Ghost Story (18 page)

But it was snowing again now; the dogs would be barking in their kennels and old Otto would be skimming off whey, cursing the early winter.

A pity.
Yes: a pity was what it was, and more than that: a mystery. Like Edward.

He stood up abruptly and dumped his dishes in the sink; then he looked at his watch and groaned. Eleven-thirty and lunch already over; the rest of the day loomed over him like an Alp. He did not even have an evening of bubbleheaded conversation with a girl to look forward to; nor, because he was trying to wind things down, could he anticipate an evening of deeper pleasure with Christina Barnes.

Lewis Benedikt had successfully managed what in a town the size of Milburn is generally considered an impossibility: from the first month of his return from Spain, he had constructed a secret life that stayed secret. He pursued college girls, young teachers at the high school, beauticians, the brittle girls who sold cosmetics at Young Brothers department store—any girl pretty enough to be ornamental. He used his good looks, his natural charm and humor and his money to establish himself in the town's mythology as a dependably comic character: the aging playboy, the Suave Old Bird. Boyish, wonderfully unselfconscious, Lewis took his girls to the best restaurants for forty miles around, ordered them the best food and wine, kept them in stitches. He took to bed, or was taken to bed by, perhaps a fifth of these girls—the ones who showed him by their laughter that they could never take him seriously. When a couple—a couple, say, like Walter and Christina Barnes—walked into The Old Mill near Kirkwood or Christo's between Belden and Harpursville, they might half expect to see Lewis's steel-gray head bending toward the amused face of a pretty girl a third his age. "Look at that old rascal," Walter Barnes might say, "at it again." His wife would smile, but it would be difficult to tell what the smile meant.

For Lewis used his comic reputation as a rake to camouflage the seriousness of his heart, and he used his public romances with girls to conceal his deeper, truer relationships with women. He spent evenings or nights with his girls; the women he loved he saw once or twice a week, in the afternoons while their husbands were at work. The first of these had been Stella Hawthorne, and in some ways the least satisfactory of his loves, she had set the pattern for the rest. Stella had been too offhand and witty, too casual with him. She was enjoying herself, and simple enjoyment was what the young high-school teachers and beauticians gave him. He wanted feeling. He wanted emotion—he needed it. Stella was the only Milburn wife who, tested, had evaded that need. She had given his playboy image back to him—consciously. He loved her briefly and wholly, but their needs were badly mismatched. Stella did not want
Sturm und Drang;
Lewis, at the center of his demanding heart, knew that he wanted to recapture the emotions Linda had given him. Frivolous Lewis was Lewis only skin deep. Sadly, he had to let Stella go: she had taken up none of his hints, his offered emotion had simply rolled off her. He knew that she thought he'd simply gone on to an empty series of affairs with girls.

But he had instead gone on, eight years ago, to Leota Mulligan, the wife of Clark Mulligan. And after Leota, to Sonny Venuti, then to Laura Bautz, the wife of the dentist Harlan Bautz, and finally, a year ago, to Christina Barnes. He had cherished each of these women. He loved in them their solidity, their attachments to their husbands, their hungers, their humor. He loved talking to them. They had understood him, and each of them had known exactly what he was offering: more a hidden pseudo-marriage than an affair.

When the emotion began to go stale and rehearsed, then it was over. Lewis still loved each of them; he still loved Christina Barnes, but—

The but was that the wall was before him. The wall was what Lewis called the moment when he began to think that his deep relationships were as trivial as his romances. Then it was time to draw in. Often, in times of withdrawal, he found that he was thinking of Stella Hawthorne.

Well, he certainly could not look forward to an evening with Stella Hawthorne. To fantasize about that would be to confirm his foolishness to himself.

What was more foolish than that ridiculous scene this morning? Lewis left the sink to look out the window toward the path into the woods, remembering how he had raced down it, panting, his heart leaping with terror—now there was real asininity. The fluffy snow fell, the familiar wood raised white arms, the return path trailed harmlessly, charmingly off at a screwball angle, going nowhere.

"When you fall off a horse, you get back on," Lewis told himself. "You get right back on that mother." What had happened? He had heard—voices? No; he had heard himself thinking. He had spooked himself by remembering too exactly Linda's last night alive. That and the nightmare—Sears and John advancing toward him—had bamboozled his emotions so that he behaved like someone in a Chowder Society story. No evil stranger had stood behind him on the path back home; you could not walk through the woods without being heard. Everything was explicable.

Lewis went upstairs to his bedroom, kicked off his loafers and pushed his feet into a pair of Dingos, pulled on a sweater and a ski parka and went back down and out the kitchen door.

His morning footprints were already filling with new snow. The air felt delicious, crisp as a winesap apple; light snow continued to come down. If he could not go coon hunting with Otto Gruebe, he might be able to get in some skiing before long. Lewis walked across his brick patio and stepped onto the path. Above him the sky was dark and scattered with shining clouds, but clear gray light filled the day. Snow on the pine branches gleamed, particular and white as moonlight.

He deliberately set off on what was normally his return path. His own fear surprised him, tingling in his mouth and belly like anticipation.

"Well, I'm here, come and get me," he said, and smiled.

He felt the presence of nothing but the day and the woods, his house at his back; he realized after a moment that even his fear had vanished.

And now, walking over new snow toward his woods, Lewis had a fresh perception. It may have come because he was seeing the woods from an unfamiliar angle, going at them backward, and it may have been because he was just walking through them for the first time in weeks, not jogging. Whatever the reason, the woods looked like an illustration in a book—not like a real woods, but a drawing on a page. It was a fairytale woods, looking too perfect, too composed—drawn in black ink—to be real. Even the path, winding off in a pretty indirection, was a fairytale path.

It was the clarity which gave it mystery. Each bare and spiky branch, each tangle of wiry stalks, stood out separately, shining with its own life. Some wry magic hovered just out of sight. As Lewis went deeper into the woods, where the new snow had not penetrated, he saw his morning's footprints, and they too seemed haunting and illustrative and part of the fairytale, these prints in snow coming toward him.

He went into his dining room. The big mahogany table reproached him; its surface was dull, lightly scratched here and there from times he'd put Spanish earthenware down on it without using a mat. The spray of flowers in a jug on the center of the table had wilted; a few petals lay like dead bees on the wood.
Did you really expect to see someone out there?
he asked himself.
Are you disappointed that you didn't?

Turning out of the dining room with the jug of wasted flowers in his hands, he saw again the fairytale tangle of the woods. Branches glistened, thorns shone like thumbtacks, implying some narrative on which he'd already closed the book.

Well.
He shook his head and took the dead flowers into the kitchen and dumped them into the waste bin.
Whom did you want to meet? Yourself?

Unexpectedly, Lewis blushed.

He set down the empty jug on a counter and went back outside, crossing the patio to the old stable some previous owner had converted into a garage and tool shed. The Morgan was parked beside a toolbench covered with screwdrivers, pliers and paintbrushes in cans. Lewis bent his head, unlocked the door and cramped himself in behind the wheel.

He reversed out of the garage, left the car and heaved the door shut, then got in and swung the car around on the bricks and drove down the tree-lined lane to the highway. He immediately felt more like himself: the canvas top of the Morgan bucked in the wind, cold breeze parted his hair in the middle. The tank was almost full.

In fifteen minutes he was surrounded by hills and open country marked off at intervals by stands of trees. He took the little roads, opening the car up to seventy, sometimes eighty when he saw a nice stretch of straight road before him. He skirted the Chenango Valley, followed the line of the Tioughnioga River as far as Whitney Point, and then cut off west toward Richford and Caroline, deep in the Cayuga Valley. Sometimes on curves the little car's back end skittered around, but Lewis corrected the skid expertly, not even thinking about it. Lewis instinctively drove well.

Finally he realized that he was traveling the same route, and in the same way, as when he'd been a student returning to Cornell. The only difference was that exhilarating speed then had been thirty miles an hour.

After nearly two hours of driving, taking little roads past farms and state parks just to see where they'd go, his face was numb with cold. He was in Tompkins County, close to Ithaca, and the country here was more lyrical than around Binghamton—when he reached the tops of hills, he could see the black road arrowing through vales and over tree-lined rises. The sky had darkened, though it was only midafternoon: Lewis thought he'd see more snow before nightfall. Then ahead of him, just far enough away to build up the right amount of speed, was a wide place in the road where he knew he could make the Morgan spin completely around. But he reminded himself that he was sixty-five years old—too old to do stunts in cars. He used the wide place in the road to turn around toward home.

Going more slowly, he drove across the valley toward Harford, cutting back east. On the straight ways he opened the car up a little, but was careful to keep under seventy. Still, there was pleasure in it, in the speed and the cold breeze on his face and the dainty handling of the little car. All this nearly made him feel that he was a Tau Kappa Epsilon boy again, skimming over the roads toward home. A few heavy snowflakes drifted down.

Near the airfield outside Glen Aubrey he passed a stand of denuded maples and saw in them the gleaming clarity of his own woods. They seemed suffused with magic, with some concealed meaning that was part of a complex story—hero foxes that were princes suffering a witch's curse. He saw the footprints racing toward him.

... suppose you went out for a walk and saw yourself running toward you, your hair flying, your face distorted with fear ...

His viscera went cold as his face. Ahead of him, standing in the middle of the road, was a woman. He had time to notice only the alarm in her posture, the hair which billowed around her shoulders. He twisted the wheel, wondering where in hell she'd come from—
Jesus she just jumped out at me
—at the same time as he realized that he was bound to hit her. The car was going to slew around.

The rear end of the Morgan drifted slowly toward the girl. Then the entire car was traveling sideways and he lost sight of her. Panicked, Lewis cramped the wheel the other way. Time whittled down to a solid capsule encasing him as he sat helpless in a flying car. Then the texture of the moment changed, time broke and began to flow, and he knew, as passive as he'd ever been in his life, that the car had left the road: everything was happening with unbelievable slowness, almost lazily, and the Morgan was floating.

It was over in a moment. The car stopped with a boneshaking jolt in a field, its nose pointed toward the road. The woman he might have struck was nowhere in sight. The taste of blood filled Lewis's mouth; locked on the wheel, his hands were trembling. Maybe he
had
hit the woman and thrown her body off into a ditch. He fought the door, opened it and got out. His legs were trembling too. He saw at once that the Morgan was stuck: its rear tires were bolted to the field. He'd need a towtruck. "Hey!" he shouted. "Are you okay?" He forced his legs to move. "Are you all right?"

Lewis went unsteadily toward the road. He saw the crazy streaks his car had made. His hips ached. He felt very old. "Hey! Lady!" He couldn't see the girl anywhere. Heart pounding, he waddled across the road, afraid of what he might see lying in the ditch, limbs splayed out, head thrown back ... but the ditch cradled only a mound of unblemished snow. He looked up and down the road: no woman anywhere in sight.

Lewis eventually gave up. Somehow the woman had gone away as suddenly as she'd come; or he had just imagined that he'd seen her. He rubbed his eyes. His hips still ached; bones seemed to be rubbing together. He went creakily down the road, hoping to see a farmhouse from which he could call the AAA. When he finally found one, a man with a thick black mattress of a beard and animal eyes let him use his telephone but made him wait outside on an open porch until the truck came.