When the dangerous turn of events forced him to look back over his files, Starr later remembered his first visit for this specific ailment of Madam Tuff man very clearly. She had received him in dark bombazine in her private upstairs living-room, which was freighted with shadow-boxed landscapes and tufted plush.
The afternoon had been a Wednesday, the 11th of September, and leaves were tending toward their first dark flush of autumn. Madam Tuffman had thought of Starr as a vigorous breath of the outdoor air as he crossed the stuffy room toward the large bay window where she sat; and she had caught his electric vitality as he joined her. She experienced, too, a tonic quality just from his bodily strength and homely features, and she regretted the necessity of withdrawing her fragile fingers from his comforting hand.
She said, “It’s nothing but twinges, Doctor,” and gestured tentatively toward several anatomical locations.
Starr smiled at her reassuringly and talked nonessentials while he took her blood-pressure and listened to her heart and gravely requested permission to examine her tongue.
All was as it should be for a woman of her age, which he knew to be seventy-four. He thought: “I wonder why she really sent for me, what she really wants?” He discussed her diet, or rather her total lack of any, and suggested that she cut down a little on wine: a dry Tokay she was partial to, having found its use less deleterious than water. She accepted the suggestion reservedly. He wrote out an innocuous prescription for the tweaks and began the courteous preliminaries of taking his leave; but he did not stand up, because he suddenly caught a sense of anxiety on her part for him to stay.
She said: “Have I told you that Ernest is home?”
“I had heard.”
“Then you know that he got married while in Hawaii? I like her: Bertha. She’s a little thing. Not anemic, but, well, not robust. She was born in Honolulu. Her parents were English, and ranched either pineapples or sugar.”
Madam Tuffman’s lively eyes grew veiled. She grimaced faintly and made a small deprecatory gesture; then she said: “My presence at the wedding was entirely by cable. I expected something exotic. I suppose you always do in connection with places like Hawaii. Not at all the sort of girl that Bertha really is. I prepared.”
“Prepared?”
“For the homecoming.” Madam Tuffman leaned forward and said: “I wanted to keep him here. To keep both of them here. I tried to arrange their room as a bridge, as a link.”
“Between the Islands and Ohio?”
“Yes, Doctor. After Edgar made his money, we did a little looting of Europe. That was a long time ago, before the turn of the century. It was a magpie rather than a grand tour. The attic is still cluttered with cases that have never been opened. I remembered certain things, and thought that they would fit.”
“For the room?”
“Yes. There were some good lacquer pieces, an excellent China rug, all very vivid in vermillions and heady tones. Then there was the paper for contrast.”
“Wallpaper?”
“A hand-blocked, lush design done by an artist in London’s Soho. I think he was mad. Both of them — Edgar to buy it, and the artist to make it in the first place. The design is a plethora of fantastic huge leaves of the most vivid green. I remember that the color glowed from a single candle lighted in the studio. The artist was especially proud of the fact that he had mixed the pigments himself.” Madam Tuffman grimaced again, adding: “So we unpacked the rolls from their case and put it up.”
“It was not a — success?”
She stared at Starr for a thoughtful moment.
“I don’t know. Bertha was very kind. She professed to be delighted. Well — I suppose it will require a certain amount of time for her to get acclimated. They’ve only been here a few weeks.”
“Then they have decided to stay?”
“I think yes. I hope yes. But I still find it somewhat unbelievable in Ernest, this sudden urge toward nesting. He resembles his Great-uncle Stuart. Both of them ran away from home at the age of sixteen. Stuart rolled on straight through his seventies, eventually dying of exhaustion at the Hotel Bruschini in Tamave, Madagascar. Well, Ernest is only thirty, and still — well, here he is.”
“Perhaps because he is married?”
“Yes, Madam Tuffman said, there might be an answer there. Great-uncle Stuart had shied at altars like a sensitive colt. But marriage, just as marriage, scarcely seemed ponderable enough as an anchor for such a rolling-stone as Ernest. She knew Ernest so very well. She loved him so much, perhaps because he was her youngest and, for his sins, the only one of her children who was left. She supposed that with time she would grow to love Bertha a good deal too. Her lively dark eyes fixed Starr sharply, and she said: ‘I feel no jealousy, Doctor. It isn’t that.’ ”
“I’m sure it isn’t, Mrs. Tuffman.”
“And it isn’t that Bertha doesn’t want to love me. I think she does. I think she is uncertain about something — about happiness. Will you meet her before you go?”
“I should like to very much.”
Madam Tuffman stood up.
“We will join them in the cellar.”
And Madam Tuffman explained, as they walked down waxed walnut stairs carpeted with an imperishable Turkey red, that Ernest was currently absorbed with photography, and was planning to open a studio in Laurel Falls and make it his life work.
Ernest had had, she went on, so many life works, starting as a boy with raising squabs, birds which had gradually been consumed by the family circle in ratio as his interest in the pursuit had waned. Chemistry, magic, portrait-painting, a bewildering and swift succession of interests that had culminated in a passion for the sea at sixteen, when he had run away and had shipped out of Boston on an Atlantic Fruit Company freighter for the West Indies. He had seemed to tire of his enthusiasms so quickly, which was why Madam Tuffman didn’t know about this one.
The darkroom occupied a portion of the large cellar usually reserved as a storage place for winter vegetables. Pale lemon light through a safety filter left it vague, as things are vague when you open your eyes while swimming under the sea. The faces of both of them were washed with the tint lightly, both bending over a tray. Starr had never met either, and Ernest Tuffman’s good looks and magnificent build registered immediately, distracting his attention from Bertha, whom Ernest’s appearance and the safety filter rendered wraithlike and ethereally obscure.
It was a strange meeting, strange beyond even its setting, and brief. Ernest was glad to be home, very satisfied at settling down with a wife, with a background, with a mother, and with an ancestral estate, at last. Starr sensed that all this gladness was implied by Ernest, rather than being baldly stated, as if it were a wish rather than a reality: a generally benign condition of affairs which Ernest hoped, very much, would come true.
In contrast, Bertha seemed impelled by a peculiar eagerness, a directness, to impress Starr and (through him) Madam Tuffman and Ernest as well. She was emphatic that she did not miss Hawaii at all, that this absolute uprooting of her life — her years couldn’t, Starr decided, have been more than twenty — and a subsequent transplanting several thousands of miles away with a continent and a vast space of Pacific Ocean in between, was entirely to her liking.
She touched with earnest graciousness on the link: the room which Madam Tuffman had so considerately arranged with its bright lacquers and hand-blocked wallpaper leaves so lush in their vivid green. The thoughtfulness of it. The consoling accuracy of its effect. A home away from home. To awake every morning and lie there absorbing that brilliant emerald paradise. Had Doctor Starr heard that an artist in London had conceived it ages ago? Doctor Starr had.