Part 1, Herbert West

 

In my father’s house there were many closed doors and not a few that were always locked. I learned early in life the value of keys and locks, and the uses of deception.

I speak here of Hiram West, who I thought was my father until I learned otherwise, at the age of thirty-three. Such as he was, he is the only father I have known, so I continue to call him that, for the sake of simplicity.

I haven’t valued remembering and reminiscing, until now. Especially not in my first life, when all my efforts were concentrated on shaping my future. But now I am a convalescent without responsibilities. On these languid afternoons between luncheon and tea, I lie on a sofa, ministered to by Margaret and the amiable Betty, and I remember. It is astonishing, this eruption of memories, as though I have only now found something that has been mine all along.

My childhood was divided into two parts. No, that’s wrong. My childhood was rather brief. It ended when I was nine years old. That’s when I became my own man.

When I was a child, I belonged to my mother, the last of her three sons. Perhaps she doted on each of us in turn when we were small. I must have displaced my next oldest brother, Jeremy, as her favourite when he was barely five, kindling in him an intense jealousy.

In a sense, my mother’s whole life was a kind of dare, a tease, a deliberate risk. She escaped from her father’s tradition-bound family by marrying Hiram West. Even then he was a man of large ambitions, although he was only an undertaker. But the ‘quiet trade’ is quiet only on the surface. Hiram drove other undertakers out of business, not always in legal ways, striving not only for success but for supremacy. He soon left undertaking behind, but until the end of his life he was known in certain circles as Hiram the Undertaker.

When I was five, we moved from the wrong side of Beacon Hill to the Back Bay mansion that was the pride of Hiram’s acquisitive heart. He claimed he got it as the result of a bet, but that sounds like a typical Hiram West exaggeration. I think the man who owned the place happened to wind up on the wrong end of a business deal with Hiram the Undertaker, and thought the loss of his house preferable to intimidation, threats, arson, even murder.

It was a large house, comfortable and not excessively vulgar in its decorations. The size of the rooms helped to absorb the ornateness of the fixtures, the plaster curlicues, the pier glasses, the elaborate cornices and whorls of dark wood. Within this edifice each of us staked out a territory. My brothers had half of the third floor to themselves (with a maid dedicated to keeping their premises in order). I was forbidden on pain of death to enter their domain uninvited.

My domain was the garden, specifically one large oak tree perfect for climbing. I spent entire summer days among its branches, rigging up a network of ropes that provided the thrill of pretending to be a trapeze artist.

My father had a study and library on the ground floor, but these were small theatres, in which he performed the roles of Mr. West the businessman, Mr. West the solid citizen and, exclusively for us boys, Hiram the Patriarch.

But the real Hiram West, who was an amalgam of the captain of a privateer, a merchant prince and a circus ringmaster, held court in the Gun Room. This was not Hiram’s idea; the antique guns came with the house. My father was no stranger to guns, but regarded them as tools, not ornaments. For him, the appeal of the Gun Room was its comfort and self-contained seclusion. He even slept there sometimes, when for reasons mysterious to me he was excluded, or chose to exclude himself, from my mother’s rooms. Often, he would come into the house, followed by two or three or half a dozen cronies, and shout for Finch, the butler, to bring drinks and a meal to the Gun Room, pronto. They would closet themselves in there for hours. Listening at the door, I would hear rumbles of conversation, punctuated by outbursts of laughter. Or low-pitched talk and no laughter, with eruptions of argument.

Once I was caught in my eavesdropping by a crony, who reported it to my father. Later that night he came to my bedroom, shook me awake and made me sit up. “I don’t like little creeps who sneak around and listen at keyholes. If you get caught again, you’ll wish you’d never been born.” Then he left. No fatherly words of wisdom, no advice to temper an inquiring mind with the virtue of circumspection. Only a threat, as though his seven year old son was a business rival who had overstepped the bounds. It was several weeks before I dared to listen at the door again, not for the things I overheard – unfamiliar names and incomprehensible plans – but for the thrill of the risk. Resolving not to be caught twice, I was ready to run at all times.

The only other piece of fatherly advice I remember from those early years, reinforced several times as I grew older, was on the usefulness of lying. My brothers, roughhousing in the front parlour, managed to break some ornament. They were discovered by our father, who happened to be nearby and heard the crash and ominous silence that followed. Both declared that I had done it. Already an expert at selecting the less painful of two painful choices, I readily admitted to the deed. After a thrashing which seemed rather perfunctory, my father took me by the ear and said, “Why didn’t you try to shift the blame onto Hiram Junior or Jeremy, instead of ‘fessing up right away? I sure hope you aren’t going to grow up to be a little pushover, Herbert. A fellow has to learn to think fast if he wants to get out of tight spots. Tell them just enough to make them wonder. Then while they’re wondering, you give ‘em the slip. Remember that.”

 

My mother’s suite of rooms was on the second floor, at the opposite end of the house from the Gun Room and equally distant in atmosphere and décor. Everything was orderly there. The curtains hung straight, the cushions were plump, the pretty ornaments on their little tables were disposed just so. Sometimes she played her piano for me; or while she embroidered, looked at books of fashion or entertained other ladies with cups of tea and ‘dainties,’ I amused myself with my picture books and toy soldiers. When I tired of them, with my mother’s permission I took her figurines of crystal and porcelain carefully into my hands, using them as actors in little dramas. I had once asked my mother for dolls, but after her refusal to provide them on the grounds that boys did not play with such toys, I contented myself with her figurines instead. Before I left her rooms, I always returned them to their places.

Then there was her ‘little room,’ a place occupied by a chaise longue piled with cushions and draped with shawls, its single window heavily curtained. When my mother went into this room, the only people who were admitted were her personal maid and her doctor, and on a few occasions of rare privilege, I. But I was glad they were infrequent, for she was invariably strange then – distant and sleepy, as though she was about to go on a journey of sleep and wanted to make sure I’d be all right while she was away. Once or twice when I wanted to see her while she was shut away inside her little room, her maid Fanny told me in a harsh whisper that Miss Anna was having one of her headaches and I would have to come back tomorrow. “You don’t want to make her suffer more than she has to already, do you, Master Herbert?” she asked, and what answer could I give to that, besides “No.”

I liked it best was when it was just the two of us, and instead of talking to me about things I didn’t really understand, she sang little songs, Italian songs her own mother had taught her. I thought they were in a secret language only she and I understood. At those times, I was her caro Francesco, and happy. But on bad days, she was agitated and talked endlessly about Him – why did He ignore her? Why did He spend all his time with his friends? Who were those other women she’d heard about? I knew He was my father, but try as I might, I couldn’t puzzle out the meanings of the things she told me, not enough to help her and make her happy again.

I do not think I shall ever understand their relationship. Their dealings with one another were like a game with secret rules. Sometimes I knew my father was an enemy; on other occasions he seemed only an amiable buffoon. Once I tried to ask my mother about sounds I had heard through their bedroom door, sounds of violence and distress, excitement and agitation. I wanted to express my fear for her, my ignorant desire to be her champion, but I did not have the words. To my surprise, she cut me short. “You shouldn’t listen at keyholes, Herbert,” she said, unknowingly echoing my father. “And why weren’t you in bed? I’ll have to speak to your governess about this.” The blush that spread over her face and neck while she spoke puzzled me even more than I was already.

I think now that even toward the end there was more than indifference between them. Love? I have never claimed to understand love, even when I have (I think) experienced it myself. Of all emotions it is the least rational, the least subject to analysis, so I shall not even guess.

I am little more confident when it comes to speculating about my mother’s mental soundness. She spent nearly half of her life in institutions for the insane. I have reason to believe her initial incarceration was an act of gross injustice on my father’s part. Years of exposure to the other inmates and the barbaric ‘treatments’ to which she must have been subjected would have broken a stronger mind than hers. And I do not believe hers was a very robust constitution, psychologically. What little I have seen of the Derby family makes me suspect a hereditary melancholy. In her, it alternated with fits of irrational exaltation and triumphalism, in whose grip she was compelled to find an enemy to vanquish. More often than not, that enemy was Hiram. Never a patient man, and absolutely devoid of empathy, he finally took the step of confinement, justifying it by her apparently irrational act of running away to New York City, abandoning her devoted husband and three young sons.

But these unhappy things came later. Before that, with the exception of the times when she hid herself away in her boudoir, my mother was my dearest friend and I her best-beloved. Which is why, when she left for good without a word, I found myself alone and friendless.

 

Everything changed the year I turned eight. My mother went out more; there were fewer parties and more frequent arguments. Unlike the masculine arguments I heard through the Gun Room door, which were interesting, these were earthquakes which shook the foundations of my little world. Once, I asked my brothers about them. I went upstairs to their rooms and interrupted their game of backgammon.

“They’re yelling at each other again,” I said. “Why do they do that?”

Hiram Junior, the oldest, looked at me seriously and said, “I guess they’re mad at each other. Father doesn’t like it when Mother goes to those meetings. You know that.”

Jeremy scowled. “Nah, it’s not that. Pa’s mad at her because of the little snot. That’s what it is.”

The “little snot.” That’s what Jeremy called me. Until I was fifteen and he nearly twenty, I don’t remember him saying a civil word to me. He regarded me as an interloper, which I suppose I was, although I couldn’t help that, after all. He was always paying court to our mother, bringing her gifts and trying to get her attention, hating it when she showed me affection and bad-mouthing me every chance he got. The difference in our looks seemed especially to irk him. He and Hiram Junior took after our father – solid, brown-haired, brown-eyed. But I looked like our mother, with my wispy blond hair that for some reason she preferred to keep longer than it should have been for a boy of my age. We were both small, too – she not quite five feet tall, and I fortunate eventually to reach five and a half feet. To the casual observer there was a strong resemblance between us. Except our eyes. Hers were undoubtedly blue, while mine are grey – my true father’s eyes, though of course I did not know that at the time.

The worst of their fights happened one night in the summer. It was hot and I couldn’t sleep. The moon came into my window so brightly I feared it would burn me, so I got up and went to my mother’s door. I was about to open it and call out to her, when I heard my father’s voice, loud and unrestrained, like the baying of a dog.

“I tell you, Anna, you’ve been falling down on the job for months now, and you’d better shape up. No more going to meetings with that lunatic Dexter and his worshippers. Or you can leave, if that’s what you want. But if you go, it’s for good.”

I don’t know what she said to him. She spoke too quietly. But he didn’t. I heard every word of his response.

“Do that and you’re a dead woman, Anna. Or as good as dead. Just remember that, and everything will be fine.”

Hearing his heavy footsteps coming toward me, I ran and didn’t stop until I was back in my bedroom, huddled under the blankets, no longer hot but shivering with cold. It was a long time before I got to sleep and my dreams were full of terrors – my father’s face, coming at me like a runaway moon, mouth opening and closing, full of teeth and malice.

A short time after this, my father took all three of us boys to the racetrack for the day. We weren’t simply spectators; Hiram had business there and wanted to show us around. We saw the stables and the exercise yards, met trainers, jockeys and general hangers-on. I was impressed by the horses, but even more by the jockeys, who were little fellows like me, but sure of themselves.

We finished up in a plushly furnished office with drinks for everyone except Jeremy and me, much to his chagrin. The men settled down to talk in a way that reminded me of the things I overheard outside the Gun Room. I was a little sleepy and would have nodded off if I hadn’t been nervous of what Jeremy might do to me. After what seemed like a long time we went to a dining room, where lunch was served, followed by more drinks, more talk, more cigars. Then, finally, there were the horse races. The first few held my attention; after that I occupied myself by trying to make sense of the talk I’d heard, about odds, and different kinds of bets and payments, and something sinister called a ‘dead heat.’

By the time we got home, I had had enough of my father’s world. My mother, I thought, would be resting in her rooms, as she usually did in the late afternoon. I wanted to tell her about the new things I had seen and heard, but even more I wanted simply to be with her.

She wasn’t there. Her rooms were peaceful as always, everything in its place, except in her bedroom, one drawer of the dresser was a little open, a blue silk scarf trailing from it. I stood and looked at it, as the light through the window grew golden with the ending of the day. Hearing steps behind me, I turned around, relieved, expecting to see her. But it was only Fanny, flustered and annoyed. “Oh it’s you, Master Herbert.”

“Where’s Mother?” I asked.

“She had to go away. I don’t know any more about it. You’d best ask your father.”

I did not want to ask him, but when she hadn’t returned by lamplighting time I couldn’t think what else to do. He was in his office and looked up impatiently when I came over to his desk. “Father, has Mother gone away?” I asked. “When is she coming back?”

He didn’t answer but stared straight in front of him for a moment. Then he said, “It seems she has. And I guess she’ll be back when she’s ready to come back. It depends.”

“Depends on what?” I persisted. “What does it depend on?”

“Things you wouldn’t understand. Go away now, I’m busy.”

I nearly went, but he hadn’t reassured me. Halfway to the door, I turned around. “Are you sure she’ll be back?”

“I’m sure,” he said, not looking up. Even now, after everything that has passed since then, there are moments when I still hate him for that lie.

Of course she never came back. I did not know what had happened to her, and did not see her again for twenty-five years, by which time it was too late.