The Glass House People (21 page)

"Come on, Dad," said Monica in a low voice from her place on the floor. "I think we really should go now. This isn't any of our business."

Bernard ignored her and pulled Hannah into his arms, right in front of everybody. She looked down at the floor. "Listen to me, Hanny." His voice was hard—out of character with his usual easygoing manner. "Stop crying. Iris, you, too. Let's try to straighten everything out. Not bottle it all up again. Okay? Tonight. Right now."

Grandad snorted. "A sensible suggestion if I ever heard one, my boy. You go right ahead and straighten us all out. Please be my guest."

Bernard
was
being arrogant, thought Beth. But who cared? There were no rules for how dinner guests should act when fake suicide attempts and family fights erupted right in front of them, were there? At this point all she wanted to do was sit so quietly no one would notice she was there. Her stomach was tight, and she knew eating dinner was an impossibility—not that anyone even seemed to remember the reason for their get-together, anyway. She dragged Romps into her lap, then pressed herself back against the radiator with Tom and Monica. Her eyes were riveted on Bernard. She felt she was sitting in the audience at a play—a drama begun long ago.

It's a play about people accusing each other, back and forth, forever throwing words like sticks and stones
, thought Beth wildly. She remembered Aunt Iris's words. A family living in a glass house, dangerously hurling rocks at each other. Meaning to wound. At that moment it seemed quite possible that the whole house would shatter around their heads.

Aunt Iris glared at Bernard. "All right, Bernie Clements. You always were a nosy kid. I'll set the story straight." Beth saw her thin hands trembling.

"I loved Clifton. And he loved me more than anyone else ever has or will—don't smirk, Hanny Lynn! He did. And we were going to get married at the beginning of September, just after his birthday. He told me not to get him a present. He said I was all the present he ever needed." Aunt Iris was in tears again, but she dabbed them away with one finger and continued, her voice low and intense. Everyone in the room was quiet, listening, even Hannah.

"He never gave me reason to doubt his love for me—except once." She drew a deep breath. "And that was the night he died. I couldn't sleep, I was so excited about the wedding plans. I was lying awake, and it was very late. Everyone in the house had gone to bed. Or so I thought." She closed her eyes and sank onto the floor. She leaned her head against the edge of the coffee table, and for a moment Beth thought she wouldn't speak again. Still, everyone waited, mesmerized by her soft voice and the tale she was unfolding. Finally she sat up and opened her eyes.

"Clifton was typing. I could hear him. He often worked late on the book he was writing. The heroine in it was named Siri—get it? 'Iris' spelled backward. She was a beautiful princess from another world, with long red curls like mine, and she didn't limp at all. She didn't even have to walk—she could fly everywhere she wanted to go. I lay there listening to the clack-clack of his keys and wanted to be with him, but I knew he needed privacy to work. I was content, really, just knowing he was there next door."

Her voice grew hard. "But someone else didn't care about interrupting him. He'd stopped typing for a few minutes—I knew he was plotting out the next chapter—and I heard his door opening. No knock, just the creak it always made. I heard the murmur of voices, and I knew it was Hanny Lynn in there pestering him."

A sharp intake of breath from Hannah made Beth drag her eyes off Aunt Iris to where her mother now sat with Bernard. He had his arm around her shoulders and pressed them as a warning to remain silent. Hannah nodded stiffly, and Aunt Iris continued.

"Yes, it was Hanny. I waited for her to come out. She should have known he needed peace and quiet to work." Again Aunt Iris was quiet, and when she resumed her voice was even softer and lower than before. Beth leaned away from the radiator and strained to hear.

"But Hanny Lynn didn't come out. So I thought enough was enough, and I got out of bed to go tell her to get out and leave him to work."

This time the silence was so long that Beth feared her aunt would not finish the story at all. But Bernard spoke up, prompting her: "So you went into the room. And what did you find?"

"Whore!" Aunt Iris turned venomously on Hannah. "Trying to turn him from me, even thinking you could succeed! Really, it was a laugh. It was so pathetic, it really was. I shouldn't have been so upset—I know that now. He'd told me just that day after dinner how you were a nuisance. He thought you were the biggest laugh since God-knows-when. He cared nothing for you! But—seeing the two of you like that in bed—well, it shook me up. I started yelling—"

"As you do so well," spat Hannah.

"—yelling at her to get out," finished Aunt Iris, looking at the others. Her face was flushed now, beaded with sweat. "Yelling so loudly that Mama and Daddy woke up and came running. Remember? Mama was furious with Hanny and Daddy was furious with Clifton for letting her into his room in the first place."

"That's the first accurate thing you've said so far," Hannah broke in angrily. "Stop poking me, Bernie! It's
my
turn to talk now, if we're going to keep on playing Truth or Consequences."

"Try to keep it civil," he muttered. He sounded curt with Hannah now, and Beth wondered whether he was angry or sad to hear that she had been with Clifton after all, that there had, in fact, been an older man all the time.

Hannah stood up and appealed to her parents. "You both were angry—understandably so. But Iris is wrong; Clifton did love me. He told me he loved me! He'd been attracted to me for a long time. By August he'd given me very good reason to believe he intended to break off your engagement. It wasn't that he didn't like you, Iris," she amended, glancing at her sister. "It was just that, in the end, I was more his type. You really were like that alien princess. Lovely, perfect. Icy."

Almost perfect,
thought Beth, remembering Aunt Iris's limp. But no one said anything, not even Aunt Iris. And Hannah kept talking.

"I was someone he could really be himself with. He told me that I made him come alive. And he always welcomed me into his room. He let me read some of his book and help him with it. We kept our feelings quiet. We thought you'd be hurt if you knew how we felt. But that's why I had to break up with you, Bernie." She glanced at his clouded face. "It wasn't honest to keep on seeing you, knowing that Clifton and I were soon going away together. We were going to get married as soon as I graduated. So, yes! That night I went to his room. He was glad to see me, damn it!"

"You're inventing this, Hanny Lynn," cried Aunt Iris. "You had a schoolgirl crush—we could all see that. But the big romance was just in your head!"

"You're forgetting what you saw with your own eyes, Iris! Did I invent his arms around me? Did I invent those kisses?"

"Look, wait a minute," Bernard broke in. He glanced over at Grandmother and Grandad on the couch. "Could we have someone else's story about what happened that night?"

Grandad was looking ill, Beth thought. The excitement and tension were too much for him. What if he had another stroke? Grandmother fingered the brooch on her black brocade dress and spoke haltingly.

"Well, we came running when we heard the girls yelling. And when we saw Hanny in the bed—well, you can imagine. What a betrayal of her sister—that was what I thought, and what I still do think! And as for that young man, well, we'd been thinking of him as a son, but just then I didn't want him in my house anymore. Would I want a man like that marrying my little Iris?"

"So she sent him packing," said Grandad in a gravelly voice. "'Get out of here and don't come back!' she told him, and I agreed—but not so much on Iris's account. No, I was looking at Hanny Lynn huddling there in the hall in her nightgown, and I thought, Christ, the girl's only in high school! How dare he mess with my little girl? Still, when I think back, we didn't give the lad much of a chance to talk. And as for Hanny Lynn—" His gaze rested on his younger daughter for a second, eyes suddenly blank. "As for her, she was crying for him not to leave her, saying he'd promised to stay with her. Iris was howling that her sister was a liar and that Clifton was a traitor—she wanted him to leave that night, though I suspect she planned for them to talk the whole thing over in the light of day. You know these lovers' tiffs. Usually something can be worked out."

"But it was a little more than a tiff," Beth murmured to Tom. "And they never had a chance to talk things over in the light of day."

"I just wanted that young man out of my house after such disgraceful behavior," exclaimed Grandmother. "Under my roof! And as for Hanny Lynn—she may have been a high school girl, but she knew how to get what she wanted. I didn't have too much sympathy for her. But my poor baby, my innocent Iris! How she suffered that night."

Aunt Iris began crying. "Oh, God! When Clifton was packing his things he was saying he loved me and that I shouldn't worry, that we'd talk it all out—and then Hanny started hanging on him, wailing that it was time to tell the world that
she
was the one he loved, garbage like that. And then, oh, Mama was shoving him out of the room and Daddy was handing him his bag and even I was saying, 'Get out of here, how could you do such a thing!'"

Hannah took up the story then, without missing a beat. "And then we were all there at the top of the stairs, and poor Clifton was pleading with Mama and Iris to let him explain. But Daddy shoved the bag in his hand, and Mama and Iris were pushing him toward the steps, and I was reaching out, crying for him to stay with me, not to leave me with
them—
"

"And then you screamed that you'd
never
let me have him," hissed Aunt Iris.

Hannah towered over her sister, who still sat on the floor by the coffee table. "And you screamed that he would never have anything to do with me again if
you
could help it!"

"And then you
PUSHED
him!" screamed Aunt Iris.

"
YOU
did, you must have! You've been blaming me all these years, but I swear I never—oh, Iris! You did it yourself!"

Aunt Iris leaped to her feet, shoving Hannah back with both arms. Hannah fought, raising her hands to pull Aunt Iris's wispy gray hair. Beth and Tom jumped up, too, and tried to pull them apart—but then Grandad struggled up from his seat and cut through all the commotion with a single word that left the walls ringing:

"
Wrong!
"

Everyone stopped and stared at him. He still looked sick, Beth thought, with his face glowing as if with fever. But when he spoke, his voice was calm. "This is where you're all wrong," he said. "So sit down. Give yourselves a break."

Everyone sat down. The atmosphere in the room was overpoweringly tense. Beth's stomach ached fiercely.

Grandad rubbed his hands over his bald head. "You're both wrong. This happened so long ago, you're not even sure of your stories, let alone your facts. But you do have a lot of the details right about those last minutes at the top of the stairs. I remember, too. And I may be older than anyone here, but my memory is the clearest on this. It has reason to be." He looked around the room at all of them listening and moved his hands as if painting a picture in the air for them to see.

"Think of it. Try to remember. We were all there. It's a small space. We were crowding him on the landing as he was starting down. Hands were reaching out all over the place—your mother shaking her fists in righteous anger. Iris pointing for the door, giving him what for. Hanny Lynn trying to grab him back, screaming that if he left her now she'd never forgive him. And then there was me. Standing there, too. Holding out his suitcase. Remember?"

And indeed, Beth seemed to remember that moment; she could see it all so clearly. She nodded. When she glanced at the others, they were all nodding, too.

Grandad's voice changed, grew gentle. He looked at his two daughters sitting before him on the floor and reached out his hands to them. They rose and stood next to him, not looking at each other.

"What happened in that next moment has torn us up for twenty years. And yet you two have got it all wrong." Grandad reached out and stroked Hannah's tear-stained cheek, then did the same to Iris's. "Iris, Hanny Lynn did not push Clifton. She was trying as hard as she could to make him stay with her. And Hanny—Hanny, honey. Iris truly loved Clifton and would never have hurt him, not even to keep you from having him." Grandad sighed a sigh so deep, it seemed to come from the past, whistling along to the present from all those long years back. "No, girls."

"Then who—?" Beth's own voice startled her. It sounded terrified.

"I did it," said Grandad simply.

The silence was absolute. Then Iris whispered, "No! Daddy—no, you couldn't have!"

"I didn't mean to, but I did it," Grandad said, reaching out again to touch her face. "I threw that suitcase into his hand—oh, yes, I was as angry as anyone that night. I shoved it at him and then—and it
was
right then, right at that second, that he fell backward. I've spent years denying it to myself, letting you both imagine.... But it was my hands that pushed him, girls. Not yours. Not ever yours. Mine."

Hannah was shaking her head. Beth found she was shaking hers, too.

But Grandad's voice continued, still surprisingly calm. "Oh, yes, I did, Hanny. I've been denying it to myself for so long, I've almost managed to convince myself. Sometimes I pretend it never happened at all—but it did. And I could have saved this family years and years of suffering if I'd owned up right when it happened."

"They might not hate each other so much today," said Grandmother, staring at her husband.

"That's right," he said. Grandad and Grandmother seemed to be holding a discussion with their eyes that Beth could not translate.

"Not hate!" cried Hannah. "I don't
hate
anybody! I just thought Iris—"