“Mother’s upset because Elizabeth is leaving,” Matthew said, trying to draw him into the family.
“Gee, that’s too bad. Who’s Elizabeth?” “Elizabeth. The handyman.”
“Oh. I guess she must think we’re a bunch of kooks after all that’s happened.”
“No, she—”
“Is that Elizabeth? I thought her name was Alvareen.”
“No — what? Whose name? Oh, never mind.”
Matthew left, bypassing the living room. He was tired of talk. He went out through the sunporch, a quiet place lit with diagonals of dusty orange light. Alvareen stood ironing a table cloth while tears rolled down her cheeks. (She had shown up two days in a row, on time, impressed by tragedy.) Margaret was curled on the windowseat reading a book and chewing on tight little cylinders that she had made from the page corners. Neither of them looked up as he passed.
“Elizabeth,” he said, standing under the poplar tree.
“Here I am.”
She sat on a branch above the one she had just cut off, leaning sideways against the trunk.
“Shall I help you down?”
“I like it here.”
“I’m going home now. I’m not coming back until the funeral.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Could you come down? I’d like to talk some things over with you.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, would you rather I stayed here? What do you want to do?”
“I want to sit in this poplar tree,” Elizabeth said.
He nodded, and stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets. Then he left.
Matthew’s house was out in the country, part of a rundown old farm that his father had somehow come into possession of. His family called it a shack, but it was more than that. It was a tiny two-story house, the front a peeling white, the other three sides unpainted and as gray as the rick-rack fence that separated it from the woods behind. To get there he had to leave the highway and drive down a rutted road that rattled the bones of his old car. At the end of the road he parked and walked through new, leafy woods up to the front yard, which was a floor of packed earth. A rotting tire hung from an apple tree. A Studebaker rusted on concrete blocks out back. His mother had come here only once and, “Oh, Matthew,” she had said, looking at the porch with its buckling slat railings, “I can’t go in there. It would make me too sad.” But she had, of course. She had perched uneasily on a squat rocking chair and accepted Oreos and lemonade. Her hair and the glass lemonade pitcher had been two discs of gold beneath the high smoked ceilings. Then forever after that she begged him to find some place nicer. “I’ll pay for it myself, don’t think about the money,” she said. “I’ll fix it up for you. I’ll shop for what it needs.” When he refused she settled for buying what she called “touches”—an Indian rug, homespun curtains, cushions from Peru. She comforted herself by imagining that the house was meant to be Bohemian, one of those places with pottery on the windowsills and serapes draped over the chairs. Matthew didn’t mind. He had chosen to live here because it was comfortable and made no demands on him, and all the cushions in Peru couldn’t change that. His father had been happy to give his permission. (He liked to see every last thing put to use.) Then at his death he had willed Matthew the house outright. The others got money; Matthew got the house, which was what he really wanted.
He walked through the front room, where each board creaked separately beneath his feet. He went into the kitchen and took a roll of liverwurst from the yellowed refrigerator. Leaning against the sink, paring off slices with a rusty knife, he ate liverwurst until he stopped feeling hungry and then put it away again. That was his supper. There was a table, of course, and two chairs, and a whole set of dishes in the cupboard (his mother’s gift, brown earthenware), but he rarely used them. Most meals he ate standing at the stove, spooning large mouthfuls directly from the pot to save dishwashing. Once when Elizabeth came for supper he had started to do that — dipped a fork absentmindedly into the stew pot, before he caught himself — and all Elizabeth did was reach for the potato skillet and find herself another fork. Halfway through the meal they traded pans. If he narrowed his eyes he could see her still, slouched against a counter munching happily and cradling the skillet in a frayed old undershirt that he used for a pot-holder.
Then sometimes, when living alone depressed him, he set the table meticulously with knife, fork and spoon and a folded napkin, plate and salad plate, salt and pepper shakers. He served into serving dishes, and from them to his plate, as if he were two people performing two separate tasks. He settled himself in his chair and smoothed the napkin across his knees; then he sat motionless, forgetting the canned hash and olive-drab beans that steamed before him, stunned by the dismalness of this elaborate table set for one. What was he doing here, twenty-eight years old and all alone? Why was he living like an elderly widower in this house without children, set in his ways, pottering from stove to table to sink? The carefully positioned salad plate and the salt and pepper shakers, side by side in their handwoven basket, looked strained and pathetic. He went back to eating at the stove, with salt from a Morton’s box and pepper from an Ann Page pepper tin.
In the living room he picked up old Newsweeks and placed them in a wooden rack. He straightened a rug. He aligned the corners of the slipcover on the daybed. Then, since it was growing dark, he lit a table lamp and sat down with that morning’s paper. Words jerked before his vision in scattered clusters. He felt like a man in a waiting room before a dreaded appointment, reading sentences that skipped along heartlessly in spite of the sick feeling in his stomach. He raised his eyes and looked at the walls instead — tongue-and-groove, shiny green, with an oval photograph of someone long dead leaning over the fireplace. The fireplace itself was black and cold, in spite of the chill in the air. A brown oil burner fed its pipe into one side of the chimney, and clanked periodically as if its metal were still contracting after all the winter months it had tried to heat this room.
“Aren’t you freezing?” his mother had asked. And Elizabeth had said, “You want to go hunt firewood?” His father, rocking in that chair with a glass of warm bourbon, had said, “When I was a boy, rooms were always this cold. We were healthier, too.” His father had come visiting often, mumbling something about business carrying him in this direction. He had supplied the bourbon himself, and occasionally fresh vegetables or a slab of bacon — country things, which he had purchased in the city to bring out here. He liked to have the fire lit. He liked to rock in silence for hours. “Now, this is the way to live,” he said. “At heart, I’m a simple man,” but there had been nothing simple about him. Every quality he had was struggling with another its exact opposite. If he rocked so contentedly here, in the city he was a whirlwind. Always selling, pushing, buying, bargaining, sometimes bending the law. “Remember this,” he kept telling his children. “If you want to rise in the world, smile with your eyes. Not just your mouth. It gets them every time.” His children cringed. Momentarily, they hated him. (Yet every one of them, blond and dark both, had his pure blue eyes that curled like cashew nuts whenever they smiled.) He mourned for weeks when Mary refused to be a debutante, and he joined the country club on his own and played golf every Sunday although he hated it. “What do I go there for?” he asked. “What do I want with those snobs?” He was made up of layers you could peel off like onion skins, each of them equally present and real. The innermost layer (garage mechanic’s son, dreaming of a purple Cadillac) could pop up at any time: when he watched TV in his undershirt, when he said “like I said” and “between you and I,” when he brought home an old tire to whitewash and plant with geraniums. “Oh, Billy,” his wife said of the tire, “people just don’t — oh, how can I explain it?” He was hurt, which made him brisker and more businesslike, and he stayed late at the office for weeks at a time. Then he bought her a ruby ring too big to wear under gloves. Then he took all his sons hunting although none of them could shoot. “I like the natural life,” he told them. “I’m a simple man, at heart.”