Shirley (24 page)

“And so?”

“Your girl, the one that disappeared, the one you thought about so much—”

“Paula Welden?”

He nodded. “She disappeared in 1946, didn't she? Right after Thanksgiving? I thought they didn't know her.”

“What? Don't be silly, Fred. This guy's joking. It's only a joke.”

He sighed, turned the page over carefully, and closed Folder 11, placing it back into Box 13. “I thought you'd like to see it.”

“They didn't know her,” I said loudly, not caring when researchers at other tables turned curiously to see who the rude scholar was. “They didn't know Paula, she told me.”

Fred shrugged, put a cautionary, comforting hand on my arm. I did not glance down at my purse, where the class list, from the fall of 1946, the class list with P. Welden's name the last alphabetical entry, was neatly folded. This was one thing I could do for Shirley, one way I could thank her, no matter how little she had thought of me.

For, in fact, I was the same as Paula, wasn't I? Rose Nemser: cipher, dream, fraud. I didn't exist. I'd been through all the later boxes—letter, journals, photos—and found nothing. Not a word about us, not anywhere in this accumulated detritus of a life. She had not thought enough of me, she had not thought to record even a mention of my existence. Not for a moment, not for a meal, not for a conversation about fidelity and marriage, not for an arduous, extraordinary winter. Not for the darning of a sock or the roasting of a chicken. Not even for a crying infant.

Rage tingled the length of my back, between my breasts and
across my scalp, as if my whole life had been a sprinter's burst and I was pushing through those last arduous strides. Before I left the reading room, I checked to make sure my husband was okay. Wasted worry: his nose was buried in a folder from Box 41. He had returned to studying what he'd come there to find, the folders with Stanley's lectures on myth, ritual, and literature—the part of Stanley Hyman's life that Fred Nemser most wished had been his own.

It was cold outside, achingly so, and the streets correspondingly empty of people. I paused in front of the library, tightening the scarf around my neck, checking the buttons on my jacket. Fred appeared next to me; I'd known he would, I suppose. That's why I waited.

We strode briskly down to the Mall, not talking. His breath coming in foggy bursts that puffed from his nostrils, dragon's smoke. I could barely feel my fingers, or my toes, but I liked how cold my brain got, how my thoughts slowed and my cheeks burned.

It was practically deserted—only temperatures this cold could keep the tourists at bay. We began to march down the path, wind cutting at the exposed skin of my neck and face. The anger dissipated, my whole being taken up in resisting the bite of the frigid air.

Our footsteps crunched on the icy gravel. Fred's boots damp at the toes and limned with salty residue, the hems of his trousers speckled with mud. When he spoke, I thought at first I had imagined the words:

“Why'd you do it?”

Walking faster to keep warm, our strides matching despite the difference in our heights, we would be at the Washington
Monument in two minutes. It loomed ahead of us and made me think of a sword, the kind a knight would use for battle with an enchanter. “Do what?” I asked.

“All those years ago. When we knew them. Why'd you throw yourself into the breach? You were the only person in the right. And you made yourself more wrong than anybody else.”

“Stanley must have hated me,” I said. “For what I did to you, for taking you away from him.”

“I wanted to leave, I wanted to go with you. And there's time. There's still time for us to matter.” He'd never before admitted that he wanted to.

“That house,” I said. “I had to get out of there.”

“There are better ways to start a marriage.” He touched my hair, a tendril escaping from under my scarf. “But why, Rosie, why'd you kiss him? Why'd you say that to him?”

“That's easy,” I said. “I made a choice.”

I simply meant that I'd decided. To be as wrong as the rest of them. Just as I'd decided on Fred, that afternoon on the Temple University campus years before. And then I'd decided to make it work. Because I needed him and he me. I took his gloved hand between my own, pulled him to a stop. We were both shivering.

“They didn't remember us.”

“I suppose.”

“I'm as absent from the world as Paula Welden. Or my mother.”

“Absent from their world, but the center of ours. We have our world, Rosie. We have each other, we have Natalie. We didn't need theirs, we didn't.”

“I trusted her,” I said bitterly. “She didn't even notice. No
record. Not a word, not in all those days we spent together. Not even a note that I hung her laundry out on the coldest afternoons, that I cracked the icy sheets before I brought them in. That Natalie was born. That we talked. Oh god, Fred, she was my friend. I was certain of it.”

He was silent.

“We have our world,” he said stubbornly. “She doesn't make our life. We do.”

“My name is nowhere! I pawed through every single page of her journal. I read her letters. I don't exist! In her mind, I was never alive!”

“We'll write about them, we can do it, we'll bring ourselves to life.” As if that was the answer. Fred stared up at the monument, reverential, determined.

“I envy you your faith,” I said. And then I opened my purse and took out Stanley's class list from the fall of 1946, consigning his connection with Paula Welden to the place where it belonged, one of the dark hooded trash bins that sat like chess pieces taken prisoner along the edges of the Mall. I shoved my hands back into my empty coat pockets, stretched my cold fingers into the stitching at the corners.

•   •   •

W
HEN
WE
RETURNED
, I felt distinctly better. I went directly to the last box I'd ordered—Shirley's Box 29, the one with her incomplete literary manuscripts. I wanted to find the book she'd been writing at the time of her death.

I pulled out the first folder, opened it, and looked at the densely typewritten sheets. If I closed my eyes, I knew I'd smell her cigarette smoke. Harum-scarum punctuation, yellow paper, handwritten corrections: I could hear the proud flourish of the typewriter roll as she drew forth the finished sheet. There was always a louder one, at day's end, as she pulled that last sheet out and tapped the day's pile into place. That sound marked the end of labor, the beginning of our evening celebration. Oh, I could still hear it now!

I extracted the first of Shirley Jackson's unpublished manuscripts from the stack, and began to read.

i know where i'm going

and i know who's going with me

i know who i love

but my dear knows who i'll marry . . .

It was to be a novel about the yearning to be an artist, the story of a woman who believes she can make an art form out of the life of an artist without ever actually doing the work to become one. Shirley wrote,
This is to be the story of a strangely haunted woman, whose life becomes a cheap tragedy because of her anxiety to be an artist in the sense in which she sees art, as irresponsibility and lack of discipline.

There was no date anywhere on the file. I had no recollection of her mentioning such a project, of her reminiscing about beginning it or why she abandoned it. I wondered why she did. Was this the project she'd begun when she discovered Stanley was in love?
Was this an early project she later deemed beneath her evolving talents? I tended to doubt that. This plan was good; the story had everything—characters, plot, ominous threat, fantasy, gossip and petty nastiness, farm fields and urban settings. It was rich in the psychological; the characters were whole. I would have loved to have the volume now, to have one more work of Shirley Jackson's I could read. Even the notes had extraordinary lines, as in her description of Oscar as a husband who believes
any woman will make [a] good
wife in the country if he is fond enough of
her
. The plot was rife with devil imagery and dreams, with ominous self-delusion and the ever-present potential for tragedy and violence.

I would write this book myself, if I could. It seemed to me a universal tale. I pushed back my heavy armchair, made my way to the front desk, and received permission to photocopy all ten pages of Shirley's proposed plan.

I know who I love
, she called it. I liked that phrase enormously; it rattled my tongue as if it were pinballing between the different areas for sweet and salty, bitter and sour. Ah, this was the thing she taught me, isn't it?

•   •   •

A
ND
THEN
, as if the witch of Bennington had waited in these cartons a full decade for the moment when I'd do this, I selected the last file from the folder.

Her last novel had barely six chapters completed when she died. It was to be the story of an older woman who sells her possessions and leaves home, takes a new name, sets herself up in a new city.
Makes a fresh new life. The novel begins with the cheerful comment:
I always believe in eating when I can.

I always believe in eating when I can.

I said that.

I said it, and the words must have tricked Shirley into action, thrilled her, driven her to her desk. I remember the kitchen that morning: water steamed over the breakfast dishes, the sponge dropping from Shirley's reddened hand, the pause as she took the words in and moved them through her brain, the way her shoulders stiffened and her smile went vague. I should have known.

Coffee grounds on the counter, a curtain partly twitched by a cat skulking at the window ledge in search of stealable leftovers. The air still charged by her exit.
I always believe in eating when I can.
I remember that I put my toast down and stepped to the sink to finish the washing up.

With my eyes closed, I saw it perfectly. Yes, I remembered precisely how her face changed, and what followed. How even Stanley had to thank me, everyone knew there were moments of relief I'd brought into the fraught landscape of their home.

It was the very first sentence.
I always believe in eating when I can.

See, world, I was there!

“We're boring,” I whispered, and Fred nodded, not really listening. The word felt glorious, an enveloping sea of comfort and understanding. I tapped his hand, said, “Our boring little family—I miss our girl. Let's drive back tonight; let's get Natalie and go home.”

“We'll finish here, we're almost done.”

And then Fred sighed as he moved the holder card to the next place in the file box, removed the next folder. I put my hand on his and squeezed it gently. His thumb shifted and pressed mine, and then we both returned to work. It was good.

I, too, know who I love.

My interest in Shirley Jackson has an arc all its own. I first read
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
and
The Haunting of Hill House
when I was around thirteen, the age when I also discovered Baroness Orczy and Judith Rossner and Daphne du Maurier and Iris Murdoch—like Jackson, women writers whose female characters managed to be both part of and resistant to what can only be called “normal” life. But I had never considered Shirley Jackson from a writerly point of view until I had the good fortune to meet the novelist Rachel Pastan in 2007 at the Bennington Writing Seminars. It was Rachel who encouraged me to examine Jackson's gift for mixing the mundane and the fantastic. For that, and for her patient, intelligent readings of this novel through many iterations, I will always be indebted.

This book has had so many friends. Thank you to readers Dinah Lenney, Renée Shafransky, Maggie Merrell, Lou Ann Walker, Martha Cooley, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Melanie Fleishman, Joe Stracci, Ian Williams, Ann Fitzsimmons, Julie Sheehan, Jennifer Pike, Jake Merrell, Martha Samuelson, and Herb and Maggie Scarf. Thank you to Bob Reeves and everyone else at Stony Brook
Southampton's MFA in Creative Writing & Literature; Jed Turner, Antonio Romani, Ann Brandon; the Library of Congress, particularly Dan DeSimone and Carolyn Sung; Benjamin Dreyer, Cathy Creedon, and Jackson biographer Judy Oppenheimer. At Bennington, particular thanks to Sven Birkerts, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alice Mattison, and Joe Tucker at Crossett Library.

Unlimited gratitude goes to the three people whose belief in this book has been a game changer: Henry Dunow, Sarah Hochman, and Jim Merrell.

Last but far from least, I must acknowledge Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman. I have conflated their residential history, and restructured facts and details to serve the purpose of my story, much as Shirley did with the story of Paula Welden or that of the two young schoolteachers who visited Versailles. My hope is that Shirley and Stanley would be amused by this fictional exercise.

S
USAN
S
CARF
M
ERRELL
is the author of a previous novel,
A Member of the Family
, and a nonfiction work,
The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections
Influence Adult Relationships
.
She is a professor in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton, and is fiction editor of
TSR: The Southampton
Review
.