Shirley Read online

  The story made my head ache. Every time I closed the cover and tried to nap, the first line popped into my thoughts, inscrutable and irritating: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked Fred, pushing the open novel onto the papers on his knee. He glanced at the lines, shook his head, and slid his typescript back out from under, lifting the pages up in the air as if he’d suddenly become farsighted.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said stubbornly.

  “Well, don’t waste time wondering. You can ask her for yourself when we get there.”

  Funny, thinking back on it. I didn’t tell him how thrilled I was about the adventure, so excited to meet a famous writer, to stay in her house. In my mind, I was not only traveling with Fred, I was journeying toward Shirley. And there you go—traveling with Fred; journeying toward Shirley. As if I already knew how much she would matter.

  The train coach was loud and full of smoke, and Fred scrawled pencil notes in the margins of the typescript he was bringing to show Professor Hyman, sighing as he did so in a way that added to my distractibility.

  I patted his arm. “It’s going to be fine,” I said.

  He turned to the next page of his manuscript.

  “Fred. Fred, honey. You’ll be fine.”

  “Not now,” he said. He jotted something in the margin, pressing the papers against his raised knee to make a surface.

  “Fred?” I said. “What if she doesn’t like me? If she thinks I’m . . .” He took my hand, not even raising his eyes off his work.

  “Everyone likes you,” he said absently. He’d obviously forgotten the things his mother had grumbled when we announced we were getting married. Go find a nice girl, Freddy. Someone you can be proud of. If she liked me, she certainly hadn’t shown it yet.

  I looked out the window. Fields jounced before me, lazy cows and rusted tractors the only relief from endless expanses of late-summer cornstalks massed askew. It was as hot as Philadelphia, but thicker, more claustrophobic, as if vegetable spores clogged the air, snagging on the open train windows as we blew past. I didn’t feel that second being alive inside me. I barely felt my own self, my breath’s rhythm the unsteady reverberation of the train. Still, that second life was going to make me matter—it would have needs I could fulfill, would give volume and weight to the hardly noticeable manifestation that was me. I leaned my head against the seat, tried again to close my eyes but couldn’t. Farm fields claimed my attention, blurring one into the other as time itself blended into mush until, finally, we arrived at the North Bennington train station with a great ceremonial screeching of brakes. My husband shuffled his papers together, grabbed our new suitcase, and assisted his bride down the train steps with solicitude.

  “Fred Nemser! Fred Nemser!” Stanley waited for us under the covered porch of the station, shielding himself from sunlight. What an extraordinary sight he was—short, wide, balding, toothy, bespectacled, rumpled, a veritable compendium of academic clichés and yet oddly compelling. I can’t, even now, explain why, except to say that when he looked at me, I felt he saw me. And when he saw me, I felt worthy.

  “This must be the estimable Rose. Welcome to Bennington! Come meet Shirley and the family.” He hoisted our suitcase atop his very plump shoulder and escorted us for quite a distance down the street to a small square. We turned left, up the hill, all of us glistening with perspiration. Along the way, Stanley described the class he wanted Fred to take on for him. It seemed Shirley had been unwell, and he hoped to lighten his teaching responsibilities by sharing duties on his folklore course. “It’s the biggest course at the college,” he said flatly, in the way of men pretending not to care about those matters of which they are most proud.

  “I can do the ballads,” Fred offered.

  “I’ve read your dissertation draft. Impressive. You have some perceptive notions about Frazer and The Golden Bough, but you miss important links between folk music and folk myth. We’ll discuss what you must do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me! A pleasure to find a young man with such noble inclinations. A member of the brotherhood already. Not for the faint of heart, our work. Ignore Negro spirituals at your peril, my friend! I’ll have you read my jazz/blues writings. You should be able to handle all the musicology.”

  Stanley was out of breath. Fred tapped our suitcase as if to remove it from Stanley’s sweaty shoulder, but it was too late. “We’re here,” said our host, turning left, onto a path between two gawky bursts of privet.

  What a house it was. A huge façade, hulking high on the property, four white columns across a sagging front porch. Shutters painted, but not recently. Bicycles toppled against the bushes. Jars of all sizes (dusty, some with dried flowers, others with pebbles or marbles or brackish water), a bucket, a ragged broom, and a tray of half-full drinking glasses—contents brownish-gold and dry—books on the railings, and a long-forgotten doll abandoned in the weedy flowerbed. But to me the worst were the trees: gargantuan evergreens, trees out of nightmares, monstrous and dark enough to seethe across the yard by themselves, stripping all light and lawn in their paths. “Hill House,” I murmured, thinking of the novel in my purse. It occurred to me then that I’d never seen evidence before this of how a novelist constructs a world from fog and fact.

  Stanley smiled approvingly but shook his head. “Shirley will show you the one everyone thinks is that house. Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn’t. She claims a house in California as the source. The wise man would wager that Hill House came straight from her imagination. Nonetheless, there are a few frightening edifices in North Bennington, good enough for haunting. Ask her to show you the best one. It’s down the hill and up, across the main street. A pleasant stroll. This one of ours is demon-free. No need to worry if you’ll turn out to be an Eleanor or a Theodora.”

  My romantic fantasies to the contrary, I’d never considered myself worthy of being a heroine, not really, and I smiled at him, feeling suddenly safe, as if he were a kind of father. The sort one would want to have. As we grinned at each other, I heard a movement on the porch and looked up the ramshackle steps. And there she was.

  I’ll not forget my first view of Shirley Jackson. Shirley, like her house, was not the surprise you expected her to be. A mountain of a woman, standing over us so that she appeared even more imposing. I would soon understand that—despite her girth—she was quite short. Still, she gave an impression of substantiality. That afternoon, Shirley wore a beige sack of a housedress imprinted with an endless green geometric pattern. Chinese cloth slippers—I would later learn this was her favored footwear. Lank reddish hair held back by a headband. Her spectacle rims a pale brown. The cigarette between her right forefinger and middle finger was burnt halfway, smoke dancing the length of her fleshy forearm. Her smile. Shy, but not so. As if there was a part of her that knew herself to be better than me, and another part, equally powerful, that believed herself to be worse.

  If there was any quality to her I recognized, it was of course that. Shirley’s was the smile of a woman like me, the abandoned and the never-loved; it was the smile of the arrogantly insecure. It was the smile of the mother-to-be who had never been mothered, the smile of the brilliant person in a woman’s body, the beautiful woman in an ugly shell. I loved her immediately, I wanted to be her and take care of her.

  Just last year, at a dinner party, a famously cantankerous American history professor proclaimed that the only people who like Shirley Jackson’s work are unhappily married women, and I snapped at him that the people who love Jackson understand imperfection and know how to live with it and appreciate it. “Isn’t that the better way to be?” His mouth hung open; he’d never before deemed me worthy of notice. But I know I’m right: that was Jackson’s gift, to understand the absurd unloveliness of love.
/>
  Ascending the porch steps in September 1964, toward Shirley in the flesh, I felt an inexplicable need to exchange a hug.

  She spoke over my head, to Stanley.

  “That woman called. You promised.”

  Stanley handed the suitcase to Fred. “I’ll talk to her again.”

  “You promised, Stanley. And we’re out of Scotch.”

  “Send Barry.”

  “I did. They want the bill paid.”

  “I’ll walk down.”

  “And you. Nobody said you were pregnant.”

  I blushed. We hadn’t told anyone.

  “I’m a witch,” she said calmly. “Now come inside and let’s get you settled. Rose, is it?”

  “Yes,” I stammered, feeling very, very out of my depth.

  “I’m Shirley. I’ve put you two at the back, in my son Laurie’s room. He’s married, lives in New York City with his family, and as green about the ears as you two. They’ll come up tomorrow afternoon; you’ll have a great deal in common.”

  I disliked, immediately, the notion of her children being real and present, and old enough to showcase how young I was myself.

  “On Monday we can meet with the estate agent, find out about homes for rent near the campus. But there’s no hurry. The room’s free and only our youngest, Barry, is at home during the week. The two girls are home on weekends.”

  “You have four?” I wanted to say something sophisticated, something clever so that Shirley would know I was not a child. Despite Shirley’s casting him as green, I pictured the married son—elegant wife and pretty baby—as someone who had all the nuances of adulthood figured out.

  “Or maybe you’ll stay here,” she continued thoughtfully, as if she’d seen something in me, something rare and worthy of study. As if I were the heroine I’d always dreamed I might become. Even though I’d imagined Fred and me ensconced in splendid solitude, our first home together, my first home anywhere, I nodded. I felt the exterior of the house thrum slightly, as if I had been recognized.

  Inside, I let my hand glide up the warm mahogany banister, an orphan arriving home. “You’ll help with dinner, won’t you? Our evenings will amuse you.” I instantly believed her.

  We climbed the broad front staircase. I wanted to touch every painting, look at every family photograph. I heard her breathing deepen. She used the railing and she moved slowly, and while I thought about the size of her, and hoped she would not topple back on me, I also wished she would turn and smile again. Already, I found her moods both dazzling and confusing.

  Three

  BLOATED WITH INDIGESTION, I must still have slept on the sagging horsehair mattress, because the moon was splashed across my face when I awakened in the otherwise pitch-black room, startled to realize that Fred was not beside me. I peered through the dark, wanting to see the rickety Victorian dresser and the comfortable green reading chair by the closet. All I could make out was the drifting of the window draperies against the muddled glass that had seemed so elegant in daylight. I lay under the quilt, my exhaustion and the persistent discomfort that was almost fear rendering me immobile for some moments.

  I could hear the house creak moodily. I’d liked it more in daylight: room after tall-ceilinged room sprawled out on both floors, each fitted out with bookcases, and endless places to lounge, and well-used blankets to throw over chilly legs. During the day, the light had been low and pleasant, flickering leafy patterns passing genially over the book piles on the floors and tables, the discarded shoes and cardigans, the stacks of student papers awaiting attention. The house seemed to have a will of its own. I had the idea the house had created itself rather than been masterminded by its owners, as if it would produce a bassinet for me when one was needed, or shorten its staircases if someone was tired.

  I wanted the house to like me, I thought, and I placed my hand on the wall next to the headboard. The plaster was thick and still beneath my spread fingers, as walls are supposed to be, but I had the sense not of an inanimate surface but of a sentient being holding its breath. Not wanting to be caught.

  Far in the distance—down the long book-lined hallway, down the staircase, perhaps out on the sagging porch—I detected conversational grumbles, male voices chuckling, the squeak/groan of a suffering rocking chair. I tipped myself off the high bed, slipping Fred’s jacket over my nightgown. Bare toes on the worn Oriental runner, I crept down the hall. It was chilly. On the stairs I began to smell the sweet odor of pipe tobacco. Fred’s laugh, sonorous, more musical than his speaking voice, wafted toward me; I was happy, knowing how happy he must be, as I made my way quietly toward the open front door, peeked around the corner.

  They sat together under the yellow porch light, Stanley’s rocker next to Fred’s rickety stool, one balding head and one curly cap of hair leaning over the same open book. “This ballad,” Stanley said. “This one has always been my favorite.”

  “‘The Demon Lover,’” Fred agreed, humming the first few lines in the tuneless tone that passed for his singing voice. Someone had once told Fred that if he couldn’t sing well, he should sing loud, and he’d taken the idea to heart. I was glad that tonight, for once, he was ignoring that advice. “‘Well met, well met, well met, my own true love, well met, my love, cried he. I’ve just come back from the salt, salt sea, and all for the love of thee.’”

  “Yes, that’s it. You’ll begin with Lomax. I like to start with Lomax and work the earlier versions in as we go. Connect the Child ballads all the way from the Orient to the Negro in America, through to the blues,” Stanley said.

  “I could spend two weeks just on the ‘House Carpenter’ variations. James Harris himself.”

  “I hoist my tumbler to the demon lover.”

  Fred sipped his drink, checking to make sure Stanley wasn’t laughing at him. But they were cut from the same cloth, those two.

  “James Harris is folklore’s proof that man has never been trustworthy. We’re not alone in our preference for that ballad; it’s Shirley’s favorite as well. D’you know, her book The Lottery and Other Stories was supposed to be subtitled The Adventures of James Harris? She’s smart about folklore, has read almost everything. I often discuss my lecture plans with her.”

  “Ah . . .” Fred’s envy so new he wasn’t yet aware of it. “It must be great to talk like that, with your wife. To share, to work through the details, to be able to think out loud . . .”

  Stanley took a long swallow of his drink. In the silence between the men I think some information was passed, but I had no idea what it was.

  “She longs for a tall, thin man in a well-made blue suit,” Stanley said lightly.

  Fred rattled the watery ice in his glass. I wondered what he was thinking.

  • • •

  I’D NEVER BEEN AROUND PEOPLE as smart as the Hymans, never felt myself surrounded by such brilliance, but at the same time, not knowing why, I felt sorry for Stanley. Just as I’d felt sorry for Shirley earlier at dinner, when the phone rang as she was slicing a pie and he was topping off our wineglasses for the umpteenth time. The look that passed between them, and their three kids—a boy and two girls, ranging in age from about twelve to maybe nineteen; the elder son would come up on the following day with his wife and child—each busily refolding napkins or studying the carpet underneath the long table, well, I didn’t have to be older or smarter than I was to know that the phone rang often at this hour. No throat-clearing, no jokes in that moment, just the strange, quick glance, the hard and unforgiving silence, and then the burst of commentary about how glad the children were that Shirley had made the first apple pie of the season. In a moment, Stanley was reciting Julius Caesar, and Shirley was interrupting him and they both slipped into Brooklyn accents—Dis was da noblest Roman of dem all—and we were giggling again, and the youngest kid, the boy, ran upstairs for his guitar, and all was well. But I observed how hard they had to work, for just that momen
t, to be happy.

  As I stood shyly in the hall, a ragged moth hovering at the outskirts of dim light, while Stanley told Fred how “my Shoiley” often had dreams about her demon lover’s appearance, how she used James Harris as a repeating character trope, I wondered if the Hymans would change us very much. Before I could fully ponder the thought, Stanley switched gears, his frame shifting in the chair, his voice speeding off in another direction, talking about how necessary folklore was to fiction writers: “Think of Ulysses the castaway. All the ritual patterns of drama: agon, pathos, sparagmos—”

  “The messenger!” Fred exclaimed.

  “Yes, and then threnos, the mourning rituals, anagnosis, theophany, and then—”

  “Peripeteia,” Fred interrupted.

  “A fiction writer needs to know all there is, everything possible,” Stanley said. “Language and history and music and culture. What we come from, our intellectual past, the beliefs that shape our thoughts. Therein lies the trouble with our contemporary novelists, not Shirley, of course, but the others. Fools and charlatans, and why? One simple reason. They don’t know enough.” He tilted his head. “As Matthew Arnold noted long before me.”

  Fred nodded appreciatively. “A virtuosic dilemma. What separates true artistry, true brilliance, from mere hackery.”