Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

1930

Giving a glance around the room, father visibly and carefully braced himself with his left hand on the table, trembled his right hand holding the telephone, and thrust his face forward courageously. He would have paled if he could, but that was out of the question and he just grew a shade more self-consciously red.

Mother was torn between a desire to whimper and an admiration for and desire to imitate father’s manly attitude.

“Keep quiet, Lil,” he said over his shoulder in a whisper, “it’s Jim.”

I could hear my Uncle Jim’s voice, roaring and excited, apparently saying the same thing over and over. My two brothers were each smoking a pipe and eyeing each other appraisingly. George, the eldest, carried it off better; he leaned against the mantle with the air of one who is about to say “Yes, sir, it’s a very serious proposition…” My two sisters were being nonchalant and earnest in turn, Myrtle all dressed up in embroidered Chinese pajamas, the pinkness of her ankles showing that she’d just had a bath; and Alison in evening clothes, with her fur coat still around her. It was almost one o’clock — this would be the last message we’d get tonight. There’d been a telegram about an hour ago; I held it in my hand and read it over and over.

REDS WIN DAY SULLIVAN AND KROWSKI SHOT THREE THOUSAND HEADED EAST VACATE OR OFFER NO RESISTANCE ELIOT MAY HOLD YET GENERAL MACLAUGHLIN.

I wondered how the Western Union happened to be still working. The telephone company had stopped running two days ago and Uncle Jim was talking over our private wire from his house down at the Neck, about twelve miles away. Among the throaty telephone sounds there was one with a hiss to it, which I recognized as— Nerissa, the name of Uncle Jim’s yacht.

“Yes, Jim, yes — we can make it. We’ll be there. You’ve saved our lives.… I say, you’ve saved our lives.” Father hung up dramatically. I shut my eyes, knowing the My God that was coming. It would be such a poor substitute for the expression father needed, a wooden doll in the garments of Lady Macbeth. “Now I bet he wishes he’d saved it,” I thought.

“My God,” said father. (Better than I expected.) “It’s all up. MacLaughlin got stabbed, Jim says; one of his own men and half of them gone Red. They’re turning every minute. We’ve all got to get out, Lil. Clear out and get up to Canada if we can. Jim’s got the Nerissa ready and we’ve got to get down there before it gets light. Let’s see, that gives us about four and a half hours.

“My God, (father put his arm around mother) Jim says the Slaters are all murdered, Lil. They set fire to their house. Thank God we have the Nerissa. ”

My family all stood awkwardly, looking around as if for the best thing to carry off first, and with a shade of satisfaction because we had the Nerissa. I remembered that the crew had all deserted a couple of weeks ago, when the servants left, but then Uncle Jim was a fair navigator.

Mother shook off father’s arm. “New England Ancestry” was suddenly written all over her. She made straight for the dining-room and the spoons. Myrtle began to cry but father stopped that. “You girls go and get dressed warmly,” he said, “good substantial clothing. George and James, go down to the garage and drive the cars around front. I’ll drive the Packard, you take the little Buick with the silverware, and you take the beach wagon. A lot of things will go in that.”

The famous MacLaughlin couldn’t have arranged better.

Father began piling things in the front hall. I’d often wondered what rescuing things from a fire would be like and now I was finding out in a much cooler, probably more leisurely way. I looked around for something to save and remembered the old banjo clock in the dining-room. Mother was tying up the green felt rolls of silver in a set, mechanical way, and didn’t even look at me. I climbed up on a chair, lifted the clock off its hooks and carried it out to the hall to add it to father’s mounting pile. Just as I got there it slipped and fell with an awful crash onto the marble floor. The case cracked, the glass broke, there were several snaps and whirrs from the inside, and it stopped going.

“Please be careful, dear,” Mother’s voice said the familiar phrase unconsciously, while the rapid laying out of silver never stopped. I checked an hysterical laugh, gave up all thought of doing anything to aid the exodus and walked in to the small Louis Quinze parlor off the hall.

It was very dark in there, just a long rectangle of light from the doorway to the wall on the other side, one gilt chair standing in it, the corner of a gilt table, the final flounce of a brocaded shining curtain. I stepped across this alleyway of glitter into the dark and sat down on a small satin sofa over in the corner. I heard two cars drive up and stop; I heard mother shout to father.

“George! the wall-safe in my room! My jewel box and papa’s watch and Lizzie’s miniature. Oh, and the children’s pictures—”

“I’ve already got them, Lil. What about the chandelier? D’you suppose we could manage it? In the beach wagon…”

“What are you going to wear, Alison?” my sister shouted. “What about a ski-suit?”

My whole family might have been getting ready for some wonderful picnic or party. And yet they were scared. I wasn’t scared, as I might have been about a picnic or party, but as I usually did, I decided to stay at home. I’d be damned if I’d go with them and the cousins on the old Nerissa. I wouldn’t be brave and martyred and a gentleman till the last. Surely there was some place around the estate to hide out in; and anyway I wanted to see what they’d do to the place, the three thousand who were coming.

Well, I sat there for a long time and finally I had to go out because my brother George suddenly started walking around the house shouting my name. I went out into the hall grabbing a pair of little gilt statues, Adam and Eve, off a table as I went to serve as some sort of excuse for my disappearance. All the family was out there. Most of the pile of stuff had been stowed away in the cars except for some stray objects that were of an awkward size, or had been broken, or had turned out to be not very valuable after all. Mother’s favorite white alabaster lamp lay broken in three pieces; two chairs stood in attitudes almost social and conversational, there was an awful mess of tramped-on table-linen, and strangest of all a dish of small red roses, tipped over, with the water spilling out in a long thin stream towards the broken lamp, and the green leaves lying flat to the floor as if exhausted.

We all looked at each other like a group of thieves or house-breakers. Father said “Are you all set, Lil?” and mother answered “Yes, let’s get away, George. I’m getting nervous,” and she began to cry.

I stared around at my brothers and sisters. Myrtle had actually put on the ski-suit — a bright red one. “Aren’t you being a little ironic?” I asked her, and she glanced down at herself and frowned slightly, looking worried. Alison was draped in black, and wore a large black hat, that she rather fancied as making her look glamorous, I knew. George wore, yes actually, khaki shorts and heavy wool socks. “Good Lord,” I thought, “nothing will persuade me to go with this party of sentimentalists.”

“What about getting all the old port up?” asked father.

“Oh come on, father, the Nerissa isn’t the Ark. Let’s get going,” George growled at him.

I found myself saying, as if in a dream, “I think I’ll stay here.”

My family’s mouths fell open with one gesture, as automatic as so many steam-shovels. Then they all began to shout at me, and to tell each other that the fear and strain had gone to my head. I’d be shot, stabbed, crucified.… I should have been dragged along willy-nilly, another wealthy refugee, only just then, far off to the west came a tremendous explosion. The house shook. My family made for the door, George helping mother politely by the elbow. I noticed that father, who was wearing a golfing cap, picked up a derby from the table near the door and carried it off with him. It was still dark out, but the cars’ lights were off. Father and mother and Myrtle piled into the already loaded Packard; James and Alison got into the Buick, (a large globe of the heavens and the handle of a vacuum cleaner stuck out of the rumble seat) and poor George drove off by himself in the beach wagon looking very Boy-Scoutish. I suppose each thought I was in another car.