Divining Women

I was always told that ghosts heard about my grandparents’ house, across the street from ours, on Dupont Circle through an odd grapevine, and after the telephone was installed, I began to think of the ghosts chatting on a party line, giving one another rendezvous instructions. Although Toby made the discovery that the house was haunted in 1876, the year he and Grandmother Leslie married and moved in, only when my father’s parents moved in, twenty years later, did someone investigate further: Grandfather Leonard used his expertise in electromagnetism to detect that ghosts were actually attracted to the house and had converted it into a sort of rest stop for themselves. He took immediate charge of what had been chaotic. He stayed in the basement during the day, working out the complexities of his electromagnetic experiments, but at night he attended to the needs of the ghosts as though managing a house full of tired and unruly children. One night when Grandmother Leslie was kept up by what she called “the racket of the spheres,” all of the ghosts expressing their aims and aggravations at once, she checked into the Willard, leaving a note that read: “Toby, if these lodgers knew how lucky they are that you waited until after Nora had left before you moved into this house they seem to admire so much, they would train themselves to be respectful and rest at night. She would have evicted them, barred the door, and gotten her beauty sleep.”

Grandfather Leonard once told me that the recently dead invariably arrived at the house sadly baffled and that any person predisposed toward bewilderment should order his affairs and feelings early on in life, or arrange to avoid death altogether. When he intuited the presence of a new arrival, he reapplied his pomade, refreshened his shirt and collar, and sweetened his breath, as would any solicitous innkeeper. To comfort them and gain their trust, he asked them to tell him what in life had been their most earnest desire, and then he made them a gift of it, bearing in mind that he was mortal and thus enjoyed only limited capabilities. One could not say, for instance, “More than anything, I wished for my husband to be mauled by a pack of wild dogs,” or “I longed to be the king of England.” If a woman died by her own hand, she was asked what need had gone unmet so blatantly for so long that she chose this conclusion, and the need was met, for it was usually achingly small and simple. Leonard once sat by the dining room wall for half the night, singing “Old Folks at Home” and dolefully squeezing his concertina to soothe a drowned woman. He was always able to make a credible claim of adoration to these lonely women, as he loved everyone who passed through those walls. He wanted the best for them. If a man had died from the whiskey habit but was parched nonetheless, he was told where the liquor was kept, but then interrogated as to whether he truly wanted to stagger and spew his way through eternity.

Leonard lined out the terms of the ghosts’ leases and the manner in which their individual infinities would be more or less personally customized, reckoned by the choices they had made while alive: “You will become the one thing that brought you the most happiness. If it was the purity of love, you’re set. You will feel loved and be love itself at all times. But if your chief pleasure was a chronic sadism wherein you thrived on human misery and compounded it through your own words and deeds, then you are not as set.”

Because he had such an ethical heart, I did not have to hear from the ghosts with my own ears to believe, when my grandfather pulled a chair to the wall, placed his ear beside it, and sat there for hours, that he was listening to what he said was there. And all my grandparents were too pragmatic and mindful of time to devote so much of it to something that they had merely imagined into existence. When I was sixteen, fear of being caught in the act of testing family loyalty kept me from marking the levels of liquor in the decanters after I was told that the ghosts were planning a party for one among them who had poisoned herself on her birthday. But my brother, Daniel, who was fifteen at the time, had grown belligerent and intolerant of anything that was not normal in his life. He was especially frustrated that, although we were wealthy, although the money was there to buy him anything he wanted, it was not. He had been scouting for evidence that he could flag in his grandparents’ faces to prove them fools or charlatans, but when he prosecuted them on the basis of the unchanged level of whiskey in the decanter, they said nothing and walked away. Later, he confronted them about a tray of unconsumed cream of tomato soup and rock-salt crackers—what an indigent boy ghost said he had unsuccessfully dreamed of being served all his nine years instead of his usual diet of boiled necks and moldy hardtack.

Our grandparents were vastly aggrieved by Daniel’s menacing, yet said nothing; but Mother rebuked him each time he violated their privilege to live as they pleased. After the tomato soup confrontation, she sat him down. “The best things,” she said, “are invisible, and invisible things are the only things safe to believe. Anything rooted in as much love and goodness as the care of these unsettled souls must be unequivocally believed. It is no different from when a Catholic says he is drinking the blood of Jesus Christ. He does not say it merely because the priest likes to hear that people have faith in something they can never touch. Which would you rather have at the end? Would you rather people remember you because of your fine clothes and your automobile or because you were an honorable and generous man? The wrong answer means I’ve failed you. It means I somehow created a monster. But you can learn better, and you will. And answer me this. Why are you so stubborn? We give you a good life. Why are you so determined against living it honestly and bravely?”

There would be many more lectures and disagreements before Daniel, who was gambling and drinking incessantly by the time he was sixteen, decided to run off to Baltimore with an older boy to work at a waterfront oyster saloon. Mother regarded his decision as just another episodic breach of common sense, and told her father, “He knows nothing about oysters and even less about doing a day’s work. I would very much appreciate you going up there and dragging him home, and then I will make getting him sober and settled my around-the-clock occupation.” But Daniel was back home within a week, after we received the news that he had been discovered dead on the floor of a hotel room. He had hanged himself. He was a large boy, and the chandelier and part of the ceiling, after a time, came down with him.

No doubt because of embarrassment over now participating in something he had so often doubted and damned, Daniel never passed through the walls of my grandparents’ house the way my father had. Grandfather Leonard had come over and told Mother that her husband was asking for her. He found her sitting at the end of the kitchen table with her head in her hands, and said, “Grammar wants you to sit with him until the funeral starts.” She smiled, took his hand, and walked out of the house.

When she came back, I went into her bedroom, where she had been sleeping in her clothes on top of the covers since my father’s death. She was smoothing her stockings up her legs, and when I asked her what she had heard in the wall, she lifted her face and said, “Oh Mary, everything. Simply everything.”

Although we might’ve saved the expense of running such a large house, Mother and I did not move in with my grandparents after my father and Daniel were gone, because she recognized how easy it would be for both of us to lose our independence. I sometimes thought of the street that ran between the two houses as the line that ensured that our identities remained individual and distinct. She made it clear that she welcomed their support, but the responsibility for raising me was hers. When I read, in a popular domestic-hygiene book, that children who were raised by hand, not by proxy, were more likely to contract nutritional-deficiency diseases like pellagra and rickets and were more prone to worms and head lice, I took such acute exception that for weeks I defiantly told anyone who asked anything remotely related to my home life that my mother raised me by hand. And I also felt the need to make sure people knew that even though we could afford squads of housekeepers and governesses, my mother’s devotion to me made them unnecessary.

The Olivers and Greenes, combined, had among the largest family fortunes in Washington. And the inherited income from my father’s estate was so huge that when Mother left his attorney’s office and met me on the sidewalk, she was laughing so hard she had to catch her breath on a bench. When I was old enough to understand, she showed me the note my father had handwritten at the bottom of his will. “Martha, for God’s sake,” it read, “take some of this and hire someone to clean the house. I will love you forever, Grammar.” He apparently had hoped that she would put an end to her famously nonchalant housekeeping, but she said, “I had rather leave the mess and take everybody to Europe for the summer. Wouldn’t you?” Both households packed hurriedly, and sailed a week later, aware of the responsibility to help give Mother what she needed most, which was more time before she faced organizing the house and her life without him.

Regardless of the wealth, my grandparents still taught frugality as a virtue and a discipline. If I stayed with them on a school night, I was likely to be sent off the next day with a boiled sweet potato in a calico-covered bucket rather than with the potted meats and fancy tinned fruit cocktails that they were willing to purchase for me only if they could buy them in bulk on extreme markdown from the dented-goods rack at the decrepit surplus store they loved to rummage through. But they were all curious about modern intellectual and scientific advances, and would gather with others in large groups for long weekends on the Chautauqua circuit, hearing about psychoanalysis or quantum physics or socialism. Crates of books they bought on these trips were always unloaded and stacked on the train platform alongside their dilapidated luggage. When Daniel once argued that the family always seemed to have an abundance of money to spend on books about things people could not understand, Grandfather Leonard said, “Precisely. We pay to understand.”

I knew we were blessed with a kind of general household intelligence, and it showed itself in the conversation that went on fairly much all the time. I associated the silence in the homes of some of the Sun and Moon Girls I visited with a poverty much more frightening than having no money to buy pretty things. Being poor, I believed, meant living in wordless gloom. I thought money bought conversation, and I was mortified that other families seemed to have run out or never to have had any at all.

My mother’s way of arranging her generosity to look unplanned lightened the strain inherent between the two groups. When I was assigned to bring beverages to a Sun and Moon Girls trip to Rock Creek Park, she packed our copper samovar, because she thought it would be convenient for the girls to serve themselves, and she knew they would have fun using the elephant-trunk spout. That this unwieldy samovar had been lugged by pack animal and train, and smuggled out of Morocco in a case of fan knobs to avoid a luxury tax, made no difference to her, as long as the girls would like it. As I lay in my tent that night, I thanked the universe for keeping me free of want, squalor, filth, hookworm, pellagra, rickets, lice, and a family with nothing to say. And I was grateful for a mother who was willing to supply a samovar on an otherwise standard Saturday afternoon.

Neither the ghosts, the séances, the esoteric interests, nor the summer weekends my grandfather Toby spent at nudist camps destroyed the security of the family’s established social position. This is what my uncle and his mother had so much difficulty understanding. We were always warmly welcomed at gatherings of Cavedwellers and Antiques, the old orders of Washington society, at embassy parties, at opening nights at the theater. We had never been subjected to a public shunning, nor had gossip reached us about being cut in private. Our record was not so different from that of families who count among their members a beloved morphine addict living in his old nursery or an adored deviant who is shackled to a chair and bolted into his room when nice ladies come over. We were never expected to change anything about our habits or ways to gain the favor of a more orthodox and normal society. It was as though there was a sign on the front door of my grandparents’ home: “This is what we do. This is not a display or a fad. This is how we live. We appreciate your respect.”

I didn’t move away from them when I attended Goucher, and during the summers I spent at Radcliffe, at least one of my grandparents went with me. I graduated from Goucher in May of 1918 but was unable to return to Cambridge to complete the postgraduate work that was required before I began teaching a seminar there the next fall. So many people there, male and female, had been absorbed by the fighting and ancillary war work that there were not enough people left to either take or teach the literature classes. A lower-level course was available for me to teach in January of 1919, and I would have to wait for that.

But after seven months at home, I began to feel something close to resentment at being trapped. It wasn’t just because of the practical matters of travel that everyone was having to adjust to; some insensible quality in the atmosphere made even the most independent and hardy spirits call for reassurance that everything was safe, that we were not going to be gassed on the trolleys or invaded, that we were not somehow accidentally going to lose the war. The need to know I would be fine pressed down on me like a coming storm. Sometimes after I read the morning paper, I would go find my mother wherever she was and would follow her around the house, close on her back, like a blind person following a sighted one.

It would have been disrespectful to complain about being housebound without then explaining to my grandparents that I intended to do something useful as soon as I finished reading my magazine or novel. I was repeatedly told that I would make a bully nurse, but I had no yearnings to take the expedited medical course that was being offered in church basements. And I had no desire to advance past the lowest ranks of the suffrage organization. Although I marched in parades, when one of the leaders learned that I had time available and asked whether she could put my name forward as an organizer, I thought of the hours Mother and I had spent debating with the mannish and combative women at their head-quarters, and I declined.

My sense is that I crawled through the blistering Washington summer on my hands and knees. Early in September, when Mother saw me with a set of Russian-language books, she said, “I had no idea things were this acute. Learning Russian. I love you, Mary, and please don’t be offended, but you have to find something to do. I’ve never felt like this. Being here with you has always been a pleasure, but I feel like you’re tangling me in my own feet.”

I told her that I certainly understood, that I would search the newspaper for any opportunity for temporary employment first thing the next morning. But I could not tell her that feeling compelled to pick up after her trail of strewn litter was beginning to grate on me. Perhaps we were simply discovering simultaneously that there eventually will come a time when a healthy and alert twenty-two-year-old woman needs to leave her mother’s house. I was three or four days into collecting notices of employment from the newspaper when Mother sat down at the table with me and said, “You remember me telling you that Troop’s wife is having a baby. I’m glad, because there’s something so lonely about him. But you see, he sent a very nice note after he received my card. It came a few days ago, and I wanted to give myself a few days to think about it before I answered. I had written a little note with the anniversary card and mentioned that you were at home for the time being, and then when he responded, he mentioned that Maureen was due two or three weeks before Thanksgiving and also that he was traveling a great deal on business.”

“Tuesday, and nothing. I haven’t told them yet. But you know we agreed after your father died that I wouldn’t go trotting over there for advice about every decision that had to be made on your behalf, and this is one of those times when I did what I thought was best. Maureen is a beautiful woman. And now she’s going to have a baby. You would be a world of help to a new mother facing Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’ll celebrate again when you get back home. Just your presence will be a relief to her. You remember how I told you that I saw so much favor between you.”