First to come back from the dead was Grandmother DeLancey, all dressed in black and smelling of ginger. Handsome, intelligent, victorious, she had broken with the past, and the thrill of this had borne her along with the force of a wave through all the days of her life and, so far as one knew, had washed her up into the very gates of heaven. Her education, she said scornfully, had consisted of learning how to hem a pocket handkerchief and speak a little French, but she had left a world where it was improper for a lady to hold an opinion and come into one where she could express her opinions on a platform, pound the lectern with her fist, walk alone in the dark, and cheer (as she always did) the firemen when the red wagon came helling up the street. Her manner was firm and oracular, for she had traveled as far west as Cleveland lecturing on women’s rights. A lady could be anything! A doctor! A lawyer! An engineer! A lady could, like Aunt Louisa, smoke cigars.
Aunt Louisa was smoking a cigar as she flew in to join the gathering. The fringe of a Spanish shawl spread out behind her in the air, and her hoop earrings rocked as she made, as always, a forceful, a pressing entrance, touched the lowboy, and settled on the blue chair. She was an artist. She had studied in Rome. Crudeness, flamboyance, passion, and disaster attended her. She tackled all the big subjects—the Rape of the Sabines, and the Sack of Rome. Naked men and women thronged her huge canvases, but they were always out of drawing, the colors were dim, and even the clouds above her battlefields seemed despondent. Her failure was not revealed to her until it was too late. She poured her ambitions onto her oldest son, Timothy, who walked in sullenly from the grave, carrying a volume of the Beethoven sonatas, his face dark with rancor.
Timothy would be a great pianist. It was her decision. He was put through every suffering, deprivation, and humiliation known to a prodigy. It was a solitary and bitter life. He had his first recital when he was seven. He played with an orchestra when he was twelve. He went on tour the next year. He wore strange clothes, and used grease on his long curls, and killed himself when he was fifteen. His mother had pushed him pitilessly. And why should this passionate and dedicated woman have made such a mistake? She may have meant to heal or avenge a feeling that, through birth or misfortune, she had been kept out of the blessed company of contented men and women. She may have believed that fame would end all this—that if she were a famous painter or he a famous pianist, they would never again taste loneliness or know scorn.
Richard could not have kept Uncle Tom from joining them if he had wanted to. He was powerless. He had been too late in realizing that the fascination of the lowboy was the fascination of pain, and he had committed himself to it. Uncle Tom came in with the grace of an old athlete. He was the amorous one. No one had been able to keep track of his affairs. His girls changed weekly—they sometimes changed in midweek. There were tens, there were hundreds, there may have been thousands. He carried in his arms his youngest son, Peter, whose legs were in braces. Peter had been crippled just before his birth, when, during a quarrel between his parents, Uncle Tom pushed Aunt Louisa down the stairs.
Aunt Mildred came stiffly through the air, drew her blue skirt down over her knees as she settled herself, and looked uneasily at Grandmother. The old lady had passed on to Mildred her emancipation, as if it were a nation secured by treaties and compacts, flags and anthems. Mildred knew that passivity, needlepoint, and housework were not for her. To decline into a contented housewife would have meant handing over to the tyrant those territories that her mother had won for eternity with the sword. She knew well enough what it was that she must not do, but she had never decided what it was that she should do. She wrote pageants. She wrote verse. She worked for six years on a play about Christopher Columbus. Her husband, Uncle Sidney, pushed the perambulator and sometimes the carpet sweeper. She watched him angrily at his housework. He had usurped her rights, her usefulness. She took a lover and, going for the first three or four times to the hotel where they met, she felt that she had found herself. This was not one of the opportunities that her mother had held out to her, but it was better than Christopher Columbus. Furtive love was the contribution she was meant to make. The affair was sordid and came to a sordid end, with disclosures, anonymous letters, and bitter tears. Her lover absconded, and Uncle Sidney began to drink.
Uncle Sidney staggered back from the grave and sat down on the sofa beside Richard, stinking of liquor. He had been drunk ever since he discovered his wife’s folly. His face was swollen. His belly was so enlarged that it had burst a shirt button. His mind and his eyes were glazed. In his drunkenness he dropped a lighted cigarette onto the sofa, and the velvet began to smoke. Richard’s position seemed confined to observation. He could not speak or move. Then Uncle Sidney noticed the fire and poured the contents of his whiskey glass onto the upholstery. The whiskey and the sofa burst into flame. Grandmother, who was sitting on the old pegged Windsor chair, sprang to her feet, but the pegs caught her clothing and tore the seat of her dress. The dogs began to bark, and Peter, the young cripple, began to sing in a thin voice—obscenely sarcastic—“Joy to the world! the Lord is come. Let Heaven and nature sing,” for it was a Christmas dinner that Richard had reconstructed.
AT SOME POINT—perhaps when he purchased the silver pitcher—Richard committed himself to the horrors of the past, and his life, like so much else in nature, took the form of an arc. There must have been some felicity, some clearness in his feeling for Wilma, but once the lowboy took a commanding position in his house, he seemed driven back upon his wretched childhood. We went there for dinner—it must have been Thanksgiving. The lowboy stood in the dining room, on its carpet of mysterious symbols, and the silver pitcher was full of chrysanthemums. Richard spoke to his wife and children in a tone of vexation that I had forgotten. He quarreled with everyone; he even quarreled with my children. Oh, why is it that life is for some an exquisite privilege and others must pay for their seats at the play with a ransom of cholers, infections, and nightmares? We got away as soon as we could.
When we got home, I took the green glass epergne that belonged to Aunt Mildred off the sideboard and smashed it with a hammer. Then I dumped Grandmother’s sewing box into the ash can, burned a big hole in her lace tablecloth, and buried her pewter in the garden. Out they go—the Roman coins, the sea horse from Venice, and the Chinese fan. We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another. Down with the stuffed owl in the upstairs hall and the statue of Hermes on the newel post! Hock the ruby necklace, throw away the invitation to Buckingham Palace, jump up and down on the perfume atomizer from Murano and the Canton fish plates. Dismiss whatever molests us and challenges our purpose, sleeping or waking. Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.
The Music Teacher
IT ALL SEEMED to have been arranged—Seton sensed this when he opened the door of his house that evening and walked down the hall into the living room. It all seemed to have been set with as much care as, in an earlier period of his life, he had known girls to devote to the flowers, the candles, and the records for the phonograph. This scene was not arranged for his pleasure, nor was it arranged for anything so simple as reproach. “Hello,” he said loudly and cheerfully. Sobbing and moaning rent the air. In the middle of the small living room stood an ironing board. One of his shirts was draped over it, and his wife, Jessica, wiped away a tear as she ironed. Near the piano stood Jocelin, the baby. Jocelin was howling. Sitting in a chair near her little sister was Millicent, his oldest daughter, sobbing and holding in her hands the pieces of a broken doll. Phyllis, the middle child, was on her hands and knees, prying the stuffing out of an armchair with a beer-can opener. Clouds of smoke from what smelled like a burning leg of lamb drifted out of the open kitchen door into the living room.