Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  When he’d gone, Alice and I exchanged plaintive glances and sipped our sherry. Sitting there it suddenly occurred to me that I now felt a curious strangeness about the parlor—that parlor, always so familiar to me that I knew every object and detail of it by heart—the white mantel with the French ormolu clock, the old brass andirons in the fire with their proud lions of St. Mark atop great brass balls, the hand-hammered Victorian tongs, the shovel and whiskbroom leaning against the white brick, the two bergeres in which we sat, the long needlepoint footstool before the brass fender of the fireplace, and the small Kirman throw rugs scattered round with the wide-plank chestnut floors showing between them—all of that so familiar to me that I could catalog it for you—was suddenly all strange and unrecognizable. The very chair I sat in, always so perfectly suited to the curvature of my back, was suddenly all new and stiff to me. It was nightmarish—just as if you’d stepped out of your life for a moment and couldn’t get back into it. I was in my parlor, but I was a total stranger there. And so was Alice. But Richard, on the contrary, seemed more than ever to belong there. The place would have been inconceivable without him. You see, Alice and I were no longer the hosts of Richard. We’d become his guests in our own house.

  When Richard reappeared it was to summon us to the dinner table, where supper was already on. There in the center was a platter with fresh steamed brook trout in a lemon and butter sauce. He’d also found baby asparagus, a favorite of mine, and put together a bright fresh garden salad. It would be hard to imagine a more tasteful or appealing table.

  We sat down precisely as he directed us and then gazed, speechless, as he deboned the trout with surgical skill and served.

  He watched us as we took our first bites. Alice responded at once. “Exquisite, Richard.”

  “Outstanding,” I added. “Where’d you get the trout?”

  “Up the stream. Wanted to get some more practice in on my new rod,” he said, a look of great satisfaction on his face. I was certain that the business about the rod was meant to soften me.

  Several times during the course of the meal I found my eyes fastened on the lineaments of that face, trying to relate it to all of the grisly violence that had boiled over the night before in Petrie’s nursery. The more I studied the face, the less sense the thing made.

  After we’d finished he cleared our plates, Alice attempted to help him but he insisted she sit in her place while he looked after dessert. By that time we were eating out of his hand, anxious to comply with his every wish.

  When he returned, he had several porringers of fresh raspberries and new whipped cream. There was also a pot of hot mint tea. It was all so lovely, you see, so terribly insidious.

  We made no mention during supper of the Petrie business. Actually, by this time, under Richard’s wizard-like spell, we’d already forgotten it. But with the end of supper, the table nearly cleaned except for the scooped-out dessert plates, the old anxiety came gnawing back at me again, and I determined to speak.

  “Richard,” I said, with a sternness that must have sounded ridiculous. “Will you join me in the library?” It had all the portentousness I could muster.

  We settled in there with a great rattling of chairs and clearing of throats. I made a few limp attempts at idle chatter. Richard wasn’t very good at idle chatter. It didn’t ruffle him to sit there and utter nothing but monosyllables at me. At last I decided to simply wade in.

  “Richard—Do you know who was here this morning?”

  “Nope.”

  “Emil Birge.”

  I watched his face for a sign of something significant. Not as much as a twitch did it betray. Instead, I was staring into an impenetrable calm. For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me.

  “I say, Emil Birge dropped in today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Harlowe Petrie’s place was destroyed last night by an intruder—or several intruders,” I added, hoping he’d take the bait and run with it. But he didn’t. Whatever I was saying or insinuating was to him a matter of stunning indifference.

  I was groping for a way of saying what I wanted to say. But what I really wanted was for him to lie to me in as bald and shameful a fashion as conceivable. I wanted him to give me some reason to despise him.

  “You weren’t out last night, were you, Richard?”

  “Yes. I was out.”

  “Oh.” I paused, then stumbled on. “You don’t know anything about this Petrie business, do you?”

  “I did it,” he said. Just like that, unfalteringly, without batting an eyelash. And all the while he was confessing his guilt, he was beaming, radiant, angelic.

  “It was justice,” he went on gently. “He did you an injustice and I paid him back.”

  “Paid him back—”

  “Sure,” he said sympathetically, as if I were an obtuse child who couldn’t get his lessons straight, “it was justice.”

  “That sort of justice is against the law.”

  “What law?”

  “The common law. The civil law. The law of the land, if you like.” The back of my neck began to sweat, and I wiped it with a handkerchief.

  He was smiling indulgently at me. “If someone hits me, I hit back.”

  “There are all sorts of ways of hitting back,” I snapped.

  “Oh, you mean the courts and all that? I don’t have no faith in that.”

  “You don’t?”

  “It only works if you’re somebody rich or important.” He shrugged. “It never worked for me.” There was no bitterness to it.

  “That’s true, Richard. The law’s not equal and never has been. It does tend to work a lot more equably if you can afford an expensive attorney. Now, you’re not of a privileged group. Nor can you afford an expensive attorney.” My eyes fixed him as I spoke. I had his attention now, and he was listening to me. “That’s why someone like you has to be particularly careful about breaking the law. What you did last night is of the gravest seriousness. These people here would like nothing better than to ride you into jail and throw away the key. And believe me, in your case they’ll do it on the slightest provocation they can find.”

  He was nodding his head, but it appeared to me that what I was saying wasn’t making the slightest dent in that surface of impassivity.

  “The law here,” I went on, “the judicial system is not exactly attuned to the kind of simple code of justice you seem to be talking about.”

  “That pimply bastard stole your fifty.”

  “I know he did,” I pleaded weakly. “But what you did last night was despicable.”

  “You did nothin’ about it. So I had to. Matter of pride.”

  The remark was shattering, the logic inexorable. He’d not put it in the form of a charge or an accusation. He’d merely stated it as a matter of fact. And since he had done so in that fashion, there was very little I could say by way of defense. I couldn’t even enjoy the satisfaction of disliking him for saying it.

  It went on like that for a while—back and forth—all empty words and futility, and in the end I yielded. “You realize, Richard, that Mrs. Graves and I have badly compromised ourselves already? But I assure you, if something like this happens again, you’re on your own.”

  He didn’t appear the least bit troubled by my words. As a matter of fact, in his own peculiar way he appeared pleased and eager to cooperate.

  “Now if the sheriff should question you,” I said, standing at the door of the library and wagging a finger, “You just say you were home all last night. He’ll say you were seen in town last night, but Mrs. Graves and I will back you up.” I patted him on the back and added sternly. “But remember, just this once.”

  When Richard had finished the dishes and gone to bed, Alice and I sat in the parlor and watched the final sparks of the fire simmer and crackls on the grate.

  I went over in my mind the whole story of that day at Petrie’s as he had related it to us. I recalled that I’d been a bit surprised that he hadn’t made more of a fuss after having
been gulled by George. I put it down then as a kind of timidity, or possibly shyness about causing a scene in a public place. I couldn’t have been more wrong. For now I realized that it wasn’t Richard Atlee’s style to make loud protests or grand fusses about indignities, real or imagined, that he had suffered. He was far too secret and oblique a person for that. Instead, I knew now that if you did him a wrong, he would probably just walk away. But that wouldn’t be the end of it. Hardly. For he would carry that wrong around with him for a good while, brooding over it, outwardly calm but inwardly smouldering, calculating an advantage, plotting his vengeance, and waiting for the right moment to pounce.

  I couldn’t really say that my talk with him that night had done much to reduce my uneasiness. On the contrary. It occurred to me I was more frightened than ever. And precisely what did he mean when he said the courts had never worked for him? How many courts had he been involved with, how many crimes had he been sentenced for?

  It was amazing, the rapidity with which Birge appeared to drop the whole business. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was so unlike the man. All the following week I kept waiting for him, expecting him at any time to come rattling up the drive waving a subpoena, full of irrefutable evidence and eyewitness accounts of that awful night. But nothing of the sort occurred, so that soon I began to breathe freely and imagine that the whole affair—ugly as it was—had finally blown over.

  But, of course, that wasn’t the case. Nearly three weeks after the incident, I learned through Washburn, of all people, that Birge had come around asking questions about Richard’s period of employment there.

  “What sort of questions, Mr. Washburn?” I asked, a slight quaver in my voice.

  “ ’Bout the boy, mostly. Who he was. Where he came from. Know nothin’, I says.” Washburn ran on full of indignation, “And that’s zactly what I told him.”

  I drove back home down the Bog Road, a little troubled and moist in the palms. Then shortly after I got into the house I concocted an excuse to call Beamish, the oil supplier.

  When I got him on the phone he was full of noisy amicability and bursting with good will. I don’t recall how I got him off the subject of boilers and fuel prices, but in the next instant we were chatting about his erstwhile employee Richard Atlee. He appeared to have no reticence about discussing that subject, either, and sure enough, in the next moment he was babbling on about a visit he’d had from Birge just a few days before.

  It was very much the same sort of thing I’d had from Washburn, but Beamish went him one better:

  “They sent some fingerprints off to Washington.” His voice was almost musical as he said it.

  “Oh, did they?”

  “Said they got ’em off one of them busted display cases up to Petrie’s. Yes, sir. Sent ’em down to the capital to see if they couldn’t tell ’em somethin’ there.”

  So Birge was on the prowl. But of course, as I saw, I expected it. I wasn’t terribly disturbed about the fingerprint business, either. After all, Richard had gone to Petrie’s during a normal work day. Finding his fingerprints on a piece of shattered glass there would not be a very startling disclosure.

  Well, so it was. Birge was not going to be content to let sleeping dogs lie. On the contrary. His blood was up now. He was on the trail of something, and even if police records failed to tell him what he wanted to know, I could be certain that in the matter of Richard Atlee he was now going to be increasingly vigilant.

  But life still went on in precisely the uneventful way it had before the Petrie incident, expect that Richard had so enjoyed the experience of making our supper that he now insisted upon doing it several times a week. And he was not merely a good cook. He was an artist. He had a way particularly with fish and poultry that really made you sit up and take notice. And he possessed an almost religious feeling about vegetables. When he prepared them, they were memorable.

  So on alternate days Alice would be banished from her kitchen, which at first she seemed more than eager and pleased to be. But Alice Graves is a woman who enjoys her kitchen, and though she made a great show of loving the banishment, of savoring her new freedom, I had more than a sneaking suspicion that the uniqueness of the experience of being cooked for and then served on expensive service would begin to wear thin. I was right in this, for later on she began to resent her banishment and showed it in a million small ways. I could see it, for instance, when Richard brought her food to her—something about the way her eyes arched, or a certain strident crack through the sweetness of her voice, when she would ask, “And what’s this one, Richard?”

  “Stewed leeks.”

  “Oh,” she would say, and in that single monosyllable you could tell all.

  The weather grew warmer and the days longer. We spent more time out of doors. We planned things.

  As a result of Richard’s demonic energy our little house on Bog Road underwent a magical transformation. The exteriors he completely painted until they sparkled like a bright new penny. He made major repairs on the vital organs of the house, modernizing the heating system and rewiring the house, putting in heavier wire so that we could have an air conditioner—something I dearly wanted. It was a job that local electrical contractors said would cost a “fortune. Richard was able to do it at very nominal expense.

  Nor did he for a moment ignore the grounds. The lawn was mowed weekly and watered each night. The bushes and shrubs around the house, which we had permitted to grow shaggy and unkempt, he pruned and sculpted impeccably. As for flowers, everything he’d put into the garden came gloriously into full cry. The dying catalpa in the back of the house he pruned and fed and sprayed and tended so assiduously that in the space of a few weeks there was a visible splash of new growth at the top and a luster to the leaves I would’ve thought was impossible. There was nothing he couldn’t do. No task, no matter how onerous, that he resented or shirked. Whatever he put his hand to, he achieved. He was a wizard of all things.

  But there was a price to be paid for all this, too, for very shortly Alice and I had nothing to do. We’d wake up in the morning and face each other across our breakfast, which Richard had already prepared. And after we had finished breakfast we would sit and stare into the dregs of our coffee cups while the bees buzzed at the screens and the long summer’s day spread out pitilessly before us.

  “What would you like to do today, dear?” Alice would say.

  “Well, I thought I’d like to clear out the cellar and make room for my new workshop.”

  “He did that Tuesday.”

  “Oh, did he?”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “Surprised?” I laughed. “Nothing about him surprises _ 55 me.

  She looked at me and we both laughed aloud. But it was the quick, guarded laughter of careworn people. When we stood up, she leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “Do you suppose he’d permit us to do the dishes?”

  “We might just sneak them into the sink right now and do them while he’s out.”

  “I’d love to do some dishes,” she said a little wistfully.

  “What he doesn’t know will never harm him.” I winked at her, and so we did the dishes.

  Between the two of us, we had recently taken to referring to Richard as “he,” or “him.”

  Not only did Richard Atlee attend to our physical needs, but apparently he felt it was his duty to minister to our spiritual requirements, as well. Though he never said it, I knew he felt a deep responsibility about what had happened between me and Reverend Horn. It bothered him that we were now without a place of worship, and so on Sundays he would wake us, somewhat earlier than usual. We would wash and put on our Sunday clothes and stumble down to the living room, where we would hold services among ourselves, reading from the Bible and singing from the Hymnal. On these occasions I would preside. During the singing, Richard’s voice could be heard above anyone else’s. With its pathetic croaking and grating nasalities it would fill the room and, so it seemed later on, the whole house.

 
; So the days came and went, moving slowly and uneventfully but bringing with their virtually unbroken tedium a highly encouraging note. We heard nothing from Birge about a police record on Richard, and apparently all efforts to locate such a record had not panned out. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Birge had stopped asking questions of people around town. He had still not come to ask any additional questions of me.

  However, there was an ominous note to all this calm. On several occasions, once in the front yard, once in the driveway, and once peering out the library windows, I saw Birge’s station wagon out on the road, cruising slowly past the front of the house. And from the way he went past, I had the distinct impression it wasn’t merely a chance passing. It was perfectly clear, he wanted us to see him.

  I never mentioned this to either Alice or Richard, even though it troubled me. But still, from the way things looked, I commenced to believe that the matter was being slowly forgotten. It seems I was wrong. It had not been forgotten. And from an incident that occurred one afternoon, the point was made abundantly clear to me.

  For several days, Alice was going through a spell of high fever and sore throat. I had Dr. Tucker out to see her. He confined her to bed and write a prescription for antibiotics. Someone had to get the prescription filled.

  Because of the high fever, I didn’t want to leave Alice alone by herself in the house. Nor did I want to leave her with Richard and go myself. Ever since the Petrie incident, I had sensed in Alice a growing although still unspoken fear of Richard Atlee, and quite frankly I didn’t want her to wake from her fever and suddenly find herself alone in the house with him. So there was no one else to send except Richard. I’d made a point of not letting him go into town since the Petrie business. By this time I was fully aware of the hostility some of the people in the town felt toward him. We’d had a rash of nasty, anonymous phone calls, and I dearly wanted to avoid another unpleasant incident.