Lady (3 page)

"And nobody saw poor Lady for months. One day I went over and peeked in a window. There she was, kneeling on the living-room floor, her hands clasped before a picture of Edward and saying not a word. Utterly dumbstruck. The poor soul, I feared she'd lost her speech again.

"By Saint Valentine's Day I was so worried I put on my best dress and hat and took over a covered dish. I rung, and Lady herself come to the door, was dressed in widow's weeds head to foot, and asked me into the front room. I says to her she must come away, and she sitting there in the wing chair as gracious as can be, but scarcely hearing a word I'm saying, but only making polite chitchat about was it going to be an early spring, and she hadn't put no bulbs in that fall.

"And the parlor -- you can't believe how dusty and frumpy it had got, and her being such a particular housekeeper. But, with Edward gone, she just didn't seem to want to go on. She looked tumble, even though the black was becoming, and her hair was neat as usual, and she'd taken his ring off, her hands were bare, and I says, 'Lady, you're just incarcerating yourself in here, when you should be out in the air. And where's your dear little dog that Miss Berry gave you?'

"'I don't care for the air,' says she, 'and the little dog is no longer here.' Dog or not, I says, you'll never regain your health thisaway. I tell you, she was willfully and deliberately destroying herself upon the altar of her dead husband -- why, it was practically a
suttee
! Not only that, she'd made a shrine! Right there in the living room on the gate-leg table. Pictures of poor Edward in uniform under small crossed flags, with his medal for bravery in a velvet-lined box and all his citations and a framed copy of the speech the First Selectman made when Edward come home a hero. And the photo they took of the ceremony, with Edward smiling so's it'd break yore heart and Lady sort of looking off to the side, and that awful Anna Strasser positively lurking in the background.

"So I says, 'You've got happy memories, Lady, you must dwell on them, not the sad ones,' and she sort of smiles and says 'Yes.' And I says, Tou must start looking forward again,' and she says 'Yes' again. 'Yes, I shall.'

"Well, that gave me a feeling of hope, so I says, What you ought to do is get another little dog.' 'No,' she says, 'I will never have another dog.' And she opened the door, she threw her arms around me and cried and cried, Lord such bitter tears" -- here another of Ruthie's celestial corroborations -- "but it was a woman's heart that shed 'em and I told myself all the way back across the Green that now she's going to come out of it at last.

"And she did. Lovely, brave Lady, on the first day of spring she come to church, not her Cath'lic one, but Edward's, and she stood in the choir loft and sang 'The Lost Chord' -- Lady has a beautiful voice. Then, come April, just before spring-cleaning time, I went over again, the forsythia was all in bloom and I took her some, and she told me the house was a mess -- and it
was
, let me say -- and it was time now to do something about it My heart leaped in my bosom. But, I says, you can't do it by yourself. No, she wouldn't, she'd advertised for a couple to take over the entire running of the place. And there they came, Elthea and Jesse Griffin, all the way from Barbados in the West Indies, as clean and good-looking a couple as you could hope for, and not one whit shiftless like some of them colored couples can be. Well, they moved into the attic -- up there where you see them two front gables -- and
my
! didn't the dust fly around that house. Busy as bees, the pair of 'em, and in no time the house just shone."

And while they worked, Lady herself took an hour or two of sun each day, and by June was the picture of health. Her skin recovered its clear, natural tone; her hair (always one of her great charms, Mrs. Sparrow asserted, which was true; and she kept it unfashionably long as a tribute, even when half the ladies in town had had theirs cut or shingled) was glossy and shining; she purchased new clothes and linens, resumed wearing her wedding ring; and, Mrs. Sparrow declared, "Hearing Lady laugh, you knew for sure everything was going to be all right."

Her mother, Mrs. Strasser, died that summer, and after observing a discreet period of mourning, Lady began entertaining in the fall. The house having been completely refurbished by then, small choice groups came to and from her elegant board. The minister, some of the selectmen, Colonel Blatchley, members of the country-club crowd (but never Porter Sprague or his wife). Elthea Griffin, an excellent cook, introduced to Pequot Landing a number of Caribbean dishes hitherto unfamiliar, and before long the whole town seemed bent on serving calaloo soup and creole crab. It was all people could do to remove themselves from table, so interesting was the talk, so merry the laughter, with Jesse in his white coat silently passing coffee and dessert and afterward brandy and cigars for the men while Colonel Blatchley told stories.

And everyone present always pretended not to notice that the place at the head of the table was kept empty, or that their hostess would never permit anyone to occupy the Sheraton armchair where the dead Edward had sat.

My earliest recollection of Lady Harleigh stems from events that occurred not in Pequot Landing but in another place entirely. The picture of these events is spun out of the threads of dimmest memory, but they served, in later years, to shed a clearer light on what had been until then an inexplicable mystery. It involved Lady herself, a wire-haired fox terrier, a dish of tapioca, and a moonlight walk in a rose garden.

There used to be, and perhaps still is, a many-roomed seashore hotel of white clapboards and green shutters and wide verandas, perched atop a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound. People of moderate means would go there to pass part of the summer away from the heat. Women, especially the older ones, often wore long white afternoon dresses then, with wide-brimmed hats, and they still carried parasols. They would sit on the veranda fussily sipping iced tea and fanning themselves with oval fans of dyed palmetto, and conversing while they regarded the view of the Sound -- never interesting -- and the men, also in white, with jaunty bow ties, would play tennis behind the hotel or go off with golf bags to the nearby links.

The summer our father died, his parents were spending that August at the hotel, which was called the Manor House Inn, and, grieving over Pa's death, Ma was invited to bring us all for a weekend.

It was there that I first saw the Minerva landaulet, and its owner. We were in the bathhouses behind the hotel, which were attached to it by a long latticed breezeway grown over with some kind of vine -- morning-glories, probably. Ma had helped me into my scratchy wool swimsuit and my feet were shod in tight bathing shoes of flesh-colored crepe rubber. As we came through the breezeway, the great car drove in, circling the arbor and birdbath, and pulling up at the side porch. The liveried chauffeur got out and opened the rear door and helped two passengers alight. One appeared ordinary enough -- I noticed the frisky wire-haired fox terrier she had on a leash, never dreaming that the dog would soon be ours, our Patsy. But the second woman! Coming up behind me, my sister, Aggie, said that she looked like a movie star. She wore a large hat with the light coming through the brim, and there was a red cloth flower pinned at her bosom, and she was laughing. I thought her the most exciting and splendid-looking person I had ever seen.

We had moved to Pequot Landing only that spring, and I had no idea who she was, or that she lived across the Green, but, "Why, there's Mrs. Harleigh," Ma said, recognizing our neighbor, and, leaving me with Aggie, she went to greet the new arrivals. A maid -- even I could tell it was a maid -- got out and began helping the chauffeur with the luggage while Ma and the two ladies strolled up the walk where Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson, the owners, came to greet them.

"Isn't she the loveliest?" Ag whispered, peeking through the shadowy lattice. I knew, of course, which person she was speaking of. She became the focus of my interest for the remainder of our stay, and I went out of my way to spy on her, or to try to contrive an encounter of some sort, but this I never seemed able to manage. Covertly I observed her strolling alone among the roses, nodding to the other guests or pausing for a brief word, but not really becoming socially involved. She never gathered with the ladies on the porch, only arriving for meals at the last minute, which she took with her friend at a corner table where she would talk quietly and stare out at the view. I wondered why the two Negroes didn't eat with them, and my brother, Lew, told me not to be dumb; servants didn't eat in the dining room. Neither, I noted, did the dog.

We did meet, finally, this marvelous-looking lady and I. Below the steep cliff the hotel was built on, there was a trio of large rocks, called The Three Sisters, where we would go climbing, or inspecting the tidal pools for starfish, snails, and other sea treasures. Playing among these rocks alone one afternoon, I had pulled off my bathing shoes, which were always uncomfortable, and was watching a hermit crab scuttle about with someone else's shell on its back. I happened to look up and saw above me the laughing lady. But she was not laughing then. Unaware, she was lost in thought as she gazed out to sea, the black silk of a parasol framing her face against the blue sky. Something bright caught the light beside her nose, and she touched it away with her fingertip, then used her handkerchief. She was crying, and some inexplicable but immediate rush of feeling rose in me -- I wanted to run to her and comfort her.

Instead, I felt a sharp pinch on my toe, and I jumped up, yelping. A large crab had attached itself to me, and was holding on with might and main. I pranced around, yelling and crying, while Mrs. Harleigh hurried down to me. Closing her parasol, she rapped the crab with it until it released me, then sat me down and inspected the damage to my toe, which was slight enough. But it was she who was now comforting me, speaking soothing words, binding my injury with her handkerchief, and joking that "that bad old crab had better watch his steps." She kissed me on the top of my head, murmuring something about my being the little boy across the Green, then went away, along the sand toward the deserted end of the beach.

Thus my brief but memorable first meeting with Lady Harleigh. Later that night, there was another occurrence which in itself seemed in no way remarkable, but which had a certain bearing on my eventual comprehension of matters.

In the evening the hotel guests would gather in the front parlor, around the radio, listening to -- I suppose -- the A. & P. Gypsies or a talk on sound investments, the usual popular fare of the time. My two older brothers, Lew and Harry, had become friendly with the dog, Patsy, and this caused her owner, a Mrs. Hooper, to have a conversation with her friend Mrs. Harleigh and our mother. Just before dinner, the two ladies came out on the veranda where we were sitting watching Lew make Patsy do tricks on the raffia runner. After Mrs. Hooper gave her a little nod, Ma said to Lew, "How would you like to take Patsy home with you?"

Mrs. Hooper was giving up her house to live in a New York apartment where pets were not allowed, and she was looking for a good home for the dog. Lew, being the eldest, established immediate sovereignty over Patsy, while I, tears brimming, sneaked down the steps and off behind the hotel. Wouldn't that damn Lew get a dog to keep? I refused to eat dinner, and Ma, saying I'd gotten too much sun, put me to bed (up in one of the attic rooms where the children always slept).

The woman called Mrs. Harleigh gave me a long, sorrowful look of commiseration as I was led up to bed, eloquent with sympathy in the matter of the dog; she knew just how I felt, I could tell. Later, when the hotel was asleep, I awoke hungry. Somewhere I could hear low voices from another room on the same floor. I fought my hunger pangs as long as I could, and when the voices fell silent I crept downstairs to the kitchen. In the large refrigerator I found a bowl of tapioca, some of which I spooned into a green-banded white dish and carried it with me out behind the bathhouses where the dog was kept. Putting the half-eaten tapioca aside, I spent perhaps half an hour petting and talking to Patsy, the fox terrier, and hating Lew because it was to be "his" dog. I was coming through the latticed breezeway, finishing the tapioca, when I saw a figure in white walking along the moonlit gravel path in the rose garden. It was Mrs. Harleigh. I wanted to bring her to see the dog, but was frustrated in this action by another figure, who approached her from the veranda: Mr. Stevenson, the hotel owner, and as he came up to her, I crouched in the shadows and tried to listen. He spoke rapidly, in a low tone I couldn't understand, but I heard Mrs. Harleigh's laugh well enough.

"Of course, Mr. Stevenson, if that is your wish. In any case, I don't suppose the salt air is helping my complexion. We'll leave in the morning, if that will be convenient." With another low laugh, she went along the path to the veranda, and disappeared inside. I returned my empty tapioca dish to the kitchen and crept back to bed. Next day, Mrs. Harleigh and her servants left in the great car, while Mrs. Hooper stayed on. There was a flurry of conjecture among the other guests at the hasty departure, and when queried, Mrs. Hooper seemed as mystified as anyone else.

Returning to Pequot Landing, I stationed myself at various vantage points to glimpse our newly discovered neighbor, but there was no Mrs. Harleigh to be seen. While Lew and Harry were away with their gang, setting off firecrackers hoarded from last Fourth of July, or popping their BB guns down in Hubbard's woods, or wherever they went that I wasn't allowed to go, I kept a vigilant watch on whatever occurred -- little enough, to my lights -- over the way. Mrs. Sparrow may have seen more through her Seiss-Altags than I with my Peeping Tom's eye, but to both of us things were nothing if not downright ordinary.

I did not know it then, but this was one of Lady's "retirements," always distressing periods for her. Once I accidentally threw a rock through her window, and she came to the door and reprimanded me sharply. I didn't play around there for a while, but later, in speaking of her to Ma, I said, "Gee, Mrs. Harleigh sure is nice -- except when you break her windows." The remark was repeated to her, and she came running out her door and across the Green to catch me on the way home from school and hug me, saying she was sorry she had scolded me. I think she liked me more after that.