NO ONE in Hawthorne could remember a midsummer more comely than this. The genial rains fell in the night, spoiling no one’s picnic plans or boating parties and keeping the wells and cisterns full. The elegant blue hydrangeas and the splendid lawns, sweeping downward to the river or to the lake, ripened coolly under the faithful sun. Everyone looked satisfied. People passing on the road in front of Congreve House whistled and sometimes sang and saluted Maddox in the rosary and Mrs. Shea pottering about the kitchen garden. The birds had never been more various nor voluble, fluting and trilling in the shrubs and thickets; on the lake, coots clucked deeply and two dapper cardinals came to live in the grape arbor. Cousin Katharine had to send away for another bird ledger because she used up the last page of the old one before July was half over. The bells, ringing for services and ringing for the hours, partook of this tranquil jubilation and their sound was woven into the fabric of the golden days. Even Mrs. Shea, a saturnine woman, was inoculated with the summer and in her singular good humour, she attended Beth in her childbed although heretofore she had never approved of cats, finding them wanton in their promiscuity with their own sons and grandsons; she accompanied the parturient purrs with “Lord Randal” and ordered Maureen to warm a bowl of milk for the brave mother who bore a litter of six.
For Andrew, though, the days lumbered on as slowly as they had done in June almost without incident. There had been one resplendent afternoon with Victor, but only one, so that afterward his loneliness was twice as great as it had been before. Cousin Katharine had got tickets to a circus for them and because Victor looked on an invitation from her as a command and also because Charles was on the mend and needed less attention now, he accepted enthusiastically; his spirits were obviously dampened when he discovered that Cousin Katharine was not going with them but he was mollified when she told Adam to drive them to the fairground in her carriage. All the way through town, Victor bowed and waved an imaginary hat and Billy Bartholomew looked up from his whittling and called, “You the personal representative of Lord Nelson?”
The circus was small and undistinguished but they saw a man eat a live rat and they had an instructive conversation with a hermaphrodite (Victor, though, was skeptical and quoting the everlasting Mr. Knowitall, Charles, said such people were fourflushers). They had seen a girl lion-tamer who was very skillful but who cared so little for her personal appearance that her dirty yellow hair was tied up with a shoe-lace and her bodice was held together at the back with a horse-blanket pin. They had ridden the Ferris wheel and had bought chameleons and Victor had won a swagger stick in the shooting gallery which he gave to Andrew to take to Cousin Katharine.
It had been exactly like old times, for after the circus they had gone to the smoke-house and, grimacing, had eaten their handouts until Victor remembered the rat the circus man had eaten and they had thrown what they had left into a can of gurry. They had gone to the store for tonic and had drunk it on the porch, watching and ridiculing the people who passed by, as much at home with each other as if nothing at all had happened and this afternoon had been preceded by others like it. Andrew tried to appear as casual as his friend but his laughter sometimes sounded hysterical, his praise was fulsome and he could not stop issuing further invitations to Victor who either refused or pretended that he did not hear. When Jasper Freeman had a fit beside the horse trough and the Black Maria came to take him home, Andrew laughed too loud though, in fact, he had never found the spectacle in the least funny and Victor told him frigidly to grow up. But Victor had been the one who had started it, long ago. Em Bugtown was on the loose, whining for Copenhagen from every passer-by, but Victor barely noticed her.
They went to call on Billy who, before he even said hello, read, “In Dumbarton, England, brides over twenty are married in sackcloth.” An ugly stream of laughter jetted from his mouth and then he welcomed his visitors, pointed to a lard can full of cherries that they might eat and opening The Northern Farmer, read them a joke. It was a dialogue dealing with the taciturnity of New England farmers and Billy read it with lugubrious solemnity:
“Morning, Si.
“Morning, Josh.
“What’d you feed your horse for bots?
“Turpentine.
“Morning, Si.
“Morning, Josh.”
Two days later:
“Morning, Si.
“Morning, Josh.
“What’d you say you fed your horse for bots?
“Turpentine.
“Killed mine.
“Mine too.
“Morning, Si.
“Morning, Josh.”
Andrew had thought it an excellent joke but no one at Congreve House had even grinned when he repeated it. He seemed, even in such small matters as the telling of jokes, to be doomed this summer to failure.
They had been together, as formerly, till supper time. They had gone home by way of the lake, plunging through Billy’s unkempt field, littered with scraps of machinery and the foundations of outbuildings that would never be finished; in his shiftless garden, the lettuce, gone to seed, was as tall as cosmos and the cabbages were striated with the black tunnels of worms. The whole place, in the fading light, had the look of ruin and the sight of it made Andrew heavy-hearted. At the lake, they bathed their faces and took off their shoes and socks and then, with their feet in the water, they lay down, their heads pillowed on mounds of moss. From far away they heard the chug and whistle of the evening train going its leisurely way to Portland and presently the first star came out; automatically, Andrew wished on it, but he had the feeling, uncomfortable and deep, that even if Charles Smithwick vanished, things still would not be the same between him and Victor. He tried to question Victor about his brother’s adventures as if he were interested but Victor said, “Oh, you know, storms and stuff … I dunno. You’d have to get him to tell you himself.”
“Would he, do you think? Could I come and see him?”
“I’d like to ask you, but Charles is funny that way. I mean he says when he’s telling a story two’s company and three’s a crowd.”
There was no doubt about it, the son of a bitch had poisoned Victor against him. Three might be a crowd to some people but Andrew would bet dollars to doughnuts that Charles Smithwick liked big audiences for his boasting and his lies. He would bet anything that he invited every man and boy in Hawthorne except Andrew to lend him his ear.
Victor had nothing to say to him and all the way across the lake when Andrew was rowing him home, he yodeled. When he got out of the boat all he said was “See you in the funny papers.”
Nothing had been recovered. The chameleon died soon and Mrs. Shea hardly reacted at all when he put its corpse on her missal; it was leglessness in creatures she objected to. Cousin Katharine had her picnic on Stork Island but Charles was sick again and he and Victor did not come, and so, instead of them, Raoul St. Denis came, bringing his house-guest, a brash seventeen-year-old dandy from Mobile named James Partridge, who had a mandolin and, inhaling, smoked Lucky Strikes, and who so swept Honor and Harriet off their feet that for days afterward they mooned and could not eat and when they were not writing in their diaries, stood looking at themselves in mirrors, stunned with foolishness. They wanted to fly a Confederate flag from the barn.
But while there had been no change in Andrew’s life and the events of it had been little more than a way to pass the time, there was a profound and unnameable change in Congreve House that affected everyone and had begun, he thought, to take place on that remarkable day when Cousin Katharine, renowned for her stalwart health, had fainted on the lawn. Andrew knew why she had fainted; she had been overwhelmed by what her intuition had discovered to her about him; she had looked him in the eye and seen that he was a murderer. It was enough to make anyone pass out. There had been nothing he could do about it, for the die was cast and he could not silence the voice inside him that perpetually sentenced Charles to death.
From Cousin Katharine down to Adam, they all appeared, like Andrew, to be anticipating something; there was that sense of an impending storm which is a kind of taut quiescence or a sort of premonition of disclosure as if, at any moment, the firmament will be slashed open by the lances of lightning to reveal, if one’s eyes are quick enough, the angels and the thrones of heaven. This mood was nothing like the stale blight of the winter past but had an invigorating element in it, so that while they waited, the members of the household were ceaselessly busy and even Adam, whose love of lounging was the principle of his life, stirred himself to build a doll house for a favored niece and to learn how to add and subtract on a Chinese abacus he had found in the barn. The twins were frequently fetched by Raoul and James in the latter’s jazzy yellow roadster to go to rustic square-dancing parties or evening sails on the tourist steamers at Bingham Bay. And when she did not dine out, leaving the house in full and magnificent regalia at eight o’clock, Cousin Katharine entertained and though her guests were the same old ones and the evening’s routine was the same—after dinner she played the virginals for a few minutes and then the company moved to the card tables except for Mr. Barker and Miss Duff who played a cutthroat game of chess—the air was gayer than it had ever been. One might have thought that Cousin Katharine, like Maureen and like the twins, was in love. But Andrew knew better. He knew that all this contagious gaiety was made up and what it was was really her fear of him. Often he woke in the middle of the night to hear her moving around in her room which was on the front of the house next to his and he knew that she was standing guard to see that he did not slip out of the house and down to the lake to row across and murder Charles in his sleep. Poor Cousin Katharine! It was a terrible secret for her to have to keep.
She talked continuously of the fireworks ball in August and the twins, who really did think she was in love (they always imposed their own state of mind on everyone around them), amused themselves by imagining that on that night a lover would appear and she would announce her engagement to him—that Ronnie Pryce, perhaps, back from Australia and less talkative now, or Max Pirsch who had had a dueling scar. However, she repeated whenever they asked, that the only thing special about this party was that it was to be unusually big and unusually elaborate but that it was to commemorate nothing more than another of Hawthorne’s heavenly summers. She meant to establish it as a regular tradition, “an estival Thanksgiving,” she said, “when we’ll give our prayerful thanks for roses instead of pumpkins and phoebes instead of turkeys.” The whole town talked of the party too and they assured one another that the fireworks show she would put on would be twice as sensational as any municipal display on the Fourth of July; Billy Bartholomew predicted that she would burn up the woods with her folderol but no one listened to him. There was an altogether groundless rumor that there was to be a set-piece of Old Ironsides.
Andrew, for his part, was not sure what she was planning unless she meant to send for the plainclothesmen to take him away that night. It was very clever if that was what she intended to do, for in all the confusion, no one would notice even if they handcuffed him.
The town talked also, rather less openly, of something else that had already happened at Congreve House, something that altogether baffled Andrew. For his unfathomable cousin had done the queerest thing of her whole life: she was having her tombstone made by a stonecutter in Thomas and once a week she drove over to see it as if she were going for a fitting for a dress. People of a sanguine cast of mind accepted her tossed-off explanation that there was nothing more morbid in ordering a tombstone than in making a will. Mr. Barker, in fact, thought it so excellent an idea that he considered having his own made and drafted several designs, but in the end he decided to be cremated and sent for illustrated brochures of urns which Cousin Katharine studied with him. “No one will make monkeys out of us when we are dead, eh, Kate?” the old man laughed. “We’ll see to it that our houses are made in the style we are accustomed to.”
But Mrs. Tyler, who was a pessimist, and Miss Duff, who was going straight through her medical encyclopedia this summer and whose thought, therefore, was largely dominated by disease (last year it had been the evolution of the automobile and Brantley Wainright-Lowe had said that if she used the word “carburetor” one more time, he would scream), connected Katharine’s act with her fainting spell and a frequent absence of her mind. One day, Andrew, bearing a message from his cousin to her neighbor, had stopped under Miss Duff’s open windows, drawn irresistibly to listen to the ladies’ low-pitched voices, and he heard Miss Duff say, “Carcinoma of the breast or I’m a dead man, so it may be just as well she’s getting ready. Must say I hate to think of Katharine pushing up the daisies, as they say, but when you’re called, you’re called and that’s that and no two ways about it.” Mrs. Tyler, who knew a thing or two herself, was inclined to suspect angina pectoris but, being shouted down by her friend, asked for evidence and was told, “Haven’t got any, but have a distinct feeling. Usually right about these things. Knew about Dan Thornton’s cirrhosis before the doctors did. Long before.”
Honor and Harriet thought the tombstone a joke but it embarrassed them a little because they were growing more and more conventional. The maids and Mrs. Shea said she was tempting fate and Beulah Smithwick ghoulishly said, “If you ask me to run up your winding sheet, I’ll refuse point blank.”
Andrew did not know what to make of it and he was inclined to accept it as he had accepted all her other caprices (her manufacture of gunpowder, for example, and her passion, one year, for collecting swords), although, from time to time, he wondered if perhaps she did have some knowledge of her death, told her in a dream. (Miss Duff’s theory was too ridiculous to consider for a minute.) Whatever her motive was, she had succeeded in doubling Andrew’s interest in death, and he often went to stand beside his great-uncle’s cedar-shaded grave, trying to imagine what the skeleton looked like and whether the shroud had rotted away; he roamed the churchyard at St. James’s and he scrutinized the dead bodies of birds, slain by cats, of rabbits run over in the road and mice pinched to death in traps in the pantry.
He began to have dreams of Charles Smithwick from which he awoke in a guilty sweat and some of which propelled him into sleepwalking. He loved to think about these nightmares afterward although they terrified him at the time and one night when he woke to find himself downstairs in the library, he screamed, partly from shock and partly from astonishment at the phenomenal power of the dream that had physically carried him, sound asleep, all the way from his bed to this pitch-dark room. Cousin Katharine had heard him and she came downstairs to lead him back to bed. When she had asked him to tell her the dream, he could only babble incoherently but long after she had left his room, he reviewed its ominous details.
He had dreamed that he was in the picking garden hunting for Cousin Katharine’s shears which she had dropped. The sun had set and the night was coming on; Congreve House was no longer white but was brown stone, domed like a museum. As he neared a great grille-work door, he saw Charles Smithwick, wearing a long beard, lying on the cement entry and when he tried to open the door to see if he were really dead, a black dog ran out from a shed and standing on his hind legs, bit at Andrew’s neck. Then Charles, clean-shaven, loomed up over a little rise, carrying a gun and two dead birds. He called off the dog and came close to Andrew and he said, “We must not kill birds. I never kill birds,” but he was carrying two and the gouts of their blood shone on his trousers. Andrew knew at once that Charles was both dead and mad, and in his wanderings through the house and grounds, he found the evidences of it everywhere, for it was the dead lunatic’s whim to strew enigmas as he restlessly roamed, scattering them on the lawns, pinning them to trees, to walls or to the backs of chairs. In Minerva’s temple, Andrew found one on the floor, its edges held down with stones, and it said, “I must have golden gold at once,” and in the library he had pasted a banner over the front of the bird cage and this one read, “My coat of dove, my glove of deer.” When Cousin Katharine had turned the light on, she had found him standing right there, beside the finches.
2
Not long before the fireworks party, Cousin Katharine and the twins went off one morning to the state prison where Cousin Katharine annually bought the handicraft of the convicts to give away as Christmas presents to maids and godchildren. Andrew, alone in the house, was glum and when the summer’s record for fair days was broken by a black rain that began to fall at noon and he knew his cousin and sisters would not be home in time for lunch, he settled into a monotonous dark mood. He could not put his mind to anything and his dissatisfaction made every act an effort of the will. At his lonely lunch, he had to think each time he carried his fork to his mouth and if he had not been careful, his water glass would have slipped from his insentient hand. He ate the peas on his plate one by one, maddening Maureen.
Afterward, he tried to read and could not; he put together a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but it was much too easy. He stared at each object that entered his range of vision as if he had never seen it before, but there was no excitement in his discovery, only a kind of dull confusion. That is, there was no excitement until it occurred to him to become a detective for the course of the next hour or so and, like Victor in the shut-up houses, examine his cousin’s history through her belongings. He pretended that he did not know her and that he had been sent as a spy to her house; sniffing and prying and listening, he wandered in and out of the crowded rooms, lingering occasionally in the long windows to gaze out at the roiled waters of the lake. Once, for no longer than a minute, the sun came out, but the rain went on. “The devil is beating his wife,” he said and his voice seemed not to come from him at all. He moved toilsomely, pausing to wonder what vagary had caused Cousin Katharine to buy or to be given a cabbage rose carved of bone and having no other purpose than to lie alone on an austere marble mantelpiece in a back bedroom; he debated which of the objects in the house were gifts and which were purchases. The milk-glass cuspidor, he knew, had been used for its intended purpose until Cousin Katharine had wrested it from a quiet old gentleman in Bath by staking ten dollars against it in a local election. From a Japanese friend of her father’s had come the Samurai sword she used to prune the Dutchman’s-pipe that grew over her windows; lopping and brandishing, she sometimes sang “The Volga Boatmen” in a stylish contralto to the delight of Miss Duff who generally came right over and stood below, watching. When Cousin Katharine had finished, she called up, “I declare, Kate, you’re more fun than a basket of chips.”
He examined, in cabinets and miniature desks and lacquered boxes and in jewel cases, on hanging what-nots and in sewing drums the accumulation of four generations. There were banjo clocks and music boxes that played minuets; embroidered nightcap holders and stuffed owls; in nooks and turnings there were Chinese vases filled with petrified cat-tails and furry grasses as old as Mr. Barker. There were porcelain umbrella stands and trivets in the shape of ducks; there was a leather fire bucket and an artificial cedar tree of jade. In drawers, there were Japanese fans whose silk had rotted from the ivory stays, Spanish lace and Spanish combs, magnifying glasses mounted on bamboo. There were snuff boxes, camel bells, and scores of ornamental wooden boxes that contained the testimonials of moods and enthusiasms and friendships, ribbons and seashells and colored stones gathered for the sake of the gathering on beaches and along the banks of rivers; fragments of wedding cake in cheesecloth bags; scraps of Mechlin, of tribute silk, of tartan ribbon and tatted edging; sashes made of velvet, solitary chamois gloves, bald buckram waistbands. There were strawberry emeries and covered corks for bone bodkins and decorated darning eggs and cases for tapestry needles. There were marbles, jack-stones, fish hooks, chessmen, golf tees, corks with silver tops in the likeness of Henry VIII and Theodore Roosevelt, water bowls from Chinese bird cages, a campaign button that pledged its wearer to vote for Grover Cleveland.
In the library, on a big round table, covered with gold-tasseled gray velvet, there were, behind the porringers and christening cups, a multitude of photographs of relatives and friends. Andrew and his sisters were there, immortalized in drooping bathing suits; each held a lobster by the tail and grimaced dreadfully although it was clear that the brutes were dead. His parents were present many times: on their wedding day they stood before the front windows of the drawing room in Congreve House and stiffly held up glasses of champagne; they posed on a beach before a dwindling Roman ruin with a company of men in collegiate-looking boaters and women in bucket-shaped hats. Several of the pictures showed them with Cousin Katharine, ankle-deep in shamrocks beside the River Boyne, drinking tea on a steamer crossing Loch Katrine, strolling through the Arboretum on Lilac Sunday. In one of them, the two girls sat on the lawn at Congreve House, plucking the petals from black-eyed Susans to learn if they were loved or not and John Shipley, a book closed over his thumb, lay in the hammock, looking fondly down at them. “Get out of my hammock, you drip,” said Andrew and turned the picture face down on the table.
Here in this room an investigator saw that the lady of the house did needlepoint but not for long at any time because beside her easel there was a table piled with books and magazines: she was reading, at this time, Henry Esmond, Bulfinch’s Mythology, an old cook book, The Illustrated London News. Even if he had not known her, he would have seen that she did not keep her mind on anything for long, for on the other side of the easel there was a second table on which she had half finished a game of Canfield.
He edged slowly up the stairs, and considered going into his room to work on a model of the State House that he was assembling but then he remembered that he had run out of mucilage. Besides, the box of parts was in the top drawer of his bureau and he felt like a criminal each time he opened it because he had never mailed the letters to his parents that Honor had given him weeks ago. He had not read them after all, for he had not dared know what Cousin Katharine had said about him, but he flinched each time he saw the neat, stamped pile.
The loud, toneless rain shut out all the sounds from downstairs and he felt as if this were the middle of the night and everyone was asleep except himself. All the bedroom doors were closed and the long corridor was full of shadows and the smell of dank. He thought of exploring the attic, he thought of going down to the kitchen to tell Mrs. Shea some perfectly awful lie such as that his father was a Hindu convert and slept on a bed of nails, but Mrs. Shea was in a bossy mood today and doubtless wouldn’t listen. And for a moment he thought of paying a call on Maddox but he gave up the idea when he remembered how short-tempered Maddox was on days when he had to stay indoors. Adam was gone with the carriage and the maids made him shy.
Aimlessly he went into Harriet’s room and examined her collection of ceramic pigs. What on earth she had them for he could not guess; incongruous garlands of dainty flowers girdled their necks and their round flanks were branded with arabesques and hearts and some of them had gilded ears. She had an equally worthless assortment of souvenir spoons, some with heart-shaped bowls, others with bowls like shovels and like arrowheads; one had a mosaic handle and all of them bore some legend that could not possibly have meant less to her: St. Louis World’s Fair, From Colvin to Emma, Niagara Falls. He looked at her closet full of dresses and her bureau drawers full of lace-edged underpants and all the scarves she never wore. A lanky French doll lay on a frilly baby-pillow on the bed. He picked up her Line-a-Day from her desk and finding that it was locked, he rummaged like a burglar through the jewel box and through the drawers again but he could not find the key. He did discover, to his mild titillation, a box of dark blue eyeshadow secreted in a handkerchief case. Finally he gave up and went into Honor’s room, but her diary was also locked and the key was nowhere to be found. He wrinkled his nose with distaste when he found a piece of paper on top of her bookcase on which she had been canceling out the letters in her name and the name of the Alabama boy, James Partridge, to determine whether their relationship was to be one of friendship, courtship, love or marriage:
With her small fountain pen he wrote beneath the names, “Honor Shipley is a moron.”
Kneeling at his sister’s window, he singsonged, “Rain, rain, go to Spain, never come back here again. Rain, rain, go away, come back on another day.” He repeated the jingles until the words lost their meaning and became no more than syllables. Then, tired of that, he read a little in a book called The Language of Flowers which bore the name Katharine Congreve in a childish hand on the flyleaf. He learned that mistletoe signified “I surmount difficulties” and that whortleberry, whatever that might be, meant “Treason.”
Back in the spooky corridor, he mechanically opened every door on the west side—the huge linen closet smelling of pine soap; the bathroom with cold marble surfaces and the longest tub in the world and a mirror opposite so that while one bathed one could make faces at oneself, a far cry from Cousin Katharine’s days in convent school when all the mirrors had been taken down from the walls on bath day and the girls had worn muslin shifts when they got into the water. How did the nuns themselves take baths, he wondered, thinking of his mother’s cook’s sisters whose habits looked to be a permanent integument like fur or feathers. Next to the bathroom was a storeroom filled with boxes neatly labeled “Kitchen Curtains,” “Lamp Chimneys,” “Coat Hangers & Shoe Trees.” After that there was the sewing room where two ample-bosomed, wasp-waisted dummies, armless and legless and with a curved hook for a head, stood, sentry-like, on either side of the Singer; around the middle of one of them, he tied a girdle of bias tape; he filled a bobbin with green silk thread, wrote “Beware” with a piece of chalk on an old billiard table piled with bolts of cloth, and bifurcated the room with a tidy row of buttons, alternating black and white.
The last of the rooms on this side of the house was Eustachia Vye’s. It was never used except once in a blue moon when an overnight visitor slept there. A long time ago, when he and the twins had still been very small and had needed the governess, it had been Miss Bowman’s room and he remembered how, somewhat to Cousin Katharine’s annoyance, she had converted it into a schoolish place, hanging up maps in place of Godey’s ladies and substituting for the graceful little escritoire a sturdy golden oak office desk which she had had sent up from Boston, causing everyone trouble. There were no signs of Bowman here now. Indeed, there were no signs of anyone, for this was unlike any other room in the full house; it was swept and dead; its narrow, stripped-down bed had an air of final vacancy as if its occupant had been carried away to a coffin, as if it really were inhabited by a ghost beyond the need of any creature comforts.
And yet, by contrast, the open desk showed letter paper and a full inkwell, ready for a guest, and a vase of roses so fresh that they must have been cut that very day, stood on the top of a chest of drawers. Light books for summer reading were lined up between two square Chinese vases on the bedside table, Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes, The Memoirs of a Midget, The Green Hat. Still in its wrapping, a cake of Pears lay in the soap dish on the commode and the towels on the rack were fresh. But the naked mattress and the frame of the bed, disrobed of its tester, were inhospitable; it was like a carcass picked by birds. He looked into the closet and found nothing there but an enormous empty hatbox from a shop in Paris. The drawers of the desk and the dressing table were empty; there was nothing in the sewing drum except a length of gray grosgrain ribbon, and on the shelves of a three-tiered what-not there was only a yellow pear made of wax with a hinged section in it, like a drop seat, which, when it was opened, revealed a minute crèche half lost in cotton.
And then his eye fell on a little box beside the vase of roses, a box that Cousin Katharine always carried with her, extracting from it lemon drops that she gave to children she encountered. She must have left it here, he reasoned, when she brought in the flowers, and though he found it peculiar that there should be flowers in this forsaken room, he found it even more peculiar that she had left the box behind. He had not imagined it had any existence except when she was making up to a child, just as umbrellas seemed to dematerialize between rainstorms. He opened the box to take a candy out and noticed, as he had not done before, that there was a photograph slipped into the inside of the lid.
It was a picture of his mother and Cousin Katharine as girls, examining the wares of a lace vendor before the doors of Chartres, and on the back of it was written, “Maeve and I buying scandalous lace gloves. M. in a black mood because of her eczema which is so severe that Sister Chrysostom thinks her skin may be permanently pitted.” Eczema, how awful! Those horrid, pinky hummocks that often appeared on his own chin? He looked closely at the photograph again but he could see no mutilation of his mother’s wide-eyed, lovely face. So tall that they dwarfed the lace vendor even in her high medieval headdress, the girls, hatless and wearing their dark hair in buns at their necks, gazed tranquilly into the camera, their arms entwined.
An arresting hypothesis came into his mind: if this Sister Chrysostom had been right, he doubted that his father would have married his mother, because he could not bear disfigurement of any kind (he could hardly endure the sight of Honor whenever she had hives and when the three of them had had chicken-pox, he talked with them through the closed doors of their rooms and never once came in). In that event, he probably would have married Cousin Katharine who, then, would have been Andrew’s mother. But would Andrew have been the same person? Would he have been born to Katharine on the same day and at the same hour of the day that he had been born to Maeve? And would he be standing here now in this little room, and would the rain be coming down so madly at this very hour if his father had married the girl on the left instead of the one on the right?
A distant, uncompleted trumpeting of thunder startled him and he looked out the window. The stable was directly opposite this room and in the gardener’s room, he saw a light-globe burning. Immediately, as if at a signal, Maddox’s face appeared; he flattened his nose against the pane like a child and scowled. The rain was heavier than ever, lunging against the windows and lashing the tops of the maple trees and making a swift muddy river down the drive. The gardens would be a mess and Maddox would not be fit to live with for a week. For a moment Andrew watched Maddox, who did nothing but glower at the ruinous downpour but Andrew felt as if those angry eyes had caught him red-handed in some wickedness and he moved backward from the window, hearing the grandfather clock strike two in the endless afternoon.
Taking the lemon-drop box, he went across the hall to put it in his cousin’s sitting room, partly out of thoughtfulness and partly as an excuse to lie on the chaise longue, an article of furniture he liked next best to a hammock. Beth and her family of six blind, naked kittens lay in a basket lined with flower-printed cotton flannel; the mother cat stretched her neck to be petted and purred loudly, narrowing her perspicacious eyes.
If Cousin Katharine were his mother … Taking up this speculation again as he lay on the chaise longue and stared up at the ceiling, he presented himself with questions and problems as if he were taking an examination. Would Cousin Maeve, in that case, be at the state prison today or would she be in Dublin, about to leave for France? Would it be Katharine who followed Paris styles and Maeve who wore what she wanted to regardless of fashion? He proposed a series of substitutions, imagined his mother in Cousin Katharine’s little drawing room on Brimmer Street, serving tea to the boys from Harvard and, on other days, walking up to Mount Vernon Street to the Shipleys’ house.
It was all unthinkable, really, because his mother would never dare to do the things his cousin did. It would never occur to her, for example, to take up Botany as Cousin Katharine had done for one semester at Radcliffe. When she bought a microscope and announced her intention of watching the sex cells of slime-mold conjugate, Mrs. Shipley had put her hands over her ears and cried, “Slime mold? For pity’s sake, don’t tell me what it is!” To use one of Bowman’s favourite expressions, his mother had no “intellectual curiosity.”
He changed his tack, pretending now that Cousin Katharine, as his mother, was the person she had always been and that his mother, as Cousin Maeve, was that rather vague, somehow always slightly worried, rather humble, faintly discouraging woman to whom he returned on winter afternoons. How much nicer it would be to go from her house to Cousin Katharine’s instead of the other way around! He remembered a typical day last February when it had seemed to him that all the careworn futility of being alive in the winter was crystallized in the person of his mother who, even while she accepted confidences and soothed tears and laughed at jokes, never gave herself up wholly but kept preoccupied with the mechanics of existence: her mind was always elsewhere—it was on the message that had come up from the kitchen that the alligator pear was bad, it was on the failure of the window-washers to appear, or the error in the address that Shreve, Crump and Low had printed on invitations to a party. If he came to her, bearing like a gift the intelligence that the word “hippocampine” meant “of or pertaining to seahorses,” she did not ignore him and, in fact, she showed a considerable interest, but it was polite and after much too short an interval in which her questions were much too perfunctory, she was as likely as not to cry, “Oh, dear! I forgot to call the men about oiling the books,” and to take up a pencil and write a note to herself; Cousin Katharine, on the other hand, would have written down hippocampine.
On that particular afternoon that came back to him today, he had gone to call on Cousin Katharine and had been wholly frustrated for she had to break her promise to show him a slide of tap water because, in the first place, an uninvited guest was announced, a doctor by the name of Codman who spent the time disrespectfully fingering the beard of a bust of Shakespeare and importunately telling Cousin Katharine that she ought to learn to drive a car.
And then, just after he left and they had adjusted the microscope, Andrew’s father came. Failing to see his son at first, he said, “Well, thank the Lord, I find you alone,” and then, “Oh, blast and damn—forgive me, Katharine—I left my briefcase in the hall. Would you get it for me, Andy, like a good chap?” He had drawn up a design for a guest house for Cousin Katharine, he said, and he wanted to go over it with her. When Andrew came back, his father commenced to shuffle through papers and to drum his fingers on the tea table and then he abruptly looked up and said irritably, “Do you mind if you cut your botanizing short today and go along home? I have only a few minutes to get through this business with your cousin.” Cousin Katharine herself had let him out and winking at him just before she stooped to press her cool cheek against his, she said, “What a fusser he is! But since he’s doing it for me free, I can’t look a gift-horse in the mouth.” He had been about to ask her where the guest house was to be and who were to be the guests who would sleep in it, but her manner hurried him and as he walked home through the cold, mean dusk, he felt cheated and scolded and he hated his father.
There was a dinner dress on his mother’s bed and his mother was at her dressing table brushing her hair. “You’re early. I thought you were having tea with Cousin Katharine and boning up on tobacco diseases. Wasn’t it very gay there?”
“No, not very,” he said. “Dr. Codman was there at first. And Daddy afterward. Just as we were starting to look at tap water.”
“Tap water? What’s botanical about that?”
“Bacteria,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t drink it if you knew what was in it. It’s alive.”
“Really? I never heard of that before. I wondered where Daddy was. Darling, you terribly need a haircut.” She began to brush her hair again. “It doesn’t matter that he didn’t come home because there was no tea today anyhow. We’re going out for dinner.”
The purling of a pigeon on the roof came strangled down the chimney. The sound made him lonely the way the sound of a night train could do or the look of a dog staring through a window.
“I don’t see why he can’t let her come to his office at a regular time. Why does he have to spoil the slide she made?”
“But if it’s only tap water, sweetheart, she can make dozens, can’t she?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said but so softly that she did not hear.
He watched her in the soft and facile light that came from under the small pink silk shades that sat like parasols upon the crooks of two dead-white Dresden shepherd boys. From across the room he could smell her perfume; she smelled delicious, but she smelled like all her friends who bought their perfume on the Champs Elysées at the same shop and discussed the price of it, dispelling, thereby, half its magic. Cousin Katharine’s, on the other hand, was brewed secretly by Maddox.
“Did she seem to like Dr. Codman?” asked his mother.
“I don’t know. I didn’t like him. He had a dead front tooth.”
“I expect he could have that taken care of. Dentists are growing awfully clever. Did he do something offensive?”
He told his mother how the doctor, as he was leaving, ostentatiously reminded Cousin Katharine of the present of red roses he had brought to her and said, “An aspirin will help keep them. And be sure to cut the stems each day,” to which Cousin Katharine replied with sincere thanks for his thoughtfulness. But when she came back after seeing him out she sharply fanned up the fire with the bellows as if she were attacking someone and said, “Cut the stems indeed! I know of nothing that annoys me more than to be instructed in matters I took in with my mother’s milk. The curse of being female, Andrew, is that we must pretend to be quite incapable of grasping the self-evident.”
His mother smiled to herself and said, “Kate would be bound to take exception to that. What a pity.” Putting down her hairbrush she began to look at her eyebrows in a magnifying mirror. “I’m sorry you had a dull tea and I’m sorry you and Cousin Katharine don’t like Dr. Codman. I, for one, wish she’d marry him. He’s a very good doctor.”
“Marry Dr. Codman?” His voice was a squeal. The pigeon moaned again like something sick.
“Dr. Codman or anyone!” exclaimed his mother. “Anyone at all! It has gone on too long. Her solitude has gone on far too long and year after year she has grown … she has grown more unpredictable.”
He was indignant at the thought of Dr. Codman eating the pears at Congreve House with that blue tooth and running his hand over Minerva’s helmet as he had fondled Shakespeare’s beard, and he said, “If she does marry him, you can bet your boots I’ll never go back to Hawthorne.”
“Of course not. Cousin Katharine would have a family of her own then.”
The possibility of never going back to Congreve House, of being supplanted by another boy (first of all it would be a baby and he loathed babies) so depressed him that he closed his eyes and behind them he saw small pictures of things he might very well not see again; the fruit room behind the kitchen where Mrs. Shea kept her jars of tomato preserves and grape catsup and chowchow, a room with a country coolness and a country smell where, on hot days, Beth lay at full length as limp and insensible as if she had been killed. He saw the lake and the river and the pond and the marriage elms; he smelled an early apple, freckled with pink, that he had picked up from the deep grass.
Suddenly he said, “She won’t marry him, I promise you. He’s a hootnanny and she knows it.”
“What is he? A hoot what?”
There was a rapid double knock on the bedroom door and Andrew’s father came in, bringing with him the chill of the street and, so Andrew thought, an echo of the smell of the room on Brimmer Street, of Cousin Katharine’s unique perfume and Dr. Codman’s roses and the fire on the hearth. He nodded to his son and to his wife he said, “Your match-making was a fiasco. She has sent Codman away with a flea in his ear.”
Mrs. Shipley put her forefingers to her temples and closed her eyes and murmured, “It isn’t natural.”
“It isn’t your business whether it’s natural or not,” her husband said brusquely. “If she marries, she’ll marry.”
“We shouldn’t be talking this way before Andrew.”
Andrew picked up his school bag and started for the door. “I’m not a child,” he said. “Why did you say all that about the guest house when you were really there to make her get married?”
His father straightened up and looked in the mirror at Andrew’s reflection. He smiled and winked though, Andrew was in no mood to accept such an intimacy. “I was killing two birds with one stone,” he said, “catching two cods with one line.” He laughed at his joke, but Andrew did not. He went on, “Sorry, old man, about that thingamajig you were going to look at. A frog’s gall bladder, was it?”
Andrew clenched his fists and enunciating clearly, he said, “Botany is the study of plants. If frogs have gall bladders, which I doubt, you would look at them in zoology.”
“They were going to look at tap water,” said his mother.
“Jove!” said his father.
When he had closed the door, he outlined on it a skull and crossbones with his finger and for a moment he listened at the keyhole. His mother said, “What is it? Oh God, John, tell me what it is!” And his father answered, “Why, ‘it,’ I suppose, is nothing more than the inevitable changes that are taking place in you. And in me. Nothing to get stirred up about.” And in a lighter voice he continued, “I meant to call you earlier but I got jammed up. I shan’t be going to the Websters’ tonight. My potentate from Indiana wants to see the sights.” A silence followed and Andrew went upstairs, listening briefly at Harriet’s door, but she was only conjugating fero, ferre, tuli, latum.
That story about the guest house had been a whopper. The only thing that had been built at Congreve House this summer was Adam’s doll house for his harelipped niece.
They were so flat and limp, both of them, and reconstructing that dispiriting scene, Andrew decided that while he wished Cousin Katharine were his mother, he wished someone altogether different were his father, someone he did not know, and he wondered what the drowned Mr. Smithwick had been like. If Cousin Katharine had married him, Victor would have been his brother. But would Charles also have been his brother? Now he was rattled and he pushed aside these philosophical experiments and gazed around the room, looking for something to do.
It was an excludingly feminine room. The painted furniture was French, thin-legged and daintily furbelowed; in the recesses of the windows there were two round tables on one of which stood a figure of Minerva, on the other, Venus. On the pearl-white walls, there hung six likenesses of Cousin Katharine, by six different painters; as a shepherdess, as a horsewoman, as a bird lover, a debutante, a bibliophile, as Marie Antoinette dressed for a masked ball. On the desk that had once been a spinet, there was a double inkwell made of Sèvres and silver and there was a mountainous supply of letter paper for her huge, incessant correspondence. Here was her black record of birds and here was her big diary. And here, as in the drawing room, there were the testimonials of her restlessness: another easel, smaller than the one downstairs, with needlepoint stretched on it and beside it, a low table over which spilled from the wide maw of her knitting bag the brilliant yarns of half a dozen unfinished sweaters. Her place in Don Quixote was marked with a letter from the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, addressed in his father’s hand. He would have liked to read the letter, he would have liked even better to read her diary and he touched its plump covers and lifted it up to judge its weight. He took the two thin, closely written sheets of paper out of the envelope with its Irish stamp, but as he hesitated, he saw the cat out of the corner of his eye stand up in her basket and look at him alertly. His bad conscience made him shudder as it had done earlier when he had seen Maddox’s face at the window and returning the letter to its place and putting the lemon-drop box neatly on the diary so that it was encircled by the signs of the zodiac embossed in gold, he left the room, feeling the vigilant cat’s eyes burning into him.
The rain had begun at last to peter out, but it was still too sopping wet to go outdoors and the house was still dark and he felt like someone going crazy in a dungeon. He must keep busy or he might begin to scream, so he went up to the big attic that ran the length of the ell and resumed his examination of other people’s property. A smell of squirrels and dust came from the old beams and hornets seethed sleepily in the rafters. His footsteps made the floorboards snap and a mouse sped through the maze of rounded trunks and wicker hampers, patched with the stickers, like heraldic emblems, of the half-mythical hotels of Florence, Athens, and Madrid.
Often in the past on just such stormy days as this, he had come up here with Honor and Harriet and had dressed up in the clothes left behind by people who had died or had left them to moulder because they were no longer in vogue. Against a trunk that had belonged to Great-Uncle George leaned a pair of snowshoes that probably belonged to Maddox; he put them on, skidding clumsily over the floor and rousing every small beast in the attic. Then he opened his uncle’s trunk from which arose a smell of camphor balls and wool; under the withering tissue paper lay morning coats and dinner jackets and opera capes. Uncle George had been very particular about his clothes and he had gone annually to London to confer with his tailor for three weeks. Miss Duff said of him, “Best-dressed man on God’s green earth.” All the fabrics were old and soft to the touch; Andrew stroked a dark red smoking jacket with velvet lapels and heavily embroidered frogs. He took out a pair of white trousers and a blazer with broad blue stripes, a crimson foulard ascot and a canvas yachting cap and when he had put them on over his own clothes (he was swallowed up and he giggled idiotically to think how he must look) he began to look for a top or a pair of Indian clubs or something, anything, to distract him for the rest of the afternoon. He found a shuffleboard set that he deduced must once have belonged on the Empress Katharine and a box of lotto cards and a parchesi game. And then he did find a top in a carton that contained wooden curtain rings and the ends of birthday candles. It was a bright red one and when he spun it, it seemed to have a glad life of its own; it was bursting with energy and merriment and he hated to see it slow and begin to falter and finally to keel over and become again nothing but a shape in wood. He spun it over and over, endowing it with vitality, making it a being more substantial than his twin.
Andrew was in the entrance hall spinning the top when the ladies of the house came back. He saw them through the sidelights, his smiling sisters flanking his cousin who wore a white leghorn hat, tied down with an old-fashioned motoring veil; he slipped behind the bamboo screen, meaning to give them the surprise of their lives. But the top, unfortunately, was still spinning when Honor opened the door and he could see her, through the narrow slits of the wood, glance round, a little startled, “Fee, fie, fo, fum,” she said. “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” He waited, breathing shallowly.
“Ignore the Englishman,” said Harriet and went into the library to put down her packages. “The Englishman has knocked over the trinity of Congreve House,” she called out.
The top slowed, reeled and fell, the play gone out of it.
“Harriet!” cried Honor. “We’d better go see if the Englishman has been in our rooms. Did you take the key to your Line-a-Day?” And the two girls ran laughing up the stairs. He knew that in a moment when Honor found what he had written below her forecast of her love affair with James Partridge, rage would replace her lightheartedness and the infantile frolic would be over. So he stepped out of hiding to have, at least, the pleasure of fooling Cousin Katharine. She had her back to him, looking through a sheaf of letters in her hand, but she wheeled instantly when he said, “The Empress Katharine, I presume?” She seemed, she really did, not to know who he was. She stared into the dusky depths of the hall and the letters fell right out of her hand and lay at her feet in a perfect fan.
She was taken in to such an extent that she said “John?” and could not move. It was the most successful hoax he had ever perpetrated.
Honor ruined it as he had known she would do, flying downstairs in a tantrum, spluttering unintelligibly but doing it at the top of her voice. And then, to his astonishment, he saw that Cousin Katharine was angry with him too; she looked at him frigidly, freezing him solid, and without a word she turned and went upstairs. Skinned and smarting, at the dizzy peak of his restiveness and loneliness, he shouted at her retreating figure, “I hate you! I hate you all!” and savagely hurled down the top and while it spun he snarled at his raving sister, “You shut up or I’ll kill you!”