Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

Spring came after a winter rain. The blue sky looked up out of rainpuddles, and warm air blew in the afternoons, though the nights were cold. Snow stayed for weeks in shady corners of the house where bushes kept off the sun, while in the front yard between the sidewalk and the street the red maples put out their redblack buds. A yellowgreen haze trembled on distant willows and one day Edwin noticed pale green buds on the sideyard forsythia. Mrs. Mullhouse cut off three branches and placed them in a slim vase on the piano; within three days they had burst into yellow flower. The last snow melted in the mild afternoon air, but the temperature dropped sharply when the sun went down.

One bright afternoon when Edwin and I were playing cowboys and Indians I chased him around the front of the house, backed him into the bushes, and was about to blow his brains out when, in the midst of his frantic looking about for help, he began to stare behind him as if he had forgotten my existence. It was an old trick. “Bang bang!” I cried, “you’re dead!” but he took no notice of me, and turning his back he stepped into the evergreens right up to the shingles and crouched down suddenly so that only the red, yellow, and blue tips of his feathers were visible. Nervously fingering the white wooden bullets in my holster I approached warily, expecting him to leap out at me with his rubber tomahawk, but as I came up behind him I saw him squatting motionless, staring at the ground. There, streaking the dirt, lay patches of old snow, miraculously unmelted in the shadow of the little fir tree. “Bang bang!” I cried; but suddenly, as if my shots had brought him to life instead of killing him, he leaped up, rushed from the bushes, and ran along the side yard with myself in hot pursuit, and dashing up the steps he flung open the door, rushed to the refrigerator, and opened the freezer. “Edwin,” said Mrs. Mullhouse, “I really wish you wouldn’t” but “My icicle!” he cried, “where’s my icicle?” “What icicle, Edwin? You mean that old icicle? Why, I threw it out long ago, remember? I asked you, and you said,” but Edwin had burst into tears.

THE STRANGE WEATHER CONTINUED. The yellow jonquils began to open, the maples put out their dark red flowers, but as the sun went down the air grew chilly, and one morning there was a film of frost. “Good old New England,” said Mr. Mullhouse. “If you’re going out, remember to wear mittens and a bathing suit.” It was treacherous weather, a mixture of bloom and chill, and one late afternoon in Edwin’s back yard a sudden cool breeze blew against our sweat-shining faces, and Edwin sneezed. The next morning when I hurried over to play, Mrs. Mullhouse told me that Edwin was sick in bed.

A cold, for you and me, is a series of unpleasant sensations in the nose and eyes; for Edwin it was a voyage down the Amazon, a flight through the blue on a magic carpet, a journey to the mountain where grave bearded men drink liquor from kegs and make thunder by playing ninepins. Fever for him was the lifting of the stone with the brass ring: a stairway went down into the earth, and at the end was a door, and opening the door he passed into a palace divided into three great halls. On both sides of each hall stood four brass cisterns full of gold and silver. He had to be careful not to touch the walls, not even with his clothes, for if he did he would die instantly. At the end of the third hall he came to a door and entered a garden filled with trees that bore strange fruit of many colors. Passing through the garden he came to a terrace, and in the terrace was a niche, and in the niche was a lighted lamp. And taking the lamp he passed back through the garden of fruit trees, stopping to take fruit from each tree; but he did not know that the white fruit were pearls, the clear fruit were diamonds, the red fruit were rubies, the green fruit were emeralds, the blue fruit were turquoises, the purple fruit were amethysts, and the yellow fruit were opals. Then he passed through the three great halls with their cisterns of gold and silver, and climbing the stairs he cried: “Pray, uncle, help me out.” “Give me the lamp first,” replied the magician. But he refused, and the magician, flying into a rage, pronounced the magic words. Then the stone closed over him, and all was darkness.

Colds always took him by surprise. A casual sneeze, no different from a hundred such sneezes, would reveal itself to be the first note of a symphony of fever, chapped lips, burning nostrils, soaked handkerchiefs, and aching bones. There was a fairytale abruptness about it all: at one moment he would sneeze in sunlight, at the next he would be lying in bed beside the shut blinds of his double window with a sopping handkerchief squatting beside his pillow like some pale animal that had crawled up out of a hole. For weeks he would not stir from his sheets except to go to the bathroom just outside his room. Lonely and wretched in my glowing health, I stood with my hands in my pockets in the house-shadowed grass of morning, gazing up at the dark windows where I sometimes saw white clouds, or standing in the emerald grass of noon I would shade my eyes as I stared at the remote sunpolished glass behind which Edwin lay like an invisible Snow White in an opaque glass coffin, or a perverse Rapunzel, content in her tower. Only sometimes, in reply to my shouts, would the window stir with a motion of blinds, and then for a moment I would catch a pale glimpse of a piece of Edwin before he suddenly disappeared, as if dragged away by a witch. Then I would hurry up the back steps, and rapping on the wooden frame of the screen door I would be admitted to the kitchen, where I would try to allay my loneliness in the company of Karen and Mrs. Mullhouse. With unusual precision Mrs. Mullhouse recounted to me the progress of Edwin’s illness while I watched Karen toddle about in her new white shoes or played pattycake with her as she sat on the floor. “His temperature was a hundred and two and a half but Dr. Blumenthal said don’t worry, it’s not polio. Poor Edwin, he has to lie on his stomach cause his heinie’s so sore.” I saw Dr. Blumenthal once: a vast white-haired man with creaking black shoes and a creaking black briefcase, who talked to Mrs. Mullhouse at the top of his voice. “So what are you telling me from starve-a-fever. Food he needs, food. You want he should win first prize in the Skinniest Boy Contest? You!” (whirling toward me). “How much is five and six?” “Eleven,” I answered promptly. Turning back to Mrs. Mullhouse and bending forward he said in a hushed conspiratorial whisper: “He’s got smart friends.”

The day came when at last I was allowed to visit Edwin. The fever and the infection were gone but he was still weak and needed rest, though Mrs. Mullhouse assured me that now he was taking his meals downstairs. Eagerly I climbed the carpeted stairs, passing the glass-framed photograph on the dark landing; and climbing the five stairs above the landing I stepped to Edwin’s door. A sudden nervousness overcame me; I paused. After all, I had not seen him for almost three weeks. Could he have changed? And I thought: three weeks ago he did not resemble the Edwin of three years ago; we do not see the hour hand move unless we look away a while; perhaps a new Edwin awaits me, a pale stranger. To my left, the door to Karen’s room was open and a band of sunlight, mad with dust, streamed into the hall almost to my toes. Holding my breath, with swift-beating heart I opened Edwin’s door.

Hushed in shadow, the room lay silently before me, as if it had not yet recovered from a prolonged illness. I blinked rapidly, scattering darkness. Before the closed blinds of the double window lay Edwin, fast asleep. The upper sheet, turned over the blanket to form a white band, was pulled up to his chin; one arm, draped in a pale blue pajama-sleeve, rested above, and from where I stood the pale hand blended into the bleached sheet. He was almost entirely covered with Golden Books, which rose and fell gently as he breathed. Straight ahead stood the room’s third window, through which, had the blinds been open, I might have seen the black roof of my house; in those days I used to enjoy walking slowly toward that window and watching my house rise higher and higher, slat on slat, until the kitchen window appeared, followed by the red roof of the Mullhouse garage. In the Late Years, while Edwin was writing his immortal masterpiece, I would sometimes creep into my kitchen late at night for a graham cracker and a glass of milk, where I would see, over the Mullhouse garage, the bright yellow rectangle of this very window. To the right of the window stood the large gray bookcase, overflowing with toys and books (including a forgotten comic book); its top was several inches higher than the windowsill, and although its right side pressed against the right wall, its left side extended past the window frame and covered a small portion of glass. To the left of the window, in an imbalance so unendurable that I would have invented a second gray bookcase if I had not known one was coming, stood a blackboard on an easel, a tall dog on wheels, a blue orange-crate bookcase full of puzzles and animals (hello, bookcase), and an open wooden chest filled with holsters, boots, chaps, spurs, green plastic arrows with pink rubber tips, a ten-gallon hat, a rubber tomahawk, a red plastic bow, and an eyeless zebra. The matte wallpaper, pebbled to the touch, contained a repeated series of six vertical maroon lines crossed by a repeated series of four horizontal maroon lines on a silver-gray background. On the left wall, over the empty bed with its two oblong pillows forming a back, was a map of the United States in full color, showing fish and steamships in the dark blue oceans, a palm tree in Florida, a skyscraper in New York, an ear of corn in Iowa, an Indian in Arizona, a log in Oregon, and nothing in Connecticut. At the age of five I knew all forty-eight states; a map to Edwin was still a picture puzzle. The reader will forgive this somewhat detailed description of Edwin’s room when I explain that many of Edwin’s happiest moments, as well as his last, were spent in this setting.