Six
The greeting ritual repeated itself until I took my uncle aside and told him that his wife had no business going up and down the stairs in her condition. I knew absolutely nothing about medicine and even less about symptoms of an impending stroke, but it sounded authentic enough to say that she was due for one if she did not stay recumbent as much as possible. Not until later did it occur to me how natural it would’ve been for him to call her doctor, but he said only, “Fine. No one requires her to trot downstairs when I get home. She calls these things upon herself and taxes the entire household.”
But as was happening all that first week, I was hearing his version of the story, delivered with purpose and authority, while hers was typically told through tears. Mamie and Zollie seemed direct enough when their employer was away, and then maddeningly timid in his presence. They could see the truth, but their position and race made any defiance or rebuttal impossible. The household had never been visited by anyone who either stayed long enough or moved far enough into the interior to see what was true and what was merely another pretty scene, orchestrated for public viewing, but I kept telling myself, “You are here now.” People saw the roses go into the house, and that was all. They did not know the degree of gratitude owed Troop Ross for that day’s delivery, and that there was to be no whiff of reproach for whatever he had said or done the night before that brought on the regretful necessity of another dozen.
Maureen was also supposed to mention the tastefully worded cards that were always attached so as to eliminate any question of his tender remorse and innermost sorrow. But because of the florist’s mistaken use of a black-bordered card for several of the deliveries, people without intimate knowledge of that home assumed they were the funerary tributes of an eloquent second cousin. I thought it must periodically slip my uncle’s mind that his wife had not been ordained with the same command over life and death that he and all men of such momentous influence enjoyed, for there was also sometimes this postscript on the cards: “Maureen, do not allow these flowers to die.” I found dozens of the cards scattered in the bottoms of her drawers. One of the first things I did on her behalf was to gather and burn them while she was sleeping.
She was supposed to thank him as though the flowers were merely an excited utterance of his affection. Nothing in her voice could say, “Thank you for another deceitful substitution for true emotion. I wish these roses meant that you will never ridicule me again, that you will never say that I belong in Mississippi with the rest of the oafs or that our neighbors secretly find me common, and, for certain, that you will never hurt me again and send me more of these meaningless flowers. And then I would not have to worry about those neighbors who see them being delivered, who think, What a beloved woman Maureen Carlton Ross is, and how fortunate she is to be married to a man who showers her with roses and overlooks her heinous flaws.”
He could not have chosen a more appropriate symbol than the rose to stand for the patina of life in that household. I wondered whether he had not chosen that flower specifically because no woman in her right mind would make any complaint against roses. If he had chosen orchids, then she could have gently complained that the orchid is a mean and stubborn variety and that to make it thrive requires expert understanding or a knack. She could have safely declared herself to have neither, and they could have been removed. But to argue against cut roses would be ungracious, and he would deftly manipulate his words so that she would feel mortified for having opened her mouth.
One would not generally hold that manipulation is acceptable in a marriage, no matter how aggrieved the woman believes herself to be, but my uncle’s behavior went far beyond calling for his wife to be routinely mendacious as a means of keeping the peace. His conduct celebrated the deceit and cheered the lies along. Traps, deep holes for the unalert, lay everywhere. I could not make out a true and thoughtful line in the structure, which was more than enough reason for me to wonder when the foundation would collapse on itself. I learned that before she was expectant, if she feigned physical illness, the daily criticisms and exacting reprisals would cease, though only until he decided that she’d been sick long enough. She trusted the lie to give her a reasonable expectation of serentiy. Once she became pregnant, things improved for a while.
“I felt as though I was at a resort,” she told me. “He was kind and attentive, like at the beginning. But when the nausea and the fatigue of carrying the baby started, he told me that women had babies all the time and that I was highlighting things for attention. That was that. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have cried wolf so much back then.”
When she told me this, she was lying on her side on the purple chaise, where, it seems, she had spent most of the last few years perfecting the art of taking responsibility for her own misery. I asked whether she realized that it was not normal for any woman to be isolated in her own house and dependent on what attention her husband chooses to dole out.
And that is when she said she had not been honest with me, but had been afraid that if I had known she suffered from “female hysteria,” I would’ve walked out. I had been there two weeks and seen nothing to indicate violent swings of mood, hysteria, nothing but loneliness and confusion. I had to ask, “Maureen, with things the way they are, why did you decide to have a baby?”
“Oh, I know that,” she said, brightly and eagerly, as though excited to hear a question she could easily answer. “The last time I went for treatments, they said I needed a hysterectomy, and Troop agreed that I could have a baby first.”
I was stunned. “Did you do anything to make him think something so drastic was necessary?”
“I can’t say if there was one thing. More like an accumulation of things that made his skin crawl.”
“And they were what?”
“The way I talked and ate. The way I wanted my own way with more of this house than just my room. The way I was nervous around his friends. The doctors he hired tried everything, but nothing changed. You don’t want to hear all of this.”
“Maureen,” I said, “this is your home. Women get a say in how their homes look.”
“Maybe, if you’re Alice and Alva Vanderbilt and know something.”
“Look at this room,” I said. “I tried to describe the bedroom and sitting area to my mother, and couldn’t.”
“You could’ve told her that they’re too odd. He threatened to bring the doctor in here and show him what I had done.”
“Then I must be hysterical,” I said.
“No, you’re not. I met your mother. She wasn’t crazy. You would have gotten it from her.”
“My mother,” I said, “came back to Washington and told us all how beautiful and smart and kind you were.”
“Maybe I was, back then. Troop liked me so much, but people like me get tedious. I look back and see myself carrying on after my sisters died, and it’s mortifying. They died four years ago, in a house fire in Yazoo City. We had been married only a little over a year, and I set up a wail to go to Mississippi. There wasn’t and still isn’t anywhere for him to stay there, so he couldn’t go. But I wouldn’t stop addling him to go.”
“Maureen,” I said, “people call that grief.”
“I’m sure it was, but he barely knew them, my sisters Ella and Eloise. He hardly needed to listen to me day in and day out. It interfered with everybody’s happiness. I went for a treatment that he put a great deal of faith in—it worked about a week and stopped. You see, I didn’t start out the marriage being critical of him, but then I set up complaints about how nervous I was because of the loads of money being poured into this house. I asked about the possibility of some of it being sent to Mississippi. He pointed out how my family would waste it. And then he found a check I was going to send to fix Mama’s house after a flood. He wanted me to stop making my own dress patterns also. It was humiliating for him to have to take me places and have me wear something I’d run up at home. He was right.
“He says he should have left back then, that he’s felt swindled. He says he was promised a contented wife, but then he was saddled with a melancholic nag. But after the hysterectomy, I’ll be the person who I promised to be. He won’t have to regret me anymore. It’s that simple. One doctor said that my womb was wandering around my body, sucking up energy and good sense, like a sponge. He tried for several weeks to massage it back into place. He even gave me my own vibrating belt so I could do my own therapy between appointments, but Troop threw it away and found another doctor, who believed surgery was the only answer. These other treatments have been drawn out over time, and very difficult for him.”
“For him? What was done to him?”
“He had to have his hopes dashed every time something failed.” She described how hard it had been on her husband for her to be shoved naked into a tub of ice, tranquilized into a stupor, beaten with wet towels, spun at a high velocity in the “Rotary Chair,” subjected to vaginal fumigation, and hitched to a galvanic battery and shocked back into a more permissible sensibility.
“You do hear yourself when you say this, right? These things were done to your body, yours, not anyone else’s. And I may be fresh out of college, but I don’t believe you need such an important part of you carved out because a man doesn’t like your opinions. We’re not talking about your tonsils. I wish you could have heard my mother describing the dress you wore at the funeral, describing everything about you. And she’s a hard woman to impress. About the money spent here, as opposed to sending some to Mississippi, you had every right to sling the nastiest tantrum he’d ever seen. If that had happened in my house, any one of the three women up there would’ve thrown everything in the front yard, set fire to it, and charged people to watch it burn. And then they would’ve taken up a collection on top of that and sent it wherever they pleased.”
“That’s because your family has money. Troop’s mother was about to starve. He had to work an unbelievable amount to pay her expenses and ours. That’s why he was so insulted that I wanted to take some of his money and send it to people who he says have no conception of what it takes to rise in the world.”
“Maureen,” I said, “do I seem like an honest person to you?”
“Yes, but I’m not the best judge of character. You’ll see how many friends I have. I tend to pick fair-weather people.”
“Well, this is the truth. Your husband has more money than God. His mother did. And then, my family sent an enormous amount over the years. Let me ask you: Why did your husband wait till his mother was dead before he brought you to see her?”
“Because he didn’t want to upset her and make her think he loved somebody more than her.”
“Has that ever seemed strange to you?”
“Yes, and so I waited until after we were married and settled to bring it up. I thought I was being respectful. He said it was anything but.”
“I imagine he did.”
“The stress, you see, that I caused by pulling him away when he needed to be with her those last two years is what caused her to go downhill and then die.” She closed her eyes and would say nothing else.
She slept for a few hours, and when she awakened, she panicked until she located her “book.” I thought she was keeping some diary or list about the baby. My mother had told me that women customarily start to feel a need to get everything in order and tie up loose ends, and since nothing was being purchased and set aside, she was probably writing down what she would need brought into the house after the delivery. Instead, she was recording the varieties of the roses Troop sent, studying and working at the list in a small volume of unlined blue parchment paper given to her for that purpose. It was best for her that she show specific indebtedness, which moved this broad-daylight larceny of her free will far across the line one could draw between the peculiar and the obsessive. These were hauled in soon after my arrival: Beauty of Rosemawr, Dr. Grill, Étoile de Lyon, Marie d’Orléans, Duchesse de Brabant, Homère, Mrs. Dudley Cross, and Rubens. I wasn’t allowed to record them for her. She had to do it. It had to be done. He would check the book now and then to make sure everything was written in her hand.
Soon I was writing home, telling my mother that I felt safe, that I would be fine, that I was going to stay and take care of Maureen, despite the fact that nothing was as it had seemed to us and that underneath the surface of benign respectability was something hard and ugly. Nothing about her half brother had changed, I told Mother:
Today, I learned that the state motto here is “To be rather than to seem.” I think they forgot to inform Troop. I know that since his mother’s death he stopped demanding money, but it certainly does not appear to be needed. It seems that the only honest thing he told you in five years is that he moved his bride into a showplace. Otherwise, Mother, he created a world of false impressions for you, but I hardly see him admitting that he’s still a vicious fraud, and his lovely wife has become a despairing but determined recluse.
I know you remember that story, “The Yellow WallPaper,” the one Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about a woman’s descent into madness after her husband, the physician, strips her of everything that is dear to her and then shuts her in the nursery. Remember how she strips the wallpaper, fighting to get out? Mother, I feel as though I have found a door that opens into this story, and let me tell you that despite the fact that Maureen does not have yellow wallpaper, there is no meaningful difference between the two worlds, the imagined one and this real one.
On the way down here, I was congratulating myself on being a perfect person, about to walk into a near-perfect set of circumstances, make some minor adjustments, and then leave them forever thinking, “What a perfect young woman Mary was. We were so fortunate to have her in our lives.” But instead I am with a woman who needs something far beyond my encouraging her to cheer up and look on the bright side. The problem is that I have never been around anything like this, and having read of it in novels is useless. She has been subjected to all the “treatments” you and I were reading about when I left, and let me tell you that she is not exactly a testimonial to their effectiveness. She is convinced that she needs a hysterectomy to make her more pleasant to be with, but I find her more than pleasant. Sad, certainly, but absolutely wonderful.
I think that he despises her, though I cannot say why, other than that he needs to beat back what is good and worthy in her so that he can be superior in all things. Remember the way he blamed you all for his mother’s death? He also blames her, or tells her that he does. I’m sure he doesn’t believe it, and has said it only to wound. Please do not be shocked. He has been rather quiet around me, but I wonder if he does not think I’m plotting to undermine him. If I were as perfect as I thought I was when you arranged this enterprise, I would know all the answers. But I don’t blame you. It wasn’t as though you were too eagerly trusting. The man is very good, violently good at what he does.
I was sitting by Maureen, reading with her, when my uncle came in without knocking and said, “I’ve been expecting you to bring me the blue book.”
“She hasn’t been well,” I told him.
“Thank you, Mary, but Maureen knows what to do. This doesn’t concern you.” Looking around the room, he said, “You could help Maureen not let these flowers go.”
“Well, they do tend to die.”
“Replacements are certainly sent with enough frequency,” he snapped.
“Uncle Troop,” I said, changing the subject, “this isn’t any of my business, but do you think we could perhaps keep some fruit up here, not for me, but because of the baby?”
“If I said yes, how do I know she would eat it? Would you, Maureen? Or would it stay up here and draw pests?”
I had needed to show her how unreasonable he could be about something she needed, something that should’ve been given without argument or challenge. She glanced at me and then said to him, “Yes, I’d eat it. I’d love some fresh fruit. Can I tell Mamie to buy some?”
“She can buy it, but it will be brought up here by the piece, and the refuse taken straight down. This house isn’t going to be destroyed by vermin. Now, I came in here for the book.”
It had slipped under the chaise. The few seconds it took Maureen to locate it were more than he could manage. He told me to go downstairs. I left the room and stood in the hall. Whispering and weeping were all I heard until he said, “You will use a pleasant tone of voice when you speak to me. You will do it.”
I opened the door and went back in. He brushed by me as I passed the bed. He looked straight ahead, infuriated, running his hands through his hair repeatedly. She was weeping. She said, “He said I needed to lower my voice. I don’t know what that means anymore.”
I told her that she had not raised her voice, that I had heard.
“You did?” She seemed genuinely to need to know, not just to need reassurance.
“Yes,” I told her. “You rest now. I’ll stay.”
From the beginning, I felt the need to be physically close to her. She endured her husband’s bruising neglect, and if his conscience, the most intimate authority he had, could not convert him, neither could I. But I could offer her what he withheld, and given her grace, loving her was effortless.
“I love having you here,” she said. “There’s room beside me. I didn’t know what it felt like to have an entire bed to myself until I got married.”
I lay beside her, thinking that if I could be nothing else to her except another set of eyes and ears, that was better than nothing, more than what she had. I saw that when he confronted her, it was so close upon her and so evenly spoken that someone observing the two of them from across the room might later testify that Troop’s obvious expressions of intimacy to his wife did not warrant her disproportionate, weepy reaction. And I probably would have been one of them had I not been listening to the exchange about the blue book, the fruit, and a dozen other trivialities during those early weeks.
If she had looked at me as someone who was now in the house who might believe her complaints, besides the stereo-typically unreliable colored maid, and effect some kind of escape, and had I not known the substance of his words and his history with my family, I would have listened patiently and dismissed her. I would’ve gone directly to him and expressed myself, no doubt saying, “I hope I’m not betraying any confidence or overstepping my bounds, but your wife told me that you’ve been whispering things to her and saying she’s responsible for your mother’s decline, and you took issue with her sending money to her mother after a flood. I’m sure it’s the expectancy that’s made her so far disordered in the mind.” He would not have corrected me.
When I had been there about a week, four ladies appeared with small gifts to welcome me to Elm City. They had heard Maureen was unwell, and wondered what they might do, while silently they prayed I would say, “Thank you, but she doesn’t need a thing.” They seemed to be the type of ladies who were honestly busy with their own lives, and finding the time for this visit was as far as mercy would take them. They definitely did not want to be pulled down into a morass. And because my uncle had so often ignored the rule of etiquette that prohibits a husband from speaking ill of his wife’s behavior, no matter how scandalous, he had given them enough information to be able to assume the rest and conclude that Maureen Ross was lucky not to be facing long-term commitment to the asylum for nervous women in Plymouth, and that, moreover, she was lucky to still be married.
And when they asked, “Is there anything we can do for her? We can sympathize with these last weeks before the baby,” I thanked them and said she didn’t need a thing.
“Well, I know Troop’s glad to have you here,” one of them said. “And it’s not only wonderful that he has someone young and bright to help him manage, it’s good for you to have a nice place to stay for a while also.”
I assumed they had heard I was the poor relation, that I’d been living inside a tree stump or a pasteboard box at Rock Creek Park and had come down from Washington out of desperation. I said nothing. There was not anything I could do but smile and nudge them toward leaving. There was no way of saying, “He tells it as he wants it told. He shows what he wants shown. Actually, you know nothing.”
In the main, he wanted a wife who would see him through the eyes of these polite acquaintances. She couldn’t do this, because she was married to him and had assumed all grades of intimacies that he now repelled. And neither could his servants escape the roiling stress that was part of living there. They were wordless around him, giving the sense of having long before traded their right to express an opinion about a brand of soap openly in front of him for the right to work for him and support their children. Lying on Maureen’s behalf, when they were certain they would not be caught, was their principal means of protecting her. If they were caught, as when Maureen asked Mamie to bring an entire bowl of fruit to her room, Zollie blamed the mistake on ignorance, saying that his wife had heard the instruction wrong. Then they scurried to correct the error.
It took a great deal of gall for Troop to think himself invincible enough to pass me off as a young woman in need and then risk my saying any variety of things that would expose his past. But he surmised that I would want to protect his wife from any more turmoil. Better, he thought, to let her stay put on her familiar purple divan under the weight of her familiar burden. I would keep the peace and let people think that he had a grateful niece in his employ, that he cared for his wife so dearly that he had put in a special order for just the right sort of young lady, all the way from Washington.
It was clear in his smile that he enjoyed the idea of having me there, supposedly as demeaned as he had felt growing up. He had a member of Toby Greene’s inner sanctum present to persecute, tactfully and with menacing efficiency—I was supposed to crumble whenever I looked around this perfect home and saw how happy he was, how well he had done without my grandfather’s and mother’s love and support. What he could not understand was that my family was too busy thrashing out such matters as whether they could ethically turn away the ghost of Lizzie Borden, whether the heart or the brain was the repository of the soul, why their old friend Dr. Walter Reed had deserved the Nobel Prize more than Sir Ronald Ross, to give a moment’s thought to the fact that Troop Ross had nice things and a nice colored woman to dust them. The way we really lived repulsed him more than anything else. His father’s authenticity made him draw back in discomfort, as though it were a form of living best left to the bluntly, uninhibitedly retarded. He wanted nothing to do with a spontaneous life, where there was always the threat that one might forget oneself and lose control in an instant of joy or surprise.
My mother wrote several times to make it clear that I was welcome to turn around and go back to Washington, and when I said I would not, she replied:
Then I suggest you try to focus Maureen’s mind on the baby. It isn’t natural that she is this close and not at least counting off the days and fantasizing about pinafores and frocks. I’ve enclosed some cute suggestions that your grandmothers and I came up with. Your grandfathers tried to help, but I couldn’t send along their list, which included a jar of metal shavings and a magnet, an ant farm, and a monkey. I told Father what’s going on down there, and he wanted me to tell you that she can come up here and have the baby, though we all know that Troop will not allow that to happen. Father did say that Maureen is to be admired and given all the love and help she needs. If anything begins to feel, as Grammar used to say, “too wrong,” you are to come home immediately, and have her with you. Frankly, I’m amazed that she married him and has stuck with it. Be sure to tell her that we killed Troop’s mother from up here, so she can release herself from that responsibility. How she has not been thoroughly disdone by it all is perfectly supernatural.
Mother offered to come to Elm City, but I thought that would make things worse. Her offer did, however, stay in the back of my mind, as a last resort. She also offered to write Maureen a personal note, and I told her that would be fine. I gave Maureen the telephone numbers for both houses in Washington and made sure she understood that she never needed my, or anyone’s, permission to call. When I told her about my mother’s suggestion that I fix up a Jack Horner welcome corner in her bedroom, she became extremely agitated and said, “No, I’m sorry. Not now. Please. Later. Later is fine.” I apologized and said I wouldn’t mention anything else about preparations.
“My body,” she groaned as she tried to lift her legs onto the chaise. I tried to help, but couldn’t because her knees were waterlogged. I sat on the floor and massaged them until they relaxed enough to bend. When she was finally able to rest, she told me, “Mary, I’m supposed to be able to count on you. And so I really mean it, please do not bring anything else into the house about the baby, no ideas. I’m fine about me. To be honest, I’m scared to die but glad for the rest. But you can’t tease God about a baby.”
She seemed more frustrated by my pressing her to do something she didn’t want to do than by the superstition itself. She had to know that I heard her and believed her. She was frustrated by small, fragmented needs that had accrued over the years, from her desire to be heard without a spontaneous challenge to the desire to be touched on her skin rather than through her clothing. Her husband so often told her that her skin felt dirty and tacky to him that she automatically pulled her skirt over her knees when I massaged them, and tugged her blouse up on her shoulder when I touched her there. She assumed that she would always have to justify her need to be shown a little humanity.
“Maureen,” I said, “do you know what a joy you are to listen to, to touch?”
“No, and I’m too tired to argue. Maybe one day I’ll be that kind of person, but not now.”
“Yes, now.” I sat beside her and held her sore, bare legs in my lap, wondering how long she would need to be touched and held before she believed in her beauty. I knew I was willing to give her all the time and care she required, but if her husband could’ve occasionally answered one simple need without demanding a proper regulation request or thanks, he could’ve settled her spirit, in less time than it had taken him to injure her to begin with. She would have seemed less “hysterical.” But she was flatly denied the compassionate understanding that he should have given, free and unencumbered by her certain expectation of his relentless and thorough reprisals. He routinely treated her like a landlord vexed by a shiftless tenant who he feels is abusing his hospitality—although his wife’s imperfections did not amount to anything, for she had spent their five years of marriage hectically correcting faults as soon as he brought them to her attention, not to mention attempting to have them “medically” excised. But there was nothing inside her that could blacken her soul or even tarnish it. When I looked through her eyes and into her, past the wounds, what I found there was as decent as I have ever known. What I saw in her truly was what Bancroft meant when he called beauty “the sensible image of the Infinite.” But for her to get through even the most quotidian of her days required so much power and dexterity that I thought when I died I would track down whoever has the power to calm a woman’s dense and marathon existence and say, “You owe them. Get to it.”