A Life of Holes

The first chill of late summer brought with it the end of one problem and the beginning of all the others. 

As the cool sun came up that day, I was not at home. In fact, I was on a walk to clear my head from lack of sleep the night before. I passed each intersection with disinterest as I took a right, then a left, then another left, under the influence of my indecision and foggy countenance, until I stopped in front of the last house on the edge of town. It was more of a castle than a house; its stone walls and weathered corners lent an air of lost aristocracy, the wide lawn around it making room for generations before it with a lost catalog of barons and signet rings. It towered over the rest of the houses along that street, as an old cathedral would in the midst of tacky row homes with low rent and lower character. It was a guardian, if you would think it to be, of the countryside, the last respite before you left town and ventured onto the next. What possessed me, I will never know, but I found the notion to seek and knock.

After several minutes of loitering littered with intermittent rapping on the door, I turned to go when I was greeted by a discreet man walking in the garden. I had not noticed him before, for he seemed to know which parts of the grounds would crackle with leaves underfoot and which parts would not. I found out later that he was the butler of the estate and was known as Tidwell. He was a polite and reserved individual, as I imagined butlers aspired to be, and yet there was a dignified, regal air about him, in the way he enunciated his words and measured his movement, quite out of place for a servant, even for a servant in an estate such as this. He did not show signs of alarm at my intrusion, but almost seemed to expect me. Truthfully, I had no real purpose being there, but I found myself fingering the hole in my pocket as I asked about the possibility of employment. Without a pause, Tidwell explained that there was a recent vacancy for a valet, and there were no second thoughts in my mind, only the craving to fix that pesky hole in my pocket, or to come into the sort of life where I could have ten holes if I wanted. I had no qualms with Tidwell shaking my hand and leading me inside.

It was a different world inside from what I had grown accustomed to in my drafty apartment. The wooden door, which I imagined once adorned the halls of Versailles, welcomed me into a cozy foyer with ornate furnishings and a warm brick fireplace in the next room. Out of the main passageway to see the newcomer came the house staff to greet me, including one called Fosnie, an odd, slouched, bookish man who did not speak and whose purpose was not entirely known to me. Tidwell introduced me to all, then bade me follow them down the wide hallway to the dining room. My nostrils quickly forgot the smells of the sweating street and were graciously invited into an enticing full English breakfast that had just been served. We all sat, myself last of all as I was occupied taking in the scenery. The room was a wide one, with a gilded chandelier overhead and delicate silk curtains veiling the natural light pouring through large windows. Behind them lay an expanse of garden, perfectly trimmed for peace over practicality. The room itself was silent now, as we all waited for one chair, the head of the table, to be filled, as Tidwell mentioned he would be there shortly.

A concealed door in the corner of the room opened without warning, and I finally laid eyes on the master of the house, Simon R. Yearwood, J.D., a tall, eccentric figure who was eager for life yet protected his mornings and evenings with the dedication of a monk. Every morning at eight o'clock sharp, he, along with the staff, would sit for breakfast, and the air was cordial: they would discuss the gamut of topics, from the day's itinerary to the decisions of the district senator, from the personal lives of those in his employment to the score of last night's baseball game. He held them close to himself, as a father would. When they had all finished, Mr. Yearwood would rise and be on his way, going about his daily business, and the staff would all resume their duties.

The first day of employment at Mr. Yearwood's estate was chiefly supervised by Tidwell, who ran me through the expectations: the day would begin at six o'clock with the stoking of the fire in the hearth and the fetching of the local paper, to be presented to Mr. Yearwood at six-thirty as he awoke, and to prepare grooming materials for a daily shave at seven as he digested the news. Upon being shaved, Mr. Yearwood would retreat to his study with Fosnie, whom I noted I never saw after that point in the day, and I would gather yesterday's laundry, as well as any formal clothes or suits that needed dry-cleaning. At eight, breakfast was served, and immediately upon finishing, I would escort Mr. Yearwood to his car, where I would drive him to his office by nine and return promptly to the manor. From that point in the morning until Mr. Yearwood was to be fetched at five o'clock in the evening, I would clean the handful of cars in his arsenal, pick up any dry-cleaning, polish his shoes, finish laundry, restock the kitchen with fresh ingredients when needed, organize his luggage if traveling on business or holiday, and otherwise be available for an odd task or an extra hand for one reason or another. Dinner was promptly at six, and Mr. Yearwood, along with the rest of us, retired shortly afterward.

For the remainder of the season, there were no concerns to speak of. Beyond my explicit duties and if not otherwise occupied, I was left ordinarily to myself, to roam the grounds and find time for leisure where it could be found. Not a room or trinket in the house was inaccessible to any of us; if we desired, considering our duties were not neglected, we could swim in the in-ground pool, or peruse the library, or help ourselves to the pantry for a refreshment, or simply help ourselves, if one had a penchant for it, to one of many ornate briar pipes from Mr. Yearwood’s collection, along with an assortment of choice tobaccos of the finest Virginian soil. More often than not, if the weather was fair, I would ruminate with a cherry smoke cloud over my head and weigh my state, watching the birds overhead and the sun move slowly in the sky. As the days flew past, and each yellow summer day turned colorfully red with the changing foliage, I remembered less and less the life I had abandoned: the life of crumbs on my plate and dust on my hat, the life of creditors hounding me for my debts I could pay but never outrun, the life of sleepless nights and worrisome tasks and burdens, the life of holes.

On one particular afternoon, Tidwell joined me. In his gentlemanly manner, he contributed to the smoky musings on the back porch as he revealed that he was, in fact, a runaway from the life of holes as well. Respect was what kept his family afloat for generations, a well-to-do mining dynasty, until his father squandered a business investment and left the wealth to the dogs. Respect was lost, and for the remainder of Tidwell's youth he fought his way back to it. Through a disjointed series of events, Mr. Yearwood’s grandfather, from whom Mr. Yearwood father had inherited the estate, and Mr. Yearwood then from his father, caught Tidwell stealing food from the pantry as a youth. Rather than reporting Tidwell to the authorities and seeing him thrown back to the streets, the eldest Yearwood gave him a grand chance to redeem himself and granted a chance to fill that hole. And respect he earned, through the years of service to the Yearwood dynasty, and he confessed to me that while respect had been earned, and given to him by association, the hole that he sought escape from was still there. In fact, he would fall into it on occasion, if a caller gave him an odd glance, or a napkin was laid quite crooked, or his bow tie seemed askew. He said we all have holes, and he learned, he said, to live with his. Could I live with mine? As he arose and went inside, I realized I had too many. While I could live with some, my bent to gamble on a new thing, and therefore let it go just to find it again, I could not, would not, live with others: my status, my lowly family name, my ambition, my stubborn grip on myself. The holes are mine to own, and my own to repair, or to keep. If life in employment to Mr. Yearwood was my savior, would my holes still remain, and if they did, would I relinquish control over it? I certainly could not live with that.

As the weather continued to cool off, the sleepless nights, which had been banished by silk sheets and a cozy loft room in the manor, crept back into my mind. At first, it was only a difficulty falling asleep, with thoughts wheeling through my mind, or a sudden startle in the middle of the night and a restlessness I could not soothe. Before long, I would lie awake for hours at a time waiting to either nod off or for the sun to rise. Not wanting to wander the streets, I would stalk the halls of the manor, tracing the wood grain of the candlelit walls as I paced back and forth from my room to the end of the hallway, and back again, occasionally snatching a piece of fruit from the kitchen just to resume my route and hope my head would tingle with the faint whisperings of sleep. These nights were uninterrupted, save for one occasion: the night after an autumn party, I found myself on the prowl again, when I nearly stumbled into Fosnie standing in front of Mr. Yearwood’s study. He had been silently loitering in the threshold of the doorway, and his stance was so that a single foot jutted out from the corner and could have tripped me if I cared less. He was a menacing sight to behold that night, his frame blackening the bookshelves behind him, the silhoutette of a shrunken man suddenly towering in the glow of a single candle. When asked what he was doing up at this hour, he did not reply. The floorboards creaked underneath me as I shifted back and forth. Plucking up my courage again, I asked him, for the first time, what his purpose is in Yearwood's employment. After a long pause, he spoke the only words I ever heard him utter: "There is always a limit. I have accepted it. Have you?" The sentence so unnerved me that I darted in the opposite direction to my quarters and quickly pretended to sleep. "Have you?"

I had not. Every breakfast as we all garthered, my countenance became as foggy as it had been that first fateful morning. Mr. Yearwood would include me in the banter before the day begun, but as weeks rolled on, my answers became short and clipped, and while Mr. Yearwood seemed to brush it off as the weather chilling my bones as well as the air, I knew it was more than that. The ease of the manor halls grew far from me, and I began to itch for more, a new scene, a new catalyst of another place and another time, to master something and not be mastered. My duties were performed with no change to their quality or consistency, but I began to detest the linens I gathered, the cars I managed, the back porch, the basket of apples at the ready on the kitchen island, the razor I held to the throat of my master every morning. They could not be mine, no matter how I willed it. And would that always be the case? The days grew colder still as I forgot the value of my station and fantasized about my own pipes, my own library, a stone hall that was mine to walk. I grew bent with plotting my rise, and I began to imagine myself to be the master of the house that had somehow been deposed in another place and another time and would stage a coup to overthrow the new order and resurrect the old. I mixed together a half-baked scheme in which I would slip into his study at an odd hour, rip a blank check out of his pocketbook, and steal off into the night, writing whatever amount I fancied and cashing it, to never return to the manor again. I would not be consoled in this maddening daydream, and I feared that my plans would slip from my mind onto my tongue in some interaction or sideways glance from another, unraveling my ploy altogether before it began. The sleepless nights continued.

"Have you? Have you?"

Tidwell noticed it first. I returned one morning from my daily escort to the office, rubbing my heavy eyes as I walked through the front door and made my way to the washroom. Tidwell, as dutiful as ever, greeted me by the door but said nothing afterward, instead watching me with scrutiny as I walked past him, not greeting him in return. My footsteps echoed along the walls, following me, but I seemed to hear another set of footsteps treading behind. I turned to see, and seeing no one I continued to walk. As my head returned forward, I stumbled into Tidwell, who had made his way in front of me. He grasped my shoulders to keep me from falling, then held firmly as he looked me over in a long moment that made me squirm. He knew. I was sure of it. He knew, even though I did not know as much myself, and he did not say a word, but his silence hung together with the stillness of the morning air. We were held between what we knew to be right and what men of our kind wanted if the eye of God passed over us. But Tidwell was a better man than me; he finally let me go, granted me a warning flick of the eye, then passed me by and disappeared at the other end of the corridor. Now it came to it: the walls were cramped, deafening. Any echo of steps along the marble floor became a raging dissonant chord in my ears. Was I the only soul in those halls that now found the comfort unbeareable?

Winter arrived in its boorish way, and Mr. Yearwood's annual New Year's Eve ball had arrived. Many odds and ends were inventoried and accounted for, and more preparation was required in anticipation for the grand assimilation of the town's high society. I remembered walking by the manor as a child, wishing on the clear stars of my childhood that I would one day attend. Now, as I found myself the night of, passing hors d'oeuvres to esteemed gentlemen and ladies and watching the silk dresses and wing-tipped shoes swish across the floor in rhythm, there was no satisfaction in it, no belonging for myself among the harmony of guarded words and more guarded reputations. Proximity was not the answer I had hoped for, nor was surrender to the holes that remained in me. When my plate of appetizers had emptied, I found that I was unsupervised, and I feigned diligence and stole away to Mr. Yearwood's study. So this is what the serpent must have felt like in Eden. I shuddered.

"Have you? Have you?"

The snow blinded the view outside as I crept into the study, opening the door with as little effort as I could muster so as to not make the door squeak on its hinges. Inside sat a row of bookshelves filled with volumes and odd trinkets, a separate fireplace that had burned low, and Mr. Yearwood's executive desk against the tall windows. I kept an ear open for any changes in the cacaphony of laughter and clinking floating in from the ballroom as I felt my way to the lowest drawer in the desk. I had just pinched my fingers on a corner of the glorious slip of paper and ripped it free, all at once holding my freedom and my burden, when the noise shifted behind me, and the light from the ballroom darkened over the desk: Tidwell. Of course it was. We were the same man, he and I. Tidwell closed the gap between us before I could blink in surprise, and I found I no longer held the check. Tidwell held it instead, and to my bewilderment, he inspected it and handed it back to me. In my shock I glanced at the check again to discover it had been filled out. It was written out to me, with an exorbitant amount of value. In this, I was stunned beyond decorum, and I flew into a blinding rage, lambasting Yearwood, Tidwell, and the whole darned affair. Tidwell did not blink as I felt my voice, at first mighty and indignant with contempt and unfounded cynicism, creep slowly to a murmur and at last was silent as I realized all that left my mouth was "Have you?", repeated until even those words lost their meaning, if they ever had any to begin with. Tidwell stepped aside, and out of the room I sprinted, past the ballroom and the kitchen, and out the front door where I stood breathless in the winter storm. 

From that moment, I knew I was dead, yet I never felt more alive. There was no harmony between the two. One part of me wanted nothing, and the other everything. One would move heaven and earth to get his way, and the other would happily watch it be buried in the snow. I would sooner take life by the goblet and drain it to the dregs than to let it pass me by, byt when I tire of it all, then I will take my solitude and never be seen again in the land of the living. I suppose that my burden is too singular to step in and write an ending. So do I stand in the gap for as long as I live? Or do I make a choice, and in doing so let another choice go? O life, in all its glory, do not let melt into the cracks of indecision. Let me fill something, anything, but not nothing. Let pieces of me die, so that all of me may live!

I looked back at the manor, now hardly visible from the street corner, yet still inviting through nature's white veil. It dawned on me that I still grasped the check, now wadded in my hand from panic. I shielded it against the elements and peered down at it in the light of a lone street lamp. I had not been mistaken: the amount was indeed more than I deserved. What I had missed was that the check was not from Mr. Yearwood's book. It had, instead, a family crest I did not recognize. Reading the name of the account holder made my heart jump with a tinge of guilt. and yet more than this there was something captured in me, reconciled, and dare I say surrendered, and I was amended to it. On the memo line, there was written only this:

"For the hole in your pocket. All my respect, -T"