Spirit (20 page)

Her father moved his eyes from side to side.

‘Is that a yes?' asked Elizabeth. ‘If that's a yes, moving your eyes from side to side, then do it again.'

There was a very long pause, and then her father did it again.

‘You saw her, didn't you? The little white girl in the little white dress?'

Yes
.

‘That was the same little girl that mommy saw, when she ran out into the rain. She turned the bushes all icy, even though it was summer.'

Yes
.

‘That was the same little girl that froze the swimming-pool, the night that mommy and I almost drowned. I saw her quite clearly. We both saw her. Mommy was never mentally sick. I wasn't making up stories. We really, really saw her, just like we did just now. I've seen her again and again. I've seen her in New York. I've seen her everyplace that you can think of. Laura's seen her too.'

Elizabeth was crying as she spoke. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and then she said, ‘Nobody believed us. Nobody believed either of us.'

Elizabeth's father remained impassive, his face still fixed in a vapid sneer.

Elizabeth said, ‘Do you believe that was Peggy? I know she doesn't look like Peggy, but do you believe that she is?'

Yes
.

‘Have you ever seen her before?'

Another long pause. Then,
Yes
.

‘You've seen her before? How many times?'

No response.

‘Twice? Three times? More than three times?'

Yes
.

‘More than ten times?'

No response.

‘And how long ago did you see her? Before mommy went to the clinic?'

No response.

‘Before mommy had her operation?'

No response.

Thank God for that, thought Elizabeth. At least he hadn't let mommy undergo a leucotomy knowing all the time that she had been telling the truth – that she
had
seen a little girl who was Peggy's soul or Peggy's spirit or whatever part of Peggy still persisted in the waking world.

‘Where did you see her?' asked Elizabeth. ‘Here in the house?'

Yes
.

‘Anywhere else?'

Yes
.

‘Further than Sherman?'

Yes
.

‘How far?' asked Elizabeth, and now a small dreadful thought was beginning to occur to her. ‘As far as New York?'

Another pause. Then,
Yes
.

Elizabeth and her father stared into each other's eyes. She could see now that he had so much that he wanted to tell her, so much that he wanted to explain and discuss. There were so many questions that she wanted to ask him, too – questions that were far too complicated for a
Yes
or a
No
. Like – why did he think Peggy should still be here? Why did she look like
another girl altogether? Why was she so cold? What was she made of? Ice, or flesh, or cotton, or smoke, or nothing at all? Were they imagining that she was here? Was she happy or was she sad? Was she trapped somehow between the living world and whatever lay beyond?

‘Are you frightened of her?' Elizabeth wanted to know.

No response. But then a very quick
Yes
.

‘You
are
frightened of her? Or not?'

Again, the same reply.

‘You're frightened?'

Yes
.

‘But not of her? Of something else?'

Yes
.

‘What is it that you're frightened of? Is it a person?'

No response. Then
Yes
.

‘It isn't a person but it is a person? I don't understand.'

Elizabeth's father lay back staring at the ceiling. She had the impression that he was making an enormous effort to do something, or to say something. His hands began to quiver, and his throat swelled up, and he started to utter a thick, low, growling sound.

‘Father – don't,' Elizabeth begged him. ‘You don't have to strain yourself, please. I'm going to stay for at least a week – we can spend a whole lot more time talking about it.'

But her father growled louder and louder, an upsetting doglike
grrrrrrrrr
which grew louder and louder.

‘Grrrrdd,' he managed to say at last. ‘Grrrdduh.'

Elizabeth shook her head in dismay. ‘Father, please, I don't understand.'

‘Grrrrdduh!'

He let out a thick, phlegmy whine, and then he relaxed. He kept flickering his eyes from side to side as if to say
Yes, Yes, Yes
. By uttering ‘Grrrdduh' he had somehow managed to tell her what was frightening him.

‘Grrrdduh?' asked Elizabeth.

Yes, Yes, Yes
.

He kept on flickering his eyes from side to side until they were interrupted by a quick, flurrying knock at the door. It was a plump blonde woman in a nurse's white uniform. ‘Hallo, Miss Buchanan,' she said, smiling. ‘My name's Edna Faulk. I'm here to take care of your father.'

Edna went across to the bed and leaned over Elizabeth's father, still smiling. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Buchanan! How would we like to have a little wash before lunch?'

Elizabeth looked into her father's eyes one more time. There was no expression in them at all. He had totally lost the ability to show her how he felt. She wished that she could understand what he was trying to tell her, but she knew that it would need hours or even days of careful questioning. What wasn't a person and yet was a person? What was ‘Grrrdduh?'

‘You won't mind leaving us for a while now, will you, Miss Buchanan?' said Edna Faulk. ‘If you'd care to come upstairs and share some lunch with your father, well, you're very welcome, but I must warn you that we're rather messy, aren't we, Mr Buchanan? We're very messy pups at mealtimes, believe me!'

‘I'll come back later,' said Elizabeth. She couldn't bear the idea of watching her father being fed. ‘I have some people to meet.'

She kissed her father on the forehead. He looked up at her but she couldn't tell if he were angry or contented, happy or miserable. As she left the sunlit room, she turned around one more time, and she found herself wishing that he hadn't survived. At least, if he had died, he would have found Peggy in heaven, rather than here.

 

 

She walked along Oak Street and saw how much Sherman had changed. Most noticeably, the large post oak had been cut down, leaving nothing but a wide flat-topped stump. There were still seats around it, but without the green cavernlike shade that its overhanging branches used to offer, the street looked bald and ordinary, a Litchfield street like any other.

The Stillwell Hardware Store had gone, to be replaced by Zee-Zee Appliances, with a window full of Frigidaires. Mr Pedersen had died of throat cancer three years ago, and the Sherman Grocery had given way to Waldo's Supermarket. The creekbed where Elizabeth's mommy had pursued the Peggy-girl in the summer rain had been all covered over with hardcore and asphalt now, to make a fifty-car parking-lot. Baxter's Realty was still here, and so was Endicott's soda-fountain, although Old Man Hauser was in a home now, deaf and blind and incontinent, and the drugstore was run by a young, lugubrious pharmacist called Gary with a flat-topped crewcut and red bow tie and heavy black-rimmed spectacles.

The war had changed Sherman first, and most dramatically, because it had taken away its self-absorption and its innocence. In previous generations, the town's children would have stayed, for the most part, and carried on the town's traditions. But Dan Marshall the school swimming star had been hit by a mortar bomb on the beach of Peleliu Island only six minutes after the US 1st Marines landed there in September 1944. His death was famous because the war artist Tom Lea had painted his head flying through the air. Dan's girlfriend Judy McGuinness, the Prom Queen, had joined the Navy as a Wave
and had married her boss, Rear-Admiral Wilbur Fetterman, and then divorced him, and now she lived in Charleston, South Carolina, with a Kaiser-Frazer concessionaire called Hewey Something-or-other.

Molly Albee was married and living in Providence, Rhode Island, with three gingery babies and a husband who repaired boats. Altogether three of Elizabeth's friends had died in the war; others had disappeared; but even those who had returned had brought back with them the outside world, with its cool and its be-bop and its cynicism, and its hugeness, too; and once Sherman knew that it was just a minuscule part of something huge, it was no longer Sherman, the warm-hearted centre of everybody's world, but just another place.

Television had changed it next. Those between-wars family evenings by the Zenith radio were gone for ever, those evenings when shared imaginations would conjure up Amos'n'Andy, Burns and Allen, and
One Man's Family
. Now everybody watched Milton Berle and
Hopalong Cassidy
and the kids all sang ‘It's Howdy Doody time, it's Howdy Doody time, Bob Smith and Howdy too, say Howdy-Doo to you'. Not only that, but they could see automobiles and floor-wax and which twin had the Toni, they could
see
what was happening in New York, and Washington, and even London, England, and the loss of innocence was complete.

Elizabeth walked along Putnam Street with its Queen Anne houses and this, at least, hadn't changed. She reached Lenny's house and walked up to the porch. As she knocked on the heavy doorknocker she had the most extraordinary sense that the last eight years hadn't passed at all, and that she was back where she had been in 1943, knocking, on the Millers' door to tell Lenny goodbye.

Mrs Miller answered the door. She was whiter-haired, but still comfortable and well-rounded, and she must have been cooking, too, because the house was fragrant with the smell of meatloaf.

‘Lizzie Buchanan, well I never! Don't you look the picture! Come along in!'

Lenny and Mr Miller were sitting in the living-room, next to a crackling log fire, drinking coffee and reading the papers. Up above their heads the canaries still twittered and chirruped in their cages.

Mr Miller was even thinner than Elizabeth remembered him. Stomach trouble, that's what Mrs Patrick had told her. But he took off his spectacles and stood up and embraced her like a long-lost daughter, and Lenny stood up too, all proud to have her call on them.

‘You want a cup of coffee?' asked Lenny.

‘Actually, no. But I could use a cigarette.'

‘Mom doesn't like me to smoke in the house.'

‘All right, then, let's smoke in the garden.'

They strolled down to the end of the garden, through the orchard. The long grass was thick with fallen apples. Elizabeth leaned against one of the trees and blew out smoke and said, ‘Sherman's changed, hasn't it? I didn't really notice until today.'

‘Everywhere's the same. It's not just the places, though. It's the people.'

‘Do you think we're all so different?'

Lenny shrugged. ‘That day you came to say goodbye, that seems like a whole world away. I was a rookie, still wet behind the ears, and you were just a schoolkid.'

‘So, what if I
was
a schoolkid? I'm still very annoyed that you didn't realize that I was desperately in love with you.'

Lenny gave her a sly grin. ‘I did realize. Especially later, when you sent me those swimsuit pictures. You were very cute, Lizzie. But let's face facts, you
were
a tad young for me, weren't you?'

‘I wasn't too young to have my heart broken.'

They walked some more, right to the very end of the Millers'
property, where it tangled into silver birches and traveller's joy. The more Elizabeth talked to Lenny, the more she found herself liking him. She had always liked his looks – those kind of hurt, self-deprecating eyes, and that very straight nose, and that cleanly-defined jawline. His face had strength and sensitivity.

‘You're not married yet?' he asked her. ‘I'm surprised at that. You were always writing those romantic stories.'

Elizabeth blushed and said, ‘Well . . . just because a girl is romantic, that doesn't mean that she can always find the right man.' She finished her cigarette, and crushed it out on the ground. ‘I dated a couple of guys when I was at high school. John Studland, you remember him?'

‘Dark curly hair, tall. Did a terrible Charlie McCarthy impersonation.'

‘That's the one. He was nice. He was really nice.'

‘Nice?'

‘All my boyfriends were nice. I dated a boy in Hartford called Neil Bennett. He was nice, too. He was so nice that I almost married him. He gave me a diamond engagement ring and everything.'

‘What was the matter with him?'

‘
Too
nice. I like men with a bit of danger.'

‘Oh, yes?' laughed Lenny. ‘Like who?'

‘I don't know,' Elizabeth blushed. ‘I haven't met one yet. Well, I've met one or two authors who seem a bit dangerous. Felix Rushmore, the man who wrote
The Tongue Tells No Stories;
and Haldeman Jones, who wrote
Babylon.
'

‘And you think they're dangerous, these two guys?'

Elizabeth shrugged. She felt embarrassed. ‘They live right on the edge, if you understand what I mean. They experience everything they can, like poverty and violence and the dope culture, and they put it all there on the page.'

Lenny flicked his cigarette butt into the trees. ‘I bet they
never ran up a beach with a tin hat and an M-1 rifle and Jap machine-guns going
dogguh-dogguh-dogguh
ail around them.'

Elizabeth looked at him narrowly. There was something in his face which appealed to her strongly. A woundedness: a vulnerability. ‘No,' she said, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her coat. ‘I bet they never did that.'

She asked him home for supper and he said okay, sure, he'd love to. She was quite surprised because he had seemed so defensive, at times even mocking. She walked back to the house on her own because she wanted to pay a few visits – first to see Molly Albee's mother and then to Sycamore Street to see Bindy Morris, who used to be a friend of Laura's. She suddenly realized as she walked along Putnam Street that she badly missed Laura – especially here, in the old home town, where they used to be so happy together.