The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (29 page)

“Beautiful house, Mrs. Haidt. Big!”

There came the quick-fl ash of Nicolas’s smile, and a glimpse of the empty socket in his lower jaw, where the incisor was missing.

And how dazzling-bright the kitchen, with Mexican tiles on the floor, a center-island work area of gleaming hardwood, eight-burner Luxor stove and copper pans overhead hanging from hooks; the counter space was considerable, in flawless white. The room included a breakfast space with a mounted TV and a latticed bay window overlooking the sloping back lawn and the lake.

“What d’ya think, Gid? You seen anything like Mrs. Haidt’s house before?”

Nicolas spoke admiringly, and not ironically—Helene was sure. But the burly black man in a Helping Hands denim jacket thrust out his lower lip saying what sounded like
Yah sure, been in Bir’m Woods before.

Helene was explaining that she had both clothes donations and some appliances and furniture, which were downstairs in the basement; there was a basement door they could use, to bring things outside without taking the stairs up to the kitchen, but one of them would have to move the van around to the garage.

Nicolas sent Gideon off on this errand. Alone in the kitchen with Helene he moved about self-consciously, shifting his shoulders as if he were uncomfortable. His gaze was restless, evasive. His mouth worked and twitched. He was pretending an interest
in framed photographs on the walls—travel photographs of Greece and Italy, taken long ago by Helene’s husband. Helene wanted to draw near him and touch his arm but sensed that Nicolas would ease away with a frown. In a bright hostess-voice she asked, “How are you, Nicolas? Have you been—busy?”

Nicolas shrugged, yes.

“I left messages for you, I’d hoped that you might call back. I was worried—just a little. You’d said something about a ‘blood infusion’. . . .”

But this was a mistake: Nicolas did not want Helene to speak of his health, or of anything personal, intimate. She supposed, not with Gideon near.

They waited for Gideon to return. Helene’s heart was still beating painfully and her mouth had gone dry. If only Nicolas had come to her house alone . . .

But then? What then?

It was a weekday, 9:20
A.M
. Helene hadn’t expected any delivery or tradesman that morning; she’d assumed that Helping Hands would call to arrange for a pickup date and time. She hadn’t had time to prepare for a visit from Nicolas—though she was wearing dove-gray wool flannel trousers, a black Shetland sweater, low-heeled canvas shoes in anticipation of going out later in the day on errands.

If she’d known that Helping Hands was in the neighborhood, she’d have done more with her hair that morning than run a brush through it hurriedly; she’d have applied makeup to her thin, sallow face, darkened her eyebrows, reddened her mouth.

She’d have tied a silk scarf around her throat. A touch of color, to gladden the heart.

Still, in the reflective bottoms of the copper pans, Helene had a glimpse of an attractive and even composed female face; the face of a gracious woman, welcoming visitors into her house though they’d taken her by surprise. Helene had to check herself from offering the Helping Hands men something to drink—coffee?—fruit juice?—the instinct in her to be hospitable, as an American woman of her class, was so strong.

Gideon returned, and Helene led the men into the basement, by a staircase adjacent to the kitchen. Here was a back corridor that led to another wing of the house, overlooking an expanse of wooded land.

Switching on a light, descending into the basement, Helene had the terrible—unbidden and baseless—thought that these strangers could shove her down the stairs, cause her to fall and crack her skull, rob her. . . .

Who would know? And when?

This was absurd of course. Helene would have been deeply ashamed, if either of the men knew what she’d been thinking. Particularly, Helene was not a
racist.

Neither she nor her husband had ever been, in any of their sympathies,
racists.

Nor was Birnam Wood, still less Quaker Heights,
segregated by race.

At the foot of the stairs were two doors: one to the left, that led into the finished part of the basement, which contained the
family room with its large flat-screen TV and attractive furnishings, an exercise room and her husband’s wine cellar; the other, that led into the large, unheated and unfinished part of the basement containing the furnace, hot water heater, electrical boxes and switches and the door and steps to the outside of the house. This was not a part of the basement in which Helene felt comfortable for it was chilly and smelled faintly of backed-up drains; the things it contained—furnace, switches—she did not understand and dreaded that they might break down. The majority of the space was used for storage and contained items long ago exiled from the upstairs—furniture, lamps, cartons of clothing, books. None of these things was shabby or useless and yet none had been seen upstairs for years. An upholstered cobbler’s bench with a frayed wicker back, a coffee table in Scandinavian blond wood with a just slightly cracked glass top, orphaned dining room chairs, box springs and headboards, Venetian blinds, folded curtains layered in dust . . . Helene did not want to look too closely at a white leather sofa that had once been the pride of their living room, or at boxes of college textbooks her husband had been reluctant to part with though acknowledging that probably he would never read the books again.

Annually the subject had come up: they should call one of the charity organizations, Goodwill perhaps, to come and haul away the things accumulating in the basement, for much here was in good condition, usable and even valuable. But neither had ever gotten around to doing it and now the task fell to the smiling widow.

“Nicolas, Gideon—here we are! Please take all these things away. Just in this room, not in the other part of the basement—not in the ‘family room.’ All this furniture, these boxes, clothing . . .” Helene’s voice faltered. She saw both men looking at her with—sympathy? pity? She supposed it was routine in their lives, Helping Hands summoned to take away clothes and household possessions after a death in the family.

She
was routine in Nicolas’s eyes. Yet she could not believe that, so much had passed between them.

“The door to the outside is here, I can open it for you.”

Helene tugged at the door, and managed to open it. Mossy stone steps led up, outside. There was a smell of wintry damp, earth. Helene hadn’t used these steps for years though furnace repairmen, plumbers and electricians used them routinely.

Immediately, without hesitation, like a practiced team, Nicolas and his frowning dark-skinned coworker hoisted up tables, chairs. Helene stepped out of the way as they headed for the opened door. It was striking to her, how efficient and capable both men were, at a task that would have defeated her both physically and emotionally.

She’d thought that she might oversee the pickup, to speak with Nicolas perhaps, but felt a touch of vertigo, as of inexpressible sorrow, and went back upstairs.

Through a back window she observed the men carrying furniture across a stretch of lawn and to the van, for just a few minutes. The
impersonality
of what she saw made her feel weak, debilitated. She wondered if she’d made a terrible and
irremediable mistake—what urgent need was there to clear out stored things in the basement, now that her husband had departed?

His college textbooks! Helene felt a stab of something like anguish, that these books would be hauled into the dim-lit interior of Helping Hands, dumped into a bin with other unwanted books, to be sold for pennies.

Of course: she’d hoped that Nicolas would come to the house, and she’d hoped he would come alone.

She had several precious things to give to him—one of her husband’s Savile Row suits, his black wool overcoat, a floral-print shirt from Liberty of London.

“Will you have something to drink? Coffee, fruit juice . . .”

By the time the men had finished hauling her things out to the van, and brought the printed form for Helene to sign, she’d recovered from her spell of melancholy; she’d hurried upstairs to put on makeup, lipstick; she’d knotted a pink-striped silk scarf around her neck. In the mirror she’d looked surprisingly young, even radiant.

“. . . you’ve worked so hard! Please let me give you something before you leave. . . .”

Despite the cold air, the men were warm from their exertions. Hesitating at first, Nicolas unzipped his windbreaker and allowed Helene to take it from him, to drape over the back of a kitchen chair; Gideon unfolded a handkerchief and wiped his dark, oily face.

At first the men asked for ice water. Then, Nicolas asked if Helene had any beer.

“If you got any, ma’am. Otherwise, no matter.”

Beer! It wasn’t yet noon.

Helene laughed, and brought two bottles of German lager from the refrigerator. For weeks—now, months—these bottles had been at the back of the refrigerator. Helene had been reluctant to remove them—she hadn’t wanted to remove any of her husband’s things—his special fig jam, his favorite black olives, even a chunk of hardened Gorgonzola cheese. These bottles of beer Helene was delighted to serve to the Helping Hands men who’d worked so hard.

They were self-conscious at first, sitting at the breakfast table. Helene gave them glasses to pour the beer into but they preferred to drink from the bottles. She set out a plate of multigrain bread, sliced cheddar cheese, black olives. She went away, and returned with the Savile Row suit, the black wool overcoat, the floral-print shirt from Liberty, all on hangers. Both men were eating hungrily when she returned.

She saw in Nicolas’s eyes an understanding that yes, he knew these beautiful articles of clothing were for him personally; but no, he did not want Helene to say anything, in Gideon’s presence.

“I’d forgotten these. I’d meant to bring them downstairs with the other things, but . . .”

On a hook in the kitchen Helene hung the suit, the overcoat, the floral-print shirt.

The men mumbled thanks ma’am! As quickly they downed their beers.

Gideon asked to use a bathroom and Helene directed him to the guest bathroom in the back hall, with its William Morris– style wallpaper, rose-marble sink and brass faucets, a glistening spotless pale-rose ceramic toilet; in a marble soap dish, fragrant hand-soap stamped Dior. When Gideon returned to the kitchen, Nicolas asked to use the bathroom.

Without asking if they wanted a second beer—(for Helene could see that they were restless, wanting to leave)—Helene brought out two more bottles of lager from the refrigerator. By this time the plate of bread and cheese had been emptied and Helene sliced more bread, more cheese, set out more black olives and a little bowl of cashews.

It was painful to her—she did not want the men to leave! Desperately she wanted them to stay a while longer, to talk with her—not as Mrs. Haidt, not as a well-to-do donor to their organization, but as an equal, and a friend. But when she asked the men about their lives—particularly, what had brought them to Helping Hands, what their experiences in the army had been—Gideon frowned and shrugged, and would not meet Helene’s eye; Nicolas was silent at first, staring at his feet, then, abruptly, he began telling Helene that the worst mistake he’d ever made had been to enlist in the U.S. Army but—at the same time—what the army brought him to in the Middle East was a “revelation” to him, he wouldn’t have had at home.

“See, the way the world
is
. Seeing it in movies and TV isn’t the real thing, the war-thing, you have got to be
in it.
”

Gideon grunted, and grinned. These harsh words of Nicolas’s, he agreed with.

Helene asked uneasily what did Nicolas mean? She was sitting across from the men at the breakfast table, her arms folded tightly beneath her breasts as if she were cold, and trying not to shiver. Sitting only just eighteen inches from Nicolas, and from Gideon, she felt that she herself was on the brink of a profound revelation, no neighbor of hers in Birnam Wood would ever know.

Nor could her poor, deceased husband have known. His widow had gone so far beyond him, now.

“What do I
mean
? What’d you think I mean, ma’am? Getting shipped over to Iraq, trained to be a soldier ‘defending democracy’—with a rifle—for a while, inside a tank—firing at whatever was out there, from a tank—sure we killed people, why not? That’s what we were sent there for.”

Helene was disconcerted, Nicolas smiled so frankly at her. Yet his voice was jeering, derisive.

“But you—you were a soldier, Nicolas. You hadn’t any choice. . . .”

“Civilians, too. ‘Iraqis’”—contemptuously the word sounded from Nicolas’s lips:
Eeer rak eees—
“some of them women, old people shrieking like pigs being slaughtered—kids . . . First I thought, Jesus! This ain’t right, we’re Americans!—then, seeing
what the other guys did, I thought, Why the fuck not? Prob’ly I won’t be coming back anyway, who gives a shit.”

Helene shrank from Nicolas, shocked and off ended. His eyes on her were disdainful. Noisily he drained his bottle of German lager, laughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

“So? You don’t want to hear, Mrs. Haidt? Why’d you ask, then? All of you—‘civilians’—always ask, and always regret it. Why’d you call me, to come here?”

“I—I—called Helping Hands—to make a donation. . . .”

“Like hell. Ma’am, you called
me.
”

Helene had stumbled to her feet, drawing away. Confusedly she thought that—if something happened—she could run into another part of the house: her husband’s downstairs study.

There, she could lock the door. She could dial 911.

Gideon said he was out of here, and left the house; Nicolas lingered to finish the remainder of the food. He ate with his fingers hungrily, insolently. Within minutes he’d seemed to become drunk, an elated and violent sort of drunk, repulsive to Helene. Boastfully he was telling her about what a feeling it is, outside the “U.S. territory of law”—“like, free to do any God-damn thing you want to, your buddies will look the other way that’s why they are called
buddies
.” Seeing the look in Helene’s face he leaned close to her, telling her that the rehab hospital he’d been in, in New Brunswick, wasn’t just for “physical trauma” but “psy-chi-at-tic” too: “See, thing is, ma’am—Gid and me, we’re both
dead
. You’d thought it was some
live vets
coming out in the van but thing is, we are
dead
.”