The Clock Winder (32 page)

Every time Elizabeth looked up, Mary was somewhere in the background watching her. Margaret was standing in the doorway hitching her baby higher on her hip. Well, Margaret she had always liked, but still, she kept having the feeling that she was being checked out. Were they afraid she would make some new mistake? Under their gaze she felt inept and self-conscious. She plumped Mrs. Emerson’s pillow too heartily, spoke to her too loudly and cheerfully. All of Thursday passed, long and slow and tedious. No one mentioned going home.

For them—for Margaret, who had sounded desperate and offered double pay and a six-week limit and a promise of no strings attached—she had taken a leave of absence from her job with only ten minutes’ notice and flown to Baltimore when she had never planned on seeing it again. She had minded leaving her job. She was a crafts teacher in a girls’ reform school, which was work that she loved and did well. The only mistake she had made there was this one: that she had left so suddenly, and lied about the reason. Told them her mother was sick. Oh, even the briefest contact with the Emersons, even a long distance phone call, was enough to make things start going wrong. She should have kept on saying no. She should be back in Virginia, doing what felt right to her. Instead here she was pretending to play chess, and all because she liked to picture herself coming to people’s rescue.

She moved out pawns, lazily, making designs with them, sustaining over several turns the image of some fanciful pattern that she wanted them to form. No need to watch out for attacks. Mrs. Emerson would never attack; all she did was buckle, at the end, when she found her king accidentally
surrounded by half a dozen men for whom Elizabeth had forgotten to say, “Check.”

“Could I bring you two some tea?” Mary asked, hovering. “Does anyone want the television on?” Margaret said, “If you’d like a breath of air, Elizabeth, I can stay with Mother. Feel free to go to the library, or draw up lesson plans.” They thought she was a teacher in a regular school. Elizabeth hadn’t set them straight. She kept meaning to, but something felt wrong about it—as if maybe the Emersons would imagine her students’ crimes clinging to her like lint, once they knew. She wondered if the school smell—damp concrete and Pine-Sol disinfectant—was still permeating her clothes. While Mrs. Emerson struggled for a word Elizabeth’s mind was on the paper towel roll on the nightstand: two more towels and the roll would be empty, and she could hoard it in her suitcase for an art project she had planned for her students. “I want—” Mrs. Emerson said, and Elizabeth’s thoughts returned to her, but only partially. Piecemeal. Neither here nor there. She felt suddenly four years younger, confused and disorganized and uncertain about what she could expect of herself.

Mrs. Emerson said, “Gillespie. Gillespie.” Elizabeth jumped and said, “Oh,” She wasn’t used to this new name yet. She wondered how it felt to have Mrs. Emerson’s trouble. Did the words start out correctly in her head, and then emerge jumbled? Did she hear her mistakes? She didn’t seem to; she appeared content with “Gillespie.” “I’m—” she said. “I’m—” Her tongue made precise T sounds far forward in her mouth. Elizabeth waited. “Tired,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“I’ll put the board away.”

“I want—”

“I’ll lay your pillow flat and leave you alone a while.”

“No!” said Mrs. Emerson.

Elizabeth thought a minute. “Do you want to sleep?” she asked.

Mrs. Emerson nodded.

“But you’d rather I stayed here.”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth put the chess pieces in their box, tipped her chair back, and looked out the window. She kept her hands still in her lap. From her months with Mr. Cunningham she had learned to lull people to sleep by being motionless and faceless, like one of those cardboard silhouettes set up to scare burglars away. Even when Mrs. Emerson tossed among the sheets, Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she did, more words would struggle out. She imagined that coming back would have been much harder if Mrs. Emerson could speak the way she used to. Think of what she might have felt compelled to say: rehashing Timothy, explaining those years of silence, asking personal questions. She shot Mrs. Emerson a sideways glance, trying to read in her eyes what bottled-up words might be waiting there. But all she saw were the white, papery lids. Mrs. Emerson slept, nothing but a small, worn-out old lady trying to gather up her lost strength. Her hair was growing out gray at the roots. The front of her bathrobe was spotted with tea-stains—a sight so sad and surprising that for a moment Elizabeth forgot all about those students that she was missing. She rocked forward in her chair and stood up, but she watched Mrs. Emerson a moment longer before she left the room.

Matthew was in the kitchen, eating what was probably his breakfast. He had shaved and dressed. He no longer had that uncared-for look that he had worn asleep in the armchair, but his face was older than she remembered and a piece of adhesive tape was wrapped around one earpiece of his glasses. “Can I pour you some coffee?” he asked her.

“No, thank you.”

“How’s Mother?”

“She’s asleep.”

“How does she seem to you?” he asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. Older.” She wandered around the kitchen with her arms folded, avoiding his eyes. She didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore. She had thought it would be easy—just act cheerful, matter-of-fact—but she hadn’t counted on his watching her so steadily. “Why are you staring?” she asked him.

“I’m not staring, you are.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. She stopped pacing. “Well, the
house
seems
terrible
to me,” she said. “Much worse off than your mother. How did it get so rundown? Look. Look at that.” She waved to a strip of wallpaper that was curling and buckling over the stove. “And the porch rail. And the lawn. And the roof gutters have whole
branches
in them, I’m going to have to see to those.”

“You’re not the handyman here anymore,” Matthew said.

She thought for a moment that he had meant to hurt her feelings, but then she looked up and found him smiling. “You have your hands full as it is,” he told her.

“When she’s napping, though. Or has visitors.”

“I’ve been trying to do things during the weekends. I mow the grass, rake leaves. But it’s a full-time job, I never quite catch up.” He looked down at his plate, where an egg lay nearly untouched. “Before she got sick I’d just finished cleaning out the basement,” he said
“Shoveling
it out. All that junk. Remember our wine?”

“Yes.”

“I found it in the basement six months after you left. White scum on the top and the worst smell you can imagine.”

“I wondered what you’d done with it,” Elizabeth said.

A younger, shinier Matthew flashed through her mind. “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic,” he had said. “I’ll bring a chicken, you bring a …” As if that picnic had actually come about, she seemed to remember the sunlight on a riverbank and the flattened grass they sat on and the feel of Matthew’s shirt, rough and warm behind her as she leaned back to drink from a stoneware jug.

“What would it have tasted like, I wonder,” Matthew said.

She knew she should never have come back here.

The first time she realized that Andrew was home was at supper. They ate in the dining room—Elizabeth, the two sisters, Matthew, and Susan. Elizabeth kept hearing clinking sounds coming from the kitchen, separated by long intervals of silence. “What’s that?” she asked, and Mary said, “Oh, Andrew.”

“Andrew? I didn’t even know he was here.”

“He’s going back on Sunday.”

Nobody pretended to find it odd that he should be eating in the kitchen.

That night, from the army cot that had been set up for her on the sunporch, she heard Andrew cruising the house in the dark. He slammed the refrigerator door, creaked across floorboards, scraped back a dining room chair. He carried some kind of radio with him that poured out music from the fifties—late-night, slow-dance, crooning songs swelling and fading as he passed through rooms, like a bell on a cat’s collar. In the morning when she went upstairs his door was tightly shut, sealed-looking. When she returned from the library with a stack of historical romances for Mrs. Emerson she found florists’
roses by the bed—nothing any of the others would have thought of buying—and the smell of an unfamiliar aftershave in the air. He ate his lunch in the kitchen. That weighty, surreptitious clinking cast a gloom over the dining room, but no one mentioned it. “We seem to be missing the butter,” Elizabeth said, and Mary rose at once, letting a fork clatter to her plate, as if she feared that Elizabeth would go out to the kitchen herself. “Sit still, I’ll get it,” she said. But Elizabeth hadn’t even thought of going. She avoided Andrew as much as he did her. Otherwise, even in a house so large, they would have had to bump into each other
sometime
. She kept an ear tuned for the sound of his approach, and circled rooms where he might be. Why should she bother him, she asked herself, if he didn’t want her around? But she knew there was more to it than that: she didn’t want
him
around, either. He had passed judgment on her. Once or twice, during the afternoon, she caught glimpses of him as he crossed the living room—a flash of his faded blue shirt, a color she associated with institutions—and she averted her face and hunched lower in her chair beside Mrs. Emerson. She should have gone right out to him, of course. “Look here,” she should have said. “Here I am. Elizabeth. You
know
I’m in the house with you. I feel so silly pretending I’m not. Why are you doing this? Or why not just go back to New York, if you can’t bear to see me?” But she already knew why. He had summed her up. He was afraid to leave his family in her hands. He alone, of all the Emersons, knew that she was the kind of person who went through life causing clatter and spills and permanent damage.

A man from an orthopedic supply house delivered an aluminum walker. It sat by Mrs. Emerson’s bed most of Friday afternoon, but she made no move to use it. “Try, just try it,” Mary said. Mrs. Emerson only sent it slit-eyed glances full of
distrust. She felt strongly enough about it to frame a very complicated sentence about walkers reminding her of fat old ladies in side-laced shoes, which made Elizabeth laugh. “You’re right, come to think of it,” she said. Mary frowned at her. When they were alone she said, “Elizabeth, I hope you’ll
encourage
Mother a little. The doctor says she’ll be back to normal in no time if she’ll just take things step by step.” “Oh, she’ll be all right,” Elizabeth said. And she was. With no one watching, with Elizabeth’s back deliberately turned, Mrs. Emerson looked at the walker more closely and finally reached out to test its weight with one hand. Within a few hours, she had allowed herself to be lifted to a standing position. She clomped around the sunporch, leaning heavily on the walker and puffing. Elizabeth read a magazine. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.

“You should probably get some rest,” Elizabeth said. She had figured out by now how to carry on their conversations. As soon as she got the gist of a sentence she interrupted, which sounded rude but spared Mrs. Emerson the humiliation of long delays or having words supplied for her. It seemed to work. Mrs. Emerson released the walker, and Elizabeth closed her magazine, helped Mrs. Emerson back to bed, and took her slippers off. “Before supper we’ll try it again,” she said.

“But I—”

“Yes, but the more you practice the sooner you’ll be free of the walker.”

Mrs. Emerson closed her mouth and nodded.

Matthew and his mother and Elizabeth went over Mrs. Emerson’s checkbook together. Mrs. Emerson wanted Elizabeth to pay bills and keep her records; she had had Elizabeth’s signature cleared at the bank. “But why?” Elizabeth asked her. “You can write
that
much. Why me?” She felt herself sinking
into some kind of trap, the trap she had been afraid of when she first said no to coming back. “I’ll only be here six weeks, remember,” she said.

“Oh well,” said Matthew, “I suppose it’s tiring for her, dealing with all this.”

But Elizabeth was still watching Mrs. Emerson. “Six weeks is all the leave I have,” she said. “That’s understood. Margaret told me so.”

Mrs. Emerson merely aligned a stack of envelopes. She moved her lips, forming no words, pretending it was the stroke that kept her from speaking.

Matthew smoothed open the pages of the budget book and explained how it was kept—a page for every month, an entry for every expense, however small. Matches, stamps, cleaning fluid. Her children thought of the book as a joke. Matthew showed Elizabeth the first page, started two years ago: “This book, 69¢; envelope for this book,
2¢.”
He pointed it out silently, smiling. Elizabeth barely glanced at it. “Why couldn’t
you
do this?” she asked him. “You’re here all the time.”

“But I won’t be after Sunday.” “Why? Where are you going?”

“Well, I have to get back to work. I can only stop by in the evenings.”

She looked up and found him watching her. His glasses had slipped down his nose again. His shoulder just brushed hers. He smelled like bread baking, and always had, but until now she had forgotten that. Caught off guard, she smiled back at him. Then Mrs. Emerson cleared her throat, and Elizabeth moved over to sit on the foot of the bed.

All Friday evening she worked on the bills, staying close by Mrs. Emerson in case questions arose. “Who is this Mr.
Robbins? Why the two dollars? Where is this bill they say you’ve overlooked?” She decided that budget books were more revealing than diaries. Mrs. Emerson, who had been born rich, worried more about money than Elizabeth ever had. Her business correspondence was full of suspicion and penny-counting, quibbling over labor hours, threatening to take her business elsewhere, reminding everyone of contracts and estimates and guarantees. Her bills were from discount stores and cut-rate drug companies, some of them clear across the country, and to their trifling amounts interest rates and penalties had been tacked on month after month while Mrs. Emerson hesitated over paying them. Her checks were from an inconvenient bank at the other end of town—lower service charges, Matthew said. Yet Elizabeth found a seventy-dollar receipt from a health food store, and a sixty-dollar bill for a bathrobe. She whistled. Mrs. Emerson said, “What, what—”