The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (27 page)

The evening ended with the presentation to Giorgio by his former employees of a watch, now that he would never again need to know the time of day. It was passed around the table for all to admire, ending with Gina. It was a heavy gold pocket watch with a heavy gold chain. The watch was silent, its hands still. That was because it had yet to be wound and set going, as Gina quickly realized; but for a moment it seemed to her that time had stopped, had never begun, that in her gnarled and workworn fingers she held the emblem of her joyless past, her joyless future, her approaching end. Attributing her tears to gratitude and a sense of fulfillment, the guests all smiled at her.

As for Giorgio, never one for
dolce far' niente
, he had lately found a way to pass the time. In his basement workshop he was busy nowadays making little wooden chests. Of scrap lumber—there was an endless supply at the shop. Nice little lidded chests. For keeping things in.

The Patience of a Saint

W
HENEVER THE
villagers of Tracytown sighed and said, as they had been doing for some thirty years now, “What will become of poor Ernest when old lady van Voorhees dies?” they were thinking not of Ernest's dependence upon his mother but rather of his dependence upon her dependence upon him. Ernest van Voorhees lived for his mother. Poor soul, he had nothing else to live for.

The van Voorhees for generations had been subsistence farmers. While all about them mechanization came and small farmers like them sold out to bigger holdings, moneyed outsiders for whom farming was a profitable loss, they kept on with their few dairy cows, sold eggs, hay for the saddlehorses of the ever-growing number of summer and weekend people up from the city. They netted herring in the Hudson on their spring spawning run and smoked and salted down a year's supply as their pioneer forebears had done. They canned the produce from their kitchen garden, stored roots, apples. In the fall they regularly put their couple of deer in the village's cold-storage locker.

But even for Ernest, who lived only to work, and no bigger than it was, the farm was too much for him alone. So, his younger brother having been killed in Korea, when his old father died it had to be sold. Since then Ernest and his mother had lived in a trailer some five miles outside the village, not far from their old farm, for whose new owners Ernest worked part-time. He supported himself and his old mother by hiring out to do odd jobs. He mowed my lawns, raked my leaves, cut my firewood, and I was but one of several for whom he did these and other chores. No better mower of lawns could be found, not even among golfcourse-keepers. Each time a different pattern so that the nap would not be pressed in any one prevailing direction but would always stand up like that of a fresh-laid carpet. With a chainsaw he was as skillful as a professional logger. A workhorse. Non-stop. Tireless. And for this the wages he charged were such that when I moved to the area and Ernest came to work for me I made myself unpopular with his other employers by insisting upon paying him more. A non-smoker, non-drinker, non-gambler, non-womanchaser—a non-everything was Ernest van Voorhees: a model of the negative virtues. The respect felt for him in the village was not unmixed with pity for all that he was missing out on in life and with a sense that such self-abnegation as his was possible only because he was “not quite all there,” though what more those who said that about him had that Ernest did not have, I for one was never able to discern.

But the outstanding thing about Ernest, the thing that earned him the village's universal, unstinting, and unqualified admiration was his dutifulness toward his old mother. He tended her like a baby, which was about what she had now become, was never without her, and his devotion was even more exemplary because his mother was not an attractive nor a sensible woman, never had been, and now that her mind had failed her, was enough to try the patience of a saint. All this not to mention the odor. Giuseppina, our cleaning woman, whenever she paused in her work and glanced out the window and saw Ernest mowing the lawn or spading the flowerbed while his mother dozed in the pickup truck, would say, “Poor soul! What will become of him when she is gone?” And from Giuseppina's ample bosom, which had known what it was to nurse, would issue the contented sigh with which the sight of filial selflessness can inflate a mother's breast.

Yet it was not Ernest but rather the other, dead son, who had been their parents' favorite, or had become so by dying, and Ernest knew it, for no effort was made to conceal it from him; he knew it and he never resented it. I did, and not having the patience of a saint myself, I showed it.

“It's a terrible thing, Mr. Robinson,” the old lady once said to me, “to lose your son.”

She sat on my right, Ernest on my left at the wheel of his pickup truck. It was as though he were not there, as far as she was concerned.

I said, “Yes, that must be a terrible thing, Mrs. van Voorhees. I just hope you appreciate how lucky you are to have left to you a son like yours.”

There was certainly nothing about her deserving of such devotion as Ernest's. I found her spoiled by his attentions, a chronic malcontent and complainer, tiresome, foolish even before her brain began to go soft, misshapen by age, and to sit beside her in the cab of that pickup with the windows shut tight and the heater going full blast was to feel—well, as if you were in, and not alone in, an outhouse.

It was Ernest who did the shopping, the cooking, the housekeeping, the laundering. It must be said that at none of these tasks did he excel. Their diet was monotonous, the house not the neatest, the clothes drying on the line rather dingy. But he did them all, uncomplainingly, in addition to his outside work, and on top of all that he looked after his elderly neighbors along the road, shopping for them whenever they were down sick, shoveling them out from under the snow whenever the man of the house had a bad back, doing for his neighbor no more than his neighbor would do for him, though none ever did because Ernest never got sick, never needed help. Not quite all there!

The years passed, so many of them that even the notable ones, those marked by storms, floods, droughts, were repeated time and again and lost their distinction, sank in the mass and faded from memory. The snows melted and the grass grew and had to be mowed, the leaves fell and had to be raked, the snow fell and the paths had to be shoveled. Our summer afternoons were filled with the steady drone of the mower as Ernest's plodding figure, as regularly as a shuttle in a loom, passed back and forth outside the windows. He raked the leaves as though he were motor-driven and when this seasonal chore was done we heard the snarl of his chainsaw day-long down in the woodlot or nearer by when, out behind the shed, he chopped the logs into fireplace length, the pile of sticks and the mound of sawdust patiently growing mountainous. And in these latter years, always, in the heat of summer and in the cold of winter, when the engine was left running and the heater on, Mother sat in the cab of the pickup truck for hours while Ernest worked. She had grown deathly afraid of being left alone and now accompanied him everywhere he went. She was afraid of falling sick or of simply falling and not having Ernest there to help her and of dying alone in the house before he got home.

In the beginning of this final phase, to pass the time, she read. Or rather, she looked at the pictures, or merely turned the pages, in the same half-dozen old tattered magazines—magazines of special interests as remote from hers, had she had any interests, as hunting, travel, fashion. Later on she dozed away the hours. I woke her from her sleep whenever I took Ernest and her a glass of lemonade or a cup of hot chocolate, until the time came when I found the glass or the cup hardly touched and after that I left her alone. Passing the truck where it sat in the drive on my way to the mailbox across the road I would see her slumped asleep, shrunken, frail, barely breathing, and it was an object lesson in the irony of existence. There was no such thing as a long life and yet there was such a thing as too long a one. Her gold brooch, her diamond engagement ring and her wedding band, now as loose on her dried-up finger as the band on a game bird's leg, were the only reminders of the woman she had been. She had shriveled to skin and bones and her hair had thinned to the scantiness of the fur on a coconut. The effort to pin it up looked as though it were Ernest's, not hers, and indeed, the mind balked at imagining the bodily functions of hers it was now his duty to attend to. The features of her face had lost their symmetry and gone awry. She was half blind, half deaf. Yet she lingered on. Rigorous natural selection, over a long span of time, had made of the old original Dutch stock of these Berkshire Hills a hardy race. Every township had its centenarian. And the same people who longed to live forever themselves saw in old lady van Voorhees what it was to live that long and heaved a sigh for her and for poor Ernest. He would have her on his hands for years yet to come, and then when she died he would owe it to her that he had many a long, lonely year to live on without her, with nothing whatever to live for.

To my question, the one time I ever put it to him, how old was he? Ernest's reply was, “Old enough to know better.” Having had his little joke, he did not retreat from it; I got no answer. I was surprised at this vanity about his age in a person otherwise totally lacking in vanity and to all outward appearance content with his lot, without regret for time lost or any sense of its having been misspent. Longevity is often the boast of those whose lives have been the emptiest.

He looked both aged and ageless, bent as though to his lawn-mower or his snowshovel even on the streets of the village and moving with that plodding gait made even more elephantine by the clothes bought always too big for him, big as he was, at church bazaars, thrift shops, a figure out of a drawing by van Gogh or a painting by Millet, and yet with the bland, seamless face, unworn by worldly emotions, of the celibate, the anchorite.

Always narrow and confined, the lives of Ernest and his mother contracted further with the closing in of time. Both had loved to play bridge, their one entertainment, and had long been regulars at the Tuesday night bridge parties at the village Grange Hall, where Ernest often won the door prize. But as the old lady's mind began to fail her she became increasingly undesirable as anybody's partner. Her confusions, her mistakes, and her gaffes grew more and more frequent. Finally she became an embarrassment to Ernest and, hard as it was to believe, a story got about that on what turned out to be their last attendance at the Grange Hall he had actually been publicly short-tempered with her. For some village gossips nothing was sacred and there was even talk of an ugly, a shocking scene between them as he hustled her to the cloakroom and out to the truck to be taken home. In any case, that was their last appearance there.

Now they never went anywhere, except for lunch daily to the diner in the village where they had been regulars for more years than anybody could remember. They had their own table there. That, however, was not entirely owing to the proprietor's gratitude for the van Voorhees' loyalty to him, though that was the fiction kept up. It rather spoils a touching story, but the plain truth of the matter was that the van Voorhees were segregated from the other customers at the diner because the old lady had become incontinent and close proximity to her would have spoiled anybody's appetite. That same unfortunate infirmity may have been partly the reason why their few friends, the few of those whom time had spared, visited less and less often and finally stopped altogether. Their friends excused themselves on the ground that they did not want to embarrass Ernest. As for him, the best son a mother ever had, he never gave a sign that he noticed anything.

I could sympathize with those friends. I did not have to imagine the atmosphere in the stuffy, overheated living room of that tiny trailer. I was obliged to ride between Ernest and the old lady in the pickup truck once a week to the town dump to get rid of my trash. I had gotten started doing that years ago, before the smell began, and now could think of no way of getting out of it without raising questions and causing pain. Distasteful to me as they were, those trips were a pleasure to Ernest, a break in his monotonous routine. It was hard to deprive a man of his enjoyment when that was so meager a thing as driving you weekly to the municipal garbage dump. So I went along, breathing through my mouth and trying not to hear with either of the two heads I felt I had at those times.

Some people have tape decks in their cars; in Ernest's pickup, on our weekly trips to the dump, we had Mother, our one cassette. Poor old soul! Nearly blind and nearly deaf, painful to behold, foul-smelling, she was now quite dotty as well. It was as we passed the Bohnsack place, just a quarter of a mile from my house, that she switched on.

Already by then she was lost and had asked Ernest at least twice where we were. Little do I know about saints, though given this chance to study one, but I suppose that even their patience can wear out, and having been asked that question now times out of number, Ernest chatted on without answering.

“Ernest! Ernest!” the old lady, getting no reply and growing panicky, would squawk. “I'm talking to you! Where are we, Ernest?” Born just five miles from there, never in her life having traveled farther than fifty miles away, she was lost in the fog, in the featureless and unfamiliar terrain of her own decaying mind.

The sight of the Bohnsack farmhouse calmed her. It also unfailingly evoked the story of how the Bohnsacks had come home from church one Sunday morning long ago to find their hired man on the roof of the house stark naked and stark mad and how he had stayed there for two whole days before being coaxed down and being tied up and sent off to the insane asylum.

Between that one and the next of her long life's landmarks she would get lost at least twice more and would squawk at Ernest demanding to know where we were, and also that many times if not more would insist that he drive slower because the bumps in the road hurt her stomach and had ever since as a girl she jumped out of the hayloft and threw it out of whack.