Nine Women (8 page)

The head nodded slightly, tipped, it seemed, by the weight of its glasses.

The sand was very hot to her feet and she hurried to the water, tossing her things on a vacant lounge.

I need bathing shoes, she thought. I did have a pair once, years ago. But Hugh disliked them. Those things make you look like a grandmotherly washerwoman, he said.… I wonder if I still have them at the house, put away in a box somewhere.

She stood in the cool sand at the very edge of the water, curling her toes in the damp softness.

At once her two grandsons appeared, swimming rapidly to stand next to her. Gleaming sleek creatures, smooth muscles under taut skin.

She smiled at them, noticing for the uncounted thousandth time how very much they resembled Hugh.

For a second or so she allowed herself the comforting thought that they were Hugh, that he was here, in them, young and strong and healthy, younger even than when she’d first met him.… The idea flitted, soothed, vanished with a tiny pop like a bubble.

Hugh did not live in them. Hugh was dead. She was here alone.

Oh, but they were good boys, they were wonderful boys. So well-mannered that they truly seemed to enjoy keeping Grandmother company.… And she was glad to have them. Glad to warm herself at the glow of their youth and health.

“This first day, today, is very hard for me,” she told them, explaining calmly and carefully. “Last year I was here with your grandfather. This year it’s very difficult for me to come to the same place without him.”

Two pairs of brown eyes watched her, understanding, patient, loving, obedient. Like fine spaniels.

“But none of that has anything to do with you. Go back to your friends,” she said. “I’ll have a swim and a bite of lunch and I’ll go home early. I don’t want to get too much sun the first day.”

They were gone into the ocean then, like porpoises, arcing and playing, ribbons of wake behind.

The water was very cold, and she went in backwards, sinking down slowly in a kind of curtsy at the last. She swam out forty strokes, counting carefully, then side-stroked in. Her arthritis—stunned, she liked to think, by the combination of cold water and sudden exercise—did not twinge or ache as she walked back across the sand to the deck. She toweled her hair quickly and stretched out on her lounge, face down, letting the sun dry her bathing suit. She could feel the rays, like a dentist’s drill, vibrate against her spine.

Jane Landrieux and her daughter Linda sat on a large red and blue beach blanket littered with plastic toys—shovels and pails and sand sieves—and watched two lifeguards give swimming lessons to a line of small children.

“Mother,” Linda said, “do you think they learn anything like that? I mean, those lessons aren’t cheap.”

Jane’s eyes found her granddaughter in the shrieking crowd. “Well, I think she’s learning. She just hasn’t got the breathing right, that’s all.”

“That’s
all!
That’s the important part, Mother.”

“I love her haircut. It makes her look, well, French.”

“I’m not sure I like it.”

“Watch out! Deerfly.” Jane swatted at her leg. “Got him, bury him quick.”

“Mother, you’ve got to kill them or they’ll dig right up out of the sand.”

Jane said, looking off across the beach, over the crowded heads and through the forest of umbrellas, “Isn’t that Myra Rowland?”

“Pink bathing suit? Yes. I saw her earlier, sitting at Papa’s table.”

“Her husband died last winter.”

“You sent us a newspaper clipping, remember?”

“I meant to,” Jane said. “I just didn’t think I had.”

“I wonder why she came back.”

“It’s a beautiful house with a lovely view. She must like it.”

“But she’s got enough money to go anywhere.” Linda was again watching the children thrashing about in the shallows.

“She must like it here.”

“Can’t,” Linda said firmly. “No way.”

“Then I don’t know.” Jane reached for her paperback to end the conversation.

Myra Rowland, bones warmed and joints comforted by the sun, gathered her towel and bag and hat, and prepared to go home. Her eyes, dazzled by the glare, wrapped the contours of the world—the beach, the buildings, the people—in a gleaming radiance. She floated through a blurred and glorious landscape, in a halo of light, through shimmering featureless ephemera.

She stopped at the bar for a gin and tonic, her second of the day, her last at the club. After this she would change and go home to sit in the green coolness of her garden, next to the heavy arcing canes of the Mermaid rosebush she herself had planted forty years before. She would have another gin and tonic and then another, less mixer each time, until finally she drank straight gin on the rocks. At eight her grandsons, houseguests, and visitors would have dinner in the dining room. Usually she joined them, though the food tasted of nothing and the wine was harsh as vinegar and she grew bored and fretful at the sound of voices. Some evenings, increasingly many evenings now, she did not go in to dinner. When she left the garden she moved, slowly and steadily, ship under full sail, through the hall—passing the dining room door without a nod, without a glance—to the stairs. She lifted and pointed her chin, following it like a compass needle. Up the wide polished stairs to the second floor where the bedrooms were, then other steps to the third floor, with its servants’ rooms and storage closets. Coming at last to a steep and narrow climb, hardly more than an enclosed ladder, where she balanced herself with palms pressed against the walls on each side. Up through the roof to the very top. The widow’s walk.

It was a small platform, four steps each way, edged by a low wooden railing and benches with blue canvas cushions. (Crisp and bright this beginning of summer, they’d be blotched with mildew by September.)

She paced the four-step pattern, back and forth. (They could hear her footfalls on the floor immediately below.) She watched the constellations swing up out of the ocean and traced the twin bands of the Milky Way. Mosquitoes buzzed softly about her ears, and owls in their passing tore silent holes in the night. Occasionally from below there’d be human sounds, filtered by distance: mumbled voices, laughter like a match flaring, a piano badly played.

Eventually, she would stretch out on the blue canvas cushions and stare at the sky overhead, listening to the songs the planets sang and the rattle of shingle on the beach in a falling tide. Usually she’d fall asleep, sound, dreamless sleep, waking only to first light and bird cries, her hair drenched and dripping with dew and night fog, her lips smiling with a quiet joy.

In the sun of midafternoon Myra Rowland picked up her gin and tonic from the bar and looked for an empty table.

“Myra! Here. Join us.”

Her sun-diluted brain fumbled for a name and found it:

Isabel. Isabel something or other. And he was, what—an Irish name, yes. Liam. Of course.

She joined them, greeting them with the names she had so recently retrieved from her memory. And then they seemed to fade away from her, to dwindle, to diminish. She lost all interest in them. She fell silent, nodding now and then, drinking steadily, sleepy, eyes half-closed.

“Look, Myra, are you sure you’re all right?”

She heard them distinctly but faintly. She opened her eyes, lifted her chin. And smiled. Their figures grew, fleshed out, they were human again. “I am perfectly all right,” she said. “You must just be patient with an old woman.”

Overhead a navy blue umbrella, faded and streaked by last season’s sun, trapped shimmering swirls of hot air under its dome. They were, the three of them, stained by its reflected light, the color of new bruises.

“I am so happy to see you.” She lifted her glass. Smiling with a delight that was real, very real, but had nothing to do with them. (They would be less pleased, she thought, were they to know that.) “To our summer,” she said to their hazy haloed faces, “to our summer here.”

Oh yes, my friends whose last name I cannot remember, I am truly glad to see you. I appreciate your kindness and your friendliness.

I am truly glad to have had this day, one of my dwindling supply, to have had the sun and the bitter sea taste in my mouth. I am glad to have my favorite drink and to hear its ice cubes rattle.

She lifted her glass again, higher, so that the umbrella’s bluish stain poured through it.

And this sun-spoiled, sun-streaked ragged umbrella over my head—how beautiful it is to me there, where soon enough there’ll be only earth.

Until then, though, the days, how they shine, how they shine.

Y
ES,
I
WAS HOUSEKEEPER THERE,
five days a week, for nearly nine years. And there was grief and sadness at the beginning as well as the end, I’ll tell you that.

I started work a month or so after my husband died. I didn’t really need the money: I had his pension and the income from two rental properties we’d managed to buy over the years. But I just couldn’t sit home and be grieved by ghosts and wet the floor with tears.

When they heard, my children got very upset. All of them—Alec and Marty and Crissie—who never agreed on anything in their lives, they all agreed that I mustn’t work. No, Mama, they said by phone, by letter. No, no, please no. Alec, my oldest, even came to see me, came all the way across the country to tell me it wasn’t decent for me to do housework.

“If there’s anything you want, Mama, just tell us. We’re all doing very well, we can give you anything you want.”

I started to say: Give me your father back, healthy and laughing.

But I couldn’t say that, not to those brown eyes glistening with confusion and worry. So, because he was my child and I had had years of being patient with him, I tried to explain politely and carefully.

“I understand, Mama,” he said. “We all understand that you want to be busy, to do something, to get out. Do you know that Mr. Congreve is looking for somebody to help in his office?”

So Alec had been talking to the minister, not telling me anything about it. That was typical Alec, he just had to organize things. But not this time.

You see, I figured I’d done my bit for the church over the years. I didn’t think I owed it anything. And I didn’t intend to spend my days typing notices and mailing out newsletters with all those other widows. Relicts, my grandmother used to call them.

Alec, I told him, you are a nice boy and a good son, but this is none of your business. I have done housework all my life, only this time it’s going to be for pay and not for family.

So that was that, though he never gave up trying to get me to change my mind. And he told everybody that working was just a passing fancy of mine, that it wouldn’t last.

Well, it did last, like I said, for nearly nine years. My first job was my last and only one. And that was because I found Dr. Hollisher.

He lived in one of the cottages on the beach at Indian Head Bay, a nice little house with wide screen porches all around and oak trees towering overhead, reaching right across the roof. It was so shady and cool in summer, he hardly ever used air-conditioning. Of course it was chilly and damp during the winter rains, but they don’t last long.

His name was Milton Eugene Hollisher, so it said on the National City Bank checks he had ready for me every week, waiting on the hall table, same place every time, one end tucked under the big brass hurricane lamp. He never once gave me my check directly, hand to hand.

He told me he was retired. I heard somewhere, at church maybe or at the grocery, that he’d been a psychiatrist at the big VA hospital at Greenwood, but I don’t know for sure. He didn’t talk about himself.

We got on just fine. He was one for putting things plainly and I always did like to have everything clearly understood.

“Mrs. Emmons,” he said to me the very first time I went there—almost but not quite inside the front door, he was waiting for me on the porch—“you are on time to the minute, I admire that.” He waved me to a cane rocking chair. (It was one of those screen porches with rockers and plant stands full of ferns and a ceiling fan turning slowly.) “I should like you to come at ten and leave at two or earlier, if possible. Please do not play the radio. The only television in the house is a single black and white set which is tuned to my evening news station. It is so very small it can hardly tempt you to turn it on. Please do not whistle or sing at your work. That was splendid for Snow White, but I do not think it is suitable for this house.”

I sat in his rocker. And looked around. The porch was spotless, not even a speck of dust on the shiny glass tabletop, though it was a dry summer and fine blowing haze hung all day in the air. He must have wiped it clean just before I came.

And I, to use his words, admire that. To have things neat for the housekeeper to start off—yes, I did like that.

There was a large nest of mud daubers building in the outside corner of the porch. I pointed to it. “You should do something about that. They’ll be inside pretty soon, you know.”

“I am very allergic to stings,” he said, scarcely looking at it.

“I’ll take care of it with a spray can.”

He nodded.

I realized then that we were talking as if I had the job already. As if he’d asked me, which he hadn’t, and I’d accepted, which I hadn’t either.

“And of course,” he said, “you will have to wear other shoes.”

I looked at my feet: black oxfords, the most comfortable shoes in the world.

“They have crepe soles,” he said. “I do not like people to walk silently.”

“Well,” I said slowly, “most people prefer the quiet.”

He shook his head violently.

“All right,” I said.

I tried for a week. My bunions burned and my spine ached, and I went back to my rubber-soled shoes. He was upset all right. I had to tell him I couldn’t work otherwise—anyway, he gave up about the shoes. Eventually I thought of a solution. Years ago, when I was a girl, we all wore charm bracelets with dozens of odd shapes dangling and rattling. I hunted up my bracelet—took me a while to find it—and wore it to work every day. I felt like one of those fat pet cats who wear silver bells to warn away birds. But it satisfied him.