cellar, where he would position himself close to the furnace or, if the fire was banked, put his back against the asbestos insulation as though to melt the marrow in his old bones.

One day I found him down there, and sensing that he was grateful for the intrusion, I pulled up a box and sat with him to keep him company, whittling on a stick and aimlessly whistling through my teeth. Once he caught my eye and the corners of his mouth twitched in a reluctant smile.

"You've grown some, son."

"I'll be thirteen."

"Twelve's old enough." He nodded, more to himself than to me, I thought, as if remembering what it was like to be twelve. "I think twelve's just fine. You goin' some, mon?"

"I'm sorry --"

"You going 'way from this place or you goin' stay 'round, like some folks do?"

"Well, I'd like to go away, yes."

"She's big."

"Who?"

"The world. Big place, the world. Never seen it, but Daddy did say. Don't you get cotched."

My inability to follow his words made me feel "stupidy," but the finely honed edge of his speech had become blunted; he seemed to have lapsed into some early, recollected speech pattern, the patois of the islands. It was as if he were seeking the safety of his earliest memories, a familiar place he had been too long away from.

"You get cotched by the world, son," he continued reflectively, "you gets your se'f in trouble." "Cotched," I translated as catched. "Well, you go 'way," he went on, "you come back sometimes. You'll have to look after Missus. Someone got to look after Missus after ol' Jesse done turned in his receipts. She a fine lady --
fine
lady. Reckon how long it's ben. Mean, reckon how long I ben hyere. I ben hyere eighteen year come Easter. Long time to live in a house that ain't your own. Well, I guess old Jesse c'n just do some settin' and a-rockin' now. Never will see next Easter."

"Sure you will --"