The Black House (16 page)

After a few minutes, Herbert went looking for Lois, and found her spooning scrambled eggs onto warmed plates on the stove. She had made toast, and there were also slices of cold boiled ham on a separate plate. This was to go on trays of the kind that stood up on the floor.

“Help me with one of these?” Lois asked.

“The Mitchells think we're nuts. They say it's going to get worse—a lot worse. And then what do we do?”

“Maybe it won't get
worse
,” Lois said.

Herbert wanted to pause a moment before taking the tray in. “You think after we tuck them in bed we could go over to the Mitchells'? They've asked us for dinner. You think it's safe—to leave them?”

Lois hesitated, knowing Herbert knew it wasn't safe. “No.”

T
HE LIVING ROOM
television set was brought up to the Forsters' room. TV was the Forsters' main diversion or occupation, even their only one, from what Lois could see. It was on from morning till night, and Lois sometimes sneaked into their bedroom at eleven o'clock or later to switch it off, partly to save electricity, but mainly because the noise of it was maddening, and her and Herbert's bedroom was adjacent on the same side of the hall. Lois took a small flashlight into their bedroom to do this. The Forsters' teeth stood in two glasses on their night table, usually, though once Lois had seen a pair in a glass on the shelf in the bathroom, out of which she and Herbert had moved their toothbrushes, shampoos and shaving articles to the smaller bathroom downstairs. The teeth gave Lois an unpleasant shock, and so they did when she switched off the loud TV every night, even though she did not shine the light on them: she simply knew they were there, one pair, anyway, and maybe the second pair was in the big bathroom. She marveled that anyone could fall asleep with the TV's bursts of canned laughter, marveled also that the sudden silence never woke the Forsters up. Mamie and Albert had said they would be more comfortable in separate beds, so Lois and Herbert had made the exchange between the two upstairs rooms, and the Forsters now had the twin beds.

A handrail had been installed on the stairway, a slender black iron rail, rather pretty and Spanish-looking. But now the Forsters seldom came downstairs, and Lois served their meals to them on trays. They loved the TV, they said, because it was in color, and those at the Hilltop hadn't been. Lois took on the tray-carrying, thinking it was what was called women's work, though Herbert fetched and carried some of the time too.

“Certainly a bore,” Herbert said, scowling one morning in his pajamas and dressing gown, about to take up the heavy tray of boiled eggs and teapot and toast. “But it's better than having them fall down the stairs and break a leg, isn't it?”

“Frankly, what's the difference if one of them did have a leg broken now?” Lois replied, and giggled nervously.

Lois's work suffered. She had to slow up on a long article she was writing for an historical quarterly, and the deadline made her anxious. She worked downstairs in a small study off the living room and on the other side of the living room from Herbert's workroom. Three or four times a day she was summoned by a shout from Mamie or Albert—they wanted more hot water for their tea (four o'clock ritual), because it was too strong, or Albert had mislaid his glasses, and could Lois find them, because Mamie couldn't. Sometimes Lois and Herbert had to be out of the house at the same time, Lois at the local library and Herbert at Bayswater. Lois had not the same joy as in former days on returning to her home: it wasn't a haven any longer that belonged to her and Herbert, because the Forsters were upstairs and might at any moment yell for something. Albert smoked an occasional cigar, not a big fat one, but a brand that smelled bitter and nasty to Lois, and she could smell it even downstairs when he lit up. He had burnt two holes in the brown and yellow cover on his bed, much to Lois's annoyance, as it was a handwoven blanket from Santa Fe. Lois had warned him and Mamie that letting ash drop could be dangerous. She hadn't been able to tell, from Albert's excuses, whether he had been asleep or merely careless.

Once, on returning from the library with some borrowed books and a folder of notes, Lois had been called upstairs by Mamie. Mamie was dressed, but lying on her bed, propped against pillows. The TV was not as loud as usual, and Albert appeared to be dozing on the other twin bed.

“Can't find my
teet
!” Mamie said petulantly, tears started to her eyes, and Lois saw from her downturned mouth, her little clamped jaw, that she was indeed toothless just now.

“Well—that should be easy.” Lois went into the bathroom, but a glance revealed that no teeth or toothglass stood on the shelf above the basin. She even looked on the floor, then returned to the Forsters' bedroom and looked around. “Did you have them out—in bed?”

Mamie hadn't, and it was her lowers, not her uppers, and she was tired of looking. Lois looked under the bed, around the TV, the tops of the bookcases, the seats of the armchairs. Mamie assured Lois they were not in the pockets of her apron, but Lois felt the pockets anyway. Was old Albert playing a silly trick, playing at being asleep now? Lois realized that she didn't really know these old people.

“You didn't flush them down the toilet by accident?”

“No! And I'm tired of looking,” said Mamie. “I'm tired!”

“Were you downstairs?”

“No!”

Lois sighed, and went downstairs. She needed a cup of strong coffee. While she was making this, she noticed that the lid was off the cake tin, that a good bit of the pound cake was gone. Lois didn't care about the cake, but it was a clue: the teeth might be downstairs. Lois knew that Mamie—maybe both of them—came downstairs sometimes when she and Herbert were out. The big square ashtray on the coffee table would be turned a little so that it looked like a diamond shape, which Lois detested, or Herbert's leather chair would be pulled out from his desk, instead of shoved close as he always left it, as if Mamie or Albert had tried the chair. Why couldn't the Forsters be equally mobile for their meals? Now with her coffee mug in hand, Lois looked over her kitchen—for teeth. She looked in her own study, where nothing seemed out of place, then went through the living room, then into Herbert's workroom. His chair was as he would have left it, but still she looked. They'll turn up, she thought, if they weren't somehow down the toilet. Finally, Lois sat down on the sofa with the rest of her coffee, and leaned back, trying to relax.

“My God!” she said, sitting up, setting the mug down on the coffee table. She had nearly spilled what was in the mug.

There were the teeth—lowers, Lois assumed—on the edge of the shelf of the coffee table that was otherwise filled with magazines. The denture looked shockingly narrow, like the lower jaw of a little rabbit. Lois took a breath. She would have to handle them. She went to the kitchen for a paper towel.

H
ERBERT LAUGHED LIKE A FOOL
at the teeth story. They told it to their friends. They still had their friends, no change there. After two months, the McIntyres had had two or three rather noisy and late dinner parties at their house. With their TV going, the Forsters presumably heard nothing; at any rate, they didn't complain or make a remark, and the McIntyres' friends seemed to be able to forget there was an elderly pair upstairs, though everyone knew it. Lois did notice that she and Herbert couldn't or didn't invite their New York friends for the weekend any longer, realizing that their friends wouldn't want to share the upstairs bathroom or the Forsters' TV racket. Christopher Forster, the son in California, had written the McIntyres a letter in longhand. The letter read as if it had been prompted by the Hilltop Home: it was courteous, expressed gratitude, and he hoped that Mom and Dad were pleased with their new home.

    

I would take them on but my wife and me haven't got too much extra space here, just one room as spare that our own children and families use when they visit us . . . Will try to get the grandchildren to write but the whole family is not much for writing . . .

The letterhead stated the name and address of a drycleaning shop of which Christopher Forster was not the manager. Albert Forster, Lois remembered, had been a salesman of some kind.

Albert started wetting the bed, and Lois acquired a rubber sheet. Albert complained of backache from “the damp,” so Lois offered him the double bed in the spare room, while she aired the twin-bed mattress for a couple of days. She telephoned the Hilltop Home to ask if there were pills that Albert might take, and had he had this complaint before? They said no, and asked if Albert was happy. Lois went to see the Hilltop Home doctor in attendance, and got some pills from him, but he doubted the complete efficacy of the pills, he said, if the subject was not even aware of his dampness until he woke up in the morning.

The second teeth story was not so funny, though both Herbert and Lois laughed at first. Mamie reported that she had dropped her teeth—again the lowers—down the heating vent in the floor of the bathroom. The teeth were not visible down there in the blackness, even when Herbert and Lois shone a flashlight. All they saw was a little dark gray lint or dust.

“You're sure?” Herbert asked Mamie, who was watching them.

“Dropped 'em
bot'
but only one fell t'rough!” said Mamie.

“Damned grill's so narrow,” Herbert said.

“So are her teeth,” said Lois.

Herbert got the grill off with a screwdriver. He rolled up his sleeves, poked gently at first in the fluffy dust, then with equal delicacy explored more deeply with a bottlebrush, not wanting to send the denture falling all the way down, if he could help it. At last he and Lois had to conclude that the teeth must have fallen all the way down, and the heating tube, rather square, curved about a yard down. Had the teeth fallen all the way into the furnace below? Herbert went down alone to the cellar, and looked with a feeling of hopelessness at the big square, rivet-secured funnel that went off the furnace and branched into six tubes that brought the heat to various rooms. Which one even belonged to the upstairs bathroom? Was it worth it to tear the whole furnace apart? Certainly not. The furnace was working as usual, and maybe the teeth had burned up. Herbert went downstairs and undertook to explain the situation to Mamie.

“We'll see that you get another set, Mamie. Might even fit better. Didn't you say these hurt and that's why—” He paused at Mamie's tragic expression. Her eyes could get a crumpled look that touched him, or disturbed him, even though he thought Mamie was usually putting on an act.

However, between him and Lois, she was consoled. She could eat “easy things” while the dental work was done. Lois at once seized on the idea of taking Mamie back to the Hilltop Home, where they might well have a dentist in residence, or an office there where dentists could work, but if they had, the Hilltop Home denied it on the telephone to Lois. This left her and Herbert to take Mamie to their own dentist in Hartford, twenty-three miles away, and the trips seemed endless, though Mamie enjoyed the rides. There was a cast of lower gums to be made, and of the upper denture for the bite, and just when Herbert and Lois, who took turns, had thought that the job was done in pretty good time, came the “fittings.”

“The lowers always present more difficulties than the uppers,” Dr. Feldman told them regretfully. “And my client here is pretty fussy.”

It was plain to the McIntyres that Mamie was putting on an act about the lowers hurting or not fitting, so she could be taken for rides back and forth. Every two weeks, Mamie wanted her hair cut and waved at a beauty salon in Hartford, which she thought better than the one in the town near where the McIntyres lived. Social Security and the pension sent on by the Hilltop helped more than fifty percent with the Forsters' expenses, but bills of the hairdresser and also the dentist the McIntyres paid. Ruth and Pete Mitchell commiserated with the McIntyres by telephone or in person (at the same time laughing their heads off), as if the McIntyres were being afflicted with the plagues of Job. In Herbert's opinion, they were. Herbert became red in the face with repressed wrath, with frustration from losing work time, but he couldn't countenance Lois losing more of her time than he did, so he did his half of hauling Mamie back and forth, and both the McIntyres took books to read in the dentist's waiting room. Twice they took Albert along, as he wanted to go, but once he peed in the waiting room before Herbert could point out the nearby toilet (Albert's deafness made him slow to understand what people were saying), so Lois and Herbert flatly refused to take him along again, saying sympathetically but really quite grimly that he shouldn't risk having to go to the toilet again in a hurry, if he happened to be in a public place. Albert snatched out his hearing aid while Lois was speaking about this. It was Albert's way of switching off.

That was in mid-May. The McIntyres had intended to fly out to Santa Barbara, where Herbert's parents had a house plus a guest house in the garden, and to rent a car there and drive up to Canada. Every other summer they visited the older McIntyres, and it had always been fun. Now that was impossible. It was impossible to think of Mamie and Albert running the house, difficult but maybe not impossible to engage the services of someone who would look after them and sleep in, full time. When they had taken on the Forsters, Lois was sure they had been more able to get about. Mamie had talked of working in the garden of the Hilltop Home, but Lois had not been able to interest Mamie in doing anything in their garden in April, even the lightest of work, such as sitting and watching. She said something to this effect to Herbert.

“I know, and it's going to get worse, not better,” he replied.

“What do you mean exactly?”

“This bed-wetting—Kids'll grow out of it. Kids grow other teeth if them lose 'em.” Herbert laughed madly for an instant. “But these two'll just get more decrepit.” He pronounced the last word with bitter amusement and looked Lois in the eyes. “Have you noticed the way Albert bangs his cane now—instead of just tapping it? They're not
satisfied
with us. And they're in the saddle! We can't even have a vacation this summer—unless we can possibly shove 'em back in the Hilltop for a month or so. You think it's worth a try?”