Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

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When Lily opened the back door and looked up the stairway to the landing, she saw Mabel step out into the hall and look down at her. The bare bulb shone down on Mabel’s gray hair and whitened it. “I’m glad it’s you, Lily,” she said, and then, focusing her eyes, she said with a little cry in her voice, “You’ve had an accident!”

After that, Mabel was all business. Her anxiety of only hours before had vanished, and Lily saw that she moved like a different person. Efficient and brusque, she ordered Lily to come to her apartment to get cleaned up and fed, and after Lily threw the bloody bag with the burnt shoes into her closet and called Mrs. Wright at the Arts Guild, who accepted her lie about falling off her bike, she obeyed.

Lily sat down on Mabel’s sofa and listened to the sound of water running in the bathroom. While she waited for Mabel, she looked for the Japanese couple but didn’t find them. Then Mabel was standing in front of her with a basin of water and a washcloth. She drew a chair close to the sofa, set the bowl on the floor and without another word began to wash Lily’s face. Mabel patted the cut on her forehead gently, lifted Lily’s hair and moved the warm cloth along her neck. Then she wiped Lily’s legs and dried them just as they were beginning to itch from the wetness. Even as it happened, Lily knew the washing marked a change between her and Mabel that could never be undone, and yet she didn’t resist it. The woman’s touch, the way her hand moved with the cloth, was so tender that Lily felt her throat tighten with emotion. When Mabel lowered Lily’s hands into the basin, the warm water aggravated her burns and she gasped. Mabel took both Lily’s hands in her own and turned them over — both thumbs and two of the fingers on each hand had blistered at their tips. Mabel looked up at Lily, her eyes steady, but she said nothing. She left the room and a few moments later returned with a fresh basin of water.

Then Mabel started to talk. She didn’t preface her remarks, didn’t give any reason for her sudden desire to tell Lily what she had never told her before. She just jumped in and said, “My father loved me, but he had no gift for affection. He rarely touched me, and when he did, his body was wood. I pity him now. It was my mother who held me and rocked me, me and my brother, and she had hands, Lily, that when they touched you, you felt the calm of every calm thing in the world, and when she died — I was younger than you, seventeen — it was as if all that was good and light had been snuffed out of my life. I left my father and my brother one day in the spring, after a year of plotting and planning. I ran off with Owen Hartwig, a freethinker from the Aberdeen Weekly, to get married.”

“But I thought your husband’s name was Evan,” Lily said.

“It was. I left Owen Hartwig at the altar, or rather at the courthouse.” Mabel paused. “I couldn’t stand the way he looked close-up, you know, nose to nose. It sounds ridiculous but I don’t believe it was, really. Something about his body repelled me.”

“But you thought you loved him?”

“I liked the idea of him — hard hitting newspaperman with a radical streak. I forgot I’d have to live with those thighs.”

“What did you do then?”

“I became a chambermaid in the Grand Hotel, established residency and eventually went to the university at night.”

“And your father and brother?”

“They stayed on the farm. My brother farmed that place until he died, ten years ago.”

“The farm?” Lily looked at her.

“Outside Aberdeen, South Dakota.”

“South Dakota? I thought you came from out east somewhere.”

“No.”

“But you’ve never even mentioned it. You’re like a city person through and through.” Lily dried her hands on the towel Mabel handed her.

“Books.”

“Books?”

“Yes, I wanted to live a great and passionate life, a life of risk, beauty and pain.” Mabel laughed. “The last part seemed to come naturally.”

“Have you?” Lily looked into Mabel’s eyes. “Has it been like that?”

Mabel smiled. “I think that it’s not what happens in life so much as how you imagine what happens, how you color events. It’s rather like the idea of the changeling when I think about it. Substitution is involved. When I worked in that hotel and made people’s beds and cleaned their toilets and straightened their perfumes and their soaps and emptied their ashtrays into a tub, I felt humiliated every single second because I imagined that I was destined for something else, but the truth is, I had no reason to believe that. I was a poor girl from the South Dakota sticks. But I had read a lot of books, and those stories wrote mine, if you see. You know who gave them to me?”

Lily shook her head.

“My mother.”

“Is that why you’re always giving me books to read?”

Mabel narrowed her eyes at Lily. “Maybe,” she said and stood up abruptly and left the room. She returned with a long, black shirt and tossed it at Lily. “Here put this on. You’ll look good in it, and we’ll put that dirty thing in bleach.” She nodded at Lily’s T-shirt.

“Why did you take this apartment, Mabel?” Lily said and looked at her hard.

Mabel shook her head. Her small face looked suddenly tired. “It reminded me of a place where I once lived — these little rooms.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted to return to it. I suppose…” Mabel shook her head.

Lily stared at the black shirt in her lap. As she pulled off her T-shirt, her blistered fingers throbbed, but she pushed her arms into the sleeves of the new shirt, and when it hung open around her, Lily looked down at the long row of buttons, then back up at Mabel.

Mabel buttoned the shirt. She held the material away from Lily’s breasts so she didn’t brush them with her moving hands, and her fingers left a scent of perfume behind them. When she finished, she looked into Lily’s eyes and said, “Secrecy isn’t always a bad thing, you know.”

“Isn’t it?” Lily thought about the shoes.

“Confession is a problem,” Mabel said. “In friendship, anyway. The listener can’t always bear the weight of it. That’s why I’ve always thought a priest in a box is a beautiful thing — the guilty person whispering through a hole into an ear that can hear anything. Freud understood that, too, with the couch. You didn’t have to look at the analyst. It’s all lost now. People stare straight into the eyes of their psychiatrists.”

Lily watched Mabel’s face. The woman turned her head away from Lily toward the window. “I wonder if he’s on vigil again tonight. Whoever he is, he’s up to something.” Mabel smiled a small thin smile that disturbed Lily. It looked out of place. Then she walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. Her motion was both dramatic and self-conscious, but Lily couldn’t quite tell whether Mabel was making fun of herself or not. “I am that merry wanderer of the night,” she said as she peered out the window. Lily recognized Puck’s line. “No,” Mabel said. “Maybe it’s too early.” She turned around. “He’ll be back though.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I heard it in his footsteps: unfinished business.”

Mabel fed Lily a sandwich and insisted that she keep the shirt, which was silk and probably expensive. Lily protested but then gave in.

Before Lily left for Ed’s, she stood on the landing with Mabel to say good-bye. The woman leaned forward and put her lips to Lily’s cheek. She barely grazed the skin, but the feeling of the kiss lingered as Lily walked down the stairs, out the door and into the street. When she opened the door of the Stuart Hotel, she could still feel it, as though Mabel’s lips had left an impression on her face.