Leave Her to Heaven (22 page)

Ruth next day, thinking she might be helpful, went to see Ellen. For pretext, she turned first to the shopping district, and she arrived at the house on Chestnut Street with an armful of bundles. Harland was not there, but she found Ellen in the pantry painting one of the cupboards, while old Mrs. Huston who
had cooked for Harland's mother and still served him and Ellen now, looked on in severe disapproval.

Ellen welcomed Ruth with a smile. ‘Hello there! Get another brush and take a hand!'

‘I thought it was about time I brought some baby presents,' Ruth explained. ‘Whatever are you doing?'

‘Put them on the dining room table,' Ellen directed. ‘I can't touch anything now. I'm all daubed up with paint. This dark old pantry has always bothered me. Just thinking about it took my appetite. Enough white paint will make it look bright and clean.'

‘A painter would do a neater job,' Ruth said smilingly. ‘You've as much paint on the floor — and in your hair — as on the shelves.'

‘I got tired of doing nothing all day.'

‘Isn't that — painting, I mean — supposed to be bad for you?' Ruth suggested, and Mrs. Huston said triumphantly:

‘There, ma'am, haven't I been telling you so!'

Ellen laughed at them both. ‘Old wives' tales!' she declared. ‘Besides, I'm almost done!'

‘You'll be done altogether if you don't stop it,' Mrs. Huston cried.

‘Oh pooh!' Ellen said laughingly: ‘Go open your packages, Ruth, and show things to me while I finish this shelf.'

She was very gay, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed, her hair in a pretty disorder; and Ruth, deciding her own doubts were absurd, obeyed, displaying a pair of little blankets, a satin quilt, a collection of small knitted things. Ellen, splashing paint along the shelves, the gifts heedlessly approved. She finished her task, and made Mrs. Huston — vocal in protest at this new recklessness — pour a trickle of turpentine over her hands while she washed them. When she and Ruth were alone, Ruth said laughingly:

‘Mrs. Huston's like a hen with one chick over you, isn't she?'

Ellen smiled in agreement. ‘Richard says she's always loved taking care of sick people,' she explained. ‘If she had her way, she'd put me to bed and keep me there! I keep telling her I'm not
sick, that having babies is perfectly healthy; but she'd make an invalid of me if she could.'

‘You certainly don't look like an invalid!'

‘I'm not,' Ellen assured her. ‘I'm wonderfully well. I took a long walk last night, and it was just what I needed. I feel better today than I have for months!'

She had to see and to admire the presents all over again; and Ruth, watching her, listening to her quick, delighted laughter, decided that Richard's concern, though probably natural enough, was reasonless. Kissing Ellen good-bye she said happily: ‘I'm so darned glad I came. You're doing a grand job on this baby, Ellen. I know it's been hard for you, all winter, but the end's in sight now.'

Ellen nodded gaily. ‘Yes, only a month more,' she agreed. ‘Give Mother my love. Maybe Richard and I will walk up and see you this evening. Exercise seems to be good for me!' She was so jolly and so affectionate that Ruth went home completely reassured.

Harland and Ellen did appear that evening, and Mrs. Berent received them in her sitting room. Ellen's happier humor had infected Harland, so they were all merry together. Even Mrs. Berent's tongue lost its roughness, and when they were gone, she said:

‘Well there! Ellen was nicer tonight than I've ever seen her!'

Ruth nodded. ‘She acted like someone with a lovely secret she wasn't ready to tell. And of course Dick was happy too.'

‘She may settle down and make him a good wife after all,' Mrs. Berent reflected. ‘I guess I'm getting old and soft, Ruth. I've almost hated Ellen, ever since she was a girl. You're more like my own daughter than she is. But she was real sweet tonight.' Then, in her old harsh tone she added: ‘If she ever makes Richard unhappy, she — well, I hope she gets what she deserves.'

‘Men are so helplessly dependent, in so many ways,' Ruth reflected. ‘I suppose that's why so many wives are tyrants.' She laughed a little. ‘We women are natural bullies, aren't we?'

Mrs. Berent said in an unaccustomed, gentle tone: ‘You'd
never bully a man, my deaf.' She chuckled. ‘You're too ready to let me bully you!'

Ruth did not see Ellen again during the next two or three days. Then one morning while she was helping Mrs. Berent make ready to receive her breakfast tray, she was called to the telephone, heard Richard on the line.

‘Did I wake you, Ruth?'

‘Oh no, I've been up and dressed long ago.'

‘Can I come to breakfast?'

‘Of course.' Her breath caught, for his voice was hollow with pain. ‘What is it, Dick? Is anything wrong?'

‘Why — Ellen's lost her baby,' he said heavily. ‘She's all right, but she lost the baby.' Ruth for a moment could not speak, and he added: ‘I'm at the hospital, but she's asleep now. I'll get a taxi, come right along.'

Ellen was a month in the hospital, and at Ruth's suggestion, Harland during these weeks took many of his meals with them. That first morning when he reached the house she thought he was emptied, like a collapsed balloon, all the life gone out of him. He talked much, repeating the same things over and over as though seeking some comfort in empty words. Ellen, he said, had walked in her sleep during the night, had fallen downstairs. Her cry woke him, and he was quickly at her side. She insisted she was unhurt, but almost at once they knew harm had been done, and Harland summoned Doctor Patron, who took her to the hospital. The baby — a lusty boy — was dead.

Ruth and Mrs. Berent comforted Harland with empty commonplaces and persuaded him to lie down for a few minutes on the bed in Professor Berent's room. Ruth, full of maternal tenderness, went to show him the way. She made him remove his coat and tie, loosed and took off his shoes and covered him over.

He slept till noon. When he woke, Ruth thought he would go at once to the hospital, but he made no move. She proposed to
telephone Doctor Patron. He agreed, and she did so; but the doctor said Ellen was sleeping, under a sedative.

‘She's perfectly all right.' Ruth wondered why he spoke so curtly. ‘But she won't know any of you for a day or two.' He added: ‘Of course, Mr. Harland can see her.'

Ruth reported this to Harland, and he nodded in a dull way. ‘I'll go tomorrow,' he said. He had lunch with them, then went out, promising to return for dinner; but at dinner time a message was telephoned from the club that Mr. Harland would be unable to come.

Ruth was almost relieved, glad he would not see Mrs. Berent; for after his departure she had spoken of Ellen with a bitter anger which Ruth dared not understand. The older woman was so disturbed that Ruth wished to call Doctor Saunders, but the proposal roused Mrs. Berent's wrath again, so Ruth was glad when she fell fitfully asleep.

Harland appeared for lunch next day, tired and drawn. ‘I couldn't come last night,' he confessed. ‘I tried playing bridge, thought it might give me something to think about; and before I realized it, I'd had too many highballs. I slept at the club.'

Ruth nodded understandingly. ‘I don't wonder,' she said. ‘I hope it did you good.' Her concern for Mrs. Berent had kept her from too much thought of Ellen, and when Harland now asked how the older woman was, thinking that to distract him might serve in his case a like end, she confessed: ‘Why, she was pretty sick last night, and she's exhausted today.' She gave details, anxious to help him forget Ellen for a while; but she saw that he listened without attention, his thoughts still his own, his mouth set in grim lines. ‘I wish I could go with you to see Ellen,' she said at last. ‘But I can't — and it's you she'll want to see, anyway.'

‘I don't want to go,' he admitted; and when she looked at him in surprise he said evasively: ‘I hate hospitals, always did, even when Danny was at Warm Springs.' His voice caught and he hesitated, said grimly: ‘But I'll go, of course.'

During the weeks Ellen stayed in the hospital, Ruth was frightened
by the settled hopelessness in him, refusing to guess its cause. The loss of their baby must have been a heavy blow, but other men had suffered thus and still kept a high heart; and it was not like Harland to surrender so completely to despair. He breakfasted at home, and worked every morning. ‘Or at least I try to,' he told Ruth drily. ‘But I don't accomplish anything. I'm like a boy watching the clock, waiting for school to let out.' Every day he walked up the hill to lunch with her — Mrs. Berent, from the day Ellen lost her baby, never came downstairs, and Doctor Saunders was a regular caller now — and in the afternoon, if Ruth had an errand to do, Harland took her place at the older woman's bedside. Ruth sometimes came home to find him reading aloud while Mrs. Berent drowsed contentedly, or they might be talking quietly together. But always there was in Harland that profound, surrendering dejection, and she wished to challenge him back to bold strength again, but dared not, dreading his reply.

She often took advantage of these free hours when he stayed with Mrs. Berent to go to the hospital to see Ellen. She found the other frail and thin; but she saw too that Ellen was animated by some inner excitement. She talked a great deal, and was extravagantly gay. There was something desperate and frantic in this gaiety, as though Ellen threw out a screen of laughing words to ward off thoughts of which she was afraid.

She asked always for news of Harland; and Ruth was puzzled by this, since he now saw Ellen almost every day. But when she said so, Ellen exclaimed:

‘I know. He comes to see me, but he's just — visiting the sick! You know, the heavy smell of flowers and the funereal air!' She laughed in a brittle way. ‘When he's here, I feel like a corpse all laid out in her coffin. He's so persistently cheerful that it's worse than if he cried all the time!'

‘He doesn't like hospitals,' Ruth remembered. ‘But he'll be fine when you're able to go home.'

‘I know you're taking good care of him. He tells me every day how wonderful you are.'

‘Yes, he has lunch and dinner with me every day.'

‘With you and Mother?'

‘Mother's not coming downstairs much,' Ruth explained, keeping her tone as casual as possible so that Ellen need not be worried about Mrs. Berent. ‘He's with her now.' She smiled. ‘Mother always liked him, you know. She's perfectly happy for me to leave her, if he's there.'

‘Be nice to him,' Ellen urged. ‘Poor man! I've failed him completely, but I'll make it up to him by-and-by.'

Mrs. Berent, during this time while Ellen was still in the hospital, changed in a frightening way. She who had been so vocal now seldom spoke; and when she did, it was in a flat and spiritless tone. It was as though she withdrew behind a wall of silence; and Ruth sometimes thought her silence was like Ellen's vivacity, that each of them erected a protective barrier against something of which they were afraid.

She had her own forebodings, for it was clear that Mrs. Berent's strength was failing. When Ruth more and more often insisted upon summoning Doctor Saunders, the older woman now received him unprotestingly. After half an hour with her, on one of these visits, he said with hollow professional cheerfulness:

‘All you need is rest and plenty of it, Mrs. Berent. You'll be right as rain presently.'

Ruth thought that doctors were sometimes wrong to treat their patients like ignorant children, who could be soothed with fairy tales; and Mrs. Berent answered him with some of her old spirit. ‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Doctor! I know what's happening to me.' Then in a different tone she added: ‘It's all right. I've lived longer than I wish I had, already.' Ruth standing by, pressed her hand to her throat to quiet the beating of her heart there.

‘Pshaw!' he protested. ‘You'll live to bury the lot of us.'

‘Bury?' she echoed. ‘I thought cremation was the latest style!' Ruth knew she was thinking bitterly of Ellen's insistence at the time of Professor Berent's death. So often nowadays, when Mrs. Berent spoke of her daughter, it was with something implacable
and unrelenting in her quiet tones. Today, after the doctor was gone, she said, apropos of nothing:

‘You know, Ruth, there's never been a sleepwalker in our family!'

Ruth did not answer, remembering guiltily that she too had had this ugly thought. Ellen, as far as she knew, had never walked in her sleep till that night she fell; but even though this were true, the implications were intolerable. Ruth was glad now that she had never told her mother about Ellen's painting the pantry, about Ellen's slipping out of the house at night to walk herself into exhaustion.

There were other occasions when Mrs. Berent's words suggested more than they said. ‘I'd like to see Leick again,' she remarked one day, and Ruth guessed she was remembering Danny and blaming Ellen for his death.

‘You'll see him when we go to Bar Harbor,' she said reassuringly.

‘I don't think I'll go to Bar Harbor this summer,' Mrs. Berent murmured. ‘I think I'll be happier staying quietly in one place.' And Ruth felt a cold touch on her heart.

Ellen in due time left the hospital, but she still stayed abed all day. Ruth would have gone to see her, but Mrs. Berent grew weaker all the time, and she refused to have a nurse, so Ruth was bound to her side. Harland came less often to the house on Mount Vernon Street, and Ellen came not at all.

One night after Ruth had prepared her for sleep, and had turned out the bed light, Mrs. Berent said: ‘Ruth, be good to Richard. He'll need you.'

‘Of course,' Ruth assented. ‘Good night, now, Mother.'

‘Good night, my dear.'

In the morning when Ruth went to her, Mrs. Berent seemed still asleep, breathing a little heavily; but Ruth could not rouse her, and she did not come back to consciousness during the three days more before she died.