"Oh, dear, oh, dear, you're all home. All?" She paused in fugitive recollection. "No -- who's missing? Someone --" Her voice trembled more, and she began to cry.
"Lew -- Lew won't be coming home," I said.
"Lew is dead?"
"Yes. Let's not talk about it, okay?"
"Oh, my dear, I've upset you -- I'm so sorry." With difficulty she reached out and touched my face. I thought of the winter I'd fallen through the ice, and she had nursed me. Those hands, so loving and so willing. Now it was too much effort for her to even lift them.
She jumped slightly as more firecrackers exploded out on the Green. Sounds of merriment came from all directions; like the sounds of one giant party.
"You should be out there, with the others. Not here with me."
"Of course I should be here. I want to be. This is the best part."
"Oh, the best part -- there isn't any best part anymore."
"It is for me."
"How dear you are. My l'il Ignatz -- except you're my big Ignatz now. If I were younger, would you marry me?"
"In a minute. But I'm going to marry Teresa Marini, and I want you to come to our wedding. You know -- larks and everything?"
"You're going to be married? To Teresa?"
"Not right away. Don't you approve?"
"Of course I do. Teresa is fine -- a lovely girl. She'll give you lots of children. Lots of --" She trailed off, murmuring Teresa's name in a tone of vague speculation, as though wondering if she really did approve. Then she closed her eyes and was still.
Outside, the noise became even louder. I heard the bell of the fire truck, and it sounded as if there were people down on the lawn. I recognized Eamon Harmon's jovial bass voice, and Mr. Harrelson's. The 5:10-ers must be working their way down the Green, I decided. There were calls and shouts, and then they began singing, drunkenly, but happily. The nurse hurried in to shut the window, followed by Helen, who was bringing me a Tom Collins.
"What are they doing out there? Don't they know Mrs. Harleigh's --"
Lady opened her eyes and they caught mine as we listened to the singing. We had recognized it at the same instant.
"Wait," I told the nurse before she could slam the front window down. "Open it, she wants to hear."
She raised the sash again, and turned with a dismayed expression, but Lady was smiling. She knew the song was for her.
"Good night, Lady, good night, Lady,
Good night, Lady, we're going to leave you now.
Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along --"
She fumbled for a handkerchief, sniffled, and laughed wryly. "If that's Colonel Blatchley down there, you'd better tell him it's Lady that's going to leave him." The serenade ended and the voices quieted, though the revelry continued unabated at a distance. Helen and the nurse retired again, and I continued to sit by Lady's bedside. There was still the trace of a smile on her lips as I helped her straighten herself on her pillows. While she dozed, I wandered to the back window and looked out on the flowering garden, and thought of other times. I felt a bitter sorrow then, as ghosts from the past nudged me. I seemed to see myself on the carriage-house roof, with Lew below, watching as I flew into the cucumber frame. I saw Lady seated on the terrace wall while the boat parade went by. I saw us digging out the septic tank. Saw Dora spying from the loft window; saw myself in the wind, rescuing the gazing-globe. Saw Blue Ferguson's market truck parked at Mrs. Pierson's kitchen door. Saw Lady and Jesse making their spring garden. I thought with amusement how they had fooled us all, she playing the Merry Widow while they lived up here as man and wife. Absently, I ran the tips of my fingers along my chin: I needed a shave. How was that possible? I was still a boy, wasn't I? I hadn't been away, had I? Lew was still alive. Blue was driving for the Pilgrim Market, Jesse and Elthea were downstairs. . . . I raised my glass to absent friends.
"'Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home -- '"
Hearing her speak, I turned and saw her smiling, as if in that old and miraculous way of hers she were reading my thoughts. She broke off and lifted her brows, one of her minute signals I could still read,
"'Your house is on fire, your children will burn. . . .'" I gave her back the line, and she asked me to take her to the chaise. I prepared it, then carried her in the bedcovers to it, where she lay back with a tiny sigh of contentment.
"Those tulips -- did I put in bulbs this year?"
I explained that Papa Marini had come and done the work, which had restored her gardens to their former glory.
"Oh, Mr. Marini," she said, as if he were there with us, "thank you. Thank you." Her brow furrowed and she reached out toward the window. "But I don't see it --"
"See what?"
"The gazing-globe. Jesse's gazing-globe."
"It's there -- in the vase on the dressing table."
"Why is it there?"
"You wanted it. You said you wanted it in the room."
This seemed to register, and to afford her some satisfaction. "Yes, that's nice."
"You said 'Jesse's gazing-globe'?"
"Jesse's, yes. He bought it for me, you know."
"No, I didn't."
Her eyes snapped briefly and her voice had an impatient edge. "Well, he did. He said I could see the whole world in it, if I wanted. He said --" The effort of talking was costing her too much. I tried to calm her, but she was persistent. "He said, 'Broken mirrors can't be mended. Neither can people, sometimes.' Perhaps he wanted it as a reminder to me. I treated him so dreadfully that time. He always liked my hair long, he liked to sit there on the bed and watch me brush it. So I cut it. To spite him. To make him unhappy. Wasn't that a dreadful thing to do?"
I remembered it well, the day I'd overheard the argument about the shrine on the gate-leg table. I remembered her slamming the silver brush at the mirror and the shattering noise it made.
"I wonder . . ." she murmured.
"What?"
"Oh . . . nothing important . . ." She smiled reassuringly; then her expression altered slightly, became a little sly, a little knowing. "He's down there, you know."
"Who?"
"You know . . ." Again her brows indicated a secret understanding between us. "Our friend. Ott."
"Ott? The red-haired man?" On her deathbed, the conclusion, the denouement, the final revelation . . . The room became still, and the silence of the room was broken by the bursts of laughter out on the Green. Someone was ringing the fire bell, and the country-clubbers were singing "Der Fuehrer's Face."
"Promise not to tell?" She said it like a little girl with a childish secret to be told.
"I promise."
"He's under the pedestal."
"The gazing-globe?"
"Yes. Under the brickwork."
"I thought he was in the sewer excavation."
"I know you did. I did, too. I was sure of it."
"First I thought he was in the coal bin."
"But he was. For a time. Then Jesse put him in a drift behind the carriage house. He was frozen all winter. By spring he had to be moved. Jesse wouldn't tell me where. I thought sure he'd done something to stop up the sewer line and that was why the Green was so wet. I was awfully frightened. But Jesse put him in the garden -- it was the night of my birthday party -- and next day he began laying the bricks over him. It was the last thing he told me --"
I recalled Jesse's disappearance at the party, and how he'd come in, cold and with muddy shoes, when Lady was singing. Recalled too the muffled words into Lady's shoulder that day at the freight station. "Yes. I see."
"No one will know, now. Will they?"
"No. No one will know."
"I'm glad."
A slight flutter of her fingers on the back of my hand, then she slid off to sleep again, or if not to sleep to that alien place she now spent so much of her time in. Her mouth opened and the rasp began in her throat again. The nurse would disapprove my having moved her, I was sure. I took her into my arms, returned her to the bed. She stirred uneasily, softly moaning, th
en uttering unintelligible sounds in a strident tone. When I had settled the covers around her again, she opened her eyes.
"Edward?"
"No. It's me."
All recognition was gone now. I said my name, got a glimmer. "Not Edward. No, I -- wouldn't have supposed. He has been here enough, Edward."
"Has he?"
"Yes! Yes, he has!" The sound rang out, angry, defiant. She raised up on her pillow with an effort and fairly shouted the words at me, as though she found his presence in whatever form indefensible, heinous, not to be borne. She stared down at her pale, crabbed hand, clutching the top of the turned-down sheet. She held it up, inspected it. "I had pretty hands. What has happened? What have you done to me?"
"Nothing . . . nothing . . ."
"You have come for the end."
"It's not the end." In that reasoning yet hopeless tone that is self-defeating by its very intrusion.
"Yes. The end. Now. It is coming. Not quite now -- but soon. He will come for me. He wants me buried beside him. He has told me so. So many times, he has told me. It will be his last revenge. I would a hundred times rather -- no, no, it is fitting. Right and fitting." She laughed a wild, crazy laugh and I knew she hardly saw me. I reached to calm her, she flung my hand away, then fell exhausted on the pillow. Her torment was more painful to witness than anything that had preceded it. I groped for a glass and the bottle of sedative pills. She seemed to understand what I was doing, and she shook her head. "No. No pills. They make me sleep -- If I sleep, you'll be gone. Bring --"
She was pointing at the globe. I took it from the bureau and placed it in her hands. She stared into it, looking like a gypsy fortune-teller, the hag-seeress. She spoke again: "All things, past and future are here. I can see them. The future -- I will come back to you. I know you are waiting." I realized she was talking not to me but to Edward.
"Are you listening?"
Now she was looking at me; she seemed to have confused my physical being with his ghostly presence. I said yes, I was listening.
"Edward -- he --" The name choked her, she couldn't get beyond it. I said she already had told me about Edward, reminding her of that day on Lamentation Mountain. She shook her head.
"No -- more -- more --"
But she could not. Using what little remained of her resources, she looked from me -- or the imagined Edward -- back to the globe. Her senses seemed briefly to right themselves, and her features relaxed slightly. Then, peering at her curved reflection in the globe, she began to cry softly.
"Do you love me?" she asked.
"Yes." I did not know if I spoke as myself or as Edward.
She said, "And Jesse loved me. That is enough for one lifetime. But I have done dreadful things -- terrible things --"
"No --"
"I have! I have! I have lived in hell and I will go to hell. It's in the Bible! Dreadful, terrible things!" Her voice rose in a crescendo, drowning out the celebration on the Green. She did not continue, but lay panting from her exertions, staring intently into the globe resting on her chest. "But that is all in the past. We know the future. Now there is only the --"
She clamped her lips. The present would not do for her. Her fingers relaxed, the silver ball slipped from her grasp, and before I could catch it, it fell to the floor and smashed to pieces. Unperturbed, Lady glanced down with a faint smile.
"There," she said, as though in this dying moment she had solicited and won some small but signal victory. "Make 'Eternity' from those if you will."
She closed her eyes. I brought the wastebasket and one by one dropped the pieces into it, then brushed away the remaining bits of silver dust. The past, the present, and the future, exploded, gone. I carried the basket to the door, then stopped as she murmured something.
"What did you say?"
"I said send for a priest. I want to confess."
"You mean the minister -- Mr. Tuthill?"
"No. The priest. Father O'Brien."
Father O'Brien had been dead more than fifteen years. "You mean Father Huegenay."
"It doesn't matter. Any priest will do." And as I left her I heard her murmuring to herself. "I wonder what that fight was all about?"
* * *
She held on through the week, and though Dr. Brainard said she might go at any time, still she lingered. On Saturday Father Huegenay was sent for to administer extreme unction; afterward, he left with an awed expression, even as Father O'Brien had thirty years before.
She died on Sunday morning. I had gone to First Church with Teresa, and afterward we drove over to Lamentation Mountain. I don't know why I decided to go there, except I wanted Teresa to see it. I told her about the day Blue Ferguson had come home, and repeated parts of Lady's story to her. Parts only, for still there were pieces lacking, ones I was sure I would never have, and that the story would end there, unsatisfactorily. I repeated what I could remember, but the missing pieces were to elude me for another ten years, until I learned the last astonishing facts.
Gazing down at the river, I recalled my visit with Lady to Lamentation Mountain six years earlier. Had it really been six? Today, with Teresa, past, present, future seemed one together. Over toward Pequot, there were the roofs and chimneys at the Center, and the familiar steeple. First Church, that was the past; George Washington had worshiped there. The present was the oil-storage tanks out near the airfield; where there had been two, now there were half a dozen, with smoking barges moored at the dock pumps. The future? I thought I knew where that lay. I looked at Teresa's finger, and the ring I had given her two nights ago.
We spoke quietly of the town where we had lived, had discovered each other in the accidental way people can, and of how we planned on leaving together. We spoke again of Adelaide Harleigh, and at that moment it seemed to me that I could see the town with her eyes, she who had loved it. She had known it to its core, could recognize most of its citizens by face and name. She had been able to see their faults with humor, their virtues with pride, for though she was not born there, she was of Pequot Landing. Born a Strasser, raised on Knobb Street, she lived a Harleigh of Broad Street, on the Green. She would die a Lady. There was a past, and a present, and a future, and they, too, seemed all one.
Later, I was sure we had been speaking of her at the moment of her death. When we drove back to the Green, Mr. Foley was coming out the front door, and it was he who gave us the news.
"Well," he said, "she had a nice life, didn't she, Lady Harleigh?"
"Yes," I said, "she did."
PART FIVE
Recollected Songs
All roads may lead to Rome; they do not lead, however, to Pequot Landing. But I have lived to discover that as a road can carry one away, so again it can carry one back. Interstate 91 has brought me back so many times since I left. It cuts across the edge of town between the Great South Meadow and the village cemetery. Coming off the parkway, you can see the cemetery markers below the First Church steeple. When I die, my ashes will be scattered, but if truth were known I would rather be there, in that churchyard, by that church, in the shadow of that steeple. I like the notion of being buried near to where Lady Harleigh lies. We would be old friends yet, sharing that close green Connecticut acreage.
I find it easier going back now, though for a time I did not, and I remember my first visit after having been away for more than ten years. We came back, Teresa and I, to a family reunion, in October. We had been married when I graduated from college. We lived for a time in New York, where our oldest boy was born. We named him Lewis, after my brother. Our two daughters, Addie and Susan, were born in California. Addie, naturally, had been christened Adelaide. The occasion for the reunion was Papa Marini's eightieth birthday, and we brought the children back for it. I had mixed feelings about returning. Ma had died, Nonnie was married and living in Michigan, Kerney was studying languages in Europe, Harry worked for an oil refinery in New Orleans, Nancy was gone. The only one of us left was Ag. She had married Rabbit Hornaday, who ran a thriving practice as a v
eterinarian. Ag took care of the office for him.
Making the curve at River Road, I slowed the car and looked in through the cemetery gates. I could see Edward and Lady Harleigh's matching headstones, and I felt a strange sensation. Perhaps it was nothing more than just feeling that I was a stranger in my own hometown -- perhaps it was more. But as we drove down Main Street, that glimpse into the graveyard made me feel alien, and everything seemed different to me. The Spragues had lived in that house -- they were dead; who lived there now? I had no idea. Keller's drugstore was gone, and the Pilgrim was a supermarket. The Noble Patriot (its black proprietor, Andy Cleves -- dead also?) was now a cute Colonial-type beauty parlor. The Academy Hall was now a museum. There was no more Academy Parliament, nor indeed any Town Meeting. Teresa's brother, Johnny, was the mayor of Pequot Landing, which was run by a town manager. The library was larger and elsewhere, likewise the post office. There was a modern steel and glass structure in place of that Gothic pile, the Chester Welles Grammar School. Miss Grimes was dead, Miss Bessie worked for an advertising firm in New York. Everywhere I sensed the cunning hand of Time at work. It was changed, all changed.
Still the same trees billowed (but haven't they grown, Teresa said. I, too, remembered them as much smaller), and still the houses along Broad Street (but don't they seem little? Teresa said. I, too, thought they had shrunk) presented their handsome fronts to us as we passed, boasting fresh coats of paint with carefully considered colors on shutters and doorways, where their owners had hung raffia baskets filled with straw flowers of seasonal colors, where they had polished their street numbers, manicured their lawns, and shined their windows. Yet who were they, these owners of the houses? No one knew. Strange faces, strange children, strange cars. Strange, all strange.
Before pulling in at the Marini farm I drove down the road so the kids could see where "Daddy used to live." Who lived there now? The house had twice been bought and sold. The Sparrows were dead, Gert Flagler was dead, Dr. Brainard had moved to Vermont. But Miss Berry, as we had heard, was still going. There was no sign of her as we passed; we made the turn at the old trolley stop, and then were in front of Lady's. Her estate had been divided between Elthea Griffin and me, with generous bequests to various town funds. The house, also left to me, I had sold to another of Teresa's brothers, Dr. Robert Marini, a dentist.