11th December 1832. Have bidden Goody Mallory’s shack good-bye. With relief, I have accepted Dr. Bellingham’s invitation to board with him. In exchange, I will attend those cases not requiring his particular attention. He has kindly allowed me the dog. He says that his son will benefit from the dog’s companionship.
–Susannah Day’s journal.
I am sitting in the historical society’s reading room. Shelley Brown is opposite me. Beside me, in its archival box, is the portion of the journal that has been in my possession. Shelley has had the society’s librarian bring out the remainder of the journal, and we wear white cotton gloves to look at it. “She’s saved.”
“Saved?”
“From Dogtown. Dr. Bellingham has offered her a place to live.” I feel tears prick. I take a big breath. “The Homestead Trust will pay to have it digitized.”
Shelley gives me a wondrous smile. “That is really good news.” She accepts the box from me with as much dignity as if I had been handing her the Host. “Would the family spring for getting the whole journal done? Access for everyone.”
“I don’t see why not, but maybe we’d better have a cost estimate done before I ask.” I’m getting better at the project manager mentality. Cost, cost, cost.
It feels a little bit like I’m sending a favorite aunt to a nursing home, this giving up of Susannah’s journal. She has kept me company through many a long, dark night in my secluded old house. Her voice has kept me from feeling completely devoid of human contact. I can almost hear her speaking voice. I think she would be an alto. Her voice never pitches up; she never whines. Her lines are declarations, not complaints. She cares about her neighbors even as they show little care for her. See how I’ve put her in the present?
After I leave Shelley and the journal, I take a detour that leads me to one of the older cemeteries, the one with the Bellingham cenotaph. Tucker’s family’s graves have recently been groomed, mums in fall red and gold have been planted. When I told him that I’d been to see my mother and brother, he gave me this look of surprised satisfaction and then put his arm around me. “Good. Good.” And then he went back to filling nail holes in the Sheetrock. I stand here at his family plot and see how he is more alone than I am. He’s got his work and he’s got his weekend visits from his kids, but he’s also got time to take care of this sad place. I never hear him speak of a date, or a lady friend. Any number of times now we’ve shared a restaurant meal, coincidentally having chosen the same place at the same time. He and his business partner, who was also his best childhood friend, bowl once a week and sometimes grab beers after work, but I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe that’s the sum total of Tucker Bellingham’s social life. I would think that every middle-aged divorcée in Gloucester would be after him. He’s attractive, if in a bearish way.
I move on from Tucker’s family plot, studying each gravestone along the way to see if I can answer the question that is dangling in front of me. If Susannah ended up essentially Edward Bellingham’s nurse/housekeeper, did she stay there for the rest of her life, or did she end up going back to Marshfield? The very last entry in the pages that I have been reading of her journal mention a letter from a nephew with an invitation to come to Marshfield, to help his new wife with their baby. Women were indeed chattel. Come not because you need a home with family, but because you will be useful. I secretly hope that she told him to kiss off; where was he when she was living in Dogtown?
Shadow is sniffing all around the most ancient of the collection of gravestones, almost as if he’s able to identify the tenants below us, who are, of course, no longer so much as dust. I linger, reading the epitaphs, the remarkable and the unremarkable notations, all that is left of these people; no one is alive who can remember who they were, whether they were kind or mean, fun-loving or dour. Here and there, a familiar name from Susannah’s diary. This Alma Pierce, could this be Susannah’s gossipy neighbor? Here is a Richard Daltry. I recall the Daltry name from her list of patients. There, his wife, Anna. I get this weird little thrill to recognize names. It’s a little bit like finding Jane Eyre’s grave. Names in a book become names on a gravestone that I can touch. I begin to leave pebbles on the stones. You are never dead until no one remembers you.
Shadow has come to a stone across the lane behind the Bellingham cenotaph. It’s a granite stone, no doubt quarried at Halibut Point, in Rockport. He has his nose deep in the thin grass. He throws me a look and I get my answer. The dog has found it for me; this is Susannah Day’s resting place. I bend and scrape off lichen that obscures the lettering. I’m hoping, I guess, that these words will tell me everything I want to know about her last days. At the very least, I know that she did live out her days here in Gloucester.
Benjamin Day, lost at sea 1832; Susannah, his wife, died 1834. Healer. Friend.
Someone cared enough that she isn’t totally alone in death; now she is with Benjamin. But it’s the two little descriptive words, Healer and Friend that move me to tears.
I wake up in the middle of the night with the dog draped across my middle. He’s nuzzling me, and for a nanosecond, I dream that I am being made love to. What I have been dreaming is far from that of being loved. I have been dreaming of Charles. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I haven’t dreamed of him in a very long time, but this new threat from his mother has reignited the long-suppressed fears. Before I was sent to prison, I dreamed of him every time I closed my eyes. As much as he filled my thoughts in the day, he expanded his presence into my nightmares, appearing most often as a heavy weight crushing me beneath it. Sometimes the weight was a bar of iron; other times, it was a giant bell, and I was under it. But I always knew that it was Charles in his metaphorical guise. I would wake up gasping, sucking in air, as if I were being suffocated. Once I was in prison, the dreams of suffocation, the bearing of a great weight devolved into being caged, and no waking ever helped dispel that. My waking and my dreaming were one and the same. Until Shark, until the program that moved me from cornered to capable.
Shadow licks my cheek, dismounts. This time, I really do have to suck in a lungful of air; my dog isn’t light. I sit up. Dawn is graying the sky, the first intimation of the new day. It’s late enough in the fall that I know it’s already close to six-thirty. Hardly early for someone having to make the trek to Connecticut and get there by one o’clock. I’m still sleeping in the kitchen, even though the two upstairs rooms are now empty and insulated, although not yet painted. Maybe when they are, I’ll move up. But for now, the kitchen is cozy with the woodstove, and certainly convenient should I have to get up in the night, as the only functioning bathroom is still the one off of it. However, the upstairs rooms, with their six-over-six windows, do afford a nice view of the trees, full green pine and denuded oaks. It’s not the view that Susannah and Benjamin would have had—that would have looked out over stony fields—but the regrowth is pretty in its own way. I’ve gotten used to the clack and squeak of windblown limbs. They no longer frighten me. Not as much as the day’s agenda of deposition and the unnerving sense that I might lay eyes on Mrs. Foster.
One thing is certain: Although Tucker has offered to keep an eye on Shadow, that dog is going with me.