Extreme Magic (25 page)

And now, Sligo’s hand lay upturned in the sedated sleep that had finally overcome it, its owner, once more deserting his bystanders, stretched on the floor to which this time he had slipped so easily. It had been so lucky that the sedation was already in him; his bystanders could never have overcome him in time. By the usual luck. On the hand, the many surface cuts and slices had flooded with red on the instant, filling the box like an ewer. But the wound on the wrist, that should have been the worst, was nothing, already puckering and congealed—not a fine seam, but a seam. Beneath it, whatever directed this man still pulsed, an anatomist’s secret.

And she was finished crying now, or retching—the sound, dreadful as it was, a relief to him, a sign that her life had not rendered her inhumanly able to bear anything. Still, her competence was what he had to fear. He held her, each contracted toward one another, inward and away from the blood that was sticky and dried on them both.

Finally she was able to speak. “It’s the—repetition of it. The repetition. I can take each separate time. But the other finally gets to you. Like a rhythm. Like killing with drums—don’t they do that somewhere?” She slid apart from him, from where they sat, on the floor too. “And now you’re part of it,” she said. “Of our Mondays.”

He stood up at that. “Oh, no. No, Marion.
No.”

Her eyes were the first to lower. “Of course not. How could I think—?”

“Because it’s your habit, to—” To defend, he’d been going to say, but saw that it wasn’t just. “Because it’s gone on so long, whatever it is. A kind of double dream.” He brushed himself off, plaster dust and other crumbs, wooden splinters, and here and there, a sparkle. He bent to take her hands, and didn’t take them. “He’s got to go to a hospital, you must know that. Not a local one. Not for local wounds. A place where he can be—for a long time.”

When she spoke, it seemed she hadn’t heard this. “I lied to you,” she said. “Last time. When I said ‘I
used
to be fond’…I don’t know really, what I
used
to be.” She looked up. “So I don’t know—what I am now.”

“As it happens,” he said. “As it happens, I—I know of such a place. Usually it takes longer to get in, much longer. But if I ask—” He swallowed. “I think they’ll come on my say-so. I think they would come, in an hour or so. Today. Now.”

Her glance wandered, vague over a shoulder. “The phone’s…
cut.”
The voice might have come over just such a line.

“That stuff you gave him,” he said. “Can I leave you here with him? How long does it last?”

“For hours,” she said. “You can leave him. I often do.”

“I’ll go in the car, then.”

The scar marks under her eyes stood out sharply. The resemblance bled him, but instructed.

Finally she spoke, an inch nearer. “The public phone booth, in the games room. It’s separate. I forgot that.”

She got up and followed him to the door, picking her way through the breakage. “While you…I’ll—pack a bag for him. And I’ll—” She looked down at her stained hands and dress, almost thoughtfully. He nodded. Both of them cast a backward glance at the room’s ruin. From hers, he couldn’t tell what she thought of it.

When he had phoned and had cleaned himself up in the little washroom under the stairs, he looked in again at the main bar. The figure there lay just as they had left it. There was no one with it. No answering call came from the upstairs bedrooms. He went down to the games room, in its heavy-browed way a beautiful room when bare of people and left to its armorial shadow. He had no panic at not finding her here. She would have a place of her own, where she could hide. It was intended that he find it. Through the open door, he saw a bright sweater, down on the pier.

He walked down to the little pier, past the over-cute tables and umbrellas toying against the river, the paper scurf of tourists, the beach unused, lapped and lonely, the water healing dark through its pebbles. She was there, on a last bench. He sat down beside her.

The long evening, projected by the river, was still alight. Less than an hour had passed since he had arrived here. There was still a disc of sun, the part that always sank within minutes.

“Will they come?” she said.

“In a couple of hours.”

They were well out from shore here, naked to the whole expanse, whose orange magnificence would for some time hold off the arriving blue.

“Open views make me uneasy,” he said after a while. “They didn’t used to. Before. Or when I was a child. But maybe that’s because in those days, we didn’t have a view.”

“I couldn’t do without this place. I grew up on the river, but it’s not only that. Nobody comes here much, and it’s always—” She stood up, spread her arms.

Behind him, he felt her turn to look back at the house. He didn’t turn with her. In front of him, the long casement of water extended, infinitely extended, on and on. In that wide, stealing amber, the little beach in front of them lay suspended, as small in that infinity as his mother’s sunset vase, with its paintscratch of beach and one palmetto.

“There’s not enough ruin there!” he heard her say. “There’s not enough ruin to
show.”

His lips were stiff. “There never is.”

When she sat down again at her end of the bench, she was as he’d always known her, the old Marion, remote, cold with an experience whose poles he was only beginning to see. He waited. This time there was no other way to help.

She spoke, an inch nearer. “Do you—want to know about it?”

He looked back at the Canal Zone, at a house which, for all its ruin, was still standing. “The original injury?”

“In comparison with what we made of it, you mean.” He felt her grimace.

“I’ve no such secrets to tell you,” he said, turning. “Everybody already knows my—” His life was on the roster for all to see, an open book. He was used to the humility of it.

Her head was lowered. “I once heard you say—you come from Hartford.”

“Yes…Why?”

“I went to school in a little town not far from there.”

“You did? Which one? I know all the schools up there—and all the towns.” He paused. “But you grew up here, you said. On the river.”

She nodded. “Then you’ll have heard of it, maybe. It had rather a—gardens. And a fence. Miss Trent’s? In Netherton?”

Once more. Reality slowed the mind—a profound deduction, especially twice. Once more, out of his sphere. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard of it.”

“Mmm.” She was facing away from him. The sun edged down—gone. The world was flowing; let humans never forget it. “Well, you know that old story, the girls who marry their riding masters? You ever wonder what happened to them?” The sunless air showed him every line of her face. “To her.”

“I had a theory about you,” he said. “But it went the other way round.” On one of the hands in her lap there was still a faint smear of brown. He touched it. “This happened, then? Sligo.”

“No!” she said, rubbing at the smear. “Not Sligo. Not yet. Ferenc Von Dombaretski, Captain. Son of Captain the same, of his something Majesty’s umpteenth Hussars. Polish on the one side, Magyar on the other. Miss Brown, who was the Miss Trent of our day, told us how to pronounce it—Magyar. He rode like a prince, she said, too well for us really, but his mother wasn’t noble. He had a bale of uniforms, swords, saddles, medals and brasses, that filled the chauffeur’s cottage. Hereditary candlesticks—knives. And always the stories, stories about horses.” She folded her hands. “And at the foot of his bed, a pair of black velveteen house slippers with silver crests on them, much worn.”

He made the sound one made to children detailing their nightmare.

“Oh, yes, very long ago,” she said. “I was seventeen.”

“Ferenc Von Dombaretski,” he said. “Sounds—he was a fake, then?”

“You know—” She was silent a space. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been sure. And later on, of course…it didn’t much matter.”

On the river it was later on, too, but still tartar yellow and bronze. Even the world at times thought slowly.

“There’s such a lot I don’t know,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how much. There’s so much I missed.”

“And a lot you know,” he said. “A hard exchange. Never belittle it.”

After a while he said, “Don’t look back at the house. When they come, we’ll hear them. Go on.”

“On? Why, that’s all there was, really. The rest, you know enough to imagine. In a straight line.”

A straight line would be horses, men of that same bow-legged world. “Then, Sligo?” he said. “Then you married
him?”

She looked at him for so long that he could see the
plage
darken behind her, at the pace of the seal-colored cloud traveling west like a barge. “The original injury. Have you forgotten it?”

“A false name!” he said, then. “It
was
Sligo, under a false name.”

“Yes. Yes. There wasn’t a Von Dombaretski, anymore. Oh, there had been. All his papers and medals, Miss Brown saw them—they were always very careful at Trent. And all his gear, that Sligo, traveling with him for so many years after all—had inherited.” She gave a short laugh. “That’s what happened to her, that girl. It was even more romantic than one had imagined. She didn’t marry the riding master. She married his Irish—ostler—they once used to call it. It has its own lineage. Groom.”

“I see,” he said.

“Are you sure you do? Do you see that this wasn’t what I minded? Do you see that after all of it, in spite of it—and in spite of the fact that I couldn’t half talk to him, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t—what I minded was that I…
still?”
She sat back. “Oh, there were the social things too of course, my family cutting me, and my friends too, and no money—but I was young, resilient enough. That was only the part of the story you’d expect. But it was the other, that did us in. That he could never get used to what he’d done, or to me he’d done it to. And that I—” She choked on it. “That I—
still
—” She touched Guy’s arm, “You know something? After all these years, I don’t know him well enough to say whether it’s that he can’t talk to me, or he won’t. After all these years.”

He thought of the diamond, thankfully lost somewhere in the shards back there, and of all she must know about fakes that became real.

“And then—” Her voice was hard. “Then I began to do
him
injury. I was built for it, of course. Speech, taste, needs, a million discriminations people like me, girls like me, didn’t even know we were born with. Oh I was primed for it.” Again she put her hand on his arm. “Do you know?” she said, her voice so charged, so tender that he caught an unbearable glimpse. “He just couldn’t think what else to do when Von Dombaretski died. Since he was fourteen, he’d spent his life with him.”

“So you’ve never stopped pitying him,” he said.

The cloud passed on, stately.

“When I said I didn’t want or hope for anything—” she said. “I lied. The inn was my idea—an aunt died and left me money. We were on our uppers, we hadn’t known anything else but uppers, and it looked like heaven. The years we worked on it—those weren’t so…” She got up and strode away to the edge. Standing there she looked back, inland. “But now—how I hate it, how I hate it. I see all I don’t know, here. Everything passes by here. All the possible. It’s like perfume. All the possible passes by.”

In his mind’s eye, in his muscles, he got up from the bench, seized her by the shoulders and shook her, not for herself alone.

As she strolled back to him, he watched her absently pause to turn over a crushed paper cup with the toe of her shoe. She stooped to tear it up and bury the fragments. He saw how the beach—merely a prospect to the inn—was tended.

“So now you know. What we made of it—between us.” Crouched over, not a foot from him, she prodded the sand again. This time, only a natural object was revealed, a worn stone. “What
I
made.” Stone in palm, she looked up at him. “Too much.”

He bent and drew a finger along each of those permanent shadows on the bone, her cheek marks, tracing what almost could be seen there beneath them. “No—you couldn’t have helped it. You—were singled out.”

At that moment, a gun reported, clearly—even with the ricochet of the river, not a gnat in the ear. She stood up. He stood up with her. The Canal Zone watched them grasp one another. All the possible passes by.

Color returned to her face slowly. “From the Point—West Point. A sunset gun, I guess. You can always hear it on hazy days here, when sound travels north.”

Across her shoulder the night was arriving—volumes of blue through whose drift, down all the darkening inlets of the shoreline she must know so well, there were being lighted, one by one, the small, persistent fires of habitation. It was said of people native to this place that even if brought up from a cellar blindfolded, they could tell which way they were turned to the current of the river—by the play of the air on their faces, in the felt promise of the harbor.

“Can you see my place from here?” he said.

She took his hand and guided it. “There. Between there and there. That’s your place. Between the dark stretch, and that one high light that’s just gone on. There you are—in that great fan of trees, some of the biggest on the river. They hide the barn though, even when the leaves are off, in winter.”

He thought of her standing here in the ice-gray winter days of people who live in inns, looking past his trees and forward, watched by whom? It was always the other people who had the view.

“I suppose…they’ll send an ambulance?”

He nodded. Arms still around her, he understood the strain words must put upon those blind who remember or dream of another communication. The inn watched them, as if only it had sufficient history not to judge.

“Do I go along in it? With him?” She bowed her head. “I suppose.”

In each window of the Canal Zone, a chandelier stood out strong against the night, beside each, its double. They had conquered the day.

He seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “Pity
yourself.
For God’s sake. So you can leave here.” He dropped his hands, in tribute to the brute lack of honor in the processes of life. “So we can go.”

He couldn’t imagine her answer. When it came, it did so on her own terms. Brutal too, she touched his cheek. “He saw you coming,” she said.