I also knew that the one who’d suffer most by her decision was Howard. He’d miss her. He needed a mother. He wasn’t an easy boy to love but Constance loved him, and my own feelings for Constance at this time were closely bound up with her relationship to my son. She was closer to him than I was, and she understood him better than I did. Now she wanted to retire to this broken-down house on the river and look after the old man, whom she hated, and Howard would lose the only real mother he had. I felt sorry for the boy but I didn’t know what I could do for him. Later I tried to speak to him about it but without success. Like Constance he sustained an inscrutable private inner world. I just hoped to god he didn’t hear voices.
After we’d left for the city Mildred moved out of Ravenswood. She’d decided to stay with one of her sisters in Rhine-cliff for a while. With Constance in the house she felt she didn’t need to be there all the time. She felt it was the tactful thing to do. That night Constance cooked a meal for the old man. He’d come down after his nap and was in his chair in the sitting room. She heard him calling, his voice frail and plaintive, but it wasn’t her he wanted.
—Iris, he was calling, Iris, are you there?
It would break your heart.
—Yes, Daddy, said Constance. I’m here.
It would be easy to believe as Sidney did that Iris fell into the river by accident but that comfort was unavailable to me. Until Mildred returned I was alone with Daddy in Ravenswood. I soon learned he couldn’t be left for long. I always had to be in earshot. Much of the day he stared into space with his mouth open but then he’d all at once awaken and panic. I never got used to it. And he couldn’t find his room. The first time it happened I heard him shouting and I went upstairs and found him in Iris’s room. He’d seen her.
—Where are you? he shouted as I came up the stairs. Where have you gone?
I found him in the doorway. He was peering wildly around the room.
—Daddy?
—Where have you been?
I saw the joke now. I was to be mistaken for Iris and Constance would cease to exist, what little of her remained. In Daddy’s mind I was extinguished and I welcomed it, I sank into it with relief that I didn’t have to sustain a self that was intolerable to me now. One morning after Mildred returned I heard
him ask her about the woman who’d been in the house last night. Who was she? Mildred said she was Constance.
—Who’s Constance?
—Your daughter.
She didn’t know I was in the corridor, listening.
—You mean Iris, he said.
—Yes, Iris.
—She looks after me very well.
We both knew he was clinging to a very few certainties now and that in his mind there was light enough for one daughter only, and she was Iris. I’d find him in Iris’s room with no idea how he’d got there or why. Gently I’d lead him back to his own room.
Sidney knew I hated Daddy and he didn’t understand why I was doing this. I’d told him someone had to and it was the truth. But it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was, I had to get away from
him.
After he found out about Eddie he watched me like a hawk, he asked me questions, he thought about what I said and what I did, always trying to make sense of me, always
dissecting
me. Trying to figure out what I was and failing to see I was nothing. In the early days it had been so much easier. Then he let me be. Not anymore. I needed him but I couldn’t take the constant surveillance. I remember one day we were discussing the Wordsworth lines about the murdering intellect. Nothing exceeds knowledge, he said, and I said, Oh yes it does. But he didn’t get it. I felt I was locked in perpetual conflict with him. I’d once felt that way about Daddy but then he’d started having strokes and grew weaker. That’s what I needed Sidney to do, grow weaker. But as it stood he wouldn’t let this happen and I was exhausted and that’s the reason I went back to
Ravenswood. I said it was to look after Daddy but I didn’t give a damn about Daddy, him I wanted to die. But now I was too much alone with him.
—Constance, said Mildred one day, do you want me to move back into the house?
—Mildred, I said, I do.
I’d hoped she’d ask. It was the first expression of the bond that developed between us over this period. Later she told me it was only when Iris died that she realized I’d been persecuted all my life for no fault of my own. Too little, I thought, too late, but at least someone understands. So she moved back in. She appeared at the front door with her suitcase. I welcomed her as though she were a relative in need of a long vacation. Daddy insisted on taking her suitcase. He went off up the stairs with it. We followed him. He went directly to Iris’s room. He set down the suitcase at the end of the bed. There were no sheets on the mattress and I’d already removed the few possessions she’d left there. Some items of clothing and makeup, a doll with no eyes called Amanda Jane.
—You’ll be comfortable here, he said.
I’d meanwhile made up Mildred’s old bed in the tower.
—This was my daughter’s room, he then said to our astonishment. She slept here the night before she died. It was haunted by her presence for a time but she’s gone now. You won’t be disturbed.
Then with some gravity, his eyes downcast, he left us there. I sat down on the mattress and stared at Mildred. What did it mean? It meant nothing. It was just one of those rare moments when for no apparent reason a stray shaft of light broke through
the darkness and briefly gave him a little clarity. Something similar had occurred a few days earlier. It was an afternoon in the early spring when I walked with him through the high grass on the south front of the house to look at the river. There was a cool breeze coming up through the trees. We stood in silence and then he spoke.
—I hope to die soon, he said.
—Don’t talk like that.
—It’s not a life, what I have. Better off dead.
He fell silent. Sometimes he touched my heart, despite everything. An hour later we were having coffee on the verandah.
—Daddy, you remember that thing you said a while ago?
But he didn’t remember.
The weather grew warmer and I knew we must make repairs to the house before the next winter. But I had so little money now. I’d taken an indefinite leave from Cooper Wilder and there was nothing coming in. We knew the dementia would kill him in the end but it might not happen for seven years. The house was old and in poor repair. The roof had to be fixed. When it rained it leaked and emptying buckets was at times a daily task. I took on the mowing of the grass near the south front but when the mower broke down I abandoned it and the grass grew high and wild. I sat at the kitchen table and wept. I’d done the right thing to get away from Sidney but I was paying a high price for my freedom. I’d forgotten how dependent on him I’d become during our short marriage. I sold some furniture that had been in the family since colonial times. It didn’t fetch much. There was no market for American antiquities then.
But I had some possessions still in New York. There was the Jerome Brook Franklin view of the Hudson in oils Sidney gave me for a wedding present. I wrote asking him to take it to a dealer. Three days later a letter arrived. I at once tore it open. A single folded sheet of paper, and in it a check. He’d been generous. The letter wasn’t long. He said that Howard missed me. I’d heard about his mother’s death and I’d sent a letter of condolence, a short one. Poor Howard. I knew what it was like for a child to lose his mother. I saw Iris go through it. Later I learned she’d died in the hospital. It was kidney disease. Sidney told me Howard never spoke of her again and never shed a tear, at least not in his presence. This impressed me. Howard knew the proper way to behave. I’d seen Iris grieving for Harriet, and what a piece of theater that was.
Later I thought Howard should have wept. He should have grieved. I hoped to god he wasn’t catching my disease.
I thought about Iris at times but not often, because whatever remained of her I’d absorbed into myself. The thing now was to attend to the living. To let the dead be, and attend to the living. I put Sidney’s letter away and returned to the kitchen, where I got down on my hands and knees. I was cleaning the oven. It hadn’t been done in years. It was like a charcoal pit in there. It was a job that called for scouring powder, buckets of hot water, scrubbing brushes, and what Harriet used to call elbow grease.
A few days later Mildred went upstairs to wake Daddy from his nap and found him sitting in the bathtub. It was a deep old tub with tarnished brass taps and clawed feet. If there was enough hot water in the tank it made for a blissful lingering immersion. Mildred came to the top of the stairs and shouted for me. When
I got upstairs she was disinfecting the old man’s wrist. He sat in a few inches of tepid water with strings and spools of blood floating around him. The bloody razor lay in a bucket under the sink. It was an inept attempt and he was unsure what had happened. But he grew excited as Mildred worked with brisk efficiency. She murmured to him, comforting him. There were no recriminations. He was skinny and slack-skinned now, white-bearded, and excited by what Mildred was doing, although he must have bandaged a cut a thousand times himself. He had an erection.
—Do we need Hugo Friedrich? I said.
Mildred, on her knees beside the tub, paused.
—I don’t think so, do you?
—I don’t think so either.
He didn’t require stitches. We got him out of the tub and into his pajamas and settled him in bed. Did he want a cup of tea? No. In a few seconds he was asleep.
—It’ll be sore when he wakes up, I said.
—He won’t know why.
We took the razor downstairs and emptied out all the drugs in his bathroom cabinet. It was a new source of concern. We sat in the kitchen with the back door open.
—Mildred, I said, that day Daddy found Walter and Harriet in the boathouse.
I wanted to let the dead alone but it wasn’t easy. Earlier that day I’d been to Tillman’s Landing. I often went there by myself to lay flowers on the rails. I was grieving for my father. But I didn’t feel his loss as acutely as I once had. Always a ghostly figure in my mind, he was now more insubstantial than ever. I was losing him.
—Yes.
—How did he know they were in there?
Mildred reached for my hand. She was gazing at me with compassion, more than compassion, sorrow. Remorse. She said she’d seen them from the tower. She fell silent. She continued to gaze at me. I remembered the long talk we’d had in the truck in the winter. Was she telling me Daddy didn’t see them go into the boathouse, but she did? And she’d betrayed them, she’d told Daddy where they were?
—Did you? I said.
She covered her mouth with her hand. She nodded her head. We sat in silence as I took in this news. I turned to her at one point, I remember, and mouthed the word
Why?
She shook her head. I didn’t pursue it. I understood why. The situation had become unbearable to her and she wanted it to just fall apart.
—Shall we have a small one? I said at last.
—I think we deserve it, said Mildred, a small one.
Later I realized it wasn’t Walter she wanted to destroy, it was Daddy’s frail marriage. But she failed. She didn’t move back into the house until Harriet was dead. She told me about the deal they made, Harriet and Daddy. He’d raise me as his own but only if Walter’s name was never mentioned in Ravenswood again.
—And was it ever mentioned? I said.
—Not until you found out.
So that was the family secret and I was supposed never to know it. I wouldn’t have known it if Daddy hadn’t started having little strokes and forgetting what the arrangements were. But in a way I’d always known. I’d known there was a secret and it made me ill. It haunted me all my life. But now the crypt was opened, now I knew the truth. Had it set me free? Was I liberated? Ha. Was I hell.
One day soon after this I was sweeping the hallway downstairs. The front door was propped wide open. I heard a car in the driveway and went out onto the porch. It was Sidney’s hearse. The black Jaguar. I stood leaning on my broom as he parked by the barn. I saw him reach across and open the passenger door. Howard stepped down onto the gravel. His arms spread wide, he was clutching a flat square object wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Carefully, slowly, he walked over to the house and climbed up the steps to the porch. He held out the wrapped object.
—Constance, this is a present from me.
The sun had come out from behind a cloud and with the glare off the windshield I couldn’t see Sidney’s face. I knew of course the gift was from him. I asked Howard if it was really for me, and he said yes, and I thanked him. Then I peered at the parcel. I lifted it to my ear, and shook it, frowning. I loved to tease that child. His impatience was easy to read. Open it now!
So I opened it. It was my painting, the Jerome Brook Franklin, the Hudson at dawn. I dropped to my knees and put my arms around the boy. It was a thoughtful gesture on Sidney’s part. I think he wanted me to believe it was more than that. Howard went back to the car. Sidney got out and we gazed at each other across the driveway. He didn’t approach me and I didn’t leave the porch but I guess it was an important encounter. Howard was simply happy that he’d seen me. That was enough. That was what mattered. But it wasn’t the only thing that mattered. Sidney was coming around. He was weakening. I was encouraged by this. Every time I looked at the Jerome Brook Franklin I felt it again. Not triumphal, no triumphalism yet. But encouraged.
The old man’s wrist was healing but our vigilance never slept now. We kept tools and sharp knives under lock and key. Talk of death grew more frequent. I remembered a time when Iris and I had been amused by him saying, on being asked if he’d had a good sleep, that no, he hadn’t: He’d woken up. It wasn’t funny anymore. At times anxiety overwhelmed him after even a few moments alone. To him it must have felt like blackest night. He was a child. He lived in the present moment and suffered his horror unmediated by reason or experience. Without any insight he might have endured his condition, and unable to reflect on it, never desired an end to it.