A few likely-looking prospects did come to see the house, marching erect and expressionless through the fluid crowd at the street, the agent nipping at their heels like a sheepdog. The crowds howled and crooned; none of the likely-looking ones came back. I was glad. These were the people whom, had they returned, I would have felt compelled to seek out and warn. I had meant to do just that with everyone who came to see the house, everyone who called. But except for those few, there could have been no ken between me and the people who came. Ashamedly, I realized that I had never in all my life really known that those others existed. I could not imagine their lives. We could not have spoken.
As in the winter, after Walter had gone to talk to Norman and Susan Greene and Claire had broken off our friendship, we drew into each other again. We slept long in the hot days, not knowing precisely what time it was when we awoke, because of the shrouding curtains. In the nights we sat on the darkened patio. Television and magazines and the newspapers drowned us once again; crossword and jigsaw puzzles and books from the central library downtown, which stayed open until nine in the evenings, opened arms to us. We talked a great deal, but I do not remember much of what we talked about. The island, and New York, and our courtship and the early days of our marriage. Things far enough in the past for safety. Nothing ahead. We laughed a lot, and it did not seem strange to us that we did. I wrote cards with our new telephone number to a few people—my remaining clients and the Parsons and a handful of out-of-town relatives and friends. Walter called and gave the number to Charlie. No one called. No one we knew wrote. Every night when we walked down the driveway to the mailbox we checked to see if the “For Sale” sign still stood beside the mailbox of the house next door. It did, grass growing taller around it. The lawn, where it was not flattened by the feet of the pilgrims, grew spiky and weedy in the slowly creeping heat of late spring. The lawn service employed by the realty firm did not come so often now. Cans and wrappers and boxes lingered for two or three days before someone came to pick them up.
Everything ends of course, and with the closing of school and the coming of the real heat the cars thinned and the night noises faded, the letters dwindled, and the hungry-faced people found fresher sustenance and moved elsewhere. We began to go out again during the daylight hours, to the market and the drugstore and the dry cleaner’s, though in other neighborhoods. Once or twice we went to lunch, in little places out near the river or in the heart of downtown, where we had not been before. We talked a lot, and drank a good bit, but we did not get drunk. I remember that we had a very good time at those lunches and at the movies we went to.
Once we drove to a new singles bar that I had read about in the newspaper, and we drank and danced until almost three in the morning, and laughed giddily in the car all the way home, and laughed in a nearly forgotten kind of simple, unencumbered joy in our lovemaking that night, like pagan children beside a warm ocean. If the physical boundaries of our lives were narrowed and straitened, the pleasures of us, one to another, stretched to infinite new horizons. There was joy and contentment and a rich enoughness to the things we said, and ate, and read, and watched, and did. I do not remember it as a bad time at all. I am very grateful—glad—for those days of proving.
A letter came from the president of the club, formal and symmetrical and freighted with genuine regret. The executive committee felt it was in the best interests of the club that we resign. Walter wrote back doing so. He was on the phone a good deal with Charlie in those days of early summer; negotiations for the sale of his half of the business were under way and could be handled by mail or phone. As Walter had expected, Charlie’s offer was more than generous. We shall have enough. Charlie offered to come by with the final papers when they were ready, but we did not want to see anyone from that other time, the time before, and they arranged to meet in the office of Charlie’s lawyer.
We saw Eloise and Semmes at the farmers’ market one Sunday afternoon staggering under baskets of snap beans and squash. Eloise cans endlessly. They turned away. I saw Gwen Parsons coming out of the dentist’s parking lot as I was driving in. I waved and she did too, and we both smiled, but she did not slow her car alongside mine as she would have done once, and I could not see her eyes behind the dark glasses she wore.
My last two clients called and canceled their accounts. The summer drew in around us and snapped shut. No one called, no one wrote, no one came. We lived. We watched the sign on the lawn of the house next door. By the middle of June it had not sold.
Still, we watched.
On a Friday evening in the third week in June there was a strangely familiar knock on the glass of the French door in the kitchen—two slow, three fast, two slow. I was upstairs zipping myself into shorts. In midstride down the stairs I realized that it was Kim’s knock, and stopped, my heart squeezed with joy and dread. Joy won, and I ran to meet him. Walter was in the basement foraging for the power drill. I could hear his feet hurrying up the basement stairs. He knew too.
I flung the kitchen door open and had my arms around Kim before I noticed the tall girl who stood beside and a little behind him. I stared insanely at her over Kim’s shoulder, the shoulder of the arm that had not moved to embrace me back. She gave me a small, uncertain smile. I released Kim, who stood still, and I stepped back and looked at the girl and at Kim.
“You’ve come home,” I said stupidly. “I knew you would.”
Walter came into the kitchen and stopped, saying nothing, looking at silent Kim Dougherty and the pretty, embarrassed girl beside him. He reached out to me and put an arm across my shoulders.
“Come in,” he said to them and stood aside so that they could enter. Kim hesitated, then came into the kitchen, pushing the girl lightly ahead of him. Still he said nothing. Then he said, “I brought Hope to meet you. We—I’m going to marry her.”
In the flurry of congratulations and the small business of shepherding them into the den and the bringing out of ice and drinks, the dreamlike, one-celled calm in which I had moved for so long split, and unreality rang high and chimelike around me. I did not know where I was. Frames of reference were gone; I moved around my kitchen by rote, assembling cheese and crackers on a tray without knowing where I had gotten them. The den looked strange, not mine. Walter, passing drinks, was a stranger in a strange room.
“How handsome he is,” I thought.
Kim looked fine, tanned and hard-muscled, his red beard neatly trimmed, his gray eyes unshadowed. But there was distance in them. The girl was tall and slender and auburn-haired, like Kim; a dusting of coppery freckles lay across her straight nose and high, pure cheekbones. Her face was strong and almost masculine, but it was the grave, delicate masculinity of a very young page boy or a medieval saint. When she smiled, as she did often, hesitantly and sweetly, it softened into a hoydenish preadolescence. She looked a lot like Kim. “Beautiful children,” I thought. “They will have beautiful children, tall and coppery, like good colts.”
We sat in the late-afternoon sunlight. Ice tinkled.
“How long have you been back?” Walter asked.
“Two or three days,” Kim said, rubbing Razz gently with the toe of his shoe. Razz crouched at his feet roaring an anthem to renewed friendship.
“We’ve been up with the family for a day or two, and to see Hope’s folks,” Kim said. “They’re old friends of my folks, it turns out. We came back here Tuesday. I’d have come by sooner, but I’ve been in the office with Frank most of the time. I did try to call you, but your number’s not listed.”
His voice was level, and he did not look at us. I was sure he must know about the People article; his partner would have told him. I did not think he would know yet about the general reaction. I felt no way at all, except a waiting.
“You’re going back into the partnership, then,” Walter said. It was not a question.
“Yes.” He looked up. The specter of his old white grin flickered, was gone. “You were right about one thing, Walter. It came back. All of it, sometime du
ring the winter. Just…pouring back. I’m designing faster than I can get it down on paper almost, and it’s good, it’s some of the best stuff I’ve ever done. I’ve got three or four ready to go right now, and Frank’s got the clients for them. I don’t know if it was Italy, or Hope, or just getting away for a while—I suspect all three. But I think it’s really this lady here. You know, she lived about thirty miles from me all my life, and then I have to find her in a damp, smelly sub-basement of a museum in Italy, with spiderwebs in her hair and rose madder on her nose.”
He smiled at the girl, and she smiled back, and there was such an envelope of rightness and youngness and joy around them that pure terror stopped my breath.
“How did you come to end up in the basement of the Uffizi?” Walter said politely to the girl.
“I took part of my senior year abroad in Florence,” she said. “The usual spoiled rich-kid trip, as Kim never ceases to point out to me. And it just got to me; I couldn’t leave. I was a fine arts major at school, and I talked my way into the most menial staff position they had, for no pay, and here was this grim-faced, hollow-eyed lout tramping around day after day with a sketch pad and huge big feet threatening two thousand years of priceless treasures, and one thing led to another—and here I am.”
“Well, Kim is just shot through with luck, and I hope he deserves it,” I smiled at her around the choking terror. “Will you be staying a while, or going back East, or what? I don’t imagine you’ve had time to find a place to live yet; maybe I could help. You’ll be married at home, I suppose, but you’ll want a place to come back to. Until Kim can design your dream house for you, of course.” I managed another smile. “There’d be plenty of time for me to scout around for you, if you’d like.”
There was another silence, and then Kim said, “We have a place. I closed on it this morning.”
“Oh, well, then—where?”
“I bought the house next door, Colquitt. The Harralson place. My house.”
“No!” I screamed. “No, no, no, no—” Redness broke around me, and then darkness that whirled and shrieked with wind and endlessness. I could hear my voice weaving in and out of it. When I came back to myself Walter was shaking me by the shoulders, and Kim was on his feet, his face whitened under the tan with fury and a sort of child’s grief. The girl still sat on the sofa, her face stiff with embarrassment.
I stopped, silent, and looked up at Kim Dougherty. “Why?” I said, but only my lips made the word. No sound came from them.
“Because I read that goddamned crazy, malign bitchery of an article you all cooked up—oh, yes, we get People in Italy—and I could not stand what you had done to my house! How could you do that? You of all people, Colquitt—you loved it, you understood it, right from the beginning—you were my friends, you understood what I was trying to do, what the house was saying. And you—you killed it! It was made for people to live in gracefully and comfortably, good people who’d appreciate what it stood for, and you’ve driven them all away now. Who would want it after all that stinking shit about hauntings, and forces, and—Goddamn, I couldn’t stand it. It’s still the best thing I’ve ever done; it always will be. And by God, Hope and I are going to live in it and love it and show the world what malicious, crazy, warped people you are.”
He stopped and took a deep, ragged, tearing breath and did not go on.
“Kim,” Walter said very slowly and distinctly. “Listen to me, Kim. Those things—they happened. Other things did too that we aren’t at liberty to talk about. One of them happened to you, don’t you remember? Do you think we would ever in this world have taken such a drastic step if we were not absolutely certain we were right? You know about some of it, you were here the whole time the Harralsons—you saw it all, that night. You lost your own juices because of it. And you can’t have forgotten that night that you and Colquitt and I—Please, let us tell you everything we—”
“No!” he roared. “Goddamn it, no! No way am I going to listen to any more of that shit! If—if awful things happened to people over there, it was because they were awful people to begin with! People who didn’t understand it, who didn’t deserve to live there. There is nothing wrong with that house! You are both crazy, and there is nothing wrong with my house!”
“Kim,” I said, and my voice sounded cracked and high and silly in my ears. “You said it yourself. You said it before any of us really caught on. Don’t you remember? You said it was a greedy house, that it didn’t bring out the best of everyone who lived there, it took the best.”
He looked at me in real astonishment. “I never said that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have; I couldn’t have. I never thought that. Nothing’s gone; I’m going better than ever—I just needed the change. Everybody dries up now and then. You told me that yourself, both of you did. I just don’t understand what’s happened to you—” The anger had drained out of his voice; a child’s profound hurt and bewilderment remained.
“You don’t remember,” I said dully. “Of course you don’t. That’s how it’s going to get at you. That’s what it’s wanted all along, you—that’s why all that other stuff, all those other things, things bad enough so that we had to make it public, public enough to reach you in Italy and get you back. Because nothing else would have, would it? You wouldn’t have come back here after what happened to you. But you don’t remember, and that’s how it’s going to get you. And that’s how it will get us. By knowing that we were the ones who—brought you back to it. That’s it. That has to be it.”
“Colquitt…” There was fear and sorrow and wariness in his voice. Kim thought we were mad. Dullness and lassitude turned my lips to stone; I could hardly push the words past them. It was as if I were very drunk or had been given novocaine.
“If you live in that house,” I said with my stiff lips, “it will take everything that you have. It will take your talent again, like it did before. It will take your wife. It will take the best there is in you, the essence of you, and in the end it will take your life. It will not wait long to do it either. It will be very quick this time. I will not let you do this.”
“You can hardly stop me, can you, Colquitt?” he said coldly and formally. He held out his hand to the girl, and, silently, her face averted, she took it, and he pulled her to her feet.
“I can stop you,” I said, but Walter cut my words off.
“When do you plan to move in, then?” he said as calmly as if he were asking about the time or the weather.
“We’re being married tomorrow, at City Hall, at two o’clock. Frank and his girl will be witnesses. We plan to move in early next week. We bought some furniture in Italy, and it’s in Boston now. We won’t need much at first.”
“That’s all right, then,” Walter said, as if to himself, and Kim looked at him oddly, but he didn’t say anything else. At the kitchen door he stopped and looked back.
“I’m sorry,” he said briefly. “I’d hoped there was some kind of mistake. I thought there must have been.”
“I’m sorry too,” Walter said, and the girl murmured something, and they walked around the patio and out of sight. I said nothing.
We sat for a while in the den, numbly, watching twilight fall on the house next door.
“The realtor’s sign didn’t come down,” I said. “I thought there would be more time. I thought we’d know.”
“It wouldn’t have yet, if they just closed this afternoon,” Walter said.
“Tonight, then,” I said.
“Yes. It will have to be very late. We can’t take a chance on somebody seeing it before it gets going good.”
“You don’t think we could change his mind if we talked to him again…?”
“No. I don’t think we could change his mind.”
We sat very still, not talking, and I know that I thought about nothing at all. I don’t think Walter did either.
At about nine o’clock, with the last flush of the sunset fading over the trees, Kim Dougherty came back. He was alone. I watched Walter as he
got up from the sofa and walked into the kitchen. His steps were stiff and small and shuffling. He will walk that way when he is very old, I thought, and then I thought, I will probably never have to see him walk that way. I’m glad. I knew that the knock on the door was Kim’s knock even though he did not rap out his old signal. It could have been no one else. A small ghost of hope brushed wings across my heart and then was gone.
Walter came back into the den, and Kim followed him, large-handed and bumbling and quiet. Remembered dearness limned him in my dry, staring eyes.
“Could you spare a drink?” Kim said. His voice was chastened and small, a boy’s voice. Walter went to get the drinks. Kim sat down on the hassock by the dead fireplace and studied his shoes. Razz and Foster stretched out of sleep on the sofa and went to eel around his ankles, and he scratched under their chins absorbedly. Walter brought vodka and tonics for all of us.
Kim swirled his drink around in his glass, watching the bubbles surge and break and reform, and then he lifted his face and looked at us, first at Walter and then at me.
“I just couldn’t leave it like it was,” he said miserably. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t come to do it. I want to try to understand all this. I—we can’t just live next door to you with this hanging between us. I love you. I love you both. Hope would love you—I have to understand. You must have been going through seven kinds of hell.”
Tears I thought were seared forever out of me prickled in my nose and started through my lashes. The remembered dearness bloomed into life, hurting unbearably. Perhaps there was still a way…
Walter began to talk. He talked for a long time. I listened; Kim Dougherty listened, attentively and gravely, looking into Walter’s face. Every muscle and cord and fiber in his long body strained toward understanding. Only when Walter finished did I dare to look at Kim. I looked away again. He did not believe us. There was a long silence.
House Next Door Page 29
