Someone in the House (23 page)

“Greek,” I said experimentally.

“Roman copy,” said Roger, like an antiphonal chorus.

“It reminds me of something.”

Roger said, “It reminds me of something too; but what I’m thinking doesn’t make sense. Wait a minute. I remember reading…” He made a movement toward the door, then caught himself. “First help me get this back in place.” Another dart toward the door. “No, I want to get a photograph first. Wait here.”

I was tired of being ordered around, so I followed him. Before he reached the door it opened, and I saw someone standing in the doorway.

I didn’t recognize Kevin at first. The room was shadowy, and the hunched pose of the still figure made it look abnormally large and threatening. Even after I had identified him I felt his anger. It fanned out like a blast of hot air.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

I scuttled forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with Roger. (I have these heroic tendencies now and then, though I try to control them.) Roger was visibly taken aback by the viciousness of Kevin’s voice. When he spoke, his tone was conciliatory.

“I looked for you to ask if it would be all right. Couldn’t find you. You did say it was okay for me to—uh—do some research.”

Kevin didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “I guess I did,” he said. He sounded confused. “What are you looking for? What are you doing in here?”

“We found something interesting,” Roger said—answering neither question. “I was going to show you. Glad you’re here. Come and have a look.”

By the time Kevin reached the altar and squatted down to inspect the relief, he was his normal self. “Looks Greek,” he said interestedly. “One of Rudolf’s acquisitions? He’s got a Roman sarcophagus in one of the bathrooms.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Roger admitted. “It’s a funny place to put it, though, under a Christian altar.”

“Maybe Rudolf was Jewish and considered all other religions equally heretical. This is Mithraic, isn’t it?”

“Could be,” Roger said.

I was about to ask for elucidation when my faithful memory dredged up some half-forgotten data from a history course I had once taken. The god-hero Mithra was Persian originally, but his cult became popular in the Roman Empire, especially among the legions. It was a religion for men, for soldiers; women were not welcome. The sacrifice of a bull was one of the rituals.

Having settled this, we prepared to leave. Roger asked Kevin if he could take a photograph of the carving, and Kevin said sure, he would appreciate having a copy. Roger trotted off to get his camera. Kevin looked at me, frowning.

“It was Roger’s idea,” I said cravenly.

“You look different,” Kevin said.

“I do? Oh—Bea cut my hair. It was—er—hot.”

“Looks good.”

“Thank you.”

Kevin continued to study me with a puzzled expression. “I was thinking—this has been a dull summer, we’ve hardly left the place. Do you want to go somewhere? A movie, maybe?”

It was absurd—like one of those old films, the ones with Doris Day or someone of that sort: the heroine takes off her glasses, buys some pretty clothes, andvoilà! the hero sees she is A Woman.

“Isthere a movie?” I asked.

“Must be one somewhere.”

“I don’t feel any need to be entertained, Kevin.” And—God help me—I added, “There’s so much going on here.”

“I’m glad you feel that way. Most girls would be bored sitting around all day.”

I didn’t even complain about the word “girls.” “Bored?” I said thoughtfully. “No, I haven’t been bored.”

We started walking. Kevin slipped a casual arm around me. I didn’t feel repelled. Not at all.

II

That day was memorable for another reason. I got a letter from Joe.

Not a miserable postcard, a real letter.

We didn’t bother much about the mail. The box was at the end of the drive, over a mile away. When one of us happened to be in the neighborhood, he or she collected the contents and dumped it on the hall table. So far I had received the postcards aforementioned, a couple of irritable scrawls from my mother asking why I never wrote, and a few circulars forwarded by the friend who had sublet my apartment.

The letter from Joe caught my eye as I passed through the hall. It was on top of the pile and it was bright with foreign stamps, stuck on every which way. I stood there looking at it for a moment. Perhaps the great news of my transformation into A Woman had crossed the Atlantic by mental telepathy—only it would have to be clairvoyance, instead of mental telepathy, because the letter had taken five days to get here. I took it up to my room.

If I had been inclined to believe in ESP, the letter would have proved to me that Joe would always misinterpret any vibes he got from my direction.

I don’t give a damn what you do, Anne, it’s your life, but I think you owe it to me to be honest with me. I never liked your crazy idea of living with Kevin this summer, but you went ahead without consulting me. Do you realize you haven’t written since that first note? And that wasn’t even a letter, just a couple of lines. If your feelings have changed, say so. Mine are the same. I don’t have time to do much screwing around. This place is a gold mine. I’ve been working my tail off, ten hours a day.

And so on. After two pages about his work, most of which was unintelligible to me, he ended abruptly, “Answer this right away. Love, Joe.” The “love” had been inserted, with a caret, as an apparent after-thought.

If he had taken a course in how to write letters designed to infuriate the recipient, he couldn’t have done better. The arrogant, demanding tone brought back all the old irritations—his bland assumption that the housework was my responsibility, his bored look while I talked about my work, his insistence that I stop whatever I was doing while he talked about his. Incredulously I remembered that once I had thought such things amusing.

III

We went to the movies that night, Kevin and I—and Roger and Bea. Roger invited himself, ignoring Bea’s coughs and frowns. He seemed keen on the idea. So we all sat in a row in a little local theater whose aisles were sticky with spilled cola, and ate popcorn, and watched one of those comedies where everybody eventually goes to bed with everybody else. Afterward Roger suggested we go someplace and get a malt—it seemed to be some kind of a ritual—but we couldn’t find anyplace that was open, so we went home.

That night I dreamed again, dreamed I was running down an interminable road lined with stiff-faced statues, running with stumbling, desperate speed because something was after me. I didn’t dare turn to see whether it was gaining, because I knew it was too horrible to face. Just as I felt its hot breath on the back of my neck I saw Joe, and I put on a last, frantic burst of speed. But when I got to him he stepped aside, and I fell, down, down, down into darkness…and woke with my heart thumping and a sick taste in my mouth.

The night was hot and humid. My windows were wide open. The outside lights cast a dim glow into the room. I don’t know how long I lay there, increasingly drowsy and relaxed as the nightmare faded back into the place from which it had come. I was still awake when I heard a door open and close.

Night sounds in that house were legitimate causes for alarm. I sat up in bed and listened. Nothing; but now I was tense and alert again. I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep until I made sure that what I had heard had been Bea on some harmless errand. The opening door had to be hers; it was the only one close by.

When I tapped lightly on her door I got an immediate response. She was sitting on the cushioned seat that ran around the inside of the bay window.

“Did I wake you?” she asked. “I tried not to make any noise.”

“I was awake. Bad dream.”

“Sit down and tell me about it.” Bea patted the cushion next to her.

“Thanks, but I’m okay. Just my damned subconscious whining at me. It does that all the time.” But I sat down. “What are you doing up at this hour? It must be threeA.M. ”

“I’ve been in the old wing,” Bea said calmly. “In the hall near Kevin’s room.”

“For God’s sake, Bea! You promised Roger—”

“I didn’t promise. He demanded; I did not agree.”

“Where is he?”

“Downstairs. In the chapel, I think; he has some silly theory about the place.”

“Why didn’t you ask me to come with you, if you were determined to go? You had no right to take such a chance.”

Bea studied me thoughtfully. “Was it that bad?” I gesticulated and sputtered. She nodded. “I know it was; you tried to tell me. Odd, how difficult it is to communicate states of emotion. You forget, though, that I am the only one who had never seen anything. I was curious. I also felt we ought to keep watch every night. The manifestation may stop, or become intermittent.”

“You’re right,” I said, after a moment of reflection. “Roger seems to have lost interest in Kevin’s lady, but I ought to have kept an eye on Kevin. I’m not as brave as you. I’d rather play ostrich. If I don’t see something, I can pretend it isn’t there.”

“Kevin never opened his door tonight,” Bea said.

“Then maybe it’s ended.”

“Maybe.”

I knew that expression—her eyelids drooping, half hiding her eyes, the tiny muscles at the corners of her mouth taut to hold the words back.

“You did see something.”

“You would say I was dreaming. Maybe I was. It was so quiet; I kept nodding off.”

“Well?”

Bea shrugged. “The conventional apparition, straight out of a ghost story. Transparent and floating. It was Ethelfleda, the way I have pictured her in my mind, costume and all. But when I blinked and pinched myself, she was gone.”

“My God.”

“It was not frightening. And, of course,” she added calmly, “not conclusive. It proves nothing.”

“Promise me you won’t do that again without telling me.”

“I don’t need your skepticism, Anne,” Bea said. “I need your support. If I can’t have it, wholehearted and without reservations, I don’t want it.”

Was that all anyone ever wanted? I wondered. Unquestioning cooperation, mindless trust? I fumbled in my weary brain for words. I couldn’t give her what she asked, but by sheer instinct I found a substitute. “You have my love,” I said. “Won’t that do?”

We had a nice emotional session, hugging and kissing and a little crying. My mother is not a hugging woman.

10

ASBEA HAD ADMITTED, her experience didn’t prove anything; it could be interpreted (and probably would be, by the parties concerned) as evidence supporting either theory—Bea’s wistful, wandering spirit, or Roger’s claim that the something in the house took different forms for each of us, depending on our individual predilections. On the whole, I preferred Bea’s interpretation to Roger’s. Only a nasty, sick subconscious could call up the ghastly vision I had seen.

Debbie turned up again the following morning. I’d overslept and decided to take a walk in the garden to clear my fuzzy brain. Somehow I happened to stroll toward the tennis court, and there they were. Her dress had even more ruffles than the other one. It was pink, with little red strawberries embroidered on it. I felt like Jane Eyre watching the brilliant and lovely Blanche flirting with Mr. Rochester.

After a while I crept away, unseen. I didn’t ask myself why the sight of them together made me ache inside. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had not been my exact antithesis—rounded and curved where I was flat and angular, ruffly and pink where I was grubby and tattered, feminine and cute and birdbrained where I was…but why go on?

I found old Mr. Marsden spraying roses and cursing Japanese beetles. I thought they were rather attractive insects, greenly iridescent in the sunlight, but when he showed me the mangled corpse of a rosebud they had devoured I began to share his feelings. They were vulgur bugs, coupling furiously all over the bushes—no sense of modesty at all. I took up a jar with a little kerosene in it and began capturing them. They were so preoccupied with eating and sex that they were easy to catch, and I discovered a hitherto unsuspected streak of sadism as the writhing collection mounted up.

After we finished the roses, Mr. Marsden let me weed the perennial border. He wouldn’t allow me to do anything more complex, though I itched to wield his neat little clippers and tie things to stakes. Even then he stood over me for fifteen minutes to make sure I was pulling up the right shoots.

I was still on my hands and knees when I heard a distant voice bellowing my name. It was a baritone voice, but I was unable to delude myself that Kevin wanted me. Roger’s gravelly tones were unique.