Lady Read online

  "But don't think Anna Strasser didn't know what sort of daughter she had over there on Knobb Street, scrubbing the linoleum. So she arranges for Lady to come by the Harleigh house to bring her a pattern she 'forgot,' and it happened Edward was to home, this being over a holiday. He takes her for a sleigh ride, let me tell you, lots of sleigh rides. I seen 'em myself, whizzing around the Green here in that little one-horse sleigh Lady's got over there in her carriage house right now. Poor dear, she's sentimental about such things, like she can't bear to part with them. Can't bear to part with Edward's chifforobe, nor won't let anyone sit in Edward's armchair, nor won't get her hair cut, because Edward liked it long.

  "Quick as a wink, there was an engagement at Christmastime and Edward and Lady were married that spring. Mr. Strasser -- he taught Greek up to the college -- he never lived to see his daughter wed, and a sad thing that was.

  "So off they went to Mexico on their honeymoon, right across the country in a Pullman drawing room. And don't think Lady was the only soul whose life changed by marrying the town prince -- in no time Anna Strasser was moved out of that tacky house on Knobb Street and living in a new place down't' the end of Valley Hill Road near the golf club, and she's got someone doin' her sewin'.

  "And there she was when Lady and Edward come home that summer, as beautiful a couple as you'd care to see. More tea, dear? 'Scuse me."

  Here I would settle down on the porch, painting the wheels of my roller skates with Aggie's nail polish until Mrs. Sparrow returned with tea to continue the story. It had been late August when the bridal couple moved onto the Green, in the Josiah Webster House, Built 1702. A large brick house, with gleaming white-painted trim and rows of sunny windows between long shutters, the squares of glass twinkling in the light. Two splendid elms canopied the broad front lawn, and a flagstoned paving led from the street to its friendly sagging doorway where the stoop was laid charmingly askew, with two small panes of bull's-eye glass set in over the lintel. The slates angled steeply from the rooftree, where graceful wrought-iron rods served to ward off bolts of lightning that threatened the slender chimneys rising like sentinels over the gabled dormers.

  Inside, generous furnishings, including a Sheraton dining table and eight chairs -- one with arms, where Edward always sat when they entertained -- to say nothing of Lady's expensive dressing table, and the walnut chifforobe with numerous drawers in which Edward kept his personal belongings.

  And so the years went by, until, hostilities having broken out in Europe, and America about to go into the war, Lady discovered she was pregnant. The prospect of motherhood seemed to delight her and she spent hours selecting a layette. Lady's pleasure was matched by Edward's and, bon vivant that he was, he announced the coming event in church, then went home and had one or two too many at a celebration luncheon. He never was known among the country-club crowd as being able to hold his liquor well, and if he wasn't at the club, he'd be celebrating with Yonny Turpin and Al Yager, two unsavory local characters who hung out at the Noble Patriot, a café across from the Academy Hall, or at the nearby River House.

  "There's your cup, dear. Did I mention Elsie Thatcher that used to wait table over there at River House, a saucy piece if ever there was, and all the boys in town chasing her? But when Edward was sober you'd see him and Lady making their rounds about the Green, for her health, dear. Oh, wasn't they the handsomest couple! I sat right there in my bay window and watched 'em, how Edward would encircle her waist and sort of lead her around; she was awfully weak then. Miss Berry from two doors down, she was a nurse -- and a good one, let me say -- and she was hired to look after Lady and the baby,

  "Wasn't any baby, of course. About five months along, Lady slipped and fell, and was badly hurt. The baby miscarried; she never had another. Affected her brain somehow -- couldn't talk at all, not a word, Lord." Here Mrs. Sparrow would roll her eyes to heaven as if seeking corroboration of the facts from her Maker.

  "Next thing, Edward gets his commission and is off to France. We'd gone into the war that summer of '17, and even the fact that he had an invalid wife couldn't keep Edward Harleigh from his duty. He sailed in October -- October, and he'd only live to see one more. Who was to know then they'd be happy for such a short time, and it'd all come to naught, with poor Lady living the rest of her life with a ghost!"

  Mrs. Sparrow felt she had all the facts at hand concerning both halves of the separated couple on either side of the Atlantic. Lady's malady, hitherto undefined, was diagnosed by Ruthie as a crise de nerfs, a French term she had discovered in a Liberty magazine article called "Is American Womanhood in a State of Nerves?" (reading time: 2, minutes, 58 seconds). The implication being that Lady Harleigh had suffered a nervous breakdown following her miscarriage.

  Between Miss Berry and the senior Harleighs, however, arrangements were made for the patient to be sent to a sanitarium outside of Washington, and by degrees, it was learned, Lady's responses showed a marked improvement.

  But while Lady's affliction abated, so did Edward's fortunes. He was gassed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive late in September, and was hospitalized. The Armistice came in November, and when he recovered sufficiently, he was awarded a medal for distinguished service during the battle. The following spring, news reached the Green that he had been released from the hospital and was returning on the Giuseppe Verdi, an Italian ship out of Genoa.

  Lady came back only weeks before Edward -- a little anxiously, Mrs. Sparrow thought, watching her alight at the station. When Edward arrived, he was given a hero's welcome, a parade, the First Selectman making a speech, and in newspaper photographs a pale but proud Lady was seen pinning a medal on the breast of her husband's tunic.

  No sooner home than the couple left for Sea Island, Georgia, in an attempt to restore Edward's health. They were gone several months. Making their return, at Lady's whim they stopped in Washington, even though the city was locked in a torturous heat wave; there were Turners on exhibition at the National Gallery. And they resumed their married life on the Green and were, according to Mrs. Sparrow, the picture of domestic bliss, which is to say that, enjoying their fine house, they kept to it. It was during this period of their return to Pequot that both Edward's parents died, first Mrs. Harleigh, then, within three months, old Daddy Harleigh. Most of the family heirlooms found their way to the Green, and became part and parcel of that house. The heavy furniture Mother Harleigh had selected was sent to auction. "Lady still wasn't feeling too well, so Miss Berry continued looking after her. Nice as pie, Miss Berry, she gave Lady one of her little dogs to keep her comp'ny -- one of them dear little whatyamacallits with the little beards? Then tragedy struck again. . . ."

  The autumn had seen a cruel epidemic of Spanish influenza, and when Lady came down with it Edward moved from their bedchamber to another room to avoid infection. Attended by Miss Berry, Lady battled a dangerously high temperature, crying out in torment of her fever, and for a time it was thought she might not survive. But she recovered, now arising to help Miss Berry tend Edward, who meantime had fallen ill.

  His lungs already impaired by the siege of gas, he lay wasted upon the pillow while Lady remained at his side, unwilling to leave for a moment, helping Miss Berry hold Edward over the inhaler, an apparatus used to produce vapors of friar's balsam to clear his congested lungs.

  "Then," Mrs. Sparrow would continue dramatically, "just when it appeared certain he was getting well, he suffered a relapse. He contracted lobar pneumonia and went into a crisis no human soul could've recovered from. I remember that night so well, late October, it was -- Halloween, as a matter of fact -- and storming fit to beat the band. But storm or not, there wasn't nothing anybody could do, not Lady nor Miss Berry nor the doctor. I seen him come and I went over and held that poor shivering girl in my arms, and she frantic as could be, crying for the priest, and Edward a good Protestant -- well, not so good, but we all have our faith, I expect.

  "And who could keep Lady from blaming herself? All them weeks she practically took
on her own shoulders the nursing of that man, not that Miss Berry wasn't a good nurse. But blame herself Lady did, and bitterly. After the funeral, she went home and locked herself up. She closed them shutters and all that long winter wouldn't see a soul. Not even Anna, her mother; wouldn't have her in the house. She let the servants go, and only the priest come -- Lady was still Cath'lic then -- almost every day for a time, and then he went away and didn't come back no more. What a burden of woe he must've been bearing -- I seen his face through m'binoculars and that poor man just looked tireder and more troubled every time he left.

  "And nobody saw poor Lady for months. One day I went over and peeked in a window. There she was, kneeling on the living-room floor, her hands clasped before a picture of Edward and saying not a word. Utterly dumbstruck. The poor soul, I feared she'd lost her speech again.

  "By Saint Valentine's Day I was so worried I put on my best dress and hat and took over a covered dish. I rung, and Lady herself come to the door, was dressed in widow's weeds head to foot, and asked me into the front room. I says to her she must come away, and she sitting there in the wing chair as gracious as can be, but scarcely hearing a word I'm saying, but only making polite chitchat about was it going to be an early spring, and she hadn't put no bulbs in that fall.

  "And the parlor -- you can't believe how dusty and frumpy it had got, and her being such a particular housekeeper. But, with Edward gone, she just didn't seem to want to go on. She looked tumble, even though the black was becoming, and her hair was neat as usual, and she'd taken his ring off, her hands were bare, and I says, 'Lady, you're just incarcerating yourself in here, when you should be out in the air. And where's your dear little dog that Miss Berry gave you?'

  "'I don't care for the air,' says she, 'and the little dog is no longer here.' Dog or not, I says, you'll never regain your health thisaway. I tell you, she was willfully and deliberately destroying herself upon the altar of her dead husband -- why, it was practically a suttee! Not only that, she'd made a shrine! Right there in the living room on the gate-leg table. Pictures of poor Edward in uniform under small crossed flags, with his medal for bravery in a velvet-lined box and all his citations and a framed copy of the speech the First Selectman made when Edward come home a hero. And the photo they took of the ceremony, with Edward smiling so's it'd break yore heart and Lady sort of looking off to the side, and that awful Anna Strasser positively lurking in the background.

  "So I says, 'You've got happy memories, Lady, you must dwell on them, not the sad ones,' and she sort of smiles and says 'Yes.' And I says, Tou must start looking forward again,' and she says 'Yes' again. 'Yes, I shall.'

  "Well, that gave me a feeling of hope, so I says, What you ought to do is get another little dog.' 'No,' she says, 'I will never have another dog.' And she opened the door, she threw her arms around me and cried and cried, Lord such bitter tears" -- here another of Ruthie's celestial corroborations -- "but it was a woman's heart that shed 'em and I told myself all the way back across the Green that now she's going to come out of it at last.

  "And she did. Lovely, brave Lady, on the first day of spring she come to church, not her Cath'lic one, but Edward's, and she stood in the choir loft and sang 'The Lost Chord' -- Lady has a beautiful voice. Then, come April, just before spring-cleaning time, I went over again, the forsythia was all in bloom and I took her some, and she told me the house was a mess -- and it was, let me say -- and it was time now to do something about it My heart leaped in my bosom. But, I says, you can't do it by yourself. No, she wouldn't, she'd advertised for a couple to take over the entire running of the place. And there they came, Elthea and Jesse Griffin, all the way from Barbados in the West Indies, as clean and good-looking a couple as you could hope for, and not one whit shiftless like some of them colored couples can be. Well, they moved into the attic -- up there where you see them two front gables -- and my! didn't the dust fly around that house. Busy as bees, the pair of 'em, and in no time the house just shone."

  And while they worked, Lady herself took an hour or two of sun each day, and by June was the picture of health. Her skin recovered its clear, natural tone; her hair (always one of her great charms, Mrs. Sparrow asserted, which was true; and she kept it unfashionably long as a tribute, even when half the ladies in town had had theirs cut or shingled) was glossy and shining; she purchased new clothes and linens, resumed wearing her wedding ring; and, Mrs. Sparrow declared, "Hearing Lady laugh, you knew for sure everything was going to be all right."

  Her mother, Mrs. Strasser, died that summer, and after observing a discreet period of mourning, Lady began entertaining in the fall. The house having been completely refurbished by then, small choice groups came to and from her elegant board. The minister, some of the selectmen, Colonel Blatchley, members of the country-club crowd (but never Porter Sprague or his wife). Elthea Griffin, an excellent cook, introduced to Pequot Landing a number of Caribbean dishes hitherto unfamiliar, and before long the whole town seemed bent on serving calaloo soup and creole crab. It was all people could do to remove themselves from table, so interesting was the talk, so merry the laughter, with Jesse in his white coat silently passing coffee and dessert and afterward brandy and cigars for the men while Colonel Blatchley told stories.

  And everyone present always pretended not to notice that the place at the head of the table was kept empty, or that their hostess would never permit anyone to occupy the Sheraton armchair where the dead Edward had sat.

  3

  My earliest recollection of Lady Harleigh stems from events that occurred not in Pequot Landing but in another place entirely. The picture of these events is spun out of the threads of dimmest memory, but they served, in later years, to shed a clearer light on what had been until then an inexplicable mystery. It involved Lady herself, a wire-haired fox terrier, a dish of tapioca, and a moonlight walk in a rose garden.

  There used to be, and perhaps still is, a many-roomed seashore hotel of white clapboards and green shutters and wide verandas, perched atop a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound. People of moderate means would go there to pass part of the summer away from the heat. Women, especially the older ones, often wore long white afternoon dresses then, with wide-brimmed hats, and they still carried parasols. They would sit on the veranda fussily sipping iced tea and fanning themselves with oval fans of dyed palmetto, and conversing while they regarded the view of the Sound -- never interesting -- and the men, also in white, with jaunty bow ties, would play tennis behind the hotel or go off with golf bags to the nearby links.

  The summer our father died, his parents were spending that August at the hotel, which was called the Manor House Inn, and, grieving over Pa's death, Ma was invited to bring us all for a weekend.

  It was there that I first saw the Minerva landaulet, and its owner. We were in the bathhouses behind the hotel, which were attached to it by a long latticed breezeway grown over with some kind of vine -- morning-glories, probably. Ma had helped me into my scratchy wool swimsuit and my feet were shod in tight bathing shoes of flesh-colored crepe rubber. As we came through the breezeway, the great car drove in, circling the arbor and birdbath, and pulling up at the side porch. The liveried chauffeur got out and opened the rear door and helped two passengers alight. One appeared ordinary enough -- I noticed the frisky wire-haired fox terrier she had on a leash, never dreaming that the dog would soon be ours, our Patsy. But the second woman! Coming up behind me, my sister, Aggie, said that she looked like a movie star. She wore a large hat with the light coming through the brim, and there was a red cloth flower pinned at her bosom, and she was laughing. I thought her the most exciting and splendid-looking person I had ever seen.

  We had moved to Pequot Landing only that spring, and I had no idea who she was, or that she lived across the Green, but, "Why, there's Mrs. Harleigh," Ma said, recognizing our neighbor, and, leaving me with Aggie, she went to greet the new arrivals. A maid -- even I could tell it was a maid -- got out and began helping the chauffeur with the luggage while Ma and
the two ladies strolled up the walk where Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson, the owners, came to greet them.

  "Isn't she the loveliest?" Ag whispered, peeking through the shadowy lattice. I knew, of course, which person she was speaking of. She became the focus of my interest for the remainder of our stay, and I went out of my way to spy on her, or to try to contrive an encounter of some sort, but this I never seemed able to manage. Covertly I observed her strolling alone among the roses, nodding to the other guests or pausing for a brief word, but not really becoming socially involved. She never gathered with the ladies on the porch, only arriving for meals at the last minute, which she took with her friend at a corner table where she would talk quietly and stare out at the view. I wondered why the two Negroes didn't eat with them, and my brother, Lew, told me not to be dumb; servants didn't eat in the dining room. Neither, I noted, did the dog.

  We did meet, finally, this marvelous-looking lady and I. Below the steep cliff the hotel was built on, there was a trio of large rocks, called The Three Sisters, where we would go climbing, or inspecting the tidal pools for starfish, snails, and other sea treasures. Playing among these rocks alone one afternoon, I had pulled off my bathing shoes, which were always uncomfortable, and was watching a hermit crab scuttle about with someone else's shell on its back. I happened to look up and saw above me the laughing lady. But she was not laughing then. Unaware, she was lost in thought as she gazed out to sea, the black silk of a parasol framing her face against the blue sky. Something bright caught the light beside her nose, and she touched it away with her fingertip, then used her handkerchief. She was crying, and some inexplicable but immediate rush of feeling rose in me -- I wanted to run to her and comfort her.