The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  She would, if the sky had not flamed over Arizona in October, not have parked her car in Battle Street on an afternoon in late August, and walked up onto the porch of Abigail Montfort’s house and knocked on the ancient door. She would not have known that there was supposed to be a cannon ball, presumably of British origin, lodged somewhere in the timbers of the old part of Abigail Montfort’s house. She would not, waiting for someone—certainly not the old lady herself—to answer the knocking, have looked back at the patched black surface of Battle Street and wondered, idly, whether it had been raining on the tenth of April, 1777.

  It was on that tenth of April that a detachment of British regulars, marching down from Danbury—where they had done some very satisfactory burning of selected houses—encountered a detachment of rebels, under command of Colonel Ephram Sopher, which was marching up toward Danbury, but some days too late. Battle Street was Brown’s Pike, then. It was, of course, a dirt road then—a road just wide enough for carts to pass on. It had not proved wide enough for armed men to pass on. Hence, the presumptive cannon ball in the timbers of the Montfort house. (Then the Brown house.) Hence, the records said, a good many men dead on both sides. Hence, the Second Battle of Glenville. It was not a battle which had settled anything, except which men died and which men lived. But, as far as that went, the First Battle of Glenville had not settled anything either, nor did the Third.

  Had the road been muddy from spring rains in April of 1777? Had men died in the road’s mud? Or, wounded, not yet dead, been carried into the Brown house, now the Montfort house, to die there or not die there? The Montfort house—she had noticed this driving toward it—had the black stripe around the top of the white-painted brick chimney—three or four courses of brick painted black, in a kind of mourning band; painted black because it had always been painted so since those who remained loyal to the crown had climbed ladders onto roofs and daubed black paint on white chimneys. The British regulars were supposed to know from that what kind of people lived inside and so to douse their torches.

  It was interesting, Lois thought—waiting for somebody to come to the door—to see how many of the oldest houses, the Revolutionary houses, did have the black chimney stripe. The British must have paid attention. There also must have been a good many who lived in Glenville who frowned on revolution, and had no ambition to become sons and daughters of it. The more substantial citizens, and the more conservative, Lois thought, and realized that the thought amused her. (And was pleased to be amused, if even so little, and by so little.)

  And, without knowing it, Lois smiled her amusement. The smile—it was almost a grin—lightened her young face under the black hair, the hair carefully tousled the day before by a hairdresser in New York. If she was going around to call on the old-timers, and make requests of them, she might as well show them that the newcomers weren’t frumps, whatever else they might be. (There were, she knew, several views as to what they might be.) To prove this further, she was wearing a print dress, predominantly blue—but not, by some shades, as deeply blue as her eyes—which she had bought two days before in New Canaan. She was also wearing stockings on brown legs, since one does not call on Abigail Montfort stockingless.

  Lois Williams, waiting for a heavy wooden door to open in a low and heavy house, was five feet six inches tall in stocking feet, and an inch taller in white linen shoes. She was a junior member of the Historical Committee and she came by appointment, to make a request. And they were taking a long time to answer the knocking. She knocked again, a little more loudly. The time had been five o’clock; not earlier, because Mrs. Montfort rested earlier. It was now just five o’clock.

  And now the door opened. The woman who opened it was unexpectedly tall. She had a long weathered face under white hair and a slightly bearded chin. She looked down at Lois, who said, “Mrs. Montfort?”, which would serve if this large woman was, improbably, actually Abigail Montfort and also if, which was more likely, she was—what was the name? Mrs. Harbrook, housekeeper.

  The tall woman smiled. Lois had heard of people who never cracked a smile. She had never before met anyone who, almost literally, did crack one.

  “You’d be Mrs. Williams,” the tall woman said. “About opening the house. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “She’s right feeble. Specially today, she’s feeble. The poor old thing.”

  She spoke in a flat voice.

  “Oh,” Lois said. “I’m sorry. We’d so hoped— And she wrote such a pleasant note. I thought—”

  “Week ago,” the tall woman said. “I’m Mrs. Harbrook.”

  “Mrs. Harbrook,” Lois repeated.

  “Good days and bad days,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “You wouldn’t know. People traipsing through. I don’t know.”

  “If she’s not well enough,” Lois said, “of course I don’t want to bother her. Perhaps another time? On—a good day?” She smiled herself, then. She felt a little as if she were selling, door to door. “The tour wouldn’t really be a tour without the Montfort house,” she said.

  “There’s that,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Oldest in town, some say. Or next to oldest.”

  “And,” Lois said, “the only one with a cannon ball.”

  “They say,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Well, come in. You’ve come this far. I’ll see how she feels. Only that Mr. Graham’s in there now. But you come in and I’ll see.”

  She drew back and held the door wider. Lois stepped out of sunshine into gloom, into dusk. She stepped into comparative coolness—dim coolness. She stepped into a low-ceilinged central hall, which ran back from light at the door into near darkness. For a moment it was as if the ceiling were the pressure of hands on her shoulders, pushing her down. Yet the ceiling was by no means that low; Mrs. Harbrook, much taller than she, moved erect under it.

  There was a large fireplace in one wall of the hallway. It opened wide into the hall—wide and shallow. It was faced with ancient masonry—squares of ancient masonry. Brick, yet not the shape of modern brick.

  “Used to be the kitchen,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Kitchen and most everything else, likely.”

  She opened the door, which was oddly close to the fireplace. A little light, but not a great deal of light, came into the hallway from the room on which the door opened.

  The room was square, low-ceilinged as the hall. One went up one shallow step to walk into it, and Lois followed Mrs. Harbrook into it. There were bookshelves on the wall opposite the door and, behind glass, rows of heavy books—books which, at a glance, seemed all to be the same book. In the right-hand wall there was a small deep window, with leaded glass. The window was closed. It was cool in this room, too, and a little musty. There was a horsehair sofa under the window. Opposite the sofa there was another, this one tufted. In front of it there was a low table.

  Lois looked around the room and Mrs. Harbrook looked with her. In the wall next the door there was another fireplace; a smaller fireplace which, Lois realized, backed to the great hall fireplace. It had a mantel, with little porcelain figures almost filling it.

  “If you’ll just sit down and wait a minute,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “I’ll see how she is. If she’s up to it.”

  She went out and closed the door after her. Lois sat on the horsehair sofa, which did not welcome. The light which came in through the little window was dim light; it was difficult to believe that, outside, there was the warmth of August, the bright sun of an. August afternoon.

  And yet—she thought, sitting uncomfortable, waiting—it was all as it should be; all as she had supposed it would be. They built low in those days; built with thick walls to keep out the cold of winter; walls to hold the heat of burning wood in wide fireplaces. They made windows small to keep the heat in and, in summer, coolness was as effectively trapped. She thought of her own bright house, with so much glass and a small fireplace for fun—and thought how, when power had failed in their first winter there, the wide windows had become like sheets of ice. And of how Ken, home between flights, had piled wood into the li
ttle fireplace and brought a mattress from one of the beds and put it in front of the fire and—

  She turned her thoughts away, wrenched them away.

  She would say—the tour of the old houses won’t really be anything at all without this house in it, Mrs. Montfort. And it’s only between one and five in the afternoon. I’m sure they’ll be nice people, Mrs. Montfort, because people who have a feeling about old houses—about history—are usually nice people, don’t you think? And there’ll be somebody in each room to see that nobody damages anything without meaning to. And all the proceeds go to the Visiting Nurse Association and the Community Center. And—

  And, Lois thought, I’m asking a frail old woman—they say she’s in her eighties—to let a lot of strangers traipse through her house, poke through her house. As if the house weren’t hers at all, but a museum, a part of history. As, she thought further, looking around her, it certainly is. Was it in this room, I wonder, that they treated the men who did not die—did not quite die—in the mud of Brown’s Pike, during a battle which did not settle anything?

  She heard voices, then—voices in the entrance hall. The walls were thick, the door heavy, so that at first she heard voices only, not words. One of the voices was, she thought, the flat voice of Mrs. Harbrook, who seemed to be speaking more quickly now than she had before. The other voice was a man’s.

  The voices came closer after a moment. She heard words then, in the man’s voice—“No harm to ask her,” the man said. Then there was the sound of the knob of the door turning and she stood up as the door opened.

  The man was of medium height and had close-cut brown hair and wore a bow tie—a bright bow tie—in the collar of a white shirt. He was smiling as he opened the door. I’ve seen him before, Lois thought and then, in almost the same instant, on Main Street—several times on Main Street and once with other men at the Inn. His smile was infectious; she found that a half smile on her own lips was answering it.

  The man merely, by standing in the doorway, brought today into a room of dim yesterdays. Lois did not realize, until he smiled and she, as a courtesy, waiting an instant for him to speak—to explain—returned the smile, that the dim old house had to some degree dimmed her spirits; that the coolness of the old house had begun to seem a rather clammy coolness. He was every day—he was the unhurried, but businesslike, life of Glenville’s Main Street. Golf at the country club (and luncheon meetings at Rotary)—that was the man in the doorway, who now said, “Mrs. Williams?” in precisely the voice, with precisely the manner, to be expected.

  “Yes,” she said. “Is Mrs. Montfort too—?”

  “Howard Graham,” the man said. “The old lady’s lawyer.” His smile went out, then. He shook his head slightly. “Nothing will do but she signs her will.”

  “Oh,” Lois said. “Then I—” She hesitated. “You mean,” she said, “she wouldn’t want—be able—to talk about opening the house for the tour?”

  “Just now,” Graham said, “I’m afraid she’s got only one thing in her mind, Mrs. Williams. Getting everything in order; getting the will signed. You know how—well, how old people get.”

  She didn’t, especially. She nodded, since she could guess.

  “So far as I know,” Graham said, “there isn’t really any great rush about it. Of course, she’s eighty-ish. But, she’s been that for quite a while. The point is, you’d think it was now or never.”

  “Then—” Lois said. She had put her summer bag down on the horsehair sofa, where it had turned instantly into an anachronism. She picked it up.

  “As to the tour,” Graham said. “While she’s got this—this thing about getting the will signed— But, Mrs. Williams, would you mind doing her a favor? Me, too, comes to that. We need a witness—somebody not involved. Who doesn’t stand to benefit. You know? Since you happen to be handy—” He smiled again. “You,” he said, “and young Tony—yard boy or whatever.”

  “Why—” she said, and there was doubt in her voice.

  “Just sign your name,” he said. “Give me your address. When the time comes, identify your signature. That way—we get it off the old dear’s mind.” He looked at her, as if they—younger in the old house—shared an understanding. “Like as not,” he said, “we get it done and she’ll come all over chipper. Ready to talk about anything. That’s what Mrs. Harbrook says. Quite a character, Mrs. Harbrook. Been with her twenty years, they say. Anyway—do you mind?”

  “Why,” Lois said. “No.” There was still, for some reason, hesitancy in her mind, hence in her voice. “Of course not,” she said, and the hesitancy vanished.

  He said, “Good. I’ll see if she’s all set,” and went back into the hall, leaving the door open. She watched him cross the hall and open a door in its opposite wall and look in and say, into dimness beyond, “O.K.?”

  Apparently there was an answer, although Lois could hear none, because, after a second, he said, “Fine. Mrs. Williams will be glad to. Somebody getting Tony?”

  He had turned back toward the hall as he said this. “Coming,” a man’s voice said, and two men came in from the back of the hall, out of the darkness there. One of them, as he came into sight, was a plump man in a gray summer suit—a youngish man with receding hair. The other wore stained khaki slacks and a skivvy shirt and was, Lois thought, just getting beyond being a boy. He was swarthy, brown-eyed, dark-haired. Of course— Tony Bourgelotti, who, at one time or another, had cut almost everybody’s grass. Including, Lois thought, mine.

  Graham faced her and smiled again, and nodded and, needlessly, said, “All set, Mrs. Williams.” She went out into the hall. Tony said, “’Noon, Mrs. Williams,” in a soft voice. Graham said, “This is Mr. Keating, Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Harbrook’s nephew. Can’t witness because his aunt’s mentioned. That is—could, but somebody might think it left a shadow.”

  “Afternoon,” Keating said. “Good of you, Mrs. Williams.”

  He spoke, she thought, like New York—like New York City. He turned an affable smile on her. Unexpectedly, he held a hand out. She took it, briefly. It was surprisingly soft, for a man’s hand. The hands of men she knew were hard—narrow hands or broad hands, but hard with muscle. Keating’s hand felt uncomfortable in hers, and she released it.

  “Right in here,” Graham said, and the men stood away from the door across the hall, and she went through it. The room was larger than the library in which she had waited, but as low, as cool—and even duskier. At first, there seemed to be no one in the room.

  Then Mrs. Harbrook, who had, it was evident, been bending over something in a corner at the far side of the room, stood up and turned and said, “We’re all ready, Mr. Graham,” and then, turning back, leaning down, “Aren’t we, dear?”

  There was someone in the chair she leaned over in the dark corner. (Lois realized that curtains were drawn across the small window at the far side of the room.) Someone—a small, oddly crumpled figure which seemed to be swaddled. In a shawl? A blanket?

  “You get the girl?”

  The voice was thin, high-pitched. It was, however, unexpectedly clear, unexpectedly carrying.

  “Let me look at her.”

  Graham, standing near Lois, looked down at her. He shrugged his shoulders, just perceptibly, sharing an understanding—an understanding of youth, of today, in the presence of age, of yesterday. He touched her arm, the touch gently impelling. Lois Williams went across the room, white shoes of today against an ancient carpet, and Mrs. Harbrook turned to her and nodded and Lois looked down at an old woman in the low chair. It was a shawl wrapped around her.

  She had thin white hair and a small face which hardly seemed more than a whitish blur in the dim light. She looked up at Lois, the shawl half shielding her face, drawn up to either cheek, held below the chin with a safety pin.

  “Pretty,” the old lady said. “Young and pretty. You’re going to help an old lady, dear? Help get things—” She hesitated. She looked toward Mrs. Harbrook. She said, in the carrying voice, “What’s that he s
ays?”

  “Your grandson,” Mrs. Harbrook said, not as a question. “Let me think, dear. Squared something?”

  “Squared away,” the old woman said. “Away. You live in town, girl?”

  “Mrs. Williams,” Mrs. Harbrook said. “Yes, Mrs. Montfort,” Lois said.

  “Came about this tour,” Mrs. Montfort said. “Be good for them. Give them a feeling—where’s that young man?”

  Graham came across the room. He said, “Here I am, Mrs. Montfort. You ready?”

  “And waiting,” the old woman said.

  He said, “Good,” and nodded to Mrs. Harbrook, and the tall woman reached beyond the chair and brought out—lifting with one hand, easily—a small table with papers on it. She put the table in front of the low chair. Graham handed her a pen and she put it in thin fingers which came out from under the shawl to receive it.

  “Right here, Mrs. Montfort,” Graham said, and leaned down over the table, toward the woman in the chair, and pointed. Lois had moved back, out of the way. She could no longer see the small crumpled face but now, standing behind Graham but a little to one side, she could see the thin fingers guide the pen on the line Graham pointed to. The movement of the pen was completed. Graham reached down and blotted and said, with cheer, reassurance, in his firm voice, “And there you are.”

  He picked up the will, which was backed with stiff blue paper, and riffled through it—there seemed to be several pages—and looked at the last and nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Now Mrs. Williams. Tony.”