Lilacs in November

Elijah lived alone. The old man's house was set back from the street, an outsized colonial behind a row of ornamental cedar. A white arch marked the place where the trees parted, where their branches had been hacked away. The lawn had long since gone to dandelions, but a footpath had been beaten from the archway to the deck.

As children, we spent hours outside the house. On summer evenings, we gathered beneath the archway and watched the windows for movement, shadows. The colonial was so quiet sometimes that it seemed to breathe: slowly, as if listening for the sound of its own heartbeat. From the cedars, we could see the clutter on the unpainted porch, the accumulation of a life lived at sea: rocking chairs and exotic plants, plaster bowls and wicker baskets, bamboo chimes from the Far East.

The shades were always drawn, light-filled and fluttering on those long August nights when we lingered among the cedar-shadows. We told each other stories: ghost stories, gruesome tales of madness and loss. When the wind gusted off the ocean, the shades slapped against the window frames and we ran, terrified, faint chimes rippling in the silence we left.

* * *

He had been a seaman: decades before, during the days of shipping, when the triangles of trade still spanned the globe, and clipper ships bounced from port to port, retracing the geometry. As a young man, he had been married. We pestered our parents, but no one remembered anything about the wife. We asked the priest, but Father Bailey merely sighed and shook his head. "You leave old Elijah alone," he said. Even then, it sounded more to us like a plea than a rebuke.

The old man never left the house. Sometimes he hired people from town to help him with odd jobs, but they were always older boys, teenagers. At sixteen, my first cousin vanished into the house for an afternoon. When I asked him about it later, he said he didn't want to talk about it. "You'll find out soon enough," he said. "Just wait til you're older."

* * *

Waiting was all we did in those days. We waited for classes to end each day and for school to let out in summer. We waited for our muscles to form and our bodies to fill, for the girls to notice us at the dancehall. Mostly, we waited for independence: from our families, from church. Even from each other.

One Sunday morning, Father Bailey took my friend Jacob aside and asked him to go over that afternoon to help the old man. "I'm sure he'll pay you," the priest added, his voice low and strangely soft, but Jacob had already made up his mind.

After church, we walked with him to the archway. "Wish me luck," he said, and passed beneath. The path was unused and overgrown, high with flowering weeds: loosestrife, chicory. He stepped onto the porch. The door was ajar. He paused for a moment, and then went inside.

Once the door shut, we melted from the house, returning to our families, our Sunday chores. We went back after supper. There was still no sign of Jacob, so we stood by the cedars swapping stories, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Sixteen years old, we watched the silent house intently, as if we expected the future itself to emerge from the close and shady stillness.

It was dusk by the time the front door creaked open. Jacob paced slowly down the path, meeting us under the arch. His face was pale and he appeared pensive. What happened? we asked him. What was it like? All around us we could hear the music of crickets, the murmur of the ocean. He cleared his throat to speak.

* * *

It's strange, he said. I thought I would be nervous crossing the lawn, but I only felt sad to see all the weeds, the dead and yellowed grass. I couldn't help but smile when I remembered standing at the arch as kids, how scared we used to get. I went up onto the porch, ducking my head beneath the wind chimes. The door had been left open, but the room beyond was dark, and I hesitated for a second. I gathered my thoughts, pushed the door open the rest of the way, and stepped one foot inside.

From what I could make out of the room, I was in the parlor. The air was musty, and the old man stood not five feet from the door, bracing himself on the edge of a roll-top desk. Shards of sun flashed at the edges of the shades, and in that light, he appeared little more than a shadow, a fire-shape on the faded wallpaper.

"So," he said.

I introduced myself, crossing the room to shake his hand. An oriental rug had been thrown down over the floorboards. It muffled my tread completely.

The old man's grip was loose, frail. "You're the one that Bailey sent."

I nodded.

"How old are you now?"

"Seventeen," I said.

He didn't say a word, but he kept on looking at me. His eyes were brown and milky.

I glanced at my feet. "Next winter."

He shrugged—or seemed to, anyway. It was a slight gesture, and the light made it hard to tell. "Old enough, I guess."

I held my silence.

"I'll give you a dollar for the day's work," he said. "And I'll give you dinner. Later on. Once you've finished."

I nodded.

"But don't go and get your hopes up," he added. "I'm no cook."

I thanked him, but he brushed it off.

"I need your help with the wallpapering upstairs," he said. "You think you can do that?"

I had never wallpapered before, but I said I could.

"Good," he said.

For a moment we stood facing each other. The house had a smell to it. A dull scent, shapeless and stale. It was as if the house had been boarded up decades ago, its windows sealed, everything inside left to linger: time-trapped, sterile, unchanging.

I could hear birds chirping in the weeds under the windows. Chickadees. When one winged too near the house, the wind chimes tinkled in its wake.

"Well," the old man said. "Let's get you to work."

* * *

He led me through the parlor, past the kitchen, and up the stairs to a long hall. Upstairs, it was similarly dark. All of the windows were shaded, their panes cracked open to admit the summer air. There was a cuckoo clock at the top of the steps. It looked expensive: a hand-carved house for the bird, its pendulum gilt with gold. As I followed him down the hall, I felt like I was on the knife's edge between two seasons, two worlds. There was a world outside and a world within. On one side there were songbirds and sunlight, summertime. On the other, the old clock, the dead light, and the stink.

At the end of the hall, he paused at the last door. He turned the handle and nudged it open with his foot. The corridor exploded with summer sun. When I ducked my head into the bedroom, I saw there were no blinds on the windows. Twin portals faced outward, away from the street and out to sea. The wallpaper was brightly patterned with flowers on a white background. It looked fresh, nearly new. It didn't need a change half as bad as the paper in the parlor.

The old man seemed uncomfortable in the sunlight. His face was expressionless, but for the first time, I could see how weak he looked: how thin his shoulders were, the way his pants seemed to hang loose around his waist, their cuffs trailing on the floor. He was deathly pale.

He didn't follow me inside. "I'll be back in a minute," he said. He closed the door behind me, leaving me alone in the room.

The bed was an old-fashioned four-poster, its frame adorned with shreds of faded gossamer. They hung there limply, a formless non-color in the streaming daylight. The bed looked to have been rarely used, the blankets dusted brown. I went to the windows. Beyond Cobble Beach, a burst of sunlight slanted to meet the sea. It was a beautiful day, and the waves turned and tossed the light against itself, everything sparkling. The windows were closed, but I could smell the ocean.

I turned back to the room. There were perfume bottles on the bureau, a row of three beneath an empty mirror frame. There were other things on the dresser too, feminine things. There was a hairbrush with a silver handle. A hand mirror with its reflective face removed. I found a small painting amid the clutter. It was a miniature oil of a woman. Her eyes were two dots of gray paint and waves of black hair fanned down her forehead, framing her sharp nose and cheekbones. She was beautiful, but it was an old painting, and I couldn't help but sigh to see it. I turned it over in my hands. Self-portrait, it read in once-black ink. And then the date: April 25, 1875. It was more than thirty-five years old.

I started when I heard the door. I replaced the painting on the bureau and turned to see the old man. He was bringing me the tools I needed. He carried them in his right hand. In his left, he held a bucket of water. Under his arm, he had a roll of fresh wallpaper, white with purple flowers. I took them from him. As before, he seemed uncomfortable in the sunlight. It was clear he didn't want to go into the bedroom, and I didn't ask him about the picture.

"I'll leave you to it," he said. "See you for dinner."

* * *

I worked deep into the afternoon. I had never wallpapered before, but I found it to be tough, rewarding work. I loved the smell of the plaster caked on my hands, the way it lingered under my nails. Halfway through my second hour of work, I noticed another smell too: the faint aroma of perfume. It was at once distant and near, delicate and diffuse. Lilacs.

As I worked, the light failed gradually, going gray. I paused at the window to watch the clouds roll off the ocean. They were shaped like waves, violet and hanging low. They moved rapidly, passing over Cobble Beach. It was going to rain.

It was close to six o'clock by the time the old man finally came upstairs. "Dinner's about ready," he said from the doorway. He nodded expectantly and turned from the room. I followed him downstairs.

* * *

We ate in the dining room. It was a tiny paneled space situated off the parlor. An oil lamp sat on a long table, flanked by twin candlesticks. He left the lamp unlit, opting for candlelight. It made the cracks and hollows vanish from his face so that he looked no more than forty or forty-five years old. For a moment, I wondered if that was the reason he kept the house so dark—but then I remembered there were no mirrors.

He served me soup from a cast-iron pot: clam chowder with carrots and potatoes. He filled my bowl and took a seat across from me. My spoon scraped on the bowl. Rain began to fall. I could hear it snaking down the darkened panes, spattering the shades as it blew in with the wind. It wasn't a storm-rain, but a healing rain: the kind that kneads the sand grains together, seeping down through the soil to make the grass glitter.

At times, it sounded like there was someone moving around upstairs. I thought I could hear footsteps through the ceiling. It was a hollow sound, ringed by the murmur of falling rain. For a moment, the footsteps seemed to grow louder, but then they were gone, and then the rain was there again, and then the silence.

I couldn't stand it any longer. "This soup," I said. "Is it your recipe?"

He grunted. "No," he said. "My wife's."

"Oh."

I thought that was the end of it. I waited for another silence to settle, but he coughed and continued. "That painting upstairs," he began. "You saw it?"

I nodded.

"How young she was then," he says. "But she was never old."

It takes me a moment to get his meaning.

"It's been thirty-five years," he said. "Thirty-five years this November. I shipped out on a clipper from Newport. When I came home a year later, she was gone."

"Gone?"

"It's a hard life," he said, avoiding the question. "A sailor's wife. She was an artist, a painter. She loved the ocean, but only the way an artist does. She was too sensitive for it, for the life I gave her. That's what everyone told her. It's too much for some people, the solitude."

I waited for him to continue.

"But she knew what I was. She knew what I was and she married me anyway. Still—it makes me sad. When I was at sea, I used to wonder what it was like to be the one left behind. To stand at the window and watch the sea until your eyes ached, wondering when that ship was coming in, wondering if. But I found out soon enough."

"What happened?"

"Bailey saw it all. He knew I was away, so he came over to give her comfort. He found the house empty. He went upstairs to the bedroom, but she wasn't there. He was about to leave when he saw her from the window. She was on the beach in her white dress. Her wedding dress. Bailey waved from the window but she didn't see him—just kept on walking toward the sea. He shouted but she couldn't hear him."

I glanced down into my bowl. I couldn't meet his eyes.

"I came back and she was gone," he continued. "I don't go in the bedroom anymore. Least I try not to. When I'm there, all I do is stand at the window, just like she must have done. I watch the waves until my eyes hurt and I know for sure that she's not coming back.

"But I try to keep it the way she left it. The bedroom. The house too. Because sometimes I'll be watching the sea, and the sun will flash in just this certain way, and I'll remember that they never found her body."

He lowered his voice as if confiding a secret. "There are even times I think she's still with me. Times I think I feel her breath on my neck or smell her perfume behind me. But the last bottle dried up years ago, and when I turn around, she's never there."

He paused. "Sometimes I wonder if she's as lost in this house as I am. If she mourns me just as I mourn her."

* * *

After dinner, the old man walked me to the front door. "I'll do the rest," he said. "But I appreciate the help." I didn't know what to say. He gave me a dollar like he had promised and another quarter as well.

He opened the door. The sun was setting. The rain looked to have cleared up, and the lawn lay steaming before us, sparkling and pink. When I caught a whiff of perfume on the air, it only made me sad.

"There were times I thought that she never loved me," he said. "That she only loved the sea. But once she was gone, I knew I had been wrong. She loved the ocean, but she didn't understand it, just as she didn't understand love. She loved it—she did—but she never understood it, and then she was gone."

* * *

When Jacob finished his story, we were silent. He laughed nervously. "That was it," he said. "All those stories, all those years of waiting, and for what?"

No one responded.

He said: "Now give me a cigarette." I handed him one of mine. He struck a match and lit up, his eyes brightening with each drag. Even fire-lit, they seemed far away.

Hours passed, but we didn't leave the house. Quiet, we listened to the night as it swooped to cover us, absorbing sound like light. Our cigarettes extinguished, we stood silent, listening. When the ocean disappeared with the crickets, leaving us with our heartbeats, we began to disperse. One-by-one, we headed home.

* * *

Years passed. My friends married and moved away. War came. Jacob died in France, torn apart by shrapnel. Father Bailey succumbed to the flu, drowning in mucus on a hospital cot. Before long, I was passing the house alone. Sometimes I stopped by the wooden archway. I peered in at the overgrown lawn, the porch with its baskets and potted plants, but I knew it was only to remember the mystery: the way we huddled by the cedars, our breath held together, waiting for the future to come out.

* * *

In August 1921, Elijah died.

It was the smell that alerted the neighbors. Someone called the sheriff. Sheriff Grady with his khaki shirt, his bulging gut. He knocked, but received no response. The door was fastened, but he forced the lock, breaking through into the musty stillness of the parlor. He followed the odor upstairs to the bedroom, where he found the old man in a four-poster, long since fallen into disrepair. Elijah's face was expressionless, his eyes like empty mirrors. The sheets were pulled to his chin, folded back against his breast. Remembering this detail later, the sheriff mused: "It almost looked like he had been tucked in."

* * *

I was twenty-five then. Twenty-seven when I married and settled down to have a family. When I was thirty, my wife died in childbirth, and my only son grew up to leave me at seventeen.

My life slipped into routine. During the week, I kept myself busy with housework, odd jobs. I wrote sonnets and printed them in the local paper. Every Sunday after church, I went to the cemetery to pray at my wife's grave. Sometimes I brought flowers with me. White roses from a florist. They were clipped and dying, but I planted them anyway, arranging them in a semicircle at the base of her headstone. I prayed. The Hail Mary. The Our Father. The Glory Be. I prayed and then I left.

It was on one such morning—a foggy Sunday in the depths of November—that it happened. As usual, I had gone to the cemetery to pray. I was kneeling by my wife's grave when I sensed that I was not alone. I looked up to see a young woman nearby. She couldn't have been much older than twenty-five, but she was wearing an old-fashioned dress. It was sopping wet, I noticed, as if she had just been for a swim, clothes and all, in the November ocean. Her hair was long and black. It fell to the small of her back, tangled throughout with scraps of seaweed. She stood motionless a few feet from the old man's grave.

When she finally caught sight of me, she smiled. It was a gentle smile, strained by years of grieving. She turned from me and stooped to touch her lips to the old man's headstone. "Goodnight, Elijah" she whispered, though it was still morning.

A seagull shrieked, somewhere far away, and she was gone.

* * *

It was only when I stood that I noticed the flowers she had placed on his grave. Two sprigs of lilac: their branches twined together, blossoms damp with saltwater. Reaching down, I lifted the flowers and brought them to my face. I breathed deeply, hoping for a hint of springtime. After a moment, I lowered them.

All I could smell was the sea.

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