She says a foolish thing.
“Are the quilts taken down off the windows? “
He doesn’t seem to know for a minute what she is talking about. Then he says, “The quilts. Yes. I think it was Olive took them down. In there was where we had the funeral.”
“I was only thinking. The sun would fade them.”
He opens the door and she comes around the table and they stand looking into the room. He says, “You can go in if you like. It’s all right. Come in.”
The bed is gone, of course. The furniture is pushed back against the walls. The middle of the room, where they would have set up the chairs for the funeral, is bare. So is the space in between the north windows-that must have been where they put the coffin. The table where Enid was used to setting the basin, and laying out cloths, cotton wool, spoons, medicine, is jammed into a corner and has a bouquet of delphiniums sitting on it. The tall windows still hold plenty of daylight.
“Lies” is the word that Enid can hear now, out of all the words that Mrs. Quinn said in that room. Lies. I bet it’s all lies.
Could a person make up something so detailed and diabolical? The answer is yes. A sick person’s mind, a dying person’s mind, could fill up with all kinds of trash and organize that trash in a most convincing way. Enid’s own mind, when she was asleep in this room, had filled up with the most disgusting inventions, with filth. Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person’s mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness. You can never say, “Nobody could make that up. Look how elaborate dreams are, layer over layer in them, so that the part you can remember and put into words is just the bit you can scratch off the top.”
When Enid was four or five years old she had told her mother that she had gone into her father’s office and that she had seen him sitting behind his desk with a woman on his knee. All she could remember about this woman, then and now, was that she wore a hat with a great many flowers on it and a veil (a hat quite out of fashion even at that time), and that her blouse or dress was unbuttoned and there was one bare breast sticking out, the tip of it disappearing into Enid’s father’s mouth. She had told her mother about this in perfect certainty that she had seen it. She said, “One of her fronts was stuck in Daddy’s mouth.” She did not know the word for breasts, though she did know they came in pairs.
Her mother said, “Now, Enid. What are you talking about? What on earth is a front?”
“Like an ice-cream cone,” Enid said.
And she saw it that way, exactly. She could see it that way still. The biscuit-colored cone with its mound of vanilla ice cream squashed against the woman’s chest and the wrong end sticking into her father’s mouth.
Her mother then did a very unexpected thing. She undid her own dress and took out a dull-skinned object that flopped over her hand. “Like this?” she said.
Enid said no. “An ice-cream cone,” she said.
“Then that was a dream,” her mother said. “Dreams are sometimes downright silly. Don’t tell Daddy about it. It’s too silly.”
Enid did not believe her mother right away, but in a year or so she saw that such an explanation had to be right, because icecream cones did not ever arrange themselves in that way on ladies’ chests and they were never so big. When she was older still she realized that the hat must have come from some picture.
Lies.
She hadn’t asked him yet, she hadn’t spoken. Nothing yet committed her to asking. It was still before. Mr. Willens had still driven himself into Jutland Pond, on purpose or by accident. Everybody still believed that, and as far as Rupert was concerned Enid believed it, too. And as long as that was so, this room and this house and her life held a different possibility, an entirely different possibility from the one she had been living with (or glorying in-however you wanted to put it) for the last few days. The different possibility was coming closer to her, and all she needed to do was to keep quiet and let it come. Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what benefits could bloom. For others, and for herself.
This was what most people knew. A simple thing that it had taken her so long to understand. This was how to keep the world habitable.
She had started to weep. Not with grief but with an onslaught of relief that she had not known she was looking for. Now she looked into Rupert’s face and saw that his eyes were bloodshot and the skin around them puckered and dried out, as if he had been weeping, too.
He said, “She wasn’t lucky in her life.”
Enid excused herself and went to get her handkerchief, which was in her purse on the table. She was embarrassed now that she had dressed herself up in readiness for such a melodramatic fate.
“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” she said. “I can’t walk down to the river in these shoes.”
Rupert shut the door of the front room.
“If you want to go we can still go,” he said. “There ought to be a pair of rubber boots would fit you somewhere.”
Not hers, Enid hoped. No. Hers would be too small.
Rupert opened a bin in the woodshed, just outside the kitchen door. Enid had never looked into that bin. She had thought it contained firewood, which she had certainly had no need of that summer. Rupert lifted out several single rubber boots and even snow boots, trying to find a pair.
“These look like they might do,” he said. “They maybe were Mother’s. Or even mine before my feet got full size.”
He pulled out something that looked like a piece of a tent, then, by a broken strap, an old school satchel.
“Forgot all the stuff that was in here,” he said, letting these things fall back and throwing the unusable boots on top of them. He dropped the lid and gave a private, grieved, and formal-sounding sigh.
A house like this, lived in by one family for so long a time, and neglected for the past several years, would have plenty of bins, drawers, shelves, suitcases, trunks, crawl spaces full of things that it would be up to Enid to sort out, saving and labelling some, restoring some to use, sending others by the boxload to the dump. When she got that chance she wouldn’t balk at it. She would make this house into a place that had no secrets from her and where all order was as she had decreed.
He set the boots down in front of her while she was bent over unbuckling her shoes. She smelled under the whiskey the bitter breath that came after a sleepless night and a long harsh day; she smelled the deeply sweat-soaked skin of a hardworked man that no washing-at least the washing he did-could get quite fresh. No bodily smell-even the smell of semen-was unfamiliar to her, but there was something new and invasive about the smell of a body so distinctly not in her power or under her care.
That was welcome.
“See can you walk,” he said.
She could walk. She walked in front of him to the gate. He bent over her shoulder to swing it open for her. She waited while he bolted it, then stood aside to let him walk ahead, because he had brought a little hatchet from the woodshed, to clear their path.
“The cows were supposed to keep the growth down,” he said. “But there’s things cows won’t eat.”
She said, “I was only down here once. Early in the morning.” The desperation of her frame of mind then had to seem childish to her now.
Rupert went along chopping at the big fleshy thistles. The sun cast a level, dusty light on the bulk of the trees ahead. The air was clear in some places, then suddenly you would enter a cloud of tiny bugs. Bugs no bigger than specks of dust that were constantly in motion yet kept themselves together in the shape of a pillar or a cloud. How did they manage to do that? And how did they choose one spot over another to do it in? It must have something to do with feeding. But they never seemed to be still enough to feed.