My great-grandmother sits in the room we have grudgingly given her and looks out of the window at the night. The shadows of the room are by Rembrandt. My great-grandmother is the work of Rops.
My mother and my grandmother sit in a room below and talk softly and eagerly of my great-grandmother's health. They think she will die soon. She is one hundred and one years old today. My father is reading a paper and scowling. He isa thin, short man with a temper. In his youth he was a brilliant writer of queer fictions. I know what he is thinking of now. I feel we are thinking of the same thing.
Neither of us can bear to eat at the table with my great-grandmother. There is an indecency about her.
A few minutes ago she raised herself to her feet with a cramped, bony gesture that was almost a cackle, and crawled out of the room. I stared at her shrunken, twisted body and at her face. One of her cheeks is yellow, the other is grey. Her features are gnarled and spotted. The skin in places is glossy. She has no hair and refuses to put on a wig. She wears a thin knitted brown shawl over her bare head.
Her emaciation is like some distasteful caricature. I am always thinking adjectives in her presence. So is my father.
As she passed my father and me when she was crawling out of the room a few minutes ago she turned her little gelatinous eyes on us and smiled.
My father and I, who know her history very well, thought, "She will never die. She is living for spite."
"Poor thing," whispered my mother. "Won't you help her upstairs?"
I helped her climb the stairs to her room. It was my grandmother Ruth's idea, giving her a room on the second floor.
"You will be away from noises, dear Eva," she said.
And now my great-grandmother has to climb up and down.
I was solicitous with her in helping her up the stairs, despite the repugnance I felt at the touch of her stiff arm on my hand. I avoided her fingers. When we reached her door she desired to kiss me. I have a feeling she does these things maliciously.
I left her sitting at the window. I do not like to undress her for bed. Neither does my father. My grandmother insists on doing it herself. She is seventy-four years old. She assumes a certain ridiculous briskness in the presence of her mother. In youth she was tyrannized over by her. Among many things she was forced into marriage with a man who deserted her at the age of fifty. My great-grandmother sought to force her to marry again. My father wrote a morbid story about this which he has promised not to show to anyone until after Eva dies.
It was his idea, by the way, of celebrating Eva's hundred and first birthday at the dinner table tonight with a cake on which one candle burned.
"You are starting over again," he said to her.
In a thin, watery voice, my great-grandmother answered: "Thank you. I should like to live to be two hundred."
I shivered. My grandmother Ruth scowled.
My father raised his glass of wine and said: "May we all live long and prosper!"
When I came downstairs from my great-grandmother's room my mother was saying to her mother, Ruth: "It won't be long now. We should really try to make her last days happier. She will be taken from us soon."
My grandmother answered: "I'll go before her, mark my words. You don't know her as I do. She'll live forever."
My father raised his head and said to me, "Zola."
"Anatole France," I answered.
He was thoughtful for a moment. It is a way we have of giving our opinions to each other when not alone.
"The early Huysmans," my father said at last.
"Wedekind," I objected.
He laughed.
My grandmother looked at us suspiciously.
"What are you talking about?" she asked.
My mother began to cry. Eva has been with us for two years now. My mother's nerves are in a bad state.
"Oh," she remarked suddenly while I was thinking of what to say to Ruth, "I don't know what to do."
It is apparent to me that all of us hate my great-grandmother.
My grandmother hates her because of the past. In the past Eva terrorized her, beat her into submission, and broke her will. In addition to this she hates her because she is impotent to avenge herself. Of late, in fact, she has developed a fear that she will die before Eva. When she was ill two months ago Eva sat at her bed and pretended to nurse her. My grandmother's eyes blazed with hate. My father and I discussed the situation at the time.
I have noticed also my grandmother's fear that she is being regarded in the same light as Eva, that my mother, father, and I think of the two of them as in the same condition of life. There is evidently a violent distinction in her own brain concerning this. Undoubtedly she remembers things tending to vivify this impression.
Once, also, when Eva said to me, "If you marry, boy, and have a baby, I will be a great-great-grand-mother," Ruth fumed silently. Her mother turned to her and said calmly, "And then you could take my place as great-grandmother, Ruthie."
My mother hates her for a greater and more subtle variety of reasons. She is nervous and tender in her presence and worries continually lest Eva will read her mind. The strain of being cheerful and kindly over irksome and sometimes loathsome tasks has worn away her spirit. Added to these physical causes is a still burning memory of the past. She remembers Eva's objections to her marriage, the scandal she created by her gossip. The feeling of indignation has remained alive in her and now her grandmother's utter helplessness, her almost pious ugliness, are constant reproaches to her inner emotions.
I can also imagine, of course, her more intricate woman's reaction to the sight of that withered and palsied body.
Once my mother said:
"I would hate to live that long, be so helpless and so . . . so . . ."
And she cried at the thought—of many things.
My father hates my great-grandmother because he is an artist. He writhes in the presence of her elegant grotesquerie, as he phrases it. He is in business now and doesn't write any more, and she is an irritating reminder to him of his art. My father knew Verlaine in Paris and D'Lisle Adam. He spent many nights talking with Symons and he and Huysmans once got drunk together. He was young then, my father. After their marriage, my mother prevailed upon him to give up writing. He hates her, even as he hates Ruth and Eva. But through some elaborate process this hate has reached its highest point against my great-grandmother. He regards her as a source. He detects a malignancy in her every attitude. Once he said to me that he was sure the creature joyed in her own decomposition.
"She is in love with her spotted complexion," he said. "She takes pride in her horrible body. She knows we hate her, and is content. She has spent all her life overriding her family, dictating, commanding. Now she glories in the contrast, aware that her ridiculous helplessness is more imperious than her strongest commands were once. She nurses her tortures as one would polish his weapons. More than anything she knows that the sight of her is an uncanny revelation of the future. She keeps thinking, 'They will all be like me some time, and they know it.' God, it is almost impossible to imagine, without seeing, what the human body can come to!"
I myself hate her, but do not know why. I am interested, sometimes fascinated, by her. I watch her queer movements and appreciate her manners. In the last few years she has marvelously resumed the manners of her youth, those sweet, regal inanities of the past. She curtsies, attitudinizes, gestures with the air of a grand dame, which fill the room with visions of post-Colonial days. Of course, they are not her manners. They are the manners of old people in the days she was a girl, and she has suddenly remembered them to the smallest detail. Whether this remembering is a natural atavism or another manifestation of her dainty maliciousness I do not know, any more than I know why I hate her.
The physical repugnance does not explain it. Yet I find myself wishing with a whole-hearted vigor at times that my great-grandmother were dead. When I left her in the dark a few minutes ago I had this feeling. I was afraid of her eyes. They struck me as being uncanny. I thought of witches and Black Sabbaths—and hurried down the stairs.
As the four of us sat in the room we were suddenly startled by a noise overhead, in my great-grandmother's room, a noise of something falling on the floor.
My grandmother stood up, her eyes eager, and sucked her lips excitedly.
My mother looked pale and remained with her mouth open as if she were holding her breath. A wild hope was in her eyes, which had suddenly started to gleam.
My father and I looked at each other. His face was full of suppressed smiles.
"Hurry," gasped my mother.
We were all on our feet, listening with a strained, awkward attentiveness.
There was no further sound.
"Hurry," my mother said again.
My father went to her and patted her shoulder.
"If anything has happened," he said, "we must be calm."
I had an idea he was going to laugh boyishly.
My grandmother remained with her face intent, still listening as if fearful of hearing other sounds, even the faintest of stirrings from up, there.
I left the room.
As I left I could feel the three of them whispering to themselves.
When I reached the stairs I heard my father's voice with a queer unctuous intonation:
"Yes, darling, be calm . . . I think it is over . . . at last. . . . The excitement . . . the excitement of the birthday . . . the cake . . . wine . . . everything must have been too much for her heart. Wait . . ."
I opened the door of my great-grandmother's room and stared against the dark.
After a few moments I made out her figure.
She was sitting in her chair at the window where I had left her. I felt her eyes turned toward me. A thin, watery voice came from her:
"I thought you'd come up. I dropped my shoe. You seem so excited, boy. You mustn't run up those stairs."
She laughed softly.
"No—it was only my shoe," she said with a sudden crispness. "And tell your grandmother I am ready to go to bed."