Sylvia Endicott Weld, from the Fall of 2004 to the Spring 2006

From the fall of 2004 to early 2006, you could not attend a party, fundraiser, auction, wedding, or funeral without being subjected to rumors and theories about the curious life of Sylvia Endicott Weld. As I was often considered Sylvia's oldest and dearest friend, I was in the unenviable position of having to hear them all.

Sylvia was the pleasant, but unremarkable product of the Salem Endicotts. Andover, Harvard. Pretty without being beautiful, smart without being clever, social without being a snob. She was considered an excellent match for Paul Weld, the bud of a New Hampshire branch of the Connecticut Welds. Philip Exeter, Harvard.

They married just a few months after graduation. There was, of course, some soft hurrumphing from the elders about unseemly haste, but both bride and groom were so unobjectionable that no family put up any serious resistance.

Next: the now-obligatory colorful year spent as a volunteer in some picaresque African locale. Then Paul returned to Boston and entered business. Sylvia transformed her year abroad into a full-time preoccupation with trendy causes and the social events that make such Sisyphean hobby-horses tolerable.

Her interest was genuine. A well-regulated and fashionable saintliness was her only rebellion.

Just what medical problem Sylvia experienced in fall of 2004 is a mystery I cannot help unravel. But it is clear that, whatever it was, it began the anchorite existence that became, for a brief period, an obsession of the nattering class.

***

Sometimes Sylvia sat on the couch and tried to pretend that she was a prisoner. If she could work herself into a rage or focus her overwhelming sense of apathy into a hot and dense black hole of horror, she thought that she could compel herself to leave the apartment. Hard as she might try, the hoped for anger and fear never materialized.

Other times, she tried to pretend that her small stores of fear and anger, along with other, less defined territories of her psychic landscape, had been submerged by the flood of solicitous and condescending behavior her near un-life provoked. From the moment the doctors told her that there was no permanent damage - but she should take things easy and, maybe, if possible, avoid work – she had been treated like some exotic and magnificently expensive hothouse flower.

Even Paul, her workaholic husband, noted for his unnecessary financial competence and the undisguised disdain with which he fulfilled the charitable obligations of vast wealth, had bent under Sylvia's every new whim and humored every quirk of Sylvia's eccentric new shut-in lifestyle. She could tell he was straining against the press of get-well and back-on-the-horse clichés. They pushed against his tightly pressed lips, eager to spill forth and tell her about the promise of new days and the character building side effects of misfortune.

A part of Sylvia was desperate to think that she could find reserves of strength, untapped stores of vitality, if only somebody would resist the oppressive demands of her status as the unfortunate victim. But she knew this was a self-serving justification: she had locked herself away. Sylvia's friends quit calling, her former co-workers no longer checked in, and her husband lived around her. Sylvia swooned into loneliness and made no move to stop the decline. She stayed in the apartment, living exclusively in bathrobes and sleepwear. Prepared meals came from the delivery service and were left by the door. She did not answer the telephone or the door. She watched her increasing isolation with an emotional numbness akin to clinical detachment.

Sometimes she wondered how much Paul's family and their wealth (Paul did not spend his working hours making money so much as he tended to a vast and fruitful herd of money) determined the responses of others to her curious existence. She never pondered the question too deeply. Her limited powers of sympathy left her unable to imagine any other life. The entire issue was really only interesting in a vague and self-evidently useless way, like the absurd and brief-lived impulse one feels to examine the crossword puzzle of another commuter on the T though one cannot make a mark on his paper.

The maid arrived after Sylvia had spent nearly a year as a solitary recluse.

The apartment had gone into a slow, but observable decline. Sylvia had even noticed a curious smell that filled the apartment: a cross between the odor of fried chicken and the scent of rotting grass clippings. Sylvia had pondered if this was the smell of her own decay.

She was – in that vague way that all her emotions had become little more than a slight back buzz of noise to her conscious thoughts – annoyed that her husband had, once again, anticipated and satisfied a need she herself had not yet identified. He announced it one night while they both read in bed (a habit that, years ago, had stuck her as charming in a 1960s sit-com way, but now filled her with a crushing sense of tradition).

"I thought we already employed a house keeper," she said.

"We did. But she would only come in when we were," Paul closed his book around the index finger of his right hand, then rotated his wrist to better see the back cover. For a moment he pretended that he was engrossed in the cover copy. He did not finish the sentence. "This new girl is highly recommended. I have told her agency to instruct her to work around you. Quiet as the dead."

She folded down the corner of the page she was reading, closed her book, leaned over the side of the bed, and placed it back-cover down on the carpeted floor of the bedroom. Though she had a nightstand on her side of the bed, she had long ago developed the habit of leaving her reading books on the floor.

She righted herself and leaned back into the pillows.

"She does not speak a word of English. At least, the agency tells me she speaks no English," he said. Paul was still reading the back cover of his book. He must have read it over several times over by that point.

"Good night," she said.

The maid was a young woman from either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Sylvia's husband had specified her point of origin, but Sylvia had forgotten.

The maid knocked twice and, before Sylvia could get to the door, let herself in. Sylvia's husband had provided her with a copy of the key. Sylvia thought this was odd as is assumed the possibility that Sylvia might be out.

The maid was wearing cheap white athletic sneakers, blue jeans, and a pink button-up work shirt. The shirt had the name of the maid's company – Professional Cleaners – on a white and pink patch above her left breast.

The maid was young. Sylvia thought she might be in her mid-twenties, maybe even younger. She wore her jet-black hair in a severe ponytail. The maid had large brown eyes that seemed too small for the glasses she wore, comical saucer-shaped lenses in dull gunmetal circular frames. Around her neck, she wore a small golden cross, turning slightly green around the edges.

An abortive attempt at conversation led Sylvia to the conclusion that the maid spoke no English and, after a few embarrassingly ineffectual attempts at pantomime-based interaction, both parties seemed to reach a mutual, if unacknowledged, agreement that they would simply ignore one another.

The maid was quiet and efficient. She came twice a week: Tuesday and Thursday. Each cleaning took her about four hours. She never talked on the phone. She never took lunch breaks. Sometimes, she hummed tunes Sylvia never recognized, though she was fairly discrete about it. The humming never bothered Sylvia. By the second week, the house was looking presentable and that smell, the thin fried chicken and decayed grass stench, was gone. By the third week, Sylvia and the maid had established an elaborate and effective – though completely unspoken – choreography of avoidance. It was a mirror relationship to the one Sylvia shared with her husband, though in some ways deeper for the naked truth of its silence, its lack of white noise small talk that attempted to hide the stark and barren dimensions of the their marriage.

Come Thanksgiving, Paul left for California to spend some time with his stepmother. The old woman was ailing and Paul planned to stay on the other coast for at least a month or two. He had offered Sylvia an opportunity to come, though he had made no effort to disguise the fact that he already knew her answer. She appreciated how easy he had made rejecting his proposal.

The first Thursday after Paul left, the maid arrived as usual. Sylvia was sleeping on the couch. She had fallen asleep there last night. The remains of a bottle of red wine, mostly finished, sat on the coffee table between Sylvia and the still-on television set.

She had been watching an all-pornographic pay channel. Something that came with the satellite package they'd purchased ages ago but, to the best of her knowledge, nothing she or Paul had watched before. She was not using the monotonous slapping of gym-worked and surgically-enhanced bodies as a masturbatory aid. Quite the opposite, actually. The chief draw of the obscene was the window it gave her on the affectless chasm of nothing within her. Like a flair thrown into a dark cave, the furiously indifferent and efficient sexuality vomiting forth from the television screen allowed her glimpses of the rough hewn limits of the emptiness which was now the single most notable feature of her psychological geography. It was this clinical self-evaluation, and not an animal lust, that was the reason she watched. And watched. And watched until the red wine and her inability to be aroused or repelled sent her to sleep.

It was this station that was still on when the maid arrived.

Sylvia was awoken by the maid's presence in the room, saw the sweaty and grunting bodies on the television, and scrambled to sit up. The wine bottle fell to its side and rolled to the floor. There was so little wine left that none of it spilled on the carpet. The maid heaved up rapidly delivered, apologetic sounding syllables, and began to clean frantically. The maid was horrified and her horror pinned Sylvia to the couch. The sudden exposure to whatever act happened was occurring on the television had struck the maid so profoundly that her movements were lose and wild, she shook uncontrollably, she chewed her lips.

Watching her, Sylvia saw and understood and, finally, felt the revulsion and attraction, the pain and humiliation, the suffering and the painful rush of excitement that, alone, she could not sense. This maid's discomfort was refilling Sylvia.

The maid did only a perfunctory job of cleaning the room. In just ten minutes, the maid beat a hasty retreat and fled the apartment.

***

It was, Sylvia would later tell me, the closest thing she ever had to a religious awakening.

That afternoon, the rush of near-divine ecstasy overpowering the pounding ache of her wine hangover, Sylvia left the apartment. She found her old clothes were rather tight. He body had grown slack during its sedentary existence. It was a crisp, but still unseasonably warm November. She walked past the astounded doorman and on to the streets of Boston. She was, she told me later, searching for a place to secure pornographic films.

How she found such a place is a mystery to me. How does anybody find such places? Though she did, a small cave-like place beneath a dry-cleaners near the Harvard Square T stop.

Manning the counter of this establishment was a young man who, when Sylvia approached him, was somewhat inexplicably underlining sections of the letter column in a copy of one of the hundreds of men's magazines on display.

"Hello," Sylvia said. "I wonder if you could assist me in making a selection."

The boy answered with a grunt. He had long blond hair and wore a green t-shirt advertising a club that claimed the distinction of being "the finest all nude entertainment experience in Atlantic City."

"I'm looking for your most offensive film. Several, actually. Let us say that I need copies of your four most upsetting films."

"Are you, like, a cop or something?"

"Oh, no. I assure that I simply wish to purchase some of your pornography." She fished into her purse and brought out a fistful of cash. "I fully intend to pay you for your products."

"You're freaking me out lady. We've got crazy shit all over the fucking place. Just pick something."

"But I have a . . . special need. To be honest, I want something that will upset somebody."

"What's this somebody into?"

"I do not really know. I imagine she is a rather prim and proper Christian type."

At this, the boy snorted a bit. "Lady, this is the weirdest best thing I've ever heard."

Sylvia left the shop a short time later with four genuinely distressing works from the lunatic fringe of contemporary pornography.

For the next four cleanings, Sylvia made the young cleaning woman tidy up the living room while her dirty movies played on the television. The maid carefully avoided looking at the images of bondage, the consumption of fecal matter, and whatever other extreme behaviors Sylvia had managed to purchase on her outing.

Each time, Sylvia told me later, was as exquisite as the first. Every time the maid ran from the apartment, she felt besotted with emotions, heavy with them, as if she had just eaten a large, sumptuous meal and her belly was fit to burst with sensation.

The maid never showed up for a fifth time. Sylvia never bothered to call the service and demand her presence.

She arranged for a new maid from a different service and, to Paul's great surprise, arranged for a flight to take her out California. She and Paul stayed with Paul's stepmother until late February.

On her return, the new maid presented her with a small religious medallion – bearing the image of some saint or lady of something or other – that she had found while changing the linens. Paul did not recognize it. Sylvia told the maid that, if she did not want it for herself, she should throw it out. What became of the trinket was something Sylvia never bothered to discover.

Her re-entrance into the social season was an assured success. The rumors that had circulated about her during her self-imposed house arrest made her the must-invite individual at all the better events. However, once the freakshow allure had faded, it was Sylvia's now uniquely strong but sympathetic personality that made her such a desirable companion and kept her never wanting for invitations.

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