Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “Aren’t you glad they got that madman who killed Marita Hasselgard?” Sarah asked him, her voice bright and careless.

  The music stopped. Miss Gonsalves began murdering “Lover.” Miss Ellinghausen wandered past and nodded at him from behind Sarah Spence’s back. She actually gave him a thin dusty smile.

  “We should be friends,” she said, and rested her head against his chest.

  “Yes,” he said, clearing his throat and separating from her as Miss Ellinghausen tapped Sarah’s shoulder and tried to shrivel them with a betrayed, angry glance. “Yes, we really should.”

  At the end of the class, Miss Ellinghausen clapped her hands together, and Miss Gonsalves lowered the upright’s polished lid. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are making excellent progress,” Miss Ellinghausen said. “Next week I shall introduce the tango, a dance which comes to us from the land of Argentina. Basic knowledge of the tango has become essential in smart society, and, considered in itself, the tango is a refined vehicle in which the strongest emotions may find expression in a delicate and controlled fashion. Some of you will see what I mean. Please give my best wishes to your parents.” She turned away to open the door to the hallway.

  Sarah and Tom filed through the door and nodded to Miss Ellinghausen, who responded to each of the hasty nods given her by the students with an identical, machine-tooled dip of the head. For the first time since Tom had joined the class, the old lady interrupted her performance at the door long enough to ask a question. “Are the two of you satisfied with the new arrangement?”

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  “Very,” said Sarah.

  “Fine,” said Miss Ellinghausen, “there’ll be no more nonsense, then,” and dipped her head in her perfect nod.

  Tom followed Sarah out on the broad top step of the townhouse. Fritz Redwing stood at the bottom of the steps, rolling his eyes and gesturing toward the waiting cart.

  “Well,” said Tom, wishing that he did not have to leave Sarah Spence, and wondering how she got home.

  “Fritzie’s waiting for you,” Sarah said. “Next week we learn to express the strongest emotions in a delicate and controlled fashion.”

  “We could use more of that around here,” he said.

  Sarah smiled rather abstractly, looked down, then up over his shoulder. She moved sideways to make room for the students still coming through the door. To Tom, she seemed set apart from all of the others going up and down the stairs—she looked in some way like two people at once, and he thought that he had imagined the same thing once about someone else, but could not remember who it had been. She flicked her eyes at him, then went back to looking at empty space. Tom wished he could embrace or kiss or capture her. In the past fifty minutes he had held her, had spoken to her more than in the past five years, but now it seemed to him that he had missed everything and wasted every second of the time he had spent with her.

  The last of the students who took the cart home stood in line on the sidewalk to jump up into the green shade of the cover. Fritz Redwing squirmed with impatience, looking as if he had to go to the bathroom.

  “You’d better go,” Sarah said.

  “See you next week,” he said, and started down the white stone steps.

  She looked away, as if he had said something too obvious.

  Tom moved down the white steps toward Fritz Redwing, and his contradictory feelings seemed to expand and declare war on him. He felt as if he had lost something of supreme value, and found himself overjoyed that the beautiful, necessary thing was gone forever. Some live object within him had broken free, and begun violently beating its wings.

  Then for a moment the contradictory emotions coursing through him obliterated all the rest of the world, and then seemed to obliterate him. He was dimly aware of Fritz Redwing staring at him in childish agitation, and of an ornate carriage turning from Calle Berghofstrasse into the shaded street. The carriage looked familiar. Everything about Tom seemed to sigh, and his hand on the railing grew suddenly pale and grainy, and then Tom realized that he could see right through his hand to the railing.

  Somewhere directly behind him, invisible but hugely present, occurred a great explosion—a flash of red light and a sound of tearing metal and breaking glass. He was vanishing, becoming nothing. His body continued to disappear as he moved down the stairs. In seconds his hands and feet, his whole body, was only a shimmer in the air, then only an outline. When he reached the bottom step, he had disappeared altogether. He was dead, he was free. The fused but contradictory feelings within him burned on, and the catastrophe just behind him kept on happening. All of this was complete and whole. He stepped across the sidewalk. Fritz’s mouth moved, but invisible words came out. On the side of the carriage rolling toward them, Tom saw a golden letter R so surrounded by scrolls and curls it resembled a golden snake in a golden nest. When he exhaled and moved toward the cart, he could hear Fritz Redwing complain about how slowly he was moving.

  Tom stepped up into the cart and sat down in the last row beside Fritz, who had never noticed that for three or four endless seconds he had been completely invisible. The driver snapped his reins, and the cart pulled forward behind Miss Ellinghausen’s slow-moving horses. Tom did not watch Sarah walk down the steps, but he heard the door of Ralph Redwing’s carriage click massively open.

  Once a year Gloria Pasmore drove Tom fifteen miles along the island’s eastern shore, past the walls of the Redwing compound and empty canefields planted with rows of willows, to the guardhouse of the Mill Walk Founders Club. There a uniformed guard with a heavy pistol on his hip wrote down the number of their license plate and checked it against a sheet on a clipboard while another guard made a telephone call. When they were approved for entry, they took a narrow asphalt lane called Ben Hogan Way past sand dunes and broom grass down to the long flat ocean rolling in on their left. They continued past the enormous white and blue Moorish structure of the clubhouse toward the thirty acres of beachfront property on which the members of the Founders Club had built the big houses they called “the bungalows.” When the road divided, they took the left fork, Suzanne Lenglen Lane, and wound through the dunes past the houses until they turned right on the branch nearest the ocean, Bobby Jones Trail, and pulled into the communal parking area just down the beach from the bungalow into which Glendenning Upshaw had moved when he left the house on Eastern Shore Road to his daughter and her husband.

  Tom’s mother got out of the car and looked almost warily at the two horse-drawn vehicles parked in the lot. Tom and Gloria knew them well. The small, slightly dusty trap hitched to a black mare belonged to Dr. Bonaventure Milton; the larger carriage from which a groom was just now leading a chestnut mare toward the stables belonged to Tom’s grandfather.

  It was the weekend after the dancing class, and Tom had felt drained and on edge all week. He had had the same nightmare several nights in a row, to the point where he nearly dreaded going to sleep. Gloria, too, seemed tired and anxious. She had said only one thing to him during the trip from Eastern Shore Road, in response to his comment that he and Sarah Spence were getting to be friends again. “Men and women can’t be friends,” she said.

  Going to see Glendenning Upshaw was like going to Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy in at least one respect, that Tom had to suffer an inspection before matters got underway. Gloria fretted over his fingernails, the knot in his tie, the condition of his shoes and hair. “I’m the one who has to pay for it, when he sees something he doesn’t like. Did you bring a comb, at least?”

  Tom pulled a pocket comb from his jacket and ran it through his hair.

  “You have bags under your eyes! What have you been doing?”

  “Playing cards, carousing, whoremongering, that kind of thing.”

  Gloria shook her head, looking very much as if she wanted to get back in the car and drive home. Behind them, a door closed across Bobby Jones Trail. “Uh-oh,” she exhaled, and he could smell breath mints.

  Tom turned around to see Kingsley, hi
s grandfather’s valet, proceeding slowly down the gleaming steps at the front of the bungalow. Kingsley was nearly as old as his employer. He always wore a long morning coat, a high collar, and striped pants. His bald head shone in the sunlight. Kingsley managed to get to the bottom step without injuring himself, and propped himself up on the railing. “We’ve been waiting for you, Miss Gloria,” he called out in his reedy voice. “And Master Tom. You’re looking to be a fine young man, Master Tom.”

  Tom rolled his eyes, and his mother shot him an agonized glance before leading him across Bobby Jones Trail toward Kingsley. The valet forced himself to stand upright as they approached, and bowed when Gloria greeted him. He led them slowly up to the terrace and beneath a white arch into a courtyard. A hummingbird zipped down the courtyard and over the top of the bungalow in one long fluid gesture. Kingsley opened the door and allowed them into the entry, tiled with small blue and white porcelain squares. Beside the door stood a Chinese umbrella stand into which had been jammed at least nine or ten unfurled black umbrellas. The year before, Glendenning Upshaw had told Tom that people who never thought about umbrellas until it rained stole them right out from under your eyes! Tom thought he had seen that the old man imagined that people stole his umbrellas because they were Glendenning Upshaw’s umbrellas. Maybe they did.

  “The parlor, Miss Gloria,” Kingsley said, and tottered off to fetch his employer.

  Gloria followed him out of the entry and turned in the opposite direction into a wide hallway. Long rugs woven with a mandala-like native design lay over red tiles, and a suit of Spanish armor the size and shape of a small potbellied boy stood guard over a refectory table. They went past the table and turned into a long narrow room with tall windows that looked down half a mile of perfect sand to the Founders Club beach. A few old men sat on beach chairs ogling girls in bikinis who ran in and out of the surf without ever getting their hair wet. A waiter dressed like Kingsley, but wearing a long white apron instead of the morning coat, passed among the men, offering drinks from a shining tray.

  Tom turned from the windows and faced the room. His mother, already seated on a stiff brocaded couch, looked up at him as if she expected him to tip over a vase. Despite the high windows facing the scroll of beach and length of bright water, the parlor was dark as a cave. A dark green fern foamed over the top of a seven-foot grand piano no one played, and glass-fronted bookshelves covered the back wall with row upon row of unjacketed books that blurred into a brownish haze. These books had titles like Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society, Vol. LVI and Selected Sermons and Essays of Sydney Smith. There was a little more furniture than the room could easily accommodate.

  Gloria coughed into her fist, and when he looked at her she pointed fiercely at an overstuffed chair at right angles to the brocaded couch. She wanted him to sit so that he could stand up when her father walked into the room. He sat down on the overstuffed chair and looked at the hands folded in his lap. They were reassuringly solid.

  His recurring dream had begun the night after the dancing class, and he supposed that the dream must be related to what had happened to him on the Academy steps. He could not see any connection, but … In the dream smoke and the smell of gunpowder filled the air. Off to his right, random small fires burned into the choking air, to his left was an ice-blue lake. The lake steamed or smoked, he could not tell which. It was a world of pure loss—loss and death. Some terrible thing had happened, and Tom wandered through its reverberating aftermath. The landscape looked like hell, but was not—the real hell was inside him. He experienced emptiness and despair so great that he realized it was himself he was looking at—this dead, ruined place was Tom Pasmore. He stumbled a few paces before noticing a corpse of a woman with tangled blond hair lying on the shore. Her blue dress had been shredded against the rocks, and lay about her in a shapeless puddle. In the dream Tom sank down and pulled the cold heavy body into his arms. The thought came to him that he knew who the dead woman was, but under another name, and this thought rocketed through his body and jolted him awake, groaning.

  The world was half night, Hattie Bascombe said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” his mother whispered.

  Tom shook his head.

  “He’s coming.” They both straightened up and smiled as the door opened.

  Kingsley entered and held the door. A moment later Tom’s grandfather stumped into the room in his black suit. He brought with him, as always, the aura of secret decisions and secret powers, of Cuban cigars and midnight meetings. Tom and his mother stood up. “Gloria,” he said, and, “Tom.” He did not smile back at them. Dr. Milton came in just behind him, talking from the moment he came through the door as if to fill up the silence.

  “What a treat, two of my favorite people.” Dr. Milton beamed at Gloria as he advanced toward her, but Gloria kept her eyes on her father, who drifted ponderously around past the bookcases. Then the doctor was directly in front of her.

  “Doctor.” She leaned forward for a kiss.

  “My dear.” He looked at her professionally for a moment, then turned to shake Tom’s hand. “Young man. I remember delivering you. Doesn’t seem it could have been seventeen years ago.”

  Tom had heard variations of this speech many times and said nothing as he shook the doctor’s plump hand.

  “Hello, Daddy,” Gloria said, and kissed her father, who had now come all the way around the room to bend down to kiss her.

  Dr. Milton patted Tom’s head and moved sideways. Glendenning Upshaw broke away from Gloria to stand before him. Tom leaned forward to kiss his grandfather’s deeply lined, leathery cheek. It felt oddly cold to his lips, and his grandfather instantly broke away. “Boy,” the old man said, and bothered to look directly at him. As always when this happened, Tom felt that his grandfather was looking straight into him and did not care for what he saw. This time, however, he noticed nearly with disbelief that he was looking down at the old man’s broad, powerful face—he was an inch or two taller than his grandfather.

  Dr. Milton noticed this too. “Glen, the boy’s taller than you! An unaccustomed experience for you to look up to anyone, isn’t it?”

  “That’s enough of that,” said Tom’s grandfather. “We all shrink with age, you included.”

  “Of course, no doubt about it,” the doctor said.

  “How does Gloria look to you?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Smiling, the doctor moved once again up to Gloria.

  “I didn’t come here for a medical examination—I came for lunch!”

  “Yes, yes,” said her father. “Take a look at the girl, Boney.”

  Dr. Milton winked at Gloria. “All she needs is a little more rest than she’s been getting.”

  “If she needs rest, give her something.” Upshaw removed a fat cigar from a humidor on the drum table. He snapped off the end, rolled it in his fingers, and fired it up with a match.

  Tom watched his grandfather going through the cigar ritual. His white hair was vigorous enough to be disorderly, like Tom’s. He still looked strong enough to hoist the grand piano up on his back. He was as wide as two men, and part of the aura that had always surrounded him was crude physical power. It would be too much, Tom supposed, to expect someone like that to act like a normal grandfather.

  Dr. Milton had written out a prescription, and snapped it off his pad. “That’s the reason your father wanted me to wait until you came.” He handed the sheet to Gloria. “Wanted a free consultation out of me.”

  The doctor looked at his watch. “Well, I have to be on my way back down-island. I wish I could stay for lunch, but a little something is going on at the hospital.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Nothing serious. Not yet, anyhow.”

  “Anything I should know about?”

  “Just something that needs looking into. A situation regarding one of the nurses.” Dr. Milton turned to Tom with an expectant look. “Someone you might remember from your own stay there. You knew Nancy Vetiver, didn’t
you?”

  Tom felt a small explosion deep in his chest, and remembered his nightmare. “Sure I do.”

  “Always a problem with that young woman’s attitude, you may remember.”

  “She was hard,” Gloria said. “I remember her. Very hard.”

  “And insubordinate,” the doctor said. “I’ll keep in touch, Glen.”

  Tom’s grandfather blew out cigar smoke and nodded his head.

  “Give me a call if you still have trouble sleeping, Gloria. Tom, you’re a fine boy. Looking more like your grandfather every day.”

  “Nancy Vetiver was one of the best people at the hospital,” Tom said. The doctor frowned, and Glen Upshaw tilted his massive head and squinted at Tom through cigar smoke.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “We shall see.” He forced himself to smile at Tom, made another short round of goodbyes, and left the room.

  They heard Kingsley walking the doctor to the entry and opening the door to the terrace. Tom’s grandfather was still squinting at him, moving the cigar in and out of his mouth like a nipple.

  “Boney’ll straighten everything out. You liked the girl, eh?”

  “She was a great nurse. She knew more about medicine than Dr. Milton.”

  “Ridiculous,” his mother said.

  “Boney is more of an administrator—could be,” said his grandfather with dangerous mildness. “But he’s always done well by me and my family.”

  Tom saw a thought move visibly through his mother’s face like lightning, but all she said was, “That’s right.”

  “Loyal man.”

  Gloria nodded grimly, then looked up at her father. “You’re loyal to him, Daddy.”

  “Well, he takes care of my daughter, doesn’t he?” The old man smiled, then looked speculatively at Tom. “Don’t worry about your little nurse, boy. Boney will do the right thing, whatever it is. A little flap at the hospital is nothing to get excited about. Mrs. Kingsley is making us a nice lunch, and after I smoke some more of this cigar, we’ll go out and enjoy it.”