Burnt Offerings (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (22 page)

“Aunt Elizabeth,” she said mournfully, “Aunt Elizabeth.”

She looked from the picture to the carved door across the room.

“It’s – true?” she called faintly. “It’s true?” And for the first time her voice rose strong enough to penetrate the door. “Oh, God
– is it true?
”

She tried staying in the sitting room that night, tried, as she had done so many times, to find reassurance, a quieting of her fears, a bolstering of her faith, in the sanctuary of the room. But this time it was different; it wasn’t a vague premonition she was bringing to the room. The face among all those other frightening faces was confirmation enough; and so, when she thought back, was the transformation of the pool, the ticking of the clocks. The light – the elevation of her understanding she had been asking for beside the carved door had come down on her with devastating power: there was a malevolence in the house and she was being used as its agent.

Well, she’d end it; she’d have them come back – the Allardyces. Somehow.

She walked out of the sitting room and went downstairs for the list of names. There had to be some means of reaching them – a number or an address she and Ben had overlooked. She studied the pages carefully and there was nothing; and nothing in any of the antique desks scattered throughout the house, or Roz’s bedroom, or Brother’s.

She’d leave then without reaching them. What responsibility to the house and Mrs. Allardyce could she have in view of such a monstrous deception?

She went up to her own bedroom and sat in her own wingchair.

A picture. A small silver-framed photograph which she might so easily have overlooked.

To have seen it, to have been allowed to see it. To have a small part of the mystery of the house put in front of her eyes so clearly. To be made a part of it.

She’d
still
leave.

Leave the greenhouse and the lawns and the sitting room she’d banked with flowers. Leave the Kirmans and Aubussons, the Chippendales and Sheratons, and all the crystal and gold and silver she’d unearthed and polished. Leave the bombé chests and consoles and commodes and fauteuils and clocks and chandeliers that had become an indispensable part of the landscape of her life. And the space and the peace, and everything she’d always wanted, everything that but for her would be moldering in closets and basements and under layers of dust. Leave the mystery and the approbation of a force beyond her understanding. Leave what had become the deepest and truest reflection of what she actually was.

For the old life, the abrasive and frustrating third-rate existence.

Because of a small photograph of an old woman who was dead.

Marian got up from the wingchair and went out into the hall, and then wandered slowly through all the rooms of the house for a long time. And then over the grounds in the moonlight, to the pool and down to the bay, and over the dewy, terraced lawn in front of the house. She turned back and looked at the full, overwhelming sweep of the house glowing like white marble in the light.

Then she went back upstairs, this time into the sitting room where she intended to stay just briefly. The small table beside the wingchair had been moved and the plate on the dinner tray was empty. And it might have been her imagination, but there was a small click in the area of the carved door just as Marian came into the room. She went to the door, tried it – it was locked – and listened; and again it might have been her imagination, but under the hum there was the sound of floorboards creaking and light footsteps moving away from the door into the recesses of the bedroom.

The depth of her reaction surprised her: the confirmation of an actual presence beyond the door wiped the picture out of her mind, and the Allardyces, and the clocks and the pool. It left her shaking and filled with a kind of exaltation that was exhausting and revivifying at the same time.

She went to the wingchair and sat, watching the door until what was left of the tension and anguish drained out of her slowly. Then she leaned back against the gold brocade and slept. Deep and dreamless.

Friday, four days after they had left the house, Ben came back with David. Marian was in the greenhouse when she heard David calling her. She looked up at the sound which came nearer, into the living room, and let the flowers she had just cut spill out of the cut-glass vase onto the table. He was coming into the alcove when she pulled the greenhouse door shut behind her, and cried out, “Davey!” She bent and threw her arms around him. “What a surprise, what a beautiful surprise!” She hugged him closer, and then held him at arm’s length. “You look like you’ve grown a whole foot in a couple of days. God, how I’ve missed you!”

David was staring at her hair. “Your hair’s all gray,” he said. “How come?”

Marian let him go and raised her hands to the sides of her head. There were only streaks of blonde now, thinner each day. After a moment she laughed. “Mommie’s getting older,” she said, and hugged him again. “Most of it’s from missing you so much.”

She saw Ben come into the hall with the suitcases. He stared at her hair too when she walked up to him and put her arms around him.

“Welcome back,” she said and kissed him, and the tension between them was back immediately. She tilted her head away from him when he tried to touch her hair. “Don’t make me more self-conscious about it,” she said.

“Aunt Marge or not,” Ben said, “it’s going to take some getting used to. It’s happened pretty fast.”

“If it bothers you I’ll do something about it when I get a chance.” She looked at David who was still fascinated by her hair. “Did you eat lunch?” she asked them both.

“I had a Big Mac,” David said.

“But no Yankee Doodles, I bet. There are some in the fridge.”

Ben held out the small suitcase. “How about taking this up to your room first?”

Marian waited for David to leave. “How did he take it?” she asked Ben.

“All right, I guess.” He moved away from Marian and looked at the walls and the chandelier and the staircase. “He hasn’t talked about her at all.”

“That’s normal, I suppose,” Marian said.

Ben shrugged. “I suppose.” He looked even more tired than she remembered. The lines in his forehead had deepened and there were others, thinner, around his eyes and mouth.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Marian said.

Ben stopped in front of the brass Regency clock which read two-ten. “I tried calling you; yesterday a couple of times, and again this morning.”

Two of the times she had heard the phone. “I might’ve been outside, or upstairs,” she said. “Incredible, isn’t it – one phone in a house this size?”

“I didn’t know what to think,” Ben said. “You might’ve given me a call.”

“I would have, darling, eventually.” She smiled. “Why don’t I put some coffee on?” She started to go toward the kitchen.

“Marian?” He waited for her to look at him. “Would it have been better if we hadn’t come back? Honestly.”

She gave him a long, uncomprehending look. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

“The fact is, I’m not.”

The clock ticked quietly in the pause, and overhead the chandelier gleamed.

“Coffee on the terrace, okay?” Marian said.

What he had said stayed with her, and as much as she tried to deny it to herself, or qualify it (maybe if they hadn’t come back so suddenly, or had given her a little more time to assimilate the mystery of the house), it was true: it
would
have been better if they hadn’t come back. For four days the house had managed to fill her life completely, more richly and intensely than anything ever had in the past. More even – and she had come to terms with the admission painfully and very slowly, in the solace of the sitting room – than Ben and David had. The question of a choice was still inconceivable; as inconceivable as the idea of ever having to give up the house. But wouldn’t –
wouldn’t
– it have to come to that eventually?

Their sudden presence (their intrusion really) and their imposition of a life she was rising above on her new life brought back what the sitting room had dispelled her first night alone in the house: the tension, the tightening knot inside her. And it was only later in the day (Ben sitting on the terrace with a book open in his lap, David adding new track to his “Hot Wheels” set), that she realized what was making the knot tighter and the tension intolerable. She left the kitchen and went quickly up to the sitting room, where face by face she searched through the pictures on the table. And there was some little relief at least in finding that the only familiar face was the face of Aunt Elizabeth. And
that
she had already learned to come to terms with.

The pain hadn’t stopped when Ben had left the house; it had continued with its incessant throbbing throughout the four days he had been away, some days less intense but still a constant presence. The blurring of his vision as well, more frequently and for longer periods of time. The fear that it might happen on the Expressway, with David in the car, had kept him in the right lane all the way from the house and all the way back. The anxiety had only intensified the pain and brought with it a feeling of nausea that passed and then recurred periodically under the strain of the four days in town.

The hallucinations, however, had stopped, and it was that fact especially that made him hold on to the idea that it was the house that was working noxiously on his mind. Just as it had worked on Aunt Elizabeth, and was now working, in an even more sinister way, on Marian.

How could three weeks – less even – wipe out nine years? There was nothing left in her that he could recognize, no point of contact. Even watching her with David, the few times she came out of the house that day, there was something strained and false, and the shows of affection seemed to be performed from memory, without any genuine feeling. If there was any feeling at all, it was reserved for the house – for the gold-rimmed china she had set out on the dining room table which was hung with web-like lace, and the three gold goblets, like chalices, and the centerpiece – a crystal bowl filled with fresh flowers and flanked by two silver candelabra – and all the other pieces that glittered in the light from the chandelier.

She had called him in from the terrace, and David from the TV in the sewing room. David still hadn’t appeared; Ben stood behind his chair and watched Marian strike a match and light the candles. He thought of Aunt Elizabeth who, as far as Marian was concerned, had never even existed at all. She blew out the match and smiled across the table at him. Then she went to the wall switch and turned down the chandelier.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” she said.

Ben let his eyes wander over the table while Marian called David again. He nodded slightly. “Life . . . sure as hell goes on, doesn’t it?” he said.

Marian pulled her chair out and sat down. “And why shouldn’t it?”

David came in. “We’re eating
here?
” he said.

“In honor of your return,” Marian said.

He started to sit, then excused himself and went into the kitchen. Ben was still standing.

“You’re going to sit down, aren’t you?” Marian said.

Ben’s hands tightened on the back of the chair. “Frankly, Marian,” he said, “I don’t have that much of an appetite tonight.” Marian looked up at him, between the candelabra, and then began to slice into an orange gelatin mold, silently. “Aunt Elizabeth is dead,” Ben said, as if to remind her. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means a great deal to me,” Marian said, and then called, “David!” impatiently.

“I don’t think anything means a great deal to you, Marian,” Ben said, “except this goddamn house.”

She scooped a slice of the mold onto a plate. David was coming back into the room with an opened bottle of Coke. He looked from Ben to Marian and slipped into his chair quietly, placing the bottle in front of him on the table.

Marian avoided Ben’s stare; her eyes shifted to the moist bottle. “I don’t think we really need that on the table, sweetheart, not on that pretty lace. Why don’t you pour it and take the bottle back to the kitchen?”

David looked over his place setting. “There’s no glass,” he said.

“That’s even better than a glass,” she said, indicating the goblet. “It’s gold.”

“I think I’d rather have a glass,” David said.

Ben kept looking down at Marian. His voice was raised slightly: “You heard your mother, Dave. You’re messing up her table.”

Marian closed her eyes; her shoulders tensed. “Are you going to
sit?
” The silver serving spoon hit against the plate.

“I told you – ” Ben said, “I don’t have much of an appetite.”

He shoved his chair closer to the table and walked out of the room, through the kitchen and out onto the rear terrace. He leaned against the balustrade and stared down into the flowerbed which was filled with fresh green shoots between the rosebushes and the flowering shrubs. The sun had lowered to just above the trees beyond the west wing of the house, intensifying the colors and the shadows on the terrace. He stared harder into the flowerbed, at the spidery cracks in the soil, spreading out from the new shoots. There was a slow, whispery sound somewhere above him, and then another, and then Marian’s voice behind him.

“Forget about me,” she said, “ – I just don’t think that was a very smart thing to do in front of David.”

Again, he heard the sound above him, like something sliding. He turned and looked up at the roof of the house; the tiles he could see on the gables and the central portion of the house were a stained and faded black, warped, with many of them cracked or missing completely. Like the gray shingles beneath them. The sound stopped.

Marian was standing near the open terrace door, all white and gold, with a long-sleeved silk blouse and a gold brocade skirt that swept over the scrubbed flagstone as she walked toward him.

“Any idea, Ben,” she said, “exactly how we resolve it? It’s intolerable this way, isn’t it?” She leaned against the balustrade, beside him, looking at the house.

“That’s just what it is, Marian,” he said quietly, “ – intolerable.” He looked over the vast spread of the house. “And nothing’s going to change as long as we’ve got
this
in our life.” He looked at her. “Except you.” Her eyes lingered on the red-draped windows in the west wing. “Take it out of our life, Marian.”

“And give it up . . .”

“Give it up. Now.”

“You can’t ask me to do that.”

“I’m
telling
you, Marian. You’ve got a choice.”

“It’s an impossible choice!”

“Impossible? Your family or a
house?
”

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to give up, you have no idea!”

“All right then, tell me. Tell me exactly
what
I’m asking you to give up. Come on, Marian, what’s the hidden part, what is it you’ve been in on all the time?”

“
Nothing
!
” She turned away from him quickly, her skirt rustling against the stone balusters. The sound seemed to echo and come at him from the roof of the house. He looked up and as he did one of the dull black rooftiles slipped loose and fell over the eaves of the gable. Ben’s hand went up in reflex. The tile fell slowly, and he saw it dissolve silently on the flagstone. He looked up at the roof again, and where the tile had been was an unwarped, rich black rectangle, conspicuous among all the faded tiles in the roof.