Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Read online

  None of these things bothered us excessively; we have always been a family that carries bewilderment like a banner, and odd new confusions do not actually seem to be any more bewildering than the ones we invent for ourselves; moreover, in each of these cases it was easier to believe that nothing had happened, or that it was of no importance anyway. We spoke affectionately of poltergeists and pixies, and affected to believe that each single instance was of course some unconscious behavior on our own parts. Laurie, who believed in any case in good and bad fairies, adjusted quickly and easily to the oddities, and was completely unaffected after a while, although my husband and I received a little jolt when, on Christmas morning, Laurie found a second stocking hung up against the mantel, as though it had been feared that we might forget. And there was the time when he lost a tooth, forgot to tell us, and found, in the morning, two dimes under his pillow. However, after a while the house seemed to gain a certain amount of confidence in us, and only Laurie ever experienced this pleasing duplication, although Joanne’s clothes are still mended occasionally, that being a field in which the house can have no legitimate confidence in me.

  It is not hard, after all, to live with such things, and after a while they do not seem much more unnatural than that water should change its form when heat is applied, or that trees should change color in the fall; I recall that the first week with our first television set shocked us much more deeply. I have grown used to the tricks of the house as I have grown used to the dip in the kitchen floor beside the windows, or the stair that creaks, or the study window that will not open at all. My husband, who does not come into as intimate contact with the house as I do, is consequently less troubled, although he was quite surprised when a nearly empty bottle of whiskey disappeared and was lost to him for a day, then returned full. And once his muffler disappeared from the hall closet and returned some time later to its own hook, where we had both looked several times.

  I think perhaps a great reason for our relaxing into this mild acceptance was the complete ease with which these small things were accomplished, frequently so unobtrusively that it was not until afterward that we realized something had happened. When Joanne’s good silver spoon vanished, it disappeared from my hand in the dish towel: That is, I was drying it, as I do every night, and as I reached forward to slip it into the drawer along with the other silverware it was gone. I had seen it the moment before and then did not see it the moment after. I looked for it, of course, but without much enthusiasm, knowing without admitting it that I need not bother. A day or so later, after Joanne had become reconciled to using another spoon, I was drying silverware, and as I was slipping it into the drawer, Joanne’s spoon fell into its place. I knew the spoon had been gone and that I had been looking for it, but it was returned so naturally that I closed the drawer, then thought, then opened the drawer and saw that the spoon was really there.

  Perhaps it was exactly because we took this cheerful teasing so well that one day, near the end of our first year in the house, the doorbell rang at about eleven o’clock in the morning. Laurie was in school, Joanne was in her playpen in the children’s room, and I was making dough for gingerbread men, which we would cut out in the afternoon. I remember that when I went to answer the door I thought idly that probably my mixing bowl and spoon, my cups and rolling pin, would all be washed and returned to their places by the time I came back. There was an old lady at the door, neatly dressed in black and smiling.

  “I’m so very sorry to trouble you,” she said as soon as I opened the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Won’t you come in?” I added, because she was obviously intending to come in anyway.

  “Thank you,” she said, and stepped daintily inside. She looked around the hall curiously, then smiled. “I used to visit here very often,” she said. “I was passing by, and I thought how wonderful it is to see the old house occupied again.” She waved her hand apologetically. “I couldn’t go on without stopping in for one more look at the old house.”

  “I’m very glad you did,” I said. “Won’t you come in and look around?”

  She followed me into the living room, stopping once to touch the shining wood of the old stair rail, and in the living room she went directly to the old wooden rocker and sat down, turning her head to look around.

  “It’s not really very much changed,” she said.

  “It’s a lovely old house,” I said.

  “Do you think so?” She turned quickly to look at me. “Do you really think it’s a lovely old house?”

  “We’re very happy here.”

  “I’m glad.” She folded her hands and smiled again, as though to herself. “It’s always been such a good house,” she said. “The old doctor always used to say it was a good house.”

  “The old doctor?”

  “Doctor Ogilvie.” She smiled at me again.

  “Doctor Ogilvie?”

  “I see they kept the pillars, after all,” she said, nodding. “We always thought they gave the house character.”

  “There was a hornet’s nest in one,” I said inadequately. Doctor Ogilvie had built the house in 1816.

  “Which one?”

  “The one on the right end.”

  She nodded again. “There always was,” she said.

  “What was it like when you visited here?” I asked.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said, and smiled on me as from a long way off. “It was very gay then, you know. There were no other houses for miles around, you know, and we all came in carriages—”

  “But the Fieldings built the other houses in—” I began, and she interrupted me, her soft cheeks faintly pink.

  “No other houses we visited, of course.”

  I was silent, a little anxious, and then Shax came into the room, without footsteps, but making his presence known the way a cat does. The old lady turned and looked at him for a minute and then said, “Fine fellow.” She put down one black-gloved hand and Shax went to her, touched her glove with his nose, and poured himself into her lap. She stroked him comfortably while she said to me, “They’ve taken away the old wallpaper, and I suppose the front bedroom isn’t blue anymore?”

  “It’s blue,” I said, wondering. “Someone chose a very pretty blue paper for that room.”

  “I’m glad the Fieldings kept it up,” she said. “So often you can’t tell, when a young family buys into a home. Sometimes they change the old things.”

  “We’ve been trying to keep it comfortable,” I said.

  “I remember,” she said, “I remember when the Fieldings first offered to buy it, we sat upstairs in the blue front room, Sally Cortland and I, and we tried to think what the Fieldings might do to the house. The Cortlands hadn’t really been here long, of course; the Ogilvies built it. We brought the pillars from Boston.”

  I could think of nothing to say, and after a minute she put Shax down and said, “May I look at the rest of the house? Are you busy?”

  She liked the way the bedrooms were still the same colors, and the children’s room pleased her. “What a pretty child you are, indeed,” she said to Joanne in the playpen, and Joanne looked up, considered, and smiled. “It needs children, this house,” the old lady said, touching me on the arm as we went out the door. “It was the sorrow of Anne Ogilvie’s life.”

  When we moved at last to the kitchen and she saw my half-finished gingerbread, she was amused, and picked up the bowl to examine the dough. “You’ll get it good and short,” she said. “It won’t bake even, if you don’t get it good and short. And put in a little coffee.”

  “The children are going to cut out the gingerbread men this afternoon.”

  “With raisin eyes,” she added, and sighed. Then she laughed softly. “Still the same old house,” she said.

  I went with her to the door, and she stood for a minute looking back into the house, as I often do. Then she smiled at me once more, affectionately, and thanked me, and I watched her go off down the walk.
r />   When I closed the door, I leaned one hand against the door frame, and it seemed to me that for the first time the old house responded, turning in toward me protectively. When I went back into the living room, Shax was asleep on the wooden rocker, and that afternoon one of my neighbors dropped in for a cup of coffee, coming through the back door so naturally that neither of us thought of her never having come in before.

  Small things still disappear, of course, and for a while Joanne spoke occasionally of a faraway voice that sang to her at night. Once I went into the kitchen and found a still-warm pumpkin pie on the table, covered with a clean cloth; we had it for dinner and praised it in voices that we hoped would carry throughout the old house.

  The Play’s the Thing

  I came to my desk one bright Monday morning recently, planning to get right to work, and looked at the various things I had been working on, any one of which I could spend my Monday doing. There were four manuscripts, in different stages of progress, on my desk.

  One was a novel, a story about a haunted house and what happens to the people who live in it; it emphasizes the idea that ghosts, like dreams and hallucinations, are figments of the human intelligence.

  The second manuscript was a long story about a girl who runs away from home and tries so successfully to eradicate any aspect of her old personality that when she wants to go home again she can’t get in; they don’t know her.

  The other two were, in a sense, nonprofessional pleasure work. One manuscript was a birthday present for my husband, the script for a ferocious dialogue to be tape-recorded by several of his bridge-playing friends. My husband is a most meticulous bridge player, and dislikes any form of clumsiness or carelessness about the game, so I wrote an account of a game in which every possible rule is broken, and all kinds of confusion goes on during the play of a hand. This was to be acted out by his friends, and recorded, and—just to make him feel happy—the fourth hand would be left out in the recording; a space of time was left for him to bid and play. We all called it “Play-Along Bridge” (and I may say that in a sense it has served its purpose; he has announced that he will never play bridge with any of us again).

  The fourth manuscript on my desk was a one-act play for children, which I had not written voluntarily. My children and some of their friends had thought they would give a play, and they’d gone about it in the eminently practical fashion that children use for these things: First they’d chosen their costumes, then they’d decided where they would give their play and how much they would charge and who could be in it and who could not be in it, and then they’d started looking for a play to give. They’d asked me where you went to find a nice play with big parts for everybody, and I’d sent them down to the library, where I was sure they would find half a dozen volumes of plays for children. My older daughter came back to me, disconsolate. “Listen to this,” she said, and read to me: “ ‘I fear me, good husband, that our wretched hut will not again withstand the rigors of the winter wind.’ ”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  She said, “It means their house is going to blow down, but that’s the way I have to say it if we do that play.”

  “Well, why not do another play instead?” I asked.

  “Do you like this better?” she asked. “ ‘I am Lafayette, a French man of noble birth, and I have come to this new country to aid General Washington in his battle for freedom.’ You know,” she continued, “I’d be downright ashamed to get up on a stage and talk junk like that, and the other plays are just as bad. No one could remember the lines because they don’t sound right, and you have to stand still and say them so you look silly on the stage because there’s no way to act or sound natural.”

  “Why don’t you make up your own play?” I asked her.

  “We can’t,” she said, “but you’re a writer…”

  Well, with half a dozen of them urging me on, I sat down that evening to sketch out a one-act play. I decided that it would be most suitable for the group who were going to act it if I used a familiar fairy story, rewriting it in language they could understand, with action that would appeal to them. I thought of Hansel and Gretel, which is a fairy story that has always annoyed me because I strongly resent that Hansel and Gretel eat the Witch’s house and never get punished for it. I thought I might please myself by seeing that Hansel and Gretel got what was coming to them.

  So I made the Witch into a fine crazy character, full of progressive ideas about the improvement of witchcraft. I put in an Enchanter, to accommodate an older boy in our cast, and made the Enchanter a lazy old creature who lets the Witch do all the work, and I made Hansel and Gretel into the two most objectionable children I could, whining and quarreling and insolent and greedy. Then I made the Mother and Father into a pair of bewildered, helpless parents who want their children to be well mannered and nice but find out that nothing seems to help: They have joined the PTA and the Little League, and bought Girl Scout cookies, and given the children bicycles for Christmas, and gone to the class play, and still their children are impolite and bad.

  So the Witch does not want to capture the children at all, but has to shut them in her house to keep them from eating all of it, and when she tries to give the children back, the parents will not take them. The Witch begs and threatens, but the parents point out that the children are so unpleasant, they would prefer to have the Witch keep them.

  I had a wonderful time writing it, though I had half an idea that I’d better keep my play away from the children, as it outraged all the tenets of fairy tales. Every time I thought of things my children do that I can’t stand—and there are a lot of them—I put them in for Hansel and Gretel. As I went along I thought of a little song that Hansel and Gretel could sing, a kind of echo song, in which one of them says, “You’re mean,” and the other answers, “You’re mean,” and it goes on “You’re bad,” “You’re bad,” “You’re a pig, I won’t play with you,” “You’re a pig, I won’t play with you.” I wrote the lyrics in, and when I’d finished the first half of my play I thought it over and decided that I would show it to the children after all and see what they thought.

  Well, to my surprise, they loved it. There was an immediate wild demand to be allowed to play the parts of Hansel and Gretel, and the children took up my little song and chanted it to a tune adapted from a nursery rhyme, adding verses freely and shouting it from one end of the house to the other. They began quoting lines back and forth, and then I discovered a very odd thing: I had thought of the Mother and Father characters as sympathetic, but kind of mixed up and tired—the way I see mothers and fathers. However, once the children got hold of the play, the Mother and Father changed: They became slightly silly, and as the children discussed the parts, it became clear that the Mother and Father were going to become the comedic roles. When their lines were read in a slightly exaggerated fashion, they sounded self-pitying and foolish.

  The Witch and the Enchanter became the powerful figures. From the Enchanter’s first appearance, it is perfectly obvious that he is the kind of person who would drop dead before he would umpire a Little League game, and the Witch’s main desire is to go on a television quiz program and make a lot of money, and spend it on fancy clothes and good things to eat. They are, in a word, not at all proper parent figures, and the children loved them.

  We ran almost at once into further complications: The children were singing the echo song and thought they would like more music, particularly a song for the Witch to sing—that was my older daughter, who fancied herself onstage belting out a solo number—and another song to close the play. My son offered to write the music, and I wrote a couple of songs with simple jingling words, but then it turned out that although the echo song was all right in its simple form, like a nursery rhyme, no one wanted the older characters to have to sing “junk like that.”

  So it was unanimously decided that the song the Enchanter sings must be a real low-down blues, to be called “The Mean Old Wizard Blues” and to begin “I want a rich
witch, baby; no others need apply.” While I sat there with my jaw hanging, the blues got itself composed and firmly embedded in the family culture. I got in a couple of fast patter songs for the Witch and the parents, with a lot of rhymes that could be from Noël Coward, and then I found that what my children wanted to close the show was a good fast number, very rhythmic, with hand clapping and a chorus, in the manner of a fast spiritual such as “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.”

  I got that song written, then proposed that since the big moment in the play is the one in which the Witch and the Enchanter do a magic incantation and dance around the pot in which the magic is cooking, there might be a little musical number for that scene, too. Thereupon, my son composed “The Incantation Rock-and-Roll,” which he said was a “good wailing rock song with a boogie bass and a crazy backbeat.”

  I was a little bit worried. Something had gone terribly wrong with my idea of making a silly little play for the kids to put on. Then I realized what it was: I had written it from my own viewpoint, hinting ironically that children ought to behave better, thinking I had a sound little moral lesson there that would really do the children good, hearing how unpleasant Hansel and Gretel sounded on the stage and how they distressed their parents. But when the children got hold of it, it turned into a general statement by the children themselves about the world. They wanted the fun of pretending to be bad children, the deep satisfaction of making fun of the parents and the laziness and self-indulgence of the Witch and the Enchanter, and the excitement and spirit of the modern kind of music, which, even in the blues, expresses a kind of young joy it is very hard for grown-ups to comprehend. Overall, I had thought that the sardonic humor of the play was mine, but it turned out to be the children’s.