It wasn’t the most soothing train of thought I’d ever pursued, but there was some comfort in it, and I was asleep long before Walter came to bed.
We walked over the next morning, the Saturday morning of the party that would not be, to see if we could do anything for the Sheehans.
Buck answered the bell, and this time he asked us in. The house was quiet in the green, tree-filtered morning light. The dishwasher was gurgling sunnily in the kitchen, and a lingering smell of coffee spoke of normal mornings. There were silver trays and serving pieces set out on the dining room table, where Anita had placed them after polishing them for the party, but the quiet downstairs showed no other sign of disarray, no sign of illness and havoc and terror.
He was obviously tired, bone-tired, death-tired, but his smile was serene.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “She’s upstairs sleeping. She’s slept for almost twenty-four hours straight, and it’s the best thing for her. I never should have left her alone. I never should have. But I called her doctor in New Jersey and told him everything she remembers about the night—the television program, and all that—and he said it wasn’t such a strange thing to happen, all told. He thinks she probably overdid it with the moving and the party, and the thing with the Swanson boy was a worse shock than we thought. He says she really must just rest for a couple of weeks. He thinks it was probably some sort of hysterical hallucination, or very possibly a vivid dream, and she agrees now that it probably was. There’s a good local man he wants her to get started with after she’s had a couple of weeks of total quiet.”
I did not say anything. Was it possible that Virginia Guthrie had not told him that she too had seen the movie? Shouldn’t he know? If he were to help his wife, shouldn’t he know everything, all the cruel, bizarre, baffling details?
“I know about all of it, Colquitt,” he said, catching my thoughts. “I don’t have any explanations, except that it’s entirely possible that there was some kind of autosuggestion working with Virginia. I only know that she’ll be all right, because I am going to make her all right, with God’s help.”
He said it naturally and unselfconsciously, and I said only, “I believe you will.”
“I have a great idea,” Walter said. “Why don’t you take her down to the beach for a couple of weeks? Stay in our cottage, if you don’t mind roughing it. It’s right on the water, and you couldn’t get any quieter than the island this time of year. Just soak up the sun and eat and sleep and don’t think about anything. It always puts Col and me back together, and you couldn’t be more welcome to it.”
I loved him achingly in that moment. Of course. The beach house. We had, I thought, been very selfish with it.
“I think that’s the best idea I ever heard,” I said. “There are linens and pots and pans, everything you could possibly need, and nobody will be using it for at least another month. Do it, Buck. It’s not a bad drive. It’s the perfect place to rest and invite your soul.”
His tired face lit with something like a child’s expectation, in July, that Christmas might really come again.
“You know, that really might do it. It really might. She loves the ocean; she loved our beach place. That’s incredibly generous of you people. Only I’d want to rent it.”
“Absolutely not. I’m going to be very offended if you even mention that again,” I said. “I mean that, Buck.”
“Well, then, let me talk to her about it, and if she’d like to do it, I’ll give you a call tonight or tomorrow.”
As we left he called after us, “God bless you.”
The Sheehans left early the next Monday morning for our house on the island, and the house next door was empty and quiet again, and the summer spun on.
13
FOR A LITTLE WHILE, then, there was a gentle time, the time in any summer that seems suspended in a sort of still, green hiatus, swung between two seasons, swaying almost imperceptibly in the languorous currents of heat and indolence. It is the time in our summers when children and animals abandon their first summer-struck frenzies of activity and motion and explorations and mischief; they drift in shoals through backyards in the cool of mornings and the honeysuckle-smelling twilights. Middays are given over to swim teams and tennis lessons and day camps for the younger children, and for long, heat-deadened sleeps beneath shrubbery and automobiles for animals. Among adults, the ruffled rush of spring cocktail parties and poolside galas slides into lazy weekends at the club or hastily thrown together suppers for a few friends on screened porches and patios. The late-spring debutante marathon slows into the desultory entertainments of the “little season”; weary teenagers abandon their froths of white and twelve-button gloves for swimsuits and cutoff jeans. People leave for vacations, and the neighborhood is subdued and not unpleasantly diminished.
On our street about a third of the old houses were empty for a time, and more were minus children, most of whom were in mountain camps or on exchange programs abroad. Duck Swanson was visiting the North Carolina cousin with whom he would room at Yale in the fall, and Claire’s two younger boys were working in OEO-sponsored youth programs in the city’s blistering, blighted southwest section. They still came, willing but leaden-footed, to do the minimal summer yardwork that our lawn requires. I had told Claire that it wasn’t necessary; let them have their summer weekends. But she insisted.
“I can’t stand them underfoot on Saturdays,” she said. “They sleep till noon and get up expecting twelve-course breakfasts, and mope around the club pool all afternoon mooning over that little Carruthers tramp with the bathing suit that vanishes right up the cleft of her dewy little butt, and then they stay out till all hours on Saturday night and Roger is furious with them Sunday morning. Thank God, Duck’s not at home; I’d have him and Libby Fleming billing and cooing all over the house ad nauseum. As it is, I’ll bet he’s called her fourteen times a day for the past two weeks and charged it to us, and Roger will kill him. I almost wish they’d go ahead and get married. It would be a lot cheaper and less nerve-wracking for everybody. Oh, no. Tommy and Rog can do their playing on Sundays. This summer is for old Mom, here. Since Tommy got his driver’s license I haven’t driven a car pool all summer, and with Duck away, Roger’s been getting his own breakfast, and there was one decadent, go-to-hell morning that I slept until nine-thirty. Not only that, but I have a Bloody Mary with lunch every day, and take a nap after that. I’m going straight to hell in a handbasket this summer, and I love it.”
“You sound like something out of a Somerset Maugham novel,” I said. “If you don’t watch it, you’ll take to tottering around in a muumuu and drinking sloe gin straight out of the bottle. But it is a quiet, nice summer, isn’t it?”
“It is since the poor Sheehans went to the island, anyway. Have you heard from them? God, I hope it’s doing her some good.”
“Just one call, to tell me where their spare key is and ask if I’d go over and water their plants. I haven’t done it yet, but I will tomorrow or the next day. I think it will do her good if anything will. You know, I’m terribly fond of both of them, and my heart breaks for them, but I have a sneaking, nasty little sense of relief—as long as they’re down there, there won’t be any more of the upsets and the night horrors. Isn’t that selfish of me? But it’s really been an upsetting time for everybody since they came.”
“Since the Harralsons came, you mean,” said Claire. “I know. I truly am fond of Buck and Anita, but I’m beginning to feel like we’ve paid our dues with trouble for a while. If it was an old house, I’d almost think it was haunted, but who ever heard of a haunted contemporary less than a year old? Maybe there was an Indian graveyard on the property once, and the natives are restless.”
“That kind of garbage really makes me uncomfortable, Claire.”
“Oh, come on, Col. Where’s your famous sense of humor? You know I’m kidding. Virginia told me about the movie on TV, and I told her she was either going through the change or she and Charles had been smoking pot over there a
nd wouldn’t admit it.”
“You don’t believe her, then?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe her. I just think Anita upset her so badly she didn’t know what she was seeing. Christ, you don’t believe it, do you?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Walter certainly doesn’t. But Virginia seemed so sure.”
“Well, she’s not all that sure anymore. She as much as admitted to me later that she could have been mistaken, and then she changed the subject. I haven’t said any more to her about it because it’s so obvious that she’s embarrassed and doesn’t want to talk about it.”
It was true that Virginia Guthrie did not want to talk about that evening. She simply refused to do so. When I told her, early in the week the Sheehans left for the island, that Walter and I had been thinking about the incident and he had had some ideas that might make her feel better about the whole thing, she said, “I shouldn’t have disturbed you with all that, Colquitt. As far as I’m concerned, it was a case of the sillies on my part, and the subject is closed.” I respected her feelings, but I wondered if it really was embarrassment that lay behind them. Somehow, I did not think it was. Virginia is not in the habit of doing things that will cause embarrassment, to other people or to herself.
Friday evening of that week Kim Dougherty came by at dusk. Walter had a meeting with a client, and I had worked longer than usual, so the late-slanting light was thickening and greening with shadows when I pulled into the driveway. I saw his dusty old VW first, and then, rounding the corner of the house to the patio, I saw Kim. He was slouched in his usual chair, drinking a beer and regarding the Sheehans’ house solemnly and fixedly over the rim of the can. Foster was curled lumpishly in his lap. We had not seen him since the incident with Anita and the television set, and I wondered if he had heard about it. I hoped not. I did not plan to tell him.
“Your favorite mendicant is back with his empty stein,” he said, brandishing the beer can at me. “I helped myself. Was that okay?”
“I wish my favorite mendicant had brought his bowl too,” I said, looking critically at his long figure and his face. Both were thinner than ever, tautened down to bone and tendon. There was something—a coiled intensity, an interior smoldering—that disturbed me. “Have you been eating at all? You look like something right out of Bergen-Belsen.”
“Sure I’ve been eating. I’ve been working like a field hand over on the Douglas site is all. Damned bricklayers walked out on me and I’ve been laying brick like—who was that stonemason in that book everybody had to read in high school? Jude the Obscure? It’s better than Weight Watchers to get you in shape.”
“Work going okay?” I asked casually. I didn’t think it was. Not the design work, anyway. The interior cauldron was obviously consuming him.
“In a word, the work is shit, if you mean the designing, and you do. Jude the Obscure wasn’t a bad analogy. Kim the Obscure has picked up the torch that cat dropped. I’m going to get it back, though.”
“I know you are.”
“No, I mean really. I left it over there, and that’s where I’ll find it again.” He gestured at the Sheehans’ house with his empty beer can, and I studied his face uneasily. He had said that before. There was a crystal raptness shining just under the calm mask of Kim-shaped bones and features. The obsession that had upset me before had not lessened; it was growing, eating.
He turned his face back to me. “Where are the Sheehans?” he said. “I’ve driven by here several times this week and their cars haven’t been here. No lights either.”
“They went down to our place on the island for a couple of weeks,” I said neutrally. “She had a little…setback, and we thought the beach house would be a good place for them to unwind.”
“What kind of setback?” Through the fast settling darkness I could feel his eyes steadily on my face.
“Just a movie on television that upset her.”
“What movie?”
“I never did get it quite straight,” I lied. “It wasn’t much of anything. I guess it wouldn’t take much, as fragile as she still is. I’ve talked to them since they’ve been down there and they seem fine.”
He was quiet for a time, and then he said, “You’re a rotten liar, Colquitt.” I did not answer.
Presently I said, “They called to ask me to go over and water the plants, and I’ve been putting it off. Come walk over with me while I do it, and then I’ll fix us a sandwich or something. Walter’s not going to be here for dinner and I’d like some company.”
“I’ll wait for you here,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Kim,” I said crossly, tired suddenly of levels and sublevels, portent and obsession. I was irritated at myself too. I realized that I did not want to go into the Sheehans’ house alone in the thick stillness.
He grunted and stood up loosely, and we walked through the rhododendrons and up the bank and into the Sheehans’ yard.
Anita had left the key under a flower pot on the back deck. I fished it out, jerking my hand back when it came in contact with something fat and damp that wriggled away from my fingers.
“Ugh. This particular key-hiding ploy wouldn’t fool a retarded first-grader,” I said, and unlocked the back door and walked into the kitchen. Kim followed. I groped for the light switch and could not find it. He reached around me with a long arm and plucked it out of the darkness, and the kitchen bloomed with white light.
“Are you a clairvoyant too?” I asked brightly. There was a swelling in the air, a charged tightening that I could feel on the skin of my arms and face and neck. It felt like a small, hot wind drying wet flesh, so that the small hairs stood up stickily. I moved away from Kim’s arm quickly.
“I’m the one who put that fixture there, remember?” he said. His voice sounded as though there was not much breath behind it. The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.
I found a plastic pitcher under the sink, and filled it with tap water, and watered the hanging plants in the kitchen windows and the African violets that stood on the wide windowsills. I chattered steadily about nothing that I can remember now to Kim Dougherty, who leaned against the kitchen counter in silence, his face lifted as into a freshening wind. He did not reply. He did not move from the counter when I refilled the pitcher and walked into the dark living room. There was just enough light from outside so that I could see the showering shapes of the plants that hung in the windows there, some nearly brushing the floor. I felt along the wall for the living room light switch but found nothing. I did not want to call out to Kim for help through the roaring silence, and set the pitcher down on the floor to free both hands, but I still couldn’t find the switch, and finally I called out, hating the ersatz jollity in my voice, “Where the hell is your living room switch?”
“It works off a rheostat thing by the door into the dining room,” he called back. “It’s that round thing. Just push it in and turn it.” But he did not come into the living room.
I stumbled in the darkness to the wall by the dining room door, taking great, silent gulps of the dense air. It was hard to breathe. I wanted desperately to be done and out of this swelling, prickling house and back in my own kitchen. I wanted Kim to be gone. I wanted Walter. I could not find the rheostat.
“I give up,” I called. “You’ll have to come and turn it on for me.”
I heard his steps come slowly through the kitchen and into the room, and turned and saw the bulk of him, thicker darkness in the dark, beside me, and he reached out past me for the switch, and then closed his arms around me. I stood stiffly in Kim Dougherty’s arms, feeling nothing but the violent wrenching of his heart, hearing his grating breath and the deep singing of the silence. It rose and bloomed into a keening that filled my ears and blood and blinded my eyes, and I put my arms around him and pulled his mouth down to mine. Even as his arms dragged me into his bending body, even as his mouth devoured mine and my own opened to his, a thin thread of pure consciousness that was
all that was left of me, of Colquitt Kennedy, crouched in a corner of my head and whimpered, high and childishly, “I don’t like this. I want to go home now. I don’t want this to happen anymore.”
Light blazed. Kim lifted his head and pushed me back, and I stumbled against the back of the sofa and caught myself with my hands, head hanging, breath choking in my throat. The very air of the house seemed to be filled with stinging, buzzing things like bees. I saw dimly, as if through smoke. Kim’s face was white and blind. Walter stood in the door from the kitchen, and his eyes were as sightless as Kim’s, though they were fastened on me. He stood very still and straight. In his hand, dangling against his leg, was Anita Sheehan’s French boning knife. No one moved or spoke. Then Walter moved toward us into the room.
The deadness lifted and I drew in my breath in mindless, ineffectual terror. His blind face was a wolf’s honed smile, a jackal’s killing rictus, a whipping, snaking death. The silent air howled with blood and inevitability. Enormity sang and screamed, a limitless gulf seemed to open in the floor that rotted under my feet. I saw murder in the face I had loved for so many years, saw my own end there, and Kim’s, and Walter’s. I lifted both hands weakly, but could not move my feet. Kim did not move either, but looked at Walter as he advanced slowly toward us, looked at him with a desperate puzzlement, an anguished incomprehension. And then he moved, fast and violently, and shoved me ahead of him into the living room toward the French doors that opened onto the front deck. Dimly, as my feet stumbled toward the front door, I heard him shouting, “Get out of this house! Get out, Colquitt! Walter, get out of the house now! Now!” He reached the glass door as I did and shattered it as easily as if it had been plastic wrap, with his shoulder, and when I was aware of anything again the three of us were standing in the cool blackness of the Sheehans’ driveway, and the air was only the air of a summer night again, and the sounds were only the sounds of a summer night.
House Next Door Page 14
