Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (29 page)

“Why didn’t they take the picture down, then?” she said. “They’ve emptied the room and left the picture still hanging!”

“They must know something! They must believe that the picture has something to do with us!”

“They’d know the room was haunted, since two of us disappeared from there…” Y began.

“And no one will ever come into it for that reason,” I finished.

We were there long enough for the ivy on the house to grow a quarter inch before someone came to rescue us.

We had often speculated as to who would come. Both of us had believed that it would be a stranger, come to see for himself if he could solve the secret of the room, but when our rescuer finally arrived one evening, it was John. I saw him first, while Y slept, and when I woke her to tell her it was John, she cried for the first time since we had given up hope. We lay in the grass before the gates, waiting for the moon to rise so John could see us and let us out.

We watched him put down a blanket on the empty bed, and lie down to stare directly into the picture. In the half-darkness that meant the moon was rising, we saw him lying there, watching for us. And as the moon rose slowly, coming toward the picture, we stood by the gates, clinging to each other and trembling with excitement.

Even before the full light was upon us, we were racing down the road to him, to the glass that he must break. I remember falling once, and stumbling to my feet to run on, with blood on my face and hands, crying out to John, and I believe now that it was during that moment wasted in getting to my feet that I knew exactly, because I heard Y’s voice calling, “Come, John, come on, John, come on!” And I knew that I was screaming, too, and shrieking at the top of my lungs.

And John was sitting up in the bed, and screaming, too, and he put up his foot and kicked at the glass and broke it—at last.

And that is how we tell it, Y and I, in the quiet of the night, in the hours of the quiet of the night, with the moonlight moving close, while we wait in the secret of the night, and John runs constantly about the house, screaming and beating the walls. For I have no partner, now in the evenings, and Y and John do not like to dance alone.

M
Y
U
NCLE IN THE
G
ARDEN

I
HAVE ALWAYS TAKEN
presents when I go to visit my uncle Oliver and my uncle Peter: a fruit cake, certainly, and a dozen oranges, and toys, a little jumping rabbit that winds with a key for Uncle Oliver, and a chocolate bone for Uncle Peter’s cat. I get on the ferry at San Francisco, stopping in the ferry building for identical boxes of candied cherries, and run at Sausalito for the train that will take me into San Rafael. Then, carrying my packages and my suitcases and my book, I must walk slowly up the long country road in the sun, waiting for Uncle Peter to catch the first sight of me, or Uncle Oliver to look up from the wicker chair on the porch and come running down to meet me. Their cottage is halfway up a steep little country hill, with flowers growing down to the road on both sides, and orchards beyond, and Uncle Oliver will be out of breath walking up with me, eyeing the packages and saying: “Peter will be pleased to see what you have brought him.” Both Uncle Oliver and I know that Peter will be pleased to see what I have brought, but Uncle Oliver will carry the presents away, to be disposed of carefully and doled out slowly.

When I reach the cottage, I must stop for a moment in the road, looking at the roof low enough to touch from the garden, the roses going up the walls and leaning over the doorway, the two flat stone steps, and the orchard and the vegetable garden creeping around the sides of the house, not content with their position in the backyard, and I must stand there for a moment and then say: “Nothing has been changed since last year, Uncle Oliver; how do you and Uncle Peter stay so young, and keep your home so pretty?”

And then Uncle Oliver, twisting his hands with delight, will say, as he always does: “I never get any older; Peter ages for both of us, and for the house, too.” Then I may go inside to be graciously received by Uncle Peter.

I call them my uncles only because it is so difficult to address both of them as Mr. Duff; some fifty years ago, when Uncle Oliver was courting my grandmother, she is said to have declared that they would be satisfactory only as bachelor brothers who would take her future grandchildren to the zoo, and so Uncles Peter and Oliver did, and her children, too, and probably my children someday as well. Aside from the one incredible year Uncle Oliver spent married to a lady known as Mrs. Duff, they have lived together, at first in a little flat in San Francisco, and finally in this rose-covered cottage, which the semi-mythical Mrs. Duff planned and arranged as a suitable bower for her husband. Neither Uncle Peter nor Uncle Oliver has ever tried to work at anything; some farsighted relative left them a small mutual income, which, augmented by the presents of oranges and fruitcake that they receive from the children whom they took to the zoo, keeps them excellently, with their several cats. Uncle Peter is lean and tired; he cares for the house and watches over the garden and the three or four trees in the orchard and the one cat that is especially his own; Uncle Oliver is rounder and lazier; he does the cooking and watches the vegetable garden and the five other cats. Uncle Peter’s gray cat, Sandra Williamson, is the only one distinguished by a name; the others, all white cats left in the house by Mrs. Duff, operate as a unit and come and go to the name of Kitty.

“They all had names once,” Uncle Oliver explains mournfully, “Mrs. Duff used to call them pretty things. One was Rosebud, as I remember, and all the others were pretty things, too.”

“Someday we will name them all again,” Uncle Peter adds, “and I will make little leather collars for them, each with his own name around his neck on a leather collar.”

The white cats will all be sitting on the front porch when I come, washing one another and playing with the sunlight. Uncle Oliver will stop and touch one or two of them on the head; “Pretty little things,” he will say. “Nice kitty.” I do not believe that the white cats understand Uncle Oliver the way Sandra Williamson understands Uncle Peter; wherever Uncle Peter goes, Sandra Williamson will follow him, sometimes so far forgetting her dignity as to touch at a dangling shoelace. And when I come, she will be standing next to Uncle Peter in the little living room, waiting to receive me.

“Peter,” Uncle Oliver will say joyously, including Sandra Williamson in his expansive loving gesture, “here is such a nice child, such a nice child, and I walked up the hill with her, and she has brought you presents.”

And then Uncle Peter, who always remembers my name and will take Uncle Oliver aside later and tell him what to call me, will come forward and kiss me on the forehead while Sandra Williamson rubs against my ankles, and Uncle Oliver will pull at my sleeve and point to the packages, winking and giggling, and, with Peter on one side and Oliver on the other, and Sandra Williamson perched on the windowsill above the sofa, I will open the packages.

“Oranges,” Uncle Peter will say with pleasure, and he will take one and offer it solemnly to Sandra Williamson, who will touch it with her gray paw.

“Look, Peter, what Sandra Williamson may have for her own, instead of an orange which we will eat ourselves, look at what this dear pretty child has brought Sandra Williamson,” Uncle Oliver will say, with the chocolate bone. Peter must offer the bone to Sandra himself, and she will sit cheerfully with it under her paw until Uncle Peter moves to another room and requires her to bring it along.

Finally, when all of us have watched Uncle Oliver’s mechanical toy move about the room, crashing into the furniture and even moving out to the front porch to startle the white cats, Uncle Oliver will gather together all the presents except Sandra Williamson’s bone and an orange apiece for his and Uncle Peter’s dinner, and hide them away in the back of a kitchen cabinet, to be taken out at a less exciting time. Then Uncle Oliver will remove himself to the stove, and dinner, and Uncle Peter will show me his garden, Sandra Williamson following and the white cats moving about under the trees in the dusk.

I do not think that there is any possibility that Uncle Peter and Uncle Oliver and the cats and the cottage will change or go away with time. Every year, when spring has irrevocably asserted itself, I begin to wonder about Uncle Oliver and Uncle Peter, and every year I gather together the fruitcake and the oranges, the toys and the candied cherries, and take the ferry to Sausalito. They are as apt not to be there as San Rafael is apt to have moved to Florida.

Always, during the two or three days I spend with Uncle Peter and Uncle Oliver, some minor domestic crisis arrives, brought on principally by the strain of having company. One year Sandra Williamson was ill from too much company food, one year the strain of baking a chicken pie brought Uncle Oliver into a hysterical temper, and one year Uncle Peter and Uncle Oliver quarreled. That is the visit I remember most clearly; the quarrel first made itself evident at the dinner table the evening of my arrival, and over the tomatoes, or rather the lack of them.

“Don’t we always have tomatoes?” Uncle Oliver asked me angrily, indicating the table with the creamed beef on toast and the plain lettuce salad. “Don’t we usually have tomatoes when you come?”

“I seem to remember that you do,” I said placatingly, “but everything is so delicious…”

“We have always had tomatoes up until this year,” Uncle Oliver persisted, “and we have always grown them in our own vegetable garden, too. My particular care,” he added bitterly in Uncle Peter’s direction.

“Possibly something got into the vines this year,” I said. “They very often die off just when you expect them to be the best.”

“We
would
have had tomatoes this year,” Uncle Oliver said.

“I always thought the tomatoes were the least important,” Uncle Peter said suddenly. “I prefer the radishes myself, and the squash.”

“I notice nothing happened to the apples,” Uncle Oliver said pointedly. There was a long moment of silence, and then Uncle Peter excused himself and left the table. Sandra Williamson followed him, and they went out into the garden.

“I think you hurt Uncle Peter’s feelings,” I said to Oliver.

“I intended to,” he answered, staring at his plate. “He has been very wicked, and the tomatoes were mine by rights.”

“What could he do to the tomatoes?” I was bewildered. “Surely he isn’t directly responsible if the tomato vine doesn’t bear tomatoes.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Oliver. “That is just it. Heaven only knows what the tomato vine
will
bear now. He has been consorting with the devil.”

“Surely, Uncle Oliver,” I began, “surely you cannot say that just because there are no tomatoes—”

“Ah,” said Uncle Oliver, “but in the garden at night, in only his nightshirt, and dancing. And with Sandra Williamson dancing along behind him, the garden at night, and both of them going among the trees and over the vegetable garden. Is it any wonder,” he cried out despairingly, “that the tomato vine refuses to bear tomatoes!”

“I should, in its place,” I agreed, suppressing the picture of Uncle Peter dancing in his nightshirt.

“The devil has no place in San Rafael, and no business with Peter or with Sandra Williamson, and certainly no traffic with my tomatoes! Perhaps you can put a stop to it?” he asked me.

“What makes you think it’s the devil?”

Uncle Oliver waved his hands. “Peter brought him to lunch one day. He smiled at me, his pointed little nose right at me, and said, ‘You cook admirably, Oliver Duff,’ and I said, ‘I’ll have no thanks from you, evil sir,’ and he smiled at me still.”

“Couldn’t it be a neighbor?”

“It could not,” Uncle Oliver said absolutely, “and I’ll thank you not to suggest it.”

“I’ll speak to Uncle Peter,” I said.

“Speak, better, to my tomato vine,” Uncle Oliver said sullenly. Uncle Peter was coming in the door, followed by Sandra Williamson. He came over to Oliver and said, “It’s been so long since we quarreled. What do we say to each other now?” They both looked at me.

“Uncle Oliver,” I instructed, “you will say that you regret being ugly about the tomato vine, and Uncle Peter, you will say that you will make every effort to console Uncle Oliver for its loss.”

“Regret ugly,” Uncle Oliver muttered to Uncle Peter.

“Make every effort,” Uncle Peter said. They smiled at each other.

“Now,” I said, “I will go out into the garden with Uncle Peter.”

Uncle Peter held the back door open for me, and we went out into the dark garden. The fruit trees were silent in the night, and the vegetable garden lay in heavy masses against the fence. Sandra Williamson preceded us down between the trees to the foot of the garden, where the grass was tall against the fence.

“Is this where he comes?” I asked Uncle Peter.

“To the other side of the fence,” Uncle Peter said. “He seldom comes over. He lives in the woods on the hill.”

“Are you sure it isn’t a neighbor?” I said.

“Quite sure,” Uncle Peter answered in surprise. “I have been consorting with the devil.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He comes down from the hill and stands on the other side of the
fence
. He came first some weeks ago, and Sandra Williamson saw him and came over to talk to him and I came over, too, and we talked to him.”

“What about the tomatoes?”

Uncle Peter shrugged. “He asked me what in the garden I would give him for tribute; he said he would protect the fruit trees and the rest if I gave him something and I said he could have the tomato vine, because Oliver likes tomatoes least. He said that would do splendidly; I didn’t know that Oliver would mind.”

“Possibly if you talked to him,” I said, “and asked him what else he would accept…”

“I had thought of giving him the apple tree,” Peter said. “He will come later tonight, and I had thought of asking him then.”

“Wait,” I said. I ran back through the garden and into the house. Uncle Oliver was standing miserably by the sink, washing dishes.

“If you could have the tomatoes back,” I said, “would you mind losing the apple tree?”

“The pretty little apples?” Uncle Oliver gasped. “Your uncle Peter likes them boiled with a little cinnamon and just a fragment of a sugar lump.”

I thought. “If I were to promise to send you another fruitcake when I got back to town…”I suggested. Uncle Oliver sighed, but he dried his hands and opened the cupboard. Carefully he took out the bag with the oranges, the two boxes of candied cherries, the mechanical rabbit, and, finally, the fruitcake.

He looked up at me. “Do you suppose one orange… or perhaps two?”

“I think the fruitcake,” I said.

He sighed again, and handed me the fruitcake. While he was storing the rest back in the cupboard I hurried out with the fruitcake and down through the garden to Uncle Peter. “Here,” I said. “Try this.” Uncle Peter brightened.

“Do you suppose it will work?” he asked. “I was thinking about the apple tree. You see, Oliver likes apples, and the white cats eat them.”

“Try the fruitcake first,” I said.

Uncle Oliver and I sat in the living room until very late, watching the white cats settle to sleep, and Uncle Peter stayed in the garden. When I finally went to bed I glanced out of my window and thought I saw, far down among the trees, a white shape moving and Sandra Williamson capering along behind.