Many Mansions. Isabel Bolton
could meet death upon her own terms how often she would choose to die. How beautiful to have floated away upon that tide of reverence. It was one’s ignorance of just how and where death might come to take one off that made it hard to contemplate. There were all the grisly speculations.
Would she have a stroke followed by a helpless dotage? Would she die of some grave heart condition long drawn out? She might be run over any day by a taxi or a truck. She might slip on the sidewalk and break a leg or a femur. She could hear the clanging bells, the siren of the ambulance that gave her right of way, bearing her off amid the city traffic to the nearest hospital. She could see the doctors and the nurses going through their paces—everything efficient, ordered, utterly inhuman—all the nightmare apparatus attendant on keeping the breath of life in her another day—who knew? Maybe another week; maybe a month or two longer—the oxygen ranks and the transfusions, the injections—penicillin and the sulfa drugs—Heaven knew what! And would there be sufficient funds she wondered to pay for all this nonsense—keeping the breath of life in one old woman more than prepared to give up the fight? Expenses mounted to the skies. Nurses were worth their weight in gold. And as for private rooms in hospitals! All these extravagances. Dear me, dear me. Could she imagine herself in an Old Ladies Home—in a hospital ward?
She worried woefully about her finances. Eating into her principal like a rat eating into the cheese, the only capital that remained to her those few government bonds. However, she’d figured it all out very carefully. She could live to be ninety—selling out a bond when necessary and keeping something for emergencies. Was it possible that she’d live to be ninety?
Not likely at all; most improbable!
And if she did, she’d have to take the consequences. She had always been a fool with money. She knew nothing about the care of it. When she thought about the foolish things she’d done—the naive way she’d listened to all those charming philanthropic young men who knew so well how to advise the single and unguided! It made her sick at heart. But the one decision she had made—capricious, unadvised—to settle on that unborn child a gift of seventy thousand dollars she wasted not a moment’s time regretting. After the completion of those arrangements if she’d had any sense she should have put her money into an annuity. They were, she supposed, fool proof. She was glad, however, she hadn’t done so (she did some swift and inaccurate sums in arithmetic). She wouldn’t be very much better off than she was now, and not a cent to leave to anyone. Those bonds, that balance at the bank could be bequeathed.
What a great lift, for instance, it would give to Adam Stone—how surprised he’d be, how grateful if she were to die tomorrow, to find himself heir to all she had! Poor Adam, she thought, poor Adam! And why not? Wasn’t he after all the only person in her life today for whom she felt genuine concern? What if she had picked him up in a restaurant? What if she had known him only a few years? Why not?
He was in his peculiar way as much of a solitary as she was herself—an odd, unhappy, interesting young man. He seemed to stand for her as a kind of terrifying symbol, seeing behind him many similar youths who had played their part in the great war and had returned without zest or hope or faith in life. And why would it not be so—marked and marred as they had been with the impact of the dreadful years? When she talked with Adam she seemed to feel the presence of a crowd of witnesses, all the young in every corner of the world. Against his bitterness, his utter disrespect for life, what was there she could say? She imagined that in his queer way he rather liked to feed upon his bitterness. You could not disagree with him; he resented argument. He would not brook contradiction. There was something rather superb about his anger—working it all out as far as she could see in a kind of sullen passion for art, music, literature. Books he devoured ravenously. He was, she gathered from his conversation, at work upon a novel. He had cast off his family. He had cast off one girl after another, or very likely one girl after another had cast him off. There was something hard, passionate and scrupulously scientific about the way he went in for these brief affairs of love—a short interval of violent passion followed by a tremendous battle of the egos—bitter, sensual, with neither romance nor beauty, but nonetheless rewarding because of some necessity he seemed to feel to further document his vast accumulating dossier on sex, all without doubt to go into the novel he was, if not at present, some day bound to write. He seemed to be driven from one sterile episode into another.
Poor boy, she thought, poor Adam. Was she justified she wondered—“A young man you met in an Armenian restaurant,” she said leaving the window and going to her desk where examining her check book and still continuing to talk aloud she muttered, “yes yes, taking that twenty-five thousand dollars that still remains to me in government bonds and adding my deposit, let me see, let me see, $3,497 and some odd cents, there would be in all (she added up the two figures) exactly $28,497.26.”
A tidy little sum. She supposed the proper people to think about were the poor old women of her acquaintance scratching along on almost nothing. She knew a number of them—there were several right here in this hotel, unutterably dreary, desolate and brave. How wonderful for one of them to wake up some fine morning and find herself heir to twenty-eight thousand four hundred and ninety-seven dollars and twenty-six cents.
But the rub was of course how much of this would still remain when she was dead. The uncertain residue—she had practically made up her mind to it in the early hours of the morning—should go to Adam Stone. The weather prevented her from going, as she had resolved to go this very day, to Maiden Lane to see old Breckenridge.
But then there were other things that she could do and as she was thinking so seriously of also bequeathing him her precious manuscript, she really should before she determined to do so sit down quietly and read it from beginning to end. What a strange thing it was she thought as she went into the bathroom to attend to the preparation of breakfast, finishing it, laying it away, never able to reread it. And why did she feel so urged to leave it in the hands of this peculiar difficult young man? What was it that consumed her—this hunger in her heart? And was not the most astonishing experience just this—old age? When all was weariness and pain and effort, when the chief business of every day was waiting on her body like a patient old nurse waiting on an unwilling absentminded child, to feel this fierce preoccupation! Was it because she had wanted to call in her conscience—her soul, her memory, as you might call in a priest at the last moment to offer absolution, that she had undertaken the writing of this book?
Well, well now at any rate she must put her mind on breakfast—this smuggling in, hiding away, pretending you didn’t make a kitchen out of your bathroom and a refrigerator out of your window ledge was a technique she’d mastered to perfection, she thought, stooping to fish a saucepan and an electric plate from under the bathtub, filling the former with water and attaching the cord of the latter—putting the water on to boil, opening the window to bring in butter, cream, fruit. She flattered herself she pulled it all off pretty well. It wasn’t that she didn’t grasp as eagerly as a child whatever pleasures life still offered her, there was something even a little sly about her manner of enjoying her small gratuitous blessings, as though she’d stolen a toy from the attentive nurse who kept watch over her or cake and candy from the august angel into whose hands old Nanny might at any moment deliver her. She made it her business to make as much out of her days as her frail margin of health allowed, lunching or dining at a restaurant and, what with the sandwiches, the yogurt, all the queer food that you could find in little tins, managing somehow to sustain herself. There was something a bit miraculous about her little feats and arrangements.
It took fortitude she admitted. The old deserved to be commended for their gallantry. Goodness, when she thought of the necessary chores—putting clothes upon their backs, food into their mouths, getting on and off the busses and across the roaring streets. Courage, self-assertion, vanity were all required. As for herself how ridiculously vain she was—always shaking off the kind and attentive people ready to assist her, as though to say, “Thank you very much indeed, I’m quite capable of looking after myself,” still trying to look as though her appearance suggested youth and vitality, never able to forget that she’d been, and not so very long ago, an agreeable and attractive woman. She was capable, she acknowledged it, of the most absurd behavior—little coquetries, high and mighty airs.
But maybe she could be forgiven for believing that she