White morning assaults her with a moment of absolute blankness. She’s expelled into the empty day. When she recognizes the blue flowered curtains in the window and the maple branches with a thin line of snow, the door in the floor has slammed shut. If she retains a fragment of dream, it will blow away unless she can chronologize it and put it into words. Yet chronology and words kill it. The story that remains is no dream, and the dream remains uncaught, contiguous to the other dreams below the door, constituting one great unbroken lifetime dream all through the oblivious day, to be continued on her next visit down.
Meanwhile, in the empty cool morning light, dreamless, Susan Morrow, lacking at first even her name, gradually constructs the new day. Tuesday. Eight. Arnold gone, the convention in New York. Wake up to that, suddenly, real life like an alarm clock. The sharp memory of Arnold’s reassuring call last night, and what it really means. It means that in New York, Marilyn Linwood, receptionist, either is or is not having an affair with him. Organizing records in his hotel room. Marilyn Linwood waits for Susan to wake up: this prim young woman in her thirties, professional, neat tweed suit, glasses, hair pinned back, careful little face. Secretive, the perfect telephone girl. Some of whose secrets came out at the staff picnic: yellow bikini, bronze hair flowing loose, white thighs a shade too thin. Who’s that? Dr. Gaspar said. Patronizing. Is that our Miss Linwood?
Things have changed since Susan gave up jealousy. She wakes up again, remembering. Liberated by a decision not to think, accepting the unknown for peace and not having to know if it needs to be accepted. Making for good marriage, stable and steady after sixteen years of doubt.
Return to the day, up you get, Susan. Let the kids sleep because it’s the Christmas break. What must I do today? You must do the laundry, Jeffrey to the vet. Shovel snow? Look out the window to see. By the time she is out of bed with her robe onto look at the snow (only a thin coat on the ground, which will disappear soon), Susan Morrow is restored without a gap. The new day stitches across the night’s wound as if her conscious life were continuous.
She does the following things during the day, along with other things. She showers, dresses, wakes the kids, gets breakfast, drives to the Burridges’ to pick up Rosie. Gathers the week’s laundry to the machine in the basement, makes beds, goes to the supermarket for margarine, lunch meat, and milk. Lunch for three children and herself. To the library to return books, then pick up the living room, carrying Rosie’s presents upstairs, also Henry’s and Dorothy’s who were supposed to do it themselves. A break at the piano, Bach inventions. Back to the basement to exchange laundry loads. Ham in the oven, run the dishwasher, set the table. Her day mind, which knows nothing of her other mind, is full of what’s not there, but knows where everything is: Rosie upstairs with Carol, Dorothy outside, Henry with Mike, Arnold in New York.
And Edward. A long hook-up from the past, grabbing her by the mind. All day she keeps wondering, why am I thinking about Edward? His memory reverberates out of slumber like a dream, it flashes like birds tree to tree. It comes too fast, flits away too quickly. To keep it, she must chronologize it just the way she chronologizes her dreams. This kills it too. Her dead memory of Edward was stored in bound volumes years ago, while the new living Edward flies around outside uncaught.
TWO
When Edward and Susan were fifteen, his father died of a heart attack, and her father and mother took him in for a year. His real mother was in an institution, and his stepmother, who had just divorced the father, wanted nothing to do with the son. He had cousins in Ohio who took him later, but her parents took him first so that he would not have to leave Hastings High. There were negotiations and long distance calls and financial compensation, but she always thought it most kind of her parents.
There was no particular reason to take him in. They were neighbors. Edward’s father would ride the commuting train to New York with her father. He came to dinner from time to time. He was a mild amusing affable man who played the violin on the side.
They lived on Edgar’s Lane, a street with comfortable suburban houses under the trees, Edward’s house at the top of a curving flight of steps down where the street dipped below the overhanging branches. The street was historical, there having been a Battle of Edgar’s Lane in Revolutionary times.
She hardly knew him before his father died, or if she did, she did not remember. They walked to school on the Aqueduct, a level grassy path between the backs of the houses, separated from them by a fence and a wide swath of grass. The Aqueduct maintained its level on embankments across all the natural dips in the land, and wherever it crossed a street people walking had to pass through wooden gates from the old horse days.
His father died on a sunny day in May. On the afternoon of that day, Susan was on the Aqueduct with Marjorie Grabel, the grass unmowed on either side, the path still damp but not muddy. Edward was a hundred yards ahead, indolent with his bookbag, chewing blades of Aqueduct grass. Behind her, Susan’s younger sister and brother lagged, avoiding her. At that time Edward was a skinny kid with yellow hair, thin neck and squinty eyes like a water bird with long legs, and he was too shy to be liked, though Susan did not realize it was shyness but thought it was innate maturity compared to which she was only a child. They came up Edgar’s Lane under the trees. Edward went up the steps into his house. Marjorie turned left at the corner, and Susan went home, with Paul and Penny keeping their distance behind.
A few minutes later he was at the door of her house, his mouth working, trying to say, Get your mother. Then she followed her mother and Edward running down the street, even her mother running. They ran up the steps beside the rock garden to the house, stucco and timbered, her mother stopping to get her breath, while Susan caught up, asking what the matter was. She stayed outside while her mother and Edward went in. Afraid because she had never seen a corpse, she waited on the stone parapet by the front door, with its box of pansies and its view down the street. After a while people arrived, going into the house past her. A fat man puffing up the steps asked her, Is this the place? Her mother came down and told her to go home. By going home she missed the covered body removed on a stretcher, and only later regretted not having seen it.
That night, Edward came to dinner at her house, and she remembers questions. Do you know your stepmother’s address? No grandparents? No uncles and aunts? Do you know anything about your father’s finances?
They put him in the room on the top floor, where he had a view over rooftops to a section of the Palisades across the river and a smaller patch of the river itself between trees, where sometimes in the summer if he was lucky he would get a glimpse of the day boats going by.
No one dreamed that anything would develop between Edward and Susan. He said, Let’s have an understanding here. You don’t want me in your house, and I don’t want to be here, but what can we do, so let’s shut up about it. You stay out of my room and I’ll stay out of yours.
He said, So there’ll be no confusion later on, just because I’m male and you’re female doesn’t mean anything, agreed? You won’t expect me to ask you for dates and I won’t expect anything from you. We just happen to be boarding in the same house.