Divining Women

Before I had departed Washington in September, I visited my academic advisor at her home. I had told her where I was about to go and some of the reason, and as I was leaving, she said, “Make good use of these months, Mary. Women like us aren’t given time.”

She was such a serious person, always available to prove her worth and her value. Sometimes I wanted her to stop pressing me to do the same. I had no desire to carry myself for the next fifty years, whether anyone was noticing or not, as an example that a woman could study, learn, and teach as well as a man. I didn’t want to leave with that fatalistic advice at my back, so I turned to her, laughing, and asked, “Well, what are women like us given?”

Now, after another couple of days passed with my uncle’s silent hostility, I was fearful of driving to Mamie’s house and finding sickness or death, terrified I’d bring it back and kill Maureen and the baby, so I did nothing. Yet there was no word from Mamie. The cold snapped the leaves off the trees outside the tall windows, and the expected declaration of an end to the fighting overseas dragged from one day to the next.

The bells continued their tolling, and people in the streets were now wearing masks. Terror that the baby would become sick and die inside her blistered Maureen’s nerves so badly that she took as fact the milkman’s rumor that the Germans had somehow broken into our atmosphere and poisoned our air. “I know I’m being unreasonable,” she told me. “The Germans are just a misguided group of people. But this is too evil to be random, and during a war. Things don’t happen like this, not this much sickness and death.”

Mother and I had made several attempts to talk, but she had quarantined herself with my grandparents, and Grandmother Leslie, who feared that germs came through the telephone, would grab the earpiece and slam it down when she caught someone on the telephone. Mother had been able to tell me that the house was backlogged with arriving ghosts: “Mary, anyone who’s ever doubted the ghosts in the walls should be here,” she said. “It’s like Union Station on Friday afternoon, everybody mad about the lines and the wait. Until I was surrounded by this much death, I don’t think I appreciated how thick it can be in a house so full of spirits. The dead are grieving the dead. But the good news is that they’re not as self-centered as they used to be.” And then there was a commotion, and my grandmother’s shouts of “The two of you are going to die on the long-distance telephone. Hang it up now!” and the connection was broken.

Later I received a letter from Mother by special post. The week before, her father had tripped over a branch in the backyard and then lain there insensible for hours, until Grandfather Leonard discovered him. Although nothing was determined broken, the fall had injured his confidence and his sense of authority. The doctor he trusted was away with the army in France, and the new man who examined him all but called him a crackpot and questioned the sanity of any method of life that would lead a man to be found naked in his yard in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The doctor had recognized him from a newspaper profile that had run a few weeks previously. Mother enclosed the clipping, in which Grandfather Toby had quite heartily admitted, “I was loathed by my first wife and my son for having mortified them with what she took to be a few tendencies toward recidivism in the area of moral turpitude, but I have always loved nature and like to be as close to it as possible. I thrive on the cool open air, blowing across all my human being.”

Mother wrote, “He could’ve accepted being called eccentric. He’s accustomed to it. But he could not bear the implication that his life was naively misspent or that he’d grown feeble-minded. When we got home from the doctor’s and told the others what he had said, they sent the doctor a pair of game hens with a note—‘We hope this plump set of chickens covers the crackpot’s bill.’ Father now refuses to consult any doctor besides the dead and alcoholic one who lives behind his bedroom wall. He resists rest but is mending nonetheless. At least it is not the flu. There have been daily notices in the paper for doctors who remember ‘even a little’ of their profession to come out of retirement and ease the shortage, so perhaps a dead drunkard is not so bad.”

Within days after I received that letter, she placed a call to tell me that the perky mother of five down the street had died. Days later, she placed another call, to tell me about one of my elementary school teachers who had died, and about our mailman’s son, who had been in especially close quarters with the flu on what could have been a celebratory voyage home from the Western Front. You might have heard the uproar of a thousand men as the ship left the port at Brest, but it was deathly still when it reached America. He survived the front but did not last the return. The replacement mailman told Mother that the boy’s father had gone to Baltimore and found enough of his son to satisfy him among other soldiers who had sickened and died so grievously and melted into one another. A sailor rushed the mailman and the other fathers because he wanted to get the deck scoured before dark.

Mother was weeping on the telephone, but she gathered herself. “Mary, that same doctor who saw your grandfather said more or less that nice people, you know, people of good association, apparently even the old kooks among them, probably won’t be stricken as badly, because of nutrition and hygiene. I thought that was an incredibly snobbish thing to say.” Then she asked timidly, “But do you think that might be true? Maybe?”

I could hardly criticize the snobbery, as I was reading the same thing, and I had started to tell myself that people like us were not the ones who suffered and died from this kind of spreading, fulminating disease. But when the newspaper began running a notice called “Prominent People Who Have Died of the Flu,” listing their hometowns and achievements, I realized that if business and political leaders could die, if Wayland Trask, the Keystone actor, could die, and if the King of Spain could fall desperately ill, then nothing we owned amounted to enough of a defense. People in my aunt’s neighborhood thought themselves immune because they could afford clean and spacious surroundings, ample food, daily baths, and ludicrous precautions like surgical and gas masks. The gadgets were soon left aside, mainly because they were inconvenient. One morning when I went to the street for the mail, a neighbor praised me for not stooping to wear a mask. “The one my husband brought home,” she said, “made me look silly.”

But for a couple of weeks masks were the rage, like pugs and Italian greyhounds, among people who wanted to show sympathy and support for the poorer classes. When several local philanthropists were interviewed, they emphasized that their hearts went out to the sections of town that were habitually marked for this kind of devastation, that those people were in their prayers, and that they had high hopes for their luck to improve. The couple across the street from Maureen did take enough pity on their servants to make them line gravy strainers with gauze and walk around with these pressed up to their faces. They must’ve had only three strainers, because two of the maids had to go about with their entire heads wound in mosquito meshing.

I thought the maids might know something of Mamie’s sick child. One of them told me, “She’s nursing her sons is all I know.” I hadn’t realized until then that both children were sick. Maureen gave me a note with some money for Mamie, and I brought it across the street, where one of the women agreed to deliver it. When I returned to the house, I walked straight into my uncle, who asked what I had been doing across the street. I told him about Mamie’s sons.

“It’s more likely they needed time off to attend that suspect colored revival set up by the train station. Maybe they were seized by the spirit or by whatever patent cure that crowd’s selling. Or maybe they’ve just gone off in the woods for a few days. We know how that works, don’t we?”

“And you know, Zollie prefaces everything with, ‘I don’t mean any disrespect,’ but I think I do. You managed to slight so much in one statement, and you know nothing about any of it. And they’re not having a revival in that tent by the depot, or selling patent medicine. They’re selling coffins.”

“Then in January you’ll be free to manage your life. Until then, I’ll decide whether the help gets to keep setting their own schedule and also whether money is handed over to a negress, with a high unlikelihood of it reaching its destination.”

“The doctor knows the way to the house. He’ll be willing to come daily for any installments of her melodrama she would like to relate to him, all of which have only served thus far to make her appear more in need of help than she may actually be.”

“No, I did not mean that the doctor is needed. I’ve been able to hold things together since Mamie had to leave, but Maureen needs more help than me, not only for herself but for this household. Surely you realize that. I simply cannot keep up anymore. This is too huge a place.”

“I know you’re used to having everything handed to you. Self-sufficiency must be a foreign notion, despite that ludicrous claim about doing your ‘chores’ in Washington. And Maureen’s gotten rather fond of having everybody jump when she snaps. She’s exhausted everybody. If I’m not careful, she’s going to deplete me as well. In fact, one thing that might have happened, which you don’t seem very eager to credit, is that Mamie and Zollie couldn’t tolerate it anymore and just left. Do you know how embarrassing it would be for you to go retrieve these people and find out that they were just waiting for a chance to leave?”

I heard and felt my heart beating in my neck. I didn’t know whether he was lying or if he really saw the life around him that way. He wasn’t displaying a liar’s typical agitation. I’d studied literature and imagined the strangest things about strangers, and nothing was ever close to this. What I could say to him, what I felt indisputably safe to say was, “I’m sorry, but all I saw was kindness on both sides, Maureen’s and theirs, all around.”

In a basket on the kitchen counter were two rolls, all that remained of those I’d bought earlier from the only market that hadn’t been closed for the flu precaution. He picked them up and wrapped them in his handkerchief.

“I bought those for Aunt Maureen—to settle her nausea. She asked for something to soak up the acid in her stomach, and the doctor recommended unbuttered bread. He assured me this symptom was not associated with the flu.”

Putting the rolls back in the basket, he said, “She’s welcome to them. But she’s only going to get sick again if she crams herself full of bread. Her stomach is upset, Mary, because she’s having a baby. Do you want to provoke another cycle of calling the doctor for consolation?”

He was about to speak, when Maureen appeared in the doorway. Her wrapper was undone, as she was too large for it to be any other way. She seemed not to have heard him, didn’t even acknowledge his presence. She said nothing about being hungry, even though that must have been why she had come downstairs. She sat down at the table and opened the newspaper.

He stood at the kitchen desk, going through mail and the past two or three days’ newspapers while she and I sat at the table, reading. And then, as though nothing had happened, as though he were spending his morning with people who enjoyed his company and looked forward to what he had to say, he told us to listen. “This is phenomenal.” He intended to read to us from the paper, and after he had, he brought it over and spread out the pages so we could read it for ourselves.

What had excited him was an advertisement on the obituary page for a particular model of casket called “Awake!” There was no price listed, but this model was meant to appeal to “those who would cherish hope” and those who know that “the mortician is only human”—that he could have mis-diagnosed a coma or, given the huge number of flu victims coming through his door, in his rush skipped over a customer entirely. Anyone who opened his eyes and found himself unlucky enough to have been buried alive better have been lucky enough to have been laid out in the Awake! With the aid of the long rubber voice-and-oxygen tube and the tins of rations, anyone who was not utterly terrified to death could eat and scream until he was rescued.

A survivor would have had to be extremely well-off, incredibly distrustful, and heady with some order of that lunatic optimism to make this purchase. And while there would be nothing remotely tasteful about a funeral or wake that featured the thing, my uncle, after scrutinizing the finest print with great care, telephoned the undertaking concern and left an urgent message that he be sent the exact specifications. He had one of these in mind for himself, he said, for if his death resulted from this flu, he wanted Maureen to question the pronouncement immediately, have him checked and double-checked, and just to be on the safe side, install him in one of the contraptions. Money, he said, was no object, and she was to waste no time in spending it on him.

What else was he going to say? That he planned to dig a hole and throw her in it? After she’d been silent for too long to suit him, he asked whether she was going to thank him. So she did. She lifted her head, looked directly at him, and in the most detailed way conceivable, thanked him profusely for rescuing her from the grave. She went as far as to thank him ahead of time for being thoughtful enough to pack her with her favorite tinned potted meats and peaches. Instead of gratitude for the roses, it was gratitude for her own grave. If this scene had been taking place at the breakfast table of any other couple in the world, they would’ve been laughing at the absurdity of the thing. But he wasn’t laughing, and neither was she.

“It’ll be grand,” she went on to say, “to have somewhere so comfortable to be, everything so well thought out, everything so handy there to eat. The more I think about it, the more appealing it sounds. Troop, maybe you do intend to take care of me. Maybe I’ve been worried about nothing.”

Even he was impressed. Her remarks were much more credible than those about the roses. Either she had become a professional-grade liar or she had finally gone mad, and it didn’t matter to him—he actually indicated his pleasure at the arrival of this moment by nodding and winking at me, as though I were suddenly complicit and just as glad as he.

Without changing her tone, she continued: “But what about the rolls? Can you make sure someone puts them in the coffin in case I feel as pukish as I do right now? I heard you just before I came in, Troop, and since you know everything about me, perhaps you can tell me who gave you the power to know when I’m sick and when I’m well? How far can you take this? Do you intend to tell the undertaker that I’ve faked my own death to get attention? Would you tell people I had myself buried alive to make you pity me? You know what, Troop? I don’t need you, but I need attention. I am having a baby. I need attention. That’s what married people give each other. I’m not trying to snatch anything from you, but I deserve something beyond what I’m getting right now. I admit it. I want to be with a kind, honest human being. There.”

“Oh, be quiet, Troop. Or don’t. You can keep talking. I don’t hear you. But you need to hear this. One of these days you’re going to look at the top of the stairs and expect to see me walking toward you, and I will not be there. Do you want that to happen?”

With a small smile, she told him, “I know you can’t stand correction. But you’re wrong. You have no idea how wrong you are. Where have you been? This house is full of women. They come and go like nothing you’ve ever seen.”