Winter Birds (11 page)

But it is November, I remind myself now, and a quarter of a century has passed since the night in Eliot’s study. I look at the telephone on the small table beside my bed. I have used it one time since my arrival to call the automated bank service, to verify that my money was transferred successfully from the bank in Kentucky to the one here in Greenville, Mississippi. I look at the wall beside the doorway into Rachel’s kitchen, and I see the electric clock made to resemble the face of the sun, with yellow plastic spikes representing rays around the circumference. The cord, half of it concealed by a straight-back chair, snakes down the wall to the outlet. The numbers and sturdy black hands of the clock are large and easily seen from every vantage within my apartment. At any time during the day I can lift my eyes to see how many minutes have passed since I last checked. I notice that Rachel has already reset the sun clock, which was disabled during the rewiring project.

I look over at the smaller windup clock beside the telephone by my bed. This is the clock I can see when I turn the lights out at bedtime. Its numbers and hands glow pale green in the dark, and I have grown accustomed to its loud tick-tock throughout the night. Sometimes when I wake from a troubling dream, I hear it and am calmed. I am still here, I tell myself. I recall a puppy we had in my childhood that howled and whimpered through the first two nights. Someone told us to put a clock in his doghouse to simulate the heartbeat of his mother. We did it, and on the third night the puppy was quiet. I think of how easily duped living things are.

I see my silver hairbrush on the dresser and a small photograph of my parents in a pewter frame. These things—the windup clock, the hairbrush, and the photograph—are my own, yet like the other things, they stir nothing within me. They are only things.

There is a blue clothes hamper beside the bathroom door, into which I deposit anything I want Rachel to wash for me. A white plastic wastebasket sits on the floor next to it. More than once I have had to pause and look at what is in my hand: Into which receptacle do I want to drop it? Once I accidentally threw two pieces of unopened junk mail into the clothes hamper. I left them there, and Rachel removed them later. Another trash can sits beside my recliner, and yet another sits beside the nightstand. A fourth is stationed under the sink in my bathroom. There is no need for so many trash cans. I don’t know what Patrick and Rachel were expecting from me. All four are checked and emptied regularly.

So I am in an apartment with four trash cans and four tables, I tell myself, not in Eliot’s study in Kentucky. I am at my nephew’s house on Edison Street in Greenville, Mississippi. Patrick will soon be home from the Main Office. He will have supper of some kind in a sack. Rachel is across the street. Perhaps she is helping Teri “in a pinch” again. She will be home soon, also, and will take my supper from the sack, arrange it on a plate, and bring it to me on a tray. Maybe she will bring me ice cream later for dessert.

The television is still on. Lou Grant is in the newsroom giving Ted Baxter a dressing down for some violation of good sense, and Georgette is in the background looking sympathetic. Murray and Mary are at their desks, heads lowered, trying to act busy. This was one of the few programs I used to watch regularly some thirty years ago. I liked the fact that Mary, Rhoda, Georgette, and Sue Ann, though they all seemed to have a high regard for marriage, nevertheless led happy, interesting lives in different ways as single women.

Since I was married by then, I could afford to admire their pluck in the adversities of singleness. Had I still been single, I might not have enjoyed the program so much, perhaps would have resented the attempts to depict the single life as a series of funny misadventures. For though I had not been struck with the blessedness of the married state in my sisters’ and parents’ lives, I had always harbored the dream that it could be so. I was not unhappy as a single woman, but feeling that I was missing out on something important, neither can I say I was especially happy. One’s marital status is not relative, though in many ways happiness is.

Too much knowledge is not a good thing. I have seen people ruined in various ways by knowing more than they need to. My five minutes of knowledge knocked away the foundation on which I stood. I could have remained steady, I believe, had I not discovered Eliot’s secret. I could have borne the shooting, the hospitalization, the death and funeral, Alonso’s trial, and all the adjustments that accompanied the sudden change from wife to widow. I was used to working hard. I would have set my face to the rising sun every morning and gone about the task of survival. I would have valiantly forged ahead as the Widow Hess, dispatching my duties and asking for no special favors. If there had been no pictures to find, I would likely have remained in Eliot’s house, would have continued to teach freshman composition at South Wesleyan, would have maintained my contacts with Eliot’s acquaintances.

But the ground had fallen away from my feet. The thirteen years of our marriage disappeared in a puff of smoke, as a magician’s trick. I knew in an instant that it had been a sham. Perhaps someone would argue with me, would say Eliot’s flaw was a sickness that had no bearing on his love for me. I would argue back. His flaw was a sickness, certainly, one that engulfed his whole heart and soul and mind, one that left no room for love. Only for the briefest second was I tempted to invent some other explanation for the pictures in his desk, to deny his behavior, to rationalize the denial by remembering how timid and uncertain he seemed to be during lovemaking, how lacking in imagination. Surely this same man couldn’t enslave himself to such baseness.

But the truth settled upon me as a sure thing. Eliot had no idea how to love a real woman. He had forfeited reality for warped fantasies. His pictures had had the same effect as an addiction to mind-altering drugs. Was I merely being prudish? I wrestled with the question. But then the pictures would rise again, and again I knew that no one with a soul could love such things.

For a man like this, a thing so dull and mundane as a wife could hold no pleasure. For thirteen years I had competed with a mistress of unparalleled power, one whom I didn’t even know. But I was no rival against the seduction of twelve folders in a desk drawer. I wondered for the flash of a moment if he had shut himself away from his first wife the same way, by retreating to his private collection, and then the thought vanished as quickly as it had come. What did it matter when the perversion had begun or who else had suffered from it? It had emptied my heart. I had no strength to care.

Since the day of Mrs. Beadle’s declaration that I was an ugly child, I had lived with the knowledge that I had no power to attract in a physical sense. Short and homely, with no compensating grace of movement or admirable talent, I became stout as the years drew on. Throughout my school years, however, I was not without friends. I had three dates in high school, all arranged by my sisters. If not as pretty, at least I was as smart as my sisters, though mine was a quieter kind of intelligence, one that seldom gained notice. I used to have a sense of humor and a quick eye for detail. In school I could sit in the back of a classroom and provide diversion for those around me by means of clever comments, whispered or written on slips of paper. The teacher would move other students to the front of the class in an effort to quell the undercurrent of mischief in the back, never suspecting I was the cause.

After high school I attended a teachers’ college in Mississippi. It was serious business for me, my father having announced that I would take over my mother’s work at the boardinghouse if I did not succeed in college. He led me to believe that college was a much more challenging proposition than high school had been.

Daddy had plans to use my mother in his printing business. Regina had already escaped from home by marriage, and Virginia had launched a plan whereby she acted deliberately clumsy and incompetent in our father’s presence, having no intention, she told me, of “being a drudge for a bunch of transigent boarders the rest of my life.” I knew she meant
transient
instead of
transigent
. Though smart, Virginia often misused words. She endured countless scoldings for spilled food, botched cleaning tasks, and broken dishes, as she systematically shaped our father’s opinion of her as “useless around the house.”

Mother may have suspected Virginia’s ruse, but she never let on. I believe she preferred staying in her familiar world, at the helm of the boardinghouse, rather than serving under Daddy at the printing shop. When he was at home, Daddy operated according to the “king of the castle” philosophy popular in that day. No doubt Mother looked forward to the mornings, when the king left his castle for nine or ten hours and gave her some peace.

I succeeded in college, as my father no doubt knew I would, secured a teaching position immediately upon graduation, and thereby escaped the boardinghouse. I took my teaching as seriously as I had taken my college studies and was good with children of all ages. As the years wore on and no prince presented himself, I frequently reminded myself of the benefits of a woman’s running her own castle, citing the many disappointments I had witnessed among the marriages of others. Still, a woman hopes. When I moved from Mississippi to Kentucky in 1965, I took a job that summer in one of the offices on the campus of South Wesleyan. I had started a fund for a special trip I was planning in honor of my fortieth birthday the following July. If I was to be a single woman, I meant to be as happy a single woman as possible.

At some point during the summer of 1965, I saw an advertisement on a bulletin board in the Academic Records Building requesting the services of a typist for “several scholarly papers of considerable length.” The card was handwritten, neatly printed in all capital letters, with the name Dr. Eliot Hess and a phone number at the bottom. This is how I met Eliot. The “several scholarly papers” were reworkings of both his master’s thesis and his doctoral dissertation, as well as three new articles for academic journals.

I believe I am correct in stating that Eliot’s brand of perfectionism was unusual even in academia. He never considered a paper truly finished. Even after multiple revisions, even after publication, even after a degree was conferred on the basis of a paper, even after presentation at a conference, he continued to tinker with every moving part within it, striving for a flawless machine, a product he never achieved, judging from the repeated modifications. I doubt that anyone other than Eliot has ever continued to revise his doctoral dissertation for years after successfully defending it, simply to make it better.

This was my husband. After Eliot married me, I allowed myself for thirteen years to believe that he saw in me a kind of beauty that surpassed shallow commercial standards. As a gentleman and scholar of the highest caliber, he was one of the few men, I thought, who could recognize true beauty when he saw it, the kind of beauty that doesn’t fade with time. How he must pity men with pretty-faced wives, I told myself, for when they lost their prettiness, what was left?

He used to smile at my gentle parodies of our colleagues in the English Department. On the way home from receptions or dinners, I would repeat to him various remarks I had overheard during the course of the evening, complete with mannerisms and inflections, and have him identify the speaker. It was easy work for both of us, for I possessed the gift of mimicry. These were private performances, however. I would never have agreed to repeat them in public if, say, Eliot had pressed me to do so for entertainment at some department function. In the English Department at South Wesleyan, I was the intellectual runt of the litter, and I knew it. I sat, observed, and listened but seldom participated in a discussion, fearful lest someone should say, “What does she know? She used to teach elementary school!”

I fashioned a romance for my life with Eliot: I imagined that he looked at me and saw a rare woodland flower, one that bloomed in deep shade and could be discovered only by someone with patience and keen vision. I imagined that he looked into my soul and saw a shining jewel, that whenever he withdrew from me, it was the steady glow of my jewel-like soul that always brought him back.

At the age of fifty-five this romance was shattered. I knew the truth now. Eliot had looked at me and seen someone who would make his life easier. He had tolerated my presence because of the work I did for him. I was not a rare woodland flower. I was a common weed, rooted up and thrown aside. I was merely ground cover that filled up space and provided a little greenery in his life. I was field vegetation—cowbane, milkweed, henbit, burdock, thistle, ragweed. I was not a shining jewel. I was a piece of gravel, a clod of dirt, a crooked stick.

He had not loved me. He had looked at impurity for too long. He had locked himself in a room of white noise, had turned up the volume so loud that he could no longer hear music. He had so feasted on abominations that he could not taste wholesome food. A man cannot keep company with twelve folders such as the ones in his drawer and love the good and simple things of life.

Until now I had thought myself to be an adequate judge of character. I had not known that a man could construct such secret and impenetrable compartments within his soul. There are certain birds that conceal themselves in thickets to gorge on grubs. One night many years ago I learned in an instant that there are such men, also.

And here is what the knowledge did to me. Do not speak to me of one’s choosing his own responses, of taking the moral high road regardless of provocation, of one’s character only being revealed by hardship, not shaped by it. Here is what happened to me in five minutes that night in Eliot’s study. I had laughed easily before that time, had sometimes cried, though not often. From that time on I saw little to laugh or cry about. When one suffers a violent blow, he is often stunned past feeling. In the face of unbearable pain, one may go into shock and lose consciousness. These things can happen to the mind as well as to the body.