The Transcendental Murder (32 page)

But
they
had all been obsessed with pattern, too, those Transcendentalists. They had all leaped from the particular to the general, looking for the pattern in the daily jumble. Why? What was the matter with the particular anyhow? Why couldn't she just be-there-and-how-do-you-do? Why did the bare bones of a simple act like walking to the stove with a pan of water have to flesh out into something alive and complicated, with skin and hair growing on it? (How many other women had carried water, in what vessels, from what source? Oh, forget it. This is
my
water,
my
pan with the nicked porcelain,
my
soft-boiled egg, and shut up to you. It's not part of any pattern, it's my breakfast.)

The trouble with the layers of meanings that grew like a fungus all over the little pieces of the particular was that the symbol might grow too huge, the stratification of meaning piled on meaning might become too ponderous, too heavy, too thick. One might start wandering in a forest from which there was no escaping; where every simple act and every trivial object became so much more that itself that one went mad. Mary shook her head and stared out the window. On this side of the house she could see the transparent moon. It was setting into a rec horizon, looking angry and mottled, like a lump of amber with a dead fly caught in it. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. That's right, there was supposed to be a storm brewing. But now there was no wind at all. Even Freddy's diapers hanging on the line hung limp and still, as stiff and orderly as dentil blocks on an architectural molding—a pure pattern, rosy in the dawn-light.

… But if you went mad, then you wouldn't be a pattern any more, would you? You would be one-of-a-kind, unique, all alone by yourself, yourself-in-yourself, crying in the forest. Look at Mrs. Goss. She had been more patterned and stylized that anybody—until she had forgotten the pattern altogether and gone crazy. Now she was, indeed, one-of-a-kind, crying in the forest …

Mary sat down and looked at her breakfast. The dishes matched. She wanted to break them. She got up and found a bottle of ketchup and shook it on her egg. It tasted terrible, but at least it wasn't old patterned ceremonial salt and pepper. The blue willow plate had a crack in it. Mary looked at the crack and blessed it. Among the apples in the bowl on the table there was one with a spot on it. She reached for it suddenly and bit into the spot.

There was that letter from Philip, leaning against the sugar bowl. Mary didn't want to read it. She knew what it would say. It would be Philip's pattern, nothing surprising. Philip didn't have any spots, that was the trouble with him. There was poor Charley in jail, all covered over with spots like a bad apple. He had fallen away from the pattern. He had run away from the template. He didn't fit the jig, so the jig was up. The letter looked at her. Read, Mary, read. Jump, Mary, jump. No, thank you, I don't want to jump today.

Of course, that was her transcendental ladies all over. They couldn't jump. Emily Dickinson had refused to jump. Margaret Fuller had wanted to jump badly, but she didn't know how, and she kept blundering clumsily all over the rope. There were the Parcae, those grim women in the Grecian robes, turning and turning the rope, setting a pattern for you to leap and jump to, chanting it for you—

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn out the light;
Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

Then
snip
, with their big scissors, and
out go you.
And sometimes it was Double Dutch they swung for you, and you had to hop and leap, frantically, between two ropes at once.

But you didn't have to jump. The little girl who was leaning in, getting ready, could just turn away and run, with her arms over her face. That was what Emily had done. She had run away. And that was what Henry Thoreau had done, too, after all, when he went to live in the woods. He had refused to jump.

Mary went upstairs and lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. The jumping rope disappeared. Instead there was that procession again, with the barrel-vaulted triumphal arch and the sublime figures and the glorious flags. She could see it clearly now, she could see it all so clearly! Now at last she could see what it was all about. It was a funeral, such a pretty funeral! Alice's? Teddy's? Ernest Goss's? No. There was the glass box, like Snow White's, with the little girl inside. It was herself, little Mary, the little girl who had refused to jump. She was asleep in there, she was dead in there—that's what the procession was all about.

Mary opened her eyes again, with the tears clinging top and bottom. Between the edge of the bed and the wall there was something wedged. It was Freddy's teddy bear. Mary picked it up and laid it against her face. Teddy bear, teddy bear, say good night.

Chapter 56

	There was displayed a Titanic force, some of that force which made and can unmake the world.
HENRY THOREAU

The wind was rising. “Oh, boy,” said John, “we're going to have one after all.”

“Well, I suppose it could have been a whole lot worse,” said Tom. “We've got all the Macs and Cortlands picked. The Baldwins are what will get it.”

“Maybe it will go out to sea,” said Gwen.

The weather bureau had given everyone plenty of warning. At Vanderhoof's Hardware Store there were kerosene lanterns in the window and big bags of charcoal. Woolworth's did a land-office business in candles. People with pump-driven wells started filling bathtubs and gallon jugs and washtubs with water. Tom routed his whole family out to pick the apples that were ripe. Harvey Finn drove over with his sons to help. There was no school, and the children ran up and down between the trees with bushel baskets, shouting with excitement, glorying in the holiday. “Silly kids,” grumbled Tom, ramming his ladder into the top of a tree, “it's their college educations that are going to get blown all to hell.” Grandmaw was out in the orchard, too. She walked around the trees picking all she could reach from ground-level, her grey hair blowing out from her hairpins. Gwen stayed in the house fixing lunch and worrying a little. She had a suspicious backache, and the feel of her burden was different. Her center of gravity seemed lower, and she waddled around, leaning backwards to make up for it. How tiresome if she should have to beapest just at this time. As if Tom didn't have enough on his mind. Tom came in to snatch a sandwich, and looked at her closely.

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, fine, fine.”

Mary kept the library open until noon, then sent her staff home. Edith Goss lingered in the doorway. “Don't worry,” said Mary. “Go on home. That brick house of yours is solid as a rock.” When Edith was gone, Mary wandered back to her new office and stood looking out at the storm. The high winds were only beginning to rise, and the brushing of the branches against Alice's window was fumbling and ineffectual, like the hand of a wandering spirit desperate to get in. Mary turned away abruptly and went to the desk. The desk had been Alice's, too, and it had cost Mary some pain to transfer her belongings to it. There was one large drawer she had left untouched. It contained Alice's hat, the eruption of pink feathers she had worn so often in church. Mary looked at the drawer. Then she reached down and pulled it open, and looked at the hat. She took it out and put it on the desk-top. Alice had left all her worldly goods to Mary, and so she supposed the hat was hers, now. So was Alice's house, down on Fairhaven Bay. So was the little rowboat tied at Alice's landing. So were the wooden swing-seats in her front yard. Heavens, what would the storm do to them? There was no one there to pull the boat up and check the house against the strong winds that were coming. Mary pulled on her coat. She must go and take care of things herself, not because they were her possessions but because they had been Alice's. She locked up the library and drove her car out Route 2 and down the mile-long dirt road that led to Fairhaven Bay. There was the fork where the road led to Teddy Staples' place. So that was two houses down by the river that had no occupants any more. And Charley Goss was gone, too, to sit out the hurricane in jail. Jails don't blow away. But lives do—they blow out. A mighty wind had picked up Charley and it was whirling him to destruction.

The tops of the pine trees were swaying as Mary got out of her car. The water of the river was almost black, and small waves crowded its surface. She stared at the river. There was something odd about it. The waves were going the wrong way. The wind was coming from the wrong direction, that was why, and wrinkling up little white crests all over it. She turned and looked at the swings. They were rocking gently in the wind. She wouldn't be able to move the frame, but perhaps she could loosen the swinging seats and drag them under the high front porch. But there was the rowboat, too. Better tend to that first. She walked down to the boat-landing and looked at the small grey-painted rowboat. It was bobbing up and down, tied to the dock with a sort of bowknot. Alice had tied that knot herself. Mary loosened the knot and looked out across the water. The river was high, there had been so much rain. The island was a real island again, the way it had been in the spring, with the water surrounding it even on its landward side, hiding all but the tops of the buttonbushes. Mary stopped still with the rope in her hand. Wasn't that someone moving about on the island? Something had come between her and the sun, which was shining out now and then under the streaking clouds. She shaded her eyes. Yes, there was a figure there at the edge of the trees. Now it was gone.

Someone must be camping there. There was no boat that she could see, but whoever it was must have come by boat. Was someone in trouble there? If they had been camping for more than twenty-four hours they wouldn't know about the hurricane. Even if they knew, there was very little time for them to come away. Perhaps it was children, camping out. With a sudden movement, Mary pulled off her shoes and stockings, left them on the landing and waded out, pushing the little rowboat before her. If there should really be a high wind it would be the trees along the shore of the island that would be dangerous. They were partially submerged, and their roots probably all leaned one way, clutching the spongy soil for support against the southwesterly prevailing breeze. With the wind coming from the other side they would go over like candle-pins. She climbed into the boat, lifted out the oars one by one and inserted them into the oarlocks. Looking over her shoulder she started to pull. Keep abreast of the waves, now, and a little pointed into the wind. Don't broach them sideways, or you'll be swamped. Choppy going. Pull
hard, hard.
Overhead the clouds were in clots, surging like pulses, pulsing like throbs. There was no rain and no thunder, only the ever-rising wind, but the white birch trees in the dark woods were like forked lightning. The wind in her face began to be laden with torn leaves and pieces of twigs.

And there was that sweet smell. Mary had forgotten that heavenly smell. With the dismemberment of the trees, the breaking off of branches, the sundering of leaf-stems, the snapping of the living wood there went a wonderful smell. Was it the bleeding sap from millions of open wounds? Mary drank it in—it was so sweet, so fresh. One might not mind dying if from one's broken body there arose so good a thing.

Pull. Pull. Mary glanced over her shoulder again and adjusted her stroke until the boat was headed for the small sloping landing place there on the bay side of the island. The trees on this side were rooted on high ground. Their trunks swayed and their boughs pumped strongly up and down. The sound of the storm had risen to a roar, and above the roar there was the occasional snapping sound of slender branches breaking loose. Mary got out and pulled the boat up on shore and turned it over to let out the water that had slapped in over the gunwales. The noise of the wind was so steady and so loud that her own movements seemed soundless. Her bare feet were cold. She turned and hurried to the clearing where the giant pine tree stood. This was low ground, and the pine stood in water. There was no one here. Perhaps she had been mistaken, and there was no one on the island at all. A fool's errand. Mary pushed through the blueberry bushes and sumac on the other side of the clearing. Then she fell.

Chapter 57

	With Midnight to the North of Her—
And Midnight to the South of Her—
And Maelstrom—in the Sky—
EMILY DICKINSON