Shirley (20 page)

S
TANLEY
,
OVERHEARD
IN
THE
KITCHEN
. I was making my way downstairs in stocking feet, not because I was sneaking but because I intended to return to bed with my morning coffee. I did not feel the need to breakfast with Shirley. I wanted to be alone, in the bed, staring at the floral wallpaper—challenging the house to tell me its intentions. Was I to be ejected like poor Eleanor in
The Haunting of Hill House
? Ejected and then forced by death to be immured in the house forever?

Was I crazy? Well, of course I was. I see it now. I do. I was crazy and I was right, and it was Stanley's voice I heard as I headed toward the kitchen.

Yes, Stanley, overheard:
So we return to normal.

The hiss of the water as she soaked the still-warm frying pan. She:
I kept my promise. Brought them both back safe and sound. Now you keep yours. No more phone calls.

He:
No more adventures. No more spells.

Obediently:
I'll work on my book and see the good doctor.

Reassuringly:
And Rose will manage the house. It was right to bring her back.

She:
But no more phone calls, Stan. I mean it.

Whatever he whispered in response made her giggle. When I entered the kitchen, having cleared my throat twice on the last few steps, their faces were arranged to greet me. We made terse morning conversation and I escaped upstairs. I felt the bed sigh pleasantly as I sank against the pillows.

And so began the first morning of that last week.

T
HAT
LAST
WEEK
, I spent less time in the kitchen and more in Shirley's library, reading the witchcraft books, of which she had so many. Spells were my focus, so small and so powerful. As the Lancashire witch Mother Cuthbert defined them,
a spell is a piece of paper written with magical characters, fixed in a critical season of the moon, and conjunction of the planets; or sometimes by repeating mystical words. Of these there are many sorts.
If someone had asked me, I wouldn't have said what I was looking for. A charm to keep a husband faithful? To find a missing mother? There had to be a spell to save a doomed friend from death.

I sneaked into their bedroom and took some hairs from her hairbrush. I put them in my dresser drawer, tucked inside my stocking bag. I would have taken a shirt or scarf of hers as well, but I was afraid she'd notice and misunderstand. I'd hate her to believe me a thief.

I went down to the library, and Mrs. Morse seemed to feel it was dangerous to speak to me, as if I'd been infected by whatever curse controlled the household. She nodded formally, and turned to speak to one of the other local matrons, barely meeting my eyes as
she checked out my books. But then, just as I was about to turn away, she said, “I suppose you'll be pleased to know his friend is back, the professor's friend. Turned up safe and sound, no matter what that crazy family tried to do to her.”

“Oh,” I said, relief pulsing through me as if it had replaced my blood. “That's good to hear.”

“Won't tell a soul where she went, or why.”

“Perhaps it was a family matter.”

“She's just too fine a woman to blame others,” Mrs. Morse averred darkly.

“I'm sure there's an explanation,” I said. Even though I was fairly certain that Mrs. Morse was right. Whether it had been a spell or one of Shirley's more “pragmatic” gestures made no difference. We were Shirley's, each of us her fictional possessions, whether we knew it or not. And then Mrs. Morse surprised me:

“That Mrs. Hyman can't turn us into another one of her evil stories. No, she cannot.” And with that, the librarian picked up the books I'd returned and began to pluck out the circulation cards, each flick of her fingers resentfully swiping clean my temporary stewardship of those volumes.

•   •   •

T
HE
M
ALAMUDS
WERE
LATE
, and Stanley was already pretty drunk. Ann had called to say they'd had a long lunch with the Bellows, who were visiting for the day on their way to Cambridge. Bern had taken a nap afterward. He was making up lost writing time, and she expected they would be at the Hymans' house by eight-thirty, “or nine at the latest.” Shirley, who had managed the
call with such considered politeness that I knew she was irritated, did not return to taking dried apricots out of the warm cider she'd used to plump them; instead, she left her fingers draped over the telephone receiver as if she were committing the phone conversation to memory. I took a handful of bay leaves from the bag in the back of the spice drawer; when I turned around to add them to the bowl with the apricots, Shirley was gone. The typewriter's click-clack began immediately.

No matter. I could reconstruct the recipe for Shirley's glazed ham with apricots from memory, I was almost positive. Off went the radio, so that I could better dredge the procedure from the cellar of my thoughts, while at the same time heeding the typewriter's rhythms from the library. Melted butter, chopped onion, and then the cider reduced by half. While the cider simmered, I scored the ham, used a skewer to make holes at each diamond edge for the cloves, and patted brown sugar on the entire roast. Already the kitchen smelled marvelously festive, as if tonight might be a bacchanalian celebration.

Malamud was coming! His world was mine. Reading
The Assistant
had been like reading about myself—streets I could picture, stores I'd been in, characters so familiar the book read like gossip from one of my childhood neighborhoods. His people were as endearingly imperfect as Shirley's, but he took them more seriously. His affections were sympathetic in a different way; he seemed kinder, somehow, his intent less ironic. I never thought he was laughing at Morris Bober, or at any of the characters in his short story collection, the one that won him the National Book Award.
Two such important writers in one small village; now that I thought about it, it was surprising I'd not met him before this.

It seemed that life had returned to normal that final week, although in the way of things when one is pretending routine as usual, routines held an element of thwarted fury. Oddly, I had returned to trusting Fred. I had no doubts, now, that when he set out for work he cached his loyalty to me next to his class notes in the soft leather briefcase Stanley had given him at Christmas. Call it another volume toted in from home for use in student instruction. That week, the days were mild and beautiful; after the troubled sleep of the night, I was awakened not by Natalie's cries but by the cheerful morning calls of innumerable friendly birds. Spring on the wing, skies smeared with pale and poignant blue—there was a gentle quality in the air, and in the house, where we were all studiedly kind to one another.

We were past intimacy. No more confiding, although our actions were tinged with the understanding of our mutual affection. Had I forgiven too early, too completely? Remember where I came from—betrayal was what I knew, and I had never seen a man with such remorse—as a tattered extended family, we were past the inevitable and had survived it.

As I read in silence in the living room each day that week, Natalie cooed in her basket at my feet. I knew it was silly, I really did, and yet I made myself believe in Shirley's spells. Her books described the way to make a witch's sacred circle, and most mornings I took time to rig one around Shirley's desk using kitchen string. I'd sit there while she was in the shower or upstairs napping, repeating
the silly rhymes I'd written asking protection for the mother of this house, for life and peace and prose that would transcend whatever misfortunes I sensed in the offing. I lit my candles, tucking the matches into the pocket of my skirt as I wished my circle into being, said my foolish phrases. I believed with categorical fervor. I so wanted to believe, I made it so. Sometimes as I heard the loud squeal of the shower faucets being turned off upstairs, I would feel the squawk reverberate down my spine, my essence urgently called home. I'd cease my exhortations with deliberate speed, drawing the kitchen twine back into a little knot that I could store inside Shirley's pencil jar, putting the candles back on the shelf. Even the smell of matches would have dissipated before her footsteps sounded on the stairs, and yet that half-amused smile told me she approved of what I'd done.

Today, however, I'd not had the chance. There were still coffee grounds on the counter by the stove and breakfast dishes in the sink; the ham to prepare, along with mashed sweet potatoes and the frozen peas I would doctor with canned mushrooms and cream. I'd wanted to read Malamud again if there was time, to dip into his short stories or the novels so I might not shame myself in his presence.

Earlier that morning, Shirley had found this laughable. “A few of the short stories are fine, I suppose. He's quite predictable. How he won a National Book Award is a mystery Miss Marple could not solve.”

“He's not good enough?”

She did not want to answer, merely tilted her head and walked down the hall to her desk for the first time that day, where I could
hear the creak of the typewriter platen as she wound a fresh piece of foolscap around it, followed by the hesitant rhythms of the morning's first typing.

I couldn't help myself, followed her into the study. I selected the Hymans' copy of
The Assistant
from the bookshelves. Without looking up from her work, she said, “He's not as good as me.”

He'd won the awards, not her. I couldn't help wondering if I would like him. “I don't know a man like Morris Bober,” I said. “But I always believed, I always wanted to believe, that there were people like that. When I was young.”

“Bern Malamud did not invent the Jews.” The sharp morning light glinted off her glasses so that I could not see if her eyes had narrowed at the thought of him. I put the book down, sensing it was wiser to do so. At lunchtime, when I went in to see how she was doing, she'd closed the volume and replaced it on the shelves.

•   •   •

T
HE
M
ALAMUDS
ARRIVED
QUIETLY
, knocking on the door and waiting until I went to answer it, standing patiently outside in the still-wintry night air while I struggled with that sticky, obstinate knob. While Shirley paced the dining room on the lookout for badly folded napkins and spotty wineglasses, matters that usually failed to interest her, Stanley read to her from a book review he was writing. He'd stumbled over his own text repeatedly but without comment, as if his inebriation were not worthy of notice. Fred sat on the couch in the parlor, correcting papers.

I introduced myself. Malamud was small and wiry, perhaps my height but no more, while Ann seemed taller and older, a matronly
woman with dark owl eyes that tracked through the front hallway deliberately, assessing the quality of the umbrellas in the stand, the gilt on the mirror, the threadbare loveseat where coats would be thrown. I saw the way she examined the sweep of the stairs and the paintings on the wall—Shirley's and the kids' intermingled with gifts from friends, a jumble of collected works and school photographs, all willy-nilly, that I found the essence of what familial life should be. “Shall I place my coat here?” Ann asked, shrugging off her navy cashmere. I took it, not thinking about whether she thought it was my job, but simply wanting to run my hands over cloth as lush and enveloping as this.

I brought her into the living room and introduced her to Fred, who was already handing Bern a glass of white wine. Ann was concerned that Bern not have too much salt, she said; with a heart like his, he had to be careful.

Enter Shirley, with a bowl of peanuts.

Ann refused them, as did Bern, and we arrayed ourselves on the various couches and chairs. Shirley raised the topic of the recent visiting writer whose car tires had been slashed while parked overnight in the village. Did Bern worry that someone was targeting writers?

No, he did not. In fact, he wished there were readers who cared enough to come and slash an author's tires; he feared that in a world transfixed by Da Nang, the Beatles, and Frank Herbert's
Dune
, it was unlikely that anybody would ever be sufficiently interested in him to stoop to violence. Intelligence glittered through the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses.

“Malamud! Here to save the Jews!” Stanley half tripped on the
edge of the Persian rug. Vodka splattered from the full martini glasses to the tray, but he managed to keep a hold on his burden. Shirley glanced at me expressionlessly.

“Have some peanuts, Bern.”

He made as if to take a few, politely. Ann touched his arm. They did not glance at each other; nonetheless, he changed his mind. “Watching my salt,” he said.

Ann began to talk about their lovely afternoon with Saul Bellow and his wife. “Bellow calls himself, Philip Roth, and my Bern the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature,” she said, and chuckled, shaking her head from side to side the way an elephant does, as if the work of carrying the trunk is a kind of dignity. Shirley took a handful of peanuts and stuffed them sloppily into her mouth, chewing vigorously.

“Meeting of the National Book Award Winners Mutual Appreciation Society. If only Roethke were still extant, you could have included him.” Stanley offered Malamud a martini, was rejected, and drank the entire glass with antic dash. Malamud sipped his white wine, smiling thinly at the wall across the room, where part of Shirley's collection of African masks was arranged.

A silence fell. Bern drew a small reporter's notebook out of the inside pocket of his blazer and held it loosely in his right hand while he drew a pen from his shirt pocket with the other. Shirley watched him with fascination, her mouth twisted in a sad little grimace.

Fred motioned for me to come and sit next to him on the couch, sliding toward the arm so that I'd be sandwiched between his lean frame and Ann's matronly girth. I shook my head. “The ham is calling,” I said, and escaped into the kitchen, where the cornbread
I'd made at the last minute was browned and ready to emerge from the oven. I felt tremendously excited by all the tension.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
CALLED
THEM
TO
DINNER
, Stanley did not appear. “He fell asleep, I think,” Fred whispered.

“I'll get him.” But Shirley said no, to serve the ham and she would wrangle him. Fred and I sat down with Bern and Ann Malamud, and I handed the large platter around. Bern asked Fred about his teaching load, and Fred described the way he was co-teaching with Stanley. Bern asked about Fred's dissertation. Fred glanced at me anxiously, as if he had suddenly forgotten the entire sum of the past two years, had lost track of his own professional interests.

“Are you interested in Jewish folklore, in our cultural myths?” Bern asked.

Fred nodded. “Lately, I've been thinking about the Old Testament as science fiction. Adam and Eve the first colonists after nuclear disaster—”

Bern laughed out loud. “You're a novelist!”

“Oh no, I only meant—” Fred blushed, picked up his fork.

Ann said, “Ham.” The one word, flatly.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I never thought. You don't eat pork?”

“Of course we eat pork. But when she asked us, I told her Bern was trying to avoid salt. His doctor says he should. And here you give us ham.”