Something in the Shadows

by Packer, Vin

  Something in the Shadows

  Vin Packer

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  5:45 to Suburbia

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Upstairs in his study, Joseph Meaker heard Maggie’s voice drown out the others. Weekends, Maggie held court in the living room, over coffee and brandy, after a late dinner. Her audience was always a captive one, since the guests were there for the weekend. Last night had been a two-thirty night, and this one? Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Ten-after-one. He was reminded of an old Frost poem which ended: “And miles to go before I sleep.” Hours to go — Saturday night Maggie was always in top form.

  They had reached an agreement about weekends after the last fight, four or five days ago. Joseph could simply sleep in his study on weekends. Maggie would close the door separating the upstairs from the downstairs. By the time everyone was ready to turn in, Joseph would be asleep, and Maggie would sleep in their bedroom so as not to disturb him. After all, wasn’t that the fair way, Maggie asked? It was certainly no fault of hers that Joseph did not drink and did not enjoy sitting up and talking. “Chewing the fat,” as she put it. Besides, Maggie always added, the move to Pennsylvania had completely inconvenienced her, and all it had done where he was concerned was to make life easier. It was Maggie who had to get up at six every weekday morning, in order to be at her office in New York by ten. It was Maggie who had to watch the weather reports and the road reports and the Trenton train schedules; Maggie, who had to rearrange her entire life so they could rent this farm. And — the knife’s final thrust — if Maggie did not have friends out for weekends, what the hell kind of a weekend would it be for her? A quiet one, maybe? Joseph Meaker thought of that answer, but said nothing. It would only start her off again on her favourite subject: how he lived in a dream world. So they had reached an agreement about weekends, and here it was in effect.

  Maggie’s shrill laughter startled the cat on Joseph’s lap. A Siamese cat named Ishmael, after a favourite opening line of Joseph’s. One of his pastimes was recollecting famous opening and closing lines of novels, plays and poems; and his cat’s name came from Moby Dick. “Call me Ishmael” — and then followed the narrator’s description of the “damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Often Joseph took down his copy of the novel and read and reread the whole opening paragraph. It was always November in Joseph Meaker’s soul, and no way to wander and escape it as Herman Melville’s hero had. The cat, then, could do it for him, Ishmael — wanderer. Joseph put his hand out and calmed the creature. Everyone downstairs was laughing now, and Joseph wondered if Ishmael felt more than a disturbance at the noise. Ishmael often slept contentedly through the noise of Joseph’s typewriter, the noise of the radio — even the noise of Joseph’s and Maggie’s arguments; but now the cat’s ears twitched nervously, and he switched his position on Joseph’s lap, and flagged his tail. Oh, there was more to it than the noise, wasn’t there? Something else, even more annoying than noise: a door closed to you. Not just the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs, but the door separating Maggie’s kind from Joseph’s. The Maggies of the world outnumbered the Josephs, and even if that was not a fact, who would know? If there were a million or more Josephs alone in the night, who would count them? Would one of the Maggies leave the bright room, put down her drink, excuse herself from her friends and go off to make the report on Josephs? No, unlikely. A Joseph doing it was even more unlikely. He would never find his way around the Real World.

  “Listen! Hush, I’ll read it!” Tom Spencer’s voice from downstairs now.

  “Yes, read it, Tom!” — Maggie’s — “Joseph had them printed in Doylestown.”

  Joseph Meaker did not have to listen too carefully to know what they were talking about. Maggie always got out one of the signs on weekends, to show guests. Joseph had designed them and had them made up as supplements to the standard NO GUNNING signs required by law to keep hunters off your property. Joseph’s signs were just as large as the official ones, and he had gone about his land tacking one over the other, on every tree in sight. It was a sort of postscript to the cold legal wording of the official one, and Joseph was aware that his sign was shamelessly sentimental, but he had always liked the poem; “corn” never really bothered Joseph Meaker if it made the point well.

  He heard Tom Spencer reading the de la Mare poem now, imagined Maggie sitting back cupping the brandy snifter with that certain smug smile tipping her lips. Joseph’s eccentricities pleased Maggie more often than not; Joseph was her conversation piece.

  HI!

  HI! HANDSOME HUNTING MAN,

  FIRE YOUR LITTLE GUN.

  BANG! NOW THE ANIMAL

  IS DEAD AND DUMB AND DONE,

  NEVERMORE TO PEEP AGAIN,

  CREEP AGAIN, LEAP AGAIN,

  EAT OR DRINK OR SLEEP AGAIN —

  OH, WHAT FUN!

  Laughter and squeals and Maggie’s voice again above it all, “Isn’t it per-fect? Per-fect!”

  “Per-fect!” Tom Spencer’s.

  “Per-fect!” Miriam Spencer’s.

  Joseph Meaker reached on the table beside him for the package of Flents. From it he took one of the pink wax plugs and popped it into his right ear, then another for the left. The noise became a humming, a buzzing; and he went back to what he was doing: reading over the letters, the poems, the notes — all that was in his Varda file.

  “… and my dear, I love your soul — profound, sad, wise and exalted, like a symphony….”

  2

  “Don’t be silly! He has his Flents in his ears,” Maggie Meaker said. “Joseph shuts the world out with wax balls! Ah, but he’s sweet! God, but he’s sweet!” She was sitting crosslegged on the couch, wearing the new red gondolier’s pants from Bonwit’s, cradling her brandy in her palm, smoking the new brand of cigarette Albion & Frazier was launching. The confirmation that A. & F. had won the account had come through yesterday; Picks were unfiltered, regular-size cigarettes, and A. & F. was supposed to dream up a campaign which would emphasize the pleasures of the past, the old way of doing things. Tom Spencer and Maggie were to work on it together; Maggie, in charge, of course, because of seniority and experience.

  “He really is sweet,” Miriam Spencer agreed.

  “He must hate advertising people!” said Tom.

  “I’m advertising people,” Maggie laughed. “No, Joseph’s just different. A loner, you know? Dreamer. He’d do the same if I had the Queen of England out for a weekend. That’s just Joseph.”

  Maggie reached across for the bottle of Remy Martin and refilled everyone’s glass. Her own was full. She was two or three ahead. At A. & F. when men went to lunch with Maggie, they often did not appear in the office again until next day, Maggie always came back, no worse for three or four martinis and a brandy or two after the meal, but Maggie’s lunch dates (the men, not the women who never tried keeping up with her) faded off to steam rooms, early trains, or some movie to sleep through. Maggie held her liquor as well as she carried her age. At thirty-eight she had a full figure,
not a thin girlish one by any means, but certainly not one that inspired her to read the Metrecal ads all the way to the end either. She was a 36-C with no sag, and a perfect size 14. Her skin was clear and softer than many women’s, and her features were good, strongly feminine, in the wide-mouthed, big-eyed, long-legged way, with large hands and feet, as some very beautiful women have, and coal black hair she wore in a semi-short, windblown fashion. If she was not exactly as beautiful as some of the classic examples of women with big feet, she was a very good-looking woman. She had style and confidence, and she was New York to her teeth.

  And Joseph? Her opposite. If Joseph was anything to his teeth, he was Joseph. He was not handsome, and if someone who knew him well (whoever that would be) were asked if he were good-looking, that someone (Maggie) would most likely pause a moment and then answer, “Well, yes, I’d say he was.” There was room for doubt, in other words. He was extremely skinny and long-nosed, with sand-coloured hair that always seemed matted to his head, since he wore a cap most of the time, and he was nearsighted, though he seldom wore his glasses. The result was that Joseph squinted. One of the things about Joseph, one in a thousand, that Maggie never figured out, was the fact that vanity kept him from wearing his glasses. He would just as soon take Maggie out to dinner in a fine restaurant tieless, with egg on his shirt, but he would not appear in public wearing glasses. If he could help it, Joseph would not appear in public, period.

  A lot of it Maggie crossed off as the predictable eccentricity of the scholar. A lot of it, as she always framed it in her thoughts, griped her soul! Before she had married Joseph three years ago, she had thought it would be fascinating to be a folklorist’s wife. She had imagined quiet evenings before some fireplace, sitting and listening to Joseph explain folk tales, discuss mores, and describe odd and enchanting peoples no one in the world had ever heard of but Joseph. As it turned out, Joseph never discussed his work and he did not enjoy sitting before fireplaces. He spent most of the time up in his study, and before they had moved to Bucks County, when they were still living in New York, he spent his evenings in the local library. Early in their marriage he had made an effort, but it was so obviously an effort — fidgeting at the table after dinner while Maggie had a second cup of coffee, falling asleep in front of guests — that Maggie finally encouraged him to do what he felt like doing, which was spending as much time as possible by himself. Bed was good, bed was very good, but whenever Maggie made a reference to her enjoyment, it seemed to embarrass Joseph. He never liked to talk about it.

  • • •

  There was a plus side, of course, even omitting bed. Joseph was a real individual, not cut out of anyone else’s pattern, nor chipped off anyone’s block. He was a beautiful artist, whether he simply sketched Maggie while she was cooking dinner or reading, or whether he did a full-scale oil of the house or a view from his study window. Any other man Maggie knew, who had a talent like Joseph’s, would be stacking canvases for a show, or never mind that, off in some garret wearing a beret and waiting for the world to recognize him; but Joseph often painted over his very best work, and never dragged a canvas out for anyone to see. Sometimes when Maggie was cleaning up Joseph’s study, she would come across a poem scribbled on his yellow scratch pad. Once she had asked him if she could make a copy of one and send it to The Saturday Review. Joseph’s answer: “What for?”

  Then there was the gentleness of Joseph, the nearly self-effacing modesty of her husband. She had never seen him lose his temper, nor make what even came near a harsh statement, and Maggie had often thrown the book at him. In contrast to Maggie’s first husband, who drank himself into Roselawn Cemetery before his thirty-third birthday, Joseph was a Ladies’ Home Journal dream partner.

  “What is Joseph working on now?” brought Maggie back from her thoughts; Tom Spencer, apple-faced and boyish (“Gotta have a gimmick, Mag, gotta get a gimmick” — rushing around A. & F., pushing his way up the ladder with calculated sincerity, fighting the good fight for that plot of suburbia at the end of the rainbow), “Another book?”

  “We don’t know whether it will be a book yet or not,” Maggie said. “The Pennsylvanian Society of Folk Mores has given him a grant to study hexerei.”

  “What-er-eye?”

  “You know, hex signs on barns and everything. A form of Pennsylvania-Dutch witchcraft.”

  Miriam Spencer exclaimed, “I love hex signs on barns!”

  The single word “dumb” came to Maggie’s mind, but she smiled sweetly at Tom’s wife, and for some reason, said she loved hex signs on barns too. Tom Spencer said he had always thought they were very interesting, that someone at the agency ought to work them into an ad some time. Well, Maggie thought as she sipped her brandy, you can take the Chinaman out of China, but you can’t take China out of the Chinaman.

  “I mean,” said Tom Spencer, “I’ve never seen hex signs in an ad, and I think we could work up something damn good around them.”

  “I love them on barns,” Miriam Spencer repeated. She was trying hard not to yawn.

  3

  Joseph had dozed off. In the dream Varda sat beside him on the steps of Jesse Hall, back at the University of Missouri, blonde hair spilling down her back with the sun on it, warm; she was reading the poem she wrote. “It’s called Dear, Joseph” — smiling up at him on the steps of Jesse Hall, in the years back at the University.

  Am I dear to you?

  I wish I were.

  Dear is the held in mind

  in warm rooms of thought

  Do I live there?

  Do I live at the fireplace of your eyes?

  Dear you call me

  I wish I knew

  Dear is the tear, the wind soft-voiced

  the peaceful word

  Is there peace in you?

  Is there

  Is there. Is there — is — and the buzzing seemed louder in his ears, slicing into his dream, waking him. He pulled the Flent out of his left ear.

  “Is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”

  It was Miriam Spencer’s voice outside the door of his study, in the hallway by the bathroom. Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Six-past-three now.

  Tom Spencer was saying, “Keep your voice down, Miriam!”

  “Well, is there any reason why you have to sit up with her all night?”

  “We’re having one last nightcap together, Miriam. Just one!”

  “Every time I hear your steps come up the stairs I think you’re finally coming to bed, but oh, no, you’re just going to the bathroom, then back down to Maggie for another hour!”

  “Go back to sleep, Miriam. I told you what it would be like this weekend. Didn’t I? We’ve got to work out this Picks deal.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes, all night, if it takes all night, dammit!”

  There were angry mumblings then, and the sound of the bathroom door shutting, of feet shuffling down the hall towards the guest room. Joseph removed the other Flent and sat up on the studio couch. Ishmael was curled in a ball at the end of the couch, and scattered on the floor beside the couch were pieces from the Varda file. Joseph picked them up and put them back neatly in the Manila file folder.

  Dear is the shadow, reflection of us

  Ours in light, yet also in darkness

  Are you going my way?

  He heard the toilet gurgle, then the faucet running. Ishmael stirred, and he leaned across and petted the cat. One day soon he would get another cat, a companion for Ishmael. The name of the second cat was already picked, from another of Melville’s novels, Mardi. In that novel there was a golden-haired girl and her name was Yillah.

  Joseph Meaker whispered to his cat, “Soon I’ll get you Yillah.”

  In college he had memorized a part of that novel: “The thoughts of things broke over me like returning billows on a beach long bared. A rush, a foam of recollections! — Sweet Yillah gone, and I bereaved!”

  He heard Tom Spencer stumble out of the bathroom an
d down the stairs to Maggie. In ten minutes he would go down to the kitchen on the pretence of being hungry. He felt sorry for Miriam Spencer sleeping fitfully in the doublebed in the guest room, waiting; he would do his best to break up Maggie’s and Tom’s talk, even though it meant he would have to sleep with Maggie and smell the brandy. He hated the smell of liquor on her breath; worse, she snored when she had a lot to drink. On the floor he saw a piece of the Varda file he had neglected to pick up. By sight he knew it was the letter from Gregging, Austria. He would never forget receiving that letter. It had arrived five years after his last letter from Varda. Five years he spent wondering about her: had she married; was she happy back home; and what was home like — Hungary? And he wrote her; but never received an answer for five years. It had arrived a day before he had married Maggie, forwarded from his old address in Washington Heights. Joseph bent over and picked the letter up. Didn’t he know it by heart? No, still he reread it.

  Dear Joseph,

  I know that if this letter reaches you it will be a real miracle, as I only have your address of several years ago, and so much could have happened to change it by now.

  But I do feel the urge of letting you know that on December 30 my family and I escaped from Hungary and are now awaiting transportation to Venezuela, where my husband’s mother lives. Are you surprised, Joseph? My ideas have changed during the last few years. I have become so disillusioned with that thing falsely called Socialism which I found in Hungary, culminating in the brutal, beastly suppression of the People’s Revolution in 1956. I was tired of the whole thing a long time ago (neither my husband nor I ever became party members), but we simply couldn’t stand it any longer and didn’t want to see our children be brought up in that awful trap. Besides, George took part in the preparation of the revolution and would have been arrested. We crossed the frontier walking for four hours in deep snow, across fields and woods carrying nothing else than our small children in arms. (Aniko is two years old and Katricka is just eight months now) I met my husband at the end of 1953 and married him early next year, romantically, you might say, against my father’s will (he’s a Protestant). I wanted the children very badly and adore them. We are living 20 miles from Vienna in a Refugee Home maintained by the American Mennonites. They are such nice people! We have to wait about three more weeks before we’ll be taken to Italy and from there to Venezuela, by boat. (But my letters will be forwarded from here.)