August, 1859
In the nineteen years that I’d lived there and even now I do no longer, I am incapable of entering the Charles River house where my parents have lived for three decades without holding my breath for as long as I can, my knuckles jammed into my nostrils.
It is not any smell in particular, reader, that drives me to blunt my olfactory organ, as you will doubtless be expecting based on other tales you’ve read—tales of little innocents imprisoned in some manor where they are subject to the tortures of a cruel, demented aunt and who only need smell the linseed oil that auntie used to dry her letters to send them headlong into fugues of remembrance from which they can never completely return.
No—since you ask, I am not one of those.
It is nothing so disturbing or evocative as that which makes me plug my nostrils up. Though I have often wished it were given the doldrums of my boyhood where a breath of the gruesome or macabre would have been better than nothing at all.
Which is what my parents’ house smelled like, not to say it had no smell; it was rather a medley, all woven together, so no smell rose above the rest.
First would come that of my father’s meerschaum, a resinous and bitter reek that was strongest in the parlour and the bedroom where he slept. Next came my mother, a sour-sweet putrescence like some garden fruit in suspended decay, a polite simile for the gin and then laudanum which she had been using to temper her pain since the “pond incident,” several years ago now. And weaving in among these notes, if the rare parlour casement was open that day, was the smell of the river gone brackish in summer or faintly metallic in the cold, along with the wind-carried smell of the hospital: orchids, ammonia, alcohol, death. And then the dust, dust everywhere, little bits of us Mumler’s flaking off day by day, collecting on the ceilings and the stones in the walls like an extension of our claim on that place, of our unhappiness.
I would venture to say, if it isn’t forgone, that this is the place where The Sadness was born.
On the day that I speak of, these smells became one, in the same hanging cloud, when I entered the house. My father wouldn’t be at home, I knew from his twelve-hour days at the shop, which would give me some much-needed time with my mother whom I hadn’t called on in a number of weeks. Her murky bedroom was upstairs, separated from my father’s by a span of dark hallway. Thusly had they always slept. Or ever since the fateful night that they battered their bodies together, made me. And it seemed darker now midday than Boston proper was at night, the churchlike panes above the stairs veiled with blood-red floor-length curtains, giving the hallway a battlefield haze—an artificial, gory twilight.
My mother’s door was locked of course, so like a good boy Willy knocked.
She opened the door in her robe de chambre, a yellow affair in dire need of a wash, and the woman inside it hollow-eyed, with a malarial air of intensity.
“Oh, Willy. Entre, entre,” she said, running a corpse-maiden’s hand through my hair. “I was just—reading, thinking, breathing. How many breaths, dear, we must take in a day.”
“Are you feeling all right today, mother? Not worse?”
“Not worse and not better. Not well, anyway. My arm, you see. It comes and goes.”
“Of course,” I said. “It must be awful.”
In the winter of 1855, my mother slipped and broke her arm on an icy embankment beside Walden Pond. I was eighteen years old and I saw the whole thing. It shook me a little, I’m happy to say. A host of bystanders, including myself, were gathered around her when daddy returned with three cones of chestnuts side-stacked in his arms. (Mother’s chestnuts went to me, which made the evening seem worthwhile.) I knelt beside her in the snow and clung to her hand through the height of her pain. She lay abed the next few weeks in a fog of good-natured self-pity, slept mostly.
“I’ve been to the chemist’s,” I said.
“Have you really?”
“You knew I’d have been to the chemist’s.” I smiled.
“I rather thought you had,” she said, backing away to sit down on the bed. “But then again, Willy, it could be you hadn’t. It could be you hadn’t and nothing in hand and I’d have been forced to abide in your company.”
“Well today I can offer you both,” I said, beginning to reach inside my pocket but mother got up jerkily and stumbled across the carpet toward me.
“Have you slimmed a bit, Willy, since last time I saw you?”
She pressed my arm back to my side, where it hung.
“A mother knows, Willy. A mother takes note. Your clothes seem to hang on your frame, well, more smartly.”
I drew the vial out of my coat and approached her, the cork-end extended.
“Perhaps I’ve not been sleeping much. I’m on a new hobby of late,” I informed her. “Now can’t you kindly take this please—”
But mother proceeded to race to the curtain where she stood with her hand trembling on the chord.
“Here’s the problem, dear. You drift. Your mind is defective somehow, I suppose. So many talents, so little commitment. What would your father have to say?”
“What wouldn’t he say?” I answered dully.
“He’d say, wake up!” she shrieked at me, drew the bedroom curtain wide and cackled as light deluged the room. “He’d say, wake up, and look around. Your life’s estate lies here—before you.”
She seemed barely able to withstand the sun, so fiercely did it flood at first and stood in a sort of perpetual wince, half wilting away from and half leaning into the smoulder of hot July light from the street.
I tossed the vial up, let it turn in the air and land with the lightest of smacks in my palm. But before I could do this again she ran toward me and sheltered the vial in the cave of her hand.
“I accept!” said my mother. “I will keep it safe, Willy. On reserve for the really bad days, don’t you know.”
“But not before you’ve tallied up.”
“No, never before that,” she said. “Though I seem to need all in my arsenal lately to make good work of just one column. But enough about me and my weaknesses, Willy. Methinks that you pity your mummy too much! Where are the ladies—the beautiful ladies—who are destined to steal your regard clean away?”
“They are here and there,” I said. “But you, mother, are everywhere.”
“Oh Willy. Don’t sport. I am just in one spot. I have been in one spot—right here—for some months.”
And then suddenly she grew silent, my mother, as though she had remembered something and her boudoir glaze of resignation seemed to leave her all at once. It was replaced by something strange and yet something I felt I knew, a sort of half-remembered fear whose ghost flitted across her eyes like a swimmer in moonlight traversing a pond but not without ripples disturbing the dark, fanning to the farther shores.
“Poor courageous, kindly thing.” I took up her arm and made with her to bed. “Let us get you snug and sound and if the pain is in you dosed. And then—”
“—hands off. Hands off, I said!” She wrenched from my grasp with fear plain in her eyes. “I can put myself to bed! Well can I withstand such pains! If I need you to help me with either,” she cried, “by God I will tell you myself, horrid boy.”
Then she went limp. Mother swooned and I caught her. I caught her and brought her, a-mumble, to bed. En route, I felt her untrimmed nails scratching along the inside of my forearm. I drew back the covers, and tucked her beneath them, and levered her head to support it with pillows. And when her eyes began to flutter, I poured from her pitcher of cloudy night-water and sweetened the murk with four droplets of laudanum.
This cupful I poured in the purse of her lip then titled her head back until it went down.
With mother asleep or nearly so, I tried to tidy up the room. First I pulled the curtains closed to spare her eyes that wicked light. Next I collected the old drinking glasses, took them downstairs to the kitchen and slopped them. Last I amassed all the blood-besmirched tissues and gave them to the wastebasket then returned to the bed, where I re-ensconced mother, smoothing down the counterpane and brushing back her sticky hair.
And yet it was strange I felt nothing at all apart from the urge to keep on, to keep moving. I’d attended, delivered, assured and made good. I must get on to other things.
And that is what sets me apart, I suppose, makes me the kind of man I am.