Sleepless Nights (15 page)

The little apartment with its half kitchen and small icebox shone and became the pure, neat square they both loved. Sitting at the card table for supper they were like nothing so much as strange, worn, contented dolls, placed on a shelf.

Their pleasure in the place expanded, and the poor cripple lifted more and more, worked harder and harder. At last with the backward, perverse turn of fate, like that of a bitter fairy tale, his gasping, obsessive toil appalled the owners of the house, created in the minds of contented tenants an accompanying sense of foreboding and guilt, an idea that it was death itself hosing down the sidewalk, polishing the door knocker. They persuaded him to quit.

Josette and Michael gave up and took on their destiny. They “retired” on a pittance to Florida, where the sun came down on the trailer parks. The Buick was retired, too, seeming to metamorphose into a mobile home.

A year later I received a card from Josette:

I lost Michael. He died instantly at the checkout counter of a supermarket, where he was working.

I see pink lights in their trailer and Josette and Michael are there watching television, side by side with others in identical pastel oblongs. It is institutional and comforting, what they like, similar to an old orphanage, a busy circumscribed space where equals gather.

Perhaps it seems to them that the rest of their life was lived in a dubious foster home, one of those dead improving transactions—sly, calculating, private accommodations in a tomb of strangers. Their trailer park—at last they have reached it, earned it.

Their trailer, like the others, is neat, but the opposite of a spartan fitness. Instead they are living in a disguise created out of fantasy. Every object is in the shape of something foreign to it. A clock is a ship’s wheel, the blue aluminum of the outside leads into a brown darkness of walls stained to look like the paneled cellars of castles. Early American rag rugs made of nylon, white picket fences, rocking chairs of knotty pine, many things that oddly wish to say, Grandmother.

The rain on the flat tin—that must be nice, as it turns the warm dust to mud.

Josette—the gap of Marlborough Street and Beacon Hill. All her grayness was filled with light and it is an embarrassment to speak of one so good. In a wine-colored pillbox hat perched on her harsh hair, she came for a visit once to New York, while they were still in the reassurance of the apartment house basement. But everything is here, she said. The true high-boy and the false sideboard.

I am sure she too has died. To him was given heart disease and to her, cancer. They are both gone, with all their questions unanswered.

After the death of their loved servant, Rose, the Goncourts spoke of her twenty-five years of care, of shared joys and sorrows, of her devotion, “the sort one hopes will be present to shut one’s eyes for the last time.”

On the day of Rose’s death—”the irony of things”—they were asked for the first time to dine with Princess Mathilde. A few days later they learned of the real life of Rose, of her “nocturnal orgies,” her secret childbearings, her debts, her jealous, ugly passion for the son of the dairywoman, a passion that killed her when she stood out all night in the rain spying on him. From these revelations the Goncourts learned what? To be forever “suspicious of all womankind,” and to be forever mindful of a woman’s “genius for lying.”

Another summer, now 1972. A circle of fog around Ida’s cottage. A window is open and so she is still there. And since she is alive she is doing people’s laundry—one fact assumes the next.

Maine, Caribou and Moosehead, awesome, rare creatures. In midsummer, ruthless, weedy wildflowers, berries hanging from the boughs of mountains ash, starlings in the alders, the spidery brambles of old blackberry bushes. A rush of heat enters the town like the roar of motorcycles on Sunday. Sunset nevertheless will bring a cool wind that rattles the windows. The islands are filled with well-to-do frosty American specimens, summering. Someone water-skis on the bay and the sight is almost indecorous. If the heat continues then the wilderness will be threatened with drought and fire. It is not possible to have a true summer without excess up here in the north; the excess that is summer threatens the natural damp, windy woods which, even if you have never seen them, are always present in your mind.

Inside the door of Ida’s house, her large black winter galoshes are standing, a premonition in August of the Maine winter. She knows where she is. In the same way a child’s sled has been propped up all summer against the front door of a house in town. At Ida’s, beet greens are on the stove and she is corning beef. The steady rhythm of her day, her season. For her breakfast, thick slices of bacon; a big black pan in which eggs float like water lilies. While they fry she will examine the sky of the day.

Large head, large teeth, large carpet slippers, and the large arms that have been wringing, pulling, lifting for a lifetime. All of the large parts of the body hurt in some way, even if all are strong.

1950

This evening I met Ida for the first time. Twice a week she goes touring about town, driven by the owner of the hardware store, and she makes her laundry deliveries. Groans and loud, hoarse laughter as she hauls first herself and then the laundry baskets out of the sinking back seat. Not much over thirty years old then, but no hint of youth except for the curls which have been formed by pins clamped next to her ears. Reddish curls, large, round, reddish face, and a voice large and reddish.

The wicker basket is heavy with linen sheets and pillowcases, with white towels. On the top are folded the blouses, silk nightgowns, and petticoats she refers to as “body clothes.” Her money is counted out and on she goes to the next house on the square, and then down to the large summer houses overlooking the bay. Finicky patrons mutter about scorchings, but softly, because she is known to be tough and to flare into anger, coming at you with a pugilistic glare in her light, pink eyes.

The spring was awful wet, she screams. Potatoes are nothing but water.

Her lyrical utterance is saved for her work. She admits that she loves wash out on the line. That’s where it is lovely and fresh, she insists, her voice rising.

Ida’s bungalow stands up on a hill near a tidal river. It is hers, she paid for it, built it, and over the years scarcely ever leaves it. No family and, like country people, no scenery for friendship; neighbors, yes, who drive her to Bucksport to the market once in a while. She gets huge loaves of white bread and a few things from a grocery truck that comes by once a week and then there is canning going on in her kitchen all summer—canning for the long winter. She is too heavy and stubborn for movement, too difficult and independent for anything except work.

1960
’s—perhaps it was her bungalow standing there in the quiet, visible if not beckoning. Neat and sturdy on its cement foundation.

The wind rustled the trees, the mailbox rusted, the coldest of stars seemed right on top of the little house at night. But inside there was this fat, strong woman and the shining black stove heating up day and night, and the wide old feather bed with its oaken headpost and its quilts and comforters.

Disaster came in the early sixties. Ida began to be visited by Herman, a local man, one of the native families. Herman appeared and disappeared, off and on, setting himself up in a shack next to his old father. Sometimes he arrived for a year and went away for as long; sometimes he stayed a few months only. He mumbled about working somewhere on ships, since he had grown up on the sea; he talked of a bit of clamdigging or of shrimping in the South.

He was dark, thin, and tall, with a disagreeable, cranky hermit inwardness, broken now and then by disconcerting jerks of rapid reminiscence. In these remembering talks, his long yellow teeth emerged like fog lights out of the taciturn lips, his wandering eyes glistened with the recall of drinking bouts, of crewing on yachts in the Caribbean.

About these claims Ida would later say with a sneer: I’d as soon have a baboon without thumbs on board as him.

His periods of torpor had their content, however; sullen schemes, petty maneuvers, small thefts, borrowing, dumb plans for curious businesses.

Herman is most horrible to behold sitting in the back seat of the delivery car on a Friday afternoon, huddled among the laundry baskets, glowering with chagrin or sometimes taking on a sort of official air, as if he were Ida’s manager.

For a time he is safe in the big feather bed. But there was the problem of the day, while the tubs boiled, the wringer squeaked, the iron filled the house with its steamy smells. They got up at daylight and sometimes at seven he walked “down street” and spent the morning talking to the men on the wharf, the boatbuilders in their crowded shed. At noon he would walk home to eat boiled cabbage and potatoes, stews and the beer he had bought with money taken from the tin candy box, hidden behind the stove.

Slowly the sound of the old Maytag churning began to have an unsettling effect upon Herman and he could be heard groaning curses at it. She screamed back in their violent defense and assault. Ida liked fighting and arguing and was known to be a dangerous enemy. Naturally she hated everything Herman was—shifty, idle, a wandering isolate, with a morose and needy nature that could when the need was upon him attach itself somewhere.

The winter came down upon them. The suicide season arrived early. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor. The little houses on the road with their stoves and furnaces blowing heat, their lamps glowing, trembling there in the whiteness, might be settlements waiting for a doom that would come over them silently in the night.

The nightmare closeness in the cottage, frozen, combative wills. What could that man talk about in the winter? There was nothing he knew, she said.

Out of bed and into the kitchen, she greeting the glacial dawn the same as ever. He—dark, sallow, morbid. They were both going mad and the heat of the stove where the iron warmed and the food boiled was the heat of hell.

In a time of thaw, Herman’s moroseness thawed to a glittering, nervous malice. By this time, Ida had learned that he had the soul and body of a convict. He had been in and out of jail, sometimes going in to flee the cold or simply to be someplace. In the same way he had come to her—a jail sentence.

But the parole spirit was on him and dull schemes began to enter his mind once more. He began to mutter that the house was half his own and the very words led her to scream and fight so fiercely the police were called. Among the neighbors there was a question of which one would be killed first.

One day, Herman vanished for good. He took with him everything of use he could find in the house—her little store of money, a war bond, her savings account book, which he threw in the gutter, a worthless brooch. These things grew in Ida’s mind to such a heat and rage that she was taken to the insane asylum for a few months.

She raged and clawed and threatened her way out and came back to her house, her baskets of clothes, her pots of boiled beef and turnips, the companionate ironing board and mopping pail.

The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick clam. A few hours ago I made the journey to Ida’s house, knocked on the latched screen door, and felt something close to fright coming over me. Oh, God, there she is, homely, homely, scabby with a terrible skin rash, heavy in her cotton housedress, lame in her carpet slippers, pushing to the door with painful, heavy slowness. She is violently cheerful. The baskets of laundry waiting to be picked up are now of red and blue latticed plastic.

Her large, muscled arms hold me for a moment in a pounding embrace. The smell of laundry is, truly, like a bitter, sacred incense. Her cropped hair is damp. Her legs are swollen, the large, aching ankles seem to groan as she pulls her weight along. She stands there, the great teeth throbbing in her round, gleaming face. Oh, Ida.

For a moment she is framed against her new white washing machine, as if waiting to be photographed—savage, miraculous, with the ambiguous smile of an old hearth goddess, an icon to which no offering was ever made without a grumble.

A
GIFT FOR
life. One I knew who had it was murdered. That night I was living in Connecticut, in a new house containing many old objects, books, and pictures rushed out of St. Petersburg in the 1920’s. The letters of the Russian alphabet were everywhere, on the cover of the cookbooks over the wall oven, inside the collections of poetry next to the bed, in the tall art books stacked up near the fireplace. From new world to new world, many old things. That summer it had seemed a good idea to rent my house up in Maine, to
try
Connecticut.

On the evening news I heard his name and saw the police carrying the body, covered in a tarpaulin, out of the apartment house in the East 50’s in New York. His name, full name, not quite what we called him. He, the name, the doors opening to the street, the body proceeding to the morgue, flashed by quickly in a staccato announcement like the temperature, promising to rise, the baseball scores. Switching to another channel for its sudden flash, I found him there once more. He, shot in his own apartment, in the night. A stranger? What powers strangers can make use of.

The murder was never solved and soon nothing more was heard of it. For some reason a year passed before his friends gathered themselves together and produced a delayed, mild, uncertain memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s.

A murder is a challenge, an embarrassment, to the inner life of the dead one, almost a dishonor, like other violent events that may come upon you without warning. It is not certain that you may not have in some careless or driven way chosen to put yourself in the path of a murderer. Maybe for pleasure —that is the worst. The path of a murderer, there to choose. Take this street, take this hand.

His apartment was very striking. Expensive views, just what he wanted, everyone said. He had begun to make money, had only been in his splendid tower for a short time, for one large dinner party, there at last in the proper setting for his gift for life. To vanish so quickly, without knowing or telling, without the body’s preparation of distress, without clues, left in this case a blank more like a natural death than death itself, with its documents of worn arteries, explosions of rampaging tumors, final minutes.