The Mill River Recluse Page 20
And so the little chestnut colt was Jester. Mary thought the name especially fitting since his daddy was a Monarch.
~~~
As American soldiers returned home from the war, Mary’s life returned to normal, or, at least, as normal as it could get. She joined the Book-of-the-Month Club, as her appetite for new reading material was voracious. She added more shelves to the library upstairs and lost herself among the titles.
Conor was finally able to resume his frequent visits. Mary eagerly watched for his car and felt a surge of excitement when she spotted it coming through the center of town toward her marble mansion. She threw open the door and embraced him before he could even ring the doorbell. “Easy now,” Conor said, laughing. “Wouldn’t want to topple your Grandpop, now would you?” Of course, this was nonsense; the patriarch was as tall and stout as ever.
Mary had almost forgotten how much she looked forward to seeing his kind, cheery face. During his first visit back to her home, they talked for hours, with Conor telling stories of being cooped up with his family during the war.
“Stephen was so beside himself. All he seemed to do was complain that he couldn’t drive any of those cars of his. He still waxed and polished them every week. Then there was Elise, always fretting and worrying that Jake would be drafted into the military. She about drove us all crazy. The last straw was when Sara and Emma came to blows over who would wear the last unripped pair of nylon stockings. Jake and Stephen had to separate them, if you can imagine that! They insisted on keeping their nylons, you know, even though most other folks were turning them in so the government could use them to make parachutes. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, but I tell you, they’re all spoiled and selfish.” Conor shook his head. “I had taken to walking in the evenings, just to get away from it all. I think we were all at our wits’ end, because the war went on so long and there was really nothing we could do.”
“You must have spent lots of time writing,” Mary said. “Your letters meant so much to me. I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to reading them. Each time I opened one, it was almost as if you were here. And you were so busy at the Marbleworks. Surely that helped keep you from feeling cooped up at home.”
“Well, yes. We haven’t done much with marble in some time, though. We’ve been making gun sights and rifle drillers and so many other things. As fast as the parts come in, we assembled them and shipped them out. Made my job easy, really. All I had to do was sign the papers at each end of the process.”
Mary nodded. “And what will you do now that the war is over?”
Conor shrugged. “Oh, we’ll go back to cutting marble at some point, but we’ve got to get some orders in first. Things have really slowed down. The country’s recovering, and I expect it will be a while before people start wanting marble again. Except for tombstones, maybe.”
“Well, I think you should spend your spare time out here while you wait for business to pick up again,” Mary told him. She smiled and bounced off the sofa. “Let’s go down to the barn. You won’t believe how the babies have grown.”
~~~
The next week, Mary was expecting Conor’s visit, but it was a whey-faced Father O’Brien who came to her door.
“Michael! What’s wrong? Are you sick?” Mary asked as she pulled him inside.
“No. Well, yes. I have some horrible news.” He watched her face shift from surprise to concern. He saw a spark of realization in her good eye, a kind of knowing, as if, perhaps, on some subconscious level, she had already guessed what he dreaded to tell her. “Bishop Ross phoned me a few minutes ago.” He lowered his voice and spoke more slowly in an effort to soften the effect of his words. “Conor died in his sleep last night. Oh, Mary, I’m so sorry.”
“What?” she gasped. He caught her as her knees buckled, helped her to a chair in the kitchen as she gripped his arm, shaking her head. “It can’t be,” she said. “He was coming to visit me today, in a few minutes.”
“I’m sure that he had every intention of doing so. I didn’t believe it myself at first, Mary.” Father O’Brien pulled up another chair and sat down beside her. She looked as though she was just starting to get her mind around the idea. At last, the tears began to fall, and her chin trembled when she tried to speak. “I am so sorry,” he kept repeating, but his words were pitifully inadequate.
“I don’t understand,” she finally said. “He wasn’t sick at all. There was no reason for him to die.”
“No reason known to us, anyway,” Father O’Brien agreed. Mary did not reply, and they sat in silence for several long minutes. He straightened up in his chair and cleared his throat. “The Bishop said that things are still chaotic at the McAllister house in Rutland, but that it looks as if the wake and funeral mass might be held the day after tomorrow. I would be happy to drive you, if you’d like.”
“No.” Her sharp refusal was tinged with terror. “No, I couldn’t go, with all the people that will be there, the rest of the family.” Her voice trailed off as her gaze focused on an invisible spot on the kitchen floor. “Besides, I don’t want to see him that way. I’d rather remember him as he was when he came here to see me.”
Her response was exactly what Father O’Brien had expected. He nodded, took her hand, and squeezed it. “I’m sure Conor would have appreciated that,” he said. “Here, let me get you a glass of water.” He began to stand up, but she shook her head.
“No, no water. Please, just sit here with me a little while longer?”
“Of course, Mary. I’ll stay as long as you’d like.”
~~~
Conor’s death brought to Father O’Brien a new understanding of the immensity of the promise he had made to the patriarch. He had become Mary’s sole source of human companionship and conversation. He still had every intention of keeping his promise, of course, but would he be able to honor it for a lifetime? He worried that something, some decision over which he had no control, some circumstance that he could not foresee, would force him from Mill River. What would become of Mary without him?
It was true, in the beginning at least, that he kept in touch with her purely out of obligation and, perhaps, pity. Now, though, he had come to value the relationship. He had become attached to her, though not in any way that was improper. He was sure that few people, if any, were aware of his visits to the marble house, and he thought this a good thing lest someone make any sort of unfounded accusation against him. Such an accusation would jeopardize their relationship, a relationship that was unlike any other he had known.
To visit Mary was to escape from his normal obligations. Her home was a place of refuge, her personality a fresh uniqueness among the people he saw on a regular basis. She was clever and delightful and totally uninfluenced by what others had or thought or did. She took in what information was available to her and formed her own opinions. Within the confines of her home and the boundaries of her property, she was a happy source of stability and confidence.
Of course, all of this changed if he made the slightest suggestion that she leave the grounds of the marble mansion, or if a person she didn’t know was required to stop by to see to a leak in the roof or a portion of fence that needed mending. She would never see the person, always asking Father O’Brien to supervise whatever the business was while she took refuge in her library or bedroom until the stranger had departed. She never answered the phone.
He did as she wished, all the while wondering what could possibly have caused her to develop the anxiety in the first place. Since he had first inquired about it on his first visit to the marble mansion, he hadn’t dared ask her again. But he felt confident that, if she would only venture out with him, he could help her. He could introduce her to people who would be accepting of her affliction and her appearance. Perhaps he could show her that she had nothing to fear from her neighbors.
Eventually, he got what he hoped for, but when she finally agreed to try to face people again, the results were disastrous.
One year, he convinc
ed Mary to participate in Halloween. A good opportunity, he thought. She can meet dozens of people while staying in the familiar surroundings of her home. He brought her an enormous pumpkin, and together they scooped out the seeds and stringy innards and carved it into a jack-o’-lantern. Mary spent all Halloween day baking batches of cookies and wrapping small packages of them in aluminum foil. Toward evening, she insisted that he attend the Halloween celebration at St. John’s as he had planned, since she wanted to attempt to give out the cookies by herself.
He never should have left her.
When he came to check on her later that evening, he’d found the jack-o’-lantern smashed, the walkway littered with broken eggs. He still remembered seeing the cookie basket abandoned in the foyer and Mary crying in the closet.
“I couldn’t do it,” she’d said. “There were so many little children…they rang and knocked over and over, and they waited for so long. I wanted to open the door, and I really, truly tried, but I couldn’t. And then, a few of them came back. They were yelling horrible things and banging on the door. I was so scared, Michael. And I wanted so much for tonight to be happy.”
Between sobs, she told him what happened. All evening, she’d heard their calls of “trick or treat.” She stood in the foyer, trembling, with the basket of cookies in her arms. She had never been able to open the door and face them.
It pained him to hear her describe the strange sounds she heard after several hours of visits by innocent trick-or-treaters. Sounds of pumpkins being smashed, wild laughter, shouts of “Stingy old witch!” Every few minutes, someone thumped violently on her front door. She’d seen ominous shadows moving past the windows and was terrified that someone or something would come crashing through. She even considered calling the police, but she decided against it. The thought of using the telephone was as horrible as doing nothing. It had been all Mary could do to crawl into the hall closet and hide.
“Don’t worry, Mary dear,” he’d told her. “I should have stayed with you. But you tried, you did your best, and that’s what matters.”
After that day, it had been years before he suggested again that she attempt to interact with strangers.
Still, he often had to squelch the part of him that wanted to drag her, kicking and screaming, if necessary, into the outside world. Despite her assurances to the contrary, he knew that she was sometimes lonely. He had seen the expressions of longing that crossed her face more and more often as she looked down at Mill River. He knew that she was imagining herself as a real member of the community. Surely, he told himself, persuading her to seek treatment would be better for her in the long run. Surely, with proper counseling and support, she could overcome her anxiety and live her life as a normal person. Surely.
But he couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. She had suffered so much pain in her life already, and she insisted that she was happy, even as isolated as she was. Living as she did kept her safe from paralyzing anxiety. He couldn’t, wouldn’t take that security from her.
~~~
“Children grow up so quickly.”
At the kitchen table in the marble mansion, Mary sighed and spread in front of her the most recent Mill River Gazette. The headline on the front page read “Class of 1968,” and she had just pulled out the pictures of the graduating students included in a special insert. “Do you remember the youngest Wilson boy, Michael?”
Father O’Brien looked up from scribbling notes for an upcoming sermon. “Do you mean little Simon? Of course. Why do you ask?”
“He’s not little anymore. He’s valedictorian this year and has a full scholarship for college.”
“If he isn’t sent to Vietnam, you mean. Let’s hope he’s not.”
“I can’t stand to think of all the kids who are ending up over there. War is always such a horrible thing.” Mary sighed again. “I’ve watched Simon Wilson spend every Saturday afternoon down in the library, and sometimes more than that during the summers. He’s done so well. In fact, all these kids have done well to graduate. I feel like they’re my own, in a way. I hate to think of any of them growing up and leaving.”
“As do I, Mary dear,” Father O’Brien said softly. He watched quietly as Mary, smiling and remembering, pored over the senior class portraits. Her joy at seeing the students reassured him that she wasn’t being crushed by the weight of her isolation. He brought her news about others in the town, activities at the schools, marriages, and people who had moved in or moved away. She knew the names and ages of most of the townspeople, what they did for a living, whether they were children or had children, when they were ill or doing well. She asked about them, cared about them, and he told her everything he could without violating any of his vows. She remembered it all.
It was only natural, he supposed, that Mary became attached to the people in town, even from a third-party perspective. Her close attention to the graduation issue of the Gazette was an annual ritual. But recently, she had begun to do more than observe and listen to his stories of her neighbors.
With his help, she had begun to provide small, anonymous gifts to the people she secretly knew. The gifts weren’t very much at first, at least as compared with Mary’s wealth. A hundred dollars to help the family of a man who’d been killed in the new war. Packages of diapers and baby clothes for new parents. Birthday cards containing ten-dollar bills for the children in town. He made sure that the gifts were delivered late at night, when the recipients were asleep.
Father O’Brien wished so much that Mary could see firsthand the joy she brought to the townspeople. She was creating within the town a sense of security, a feeling of wondrous gratitude toward an unknown benevolence. He did his best to convey it to her, although his own knowledge of the recipients’ reactions to Mary’s gifts was usually limited and never as satisfying as seeing them in person would have been. It made no difference to Mary, though. “In our world, even small gestures of kindness are remembered,” she often reminded him. Just knowing that she had helped made her happy.
The appreciation of her neighbors was only a small part of what Father O’Brien wished that Mary could see. During the summer of 1972, he figured out a way to change everything.
To celebrate thirty years of friendship, he bought for Mary a brand new RCA color television set. True, she had always loved her radio and had never expressed much interest in the newer technology, but the times were changing. Most of the programs were broadcast in color, and the screens of the newer TVs were larger than those of earlier models. A television could bring to Mary a real-life view of the world that her anxiety kept from her.
At once, Mary’s radio faced serious competition. She stared at the news anchors’ faces, fascinated by every muscle movement and nuanced expression. She told him repeatedly how wonderful it was to be spoken to by a strange person, to be able to listen to and enjoy seeing the new person on the television screen without being overcome by fear.
She delighted in watching Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” and loved the Cookie Monster on “Sesame Street.” “It’s those googly eyes,” she told him as she watched the blue monster gorge himself on cookies after singing about the letter “C.” “I think I could’ve opened the door for him that Halloween.”
Mary raved about “The Price is Right,” admitted to him how she dreamed of being able to run up on stage in front of everyone and kiss Bob Barker on the cheek. Together, they laughed until their sides ached at the old black-and-white reruns of “I Love Lucy.” Mary had never been outside New England, but she experienced the old West through episodes of “Bonanza.” She watched cooking shows on PBS, cheered as Secretariat won the Triple Crown in the spring of 1973. She looked forward to watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” again that December.
It was that Peanuts’ Christmas special that helped her decide to provide new color televisions for every family in Mill River. “No one should have to miss something as precious as that program. And just think, Michael,” she said as they worked out the number of RCAs to order and ma
de sure they would be delivered on time, “what it will mean, especially for the children. They’ll be able to see things and visit places they’ve only imagined.”
“Yes,” he replied, looking at Mary and comparing her to that poor Christmas tree chosen by Charlie Brown. Like the fragile evergreen, he knew that Mary would thrive if only she could experience the support and affection of others.
~~~
Father O’Brien’s spoon collection continued to grow.
The stolen utensils came from the homes of his parishioners, from restaurants, from hospitals and picnics and just about every place he visited. Only a sample of Mary’s flatware was missing. He hated the thought of what he might do, would do, if she hadn’t hidden her spoons from him. He didn’t blame Mary for insisting that he bring one of his own spoons to use when he came for lunch or dinner, just in case she had prepared something that required the use of that utensil.
Gradually, the unmatched specimens of his thievery came to number over six hundred. They spilled out of their shoebox, into bigger and bigger boxes, until he was forced to store them in the box that once held his RCA. But the square behemoth was too big to fit under his bed or in his closet. He finally shoved it under his desk so that he would be spared the agony of seeing it out in the open, reminding him of his weakness.
Mary never divulged his secret.
Their quiet trust in each other permeated even their usual greetings. It was always, “Good day, Mary,” or “Good evening, Michael.” A simple smile, the door held open to allow safe passage, a comforting presence. They noticed the gray hair and wrinkles as they appeared, but those physical signs of age changed nothing between them.
It was with delight that Father O’Brien first presented Mary with a pie from the new bakery in town. “It just opened,” he told her upon arriving at the marble mansion for dinner. “Joe Fitzgerald, you know, the new police chief? His wife, Ruth, is in charge of it. She says she’s saving up to run a bed and breakfast after Fitz retires. I don’t know how she does it, but her pie is amazing. This one’s a tart cherry. I thought we’d have some for dessert.” After dinner, he smiled at her reaction--curiosity, then surprise, and finally bliss--as she tasted the first bite.