Four Souls

TEN. If She Will Have Me Now Polly Elizabeth

I FOUND THAT I liked living by my own laws, not Miss Hammond’s, and by my own law’s devising I saw at last that I should step out of place and speak to Mauser about the state that his household had fallen into since the birth of his son. With Testor in charge and Fleur indifferent to overseeing expenditures, what appeared at table was but a fraction of what was cooked and consumed. The monthly butcher’s bill was what one might expect for an outgoing steamship — to stock it for a transatlantic crossing. Veal chops might appear at dinner, perfectly cooked, but the rest of the calf from ear to split hoof was devoured by Testor’s family and by friends of the family and by the whole neighborhood, I wouldn’t be surprised. I hated to turn tattle on the woman, but after all, I had given her fair warning where my loyalties lay.

So that was how I made myself essentials again, even as the boy grew past the bounds of my care. It happened suddenly, with a bewildering rush, in fact. He seemed to enlarge by the hour, by the day. He burst from his clothes and could not fit into our laps. Sly hungers developed in him. I had to lock the cabinet where our new cook kept the sugar and all sweets, yet one night he pried into it with a butcher knife. He’d pour the contents of a sugar bowl straight down his throat. Weep wretchedly on those rare times he was denied. He began to frighten me. He was as big as some boy twice his age. Then suddenly he stopped growing upward and grew outward, became very plump. It was all we could do to contain him, and then we couldn’t contain him. Where before he had run the household on the whim of his charms, now he ran it by the strange dictates of his temperament.

Some days, I woke to the sound I began to dread, a rhythmical creak. A certain floorboard gave persistently in the corner of his bedroom where he liked to rock, sitting on the floor, his fist in his mouth. He stared at nothing then. He wouldn’t know me when I came in or be stopped or soothed out of his gross repetition by any means. Even Fleur couldn’t pull him from his trance, not that she tried. In fact, at those times, she would sit with him. Simply sit. At first I thought it a mistake — she would encourage his vacancies. But upon observing them both I revised my opinion. For I believe by the rapt expression on her face and the lightest movement of her lips and the far focus of her eyes that she was praying.

THE BOY ’S CONDITION was diagnosed by Dr. Fulmer, at last, as the result of the father’s spermatozoal frustration too hastily released. The doctor himself had cautioned Mauser that he should forbear from procreative attempts for at least a year, and that he should cleanse his system by a regimen of sexual emissions and releases that would come to no fruition, or human result. Fulmer pronounced the boy a tragical mistake, the effect of an aberrant spermatozoa deformed by the long practice of Karezza. There it was again! The vile practice! How I wept to find that by a twisted path my own reading and advice was the source of such pain in the outcome. Were we to know, to anticipate, how grave an implication might arrive from the slightest of our actions, I suppose we would not act at all. Still, what occurred seems unholy, ungodly, and the fact that I saw it develop as a retribution upon the meekness of a child, a small boy quickly growing, hopelessly, oh, monstrous, took away my faith. I simply don’t have it anymore. Mauser ran to the church to beg forgiveness. Fleur prayed to what god or spirit she knew. But I rejected any deity who would so construct nature to fail. In fact, I cried shame. Shame on God! And I was not afraid to say it.

When the boy spun in circles for hours at a time. When his speech came out sideways. When his rage for sweet things overwhelmed us and especially at those times he went utterly tranced, void, blank, I made a calm promise to the deity that I should slap Him should we ever meet.

“So You’d best send me to the devil,” I said at night, instead of uttering my usual prayer, “for I’ll take You to task if You admit me to heaven. I’ll try my very best to exact an explanation. I’d like one. I won’t stop asking. Why did You do this? Why did You do this to a child?”

REINSTATED WITH the household, I had moved in my little Diablo, the Pomeranian who treated me with such contempt. Now I decided that I should train it to revise its attitude toward me and tried to withhold food, but that was impossible. The beast would starve before it would show affection. And I always thought dogs were incapable of turning face against one. So much for “merely” canine affection! I might have believed that I was too arduous a person to love, except that the boy had shown me different. He had changed my expectation and unlike Mauser I not only craved but understood that some return on my feelings should be mine.

That I was not so blighted a creature as I’d begun to accept was seconded, though not in so many words, by Fleur. Oh, many times it was obvious she had been drinking. She now tried to hide her consumption, but, to one who does not imbibe, the undertone of spirits is unmistakable. No matter how much Fleur gargled with orange flower water, I could tell. She put her arms around me, sometimes just to guide her faltering step. But other times she embraced me with true emotion, often when she witnessed how much I loved her child. She had a heart, no matter how she tried to hide it from her husband, a heart that stood both fast and passionate when it came to defending those she loved. I found out. There was an incident.

We took the boy by streetcar to the lake one afternoon. It was an adventure. We’d thrown off Fantan’s guardianship and struck off on our own with an umbrella and a basket of food and drink. I knew, of course, there would be a flask of whiskey underneath the folded napkins. But I ignored my uneasy regret. My cure was a curse. I understood that. I tried to reason with her often, but today I decided to turn a blind eye. Anyway, what happened occurred before she’d even sipped a drop.

We’d walked out on the long dock to catch the fresh breeze, found a bench at the very end, and sat down there together to watch clouds. Fleur nicked her chin up into the sky. She pointed at things that way, with her face, her lips, the expression in her eyes. She never used her hands or fingers.

“My mother’s name,” she said.

I didn’t understand.

“Anaquot. My mother’s name. One of her names.”

“Anaquot. It has a lovely sound. What does it mean?”

“Cloud.”

To the west, in blazing white billows, the clouds were massing. Over us the most perfect, rounded, pillow puff shapes were arranged in a warm blue sky. Our boy was standing at the rail at the dock’s end with his fishing pole, the hook baited with a bit of salt pork. At any moment, I was sure he’d catch a sunfish and I would shout for him, praise him high, and take the chance to gather him close. But the fish weren’t biting or they didn’t like salt pork. The sun struck our faces and arms. We grew lazy. We watched the clouds pass back and forth.

A man and woman came to the end of the dock and stood next to the boy looking out over the water. I saw them from the corner of my eye. Didn’t register. Then something drew me to stare at the man’s back and my heart crumpled like a mistaken drawing. I felt quite sick. It was the man who’d “done” the house of which Fleur was now mistress. It was the architect. I looked around wildly in a terror to escape, and met Fleur’s eyes. She frowned and gripped my arm, seeing that there was something very wrong, and just as I tried to gesture, to mouth the words, to indicate that I must hurry off or be discovered, he turned around. He and the woman — that is, the small, pretty, dark-haired, immaculately complexioned woman. Her figure was a graceful little arc. Her hair was cut in the latest fashion and she wore tiny webs of lace on her hands. She was the figure on top of a jewelry box.

“Why if it isn’t Miss Gheen,” he said, and then, just by the way my name was received by his companion, his sweetheart, his mistress I suppose, perhaps his fiancée, I knew the two of them had spoken of me together, before this moment.

“Ah, Miss Gheen!” The tiny woman glided up to me with the effortless movement of a dancer. Her face was all mocking curiosity. I understood at once that their conversation together had been at my expense, that I had been the butt of their fun together. Her hand was in his and I saw her squeeze it as if to say, Watch me bait her. Watch this!

“Miss Gheen, I’ve heard so very much about you,” she simpered.

I stammered, my face flushing wildly. I wished to jump right off the dock!

“I believe you have some… history… with my husband-tobe…”

Suddenly her coo turned to a gurgle. She leaned backward and went off balance, tiptoed for purchase, and swung her little parasol in an ungainly fashion as Fleur stepped neatly into place between us. Fleur had apprehended the situation, perhaps not the entire history of my shame — that I’d tried an awkward seduction would have been impossible for her to know — but somehow she caught the gist of what was happening. She knew to stand where she did, and then step forward. And forward. Without speaking.

“Who are you?” The small woman gave a little shriek, and spun away from Fleur with a flustered wave. I was emboldened.

“I would like to introduce you to Mrs. John James Mauser,” I said, from behind Fleur.

“Ah!” Weakly, the architect succumbed, cringed a little, and put out his hand with a smile he hoped would charm. He of course counted upon the good recommendations of those who held a mass of money, an unusual circumstance and soon to change, in fact, for John James Mauser. He wouldn’t risk offending the friend of the wife of a powerful client, and pulled his little trick away from the scene with a scrape of apologies.

Watching, I felt a heady triumph sneak through the center of me, rise like bubbles from the bottom of a champagne bottle, until I blurted out a laugh. Fleur turned to me, her face a comical copy of the woman’s sly and smug attempt to embarrass me. I was undone. We laughed together and then the boy, unknowing but only hearing us, joined in, raucous and funny all on his own. We couldn’t stop laughing as we opened our basket, as we spread our little repast on the bench. We kept laughing — not that we spoke of what had happened — it was all mime between us. My pretend twirl of the arrogant lace parasol made us hoot. Fleur reeled herself along the railings in a hilarious caricature. For me it was, somehow, a blessed afternoon. My self-pity about my failure in love was erased. The absurd triumphed. I had a true connection, something quite beyond the pale of words. If one accepts, I thought later, as we drowsily swayed home on the streetcar. If one only accepts what is given! There could be afternoons of laughter. There could even be happiness. If one only accepts!

PERHAPS my understanding came about at Fleur’s expense, for as I see it now, she was not happy. She was more trapped than in control, even with the position she had gained as Mauser’s wife. Between the two of them, laughter ceased. There was a humming tension, an electric shadow. It was not a thing I wished to investigate or understand, but I had no choice in it once I placed myself firmly in the household. I would know the truth of their marriage whether or not I wanted to. I thought of course that the pain John James Mauser admitted to about the boy, the anguish that drove him to Holy Mass, was the source of all that was wrong between them. I had no idea, for instance, that Fleur knew that Mauser had wronged and stolen and gained his fabulous position in the first place by obtaining false holdings in northern Minnesota. I didn’t think she knew he’d cut the last of the great pine forests there, thousands of acres, or that he’d left behind a world of stumps and then sold the land off cheap.

We had progressed to the point of speaking about it, Mauser and I, and I did tell him that I thought it a blessing that Fleur had no idea where his fortune had originated.

“Oh, but she does know,” he said. We were sitting together in his library one night, and he was brooding over a bottle of old brandy he’d fetched from the cellar. He had asked me to sit with him. I felt there was something he wanted to tell me and there would be some roundabout way of getting at it.

“Fleur knows?”

“I’m just one of an army of swindlers and scavengers,” he laughed shortly, giving me a long look underneath his eyebrows. “I’ve got the misfortune, perhaps, to have understood at last what I’ve done. She has let me know full well the misery I left behind. She has told me that she expects I’ll sell this house, that I’ll give her the automobile she covets, and our son. Our son! She tells me that she expects that I will restore her land and give her all of my money.”

I thought I’d heard what I’d heard, but I made him repeat the whole thing.

“Why, you can’t do that,” I said, oddly moved by her faith. I think I spoke somewhat wistfully, as though it was possible, after all, for a man like Mauser to go broke through the exercise of sheer moral principles.

“Of course not, but she doesn’t understand. Even if I did have the money, which I don’t anymore, I could hardly make restitution to a people who’ve become so depraved. I know the folly of those people up there now! The old type, the old warrior type, they are gone. Only the wastrels, the dregs of humanity left, only the poor toms have survived. Even she left. I point that out to her. The reservations are ruined spots and may as well be sold off and all trace of their former owners obliterated. That’s my theory. Let the Indians drift into the towns and cities or subsist where they will. Thinking their tribes will ever be restored is sheer foolishness. There’s nothing left!”

Mauser shook his head, and puffed away on his cigar to form a melancholy cloud that stopped above his head.

“I don’t think she wants to kill me anymore,” he said. “That’s one thing. She can’t. In some interior way — I cannot grasp it, I don’t even experience it — she has developed a form of love for me. I call it love, anyway, though I suspect it is more like pity. Kindness. Some honor in her that won’t permit my death at her hand. I meditate on this — it’s strange! I could feel her hatred of me change with the birth of the boy.”

“She hated you?” I said this in an aghast tone, but a split second later I was of course not surprised, thinking, yes, of course she hated you. She came here hating you. I see that now. Her dark figure on that white, white day. A cipher. A keyhole. I was the one who admitted her into this house. It was no accident. She found you because she wished to destroy you but then she started healing you and found that once she’d healed you she could not kill you. For who can destroy what one has put back together with such care? And then the boy — you after all are the father of her son. She loves him. Therefore, she can’t kill you. So she is trapped. I said this last sentence aloud. He did not acknowledge it, though I know he heard.

“Of course she hated me. She came here to skin me and had a very sharp knife to do it with. But the whiskey got her, as it does so many of her people. It will waste her in a few years. Already, she’s gotten careless. It won’t be long.”

“How can you speak in such a heartless fashion?” I was angry. “You profess to love her, and yet you will watch her be destroyed.”

“There is no helping her, don’t you see? The stuff is poison to them. It’s their downfall. They’d have beaten us back and kept their lands if it wasn’t for the liquor. They can’t help it. One taste, one teaspoon of it, and they’re utterly doomed.”

Now he forgot to smoke his sad cigar. Real feeling seized him. His eyes whelmed with felt tears and he looked at me with something like appeal.

“I almost wish she would kill me,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I cannot watch the wreck she will become. She’s caught me somehow.” He touched the breast of his jacket, softly, with the tips of his fingers. “It isn’t just her face, either, or the figure she cuts. It isn’t that I married her for notoriety, as some say, but only that I couldn’t bear not to have her near. God,” his voice went ragged. “I had to have her and I swear to you there was no other way. Only now do I understand that I had to get near something in her that I can’t know, some pure space, something that I went up north to have and only ended up destroying. It is the same with her,” he nearly wailed, and then I thought, oh, he feels sorry for himself. He regained control and spoke with a surface sincerity. “I am a greedy man. I have always been a greedy man and always wanted to live like this”—he waved his arm around the oak-paneled room—“and now I do, for the next few months anyway. After that, I think…”

“What,” I said, knowing this was where he’d wanted to lead me. “Tell me the worst!”

“I think it’s all gone. I think you must find yourself a new place to live. Go back to your sister.”

I took that in. The fire crackled in the hearth. I gestured to my glass and he poured out fingers of brandy for us both.

“Fleur is my sister, now,” I said. “I think I’ll cast my lot with her.”

Mauser looked at me in astonishment. His mouth actually dropped open. He gave a bark of laughter. “She’ll go back! She’ll go back there to live, I suppose! I have nothing. I plan to leave the country with all that I can pry from my bankers before the great rout, and she refuses to come with me.”

“She probably misses her family,” I said sharply to him, trying to fight off my appalled shock. The world, indeed, was breaking apart. I could function only by remaining dry and allowing my old vinegar into my voice.

“Her family?” Now he laughed a good deal longer. “She hasn’t any. She’s the last of them.”

“Well, she’s got me now,” I said, rising, rustling my skirt. I seemed to grow taller in my own skin. “If she’ll have me, she’s got Miss Gheen.”