SHE DIED, MY MOTHER told me, in childbirth. She needed blood, they gave her blood, and the blood was poisoned. She died with a stranger’s germs cruising through her veins at a startling rate. The baby, a girl, lived. Her husband cared for the baby and in time remarried. Her father kept in close touch with his son-in-law, and took the baby every Saturday. He had wanted a grandchild badly, and he needed to keep the connection in memory of his daughter, who had been an only child. I say her father because her mother’s mind was opaque: what she felt or needed we shall never know.
Her name was Harriet Gross. When I knew her, as a child and teen-ager, she was not clever or pretty or distinguished in any way. But she was very agreeable and free of malice, and all those who took the trouble to notice her liked her. She was never too busy with homework or dates, always ready for an impromptu visit or an aimless outing. She didn’t add anything special to a group, but you missed her if she wasn’t there.
My mother had to tell me twice that Harriet died. She told me ten years ago, shortly after it happened, and she told me again last month, when our conversation, lugubrious, was running to sad tales of untimely death. I forgot, the first time. Harriet was easy to forget, but it was not that quality that made me forget. I denied. Harriet was the sort of person to whom dramatic events should not happen. She should have lived peacefully to be eighty.
I denied that Harriet Gross died. I shredded the news and cast it out my mother’s kitchen window. “But I’m sure I told you,” my mother said. I denied that too. Later, of course, I remembered.
I denied that she had told me because I was horrified and embarrassed to admit even to myself that I could forget such a piece of news. For in the intervening years I had actually thought of Harriet once in a while and wondered what she was doing.
Harriet’s family and mine spent the summer in the same dull mountain resort, her family because her father worked as handyman for the owner, my family ostensibly for pleasure. Her family’s quarters were off the main path, at the back of a low building of attached units. To get to see her I had to climb through thorns and brambles, and I felt like a Victorian lady of mercy bringing baskets of goodies to the slums. In fact their rooms were as spacious and well-kept as ours, and identically furnished. We had very little in common, Harriet and I. We picked berries together, and watched our team’s baseball games, and raided each other’s refrigerators.
When we were very small girls we caught salamanders together in glass jars with air holes poked in the covers. You had to go out after a rain, along the dirt road. The tiny orange creatures hid there, where the dirt met the shrubbery. We picked them up by the tails and watched them wriggle, then dropped them gently into the jars, which had a half inch of water in them. I suppose they died there, after a while. One afternoon my only salamander died on our way home. He lay inert at the bottom of the jar, bright bright orange, but all the life had gone out of him. Harriet said he wasn’t dead, though. She lifted him up and laid him in her outstretched palm to let him dry in the sun, and soon, a miracle, he began to move again and inch up towards her wrist. “Here,” she said. “He’s okay. He was just sleeping.” I was very grateful, and suddenly felt that Harriet was, perhaps, special in a way I could not name.
One thing we did have in common, later on, was not being paired off with any boys at the resort. It is a mystery how these random pairings and exclusions come about, but I imagine in our case it was because I was awkward and bookish and Harriet was unattractive. Her hair was stringy and brown, her face was oily, and she was quite thin. She had prominent shoulder bones and poor posture.
What saved Harriet’s self-esteem was her father. He loved her, as my own father used to say, to excess. He took her along for company from one bungalow to the next on his fixing missions, praising her goodness to all he met. He was gruff, in overalls, always in need of a shave, joking, curly-haired, a wizard with bathroom pipes. “No dope,” my father said about him—the highest compliment. Harriet’s mother, a well-meaning woman whom nature mistakenly burdened with the face and manners of a witch, scolded and screeched, but Harriet laughed kindly and said, “All right, all right, Ma.” Deficient in mind, she managed to cook, clean, clothe her child, and get by. “For that,” my mother said, “you don’t have to be a genius.”
The only things I found unpleasant in Harriet were her voice and speech. She was nasal, a bit whiny, and ungrammatical besides. She had a limited vocabulary and a New York accent. I sought Harriet out daily, for she was the most unthreatening person in the universe, in addition to her other good qualities, but I always wished she could learn to speak better. Then I would think, in her defense: with a mother like that to guide her, it’s a miracle she speaks as well as she does.
When we were about thirteen Harriet and I began to see each other winters in the city as well as summers in the country. I discovered, after all those years, that she lived only six blocks away. We attended the same junior high and high school. I brought Harriet home and introduced her to my friends; she brought me home and did the same. Her friends and my friends formed a social club that met every Friday night. We went frequently to Radio City Music Hall and the Ice Palace, and we wore navy-blue jackets with white satin lettering across the back. There were naturally differences between her friends and my friends. Hers were not smart in school, took shorthand and typing, cracked their chewing gum, smoked, had pierced ears, and went further with boys. Mine were in special progress classes, spoke grammatically, read books, played the piano, overate, and with boys did nothing below the waist. We were mutually fascinated.
That is all about Harriet herself. Loved by her father, liked by her peers. In the few years between high school graduation and death she led, I am quite sure, an ordinary life.
The second time my mother told me Harriet Gross died in childbirth I lay awake at night enumerating the reasons why Harriet’s death was unfair:
She was too young, my age, and not ready to die.
No one should have to die giving birth.
No one should have to die of another’s poison.
She was the only comfort of her worthy father, whose wife didn’t do much for him.
Her husband would be wifeless.
Her baby would be motherless.
Mortality in general, like city air, is unacceptable.
But as I rolled over and over in my mind these seven reasons, like smooth round marbles, I kept coming back to the first. I couldn’t escape it. She was my age, of my age, my age, not ready to die, and I fell asleep with that song in my head.
That night, I resurrected Harriet in my dreams. A grown woman in her early thirties, she was presiding over a small cocktail party in her living room. Still unobtrusive and quiet, she had transformed her indistinctions into a gentle, reliable charm. The mousy brown hair was a dark blond, with the sheen of frequent washing. She was impeccably and elegantly dressed in a green wool suit and white ruffled blouse. The skirt swirled softly around her knees. Her face was the same, but without the shine: she had learned how to use make-up. Her lipstick was the same shade as mine. Green eye shadow echoed the green of her suit. Ease had replaced the lankiness. Harriet moved among her guests, offering trays of oyster canapés, stopping here and there for a low-voiced remark, a warm, intimate smile, a tilt of the head to show she was listening.
It was clear that only good things had happened to Harriet.
Her living room was modestly but nicely furnished, with soft green carpeting, soft chairs, soft lighting—nothing tacky. Like mine, it had a view of flowering trees and a river. A print of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte hung on the wall. Harriet moved through her room as if it were a larger body she lived in; I felt she could have moved through it blindfolded.
Her daughter appeared for a moment to get a snack, and was introduced. Harriet put her arm around the shoulder of the tall, thin blond girl, and drew her close. The child was bony, but would be beautiful after puberty. Her features were fine and sharp; her voice chirped in a nasal twang. Stuffing a cheese and cracker sandwich into her mouth, standing barefoot in her short plaid skirt, she let her eyes move serenely over the guests, contented and accepting.
I, too, was tall and slender and blond, with well-washed hair, and I wore green. I accepted a drink from Harriet and she sat next to me on the arm of the couch. Her voice was low and pleasing, her diction perfect, her facial expressions the mirror of inner and outer harmony. She was well-satisfied with life. She asked polite questions about my life since we had last met, which I answered obliquely. I didn’t want to talk about my life but about hers. I wanted to ask Harriet how all this had come about, how she had contrived to make this gentle, benevolent life happen to her—perhaps she might help me as she had once before with the salamander—but I didn’t get the opportunity. A telephone rang; she left to answer it. She waved to me with a ringed hand on her way out, as if to say, I’ll be right back, and she was ringed in sunlight streaming through the window.
I woke in the dark and thought, But Harriet Gross is dead. Then, Harriet Gross is not dead. I deny the death of Harriet Gross, and will deny it as long as I live.