“I would in a minute.” Elizabeth put her hand on a small chest of drawers and braced herself wearily. “But, please, could I ask you some questions first?”
“Of course. Come in and sit down.” Mrs. Woolf seated herself back on the piano bench. Elizabeth sat uncomfortably on a straight chair and looked around at the room. It was ugly, filled with massive Victorian furniture. There were, however, no knicknacks around, no scatter rugs or tables, no potted plants or shelves of curios or vases or figurines, none of the horrible little things that were usually in such rooms.
“Your mother is at the undertaker's,” Mrs. Woolf said. “Reuben will drive you over whenever you're ready to go. Would you like me to go with you?”
“Ohâpleaseâdon't botherâ” Elizabeth said quickly. “But pleaseâI didn't even know she was ill. Was it something sudden?”
Mrs. Woolf had very light, very clear blue eyes, and they seemed to Elizabeth to be piercing her like two arrows and pinning her against the wall. “Her heart was bad. She was here for about six months and was ill most of that time.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you.” She sat in her chair silently for a moment while Mrs. Woolf continued to stare at her.
“Do you smoke?” Mrs. Woolf finally asked.
“No. I don't. Thank you.”
The older woman reached in the pocket of her blue tweed jacket and pulled out cigarettes and matches. She put a cigarette in her mouth, struck a match, and lit the cigarette, bending down to the match with a gesture at the same time impatient and extremely careful. She shook out the match, then reached with the fingers of her left hand to the top of the piano where a pair of silver candlesticks stood, ran her fingers over one's heavy base, then over the dark mahogany of the piano. A flicker of annoyance crossed her face. She reached toward the other candlestick, and again ran her fingers over silver, over polished wood. Then she stood up and walked rather angrily to a table and ran her fingers searchingly across its surface until they touched a silver ashtray. She dropped her
match in it, took it back to the piano, and banged it down next to one of the candles. “I wish people would learn not to move my things from their places,” she said.
It was only then that Elizabeth realized Mrs. Woolf was blind.
“You didn't know your mother very well, did you?” Mrs. Woolf asked.
“I didn't know her at all.”
“I wondered about that,” Mrs. Woolf said. “But she talked about you a great deal. She wanted me to tell you that it had been hard for her to leave you, terribly hard, and that losing you was the one great regret of her life, and that she loved you more than anyone in the world, even though she was never able to let you know this.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She wanted to cry, but instead she asked, “Could you tell me anything else about her?”
Mrs. Woolf leaned back against the piano so that her elbows made two light discords as she put her weight on them. “I really knew very little about her as far as facts went. She so obviously didn't want anyone to question her, and I have been so hounded all my life by prying busybodies that I felt that the least I could do was to refrain from bothering her with any kind of curiosity.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Your mother and I got on very well. You understand perhaps the way one can simply
know
someone without knowing anything in the way of past history. And she never pitied me because of my blindness. Your mother treated me like a human being and sheâwell, we were friends. I was able to give her a small amount of help and comfort. She was the kind of person who
needs terribly to be loved and I found it very easy to love her. I shall miss her a great deal ⦠I thought perhaps you might like to know that she was loved here and cared for, that she wasn't completely alone.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. “But was there anybody elseâI mean anyone fromâfrom before?”
Mrs. Woolf shook her head. “No, but I think it was of her own choosing. At first she received letters, but she never answered them and gradually they stopped coming.”
“Was she alone when she died?”
“I was with her.”
Elizabeth stood up. “I think I would like toâto see her now, please.”
Mrs. Woolf walked across the room with complete assurance, only occasionally guiding herself with a featherlight touch on a table or chair back. She pulled on a faded petit point pull, and somewhere far off in the house Elizabeth could hear the faint ringing of a bell.
Mrs. Woolf did not ask again if Elizabeth wanted her company but went out to the car with her and got in beside her.
Outside the undertaker's there was a magnolia tree in full bloom. Many of the delicate white petals had fallen to the ground and lay there, bruised and browning. Mrs. Woolf said in a low voice, “I'll have to take your arm now, please, Miss Jerrold,” and Elizabeth guided her into the undertaker's establishment; it was a strange feeling, because even in being led Mrs. Woolf moved with authority, and Elizabeth, numbed and bewildered, felt that she was the one being guided.
“Your mother left full instructions for the funeral,” Mrs. Woolf said.
“Thank you. Iâif there's anything I ought to do, please let me know.”
The face of the woman in the coffin was much younger than Elizabeth had expected. She had never been able to imagine in her mind's eye what her mother might look like. Always in her daydreams, in spite of the newspaper picture, the face was amorphous, and somehow she had anticipated someone much older and with more obvious signs of a turbulent career, someone who bore the markings of what, to Jordan, Virginia, was a wicked and glamorous life. But the face in the coffin was small and pale and childish, and the straight fair hair was soft as a baby's. The few lines Anna Larsen bore touched the soft skin gently; only the closed eyelids, bruised like the fallen magnolia petals, bore witness to her illness. Elizabeth stood looking down at her for a long time. Then she went back to Mrs. Woolf.
She remembered Mrs. Woolf taking her in to dinner that night and introducing her in a low quiet voice to the boarders. “Miss Myra TurbcullâMr. and Mrs. Joshua Tisburyâ” Elizabeth murmured how-do-you-dos and stared down at her plate, acutely overaware of the curious and pitying glances of the boarders. Mrs. Woolf said grace in a clear, businesslike manner, and then a maid served the dinner. In front of Mrs. Woolf, however, she put a plate that had been prepared in the kitchen, the food arranged systematically, the meat already cut up in small pieces; and Elizabeth thought with a kind of horror of how Mrs. Woolf must reach out into darkness, into the illimitable
void, for every bite she took. But only a strange, sure grace as her steady fingers reached for her water tumbler or broke off a piece of biscuit marked her eating as being in any way different from that of a sighted person.
After dinner Elizabeth said good night to Mrs. Woolf and went to her room. She had seen her mother and now she would never see her again.
Â
Ben was looking soberly at Elizabeth. Suddenly he put his arms around her in a rough, comforting gesture. “Oh, my God, Liz, what a ghastly nightmare for you to have gone through. But that Mrs. Woolf sounds like a fine person.”
Elizabeth nodded. “She was. I don't know what I would have done without herâor if she'd been different, the way I'd imagine someone who'd keep a boardinghouse would be. It was such a terribly strange thing, Ben, going down there and seeing Mother that way. There was a quality ofâof insanity about it. But Mrs. Woolf let me alone when I ought to be alone and talked to me when I needed someone to talk to me. She made a terrific impression on me, maybe because I met her when I first saw Mother and it was a time that stands out in my life likeâwell, I don't know exactly like what, Ben, but it was completely unlike anything else and I remember it so clearly that sometimes it frightens me.
“I mean, the theatre, this summer, this is all different, but it's
part
of everything, and that, somehow, was
outside
of everything. Do you know what I mean? And Mrs. Woolf was the last person who'd been close to Mother and the first person I'd ever been able to talk to about Motherâthe only other person
besides you, Ben. And then, I'd always felt that, because of Mother, I was different, not like other people who had proper mothers, even though I always got on well enough with people. And Mrs. Woolf was different, too. I was different because of Mother and she was different because she was blind. And she'd taken her blindness and made it become something outside of her; she was much bigger than it was, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know,” Ben said.
“It wasn't that it didn't matter to her, because of course it must have mattered horribly, but she never let it become more important than she was. Aunt Harriet has a friend in Jordan who's blind, and whenever we go to call on her all she ever talks about is how much she's missing and how lucky everybody else is to be able to see, and she never lets you forget it for a minute.
“But with Mrs. Woolf it wasn't like that. Aunt Harriet's friend just dotes on being led around, but Mrs. Woolf got annoyed whenever she had to give in to her blindness in any way, and she didn't give in to it. And somehow she gave me courageâor at any rate she made me value courage a lot moreâand I felt stupid for worrying about being different because I didn't have the same kind of mother other people had ⦠And she was good to Mother. That was terribly important. They used to talk a lot together and she said that on the days when Mother felt well, Mother used to read aloud to her, mostly plays, Shakespeare and Ibsen, and Chekhov's short stories, and Balzac. She was never well enough to sing, though.
Mrs. Woolf used to play piano for her a good bit, too. She said Mother's favorite was Chopin's
Revolutionary
Ãtude.
“Oh, Ben,” Elizabeth said, “it was soâso sadâto think of Mother dying there all alone and away from everything and everybody she knew and loved. And I was thankful she had someone with her who could understand her and help her a little.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “The whole experience was unreal, andâand sort of like a nightmareâbut it made me believe in Mother for the first time. I finally felt that I'd been born; that I'd actually had a mother, just like anybody else.”
The waltz from
Der Rosenkavalier
had long since played through and the needle was scratching round and round in the final groove. Ben put the playing arm back on its rest and turned the machine off. “Your mother didn't leave you anything?”
“No. I found out later that Mother hadn't paid Mrs. Woolf anything for several weeks before she died, and Mrs. Woolf paid for the funeral. I think Mother lived longer than she had expected to when she went south.”
“Your mother must have made a good bit of money, one way or another,” Ben said, “but she never knew how to hang on to it. She was always giving presents, and trying to make herself beautiful, so people would love her. Mother said she always needed someone to take care of her. She wasn't strong the way you are, Liz.”
“Me!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “But I'm not strong, Ben!”
“Sure you are,” Ben said, “even if you don't know it. Probably
because
you don't know it. Tell me some more about this Woolf dame. How did she come to be running a boardinghouse anyhow?”
“I asked her that,” Elizabeth said, “and she gave a funny kind of laugh and said there wasn't much else an impoverished Southern woman who was blind into the bargain could do.”
“She really did make a big impression on you, didn't she?”
Elizabeth nodded. “She was really a wonderful person, Ben. And so good to me. And what I admired most was that in spite of being blind she was so much stronger andâand biggerâthan anyone else around her.” As she talked Elizabeth remembered the start of surprise with which she had realized that Mrs. Woolf 's seemingly unconscious carelessness, the dash, the bravado, was the result of discipline, patience, and courage. From her room Elizabeth had seen Mrs. Woolf walk by the river, watched her fall headlong over an uncovered root and pick herself up unshaken, and continue. After that it had been impossible, somehow, for Elizabeth to turn back to the room, fling herself down on the bed, and weep for lost Anna Larsen. She could love her mother now, because at last Anna was real to her; but she knew that if she wept, the tears would be not for Anna but for Elizabeth herself.
“Ben,” Elizabeth said, “thank you.”
“What for?” Ben asked.
“For talking to me about Mother. For letting me tell you about it. It's something I've needed to say to someone ever sinceâever since it happened.”
“Listen,” Ben started, and broke off as the screen door to
the stage entrance slammed and someone came hurrying by the dressing rooms and out onto the stage. It was Dottie.
“Thought I might as well be bright and early today,” she said. “Anguished Andersen here yet? Oh, hello, Liz. What are you doing hanging around?”
Ben scowled furiously. “She's not hanging around. She's here talking to me. At my invitation.”