Shirley (4 page)

Even at our worst, and we have had our share of worsts—even then, we have trusted one another to hang in and fight for what we are. I think Shirley and Stanley had that, too. Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core. Without her, he was nothing. Without him, she could not go on.

“What are you thinking about?” she said to me suddenly.

I had not drifted off into the future, as it must seem, but was afloat somewhere equally hazy, pillowed in my own embryonic seas. I lowered my head, embarrassed.

“Do you ever wonder, what if I had turned left instead of right? Just then, when I was heading to the door? If I had chosen right, not left, and walked up the street, or up the stairs, what different fates awaited?”

I nodded. Now I think we had been pondering a nearly identical idea.

She leaned in, her pale fleshy cheeks aglow. There were coffee grounds on the table, but she put her hands right there, in the pocked puddles. She said, “I dream about it all the time. I get in the car, I have to drive Stanley here or there, and he says to go right and I am certain it should be left. I am certain left is the direction. Left, left, left, but I go right. I listen and go right.”

I nodded. She told me to wait, to stay where I was, and she moved quickly down the hall, graceful despite her size. She returned with a small moss-colored book: “You must read this.”

“I will,” I said, nearly breathless with the importance of it. It was an old book, worn along the binding, its pages foxed by damp. I could smell the sweet mold, anticipate the crackling of the pages, and I held it up so I could read the title.
An Adventure
tooled in gold leaf, its authors
Two Ladies
. An adventure. “I'll start it now.”

“Girls without mothers, you and me. We have to help one another.” How did she know? I put a hand on my belly. “You'll be good to her,” Shirley said then, and, as she turned to leave the room, added, “My mother thinks I failed her. I'm not thin or dressed properly, not ladylike enough, don't meet her standards. But she has no idea, not really. At least yours has an accurate grasp on the realities.”

“My mother? How could you know about my mother?”

“Time,” she answered matter-of-factly. “It slips.”

I stared at her, speechless.

“Or we do, rather. We slip in time, some of us. We do. Or I wonder if that's what it is.” Her laugh, moderate as it sounded, rippled visibly beneath the surface of her skin. Whatever she was, she was more than just eccentric; this was, to me, an exceedingly exciting notion. I asked her what she meant.

“Read the book and then we'll talk. Now I'm off to write a little thing for the devil.” She laughed again. I wondered if Stanley was equally strange, if all academics, all brilliant people, were like this. She stopped in the doorway, tilted her head slightly. “And then this afternoon, if I finish my work, perhaps we'll go grocery shopping, and I'll walk you up to campus. Show you around. You can see where Fred will have his office, get a look at the harem.”

“Harem?”

“The students,” she said, and I could not tell if her tone was mocking me or mocking herself. “Such pretty, bright young things. Just like you, Rose Nemser. Young and pretty, and ever-so-enlightened. So admiring of the great minds that deign to educate them. Those girls love their professors.”

•   •   •

A
FTER
SHE
LEFT
, I opened the book and turned the first dried pages but could not settle in, the print scrambling under my overwhelmed gaze.

I want to try to reconstruct the way I felt the first time I read
An Adventure
, but it's difficult, like trying to separate out the first time Fred and I made love from all the rest, or to recall the specific weight of holding baby Natalie in my arms—I recall her damp warmth more easily than the work required by my muscles. It was a moment in a continuum—not so odd, considering the material—and never felt like something new. The book is the report of two young British schoolteachers who visited Versailles in the year 1901 and got lost in the gardens near the Petit Trianon—Marie Antoinette's private “farmhouse,” the place where she held her amusements. As they tried to choose between the various paths, everything became excessively quiet,
flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still
. (I quote from memory, sure that I will always know these words.) From behind them, a costumed man came running, insisting that they head right and not left. Right and not left. They went over a bridge, heard running footsteps, passed a servant and her daughter, and then came upon a woman sitting
and sketching in the center of her garden: Marie Antoinette. The sound of horse hooves in the distance. When, months later, they returned to Versailles and attempted to retrace their steps, the path they took was not to be found. It didn't exist.

No one believed the women.

They were unable to reproduce the experience.

Eventually, the friendship dissipated.

There was never any proof.

Shirley loved this story, the bitter sweetness of both miracle and aftermath. She loved this story and she shared it with me and became my friend. Part of being loved by Shirley, I suppose, was always that I appreciated those women, too. And I still see why they matter, what they teach us: that an adventure can begin without warning, that the most minor decisions—right, left—can change lives in a moment. That friendships, even the best of them, don't always survive. Oh, and this: that so much of what happens can't ever be proved—the best we can do is write our paltry tales. Those women at Versailles, young, not special in any way—they were brave to share their stories.

Years after her death, when I saw her journals, I was not surprised at how often Shirley mulled over what might have happened in the gardens of Versailles on that hot August afternoon. What she loved most was how intensely the two schoolteachers were told: Go right. Avoid that path. Take this.

There is never any proof. I suppose I will come back to that. There's no one alive to confirm that what I'm writing down is true. That the celebrated novelist Shirley Jackson, age forty-seven, and the pregnant nineteen-year-old Rose Klein Nemser, became the
best of friends for one brief moment in time, a wormhole, a slip between one world and another. Is it possible to reserve one's cynicism? Stanley is about to return home, with my husband, Fred, at the end of an arduous day of adulation. Perhaps it is time to mix them their martinis.

•   •   •

“D
ID
YOU
TAKE
HER
TO
THE
DOCTOR
?” Stanley asked me when both men had returned that evening. The younger son, Barry, had arrived earlier, disappearing first into the kitchen and then upstairs to his room. He'd stopped in to see Shirley but not stayed long. She was still hard at work, the typewriter keys clicking like hailstorms, lengthy bursts, some lasting several minutes or more, to be followed by bouts of silence, the grind of the paper roll, a ping or two, and then another long, emotional outpouring of
tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
. It seemed the household functioned around that sound, that it was the linchpin and the director of all activity: if she was typing, that took priority over anything else.

We never did get to campus that first day. I'd sat listening to Shirley's typewriter from the front parlor as I reclined on the clammy leather sofa. Both the armchairs seemed spoken for, even though no one else was in the house, an Agatha Christie opened on one and a set of marked-up galleys on the arm of the other. I had finished
An Adventure
and skimmed its pages again, and, as the early-September heat drifted in through the side windows, I let my eyelids drop and drifted off to sleep. Downstairs, the house seemed to let me sleep easily, without dreaming. Or perhaps it was
the exhaustion from the previous night that caused it. In any case, the nausea of the past weeks had entirely left me, and I felt blissfully at peace. But at Stanley's question, I sat bolt upright, guilty as charged.

“Doctor?”

“She didn't tell you.”

“No,” I said, beginning to formulate an apologetic explanation. His eyebrows, dark and heavy, drew together; his scowl reminded me of my father's, and I had to remind myself that someone like Stanley Hyman was unlikely to use violence. “I didn't know—”

“Shirley,” he said, raising his voice so that it carried before him as he entered the library. “You forgot Dr. Toolan.”

A short silence.

“I was working,” I heard her say. “Stan. I need another hour, I'm almost done. Can you send Barry down to the market, or ask . . . ask the girl, the new girl. Can you ask the little wife to go get us some chops? Rose. Can you ask Rose?”

Fred, who, arriving with Stanley, hadn't moved from the high-ceilinged hallway between the two rooms, nodded to me. “I'll go with you,” he whispered. “Come on.”

I stood obediently.

“We'll go,” Fred told them. “We'll get whatever's needed.”

That was fine with Stanley. He didn't care how things happened, so long as they did. Some of the new students were coming to dinner, as was their elder son with his wife and children. When we got to the market, Shirley had already called; the chops were cut and the string beans and potatoes had been set aside. We took
a container of milk, and some apples, and a bag of farina, as she'd asked the grocer to tell us.

The chops alone were 89 cents a pound, and she'd ordered enough for twelve. I felt faint at the thought of what a household cost to run. Did they always live like this? There was an awkward moment when Fred pulled out his wallet, knowing he couldn't possibly have enough cash in there to pay, but Mr. Powers told us the Hymans had said to put it on their account, and he walked away before we could pretend to be disappointed. Later, knowing better, I admired the grocer for not taking any cash he could get for Hyman groceries as quickly as possible. He must have been a man most appreciative of the arts, to his own detriment.

We walked up the hill, Fred carrying the two sacks, one in either arm.

“Was it wonderful?” I asked him.

His cheeks flushed pink; I had not an inkling why.

“It was okay.”

“Who did you meet? Do you have an office? Do you have a classroom? How was lunch? Is the pay enough? Will you like it? Will you have time to finish your thesis?”

“The pay's fine, Rosie. Nearly five thousand dollars.”

For the first time ever, I imagined a life without worry.

“And we'll save most of it, staying here,” he said. “They want us to. Stanley thinks you'll be good for Shirley.”

“Me? How?”

“My office is next to his, it's huge. It's as big as the one I shared with those other fellows at Temple. Bookshelves and a desk and a view. And the campus is, well, it's like nothing we've ever seen.
Views in every direction, all woods and trees and a little pond with swans in it, and there's this field, in front of the main building. The Commons. And if you walk to the other end, they call it The End of the World, there's a wall and then the world drops off, and you're staring out at enormous green mountains in every direction.”

“You like it?” I teased him.

“I like it,” he answered seriously.

“Shirley told me about a Bennington student, a girl who disappeared into the mountains,” I said then. “She went for a walk by herself one afternoon and never came back, no one ever found her. I'll show you her picture, the articles from the paper.”

He shook his head; nobody had mentioned Paula Welden to him.

“Oh, it was years ago, Fred. Still, it makes you think, all those mountain trails leading god knows where. Nobody knows what happened to her.” I sighed. “But Shirley says the students are pretty.”

He shrugged. “They're okay.”

I was still so happy. I had Fred. My world was safe. “Just okay?”

“Don't be ridiculous, Rose. I didn't do anything.”

We were two houses away from the Hymans' place, and Fred started walking faster—striding, really—on his much longer legs. “I meant,” I began to say, but didn't finish. He turned left, into their driveway, and I paused, watching him, but then I kept walking straight, without him, up the hill another few houses, and through the back gate to the college, so that I could see for myself what my husband had enjoyed that day. When the road split, one large building off to the side and the main campus before me, I thought about my direction. Right turns were the order of the day, I told myself,
and strolled past a big barn and over a footpath to the little duck pond and then down into the thick of the dormitories.

Someone had told me—I think Barry the night before—how the Bennington College campus was purposely designed so that no building was easily accessible from another. Entryways did not line up; paths were deliberately several degrees off the direct route—the idea was that nothing would ever be too easy, no excursion possible without conscious thought.

On the face of it, the dormitory buildings appeared to my inexperienced mind to represent simple privilege in its most concrete form. One pretty colonial mansion after another, a parade of Taras down a well-maintained, nicely landscaped drive. And the girls, blowing cigarette rings as they walked, their kohl-outlined eyes and lean dancers' bodies and cleverly embroidered coats and bright stockings and cheerful knitted caps. Bohemian entitlement embodied by one after the other. We were the same age, those girls and I, but it didn't feel that way to me. We were the same age, but none of them knew what it was to be poor, nineteen, and pregnant. They were too bright, too hip, too extraordinary to be tethered to so banal a fate.