The Neurosis of Containment
Breakfast was always sumptuous—Cobb bringing out a great silver platter of eggs scrambled with oysters, piping hot coffee, and fresh bread. When Mrs. Livesday noticed that my appetite was not equal to her own, I described for her as best I could the wee cacophony plaguing me. I was mortified when, as Cobb returned with a freshly made compote of summer apples, she asked him to fetch the ear syringe, for she supposed my discomfort was the result of accumulated wax. I thanked her curtly, informing her that I was not accustomed to having men aware of or engaged in my intimate affairs. Just then Cobb returned with the thing—bright red it was and seemed far too large for the office with which it was to be entrusted.
“Warm salt water,” said Cobb. “I’ve placed a basin in the upstairs lavatory.” I blushed. Once he was gone, Mrs. Livesday, with an odd bark, said, “Well! I never thought I’d see the day when Cobb—poor old Cobb! —would make a woman blush! And over an ear—! It’s not as though he’d handed you an amorous proposal!” I was shocked. Never in all our time together had I ever heard Mrs. Livesday suggest a vulgarity. In more soothing tones she continued: “Do give it a good flushing, and then we will take our walk and I will tell you about Freud and you will tell me about your sister and Deacon Hill’s latest letter, and all the things that have transpired since we were last together!”
Enraged with her, I kept an outward appearance of calm and did as she asked. The cymbals were clashing and the little hooves clattering, and when I reached the lavatory I dropped the basin to the tiles, where it shattered, bringing Cobb at once with another basin, a large mop, a dustpan, and a broom. As he bent over the small mess I had caused, I thought that, indeed, he was not much of a man. One could not imagine him in any function other than the one he had—that of butler, cook, and companion to an old, an eccentric woman.
“Cobb!” I said. “Do you do the ironing, too?” And as his answer was satisfactory, I gave him what I had brought but for the clothes I wore—everything horribly creased despite the care I had taken, packing it all between sheets of tissue paper.
It was later, on our walk together, that I heard a trill of peculiar intensity, a series of notes sweetly piercing. Next I saw close by the path a remarkably beautiful bird, slender- beaked, its wings a velvety black with emerald markings as though embroidered there, its breast a glittering steel blue, its tail velvet. Indeed it seemed to me so lovely that I imagined it had flown directly to Barrytown from Paradise. Again it called and then, spreading its wings, was gone with such celerity I was astonished.
I cried out to Mrs. Livesday, who at that moment was off the path examining a clump of wild asparagus with the intent to pirate it for lunch, and who came running—too late to see the marvelous bird. She had no idea what it was I had seen and supposed it was a raven: the velvety black, the metallic reflection… Once again I felt myself flush with anger.
“But,” I insisted, “the song was superb!”
“I don’t disbelieve you,” she countered. “However, the raven imitates the cries of other birds—a marvelous thing in itself” And she was off, as was her wont, this time telling of Dr. Franklin’s raven Jacob who could imitate the cries of infants, the crowing of cocks. As she spoke, the ringing in my ear, until then blessedly absent, thrust me into an agitation impossible to conceal.
My sister Abigail had been a flapper and when she returned home at dawn dressed in what looked like a slip our family dissolved. Mother, who had been waiting up for her, slapped her as soon as she walked through the door. This fact was the one major event that undid everything, for rather than burst into tears, or run to her room and lock herself in, or implore forgiveness, or attempt the impossible: to justify the levity (and that is putting it politely), she turned on her heel and vanished (and she was wearing a pair of silver shoes such as I had never seen). We had no news of her for years.
Once she was picked up downtown for vagrancy and if Father paid her bail he did not attempt to see her. That week he removed her from his will. A few years later when both Mother and Father were carried away by influenza, I was sole inheritress of a modest allowance that has enabled me to live comfortably—if carefully—the life of a gentlewoman of an earlier time and not have to scrounge for a living teaching other people’s brats—the work for which I was trained—or to submit to the banalities and indignities of matrimony.
