Shirley (2 page)

Stanley smiled approvingly but shook his head. “Shirley will show you the one everyone thinks is that house. Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn't. She claims a house in California as the source. The wise man would wager that Hill House came straight from her imagination. Nonetheless, there are a few frightening edifices in North Bennington, good enough for haunting. Ask her to show you the best one. It's down the hill and up, across the main street. A pleasant stroll. This one of ours is demon-free. No need to worry if you'll turn out to be an Eleanor or a Theodora.”

My romantic fantasies to the contrary, I'd never considered myself worthy of being a heroine, not really, and I smiled at him, feeling suddenly safe, as if he were a kind of father. The sort one would want to have. As we grinned at each other, I heard a movement on the porch and looked up the ramshackle steps. And there she was.

I'll not forget my first view of Shirley Jackson. Shirley, like her house, was not the surprise you expected her to be. A mountain of a woman, standing over us so that she appeared even more imposing. I would soon understand that—despite her girth—she was quite short. Still, she gave an impression of substantiality. That afternoon, Shirley wore a beige sack of a housedress imprinted with an endless green geometric pattern. Chinese cloth slippers—I would later learn this was her favored footwear. Lank reddish hair held back by a headband. Her spectacle rims a pale brown. The cigarette between her right forefinger and middle finger was burnt halfway, smoke dancing the length of her fleshy forearm. Her
smile. Shy, but not so. As if there was a part of her that knew herself to be better than me, and another part, equally powerful, that believed herself to be worse.

If there was any quality to her I recognized, it was of course that. Shirley's was the smile of a woman like me, the abandoned and the never-loved; it was the smile of the arrogantly insecure. It was the smile of the mother-to-be who had never been mothered, the smile of the brilliant person in a woman's body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell. I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her.

Just last year, at a dinner party, a famously cantankerous American history professor proclaimed that the only people who like Shirley Jackson's work are unhappily married women, and I snapped at him that the people who love Jackson understand imperfection and know how to live with it and appreciate it. “Isn't that the better way to be?” His mouth hung open; he'd never before deemed me worthy of notice. But I know I'm right: that was Jackson's gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love.

Ascending the porch steps in September 1964, toward Shirley in the flesh, I felt an inexplicable need to exchange a hug.

She spoke over my head, to Stanley.

“That woman called. You promised.”

Stanley handed the suitcase to Fred. “I'll talk to her again.”

“You promised, Stanley. And we're out of Scotch.”

“Send Barry.”

“I did. They want the bill paid.”

“I'll walk down.”

“And you. Nobody said you were pregnant.”

I blushed. We hadn't told anyone.

“I'm a witch,” she said calmly. “Now come inside and let's get you settled. Rose, is it?”

“Yes,” I stammered, feeling very, very out of my depth.

“I'm Shirley. I've put you two at the back, in my son Laurie's room. He's married, lives in New York City with his family, and as green about the ears as you two. They'll come up tomorrow afternoon; you'll have a great deal in common.”

I disliked, immediately, the notion of her children being real and present, and old enough to showcase how young I was myself.

“On Monday we can meet with the estate agent, find out about homes for rent near the campus. But there's no hurry. The room's free and only our youngest, Barry, is at home during the week. The two girls are home on weekends.”

“You have four?” I wanted to say something sophisticated, something clever so that Shirley would know I was not a child. Despite Shirley's casting him as green, I pictured the married son—elegant wife and pretty baby—as someone who had all the nuances of adulthood figured out.

“Or maybe you'll stay here,” she continued thoughtfully, as if she'd seen something in me, something rare and worthy of study. As if I were the heroine I'd always dreamed I might become. Even though I'd imagined Fred and me ensconced in splendid solitude, our first home together, my first home anywhere, I nodded. I felt the exterior of the house thrum slightly, as if I had been recognized.

Inside, I let my hand glide up the warm mahogany banister, an orphan arriving home. “You'll help with dinner, won't you? Our evenings will amuse you.” I instantly believed her.

We climbed the broad front staircase. I wanted to touch every painting, look at every family photograph. I heard her breathing deepen. She used the railing and she moved slowly, and while I thought about the size of her, and hoped she would not topple back on me, I also wished she would turn and smile again. Already, I found her moods both dazzling and confusing.

B
LOATED
WITH
INDIGESTION
, I must still have slept on the sagging horsehair mattress, because the moon was splashed across my face when I awakened in the otherwise pitch-black room, startled to realize that Fred was not beside me. I peered through the dark, wanting to see the rickety Victorian dresser and the comfortable green reading chair by the closet. All I could make out was the drifting of the window draperies against the muddled glass that had seemed so elegant in daylight. I lay under the quilt, my exhaustion and the persistent discomfort that was almost fear rendering me immobile for some moments.

I could hear the house creak moodily. I'd liked it more in daylight: room after tall-ceilinged room sprawled out on both floors, each fitted out with bookcases, and endless places to lounge, and well-used blankets to throw over chilly legs. During the day, the light had been low and pleasant, flickering leafy patterns passing genially over the book piles on the floors and tables, the discarded shoes and cardigans, the stacks of student papers awaiting attention. The house seemed to have a will of its own. I had the idea the
house had created itself rather than been masterminded by its owners, as if it would produce a bassinet for me when one was needed, or shorten its staircases if someone was tired.

I wanted the house to like me, I thought, and I placed my hand on the wall next to the headboard. The plaster was thick and still beneath my spread fingers, as walls are supposed to be, but I had the sense not of an inanimate surface but of a sentient being holding its breath. Not wanting to be caught.

Far in the distance—down the long book-lined hallway, down the staircase, perhaps out on the sagging porch—I detected conversational grumbles, male voices chuckling, the squeak/groan of a suffering rocking chair. I tipped myself off the high bed, slipping Fred's jacket over my nightgown. Bare toes on the worn Oriental runner, I crept down the hall. It was chilly. On the stairs I began to smell the sweet odor of pipe tobacco. Fred's laugh, sonorous, more musical than his speaking voice, wafted toward me; I was happy, knowing how happy he must be, as I made my way quietly toward the open front door, peeked around the corner.

They sat together under the yellow porch light, Stanley's rocker next to Fred's rickety stool, one balding head and one curly cap of hair leaning over the same open book. “This ballad,” Stanley said. “This one has always been my favorite.”

“‘The Demon Lover,'” Fred agreed, humming the first few lines in the tuneless tone that passed for his singing voice. Someone had once told Fred that if he couldn't sing well, he should sing loud, and he'd taken the idea to heart. I was glad that tonight, for once, he was ignoring that advice. “‘Well met, well met, well met,
my own true love, well met, my love, cried he. I've just come back from the salt, salt sea, and all for the love of thee.'”

“Yes, that's it. You'll begin with Lomax. I like to start with Lomax and work the earlier versions in as we go. Connect the Child ballads all the way from the Orient to the Negro in America, through to the blues,” Stanley said.

“I could spend two weeks just on the ‘House Carpenter' variations. James Harris himself.”

“I hoist my tumbler to the demon lover.”

Fred sipped his drink, checking to make sure Stanley wasn't laughing at him. But they were cut from the same cloth, those two.

“James Harris is folklore's proof that man has never been trustworthy. We're not alone in our preference for that ballad; it's Shirley's favorite as well. D'you know, her book
The Lottery and Other Stories
was supposed to be subtitled
The Adventures of James Harris
? She's smart about folklore, has read almost everything. I often discuss my lecture plans with her.”

“Ah . . .” Fred's envy so new he wasn't yet aware of it. “It must be great to talk like that, with your wife. To share, to work through the details, to be able to think out loud . . .”

Stanley took a long swallow of his drink. In the silence between the men I think some information was passed, but I had no idea what it was.

“She longs for a tall, thin man in a well-made blue suit,” Stanley said lightly.

Fred rattled the watery ice in his glass. I wondered what he was thinking.

•   •   •

I'
D
NEVER
BEEN
AROUND
PEOPLE
as smart as the Hymans, never felt myself surrounded by such brilliance, but at the same time, not knowing why, I felt sorry for Stanley. Just as I'd felt sorry for Shirley earlier at dinner, when the phone rang as she was slicing a pie and he was topping off our wineglasses for the umpteenth time. The look that passed between them, and their three kids—a boy and two girls, ranging in age from about twelve to maybe nineteen; the elder son would come up on the following day with his wife and child—each busily refolding napkins or studying the carpet underneath the long table, well, I didn't have to be older or smarter than I was to know that the phone rang often at this hour. No throat-clearing, no jokes in that moment, just the strange, quick glance, the hard and unforgiving silence, and then the burst of commentary about how glad the children were that Shirley had made the first apple pie of the season. In a moment, Stanley was reciting
Julius Caesar
, and Shirley was interrupting him and they both slipped into Brooklyn accents—
Dis was da noblest Roman of dem all
—and we were giggling again, and the youngest kid, the boy, ran upstairs for his guitar, and all was well. But I observed how hard they had to work, for just that moment, to be happy.

As I stood shyly in the hall, a ragged moth hovering at the outskirts of dim light, while Stanley told Fred how “my Shoiley” often had dreams about her demon lover's appearance, how she used James Harris as a repeating character trope, I wondered if the Hymans would change us very much. Before I could fully ponder the thought, Stanley switched gears, his frame shifting in the chair, his
voice speeding off in another direction, talking about how necessary folklore was to fiction writers: “Think of Ulysses the castaway. All the ritual patterns of drama:
agon
,
pathos, sparagmos
—”

“The messenger!” Fred exclaimed.

“Yes, and then
threnos
, the mourning rituals,
anagnosis
,
theophany,
and then—”

“Peripeteia,”
Fred interrupted.

“A fiction writer needs to know all there is, everything possible,” Stanley said. “Language and history and music and culture. What we come from, our intellectual past, the beliefs that shape our thoughts. Therein lies the trouble with our contemporary novelists, not Shirley, of course, but the others. Fools and charlatans, and why? One simple reason. They don't know enough.” He tilted his head. “As Matthew Arnold noted long before me.”

Fred nodded appreciatively. “A virtuosic dilemma. What separates true artistry, true brilliance, from mere hackery.”

“I know what we'll do this semester! We'll run a small second seminar, very exclusive—demonstrate theory in action, take our eager-minded students through a handful of contemporary writers, examine what specific knowledge might have profited them! Contrast them with better writers, you know, Hersey versus Hemingway. Penn Warren's
World Enough
against Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter
.”

“Yes,” Fred agreed excitedly. “The cultural patterns. Experience instead of aimless reporting. Faulkner, not Steinbeck.”

Hyman slapped my husband on the leg. “Excellent choice. We'll raise the stakes on our young ladies!”

“Stan,” Fred said, trying out the name. “This will be great!”

“They're not bad to look at, either, most of them. The students. An enthusiastic coterie of willing acolytes.”

Fred nodded. To his credit, he was unsure of how to answer.

I had been about to go out onto the porch, to sit with them and listen. The door was open; I would not have to make a sound. But instead I returned to our room, huddled under the thick quilt, and tried to keep a brave face in case the walls reported directly to my hostess. I wanted beyond anything to spend the winter living in this house. I was amazed by the Hymans. I wanted their approval. Nonetheless, I wondered how safe we were with them.

•   •   •

I
SLEPT
BADLY
under the cold, opaque eyes of the windows, troubled by dreams of a sort I'd never had. Each time I awoke, my body wanted to spring from the bed, panicked and afraid of something real: My sister Helen, resisting the insistent pawing of her employer, Mr. Cartwright. My father in a well-used car: avuncularly proud of a particularly fine storefront blaze as firefighters scrambled to unleash their hoses; unaware of the cops creeping closer in the gloomy alleyway. My mother, outside somewhere dark, alone, missed by no one. And Fred. I dreamed something of Fred I cannot bring myself to recall. Not even now.