Chapter 3
MAISIE, often skipping around in her head for events and subject matters, one thing leading to another, reconstructing her family history and guessing at dates, built up for posterity a short-lived crazy patchwork quilt of the North American continent. She mixed up generations and professions, medical lore and Indian mythology. She did have a deal of reliable information dating back, almost, to the beginnings of Colonial America; from both Jamestown on the banks of Virginia and Plymouth on the Bay of Massachusetts. Many minor but significant matters could be vouched for in old family Bibles and almost unreadable documents, receipt books and diaries. She identified herself with and often believed herself to be, and have suffered the privations of, a Mehitabel, an Eleazer, Sarah Lincoln, Joanna Hobart and "she that was mother to Sir William Phipps, the late Governor of New England" who had no less than twenty-five children besides him. "She had one and twenty sons and five daughters," and no wonder, kin as Maisie was also to the Hingham matrons: Hannah Beal who had twelve children, Sarah Cushing, twelve, Christian Dunbar, thirteen, Rebecca Hersy, twelve, Hannah Jacob, twelve, Mary Joy, fifteen, Elizabeth Stodder, twelve, and Remember Ward, twelve! Family records, indeed, bore out these birthday facts, anachronistic as they surely were in Maisie's juvenilia and memories. The prolific birth rate of languishing and vapourish New England matrons from age fifteen on to early demise, as a rule, vindicates her word in our history books of provincial society. And like Maisie, generations later still without much medical knowledge, the death rate kept pace with the birth certificates signed, almost, in the blood the dealers in physick let. The colonists, divorced from the mother country and its "Royal Touch," the miraculous cures of epilepsy and scrofula by the thousands perpetrated by, for instance, James and Charles, depended only on a motley crew of "Practitioners in Physick" who were very profitably employed. "Chirurgeons" and mid-wives, casually licensed, provoked and confounded the medical Muse with their carryings-on and their lyings-in, and babes, scarcely weaned, soberly died of smallpox, scarlet fever and measles, dosed, as they were, with mithridate and Venice treacle, opium, spices, licorice, and red roses, better off as they might have been with an amulet than St.-John's-wort and a compound of vipers. Maisie remembered her grandmother's dipping Louisa, who suffered from rickets, and a little later hobbled off to Heaven uncomplaining, head foremost into cold water three mornings in a row, before giving her a mixture of snakeroot and saffern steeped in rum, comfry, hartshorn and knotty grass. She had often been bled as a child, herself, and it is hard to understand where Maisie learned of Harvey's treatise on the circulation of the blood, as the old people, her begetters, that she dwelled on in her mind, were ignorant of anything but Galen's herbiage well into the eighteenth century and bleedings "freed the patient of hostile humours" late into the nineteenth. It was a wonder there was any blood left to circulate. "Prick the gums with the bill of an osprey!".
Among Maisie's souvenirs was a charming letter Governor Winthrop had written to her great-great-grandfather on her Ma-Ma's side of the Mason and Dixon Line in 1656 which reads, in part, as follows: Lett me tell you an easy medicine of mine own that I have scene do miraculous cures in all sortes of Ulcers, and in knitting soddainly broken bones.... Beate to subtile powder one ounce of crabbes eyes, then putt upon it in a high glasse four ounces of strong wine vinegar. It will instantly boyle up extremely; lett it stand till all be quiett; then strain it through a fine linen; and of this liquor (which will then taste like dead beere, without sharpness) give two spoonefuls att 1 time to drinke, three times a day and you shall see a strange effect in a weeke or two.
Underneath this Shakespearean witches' brew her progenitor had added one of his own (this exchange of prescriptions by amateurs must have been quite the thing): For all sortes of agewes... pare the patient's nayles when the fever is coming on; and putt the parings into a little bagge of fine linen and tye that about a live eeles necke, in a tubbe of water. The eele will dye and the patient will recover.
Her own Pa-Pa, the old judge, Virginian, had penciled a medical and spiritual addenda to these New England solices: Things bad for the heart: beans, pease, sadness, onions, anger, evil tidings and the loss of friends.
Maisie's head abounded in theses, conceits, fancies and phantasies, but there was, as said, a good modicum of amazing fact and it was all mental pabulum for her, sustaining her through long days and nearly as long nights, keeping up her morale in time of stress, or doubt as to her position in the household, spooky and unreal as it was to her, who lived more comfortably in the past. She suspected at times a decline in control, a demotion from absolute power, from matriarch to old lady, a proxy of herself without portfolio; she only sporadically felt it and not for long, but she resented it: "Kitty cornered! Put it back straight!" And she would recall, and quote, presidents and royal governors, deacons and world-shaking events; climbing up, in this devious way, back on her throne, mentally alienate herself from them all, all that she had given suck, what's more; she couldn't help it if they were daft, barmy, cracked.... And her disordered reasoning soothed her, sent her back in an abstract phaeton to her delusions; some of them so pretty! In the long halls of her memory she stored the Southern portraits, too, of belles cloistered in the Old Dominion who had preceded her; out of the loins of planters and roisterers and skippers, too. She gazed at their sweet upturned noses and short upper lips, with skulls no bigger than a monkey's. Some of them inherited from way back a livid aristocratic pallor; a few, an almost dull English stare, a carefully acquired, over the generations, isolation and immunity in their stance; throwbacks, even in Virginia, and, in New England, out of place. "Their underdone quality looks!" her Ma-Ma had sniffed, "and no backbone!" Maisie smiled at the anatomical insults that the women of the Reconstruction Period heaped upon one another, and took an eccentric pleasure in what she called "spirit." Ricocheting back to New England, she spent many hours enjoying the talents and canny intelligence of her contemporary, in her mind, Yankee ancestors, chuckling over wise sayings, embroidered platitudes, unheard-of and impudent quackery, fabulous speculations and well-turned bargains. She was capable of contrasting their independent ventures and virtues with the Southerner's dependence on the liberality of nature, the bland acceptance, julep in hand, of the bounties of the earth; but she admired all her dead. "Here, now, let's see, who's this good-looking boy?... he's the image of my Dougherty!" She traced down with her long finger the finely written names in her grandfather's Bible and decided immediately that it could be no other than Increase Fitch who married... hum... let's see... Abigail Spare-hawk. She laid aside the big book and carried the ball alone from there. It was Increase Fitch, son of William (and Jail Porter). "That would be my... no... let's see... never mind." Well, anyway, Increase being the youngest son was meant to carry out the New England tradition and take the cloth to which he had no particular aversion, or inclination, either. Maisie chuckled. His father's big landholdings made him wish for more of the same. He nevertheless went along to Harvard and accepted his conventional fate. After graduation, easy for him, he was called to the church and did a little fiery preaching which was fun, but his brother's law books interested him more. He was admitted readily to the bar, and became the "most noted jurist in that colony." Maisie remembered the words written in the Bible without checking, "and the oracle of the council." But land was in his head and his talents bored him. Maisie tried to think of the descriptive phrase that was right there on the tip of her tongue... "Equivalent Lands!"
Yes sir! Massachusetts had ceded to Connecticut one hundred and six thousand acres! Increase got ten thousand acres as his share as commissioner. There was a scandal of some sort, naturally, but he developed himself an English manor and wouldn't sell any of it, not an inch of it. Then he inherited more land, and bought some more, too, and so on.... Maisie sighed. That was only the beginning... Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire... and at one penny halfpenny an acre! Whew! The young clergyman had done well as well as good. Land! (Maisie had honestly inherited the love of acreage, somewhat dishonestly, to say the least, acquired by her puritan ancestors and the huge grants thrust upon them, by her Southern kin.) The old lady relaxed from the effort expended on the above, fairly accurate as it was, and dreamed of undated dandies with powdered wigs, jet-black beauty patches on their cheeks, like girls; scarlet and grass-green fitted coats; velvet and millefleurs tapestrylike waistcoats, and silver and gold buckles, cascades of foamy lace at their bosoms; elegant tight, so tight, breeches proclaiming the sex that was otherwise indistinguishable from the ladies; "Cowslip wine," she thought, "and cherry bounce and raspberry fling."
Maisie Sparehawk Herbert was as proud of her rebel aristocratic blood as she was amused and vain of the New England squires who trooped through her mind, dressed no whit less fashionably than the others, but cannier in the head. Maisie knew she was pur sang, of the carriage trade, the quality; no skipjacks or chaw-bacons in her family tree! The Herberts had been and still were the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery and might drop in any time, and Captain Ratcliffe, one of the three skippers to sail into Jamestown in 1607, had chosen to bear the same name as old Judge Herbert's mother although his real name was something else... she could not remember; an impostor Ratcliffe had been, according to her mother's friend, John Fiske, but a mighty fine name he had chosen to sail under and he had often got the better of Captain John Smith, too, impostor, rogue or charlatan notwithstanding... humph! Ousted Smith again and again and became president of the council in his place. "Think I don't know!" said the old lady out loud. "Shucks, it's like yesterday," and she nodded, her old brain weary with data.
Maisie came to with a start. Someone had said, "Philip!" She listened, her tired heart skipping around, its shallow beat eccentric and uneven as a hunting dog's. There was no sound; the lights had been lit, and Bunce lay at her feet, gently snoring, unconcerned. The orange and black cat felt it, though. She sat staring at the old lady like an oriental image in soapstone; only the very tip of her tail twitching erratically, an evil grin on her heart-shaped face, her spangled whiskers aslant. Maisie, in good form in broad daylight, would have "scatted" her but she felt the need (something was in the air) of placating her.
"Kitty?"
The animal continued to stare as if wishing to hypnotize the old lady.
"You little elemental," Maisie whispered; Ma-Ma, her Ma-Ma, had described a cat so, that crept over the eaves at night, dodging the short mauve moonlight shadows.
"Philip!"
The old lady heard it clear as could be. Where had she been for those few seconds only, that she had nodded, that she woke with a start like a guilty child, fearful, with irregularly racing heart? You could see the pulse, as big as a pea, jumping between the ultramarine-blue veins on her wrist.
"You!" she said to the cat. It was the same cat, the very cat, the only witness of her adultery with her husband's brother. The young Maisie looked straight into the cat's eyes over Philip's shoulder as he embraced her. She had not been afraid then. The old lady's agitation began to leave her; she could not be spooked as you and I from the past; she was not afraid of the dead. And now, only the realness of this same cat who certainly heard someone say "Philip" as clear as she had heard it, confused her. The cat did not stir as the old lady said for the third time: "Philip!"
The handsome Philip had delicately and tremulously ravished the spirited and beautiful wife, mother of eight at the time, of his eldest brother and dishonored and betrayed the "old man" who supported his philanderings at home, really at home this time, and abroad. Philip's dashing cravats and the thrilling sideburns that caressed his cheek and jaws smelled sweet of contented women-discontented wives-and teeming mothers. He did not care for, or trust, girls; their vapours and hysterics, their absurd faith in their lovers and innocent flirtations, their want to pin him down and take up housekeeping. He seldom visited a lady twice, and Maisie was no exception. For a while she had foolishly longed for a second visitation, one more delicious thrill, and sent him little secret notes, gay, not too meek or too demanding, and then had lain, as usual, again and again with the "old man"; each time, it seemed, getting up with a little frantic new life inside her. She could scarcely keep track of the months, and the old doctor delivered her again and again of the weight within her.
"Do you know what to do?" Philip had whispered when he had finished.
"Of course not," she had said modestly. "Certainly not, sir!" she had added, as if she flipped him with a lacy fan for a naughty indiscreet speech; and she had told the truth, nevertheless: What was there to do? And she dare not ask him an intimate question even in the bodily intimacy, the skin intimacy, of his embrace. He might have carried an amulet from Paris, some secret receipt from Montmartre, but Maisie hadn't an idea. She had not even wondered at the next child's gestures or looked for a resemblance; she might have been a savage from the pages of The Golden Bough who really and truly didn't know, hadn't solved the mystery of birth any more than of the curious rhythmic rotating moon, and copulated strictly for pleasure. Maisie accepted the "old man's" ministrations because she was stuck with it and she lived with him as a good wife with one exception for forty years. She was not without her principles and conventions, and asked none of the questions, either from Ward's Sentence and Theme or from literature in general: Am I free? Am I entitled to my own life? What is happiness? These questions did not provoke her and so did not confound her. She was strong and well, and her fruitfulness nothing unusual. She did not resent it or think, "I might do something else."
She had been relieved when the old man died, not so much because of his habitual begetting as of impatience with his maudlin ideas, his saccharine notions, his drooling, his hiccoughs, his non-ego, the sharp male smell of him, so different from Philip, who, like a bee, withdrew with himself a little perfumed honey each time he visited and deposited a little of it, too, the next time. She did not make the comparison; it was simply there.
Maisie always avoided, in her recollections, the period of adjustment from riches to mere comfort that had been hers when the old man had had the impudence to leave them all, the omnific Maisie and her brood, with-well-no one knows, and Maisie, as has been said, "forgot."
"Scat," said the old lady, at ease in her mind again; Philip and the "old man" could have gone out, hand in hand, of her venerable dome, drifted away, one to Heaven, one to Hell, the Schopenhauer possibilities of a contingent question did not occur to her; her frustrations, we know, are tinier ones than that, and neither did she insist now, or enervate her subliminal self, fretting about what happened a minute ago to her psyche, than she had, as an adulteress, asked who begot whom.
The little elemental dropped to the floor noiselessly without having left an indentation anywhere and as she strolled out, the expression on her face suggested that she had indeed been the very cat that Maisie believed her to be, a cat not to be shoved around, a cat with a good memory, who would not forget anything.
Philip had come into her head uninvited, as she nodded, from way back; there had been no association of ideas; he had popped up like a jack-in-the-box when she least expected him, the result perhaps of a certain procrastination on Maisie's part, a putting off till later, a some-other-time-not-now Philip. Well, he was gone; a very mild and senile nostalgia remained.
"I'm dumfounded," she said and blamed it on the cat; she had a pretty good grip on her memories, wasn't often caught with her pants down and she still didn't know that it was herself who had said, three times: Philip. Vespertine, past even the grand climacteric, she had lost the reasons for suspecting herself of guilt and self-censorship; she was only aware of an uneasiness that came over her when Philip threatened her. Perhaps she had not been at her best in that situation and desired simply to forget it, out of pride; it doesn't matter.
She readily recalled pleasanter memorabilia and returned smilingly, there was plenty of time, to the boys, twins of her bosom, their continued story that would only end with the old lady herself.
The lads had matriculated at Yale College when they were no older than fifteen, which wasn't very unusual. The annals of that institution rang little bells in Maisie's doting pneuma. She settled down happily, breathing shallowly, scarcely burning any calories at all, to the pleasure of college life; illustrated and embellished, as a kind of backdrop to her lively lads, by halftones and views of Connecticut Hall, Trumbull Gallery, College Square, President Clap's monument, portrait of Governor Yale, and an "Exact View of Yale College, with Its Scenery." Maisie heard again the pleasant muted pop of tennis balls, the cries of young gentlemen at football or wicket; "Oh, the bullfrog in the pool..." she hummed, tapping her foot. She heard cries out of hearsay: "Yale! Yale!" sing through the corridors and involutions of her brain, as the students, fed up with bucolic monotony, looked for trouble and found it in the town, returning home with bloody heads. She opened her eyes and peered into the corner of the room for reference. "No," she said. Her eyes had fallen on, her attention had been diverted to, the old tomes of Chitty on Blackstone that staggered on the shelves, disintegrating, smelling of death, already riddled with pale worms. Ahhh, the well-conditioned lads and young swells were all dead, too, of fever! Every last one of them! A shiver passed through her as if she, too, suffered a chill, caught in the evil climate, as they had caught it, what with inadequate housing and the filth of-the lack of-she glanced at her little powder room and one tear fell; a sickening dry sob shook her. "No," she said bravely, and the handsome "bully club" she had been seeking in the first place leaned, as usual, in the corner, easing her gently back to tales the boys had told of its origin and its use. Its big yellowing ivory head had smashed originally the skulls of impertinent and raucous "Townies" who so wholeheartedly resented, to put it mildly, the influx and unwelcome presence of young gentlemen in their midst. Its gold adornments are tarnished and brittle but the engraved lettering is clear, Sparehawk, '40. It is not quite clear to the old lady which of her Sparehawks toted the thing home, presented as it was to the young buck who smashed the most skulls the fastest, but it was easy to believe that Dodge or Dougherty would have got a leg on it at least, without much trouble, and brought it home to her, another badge of their virility that she so prized. She knew it was, at any rate, the last "bully club" presented at New Haven where young gentlemen, if indeed Yale College still stands, prefer now less spectacular and bloody honors, insuring their acceptance in such conservative houses as the Fifth Avenue Bank. She sniffs as she thinks of Paula's beaux, an anemic lot, with bad manners, and beardless.
Dodge hadn't lost any time, or Dougherty either, close behind him, in renewing his acquaintance with the girls and little tarts, but a professor's wife, bereft as she was of practically everything, let him love her, and he really did. Maisie had been torn between jealousy at his rapt letters home about a "lovely woman whom I hope to make my wife" and the shrewd knowledge that the bold minx, twice his age, might be of use to him. She had been proud, too, that a stripling, her Dody, had so easily seduced an intelligent woman, wife of another.
Dody's eager manhood had startled the pretty wife with roving eyes out of her wits, and she threw them out the window, as it were, as she pulled down the shades and sent away the nursemaid on an errand. Dody, whose experience had not taught him to dawdle, wasn't as surprised as he should have been if he had known more about the gradations of the sex. Mary Elizabeth had held hands with boys before and accepted unresponsively the occasional lapses of the professor of concatenation and apothegms. She daydreamed of well-armored, passionate, gift-giving and ribbon-displaying white knights on entire horses, and sometimes was awakened in the dark by an unsought-for passion that she forgot, but she had no intention of giving all, ever, and preferred it that way. She was too astute in a feminine way for the lovely boys, as she thought them, who gazed at her with a longing that sent them home with evil impulses, and who called her intimate pet names among themselves. She assumed, in the progression of their desires, a modesty that was really a fact. She could dream of love but could not really take off her-let's say-bra and panties. As a girl, she had wondered how in the world these obstacles which she thought unassailable were overcome in real life. She could not imagine nudity. Her marriage to a man who could not imagine anything, kept her behind this eight ball that couldn't be budged. She received him in the dark when she had to, and was up and dressed before he awoke. The boys never saw so much as the small dark mole on her inner thigh, or the suggestion even of a bosom that Dody uncovered in broad daylight.
"Mister Herbert!"
"Call me Dody."
Dody's immediate success was no surprise to Dody and he did not live to meet the woman who meant "no," if there was such a one somewhere, immune to his charm and his faith in his ability that the little kitchen wench had endowed him with, under the eaves. And Mary Elizabeth accepted the inevitable with good grace.
Being a woman she caught up with and surpassed him in no time at all. Having learned that the premise was good, her logic, or intuition, supplied the rest and, from patiently sleeping with the schoolteacher to swooning with pleasure in a boy's arms was an ellipsis that scarcely needed any concentration or homework. She soon taught him, at least he learned, that a lady is finicky in her pleasures, and liked it. He learned from her, too, about Shelley and Keats and Byron and Leigh Hunt and Mary Lamb; the Carlyles; and to put his heart into his kisses. She taught him to prolong his desires and polish up his technique and he tagged along after the things she thought up quite willingly. The thrill of deceit shone out of her big black eyes and the excitement of waiting for felicity until the professor's step was heard on the porch was better than the original purely physical seduction which left them nothing to do but make fudge.
He adored her.
He did not know that they had, as if in a quadrille, changed places, but she did. All gone were the daydreams of white knights on entire horses, the abortive cerebral imaginings of everlasting love. As if the bright heat of his love-making had dispelled the foggy foggy dew, she became overnight, as it were, a sensualist; while Dody from just that and no more, something he was born with, turned into a smitten lover, smote indeed from behind by an unscrupulous and predatory woman, a selfish little prig turned both thirty and libidinous. But the neurosis, so called, of love, that sublimated Dody was a step forward for him; better than retreating into the slime, as she had, was his myopic, illusory flight to a twilight zone, of sorts not unattractive. In time the slower male might have, if God had been willing, progressed into the real thing, an integrated personality, the last metamorphosis Dody would have wanted, so let us not regret too much his early demise. As in any illness, one must, we are told, get worse before one gets better, Dody's spells of euphoria and dejection, with a subject matter now (she loves me-she loves me not), wrestled with the grain of sanity inherent in his stock like an overwhelming dough with its leaven. Without that drop of genesis he would have been as loco as some of his comrades thought him truly to be. Mary Elizabeth had him as spooked as a horse who has met a camel, and she knew it. She was, astonishingly enough, perfectly aware that Shelley and Keats and Mary Lamb were a form of protracted sex play in this instance. She was, as Maisie guessed, an intelligent woman and she held her man-child. Only a more desperate fever alienated him from his mistress, a killing one that was followed by the final and potent chill of death. The woman he loved could not, by nature, mourn him long although she searched for him elsewhere and elsewhere until the authorities, bedeviled by such as she, had her moved out behind East Rock where she was geographically impossible to make, her lilting voice inaudible to the impressionables.
"Ma-Ma?"