I hope you aren’t too disgusted with us. We are not as unhappy as we must seem. Sometimes when we are all together things start going wrong somehow, I don’t know why, and everybody ends up feeling they can’t do anything right, and anything they try to do will make it worse. Everybody. Even Mother, maybe. But we love her very much, and we are a very close family, and Matthew is closest of all. I wish I could make you see that.
Well, so I am married—my husband’s name is Brady Summers and he’s in his last year of law school—next year we’ll be moving to New York where he has a job with a corporation—
I’m going to like being so near Melissa and Andrew, who is the most interesting of all my brothers although of course Matthew is very interesting too—we will all have lunch together on Wednesdays at this little restaurant Andrew likes to go to, which will be fun—
I should say also that I’m not a frequent letter writer, so if it should happen that you’d like to keep in touch I won’t be disappointed if you wait months to answer—then too you might not want to write at all, which I would understand. Thank you again—
Sincerely,
Margaret Emerson Summers
JULY 4, 1961
Dear Elizabeth Abbott:
I picked a revolver off a policeman at a parade today. It’s for you.
Yours very truly,
Andrew Carter Emerson
Dear Matthew,
How are you? I’m doing just fine.
I have a job taking care of an old man who I like very much. I’m having a nice summer.
The reason I’m writing is to tell you not to come in August. I’m not angry or anything, I just don’t think there would be any point to it.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
JULY 11, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
What do you mean, point? When did you start caring whether things had a point?
I’m coming anyway. This is important. You are the first person outside my family I’ve ever loved and I’m worried you may be the last.
Matthew
Dear Margaret,
Congratulations on your recent marriage which I was very happy to hear about. I’m not much for writing letters but will try to keep in touch.
I know that your family is very nice and I always did like your mother, only I had to start school again. Thank you for writing.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
JULY 15, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
I know that my last letter must have sounded rude. I’ve been thinking things over since then. I woke up last night and suddenly I saw this whole situation in a different light—not me being steadfast and patient but just pushing you, backing you against a wall, forcing a visit on you and talking on and on about love when you don’t want to listen. Is that how you see it, too? You’re younger than me. Maybe you’re just not interested in settling down yet. Maybe I was always afraid of that underneath, or I would have called you on the phone or come down there one of these weekends.
You will have to discuss this with me somehow. I don’t know what to think any more.
Mother is back from visiting Mary and Margaret. I don’t know that traveling did her that much good after all. She looks tired. When I went to see her yesterday she was just putting the permanent license plates on the new car. She didn’t have the faintest idea how to go about it. I suppose Dad or Richard always did it before, and then you last March. Anyway she was just circling the car with them, looking at the plates and then the car and then the plates again and holding a little screwdriver in her hand like a pen. I would have given a million dollars to see you coming across the grass with your toolbox. I even thought you would, for a minute. I kept looking for you. Then when I was putting the plates on for her Mother started crying. Without you we are falling apart. The basement has started seeping at the corners. Mother says she wouldn’t even know what to look under in the yellow pages, for a job like that. Elizabeth should be here, she said. She knew the names of things.
I don’t know how to think all this through any more, except to ask if you would mind writing and just telling me if you love me or not, no strings attached. If you don’t want me to come in August, I won’t.
Matthew
Dear Alvareen,
How are you? I’m doing just fine.
I’m writing because I asked Mrs. Emerson to send my drill, but so far she hasn’t. Could you do it, please? The combination one, that sands and grinds and all. It’s on the left-hand side of the workbench. There is a metal case you can put it all into compactly. If you mail it to me you can keep that other five dollars, I bet the postage will come to nearly that anyway. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
JULY 18, 1961
Dear Elizabeth Abbott:
The bullet will enter your left temple. Although I prefer the heart, for reasons which I am sure you understand.
Yours very truly,
Andrew Carter Emerson
JULY 23, 1961
Dear Elizabeth,
Well I have mailed the drill like you asked. It’s no surprise about Mrs. E. not sending it as I believe she is mad at you, also out of town quite alot. Turning into one of those visiting mothers. She had a fight with Margaret’s new husband who she didn’t hit it off with and came back early. Now she’s off seeing Peter in summer school. Melissa up there is going through some kind of breakup with her boyfriend and always calling on the phone “where is she, you think she’d be home the one time I wanted to talk to her.” Honey I don’t know I tell her. I only come in with my key and dust out these rooms that is seldom used anyway. If I had the strenth I would find me another job. My husband is so bad with the arthritis he just all the time moans and groans. Well the Lord knows what He is doing I suppose. I must close for now as I am not feeling too well myself these days.
Sincerely,
Alvareen
JULY 25, 1961
Dear Elizabeth Abbott:
Now prepare to die.
Yours very truly,
Andrew Carter Emerson
Dear Andrew Carter Emerson:
Lay off the letters, I’m getting tired of them. If I’m not left alone after this I’ll see that you aren’t either, ever again. I’ll fill out your address on all the magazine coupons I come across. I’ll sign you up with the Avon lady and the Tupperware people. I’ll get you listed with every charity and insurance agency and Mormon missionary between here and Canada, I’ll put you down for catalog calls at Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. When they phone you in the dead of night to tell you about their white sales, think of me, Andrew.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Abbott
8
“This is a story about an outlaw,” Elizabeth said. “I got it from the library.”
“Let me see the cover,” said Mr. Cunningham.
She held it up for him—a pulpy book too lightweight for its size, with a picture of a speeding horseman looking over his shoulder. Mr. Cunningham nodded and let his head fall back onto his pillow.
He was growing smaller day by day, Elizabeth thought. He reminded her of a fear she used to have: that once grown, free to do what she chose, she might dwindle back into childhood again. Life might be a triangle, with adulthood as its apex; or worse yet, a cycle of seasons, with childhood recurring over and over like that cold rainy period in February. Mr. Cunningham’s hands were as small and curled as a four-year-old’s. His formless smile, directed at the ceiling, had no more purpose than a baby’s. He was in bed nearly all the time now. He lay propped on his back exactly as she had placed him, his arms resting passively at his sides. “I do like westerns,” he said. His S’s whistled; his teeth were gnashed helplessly in a glass on his nightstand.
“Chapter one, then,” Elizabeth said.
“Couldn’t you just tell it to me?”
“It’s better if we read it.”
“I’m not up to that.”
She flattened the book open and frown
ed at him, considering. They were doing battle together against old age, which he saw as a distinct individual out to get him. They read books or played checkers, pinning his thoughts to the present moment, hoping to dig a groove too deep for his mind to escape from. His attention span grew shorter every day, but Elizabeth pretended not to notice. “Isn’t it depressing?” people asked when they heard of her job. They were thinking of physical details—the toothlessness, the constant, faltering trips to the bathroom. But all that depressed Elizabeth was that he knew what he was coming to. He could feel the skipped rhythms of his brain. He raged over memory lapses, even the small ones other people might take for granted. “The man who built this house was named Beacham,” he would say. “Joe Beacham. Was it Joe? Was it John? Oh, a common name, I have it right here. Was it John? Don’t help me. What’s the matter with me? What’s happening here?” When he awoke in a wet bed, he suffered silent, fierce embarrassment and turned his face to the wall while she changed his sheets. He viewed his body as an acquaintance who had gone over to the enemy. Why had she supposed that people’s interiors aged with the rest of them? She had often wished, when things went wrong, that she were old and wise and settled, preferably in some nice nursing home. Well, not any longer. She sighed and creased the book’s binding with her fingernail.
“We can read tomorrow,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Today, just sum things up.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Elizabeth.
She turned to the first page and scanned it. “It seems to be about someone named Bartlett. He starts out getting chased by a posse. He’s riding through this gulch.”
“What’s he wanted for?” Mr. Cunningham asked.
“Well, let’s see. They say, ‘In the course of his career as a gunman.…’ Probably one of those guys that hires out. Now he’s coming to a shanty, there’s a woman hanging out the wash. Her hair is the color of a sunset.”
“Red, they mean,” Mr. Cunningham said dreamily.
“Who knows? Maybe purple.” Elizabeth snorted, and then caught herself. All these westerns were getting on her nerves. “He asks her for a dipper of water from the well. Then when the posse comes up she hides him away, she tells them she hasn’t seen a soul. She brings him beef stew and a canteen, and he sits there eating and admiring her.”
“This talk about water is making me thirsty,” Mr. Cunningham said.
She laid the book on its face and poured him water from an earthenware pitcher. “Can you sit up?” she asked him. “I just don’t know.”
She helped him, raising his head in the crook of her arm while he took small, noisy gulps. His head was strangely light, like a gourd that was drying out. When he had finished he slid down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Even that much movement had been an effort for him. Resettling himself among the sheets, he gasped out the beginnings of defeated protests. “I can’t get—” “It don’t seem—” Elizabeth smoothed her denim skirt and sat back down. She was conscious of the easy way her joints bent and the straightness of her back fitting into the chair. Wouldn’t he think of it as a mockery—even such a simple act as her sitting down in a Boston rocker? But it didn’t seem to occur to him. He stared at the ceiling, flicking his eyes rapidly across it like a man checking faces in a crowd. Sometimes it seemed to her there was a crowd, packing the room until she felt out of place—dead people, living people, long ago stages of living people, all gathered at once into a single moment. She waited for him to call out some name she had never heard of, but he was still with her. “Go on,” he told her. “Get to the good part.”
“Okay.” She turned pages, several at a time. “He’s boarding with this woman, taking care of her livestock and such. He goes into town for provisions. Now he’s—” she skimmed the paragraphs. “He’s in the saloon, getting challenged by a tough guy.”
“What about?”
“They don’t make it clear.”
“People in those days were so cranky,” Mr. Cunningham said.
“They have this fistfight.” “Where, out in the street?” “Right in the saloon.”
“Oh, good.”
“Bottles smashing,” said Elizabeth. “Mirrors breaking. Chairs going through the windows.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, in the end he knocks the other guy out,” Elizabeth said. “Then he has about a page and a half of bad mood, wondering why people will never allow him to go straight and lead a peaceful life. Let’s see. But they don’t know he’s thinking that, they offer him a sheriff’s badge.”
“I don’t want the responsibility,” said Mr. Cunningham.
Elizabeth glanced over at him and turned another page. “He has to be argued into it, there’s quite a stretch of arguing. Then—”
“I couldn’t be expected to take on that kind of burden,” Mr. Cunningham said.
“Well, it would be quite a job. But this is only a story. We’re reading a story now.”
“Oh yes. I knew that.”
“Where was I? They want him to be sheriff.”
“It’s too much. It’s too much. It’s too much.”
“I’ll just lower the shades,” said Elizabeth. She set the book down and went over to the window. Mr. Cunningham rolled his head from side to side. “It’s time to sleep,” Elizabeth told him.
“I’m too little.”
Elizabeth stayed at the window, looking down into the front yard. Heat waves shimmered up from the pavement, and the grass had an ashy, flat, washed-out look. She was glad to be here in the dimness. She pulled the paper shade, darkening the room even more, and then looked back at Mr. Cunningham. His eyes were blinking shut. He kept his face set toward her. In the night, Mrs. Stimson said, he sometimes woke and called her name—“Elizabeth? Where’d you get to?”—turning her into another ghost, one more among the crowd whose old-fashioned faces and summer dresses filled this room. “He just dotes on you,” Mrs. Stimson said, and Elizabeth had smiled, but underneath she was worried: Wasn’t he sinking awfully fast? Just since she had come here? Maybe, having found her to lean on, he had stopped making an effort. Maybe she was the worst thing in the world for him. When she read aloud so patiently, and pulled his mind back to the checkers, and fought so hard against his invisible, grinning, white-haired enemy in the corner, it was all because of that worry. She was fighting for herself as well—for her picture of herself as someone who was being of use, and who would never cause an old man harm.
She watched him drop off like this a dozen times a day, maybe more. He swam in again and out again. Mrs. Stimson would say, “Oh, bless his heart, he’s sound asleep,” but there was nothing sound about that sleep. He seemed to have gone somewhere else, but always with a backward glance; returning, he glanced backward too, and mentioned recent experiences that he had never had.
His eyes were flinching beneath the lids. His mouth was open. Short breaths fluttered the hollows of his cheeks. The fingers of one hand clutched and loosened on a tuft in the bedspread.
Now was her time for just sitting. She had sat more this summer than in all the rest of her life put together, and when she bothered to think about it she wondered why she didn’t mind. Day after day she rocked in her chair, staring into space, while the flattened old man on the bed stirred and muttered in his sleep. Sometimes her eyes seemed hooked in space; to focus them took real effort, so that she would be conscious of a pulling sensation when Mr. Cunningham woke again. Her mind was unfocused as well. She thought about nothing, nothing at all. She was not always conscious of the passage of time. It would have been possible to start a woodcarving, or to read some book of her own, but whenever she considered it she forgot to do anything about it. She would think of her whittling knives, which she had brought here on her first day of work along with two blocks of wood. She would picture the set of motions necessary to rise and fetch them, and then the wood itself: how the first slash along the grain would leave a gleaming white strip behind it. But from there her thoughts blurred and vanished, and when the
old man awoke he would find her rocking steadily with her empty hands locked in her lap. It was as if she were asleep herself, or in that space on the edge of sleep where people make plans for some action but only dream they have carried it out.
The doorbell rang. Elizabeth rocked on. The doorbell rang again, and she gathered her muscles together to rise from the chair. “Coming,” she called. Then she glanced at Mr. Cunningham, but he only frowned slightly and stirred in his sleep.
The front door was open, so that as she came down the stairs she could see who stood behind the screen. But it took her several seconds, even so, to realize who it was. He was too much out of context. She had to assemble him piece by piece—first that stooped, hesitant posture, then the frayed jeans, finally the tangle of black hair and the smudged glasses. She stopped dead still in the hallway. “Matthew,” she said.
“Hello, Elizabeth.”
Then, when she didn’t open the door, he said, “It’s August. Here I am.”
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Is it all right if I come in?”
“I guess so.”
He opened the screen door, but she led him no farther inside the house. If he had tried to kiss her she would have dodged him, but when he didn’t there was another awkwardness—how to stand, what to do with her hands, how to pretend that there was nothing new about the cold, blank space between them. “Did you have any trouble finding me?” she asked.
“Your mother gave me directions.”
“How’d you find her?”
“Asked in town.”
He shifted his weight and put his hands in his pockets. “None of it was easy,” he said. “Not even locating Ellington. I was wondering if you hoped I would just get lost and never make it.”
“I wrote you not to come.”
“Only the once. You didn’t say why. I can’t leave things up in the air like this, Elizabeth.”