Divining Women

Most of the Great War casualties were coming back with great damage to their faces and upper torsos, the first parts of themselves available to be destroyed when they came up over the top of the trenches. I had seen only a few of those who had recuperated enough to be out in the world again. Although the deformed man was not as young as the others who had been in France, his scars said he had suffered horribly there. But when we disembarked in Elm City, I overheard him tell several veterans who greeted him like one of their own, “Thank you, but it was a pint of carbolic acid chunked at me in 1888.” He invited them to enjoy a glass of steam beer with him, but they said they had to make a living, although they did appreciate the invitation. They were pushing trunks and carrying bags for passengers, and some of them could not manage. The more able men stepped forward and helped, wordlessly, then picked through the change in their palms and made sure the tips were split correctly. While I was waiting for Zollie, the Ross household’s “useful man,” to collect me, I noticed two wild-eyed and despairing boys barely staying upright on a bench beside the station, shocked, blistered, and muttering, aged into very old men by the mustard gas that must have fallen on them like rain in Flanders.

Tall and thin, with hair that was going to gray at the temples, Zollie appeared to be between thirty-five and forty. He was gotten up like the headwaiter at the Ritz, and before we left the station he reached behind his seat and exchanged his hat for a sporty khaki driving cap to wear on the mile-or-so ride home. He said that his wife, Mamie, the housekeeper, had covered a plate for me before she went home to tend to their two children, eight-year-old twin boys named Turner and Wells.

He said that he would make sure I was settled, then be back at five, and that he was willing to pick up any special breakfast requests before I awakened. I wondered how anyone could be so nonchalant about this continued enslavement, which he seemed to be passing off as dedication to his employer.

This indicated to me that the family was committed to the old tradition of keeping the household free of any sign of the coming birth, whether it be pretty baby things or conversation about the event. Even people with habitual access to sophisticated medical care still would not dare do anything toward preparing the home to receive a child, a superstition certainly, yet one grounded in sad truth. Babies popped up in families and startled siblings. Expectant mothers draped and swooped on extra layers of chiffon and silk, and never let on. The cause was usually laid to fear of bad luck, but in truth it was their acceptance of probability and their acknowledgment that everyone in the home need not be wrenched up into a frenzy of hope that might be dashed to ruination by a house full of grief: Here comes another baby, more joy all around—and then a fever, pertussis, diphtheria, rubella, any of the other many claimants to the souls of mothers and their infants. In those days even the plumpest and loudest and rudest infants were not fully, justifiably celebrated until true promise of life was assured, when they were at least three months old.

The Ross house was situated on a corner, at the top of sloping grounds. Even in the dark, it was imposing. Our house on Dupont Circle was rickety in comparison to this massive stone affair. I entered an oval foyer that was plastered a chalky white and thickly carved, like a wedding cake or a sugar-spun Easter egg. I had expected the entry to be dark, in keeping with the outside of the house, but as I followed Zollie through the downstairs and up the wide curving staircase to Maureen’s room, I realized that there was no continuity; I was more or less hit in the face with varying, grand visions. It was as if someone had decided what impressive scene should be presented next, and then set about accumulating the most magnificently expensive and overwrought merchandise they could find to put in room after room.

Not more than two or three days before I left Washington, the chair Grandmother Louise was sitting in at dinner cracked and tipped her out onto the floor, for no apparent reason. While we were helping her up, she declared herself furious at her father for not having fixed the chair correctly in 1857, when it broke the first time, and she broke her elbow. Most of the interiors of the houses in our neighborhood looked to have been similarly long worn, the furnishings passed down, impacted with beeswax. Unless one’s house had caught fire, buying a new piece of furniture required justification and was generally considered evidence of climbing. As I walked through rooms that were done to the point that they could not have taken another tassel or trinket without having the entire conglomeration collapse under its own weight, I sensed something adamant, almost pathetic, and what caused the greatest unease was the intimation that everything was packed with family history, but not of the family inhabiting those rooms. A coat of arms was placed conspicuously on the wall near the foot of the stairs, and I wondered whether it had been purchased at some point in the family’s history, along with the name, the way people buy the name of a ruined aristocrat and outfit themselves with a lineage, like D’Urberville.

Standing there after midnight in a hallway lined by store-bought portraits of ancestors, I felt nothing but contempt for my uncle and his mother. I had learned that Nora’s family wealth came from the creative and lucrative convict-leasing scheme that her grandfather established the day after slavery was abolished. That money bought her way into Elm City society, such as it was, and into a woman’s college in northern Virginia, where she met my grandfather at a party on the James River. I wanted to ask Zollie, who was putting my things in a bedroom before he took me to meet Maureen, “Who are all of these people on the walls?” I featured in my mind the piteous image of a boy and his mother at a Saturday-morning flea market, picking through the bins of castoffs and unsold leavings from estate sales, searching out the most distinguished lot of ladies and gentlemen who might be said to bear some family favor.

Maureen’s room was at one end of the hall, and my uncle’s was at the other. Both had double doors, with heavily carved molding around them and stained-glass transoms above. Zollie indicated that I was to go meet Maureen by myself. Pointing to the far right of her dimly lit room, he whispered, “She stays over there.”

I walked through the room, past a canopied bed with a silver satin-covered bench at the foot. Although I could not make out any details, I could see enough to know that they were unique in relation to what I had seen of the rest of the house. Instead of the William Morris wallpaper that changed pattern from room to room downstairs, her walls were a faint ocean blue. Every surface that could held vases of roses, of every color and variety conceivable. I heard her call my name, and I followed her voice around a corner into a small alcove surrounded by tall Florida windows, which were cranked wide open despite the wet mist outside. She turned up the lamp beside the purple velvet chaise she lay on, and spoke carefully and quietly. “I like to let the weather in and clean up later. How are you, Mary? Did you travel well?”

The fatigue from all those hours on the train, the petulance over the unnecessary servitude and the fraudulent ancestors in the hall, any other strain and anxiety, vanished. Maureen was sheer wonder, layered in ivory silk, her thick black hair upswept and tied with a long black grosgrain ribbon. She lay on her side, with her long legs bent at the knees and her arms underneath her stomach, supporting the weight of the baby. After she got herself standing and hugged me, instead of going on to bed, she lay back down on the chaise and pulled the quilted green blanket over her hips and legs, telling me, “This chaise is better than a board on my back. I can get in bed again in fifty days.”

When I asked if she needed anything before bed, she only reminded me that supper was waiting if I wanted it. I should sleep late in the morning, as she doubted she would need me then, either. And then, lowering the light by the chaise, she said, “In fact, you can go and do as you please. We have a new moving picture theater here. If I think of something I need, I can send Mamie. But I thank you for coming, even if it is under false pretenses.”

I settled in that first night, thinking how her sweetly baffled affect was so like the manner common among ancient former slaves I had met as a child in Washington, the women who sold baskets and flowers near the fountain at Union Station. They had withstood decades of hurt but were then blessed by heaven with a thorough, absentminded forgetfulness. When Maureen’s distraction was just as apparent the next day, I wondered whether something horrible had happened just before my arrival.

It was almost hypnotic to watch her as she ranged about her room in a state of heightened unreality, as though that was the perfect and only place she could find true consolation. She would stop, turn her face to a wall, and weep, saying, “Excuse me, please,” when I tried to help. I had been with Mamie in the kitchen early that morning, but she had not mentioned any sudden shock, such as a bad report from the doctor, and when I found her again and asked her outright what was happening in the house that I should know about, anything that would help me help my aunt, Mamie said, “Nothing out of the ordinary that I know of. Zollie and I keep an eye on her.”

Maureen slept most of that day, and when she was awake, she was unable to engage herself in anything but worry that I was going to be angry with her for wasting my time. She slept in this beautiful space she had created for herself, with the pale blue and green, the deep violet and lavender, the brown and iridescent silver, that told me she had been alert enough to figure this out when she moved here. My impression, when the full morning light came in through those tall windows on that first day I was in the house, was that she had somehow improved on nature. The colors in her room could all be seen when I looked outside, but hers were better.

On the table beside her was a collection of Edna Ferber’s short stories, but the pages were uncut, and there wasn’t a paper knife around anywhere, unless it was under the heaps of fallen rose petals. I thought I might glance at it while she napped, so I opened a cabinet to hunt for a knife, and inside I saw fifty or so books stacked haphazardly, nothing light or trivial. Tucked into the back of the cabinet, where I also finally found the knife, was a stash of pocket travel guides to everywhere a person might possibly go if she did not weep at the prospect of going outside. I thought of the times that Maureen had been mentioned in her husband’s notes over the past few years and realized that he had evidently forgotten to mention some things about her basic nature. “Maureen is thriving.” “Maureen appreciates the shawl you sent. She loves to wear it when she goes about.” “Maureen’s friends all envy the hair combs you last sent.”

Mother believed that Maureen had never written a line herself. But she did send tasteful, appropriate gifts on holidays and birthdays, things ordered from better department stores, which managed to feel personally selected nonetheless. Now that I saw her, I also saw how ridiculous it was to think of her perched on the edge of one of those gilt chairs in the downstairs parlor, writing a bread-and-butter note. That she had been able to send us the orchid pots, the pewter chafing dish, the scrimshaw hair ornaments, and the silk brocade wrappers now seemed miraculous. Mother was always sure these gifts had been chosen by a woman. “Nothing about them,” she said, “is ever off.” The first gift she had sent to us after Nora’s funeral was Edith Wharton’s decorating book. Mother and I were both amazed, as we loved her novels, but we had not known of this fascinating book. Mother sat down and read it like a novel, saying again and again that she could not imagine such unprovoked thoughtfulness from this woman she barely knew. I had to wonder whether Maureen had been such a shadowy figure in the background because of a natural reticence or an unnatural restraint.

Among the few words she said all day were, “Thank you, but Troop dislikes my room, so I keep the door closed. He says my room ruins the house.” She hurriedly pulled herself together and spent the next few minutes practicing tones of voice with which she would greet her husband when he entered the house promptly at seven-thirty and thank him for the roses that had arrived earlier in the day. I followed her downstairs to the foyer and listened to her rehearse, repeating to herself in varying earnest tones and volumes until she thought she had it the way he wanted to hear it. “Troop, thank you so much. Thank you. I want to thank you for the flowers, and I am so very glad for you to be home. And Mary, please tell him how happy you’ve been today and how I’ve seen to it that you have everything you need.”

Even in walking weather, Zollie drove Uncle Troop the ten blocks home from his office at the Duke brothers’ tobacco concern, but Zollie could not come through the main door. He let Troop out at the walkway and then began his own routine. He parked the automobile, wiped it down with a fresh chamois cloth, and hung his duster in the garage. Then he came in the house through the kitchen, took his valet jacket from a hook in the pantry, and walked swiftly to my uncle’s bedroom, where he brushed and laid out his evening clothes. He would brush each piece again in my uncle’s presence, and then brush again once the clothing was on my uncle’s body.

To my mind, only the great houses in places like Newport had carried this degree of formality over from the last century—daily life that does not admit muddy shoes or curtains unevenly drawn, with everything stylishly arranged, as though staged for an elaborate tableau vivant, and people in formal dress, sitting on the edges of their seats with their hands in their laps. And then the stillness sometimes made me feel as though we were all perpetually waiting for a body to be brought down.

He entered the house with a quiet sort of aplomb. He wanted me to say how happy I was to meet him and that I had everything I needed, and I did. The way he breezed in, so oblivious of the gloom already in the air and the extra dread he was bringing in with him, I understood my aunt’s rehearsal, and so I heard myself speaking with her same apprehension.

My uncle was a man of superb figure. If he had had additional size, it would have been too much, as overwrought as the house. He still took up a great deal of space in the room, and he knew it, using this awareness to his advantage, to make us all back up and give him more. As he turned to Maureen, the strain in the house increased to the level that people must feel when they are locked on the inside of a seizure. I had attributed any nervousness about meeting him to everything I had heard and read, but now that I was beside him, I remembered my mother’s description of how she had bested him after the funeral, and I could not imagine how she’d managed it. I already felt threatened by how he smiled and inquired after my comfort.

Maybe I was to say that I had told my mother that I was so happily settled in this beautiful place that I could not ever see myself returning home to our neighboring shacks full of crazy people. Maybe I was to say, “I notified her that you have obviously won, and everyone should go ahead and start eating themselves alive with envy.”

She was a terrible actress. For all the rehearsal, she was tentative and edgy. He removed her hand from his sleeve, as if picking off a piece of lint. And then he went upstairs, saying nothing but nonetheless looking disappointed in the careless lack of trying on her part.

Sitting down on a carved gilt chair, she said, “I’m too heavy to be on this, but I have to stay here and blow a while before I go back up there. Mary, I don’t mean to treat you like a day-wage slave, but if you could bring supper up for us, I would appreciate it.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “just you and me. He can talk to me later. Maybe you could stick your head in his room and tell him that my legs have swollen, and then I need to sleep. And one more thing. I think you want to go home now, don’t you, Mary? I would if I were you.”

“No, I don’t want to go home, not right at this instant,” I told her. “But this is quite a situation, and I just want to know what I’ve walked into. I should know what kind of what my family calls uproar and onslaught we may be in for with this child on the way.”