Lady (38 page)

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.

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."

She rested her eyes on me and smiled. "It's why I've loved you children so, hoping you would take some part of this house -- and me -- to remember. It's why I opened the house to you. It -- hasn't been easy. I am a . . . private person. I have lived here and I shall die here and there are walls enough in this house. I have not wanted to build more of them around me. But sometimes it becomes necessary."

She seemed upset, and, leaving her sherry unfinished, she excused herself for her nap. I found Helen in the kitchen and asked her how Lady really was.

"She's well enough. She just needs people around. It's different now -- she misses all you kids trooping in and out of here. And she misses . . ." Her glance went to the ceiling, and though I knew she meant Jesse I wondered why she gestured upward, then decided it was the notion of his having slept in Lady's bedroom for so long.

"You ought to write her, you know." Helen looked at me across the table where she sat leafing through a recipe book.

"I do, Helen."

"You ought to write more. She looks forward to your letters."

"But nothing ever happens at school. There's nothing to write about."

"Make something up. Make up a romance to interest her. You got a girl friend up there?"

I had several, over at the seminary, but since Dottie Frame I'd been keeping my nose to the grindstone -- or, rather, in Jesse's copy of Bowditch's. Lew had already gone into the Army that winter, with Harry close behind, and I was itching to get into the Navy.

I graduated from Blankenschip that spring. Lady gave me a handsome wristwatch, and when I went to say goodbye to Miss Berry before I enlisted, she presented me with an onyx ring with a diamond chip in it, which had been in her father's stickpin. It was strange about Miss Berry -- she seemed to look upon me with signal favor, saying she would be grateful if I would manage a letter to her sometimes, but I felt that it was not a relationship between her and me, but rather a mutual interest that we shared for Lady Harleigh and her welfare.

But Pequot Landing all seemed insignificant and far away when I went to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and thereafter to communications school where I became Signalman Third Class. I joined my ship at Bremerton, Washington, one of the first aircraft carriers to be floated since the Pacific Fleet was destroyed at Pearl Harbor, and when we made port after our shakedown cruise, I was granted a ten-day leave.

In the meantime Lady had had her accident in the department store, the tests had revealed her red-cell deficiency, and Dr. Brainard had discovered that the treatment he had instituted was not working. Nor did any medicine he prescribed seem to help. At last it was decided that Lady must go into the hospital for the first of her long series of transfusions.

She had become querulous and petulant by turns. She now seemed to regard the war as a personal inconvenience, and I heard from Aggie how she complained -- about rationing, about the lack of gas, about having to keep the curtains drawn. She would not confront her illness as she had her life; she weakened, then succumbed to it. Nothing pleased her, she found every opportunity to complain, she refused to read the paper or listen to the radio, the news during those dark days upset her so much. It was as if she washed her hands of the whole business.

Her trips to the hospital and the transfusions proved more frequent, then ultimately became a regular part of her medical pattern. She had just been released when I returned home on leave, and as I came into her bedroom she gripped my hand, holding me and asking me to help her. She didn't want the doctor to send her back to the hospital again.

"I hate it so. If I have to do that to live, then I don't want to live. I don't -- I don't." She began weeping, and seeing her cry was something I never could bear. To relieve her anxieties, I said I would talk to Dr. Brainard.

"It won't do any good. He says I must." She drew up the sleeve of her bed jacket and showed me her arms, covered with ugly bruises. "And they're going to get me a nurse. Why can't I have Miss Berry back again?"

"Miss Berry isn't up to it. Ma says she's been --" I didn't want to say that Miss Berry was also ill. I again reassured her that I would talk with the doctor and see what might be done.

Doctor Brainard spoke to me with candor, as if we were two adults together. Some of the hospital tests had revealed the fact, undiagnosed originally, that Lady, at the time of her influenza, had also been stricken with encephalitis, generally known as "brain fever." Though she had recovered on her own, she had suffered damage, which was now affecting her thinking processes and hastening the debilitation we were witnessing. The return to the hospital was absolutely necessary. Helen was not a trained nurse, and since Miss Berry's being put on the case was out of the question, other arrangements would have to be made. The transfusions could be administered at home, but they were a difficult process, since, because of a developing sclerotic condition, the arteries had contracted and it was a painful task getting the blood through them.

It was a long time before I saw her again. Our carrier was involved in a good deal of the South Pacific and mid-Pacific action. Off New Guinea, we suffered damage and fires, and during the action I was injured. Pieces of metal had to be removed from my back, and while I was in the hospital a letter from Helen reached me. I was due for leave again when my back had repaired, but the letter warned me of an altered Lady.