Lit Riffs (28 page)

After the admirers said good-night and Mr. Reed returned to the cottage he shared with a dozen cats, Olive sat at her dressing table wiping the Pan-Cake from her throat. She was still flushed with the excitement of her musical triumph. As she blotted away the makeup, her own glow burned through. Self-regard brings beauty to any face and it was there tonight, shining within Olive. It was then, in the mirror, she saw a second pair of eyes: a stranger lingering at the door. He held the musical program rolled up like a little wand. “Mrs. Harrington?” The man dipped his dimpled chin. He was an attractive, Nordic-looking man, not much older than thirty, with cheeks like apricots and blond hair tonicked into a luster. He introduced himself as Marcus Gardner Sutton. “I’m visiting your fine community. Up looking at a small piece of property. You have a beautiful voice, Mrs. Harrington. Did I once hear you in Salzburg?”

He was staying at the Cambridge Hotel and they dined in the flocked-wallpapered ballroom where he ordered beef au jus for two. “I understand you are a widow. My deepest regrets.” Sutton’s hard, squarish eyes were like two slate shingles. He spoke with an unidentifiable accent: British, but not quite. Among his many passions was tea; he was a self-described snob about it and he sniffed a bit rudely at the teapot brought to their table by the waiter. Sutton explained that he had recently sold a woman’s service magazine, reaping what he called “a small but satisfactory fortune,” and was looking to invest. He added, nibbling into a baked apple, “It’s time I made myself a home.”

“Isn’t Washington County a little quaint compared to New York?”

“I’ll always keep the town house open, but one can take only so much of city living, I should say.” Olive Harrington understood this, having read most of Mrs. Wharton’s novels.

The next day Sutton pulled up to the farm on Fly Summit Road in an open-aired speedster. He wore a white silk scarf and a leather golf cap. They drove to Vermont and found a country dining room that served stuffed grouse and, to the trustworthy customer, fermented cider. The waiter served the cider in coffee cups and looked up nervously when he thought he heard a rap at the door. The cider was sweet and strong and it brightened the fine autumn day outside the window to a near hysteria of late color, old orange and graying red. Dizzy, and maybe in love, Olive and Sutton walked to a waterfall and watched the leaves float downstream. On the drive home he took her hand, then her knee. Later, he asked her to sing for him. In her parlor she gave a private recital, culminating with a touching rendition of “At the Harvest.” Together, the eyes of Olive and Marcus misted over, while the teakettle whistled on the stove.

They were married at the end of the month by the justice of the peace in the Easton town hall. Olive wore a red maple leaf in her hair. On their wedding night they retired to Olive’s bed, which she had refashioned with eight eyelet pillows. After a turn of lovemaking that caused about as much fuss as a sneeze, the two fell asleep, their little pinkies linked.

Before dawn the mouse began to scratch in the wall. Olive was so used to the noise that it didn’t wake her. But the quick, shrill sound of its tiny nails scuttling up the beam startled Sutton. He clutched at Olive like a frightened child. “Is there a ghost?” Olive pressed her palm atop his head and was moved by his tenderness. “Only a mouse.” This failed to settle Sutton and he couldn’t return to sleep. “We can’t live in an infested house now, can we? It’s rather unsanitary, I should say.”

“There’s only one,” said Olive.

“Silly, Olive. There’s never only one.” Sutton tried to fall back to sleep but he tossed this way and that for the rest of the night. Several times he punched the pillows in exhausted frustration. This distressed Olive and the incident set a subtle tone for their marriage: much would be the fault of Olive and for this she would pay.

In the morning Sutton kissed her forehead. He was cheery and the shine had returned to his cheeks. “Calling in the exterminator is the only thing to do. Wouldn’t you agree, my dear?” From his polite, inflexible, tight-jawed voice Olive could tell that her opinion—not just on how to dispatch the mouse, but on everything—interested Sutton not at all. Recently he had changed his mind about the dairy farm and by the second week of marriage he stopped mentioning the East Side town house altogether. The exterminator came and in each corner of the house he left chunks of Swiss cheese stuffed with gray, gooey poison. “I guarantee your mouse will be dead by dawn.” The exterminator’s nose was red with burst capillaries and he had a wizened face that made it look as if he had outlived everyone and everything. He and Harrington had been friends; sometimes he would stop by the farmhouse and offer Harrington an extermination at half price, but Harrington never took him up on the offer.

Now Olive asked the exterminator how many vermin he thought he’d killed over the years. His voice was steady and aged and humble when he said seriously, “About a million.”

When the exterminator finished setting out the poison, Sutton looked up from his teapot and said, “Olive, dear, pay the gentleman.”

Over the years Olive had amassed a small but pleasing sum in her savings account. The Harrington farm was paid for and she was careful to promptly settle her account at the cooperative by the first of the month. Mr. Beckley rented the timothy fields and was good about paying on time, except the year there was snow in August. Olive took minor pride in her assets, storing her passbook and her deed in a safe the size of a Bible. She shared the safe’s combination with Sutton, assuming it as much her duty as making love to him; she minded both only a little.

Each afternoon Sutton drove into the village to fetch the papers from Albany, and he spent the evening poring over the financial page, sometimes thrusting it into the fire, other times shredding it with what seemed to Olive as spite. He would join her at supper smudged with newsprint and with a sickly frown. She once inquired, “Did you keep much in the market?” Marcus instantly perked up, shaking the distress from his face, and said, “Not at all, dear. In fact, I got out just in time.” Once, when he was in town, the telephone rang and a man asked for Mr. Sutton. “Would you give him a message? This is Mr. Grove from the Merchant’s National Bank, Department of Loans and Liens. Please have him call back at once.” When Olive delivered the message, Marcus twitched and then recomposed himself. “Never heard of him.”

Olive and Marcus made a habit of dining at the Cambridge Hotel on Sundays; quickly he become friendly with many people in the village and so Olive did not notice, at least at first, Marcus’s departure from the table to greet a neighbor just as the bill arrived. At church, he would nudge her to drop her coins into the dish and then pass it on himself cheerfully. Although he never ventured back to New York City, he continued to order his clothing from a shop on East Sixty-third. The shirts arrived in blue cardboard and pink-and-white string, followed, a few days later, by a small, discreet envelope, like the kind children use to leave money at church. Marcus would deposit the unopened envelope upon Olive’s piano.

One Friday they took the train to Montreal and stayed at a hotel overlooking a park. Olive stumbled badly with the French menus, ordering marinated tongue when she wanted rabbit pie. When they passed the window of a furrier, Marcus steered her inside. A man with a pencil mustache helped Olive out of her cape and into ankle-length coats of squirrel and white fox. The coats were heavy and nearly swallowed Olive. When she looked at herself in the three-way mirror, she saw only her small dark eyes peering rodentlike from the fur. “Do you carry chinchilla?” asked Marcus. “Do you carry raccoon?” He turned to his wife. “Which one do you want, my dear?” Olive felt a hot anger rise in her breast. “Can’t decide?” said Marcus. “Then why not take two?” Olive peeled herself out of the fur and told the clerk she would pass today. As she gathered her things, Marcus slipped himself into a gentleman’s raccoon and handed the man a card: “You’ll be kind enough to send the bill here.”

A few weeks later a mouse returned to the farmhouse. The first clue was the pellets left upon the stove, as dark and shiny as iron filings. Then came the skittering in the walls. “It’s a farmhouse,” Olive explained. “If you have hay fields, you have field mice.” But Marcus grumped and turned over in bed and punched the pillows with such nastiness that one night Olive got up. She wrapped herself in a flannel robe and went downstairs to her piano. She played a lullaby, the somber notes and her pretty voice covering up the mouse running between ceiling and floor. Soon from upstairs came the little piggy sound of her husband’s snore. Olive continued to play, her fingers finding the notes as if on their own and her register deepening to an amber hue.
He will gather us around, all around, all around
….

In the morning Marcus called the exterminator. He was out buying the newspapers when the man came and scooped his poison into the corners. “Don’t touch it for a week,” the exterminator warned. Marcus would want his afternoon tea and Olive set the kettle on the stove. While she waited for him to return, the telephone rang. “Is Mr. Sutton in? Would you ask him to call Mr. Grove at Merchant’s National? It’s rather urgent.” And then, “Have you given him my messages, Mrs. Sutton?”

When Sutton returned, he took his chair beneath the lamp and hid himself behind the shield of newsprint. Olive steeped and poured the tea. He brought the hot rim to his lips. “Mmmm, a new kind, my dear?”

“Bitter rose. Do you like it?”

“Not bad, is it?”

She began to play the piano and sing a folk song about the bounty, and Marcus said from behind the newspaper, “Lovely voice, my dear. Make any man weak in the knees, it would.” He laughed at his own romantic nature.

Olive continued to play. After some time she said, “The exterminator came.”

“So I smell.”

“He should be dead by the middle of the night.”

“Now what makes you so sure that mouse of ours is a male, my dear? It’s a rather unkind thing for you to say about my half of the breed.”

“It’s not unkind if it’s true.”

“Once again, you’re right, Olive dear.” He rose from his chair and kissed the crown of her head the way her father used to. “Keep singing. The world’s falling to pieces and the only thing that’ll help is your pretty voice.”

He returned to the newspaper and swallowed the last of his tea and poured another cup. Not long after, he said he was feeling sleepy and would go upstairs for a lie-down. “But do keep playing, dear. No greater lullaby than one of your songs.” His feet were heavy upon the steps and Olive’s fingers were light upon the keys. She played until dusk and beyond and her music accompanied the noises—the skittering mouse and the retching, strangling moans—that filled the farmhouse in the autumn night.

III. UPON GOING TO SLEEP

By the spring of 1942 nearly every man of able body, including Mr. Reed, had volunteered for duty. Washington County felt like a planet in a scientific romance, populated by only the young and the old and the female. Mr. Reed signed up to serve in a naval band aboard a carrier in the Pacific. A few days before his departure he confessed to Olive his fear of death, and they agreed to marry. The justice of the peace united them in a brief service in the Easton town hall. They did not celebrate or consummate. His departing lips upon her cheek were as velvety as a grandmother’s.

Olive wrote Mr. Reed every day. Sometime after the death of Sutton she started composing song cycles, usually quattros. She would send them to Mr. Reed, the music annotated with questions:
How does this sound? Is it beautiful?
Months later a reply would arrive on paper warped with humidity: “I played your lovely ‘From the Mountaintop’ in chapel the Sunday past and the good sailors wept.”

A year went by and then two, and despite her daily letters to Mr. Reed, she felt as if she had returned to widowhood. She gave her autumn recital, less gay this year round. She formed a canning circle to send stewed vegetables to the front, and she brushed her now silver hair to a pretty, elfish sheen. In the evenings she played the piano while listening to the war updates on the radio. The war took on a permanent feeling—the nightly recount of lines crossed and atolls gained; the murderous tally of lost tanks, downed fighters, torpedoed ships; the acute awareness of suffering, as if an antenna she didn’t know she possessed had been raised. She, and others, forgot that there was such a thing as peace.

Then Germany fell and Europe was liberated and before the end of summer Japan, too. Late one night, just as Olive was falling asleep, the eyelet pillows arranged around her, noise came from the kitchen. She thought it was the mouse, but it came again, this time more like a rap on the door, and then someone was calling her name.

It was Mr. Reed. She clutched her nightdress at the throat as she let him in and watched him deposit his duffel upon the davenport. The navy had improved his posture, and years on ship had cured his cheeks to a leathery brown. But his hands were still spidery and he kissed Olive in a maternal sort of way. In their letters they had written, vaguely, about living together at the farmhouse upon his return. She had said that she would welcome him, if only because she believed she would never see him again. There comes a point, Olive knew, when a solitary person can no longer share her heart, or her house. We get stuck in our ways until our ways are who we are. It’s a mysteriously fast leap—the dash from flexible youth to this. A tiny tremor shook Olive as she feared that she could not make room for her husband: Had something in her shriveled beyond repair?

And now here he was, in peacoat and cap, compassionate Mr. Reed, a man who always sided with the lamb. She had taken his name—how quickly the village had grown used to saying
Morning, Mrs. Reed
—but now it almost felt as if the name had always belonged to her and he was the borrower. She could see deep in his eyes he felt the same.