Chapter 1
"ALLEGED to have mugged," the old lady muttered and she shivered although the room was warm, too warm, hot and dry, withering still more her old skin, an unnecessary astringent that made her scratch. She folded the paper with trembling fingers and attempted to swat an agile fly.
"I wonder what that means now," she said, "'alleged to have mugged'?" The inference was naughty, the language of The New York Times, secret. She hid the paper between the cushion and the chair and let her eldest daughter, the old maid for whom she had no respect, kiss her lightly flushed and crepelike cheek,
"Hi, Granny, are you O.K.?"
The old lady sniffed and moved irritably in her chair, keeping to herself with some effort her disgust for Lamby's youthful lingo, her silly nostalgia, her vulgar grip on her lost youth, her fretful "girlish" look.
"O.K.," she mumbled. "Humph."
"What, Granny."
But the old lady's eyes were good enough to see that Lamby was looking at herself in the mirror over the mantel and didn't expect an answer. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep but her lavender eyelids quivered and her mouth twitched. "Humph!" she said again. She was in a bad mood.
"Darn fly!" she said; the persistent creepy thing alone in the big room was attracted to the old lady's black silk dress and the cold cream, maybe, near her hairline, a spot on her bosom from lunch. "Filthy house, bad housekeepers, dirty dishes!" she said to herself, and out loud, "I want my tea."
"You've had it," said Lamby, not turning around but watching her mother's reflection in the mirror. "You've had your tea, Granny, Daisy brought it to you, you said it was good, remember?"
"Do shut up!"
"Granny!"
"I'm not your granny, Lamby, call me Ma-Ma, you're not a child."
Lamby's Hp trembled.
"Ma-Ma," she said.
"Don't be a fool," the old lady said.
"Stinker!" the aging daughter said to herself, "Old bitch!" but she was frightened at the vernacular of her nieces and turned to her mother and said meekly, "May I get you anything?"
"Get out!" said the old lady using up the rest of her anger. "Git!" she said softly.
Lamby figuratively added the insult to a long list of similar ones that she kept in a Little box in her mind. She meant to get even. She was collecting evidence.
The old lady was not sleepy; she had long since passed the age of curative slumber at any hour of the day, the retreat into darkness, the idiocy of unconsciousness, the petit mal of cat naps. Four hours a night was her limit and in her head she carried on a number of continued stories and curious anecdotes and addenda, prefixes and appendix; exordium and lullaby. It is true, her mind, built like a weird indented and curled-up ropy sponge like anyone else's, not Mongolian, wandered, and proper names eluded her; cities didn't count and the dates of important events, with the exception of the Battle of Hastings, had been erased and forgotten; she could not name the Presidents of the United States and even the ones she had known personally might have been Eddie. Lamby irritated her and interrupted her self-entertainment and her everlasting curiosity, too, that kept her alive. "Alleged to have mugged?" She took out the paper again and another minor headline caught her eye. "'Subway bumper apprehended.'"
"How's that?"
It was Sissy, the one with all of Lamby's nieces to her credit, which in some departments was in the red. The minute the old lady raised her eyelids that she had lowered again as protection against another interruption, she remembered Sissy's adultery that had not bothered her much. Sissy, to the old lady, wore Hawthorne's letter A embroidered on her chest and that's about all. She liked Sissy, considered her the most worth while of her living children. She reminded her a little, but not much, of herself. Sissy's experiences were strictly one-dimensional, you might say, about six feet two; she was no dreamer, no scholar, she couldn't even cook, but she had no silly affectations and didn't irritate her mother as Lamby did, and she was pretty. The old lady mentally disinherited any members of the family that were plain, they were as good as illegitimate to her. She had a pride of good looks. "We are a good-looking lot," she used to say, and she herself had been a "real beauty." She saw herself as such step into the yellow phaeton in her blue silk, twirling her tiny, lacy, hinged parasol; and she did not miss the groom's hot look at her as he stood at the sleek mare's head waiting for the young mistress to take the reins when she felt like it.
"Well, Ferris, have you a tummyache?"
The groom turned slowly crimson and bit at his lip.
"No, miss."
"No, Miss Maisie," she corrected him. "No, Miss Maisie."
"No, Maisie," she said, almost tenderly; her heart was beating fast with the fun of it and her tight corset pushed up her full breast and tightened itself, if possible, around her little waist that the groom could have easily encircled with one big rough hand. He lowered his flaming eyes and said nothing. The mare fidgeted. "Whoa, girl," he murmured caressingly.
"Ferris!"
"Yes, miss."
"Yes, Miss Maisie." (What sport!)
"Yes, Miss Maisie."
"Yes, Maisie!"
Silence.
The mare gently raised up ever so little on her hind legs, a matter of inches, and tossed her head.
"Take the reins, miss, Holly wants to go; whoa, girl, there now!"
"Presently," said Maisie.
"Whoa now! Easy!"
"Get up behind me," said Maisie, "quick! I've got her; we're off!"
With no choice of his own Ferris was up behind her and sat down hard as Maisie gave the mare her head and for a second let the end of the curling whip be seen by the agitated and flighty animal.
"Ma-Ma," said Sissy a second time.
"Fiddlesticks!"
Sissy laughed. "Daydreaming again, sweetie?"
The old lady responded to Sissy's affectionate tone and opened her eyes, giving her an engaging (still!) smile, pointing up the corners of her mouth and showing the indented ridges of small even teeth that had once been a milky transparent blue and had transfixed with admiration a number of beaux. The lips that had been full and palpitating were thin, dehydrated, and of a purplish tinge, not unattractive, but startling and unexplained next the ivory-colored skin, Dantesque, like a mask for a weird occasion. She had a sharp almost cruel glance that kept the respect and held the attention, too, of the observer; even the absent-minded old collie in the house, deaf and cataracted in both eyes, as well as generations of plump inconsiderate puppies of different makes and nationalities, belonging to the grandchildren, "lay down" for Ma-Mo, and the yellow and black cats tiptoed along the mantel or sat in corners and stared unblinking at something they felt was superior and meant it.
"I'll be in this evening, Ma-Ma, if I can get the car away from the girls," said Sissy. "Go back to your dreams, Ma-Ma."
The old lady had already closed her eyes; the collie came and lay at her feet, his nose across her pointed slipper, and the room was dim. That fool Daisy will be in to light the lights....
"Who was it... Ferris?" she asked herself. "Yes, it was Ferris." She quickly reviewed the pretty scene and stepped again into the phaeton, so light, and yet it gave to a still lighter weight, her own. This time she had left the hinged parasol at home on the bed and wore rose-colored gloves, short and smart, with one button, so tight that the little oval of flesh leapt out half an inch high at the palms, pink, inviting kisses; "No, that was one of the others," murmured the old lady shaking her head. The collie looked up. "Down, sir!"
"That was... that was..." and she tried to place him, superimposed as he was for the moment on the less gallant but more exciting figure of Ferris, the groom, who did not kiss ladies' hands, no matter how plump and soft but instead he... "Philip," she said out loud. "Later..."
"Take it easy, miss!" Ferris had almost begged as Holly at a fast trot trundled the light carriage over the narrow straightaway and Maisie clucked with her tongue to make her go faster, but held the reins taut not to let her break her trot. That would be vulgar.
"Ahhh!"
The old lady proudly recalled her horsemanship, her elegant little "figger" in blue silk, her fearlessness; she sighed for her desirability, the spell she had cast. The vivid girl faced the curving roads now, ducking at intervals an overhanging branch, Ferris behind her, and they went into the woods that for thousands of acres surrounded the big clearing where her father's house had been built. The road grew soft and red, loamy, and Maisie let Holly walk, but the mare's pointed ears twitched with excitement and apprehension. She lifted her feet high and set them down daintily; her sides were covered with sweat. "Oh well, what happened next..."
The old lady was incapable now of blushing for the girl who blushed that night in her maiden's bed for the bold little slut she had been in the afternoon in her father's woods with her handsome groom. But the pleasure of his wild embraces when he finally succumbed to her blandishments and teasing, his seeking hands, his hot mouth and flaming eyes, his dense brown locks that smelled of the stables, and hard thighs, the little Maisie could not censor but only wanted again and lay awake living it over until the swallows in the ivy announced it was daylight', and her newly aroused passion, unused to the energy it took, the calories it burned, sent her into a deep short nap.
Daisy interrupted their dual "sleep," it seemed, just as each Maisie was recalling the pretty girl's impudence even under the hard kisses; as she caught her breath and, still hot from his passionate caresses, how she said, "Now will you call me Maisie!" And he had uttered, spat out, a name; a good name for what Maisie was doing, doing to him against his will; his pleasure had left him quickly, and the ugly word shot up into the air in the silence of her father's woods like a flare announcing their whereabouts, sobering them both but not for long. The thrill of the nasty cognomen sang in the girl's ear and fluttered there like a moth. She liked it. But it can't be written because the young girl and the old lady censored it in the polite company, themselves included, that they later grew up amongst. The groom Ferris was a privileged minority in the sum of Maisie's more sophisticated and decadent flirtations.
The old lady stirred uneasily, not wanting to let the scene go out of her mind; she hung onto the detail of the mare's nervous insight into the struggle between the sexes, how she danced and side-stepped and shied at white paper all the way home and whinnied and coughed. "Whoa, girl! Easy! Easy, sweetheart!" The tenderness in the groom's voice all for a horse.... (But didn't her silky sides still hurt from the stallion's beating hooves there. She had given him a blow herself with her flighty heels, under his chin, when she scampered off; she had heard his yellow teeth rattle. Then she had nibbled the sweet grass in the corner of the field and seen him roll and plunge and groan and snort and with tremendous effort get himself upright again; he had stretched out his neck and called to her, but she paid him no heed. Beast!)
Old Maisie hunted for the lost name she had been called only once, but it eluded her; she saw the orange and black cat with the white paws weaving in and out along the mantel between the red Bohemian glass and pale green Venetian decanters.
"Scat!"
The cat came down firmly and evenly on all four paws and went out slow, gracefully, her tail high, cross. "Mum?" said Daisy.
"Fool," muttered the old lady. "Eat you out of house and home."
The girl tiptoed awkwardly around the room turning on the lamps, rearranging a magazine, picking a thread off the carpet.
"Leave things alone, not kitty-cornered; put that magazine back the way it was!"
"Yes, mum."
"Daisy!"
"Mum?"
"Have you got a beau?"
"Oh mum." The girl turned a vivid red.
"Is he good-looking?"
"That he is, mum."
"Thick black hair? Long legs? Eh?"
"Oh mum," said the girl, losing some of her fear of the old lady who never said a decent word to her, "as long as, as long as... aye they're long, mum," she finished lamely, her eyes shining.
"Get along, now," said the old lady impatiently but not unkindly, "mind your manners and pick up your feet."
"Oh yes, mum, that I will." She was heard singing in the kitchen a wild Irish tune. "The old lady isn't so bad," she said that night to the gardener's son. "She's an old bitch," he said cheerfully.
"Straight out of the bog," the old lady said, "and impudent." She shoved her foot forward and dislodged the dog. The collie rose and looked her in the eye.
"I beg your pardon, Bunce," the old lady said, and the dog lay down again at her feet, watching her with his strange, glassy, cataracted eyes. Did he see her at all? What did he remember? Philip? Bessie? Dodge? Dougherty? The time...? "Daisy!"
"Mum?"
"Quit that racket."
"I didn't mean to, mum."
"Ninny."
The old lady rose painfully and, followed by the aged collie, went into what had been the old man's "den." She often confused it with what had been her father's "study"; the difference, one supposes, one of those tinier differentiations between the times, or possibly, the North and the South. The old Maisie had inherited the room, in any event, at Sissy's wise, at least kindly, suggestion; it would be Ma-Ma's playroom, a place she could go away to and close the door, a ground-floor attic, eliminating certain physical effort, not mentioned, a safe place, not mentioned, where she was within calling distance and no need to pull the ladder up after her, be too warm in the summer or too cold in winter. At some expense, but warranted, they all felt, a modern lavatory had been added, gleaming and cosy, for Ma-Ma's convenience, her powder room. Then, too, with the old lady out of the way but within calling distance, it was as if they had sent her to camp, a respite for themselves, too; and the living room with its chaises and later, love seats, a place for Paula's and Maggie's boy friends to loll and smoke and tease and make love ("Neck," said Lamby. "Phaugh!" said the old lady. "Smooch," giggled Janey, the littlest monster of them all. "I saw you! Smoochy-woochy-couchy-luchy!"), where formerly Sissy's affairs had reached, each one, its climax, except for that adultery that she had left home for. Her men had been, like Ma-Ma's, beaux and admirers but in every other way, with the exception of a difference in fashion and smart colloquialisms, the same old thing. Evolution didn't show, nothing sloughed off from lack of use, inherited characteristics were inherited, acquired characteristics were fun.
Old Maisie took The New York Times out of a deep pocket in her skirts and put it away temporarily. "To mug," she thought and glanced at the big Webster's dictionary open to a display of heraldry because it was pretty that way, but "Later," she said, as she had a little while ago dismissed Philip, "there is plenty of time," and she looked forward to a growing list of subject matters to be gone over in her active mind; it was the only future she could count on, her past. "Some rainy day when the light is bad." She still had that Colette novel to finish that was in another deep pocket; someone as usual had interrupted, "Do you want anything, Granny?"
"Peace, peace and quiet," the old lady had answered. "Pack of ninnies."
Maisie's reminiscences were, one suspects, one-dimensional, factual snapshots by the million, some bright and clear, some faded, spotted, parts missing, curling at the corners, that slid across her forehead almost faster than she could catalogue them. Maisie's heart, or the seat of her emotions, did not count so much any more as did an avid, almost historical sense, a sort of "Dear Diary, this is Tuesday, I wore my new pinafore to church and spit at my nurse." Manners and customs of the North American upper classes; a kaleidoscope of past events; the composition dictated by an astonishing memory for detail, and censored only in some instances by the times she had lived in, the persons of her parents, or possibly a nurse, a tutor, a prenatal abhorrence, for the judge, her father, had hushed, turning pale, her silly rhyming, the sing-song prattle of very little folk who skip in time to some savage rhythm, the words that tumble out of their soft lips sometimes charged with meaning, excavated from somewhere, a Tutankhamen's tomb of significalia, shocking the listener who has forgotten the patois and grown up. ("Oh, look at the hunter, the hunter, the hunter, oh, there goes the --, the --, the --."
"Go to your room, Maisie! And stay there!") Fifteen years later she heard the lost word and recognized it and did not blame the old judge a bit for turning pale at an expression she thought she had invented. She learned its meaning from the strangled tones of the handsome groom accompanied by a demonstration she need not ask the meaning of. She still cannot recall the bitter insulting name ("What was it now!") the same groom in his passion called her. She will overhear it before the year is out. But as we have said, the old lady's feelings, as such, were no longer aroused very much either by her own memories or by the daily goings-on in the present. Irritability and a kind of impotent anger at interruption, and disorder, and plainness, and stupidity, remained: a mild, really, cerebral reaction to everyday stimuli; her aged body continued to function just enough to keep her alive and clean; her nerves, closer and closer to the skin, it seemed, tingled and jumped with annoyance, but, well, sex, with its powerful drive, no longer lay waiting at the bottom of everything, in a bureau drawer, in a sickle moon, on a man's lips, in a wallpaper design; it did not. He curled up in the flaming sunset or unfold itself in the cumulus on a summer day. It had but now it didn't. Curiosity, yes, she couldn't let go of wanting to know, but the connotation was innocent because she was sexless, neither male nor female. Maisie's recollections are without shame for the same reason. Pride remains, however, indented in the protoplasm. Neither does she judge or censor herself any longer but she does, on the whole, admire herself as she used to be: she had been spirited and saucy and so pretty! Her responses, then, are minor ones, attenuated, the rest had been abstracted, she was no longer the seventy per cent water, as it were, which is sex, and that throws its weight around, as it were again. Her displacement was slight, as the little scales in the modern cabinet d'aisances recorded. She weighed scarcely more than her corset and accessories, but her fingernails still had to be clipped, her skimpy hair grew an inch a year, as both would, we are told by pathologists, and will, for a certain time after she and we are interred, a stubborn proof of our desire for longevity.
Not much of her childhood, unless it was statically and suddenly brought back to her as in the above, the rhymes with meaning beyond her years, skipped or sulked in her grey matter any longer, as it had when she was middle-aged and normally psychosomatic, hypersensitive and plumper, with headaches; and fearful. Her prodigious memory, now, circled the years mostly of her majority, and a comparative anatomy between, following her beaux and her exploits, her progeny, the dead ones and the live ones; and the dead ones were the more amusing companions. Definitely!
The old lady stood for a moment in front of Bessie's portrait. Bessie, the only one who could have really matched her. The little monkey! Sissy, It was true, got herself with child every year and committed adultery, too; Sissy at forty-five was still producing... or wasn't she? Maisie tried to remember. The past came tumbling so easy into her mind but this morning? Yesterday? When was Sissy's last lying-in? She had to figure it out: Janey was the youngest, Janey was ten-well, it was close.... Sissy at forty-five was still producing as regularly as a cat and as easily. Her waistline rose and fell once a year as if she were merely breathing deeply and holding it; the only difference in her regularly appearing breed and Maisie's-that they were every last one of them alive, blooming and sensuous and healthy, with colored cheeks like garden roses while Ma-Ma's, as numerous, were most of them dead (Lamby might as well be! Old maid!), their bodies, in memoriam, confined in oval or square frames according to their sex which, one supposes, was otherwise dust and ashes; their cheeks highly varnished and their likeness candid and cold, any sensuousness in the drapery and mufti alone. They had "shuffled off this mortal coil" from meningitis and measles and, accident prone, had fallen into wells, the older ones bowled over by runaway thoroughbreds; childbed fever had taken a couple and heart "disease"... typhoid fever, two more; without much fuss, no last words, they left their uneasy but philosophical parents-well-resigned, and ready to try again. Planned parenthood had not been dreamed up, and biblically enough, one of the admonitions most lived up to was "Thou shalt cleave to one another." One imagines the seed was mostly sown at home, which was proper, and the harvest reaped quite soon by God Himself. Maisie saw the five children punctured with quantities of penicillin and wondered if they were worth it; it was expensive.
The portrait of Bessie was rather good, nameless and forgotten the artist, that household nomadic, ambidextrous bum almost, who used, from house to house, to paint, as if they were barns or cribs, the young and old landed gentry, for their descendants to wonder at; sooner or later to be restored as Bessie had been and the others whom Maisie kept on the walls of her hideaway as cross reference to her wandering anecdote. Bessie, portrayed at, let's say, the age of twelve, had still beneath the yellowing varnish a mischievous, sprightly look, like, as her mother had called her, a monkey. And her features, too, overworked by a too painstaking artisan, were a little drawn and elderly like a monkey's. A fine gold chain excellently photographic brought out the swelling of her throat, Rossetti-like, and a small gold cross, gift of her communion, lay just above where her Little breasts must surely have been, concealed as they were by white paint which had been the modest guimpe, the uniform of the preadolescent. The artist had laid the paint on so flat that the neck and face above it looked as if they were peeping over the garden wall. Bessie, affectionate, naughty, impudent and sensuous, at sixteen had soberly passed away of meningitis, unaided by science, which was sleeping, but tenderly administered to by an old doctor with a colorful variety of pills and an occasional mustard plaster. Her precocious soft body that had already burned under the caresses of her brothers and her cousins and had so tempted every male that visited the house, was taken away to the dusty cemetery on the hill dressed in a modest jumper, its sweetness lost, its virginity intact, its desires stifled under a handful of earth. But she lived on in Maisie's old head like a paper doll, beloved, her prize possession. Maisie had forgot her remorse, her wild self-condemnation upon returning from the ball, to find her eldest daughter quite dead, the shades drawn, the servants in tears, the old doctor's "It was for the best, ma'am, we did what we could, God rest her soul, amen; remember-ah- your precious burden, ma'am." Inside her as she leaned over Bessie and wept, she could feel the plaintive pawing of the almost bloodless boy who would be born dead. The handsome man she had married stood in the doorway. "Come, Maisie, come, my beloved, it is all over."
Old Maisie was spared these emotional details, drained as she was, almost bloodless, as if a gigantic leech had been the indicated medication for her. The only sediment left in her veins led her to study the intricate and gorgeous gilded frame attentively, that Daisy had neglected, that day, to dust.
"Careless, lazy, good-for-nothing!"
The massive, yet cleverly delicate, ornate gilded frame was busy with cherubs, dimpled, with tiny members like buttons; each little belly precisely indented in the exact center; some of the toes, no bigger than peas, rubbed completely off from Daisy's fool dusting.
"Bog-hopper!"
But Daisy tried hard and it was fortunate the old lady didn't, at least not now, recognize the painstaking mending. Daisy used to dream in Gaelic as she polished up the tiny private parts. "Little tantivy," she said caressingly. "Whoops!"
"I broke it off," the girl told the gardener's son that night in the kitchen; it lay between them like a gold nugget on the red-checked tablecloth as they drank their strong hot tea. "I'm going to glue it back on. If Gramma ketches me! Oh! Oh! Sure and it's a love of a little..." The gardener's son blushed. "Stow it," he said and turned his eyes away from the accidental circumcision, the gilded curtailment.
Hung on either side of the beauteous Bessie, separated by her on the wall as they had been truly by her tricks and love of seeing them quarrel over her in life, were Dodge and Dougherty, nine months apart, Maisie was sure. One had followed the other as if they were twins, "one in the morning and one in the afternoon," she murmured, and they had tumbled and played together like savage Little puppies, inseparable until Bessie's reign of terror. Both of them sat for their portraits in identical positions, each held his bowler, each wore his hair parted in the middle, slicked down to his ears, and each wore a short tight jacket, waistcoat and grey pants, a big sloppy cravat and choking collar. Each, with one leg lifted, might have been sitting on the old Yale fence where each had matriculated, each had succumbed; each had been sent home in a box, packages Maisie hadn't wanted to open. Their shiny faces reflected the Light; their serious expressions belied their shindigs, their inherited characteristics, their simmering blood, the horsewhipping they had endured because of Bessie's tattling, their explorations into forbidden places. What fun they had had, what Little rascals, lovable rogues! The old lady forgot, or did not count, the casualties along their short but headlong route, the fainting pregnant kitchen maid, the village girls, hussies all; the professor's wife at New Haven, the hullabaloo of the wronged, the indignant cook.
Maisie smiled; a faint grimace passed over her parched face as she peered closely at Dodge, the elder. A tiny facial differentiation kept him straight in her mind, "Yes, this one is Dody." Bessie had bit him hard and deep on the cheek, even in a temper she loved him, and he wore, ever after, for that short and passionate evenness, a synthetic dimple as ravishing as a girl's, at the corner of his mouth, even when he was sulky. And he was: sulky. If they had only known it, he was manic depressive, with powerful counterspells of euphoria and dejection. In his despondent moods he had a disgust of life, taedium vitae, mal du pays, that was positively poetic. His pouting Lips and downcast look, the depth of his melancholy, enchanted his sister Bessie, and she adored him in these interludes, petted and kissed him, picked up after him. It was a weapon but he never learned how it worked and could not make use of it; it came over him when he least expected it and he could not ape it or recall it at will. It was the real thing. "Bilious," they said and dosed him with sulphur and molasses, sickening him still more, dulling his spirit: "Leave me alone."
"What is the matter?"
"I don't know."
Just as suddenly as the blues had overcome him, a rise of spirits would take place, a levity that didn't make sense, a feverish frivolity and absurd sense of humor, an overemphasis that frightened the observer more than the gentler prostration of soul had distressed him. In between his exaggerated moods he was, it is true, an exceptionally intelligent lad, good-looking and lovable. Dougherty too, the younger, had his inhesions and unlikely aspirations, his inspired nonsense and willful periods. Neither ever seemed, however, to let the subject matter, as it were, depress or animate him. Whatever was the cause of high or low spirits, triumph or remorse, it came from within, from a secret source, and had nothing to do with the occasion. They helped themselves to pleasure and bore up as best they could under the loneliness that in turn possessed them, and "devil take the hindmost" it looked like, but wasn't. Without motive or plan they did not deserve the punishment that might have been theirs if they had lived to accept the sentence. They did not wait to reap the titillating harvest that they had sown or lie down in the cots they had soiled, but neither did they grow up to be corrupted in less headlong ways, sins, not so much of the flesh, to be counted against them, but of arrogance and pride and hypocrisy, sins of the spirit; elder statesmen with hair shirts and bullet-proof vests. They had been saved senility, too, and the obsequious hatred of their fellow men.
The two glassy portraits of the little neurotics held the attention of the old lady a long time and Bessie's, which hung between them, and who lay between them, too, in the cemetery on the hill. How close they had all been, the two boys and that Bessie! They mingled their dust and ashes now, inseparable; precious incest. The old lady shook her head from side to side although the curving tremulous smile at her memories persisted, as if painted on her old face. She had shaken her head like that threescore years ago when she had been troubled beyond her book learning at the esoteric games and secret signals of the little triumvirate, before they were separated to be educated... but even after that, hadn't they been closer than was... decent? Hadn't the boys, on vacation at home, renewed their acquaintance with Bessie, fought over her all too violently as they grew older and each, it appeared, wanted her to himself? Hadn't Bessie slapped, and spit at, the kitchen maid: "Leave Dody alone!"?
"Bessie, I shall have to ask you to behave yourself."
And what had the boys taught Bessie to do, that in their long absences she played by herself and didn't answer when she was spoken to? "Bessie!"
"Ma-Ma!"
"Ma-Ma! I'm back!"
The old lady gazed at Sissy without, for the moment, recognizing her; it was nature's way of sparing her the shock of a too quick return from the past; it would have stung her nerves to see Sissy, one of the live ones, in modern dress like that, come out of nowhere. "Bessie."
"No, Sissy, Ma-Ma, I'm sorry to be late, the girls..."
"On the contrary," said the old lady, "you are early," and she was, one supposes, in the timelessness of Maisie's preoccupation, paraphernalia of the past, early. She stared at Sissy.
"Child, you're getting plump again. How do you feel?"
"Oh, Mo-Ma, please!"
"Suit yourself."
"It's my foundation."
"It's your what?" The old lady visualized a pile of bricks, as plain as day.
"May I sit down, Ma-Ma, or..."
She contemplated, the old lady, a gay parade of perambulators; baptisms; a line of white girls going to communion and returning quite serious, their homecoming kisses bitter from the wine, Jesus' blood; rowdy as ever in the afternoon. Would it never end, the... the... What was it? Genesis?