‘My God,’ Hector thought. ‘My God, my God, my God.’
Then, without waiting for an answer and without even any change of tone (the transition was clear in her own mind, if not in anyone else’s; she had mentioned Mrs Crenshaw’s daughter and Mrs Crenshaw’s death) Mrs Lowry said abruptly, “People said things about her I wont repeat, but they didn’t know. What did they know? They made them up because of their idle minds. Elly was a good girl, good as gold. Who could know better than me? Why, I could tell you things she done for me.…”
She paused and dabbed at her eyes with one corner of the big plum-colored handkerchief, beginning to weep again. It was a bright clear day, very hot and still, the leaves hanging motionless, the sky intensely blue, almost to cobalt, not at all in keeping with the scene now being staged in the carriage. For a moment Hector had hopes that she would not be able to continue, but she recovered her voice soon afterwards.
“When Mr Lowry went away, ran off that is, and I begun taking in sewing, little odd jobs, piecework in the beginning, never any too sure where my next fifty cents was coming from, she used to say: ‘I know what youre doing for me, mamma. I wont forget.’ Mind you, she was just a little girl. (Wait.” Mrs Lowry counted on her fingers, and then for some reason pointed one of them at Mrs Sturgis like a pistol. “She was barely six.) And then some nights when my poor legs were aching me too bad for me to use, she’d get down on her hands and knees under the machine and pump the pedal, going even and smooth with hardly a breathing-space until I’d make her stop and rest a spell. Nobody knows what a comfort she was to me in my misery. Lord love us, nobody knows!”
She threw back her head and roared this last, and the moans and strangulating sobs resumed: Ah, ah, ah, ha! Ah, ah, ah, ha! while the remaining three people in the carriage avoided not only Mrs Lowry’s eyes but, now, each other’s as well, seeking to occupy themselves, in the presence of a common embarrassment, with various trivialities apart from the action at hand. Mrs Sturgis smoothed her skirt, watching the cloth ripple under her fingers and the glitter of her rings against the black. Mr Clinkscales took out his watch, a big one, turnip-sized in a hunting case, which he always laid face-up on the lectern at the beginning of every sermon; he joggled it now on the flat of his palm, raising and lowering it as if trying to estimate its weight for the first time in all the years he’d worn it, as intent as if he were absorbed in solving the riddle of Time. Hector was the only one who apparently did not feel obliged to occupy himself in some such manner. He kept his head down, hoping that now at last Mrs Lowry would be unable to continue.
But it was not so. She soon recovered. In addition to wiping her eyes, this time she blew her nose loudly twice, like trumpetings, and then resumed. Now she spoke with bitterness. Her voice was cold and, in comparison, calm.
“Yes. And mind you that wasnt the worst I had to bear, oh no, because when she was coming up, barely out of pinafores, they couldnt keep her name off their filthy tongues. I was dressing her fine as any lady in this town and they couldnt bear it. They couldnt bear it. And why?” She paused, eyes narrowed. “I’ll tell you why.”
This time it was not Mrs Sturgis she chose to address in particular. She leaned across the minister’s knees and shook a finger in Hector’s face for emphasis. Mrs Sturgis continued to smooth her skirt and watch the glitter of her rings, still trying to pretend for the benefit of the public-at-large that nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the carriage, but Mr Clinkscales drew back in alarm at the sudden aggression, the seamstress leaning across his knees, and almost dropped his watch. Hector raised his head, watching Mrs Lowry with unbelief as she continued to rail.
“Because she made their skimpy little knock-knee girls look silly. Thats why! Yes. And then to have a whole delegation of Baptists (and me a Methodist and always have been) come marching into my sewing room with their mouths screwed tight as buttonholes, prunes and prisms, prunes and prisms, telling me I’d have to keep her off the streets of Bristol because she was proud of the legs and the gorgeous bosom God had give her, and was already more of a woman at sixteen than any of them would ever be.”
“Dear lady —” Mr Clinkscales said, putting the watch back into his waistcoat pocket for safe-keeping. But she ignored him, or more probably had not heard him at all.
“Yes! And them the same identical ones as used to bring their pipsqueak little scrawny-chested girls in for fittings and ask me please to tack some padding into the bosom but, shh, dont tell a soul, whatever you do — as if they wasnt all out after the selfsame thing: a man: else why would they want to be pretending to be having what they aint?”
“Really, madam,” Mr Clinkscales said—
“You think I dont know them? I know them, all right. And when she up and married Hector Sturgis I thought theyd die. Die!” she cried, leaning again across the rector’s knees, her face quite close to Hector’s face. He could see the individual pores in her putty-colored skin, the mad grief in her eyes. She was speaking directly at him and she sputtered as she spoke. “Because you know as well as me the way they set their caps for you. I dont mean the girls; I mean the mammas. You may not be much man (and in fact I warned her at the time; I said, “Baby doll, I’m afraid thats not much man”) but that was all right, where they were concerned, so long as the—”
“Dear lady, I must ask you,” Mr Clinkscales managed to say. But for a third time she ignored him, not even pausing.
“— Wingate money was there and they could get their hands on it. But that didnt stop them, oh my no, even after she was sitting up there in that fine big house with servants to fetch and carry for her and hand her things on a plate. Marrying you wasnt their notion of the reward she ought to have gotten for the kind of life theyd been saying she was leading, not by a long shot. No sir, that didnt stop their limber tongues from wagging. You might think I dont hear things, cooped up there in that sewing room with a pair of legs that went bad on me when my man took off for parts unknown with a cootch girl. But I hear them; I hear them, all right, when theyre sitting there waiting for fittings, talking out of the sides of their mouths. I hear them all right: ‘I heard she did this’; ‘I heard she did that’; ‘Did you hear about the other?’ ”
Here Mrs Lowry performed an imitation of the gossips, hunching her shoulders to the level of her ears, screwing up her eyes, and hiding her mouth with her hand as she spoke. It was a credible performance, though rather broad. By now the others in the carriage had abandoned all pretense of being variously occupied; they watched her with wide eyes, frankly horrified, as she dropped back into character and continued, speaking faster all the time. It was as if she feared that some outside force was going to stop her before she finished saying all she had stored up through all those years.
“They doted on it; it was their bread and butter. Well, it’s easy enough to explain. Theyve got such empty lives anyhow; you could almost forgive them, except the harm they do. When their men come home at night from bending over desks all day and counting other people’s money, theyre too tired, too wore-out to treat them right. Yes: thats their trouble, for a fact. That might explain it, right enough, but it dont forgive them what they done. It dont forgive them provoking Elly into what happened to her. It dont forgive them murdering my child. Bitches!” she cried suddenly, her voice mounting toward some unattainable shrillness, perhaps beyond the furthest range of hearing. “Bitches! Bitches!” she cried, over and over, wringing her hands and shaking the tears from her eyes.
During this last the carriage drew up at the curb in front of the big gray boarding house where Mrs Lowry had two rooms on the upper floor. However, she took no note of this; she remained launched on the flood of bitterness, her voice mounting higher and higher, until two of the men boarders (they were night shift workers from the mill and had come onto the porch to watch the fun) responded to the rector’s gestures by coming out to the parked carriage, where they clasped each other’s wrists to form a four-hand basket carry, then lifted her clear of the seat a
nd across the yard. Her legs bulged enormous in black cotton stockings and the workers panted under the load, their faces drawn from exertion, the tendons of their necks standing out like cords, the corners of their mouths pulled sharply down. Mr Clinkscales ran alongside, uttering quick, chirpy cries of caution and fluttering his hands, which were pale and large and, now, apparently boneless. Overhead, the cloudless, cobalt vault, with its limitless intensity, still lent the scene an atmosphere of too-vivid unreality, as if it were being played on a stage or even by the glare of lightning and must therefore end in darkness, suddenly, like the end of the world. Mrs Lowry, thus transported, was still weeping, still screaming and calling the Baptist ladies bitches, when the men took her up the steps, between the two shingles on the flanking pillars, and into the house.
All down the block, on both sides of the street, her neighbors (they were mostly women at this time of the day; their husbands would be home between five thirty and six oclock) leaned out of windows or came out onto the sidewalk, already beginning to tell each other what they had seen and heard, rehearsing what they would tell their men when they got home from work.
“Did you see her? Did you hear the way she bellered?”
“Did I? Oo!”
“She really told them, didnt she?”
“Did she? Oo!”
“She did. She did, indeed!”
Two hours ago they had watched the departure, the Sturgis carriage drawing up and Mrs Lowry being carried out and deposited in it, greeting the others with considerable decorum and settling back against the button-studded cushions as the carriage pulled away, like any duchess out for an airing in her black taffeta tea gown. It had all been very polite, very sedate, and therefore something of a disappointment. The return was more to their liking; they leaned out of windows and across hedges, commenting on it with delight.
“She really told them, didnt she?”
“Did you see the way she yelled it in their faces?”
“Did I! My oh my.”
They said these things with a considerable element of pride, lifting their voices higher than was necessary to span the gaps between. It was as if Mrs Lowry had championed a common cause, and now they took courage and followed the example she had set.
Hector and Mrs Sturgis did not look at them or even at each other. Their faces empty of expression, they waited for the rector to return. Presently he did, a nervous, gray-haired man who by ordinary retained the elaborately cordial manner he had brought to Bristol forty years ago as a young minister with a boyish, pink-cheeked face that caused the older ladies of his congregation to coo and flutter over him, who also had played unsuspecting chaperon at Esther Wingate’s courtship, and who still walked with a slightly rolling limp like a seafaring man because of the badly knit ankle that brought Hector Sturgis into the world or at any rate contributed toward his conception. But he was worried now for fear that he would be blamed for the scene just past. It had been his suggestion that Mrs Lowry go in the carriage with them, though he knew that the two women had never met; Mrs Lowry’s legs prevented her making calls, and certainly it had never occurred to Mrs Sturgis that she should make the overture, even at the time of the marriage that connected them, any more than her mother had made any overture to her son-in-law’s barkeep father, back in her own time.
Mr Clinkscales climbed in at last, flushed from exertion and the difficulty of his position. “My dear Mrs Sturgis, I cannot tell you how much I regret—”
But she cut him short, speaking for the first time since they left the cemetery and losing control of her voice for the first time since the old days when she quarreled with her red-faced feed-salesman husband, dead of the fever almost twenty years. “Drive on!” she cried in a cracked voice, prodding the coachman with the ferrule of her parasol.
The coachman, a young saddle-colored Negro — old Samuel had been retired four years ago — had sat motionless and wooden-faced through Mrs Lowry’s tirade, as well as through the period of waiting which had followed. Startled by the shrill command and the sudden jab between his shoulder blades, he slapped down smartly with the reins. The fat, asthmatic carriage mares leaped forward, translated instantly from a standstill to a headlong, plunging gallop. Watching them was like watching a motion picture scene from which fifty interior feet of film had been carelessly snipped. One second they were drowsing at the curb, heads down, somnolent in the August heat, and the next they were involved in a wild-maned swirl of motion, lifting their knees like circus ponies and traveling at the tip of a funnel of dust. People on the sidewalks and lawns and porches gave them a cheer. Mr Clinkscales clung desperately to the edge of the seat, crying “Madam! Madam! Madam!” until the coachman brought them under control and they proceeded, wheezing, at a walk.
But for Hector things were never the same again. Mrs Lowry’s tirade, on the way back from the cemetery and in front of the boarding house, had given him a glimpse into a life he had never suspected during all the ten years he had shared it. After circling the town to let Mr Clinkscales out, the carriage finally pulled up at the house and Hector went straight upstairs to his room and lay on the bed. It was deathly still, the curtains hanging rigid as carved marble.
‘I stood here with the ax,’ he thought.
‘And I’d have used it, too,’ he told himself.
He could not admit that he would not have used it; in his mind that would have amounted to admitting he had not loved her. While the sunset burned and faded beyond the river he shaped her name with his lips: Ella, Ella, over and over again, and when his mother came in the twilight to tell him supper was ready, he gave no sign that he knew she was standing in the doorway.
She spoke his name softly: “Hector …” and then again, a little louder: “Hector? Supper’s ready.”
“You go on,” he said at last. “I dont want any.”
He spoke with his face turned sideways on the pillow. Mrs Sturgis left and he lay there, and presently the evening breeze came up, stirring and rustling the lace curtains. Alive, they moved languidly, in and out; they sighed her name. He could see in a shadowed corner the chair in which he had sat for so many nights, nursing the ax, his brain full of murder, while she was out with other men. Feeling the ten-year indentation her body had made on the opposite side of the mattress, he imagined a faint glow of warmth beneath his hand. Suddenly he remembered that night two weeks ago when he stood beside the bed, looking down at her lying as in a shallow trough, one breast spilling into the V of her gown with a smooth, pouring motion; he remembered the hate he felt, the way he gripped the ax while time stood still throughout the world. ‘And I could have done it, too,’ he thought. He still told himself that, for the room was pregnant with her, or with her ghost.
Mrs Sturgis watched and waited, and that was the way it was from this day on. He kept to his room except at mealtimes, as oblivious to what went on around him as a man engaged in counting his heartbeats; he would enter and close the door, and there would be nothing but silence. Mrs Sturgis, who had waited all these years to have her son to herself again, was willing to wait still longer. She had got into the habit. Besides, she told herself, this was merely a period of bereavement and readjustment, something to be outlived as the other had been, and she reassured herself with the thought that now she had no rival. Some nights she would get out of bed and steal across the hall, moving quietly in the darkness until she stood outside his door in her batiste nightgown, catching the moonlight like a figure on a tomb. There was only silence. She believed that this would reach an end, as the other had done in its time, one way or another, and she waited.
But whether she knew it or not, she still had a rival, a new one more formidable than any she had faced before. That evening when Hector came home from the funeral and lay on the bed, repeating the dead woman’s name to soothe his grief while he fumbled at her imprint on the mattress and mistook the warmth of his hand for the warmth of her body, he began to realize for the first time that what he had thought was hate was love; he was
in love. It came to him as he lay staring upward. He was in love as few men ever had been, sincerely and with all his heart, calmly and with infinite tenderness — not infatuated, as he had been on the night of the elopement: nor entranced, as he had been during his initiation into the rites of marriage: nor bewitched, as he had been through the years of inadequacy and torment. He knew all this, and he trembled with the strength of his desire. Knowing that the object of his love was dead was no deterrent; no man was ever inadequate with the dead. Besides, he intended to bring her alive again in his mind. He saw his task clearly.
The first step had been shown him by Mrs Lowry that afternoon in the carriage when she revealed things about her daughter which Hector had never suspected. He determined now to reconstruct her life, their life together. He would join fact to fact with all the patience and skill of a paleontologist reconstructing a skeleton from what few bones had been dug up, with all the devotion and industry of a biographer piling scene upon scene with the use of jotted notes until the figure grew rounded and warm and breathed beneath his touch. When she had been alive he had thought he wanted to kill her, but now that she was dead he wanted to bring her back to life.
That was his task as he saw it. And best of all, he told himself, when he was done she would be exclusively his. She would never demand more than he could give. She would never be unfaithful, at least not without the permission he might sometimes grant for the sake of the comfort that followed forgiveness. He set himself this task; he began it that first evening after the funeral, and he began it in the classical manner, invoking her spirit by calling her name, repeating it in his mind until even the curtains sighed it.