Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (21 page)

Marian closed the door in case David should happen to come upstairs while she was still in the sitting room.

The lamp was on, the drapes drawn shut. Mrs. Allardyce’s dinner tray was on the table beside the wingchair. It was untouched.

Marian moved around the room, slower and slower, as the knot began to loosen inside her. She lingered over the photographs and the flower-filled urns and vases; the gold candlesticks and the silver candelabra, and the two bronze holders she had found in the basement, huge and vaguely liturgical. She touched the tables and the porcelain figurines, the damask walls and the crystal, and she could feel the hum coursing through everything she touched, vibrantly. Especially the door. She traced the carvings with her hands raised and her eyes closed, and it was like touching something or someone loved profoundly, and then feeling the touch returned.

The gown rippled with the movement of her hands.

She moved away from the door, lifted a small cylinder of gold-tipped matches from the table, and lighted the candles in the bronze holders, and all the other candles in the room. She turned off the lamp and stood spellbound by the serenity and the dazzling beauty of the room.

The wingchair and the silver tray glowed in front of her, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sat down and brought the tray closer to herself. She unfolded the napkin and reached for the silver knife and fork. The presence directing her hands and imposing itself on her will was almost palpable, and she felt no desire to resist or question the force. She cut into the meat, and in a moment all she was aware of was the hum and the incredible fragrance of roses rising all around her.

The sounds crept into his sleep, more insistently: the rattling gasp for air and then the pained exhalation, hoarse and mortal. Ben opened his eyes.

She was in the same position on the bed, but her skin, shrivelled and tissue-thin, had the pallor of death. There were two dark hollows where her eyes had been, and the flesh was stretched transparent over the bridge of her nose. She had become incredibly old, mummified almost, and the more Ben stared at her, the more she seemed to age; her jaw slackened and her lips tightened inside her mouth.

He was asleep still, he had to be. Or he was hallucinating. He closed his eyes and tried to shake the image out of his brain. The sounds enveloped him.

The pain had intensified and there was something almost reassuring in the throbbing inside his head. It was the pain he trusted, not what he thought he was seeing, and the pain meant that, however real it seemed (even a bumper pressing against his leg), it was an hallucination. And if he waited long enough (
count
) and tried not to panic, he could will it out of existence – the transformation he was imagining would disappear and he’d see that in reality there had been no change in Aunt Elizabeth at all. It was all illusory, a projection of the pain.

He closed his eyes tighter and began to tick off the numbers.

Marian placed the silver on the empty plate and lay the napkin on the tray. She moved the small table to one side and then sat back in the wingchair, gripping the arms.

The fragrance had grown even stronger in the room, waves of it – gardenia as well as rose, and peony and honeysuckle and something like lilac, and other fragrances she didn’t recognize. She raised her head and looked around the room, trying to trace the source. It was not only in the room, it was beyond it, she was sure. She rose from the chair and moved toward the sitting room door, and then past it, into the hall. The fragrance was there as well, and at the top of the stairs, and all through the house, drifting through the rooms from somewhere. She crossed the entrance hall and went into the living room.

When he heard the car approaching the house, he opened his eyes, and real or not, nothing had changed. He looked away from Aunt Elizabeth, toward the windows. It was dark. How long had he been asleep in the chair since Marian had told him about the doctor? The car was stopping near the front steps, to the left of the windows, and just as he was about to rise and look down at the drive, he realized from the sound outside that it wasn’t the doctor. He stiffened in the chair and listened to the motor idling in the vast silence outside. Aunt Elizabeth’s struggle for breath was more desperate. He thought he saw her stir, just perceptibly. The pain hammered at him, and then it projected another sound, one he hadn’t heard before. It was somewhere in the house, dimmer at first than the throbbing of the motor. He tried to make it out. It was near the foot of the stairs – something sliding, being dragged over the wooden floor. And then it was on the stairs, coming up. A sliding, then a thud – a heavy bumping sound. And again. Slide, bump, slide, bump – the sounds coming faster and closer. He saw it again – the stirring on the bed: Aunt Elizabeth’s right hand trembled and her head moved slightly, as though she were hearing the same sounds. The moaning was constant, deeper – a strengthless, animallike keening that had to be the edge of death.

Ben’s hands tightened white on the chair. He leaned forward and saw her twist herself onto her back. The sound was near the top of the stairs. Slide. Bump. He sat paralyzed, watching Aunt Elizabeth’s eyes open to the sound, to the metallic rattling now, at the end of the corridor. Something was being wheeled toward the door very quickly. Aunt Elizabeth suddenly sat up in the bed, her tongue swelling between her lips. She turned her face to the door.

It was a dream, he wasn’t seeing any of this, wasn’t hearing those sounds
. Not the choking or the chambered rattling directly outside the door, or the great blow against it that made the door fly open. He wouldn’t give in to it, wouldn’t look, not even when it was wheeled beside the bed, and the polished lid pulled open brutally by the chauffeur who moved toward Aunt Elizabeth then as she stared lifeless at the white satin lining.
He wouldn’t look
.

The greenhouse. Marian moved through the living room, flicking on lamps as she approached the alcove and the glass door opposite the wall of shadowy photographs. The fragrance was stronger. She breathed it in, waiting with her hand on the knob and trying to see into the darkness beyond the door. The anticipation was making her hand sweat against the knob; she turned it slowly and pulled the door open. The warmth and sweetness spilled over her, and it was a moment before she could fumble for the row of switches just inside the greenhouse, and finally make the whole glory of the room burst on her.

The long shelves and tables were filled with color, sprays of it, with rows of billowing plants, an infinite variety of them, growing thick and vividly green. What had been stiff and lifeless now hung from the clay pots and brass planters, laden with blossoms. There were orchids, great climbing masses of them, and huge exotic blooms, and ferns with lacy sprawling fronds, and odd shaped leaves and petals riddled with the most intense colors. As far as she could see, up to the glass ceiling and all the way to the other end of the greenhouse, there was life, miraculous new life, with everything unnaturally large and bright.

She walked slowly down the narrow passages, pulling the folds of her gown closer. Filling herself with the wonder of it all. And if there was a certain uneasiness creeping in, very subtly at first, well, that was understandable in the face of such an awesome mystery. She stopped to touch the pattern of a leaf, to breathe in the fragrance, bending as if in homage to the sheer perfection of the flowers, of the life the house was offering her.

It was alive, all around her it was alive, and how else had it come alive but through her? And wasn’t that the uneasiness she was feeling – the growing awareness of her power in the house, the enormity of the mystery enveloping her life, which, but for the sanctuary of the sitting room, would be unthinkable?

But there was something more immediate feeding the uneasiness – an emanation from somewhere else in the house that filled the greenhouse with a sickly, over-ripe sweetness.

Marian stopped suddenly. She was standing exactly where Aunt Elizabeth had been standing that morning.

She said the name aloud: “Aunt Elizabeth . . .” and felt something coil inside her. The sweetness became intolerable. She brushed past the overhanging foliage, flicked off the lights and closed the door behind her, fixing her eyes on the opposite end of the living room and then the head of the stairs and then the door to Aunt Elizabeth’s room. She pushed it open and stood frozen in the doorway.

Aunt Elizabeth’s head was thrown back against the pillow, her mouth pulled open hideously, her eyes staring back at the headboard. Ben was in the chair beside the bed, slumped forward, his arms clutching his stomach.

Marian approached the bed and stared for a long time at Aunt Elizabeth before her hand touched Ben’s shoulder. Ben raised his face to her slowly.

“Oh, God,” Marian whispered. “Oh, God.”

Ben continued to stare up at her, blank and silent, even when she brought her hand to her mouth and turned her back to the bed.

A while later, the phone rang. It was the doctor who told Marian, “I’ll be damned if I can find any Seventeen Shore Road, as
long
as I’ve lived here. Where in God’s name are you?”

(10)

When Marian came back into the room, Ben had covered Aunt Elizabeth’s body with a blanket. She told him about the doctor, and he replied, tonelessly, “It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?” He moved away from the bed, his face still blank with shock, and stood with his back to her, looking out the window. She came behind him.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said quietly. When she tried to put her arms around him, he moved away from her, going to the bureau which was piled neatly with Aunt Elizabeth’s effects – toiletries, the huge sunglasses, a few paperbacks, a lace handkerchief. Her paint box and the two canvases were against the wall, the straw sunhat on a chair next to them.

Marian watched him pace silently; every once in a while he would look at the small shrouded figure on the bed.

“We can’t do anything until he gets here,” Marian said. “Then who do you want to call?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, and it was like a casual wave of his hand, dismissing her.

He stopped pacing and leaned his elbow against a large armoire with spiring finials. He was facing the wall and massaging the back of his neck. Her presence was obviously as much of an intrusion as his had been in the sitting room.

“We’ll have to tell David,” she said.

Ben lowered his elbow and looked across at her. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs.”

Ben thought a moment. “I’ll tell him,” he said, and before Marian could reply he had walked out of the room.

As stunned, as numb with fatigue as he seemed, he handled everything with a strength and determination that surprised her – the doctor, the call to the undertaker, and especially David’s wide-eyed, inarticulate grief which found the release of tears only later, when Marian came into the sewing room.

Ben avoided her through it all, pointedly enough for her not to force herself on him, and shock and grief, she knew, were only partly responsible for the distance. It was unspoken this time but it was clear enough: the house, despite the testimony of the doctor, despite all reason, was responsible for Aunt Elizabeth’s death, and Marian was acting in complicity with the house. He believed it, there was no question in Marian’s mind that he actually believed it.

She had not willed Aunt Elizabeth’s death, never for one moment; and whatever premonition, brief and frightening, she herself had had in the greenhouse, however beyond her understanding the mystery of the house was at this point, no amount of silence and suspicion would convince her that she had. The idea was unspeakable.

They would wait until morning to leave, he told her later, and her only reply was a cold, “Whatever you say.” (Absolutely
unspeakable
.) He spent the night closed in the study, with David on the couch and himself, as far as she could tell, propped up in a chair. The shutting of the door was like a blow against her, which no amount of grief or confusion of mind could excuse as far as Marian was concerned.

She went back to the greenhouse and paced the aisles for a long while, until the turmoil inside her – the feeling that she was being forced, against her will, into an impossible position, one absolutely incapable of resolution – until it drove her up to the refuge, the sweet light and comfort of the sitting room, where there was, so quickly and so simply, peace and resolution.

The next morning she announced to Ben that she was not going back with him for Aunt Elizabeth’s funeral.

She had come into their bedroom where Ben was packing a small suitcase. He stopped between the open drawer in his bureau and the bed. “Not coming back.” He repeated it slowly, as if there were an anagram hidden in the words. The lines in his forehead and between his eyes deepened.

Marian shook her head and let him see how difficult the decision had been. “I can’t.” She raised her hands helplessly.

Ben was silent for a few moments. He threw several balls of dark socks into the suitcase, moving away from her. “I suppose you’ve thought about it,” he said.

“All night.”

There was another pause; he walked back to the drawer and slid it shut slowly. “Okay,” he said; “any way you want it.”

“I don’t
want
it, Ben,” Marian said, and her voice became more sincere and apologetic. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

“I understand, Marian,” Ben said. He lowered the lid of the suitcase and played with the latches.

Marian came to the edge of the bed and sat beside the suitcase, covering his hand with hers. “How can I leave her, Ben? You know how she depends on me for everything.”

He pulled his hand away, and softened the gesture with a tight smile. “I said I understand, Marian. Don’t agonize over it.”

“I
am
. I know what Aunt Elizabeth meant to you. I’d give anything to be able to come back.”

“Simple question of priorities.” He snapped the latches shut and lifted the suitcase to the floor. “By all means stay.” He went to the closet and pulled out a blue tie and a blue-and-black check sport jacket. “David comes with me of course.”

“David?”

He closed the closet door. “David,” he said firmly. “Can you pack a bag for him?”

She hadn’t planned on his taking David, hadn’t even considered David in making her decision; and the locked-out feeling of the night before came back to her, more intense, deeper than mere hurt or resentment, though there was that too. She rose from the bed and had to clear her throat before she could ask, “How long do you expect to be gone?”

Ben shrugged. “I have no idea.”

It was becoming harder for her to speak. “That’s no kind of answer, Ben,” she said.

“I’m being honest. There’ll be things to do after the funeral.”

“I know, but – three days? Four? A week?”

“I’ll let you know, okay?”

“When?”

“As soon as I know myself.”

But you
will
be back? she wanted to say. But of course they’d be back, how could they not come back? He must have seen the question in her face, because he looked at her very deeply, and it was either pain or weariness, or just that simple fact of his life once again, that seemed to creep into his voice and warm it a little. “When this is over, Marian, we’ll talk.”

“Yes,” Marian said, and maybe after a small separation she would feel comfortable enough with him to speak, to have it out finally one way or another.

“One more time,” he said, and the warmth had gone out of his voice with the ultimatum.

She nodded slowly and waited for something inside herself to be called up again, either through love or through fear. There was neither, only a vaguely unsettling resignation. She tried telling herself that there was nothing important enough to keep her alone in the house, nothing worth the pain of separation. From David. From Ben. Who had been her whole life. Who
were
her life.

None of it worked, none of it was strong enough to make her say to Ben, “All right, I’ll leave the house. I’ll come with you.” If it was a question of choice this one time, the new life or the old, then the choice had to be the house and Mrs. Allardyce. That was her chief responsibility (Ben and even David could do without her for a few days), and that, she’d admit to herself eventually, would be the really wrenching separation. This one time.

She told Ben again how truly sorry she was, how she would give anything to be able to call back her words to Aunt Elizabeth on the day of her death, how truly she had loved her, and would mourn her.

“I’ll pray for her soul,” Marian said.

Ben’s eyes clouded. He nodded and turned away from her. She saw him raise his hand to his head and then feel his way almost blindly to the edge of the bed.

“Ben?” she called. “Are you all right?”

He leaned forward. “Pack David’s bag,” he said. His hands covered his face, his fingers bent and bloodless against his forehead.

She hesitated until he said, “I’m all right.” It was pain, not grief in his voice. He lowered his hands then, and went into the bathroom without looking at her.

She called his name again and there was no reply, only the sound of water running.

Marian went into David’s room, and while she was piling his clothes into the suitcase, she started to weep quietly. She was still weeping when she saw them to the car. Ben’s face was pale and there were beads of sweat like blisters along his hairline. He was all right, he insisted again, and his kiss, when Marian brought her face down to the open window, was brief and mechanical. The car pulled away and she strained to see David look back at her through the rear window, which made her weep for a long time after they had passed out of sight, beyond the green and rolling sweep of lawn.

Whatever her resolution, the loneliness of those first few hours without them would be unbearable, she had thought. She was wrong. Halfway around the house, distracting herself with the new growth in the flowerbeds, her eyes were dry, and while she would miss them of course, right now she felt secure and completely at peace in the vast, quiet shade of the house and the trees. Even the realization (and had it ever occurred to Ben?) that she was without a car and was, effectively, sealed off from the outside world, heightened her sense of freedom.

There were suddenly no encumbrances, nothing to distract
her from the house. And, curiously, no guilt at all in the feeling – as though the spirit of the sitting room had been released and was hovering guardian-like over her as she walked the grounds.

She had come under the rounded bay in the west wing. She looked up at the curtained windows and felt Mrs. Allardyce very close, even closer than in the sitting room. And if ever, surely she would show herself to Marian now, with the two of them alone together in the house. And maybe reveal even a part of the mystery. The pool, the clocks, the greenhouse, the grounds; the force in the sitting room that at times made Marian feel like an extension of her.

Last night came back to her. The dinner tray. Had it happened or had she only dreamed it? She couldn’t remember.

The breakfast tray, when she went up to the sitting room, was untouched; and so, later, was the lunch tray. Each time Marian carried the food back down to the kitchen and eventually ate it herself. Had she done the same the previous evening, or actually sat in Mrs. Allardyce’s wingchair and used her silver, her linen, her tray? In her place? She still couldn’t remember with any certainty.

Around four, just as she finished clearing out Aunt Elizabeth’s room, Ben called her from the apartment. He brought up the car immediately. “I just wasn’t thinking this morning. You might’ve guessed as much.”

“I’ve got everything I need here,” Marian said.

“I don’t like you being that isolated. What if there’s an emergency?”

“There won’t be any. Stop worrying.”

She asked him about the funeral which would be on Thurs
day. There were frequent pauses on his end of the line, which Marian did nothing to fill in; when he spoke it was all slow and toneless and wearying.

“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” he asked her.

“About coming in? Honey, I told you – it’s impossible. Now please don’t make me feel any worse about it.”

“That’s not my intention,” Ben said. “It’s just that . . . it might be a little easier if you were here.” There was another pause. She could hear the courtyard noises in the background. “Christ, Marian – ” Ben started to say. He stopped and she could hear his breath catch. She ran her finger along the edge of the hall commode. “How the hell did we wind up like this?”

Please – not now, she wanted to say to him; give it a little rest. Instead, she said, “Don’t worry about us, darling.”

“I do.”

She changed the subject to the apartment, and his voice became a little less mournful. “It’s just the way you left it.”

“Hot?”

“Cool.”

“Noisy?”

“Listen.” He held the phone closer to the window.

Marian put a roll of her eyes into the laugh. “Hello to the Supervisor. And a big kiss to my baby.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Ben said.

“I’ll be here.”

They both waited. “Miss you,” she said to end it. “ ’Bye.”

Ben said, “ ’Bye.”

The house was no different, no more intimidating at night, not even with all its long shadowy stretches, and basements and sub-basements, and the sporadic sounds of wind and wood creaking. She moved easily through the rooms – regally even, in the blue-and-gold gown she had put on again for the evening.

A little after nine she turned off all the lights on the lower floor and went back up to the sitting room which was banked even more with flowers cut that afternoon from the greenhouse and the flowerbeds. The dinner tray was where she had left it at six.

Marian lifted the matches from the table and relighted all the candles, working her way toward the hieroglyphs in the door. She stood in front of them for a while, and then cleared her throat and knocked gently, feeling the pulse of the room against her knuckles.

“Mrs. Allardyce?” She waited, and then announced: “They’ve gone.” She brought her face closer to the door, listening. “They won’t be back for a while, I suspect.” Another pause. “There’s just me now . . . just the two of us . . .”

Her voice had lowered to a reverent whisper which would hardly be audible beyond the thickness of the door. The side of her head touched the carvings, and her right hand.

“I’ve been doing what I can,” Marian continued. “I don’t know what else to do. I don’t honestly know what’s expected of me, Mrs. Allardyce. It would be so much easier if you could somehow tell me . . . just a little more.” She moved her head away from the door and slid her fingers down the sculpted surface. “It’s so difficult, so frustrating to have this door between us all the time.” Her hand fell to her side. There was only the hum intensifying the stubborn silence beyond the door. “In any event,” Marian said, “they’ve gone.”

She raised her arms and brushed the gray back against her temples. Ben, David – abstracted to an anonymous “they.” How many times had she just said it without thinking? She walked slowly across the room and lost the thought, watching the candlelight glow in the faces on the table. And then, near the edge, framed in lace-like silver and dimming the mass of faces surrounding her, she saw Aunt Elizabeth staring up at her.

It took a moment for the numbing shock to pass, and then Marian’s hands jerked up to her mouth to stifle the cry. She squeezed her eyes shut, the palms of her hands came together, forefingers pressed tight against her lips, and all she could think was
no
and
no
and
no
. The room became suffocating all of a sudden, and the hum seemed to be boring into her. She opened her eyes again and caught herself against the edge of the table. It trembled, and a metallic rattle wove its way over the surface.

She looked at the picture again, and again, closer, and each time a chill passed through her. It was a small color photograph of Aunt Elizabeth in the bright silk print she had worn the day they arrived at the house. She was looking up blankly, her eyes a washed-out blue; her hands were crossed placidly in her lap. There was something about the pose and the face – the line of the mouth especially – that looked tampered with and unfamiliar, as though a strange hand had tried to recreate her features.

The shock passed slowly. Marian breathed in a long draft of air, and gradually the hum faded into the background again and became a gentle, soothing presence that steadied her hand as she reached out to touch the picture.