Let Me Tell You (21 page)

It is difficult today to suggest seriously that any thinking, responsible person sit down and read a book; the glorified comic magazine we call the modern “novel” has taken too firm a hold on our racing, bewildered minds. It is too easy to read a thin volume where everything is said only once, and seven or eight words suffice for a sentence, just as seven or eight pat phrases suffice for an idea; why read anything “long” or, worse still, “old”? Why, for instance, read a stuffy old character like Samuel Richardson, who looms only very vaguely back there beyond Henry James and past Thackeray and is more than obscured by Jane Austen; why read Richardson, who was certainly very moral and extremely long and, not to put too fine a point on it, dull?

I can think of, offhand, three reasons. I can find in someone like Richardson three attributes somehow lost today and intensely, humanly, valuable: peace, principle, kindness—three qualities as emphatically stuffy and old-fashioned as your grandmother's wedding gown, and as emphatically lost from general circulation.

Peace would come first today, I should think. Out of a time when things moved slowly, and conversation was formal and, if you like, stilted, and when a man could, if he chose, write a book a million words long and expect people to have time for it, Richardson made three books. They move along like molasses; no small action is consummated in less than ten pages. They line up, volume after volume full of solid, meaningful words, and they are leisurely, relaxed, and gracious. Richardson was a fat little man who ran a fine printing business and worked hard at it; he sat daily at tea with groups of admiring ladies; he liked his cat and he liked his garden and he liked gossip about high life, and he had plenty of time. With all his interests and all his busy concerns—and he stayed plump; he liked his food—he wrote three novels,
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded; Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady;
and
The History of Sir Charles Grandison,
which, placed side by side, would fill up two mystery-story shelves in a modern library.

Page after page, volume after volume of intimate letters go into these novels, letters back and forth from one character to another, describing events, commenting on the descriptions, reflecting on the moral implications of several courses of action, requesting more comments, all taking plenty of time, with nobody hurrying. In any dramatic crisis, the heroine has time for a polysyllabic remonstrance, which she reports faithfully in her letters; the villain has time for a lengthy insincere apology, which
he
reports faithfully in
his
letters; and both explain their actions minutely, and ask for comments from their correspondents, which they get, along with recapitulations of what
might
have been done under the circumstances, and comments on
that.
And in all of it, there is a vast sense of leisure to reflect, to choose, to be graceful. Peace provides the opportunity to have time to think.

Principle is a great inspiration, too. Sir Charles Grandison (who may be the perfect man) cannot marry the woman he loves, or even let her suspect that he loves her, because he feels himself responsible to another woman who is devoted to him. Clarissa Harlowe is abducted and seduced, but she cannot marry Lovelace, her repentant seducer, although offered riches, a title, the forgiveness of her family, and perfect respect from all her friends, because her conception of herself as honorable has been destroyed. Pamela is kidnapped, besieged, commanded, bribed, tormented, and deceived, but cannot bring herself to yield to the irrepressible Mr. B. until she is offered a genuine wedding ring. It all sounds like the most outrageous nonsense, and yet what is it but Richardson's exaggerated notion of honor? And is it possible that honor, however exaggerated, can really be ridiculous? Pride of self, dignity, respect: these still exist today, one hopes, and although Pamela and Clarissa and dear Sir Charles keep their values in an area once removed from the area in which our values lie today, are they so foolish? Is a sinful man the less sinful because his crimes are against a standard more rarified than ours? Lovelace, who ruined Clarissa, is not perhaps as bad a man as Faulkner's Popeye, but Lovelace is certainly as real a sinner in his sphere; moreover, he has more time to be bad and to be subtle about it than Popeye.

The goodness of Richardson's good characters—and all his characters are very sharply divided, half being devils, half angels—is in the same terms as the badness: That is, they are good in a sense that, translated into terms we understand fully, comes out as qualities we like and admire and would like to own ourselves.

Kindness, the third attribute, is an outlandish word to use about a writer, or about writing, or about anything except people and the way they feel. And yet kindness is a strong quality felt in Richardson's writing, the sort of kindness that evokes the tremendous tenderness the man himself must have felt, and tossed about embarrassingly on everyone who came his way. His characters, for instance, are nice to one another. One of them may abhor another; some of them—again, like Lovelace—outrage every precious tenet of a rigid morality and bring this outrage to bear on others; frequently these precise, lazy people are cross with one another, and stirred to anger. Harriet Byron was completely out of patience by about volume eight, when Sir Charles was sedately making absolutely
sure
that no conceivable shred of formality had been inadvertently overlooked. Nevertheless, implicit in every word, in every comment upon a comment, is the deep conviction of sympathy: not “We are all from the same mind: Richardson's,” but “We are all from the same people: the mortals.” That is a valuable thing to record, and perhaps it takes ten volumes to put it across.

There is very little humor in Richardson, and, to be honest, some of the books are pretty heavy going—Pamela's reflections on the education of her children, or some of the long stretches in
Grandison
where everyone takes a breather from the burning question (is it honorable or is it not?) and they just sit back and write long letters scrutinizing themselves—but without every word of it you couldn't really be satisfied that Sir Charles ought to propose or that Pamela deserves her husband. The richness of it is in those long muddy sections, the dark background of the bright tapestry. After Pamela's prolonged musings on children, we are disrespectfully delighted to see Mr. B. contemplate an elopement with a designing widow.

It takes a long time to read Richardson, and even so, he is only that stuffy little man a long way back—down the length of years to the eighteenth century, standing beyond even Thackeray and just behind Fielding—but peace, principle, and kindness are qualities that may even survive our own distempered time.

When the private showing of the movie
Lizzie,
made from my novel
The Bird's Nest,
was scheduled in New York, I could not see it because my small son Barry had chickenpox. I had put the bottle of calamine lotion down on the telephone table to pick up the phone and said, no, I could not come to New York because I had chickenpox—and, I could have added, because there was a button off my blue coat, and my only decent dress, the brown one, had a large spot on the front, and the living room had to be vacuumed, and I had so many letters to write, and anyway, the first meeting with my Lizzie was something I had been trembling over for nearly a year, and I honestly lacked the courage to make the first move. When I finally put down the phone I tried to pick up the bottle of calamine lotion and could not close my fingers around it; the stain is still there on the hall floor, but—I have met Lizzie.

Out of consideration for the chickenpox, the magicians in charge of such things arranged to send Lizzie to me, and so I met her face-to-face at last on my home field, as it were, in our small local movie theater here in Vermont. Out of my many conflicting reactions, the only one I can isolate clearly is excitement; nothing so surprising has ever happened to me.

As long as I can remember, the act of writing has been a private one. A book is a comfortable stack of pages of yellow copy paper, with typed words on them, a familiar and fitted country in which I am perfectly at home, able to find a paragraph or a line without difficulty, able to recognize from the look of a page just where it belongs. A book translated into galley proofs is no longer mine—the pages are different, the paper is not yellow, the words are printed and look smaller; the whole country has been tidied and set in order. When the book is bound, there is the unfamiliar jacket and the sudden odd weight of it, and other people—strangers!—are holding it in their hands. I can read my own books in print the way I read and reread old books from my childhood, and the difference between
The Bird's Nest
and, say,
Northanger Abbey
is one of literary skill, not degree of familiarity; I can remember more passages from
Jane Eyre
than I can from any of my own books.

I have never, in all the years I have been writing, heard my own words read or spoken aloud, except by myself, unwillingly, and under pressure.
That
translation is too much for me; I cannot imagine how these words will sound; on the yellow page they
look
as though they will sound all right, and since they are going to be read, I trust, in silence, it seems to me most important that they look as though they will sound all right. I once heard a tape of myself reading one of my own stories and it sounded silly. The voice, of course, was not mine, and the words had been subtly changed; they were not on yellow paper at all, they were
strange
on that infernal tape.

All this, of course, changed, because of my unnerving encounter with my own words spoken out loud, and my own people walking around, in the movie
Lizzie.
It was something like being hit on the head with a rock: Everything was very bright for a second, and then it got kind of wavy. I sat there watching
Lizzie
with my mouth half-open, thinking—and there is really no other sensation like it—Why, there is Doctor Wright; he is taller than I remembered. It was suddenly clear that through some gap in time
these
were the real people, and I had stolen them for my book. Elizabeth talked and looked just exactly as I remembered her (remembered her from where? from the movie, from the book?) and Aunt Morgen and Doctor Wright were there, and it was like a family reunion, although I kept wondering if
they
recognized
me.

It was exciting, too, because—as in any family reunion—I knew pretty well how everyone was going to behave, but still I could not tell when the explosions were coming. At one point I wanted to tell Morgen to look out—if she kept on talking to Elizabeth like that there would be trouble, even though I
knew
that Morgen always talked like that. It isn't fair, I kept on thinking, the way Morgen keeps picking on that poor child, when everyone knows Elizabeth isn't well, and then I had to shake my head and tell myself not to worry, it's only a movie; everything will come out all right.

I took my four children to see what they were unashamedly calling “Mommy's movie,” after explaining with some care that there would be no serial, no cartoon, no popcorn stand open, no candy, but that at least they could sit wherever they liked, because there would also be no audience. It was Barry's second movie—the other one having been
Cinderella
—and he approved wholeheartedly of the MGM lion at the beginning; he felt that I had achieved a kind of masterstroke by arranging to have my movie begin with that lion roaring. For the rest of it, he pointed out that it was not very much different from
Cinderella,
after all.

Sally broke into enthusiastic cheering at the sight of my name on the screen and had to be violently hushed by her horribly embarrassed father and brother, one on each side holding a hand over her mouth. The movie itself enchanted her; she screamed once when Lizzie threw a bottle at Aunt Morgen, and clapped wildly when Doctor Lone Ranger Wright came riding to the rescue.

Jannie, whose standards are noticeably more mature than her younger sister's, found the movie experience deeply disturbing. She sat through the entire show in silence, refused to join in the later discussion at the dinner table, and had nightmares all night. Under other circumstances, I had realized by then, it would not be the kind of movie we would take Jannie to at all; I could measure the extent of its disturbance to her by my own reactions.

Laurie, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed it; he is fourteen, and has spent perhaps an accumulated four or five years at Saturday matinees, regarding beasts from Planet X and alien minds plotting to take over Earth. He had no difficulty whatsoever in identifying the Mad Scientist, and a Monstrous Intelligence (though human, not movie prop construction) that disguises itself behind a smiling face, and a pretty good, even cool, piano. Our conversation at the dinner table that evening took the form of “Well, I think the best thing in Mommy's movie was the part where…”

Later, I went upstairs to investigate a suspicious silence in the playroom, and found Barry lying back in a chair with his eyes closed while Sally made mystic passes before his eyes. They explained that they were playing doctor.

When we came to occupy our present house, we were not at first accepted, although the neighbors welcomed us and took us in with the deep New England courtesy that is half tolerance and half humor. We shortly accustomed ourselves to trading at certain stores, and we bought our coal locally, and we found a doctor and a dentist and a dog, and we went to the local movie theater and enrolled Laurie in the local nursery school—still, the old house had grave reservations about us and would allow us to feel only provisionally at home. Twice, the first week we were there, I awoke with nightmares of the old house shaking over me, malevolent and cruel, and after that, during our first few months, I frequently found myself awake after having walked in my sleep toward the front door, and once I found myself out between the pillars, as if running away.

Our cats, who had lived with us for years in New York, could find no resting place in this house; all the hallowed places for cats to sleep—the spot behind the stove, the wooden rocker—would not countenance city cats, and turned them away, and our New York furniture had somehow become different, so that the armchair in which young Shax had always slept before was off in a cold corner and had no sun in the afternoons. Laurie went off pleasantly from the house to nursery school, he played happily in the yard and through the attics, but there was a corner of the hall where a wolf lived, and he would not go near it alone.

We had been there only about three weeks when I found an ad in the local paper for a woman who wanted to do housework, and such things being fairly rare in our town, I telephoned her immediately and asked if she could come to work for us. She was pleased to have an answer to her ad so quickly, and terms were quickly and easily settled between us. I agreed to her charges, she approved of the children, we reached an honorable agreement about laundry, and then she asked, her voice trim and clean over the phone, “I clean forgot to ask you, Missus, where do you live?”

“In the old Ogilvie house,” I said readily. “The one with the pill—”

“Where?” she asked. “The old Ogilvie house, did you say? The Fielding place?”

“That's right,” I said. “The one with—”

“I'm sorry, Missus,” she said, and her voice sounded really regretful. “I guess I can't come work for you after all.”

“Why not?”

“Well…” she said. “It's too far,” she said.

“I'll take care of your transportation.”

“Well…” she said. “I guess I better not.”

“But
why
?” I asked, but she had hung up.

No one liked to come into the house. We discovered much later that the painters and plumbers and carpenters Mr. Fielding had hired before we came had demanded extravagantly high pay, and Mr. Fielding had agreed to stay with them all the time they worked in the house. My grocer, who was very helpful about delivering orders, could never find a delivery boy who would leave my groceries any closer to the house than the end of the lawn. Our neighbors would stand and talk interminably at the front door or the back door, but they would never come inside, and the attempts I made to invite them in for tea met with faint, but polite, incredulity.

Toward the end of our first month, the painter arrived to do the outside of the house. As always, we were not consulted. The house had always been white with green trim, as were all the other houses on the block, and I suppose all the other houses in New England, and the painter did not for a minute imagine that anything else would be required of him; indeed, I doubt if he owned any other colors of paint. The first day he worked I went out to talk to him, and took him out a cup of coffee; he was on a ladder painting the pillars.

“Nice to see the old house cleaned up,” he said, after we had spoken about the weather and had taken care of such other conversational preliminaries as the rent we paid for the house, my husband's income, and our opinion of the town.

“I can't believe it's the same house we saw last year,” I said. I turned, as I frequently did, to look through the glass panes of the front door into our pleasant light hall, with the dining room showing beyond and the bright curtains and the pretty rugs and the lines of plants against the windows. “I'm so happy here,” I said, realizing as I said it that I was.

“You know,” the painter said, applying himself industriously to the pillar, “it don't seem to matter much what folks get to thinking about a house; when you get people living there, it all changes.”

“This house has seen a lot of people going in and out.”

“It's a good old house,” he said. “Spite of what they say, it's a good solid house; not many like it nowadays.” He turned and waved the paintbrush at me. “Kids wouldn't go past it at night,” he said.

“I didn't know that,” I said. “Do they feel any different now?”

“Well, no,” the painter said. He seemed afraid that he might have hurt my feelings, because he added quickly, “It's a good old house, though.”

There was another strange quality to the house; it had an odd effect on the things in it—never the old things, of course; they seemed to belong and to understand—but only our newer things, such as the living room clock, which had been a wedding present and had worked perfectly well until we moved into this old house. It stopped every day at five minutes to five. For a little while I thought it was an eccentricity of my own, that perhaps I did not wind it enough, or perhaps I had noticed that once or twice it had stopped near five o'clock and so fell to believing that it stopped every day. I made a point of winding it carefully, and then I got so that I was checking it regularly, and I would glance at it every time I passed the living room, and finally I came to accept as natural the fact that it would stop every day at five minutes to five, and when the five o'clock whistles blew at the lumberyard I went in and restarted the clock. It became an almost habitual small gesture, like checking to see if the children were covered at night, and I timed myself by it, knowing that when I had to restart the clock it was time to start making the children's supper.

The window in the back bedroom was another thing. It was ordinary glass; I knew that because I had had a glazier in to change it once. But no matter when you looked out of it, and no matter what the weather was like outside, it was opaque, as though a cloth were over the outside of it. When the glazier was working on it and had taken out the glass, he had held the new glass outside the window and looked through it. I could see his face clearly, as though through an ordinary window, and then he set the new pane of glass into the frame and dusted his hands and closed the window, and we looked through it together, and it was opaque. When we opened the window and looked out again we saw the maple trees outside and the sky; the glazier, who was a local man, smiled and shrugged and refused his pay, and touched one of the pillars gently as he went down the steps.

Still another troubling thing was the way small articles disappeared. I realized that in a large house with small children, things are always disappearing anyway, but this was different; it was as though there were pockets of time in the house into which things dropped for a little while and then came back. Small things disappeared, such as scissors and pencils and spoons, all things you might expect to lose but of course do not expect to find again back in their accustomed places. Sometimes it was larger things that stepped out, such as kitchen utensils. I remember one evening I went into the pantry to get a strainer off the shelf, groping absentmindedly the way you do when a thing is always kept in the same place and you reach for it without looking, and it was not there. I spent the next two days taking the pantry apart to find the strainer, and I looked as far afield as the playroom and the tool chest, and at the end of the two days I went into the pantry absentmindedly and put up my hand to take down the strainer and it was there.

Once, a little round rug disappeared for almost a week from the study, as though it had been absorbed into the floor, and reappeared after a while looking the same as ever, and so natural that for a while we forgot to be surprised that it was there. Several times I left groceries on the kitchen table and found them later neatly put away in the pantry; one reason I am sure I do not do this myself in a sort of trance is that the refrigerator is never used—butter and milk and such are set on the pantry windowsill, where it is cool. Once, buttons appeared, newly sewn onto my son's jacket, and another time my daughter's stuffed lamb had a blue ribbon removed and a pink one substituted. A day or so later the blue ribbon was back, washed and ironed.

None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway. We spoke affectionately of poltergeists and pixies, and affected to believe that each single instance was of course some unconscious behavior on our own parts. Laurie, who believed in any case in good and bad fairies, adjusted quickly and easily to the oddities, and was completely unaffected after a while, although my husband and I received a little jolt when, on Christmas morning, Laurie found a second stocking hung up against the mantel, as though it had been feared that
we
might forget. And there was the time when he lost a tooth, forgot to tell us, and found, in the morning, two dimes under his pillow. However, after a while the house seemed to gain a certain amount of confidence in us, and only Laurie ever experienced this pleasing duplication, although Joanne's clothes are still mended occasionally, that being a field in which the house can have no legitimate confidence in me.

It is not hard, after all, to live with such things, and after a while they do not seem much more unnatural than that water should change its form when heat is applied, or that trees should change color in the fall; I recall that the first week with our first television set shocked us much more deeply. I have grown used to the tricks of the house as I have grown used to the dip in the kitchen floor beside the windows, or the stair that creaks, or the study window that will not open at all. My husband, who does not come into as intimate contact with the house as I do, is consequently less troubled, although he was quite surprised when a nearly empty bottle of whiskey disappeared and was lost to him for a day, then returned full. And once his muffler disappeared from the hall closet and returned some time later to its own hook, where we had both looked several times.

I think perhaps a great reason for our relaxing into this mild acceptance was the complete ease with which these small things were accomplished, frequently so unobtrusively that it was not until afterward that we realized something had happened. When Joanne's good silver spoon vanished, it disappeared from my hand in the dish towel: That is, I was drying it, as I do every night, and as I reached forward to slip it into the drawer along with the other silverware it was gone. I had seen it the moment before and then did not see it the moment after. I looked for it, of course, but without much enthusiasm, knowing without admitting it that I need not bother. A day or so later, after Joanne had become reconciled to using another spoon, I was drying silverware, and as I was slipping it into the drawer, Joanne's spoon fell into its place. I knew the spoon had been gone and that I had been looking for it, but it was returned so naturally that I closed the drawer, then thought, then opened the drawer and saw that the spoon was really there.

Perhaps it was exactly because we took this cheerful teasing so well that one day, near the end of our first year in the house, the doorbell rang at about eleven o'clock in the morning. Laurie was in school, Joanne was in her playpen in the children's room, and I was making dough for gingerbread men, which we would cut out in the afternoon. I remember that when I went to answer the door I thought idly that probably my mixing bowl and spoon, my cups and rolling pin, would all be washed and returned to their places by the time I came back. There was an old lady at the door, neatly dressed in black and smiling.

“I'm so
very
sorry to trouble you,” she said as soon as I opened the door. “I hope I'm not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Won't you come in?” I added, because she was obviously intending to come in anyway.

“Thank you,” she said, and stepped daintily inside. She looked around the hall curiously, then smiled. “I used to visit here very often,” she said. “I was passing by, and I thought how wonderful it is to see the old house occupied again.” She waved her hand apologetically. “I
couldn't
go on without stopping in for one more look at the old house.”

“I'm very glad you did,” I said. “Won't you come in and look around?”

She followed me into the living room, stopping once to touch the shining wood of the old stair rail, and in the living room she went directly to the old wooden rocker and sat down, turning her head to look around.

“It's not really very much changed,” she said.

“It's a lovely old house,” I said.

“Do you think so?” She turned quickly to look at me. “Do you really think it's a lovely old house?”

“We're very happy here.”

“I'm glad.” She folded her hands and smiled again, as though to herself. “It's always been such a
good
house,” she said. “The old doctor always used to say it was a
good
house.”

“The old doctor?”

“Doctor Ogilvie.” She smiled at me again.

“Doctor
Ogilvie
?”

“I see they kept the pillars, after all,” she said, nodding. “We always thought they gave the house character.”

“There was a hornet's nest in one,” I said inadequately. Doctor Ogilvie had built the house in 1816.