7

“What does she do now?”

“Now she sits alone and remembers.”

“No. Now she sleeps.”

“She dreams, in her dreams she is ageless.”

“She thinks when she dreams that her dream will be her destiny.”

“She dreams that an old man (her father?) is going to kiss her while she sleeps, before he goes away to war.”

“He never returned from Cuba.”

“There’s an empty grave in Arlington.”

“When I die, I want to be free of humiliation, resentment, guilt, or suspicion; mistress of myself, with my own opinions but without being sanctimonious or a pharisee.”

“Your father went to Cuba and now you’re going to Mexico. What a mania the Winslows have for back yards.”

“Look at the map of our back yard: Here is Cuba. Here is Mexico. Here is Santo Domingo. Here is Honduras. Here is Nicaragua.”

“I will never be able to understand our neighbors. We invite them to dinner and then they refuse to stay and wash the dishes.”

“Look at the map, children. Learn.”

“Loneliness is an absence of time.”

“Wake up, Harriet, wake up. It’s late.”

Her mother always said that as a girl she’d been stubborn as a mule, but not very realistic, a bad combination for a young woman who had no dowry, especially if her behavior was not the coolest or most impeccable.

When she read the advertisement in the Washington Star, her heart began to pound. Why not? Teaching her primary-school classes had become routine, like attending church with her mother every Sunday, or the chaperoned outings over the last eight years with her just-turned-forty-two beau.

“After a certain age, society accepts you for what you are, as long as nothing changes and there are no surprises.”

Why not! she asked herself, nibbling on the tie of her Gibson Girl outfit: white shirtwaist with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a high collar; tie; full, long wool skirt; high-button boots. Why not! After all, because of her, her mother was happy; she felt she had not been abandoned in her old age and appreciated the fact that her only daughter still slept under the same roof as her and accompanied her every Sunday to services in the Methodist church on Fifteenth Street, and Delaney, her beau, was happy because he had not been forced to give up his comfortable accommodations at his club, with all the customary services and minimal expenses of bachelor life, or jeopardize the necessary independence of a man who lobbied for special interests before the United States government.

“It’s not safe anywhere in the world,” Delaney would say as he read the daily headlines about the war clouds gathering over Europe.

“Why do you stay on here with me?” her mother would ask with a sweetly malicious smile. “You’re thirty-one. Aren’t you bored?”

Then she would kiss her daughter’s cheek, forcing her to bow her head until she touched the mother’s withered skin. And thus captive in the filial embrace, she had to listen to her mother’s lament, yes, she could imagine the sorrow of a young girl who might have grown up wealthy in New York but instead had to go on waiting like her mother; waiting for news that never came, all her life. I wonder whether we’ve come into an inheritance? I wonder whether Papa died in Cuba? I wonder whether some young man will come to ask you out? No, it wasn’t easy, because they wouldn’t accept charity, isn’t that right, daughter? and no young man would come to call on the penniless daughter of a widow of a captain in the United States Army, forced to leave New York and study in a Washington, D.C., normal school in order to be near—God knows why!—the source of army pensions, the memory of the father who’d been stationed there all those years, Arlington Cemetery where he should have been buried with full honors, except that no one knew where he was, where he fell during the Cuban campaign.

Beleaguered during a Washington summer, where if the vegetation was neglected for a moment the jungle would take over, swallowing up the entire city beneath a luxuriant growth of tropical plants, climbing vines, and rotting magnolias.

“The human response to the tropical jungle of Washington was to construct a pantheon worthy of Greece and Rome.”

When she decided to leave, she took her mother’s hand and her mother murmured: A cultivated young lady, but stubborn as a mule and unrealistic besides. In spite of everything, she said, sighing, I hope you will be happy; in spite of everything, she repeated, and in spite of our differences of opinion.

“You are not listening to me, Mama.”

“Of course I am, daughter. I know everything. Here. This letter came for you.”

The envelope was postmarked Mexico. It said clearly: Miss Harriet Winslow, 2400 Fourteenth Street, Washington, D.C., United States of America.

“Why did you open it, Mama? Who…?”

She didn’t want to finish the sentence, she didn’t want to argue. She decided to accept the offer from the Miranda family before something happened, before her mother died, or her father returned, or Delaney was tried for federal fraud, she swears, she swears to herself. She was determined to go to Mexico because she felt as if she had already taught little American boys and girls everything she could. She read that advertisement in the Star and thought how in Mexico she would be able to teach everything she knew to Mexican children. That was the challenge she needed, she decided one day as she donned her lacquered, black-ribboned straw hat. Her knowledge of Spanish was a normal-school-trained teacher’s minimal homage to a father fallen in Cuba. It would serve her in teaching English to the children of the Miranda family on a hacienda in Chihuahua.

“Don’t go, Harriet. Don’t forsake me now.”

“I had made up my mind before I knew about this,” she told her beau, Mr. Delaney.

“Why did we leave New York?” she would say to her mother when she reminded them that the family roots were all there beside the Hudson, not here beside the Potomac.

Then she laughed and told her that they didn’t leave New York; New York had left them. So many things had been left unanswered when her father set off for Cuba and she was sixteen and he never returned.

She sat every morning before the mirror in her tiny bedroom on Fourteenth Street, and there came a day when she admitted that her face was telling a story that didn’t please her.

She was only thirty-one, but the features she traced gently on the mirror before touching her icy temple with the same finger seemed not older but emptier, less legible than ten—even two—years before: like the blanched pages of a book after the words have disappeared.

She was a woman who dreamed a lot. If her soul was not different from her dreams, she could accept that both were instantaneous. Like a dream, her soul revealed itself in flashes. No, the soul isn’t like that, she argued with herself in her dreams, the teachings of her religion filtering to the deepest center of the dream; the soul’s not like that, she chastised herself for such thoughts; one’s soul isn’t something that belongs to the instant, it belongs to God, and is eternal.

She would awaken thinking of what she might have said but hadn’t, of the errors and spectral hiatuses in her words and her waking acts, which pursued her throughout the night.

This was the realm of shadow, but light was a worse torture for her. In the darkness of dream, she sank into the hot tidewater summer, as she sank into the heat of her own sleeping body. Hers were the humidity of the banks of the Potomac and the wet and drooping vegetation of the city, domesticated in appearance only, in reality invading the farthest corners of forgotten gardens and cesspools, back yards shaded beneath dripping green roofs and carpeted with dead dogwood blossoms, and the sweet-sour smell of Negroes who drifted through a haze of dog days—sweaty bodies and lazily powdered faces.

Halfway between Washington and Mexico, she was to imagine that Washington had summer but Mexico had light. Suspended in her imagination between memory and visions of the future, both illuminations denuded the surrounding space. The Mexican sun could leave a landscape naked beneath its fire. The Potomac sun could become a luminous mist that devoured the contours of interiors, drawing rooms, bedchambers, the humid and hollow spaces of stinking cellars where cats crept to give birth to their litters, where the tired presence of rugs, furniture, and old clothes that lingered in Washington while people arrived and departed with their trunks, all joined together like latent, dispassionate ghosts amid a heavy smell of moss and mothballs.

At times she asked herself: “When was I most happy?”

She knew the answer: when her adored father had left and she felt she could be the responsible one. Now she was responsible. She had spent her childhood haunted by the brilliant yellow light she watched moving slowly from floor to floor in a recently constructed but already decaying mansion on Sixteenth Street. Hidden behind stubborn summer shrubs on a hill that plunged abruptly from an abandoned tennis court to a lawn covered with dead magnolias, she stared at the light as slowly it came and went, melting what must have been the soft interior, the buttery recesses behind the façade of carved stone, cut and assembled to resemble a fantasy of a Second Empire mansion, pompous and dank.

Who was carrying that lamp? Why did she feel that its light was calling to her? Who lived there? She never saw a face.

Now she stared at the light in the center of her mother’s favorite table, a marble-topped table her father had used every night for the paperwork and the bills, and the family for eating, and now her mother used only for the latter. She stared at that domestic glow and realized that she had invested this simple household object, this everyday necessity, this green-shaded lamp with all the trembling imagination, all the passionate desire of the light she remembered from that humid summer mansion.

She reached out and took her mother’s hand to tell her that she was leaving. Her mother already knew. She had opened the letter from the Mirandas, without asking her permission then or her pardon now.

Miss Harriet Winslow, 2400 Fourteenth Street …

“A cultivated young lady, but headstrong and fanciful…”

It didn’t matter; she would never again listen to her mother.

She didn’t realize it, but the daughter’s promise of happiness and youth was evident only on the mother’s face. The light worked this transference, this gift from the daughter. A light. Perhaps the same light she had followed like a ghost through the decaying mansion; that same light had come here, to this tiny apartment, to fulfill Miss Winslow’s desire: that her mother reflect the brilliant light of her childhood; that the daughter no longer reflect the sorrowful shadow of the mother.

She dreamed: the light stopped at the foot of the service stairway beside the cellar that was the last and darkest labyrinth in the unserviceable shell of the intimidating and ephemeral façade of Washingtonian luxury and duty, the stark whiteness of the pantheon of the city, its black wells, and the smell became stronger. First she recognized half the smell, the smell of old mattresses and damp rugs, and then the other half, the smell of the couple lying there, the sour-sweet smell of love and blood, of moist armpits and genital spasms as her father possessed the solitary Negress who lived there, perhaps in the service of absent masters, perhaps she herself the repudiated lady of the house.

“Captain Winslow, I am very lonely. You may have me at your pleasure.”

Mr. Delaney, who had been her beau for eight years, smelled like a laundry when he stole a kiss during their promenades through the summer evenings, and later, when it was all over, she saw that without his starched Arrow collar he was old and tired, and he said to her: Well, what can women be but sluts or virgins.

“Aren’t you happy that I have chosen you as my ideal girl, Harriet?”