Spirit Read online

  Mrs Patrick was listening to the radio, too. There was news from Europe, where the Russians were having horrendous difficulties invading Finland. Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News was recounting what he had seen. ‘In this sad solitude lie the dead . . . uncounted thousands of Russian dead. They lie as they fell – twisting, gesticulating and tortured . . . beneath a kindly mask of two inches of newly-fallen snow.’

  Mrs Patrick suddenly realized that the girls were listening and switched the radio off.

  ‘What is it?’ hissed Laura.

  ‘It’s the war,’ said Elizabeth. They knew that there was a war in Europe but Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine what Europe was like. At school they had learned that there were kings and queens in Europe, and palaces. They had also learned that Europe was very much smaller than America, and much more densely populated. Elizabeth had a mental impression of a glittering ballroom crowded with thousands of people in golden crowns and ermine robes, angrily jostling and pushing each other. No wonder they had wars.

  ‘You shouldn’t fuss your head thinking about the war,’ said Mrs Patrick, dredging flour across the tabletop. ‘It doesn’t concern us, not one whit. It’s their quarrel, the British and the French and the Germans. If Mr Roosevelt has any sense at all, he’ll keep us well out of it. Not that any politician has any sense.’

  Father came into the kitchen. His glasses steamed up almost immediately, and he had to take them off.

  ‘Come on girls, hurry up now. You don’t have all day.’

  ‘Where’s mommy?’ asked Laura. ‘I haven’t said good morning yet.’

  ‘Mommy’s okay, you can see her in a minute. Just finish your breakfast and get yourselves dressed.’

  As they climbed back upstairs, they felt a chilly, unsettled atmosphere in the house. There was very little wind, and so the fires had taken a long time to draw. The whole house was hazy with acrid woodsmoke, which made them cough, and being nine and seven they really made a performance of their coughing, rolling around on their beds in their long woolly underwear, spluttering and hacking and wheezing like terminal tuberculosis patients, until father called out to them to shut UP, will you, and get yourselves ready.

  ‘But it’s so smoky.’

  Father was about to say something angry, he hated laying all those goddamned fires in any case, but stopped himself. Instead, he shielded his eyes with his hand in a very curious way; and then took his hand away again, and said, ‘Listen . . . this is going to be a difficult day. It’s going to be a difficult day for mommy and it’s going to be a difficult day for me. I know how close you both were to Peggy, and that you can still talk to her. But when you’re grown up like mommy and me, you can’t do that any more, don’t ask me why. So for us, Peggy has gone away, completely gone away. We’ve lost her.’

  The girls lay on their beds in their underwear watching him solemnly. He licked his lips quickly (mouth turned dry) and then he said, ‘Today mommy and I have to put our youngest little girl into the ground. That isn’t going to be easy for us; and I hope you’ll understand how we feel, and try to be patient and helpful.’

  Laura said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said father, with his eyes glistening.

  ‘And suffer the succotash to come unto Me.’

  Father said, ‘What?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Elizabeth interrupted. ‘We promise we’ll be helpful.’

  Elizabeth brushed Laura’s hair, a procedure which was always accompanied by a monotonous chorus of ‘ow’, ‘ow’, ‘OW’, ‘ow,’ as she cleared out the tangles. Then they dressed in their mourning clothes and stood side by side and looked at themselves in the cheval-glass. Elizabeth thought that they looked as if they were dead, too. Their faces were waxy and their eyes were large, and the luminous snow-light surrounded them with a blurry, almost ghostly aura.

  It was then that they glimpsed a shadowy movement in the mirror, which made them jump. They turned around and saw mommy standing in their bedroom doorway. She was dressed in a severe, boxy suit of black moiré silk, with a small upswept black hat and a dense black veil that completely masked her face.

  For a split second, they were very frightened. Mommy was so black, so silent, so faceless. ‘Mommy?’ said Laura, in alarm.

  Mommy moved and when she moved she was just mommy. She came into the room and laid a black-gloved hand on each of them. She smelled of cigarettes, and perfume and something else aromatic, which they weren’t old enough to identify as gin. ‘Don’t worry, Laura sweetheart, I’m quite all right. You both look beautiful. Are you ready to come downstairs now? Granpa and granma have just arrived; and so has Aunt Beverley.’

  ‘I haven’t washed my teeth yet,’ said Laura.

  ‘You’re all dressed up in black and you haven’t washed your teeth? You’ll get toothpowder all over your collar.’

  ‘I have to wash my teeth, you can die from dental caries.’

  Mommy didn’t argue. Elizabeth couldn’t see her face, because her veil was too dark, but she could guess what she was thinking. When mommy had gone downstairs, and Laura was industriously brushing her teeth with her Donald Duck toothbrush, Elizabeth came into the bathroom and hissed at her, ‘Don’t talk about dying any more. Mommy doesn’t like it. It’d bad enough Peggy being drowned.’

  ‘But they told us at school. And you can die from not washing your hands, after you’ve been to the bathroom.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. And you can die if somebody drops a cow on your head.’

  They went downstairs. The front door was wide open and a few mischievous snowflake-fairies were flying over the threshold and dancing across the orange-and-yellow Shaker rug. An icy draft was streaming in, ruffling the fringes of the lampshades, and scattering black-edged condolence cards across the floor, but at least it was clearing away the woodsmoke and brightening up father’s sulky fires.

  Aunt Beverley was taking off her sleek brown mink and talking eight million to the dozen, as usual. Aunt Beverley was a very tall mannish woman in her late thirties, with a long neck, and a big, bloodless, bony head. Mommy always said that Aunt Beverley believed herself to be much more beautiful than she really was. She must have spent untold eye-watering hours plucking her brows into geometrically-perfect arches, and pinning up her hair into a glossy black tidal wave.

  But her ears were too big and lobular, and her nose was too complicated, and her funeral-dress might have been Pauline Trigere but it hung on her frame (in Elizabeth’s opinion) like a photographer’s black cape over a camera and tripod.

  ‘Well, the roads were so darned impossible that we nearly turned back at Cannondale. I can’t tell you, Margaret, it was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, all over. Humphrey was adamant that he didn’t want to die in Connecticut. He said his grandparents died in their beds in Braggadocio, Missouri, and his parents died in their beds in Braggadocio, Missouri, and he certainly didn’t intend to be frozen to death in the middle of winter in a rented automobile in some prissy Yankee dormitory in Connecticut. And, why! Look who’s here! My dear little Lizzie; my dear little Laura!’

  Aunt Beverley bent down and kissed them both with her sticky scarlet lips. She smelled of cigarettes and freckle cream. She wore four rows of sparkling jet beads, and a ruby-and-emerald brooch in the shape of an apple tree. Mommy had known Aunt Beverley for ever and ever – since Fifty Thousand Frenchmen, when Aunt Beverley had been wardrobe mistress. Elizabeth knew that there was something different about Aunt Beverley. She wasn’t at all like mommy, or like any of the women who lived in Sherman. She was bossy, and wickedly gossipy, and drank whiskey. Even the men seemed to be afraid of her. She wasn’t their real aunt, of course, she just liked them to call her aunt. She had never married: she was still ‘Miss Lowenstein’, although she never seemd to be wanting for male escorts. Humphrey was the latest: a bulbous-eyed man in his early forties with thinning hair and a little clipped moustache.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he told mom
my. Then he said, ‘Wonderful house.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said mommy.

  Father came up and said, ‘Glad you could make it.’

  ‘Wonderful house,’ Humphrey repeated.

  ‘Seventeen-sixty-one,’ said father.

  ‘As much as that? I thought Connecticut prices were coming down.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said father.

  Outside, in the snow, more cars were silently arriving, in plumes of exhaust. Big black Buick Eights and Chrysler Imperials and Packard sedans, nose to tail. There was a sporadic slamming of doors, and then the funeral guests began to make their way towards the house. Elizabeth and Laura had to stay in the hallway to greet them, while Seamus collected their coats and hung them up. Seamus was seventeen with carroty hair and a face like one of his mother’s rising loaves. Mommy said that Seamus had been stricken with meningitis when he was six, which had left him fanciful and odd; but Mrs Patrick said that he had been kidnapped by leprechauns for a month or two, that was all, and that when the leprechauns had brought him back he had seen sights and danced dances that no human being had ever seen or danced before, and that was what made him the way he was.

  Elizabeth liked him and didn’t mind it when he sat in the corner listening intently while she read The Snow Queen, but she was always a little afraid of him. He would say things like, ‘Brilliant umbrella, sir,’ over and over again. Or, ‘Forward with fences, that’s what I say, forward with fences.’ Or else he would quote whole pages of The Snow Queen, with extraordinary emphasis, like somebody speaking in Finnish. Laura adored him and thought that he spoke just as much sense as anybody else.

  At a quarter to eleven, father told Elizabeth to close the door, because everybody was feeling the draught. The living-room was crowded with guests, and the fires were crackling, and Seamus was taking round trays of sherry and cheese straws.

  Just as she was about to close the door, Elizabeth saw a whale of a Cadillac arriving through the snow. It parked a little way away from the rest of the cars, and for two or three minutes there was no sign of anybody climbing out. ‘Lizzie!’ her father called her. ‘Close the door now, will you, for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘Somebody’s coming,’ said Elizabeth.

  Her father came up behind her and peered through the crack in the door. The snow was falling so furiously that it was almost impossible to see anything at all. The door of the Cadillac opened and a stocky wide-shouldered man in a wide-brimmed hat climbed out, and started to trudge to the house.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ said her father, and he never, ever said ‘I’ll be damned’, at least not in front of her. ‘It’s Johnson Ward.’

  ‘Who’s Johnson Ward?’ asked Elizabeth.

  Her father laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘A writer, sweetheart. You’ve met him before but you probably don’t remember. He’s one of the greatest writers that ever was, in my opinion. He wrote a very famous book called Bitter Fruit.’

  Elizabeth didn’t know what to say about that. She had met a few writers – a nervous, chainsmoking young man called Ashley Tibbett, who had written some essays about rural life in the Litchfield Hills, books so skinny that they looked as if they didn’t have any pages between their covers. And Mary Kenneth Randall, a serious, harsh-voiced woman with thick ankles and thick sombre clothes and hair like a scouring-pad, who had written two huge novels about objectivism, whatever that was.

  But as far as Elizabeth had been able to tell, writers didn’t care for children very much. Writers talked about nothing except themselves, and they seemed to regard children as competition. Ashley Tibbett hadn’t even been able to look at them, and Mary Kenneth Randall had given them a particularly vile cough-candy and patted them so hard on the top of the head that her wedding ring had clonked against their skulls.

  Johnson Ward reached the porch and he was big and smiling and twinkly-eyed and he stamped his feet and banged his leather gloves together.

  ‘Johnson,’ said father. He looked quite small by comparison, almost as if he had shrunk in the wash. Johnson Ward took off his glove and squeezed father’s hand tight, and then clapped him on the back.

  ‘Hullo, David. I hope you don’t object to my coming. Michael Farkas told me what had happened. I’m really so sorry. Your little Peggy was a dream come true.’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said father. ‘Yes. We’re going to miss her.’

  ‘And this must be Lizzie,’ said Johnson Ward. He took off his hat, and when he took off his hat, Elizabeth saw that he wasn’t so very old. His hair was the shiny light-brown colour of peanut-brittle, and neatly combed into a parting. He had a peanut-brittle coloured moustache, too. His face was broad and generous and friendly, with an easy smile and a captivating way of crinkling up his eyes. He reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable, sort of, except that he was taller and heavier, and his ears didn’t stick out, as Laura always said, ‘like the kitchen cupboard with its doors wide open.’

  ‘How do you do, sir,’ said Elizabeth, in a whisper.

  Johnson Ward squatted down in the porch so that his coat-tails dragged in the snow. He was very clean, with a crisp white collar, and he smelled of cigars and spices.

  ‘You don’t have to call me “sir”,’ he told her, taking hold of both of her hands. ‘We’re friends, you and me, even if you don’t know it. The last time I saw you was when your baby sister was born, and you were four. Do you know what we did?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we did, we spent the whole afternoon in the garden popping balloons, that’s what we did. We jumped on them. We sat on them. We pricked them with pins. We even bit them, do you know that? Now, that’s what I call brave, biting a balloon. But there’s one thing I’ll never forget; and that is, what a lady you were. Even at four, you were a lady, and I can see today that you’re still a lady; and that you always will be.’

  Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. She remembered bursting the balloons but she didn’t remember Johnson Ward. All the same, Johnson Ward grasped her hands warmly and tightly, and she decided she liked him. Elizabeth’s father said, rather sharply, ‘Say thank you to Mr Ward, Lizzie.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Ward,’ Elizabeth whispered.

  ‘No, no, thank you, Bronco,’ Johnson Ward insisted.

  Elizabeth hesitated. How could a grown-up writer with a Cadillac and a moustache call himself ‘Bronco’? That was a cowboy’s name; a name that little boys used, in schoolyard games.

  ‘Come on, now,’ Johnson Ward urged her.

  Elizabeth swallowed. The cold draught had made her throat feel dry. ‘Thank you, Bronco,’ she told him.

  Father closed the front door and Johnson Ward took off his heavy coat. ‘I’ll bet you miss your little sister sorely,’ he said.

  Elizabeth nodded. Most of the time she didn’t find it too difficult to think that Peggy was dead. But now and then, for no particular reason, her eyes would fill with tears, and her throat would tighten up, and her voice would sound as if she had a thistle stuck in her larynx – that’s if she could speak at all. At those times, she felt a cold and blasphemous suspicion that Peggy wasn’t in Heaven, after all; that she wasn’t sitting on some sun-blessed cumulus cloud, with white wings and a white nightgown and a golden halo around her head. At those times, she suspected that Peggy had simply left them for ever, and was lying chilly as ice in her coffin, and that was all.

  At those times, she thought about Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, too, lying concealed beneath the shed.

  As they crossed the hallway to the crowded living-room, Johnson Ward laid his hand reassuringly on Elizabeth’s shoulder. ‘When my older brother Billy died, I was so cut up that I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t write and I couldn’t even think. You know what that’s like, when you can’t even think? Your head’s no more good to you than an empty cooking-pot. You can bang on your skull with your knuckles for all you’re worth, but there’s nothing inside, only echoes. Those were bad, bad times for me, those were
.’

  He stopped, and looked down at her. ‘But do you know what happened? I went to Havana, for the principal purpose of getting drunk. I gambled at the casino, and I smoked big cigars the size of telegraph poles, and I got drunk. And I was sitting in the Plaza de Armas, with a mouth that felt like a cat’s favourite cushion and a headache that felt like an iron Derby that was half a size too small, when a Cuban boy came up to me, and stood staring at me. He was wearing a white shirt and khaki pants and sandals with open toes. He stood and stared at me and I sat and stared back at him. And do you know what he said? He said, “Bronco, don’t you recognize me?”

  ‘Well, I stared at him even harder, and maybe there was something familiar about his eyes, but that was all. But then he said, “It’s Billy, your brother.”

  ‘You can imagine that I went shivery all over, just like somebody had emptied an ice-bucket down the back of my shirt. I said, “It can’t be. Billy’s dead.” But he stepped a little closer and he looked at me just the way I’m looking at you now, and he said, “It’s Billy. I just want to tell you that everything’s fine.”

  ‘ “Fine?” I said. “You’ve turned into a Cuban and everything’s fine?” ’

  ‘ “Couldn’t be sweller,” he said. And he turned around, and walked across the plaza, and that was the last I ever saw of him.’

  ‘Was he a ghost?’ asked Elizabeth, in awe.

  ‘Uh-unh. I don’t think so. I think he was just Billy.’

  Elizabeth wanted to ask Johnson Ward if it might be possible to find Peggy, too, amongst the crowds around the Plaza de Armas, or anywhere else for that matter. But before she could do so, mommy came across the room, black-veiled, tilting slightly.