"It was not done simply," Lady had said. "We paid a terrible price. He did, and I did." Here her calm expression had slightly altered, her tone as well, and it seemed to me that perhaps there was something more than the apparent price that had been paid. Something to do with Edward? Her guilt? The shrine on the gate-leg table? I could not fathom it, yet it was there. In that final moment of revelation concerning Ott, she had spoken with such candor, and then vehemence. I believed her utterly, yet still I was left with the feeling she was withholding one last piece of the story, something that had gone unsaid.
"It's not easy to pretend," she had explained. "For a lifetime. It is a wearisome burden, pretending. Playing a game, acting a part -- for others, not yourself. To make it easier for them, not you. It was all a masquerade."
I recalled our talk in the summerhouse, when she had spoken of the differences between things as they are and things as they seemed. "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." And so she had thought of herself, for so many years. I would not have liked to carry such a burden. "Extraordinary," she had said, removing the Halloween child's disguise, "what a mask may do for one."
I wondered where she had gotten the strength to stand up to the rigors of leading a double life, and the danger of revelation in a small town such as Pequot Landing. Yet, until Dora had taken to spying in the carriage house, it had been accomplished. Poor Dumb Dora! If she could know what pain she'd caused.
But for me so much had become clear; now I comprehended Lady's guilt, her tears, her talking to herself, her vigils at the gravesite, at the living-room shrine. Small wonder she saw the ghost of Edward Harleigh wherever she looked, in whatever dark corner she might peer. A widow, living unmarried with another man, her black servant.
"It was the walks, mainly," she had said, her eyes growing misty. "That we could never go anywhere in public together, never be seen as a couple, except out driving. That was why you were always asked to take me around the Green, because he could not. I used to imagine what it would be like to be with him, walking, and that Mrs. Sparrow wouldn't pay any attention to us, that we could be just like other people, that what we had done with our happy lives wouldn't matter to people who had made their lives unhappy.
"He was all my hope, you see. In the nights I couldn't wait for the sun to come up, to see his face, and in the day I couldn't wait for it to be night, when I could hold him." She paused, then finished: "There was nothing I wouldn't have done for him. Nothing. Nothing I didn't do. Nothing."
And nothing he hadn't done for her. I thought again of Eotis Thorne, my Mr. Ott, who had threatened their existence, and whom Jesse had done away with. Lady had told me how he had removed the body to the cellar on that Halloween night, and then put on the coat and hat, and taken the streetcar, as a decoy, in case anyone -- like me -- had seen him arrive. Fear of discovery was what had prompted Lady's trip the following summer to Virginia Beach. They had gone to Memphis, where discreet inquiries were made to learn if Thome's trips to Pequot were known. They were not, nor had he been even missed. But still Lady had not revealed to me of the final disposition of the corpus delicti.
I thought I understood the psychology behind the shrine on the gate-leg table. As Miss Berry had pointed out, the workings of Lady's mind were indeed elaborate, and for her the shrine was a form of self-punishment, some unfathomable need to be constantly reminded of what she was doing, and what would happen if discovery came.
But for my remaining weeks at home that autumn her earlier words seemed to hang in my inner memory: ". . . people who had made their lives unhappy . . ." That, and "our happy lives . . ."
Everything else seemed irrelevant.
* * *
Meanwhile, Hitler's panzers marched into Poland, and the world, our town, and all our lives became different. It was another beginning, or another ending; I could not tell which, for I was not -- none of us were -- aware of the vast changes that were coming. For me the measure of my life seemed only the distance across the Green from our house to Lady's, and it was there that it seemed the changes were most vividly drawn. As I grew in height, our dwelling, always crowded, seemed to shrink, until in fact I could reach to the ceiling when I stood on tiptoe, and inch by inch the yardstick marks on the kitchen door jamb crept swiftly upward toward the lintel.
And as its size diminished, the house emptied. Nonnie had already gone, and myself. Lew had graduated from high school the previous June and found a job in Mystic working for a lobster fisherman. Harry was now in senior high and employed nights at the Sunbeam. This left only Aggie and Kerney at home. Ag was a junior at Thomas Hooker High when I was a sophomore at Blankenschip, and Kerney celebrated his tenth birthday that winter. Nancy began her sixth year with us, and she was the one constant factor on the premises, never changing, never different, never anything but Nancy. Ma might have retired, but she had been at the Sunbeam so long it had become a way of life for her, and she was reluctant to give up her position because we still needed the money. If Nonnie had never managed to lay by enough to put a cow in our shed, at least we now had a secondhand Studebaker in the garage, but there still were our college educations to be thought about.
During my sophomore year, I met a girl at a seminary near Blankenschip, and found I was spending more vacation time in New Hampshire. I believed myself in love, but this was short-lived after Dottie Frame moved to town. Dottie, beautiful, bewitching, auburn-haired, became the belle of Pequot Landing, and she had the boys falling all over themselves, myself included. I quickly switched affections and time schedules and now spent more holidays in Pequot than I had at school. None of this was lost on Lady, who watched my courting of the dazzling Dottie with no comment It was a feverish four months, and there was a zealous exchange of letters (I labored over mine to her while my marks dropped; hers were bright and breezy, and I knew they had cost her no trouble) while I panted in expectation of the next holiday which would see me back on the Green again.
Across the way, I would notice each time I returned how strangely denuded Lady's house looked in its setting, with the old twin elms gone from in front, and two new trees providing little to make up for the damage from the hurricane. Between dates with Dottie Frame I managed to spend as much time as I could over at Lady's, but my periods away at school were sufficient to reveal the extent of the changes, in both the house and the mistress.
Two things were obvious. One, that for all those years it had been Jesse's and FJthea's hands who had kept up the luster of the house, and with their going that luster had dimmed. Two, Lady needed someone to replace them; but no amount of urging seemed to change her mind. It was as though, with the Griffins gone, she was unwilling to accept the presence of some stranger, nor would she suffer the adjustments this would have required her making.
She had another accident, one that, though we did not know it then, proved the beginning of her early decline into ill health, and eventually her death. She'd gone shopping upstreet and the heel of her rubber boot had caught in the escalator in a department store, and she fell. There were no fractures, but her old ankle injury kicked up and she was incapacitated, in addition to which she suffered painful bruises over a good deal of her body. When Dr. Brainard examined her -- it had been some time since she had submitted to an examination of any kind -- the good German Strasser blood was found to be lacking in red cells, and treatments were instituted to correct this deficiency. She got out the cane again. When X-rays were taken, it was discovered that the fall had put her lower back out of alignment, and she was required to wear a brace. When I went to her house, I would find her still cheerful, though she walked more slowly, and it required little effort for her to get out of breath; the slightest exertion tired her.
Worse was to come; a painful series of blood transfusions, a cast, hospitals, and the gradual wearing down of the entire machinery. Nobody knew at that time what lay ahead, but she already entered on the slow downw
ard curve that would eventually see her buried in the churchyard beside Edward. Yet, until the time of Pearl Harbor, we felt she was managing well enough, except in the matter of household help.
While her ankle mended and she wore her back brace, it was necessary for her to be looked after. Rabbit Hornaday still made himself available doing odd chores for her, but more hands were needed. The parade began. For endless months the house on the Green saw a doleful succession of hired girls, maids, housekeepers, and practical nurses. None sufficed for Mrs. Adelaide Harleigh; one by one they arrived, and one by one they departed, with hard feelings on both sides, and the problem continued until Miss Berry once again came to the rescue. But Miss Berry was herself not in the best of health, and the search continued for someone to take over the heavier household work.
One apparent answer to the problem was the recalling of Elthea Griffin from Barbados. This, however, proved impossible. First, since her return to the island it had become her arduous task to take charge of her aged and sickly father, who required close and constant attention. Second, Lady adamantly refused even to hint in her letters that Elthea might be needed. It was not a matter of pride, but of consideration. Elthea, well advanced in years, had already performed a long term of service; it would be selfish to ask her now to take up her old duties. All of us were forbidden burdening her with tales of Lady's unfortunate turn of events. Against our better judgment the news remained undisclosed and Elthea continued caring for her father, while we cast about elsewhere for rescue.
The solution was, like most, a simple one, and I must confess it was not mine, but Ag's. This was in the late autumn of 1941, scant weeks before Pearl Harbor. Giving up serving tables at the Red Fox Café, Helen Zelinski came to the brick house across the Green, and she was the perfect answer.
It was as if she'd been waiting for years to step into her place at Lady's, and once finding it, she made the most of it. Lady called her a diamond in the rough, but nonetheless a gem. Helen had a rare strength, a primitive form that was at once knotty and smooth. Artless, often uncouth, she was louder and more rambunctious than our Nancy, as agreeable as Elthea, and as hard a worker as either. There seemed to be two distinct sides to her. She was both brusque and melting, and I soon discovered I could never know which to expect.
When I would enter Lady's house, she would look at me with a blaze of eagerness in her eyes; they shone with a willing kindliness that reminded me of photographs of the peasant immigrants arriving at Ellis Island -- hopeful, desirous of good things, and full of strength. In all her looks and gestures there was appeal, a wish to please, and again I was struck by the vulnerability that she tried to hide behind her abrasive exterior. Life had not used her kindly; but Lady did, and the favor was returned, and once again things were running smoothly across the Green.
Coming home for the Thanksgiving holiday, I was, as usual, making the long trip down from New Hampshire by bus, since the train schedule was less convenient. I took a seat near the back by a window, alternately studying the worn copy of Bowditch's manual that had been Jesse's, and staring out the window, morosely thinking about Dottie Frame. Out of her sight, surely, in spite of her letters, I was also undoubtedly out of her mind.
When the bus got to Saltonville, a town in lower Massachusetts, we pulled in at the gas station that served as a stop on the route, and I got out to go to the bathroom. A pickup truck was parked at the pump, the driver squatting at a tire with the air hose. He looked vaguely familiar as I passed, and when I came out again, after calling the house to say I would be there in two hours, I discovered that the driver was Rabbit Hornaday. I hadn't seen him in some time and, like me, he had grown considerably. He offered me a ride to Pequot Landing in his truck, and though perhaps less comfortable, it was ultimately more convenient, because he would take me right to my door.
I was glad of his company. He wore new glasses, but the lenses were still thick and made him look more owlish than ever, enlarging his eyes as they did. But he could see well enough to drive, was in fact a good driver -- "handy," as Jesse would have said -- and I envied him his truck, jalopy that it was. A recent purchase, he had bought it with his mink money. I knew that he had been raising minks as a sideline, along with numerous, other animals, and he said he'd driven up to Saltonville to buy a pair of beavers, which were in the back of the truck.
It was a strange situation between Rabbit and me. We were friends who weren't really friends -- or the reverse, I wasn't sure. Uncomfortable silences opened between us which we both tried to fill with those topics we held in common, mainly local events and what we were going to do in the war when it came. Rabbit said that with his eyes they wouldn't take him. I knew he was disappointed. But he talked easily enough about his minks and beavers, explaining about the prices of the different pelts, nature habits, and so on, and I could tell he really had a feeling for animals. Far cry, I thought, from the scourge of Pequot Landing who'd massacred the Colonel's Belgian hares.
I asked about his sister Dora, who had been enrolled in a Quaker school near Philadelphia, where special cases like hers were treated carefully. Rabbit said she was getting along well; neither of us mentioned the events that had taken place that day at the railroad crossing. Several times I noticed that he'd bring Aggie's name into the conversation, but once he had it in, he didn't know what to do with it. He was, in fact, taking her to the movies that night. Ag and Rabbit Hornaday? I mentioned her name again, just to see his reaction, but he only suggested that I might like to come with them to the movies. Pequot Landing had recently acquired its own movie house, up on the Hooker Highway. I said I already had a date, having written Dottie Frame that I was coming home.
If Ag's name had produced no reaction, Dottie's did. Rabbit gave me a quick look, then began fiddling with the choke, but I knew he wasn't having motor trouble. I was having love trouble. I finally got it out of him; Dottie had been pinned to a college guy at the university and was going steady. So Rabbit and Aggie took me along to the movies that night.
The following afternoon I went to the library to return some of Lady's books and get some others. As I put them on Miss Shedd's desk, I saw Cookie Bunder at a table in the corner with another girl I did not immediately recognize.
"How is school?" Miss Shedd inquired.
"Fine, Miss Shedd."
I don't suppose anyone ever gave much thought to Miss Shedd. She was just there, like Miss Berry, a local institution, and for uncounted years had supervised the reading habits of Pequot Landing. If any small fry ever thought they could sneak a volume of Casanova's Memoirs or The Night Life of the Gods past her eagle eyes, they were mistaken. "I don't think your mother would want you reading that," she would say. "Why don't you try Northwest Passage, it's very good," and she would put the other book aside.
After she had stamped the cards, I thanked her and went over to say hello to Cookie Bunder. The girl with her looked up and I realized it was Teresa Marini. What, I wondered, had happened to the Teresa Marini I had known? Had I been away that long, or had Dottie Frame merely blinded me?
Our whispering did not please Miss Shedd, and she obliged us with banishment. Cookie had to meet her mother, so I invited Teresa to the drugstore where we continued our conversation over sodas in the back booth. I couldn't get over the change in her. She was growing into a startlingly pretty young woman, with the dark glowing beauty of the Latins, deep shining eyes, and a smile that was broad and easy; I could tell right away that Teresa Marini loved to laugh -- after my discovery about Dottie Frame I could use some cheering up.
While we were there, Porter Sprague came in, waiting impatiently while Mr. Keller filled a prescription for him. Spouse, he let those within earshot know, was not up to snuff. He glanced over at us without acknowledgment, but when he went out he said loudly to no one, "I don't know why these boys can't find some nice American girls to go around with."
I decided Teresa Marini was a nice American girl for someone to go around with -- not me, however. I was still sunk
over Dottie Frame. And shortly after I returned to school the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed the joint houses the next day, saying a state of war existed between the Axis powers and our country, and I buckled down to the books. I was to be graduated in June, and was hopeful of Officers' Training School, and a commission.
4
That Easter vacation, I went with Lady while she put the gazing-globe in its accustomed place atop the pedestal. We did not sit on the stone bench, however, for there was a chill in the air, and we came in to find that Helen had thoughtfully laid a fire. She brought sherry and biscuits and when she had gone I watched Lady in the lamplight; she didn't look well, I decided. With the outbreak of war, she had forced herself to come out of her self-imposed exile from the world, and joined in the home-front effort making itself felt across the country. She worked with the various Red Cross drives, and helped organize some of the local girls into student nursing units, and her kitchen was always open to welcome the air-raid wardens on their cold patrols around the blacked-out Green, when Helen would help her serve hot coffee and sandwiches. She even found it possible to go to church again.
When we had finished our sherries, Lady pointedly informed me that she was allowed two, so I refilled her glass, and stepped across Honey to poke up the fire. Helen came in and drew the chintz curtains, then the heavy blackout curtains that had been hung over them. Blackout curtains had become a mournful necessity in all our houses, and though one was used to them, still they had their funereal effect. Yet the room was as cozy and comfortable as ever, which I observed to Lady.
"Yes, perhaps," she replied, staring thoughtfully into the fire, "but who will have it when I die? The Historical Society? 'Josiah Webster House, Built 1702' and underneath 'Here lived Lady Harleigh for thirty years'? It's not much to leave, a house. I would like to leave something -- but what? I wish I could have been an artist and leave a fine painting. Or have composed a piece of music that would be remembered. Or have written a book that would stay on Miss Shedd's library shelf. But I am not an artist, or even a mother, and when I die there will be only a stone in the cemetery."