FOR A WEEK CHERRY WENT FAITHFULLY TO THE Victorian mansion. Every day, as she nursed and cleaned and cooked for Mary Gregory, Cherry hoped that the woman would talk. She did not talk, except to murmur words of thanks. Her wistful gaze followed Cherry at her tasks, and her first fright died away. But a trace of hostility remained.
Cherry did not press. After eighteen years alone, one did not return to the world overnight. Cherry would make occasional remarks. “It’s colder out today. The children are wearing their leggings now. I met them on their way to school.” Or, “Mr. Jonas says the winter squash and potatoes are coming in, if you’d like some.” Or Cherry simply brought Miss Gregory the daily newspaper she found on the back step. “Did you see this article about care for the war orphans?”
Children were an appeal Miss Gregory always responded to. Once she told Cherry sadly that the neighborhood children never played in her yard any more, as they used to do.
“Oh, they talk about you often,” Cherry said carefully, and smiled. “There’s a fine crop of youngsters around here, isn’t there?”
Mary Gregory smiled back. She closed her eyes and was silent.
This far Cherry went but no further.
She was troubled about this odd woman. What was to happen after she reached convalescence, and needed the nurse no longer? Would she slip back into her life of dreams? Cherry felt a horror at permitting that to happen again. If only she could rouse Mary Gregory—shake her into seeing that she was being afraid of mere ghosts, needlessly wasting herself.
“I won’t be able to help her,” Cherry realized, tramping her district these cold, December days, “until I know what those ghosts in her mind are. Until she talks to me about her past. Those three portraits—Why did she lock herself away in the first place? Why? Why?”
Knocking on doors, nursing and teaching, writing up her case records at the center, occupied only the periphery of Cherry’s attention. The core of her thoughts was Mary Gregory.
The woman’s affection for children—there was a clue. Children were the only people she had felt able to talk to, during any of these years. “And she regards me as a child,” Cherry thought in some amusement. “As a matter of fact, she is the one who’s not grown up—running away and refusing to face her problems.” Something really crushing must have befallen her.
“She was so young, so pretty!” echoed Mr. Jonas’s voice in Cherry’s mind. “I was sorry for her even then.”
At home at the apartment these days, Cherry was preoccupied. She scarcely heard the girls’ chatter.
“The head worker at Laurel House has approved having a great, big Christmas party!”
“We’ll all have to pitch in. If we could get dolls, lots of ’em, and make doll clothes, for the neighborhood children—What do you think?”
“Cherry, aren’t you interested any more?”
“That’s fine,” Cherry said absently. “Of course I’m interested but—”
But at this moment she was concentrating on Mary Gregory. A great deal depended on Cherry’s proper handling of this case. Err, and the woman would creep forever back into her shell. But with tact, insight, skill, a woman’s life might be salvaged.
Cherry’s supervisor at the center, Dorothy Davis, had a brisk suggestion. “Get her to move. Get her out of that mausoleum of a house, where she sees the past every day. Then she’ll have to live in the present!”
“How can I get her to move?”
Supervisor and nurse held a conference, and talked the case over from every angle. Miss Davis finally admitted that, short of a fire or a Health Department order to move, Mary Gregory would probably never live elsewhere.
Cherry had learned, in this week with the recluse, that Mary Gregory was a wealthy woman. She owned the house, and had a large independent income, left her by her father. The bank handled all her affairs, and paid all her bills. Cherry thought this financial good luck, in a way, had almost spelled bad luck for Mary Gregory.
“If she’d had no funds, she would have been forced out among people, like my brave Miss Culver. She would have been a much healthier, happier, and more useful person, too. Well, maybe it isn’t too late,” Cherry mused. “She isn’t really old, scarcely middle-aged. Half her life still stretches ahead of her. She mustn’t waste that, too. If only, only, only she would tell me her story!”
At the Jonas delicatessen, between sips of steaming broth and bites of tangy rye bread, Cherry reported the recluse’s progress. The old man, who had wondered for eighteen years as he packed up each weekly food basket and his own head grew slowly gray, remained as baffled as ever.
“To die of a broken heart, I can understand, yes. But to half die—to neither live nor die, it makes no sense.”
Mama Jonas called from the back of the shop: “Papa! So romantical, where is the cheese?”
The old man called back indignantly, “I suppose you weren’t romantical when you married me, hah?”
“Hokay, Papa, you still are my heart’s blood, but if you should be so kindly—where are you putting the cheese?”
Cherry grinned and asked Mr. Jonas to help her with menus for Miss Gregory. Cooking three meals daily for her took too much time from Cherry’s other patients. The grocer selected several prepared dinners to go into this week’s food basket.
“Miss Gregory will be walking around soon,” Cherry said. “She’ll be able to get down to the kitchen and do a few light tasks. No, Mr. Jonas, there isn’t anything you, or anyone, can do for her, I’m afraid.”
Officer O’Brien was another interested person. When Cherry stopped by at the station house, he plied her with questions for his report, and questions out of plain, human curiosity.
“Her with her comfortable house and means, not enjoyin’ life!” The big policeman shook his head. “Not even steppin’ out under the blue skies! Now, mind you, Nurse Ames, I’m sorry for the poor soul but—Say, how can people be like that?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, too,” Cherry assured him.
“Well, thanks for the report. I’ll keep a weather eye on her and the house, as usual. Nobody been botherin’ her? Everything all right?”
Dr. Gray, in learned language, asked the same question about Mary Gregory. Conferring softly with the nurse in the upstairs sitting room, after each visit, the doctor speculated:
“What motivated her withdrawal from life? What crisis or loss was she unable to adjust to? And what early conditioning rendered her unable or unwilling to adjust? Try to get her history, nurse.”
“I am trying, Dr. Gray. But she won’t break her silence.”
“Keep after her. Be ingenious.”
Cherry tried everything she could think of. She recalled her courses in psychology, during nursing training. She sat up late three nights studying a book on casework, which Supervisor Davis thought might help her. She challenged Miss Gregory, she coaxed her, then ignored her, offered provocative openings in conversation, struggled to rouse her sympathy or curiosity for others, offered her own sympathy to the strange woman. None of it worked. Mary Gregory merely turned away.
On the day of one of Cherry’s final visits, Miss Gregory was sitting in a chair beside a window. Pale winter sunshine filtered in, illumining her face. She was almost pretty in her embroidered negligee, Cherry thought, and certainly less ghostly, more like a flesh-and-blood person now.
But she still should not be left all alone again. Cherry made a last, despairing effort.
“I’ll be here again tomorrow, Miss Gregory,” Cherry said, packing her black bag. “Then after that I won’t come any more, unless you send for me.”
The woman looked at her with an expression Cherry could not decipher. Was it fear? The dignity of her bearing became steeliness, tension.
“Unless”—Cherry hesitated and urged again—“you’d like me to drop in, say, once a week, to see how you are getting along. Mondays would be good. Would Mondays suit you?”
“It isn’t a question of Monday or Tuesday or Friday,” Mary Gregory brushed her aside. But she faltered under Cherry’s earnest gaze. “You say you—won’t be back at all after tomorrow?”
“Unless you change your mind. I’d like to come back.” And Cherry put into her eyes and voice all the concern she felt for this drifting woman.
Suddenly Miss Gregory turned a stricken face to Cherry and held out her hands. “Don’t go away and never come back! Don’t leave me all alone!”
Cherry could hardly believe her ears. She took a step forward. Mary Gregory burst out weeping.
“I’ve been wanting to—get back in touch—Wanting to for a long time now—But I don’t know how—with people—And then you came, you’re easy to talk to, you didn’t ask me questions. But now you’re leaving—Oh, help me, help me!”
Cherry took the woman’s hand. She said very low, “I’ll help you. I won’t leave you.”
She let the woman weep stormily, clinging to her hand. Years of dammed-up emotion overflowed at last. The tears were washing away the mental locks and bolts, so that finally Cherry could reach her. Cherry watched the racked woman with pity, until her sobs subsided.
“I’m—so ashamed, nurse.”
“You needed to cry. Here, wipe your eyes. Take a sip of water.” Cherry comforted her, smiled, sat down in a chair beside her. “Better now?”
“Yes, much better. Nurse, I wish—Would you let me talk to you? Would you listen? If you’re going to help me—come back, I’d better tell you what’s happened.”
Cherry soothed her and reassured her. She settled back to listen, marveling at the change that had come over Mary Gregory in these last few minutes. The strain had slipped from her face, leaving it naked-looking, and her bearing was no longer steely but exhausted. She began to talk in low, rapid tones, not looking at Cherry.
Mary Gregory had been the only child of wealthy, elderly parents. They lived very much to themselves, and when a daughter was born to them, late in life, they kept their treasure to themselves. Mary Gregory was not permitted to go to school but was educated by private tutors at home. She traveled much with her parents, all over the world, throughout her childhood and adolescence. Rarely did she know other children, never did she have friends of her own age. She was constantly with her parents, and when occasionally she met other people, either they were much older than herself or Mary was strictly chaperoned and soon whisked away.
“You can see”—the woman looked at Cherry apologetically—“why I grew up fantastically shy and totally unable to deal with people. Oh, I like people, I wanted so much to know them and be friends with them. But my shyness held me back. There was only one person my own age to whom I ever felt close. Louise and I didn’t see each other often, but we exchanged long letters when we were apart and we were dear friends. I liked writing to her sometimes better than seeing her face to face. I always had my mother and father, whom I loved dearly, for companionship. There seemed to be no need for other people. I suppose—I suppose I was a very odd sort of girl.”
“Through no fault of your own,” Cherry put in gently.
“You would think, wouldn’t you, that the odds against my meeting a young man would be very great? Yet it happened. He was Louise’s cousin, and he called on us—a purely polite call when we happened to be in San Francisco one year. I fell in love with him and—I was so grateful!—he with me. I was—rather pretty, then.” A ghost of tenderness flickered across Mary Gregory’s face, as she sat remembering her love affair of long ago.
Reluctantly Mary Gregory’s parents acceded to the courtship and gave permission for her marriage. John Wheeler was a handsome, robust, high-spirited young man, sociable and easygoing, the opposite of the shy girl who was to be his wife. “He was exactly the right temperament to draw me out of my shell,” Miss Gregory murmured, smiling. “Everything I did in his company magically became easy, happy, thrilling—I forgot to be afraid of people when I could hear John laughing. He was so proud of me when he introduced me to his friends, and I felt free for the first time in my life. We planned to go all over the world together—he was an engineer and had to travel—”
Her face convulsed. She swiftly rose and went to a dresser. Opening the top drawer, she took out a small, white satin box and brought it over to Cherry. Shining in the box was an unworn wedding ring.
“Mrs. John Wheeler, I was to have been,” Mary Gregory whispered. Weeping, she told Cherry the rest.
A month before their marriage, John had been called away on an engineering project. He would be back soon, he cheerfully told her to go ahead with the myriad preparations for their wedding. Mary Gregory was having the final fitting of her bridal gown, standing in the seamstress’ dressing room in white satin and lace, when the telegram came. John Wheeler had been seriously injured in a construction accident. He was asking for her.
“My father did not want me to go, because John was in a little mountain village miles from anywhere, difficult of access. My mother was undecided. You can’t imagine how I pleaded, when every minute counted! Finally, we rushed down by train and then had to go on by rented car. When we got there”—Mary Gregory choked—“it was too late. John had died alone. Asking for me.”
She covered her face with her hands. She was barely able to go on. Cherry’s heart swelled with pity for her, and for young John Wheeler dying alone in the alien mountains.
“You won’t believe this.” Mary Gregory looked up vaguely. She gripped the arms of her chair, the wedding ring in her lap. “My parents had dragged me from the crude hospital. I was half hysterical with grief. We started on our way back to the railroad in that rented car. Mountain roads—you know what they are, steep, narrow, hairpin curves, valleys miles below. It was night, and raining. And—our car plunged over the side.”
Mary Gregory was in the hospital for months afterwards. It was feared she would never walk again. She kept asking for her parents. Why didn’t they come to her? Finally the hospital people told her.
“I was left utterly alone. The three people I loved most were gone. The rest of the world, even Louise, seemed strangers to me. And after what had happened, I felt shyer, more terrified and crushed than ever. I—I just couldn’t start out to face people, all over again, all by myself. I couldn’t do it, I tell you! I couldn’t do it!”
Some pitiful instinct to find a place of refuge led her back to this house, where as a very young child she had spent happy summers. Opening it up and finding all the dear, remembered things seemed to bring back her parents and their warm, safe, protective presence.
“I knew it was cowardly to run away and hide,” Mary Gregory said gropingly. “I realized I was trying to return to my childhood, and that was wrong. But I wanted only to die, or to disappear.”
Here in this house she had stopped all the clocks at quarter to three, the hour of her parents’ death. The downstairs rooms were left as her parents would have wished them, and perversely it comforted her. Her own childhood bedroom, too, she had kept unchanged, standing in its aura of memories. The house was peopled with friendly ghosts, shedding the faint perfume of a happier time.
“Of John’s things I had nothing but this ring, and a photograph of him. I had his portrait painted from that picture, and portraits of my parents. Then I hung them at the stair landing, so that I could imagine”—Mary Gregory smiled sadly—“they were downstairs, moving around in the familiar rooms, right here in the house with me.”
“But upstairs—” Cherry was puzzled. “Upstairs, at least in your bedroom and sitting room, you are living in the present. Your furniture, what I’ve seen of your clothes, your radio and books, are quite new.” She wondered, too, how Miss Gregory managed these things without ever leaving her house. “And I couldn’t help seeing all those letters—”
Mary Gregory haltingly explained. She knew it was dangerous to shut herself away and that to retain her sanity, she must keep in touch with the outside world. More, though lacking courage to deal with people face to face, she wanted keenly to know them, at least through letters. Then, too, she felt guilty and selfish at using her wealth only for herself.
So—indirectly, through her bank and her attorney, never releasing this address to anyone else—Mary Gregory had played Lady Bountiful. Whenever she read of a worth-while welfare fund, particularly if children needed help, she wrote to them and contributed. Gradually she established a wide and vital correspondence. She had kept up with the news by ordering newspapers delivered through Mr. Jonas. She had bought books and a radio and house furnishings and even up-to-date clothes from department stores. All this had been done by mail (the postman picked up her outgoing letters from a box fastened beside her door) and the bank had handled all bills and money matters.
“So you see,” Miss Gregory smiled, “I am of the world, though not in it.”
She had read and studied a great deal. She spent hours every day keeping her house immaculate, cooking, making these fine embroideries which she loved, sewing for organizations for needy persons.
“I tried every sort of needlework I could think of. In the past year and a half, I even made these hooked rugs you see on the floor”—Cherry glanced down, noticing them for the first time—“and I still hook rugs occasionally.”
“It’s quite a task,” said Miss Gregory, warming to her subject. “You need a big frame and a big hook. I experimented and devised a frame out of those large, wooden, curtain stretchers. Then I set the frame sideways to the window for a good light—though often I work at night, too, with a very strong light. You know, the threads hang down on the wrong side and I have to run from one side to the other.” She added, smiling, “I’m light on my feet and dancing from side to side of that frame is good exercise.”
“Then—that’s what the children—” Cherry started but quickly silenced herself.
“I beg your pardon?”
Cherry was thinking that this, then, was the innocent explanation of the “witch’s shadows” and the “gallows” which the soda fountain boy had fearsomely described. Of course! The strong light had silhouetted the curtain stretchers and Miss Gregory’s active figure against the window. Bogeyman, indeed! Cherry determined to spread this true story as early and widely as possible.
“I was always busy,” Miss Gregory summed up. “I tried not to give myself time to be lonely. But I was lonely. It’s only in the past two years that I’ve come to admit it.”
Cherry leaned forward, stirred by the strange story.
“Miss Gregory, haven’t you anyone—any family—anyone at all?”
“No,” she said. “There is really no one close to me except Louise Carewe. Louise and I have kept on writing to each other through the years. She lives in Thornwood where her husband was manager of a small store until his death. The last time I saw Louise,” Mary Gregory reminisced, “she was a young girl. She came to tell me how happy she was that I was to be John’s wife. She loved John, too. She named her boy for him.”
Cherry thought she saw an opening here, a ray of hope. “Does she have more than one child?”
“Yes, she has a girl, too,” Miss Gregory said warmly. “Louise sends me snapshots of them, to show me how they are growing up. I almost feel they are my children, too.” She hesitated, then added delicately, “When Louise’s husband died he left her almost nothing. I have been assisting financially, so her children may have a few more advantages.”
“Then you do have a family!” Cherry said happily.
“Yes, I—I care very much for Louise and her two children.”
“Then Louise would be the very person you’d want to see.”
The effect of Cherry’s words was like that of tossing a glass of cold water in the recluse’s face. She paled and shrank back in her chair.
“Oh, no, no—I couldn’t actually see her! I couldn’t venture face to face. Letters, at a safe distance, are one thing, but to—”
“But you said you wanted to ‘come back’!” Cherry cried.
Mary Gregory wearily drew her hand across her forehead. “I do want to. But I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to do it. It will be an ordeal. I won’t know what to say. I’ll draw back, and Louise will be offended—”
“No, you won’t, Miss Gregory,” Cherry soothed. “Louise is no stranger to you, and she must love you for all you’ve done for her and her children.”
“I haven’t the courage.” Her voice dropped. “No, I can’t do it, after all.”
Cherry pleaded, reasoned, reassured. Miss Gregory mutely shook her head and sat there trembling.
“I can’t. I can’t. It’s too late.”
There was only one way left. Cherry took a deep breath.
“Miss Gregory, you trust me, don’t you? Will you tell me Louise’s address?”
“She lives in Thornwood. Mrs. Donald Carewe—Why? Oh, Miss Ames, you mustn’t—”
“Ssh, now. You know I wouldn’t do anything that could possibly hurt you.”
The woman looked up at her with pleading eyes. It was the same pathetic expression as when Cherry had first found her. It seemed to Cherry that, now as then, she was pleading to be rescued from her self-imposed prison. Her resistance and fears were automatic by now and less urgent than the pain in her eyes.
Out of that house, and out on the street again, with night falling and all this to figure out, the last person Cherry wanted to see was Driver Smith. Yet it was his bus she boarded.
As she stood beside him and opened her purse for fare, he favored her with a mock-elaborate nod.
“So it’s the smart nurse! Good evenin’, madomoozelle, I’m tickled pink to see yah.”
Cherry’s too-quick temper rose at this taunt. But she decided to take it as a joke.
“Sir, I am tickled red, white, and blue to see you. I’ve missed you like anything.”
He looked at her uncertainly, ready in his turn to grow angry. But he caught the merriment in Cherry’s eyes.
“Y’know, lady, it kills me t’ hafta take yer nickel.”
They grinned at each other, for the first time. The bus started off. Cherry took a seat right behind Driver Smith and said practically into his ear:
“You’re so charming these days, Mr. Smith, I’d gladly pay a dime to ride on your bus.”
“Chawmin’, she says. Lady, you ain’t kidding! You think I can’t be chawmin’? Huh! Watch this.”
The bus slowed down and stopped at the next corner. A woman climbed aboard. She fished for a long time in her purse.
“Take yer time, lady,” Driver Smith said, with only the slightest edge in his voice. “I wouldn’ hurry ya for the world.”
The woman smiled delightedly. “You certainly are the nicest bus driver I’ve met in a long time! Here you are.”
“Oh, thank you, lady.” Driver Smith was goggle-eyed at her reaction but he went on with his act. “Take a seat. Any seat you like.”
The woman giggled and sat down. The other passengers who had overheard were smiling, too. As the bus started off again, Cherry hissed mockingly into Smith’s ear:
“Didn’t turn out quite the way you meant it to, did it?”
Driver Smith hissed back indignantly, “And why shouldn’ people like me? So what’s wrong with me? I can be chawmin’ again, I betcha. Watch this!”
Corner after corner, Driver Smith was charming. He seemed astounded that he could actually play the part, and delighted with the novelty of it. Loudly enough for everyone to hear and appreciate him, he intoned:
“Step right in, mister, we been waitin’ for yah!” “Glad t’ see yah, lady, sorry yah hafta get off now.” “So long, nurse, it wuz chawmin’ havin’ yah aboard.”
Cherry left the bus giggling and wondering how long this transformation would last.