Orpheus and the Pearl & Nevermore (5 page)

There was a moment of silence. Then
Catherine again fastened her burning, green eyes onto Mrs.
Wallston. When she spoke, her tone was as icy and even as the stare
of Mrs. Wallston’s two frozen orbs. “I assume you two were raised
not to use the third person when speaking of someone who is
present, unless that person is a servant or a child. And let us be
quite clear, I am not the servant or inferior of anyone here.”

“
I’m sorry, I never said
you were,” muttered Dr. Wallston.

“
If you
wish to remain the loathsome, little beast that you are playing at
the moment, Mrs. Wallston, then I will gladly get on the next train
back to Boston. If it’s threats you enjoy, then let’s have a good
and proper row right here and get it over with. But if you want me
to stay, so that perhaps you and your husband can return to
something resembling a normal, or even a happy existence, then you
will address me by my title. And you
will
apologize.”

Catherine had no idea where the words had
come from, or what their effect would be. She had actually been
formulating something quite different when those words had come
tumbling out instead. And even if the part about fighting Mrs.
Wallston was mostly adrenalin induced bravado, it had felt like the
right way to address the situation.

Mrs. Wallston took another drink of scotch, sipping
it tidily, and kept her eyes fixed on Catherine. “Please believe
me, doctor, when I say that no one is more sorry for the way I am
than I, myself. You have now been forthright with me, and that is
something that deserves much better treatment than I have given
you. I am sorry I was rude to you. Will that do?”

“
Yes, it will do quite
well, thank you.”

“
Good. Would you like some
scotch? It’s really quite exceptional, and I expect, with your
anatomy, you might enjoy it even more than I do.”

“
Yes, thank you. That
would be nice.”

After lunch the two women retired to the
sitting room in the west wing. There was a couch there on which
Mrs. Wallston sat, while Catherine sat in the same large chair she
had the night before. Dr. Wallston was surprised she was already
willing to sit alone with Mrs. Wallston, but there was no other way
to conduct therapy. Besides, Catherine thought with grim humor, to
be the first doctor to die at the hands of the first reanimated
corpse was a sort of scientific milestone of which she could be
proud, even if it had not been the one she had had in mind all
these years.

Mrs. Wallston kept her humor as well, even
if her demeanor had softened. “So, do I start talking about my
parents now?”

“
No, it’s not like people
think. We don’t just come out and force you to talk about certain
things.”

“
Oh, all right. Don’t you
take notes?”

“
No, it’s distracting to
both of us. I’ll write everything down when we’re
finished.”

“
So what do we talk
about?”

“
Well, what do you like to
do?”

“
I like to read. These are
all my books. Many are from my father’s house, he is a professor of
literature at Brown University.”

“
I noticed they were all
books of literature and not medicine. I wondered what the doctor
was doing with such a collection.”

“
Oh my, he considers
literature quite frivolous, I think. That’s why they all ended up
out here and not in the main building. But there is so much in
these pages. So much beauty that I sometimes wonder how they came
to be in such an ugly world. And what about you, doctor? Do you
think literature a frivolity, too, like my husband?”

“
No, not at all. I once
thought to study literature, but there were even fewer women
studying it than were in medicine, so I found myself gravitating
towards that field.”

“
Well, I never thought to
study it at school. I hardly think my parents would have approved
of such a course. School was something a nice young lady did in
order to be interesting and attractive to a man, not to pursue
beauty and knowledge for their own sakes. And then when I got
married, I hardly had any time to read. It’s one of the few
advantages to being dead, having all this time to read.”

“
Why didn’t you have time
before?”

“
Oh, I
was always doing so much work around the house. Romwald is a most
helpful and efficient man, but I liked to do as much as possible
myself. I suppose it was a habit from when I grew up. My mother
always made me do so much of the work around the
house
.
I just
became used to it and expected to do it when I had my own
home.”

Catherine nodded impassively, not wanting to
let on that Mrs. Wallston had already talked about both her
parents. “So, you haven’t had other servants besides Romwald? I
thought perhaps Dr. Wallston had kept only him on after your…
illness, but I assumed there were others in the house before.”

“
No, only Romwald. He
always did the heavier, manual work, as in repairing the buildings,
shoveling snow, raking leaves. And, of course, the driving. But I
did all the cooking and cleaning, and most all the
gardening.”

“
I see.”
It seemed a strange arrangement for an extremely wealthy woman, but
now was not the time to investigate. “And what sorts of books have
you read since… this year? I was reading
Jane Eyre
last
night.”

“
Oh yes,
any novel I can. I know it’s silly, but I hope you don’t find it
too funny that I read Mary Shelley’s monster story as soon as I was
cognizant again of my surroundings. I think poor Percy had tried to
hide it, for it wasn’t in its usual place where I’d put it on the
shelf, as though he thought it might upset me. I suspect the poor
man did it because he thinks the story might be taken to reflect
badly on him, the man of reason and science and action, for I’ve
noticed
Faust
and
Macbeth
were similarly hidden. Or who knows? Perhaps Romwald secretly
has censored the books to protect both of us. He’s not nearly as
dull and uncomprehending as you might think at first. And lately
I’ve also gone back and reread the Greek tragedians. I know they’re
difficult
,
and
somehow so distant and removed from reality, but I found myself
craving them. Does that make sense?”

Catherine could see where it made a good
deal of sense, but also she was quite embarrassed that a dead
woman’s reading list was so much more lively and sophisticated than
her own. “Yes, it does. Would you like to read some books together?
Are there any that you have two copies of, so we could read them at
night, and discuss them in the afternoons?”

Mrs. Wallston raised her
eyebrows. “You want to
read
with me?”

“
Why not? You said it’s
what you like to do, and I like to do it too. And it’ll give us
something useful to talk about.”

“
Yes, that would be nice.
Thank you.”

“
You’re entirely
welcome.”

“
I didn’t know talking to
you would be enjoyable.”

“
Mostly, it will
be.”

“
And when it’s
not?”

“
It will be useful then,
too.”

“
That’s good. Sometimes
unpleasant things can be useful.”

“
Let’s talk about which
unpleasant things are useful, and which aren’t.”

Catherine’s first real job in the craft for
which she had so long and so diligently trained had finally begun.
And even if it were in such a wholly unexpected way, with such an
unusual and difficult charge, it was nonetheless the most
thrilling, satisfying thing she had felt since she was a child.

The next several weeks continued the therapy
begun that day. The hook of talking about literature rather than
directly about family and personal matters was quite useful to
Catherine. Though she never lost sight of the goal or the roles
they must play in order for therapy to be successful, she found
herself enjoying their conversations, even looking forward to them,
as she looked forward to spending every evening reading the same
books as Mrs. Wallston.

As Catherine had expected, the progress was
much slower than Dr. Wallston could have imagined, although the
physical attacks ended after the first day. But Mrs. Wallston’s
deep depression and anger were not dissipated, even if the outright
violence had been restrained. All Catherine could offer to Dr.
Wallston by way of explanation was to note that Mrs. Wallston had a
deep-seated conflict with her mother, but so did practically every
female of the species, so far as anyone could tell. It hardly took
any new theories of Freud to ferret that out. But what lay behind
those issues, the particular implications and connections of her
own unique situation—these were secrets that everyone’s psyche
spent decades learning to hide most effectively. It hardly helped
matters that Catherine could not know whether or to what extent
Mrs. Wallston’s mental state was affected by her physical condition
and the massive quantities and unknown qualities of all the
chemicals to which she was daily subjected. So, as much as
Catherine enjoyed her daily work, she could make no guarantees of
success, or even progress.

After several such weeks of enjoyable but
inconclusive therapy, Catherine thought it was time to bring the
conversation back to Mrs. Wallston’s mother more explicitly than
she had attempted before. Catherine was standing, as she often did
in their sessions, rather than sitting, for it put them both more
at ease, somehow seeming less static or formal.

“
You mentioned that you
did much housework when you were young. You must have had servants.
Why did you have to do so much?”

Mrs. Wallston was sitting on the couch, as
usual. She never lay on it, partly for the physical reason that
with her system so stimulated, she was restless and had to move
around constantly, thereby making lying down the more stressful and
uncomfortable posture. She had also admitted, without revealing
anything at all surprising, that lying down reminded her far too
much of being dead again, so she avoided it. As she sometimes did,
she had let her hair down after lunch, since it was just the two of
them, and pins and the tightening of her scalp often annoyed her
hyper-sensitized nerves. Sitting there on the dark blue sofa – her
skin as always so appallingly white, accentuated by cascading folds
of a dress of the same hue, and her blonde hair catching the
sunlight and framing her face like the corona of an eclipse – the
contrast was both unnerving and captivating, somewhat like seeing a
cameo that moved and spoke.

Or, Catherine had the
queerest imagining, like a large, perfect pearl set on a navy blue
cushion.
Yes,
she
thought,
with the sunlight spilling into
the room and over her, Mrs. Wallston today has more of the pearl’s
iridescence than a corpse’s pallor.

Catherine couldn’t quite recall the parable
about the pearl, or even if there were more than one, as she could
remember the Lord saying both that pearls were not to be cast
before swine, but also that a pearl was of great price. As a
scientist she could also not help but remember that a pearl was, in
the end, little more than a giant tumor. A product of pain and
nervous excitement at the most basic, animal level. Catherine
thought of all these as she considered her fragile and horribly
beautiful charge.

Mrs. Wallston took a deep
breath, so as to say something, not because she needed to breathe.
“Oh my, no, we didn’t have servants. I used to think it was because
mother was just being so
particular
in everything, just to spite me. And then I
thought perhaps she was just being stingy, for she made my father
do a lot of work around the house that a man of his stature might
have expected servants to do.”

Catherine nodded. “You say you used to think
of those explanations. What explanation did you decide on
later?”

“
I
remembered back to when I was very little. I remembered that then,
there
were
servants, quite a few of them. A nanny, a cook, two different
maids. And all of them such pretty, lively young women. All so very
different… a bosomy English woman, a beautiful Irish girl, dark
haired Italians, even several Negresses. Each one so different, but
so charming. Several of them loved to play with me. And they all
always smelled so nice… never perfume, of course, but earthy and
rich and fecund, each in her own way. I loved having them near me.
It was such an overwhelmingly feminine house, I don’t know how my
father could stand it.” Mrs. Wallston wasn’t really capable of
laughing anymore, as it involved too much of a conscious inhaling
and exhaling for it to sound like normal laughter, but she did
manage a nervous sort of chuckle, almost like a
cough.

“
But then they were gone?
Did you ever know why?”

Mrs. Wallston paused for quite a while. She
frowned. She fidgeted. Catherine waited. To comfort her in her
distress at this point would be premature and she would again cover
up whatever it was. “They all laughed so much, too. It was quite a
gay, frolicsome place. But mother never laughed. Never. I always
thought her so severe and so particular and wondered why. But
father laughed. He had a big, booming laugh when he was with me and
we were playing. Sometimes I’d hear him behind a door, laughing
with one of the servants, and it was more of a snicker. And they’d
laugh then, too, but theirs weren’t loud laughs, either, but more
like little giggles or coos. I’d hear them behind doors and wonder.
I even wondered when I actually saw him with one of them, his hands
on her, lifting her skirt up, kissing her neck. I’d never seen him
kiss mother that way, because one simply doesn’t do that in front
of others, does one?