House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  We saw nothing of the Greenes, or of Norman Greene, anyway. His shining, clifflike Lincoln left early on those mornings; I would hear it start in the driveway next door before it was light, while I was still showering or dressing in our bedroom. I did not pull aside the curtains to watch him drive away. I knew that Melissa was home from the hospital, for the time being, anyway. I saw Susan Greene from my office windows occasionally, carrying the bundled-up child to her car, and they would drive away, to return an hour or so later. I assumed they were going to the doctor. Susan did not look up toward my window to wave, as she had in the early days of their occupancy. She looked drawn and tired, and her small, square body under the smart, belted green coat she wore seemed diminished, shrunken somehow, as if she were losing weight. At the one ballet guild meeting I went to that winter, safe in the knowledge that Claire was not a member, Eloise Jennings told me that they were attempting to treat Melissa at home, but further hospitalization would be necessary if she did not improve soon.

  “Well, at least she won’t feel like she has to give another of those awful parties, with Melissa sick,” Eloise went on, oblivious to the slanting look of fury Gwen Parsons shot her and the sudden small silence that fell in the room. Eyes turned toward her.

  “Although even that would be better than sitting home all winter, like we’ve been doing,” she continued. “Have you ever known things to be so dull around here? I guess, with Charles and Virginia gone and Colquitt and Claire not speaking…I don’t know what you all are fighting about, Colquitt, but I wish you’d patch it up. You’re ruining everybody else’s social life. Oh, come on, we’re among friends,” she caroled when Gwen attempted to interrupt her. “Everybody knows they’ve had a tiff.”

  The eyes turned to me, embarrassed but veiled, with speculation and something else behind them. Eloise saw that she had the group’s attention and, flown with her success, said in a coy singsong, “Could it possibly have anything to do with a certain haunted house, Colquitt? Now, that’s the best thing I’ve heard all winter. I told Semmes the other night—”

  “You talk too much, Eloise,” I said, setting my cup and plate aside and getting up. “You’re a regular one-woman transmitting station. Thanks for the refreshments, Marilyn. I’ll bring those press releases by when I’m done with them.” And I walked out of the room and got my coat from the closet in the foyer.

  Behind me silence rang like a bell, and then a soft, murmuring surf of women’s voices broke, and I could hear Eloise saying aggrievedly, “Well, I’m sure I never meant to offend her, but everybody’s talking about what she and Walter told Susan and Norman Greene, and if she can’t take a little kidding—”

  “Oh, shut up, Eloise,” I heard Gwen Parsons say, and I let myself out the front door. I did not go back to the ballet guild, and I did not tell Walter about the incident.

  I knew that people probably were talking now, and not just on the street. But we saw few people that winter, and so I did not know, nor did I think much about, the extent of the speculation.

  Toward the end of February the weather turned bitter cold, black-ice cold, and the temperature dropped to 12 degrees, then 10, then 8. An ice storm came hissing and slithering out of the north, silent and feral in the night, and in the morning there was desolation and ruin. Trees and power lines were down, streets were sheeted solid with pocked gray ice, lights and heat were gone from many homes and businesses in the city. Our neighborhood was not so badly hit as some, but it was two days before we had lights and heat. Walter could not get to work, and judging from the cars parked in driveways on our street, neither could anyone else.

  We lost no trees, but a monster oak was down in the Guthries’ garden, and a great limb had crashed through the roof of the Jenningses’ house. Walter, returning from a skittering, windmilling foray up and down the street to assess the damage, said that the Jenningses had packed up and gone, probably to Eloise’s parents’ scanty little frame house on the south side of town, as the radio reported no vacancies in any of the hotels and motels around the metropolitan area. Semmes would hate that, I knew; he saw as little of his in-laws as decency allowed, and the children would whine and weep and overflow the little house, and would probably all catch sodden, nose-running colds. I was unashamedly delighted at the thought.

  Walter reported that several other houses looked to be empty, but that both Claire and Roger’s cars were parked in their driveway and smoke was coming from their chimney. Smoke plumed from the Greenes’ chimneys, too, and flickering lights appeared in some windows and disappeared and reappeared in others. I thought the Greenes were making do, as we were, with candlelight and the fireplaces, and I knew that Susan’s stove was gas. In any other time I would have gone over to see if they or the child needed anything we might have to offer, but of course I did not. If the child worsened, I knew that they would take her back to the hospital.

  We closed off all our rooms but the kitchen and den and kept a fire roaring, and slept the first night on sofa cushions pulled up in front of the fireplace. My stove was gas too, and it generated enough heat, if we left the door open, to warm the kitchen and cook simple meals. In the manner of children, who love the novelty of natural disasters and the disruption of routine, we enjoyed the two days even while we listened guiltily to the litany of disaster and hardship and privation pouring in over the transistor radio. Nothing had to be thought of but warmth and survival; the enforced isolation gave a sort of sanction to our own self-imposed exile. We read aloud to each other by the light of an old kerosene lantern Walter had never gotten around to throwing away, and dozed fitfully in turn, one of us always awake to keep the fire going. We played Scrabble and chess and started a mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters. Razz and Foster, fizzy-tailed and wild-eyed with the storm, prowled the shrunken perimeters of their winter kingdom and finally burrowed nests for themselves deep in the tumbled sofa afghan and slept.

  At nine o’clock on the evening of the second day without lights someone hammered at the kitchen door, an urgent, insistent rattling against the frozen panes. I had tacked a blanket over the glass and we could not see out. Having heard radioed accounts of sporadic looting in the blackened ghetto neighborhoods, we hesitated for a moment, looking at each other, and then Claire’s voice came, calling, “Colquitt! Walter! Are you there? Let me in!”

  Her voice sounded strange and high. We scrambled for the door and pulled it open, and she stumbled into the kitchen, her hair wild around her face, dressed only in woolen slacks and a sweater and sneakers. I pulled her, stumbling, into the den, and pushed her down onto the cushions in front of the fire, and Walter dislodged the cats and draped the sofa afghan around her shoulders. She was shivering so hard that it was a moment before she could speak. Fire, I thought. Their house has caught fire, and their phone isn’t working. But then I remembered that phones on our street were working; I had talked to Gwen Parsons that morning.

  “What’s the matter?” Walter said. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s Duck,” she gasped, breathless, beginning to cry. Her face was leached to an unearthly white in the leaping firelight and there were the frozen silver tracks of tears on it.

  “It’s Duck. He called, he just called—” She could not go on.

  “What’s the matter with Duck?” I said, my heart cold and still with dread. “Claire, is he sick? Has there been an accident? What—”

  She drew a deep, shuddering breath and looked up at me. Her face was ravaged, wrecked, blasted, ruined. “Duck is married,” she said, her voice trembling like a hurt child’s. “Duck got married three days ago and has dropped out of Yale and isn’t going back. They drove to Maryland and got married, and they’re staying with her sister in Alexandria until he can get a job and they can find somewhere to live. He isn’t coming home. He isn’t even coming home! I don’t even know where he is now, because he wouldn’t tell us! Roger was going to go there, Roger was going to go get them and bring them home, but Duck said if
he came they wouldn’t be at the sister’s, they’d go somewhere else and we wouldn’t be able to find them! Oh, Colquitt, he’s just…thrown it all away, all of it, everything…”

  She was crying with the deep, tearing, uncontrollable sobs that do not allow even breath, and I held her and rocked her shoulders and murmured to her in distress and grief until the awful keening slid into soft, tired breathing. Walter went into the kitchen and brought back the brandy bottle and three glasses. In a little while she was able to sip some and to talk again.

  “Tell me, Claire. Start from the beginning,” I coaxed. “Who did Duck marry? Do you know the girl? Was it Libby?”

  “Oh, of course Libby,” she said. “Who else? We knew they would one day, and that was fine, that was perfectly all right, but not like this—not just…throwing away his whole future, not running off in the night, dropping out of school. What kind of life can he possibly have now, with no education, with no money, with a baby—”

  “A baby?”

  “Oh, yes, a baby. She’s pregnant. Why else would they—and besides, he told us she was. About three months pregnant, and never said a word to Ford and Anne. Afraid to, I guess; you know how Ford has always been about her, how terribly strict. Roger’s gone over there now to see what we can do about it, but Duck said they didn’t know about the baby. Libby wouldn’t let him call them. Libby told them she wanted to visit Dorothy—you know, the oldest Fleming girl, the one who works in Senator Gordon’s office. And since it was finals week at Chase and she’d finished, they let her go, and she and Duck met in some terrible little town in Maryland and got a justice of the peace to marry them, and that’s that. He asked us to tell the Flemings, so I guess Roger’s done that by now.”

  Walter and I looked at each other. Claire’s labored breathing was the only sound in the room for a time. Then I said, “Claire, I know it’s an awful shock to you, but nowadays—I mean, kids just don’t have to get married anymore—there are…other options.”

  “You mean abortion?” She grinned at me, a mirthless, awful death’s-head grin. “Ford Fleming’s daughter? She’d die first, she’d literally die. I think Duck would too. He says he wants this child; he says he’s glad to be married. I said, well, why not let her, oh, go away and have the child and put it up for adoption, and I said we’d pay for it if Ford and Anne were opposed to that, but I know they wouldn’t be in the long run. But he said absolutely not, he was going to go to work and support his family like any man would, and later, maybe, he’d go back and finish school. But, oh, Colquitt, he won’t; they never do. And of course his scholarship’s down the drain now, so we said we’d pay their living expenses if he’d just stay in school and finish, and pay for the baby and all, but he wouldn’t hear of that either. Oh, my God, my baby, my good, bright boy—”

  “You couldn’t…stop it somehow? I mean, are they both eighteen?” Walter said.

  “Yes. Both of them. Libby’s birthday was right after Christmas. It’s legal, it’s perfectly legal, and there’s not a thing in the world we can do about it! With any other kids, I’d say maybe, after things cooled down, they’d listen to reason, they’d come home and talk it out with us, they’d let us help, but she’s so afraid of her father, and you know Duck. He does what he says he’s going to do. He always did, from the time he was a little, little boy. He was always so…honorable.”

  I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. I did know Duck. Claire was right. Having done this thing, he would see it through. He would accept no help. He had never been a childish child; he was Roger to the core. I remembered a summer day when he was about ten and had been cleaning debris out of our creek, and had brought a slim, vivid green whip of a small snake, cradled carefully in his hands, to my back door.

  “I found him in the creek, Mrs. Kennedy,” he’d said, “and I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It’s really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper. See? But I wanted to ask you first, because he’s your snake.”

  My eyes filled at the memory of the small boy and the little snake, and the gentle, cupped hands.

  “Claire, dearest baby, I’m so terribly sorry,” I said, and she looked up at me over the rim of the brandy glass.

  “I know you are,” she said. “I came to tell you you were right. You were right, and I was a stupid damned fool, and I’d give anything in the world if I’d listened to you, and now it’s too late.”

  “Right about what?”

  “About that house,” she said, and the venom in her voice shocked me. It was pure, palpable, hissing hatred. “That damned evil, hovering, sneaking, crouching, monstrous killer of a house over there. You told me, you knew, you tried to tell me when Susan and Norman first moved in, and I thought you were jealous of me and Susan Greene, and all the time you knew…well. It’s too late to apologize to you, because you should hate me for the things I’ve said about you, and it’s too late to help Duck, but I can tell you right now that we’re getting out of here before it touches Roger or one of the other boys. We’re moving, just as soon as I can find a house big enough, and I don’t care where it is so long as it’s as far away from this street and that house as I can get. I’m not going to stay here one minute longer than—”

  “Claire, what in the name of God are you talking about?” I said.

  “That’s where it happened, of course,” Claire said. “That night—you remember—the night of Gwen and Carey’s party, around the first of December? Don’t you remember—Libby was baby-sitting with Melissa, and I said to Susan, ‘Well, don’t think she’s doing you a favor, because Duck will be over there before you’re out the door,’ or something? And Norman made those awful cracks about them? Well, Duck was over there. He went. And they…after Melissa was asleep, they…it was the first time, Colquitt. He told me it was, and I absolutely believe him. You know how Libby is—was. And Duck’s funny; I’m not such a fool as to believe he’s never—slept with a girl before, but he simply would not, not with Libby. He loves her. He really does. They’ve gone together since eighth grade. There never was a time they didn’t plan to get married, someday—and he would not just casually—he says so. He says he just doesn’t know what came over them; one minute they were watching TV and eating popcorn, and the next minute—But I know what came over them. You know, don’t you? It’s the same thing that came over Buddy Harralson and Lucas Abbott. And Anita Sheehan. And it happened to Virginia too, didn’t it? Or something awful did, there in that house. I got too close to it, didn’t I, Col? Interfered with it somehow. So it reached out for me, only not me but someone who means more to me than my own life. And I will not stay and wait for it to—to—get at Roger or Rog or Tommy. I don’t care what Roger thinks, we’re moving.”

  She stopped, breathless and blank-faced and wild-eyed, and Walter said, “What does Roger think about all this, Claire? About moving, I mean. Does he believe what you think about the house?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks, because I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but I’m going to. He can think I’m just as crazy as you, Col—and God forgive me that—but we’re going to move no matter what he thinks. And if he won’t, I’ll take the children and go without him.”

  “He wouldn’t let you do that,” I said.

  “No,” Claire said. “I don’t think he would. Whatever he says, in the end we’ll move. It may take a while, but we will. And if you had one ounce of sense, you’d go too—you, of all people, who caught on—but if you don’t, that’s your affair. Stay and warn people if you think that’s the noble thing to do, but you’ll regret it.”

  “Are you going to tell people, Claire?” I asked almost conversationally. We three might have made a scene from an eighteenth-century madhouse, sitting there in the primal firelight talking of unutterable things. A tableau out of Bedlam. I felt only bone-deep fatigue and a ghost of remembered grief and fear.

  “No. I’m not going to tell anybody. We’re just going to move and live our lives and not
say another word ever about it to a living soul. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I don’t want to see that house ever again. I don’t care what happens to it or to anybody who lives there so long as my family is away from it. It’s…insane, and crazy, and awful. Things like this don’t happen; I don’t have the equipment to deal with this. But I wanted to tell you—I wanted you to know that I—”

  “I know. Don’t say anything more about it. We won’t talk about it anymore. I promise we won’t ever mention it again. But, Claire, please don’t just move out tomorrow. Think about it when you feel better.”

  “I’m not ever going to feel better about this,” she said.

  “What do you think we ought to do about the Greenes, then?” Walter asked.