The Black House

  I would take them on but my wife and me haven’t got too much extra space here, just one room as spare that our own children and families use when they visit us . . . Will try to get the grandchildren to write but the whole family is not much for writing . . .

  The letterhead stated the name and address of a drycleaning shop of which Christopher Forster was not the manager. Albert Forster, Lois remembered, had been a salesman of some kind.

  Albert started wetting the bed, and Lois acquired a rubber sheet. Albert complained of backache from “the damp,” so Lois offered him the double bed in the spare room, while she aired the twin-bed mattress for a couple of days. She telephoned the Hilltop Home to ask if there were pills that Albert might take, and had he had this complaint before? They said no, and asked if Albert was happy. Lois went to see the Hilltop Home doctor in attendance, and got some pills from him, but he doubted the complete efficacy of the pills, he said, if the subject was not even aware of his dampness until he woke up in the morning.

  The second teeth story was not so funny, though both Herbert and Lois laughed at first. Mamie reported that she had dropped her teeth—again the lowers—down the heating vent in the floor of the bathroom. The teeth were not visible down there in the blackness, even when Herbert and Lois shone a flashlight. All they saw was a little dark gray lint or dust.

  “You’re sure?” Herbert asked Mamie, who was watching them.

  “Dropped ’em bot’ but only one fell t’rough!” said Mamie.

  “Damned grill’s so narrow,” Herbert said.

  “So are her teeth,” said Lois.

  Herbert got the grill off with a screwdriver. He rolled up his sleeves, poked gently at first in the fluffy dust, then with equal delicacy explored more deeply with a bottlebrush, not wanting to send the denture falling all the way down, if he could help it. At last he and Lois had to conclude that the teeth must have fallen all the way down, and the heating tube, rather square, curved about a yard down. Had the teeth fallen all the way into the furnace below? Herbert went down alone to the cellar, and looked with a feeling of hopelessness at the big square, rivet-secured funnel that went off the furnace and branched into six tubes that brought the heat to various rooms. Which one even belonged to the upstairs bathroom? Was it worth it to tear the whole furnace apart? Certainly not. The furnace was working as usual, and maybe the teeth had burned up. Herbert went downstairs and undertook to explain the situation to Mamie.

  “We’ll see that you get another set, Mamie. Might even fit better. Didn’t you say these hurt and that’s why—” He paused at Mamie’s tragic expression. Her eyes could get a crumpled look that touched him, or disturbed him, even though he thought Mamie was usually putting on an act.

  However, between him and Lois, she was consoled. She could eat “easy things” while the dental work was done. Lois at once seized on the idea of taking Mamie back to the Hilltop Home, where they might well have a dentist in residence, or an office there where dentists could work, but if they had, the Hilltop Home denied it on the telephone to Lois. This left her and Herbert to take Mamie to their own dentist in Hartford, twenty-three miles away, and the trips seemed endless, though Mamie enjoyed the rides. There was a cast of lower gums to be made, and of the upper denture for the bite, and just when Herbert and Lois, who took turns, had thought that the job was done in pretty good time, came the “fittings.”

  “The lowers always present more difficulties than the uppers,” Dr. Feldman told them regretfully. “And my client here is pretty fussy.”

  It was plain to the McIntyres that Mamie was putting on an act about the lowers hurting or not fitting, so she could be taken for rides back and forth. Every two weeks, Mamie wanted her hair cut and waved at a beauty salon in Hartford, which she thought better than the one in the town near where the McIntyres lived. Social Security and the pension sent on by the Hilltop helped more than fifty percent with the Forsters’ expenses, but bills of the hairdresser and also the dentist the McIntyres paid. Ruth and Pete Mitchell commiserated with the McIntyres by telephone or in person (at the same time laughing their heads off), as if the McIntyres were being afflicted with the plagues of Job. In Herbert’s opinion, they were. Herbert became red in the face with repressed wrath, with frustration from losing work time, but he couldn’t countenance Lois losing more of her time than he did, so he did his half of hauling Mamie back and forth, and both the McIntyres took books to read in the dentist’s waiting room. Twice they took Albert along, as he wanted to go, but once he peed in the waiting room before Herbert could point out the nearby toilet (Albert’s deafness made him slow to understand what people were saying), so Lois and Herbert flatly refused to take him along again, saying sympathetically but really quite grimly that he shouldn’t risk having to go to the toilet again in a hurry, if he happened to be in a public place. Albert snatched out his hearing aid while Lois was speaking about this. It was Albert’s way of switching off.

  That was in mid-May. The McIntyres had intended to fly out to Santa Barbara, where Herbert’s parents had a house plus a guest house in the garden, and to rent a car there and drive up to Canada. Every other summer they visited the older McIntyres, and it had always been fun. Now that was impossible. It was impossible to think of Mamie and Albert running the house, difficult but maybe not impossible to engage the services of someone who would look after them and sleep in, full time. When they had taken on the Forsters, Lois was sure they had been more able to get about. Mamie had talked of working in the garden of the Hilltop Home, but Lois had not been able to interest Mamie in doing anything in their garden in April, even the lightest of work, such as sitting and watching. She said something to this effect to Herbert.

  “I know, and it’s going to get worse, not better,” he replied.

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “This bed-wetting—Kids’ll grow out of it. Kids grow other teeth if them lose ’em.” Herbert laughed madly for an instant. “But these two’ll just get more decrepit.” He pronounced the last word with bitter amusement and looked Lois in the eyes. “Have you noticed the way Albert bangs his cane now—instead of just tapping it? They’re not satisfied with us. And they’re in the saddle! We can’t even have a vacation this summer—unless we can possibly shove ’em back in the Hilltop for a month or so. You think it’s worth a try?”

  “Yes!” Lois’ heart gave a leap. “Maybe. What a good idea, Herb!”

  “Let’s have a drink on it!” They were standing in the kitchen, about to have their own dinner, the Forsters having been served earlier upstairs. Herbert made Lois a scotch, and replenished his own glass. “And speaking of shoving,” he went on, pronouncing his words very clearly as he did when he had something to say that passionately interested him, “Dr. Feldman said today that there was absolutely nothing the matter with Mamie’s lowers, no sign of gum irritation, and he could hardly pull ’em off her jaw himself, they fitted so well. Ha!—Ha-ha-ha-a!” Herbert fell about the kitchen laughing. He had lost three hours taking Mamie to the dentist that afternoon. “The goddamn last time—today! I was saving it to tell you.” Herbert lifted his glass and drank.

  When Lois rang the Hilltop the next morning, she was told that their accommodations were more than filled, some people were four in a room or booked for that, because so many other people were placing their elderly relatives in the Hilltop in order to be free for vacations themselves. Somehow Lois didn’t believe the mechanical-sounding voice. But what could she do about it? She didn’t believe that so many people lived with their parents or grandparents these days. Yet if they didn’t, what did people do with them? Lois had a vision of a tribe shoving its elders off a cliff, and she shook her head to get the thought out, and stood up from the telephone. Lois did not tell Herbert.

  Unfortunately, Herbert, who fetched the tray down at lunchtime, shouted to the Forsters that they would be going back to the Hilltop for two months that summer.
He turned the TV down and repeated it with a big smile. “Another nice change of scene. You can see some of your old friends again—visit with them.” He looked at both of them, and saw at once that the idea did not appeal.

  Mamie exchanged a look with her husband. They were lying on their respective beds, shoes off, propped facing the TV screen. “No particular friends there,” said Mamie.

  In her sharp eyes Herbert saw a blood-chilling hostility. Mamie knew also that she wasn’t going to be driven to the Hartford dentist or hairdresser again. Herbert did not mention this conversation to Lois. But Lois told Herbert during their lunch that the Hilltop Home had no room this summer. She hadn’t wanted to disturb Herbert with the bad news while he had been working that morning.

  “Well, that cooks it,” Herbert said. “Damn, I’d like to get away this summer. Even for two weeks.”

  “Well, you can. I’ll—”

  Herbert shook his head bitterly, slowly. “We might do it in shifts? No, darling.”

  Then they heard Albert’s cane—it made a different sound from Mamie’s—tapping down the stairs. Then another cane. Both the Forsters were coming down. Most unusual. Lois and Herbert braced themselves as if for enemy attack.

  “We don’t want to go to the Hilltop this summer,” said Mamie. “You—”

  “No!” said Albert with a bang of his cane from his standing position.

  “You agreed to let us live with you.” Mamie had her squinty, pity-poor-me face on again, while Albert’s eyes were suspicious, his lower lip twisted with inquiry.

  “Well,” said Lois with an embarrassed, retreating feeling that she hated, “the Hilltop is filled up, so you needn’t worry. Everything’s all right.”

  “But you tried,” said Mamie.

  “We’re trying—to have a little vacation,” said Herbert loudly for the deaf Albert’s benefit, and he felt like socking the old bed-wetting bastard and knocking him down, old as he was. How dare that recipient of charity glare at him as if he were a crook, or someone who meant to do him harm?

  “We don’t understand,” said Albert. “Are you trying—”

  “You’re staying here,” Lois interrupted, forcing a huge smile to calm the atmosphere, if she could.

  But Mamie began again, and Herbert was livid. They both spoke at once, Albert joined in, and in the Babel-like roar, Lois heard her husband assuring the Forsters grimly that they were staying, and heard the Forsters saying that the McIntyres had gone back on their word to them and the Hilltop. The phrase “. . . not fair” came again and again from the mouths of Mamie and Albert, until Herbert uttered a dreadful curse and turned his back. Then there was a sudden silence which fairly made Lois’s ears ring, and thank God Albert decided to turn and leave the kitchen, but in the living room he paused, and Lois saw that he had begun to pee. Is that deliberate? Lois wondered as she rushed toward him to steer him toward the downstairs bathroom which was to the right of the kitchen door around a partition of bookshelves. She and Albert were on the way, but by the time they got there, Albert was finished, and the pale green carpet quite splotched between kitchen and the bathroom door which she had not even opened. She jerked her hand away from his coat-sweatered arm, disgusted that she had even touched him.

  She went back to her husband, past Mamie. “My God,” she said to Herbert.

  Herbert stood like a fortress with feet apart, arms folded, eyebrows lowered. He said to his wife, “We’ll make it.” Then he sprang into action, grabbed a floor rag from a cupboard under the sink, wet it, and tackled the splotches on their carpet.

  Albert was on his slow way upstairs, Mamie started to follow him, but paused to present her stricken face to Lois once more. Herbert was stooped and scrubbing, and didn’t see it. Lois turned away and faced the stove. When Lois looked again, Mamie was creeping toward the stairs.

  As Herbert rinsed and re-rinsed the floor cloth, a task he would not let Lois take over, he muttered plans. He would speak with the Hilltop Home in person, inform them that since he and Lois worked at home and needed a certain amount of solitude and silence, they could not and should not have to spend more money for a full-time servant to take meals upstairs, plus changing bed linen every day. When they had taken on the Forsters, they had both been continent and more able to look after themselves, as far as the McIntyres had known.

  Herbert went to the Hilltop Home that afternoon around three, without having made an appointment. He was in an aggressive enough mood to insist on seeing the right person, and he had thought it best not to make an appointment. Finally, he was shown into the office of one Stephen Culwart, superintendent, a slender, balding man, who told him calmly that the Forsters could not be taken back into the Hilltop, because there was no room. Mr McIntyre could get in touch with the Forsters’ son, of course, and another home might be found, but the problem was no longer the responsibility of the Hilltop Home. Herbert went away frustrated, and a bit tired, though he knew the tiredness was only mental and that he’d best shake it off.

  Lois had been writing in her study off the living room, with her door closed, when she heard a crash of breaking glass. She went into the living room and found Mamie in a trembling state near the bookshelf partition outside the kitchen door. Mamie said she had been downstairs and had wanted to use the downstairs toilet, and had bumped the vase at the end of one of the bookshelves by accident. Mamie’s manner was one of curiously mixed aggression and apology. Not for the first time, Mamie gave Lois the creeps.

  “And I’d like to have some knitting,” Mamie said quaveringly.

  “Knitting?” Lois pressed the side of the pencil in her hand with her thumb, not hard enough to break it. She herself felt shattered at the sight of the blue and white glass shards near her feet. She had loved that Chinese vase, which had belonged to her mother—not a museum piece, perhaps, that vase, but still special and valuable. The point was, Mamie had done it on purpose. “What kind of knitting? You mean—wool for knitting?”

  “Ye-es! Several colors. And needles,” Mamie said almost tearfully, like a pitiable pauper begging for alms.

  Lois nodded. “Very well.”

  Mamie made her slow, waddling way toward the stairs. Gay music came from the TV set above, an afternoon serial’s theme music.

  Lois swept up the vase, which was too much in pieces—or she thought so now—to be mended. Nevertheless, she kept the pieces, in a plastic bag, and then Herbert came in and told her his lack of success.

  “I think we’d better see a lawyer,” Herbert said. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Lois tried to calm him with a cup of tea in the kitchen. They could get in touch with the son again, Lois said. A lawyer would be expensive and maybe not even successful. “But they know something’s up,” Lois said as she sipped her tea.

  “How so? . . . What do you mean?”

  “I feel it. In the atmosphere.” Lois didn’t tell him about the vase, and hoped that he would not soon notice it.

  Lois wrote to Christopher Forster. Mamie knitted, and Albert peed. Lois and their once-a-week cleaning girl, Rita, a plump half–Puerto Rican girl who was cheerful and an angel, rinsed the sheets and hung them on the garden line. Mamie presented Lois with a round knitted doily which was rather pretty but of a dark purple color that Lois didn’t care for, or was she simply all round turned off of Mamie? Lois praised Mamie for her work, said she loved the doily, and put it in the center of the coffee table. Mamie did not seem gratified by Lois’s words, strangely, but put on her wrinkled frown. After that, Mamie began turning out messes of mixed colors, dropped stitches, in articles presumably meant to be more doilies, or teapot cozies, even socks. The madness of these items made Lois and Herbert more uneasy. Now it was mid-June. Christopher had replied that his house situation was more strained than ever, because his own four-year-old grandson was spending the summer with him and his wife, as his parents were p
robably going to get a divorce, so the last thing he could do just now was take on his father and Mamie. Herbert invested in an hour’s consultation with a lawyer, who suggested that the McIntyres might take up the situation with Medicare, combined with cooperation from Christopher Forster, or Herbert might look for another rest home for the elderly, where the problem might be difficult for him, because he was not a blood relation, and would have to explain that he had taken on responsibility for the Forsters from the Hilltop Home.

  Herbert and Lois’s neighbors rallied round with moral support and invitations to break their monotony, but none offered to put the Forsters up for even a week. Lois mentioned this to Herbert, jokingly, and both of them smiled at the idea: that was too much to expect even from the best of friends, and the fact that such an offer had not been forthcoming from the Mitchells or their other good friends the Lowenhooks did not diminish the McIntyres’ esteem for their friends. The fact was that the Forsters were, combined, a pain, a cross, albatrosses. And now the Forsters were waging a subtle war. Things got broken. Lois no long cared what happened to Albert’s mattress, or the carpet upstairs for that matter, as she had crossed them off. She did not suggest taking Albert’s trousers to the cleaners, because she didn’t care what their condition was. Let them stew in their own juice was a phrase that crossed her mind, but she never said it aloud. Lois was worried that Herbert might crack up. They had both reached the point, by early August, at which they could no longer laugh, even cynically.

  “Let’s rent a couple of studios—office rooms to work in, Lois,” Herbert said one evening. “I’ve been looking around. There’re two free in the same building on Barington Street in Hartford. Four hundred dollars a month—each. It’s worth it, to me at least and I’m sure to you. You’ve really had the worst of it.” Herbert’s eyes were pinkish from fatigue, but he was able to smile.