The Eighth Day (53 page)

Eustacia opened the gate. They mounted the steps softly. They moved along the verandah and looked long into the room. Beata was reading aloud. Constance was mending some sheets. Sophia lay on the floor adding columns in her account books. An old man sat against the wall, asleep. Two others were playing checkers. An old lady was rocking a cat on her lap. Abruptly Eustacia seized her daughters' elbows and drew them into the street. They returned to “St. Kitts” in silence.

This is a history.

But there is only one history. It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished. All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions—makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entireties, diffusing petty comfort or petty despair. The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and a brief passage of time from that enormous tapestry. Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against the injustice, against the imposture.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Look about you in all directions—rise higher, rise higher!—and see hills beyond hills, plains and rivers.

This history made the pretense of a beginning:
“In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenbridge Lansing, also of Coaltown.”
The reader has long been aware of how misleading those words are—regarded as the
beginning
of anything.

Hills beyond hills:
there
a mentally unstable family of the Loire;
there
a massacre in the West Indies;
there
a religious sect in Kentucky that moves westward. . . . ?

Do you see a man drowning in a wreck off Costa Rica? A great Russian actor killed in a
mêlée
, where no one gave much thought to who was slain? A funeral in Washington in 1930, with military bands and statesmen in silk hats; behind the widow and her children you can see two middle-aged women—a great opera singer and a troublemaking social reformer? (But funerals are only in appearance the end of anything.) Two old ladies sitting down to lunch in Los Angeles, enjoying the sixty-five-cent plate at The Copper Kettle (“Have the veal, Beata. You remember you liked it.” “Now don't flutter at me, Eustacia!”)? The children, the innumerable children . . . ??

History is
one
tapestry. No eye can venture to compass a hand's-breadth of it. There were once a million people in Babylon.

Then look again at a miscarriage of justice in an unimportant case in a small Middlewestern town.

December twenty-third.

The train was late. Dusk had fallen. Between the bluffs of Coaltown the snowflakes fell unhurriedly in the windless air.

A large crowd had gathered at the depot. Some came to meet relatives. Some were there because it was their custom to be there every late afternoon in the year. The larger part of the throng was present because it was rumored that Lily and Roger Ashley were returning to spend the holidays with their mother and sisters. There was a good deal of nudging and pointing. Constance and Sophia were standing at the far edge of the platform. Exciting and contradictory rumors had been circulating for many months. Some said that Lily Ashley had run away with a drummer and had been abandoned in the great city (but people will believe anything!) and that—wearing short skirts—she danced and sang in low resorts; some said that Roger frequented prize fighters and horse-racing men and Italians and Greeks and people like that; that he engaged in fisticuffs in saloons and that he wrote articles in the papers about subjects that decent people don't even think about. And yet others said that Lily—first as Mrs. Temple, and then as Miss Scolastica Ashley—sang at the weddings and funerals of Chicago's first families and that Roger had received honors and tributes from important persons and organizations. Roger was not a newspaperman for nothing; he was no stranger to the manipulation of rumor. He had forwarded clippings to Miss Doubkov and Dr. Gillies, lively advocates. They had received proof sheets of his forthcoming book. He was very conscious of being the head of the family and the defender of its damaged honor. Under such conditions one sacrifices even modesty. The most lively rumors are conflicting ones. The unhappy citizens of Coaltown did not know what to believe or whom to condemn.

Roger was dressed as a man of substance. Lily had taken him shopping. His collar scraped his chin; his coat was impressive; his handbag was new; his shoes shone. He carried a number of brightly wrapped packages. When he descended from the train his face wore a stern expression. He was endeavoring to master a constriction in his throat and an unaccustomed pounding of his heart. He was not yet ready to enter “The Elms.”

Coaltown.

He looked about him in the tumultuous crowd. His sisters did not at first recognize him. He failed to see Porky, who was standing under the trees beyond the edge of the platform. He mastered his constraint and entered at once into his performance. He walked resolutely toward the stationmaster and—putting down his parcels—held out his hand.

“How are you, Mr. Killigrew? I'm glad to see you.”

“Why,
Roger!
Glad to see you! Welcome home! Your sisters are here—saw them just a minute ago.”

Ranges beyond ranges of hills, plains and rivers . . . ?

Three and a half years earlier his father
—
handcuffed
—
had obtained permission from his guards to speak to Mr. Killigrew: “Horace, will you see that my son gets this watch?” “Yes, Mr. Ashley, I'll do that.” Four weeks later Sophia had set up her table and sold lemonade, three cents a glass. Here Mrs. Gillies had bowed in silence to her husband, returning with the coffin of their son, killed in a sledding accident in Massachusetts. Here the young John Ashleys had descended from the train and looked about them, all happy expectation. The platforms of railway stations! From here Olga Sergeievna will leave Coaltown forever, head high, bravely dressed for her return to her fatherland; Beata will take a train for the first time in twenty-eight years to spend a short holiday with her son and grandchildren in New York. The station platform will miss by a few hundred yards being witness to George Lansing's departure toward that astonishing career five thousand miles away (his departure was surreptitious; he leapt aboard the moving train from the heaps of coal in the station yard). Here young men departed for the First World War and returned from it. Before the second war a new highway had been built and new tracks laid eleven miles to the west of Coaltown. The station fell into disrepair. It decayed
—
which is a burning
—
and finally went up in flames one frosty November night. It burned up, like everything else in history.

Roger turned. He saw Mrs. Lansing coming toward him. “Roger! Dear Roger!” she said and kissed him as she had done several hundred times yearly during his childhood. An account of this unsuitable greeting was carried from house to house for days. He shook hands with the Lansing girls. “A merry Christmas to you all,” continued Eustacia. “I hope you'll come and see us while you're here.”

“I will, Mrs. Lansing. I'll come and see you tomorrow night.”

Before he turned away he exchanged a glance of intelligence and connivance with Félicité. It said, “Tomorrow morning at half past ten in Miss Doubkov's store.”

Shyly Sophia and Constance approached him.

Several prominent citizens came up and shook his hand. “Well, Roger! How are you? You're looking fine. Yes, sir, you're looking fine.” “Why, Roger! Welcome home. How things been with you?” A number of them had behaved like skunks and weasels at the trial, but shucks! There are a lot of those in the world. Nothing to get hot about.

He shook their hands and looked into their uneasy faces. His eyes were searching for his sisters; perhaps his mother was here.

“Roger,” said Sophia, softly.

How tall they were! For the first time in his life he kissed them. “Sophie! Connie! My, aren't you beautiful girls!”

“Are we?” asked Constance, eagerly. “Some of the boarders say we are.”

“Is Mama here?”

“No,” said Constance. “She's at home. She never comes out on the street and I almost never do.” They could find nothing further to say until Constance suddenly cried. “You look just like Papa! Sophie, doesn't he look just like Papa?” She threw her arms about him in the ecstasy of embracing two.

The former mayor Mr. Wilkins (weasel and rat) came up to Roger and shook his hand. “Glad to see you, Roger. Welcome home!”

“Thank you, Mr. Wilkins.”

To Sophia he whispered, “Where did you sell the lemonade and the books?”

She pointed, smiling.

“You're great, Sophie. That's all I can say about you. . . . ? Where's Porky?”

“Here I am.”

They shook hands. “Porky, I want to have a long talk with you. After supper I'm going to have a talk with my mother and then I'm going to take a walk with Sophie. Are you going up the hill to your grandfather's house tonight?”

“No, I'll be working in my store.”

Only a portion of the crowd had gone home. A number were standing about, now motionless and silent, staring at the Ashleys—“like we were two-headed chickens,” thought Constance. Roger dispersed them easily: “Good evening, Mrs. Folsom. How are Bert and Delia? . . . ? Good evening, Mrs. Stubbs. . . . ? Hello, Frank.”

They reached the top of the main street. Roger could see a light at the corner of the house, in the dining room. He wasn't ready to enter “The Elms.” “Porky, will you take these things and put them beside the front door? I'll see you at about a quarter of nine.—Girls, let's walk down the street a ways.”

In front of the post office Constance said, “They took down Papa's picture off the wall.”

“I've got one. A friend of mine stole it from a police station in Chicago. I cut out the picture and put it in a frame for Mama's Christmas present.”

“Oh, Roger! We can have one in the house for our very own!”

It had snowed during the last weeks in Chicago; rain, sleet, and snow had been driven furiously across the city from the lake. This was the first true snowfall that he had seen this year. The snowfall of his childhood. He remembered that the Maestro's daughter Beatrice had once put to her father a question that had often occurred to himself: “
Papà Benè
” (for Benedetto), “why is the first snow in winter so beautiful . . . ? like music?”

“So! Well!
Bice
, listen to your father: the first months of our life we are wrapped in white, we are soothed and put to sleep in white. Later, we are told that Heaven—which is the memory of infancy—is white. We are lifted and carried about; we float. That is why we are told that angels fly. The first snow reminds us of the only times in our lives when we were without fear. A cemetery under rain is the saddest sight in the world, because the rain reminds of tears; but a cemetery under snow is inviting. We remember that world. In winter the dead are encradled.”

“Si, Papà. Grazie, Papà Benè.”

They passed the tavern and Mr. Bostwick's grocery store. “This is Miss Doubkov's store. Mrs. Lansing owns it and Felicity works there sometimes. Here's Porky's store. Look, he's making it bigger. And this was Mrs. Cavanaugh's house—who they took away to Goshen.”

Before they reached “St. Kitts” Roger turned back. “I guess Mama'll be waiting for us,” he said.

Constance was now a young lady of almost thirteen and tall for her age, but under the stress of her brother's (and father's return)—on this short walk, for a few minutes—she exhibited a surprising regression. She kept tugging at Roger's sleeve, his pocket, his elbow. It became evident that she wished to be picked up and carried on his shoulder, as her father had carried her every evening when he returned from work.

Roger stopped and looked down at her with a smile: “But, Connie, you're too big to be picked up now.”

A look of confusion crossed her face. “Well, let me hold your hand.”

Hills beyond hills . . . ?

Throughout her whole life her friends and enemies used to say of her, “There's something ‘little-girl' about Constance Ashley-Nishimura,” or “There's a side of Constance that really never grew up; there's a silly side.” In all her campaigns she relied on older men, as though they were a father or brother, and she had an unerring instinct for selecting them—two Viceroys of India, the last Khedive, Presidents, and Prime Ministers (“Codes for Landlords,” “Votes for Women,” “Rights of Married Women,” “Supervision of Prostitution”—she advocated a sort of trade union—“Eye Clinics for Children”—she was a pioneer in preventive medicine), millionaires (all that money she collected and she was often at her wits' end to pay her hotel bill). It was the little-girl side of her that carried her through difficult times—the brutality of the police, the insults and filth thrown at her. She had the fearlessness of a little girl, not that of a mature woman. All this candor and self-confidence were a gift to her from her father and brother. The fairest gifts—and the most baneful—are those of which the donor is unconscious; they are conveyed over the years in the innumerable occasions of the daily life—in glance, pause, jest, silence, smile, expressions of admiration or disapproval. Constance found other fathers and brothers. They were often exasperated, occasionally furious; but they seldom betrayed her. . . . ?

Finally, they approached the house. Roger gazed long at the sign
THE ELMS ROOMS AND BOARD
. He was remembering Sophia's letters, his first year in Chicago, the day the taxes were paid. He pressed Sophia's elbow against his side.