A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  “Are you quite finished, Oscar?”

  “If my meaning is plain.”

  “Plain as a mud hut, wouldn’t you say, Marilyn?” Barnaby inquired mildly, looking at me full on for the first time. His eyes had a curious hovering about them, caught somehow between stillness and action.

  “The poetic justice,” I said slowly. “Let’s see. Barnaby survived Africa only to injure himself in the wild interiors of Ellis Park.”

  Oscar looked from Barnaby to me and back again. I glimpsed something in his face—some realization that glimmered for an instant behind the closed shutters of his reserve.

  It was a gregarious crowd; the endless talk could be wearying. The first Saturday evening of the season, Oscar brought in a brass band. While it was setting up in the ballroom, I excused myself from a discussion about the influence of Mississippi Blues on the Big Band, and made my way along the hallway past the brightly lit front rooms to the rear foyer where a Steinway stood in the shadows. I flicked on the lamp, opened the glass doors of the music case, and selected a volume of Ancient Keyboard Music I myself happened to own.

  It was my second summer as a regular weekend guest, and already I had forgotten what life without Ellis Park was like. Yet, I did not exactly feel as if I belonged. Oscar had accrued an odd collection of people: a motley group which came and went, most of them leaving only the shallow imprint of caricature—the judge given to furtively adjusting his eyeglasses; the overweight matron who would labor across the lawn, jewels crusted to her fingers and throat.

  Simon and I were allotted the yellow suite in the west wing, and also invited to the occasional midweek dinner reserved for Oscar’s closest friends. These gatherings invariably included a dignitary of some kind, a foreigner of distinction, a modestly celebrated artist or journalist. I suppose Simon and I slotted into the artist category—he, a writer; me, a photographer. Though despite the glittering guest list, Oscar himself was not at all pretentious. His elegance seemed to spring from the same uncalculated place as his sculpted features, some serene department of nature that dispensed dignity and grace.

  I’d lost track of how many times I had repeated the piece on the piano; it was rolling from my fingers of its own accord. I’d forgotten the party, and the band, which by this time must have been swinging mightily on the other side of the house. I was aware only of my solitude, of the lilting melody that had nothing and everything to do with me. No longer looking at the music, I watched my fingers in a trance, stalled in the limpid timelessness of the melody.

  I looked up. My eyes followed the balcony encircling the foyer midway up the wall. A rustle, and then I fancied I saw a pale round moon withdraw into the dark. No, not a moon: a face. Tap, tap, tap, fading away from the balcony toward the servant stairway at the back of the house. Barnaby, of course, it must have been Barnaby, there, on the balcony, in the dark, watching. For how long?

  * * *

  We retired to the green parlor after dinner, where the butler had poured out glasses of Oscar’s crimson port. As the small talk dwindled, we sank more deeply into the leather couches and paisley wingback chairs and I sensed, in the room, that ambiguous moment in which the comfort of familiar faces and pleasurable habit thickens to tedium. Barnaby had a sixth sense about such awkwardnesses and a canny talent for dispelling them.

  That was when Barnaby came up with the idea of the storytelling salon. “Next he’ll have us playing charades,” I said. But Barnaby’s enthusiasm won us over.

  “One rule,” he announced. “Each story must contain an element of truth.”

  I looked over to Simon and saw him frown.

  “I’m happy to get the ball rolling,” Barnaby continued. “Only, I like my audience well-oiled.”

  He fetched the decanter from the sideboard. Barnaby was no longer using the cane; a slight limp was the only remaining sign of his tumble down the staircase. He did a slow circuit of the room, filling each glass.

  Simon rose and excused himself, pausing to kiss my cheek. “I’ll see you back in the room, darling,” he whispered, an odd expression in his face: vaguely disapproving, but also puzzled.

  Barnaby dusted off one of his Africa exploits. As I listened to him tell his story about hunting with Charlie, a swashbuckler who had once bagged an elusive white panther, it became clear to me that Barnaby was somehow making himself up. Seeing himself as a jazz-age adventurer on safari, perhaps, as he stole through the Kenyan brush, rifle in hand, a silver whiskey flask sloshing on his hip. And yet the Barnaby I pictured scouting low in the wilds was not a thumb-worn figure, not diminished for having been constructed, but the reverse: realer than real. Barnaby had a way of enlarging a situation, a sort of Midas touch of ownership and prowess. As the story progressed, I found myself shedding my critical distance, and had anybody asked me what Hemingway himself might have thought, I would have answered in a flash that both Charlie and Barnaby were the kinds of men Hemingway had always longed to be.

  The story had a terrible end, as I knew it would: Charlie found mauled almost beyond recognition, having given himself over to a lioness in some mysterious compact with the animal kingdom. His final words hovering in the air, Barnaby rose for another pass with the decanter of port.

  By the time I got back to our suite, Simon was already asleep. Barnaby’s story was still swirling in my head. Slipping off my shoes, I crossed into the sitting room adjoining the bedroom, opened the curtains, and sat in the easy chair by the window. The trees outside were strung with lights; their tiny bulbs picked out circlets of new green from the heavy black foliage.

  I wasn’t particularly interested in the dance Oscar set up for the next evening. Simon, however, was in a romantic mood; I danced a few slow numbers with him, but my heart wasn’t in it. I looked for a moment into his face—the stillness of his chiseled features, those eyes that melted me sometimes, at other times stopped me cold with their icy detachment. Simon wore his good looks lightly. He was not unaware of his physical charisma (he had been mistaken, on more than one occasion, for a matinee idol to whom he did, in fact, bear a strong resemblance). He simply had little interest in what others thought of him, a self-sufficiency that could spark resentment, even ire—and in my case left me, at times, feeling shamed and alone.

  I started to speak. “Simon, why don’t we …” But then, aghast at the pleading tone in my voice, muttered an excuse: “The wine, it’s gone to my head.” I stepped out onto the porch and breathed in the warm salt air. I made my way down the wooden steps and along the loose-stone path that led to the water.

  The private beach stretched for half a mile. I walked the length of it, accompanied by three gulls the size of small geese which rose every now and then to glide above the Sound, looking straight ahead, as if waiting for something important to be borne to them on the breeze. The ocean was quiet, except where it licked the sand near my feet. I found myself thinking again, as I had on and off all day, about Charlie’s white panther, its velvety coat and spellbound eyes. What had they been saying to each other, I wondered, this man, the beast, soul to soul, the moment before the shot?

  The beach side of the house was in darkness when I returned. Behind me, wavelets fingered the shore. I headed for the kitchen, where a maid was busy at a frothy sink, and poured myself a glass of milk. On my way back, I noticed light under the door of Oscar’s study. I knocked, then entered, but instead of Oscar, found Barnaby sitting in a halo of light, reading. He put the book down on the side table.

  “Hello.” He smiled. “A nightcap?”

  I pointed to my glass of milk and shook my head. I leaned against the doorjamb; looking down at him sitting in the green chair, the tapestry of the fox hunt rising behind him, I had the feeling that for all his travels, Barnaby most truly belonged here, in Oscar’s wood-paneled room.

  “I’ve been thinking about Charlie,” I said. “How high was the truth quotient of that story?”

  “If you’re asking me whether it happened, the answer is yes.”

  “
Did you have any idea he was going to do what he did in the end? Was there ever a hint?”

  Barnaby slowly rotated his glass. “There was one incident, now that I think about it. I was awoken one night by the cold. The fire had gone out, and when I saw Charlie’s empty sleeping bag, I went to look for him. I found him by the water hole in a kind of daze. No rifle, just standing there, staring into the water. He looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. The whole way back to camp, he didn’t say a word.

  “Next morning, he was back to his old self. Whistled as he shaved and wolfed down his breakfast. As usual, it was Ready boys? before any of us had finished eating. No mention of the previous night.”

  Barnaby stared for a moment at the blackened window, then turned back to me.

  “As for the truth quotient: that’s not for me to judge. Besides, isn’t that the business you’re in? The photographer, going about the world with a camera—teasing the truth out of things?”

  Barnaby rose and walked toward me, a seriousness in his face I’d not seen before. He leaned against the opposite side of the doorjamb.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said. “Am I just imagining it, or do you sometimes follow me?”

  Back at our apartment on Riverside Drive the following Thursday, as we were sitting up in bed reading, I had an idea for a story of my own. Not really an idea—more like a glimpse in the dark into an intriguing, unfamiliar room full of somebody else’s belongings. I barely had time to register it and it was gone, leaving behind a wild, jumpy feeling in my chest.

  “Simon, won’t you join us in the green room for the storytelling tomorrow night?” I found myself asking.

  Simon looked up from his book. “You know I don’t have a taste for that kind of thing.” He seemed a little put out by my question.

  In the morning, we loaded up the Studebaker outside our apartment building. And then, the ritual leave-taking: traveling a little ways north in order to cross the city above the park, and then east to take in the wide main boulevard of Harlem, open as an honest face, its jazz clubs slumbering in the daylight like unsung notes on a stave. As we headed south, I leaned back in my seat and watched the chameleon performance of the city as it sped by, dressing and undressing itself of decorum and civility: the slouching tenements of upper Park Avenue straightening to stately apartment buildings, with doormen in navy jackets and gold-braid epaulets, who guarded their marble entrances with vaguely bewildered pride. Then, the sparkling storefronts, with their whimsical displays and piles of summer fruit. I felt myself uncoiling, returning from the chill landscape of my work where I bounced along eerily unhampered by gravity, my camera, snug in my hands, fixing me not to space but to time in tiny, stolen snippets. When we finally crossed the Queensboro Bridge, I looked back to see Manhattan transformed yet again: now the trapped beast it always seemed from any distance great enough to view it whole.

  By the time we pulled into the circular driveway in front of the house, I felt alive with excitement. I glanced over at Simon. His face was tight.

  “Why don’t you take a walk?” I suggested.

  He gave a strained smile. “Good idea.”

  I got everything up to our suite in two trips, then returned to park the car. Back in the room I freshened up. I sat on the chintz-covered couch and smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, looking out at the handful of guests milling about on the lawn. I changed into a light evening suit and headed down to join them.

  Outside, I walked across the lawn to the croquet course where the little group was scattered among the hoops, Barnaby somehow at the center of things, leaning on his croquet stick. Beside him was the red-haired woman again, wearing freshly applied lipstick, her hand cradling the crown of her head where the ponytail sprouted, attempting to protect it, I suspected, from the sudden breeze that was tickling up skirts and setting wide trouser legs aflap.

  “Marilyn,” Barnaby smiled, tipping the rim of his straw hat. The woman’s face darkened to a frown she tried to hide behind a toothy grin.

  “It’s all the rest of us against Barnaby,” she said. “Don’t let the limp fool you—he’s leaving us in the dust.”

  “Croquet’s not my strong suit, I’m afraid,” I said. “I always end up hitting someone’s foot.”

  Barnaby handed his croquet stick to the woman. “Tell you what, Hilary. I’m appointing you my proxy.” Barnaby took my elbow, turned me in the direction of the beach. “Do me proud,” he called back to the woman, who was trying, without success, to disguise an out-and-out scowl.

  “You could be kinder,” I said when we were out of earshot. “The woman is clearly smitten.”

  “Hilary? Oh, she’ll be all right,” Barnaby replied absently.

  I was aware of the firmness of his hand on my elbow, of the way it made me feel: as if I were at the mercy of an unpredictable force of nature.

  “The Consulate must be missing you,” I said.

  “The consul general’s a friend of Oscar’s. They’re in cahoots, you know.”

  “Oh yes. Your enforced recuperation.”

  “Incarceration, I call it.”

  We entered the formal gardens. There was not a soul about. Only the gushing presence of the wild assortment of blooms, and a volley of twittering, muffled by distance, coming from the direction of the woods. Barnaby led me to a bench and we sat down.

  “Do you feel at a loose end?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. I’m working on a couple of ideas. Diplomatic travel writing, you might call it, about the postings I’ve had. Actually, the hardest thing about being here,” he broke off, reached forward, and cupped his hand around an openthroated tiger lily, “is being surrounded by all this, well, beauty.” He looked up to the clear and vibrantly blue sky. “I’m afraid I’m accustomed to a little more reality than Oscar provides. But it would be wickedly ungrateful of me to complain.”

  “I imagine there are worse places to be incarcerated,” I said.

  “Do you?” Barnaby leaned back, though the bench had no back, as if he had made a cushiony support of the fresh sunny air. “And what kind of prisons are you familiar with?” The half-smile, the deep vertical dimple, the intimate conspiratorial voice.

  “Actually, prisons are not my forte.”

  “No, the pictures of yours I’ve seen don’t have a lot of walls. You seem to prefer the outdoors.”

  We both hesitated. The far-off twittering of birds seemed to grow louder, as if the woods were stealthily advancing.

  “Non-fortes,” he said. With his right hand, he counted out two fingers on his left. “Croquet. Prisons. I see I’ll be learning about you in the negative.”

  Those brown eyes: I felt I might reach into them and pull out something marvelous and undiscovered.

  At dinner Barnaby leaned over and whispered in my ear, “We’ll be hearing from you this evening, I trust.” The pounding in my chest started up. I patted his arm.

  “Perhaps,” I said, attempting nonchalance. “If Oscar’s brandy inspires me sufficiently.”

  Barnaby gave a knowing smile and resumed his banter with the woman seated on his other side who was poking at her salad and looking at him in that hopeful, insecure way I’d seen women look at him before.

  After dinner, we made our way upstairs to the green room. Simon, in conversation with a scholarly looking man from the Treasury Department, remained in the dining room. Climbing the stairs alongside Barnaby, I could feel the weight of his gaze.

  We were the first to enter. Barnaby crossed the room to check the decanters, which had been readied on the sideboard. I sat in an overstuffed chair. Everything seemed vaguely altered; it was as if each piece of furniture had been moved two or three inches in one or another direction. The huntergreen of the walls appeared more precise, and the two paintings opposite me—a woman reading a letter, and a stiff family portrait of English aristocrats bearing no resemblance to Oscar—seemed suddenly both very still and very animated, as if the figures were holding their breath and waiting to spring t
o life.

  The others came drifting into the room. From where Barnaby stood in the corner I could hear the sound of ice cubes clinking, one at a time, into empty glasses. I recalled the flash that had come to me the previous evening—only in the remembering it was different, larger and smaller at the same time. I could see the whole story before me in one frozen scene, the characters and setting in miniature: propped up on a bed the size of a matchbox, a minuscule girl with honey-blond braids that fell across her shoulders and onto her developing bosom, which rose nakedly above a tightly laced bodice. The picture had the feel of memory—not my own, but somebody else’s, as if I had divined the source of some stranger’s secret obsession. I looked around, a little bewildered. There was Barnaby, moving about with the tray of fresh drinks and an exaggerated, waiterly air. The room had filled. Barnaby set the last drink from his tray onto the coffee table in front of me and returned to the sideboard to retrieve the one he had poured for himself. Everybody turned expectantly to where he stood by the window.

  “To this evening’s raconteur,” he said, raising his drink in my direction.

  “It was discovered in the vault of a cathedral,” I began, though I scarcely knew where the words were coming from. “A leatherbound notebook, rotting at the spine and filled with the writing of a feminine hand. The Twelfth Day of the Month of May, 1601 Years After the Birth of Our Lord Jesus was written across the top of the first page.”

  I found myself describing the story of a young girl, born in a servant’s shack built against the inside of a monastery wall, who grew up scrabbling with other children around the straw-roofed settlement, gazing in awe at the priests when they passed by on their way out into the parish.

  Every now and then I glanced across at Barnaby, who was leaning back in a leather chair, chin resting on interlaced fingers. I wondered if he had contrived this storytelling business solely to afford the chance of watching me frankly, and in the open.

  “The Canon knew the girl from church,” I continued. “He had not failed to notice how lovely she was. The mother, he knew, had eight other children at home; he knew, too, that her husband, an ironsmith, had recently lost the use of one hand.” A hush fell over the room. The only sound, apart from my voice, was the tinkle every now and then of ice cubes in a glass.